“Hey!”
I jolted in surprise at the man’s voice behind me. Lukewarm coffee sloshed out of my mug and onto my mauve blouse, the liquid coating my fingers.
“Dang it,” I muttered, quickly moving my mug farther away to prevent more damage.
Coffee dripped from the white ceramic mug and onto the worn blue-and-gray office carpet. For the past three years I’d walked into my cube space every morning like a zombie too lazy to attack people and infect others.
“Oops, looks like you spilled your coffee!” Harold grinned at me from the neighboring cube, his elbow propped on the top of the partition. His spindly gray eyebrows fanned up and out haphazardly, no rhyme or reason in their growing pattern, and the hair in his nostrils reached for the light of day. Deep lines creased his face, those around his eyes and mouth the most prominent from smiling or laughing, often at me…after he popped up and disturbed my morning’s moody silence.
“Hey, Harold.” I let out a sigh and swiveled to grab a brown to-go napkin from the pile on my shelf. “Good morning. How are you?”
“Great, couldn’t be better!” He was the only chipper person in this entire office today, I had no doubt. At least this close to starting time. Retirement age had come and gone for him, but it wasn’t about the money. He needed a reason to get out of the house and leave Missus Harold in peace. She apparently didn’t like him always underfoot.
In fairness, he probably didn’t like being told to shoo.
He worked three days a week now and was always in a good mood, even after a long weekend. Maybe especially after a long weekend.
“Oops. You got a little…” He straightened a bit and wagged a finger at his chest. “Just got a little spill there.”
“Yeah,” I murmured as I set down a napkin on the cleared desk. My mug immediately created a wet ring on the paper. “What’s up?”
His eyes sparkled and he leaned closer, lowering his voice. “Did you hear the latest?”
I dabbed at the wet spot on my chest. Brown stained my deep pink blouse, and I debated heading to the restroom. I didn’t really care about this cheap blouse or my appearance in this drab place, but I knew where this conversation was going and I wasn’t sure I could handle it. Not this early in the morning, especially on a Monday after a three-day weekend.
Darlene would still be in the restroom, though, applying the last layer of her heavily applied makeup with the almost severe contouring. She’d then douse herself in perfume and crop-dust her head with hairspray, posing a safety hazard to anyone who even contemplated lighting a match. During this final polish, something she didn’t do at home because the kids complained about the smell, she’d tell anyone who would listen all the gossip no one really wanted to hear.
With a sigh reserved for the world’s weariest, I cleaned off my fingers and swiveled, facing him. “No, what’s the latest?”
His lips stretched into a delighted smile. “There’s been touchdown!”
I blinked at him. Either I was extra slow today or that didn’t make sense. “Touchdown…like in football?”
He chuckled, shaking his head in little jerks. “No, no. Not football. Though did you see the game last night?” His expression sobered. “What a travesty. What was that coach thinking? All he did was run plays when he should know the Ravens’ defense is one of the best in the league this year! He wasn’t going to get through, anyone could see that. He lost the game, not the players. He did.”
“Hmm. Umm-hmm.” I nodded like I cared. It was the fastest way to make the flow of words stop. Otherwise he lectured me about watching the games, having heard that I understood the sport and was up to date on all the stats, and tell me I should support for “our” team.
I’d grown up an athletic girl with three older brothers, who still talked football constantly—I’d played with them in youth, and I was inundated with facts currently. It was how our family worked. But that was for big Sunday dinners and holiday parties. I was a hobbyist fan, not a die-hard like Harold and my brothers.
“No, touchdown.” He leaned harder onto the partition and lowered his voice. “A U-ap touched down in Detroit. It’s all over the interwebs!”
I hadn’t figured out if Harold actually thought his chat forums were called an interweb or if it was a joke. I was afraid to ask.
“A U-ap?”
“U-A-P. Unidentified aerial phenomenon.” He nonchalantly shrugged one shoulder. “Some of the kids call it a U-ap now.”
“Ah. And one of those landed somewhere?”
