Lunch Break
Image by Charles Deluvio
by D. D. Christopher
Lunch Break
Gone. Again. For the third time in as many weeks. Lori stared at the shelf as though the missing Bolognese might materialize in empty space. Behind every salad pack, under every meal prep container, even in the crisper drawer, no use. She scanned the office pantry. Her jaw flexed, teeth worrying a sore in her cheek that she never allowed to heal. None of the lunch breakers met her gaze, a code of silence implacable even before such blatant transgression.
Back at her desk, Lori clawed at her scalp, tearing clumps of hair loose from her ponytail. She drafted an email to her supervisor, deleted it. Started a letter to human resources, deleted it. Dialed the non-emergency police line, hung up. She switched off the computer and watched her reflection mouth a litany of silent curses from the black screen. The glass paperweight beside her computer began to rattle, spider-line fractures formed in its center. The rattling grew, reaching a thumping crescendo, then went supernova, pelting her office with crystalline shrapnel. Lori gaped at her bleeding arm, peppered to the shoulder with tiny shards.
Her power. This was the first time in three years. Not since the birth of her daughter, who after twenty-six hours of labor, two epidurals, and a Pitocin drip, just needed a little extra push over the finish line. Even before Amelia was born Lori tried not to cheat, unlike her mother who relied on the ability to solve every minor inconvenience. In her last days the old woman even used her power to operate her own atrophied muscles, jerking her limbs like some morbid marionette. Lori did not want to model that sort of laziness for Amelia, especially after she started feeling a telekinetic tug at her nipples whenever the baby woke screaming in the night, or when Charlie’s little feet flew out from under him after swiping his little sister’s favorite doll.
This was different. Grownup land has no big mommies and daddies to punish the bullies for you. This thief needed a lesson. The last person that tried to steal from her, that filthy mugger in the parking lot her freshman year, that lout, he ended up a pile of red sludge seeping down the storm drain. A bit extreme in this case, Lori thought despite her anger. The punishment must fit the crime.
Her eyes shut. Invisible hands stretched through the heavy darkness, the fingers brushed against cubicle walls, crept under office doors, slid along conference tables. They sought out waste baskets, recycling bins, scraps of litter. On a filthy desk in the north face of the floor, the sneakiest, most cowardly corner of the office, the hands felt the familiar curves of a collapsible microwave safe silicone container. The stolen meal was left in plain sight, half eaten, wasted. Lori bit down on her cheek and tasted blood.
#
That weekend Lori cooked her grandmother’s lasagna, layering the delicate sheets and gooey ricotta with a precision no human hands could manage. More than enough for a week’s worth of tempting lunches.
“You haven’t made this since the kids were born,” her husband said between heaping bolts of pasta. “Let me tell you two a story,” he continued, seeing Lori’s grin. “On our third date, your mother cooked this same lasagna for me and I knew right then I was going to marry her.”
Charlie rolled his eyes at this, while Amelia merely stared behind tomato stained cheeks.
“Are you sure it wasn’t what I did for you after the lasagna?” Lori’s invisible fingers sent shivers up her husband’s neck.
She rode him with a nostalgic vigor that night, and managed to climax quickly with a discreet use of her power. As he snored beside her, Lori noticed how tired and sagging her husband’s once Heston-esque jawline had become. How ugly it now looked, how old, like Dorian Gray’s portrait slowly corrupting in secret.
With that thought a long unvisited memory rose from Lori’s half dreaming brain. Her twelfth birthday. She wandered the bright halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art while her mother sipped wine in the cafe. An exhibit in the contemporary wing caught her curiosity, “The Seven Deadly Sins” by Paul Cadmus. Each painting depicted a unique and monstrous figure in the throes of unspeakable agony. Each subject bore terrible wounds symbolic to their respective sin. Wrath spilled gouts of blood as thorns and broken glass tore at its flesh. Gluttony’s entrails burst from its stomach as it gorged on more and more rotting waste. The worst of them all was Sloth, whose putrid flesh melted off its head and chest in great strands while some wart-like malignancy turned its legs to stone. Lori suffered nightmares for weeks after seeing the paintings. Sloth, however, stayed with her long after the others faded from mind, and she even gained a morbid fondness for the painting. It seemed right that Sloth should suffer the cruelest punishment, the most irreversible, for was it not the least justifiable of the sins? Where would society be without Pride, Envy, and their god-child Ambition? Is Gluttony not the natural result of the abundance Avarice creates? Does Lust not drive our numbers? Anger not fuel our resolve? Not Sloth. Useless Sloth in his disgusting cubicle, stealing lunches he is too lazy to make himself. Lori smiled at the memory of that long lost painting, and thought, perhaps for the first time ever, that Monday could not come soon enough.
