“Oh!” the woman said, wide eyes directed at his chest. Sliding down to his shoes.
He looked down. Little speckles, these tiny red specs, they were collecting on the gray office carpet. Hitting his shoes on the way down. He muttered, “Shit,” and excused himself from the room, grabbing a handful of tissues from the box the woman offered him on his way out.
On the way down halls past cubicles and the sleepy faces of people who wished they had chosen something else for themselves, anything else, just not spending all day behind a computer screen, he held the handful of Kleenex to his nose.
This would be the death of him. This place. The air was stagnant. It just smelled that way. Artificial. Fake. Like the leather shoes he’d bought with his pay raise last month, which was more of a pay speed bump. He could have saved it for a car. He could have used it on gas. He could have a nice coffee table right now, probably, if he found a good deal. But instead he bought shoes because he was supposed to get that promotion today, and he’d need new shoes to meet clients. Nice, powerful, businessman shoes.
Instead of hearing if he got that promotion, he got a nosebleed.
“Figures,” he said to his reflection, throwing away the bloodied tissues to survey the damage. Figures he’d be taken out of commission right when the Mighty Boss Man was scheduled to announce the victor of the open position.
Maybe if he told himself enough times, while pinching the bridge of his nose with two fingers and tilting his head down toward the sink (which would likely be stained red by the time he left), that the position was still a crappy office job and he would always hate office jobs no matter what title he was given to do them, he’d start to really believe it and he wouldn’t be so annoyed.
He tried this for a minute or so before he heard someone come into the bathroom, the message still not sticking itself into his subconscious as truth.
“Ah, you are in here.” Rough. Deep. Stern. He’d know that voice anywhere.
“Mister Morgan,” he said, glancing up at his boss from the corner of his eye. “Sorry, I’m in a bit of a predicament.” And he didn’t dare look up to bleed on himself even more, especially not in front of the man who held his destiny in his greedy little corporate hands.
“Don’t fret. Vice President Anderson told me you’d run out with a nosebleed.”
He quite possibly stopped breathing for a second. He inhaled. And blinked. And swallowed metallic saliva. “She got the job.” He did stand up then, dropping his hand from his nose. He felt the blood creeping down to escape, but he didn’t care.
“Well, she had wonderful qualifications…”
The world was fuzzy. It was full of these reds and oranges and yellows; warm colors. Angry colors. His hands clenched into fists and his fingernails dug into his palms without mercy, and he was grinding his teeth together like in high school before he got into fights with the other boys over things like dance and his sister and his inability to amount to anything.
“…and it isn’t that you weren’t similarly qualified, but…”
He heard in snippets. No full sentences. Only key words.
“…I’m sorry, Jeremy.”
“No,” he said.
“The decision’s been made.”
“Well, unmake it.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You promised me that job. You fucking promised.”
“Calm down. You’re bleeding again.”
He wiped the back of his hand across the bottom of his nose. His breathing had become shallow. Slightly uneven. Very purposeful.
He wasn’t even capable of thought anymore. He just lunged. He screamed, short, and he lunged, and he was on top of the boss before the latter could even think to move away. His hands were clenched around the man’s throat now, and the man’s arms waved like a windmill, but it was no use. Dancing since age three had, if nothing else, made the assailant strong.
And then the arms stopped waving and the chest stopped raising and the noises stopped coming from his throat, and it was done. It was bloody – the dead man was tainted with the blood of the living – and it was done.
He stood and stepped away. Looked down at his hands and the floor and his wrinkle-free clothes, and it dawned on him that he still had to make it out of the building somehow. So he pulled the body into the stall and he collected a generous amount of toilet paper while he was in there, and he put it against his nose. Everyone who would notice his departure already knew about his nosebleed. He wouldn’t get caught. It would work. It would.
It wouldn’t.
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Edited because I apparently clicked "No rating" the first time.
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