“Yes!” His eyes flashed in excitement. “In someone’s backyard in Detroit! Nextdoor lit up with comments and questions late Friday night and early Saturday morning about the lights and the noise and the ground rumbling. Then someone else said a strange craft landed in their backyard! The next day and into this morning, there’s been army helicopters coming and going, telling people to go back into their houses and shut the doors.”
I pulled my brows together, taking that in, while also absently thinking about getting another cup of coffee. I needed a refresh, especially since I was now wearing some of it, but Harold would follow me into the breakroom with the latest news. I didn’t want to see the sneers or eye rolls from other employees that he didn’t seem to notice.
Everyone knew Harold was a bona fide alien conspiracy theorist. He believed extraterrestrials had created the pyramids and Stonehenge, had infiltrated parts of human history, and had even gifted ancient humans with fire.
Aliens spying on us from the moon? Absolutely! That thing was hollow, everyone knew that. It made a sound like a bell. Of course aliens set up camp there.
Area 51? Yup! The government could not be trusted to give us the facts.
Oblong alien skulls hidden in the archives of museums? Definitely! Archeologists ignored what they couldn’t understand.
He even thought aliens were responsible for the origin of the dragon mythology. He believed ancient humans saw the fire from the spacecrafts as they took off into the sky and didn’t know how else to describe them.
I had to admit, the whole thing fascinated me. I didn’t deep-dive into conspiracy theories or put stock in any of that, but it was interesting to hear all the various “evidence.” Art history and cultural anthropology greatly interested me, and those were strongly woven into the fabric of alien lore.
It was also something to distract me from endless data crunching and report pulling as a midlevel financial data analyst. This job was a grind at the best of times, and Harold’s excitement over U-aps gave me something interesting to focus on.
“Did they get a picture this time?” I asked, folding my hands into my lap.
“No, listen to this.” He looked around as though men in black suits might be wandering the halls. “All the chatter from Nextdoor about what they saw vanished. It was there as late as yesterday evening. Today? Gone. Oh, a few people got screenshots, obviously—we aren’t novices—but the picture the person took didn’t turn up. There’s a blank space where it is supposed to be, but the picture itself is not there!”
He widened his eyes at me knowingly, then nodded conspiratorially.
“Just like the latest pictures of…U-aps that have vanished on the phones, right?” I asked.
“Right! A witness takes a photo of a U-ap, has it in their phone”—he cupped his hands and shook them as though holding a phone—“but when they go to send it to anyone, the picture comes up blank. It is in their phone, but it won’t send. It blanks itself out.”
“Except didn’t you say that when that guy’s friend looked at the picture on the guy’s phone, it wasn’t there?”
He held up a finger. “Right. Exactly! It’s like only the person who took the picture can see the image. It is blank for everyone else.” His lips thinned and his eyes narrowed. He clearly did not think much of that at all. “They are incredibly advanced, technologically. Incredibly advanced. We can’t even hold a candle to their level of technological know-how. I mean…” He shifted his weight, one elbow resting on the partition again. “They got here, didn’t they? We can’t even get to Mars. The leading thought is that they can travel through various wormholes that drop them into our solar system. Some say those wormholes drop them right into Earth! I’ve seen the—”
“Quinn,” a disapproving voice interrupted, announcing the director of finance. My boss’s boss strode down the aisle toward me holding a green mug with a yellow smiley face and the words Have a fantastic day in white lettering in one hand.
I wondered whether the mug was a conscious choice, celebrating the irony of his being the ultimate ruiner of days. And Christmas parties.
Harold grimaced, giving me a “good luck” expression before drifting back down into his cube.
Adopting a posture that conveyed “I’m incredibly busy and definitely working but will take this moment to chat with you,” I swiveled to face him. It would have been much more effective had I not just been caught chatting with my neighbor about alien invasions.
“Yes, sir?” I angled my face up and lifted my eyebrows, the epitome of alert and responsive.
