Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Author’s note: Once my first outline done I realized I had “borrowed” from Borges’ Book of Sand and John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. I’m putting these two titles here so you can check them out when you find the time.

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And there is something else I thought about.

All this room they gave us. All this time I spent taking it when I could have been filling it. If this box is infinite there’s enough space for us and all I could have made up about it. Maybe that’s why they’ve lost from the beginning. It contained what I forgot to write. What I didn’t. In between the billion typewriting monkeys, a billion things could get nipped. A few words about how I, the naked ape, could write a few words. About you. Of you. Your name. Your thoughts. Everything you ever said. Everything you didn’t, couldn’t. Everything I remember. Everything I forgot. A word for the color of your eyes. A word to remind me you forgive me.

*****

Friday (eleven days)

The smiles didn’t alter when it was finally Lenore’s turn. They were still grins stuck in muscles with neither variations nor nuances. Polite.

She stood from her chair to speak at 9am, the time workday began the other days.

The mid-September staff meetings at Deep Green Alliance were relaxed, happy, friendly; everybody was supposed to be mellow from the summer break, and the starting year of the company was only about last year’s performance and not yet about the projections for Quarter 1. But it was 9am. Everybody was anxious to go to their desks.

But she replaced the pie charts on the screen with the schedule for the next internal newsletter–The Halloween Special–and in it would be more pie charts, bottom lines and headshots but most importantly the one announcement everybody would read: the Halloween party. And only then the smiles twitched a bit.

This spurt of attention helped her segue to the part of Monthly Green everybody would only pretend they would read: the ten extra pages Lenore had engaged herself to write: a scary short story.

“…I wanna thank Eliza of Management who suggested the idea after she learned about my literary quirks. Proof that she does read our resumes.”

The laughs went convincing enough and the beat allowed her to show and explain the cardboard box:

“So as I explained, you’re all invited to put your scary story idea into the box. It can be anonymous, of course. You have till next Friday to fill it with all your spooky anecdotes, outlines, or cinematic universe, I don’t know… then it’s up to me to make them into an entertaining story. The box will be in the breakroom of Accounting, next to the coffee machine. The slit is too thin to throw your empty cups inside.”

The few laughs she got bent toward embarrassment. Only Eliza nodded. Winked even. The rest of the frontline of smiles was back to polite. The floors above and beneath were already at the job. Lenore cut her presentation short. The double doors of the meeting room opened, people spread out.

She went back to the Accounting floor and put her suggestion box between the coffee machine and the microwave and then she went to work on some pie charts all day.

At 7pm, she took it home. It was surprisingly heavy.

*****

Lenore locked the door of her apartment and took her shoes off.

She exhaled with relief and excitement, and secretly with fatigue. As every day, her real workday could begin: writing.

Supposedly.

The backlog of books for her next haul video was still there on her desk. Her real desk. It had been for weeks now. As every day she would not dare log on to her YouTube account, check her inbox, too scared to see the hundreds of impatient comments and messages–or a lack thereof. To see the stagnating subscriber count. Too scared to admit her channel was defunct and it was just a lack of commitment.

Like every evening she took some time from her real workday to take a shower, have dinner, clean her kitchen a little, watch a little internet, then inexplicably waste some more time, ten minutes here, five minutes there… Then it was midnight again, time to sleep. Again.

What’s it gonna be when I have children, she thought.

Teeth brushed and pajama on, she got in bed, took the suggestion box with her.

The white ceiling welcomed her, the last sight of each of her days, where she could draw her last thoughts.

Today was how she aced public speaking this morning.

Lenore ripped the two pieces of tape off the lids.

The 8x8x8 box was full.

She couldn’t believe it. They were forty-five at the meeting but it was like the whole building had come to play her horror story contest, every floor of Deep Green, plus the guys at TravelGuess next door, and probably even the Störme-Sterne people from across the street, they were at least two millions in that skyscraper that stole their sun all day.

The surface layer was all letter-size sheets. No torn papers.

Lenore was actually…touched.

She unfolded a first one.

THERE’S SOMEONE BEHIND YOU

Just this. Handwritten. Centered. Capital letters. Black ink.

Ok…

There was only the wall behind her. Still she stirred her legs under the covers and rubbed the back of her neck. Like when someone tells you the room has cockroaches and the entirety of your skin suddenly gets on the watch.

She’d never liked horror. Some parts of Harry Potter had frightened her sleepless as a kid. So Stephen King, fucking Lovecraft and Ligotti had always been a no-go. But hey, it’s Halloween. And Eliza was enthusiastic. And she’s not 10 anymore, she’s 23, a big girl, she knew a thing or two about horror. About being scared at least.

A STORY THAT WOULD BE LIKE JURASSIC PARK … WITH ZOMBIES. YOU GO ON VACATION THERE AND YOU CAN HUNT ZOMBIES LIKE A SAFARI. AND AT THE END THE MAIN CHARACTER GETS BITTEN BY A ZOMBIE AND TURNS INTO ONE AND THE YEAR AFTER ONE OF HIS COWORKER COMES AND KILLS HIM.

Lenore cracked up, not because it was good but because it was adorable. Then because it was not good. Or maybe it was.

Among the papers, the slips, the sticky notes, the torn pages, she found a small strip, folded as to form a long accordion once unfolded.

It said:

v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

It took her some time to figure out it was the end of a YouTube address. But when she did and checked, she sighed it was going to be a long week.

*****

Around 1am, after a few videos from the suggestions sidebar, she closed her laptop and went back to the box, determined to read at least one good thing tonight.

THE HAUNTED DILDO

A GIRL DECIDES TO USE HER DILDO ON THE BALCONY FOR A CHANGE. IT’S A NICE SUMMER NIGHT AND ALL.

SHES DOING HER BUSINESS AND SHE NOTICES A MAN WATCHING HER FROM A WINDOW IN THE BULDING IN FRONT. HE LOOKS HANDSOME SO SHE LETS HIM PEEP AND IT ACTUALLY MAKES HER COME HARDER COS SHE’S A SKANK LIKE THAT.

THE NEXT DAY SHE ASKS WHO LIVES THERE AND THE LANDLORD TELLS HER THE APPARTMENT HAS BEEN EMPTY FOR YEARS CAUSE THERE WAS A MURDER OR SOMETHING.

THE GUY WAS A GHOST.

Jesus Christ…

Tomorrow was Saturday but she really should go to sleep. Since she had started to cut back on her antidepressants, Lenore tended to oversleep and didn’t want that. She had a lot of things to do. She hadn’t planned what exactly, but she did.

As she put back the box on the floor, she heard a thump.

Someone had managed to stick an object inside.

She shook the box, it thumped again, sounded quite big.

With no fear for papercuts, she sank a hand down the sheets.

She felt plastic, gripped it and pulled out the last thing she expected to see in her home.

A dildo.

She was no expert but it was the basic type. A purple bullet-shaped dildo with buttons on the base to make it vibrate. Seven reasonable inches. Brand new in its clamshell pack.

“Made in China,” she read out loud from the paperboard card inside.

So the kind that gives you butt cancer cause it’s made out of cheap plastic.

There were instructions in five different languages, a speech bubble that read ‘5 Super Speeds !’, a picture of some random whore with a better ass than her, but there was no note to accompany the offensive gift. No GOTCHA, no LOL, no HAPPY BIRTHDAY. It wasn’t her birthday.

If a man put it there, it’s harassment, she sneered, despite herself. If it’s a woman… She brushed off the pavlovian thought and tossed the sextoy back into the waves of paper.

She turned off the light and tried some shuteye. Since she had cut back on her antidepressants she had a hard time falling asleep.

2am, she saw.

For fuck’s sake…

She thought. And thought and rolled over, and thought.

How did they even pull that off?

The practical joke was unlike anyone at work to begin with. No one she knew at least.

The inner monologue tossed and turned as much as she tossed and turned in the bed, looking for a good posture, one that wouldn’t make her hear her heartbeat inside the pillow.

Until her thoughts caught on something.

The package is sealed at least. Means it’s unused.

She thought casually that she hadn’t masturbated in two weeks. A long time, even by her standards.

The fight for sleep calmed down, until Lenore was lying on her back, eyes to the ceiling, paradoxically immobile and tense.

One more minute passed and suddenly she reached out for the thingy and held it in the patch of streetlamp light filtering through her shades.

If I don’t say anything about this on Monday, some people will have a good laugh behind my back. But if I say anything it’s gonna be a legal massacre.

Down the street, a car drove by. People out on a Friday. Having fun.

I don’t have batteries anyway.

I never tried a vibrator before. Must be so intense.

Too intense.

I can’t be-lieve they did that shit.

No way this crap is touching my skin.

I have a few condoms left from Brian…

Her nipples hardened under her oversized t-shirt.

She refrained from rolling over because she knew she would then feel a cold wet spot in her boxers.

There were two batteries in the TV remote. Three more in her alarm clock.

2:39am

“Fh-uuuuuuck,” she sighed out.

And got up.

If this thing vibrates like an earthquake I’m throwing it away.

I wanna see how it works. If I’m destined to write about haunted dildos at least let’s see how a dildo works.

It took three minutes to scissor the package open without slicing her fingers, a couple more to clean the toy in the sink, to look and touch around for any default, to put the batteries in, sit back comfortably in her bed and eventually a soft buzzing covered the sound of nervous breathing in her bedroom.

The noise wasn’t as menacing as expected.

She wrapped her hand around the smooth shaft.

“Ok. It vibrates alright.”

She turned it off, dropped it onto the covers.

In the restored silence, she easily pictured how it would feel on her clitoris and it made her blush.

How it would feel inside her vagina was more difficult and her imagination came up with strange uncharted reactions the dildo could awake. This made her uneasy. A well-known, well-hated anxiety. Often accompanied by the image of her mother slapping her fingers for biting her nails.

Lenore pushed the On button twice. Speed #2 resounded. A bit faster, a bit louder. Three more pushes to Max Speed. This one was low and ample and rough. Almost hilarious.

One more and the cycle ended, the toy shut down.

Again, the silence left Lenore facing her empty hesitations.

Her legs stirred under the covers, this time in a very specific way and Lenore was nonplussed, if not bewildered, that in the back of her head she had already decided she would masturbate. And not as a frustrating substitute for sex: masturbating for the sake of masturbating.

And then she rolled her eyes, as she additionally realized she would have to decide which speed she wanted for her clitoris.

Though, a nicely warm flush came up with the reasons why she settled on #2.

It flowed from her face to her whole body. Her shirt was chaffing her nipples.

