Ball Launch

The vanilla extract she put on her broken arm did not heal the arm any faster. Three of the girls online said the extract would help, but maybe she wasn’t applying it right. Jaylee’s sister had used it on her pink eye. After one day, her eye not only looked fine, but her vision had improved. She stopped needing glasses. She took up sharpshooting. Why didn’t the extract work on her? Was it because she didn’t believe it would?

“It’s all about faith,” Hunter explained to her while they were on break, “If you don’t believe, it won’t work. It’s just like religion. If I show you cinnamon and tell you that it can heal dementia, you need to believe that. It’s not just about the inherent medicinal qualities of the cinnamon.”

They got seven two-hour breaks whenever they worked a seventy-nine hour shift. This was their fourth break, and they were spending it at the arts and crafts store across the street from their office. Hunter’s phone buzzed, and from the way she looked at it, Jaylee knew it was her boyfriend. He’d been laid off from the aquarium for having an affair with one of the mermaids. Hunter forgave him his transgression, and now they were poly and had a mermaid living in their bathtub. The boyfriend was unemployed, the mermaid was dehydrated, and Hunter kept asking for overtime shifts to try and move everybody into a new apartment.

Preferably one with a jacuzzi tub.

“Are you still going for that promotion,” she asked Jaylee, taking a big bite out of her standard lunch, a sea salt bonsai branch, “Because I thought about it, and it’s not enough money for me when you take into consideration all the extra responsibilities. I need to be home more or Steve and Aquatica might try conceiving a baby without me.”

Jaylee was not planning on going for the promotion. It would mean nearly doubling her hourly rate and getting cornea insurance, but it also meant--

“We should get back,” Hunter spit out a moldy part of the bonsai, “Otherwise we’ll get a Pinball lecture.”

Pinball was their boss. He was a rather large pinball machine. Pinball machines, in general, are large, but Pinball was the largest pinball machine on earth. He managed the Department, and whenever someone would show up at the office and ask why they were being told to spend eternity inside a painting of a supermarket produce section, he would take them into his office and let them play him for an hour or two until they calmed down. Then, he would ask Jaylee or Hunter or one of the other two thousand employees why they were so useless. He would berate them in front of the entire office. Sometimes spittle would fly from his coin slot. Nobody wanted to get under Pinball’s skin, but it was unavoidable. So many people were upset with their unending outcome, and Pinball was always forced to let them play until they were numb to their fate. It was understandable that he would cross, but it didn’t make the harassment any easier to bear.

Jaylee had broken her arm playing him, but nobody was supposed to know that. He had called her into the office at the end of a ninety-one hour day, and he let her know that she had a free ball. She wasn’t sure what to make of that. Pinball never let the employees play him. Something about it felt inappropriate. Still, she decided it was better to play a game or two than risk saying “No” if it meant angering him. She began to play. Pinball’s lights flashed. His flippers thrashed. The scoreboard kept rising until it hit its maximum number only to zero back to one. She kept playing. Right before she became number two on the leaderboard, she heard something snap. When she looked down, her arm was in an odd position. The pain arrived a moment later.

Pinball had her report to HR so she could tell them that her injury wasn’t his fault. Then he told her that she was a strong contender for the promotion provided she was all right with weekly games. He told her that her bones would eventually grow used to the strain. They’d harden and resist breaking, but not before each one of them shattered at least once. He told her that her sight would dull and then sharpen. He said her hair would fall out. He promised that she’d reach the highest score, and that once she did, she’d know things about life that no religion or guru could help her understand.

Jaylee said it all sounded great, and then she went to get her arm examined at a nearby urgent care. She had to pay out of pocket, because she didn’t have pinball injury insurance.

Now, she was having second thoughts. It wasn’t the threat of further excruciation that gave her pause. It was the amount of time she’d have to spend with her hands on Pinball’s side rails. She knew he’d never tell her why an exciting new job involved pressing his start button, but all she could do was envision spending all that extra income. She could finally move out of the pharmacy. No more waking up in the middle of the night, because someone needed to grab a new toothbrush on the shelf behind her. One of her co-workers was living in an abandoned magazine kiosk. Jaylee envied her. With the promotion, she’d have enough to move into an actual apartment like the one Hunter lived in. Hunter could only afford it because her father still gave her money every month from the settlement he got from a teleportation accident.

After returning from break, Pinball called her into his office. She could hear a ball bouncing around inside him, but soon enough, it would fall through the bottom, and he’d ask her to launch a new one. His office was all windows. Jaylee could look a few dozen floors down at a city designed like a maze. Each street led to a shorter street and then a shorter street until you reached the center where there was a concrete circle where food trucks parked and seagulls swarmed and the homeless--the people who couldn’t even afford to live amongst the toothpaste and the deodorants--tried to catch the seagulls so they could bash their heads in and roast them over trashcan fires in the alleys attached to the shortest of the short streets.

Jaylee knew that she was only one wrong move away from being a shorebird murderer. The crazy thing is that they weren’t even near the water. Jaylee had never seen the office, but she knew it was deep and dark and that it captured heat so that it could expand whenever it wanted to. Pinball asked her if she wanted to play, and she said “Tomorrow.”

Tomorrow her arm would feel better.