Red Room Where the Writers Are

Where is all the damn cotton candy? It's gone, I tell you. The long hours of this entire day have passed by in a slow, grinding gray. Or perhaps grey, the e being sadder than the a since it's flat and has no leap in it. Grey like the cold handle of a ratchet or the pallor of a crowd's gasp when a bull gores a runner. But there is no red splash today. The horn jabs through the thigh like dead jelly with a thunk and a soft suck on removal - comes out clean as a sentence washed by proper grammar.

Fuzz, yes. Fuzz abounds today. My head like a sock filled with dough. It's all mush inside and outside is all mush also. Mush mush mush. I sat across from a man today, a man near retirement, and told him that he'd have to switch departments. Outsourcing, I threw out there. No cut in pay, just a shift in duties to make your last days interesting. Different, perhaps. Earlier, he had been told the moves wouldn't affect him. I'll talk about that some other day, perhaps.

Meetings today. Chairs itchy under my ass. A lunch of cold noodles, slimy in red sauce. The phone ringing with strident salesmen. Personnel moves. One out of another department into mine; one out of mine into another.

"Well, it'll be a blessing really then." he said to me after learning of his move. "This." He snapped paper in the air and dropped it on the desk. "It's gone off my desk, I guess. " Another. "And this too. A blessing really. I won't have to deal with all this anymore."

"All five of these issues, yes." I said, regretting it. "You can leave these five behind."

Five! I thought. There's 58 on my to-do list. I swallowed that ire. It was my duty. What was inflicted there is hard. He is 20 years older than me and I can imagine how it must feel.

I thought he'd shatter from an inexorable dryness. His eye quivered a moment, then hardened after my sentence, as tight and closed as the period that concluded it. I saw in his eyes that it was my fault. Of course it is. Sometimes we are forced into positions where we must do evil. Is it truly evil if the mechanics of life force us into actions we despise? Actions that protect our families? I don't know: ask a Nazi.

A grey day ripe with fuzz, this. But it is late now and a softness has settled on our house. A ceiling fan stirs the lazy air. The cats are actually sleeping, curled purrs on all the best chairs. I sit here sipping Rum, hoping it will soon bring me the same softness that has settled over my baby daughter and wife, the softness laying upon my sleeping son, the slight breath of contentment, that in it's seeping exodus from our lung, pulls us out of squalid selves so that we hang in the still air utterly satiated for a brief moment before the grinding machinery causes us to gasp and suck it all back in again.