But the shirt would stay on. As if people were was watching, she would keep her clothes on. She even tucked the covers up around her shoulders, and sitting up against the headboard, her feet flat on the mattress, she made it look like a pelvic exam.

She placed the tip on her left inner thigh, as close to her crotch as she could dare.

Two clicks, the thing buzzed. It tickled.

She let the doohickey do its thing on the side; her free hand had a more serious affair to attend: ease under her boxers and through her unkempt bush, down to her labia.

Lenore was definitely wet.

Her fingers bent back up, spread her open, pulled the hood of her clitoris.

It didn’t tickle anymore.

She caressed her sweet little button, just to pet it, reassure it. And that she so secretly cherished it this way made her flush all over one last time before…

Her other hand moved just an inch upward and the alien object made contact with her sex through the fabric.

“hhhOh my God!” Immediately she pulled it away in shock. And just as immediately put it back on, to be sure.

And yes, a moan or a gasp escaped her mouth as the vibrations broke through. Yes, it was more intense, it was more different than anything she could have imagined.

She pulled the dildo away again, stopped right on the edge, panting, whimpering. Five seconds. Five seconds had been enough to feel the domino effect inside her that lead to her orgasms. Five seconds to realize her face was a lewd grimace of surprise.

And she hadn’t even moved her hand.

She closed her knees together, turned the thing off, turned the lights on.

She trod the comforter away and looked down at her body.

“Oh my God…”

So that’s why everybody has one, she thought because she wouldn’t think So that’s what I’ve been missing out all these years.

Her clitoris was throbbing, as surprised as herself. Phantom vibrations were still inside and reluctantly fading out.

She rubbed herself to scramble them off and then, forgetting about the supposed watchers, she pulled her underwear down.

She had two choices: get herself off the traditional way, or use the toy and have, hypothetically, the biggest orgasm of her life.

But it was more than that–it was beyond all that–The pleasure inside her clit she had glimpsed, it wanted nothing to do with the short way to climax. It was a pleasure as long as warmth, or inner peace. Something to savor for as long as…

The journey more important than the destination. It made Lenore smirk how a guilty as charged jill-off session had taken a buddhic turn. But it was true. They may not be as intimate and gracious as her fingers but the vibrations of the toy were something huge. So huge there were things inside. And as a writer, things hiding inside bigger things called her forth. Turned her on.

Also she was horny. Lenore was human at the end of the day.

Her heart was beating fast and hard. It went harder and faster because she opened the drawer of her nightstand and took a condom wrapper out of it.

Three left, she saw.

2:54am

She took her shirt off, it gave her nipples a break. Now she was completely nude. She hadn’t masturbated naked in years. In fact she never did.

With two trembling hands, she rubbed uncomfortable shivers off of her breasts, turned them into manageable heat.

Two fingers did the same for the hole of her vagina. And while she couldn’t believe it, she got on all fours to reach deeper inside herself. While not extinguishing any fire, her massage soothed her muscles, got her patiently ready.

Propped up on her elbows, her two unsure hands put a condom on the dildo. Then going treacherously confident, her hands turned the vibrator on. Her confident back lay down on the bed and her confident legs spread a little.

She looked down at the cleft of her pussy. Watched the tip of the dildo approach, its purple color paled by the transparent yellow of the condom.

It touched her and she heard herself moan. She couldn’t believe how it sounded. Almost like crying. And these vocalizations destroyed her efforts to delay the moment she would move on to her clitoris.

There was no way to get ready for this. Besides delaying.

The vibrations made contact with her delicate genital skin.

“Aaaaaaahh…”

It came out naturally. She couldn’t believe it.

Her hand began the slightest circling motion. She let out another moan. Usually those only appeared at the peak of her orgasms. Not anymore.

Now she discovered that there was such a thing as fighting back her orgasm. Holding it back with every technique, every little tweaking of her flesh that she knew, every muscle, every tendon, every breath, hold it and enjoy the new sensation blasting in her, hold it until she would find it too wrong to feel it, which would only take a matter of seconds.

She pulled the toy away not to come too quickly. And of course she couldn’t believe that it meant come too soon. Usually it never took her more than five minutes to masturbate, right now it would take five seconds to come. And she wanted it to last all night. It was the only thing she controlled, her will to live this moment.

She turned on all fours again and widened the circular motion over her clit, fast and rigid.

It was like when Brian used to take her doggystyle. When she loved to let him take her like that, see her like that, hear her like that, when she knew he was looking at himself penetrating her so deep and understood him, when he spread her cheeks and looked at her asshole and this gaze felt just like a tongue.

Her anus was contracting, to the rhythm of her pleasure, open for all the ghosts to see, the ones supposed to be behind her tonight.

Her pussyhole too. Pulsating over wetness. Begging.

She glided the full length of the shaft along her slit, up and down, and almost paused when the tip rested against the wet opening, but she withdrew, thinking, No, not that.

Instead she turned to her side, lifted a leg up and pressed hard against her clit, saturated it, afraid that she wouldn’t have the same resolve next time she ventured.

So she made sure the vibration seeped in her, thick.

The cries it pulled out of her mouth were from a new woman. One Lenore didn’t know she was. In a matter of one evening, she proved, through sexuality, to be an immense being. Immense like ambition, inspiration, strength. Ideals.

She could now understand those diagrams of the anatomy of the clitoris she saw on Reddit. She got them. Got how this tiny nub was in reality this huge strange four-legged creature snuggling her vagina. She could feel the whole of it for the first time, stiff, rattling, and about to come.

Her orgasm began with a long-drawn-out groan, cut short by a first contraction of pure pleasure that hammered in her brain. She pushed the tip even deeper into her clit. She moaned with her mouth open and her eyes closed. But no, she needed to be on all fours, so she did, opened, liberated, just in time to feel all the following contractions of her two very jealous holes.

She couldn’t stop wailing, blow after blow. Until it brought laughs and tears. Lenore had never come so hard she cried and/or laughed before. A gift from the new woman.

Liquid even dripped down from her urethra at some point but she didn’t notice, too busy transforming into the person who was having the biggest, longest, weirdest, most spectacular orgasm of her life.

She gave herself three more of those that night.

Only three because when she finally did notice she was squirting, she started to cry too hard to go on. Cries of bitter joy, full of promises for the next day and the next days forever.

5am.

*****

Saturday (ten days)

The new woman disappeared like shadows did at sunrise. Lenore awoke at noon on a salty pillow. Her brain assured her she was tired and she believed it.

Everything that happened last night was now unexciting like stored data and she could feel she would spend her Saturday the usual way: doing not much.

She would not feel guilty about it. Writing was out the question so soon in the process. And the formidable rush she had experienced only proved once again that she had it in her, that there was hope, not necessarily a ravenous drive, not an irrepressible capacity to write half a novel in one feverish sitting, not the network, not the results, but at least a will. Something stronger than her apathy. A Viking mode she would switch on later. At the right moment.

But now in the daylight, the two new objects in her space, box and dildo, felt like tasks.

Their sight sent butterflies in her belly, yet going back to them would not flow smoothly like it did yesterday. And despite knowing she would masturbate today–several times, no doubt–despite the fact that she shaved for the first time in weeks, Lenore got dressed after her shower.

While eating her microwaved lunch she avoided thinking about her next orgasm. It was exhausting to think about it, to feel about it. She had the whole afternoon for herself and had just discovered masturbation as an unexplored continent.

Stagefright. For lack of a better word.

As the hours passed, the urge hindered her from even indulging in idleness. So eventually, reading from the suggestion box became a good excuse. No preparation, no cleaning up. And she could do it on her couch.

Notepad and pen to look serious. She put the box on her lap.

THIS BOX CONTAINS ONLY LIES

Lenore rolled her eyes with an amused pout. Clever boy wanted to show off with his liar’s paradox, but he ignored how Brian used to nag her with this kind of mindfucks.

Let’s find a long one.

100% TRUE. CANON HAD TO RECALL ALL THEIR NEWEST L SERIES CAMERA LENSES BECAUSE OF A DEFAULT. WHEN USERS TOOK A PICTURE, SOME PEOPLE ON THE PICTURE APPEARED EYELESS. ON EVERY PHOTO AND ALWAYS THE SAME PERSON.

CANON DID THIS AFTER SOME GUY IN JAPAN KILLED HIS FAMILY AND CLAIMED THE PHOTOS SHOWED THEY WERE EVIL DUPLICATES.

WHEN YOU SEARCH FOR THE LENS ON EBAY YOU GET YOUR ACCOUNT TERMINATED.

Come on, it’s the same story as that movie with the sunglasses. You can do better.

She kept on reading. Some good leads. Some pathetic attempts. Lenore observed the experiment got her very arrogant. Normal people didn’t understand the science of storytelling. Not as instinctively as her.

But overall, people were just nice and funny. It was nice they had taken the time for this. It was sad she barely talked to any of them.

It was weird they had taken the time for this. It was weird anyone paid attention.

At least she didn’t find anything weird. Weirder than the dildo. She found a small envelope, the elegant kind that goes with flowers and gifts. It contained a note: FOR THE GIRL WHO LOST EVERYTHING. And a key. Common type, padlock key, nickel, round head. ‘P19’ sharpied on it.

“Wow, an ARG,” Lenore said, mildly enthused, more focused on the fact that someone assumed she had ‘lost everything.’

She read until she had a thin stack of paper neatly unfolded at her feet, under a paperweight.

And until she couldn’t deny anymore that her hands were shaking.

She wanted to meet the new woman. Through sexually altered state.

No, cross that. She wanted to reach that point where both, her and the new woman, met. A point where she was coming really hard. And hand in hand they became undistinguishable.

Convoluted comparison.

She was exhausted before even starting. After much ceiling-staring, she decided it could begin with something that always had made her blush about masturbation as much as it thrilled her: a ritual.

Lenore took her clothes off and folded them neatly next to the stack of paper. It looked like a ritual enough.

She got up before making a wet spot on the couch and went to the bathroom for a towel. The largest she would find.

There she found herself standing motionless, thinking it didn’t happen to her a lot to walk around naked, in broad daylight.

And she also pondered if she should submit to the idea that came to her suddenly.

Do it out of curiosity.

She went back to the couch with the towel and a hand mirror. Just for curiosity.

She masturbated three times, as many times as there were leftover condoms in the nightstand.

The first orgasm was quick but as strong as ever. Only a few drops fell on the towel, nothing like those incredible jets she had seen on the internet.

The new woman didn’t show up.

Lenore allowed herself a coffee break.

For the second, she sat on the floor, between paper and clothes, her back against the couch and the mirror angled at her vagina.

