НАТАША

Do not bother to ask Natasha if she has plans on Friday. Natasha works the Friday shift. And if it wasn’t for the glossy, scattershot promise she had as a writer, with a bespoke blessing of dyslexia, Natasha would be a receptionist for as long as it took for her to decipher Moby Dick in high school. 

The occupation's tactile demands transfixed her. The tips of her fingers were promised to meet the same, banal surfaces every shift. She peeled folios of paper into empty printing appliances, which calibrated and regurgitated pages, freshly brindled with inky word-entropy. She elected to hand-wash the staff’s glasses, frosted with coagulated crumbs. Digging her fingers into a spiracled sponge, glissading it around rims and over grime, she echoed this movement like a ritual, one she did not commit on paper, but understood nonetheless. 

Natasha discerned that these surfaces she met, all sterile and pale, possessed an eager, embryonic potential to harm. If her hand lingered too close to the stapler, if smudged ink on the packet seized her glance, if the Swingline’s metallic bite felt ravenous, perhaps she could give her finger a solid, nonchalant slam. She could even shred herself into tendon-ribbons, joining the nullified NDAs, leaving Little Miss Monday Morning Shift, Nastya, a sinewy, latticed surprise of marrow, of skin macerated from metallic blood. 

Rivulets will first besmatter. They will then roll. They shall cascade and pour onto the linoleum tiling, onto the neighboring pristine printers, onto the bulletin and Nastya’s employee-of-the-month, upturned brown nose — and Natasha, even as a puree, would give an acerbic chortle. Natasha, even with ruptured irises and prosciuttoed flesh, stuck between the shredder combs, would prevail over what the doctors call being “differently abled.” 

Voraciously, Natasha would read the terror she penned on Nastya’s face.