The Calm Before the Storm: A Short Story

It is morning.

I sit at my desk, though I'm constantly being reminded that the desk is not technically mine by my boss who seems to be a little too happy that it's his. I breath in as deeply as I can without disturbing my next-door neighbour who is very sensitive about excessive breathing. I always bug him that in a previous life he must have been a bat which, for some reason, always makes him look so disarmingly sad.

Another busy day with near-rabid clients all wanting more and more and more almost literally ripping me to shreds is about to begin and I just can't wait! I know what I signed up for - salsa lessons on Thursdays - and I also love my work. It just feels important despite my office being between the bathroom and the storage closet. Ever the optimist, I boast to my colleagues, that in the likely event of a flood, only I'll have the best access to a mop and bucket. Maybe it was the significantly large amount of time I was forced into playing make believe Noah's ark games as a child and into my adulthood, but I am constantly on red alert for the next flood.

But now, at this moment, I am enjoying the last few minutes of calm before the storm, which is always a challenge, as approaching storms remind me of the anxiety-producing bedtime stories my older sister insisted on reading to me by candlelight no matter how much the dripping wax burned my upper lip and how well the slightly-too-bright fluorescent lights worked in my room. My sister went on to enjoy an illustrative career as a candlemaker bringing my parents, and our small town, much pride while still giving me the shivers everytime I smell wax or have dripping wax land on my upper lip which is depressingly often.

It is a regular, everyday, not-worth-writing-home-about-but-not-that-I-let-that-stop-me-haha-mom-and-dad-I-hope-you-love-all-of-the-letters-I-send-you-on-a-daily-basis-about-nondescript-periods-of-time morning. Some years back my parents attempted to place a restraining order on my ability to send letters and were laughed out of court. The cash I spent hiring a group of aggressive, over-the-top professional laughers for the occasion was money well spent as was that corned beef on rye that I taunted my roommate with as way of celebration.

As crazy as it sounds, with the exact amount of crazy depending on the company I'm keeping at the time who typically fall between kneeling down to smell flowers when there are no flowers around to assigning unique names to each of  50 different peanuts before consuming them all while bawling, I love mornings. I love them the same way other people love their cats that continually scratch their couches as if on a mission to remove all upholstering. I love mornings, but they've made it pretty clear the feeling is not mutual and that I need to stop already and move on or else they'll have to alert the authorities.

No matter how it looks, I didn't always love mornings, and I'm quite aware of how it looks as I spend significant time looking at it each evening while meticulously combing my hair while listening to Wagner. That's right, as I'm always telling anyone within earshot which I make easier by carrying around my own amplifier on weekends, when I was a younger, more marketable and less brittle version of myself, I couldn't stand waking up. Actually, the waking up part was okay, but I refused to stand unless ordered to by a lady with perfect posture and a haircut to match who spoke with a proper British accent accompanied by a spot of tea. Not a cup, but an actual spot as I am trying to cut way back on my tea consumption before I become known as "that guy".

For those who aren't around while I am sleeping, which is hopefully everyone but the man in the poncho whom I occasionally pay to watch me sleep, I have always been quite adept at laying down while awake, despite the fact that those world records keepers always refuse to answer my calls. But as both I and my prized cheddar aged, more and more meetings and appointments and work happened before lunch that I needed to feign consciousness for or, if I was in the mood, actually be conscious for. I did try, for a short time, being unconscious at work which, while providing hours of hilarity for the boys in the mail room, was frowned upon by my superiors who were the women in the room directly above the mail room.

One day it hit me. Unless I wanted to drift through life as an unemployed drifter who enjoyed some drift-net fishing on the side just as my highschool yearbook had predicted I, out of our grad class of 250, was the most likely candidate to do, I needed to change. Yes, I realized that I needed to change everything starting with my pillow case. My mom argued, quite over-the-top vehemently which, if you know my mom, is standard operating procedure, that my pillowcase was the least of my worries. My mom, cutely, is always either vastly underestimating or greatly overestimating the psychological and emotional impact that linens have on me.

But I figured things out and quickly transformed from a sleep-all-morning-on-the-kitchen-floor-caked-in-tortilla-chip-crumbs slacker to a rise-at-the-crack-of-dawn-and-chomp-at-the-bit-night-mouthguard-wearing go-getter despite what all of those naysayers were saying about me. Those particular naysayers are horses. True, those months mostly spent in my unfinished basement that I had re-purposed into the padded cell of my childhood dreams were as transformative as they were damaging, but just like my daycare provider used to tell us during afternoon snack, drastic times call for drastic measures.

In the blink of an eye - multiple blinks if I'm being honest - it was like I was a different person, with different sweater tops and my friends seemed different too, taller, more mysterious and into Greek food. In some ways it was like someone had forcibly put wool in front of my eyes right after making me sit through hours of excruciatingly boring shearing only to remove the wool and run away giggling like a wild pack of schoolgirls, while in another more accurate way, it was nothing like that at all. No wonder my roommate is always complaining of headaches even after I begrudgingly removed all of the wonderful asbestos that I claimed gave our place a certain je ne sais quoi feeling from days gone by.