She looked at it, indecently hairless. She could have found it pretty. Had it been not hers. She parted her labia, opened herself as wide as she could, as indecently as she could. She pulled on the hood of her clitoris and squinted at the reflection of it sticking out, leaned closer.

With two fingers she tried for the fabled G-spot magazines and blogs were so stoked about. Only to be disappointed; more fascinated by the sight of fingers delving into her.

And thinking that fingers don’t vibrate.

She pulled off the old condom and rolled on a new one.

Her breathing rose to a hardly manageable level.

She caressed herself with the vibrating toy, avoiding her clit.

And then finally, pushed a few inches inside her.

The first observation was, again, disappointing. Her vagina was not used to such a girth anymore. And her crotch vibrated. That was pretty much it. Down to the bones in her buttocks on the carpet.

Let’s try speed #3.

No, 4.

The vibrations increased comically with each push of the button. And then Lenore angled the tip against where G-spots are supposed to be.

“Ohhhhh Oh my God AAaaaah!”

She pressed against what she had found. “Fuuuck…HH…HHHh…” Her toes curled. In the mirror, her pussy swelled up.

There was a now very obvious little ball inside her that was sparkling in response.

Lenore pushed the dildo as far as she could to get away from it and give herself a break. She went through the speed cycle back to #2.

She braced for the next step: moving her hand up and down.

How could she have missed such a sensitive organ inside her?

Anyway, she started massaging it.

She looked at herself doing it.

She moaned with unexpected pleasures.

And became a writhing, blabbering choreography of twitches.

The time it took her to find the right motion was not lost. Journey and destination again. (Not Buddha, Oliver Goldsmith, she looked it up.) She still wasn’t sure she had found it when she put her fingers on her clit and went for the climax.

Finding out she actually did made her moan definitely loud. Because her G-spot came, not her clitoris.

Now this was a mindfuck. She groaned. Indecently. But the feel fleeted away so rapidly its memory got lost into disbelief. In place, fluid heat broke down inside her. She didn’t need the mirror to see the stream of clear liquid she pushed out of her climaxing pussy. It sprayed her wrist and the towel. It was warm. It was benevolent. Strange word crossing her mind as she crossed her orgasm toward states that don’t use words.

After this loud climax, as thoughts came back, she decided she needed to hydrate.

And with a bottle, with wobbly legs and arms, with a new condom, with the reminder to take more care of her nipples, and with twenty minutes of pause reading about G-spot stimulation, Lenore went for her third.

This time she masturbated for a couple hours, unconcerned of driving herself crazy with climaxes of various shapes and intensities. The towel seeped into the carpet. The mirror wasn’t entirely forgotten. The new woman not entirely absent.

The detail that eventually put a stop to her frenzy was finding that squirting didn’t feel that good. She had a few screaming orgasms, climaxes that took her to mystic high points, but the sensation of squirt passing through her urethra was not that enjoyable in itself. It didn’t add anything. It made a mess.

The experience was not a disappointment, though.

Squirting looked beautiful.

More a decision than an observation. But tears of joy rolled down Lenore’s cheeks.

I’m a squirter, she thought, like an unlocked skill.

I can do this beautiful thing when I come.

She felt unbelievably good, and resolute to stay that way she crashed on the couch, stayed naked, reads some ideas from the box.

I KNEW A GUY WHO WAS SO SCARED OF SCREAMERS HE CODED AN APP THAT WOULD SET OFF A SCREAMER ON HIS COMPUTERS AND HIS PHONE AND HIS TV REGULARLY AND AT RANDOM SO THAT HE WOULD GET DESENSITIZED.

SO FROM TIME TO TIME YOU WOULD HEAR THIS SUPER LOUD SCREAM COMING FROM HIS OFFICE AND I SWEAR TO GOD AFTER A FEW MONTHS I REMEMBER YOU COULD HEAR THE GUY SAYING ‘HAHA YOU DIDN’T SCARE ME THIS TIME, BITCH!’

This kind of stupid was interrupted by the phone.

*Lena, you’re going out tonight!*

This was Kate. Her best friend.

Without thinking, Lenore put on a bathrobe while they spoke. And when they were done and had agreed on when and where to meet, she felt the familiar blend of guilt and relief of having a good reason not to write tonight. And discovered the relief of not having to masturbate tonight.

*****

Their moods always completed each other some way or another. Tonight though, they were in perfect sync. They were both hypering away in the café they had stormed in preparation of the night.

Lenore talked endlessly about the suggestion box–the PG parts at least.

Kate was always hyper to begin with. Even if it sometimes could hide something else.

Kate was the only co-worker Lenore would call a friend. She was the only person she saw crying at her desk. Crying and still working at the same time.

The pressure and the turnover at Deep Green were so relentless no one saw the point in making friends with someone that would most likely be replaced the next year.

Not these two girls–these two kids. They had chosen otherwise.

Kate had been fired a month ago.

“You know what?” Lenore said. “You’ll come put your own story idea in my box.”

“Oh?” Kate chortled.

“But you have to be gentle, it’s a very delicate box.”

“I’ll use very delicate paper.”

Flirting like this didn’t count when you were hyper.

They left the place to go decide upon which club they could bring mayhem and met two colleagues along the way. Two women Lenore didn’t know the names of and didn’t know what their job was at Deep Green.

The four girls were let in easily and for free. They were beautiful girls. Lenore thought the two nameless ones (she chose to call them Jill and Becky) were Saturday-night-beautiful: legs, cleavage, loudness… Unlike Kate who was simply beautiful, in her opinion. She didn’t need a mask of greasy powdery foundation and darkened brows.

Kate was a lesbian. Not that these two facts were related, Lenore corrected herself. She hadn’t made friend with her for status. Although Kate still had said, “You’ve unlocked Gay Friend,” jokingly. Lenore liked her precisely because she didn’t feel awkward finding her beautiful. Because Kate’s eyes on her body didn’t feel wrong, or right. With her, Lenore felt…well, like female friends do.

The rest of the time, the surface time, they completed each other, as we say. Lenore would say ‘Blue’ Kate would reply ‘Maybe your blue is not my blue’ and Lenore would think ‘I wish I could show you my blue’ and Kate ‘Bitch, that’s pink’. And it worked for them.

Lenore paid for the first row.

After two hours she was louder than Becky and Jill, in a perfect recovering shy girl fashion.

Booze had helped a lot these last two years, to overcome the hostility of festive places, where she used to feel as if everybody was staring at her, judging her bad dancing and anything else.

She had made some progress, being tipsy made her stop caring and it had been key in understanding that shyness is mostly centripetal ego. She had even noted that thought down for a potential novel.

“I’m leaving,” Kate screamed in her ear over the music.

“Oh?”

Lenore realized she had been dancing around Becky and Jill for a long time and had lost track of her friend’s sapphic antics.

For once, Kate’s face didn’t really say, I’m getting laiiiiiiid, as her feet were on the way out, but Lenore was certain it was the reason.

To hide her disarray, she stuck her tongue out between two raised fingers, too drunk to care that it was a good way to spot the straight white girl.

Kate smiled and squeezed Lenore’s other hand, held it as a goodbye as she walked away backward. Held it and held eye contact until they separated. The caress of their palms, their fingertips, lasted longer than it appeared.

Back with the two nameless, Lenore danced some more, danced whatever, drank whatever, talked whatever.

She learned they were roommates and they prompted her to go to their place for the afterparty. There was more alcohol there. And weed and pills. She pretended she didn’t hear that last one.

They laughed a lot in the Uber. It was going all right. Lenore forgot she had been kind of ditched. She tried not to picture Kate having sex with a stranger. She tried not to think about her dildo waiting at home.

She was wet when Jill locked the door and had her sit on the sofa.

Becky went straight for a shower. Jill turned out the lights and lit some candles and lit up a blunt with one of them.

“You just killed a sailor,” Lenore said.

“Wat?”

“You know, it’s just… when you light a cigarette like that, it’s… heh, it’s just some stupid superstition.”

“Oh my God, you mean like I killed so many people over the years, why did you fucking tell me that?” she blurted out and handed her the joint.

Lenore turned down the illegal hit and instead poured herself a legal shot.

“I know what we’re gonna do,” Jill mumbled as she crawled around looking for something under all the piles of other things everywhere.

She took a Ouija board out from an unlabelled box.

It was the last thing Lenore wanted to do. But turning down an activity twice in a row would definitely dent the frail beginnings of connection with this girl she had never spoken to before tonight.

“It’ll help you with your scary story you talked about yesterday,” Jill was convinced. “Did you start by the way?”

“Yea.”

“Bet you found the weirdest shit in that box. Anyone asked you out?”

“Haha, no. How does this work?” she pointed at the Ouija on the coffee table.

“You never watch movies?”

Jill took the glass from her hand and emptied it, then put it upside down onto the board.

“Put your finger on it and ask away. Don’t push or anything, just let it move by itself.”

They sat next to each other on the carpet and their fingertips met over the narrow surface of the glass.

The breeze through the opened windows made the candlelight flicker and the darkness squirm.

Lenore didn’t want to do this. She really didn’t.

“Ghost,” clamored Jill. “Tell us where the old tenant hid the gold.”

They stared at the board.

“Ghost,” she went on, “tell us why I didn’t get laid tonight.”

Nothing happened.

Because ghosts aren’t real.

They could hear Becky blowdrying her hair.

Jill sighed.

“Ghos–”

The glass moved.

“Holy shieeet!” they whispered.

Slowly it shuffled toward the bottom of the board. And stopped there, at the word GOOD BYE.

A comedic beat and the two girls burst out in a greasy, inebriated guffaw. “What the fuck,” they also managed to breathe out. Jill did the proverbial roll on the floor.

“What you bitches doing in the dark?” Becky asked, landing onto the sofa in front of them. She was wearing nothing but a towel.

“A spirit told us to fuck off,” Jill explained.

“Yeah, whatever.” Becky kicked the Ouija and a candle off the table to put her legs in place. “My feet are killing me.”

Lenore went and stomped the candle out before it would set the rug on fire. There were still five more on, which cast an orange glow over the sight of Jill giving a foot massage to her near naked roommate.

Becky took the joint from the ashtray and proceeded to finish it.

Lenore reached for her phone in her pocket…which was actually in her purse, far away.

Ashes fell on Becky’s towel, startled her. The girl wriggled herself out of it and tossed it away, leaving her nude. Jill had not let go of her feet.

They heard in the background: “M-Maybe I should get going–”

“Is your boyfriend waiting for you?”

Lenore got betrayed by a pause before saying, “No.”

Becky spread her thighs a little. Jill protested, “Don’t move.”

