Drain Bump
Fast forward two months. The new job has me running ragged. I haven’t worked this hard—literally—in over four years. Hey, I worked in government; what do you expect? My days are long and exhausting; I spend my spare time trying to balance sleep and spending some time with my wife. Did I mention I still have outside contract work duties? Needless to say things have had to give and the first to go was my daily gym visit and the second to go was my focus on healthful eating. I suffer as a result, I know this. I feel badly (both in terms of general well-being and guilt-wise), I’m gaining weight and I’m not at my peak in terms of any of the things I need to do. My mood is sketchy; my energy level is limp; my stress in occasionally unmanageable. The time to change is now.
Somehow, the menacing voice in my head knew this would happen. I stare at the box of coconut and caramel bliss on my desk, delivered fresh this morning by a jovial but wicked co-worker to whom I gleefully handed over my lunch money in exchange for his product. “There’s more where these came from,” he offered. I glanced down, shamed, and out of the corner of my eye his face twisted and distorted into a devilishly inhuman grin like those creepy guys from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, “Hush.” When I looked back quickly, it was gone. He was normal. “Enjoy!” he cried and inside I wept.
The voice is back now, harsher and less soothing. It implores me to eat. And eat and eat. The discomfort I’ve felt of late: It is not some silly weakening of resolve and atrophing of muscle tissue. I am not weary from long hours and hectic schedules and pressure from many disparate sources. No, the voice assures me, all I have been missing are these cookies.
I turned the boxes around so the bottoms face me and the tops are pushed against the tan/grey fabric of the cube wall. A printed message on the box bottom reads, “Open Other End.” As I read it, over and over, it comes through in the voice’s now grating rasp. It doesn’t seem like a helpful consumer warning, it reads like a dictum urging me to action. My resolve, already weak, slips like a sweaty finger clinging to edge of a sheer cliff. The voice returns now, given shape and form and it brings its foot down on my clutching grap, cracking fingers beneath a patent leather shoe. I tumble and my final vision is that of the voice’s physical manifestation, wearing a green sash dotted by hand-sewn patches, glaring down with triumphantly burning red eyes.
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