#
When Mark boarded the elevator Monday morning, he recalled the chicken quinoa bowl he packed the night before sitting forgotten on his kitchen counter. That’s what I get for eating healthy, he thought. No matter, Mondays usually have decent pickings.
His position in the company lacked enough seniority to access the enclosed offices, but Mark did not mind this lack of prestige. His desk near the northeast corner granted a near perfect vantage of the entire floor. With no other cubicles to his rear, he could enjoy some personal entertainment while going about his daily work. A curated gallery of discretely muted browser tabs paraded about Mark’s screens.
Morning passed in this visually enriched silence, spreadsheets populating at a leisurely clip, until the gastric flow of cheese puffs and pretzels fell out of pace with his rising hunger. Mark minimized his tabs and stomped off to the pantry. A quick survey of the room revealed only two occupants, hunched forms slurping from the shadows of the break counter. Feigning the instant discernment of one recognizing his own property, Mark reached into the refrigerator and retrieved a meal. Safely back at his perch, he examined the loot. The lasagna could use more meat, but it was crafted by a competent hand. Mark reached down, passing the container into the portable mini-microware that glowed in secret beneath his desk.
With hunger abated, Mark returned to his meditations. At a moment of particular interest, the volume of his computer suddenly rose to a deafening level, the actors upon the screens blaring the immodest cries of their strenuous endeavors for all the office to hear. So honed were his reflexes, so practiced his hand, that before any reasonable ear could detect the nature of the sound, Mark swept his fingers over the keyboard, activating a custom macro that killed the browser process, muted the volume, and emblazoned a spreadsheet across the entire desktop.
He craned his neck over the cubicle wall, surveying all immediate neighbors. There was a startled shudder, a confused head shake, the hint of a snicker. None pointed in accusation. None cried scandal. Thinking it best to forgo further entertainment, Mark leaned back, only to find that his chair would not recline. The lever beneath the armrest was already flipped, and no amount of fiddling could disengage the lock. He bounced, wiggled, threw his weight against the back to no avail. After a forceful hip thrust, the chair’s pneumatic chamber released itself with an agonized hiss, settling at the lowest level.
With elbows nearly level with his shoulders, knees tucked above his hips, back ramrod, Mark considered his situation. There were no other unguarded chairs in the vicinity. He would need raid the storeroom, but a pressure headache was climbing up his skull and he did not feel like standing or walking anywhere.
After half an hour of diligent work, Mark felt better despite his cramped posture. He reopened a private browsing tab and resumed the previous video. This time the volume stayed off, but his headache returned, as though unseen fists jammed into his temples. His eyes moved from the first monitor to the spreadsheet on the second. The pain lessened. He input another cell of data, and the pressure eased further. He turned his attention back to the video and the fists boxed him hard, what felt like a second set of hands began squeezing the base of his neck. Body comprehending the connection far ahead of the mind, he looked back at the spreadsheet and begin typing.
Hours passed. Mark fetal in his broken chair, arms cramping, bladder aching. Any move of the head, any inefficient gesture that did not result in data saved to a cell summoned the pain. Standing up was out of the question. With the roster of itemized client invoices long exhausted, he reentered the same data set three times, but still he could not stop.
The office lights dimmed, the cleaning crew completed their rounds, all his colleagues departed for their warm beds. Still Mark typed. Finally, the agony in his wrists and hips overwhelmed his fear. He pitched forward out of the chair and fell face first into the pretzel crumbed rug. No pain. He opened his eyes, stretched his limbs, and stood with the caution of a hunted rabbit emerging from its burrow. He was free. Whatever caused that frenzy of efficiency, that trance of toil, was gone.