“I never wanna go back to that club again, it’s lame,” Becky sighed. “We always come back empty-handed.” And she cupped her hands over her sex.

“You’re gonna scare away our guest,” Jill whispered.

“She can watch, I don’t give a fuck.”

Her fingers ran down to her labia.

They were talking like she wasn’t here but Lenore didn’t say anything, like she wasn’t there. Because of it, things unfurled fast.

Jill easily pushed the table out of the way and leaned above her roommate’s hands. She kissed them, kissed the inside of her legs.

And then Lenore saw for sure that mouth and tongue touched the hairless mound, just between the wrists.

Becky exhaled softly and asked Lenore without turning her head to her: “You ever went down on a girl?”

Again the same kind of pause got stuck in her throat.

“No.”

She could guess the next question and was afraid the answer would be no again.

If only her phone could ring.

“It’s gonna be awkward Monday at work,” Becky said.

“Breaking my concentration,” Jill chortled. She beckoned Lenore:

“Hey writer girl, come closer. Have a look at how it’s done. You ever wrote porn?”

It definitely was a porn scene rolling before her eyes. There was no real character motivation. The only difference was the playlist going in the background. There’s no music in porn anymore.

Trying all the while to figure out what to do, Lenore sat close to the girls.

She saw Jill kissing further and further, toward what was under those hands, a clitoris, wetness, taboo.

They had done this before. A lot. Evident by the intoxication-defying application of that mouth.

The fingers spread before the tongue. And Lenore saw oral sex happen before her eyes. Not on a computer screen.

Alcohol would be to blame for the way she saw it. It looked cute. For a long moment it was cute, Jill licking Becky, both humming with satisfaction, her tongue moving, her clitoris reacting, much like a penis but twice as sensitive, and so totally adorable.

Until the dreaded final question came out. There, Lenore lost some of the glimmer in her eyes.

They didn’t give her the usual bullshit of how women are naturally bi and it was what she missed out in college. They were straightforward: they gave her the opportunity to taste a pussy.

And she took it.

Because it was there. That would be the explanation during the hangover tomorrow. That was if Lenore had to explain herself anyway.

She had this thought that she could do better. As a vagina-bearer herself, she thought she could bring more attention to parts other than the clitoris. She pictured all the details, all the patterns she could do to send Becky to oral heaven.

This was one part of the chain reaction that lead Lenore to defeat everything, from fear to bashfulness, and rise to her knees and kiss Becky right on her pussyhole.

Her lips dipped into heat and wetness.

She really wanted to taste it. The two girls had guessed it before she did in a way.

Lenore kissed around.

Gave a shy lick.

Up to the clit, around which she enclosed her lips.

It tasted a lot like a penis. Warmer. The smell of soap was still too fresh to tell.

“You know what’s the best?” Jill cut in. “It’s feeling two mouths instead of one.” And she turned Becky on her side, pulled her leg up. Becky spread her buttcheeks. She was breathing hard.

Jill put her tongue on her anus. Lenore put her mouth back on her pussy.

It was exhilarating to hear the moans change, go to a less controlled place, less dominant.

Lenore was pleasuring someone for the first time in a very, very long time. She had quite a lot of character motivation after all. So the playlist went on and the new woman she had chased all day opened her drowsy eyes.

“Did you?” Jill asked Becky.

“Yes.” Her voice trembling.

Jill wetted her middle finger and pushed it into her asshole.

Lenore stopped everything she was doing to crane her head and watch.

“You like anal?” Jill asked her.

“I… No, I… just…”

“Stick your tongue as far as you can in her pussy.”

Hesitantly, Lenore did what she had been told.

She felt uncomfortable doing it. Stared at.

Yet she fought against a moan as she felt Jill’s finger through the thin membrane of flesh start to slide up and down. She had no particular reason to moan at that, it didn’t feel any good, yet it was moan-worthy.

“Suck on her clit now,” Jill ordered once Lenore had enjoyed it so much her eyes had closed.

Becky squealed frankly as the tongue in her pussy nervously left only to be replaced by Jill’s thumb. She squirmed, being sucked and double penetrated and stoned.

“The quicker you make her cum, the quicker we can do the same to you,” Jill pointed out.

Chills coursed down Lenore’s loins. Jill had said you make her cum, not we.

I’M gonna make a woman come.

Knowing this was delightful. Lenore loved it at first try. The only reason she asked herself What the fuck am I doing? was that it turned her on to wonder so.

The answer was I don’t care. The best answer in life.

She reached for Becky’s chest and caressed the curves of her breasts. But she shied back when she felt a nipple ring. She was scared to hurt her. To rip the thing off somehow. It was a stupid phobia. Her own ears were pierced, but still, she couldn’t get over this.

Instead she put even more thinking into her tongue moves. She wanted to make her come as best she could. She wanted to make her holes clench real hard over Jill’s fingers. She remembered how Brian had groaned the one (only) time she let him penetrate her ass. She even dared to remember the delicious shame of taking his cum inside of it.

Becky collapsed a little more on the couch and mewled. Lenore licked faster, suckled brazenly and suddenly everything within her mouth stiffened and throbbed, everything without thrashed around in submission.

There. She was making a woman come.

GOOD BYE

Some spirits had left before they could witness it.

Good.

The start of an orgasm was clear, its end rarely. Becky’s lasted for quite some time. Lenore only slowed down when Jill came to squeeze her tongue against her tongue. It was stupid after all that happened but she felt a little wavering about this half French kiss.

The slick intertwining didn’t end up in a full French kiss, or any kiss. They finished Becky off together and it just ended.

The trio separated, thanklessly, sprawled about.

“I need a bowl,” Becky panted into a cushion.

And that was it. Even the playlist ended.

Lenore could still feel the pussy and the spit in her mouth, her body electrified inside her clothes. All it would take was for Becky to add, “And I want you two naked, now!”

Then Lenore wouldn’t have worried that maybe she smelled too much of sweat, that maybe they’d find lint between her toes when they’d remove her socks, that maybe they’d want to finger her ass too, that maybe she was just a klutz who barely knew how to make love to a man, let alone two experienced women.

And fast they would all be naked, snuggling against her, oh so fucking nude in return against their skins. And they would FUCK! And she would not just be passively sandwiched between them, she’d put an overwhelming abandon into it and an energy she didn’t know she still had in her at this time of night. It would be the best feeling ever this unlimited outpouring of sex partners.

As promised, at some point the two girls would lick her from mound to tailbone. If they did it right it would make her ejaculate a few drops and it wouldn’t gross them out. They’d purr just as sweetly as her.

Lenore would surprise herself as all the colors of fuck would go by. She wouldn’t ask for permission before pushing two fingers inside the asshole she’d found in front of her face. She wanted to do that, do it her way. It would feel even better when a tit would brush her cheek and she’d twist her neck to suck on the nipple. Just in time to enjoy the tongue making her clitoris cum one more time.

The end of their threesome would be just as unclear as the end of a female orgasm. Their eventual crashing down on the carpet wouldn’t feel like Jill and Becky holding each other and inconspicuously leaving Lenore apart. No, they would be still three and together and within five minutes, Lenore would want to go again.

With a grin, she would sit up, reach down and cup the first vagina she would find. She would masturbate the girl, Jill or Becky, she didn’t care. She wouldn’t care if they were sore or not. Her fingers would be so effective on that clit. A fast circling rub.

“This is how I masturbate,” she would reveal.

“We created a monster,” they would say, the first girl cumming from it in less than thirty seconds and the other already begging for the same treatment: “Oh please, me me me, masturbate me like I am you!”

And she would, making two people come in just under a minute. And then having them vanquished, she’d gather her clothes, her purse and would leave the apartment with one last look at her two friends passed out on the floor.

Instead Lenore woke up, still in her clothes, with the bad taste of drinking spree in her mouth. All of her joints that had been in contact with the floor while she slept were aching. The sun was rising, in September it meant something like 7am.

Becky was still on the couch, still naked, looking down at the portable console Jill was playing on.

“I really should go,” Lenore whispered.

Jill didn’t look up from the screen. “You can stay if you want.”

“No, really, I better go.”

“Same time next week?”

This time the betraying pause was for a “S-sure.”

*****

Sunday (nine days)

The instant the door of her apartment closed, Lenore threw all her clothes around and ran to her bed, desperate to cum. With her fingers, with her dildo, without a condom (she didn’t care) and without lube (she didn’t need any).

Only after it done she thought about getting some sleep. But the sun was up. Too much up.

She engaged The Plan (that never worked): force herself to stay awake all day not to mess up her sleep schedule.

The only time she wore clothes that Sunday was when she went outside to buy batteries in one shop, and then lube in another so that she wouldn’t have to face the raising eyebrows of some cashier.

The rest of the day was nudist. Even when she ate. Even when Kate called. Even when she vacuumed the living-room. Even when she saw her reflection in the full-length mirror of her bathroom.

Among other wonders, she discovered the delicious torture of touching herself on and off throughout the afternoon without cumming. She discovered its eventual bone-aching result, which was cumming twice in a row, twice as intensely.

She tasted her own squirt. Out of curiosity.

She masturbated so much she forgot she was masturbating.

And all day she had the excuse that she was too exhausted to write.

Not enough to read obsessively, though. When she was not touching herself, she read. When she was touching herself, she kinda read too.

ONE DAY MY PHONE RANG AND I WAS SURPRISED BECAUSE THE RINGTONE WAS SMASH MOUTH’S ALL STAR, MY FAVOURITE SONG.

IT WAS THE BOGDANOFFS, THEY OFFERED ME COUPONS FOR A SHREK-THEMED WEDDING

Ok neeext.

People’s creativity filled her mood to the brim.

She laughed to tears several times. Dracula told her to buy his mixtape and it killed her. The Zodiac killer once called the cops to burp the alphabet and Lenore was dead. Not that it was particularly funny and clever, the limits between stupid and brilliant blurred, or lost sense. Some notes seemed to respond to each other. It felt like an escalating conversation with the world of ideas and her mind. She felt part of something.

Around 9pm, she told herself she would lie down for a while. Just ten minutes. Fatal error. She woke up in the middle of the night, tired, pins and needles in one arm, angry at herself, hungry and so thirsty her tongue was like cardboard.

She read:

DICKPICS FROM HEAVEN, about a woman who gets a dickpic from her ex-boyfriend who died trying to suck his own penis.

She didn’t like it.

And then it was time to go to work.

*****

Monday (eight days)

It was difficult to concentrate on the three Excel sheets on her screen.