He stopped at the mouth of my cube with a disapproving, severe expression, almost like he smelled something terrible. He’d worn that expression every single time he’d spoken to me, and I started to wonder if it was me. His hair was slicked back from his lengthening forehead, currently shining with a bit of perspiration, and his ill-fitting suit hung off his shoulders and strained at his middle.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
He never wasted time with pleasantries. “Did you see the email regarding rerunning the quarterly reports?”
“I did, yes. I’ve already rerun them and—”
“We need to rerun the quarterly reports. The accounting team has identified a couple oddities in the third quarter that we need you to check out.”
“Yep! I’m on it. I’ve rerun them and am already—”
“Once you have those run, we’ll need you to drill down into those specific cost buckets and compare this quarter with the last two and see what stands out, mmkay?”
“Totally. I’ve already identified—”
“We’re really trying to tighten our belts this quarter. Drive up that bottom line. We’re well positioned for growth with a strong momentum, so we just need to focus on our core competencies and hit those benchmarks.”
Super, he’d devolved into corporate-speak. That marked the end of my participation in this conversation. I was sure he scheduled meetings just to hear himself talk.
He droned on for a while longer, re-explaining the email that had already been very clear, throwing in phrases like “tease out the discrepancy,” and finally ending with, “Let’s make sure we’re working hard…rather than hardly working, mmkay?” He paused, his gaze dipping for a moment. “You’ve got a little something…” He waggled his finger over my new coffee stain.
It was not easy to keep the scowl from my expression. He rapped his knuckles on the top of the cube wall before turning away and striding down the rest of the aisle, disappearing from sight.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Harold slowly appear over the partition again. He dramatically rolled his eyes, shook his head, and lowered back down.
I huffed, smirking, before turning back to my monitor and the open pivot table. I’d already locked in on what was probably causing the issue—a single large expense likely posted to the wrong account—and I just had to double-check everything before I stamped my name on it.
I had no idea why accounting couldn’t do this. It wasn’t a hard discrepancy to find.
Unless the controller had been against the entry and was using me as an “I told you so” to the CFO or someone else. It wouldn’t be the first time. I sometimes wondered if my department should exist at all. All we did was run reports and make suggestions no one really listened to. I had no idea why we bothered.
Not like I’d voice that. My paycheck was decent and the work easy. Better still, I had a pretty clear line for advancement. If I played nice and did the work, I could eventually make some real money. I just had to ignore ding-dong bosses like that one and the one above him, and the one above her, and also the—
On days like today, I really wasn’t sure what my future held.
I lugged myself up, coffee cup in hand, and sought out the breakroom.
“I swear to you,” a middle-aged woman called Margie was saying, holding her steaming mug and standing next to the creamer station. “I saw it. With my own eyes, I saw it.”
“Just like you saw your reflection in the mirror when you cut your bangs, huh?” Dan, a man in his late fifties with a mustard-colored shirt, was forever tossing around put-downs he called jokes. He gave a booming laugh. “I wouldn’t believe your eyes, if I was you.”
Margie wilted, her face closing down in embarrassed discomfort.
A woman with a paycheck similar to mine but with kids and ten times more expenses, she didn’t have much money to spend on herself. She’d tried to give herself a haircut, starting with bangs. The result had apparently been an angle across her forehead instead of a straight line. She’d attempted to adjust, the bangs getting that bit shorter, but didn’t quite manage. After that, I’d lost the thread of logic within the story. Somehow, she’d gone from all-around shoulder-length hair to half a head of bangs and a Rod Stewart hairdo.
While, yes, I privately thought it was hilarious, she didn’t think so, and I would not allow this office bully to make fun of her.
“Like you’re one to talk, Dan,” I said breezily, walking around the rectangular table in the middle of the breakroom. “At least Margie accidentally gave herself that haircut. You actually paid someone to give you a mullet.” I laughed, mimicking his comedic style with the same cutting tone. “Who’s the fool here, her or you?”
Two other people in the breakroom laughed as they sauntered from the area.
“Ah yeah, there you go.” Dan gestured at me, shuffling toward the doorway in disgruntled frustration. “There you go, Margie. Tell her. She listens to that other loony, the one with all the abduction stories.” He touched his thumb to his temple with his fingers splayed. “Maybe Scottie will beam you all up.” He scoffed, rolled his eyes, and left.