For a few years I went to school, before deciding to actually enrol in courses as it was getting very boring just hanging out. I graduated near the top of my class thanks to my new hat at the time and my good fortune to always show up late when they decided to make human pyramids. And here I am. A veritable success in the most limited definition of the term without sounding sarcastic. Gone are the days of wondering where I was going in life which seemed to be dominated by walking cautiously on a series of poorly lit paths at dusk. These days I never leave the house without my trusty lantern as well as a trunk full of backup lanterns just in case an impromptu lantern party breaks out.

I look at my daybook and scan down the huge and daunting list of appointments while silently applauding the use of page numbers. I had written in a thick red marker for some strange reason giving a fairly regular list of names a huge and daunting feeling to it for dramatic effect and so that the markers I had spent my weekly advance on wouldn't just sit there gathering dust. I mean I wanted them to gather dust so I could avoid feeling like I wasted money on the new duster I bought, I just didn't want the markers to solely gather dust as that was what the scissors were for. It would be a cold day in hell, I was always muttering to myself, before I'd use those scissors. My daybook, interestingly, had been an odd, yet practical gift, from my estranged uncle who is an odd, yet practical gift of a man whom my aunt always lovingly and cryptically referred to as the human embodiment of a daybook.

As I gathered my thoughts and remembered how I got here - it was two rights, followed by a left, followed by three lefts and finished off with a huge roar and fist pump that freaked out a group of new mothers pushing strollers enjoying a seasonally warm morning, I reminded myself of the plan for the day. My bosses were always reminding me in eerie, yet standing-ovation-worthy unison to toe the company line which I begrudgingly did. I thought it was just an old expression until that one day, when I arrived at work, and saw this ridiculously audacious line that the bosses had painted as if to prove a point or just because they love painted lines. But, there was no way I was going to simply do what "they" wanted and I went as far as refusing to unless someone left me a briefcase with unmarked bills under my pile of decoy briefcases I keep out back just in case. The bills, plain sheets of white paper, were as unmarked as they could have been and I was impressed that they took the time and effort to placate me.

After a slow start that I attributed to leg cramps though industrial strength glue might be more accurate, I started climbing the company's ladder rung by rung while also receiving promotions and raises that were completely unrelated to my love of climbing the rope ladder they had installed in the company gym. In little time I went from the assistant to the mail clerk to his co-assistant to someone worthy of sitting down during the day at an actual desk. And to think my first girlfriend believed that no one would ever pay me to sit at a desk. The random and diverse things she thought would never happen to me would have been enough to fill exactly two pages of her diary, which they did. I remember the day she ran out of ideas and how she wept as the other 98 pages of her diary would have to be filled with pictures of farm animals that she clipped out of magazines. I missed her sometimes before I recall how painful our separation was. I still can't believe she actually bit my leg.

The crew had all arrived by now and each of us were primed and ready. Some of us had chosen to wear deodorant for the occasion, while others had chosen to surround themselves with things that smell awful, thus appearing better smelling relative to those objects. I sit at my desk looking at the wall openly admiring its verticality. I hoped my envy isn't too pronounced or if it is, that the new girl isn't standing outside my office gaping at me with her a-little-too-cute mouth right now and permanently etching me off her list of eligible bachelors if she even had a list in the first place that I was fortunate to make. Why she'd have an etching tool on her person is another great question that really has no good answer, unless she comes from a long line of etchers, and even then. This new girl is the latest model off of the assembly line of cute girls hired at the office who somehow appear less cute after lunch.

As I enjoy the last few moments of calm, I smugly lean back on my swivel chair and allow myself a small, yet infinitely satisfying, chuckle at my ancestors who never got to experience a chair that swivelled. And then, mid-chuckle, I am slapped hard upside my cheek by reality who always slaps a touch too hard. Today is going to be rough, like a storm at sea, or a storm on land. There would be a line of angry, demanding customers who were only slightly better than a hoard of angry, demanding customers mostly due to their ability to organize into a line, thus making themselves seem more approachable. These customers would want refunds and apologies and free pens or, failing that, a sincerity that I usually only reserved for my grade 8 math teacher because she unapologetically gave me free pens from time to time.

"Everybody ready?" the boss called out as she did on a daily basis without ever opening the question to the floor for debate and discussion. For months I had been a little worried about the guy next to me who closely resembled a rabid dog only with drastically less ear hair, until one day it hit me that I should remove the plastic before microwaving and consuming my breakfast burrito. One last glance at the blank space on the wall right above my computer and then back at my computer and then up at the blank space again as if searching for inspiration or a computer, and I was truly ready for whatever this day would bring as long as it wasn't horrible indigestion.