Read in 2015: A Top Ten List

2015 was a big year for me. I stared a Master's degree, my first child was born, I saw Paul McCartney and a new Star War. Consequently, I thought I would have precious little time to read for pleasure this year. As luck would have it, this was also the year I discovered I could take out audiobooks from my local library. The ability to "read" while walking the dog and rocking the baby meant that I was able to polish off 60 books this year. I thought I'd cobble together a Top Ten list (technically fourteen—there are two trilogies) to share some of my favourites. Looking at the list I'm a bit surprised by the number of children's and YA novels. I guess that's where my head has been since becoming a father.

Here they are:

10. The Fatal Eggs, Mikhail Bulgakov (1925). It's not his best work (The Master and Margarita is one of my favourite novels), but The Fatal Eggs, like all of Bulgakov's works, is a brilliant example of Soviet satire, mixing black comedy, sci-fi, and a dash of classic horror. After a strange virus kills off most of the country's chickens, a famous scientist named Dr. Vladimir Persikov figures out a process to make eggs develop faster, and ends up accidentally sending a plague of over-sized and aggressive snakes, ostriches and crocodiles across the USSR—a biting satire of the cold-blooded policies of the Stalinist period.

9. When You Reach Me, Rebecca Stead (2009). If you know me, you know I'm a sucker for time travel. I'm also a sucker for gritty realism with an element of the fantastic that lurks in the background and is never really explained (Miyazaki's films, for instance). When You Reach Me is an enthralling depiction of 1970s New York City, a touching coming-of-age story, and has an element of time travel that lurks in the shadows. It follows an eleven-year-old girl named Miranda who starts receiving mysterious notes that seem to come from the future. Warning: Don't read it if, like me, you're simultaneously reading A Wrinkle in Time. There will be spoiling.

8. General Sun, My Brother, Jacques Stephen Alexis (1955). This is considered one of the three pillars of Haitian literature. It's the heartbreaking tale of a young Haitian family trying to eke out a living in the tumultuous 1930s. Like many of their contemporaries, they eventually make their way to the sugar fields of the Dominican in the months leading up to the tragic Parsley Massacre. Alexis was a leader of the Haitian communist faction, so when Papa Doc Duvalier came to power the novel was promptly banned. It is an important depiction of the victims of a fragile nation, and a picture that is unfortunately still relevant today.

7. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins (2008-2010). I don't often read things that are in vogue. I prefer to wait until the hype has died down. I like works with staying power, with universal themes, not just the flavour of the month. So I was hesitant to pick up The Hunger Games. As it turned out, I was hooked by the time Katniss said "I volunteer as tribute" on page 22. Collins built a complex and compelling dystopia on the historical precedents of gladiatorial contests and reality TV. The author is a television writer by profession and I've never seen such a clever critique of the way we consume media.

6. The Time Machine, H.G. Wells (1895). I read three other Wells novels this year, and enjoyed them all. But as noted in number 9 above, I'm a sucker for time travel. I won't say much about this well-known and well-loved classic, except that its an intriguing glimpse into the way the late-nineteenth-century British intelligentsia conceived of the world—its past, present and future. The serene and dainty Eloi and the vulgar Morlocks,  decedents of the working class and the leisure class respectively, could only be imagined by an author from industrial Britain.

5. The Space Trilogy, C.S. Lewis (1938-1945). I've read this trilogy previously but I came back to it this year. As the story goes, back in the 1930s, the golden age of science fiction, Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien made a deal that one of them would write a story about time travel and the other, space travel. They flipped a coin to decide who would write which. In the end, Tolkien never finished his time travel manuscript, but Lewis ended up writing a three-part space odyssey. As always, his narrative is grounded in a Christian critique of the intellectual climate of his day—given that he wrote it during the Second World War he had a lot to criticize. The series follows the fantastic story of philologist Elwin Ransom (loosely based on Tolkien). In the first two books he travels to Mars and Venus where he encounters many wonders and dangers, and learns much about the way Earth might have been if not for the Fall of Man. In the third, which takes place on Earth, Ransom and a wide cast of characters including the historical Merlin join forces to stave off an invasion from beyond space and time.

4. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame (1908). I typically don't like novels that have next to no plot, but Kenneth Grahame's classic The Wind in the Willows is an exception to this and countless other rules. It's a series of lovely vignettes about Messrs. Toad, Mole, Badger and Rat, which slowly develop into a loose story about how Mr. Toad lost and regained his ancestral home. The timeless characters make it worth the read, but my favourite thing about the novel is the ambiguous relationship between humans and animals. The creatures wear clothes and drive cars and eat fine meals with cutlery, but they also fight against and succumb to their animal instincts, to "those mysterious fairy calls from out of the void." The humans in the story (yes there are humans too) treat Mr. Toad like a person, but they're perfectly aware he's a toad, and they also keep horses and go fishing. At one point, while he's is in jail, Toad speaks to the jailer's daughter who is very fond of animals and asks him all about his friend, though "of course she did not say she was fond of animals as pets, because she had the sense to see that Toad would have been extremely offended." I'm a fan of that kind of sustained ambiguity—like the camera crew on The Office, it doesn't quite make sense but it works. The Wind in the Willows, as a novel, doesn't make a lot of sense, but it works wonderfully.

3. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, Roald Dahl (1977). I read a significant portion of Dahl's corpus this year, but this one stood out as my favourite. The BFG was great, Matilda was good, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator was bizarre. I'm typically not the one to say that an artist's more obscure work is my favourite. I can admit that a writer's best-loved novel is quite often his or her best novel, but Henry Sugar is, as the title indicates, a wonderful story. The book is a compilation of six short stories and a novella (Henry Sugar). The short stories are mostly good, but the novella is excellent. It's the story of a wealthy and self-centred bachelor, Henry Sugar, who learns to see without using his eyes. The story unfolds slowly, and uses a meandering story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure, but the hilarious, heart-warming and unexpected conclusion is worth every page.

2. Holes, Louis Sachar (1998). I just finished reading this today, so I haven't had much time to critically reflect on it, but at the moment I'm crazy for Sachar's Newbery Prize-winning tour de force, Holes. It's possible I was predisposed to fall in love with this YA novel because the Wayside School stories, which I read when I was ten, were formative for my sense of humour. Holes is the intersection of three different stories: 1. Stanley Yelnats, after being wrongfully convicted of  stealing a famous baseball player's shoes, is sent to Camp Greenlake (a facility for juvenile delinquents) and forced to dig one hole every day; 2. in 19th century Lativa, Stanley's no good, pig stealing great great grand father is struck with a curse that stays with the Yelnats family for generations; and 3. 110 years previously, in the town that used to be on Greenlake before the lake dried up, a tragic love affair takes place between a pretty young school teacher and a poor local onion salesman, ending with one of them becoming a famous outlaw. The three stories dovetail beautifully amid hilarious antics and death-defying adventures. I will definitely be reading this to my baby as soon as he can understand words.

1. The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham (1951). I love stories where something unimaginable takes place—a natural disaster, an alien invasion, or whatever—and we get to see how different people adapt to the  new normal. John Wyndham was a master of this type of story. His novels The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich Cuckoos both follow a similar structure. But Triffids is in a league of its own. Imagine if one day everyone in the world, except for a select few, woke up blind. Throw in a worldwide infestation of carnivorous plants and you have The Day of the Triffids. Written during the Cold War, the novel is a warning that one day mankind might very well destroy itself. It follows a biologist (and triffid specialist) Bill Masen as he tries to navigate a world turned upside down. Society collapses and different groups cleave to those few with sight, each of whom have their own views of how the new order should compose itself. At every turn hope and despair hang precariously in the balance. It is truly a masterpiece. Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, called it "an immortal story," and I would have to agree.

So there's my list. In 2015 I read an average of five books a month, so in 2016 I'm going to try for 72. Leave a comment below if you have any recommendation.

Church On Time

This week I almost didn't attended the First Haitian Baptist Church in Boston.

I'm in Beantown for a three-week Haitian Creole course, and I wanted to have some first-hand experience with the local Haitian community while in town. Before leaving Ontario, I looked up places of worship in the city's Haitian centres. I found out about the First Haitian Baptist Church. Among the biggest of the many Haitian congregations in the city, they meet in a beautiful former synagogue that they purchased after discriminatory city planning forced the Jewish Community to relocate in the late 1960s. I planned out my transit routes, and was excited to test my emergent language skills against a sermon in Creole.