Thankfully, I’d flustered him so much that he didn’t notice the coffee stain on my blouse. I now needed to steer clear of him for the rest of the day, so he didn’t have any ammo to fire back at me. Not that it would help him. His cutting remarks never landed, and I was always ready with a rebuttal. He’d never last through Thanksgiving with my family. My brothers would eat him up and spit him out, and that was if he was lucky and didn’t come out the other end.
Still, it would discount whatever was going on with him and Margie, and he’d double down on his efforts to tear her down. I hated that guy.
“I probably did get a little carried away with my bangs,” she muttered, pouring creamer into her mug. “It’s just…hard to know when to stop, you know?”
“When it comes to alcohol, I do know, yes. I know very well.” I smiled at her and then sighed when I saw the coffee pot. “Freaking Dan!” I lifted the pot to study the brown, watery remains at the bottom. “When you take the last of the coffee, you’re supposed to put on a fresh pot. He knows this, the turd. He needs to be hauled into human resources again. Seriously. He needs a refresher on office etiquette.”
I put my mug down and went to make a fresh pot. This one would be strong.
A bright fuchsia sequin top caught my eye as someone entered the breakroom and my dwindling tolerance for Monday evaporated. The smell hit me a moment later, a donkey kick of weaponized flowers created with nothing but chemicals. Darlene had entered the room.
“Hey, Darlene,” Margie said with a bright smile.
“Hey,” I muttered, now entirely focused on my task and breathing through my mouth.
“Hi, ladies.” She walked in like a matador. “How was your long weekend?” she asked, singsonging the question.
I shoveled grounds into the filter, thankful when Margie took up the conversational baton…until I realized what she was saying.
“There I was, waiting for Rufus—that’s my little Pekingese—to finish his pee-pees when I saw this…hovering light in the sky. It was as silent as the grave, and it just sat there, watching me.”
“Oh no, don’t tell me. Ohmygawd.” Darlene stopped next to me and put her hand on my arm, her long nails lacquered in pink to match her top. “Did you and Harvey put her up to this?”
“You mean Harold?” I glanced around her, having to bend to see past the back-teased highlighted dome Darlene had assembled on her head before spraying it with enough aerosol to wipe out the entire ozone layer. “How close was it that you thought it was watching you specifically?”
“Well…it wasn’t that close.” Margie twisted her lips to the side in thought. “I guess maybe it could’ve been watching someone else. But it was very big! The size of a house. And more oblong than a disc. I’d always heard flying saucers were discs, but this one wasn’t.”
This was the first time Margie had joined in on the “alien encounter interwebs” situation. Maybe she had been talking to Harold. She could be impressionable at times, especially when trying to find common ground with a work associate. It had not been easy to convince her that no, Elvis wasn’t still alive. And honestly, I still wasn’t sure I’d succeeded.
“But…” I squinted a little, trying to come up with questions where her logic and mine could shake hands as the coffee started to percolate. “This was at night?”
“You’re not really going to entertain this, are you?” Darlene asked. She was still standing much too close. My nose hair was burning.
“At night, yes. Well…you know, it gets dark so early now.” Margie took a sip. “So, I wasn’t out all that late. More like twilight, but darker. Like…almost night. Dark, but not black. Oh! The moon was nearly full. That’s why. Yes, it was dark, but there was light from the moon, so I could see the shape. And the lights. One of the lights twinkled when I looked up at it. It almost got brighter, like it was focusing in on me. I thought I was about to be abducted!” She laughed like she didn’t really believe it, or maybe any of this.
Darlene lifted her pencil-thin eyebrows, her stare flat. “I think you need to get your eyes checked.”
“Did you get a picture?” I asked, tapping my fingers against the top of the coffee machine impatiently.
“I did!” Margie hurriedly set down her mug and pulled her phone from her loose gray slacks.
Darlene turned to me, her sequins sparkling in spectacular office glam, and lifted her eyebrows again. She was clearly asking if I was really entertaining any of this.
