I stood at the water cooler in the gray breakroom and attempted to hold one of the paper cone cups with my limbs while simultaneously pulling the small blue lever that would distribute water in it. I gave up and let the paper cup fall to my feet. Was I walking with a hunch? It felt that way.
My phone buzzed with a text and I reached into my trousers to retrieve it. That’s the moment that the back of my shirt split down the middle and a pair of thick filmy wings split from the fabric and then relaxed around my shoulders.
I sighed and blinked.
My body was entirely foreign to me; it was as though I was trying to control myself with stale rubber bands.
The text was from Janice:
“Do you have wings?”
***
“Why is my body doing this?” I asked while sitting in the human resources office.
“Perhaps you’re a late bloomer?” pondered Janice far away in water.
“Is this normal?”
“Absolutely not, you should be ashamed of yourself. You’re no longer dressed appropriately for work.” Janice motioned to the tattered dress shirt hanging from around my thorax.
“I’m sorry.” The metronome in her office sat silently and yet I could still hear it. My antennae once again picked up on the inaudible frequency and moved in tandem with it.
“So, you have the wings then? Have you tried using them?”
“No.”
“That is good. It doesn’t seem you are finished molting.”
“What happens then?”
Janice pursed her lips and seemed to think about this for a moment. She offered no condolences for my miserable soul.
“I think I’d like a vacation.”
“Vacations are for humans. In fact, you understand this room is for humans, yes? So, what is it that you want with resources strictly for humans?”
I looked down at the pincers jutting out in front of my face and peered down at my prickly limbs. “I don’t know anymore.” I’m sure that if my tear ducts were in my face, that’s the moment I would have let them free into a gushing torrent.
“Eek!” squealed Janice as she jumped from her chair and removed one of her platform shoes. She came right at me with the shoe raised over her head and I flinched in response, closing my eyes, and waiting for the inevitable crunch of my exoskeleton. The thump of her shoe against the wall next to me resounded and I opened my eyes to see her grinning maniacally as she replaced the shoe on her foot. The spot on the wall she’d struck with her shoe, I could see the yellow and brown outline of a dead cockroach, legs still twitching. “Nasty bugs.”
When she was not looking, I scooped the thing into my pocket.
***
I sat at my desk and Janice left me, whistling a jaunty tone to herself.
“You poor thing,” I whispered to the splattered roach as I flipped it onto the desk. I poked and prodded the bits of its body. It did not respond, and I slipped it into the bin under my desk before returning to work.
***
It became an impossibility to walk upright on my way home, so I crawled along the sidewalk panicky, skittering in fright at every passing splash of headlights.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
I lost my clothes.
***
I crawled up the steps leading to the front door of the squalor factory, listening to the rhythm clack of my legs against the concrete. Like a metronome.
***
I slept in the dark corners of my apartment, waking several times in the night to stretch my limbs.
***
Upon returning to Sceptre Incorporated the following morning, I was greeted by Janice with a toothy smile oozing with contempt.
“You are late,” she said.
“Sorry?” I didn’t understand.
“Come along.” I followed her into the building, entering the lobby I’d spent time in during my last meeting with the board of officials. Janice ushered me into the board’s chamber and there they sat along their high counter, tapping their pens or nails atop its surface with dying impatience.
One of them spoke down to me and I tried lifting my head to meet their black shadow faces beneath the hoods. “You are late, Bannon.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve lost my phone.”
“Mm. Yes. It seems you have no pockets or clothes.” I could feel their eyes needling me.
“Am I to be reprimanded?”
“Well,” The board’s speech was stilted and difficult to understand. Human language was beginning to slip into the edges of madness. “It seems there is only one thing to be done with you.”
“Yes?” My voice came from betwixt the pincers, pleading.
“You are to be promoted.” They grumbled amongst themselves, “Yes, a promotion would do you very well.”
“No!” I hissed, “Please! Anything but that!”