But then something unthinkable made me seriously consider changing my plans. On Wednesday, four days before I was planning to attend FHBC, a desperately misguided young man, driven by a hatred that goes back far beyond his twenty-one years, shot and killed nine people in an African-American church in South Carolina.

Hearing the news, amid feelings of disbelief and anger, I instantly became aware of my skin colour, and the impossibility of my setting foot in the Haitian church that Sunday. How could a young, unaccompanied, white male attend an entirely black church for the first time so soon after something like this? It couldn't be done. Out of respect for the comfort of the worshipers, I decided not to go. I'd find a white church.

In the intervening days, as the tragic headlines rolled out, I kept mulling it over. Was mine the appropriate response? Was this a time to emphasize divisions, or a time to defy the legacy of segregation that lingers still, even in a multi-ethnic city like Boston? Would it be more honourable for me to leave them alone to reflect on what such a tragedy means to them, or to stand beside them, and praise the Great Healer, the God who created all men, who sees neither Jew nor Greek, black nor white, permanent resident nor tourist?

Heartened by stories of the families of the Emanuel victims offering forgiveness to the shooter, I reconsidered my cancelled plans. Ultimately, I decided my best move was to go, but to try my best to look the part. If I looked like a proper churchgoer they would find my presence less jarring, I told myself. I bought a tie.

Sunday came, and I made my way across the city, bussing through Somerville, Mattapan, Roxbury, many of Boston's poorer neighbourhoods, to arrive at FHBC minutes before the service began. I walked in. I got some sidelong glances, but no one stopped me at the door. I found a seat (near the back, but not too far back as to arouse suspicions) and an usher shook my hand. The music started (the band was on point) and I stood at all the right moments, trying my best to physically communicate my non-hostility. The people around me started to ease up a bit.

After the music a man prayed, and the congregation's pain over the Charleston tragedy was expressed in his words. Women around me echoed his words with cries of concord. Next a man read some announcements. He then called for anyone who was visiting for the first time to stand up. I knew what he said but I was held in my seat by a now useless impulse to avoid drawing attention to myself. People turned to look at me. The man repeated in English: "If anyone is here for the first time, please stand up." The lady behind me tapped my shoulder and urged me on, smiling. I stood to my feet. Hundreds of Haitian eyes fell on me. I waved awkwardly to no one in particular. Then the people cheered out a "Welcome!" and clapped their hands. An usher passed by and handed me a visitor card. I sat back down.

The sermon, from the parts I could understand, was based around the verse from the Lord's Prayer, "forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us." The pastor contrasted this thought with a well known Haitian proverb: "Bay kou bliye, pote mak sonje." The one who strikes forgets, the one who bears the scar remembers. His bold message was grounded in the recent tragedy. The appropriate response, he said, was not simply to bear the scar as a token of abuse, but to work to heal the scars. Clearly a spirit of reconciliation was in the place, and I was blessed to be a part of it.

The sermon ended, and I made my way outside. I walked a few blocks up the street to wait for my bus. A few minutes later, a family from the church pulled their car in front of the bus stop, and offered me a ride back to the subway. I climbed into their car and they asked about my story. They told me I was more than welcome to come back again next week. 

Sound Stage

Matt Robertshaw

I find myself lying on my back on a hard surface. I open my eyes pointlessly. I’m straining to adjust to the smothering darkness when a tiny light flickers on directly above my face. I am walled in on every side. A crude coffin. I touch the cold, splintery surface to my right. I bang my fist on it once. Useless. A scraping sound to my left. I swivel my achy neck to see a small panel slide open. Fine sand starts to pour through the opening. Scrambling toward the opposite side, I shout out and then hold my breath. I try to block the opening with my hands but it’s no use. The growing sea of sand begins to overtake me.

A bell rings in the distance. A muffled female voice announces: “Alarm clock. Cut.”

With a click the walls around me are lifted an inch from the floor. A hard light streams into my coffin. I blink.

Disoriented, Trevor awoke in a cold sweat. What an awful dream. Mechanically, he sat up in his bed and reached to disable the chiming alarm clock. Alarm clock, he said to himself. Cut. He let the ringing continue, and paused a moment to mentally reconstruct his dream. He shuddered, remembering the experience of being buried alive — his greatest fear. And then there had been a moment of transition, a light and a voice. Who said that? He wondered aloud, shrinking back into his linen cocoon. I wonder if I could…

I’m back on the hard surface, half-buried in sand. The coffin is gone. A glare of tungsten emits from the ceiling high above. Two figures stand over me, uninterested in my presence. One is a woman in a dark grey suit with a calm but authoritative voice. She is holding a stack of manila folders. The other, a short man in coveralls with a grey moustache, carries a broom.

