by Jay DiNitto
Bored in the Breakroom
by Jay DiNitto
https://jaydinitto.com
Edited by Matt DeBenedictis
https://wordsforguns.com/
Cover design by Jay DiNitto
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Prologue: Takeover
Light Up Night
Rescue Dog
Civil War
Truth Repeated Enough
Rush Week
Paper Trail
Mall Zombies
Undo
Surprised by Wire
Coffee with Rousseau
The Philosophers’ Guild
Demolition
Moses
Famous Last Words
Part God, All Ape
The Pennyfarthings
American Premonitions
Bringing Out the Dead
Light Up Night, Part 2
Eating Trash
God of Fire
Divine Right
The Pickup Line
Reese and the Recliner
Epilogue: Ecumenopolis
About the Author
Introduction
Bored in the Breakroom is a compilation of flash fiction and slightly longer stories that I have written, most of which had already been published on my blogs as well as blogs run by others.
Originally this collection had no theme and was instead just a glom of everything I thought worthwhile. During the editing process, Matt DeBenedictis mentioned the strong presence of academic and office life in many of the stories. We decided to do much pruning here and add some detail there to make the content less burdensome. The result is a more cohesive narrative about the lives of academics and young, urban professionals.
This book serves as a shot in the dark for me. I’m inexperienced in the publishing business and I’m just learning about the industry. My goal has been met, however; if the adventurous reader, taking a chance by spending time with an unknown writer’s first e-book, is a little less bored in the breakroom.
Prologue: Takeover
Ida handed over her tax forms to the uninspired HR rep in the early morning and escaped the depressing reagent of the crumbling building. She walked back to the satellite office on 5th, bundled up and unstylish against the frozen, barren morning. A dozen or so staid Japanese executives, unaffected by the cold, carried their briefcases like coffins and plowed past her without consideration.
At the elevator banks on the 14th floor she met Jim, who was heading down with a cardboard box of his personal affects stuffed to the edge. He shook his head as a greeting, and Ida quickly slipped back into the down elevator. On the way down she began to cry to Jim’s discomfort because she didn’t even get the chance to decorate her cubicle.
Light Up Night
I met Alicia, who was new to the city, near Macy’s windows after the crowds got their fill of the new display. We had planned to meet at the monolith at PPG Place, but she texted me that she couldn’t find it, since it transformed into a Christmas tree.
Understandable, but I rolled my eyes when she wasn’t looking; she lived right next to it. I wanted to make a Kubrick reference but the vacuous look in her eyes told me she wouldn’t have caught it.
Alicia looked good bundled up besides the unflattering blue and pink scarf horizontally bisecting her face, and she was weightier than her profile photos let on. No big surprise there.
We made awful small talk for a few minutes before she begged me to accompany her to our original rendezvous point so she could ice skate.
At PPG, a gaudy crystalline castle set in the middle of the steel scrapheap of the rest of the city, she “bladed up” and took to the ice. After she fell down – laughing hysterically, of course – for the fifth time before her third lap, I recalled the claim in her profile that she was a semi-professional dancer. Strike three.
I lit up my last Treasurer and began checking out other prospects. With 200,000 people flooding the area there’s bound to be a good fit flitting around somewhere.
Rescue Dog
Smith hated illustrating clothing. The nuances of shadow and wrinkle, conceived in the ideal, escaped the intermediate deft of his digital command in practice.
Professor Leary, patient by nature, was secretly exasperated.
The mid-term assignment involved the rendering of black and white, stylized trousers: pop kitsch, realism. Smith finished off his sketchbook with unsatisfying drafts.
Fed up and with no recourse, he submitted a four-panel gaudy damnation of the color wheel, depicting the snout of a bullmastiff breathing and drooling on a flattened scrap of stonewashed denim. Professor Leary failed him but Smith’s linguistics professor had a good chuckle.
Civil War
One of the Bow Street Runners, being more intrepid and enjoying the fortune of having taking up residence near the disturbance a month before, found a complete series of letters in the house, the perfect order of which was almost completely derailed from the donnybrook a mere half hour earlier. The letters, held in two separate plain pine boxes and smelling of the halo of some kind of combustible residue, were found undisturbed right near the fireplace and were unusual in that it held correspondence from either post-end.
The start of the correspondence was written by a young spinster schoolteacher somewhere in Hertfordshire, to her father in London. Both were diligent grammarians and experts in the realm of linguistics, though the inspector had strong presuppositions that the father held a slight advantage as a prestigious university-level department head and held various scholarly titles of the highest-sounding order.
The letters were filled with questions and conversations on comma usage, dangling participles, the correct deployment of the pluperfect tense in Victorian fiction, the authenticity of loan words, and predicate logic. The correspondence on both sides got progressively more contested and personal, as evidenced by the harsher glyphs, hasty ink blots, and meticulously crafted curses and insults. The inspector, with the trained scales of his internal and informal jury, blamed such hotheadedness on the daughter’s upbringing by her father’s spoiling hand, which instilled an excess of presupposed and deposed royalty (the family’s pedigree was assuredly not royal, much less overthrown).
Wishing to move on from their professional differences, the pair decided to reunite in person at the father’s estate – the scene of the crime – and to symbolize the reconciliation they planned to surrender the evidence of their lengthy exchange to the flames of the father’s fireplace.
But academic passions prevailed once again, it was concluded, and made the injudicious and injurious leap into the physical realm right there in the study. Much afterwards, the case was settled with nary a barrister’s inclusion (or intrusion, if the reader prefers) and the perpetrators went back to their own professions and lives as it was before the start of the entire protracted disputation, but it took the inspector an entire month to shake the fright and mental agony of ever etching out a simple sentence onto paper.
Truth Repeated Enough
William gazed at the sun-baked street, sideways-sipping from a straw, his gaudy Neapolitan Root Beer Float…
“It is a really sunny day,” he said.
Louisa looked up from assessing her Nuclear Chocolate Brownie Detonation and raised an eyebrow.
“It is a really sunny day.”
“It is a really sunny day.”
“It is a really sunny day.”
“It is a really sunny day.”
“It is a really sunny day.”
Louisa looked down at her brownie, then over at William’s float, then back again at her brownie. After a moment of thought she stared at him and spoke up in protest.
“Nothing you said was true.”
Rush Week
The debates were preambled with the traditional low-key festivities and solemn procedures. The raucous, bright promise of the preliminaries had passed and was replaced with the Master finals and the somber presence of the dean and department chairs. Their gray heads regally brought order to everything.
It was a disputable tie between the incumbent winner and the freshman, who would only be known years later not for his arguments but for his fluorescent braces.
The freshman burned all his books, quietly renounced the towers of university life, and returned to his parents’ home in rural Maine. The loser’s fate was always unofficial, but had he been proud enough to look his classmates in the eye he would have read undisguised sentiments of contempt and rejection.
Paper Trail
As a matter of habit Gil carried a pen and small pad of paper – Fran’s habitual behest since the accident.
“Next time,” she would say in the mornings over muffins and jam, “Someone may be as unlucky as you were.”
As a be-caned Gil limped off the sidewalk he could sense the approach of a thought in profound