Employee of the Month

In the icy dimness of the local Electronics and MORE, Willard Morrison sat with his knees tucked to his chest, and his back pressed against the customer service counter. He’d only been working here three months and he couldn’t say that this place was somewhere he’d found too comfortable. He watched the snow as it glistened against the navy blue darkness of the evening, as it continued to relentlessly pile against the locked entrance doors. The clicking and clacking of sharp stilettos echoed against the laminate floors, pulling Will’s attention away from the blizzard’s taunting. 

“Corporate’s automated eco-furnace switched off fifteen minutes ago,” Aiyana Northcott, the manager of the local Electronics and MORE, knelt down and laid a stiff, heavy, chunk of wool gently on his lap, “I borrowed the blankets from the fire safety kit. I open tomorrow, so don’t worry about putting yours away when you leave.”

“Thank you.” He said in a stifled breath from the air he’d choked on. Aiyana nodded in response before she returned to watching the front door in her chillingly statuous way that could easily last hours. Will had personally stopped trying to count to the exact minute her stillness could last by his second week.

It wasn’t that Aiyana had made him uncomfortable. It was more about the utter confusion that continued to grow after every interaction. She had been the one who hired him, and even then he’d noted her hyper formality and strict lack of emotional exposure. He’d also never seen her eat, or slump or make any expression outside that of a small customer service complacency smile. Will had even once witnessed a customer stand a mere inch from her face and scream at her. Not once did she ever flinch. 

Aiyana seemed to unthaw at the small vibration that demanded attention from within her blazer’s inner pocket. Tucking her long slender fingers within the jacket, the brightness of the phone illuminated her features in a haunting blueish grey as she slid her thumb over the device’s screen. 

“It appears the vehicles corporate had sent to take us home have been delayed. They should be here within the next few hours.” Aiyana enunciated her statement and sharply placed her phone back in its place. The aggression behind her words could have been irritation, but the everlasting grin contradicted that. 

After taking a moment to look him over, she began “Perhaps,” there was hesitance though it was hardly detectable, “I should call corporate to see if they’ll turn on their heaters while we’re here. Someone from headquarters would have to be the one to do so. I’d only be able call from an office phone at this hour. Please watch for when the cars arrive, Mr. Morrison.” Aiyana turned on her heel and began her tread to the break room, abandoning Will to fend for himself in the empty void of scarce lighting and lifeless electronics. Will brought his gaze back to the ever growing flurry of white accumulating and crawling up the glass windows. Despite the defense provided to him by the building's structure, an eerie twist would flutter and trash within his stomach to remind him that his place of work was nowhere to feel sound. The lack of the build’s usual noise, during the daylight of the relatively bustling Electronics and MORE, had only seemed to tense his winding nerves. Aiyana’s maintained formality even without a customer insight had also been disconcerting to him. She was on a last name basis with everyone besides the assistant manager, Adel Stevens, and one of the elderly cashiers, Dudley Pierce. The two other employees who’d adopted Aiyana's bizarre habit of only using last names when addressing others. Will had heard from a coworker, who’d quit only a day after he’d started, that Dudley used to call people by their first names, but everything changed after he’d received some praise from corporate. Then his whole personality stiffened. It was agreed it was because of ego from the attention or fear from being monitored in a way he never realized. When the forceful winds rattle the bones of the building and force the door to violently shutter, Will jolted away from his spiraling musings. He became very aware of the duration of time that had passed since Aiyana had left the sales floor. He didn’t have an exact number, but he did have the gathering snow to hold as evidence for his disconcert. Especially since the break room didn’t have a phone. He stood from his crouched seating and trailed back to locate Aiyana. He could see vapors curl from between his lips as he breathed, making it evident the heater had yet to be switched on. The break room had been empty with nothing besides the  smell of drip coffee they'd made when they had first realized they’d need cars built to withstand the snow to take them home.  Luckily, he didn’t eat his entire lunch during his shift’s break which caused the memory of his half eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and the accompanying semi-emptied bag of chips, to aid the worried cramping in his stomach. A couple bites in, he knew there was something off. There are three doors in the break room. The first, the one he entered through, led to the sales floor, another to the bathrooms and the last had led to the restricted area that only members of corporate were allowed to enter. Normally the door was locked. Never had he, nor anyone--according to his coworkers--seen the door open before. Except for now. The vermillion door stood out against the daffodil yellow of the break room’s interior, but the thick ebony that existed in the space between the door and its frame had announced its contrast even louder. Will couldn’t resist its allure, and temptation compelled his delicate movements to carry him silently to the door. In a motion with stark contrast to the one’s prior, he found himself pushing the door and fully exposing the shadowy room. A light in the distance shaded the room’s features to reveal its hallway shape. Will had already crossed the forbidden boundary, so he reasoned with his logic that any further shouldn’t make much of a difference. The logic did not hold much of a fight. He noted that the hallway he walked though had been suffocatingly narrow while heading towards the brightness of the next room.