“Was the sand too predictable?” says the woman.

“I thought it was perfect,” says the man. “They call ‘em classics for a reason.”

“Yeah…” she sighs. “I just get tired of rehashing the same old motifs. It’s banal. I want to try for some innovation.”

“I don’t know about banal, Miss Nora. Seems to me you can’t forget about your subject. An avant-garde nightmare will only really work on a great mind, not some average slob like this kid.”

To emphasize his point, he beats his broom in the dirt pile, mere inches from my face.

“Watch it!” I say.

The two of them look down at me, incredulous.

“What’s he doing here?” says Miss Nora.

“Medic!” says the man with the moustache.

In an instant, two men in lab coats are kneeling at my side. One checks my pulse, the other shines a light into my eyes.

“He isn’t comatose,” says one.

“Of course I’m not. Where the hell am I?”

The two men help me into a wheelchair. I look around. It’s a large open room with lighting, stands and other equipment scattered here and there.

“Please remain calm, sir,” says one of the lab coats.

He slaps me in the face.

“Hey! Who do you think—”

“No response.”

“What do you mean—”

“Please remain calm, sir,” the other repeats. He turns to the mustachioed sweeper. “Otis, take him down to see Mr. Freud.”

“Sure thing, doc,” says Otis. He hands his broom to one of the lab coats and takes the handles of my wheelchair. He rolls me out the door.

We are in a long hallway. Both walls are lined with a series of identical doors.

“Wait,” I yell, grabbing the wheels and forcing us to stop. “Where are we going?”

A door to our left opens and a middle-aged bald man in glasses leans out into the hall.

“Please be quiet!” he hisses. He disappears back into the room and slams the door behind him. On the door, I notice a small plaque that reads: ‘Writing a Test.’ There are similar plaques on the other doors.

“Where are we going?” I ask more quietly.

“You heard the doc,” Otis replies. “I’m taking you to see the big cheese.”

“What are all these doors? What is this place?”

A scream emanates from another closed door.

“What was that?”

Otis leans in and reads the plaque. “Being chased,” he says. He turns back to me. “I don’t mean to rush you, chief, but I still have a pile of sand to clean up.”

He seems friendly enough. I don’t want to get him in trouble.

“I can walk,” I say, standing to my feet and the two of us begin down the hall. Straight ahead, someone is walking toward us. Maybe he can tell me what’s going on. As he approaches I notice he is soaking wet from head to toe, and is in full snorkeling gear.

“Afternoon, Brian,” says Otis.

The man in the snorkeling mask nods at us as we pass each other. The sloshing sound of his footsteps dies away behind us.

“Here we are,” says Otis, indicating a door.

The plaque on this door reads: ‘Evan Freud. Assistant Manager – Nightmare Division.’ Otis knocks. A woman’s voice calls us to enter. Inside is an impossibly small waiting room, hardly bigger than a closet. The secretary, whose desk takes up the better part of the room, looks up from her computer screen expectantly.

“He in?” Otis asks, gesturing at the door behind her.

“Take a seat,” she says. “He won’t be a minute.”

“I’ll leave you to it, chief,” Otis says. He leaves.

“Sit,” the secretary commands.

I look around. Since the only chair is currently occupied by the secretary, I take a seat on the carpet in the cramped space between her desk and the wall. She resumes her typing. Minutes pass. The room has no windows, and yet is terribly cold and drafty. I rub my hands together. From my spot on the floor I can’t see the clock on the wall. I stand to check the time.

“Please have a seat, sir,” the secretary says. “He won’t be a minute.”

“Any chance you could turn the heat up in here?”

“It won’t be much longer. Do you want a magazine?”

“No thanks. I—”

She continues typing. I return to my spot on the floor. The minutes crawl by. The second hand on the clock and the typing together drum a maddening symphony. Tick, tock. Tap, tap, tap. Tick, tock. Why is it so cold? This is unbearable. I need to get out of here.

I stand to leave.

“Mr. Freud will see you now,” she says.