“You deserve it.” They said, flipping through the thick employee handbook, “Besides, Bannon, it’s in your contract. It is what you’ve agreed to.” There was a series of tut tuts from the board. I barely registered that the tut tuts were meant for me before my brain rattled like sheet metal in the wind as I felt my skull changing shape. My body made continuous pops as it shifted from that of a man into something much, much worse.
I was all gone.
***
Janice led me to an area of the building I’d never seen before; though it could have been any area of the structure for it all looked the same to me. She took me by a leash that cinched to a collar around my neck.
“Where’s Quincey?”
“That’s none of your business anymore. He’s no longer your supervisor,” She spoke as she tugged me into the small closet***sized elevator.
I was tired and on the verge of total collapse. “What do you mean? What is my new position?” The insectoid lenses I observed the world through were nauseating.
“ARTHUR BANNON, MANAGER.”
Manager? I was to be promoted to the station of manager. The elevator dinged to register that we were in the basement. “What sort of manager?” I was grasping at straws; any explanation would have sufficed. I needed an answer of any sort. Tell me it was a joke. I would wake up any moment and I would be human once more. I would no longer be this hideous thing. A man again.
As if to read my thoughts, Janice sneered down at me and said, “Haven’t you noticed that you were never a man to begin with?”
In a last-ditch effort, I tried, “Click. Click. Click.” I waited to see whether or not the cockroaches, my babies, would come flying from the edges of darkness to recue their mother. Nothing. I tried once more. “Click. Click. Click.”
“Nice try drone boy,” said Quincey as the doors of the elevator parted. He was standing in the threshold of the elevator. “Damn, Art. Haven’t you figured it out by now? What a dolt you really are.” He shook his head. “Poor, poor bastard.”
Janice chuckled at this, but Quincey’s face seemed to express genuine pity. This only angered me. I latched onto his shoe with my pincers and rocked my body back and forth, jerking my head like a wild dog. Janice kicked me in the side and disturbed my wings.
Quincey stepped to the side, allowing me to catch a glimpse of innumerable cubicle walls that stretched into infinity. “Would you like to see your new quarters?” asked my ex***supervisor.
My voice, all gruff, came out without me thinking. “Go to hell.”
Quincey smacked his hands together. “There you are! There’s the feisty attitude I’ve been waiting for. I knew you had it in you!” He reached over as though he were about to pat me on the back but thought better of it. He did not want to touch me.
Janice led me into the room with the forever cubicles.
Each desk was manned by something that was not a man at all. Each desk had a human sized cockroach sitting in an office chair speaking into a telephone. The cockroaches barely noticed me and my company as we trod along. “These will be your co-workers,” said Quincey. We came to an empty desk. “And this,” he thumbed an empty desk, “Is your new station.”
I looked at the plaque on the desk: ARTHUR BANNON MANAGER.
Janice locked my leash into a slot on the desk and I precariously positioned myself into the office chair, scanning the pin headed roaches all around me.
“Now,” said Janice, “Please don’t cause us anymore trouble.”
The humans left me, and I focused my attention on the computer monitor sitting in front of me. Within the frame of the display sat a sad shouldered man with bags under his eyes. I recognized his face. It was once mine.
The cockroach to my left craned his head around the edge of the cubicle and hissed, “Hey bucko, I hope you’re not like the last guy.”
I tried raising an eyebrow before realizing I no longer had eyebrows. “What was wrong with the last guy?”
“The fellow that had your desk last tried to get Arthur out of this pickle. They dragged that poor bastard out of here.” The cockroach paused, “I heard he got the shoe.”
“The shoe?”
“Yes. Speaking of which, I’d better get to work otherwise the board will give me the shoe. I’m Arthur, by the way.” He disappeared behind his wall.
I looked back at the monitor and then read over the script in front of me. I used the phone on my desk. I watched as the Arthur on my computer monitor answered the phone. “Good morning Mister Bannon.” I said in a gruff voice while reading from the script, “Your boss will come for you in two days’ time.”