Whenever she’d realize she had closed her eyes for longer than thirty seconds and her thoughts had drifted toward the bizarre, she would think, I’m falling asleep, and it would awake her.

To clear her head, she went to put back the suggestion box next to the coffee machine.

No sign of Jill or Becky as her gaze embraced the space and she sighed. Only indifferent faces. Some new. Down at the task. A drizzle of keyboard keys. On her way back to her desk, a portion of the wall around the door to the copy room had changed.

A mild indifference would have left her in her slumberous state if she hadn’t noticed that it was the same cheap print she had on the walls of her kitchen. Only…stretched out?

The idea of hallucinating from sleep deprivation shocked her awake.

She looked at the wall from every angle. Eventually recognized it was real. Out of place but real. Anyway, workers probably came and did it during the weekend. She didn’t have time, there was someone at her desk.

A woman she had never seen before. In her forties. Unsmiling. Caught in the act of leaving a note under her mouse.

“Hi?” Lenore said.

ELIZA WANTS TO SEE YOU

“Hi, Lena. Portia Keller. HR.” She extended a hand, Lenore shook it. “Eliza wants to see you, let’s go.”

Unusual procedure. Had it been any other manager, Lenore would have freaked out. But Eliza was…an okay person. Who had always been somewhat supporting. Or bubbly. Or nosy. With at least some attempt at humor. At Lenore’s humor, that is.

So the silence was not tense in the elevator up to Management. “How’s your story going?” was the only small talk. “Steady”, Lenore’s only reply before the hushed hum of the upper floors.

Management wasn’t a bullpen but a series of closed doors. The first right out of the elevator being Eliza’s office.

Behind bay windows further down the corridor, a man was looking miserable for all to see, sitting across from two women who looked formal, had dressed formal and spoke formal.

He was presented his severance package. No need to read lips.

Portia was the only one on Management floor who did not look at the scene. Even Eliza got caught staring when Lenore entered her office. The other woman closed the door and left, apparently her job was done.

“Ah, Eleonore, I wanted to see you, sit down, have some cookies.”

Mrs. Goddard made them, to celebrate something unspecified. Lenore took one from the bowl next to the monitor and wrapped it in a napkin. “For after lunch,” she explained.

“No, go ahead, they’re gluten-free.”

“Really, I just had a snack,” Lenore lied.

“So how’s your story going?”

“Surprising.”

“You found surprises in your box?”

Eliza let her the time to giggle at that. Lenore had a fugitive vision of her dildo all the way up her pussy and it made her buttocks twitch.

“Any penis pics yet?”

“How did you guess?”

“I re-read Sawn-off Shotgun Romance the other night. Such a good title.”

“Heh, thanks.”

“So, I talked to Prudence, as promised, I’ll send you her e-mail.”

“Oh my God thank you so much for that!”

Prudence Fleischer worked for HarperCollins. According to Eliza, the kind of person who can get your manuscript move from the bottom of the pile to the top of a desk.

Lenore had been the first surprised to learn that publishers still read manuscripts at all.

“You’re welcome, from there it’s up to you to make it work. But anyways, I got a word from Legal, they’ll need your draft once you’re done.”

The smiles stopped. Those dickheads were messing with the deadline.

Lenore tried to bargain:

“Why? I’ll put some warning myself, if needed. It’s not like I’ll go into anything extreme, I mean you know me.”

“It’s not about censoring, you know, they just want to clear the whole thing, the idea of taking suggestions from other employees is nice, it’s “corporate”, you know. But what they don’t want is some schmuck having afterthoughts because all of a sudden he thinks he knows more about copyright than us.”

“Ok.”

Eliza’s smile came back. “Don’t worry, it’s their job to be paranoid.”

“Ok. Fine.”

“I’ll forward you the name of your mediator.”

“Couldn’t they tell me in person?”

“Oh don’t ask…”

“So, that’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“Alright. Whatever.”

They paused and it allowed them to take a look at the firing process still going fifteen feet from them.

“It’s um…Karl, right?” Lenore asked.

“Yes, our Carl of Management.”

The two women, she didn’t know however. They were from outside. Deep Green Alliance outsourced firing people.

A security guard was now waiting by the door, ready to escort Carl Winthrop off the premises after he cleared his desk.

“They had to let him go, we just engaged our new diversity program. Came from up there, you know…” Eliza pointed up, almost rolling her eyes.

At the speed of thoughts, Lenore pondered if she should observe that, if she remembered correctly, it left only women in the department. She pondered the level of closeness between Eliza of Management and her, if closeness there really was.

And she said nothing. The policeman in her head was tapping his foot.

Instead, on her way out, with her cookie in her hand, she just smiled, or winced.

“Close the door behind you,” Eliza said.

“Ok.”

“Have a nice day.”

“Have a nice day.”

She closed the door behind as asked, just as Carl was banging his fist on the desk twice. Hard enough to be heard through the glass.

That’s the only thing he did really.

She looked away.

Management floor didn’t have a breakroom, only a sideboard near the elevator. Some chairs. Blue-sky-white-clouds wallpaper. Portia Keller was waiting there, standing in a corner, still not staring at the main event of the morning.

Lenore had to meet her gaze.

“Come and have a coffee with that delicious cookie,” the woman said.

“Oh no, I–”

“Please.”

She hesitated.

This stranger was filling two mugs marked of the Deep Green logo, invited her to sit on a stool with her.

Lenore sat down and took a reluctant bite. She doubled over and immediately went to toss the rest in the trashcan. “It’s stale,” she explained.

“Spit it out.”

“No, it’s alr–”

“Spit. She’s not looking.”

Hiding herself and her embarrassment, Lenore spat the ball of floury muck down the plastic bag of the trashcan, then Portia gave her her coffee. She swished some in her mouth and spewed it in the sink. That’s how bad the cookie tasted.

There was an untouched bowl of them on the countertop.

Portia was watching from her stool, blowing on her steaming coffee.

Eliza burst out of her office. She stood in the doorway, her hand gripping the handle, asked, “Is everything alr–” but Portia cut her:

“Go back to work, Eliza, I got this. I’m having a nice conversation with my new friend from Accounting.”

There was some hostility to glimpse. Not just from Eliza. From both women. Lenore stooped in between. She had no idea what the dynamic was, who reported to whom. Portia, the older of the two, shrugged off. Eliza glared, went back to work without a word going through her clenched teeth.

“So, how’s your story going?”

Lenore snapped, “I haven’t started yet.”

“Did you know him?” The HR woman was talking about Carl who was walking to the elevator, a security guard’s hand on his shoulder.

“No.”

That coffee was the strongest Lenore had ever had. There was a box of sugar cubes three arm lengths from her but she didn’t want to move and break their gaze.

She gulped down everything, like as many punches to her brain.

“I heard you went out with Jill and Becky on Saturday.”

“Yeah, I… How did you know–”

“I hear a lot of things.”

Lenore didn’t let her frustration show, partly because she had guessed Portia was getting to her point:

“Actually you can hear so much in this building. Before you go back to your workstation, you should get an ear by the drywall right next to the dolphin poster and the door to Johnson’s office. In front of the water cooler. By a strange particularity in the architecture, you can hear the conversation from a certain spot of the HR floor. I’ve heard your name a lot lately.”

“Why are you telling me this–”

“Because it would be unfortunate if you don’t have the time to finish your Halloween story. I want to read it.”

“I’m getting fired?” Lenore’s voice broke.

“I don’t know, it’s out of my power. But I guess you better go and be productive!” She stood up. “I’ll show you out.”

Lenore struggled with what to say, what to ask, she struggled against a sob. From her stool to the elevator doors, then standing in the elevator on their way down.

And it was Portia who broke the silence. Just before the braking and the digitized ding, she passed an arm around her shoulders and said, “Will you do something for me, Lena?” The doors opened. “I want to see how you manage on a harder level.”

Before them appeared the pasted blue skies & white clouds, the stools, the bowl of cookies. Lenore thought it was the wrong floor but Portia steered her out and it was definitely the thick carpeting of Management and its noise of walls and doors. The elevator went in circle, she would have thought if Portia would have let her the time to, and if it would have made sense. But the woman was pushing her forward gently, two hands on her shoulders and Carl was still in the office with no frosted windows, with the two women. She could have thought he had the same elevator malfunction if Portia had given her time for paradoxes, but Portia was behind her walking her to Eliza’s office again, opening the door for her again.

Before being pushed inside, Lenore spun around, she didn’t like having Portia behind her, didn’t like it at all. She opened her mouth to say something. Anything. About the elevator… about…

But facing Portia turned out worse: she drew a gun from her jacket. And put it in her hands.

Lenore didn’t have the time and the background to tell it was a Desert Eagle, one of those absurdly large handguns, silver and ridged, so far from the small, more reasonable matt black Glocks cops use and more fitted to her 5’2 frame, way less heavy whereas all guns were surprisingly heavy to people who never held one before.

Lenore got scared to grip, got scared to throw it back to Portia, she was scared the thing would fire by doing anything. She grabbed the handle with her five fingers as far away as possible from the trigger and all the scary buttons on the barrel.

Meanwhile Portia forcefully turned her back around, pushed her inside the office, closed the door and left, her job done.

“Ah, Eleanor, I was thinking about you, sit down, take some cookies,” Eliza said.

Lenore hid the gun under her jacket. It was one of these dreams. Only instead of being naked on a theater stage, she had brought a gun to work. Please be one of these dreams.

She mumbled and sat down and pulled on her clothes to hide the oversized piece of metal twisting her hand and her wrist.

“Come on, have a bite, they’re delicious.”

“No. I’m good. Really.”

“Oh… So how’s your little story coming along?”

Lenore didn’t reply. Deer eyes caught in headlights.

Her lack of smile failed to be contagious. Eliza was fully focused on her rather than checking on Carl every other second.

Lenore got immediately so consumed by her gun problem that she lost her social filter. She couldn’t control where the conversation was going, even if she had already lived it once. All she wanted was for it to end as soon as possible, so she could wonder what the hell was going on, by herself, safe and without a firearm rattling against her ribs. And maybe wake up.

This answer finally came out of her mouth:

“It seems… like… People like to make me gifts apparently.”

“Dickpics? You have to tell me if you’ve got dickpics, you know?”

Eliza could not see her fear, it seemed, and most importantly not her heavy hand bulging her clothes. She couldn’t see all the other emotions going through her either. Like anger for example, which was starting to grow, to root on her fight with an object.

“I read Sawn-off Shotgun Romance the other nigh–”

“I didn’t write it. Sheila Mason did, for the Valentine’s Day supplement two years ago. Before your time.”

Lenore grew up in Long Island, she had never even seen a shotgun in her life.