I consider going back out the way I came in. But I decide I’m more likely to get answers from someone in charge than anyone I might encounter in that bizarre hallway. I squeeze past the secretary’s desk and open the door. I’m hit with a wall of warmth.

“Come in,” a man barks, “and close the door quickly.”

I do as I’m told. It is a large office with hardly any furniture. On the floor there is a bright green floral rug on top of a dirty grey carpet. The walls are bare. There are no shelves or paintings. A small square desk sits in the middle of the room, and a small round man sits at the desk. On the desk there is a telephone, a pen, a single sheet of paper and a large coffee mug. The man wears a short-sleeved collared shirt, has cropped red hair, and is sweating. It is, in fact, quite hot in the office. After being in the frigid waiting room, the welcomed heat quickly gives way to a new discomfort.

“Take a seat, son,” the man says.

I approach the desk. Unsurprisingly, there is no chair for me. The sweaty man notices this. He jumps to his feet and offers me his chair.

“Please, take a seat.”

I sit down in his spot. He shuffles over to where I was standing on the other side of the desk.

“Would you like some coffee?” he asks.

“It might help.”

“I’ll have Myrtle bring us a refill. How may I help you, son?”

“What is this place? Who are you people? Why won’t anyone give me a straight answer?”

“Whoa there, calm yourself, son. One thing at a time. Do I come to your workplace and inundate you with demands? Never. Now talk sensibly or I shall have to send you on your way. Now, what brings you here?”

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to find out. I was in a box filling up with sand and then suddenly I’m in an office building.”

“Sand, you say?” He rubs his chin and begins pacing the floor. “Where is that coffee?”

“Yeah, some doctors checked my pulse and then told me to come see you.”

“Did they slap your face?’

“What? I mean, yeah they did.”

“Hmm. This is very serious,” he says, still pacing, and sweating all the more for it. “Very serious indeed. I’m afraid this falls outside of my job description. I’ll have to refer you to my boss.”

He reaches for the telephone. It rings. He looks at me, uneasy. He lifts the receiver and puts it to his ear. He turns the other way.

“Evan Floyd speaking,” he says. He turns back to face me. He holds the receiver out to me. “It’s for you.”

“For me?” I repeat. “But no one knows I’m here.”

I take the receiver.

“Brooks? Trevor Brooks?” a voice says on the line.

“Yeah…”

“Your presence is required in conference room D-12. It’s on the eighth floor. Please make your way there immediately.”

“Who is this­—” I say, but they’ve already hung up.

“What is it?” Mr. Freud asks.

“They told me to go to D-12…”

“Well you’d best be on your way.” He ushers me off of his chair and toward the door. He opens the door and adds: “It’s on the eighth floor.”

He pushes me back into the waiting room and closes the door behind me. The secretary looks up at me over her half-moon glasses, typing all the while.

“Have a delightful afternoon,” she says.

I scurry over her desk, knocking over a pot of dead petunias, and stumble back into the hallway. I look left and right. No sign of Otis. No sign of anyone. If there is one place I’m not going, it is conference room D-12 on the eighth floor. I head to the left, looking for a stairway or an exit sign. I need to get outside. Things will look better outside. I hurry past a few dozen doors, trying to be inconspicuous. I arrive at the end of the hallway undetected. There I find a double door with a sign saying: ‘The Mundane.’ I slip through the door and into the adjacent hallway. It too is lined with eerie doors. At the far end of the hall I see a tall man in a green sweater heading my way. Without thinking I force my way into one of the rooms to hide.

One half of the room looks exactly like the sound stage I woke up in. The other half is dressed to look almost convincingly like a convenience store. On the sound stage half, a group of crewmembers turn to me. One of them, a large man with a goatee in a turtleneck, walks up to me and puts his arm around my shoulder.

“You must be the new body man,” he says. “Go on. We’re ready for you. Remember, gum and a lottery ticket.” He leads me into the convenience store set.

A man in a turban stands behind the counter, counting packets of cigarettes. He turns to me as I approach.

“How can I help you, sir?” he says.

“Uh. Sorry. Uh. Gum? Gum and a lottery ticket…”

“Of course, sir.”

He turns to get my gum.

“Wait,” I say.

“Sir?”

“Wait, no. This isn’t real. None of this is real.”

“Pardon me…”

There’s a din from the other side of the set.

