John sat uncomfortably in a chair which must surely have been designed for discomfort, since it served no other purpose. It was eleven forty-seven a.m., or maybe two-eighteen p.m. or twenty past the hour. It didn’t matter. Some dreadful, featureless time where nothing good can or will ever happen. The day’s gaping maw hung slack and despicable.
John’s boss — a pale apparition haunting a boxy suit (we’ll call him Graham, though it could just as easily have been Greg or Steve or Winston or Bojangles or Shoop-Shoop Mungo Delaney—it’s not important) handed him a squeezy bottle containing some sort of cream or balm or life-giving elixir. It had a fancy look, this bottle, though not what John would call high-end fancy—the kind of fancy that pretended not to notice itself. Aloof fancy. This bottle was “fancy-ish”, it demanded attention in a way some would call garish, bordering on desperate. Day-glo green, it was the only thing of any colour in the office.
“John, if you wouldn’t mind, could you kindly read the text on the front,” said Graham, flickering phantasmagorically in the wan office light.
It was coming back to John, how he’d been tasked with writing the copy for this green, tubular squeezy bottle which (he now recalled) contained an exfoliating AHA body-scrub and the fact he was sitting in this dismal office on this awful day with Graham, who appeared to him now as little more than a greyish rectangle, meant something was terribly, terribly wrong. But what? Was it? With utmost trepidation, John read aloud:
“With the intoxicating scent of golden vanilla and wild coconut, AHA’s…open brackets… Alpha Hydroxy Acids…close brackets…help to gently exfoliate the skin for a more radiant…glowl.”
Glowl? That didn’t sound quite right, did it? Not at all.
“Glowl?” John asked. Questioning the very word he himself had apparently written.
“Glowl,” said Graham, in a blank monotone sound which seemed to resonate from somewhere within John and yet, also from all around him.
“Glowl?” John repeated, pointlessly, shamefully.
“Glowl.” Graham, or the idea of Graham, made the booming, robotic sound again.
GLOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWLLLLLLLLL
Glowl. It could be a word, John thought. It sounded vaguely word-like. And even if it wasn’t, maybe it could become one, if Gen-Z started using it in an ironic, hipster-ish way until it eventually passed over into common parlance and John himself was credited with the success of this disruptive, viral marketing campaign. That could happen. Hey man, nice glowl, everyone would say.
Graham spoke again, and this time he sounded like one of the aggressively obnoxious teenagers who circled the bus-stop on bikes with their hoods pulled up and pestered John for cigarettes on his way home even though John didn’t smoke and never took the bus.
“We’ve had fifteen-hundred of these green cunts made up and now they’re all covered in some shit you’ve just shat out your brain and we’re gonna have to make them cunts up again. Cunt.”
“You see the problem?” said Graham, snapping back into his original middle-aged middle-manager voice.
John did see the problem. He couldn’t believe that in a company this size, no-one was responsible for sense-checking product copy to ensure they weren’t inventing words willy-nilly. Someone should be accountable. A small voice inside him—the one he tried very, very hard to silence whispered, It’s you, John. That person is you. This is your job. But that didn’t seem right. In fact it was unconscionable (was that a word?).
“Pick up with Cheryl in logistics regarding the recall,” said Graham, before adding the last sentence anyone ever wants to hear: “This isn’t the end of the matter.” And then also adding, very politely, “you cunt.”
John thanked Graham and returned to his desk. Having no idea who Cheryl in logistics was (maybe she was nice?) he opened his inbox and saw one new email. It was from camel.trinket@hyphencompany.com. John didn’t know a Camel Trinket either. Was that even a name? It didn’t matter if it was, it was the same as any other — an artificial facsimile of a person rendered onscreen in binary code. Unreachable. Unknowable.
The email read:
Hi John
See below. Please advise.
But there was nothing below. However far John scrolled, there was only the dead light of a thousand billion pixels leeched of all their colour. The negative space inside the empty squares on a calendar stretching on forever. Down and down and down he scrolled>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> until it was time for lunch.
He sat on his favourite bench to eat his sandwich, which today consisted of tuna and some other substance (almost certainly mayonnaise but there was always a chance it could’ve been exfoliating AHA body scrub). As he ate, he began to sense that everything around him was on fire. Seconds later, he confirmed this with his own two eyes. The park in which he spent every lunch-hour was now a smouldering pile of ash and rubble. The bench beneath him turned to blackened charcoal.
John accepted his fate. He was ready to burn. And yet he felt nothing. No warmth, no light penetrated him. The tuna sandwich in his right hand went up in flames as he reached his left hand out to where nobody sat, imagining someone—Cheryl from logistics maybe—reaching back to touch his fingertips as they both waited to be immolated on this nothing-y afternoon.
There was a man and a dog in the park. The man was carrying the dog—some small, wiry, bearded terrier—wrapped cozily in a tartan blanket. The dog was old and infirm, clearly too frail to walk, and so the man carried him like this around the park every afternoon, letting him enjoy the fresh air on his whiskers, neither of them knowing when would be the last time.
John had never noticed the two companions before but was glad to notice them now; it comforted him to know they were the last two things he would ever see. As the dog licked gently at the man’s hand and the flames licked gently at them both, they made a beautiful sight, John thought, fully aglowl. And he wondered, in his final moments, which of them would burn first? Which way would be kinder?