Three days passed at home as he recovered. He returned that Friday, rejuvenated in the knowledge that he completed an entire week’s worth of work in that single day. But as he stepped off the elevator the kale-farro-avocado salad tumbled from his hands. Like a schoolyard bully after summer break, the headache was back.
He looked toward the stairway. Perhaps he could run, put enough distance between himself and the office. One step toward the exit and the pain shattered any further design. Phantom fists rapped his skull, scrambling his thoughts. Mark vaulted for his desk, collapsed into the sunken chair, and set to work.
This time typing not only relieved the pain, it brought on a sensual pleasure. The fists upon his neck and temples opened, fingers smooth and strong massaged a point inside his head he never knew existed. The day passed in a floating rapture, no mind to the burning cramps in his legs, no shame even when he soiled himself. Late into the evening the hands finally released their grip and faded away. Mark stood and limped home.
He spent that weekend before his own computer, closing and opening spreadsheet after spreadsheet, body shaking like an addict in withdrawal. Whatever feeling seized him at the office was absent here. Only echoes of the pleasure as he typed. Only ghosts of the pain when he looked away.
Monday came. Mark huddled in the eves beneath the office entrance, waiting for the security guard to unlock the doors. First at his desk, the sensation did not begin until after most of the other bleary-eyed employees streamed in. Hours passed into days. Mark’s back curled into an intractable hump, his tortoise neck jammed beneath his shoulders inches from the screen. Hips and legs seemed to meld with the chair base, like a broken dress mannequin mounted on a tripod. His arms were mere extensions of the singular command to type, to fuel the pleasure, to avoid the pain. Each day he exhausted his assignments in the first hour, and in rare moments of lucidity he sometimes read over the mad typings that followed. Sheet1, Column A: Lunch Budget, rows by date ad infinitum, always $0 in every cell.
For Mark there was only the ecstasy of the office, and the cruel deprivation of his apartment. Eyes blind both to colleagues and passersby, they first stared out of pity, and later averted their eyes in revulsion. Ears deaf to their whispers. That perfect rectangle, a pristine space to engrave his prayers, give offering to the source of all feelings, the spreadsheet.
A voice sounded in the distance. Mark ignored it.
“Hey Mark, buddy. Do you have a second?”
Lunch Budget: $0.
“I want you to know the other partners and I are really impressed with the work you’ve been doing. Your productivity is through the roof. You should be really proud. Hey, can you listen to me for a sec, pal?”
Lunch Budget: $0.
“But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. There’s been some complaints about, um, odors. The cleaning staff said you’ve been using, how do I put this, that you’ve been using cups to go, you know. Uh, Mark? Can you hear me?”
The screen went black. A disgusting little finger was desecrating the monitor’s power button. The fists came down like an avalanche. They squeezed Mark’s neck so hard he feared his head might come spinning off.
He met the man’s face then, the distorted visage like a cubist painting through the gridlines burned into Mark’s vision. He lunged for the offender’s throat. Clawed fingers dug into the soft neck, teeth bit at the flesh. Mark’s swollen legs flailed like two rotten sausages as they tumbled over the desk.
“I need to work!” Mark shrieked as he drove his forehead again and again into the man's nose. “Why won’t you lazy bastards just let me work!”
A shattered coffee mug lay beside the jumble of fallen stationary. Mark grabbed a shard and began to carve bloody letters into the red ruin twitching beneath him. He got so far as "Lunch B" before hands, real hands, grasped at him. They bore him farther and farther from his computer. Work, work, work, was his lament as the world went black.
#
“Our guest this morning is Lori Stanford, founder and CEO of Kinetic Financial. Lori, after you left Harris & White, you managed to build a ten billion dollar financial services firm in less than three years. Fortune magazine named Kinetic as one of the top ten companies to work for. How do you manage to inspire such devotion in your employees?"
"Thanks so much James. It's all about creating a culture of accountability. We value our employees and do everything we can to help them reach their potential. When you work at Kinetic, you will always feel that support in everything you do. No one is going to steal your lunch, so to speak."
END
D. D. Christopher is a writer of speculative fiction and creative nonfiction. His work has appeared at Apparition Literary Magazine, Every Day Fiction, AntipodeanSF, and 365tomorrows. His favorite authors include Jorge Luis Borges, Patricia A. McKillip, and Philip K Dick.