“Oh? right, well, Prudence Fleischer told me she liked it too, so let’s keep it our secret.” Her lips feigned being sorry.

Lenore started to sweat. Only the armpits, so far.

The gun felt lighter. And not because her hand got used to it.

“Thank you. For…talking to her,” she said weakly, bitter, somber, sheepish… While Eliza snapped into the grandiose:

“It’s alright, honey! I believe in you! You know it’s my role as a manager! To bring you up to the height of your full capacities! And when you’re our new Virginia Woolf I’m sure you’ll remember with a smile the time when you tackled all the extra hours to get this short story out!”

Lenore almost interrupted: “Y-yes! This. I’m very busy today.”

“You’ll manage. Oh wait, that’s my job.”

Lenore gripped the gun at that fucking joke. “So you wanted to see me.”

Eliza smiled. “You know.” Here came the angering moment. “Your idea of the suggestion box is a legal nightmare, we want to have a look at your work before printing.”

“The newsletter is a PDF.”

“You know what I mean.”

“It changes the deadline.”

“You better get to it then, take some time over your real job, who cares?”

“What?”

“I’m joking.”

“I’m not gonna use the suggestions, they all suck.”

“Fine, we still want to see what you do.”

With a clammy hand, Lenore pressed the gun against her moist stomach. She had to look. The gun had turned into a smaller one. The cops one.

As it had lost in weight, her reply lost in suppressed anger:

“Ok. Sure.”

“As you did notice, we had to let Carl go.”

Lenore waited for the rest of the phrase. It never came.

The gun was shrinking faster and faster.

Eliza put some papers and a pen on the desk. “We need you to sign this.”

Lenore had seen forms like these before. By signing them she would give up all her copyright ownership to Deep Green.

“Because we don’t want a legal nightmare, now do we?”

She didn’t care. Didn’t care about some ten-page story, rushed and uninspired and which ultimately no one would really read.

But she needed her two hands to sign.

The gun had shrunk enough that it fitted inside her closed fingers. She could take her hand from under her jacket but still… she had no pockets, no place to hide a two-inch pistol that she was sure could still fire.

In her confusion she put it in her mouth, when Eliza was looking away, at Carl.

The taste of metal poured into her mouth.

She signed without reading.

“I can’t wait to read what you came up with,” Eliza said. Then as Lenore got up, “Close the door behind you.”

Lenore didn’t leave, she fled. She didn’t close the door, she let it slam shut.

Again Portia was waiting in the corner of the break area. She didn’t say anything. She just stared. Stark.

Lenore went for the sink and spat the tiny gun into it with a brittle glare at her. It thumped like a half-sucked candy.

“What is happening?” she asked, trembling.

“You’re a disappointment, that’s what is happening.”

“Who are you?”

“Your best friend.”

“No you’re not!”

Again Carl and the guard passed them.

Again Eliza burst out of her office. “Is there a problem here?”

“I was asking my friend about the Halloween story,” Portia replied without turning her eyes away from Lenore. “Just fuck off, Eliza.”

“Don’t put pressure on her like that, it’s not like she’ll get fired if she fails to deliver, speaking of which, don’t you have work to do, Portia?”

“Eat shit.”

“We’ll see.”

Lenore ran away as slowly, as casually as her floppy legs could let her. She went straight for the stairwell and down to Accounting.

*****

The suspension of disbelief collapsed sometime after Lenore sat back at her workstation.

But at a lack of words to confront the reality of what happened, she took her phone and texted Kate. Only to never get a response.

Tristyn–another friend, a childhood friend–was apparently just as busy.

Her parents didn’t like texts and would call her on the spot if they felt anything was wrong with her. So this was out of the question.

Her doctor would just give her more antidepressants. Or a straightjacket.

Unable to communicate, the only thing her brain started to articulate was a block of images that stuck out and roiled the usual flux of the straight tight timeline of existence. No thoughts, no questions that could have led to answers, even partial, even irrational.

The world, changed, was too present around for her to be able to sink enough and think, to close down enough and pay her sleep debt. She could never concentrate ever again for the rest of her life. It was over. Irreversibly awake. Irreversible fatigue. Eternal evil twin of ADHD.

The vanishing point of this state was insanity. This she was still alert enough to foretell. But it would be a more socially acceptable nature of insanity compared to the one brought along with the answers she couldn’t access.

What do people do when they’re facing a supernatural event? was the meta-question of all the questions Lenore was too stupefied to ask herself.

They recognize the supernatural.

That was unacceptable.

Something not normal happened, just stare at your computer screen.

She went along with the dream, as dreams impose, in hope she would awake out of sleepwalking before anyone noticed. It meant the continuation of a taste of gun oil in her mouth and two memories of a same event already fading into indistinctiveness and words isolating themselves into symbolic value; a door; a gun; a stale cookie given for free.

“Hey Lena, how’s your story going?”

It was Jill, with less makeup.

Lenore got up way too fast and almost threw herself at the girl with a hug way too out of line. Her co-worker wouldn’t have it and gently pushed her back, looking around like it was still the fifties.

“Save it for Saturday,” she whispered.

Yes. Lenore said yes immediately. In six days they would go out together again. Anything that set a future put sense to her present. And she didn’t notice that Jill did not ask her if everything was all right. The girl had already left, back to her own day.

Lenore still had no idea what her job was.

She, on the other hand, knew she had a job to do.

She tried to focus on whatever that meant.

It seemed it had divided into two parallel works. The Halloween story felt important now. It had something to do with not getting fired. An edge of the heavy block of images. It made her see herself throw the dildo down the garbage chute first thing back home, maybe break it beforehand, stomp it. So they would see her self-righteous self-disgust, her determination.

Who’s ‘they’? she typed in one Excel cell.

It’s the only thing she did all morning. The numbers on paper and screen could not be added up. So nothing productive. She could not wake up.

At 1pm, when the floor had gone for lunchbreak, she locked herself in a toilet cubicle, set up an alarm on her phone and tried to fall asleep, even if it was sitting on a toilet lid, scalp against a wooden panel. She needed to fall asleep to wake up twice from her dream of guns and time loops and getting fired.

The phone chimed ten minutes later and the eyes of Lenore if they did close, had only brought a few tears now lost on the tiled floor.

People started to come back after she ate an energy bar from the vending machine. No one expressed concern that she didn’t go eat out, but that’s not what made her take the stairs to HR.

*****

Up there, it looked pretty much like Management.

She had to ask for Mrs. Keller.

“Who?”

“Portia.”

“Second door on your left.”

This door was ajar. As she approached, she prepared for the awkwardness of the impromptu talk. It was the last place to have a breakdown.

“Yes?” Portia of HR said, interrupted in her work at her large desk, Lenore standing across from her.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” she tried, as not hysterically as possible.

The woman tilted her head in an animalistic question mark.

“What did you do to me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I… I can’t wake up.”

“Have you listened to the wall yet?”

So it was still going, the insanity. But now they were both insane, not just Lenore. It was the strange comforting she had come for.

Portia cut short the nonsense. “You can come and talk to me anytime. Now if you’ll excuse me…”

Lenore backed off. The dialog tree was depleted.

“And close the door, please.”

She did and staggered to her own floor.

The stairwell door conveniently opened to the poster with the dolphin and the water cooler.

Lenore drank a cup of icy water.

And she leaned near the drywall. The one Portia told her would be special.

She expected it to take concentration–impossible effort–to hear anything, to filter out the sound of Accounting, but voices immediately found their way to her ear.

Reverbless voices of a room shut for confidentiality. Two women. Maybe three. A fourth over the phone on speaker.

Lenore found the best angle, the right spot, where two distant rooms would impossibly intersect.

They were reviewing employees. She could hear them as clearly as if she was there.

She straightened back up. Accounting came back over the voices. She looked around. It was just Johnson’s office on the left and on the right beyond that wall it was the street three stories below.

Again, she was too bluntly awake to question this acoustic anomaly. Her writer instincts automatically recalled that haunted houses are often just bad plumbing but Lenore lowered her head back in and listened to the litany of names.

Sean. Michelle. John. Rob. Ken. Rosemary. Sean. Laurie. Danielle. Laura. Swen. Cameron. Misha. John. Rosie. Ruby. Portia. Alex. Rick. Jon. They were going on and on. They were going since this morning, they hadn’t waited for her to start. Cheryl. Charlotte. Victor. Helen or Ellen. Irina. John. John. Jonathan. Reggie. Jenn. Clarke. Lena.

The voices were not saying anything, not deciding anything. Just names. And contempt.

And Lenore was in there.

She went for her purse, her vest, the suggestion box, her car. It wasn’t even 2pm. She just left, escaped, without a moment of doubt.

Only a short slowing-down on her drive out of the parking lot:

She passed a large group of employees on a cigarette break, gathered near a service door. Jill and Becky were there, suckling on their stick of outdoor boredom. And when Lenore tepidly waved at them, everybody, them included, scattered like a swarm, without as much as a nod, leaving in her sight the door she vaguely knew had always been barred.

Close enough to see the padlock hanging down a chain had ‘P29’ sharpied on it.

She saw it so well she almost hit a car, transfixed on her rear-view mirror, and the sound of the horn was the sign she should flee this workday once and for all.

*****

Leaving work without a reason was admitting that her career now depended on whether she finished the horror story or not. It was still less absurd than magic elevators.

Yet she did nothing she had wanted to once home. The sun was shining at such an angle her apartment looked like Sunday. When she would take a sick day from school, young Lenore used to watch The Price is Right, eat, nap and waste the rest of the hours.

Nothing ever changed.

So the dildo wasn’t thrown away. The short story didn’t gain one word.

And Lenore still couldn’t think. Or wake up. Or fall asleep.

But she could read. She needed to.

The box was full again. Full of:

WOT IF YER MUM WAS A SKELETON? MENTAL, INNIT?

Nothing.

THERE WAS THIS GIRL ON YOUTUBE, SHE DID VLOGS AND STUFF. SHE HAD LIKE A MILLION FOLLOWERS AND PEOPLE DISCOVERD WHEN THEY TURNED ON THE SUBTITLES ON HER VIDEOS IT WAS JUST LINES OF AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA OVER AND OVER.

SO EVERYBODY THOUGHT IT WAS A BUG AND THE GIRL NEVER ADRESSED IT AND PEOPLE CONCLUDED IT WAS REALLY JUST YOUTUBE GLITCHING.

BUT THEN SOMEONE SAW ON ONE VIDEO, AMONGST THE WALL OF AAAAAA IT SAID ‘HELP’ AND ‘HELP ME PLEASE’. AND THE RUMOR STARTED TO SPRED THAT THE AAAAA WERE ACTUALLY THE GIRL’S SCREAMS OF PAIN.

