Lying in bed he felt the pain in his back. A stiff shot
of hurt that originated in the middle of his spine and rose to encompass all
the space beneath his shoulders, like a painting of a phoenix rising. It never
hurt during the day, when he was upright. Sitting was fine, standing was fine.
Lying down was what flicked the pain switch from Off to On. Maybe he stretched
too hard at the office when he leaned back in his chair and raised his hands
over his head, a practice he did multiple times a day unconsciously. Maybe his
bones were rotting. When it hurt like this he imagined steel replacing his
bones. Like a Giger creation but minus the interlocking vaginas and penises.
The steel would be cold. Not even the muscle, blood and viscera surrounding
could warm it. The cold would replace the back pain with a deeper ache. His
movements would stiffen, not that they were fluid now. Unlike bone, steel was
unyielding. If he strained hard enough his skin would stretch and tear apart,
like tight plastic wrap penetrated and dragged by a fork. Envisioning this
helped him go to sleep before his wife came to bed, though he of course knew
the pain was originating in muscle, not bone. Most mornings when he awoke he
could barely move and tears mixed with the sleep in his eyes and made it impossible
to see. A hot shower erased the pain and cleared his eyes. Paying the water
bill was never a problem.
The boxes, now those scared him. There were so many
cluttering his living room now. Mostly from Amazon or other online retailers,
though there were a few from the local grocery store as well. All of the boxes
were empty. When they arrived they had contained things he thought he needed.
Sometimes this remained true but often he found he didn’t need anything in the
boxes after all. He threw these unneeded things away or donated them to friends
and charities. The boxes remained. He couldn’t bring himself to recycle them or
even break them down so they’d lay flat and he’d have more room. They were all
over the place, in front of the windows, blocking out the sun. They were a fire
hazard. They scared him, yes, but he took no action. It wasn’t actually the
boxes that scared him. It was their emptiness. A container that no longer
contained anything. He thought of putting something in them, utilizing them for
storage. This solution would not work, however, as he owned nothing that needed
storing. So they remained, neatly stacked, waiting. He largely abandoned his
living room, choosing to spend most of his time in the bedroom, bathroom or
kitchen, which remained free of boxes for the time being. He was also waiting.
In the breakroom at work there are paper cups with
inspirational quotes and poorly drawn portraits of the person to whom the quote
is attributed, clearly done on a computer by someone with minimal design
skills. These cups are supposed to inspire he and his co-workers to innovate
and change their mindset and other buzzword topics which ultimately translate
to a directive to make the shareholders more money. One of his coworkers
defaces a cup every day by adding to the quotation or crossing it out and
changing it altogether. The most popular of these defaced cups features Gandhi.
His quote is crossed out and replaced with a quote from Conan the Barbarian
who, when asked what is best in life, replies “To crush your enemies -- See
them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!” It was
marginally more inspiring than the Gandhi quote but he still did his job the
same way every day and collected a paycheck every two weeks as the cups choked
up landfills even though they were supposedly compostable. The night janitorial
staff threw them all into the same bag which went into the trash dumpster.
Except for the defaced cups, which sat in a line on the breakroom counter for
almost a month before disappearing. It was thought that a SLT (Senior
Leadership Team) member saw them and ordered their removal, but no one knew for
sure. The poorly drawn quotation cups remained, and it was gradually realized
they would never go away.