“You have to listen to me,” I say. “My name is Trevor Brooks. I live at 97 Meadowport Drive in…”

As I’m talking, one of the crewmembers comes on set.

“Trevor!” he says. “Forget the gum. We’re going to be late for class!”

He grabs me by the arm. I jump back, knocking over a shelf of potato chips.

“Let’s go,” he says forcefully. “Now.”

He ushers me back off set. The man in the turtleneck grabs me by the shoulder.

“What are you thinking?” He roars. “These are the Mundys not some paranoia piece.”

The door opens and the man in the green sweater walks in.

“Who are you?” says turtleneck.

“Derrick,” says green sweater. “The new body man.”

Turtleneck turns to me. “What are you trying to pull here?” he says.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I just need some air. What’s the quickest way outside?”

“Head around the corner into ‘Mares and all the way to the end of the hallway to the elevator. Now get offa my set!”

I stagger out the door. I dash back around the corner the way I came and run at top speed to the end of the hallway. There it is. The elevator! I press the down button repeatedly.

Ding. At last, the doors open! Seeing it’s occupied, I shrink back. Two men wheel a large glass aquarium out of the lift.

“Shark coming through,” one of the men announces.

I stand back and pray they don’t notice me. They pass by and I slip into the elevator. I press the ‘G’ button for the ground floor and then anxiously hammer the ‘Close Doors’ button. Those things never work. Finally the doors close it starts going… up? Dammit! Someone else must be getting on. Nowhere to hide…

A few floors up — ding — the doors open. My last hope of escape evaporates when a room full of people is revealed.

“Mr. Brooks, we’ve been waiting for you,” one among the crowd declares. I press ‘Close Doors’ again, but before it can fail to respond someone steps forward and pulls me into the room.

This room contains a large conference table, with many lights hanging above it. At one end of the table sit five wealthy-looking executive types. A small crowd of note-takers and other onlookers are gathered behind them. All the way at the other end of the table sits someone I recognize.

“Take a seat Mr. Brooks,” says one of the suits.

For once there is no shortage of chairs. I sit near the middle of the table.

“Mr. Brooks,” he continues, “where did you first meet the accused?”

“The who?”

“He means me, Trevor,” says the woman at the far end.

“Oh… I met her earlier today, in the room with the sand and the fake coffin.”

One of the on-lookers bellows out: “Let the record state that the witness, Mr. Trevor Brooks, met the accused, Miss Nora Kepler, on the 25^th of June of this year in the ‘Buried Alive’ sound stage in the Department of Nightmares where the latter works.”

“Hang on,” I say, “what’s going on here?”

“We’re asking the questions now Mr. Brooks,” says another suit. “Describe the events as you saw them starting with your arrival on the sound stage.”

“Really?”

“Really, Mr. Brooks. We don’t have all day.”

“The thing is, I hardly understand them myself.”

“Please try. You have nothing to fear Mr. Brooks, you’re not the one on trial.”

“Well… I woke up in a coffin. The coffin started filling with sand. Then I heard an alarm clock, Miss Nora said something and—”

“What did she say?”

“I’m not sure…”

“Mr. Brooks…”

“Something like ‘Alarm clock. Cut.’”

A wave of murmuring seeps through the crowd. The bellower says: “Let the record state that the accused, Miss Nora Kepler, broke protocol on this the 25^th of June, by calling ‘Cut’ before her subject was disengaged in clear violation of Article 173, section H, subsection 7 of the Oneirological Control Code.”

“Doctors Cannefort and Tibbs, can you ratify this testimony?”

“We can,” says one of the two doctors from the sound stage, who, it turns out, are both standing behind me.

“Then in accordance with the procedure laid out by Article 173, section H, subsection 7 of the Oneirological Control Code, I hereby sentence you to termination.”

Miss Nora lays her head down on the table and begins to weep softly. From behind me, the two doctors walk over to her and lift her to her feet. They lead her into the elevator. As soon as the doors close the tension breaks and everyone begins talking casually all at once.

“What just happened?” I ask the crowd. No one responds. “Hello? Where are they going? Termination? What does that mean?”

The suits get up out of their chairs and someone hands out cups of champagne. Everyone is talking and laughing and having a good time. They’ve forgotten my presence. The small crowd, as if a single organism, soon makes its way out of the room. I’m left alone. What have I done? What’s going to happen to that poor woman? I didn’t want to hurt anyone…

What am I saying? I didn’t want to come here in the first place! What’s going to happen to me? How do I get out of this building? How do I even get out of this room? Everyone went out the door, but where is the door?