YOUTUBE WAS CONTACTED BUT THE CHANNEL AND HER TWITTER ACCOUNT CLOSED DOWN OVERNIGHT. NO ONE KNOWS WHAT HAPPENED TO HER.

This one was all right. Not a story, though.

She read a whole bunch of creepypastas of the same caliber. They almost made her forget she shouldn’t be here. She found a story of a co-worker detained for five hours by the Canadian customs because he filmed a UFO through the window of his plane and they wanted him to delete it. She learned that if you google ‘circadian parallel desecrate’ you die instantly. She found two keyboard keys, Esc and Ctrl. Old bulky keys from the eighties.

As she dug further down, the suggestions were getting shorter and the sheets smaller.

From weird stanzas:

whatdoyoustandtoloose

whatdoyoustandtogain

theboxleftunopened

holdsnoprize

butleavesnoscar

To weird blurbs:

PUBLIC RECORD CRYPTID FILES ARE NOT TO BE TRUSTED

To weird rumors:

VICTOR IS ALEX

To plain weird shit:

DECOMPILED STROLL_LAKE.WMV CULT FOLLOWING

She found one that said, THERE’S A COVEN OF WITCHES AT DEEP GREEN. It joined the other crumpled papers covering the floor. Every one of them had felt like a defeat. A tick closer to her disgrace.

Reaching the bottom, from the way she was lying, she had to extend her arm in too much of a painful angle to pick the notes. So instead, she decided to empty the box on the bed.

One, two, three impulses of the wrists. A ream’s worth of paper piled up.

As she put the box aside, she saw it was still half-full.

What the hell

She tilted it and fed the already huge pile with her hand.

The papers were still coming.

She stood up, turned the box upside down and fresh folded sheets rained down over the old crumpled ones.

The puddle became pyramid and Lenore stopped shaking up and down when the top of it reached waist level.

And still, the box was almost full.

She took a post-it note folded in four from the top:

MY HUSBAND SAYS SOMETIMES I SPEAK LATIN IN MY SLEEP.

She turned the box to look at the bottom–paper cascading down her legs–she reached for the strip of duct tape and stopped herself because it could be a very, very bad idea to tear it off.

Last chance. The post-it still sticking to her middle finger, she put it back into the box. She shut the lids, wriggled just a little, re-opened. The yellow paper was nowhere to be found.

It took her several more tries to convince herself she was still asleep, that the supernatural had not followed her home, concluding with the Mary Poppins test: Lenore took an umbrella and pushed it down past where the bottom of the box was supposed to be. Three feet in and she had found no taped cardboard, only more paper.

Even if it wasn’t her hand down there the feel of it scared her. Like cold water full of unseen sharks. She dropped the box.

Suggestions spilled around.

The box was bottomless.

The ideas supply was endless. She was knee-deep in them.

And there, thinking finally came back to Lenore and she remembered how to react toward supernatural events. She started crying. Not just tears, she bawled fully.

It was one of these dreams. Where the storyline gave her the idea. The one that would create the perfect novel, that would blow people’s mind and last for centuries, that would make her the queen of Hollywood, of anything, the paradigm shift in literature, a style of the future, jazz records brought to Beethoven, and a best-seller. Oprah. Ellen. Larry. Joe. Nobel.

In the morning, the history-making idea rarely made sense, when she remembered it at all. But today she would never wake up. And what’s one idea when you can rake thousands? See? the questions were coming back. She could reverse the dull insanity. She could be in control. A new woman.

The box, now the most fragile object in the world, never left her side from then on.

And she read. And read. And drank coffee. And the best ones she read out loud so she would remember herself reading them out loud. There were drawings too. Schematics. Lab reports. Pathologic ramblings. Equations. Transcripts. Storylines in foreign languages. Ancient manuscripts. Doctored photographs. The craziest stuff she could never have imagined. A copy of Frankenstein full of typos. Twelve pages of just the letter A. Mediocre stories. Off-topic anecdotes. Stories that scared her to her core, changed her vision of life, her approach to writing, to art–reasons why most people, her included, had shrugged off the horror genre as trash for teenagers. Not anymore.

I HAD A DREAM OF ME AND MY DAUGHTER, WE WERE WALKING DOWN THE STREET AND SHE FELL TO THE GROUND AND STARTED TO VOMIT THE WATER FROM THE POND WE HAVE IN OUR BACKYARD. GALLONS OF IT. AND WHEN I WOULD TRY TO HELP HER SHE WOULD SCREAM AT ME TO STAY AWAY FROM HER.

Horror could tell her about human nature somehow. Lenore choked on sobs as she realized, as she thought of the things she would have to work out, the things she would have to channel if she wanted to scare people. Scare herself first. It made her remember and understand Sturgeon’s law. Why artists failed. And it became a fright of its own. To cut the bullshit.

She kept reading, deliriously, desperately. She faced her new woman, she faced her molting, she cried. Cried at everything that came to her. She angered at her reflections, her biases, her cruelty. Horror didn’t say the enemy was them, it said the enemy was us. Science-fiction didn’t say it could happen, it said it was too late. Haunted house stories were not about bad plumbing, they were about child abuse. Lenore exploded. She had no reason, she had no right to interpret it that way.

So now what was romance about? And what were fantasy novels about? What was tripe about? What if she was wrong?

The night fell, the lights were turned on. There were texts on her phone she didn’t look at, tweets on her feed she didn’t check. She tried to fight falling asleep, which can only accelerate the process. Her eyes followed the lines. Her hands held the papers lower. Drool pearled from the corner of her lips. Her thoughts became her only surroundings while paradoxically branching off to their own fractal-like tracks. Her eyes closed once. Twice. And without realizing it, everything stopped.

*****

Tuesday (seven days)

She awoke in her bed just before dawn, still fully dressed, lights switched off, and the nightmare began.

Ghosts is usually one person. Not for her. There were at least thirty of them standing in her bedroom, shapes in the dark staring down at her. She felt their silent eyes while she shrieked and turned the bedside lamp on.

Nobody. Empty room. Empty space cleaned back to normal by the electrical light.

Lenore sat up in afterscare, pressed her back against the headboard.

THERE’S SOMEONE BEHIND YOU

Her bed was littered with crumpled papers.

She started on a long breathy laugh.

The box was waiting next to her pillow. Calling her already.

ELIZA called her too. She picked up the phone; at the same time picked her first suggestion of the day.

WE LIVE YOU SLEEP

Her manager strongly advised she showed up at work ten minutes early to explain her escapade of yesterday.

Lenore grabbed a handful of notes and threw it like confetti, then another, then three others. Then opened the bedroom door and filled her living-room with flying sheets.

Still infinite. All real. She was not dreaming. She thought this platitude in euphoria instead of wondering why Eliza was already at work so early in the morning.

*****

Lenore showed up ten minutes late because she had wanted to see Portia first and tell her the short story would be made and would be awesome.

But the office was empty–completely empty.

She asked a secretary, Sybil Rossi, an Eliza clone. Same smile, same bowl of rancid cookies on her desk. The resemblance ended there but that was enough.

“I’m sorry, who?”

“Portia Keller. I wondered if you could give me her number or even an e-mail.”

As if she had overheard, another Eliza-clone showed up. “We can’t share her information with you. Portia Keller quit, she works for Stuxnet now. I find it suspicious that you want to see her. What’s your name again?”

“Lenore Llamarada. Of Accounting.”

“And why do you want to talk with the competition, Lenore of Accounting?”

“She was a friend.”

“Then why don’t you have her number?”

Lenore ended the conversation with the sharpest sting of the human language:

“I see…”

And left.

What would have been a day of euphoria lost its pleasant hues on her way from HR to Management.

It had started so well, tough, with first the shedding of her clothes, dirty from the anguish of the previous day.

She had no reason to put her jammies on and went back to the reading, the exploration. She lay on the bed in this pose, the one so unnatural and back-destroying but which Brian liked so much: on her stomach with her feet crossed up in the air. It prepared her, as if she knew, for the story of a male co-worker who had a boyfriend who liked to ejaculate on his feet. Just an ordinary fetish. The scary part was learning about the hygiene of pedicure salons. The even more scary part was when one day his boyfriend got a prostate infection and they saw blood in his semen as it spread on his toes.

She didn’t care for those two parts but she enjoyed the fabricated image of these two beautiful men loving each other so well. She loved that two men could both share both their cum. Couples that had something so intimate in common.

Brian never let her kiss him after she sucked him. She never had a problem with him kissing her after he went down on her. After he went down on her butthole, she added and smiled.

Without much fuss, the dildo ended up between her legs, resting along her parted lips, vibration set to 1, with the secret goal of letting the batteries die out.

The sun rose up on her shivering body. She didn’t find any more erotica. And when her back hurt too much she kept on lying prone but put down her feet and stretched out her legs.

They stayed spread.

The dildo fell.

In this position, the only way to keep contact with her toy was to let the base rest on the bed and have the tip lean between her buttocks.

This too made her smile.

She lubed it with her own wetness and placed the kinky vibration on her anus.

She could read with one hand. The other reached underneath and went for her clitoris.

They could fire her all they wanted. She soon would be Stephen King. Stephen Queen.

She giggled. And moaned.

It felt so fucking good.

The dildo fell again. The cool breeze licked her buttcrack.

Lenore thought about a dildo shaped like a penis. It would be more suited for anal masturbation. Even if she didn’t consider it at all. Not in a million years. She thought about what it would feel like when the head would pierce through the tight sphincter. That moment when you have pushed hard enough and the glans pops in, the rim swallowed in by her asshole, like a first step, an introduction.

She giggled again, biting her upper lip.

The dildo was vibrating between her thighs, batteries holding up.

She wedged it again between the bed and her anus. Set to 5.

Her fingers were not going casual anymore. She could not keep on reading.

She rested her head on the sheets unfolded there, closed her eyes and let herself drift down and toward an orgasm.

Becky and Jill were looking at her. At the peak of her mind-numbing, when her moans were really pitching up because the pleasure was so full, when thoughts got nonsensical and unleashable, she thought it could be the last time she ever masturbated. She could have a threesome every Saturday with the two girls and make it her new masturbation. She could bring the dildo and share it with them. She could teach them how to squirt and they would revere her as their Goddess. It could be her new life. Her only lived life, with all the other boring parts edited out.

She started to cum. Her buttocks clenched around the toy as many times as waves of heat washed out her clit. It pressed the tip against her anus with a luscious insistence.

