Terminus

The department has a new manager and she’s been placed in the cubicle with me, which means I have to shift the sprawl of my stuff in order to make room for her things (which are more important than dusty action figures, artifacts of personal flair, and binders full of meeting minutes no one if ever going to read).

Within a day, I’ve been terminated. The packet she hands me is very well designed and includes a stack of little infographic cards detailing my various transgressions—loading up my work computer with personal music and movies, incessant and unapologetic use of profanity in meetings, and falling asleep at my desk.

(To that last point, I woke up nestled against her midsection, cradled in her arms—so I feel like maybe that’s on her too. But she was very kind when she woke me up and handed me the termination packet, so much so that I almost went back to sleep.)

No one is sad to see me go and they barely look up as I pass with my two cardboard boxes full of personal belongings (including the dusty trench-coat I wore every day of my senior year of high school, which was a nice discovery under some forgotten invoices at the bottom of an old filing cabinet).

I am not upset, although I already feel the financial dread of “what am I going to live on?” once the severance runs out. It’s probably for the best, though. The building is so dimly lit that there was no chance I’d ever be able to stay awake. They should do something about that.

A little while later I am standing on a crowded platform next to myself. My hands are empty but the other me is still struggling to manage the two boxes of office detritus. In the dim light people shift and mutter all around us, waiting for the gates at the top of the steps to open.

“Don’t worry,” I tell myself. “It’s like ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’. I’ll be here to guide you.” The trench-coat has given me newfound confidence as a psychopomp, but I can tell that my charge (my self) is not convinced.

…

Later still, in another place located well past the the margins of what any reasonable person would call “livable”—it’s an old refugee camp decommissioned after the Salamander Wars—the non trench-coat me is alone once again and I struggle with the boxes as I go up the dusty path to the corrugated iron shack where I live.

Next door, the neighbor’s dogs are whining and barking. One of them has been caught in some kind of snare—and not for the first time. The neighbor is always setting them, though if it’s to catch game or trespassers I don’t know. The dog dangles a few feet off the ground, whining like a violin while two other dogs bark up at it as though offering advice (or perhaps admonishing it for having gotten itself into this predicament).

The door opens and my neighbor’s sullen teenage spawn spill out to inspect the dog, but none of them try to get it out of the snare.

Above, the sky is flat and white. Featureless. There is no sun in this place and never has been.

I heft my boxes again and go inside.