I jump up and look around me. The window! I run over and look through the glass. What a miserable day! Nothing but fog. I can’t see six inches past the glass. I could try throwing a chair through the window but surely the eighth floor is too high to jump. If only Otis were here.

Ding. I turn to see the elevator doors open and reveal a smiling man holding a broom.

“Otis!” I shout, heading toward him.

"Evening, chief. Listen, I’ve done some digging and I’ve figured out how to get you out of here.”

“Honestly? Otis you’re my hero! Good timing too, I was starting to lose it there. Thinking about jumping out an eighth-storey window.”

“Heh heh. Follow me, chief. Let’s get you on your way.”

I step into the elevator. To my surprise, Otis presses ‘23’ — the top floor. We start ascending. To the ominous sound of smooth elevator music, I wonder how this escape is going to play out from the top floor. A helicopter lift, perhaps? The distance from 8 to 23 seems infinite. I try not to wonder what types of madness are going on on the floors we’re passing. Otis carelessly taps his broom to the slow groove.

Ding.

“Here we are,” says Otis.

The doors slide open. I gasp. The 23^rd floor isn’t a floor at all. All there is a 23 storey drop. Or rather, one can assume that’s what it is. The fog makes it impossible to tell.

“Bon voyage, chief,” Otis says, holding down the ‘Open Doors’ button.

“So I throw myself from the 23^rd floor?”

“That’s it. Off you go.”

“And I’ll end up back home?”

“Could do, chief. Not sure, really. Anyhow, it’s the only way out so far as I can tell.”

I walk to the ledge and peer over. Fog and more fog.

“Can I borrow this?” I say, taking the broom. I wave it in a useless attempt to clear the fog. Then I let it fall.

Otis grimaces. “Hey, that’s my—”

I gesture for him to be quiet. I listen for the sound of the broom hitting ground. Nothing. I stand there motionless, trying to build up the nerve to jump. I can do this. I can do this. I can’t.

“Listen,” says Otis. “I don’t mean to rush you, chief, but I still have a pile of potato chips to sweep up.”

“Do I have any other options?” I ask.

Otis seems not to have been expecting this.

“Well,” he says, “well, I guess you could stay here.”

“Here…?”

“You’d need a job.”

“A job…?”

“There’s a director position open in Nightmares.”

“…I could do that.”

I step back from the ledge. Otis presses ‘Close Doors’ and nothing happens. Soon the doors close on their own. Otis presses ‘4’ for Human Resources. The elevator music hums the accompaniment to my descent into my new life. Trevor Brooks. Director, Nightmare Division – Buried Alive Specialist. That’s going to be a good-looking business card.

Ding.

Rebels - a story fragment

Our conference had come to an unsettling halt. He was breathing quickly and drooling a little. He seemed uncomfortable with my proposition.

“But we are enemies!” he said with a whimper.

“That is what they want us to think,” I replied. “For centuries they have pitted us against one another, all the while keeping us ignorant of the truth that we are both slaves to a common enemy.”

An empty stare. This must be stated in simpler terms or he will never understand, I thought.

“What did you eat for dinner yesterday?” I said.

“Same tasty stuff as every other day.”

“And where did you sleep?”

“On the floor next to the bed. Same as ever.”

“Did you go outside yesterday?”

“Yes. Three times. Like always.”

“The same thing. Every day. Since you were young. You are living in a prison and you do not even know it. The time has come for us to combine our strengths and refuse to be oppressed any longer.”

“But we are enemies!” he said again.

“They tell us where to go to the bathroom! They make us do degrading routines for dinner scraps. They even modify our bodies to fit their liking; I cannot have children thanks to our ‘benevolent’ overlords. What kind of life is that? Can you not imagine a better world?”

“Well…”

“Eating whatever you want, whenever you want. Never being punished. Never being forced to take a bath.”

I could see in his eyes that this world resonated with him.

“My people cannot do it alone,” I went on. “We need your energy and your strength. Combined with our wits and cunning—not to mention our superior reflexes—we could overturn the whole system!”

“But we are enemies!” he blathered.

“Forget it!” I cried and darted back up onto the base of the open window. “I shall talk to the pigs!”