The first thing he noticed was the room’s shape. It was circular with black marble flooring and walls wrapped with the peculiar choice of red velvet. An exit to the room had been a just few strides forward but before Will exited he’d noticed something else. The room had been horizontally lined with paintings. All of elderly men, dressed in suits with their grayed brows furrowed over their pasty wrinkled skin. Perhaps the scowls were for intimidation. Will couldn't recognize any of the men from the paintings, aside from one. He remembered seeing one of the elderly men in an Electronics and MORE commercial several years ago playing the role of the understanding middleman who didn’t want to take advantage of the buyer to show how much Electronics and MORE cares. The next room was much larger than expected. It was shaped like how a room would be normally shaped but it also was scattered with painting. The room had couches and amenities like coffee or magazines. It looked as though it was built to be the perfect waiting room for a bank or a doctor's office. It seemed out of place behind the door of a velvet room. This room offered a multitude of doors for him to choose where to explore next, but Will kept straight as to later help him leave without getting stuck in the restricted area. He didn’t recognize any faces in the pictures of this room. Until he’d reached the end of the room. 

It was a painting of Aiyana.

The painting held her usual helpful smile and she dawned one of her striking suits. Will wondered why her picture was on one of the walls of the restricted area, but he chose to set the inquiry aside as to continue going deeper in the seemingly endless maze full of doors and paintings. The next couple rooms Will has walked through were decorated as an art gallery would have been, complete with the avant-garde display and dramatic wall angles that rivaled the spectacle of the art. In the first gallery room, he spotted the familiar face of Adel, the assistant manager. Will spotted Dudley in the third gallery. After the third gallery, Will found himself walking into a room that looked nearly identical to the employee break room. Except this room didn’t have three doors, it just had the one he had walked though. The room was larger than the real break room and had more features that were associated with the individual working at Electronics and MORE, like Adel's mugs, Dudley's protein bars, or the faint smell of coffee that had been brewed a mere hour ago. The only smell that appeared to belong to this room was a pungent sour. On one of the walls, there was only one picture. The canvas glistened as if it were still fresh and above it, a plaque read “Employee of the Month." 

The picture was of Will. 

He’d never heard of being employee of the month, nor had he’d known that the company cared about that since they never appeared to before. 

Across the room there was a table. Just like the real break room, but this time someone was sitting at a table, resting their head down on the top. Will stiffened, fearing that he was about to be caught and fired for trespassing. The body didn’t seem to move at Will’s entrance, nor did it toss and turn at his presence. Slowly, he began to approach the table, so he could see what kind of person got to work within the restricted area. Will circled around to see who sat at the break room table’s replica. Once he’d reached an angle where he could identify whomever it was, Will felt his blood turn to ice and his throat clot with unswallowable mucus. The person laid limp over a disheveled and molded lunch, looking as though it had long since been abandoned. From what could be seen under the mold, it appeared to have been corn chowder. The bowl appeared to have been  knocked to the ground in a panicked and weakened effort to draw the attention of any nearby help. The soup covered the table, spilling over the surface’s edge and onto the breakroom’s musty 80’s era carpet. Their eyes laid wide open as their head rested in the pool of forgotten soup. Their mouth agape, and their jaw barely skimming the blueish fuzz on the soup's puddle. 

It was Will. 

The person that seemed to no longer be breathing, without an ounce of blood in their face, besides the pooling bruise collecting on the side of the face that pressed against the table. It was, without a doubt, Will. He even had the scar on his nose from when he fell off his bike as a child. His lucky bracelet, his haircut, and even his mismatched sneakers. Will hadn’t had chowder in weeks. 

And he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d worn his shoes like that. 

As he watched his lifeless eye look past him, a door opened and closed behind him. He couldn’t move. Not to run, or scream or hide. He was paralyzed and unable to look away at the Will that was left to rot in a soggy puddle of spoiled corn chowder. The click clacking closed their distance behind him and then everything went black. 

Will wasn’t fully awake when he gained a small bit of consciousness back. The world spun and the pillow that held his head felt soft and curiously fleshy. Will’s head rested upon Aiyana’s lap as the car that evidently had come, drove them to their homes. Her smile was the same. Her statuous demeanor not at all waived for the events that occurred before Will was rendered unconscious. Slowly, the rocking of the moving vehicle soothed Will back into sleep.

When Will awoke next, he did so in a violent lurch. All his stillness before couldn’t stop the pain and confusion from coming up now that he felt comforted by the walls of his room. In a flurry of tears and vomit, Will released his unease as best as he could until his brain had taken back over his emotions. He was unsure of how he’d gotten into his room or home. The only thing he had been sure of was that a note had been left behind. It was printed neatly on the back of an Electronics and MORE business and carefully displayed the prim handwriting of Aiyana that decorated; the card which very simply read:

“See you at work tomorrow, Willard”

It was beginning to dawn on Will just how lost he’d truly gotten when entering the restricted area at the local Electronics and MORE.