By Carolyn R. Russell

Our cubicles are arranged in a circular rather than grid rat maze because she says it’ll work best to foster what she calls a community of empowered individual contributors sharing our expertise with each other in our particular spheres of influence, and we don’t know what she’s talking about because we’re all hourly wagers who have no spheres, just non-viable undergraduate degrees and decent computer skills and bills to pay. Most likely it’s just her excuse to make us come into the office rather than work remotely, because who would she have to play with then? She likes to randomly occupy an empty cube some days, possibly to show how egalitarian her sensibilities are, or maybe because she wants to eavesdrop on our personal lives. Which we never discuss anywhere but the hallway restroom because she has her own executive type ensuite and has never to anyone’s knowledge used anything but. Today she’s installed herself behind the partition to my left, which nobody in their right mind would call a wall, but it’s like she imagines it’s reinforced cement or something, and we can all hear her yelling at someone named Melissa who works on the floor above us in finance. Don’t you dare cry, she booms in this frozen tundra tone. Then she goes on and on about floating decimal points and Santos in the cube to the right of me starts laughing contagiously and I can’t help myself, I start laughing too. Suddenly she’s standing beside me and for some reason I stand too, and she looks me up and down and says, Did you buy those shoes on purpose? and leaves. It’s 9:45 a.m.

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A Best Microfiction 2024 winner and Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions nominee, Carolyn R. Russell’s short stories, poetry, and creative nonfiction have been featured in numerous publications. She has also authored four books, including a multi-genre flash collection called “Death and Other Survival Strategies” (Vine Leaves Press, 2023). Carolyn lives on and writes from Boston’s North Shore.