As soon as her dwindling cries allowed it, she thought, I bet Brian would have loved the idea. That perv, and she giggled. And panted and sprawled about, rubbed the sweat off her chest, shaking, dismissing the preposterous fantasy as just hornyspeak. Her life was writing, old or new woman, especially new. It was her calling. Being naked to the reader–figuring out how to–was her only fate.

My doom.

“Oh that’s awesome!” Eliza said. She was expressing unexpected enthusiasm in the validation Lenore had originally sought from Portia.

The manager didn’t care that she had left work after lunchbreak. As long as it never happened again. “I’m your ally, you know?” did she say.

It was an unnerving discussion to say the least, in this office where things repeated.

“As I told you the other day,” Eliza went on, “If you fail to deliver your manuscript in time, it will be considered a breach of contract.”

Lenore waited. She was waiting for the I’m joking. She was thinking about these forms she signed without looking.

“I’m joking, we don’t need a contract, the press team being pissed off would be enough!” and Eliza laughed and winked. “I saw you don’t take the elevator anymore?”

“No. It’s… just… exercise…”

“Yeah well, an elevator is an investment made for the comfort of the employees, it’s a shame not to use it, and you could sprain your ankle in those stairs, that would be even more money spent in sick leave.”

Lenore remembered the gun, last time she was sitting in this chair. She answered, “I learned Portia quit.”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Keller.”

“Yeah, I don’t know the details.”

“It’s nine o’clock, I should go, lots to catch up.”

“Take all the time you need, you know, in Korea they have bedrooms for their employees, maybe you could put a sleeping bag underneath your desk.”

Lenore merely nodded as she got up.

Bitterness followed her to her desk and sat with her all morning. She worked, sure, but most of her mental capacity was dedicated to imagining an outline for her short story.

On some blessed days, in Lenore’s life, work and house chores felt like chores while writing felt like an adventure. Today, writing felt like revenge. She would show Eliza.

Although as always on the first days, the brainstorming remained fruitless. She had been writing since she was 9 and she knew creativity was 85% staring at the wall.

Characters and actions came and went, discarded with embarrassment like Freudian slips. She called PR to greenlight a proofread article she wrote for the company Facebook page. She called Kate to have lunch with her. She doodled a lot.

I should have been an accountant, like dad told me.

Oh, wait.

The joke still made her smile.

*****

Kate had chosen her very temporary job to be a Papa John’s (Daddy Issues, as she liked to call it) ten minutes away from Deep Green. She would find better soon, as the world would always need bookkeeping–but she would always need to pay her rent. In the meantime, they were sharing her free pizza at a table, with her clothes over her uniform. Forty minutes.

Lenore had so many things to tell her and couldn’t.

She could only show her her excitement, not her terror of living in a paranormal world.

Even sex, Kate’s favorite subject, was limited by…

Doubt?

The new woman would have sounded like a crazy person. Particularly opposite her friend’s attitude today. Kate wasn’t hyper, she sounded calm, mature. Sad almost.

She hadn’t slept with any girl last Saturday, she had spent the night at a friend’s. Lenore felt guilty that she never bothered to picture the 20-something lesbian life as something other than carelessness and hook-ups with Taylor Swift lookalikes. She was a writer–the secret spies of human psychology–she should know better.

“And the two thots?” Kate asked? “You went on an adventure with them?”

Lenore prayed her voice didn’t falter. “They were already pretty lit when you left. I went home before they’d pass out in my arms. But I think my co-workers definitely want to send me on an adventure. I found this in the box.”

She drew the key for the girl who lost everything from her purse.

“Are you serious?” Kate said and got up. She walked to the counter and went back with the restaurant’s suggestion box. She drew from it a second ‘P29’ key. Brass. Square head.

“Get outta here. Did it have a note with it?” Lenore asked, thinking, Lock. Padlock.

“Nope.”

“Can I have it?”

“Nope.”

“Just for today, pleeeease.”

“Aight…”

Lenore took the new key and did a little victory shimmy on her seat, chanting, “A-R-G! A-R-G!”

“You know what they open?”

“I think so.”

“Doesn’t it mean I’m part of your scavenger hunt?”

Lenore calmed down on the spot and sat up. “Well, I’m pretty sure the door is in Deep Green, so…”

“Ok… Well, urbex is a cool way to get killed, I guess. So anyway, can I read what you’ve done so far? I feel like crushing some dreams all of a sudden.”

“No. I hate it,” she lied. She tried to find some analogy: “It’d be like exposing myself.”

Kate blew out air through her nose. “I see.” Her flushing would have been more obvious had she not looked down at her leftover crust.

And Lenore was looking for her phone anyway. She took a selfie of them both while chugging down the rest of her bottle of San Pellegrino, trying not to laugh doing it. Then she suppressed a belch they both would have otherwise enjoyed.

Kate burped freely and didn’t even look at the few heads that turned, instead she delivered a soft, “I don’t give a fuuug,” with a funny voice, upwards to the ceiling.

“Come to my place tonight,” Lenore said, “you can take the key back and put your story idea in mah box.” She had decided that she would write this afternoon, so tonight could be leisure time.

“Lemme think… How ’bout Thursday night?”

“Ok. I promise we won’t eat pizza. And I was thinking… you’re gonna have to teach me about some things.”

“Such as?”

“The lesbian experience.”

“Oh… Well… Neurosis… Nicotine… Um… Anyways, how do you feel having your co-workers read your stuff?”

“I won’t go very personal if that’s what you’re asking. I’ll stick to plot. Plot is always formulaic, you know?” Lenore winced for having said those two words. She swiped Eliza off her mind.

“Crafty. But really, how do you feel?”

“I… I-I dunno…”

Lenore was stumped, less by the fact that she did not really know than by such a question being asked. It wasn’t some question about the narcissism of Lenore Llamarada, or an American question about measurable worth, it was a question about meaning.

“I’ll have the answer on Thursday.”

“I’m sure you will.”

Tell her. Come on, tell her. Be casual about it, just fucking tell her. Please. Go. Tell her. Tellhertellhertellher. And because Lenore was trained to quickly find the right embellishment to tell her, she told her:

“I love you, Kate.” That was the hard part. Telling a friend how she felt. Almost got stuck in her throat. Now, for the comic relief: “You are a cunning linguist. And you are a good friend.”

“Lesbians don’t like Star Wars.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake!”

*****

The pangs of work pressure hit Lenore as she stepped into the shadow of the Deep Green building.

This afternoon, they didn’t come from the vision of arrays of filled-up Excel sheets but from the exhilarating anguish of the blank Word page, of absolute freedom, the apprehension of turning a What into the much more concrete How. Which would vanish as soon as she would start writing.

But her walk of stress came to a sudden halt in front of a deserted P29 door.

It was a windowless, sturdy, dirty, generic door. Chained. It was the scariest thing she had ever seen.

Though she turned and hesitated for long minutes, she saw no smokers to stop her.

She tried out a key, which went in easily, turned easily. The padlock snapped open just as Lenore heard steps closing in.

Shit. She pulled out the key and cleared off, not wanting to be seen trespassing or something.

She went straight for the lobby to warn security about this inexplicable breach. Not as if she knew if it made sense at all but last year when a fire alarm went off at the Störme-Sterne, they had to evacuate the whole block. They lost a day of work.

“The mystery door?” the security guard asked.

“That one.”

“It’s no big deal, the door itself is barred. I’ll go have a look.” He reached for his walkie-talkie on the counter. “Who got the keys of um…P29?”

*I’m on my break,* a voice crackled back.

So they don’t really say over, Lenore noted.

“What’s behind this door anyway?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing. I mean yeah it’s…” They turned toward an emergency exit map on the wall and he fingered the layout of a corridor shortly ending in no more lines at all. “It’s a dead end. They made a mistake when they made the building. And they left it. Heh, it’s just a hole.”

“And they didn’t bother drawing it on the map.”

Other lines from other walls were drawn dangerously close to the blank space.

She asked, “Do you think someone broke in?” trying to sound casual.

“There’s nothing to steal in there, I don’t even think there’s a surveillance camera, I don’t see the point.”

And there Lenore bit the inside of her cheeks to keep herself from laughing. Because she was picturing the big buttplug the suggestion box pranksters had left for her at the end of that dark corridor.

*****

In the staircase, she noticed the banister she had her hand on was marked S01. She knew every object had an ID number. Every hallway. Every trashcan. Every inlet box. Every elevator. To know exactly which one to repair, or replace.

Her desk was probably D666.

Her desk chair was DC69. She sat down and sighed, started up Word. No avoiding around anymore.

She got windows of Excel ready in case someone sneaked up.

Let’s write. Something. Anything.

Maybe a last ritual beforehand.

She went for a cup of water by the dolphin poster and listened to the impossible room.

A woman was still droning out names. Another one over the phone was repeating them with the same flat tone.

Nick. Brava. Laurel. Dante. Freya.

The world had become magical. It was one of the things Lenore couldn’t tell Kate about earlier. It was endlessly disturbing but the great terror of accepting it–or letting it be–also brought solace. Finally art had a meaning in the grand scheme of things. Ghosts would listen.

The ghosts say go sit your creative ass down DC69 and do your magic.

So she did. Nervous that now every word would count.

She typed:

There is a coven of witches at Deep Green Alliance.

That was it.

“What are you doing?”

It was a manager. Not Eliza. Melissa Something.

Lenore smashed Alt-Tab. “I’m working on the Morris joint contract.”

“No, I don’t think you are.”

“No, look.”

Melissa squinted at the screen full of cells and graphs. “You’re wasting our time with that. Call Henry ASAP.”

“She’s been staring at the wall all morning,” said a female voice from a cubicle.

Lenore chocked on a, “Annie, what the f–”

“Call Henry,” the manager repeated. “Don’t make me repeat it. Even if that’s what I’m paid for…” she added as leaving, self-satisfied of her quip.

Lenore exhaled slowly, and then turned back to work.

Not much in the end. The main character was female, of course. A little like her, of course. We see her having a normal day, so that we meet the character. Characters > Plot. That’s what she believed.

Her co-workers roamed around all afternoon, sighed, mumbled. One of them asked her why she didn’t put the suggestion box in the breakroom today and called her a selfish bitch under her breath.

Lenore wished she did take the box with her. She wanted to read its miracle; she needed the feeling of excitement, like you automatically drive a little faster, a little cooler when there’s a good song on the radio.

500 meager words. Half of them would be later edited out. Cringed out.

She saved the file on a USB key; knew she would feel uneasy for as long as it would be saved on only one device; called Henry; did some accounting till 7pm and then left.