Consider This My Resignation

For The 6th Flash-Style Fiction Battle. The prompt was Corporate Hellscape / Friday Afternoon / Existential Crisis

Before you read, if you aren’t subscribed already, go subscribe to the Flash-Style Fiction Battle. Every one of these, you’ll get to see two heavy hitters go head-to-head writing 500-word stories based on the same prompt. The story below was my entry for the 6th Flash-Style Battle and the prompt was Corporate Hellscape / Friday Afternoon / Existential Crisis.

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Y'know the clock clicks, right? Two-thirteen in the afternoon. Every day. Some catch in the mechanism. Sounds like a snapped bone. I used to like it, what, eight years ago? Jesus. JESUS. That's just hitting me. My career's a third-grader, probably just learning about force and motion in science class.

Speaking of. A word problem for you, boss: A fed-up employee picks up a tape dispenser weighing 8.1 ounces and pitches it World Series-style into the face of a manager with a head shaped like the negative of a tape dispenser. It takes 33 pounds of force to crack a human skull. How fast would he have to throw the dispenser to make the manager's head click like a clock at two-thirteen?

Don't worry about it. Lucky you, I flamed out of baseball in little league. I'd pitch wide and catch an assault charge.

Anyway. I was saying I used to like it, the clock sound. Meant the end of the day was closer than it wasn't. Exciting. Now, I'm older. Time stretches out when you're older. Three hours ain't three hours any more. It's your whole fucking future pissed away over spreadsheets instead of... I don't know, communing with nature or some shit! Something worthy.

Anything worthy.

I forget what nature looks like when I come here. That's your fault. Big ol' window to the world for everyone else in the pod to look out of, but you give me the only desk pointed straight at your office. You're the only world I get to see for nine hours a day.

Why'd you do that, man?

You sat me here when I was hired. Means you took one look at me in the interview and thought "Yes, I must mentally condition him until my hair becomes dead grass rolling over beer-bellied Yela Mala wicking a polluted Ganges-sweat river down knock-kneed cliffs to fall into a cracked and yellow keratin bed."

Body's gross, dude. So gross I'm starting to appreciate it. Like the smell of gasoline. Like the taste of durian. Do you get it? Beauty itself was stolen from me. I've been locked in a cage, reduced to staring at a block of commissary ramen trying to find gallery-grade meaning in its brushstroke waves.

I gotta bust out of here, man! You don't know what it's like outside that Murcielago I know you're going to default on! We're dying out here! We're getting carpal tunnel and heart disease and diabetes out here! I gotta get up from this ass-flattened torture throne every hour on the hour, or I'm shitting blood and radiating pain from taint to trapezius!

I gotta get out. I gotta get out. I gotta get out.

Hey.

One more word problem.

A fed-up employee weighing 225 pounds launches himself through a two-story glass window. How fast must he take off in order to maintain his flight back to happy, gap-year days doing open mics in New York before succumbing to the trauma?

Think I'll find out.

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