“It could be any number of things,” I told her, scooting away a little.
She reached her mug toward the dripping machine as though I wasn’t sitting here, guarding it.
“No.” I put out my hand to stop her. “You have to wait for it to finish. If you take from the machine right now, you’ll get all the strong coffee, and then the weak stuff will fill the pot.”
“Yeah, I know. I like the strong stuff.”
I closed my eyes, breathing through my annoyance at her lack of office etiquette. She clearly didn’t care about the poor schmuck who came after her and didn’t have enough caffeine to brave the morning.
I was so often that poor schmuck.
She reached again, and I held out my hand a little more forcefully. “No. We need to wait.”
“Here.” Margie came around my other side, holding out her phone. The screen was dark.
I said as much, a surge of something close to adrenaline filling me.
“Oh. Here.” She flicked her fingers across the screen and then held it out again.
The butterflies settled as I made out the image, my hand still held out to stop Darlene. I would police this pot until I got the coffee I made, and I did not care if people thought I was a stickler for the rules because of it.
Although, yes, I was a stickler for the rules. At least the ones that made for a “cohesive working environment,” as the flyer in the HR department waiting room said. Proper coffee for all helped us all. It kept me from breaking things over people’s heads.
“That’s just a star, Margie,” I said, turning away. “It’s pretty bright, so I can see the confusion, but yeah, that’s just a star.”
Darlene huffed, obviously having figured that might be the case.
“Oh, shoot.” Margie leaned closer to the screen. “Oops, no, wrong picture. I don’t have my glasses. Here, this one.”
She swiped her finger across the screen. I saw a flash of a shape with lights and the gleam of moonlight on a strangely curved material before the image faded into white.
“What…” I leaned closer, then broke a cardinal rule of picture viewing by swiping without asking.
Thankfully, Margie wasn’t prone to keeping dick pics or taking embarrassing photos. At least, not that I was encountering. I looked at the star picture, swiped right past the white screen, and then stared at a pic of her dog looking up at her with its tongue hanging out. Swipe left again to a white screen.
Had I imagined it?
“Well, this is too la-la for me.” Darlene pulled her mug from underneath the streaming liquid.
“Dang it, Darlene!” I’d used my dominant hand to swipe, the one keeping Darlene at bay. “You need to join Dan in HR for a lesson on etiquette.”
“See you there.” She turned, waggling pink-tipped fingers from over her shoulder. “Toodles.”
“That’s crap,” I said, watching the rest of the coffee fall into the pot. At least she hadn’t gotten the first bit. It would still be plenty strong.
“That’s weird.” Margie pulled the phone closer to her face. She swiped left and right, like I had done. “Where’d it go?”
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
It was a Monday morning in a cube farm after a three-day weekend. So far, I’d spilled coffee on myself, been caught not working by the boss’s boss, and had my sense of smell temporarily singed away by Darlene’s proximity. Today was not the day to buy admittance to the conspiracy theory circus. It simply was not. If any of this still sounded plausible tomorrow—
You know what? No. Not even tomorrow. I was not entering that circus. If I started believing the moon was hollow, I might fall down the rabbit hole. Next, I’d be in some cult showering praise and money on a man named Todd who owned a mansion and a gold car and had me believing he was poor. I needed to nip this in the bud.
“Well, anyway.” I grabbed the coffee pot, ignoring the hiss of drips from the machine as it hit the hot plate, and filled my mug.
Except I hadn’t emptied it of the quarter cup of lukewarm coffee.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said to myself, following through. “Does not matter. I’m good. This is good. I don’t know about that picture, Margie. Weird. Well, I gotta go now. I have a date with a spreadsheet.”
“Oh, Quinn, wait.”
I slowed because I hated being rude to nice people, and half turned. “Yeah?”
“Did you know you had a stain on your shirt?”
https://www.kfbreene.com. I write fantasy in a variety of sub-genres, some with spice, some without, and all with humor and found families.
Do you follow all the UFO/UAP theories?
