Tuesday 29 January 2008

Under the desk

Last week it was all getting too much for me, so I crawled under my desk during a particularly difficult phone call and hid upon the purple floor.
As I sat under the desk I looked out at many pairs of female legs, gathering around my chair. They were talking about me in hideous whispers. I put my hands over my ears so that I couldn't hear them any more, to little avail.
The whispers became chants which grew ever louder and more raucous. Feet began stamping in obtuse rhythm. There may have been hand claps and then a pair of legs vanished upwards. With a thick thud the bang sounded that announced this woman had leapt up onto my desk. She stamped and wailed and danced about making a cacophony for my poor mind to cope with, crying now, below the desk.
The leader seemed to call her followers' motions with rabid screams. Shatteringly, my earlier telephone caller then rang back and the leader picked it up and vomited gargling inanities into the mouthpiece. Next it seemed like she smashed the receiver down, down, down onto my desk. An excited laughter rumbled around the office until the phone finally was smashed into chunks. With this, all the pairs of feet suddenly held still and I could not hear a breath taken.
I waited in horror, my breath also baited, what would break the monotony of this nothing? Of this puncture in time and space? Was an attack inevitable, would they leap below the desk, clawing for me and drag me out for crucifixion? Perhaps they meant to smoke me out?
The silence moved me with incalculable tension to begin to scream, to begin to blurt out my name. As I opened my mouth every telephone in the room sounded. Every telephone rang it's dreadful call and the blood drained from my brain, causing my faint.
That was the last thing I remember and now, here I am writing this at the same desk, with the same phone next to me, with the same pairs of legs sitting neatly at right angles across nearby chairs with multi-wheels. But the floor these wheels track across - the floor is now violet!

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