Calvin never really understood the bellyaching that surrounded work. After all, he worked one of those “boring office jobs.” He commuted through a suffocating line of traffic, and returned home long after the sun had set ready to prepare himself for the same thing the next day. It wasn’t that he liked his job, it was just simply what he did.

In the time he had worked as an accountant, he had never taken a sick day, and had only been late the time he had been rear ended on the way to the office. When he had returned from the first vacation he had ever taken at this firm, he found himself subject to many unwanted questions.

How was his trip? Did he feel recharged? Where had he gone? Somewhere warm, they hoped. It was such a waste of time. The added bristles in his responses had nothing to do with what had occurred on his “vacation.” The extra questions were just particularly intrusive when he had so much work to get caught up on.

He began to stay late on most days. He had to catch up somehow. It became its own form of meditation, casting furtive looks over the top of his computer, as everyone else donned coats and scarves and headed out into the cold. Soon, the only sound came from the heater rumbling to life, and the lonely tapping of his keyboard.

He continued to do this even after he had caught up from his moment of madness. Soon, he was asking for extra projects, always searching for something he could do to fill these late hours. A raise was highly likely given the volume of work he was completing on a daily basis. But that wasn’t why he continued to do it. It was difficult to put his finger on it, the origin of his drive to pile more and more work onto his plate.

His longer hours had the added benefit that his coworkers began to speak to him less. He had gone from the slightly awkward coworker to the loser who was ruining the expectation of a reasonable workload.

It was on one of these late nights, his eyes beginning to glaze over after hours of pouring through expense reports and spreadsheets, when he felt something odd. His eyes snapped open wide, as if he had been doused in freezing water.

The office was deserted, the dim light mixed with the blue coming from several sleeping monitors which made the whole room colder. Calvin was alone. He was sure of it. Maybe the odd feeling he had wasn’t connected to someone in his space, but the space itself.

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It suddenly felt as if he were taking in the office for the first time. Everything repulsed him. The feeling was contagious, as he wondered what sort of person would be spend so much time in a place like this. How long could someone stay here before the numbing mediocrity infected them?

A moment later, those feelings faded. He wondered if he was having a stroke. Looking around the space once more, his pallid view had diminished, but it the feeling hadn’t completely gone. He walked to the breakroom, and splashed water on his face. Then took a longer route back to his desk. Almost like he was searching for something. Was it the source of this repulsion, or something else?

The feeling persisted as he sat down and tried to focus. Something was off. Perhaps he had been staring at the screen too long, but his eyes could not properly bring the small print back into focus. He leaned back in his chair, and stared at the ceiling, trying to get things to straighten out.

Then a wholly different emotion overcame Calvin. It wasn’t anger, but something simmering dangerously beneath that. He felt vindictive. His movements felt as if they had been made from far away. He slowly slid a stack of papers from his desk, and made his way toward the break room again.

There was a large paper shredder, positioned against the blank, cream-colored wall. He pulled up a chair, and sat directly in front of it. It was a blessing that it was so late at night, because had he been caught, staring straight ahead, feeding page after page into the shredder, he wouldn’t have been able to explain his actions.

That’s all he did. He watched each one being pulled into the metal teeth that spat out standardized ribbons. Eventually, he ran out of the stack of paper he had taken from his desk. The last page was still being turned into confetti when he returned with a stack of blank sheets taken from the pile beside the printer.

It would have been difficult to explain to anyone, because Calvin wasn’t quite sure why he was doing it himself. His mind remained as blank as the sheets he destroyed, one after another. How long had he been doing this for? An hour? Two?

At some point in the early hours of the morning, he stood, emptied the overflowing receptacle, put on his coat, and drove home. He made sure that he was still on time the next morning. As he lay in bed that night, beginning to cross the border into sleep, an image came to him from a film long forgotten. It was shorter than a scene, just a singular action done again and again. A religious acolyte whipping their back over and over, until his skin had transformed into pulp. Again, and again.

When he had originally seen the film, he had been forced to turn away. Now, he looked on with something resembling adoration.