jamieproctor.ca

She sat at her desk. 

Her desk sat back at her. 

Well well well.  Another impasse.

Her phone rang, hidden somewhere behind a forest of bottles.  She ignored it.  Again. 

“Maybe not the mayonnaise,” she said.  “I know it’s the foundation of the sauce, but like…fuck it.  Vinegar instead.  Go for a drizzled dressing.”  She felt sharp today, not rich – and in more than one way. 

Her phone rang again and her reflexes encroached on the turf of her best senses and answered it. 

“’lo.”

“Finally!  What the HELL have you been doing?!”
“Writing.”
“News to me!  Your first draft is overdue by three fucking weeks!  I can’t contact you, I can’t contact your agent – hell, I can’t even contact your husband!  This is the first chance I’ve had to even proximally reach you in almost two months!”

“Uh-huh,” she said, muffled a bit by the cork between her teeth.  She spat it out and took a belt.  “Who are you again?”
The room filled with thick, clammy silence. 

“’lo?”
“It’s Marge.  Your editor.  Who you’ve worked with for twenty-six years.”
“Huh?”
“I made your career out of floss and hope you goddamned washed-up half-assed paint-stripper-drinking canape-baking cabana-chef-ass piece of UNGRATEFUL-“

“Listen,” she said, “it’s been a long day and I’m really struggling with this page.  Tell me about crabs.”

“About WHAT?”
“Crabs.  I’m working on crab cakes.  With crabs.  The cakes are set but I can’t decide if I should switch from a mayonnaise sauce to a vinaigrette.”
“Christie.  This is a cocktail book.”

“What?  No it isn’t.  Talk to me.  Talk to me about crabs.”
*click*

“’lo?  Hello?” 

She put down the phone, took another three quick swigs, then used the vinaigrette.  A choice made without thinking was always the best one. 

***

It was a bright and stormy morning.  Sunlight sparkled on the ocean at the horizon as surely as the rain punched into the windowpanes.  She looked at the curdling clouds, then looked at her curdling stewpot, then looked at the clouds, then looked at the stewpot, then upended an entire carton of cream into it. 

The phone rang.  Her hand slapped it to the floor. 

“Hello?  Hello?  Hello?”

“Wrong number.”
“Is that you, Christine?  Hello?”
“Who?”
“That IS you.  What in the blazes do you think you’re playing at?”

“Emulsification.”

“Excuse me?”
“I’m trying to get this stupid chowder to thicken.”
“Christine Julianne Aquifer Sanderson, this is your father speaking to you: why in god’s name have you dropped off the face of the earth?!  Your mother’s been worried sick, your aunt’s got an ulcer, your sister won’t return my calls, and your editor has been at me for weeks and weeks and weeks.  Don’t you care about other people?”

“Yes.”  She sniffed the pot gently, then tasted it.  “Ugh.  Tell me, do you think chives would help?”
“EXCUSE me?”

“Chives.  With the chowder.”
“Are you cooking right now while I’m talking to you?”
“Yes.  I’m making a crab chowder.  With crabs.”
“Christine you turn off that damned stove  and pay attention to me this second young lady I knew encouraging you to do these damn foolhardy things would cause no end of grief no wonder it took you so long to find a husband why if your grandmother were alive she’d die of shame and another-”

The phone’s battery died. 

“Chives?” she asked.  She nodded.  “Chives.”

***

The doorbell went off. 

This was a problem she solved by ignoring it.

The smoke alarm went off. 

This was a problem she solved by laboriously dragging a chair underneath it and then smashing it with a hammer.  

“Let me help you with that.”
“No thanks I’ve got it it’s fine.”  She blinked.  “Who are you?”
“Constable Thomas,” said the stranger, who was tall dark and geekish. 
“Oh.  That explains the uniform.”  She rubbed the smoke from her eyes.  “Well, can you help me with some firewood?  The smoking is going a bit harder than I thought it’d be.”
“You’re cooking?”
“Smoking.  A crabsmoke.  For crabs.”

“Working on a new cookbook?”
“Sort of.”  She lugged the chair back into position with a grunt. 

“So you’re Christine Sanderson?”
“Sort of.”
“Your family have filed a notice with us about your mental state.”
“Sort of.”

“Pardon me?”
“Yeah, I think they might have done that.”  She rummaged through the drawers of her kitchen.  “Listen, can you give me a hand here?  Just pass me that seasoning jar on your left.”

Constable Thomas looked to his left, looked back, and caught a fork to the jaw and through important bits of his neck.

“Thanks,” she said. 

***

It was a cool, moonlight night, but the firepit was warm and the crabsmoke was ready. 
“Come on and get it,” she said, as the first guests arrived, skittering low and fast over the sands.  “I think it’s a real winner.  Got some new meat in.  Nice and lean.”
Just in time too.  She’d never have been able to finish the book in time on just Joshua and her agent.

“I think we might be in for trouble soon,” she confided as the meal was consumed.  “Going to have to leave the country, I reckon.”
The thoughtful click-click-clack and snickety-snip of thousands of tiny claws answered her. 

“Yeah, it’s a land thing.  Stupid, I know.”  She sighed and kicked back in her chair, looking up without noticing the stars.  “Just drop me off somewhere with a word processor and I’ll keep up the work, yeah?”

An agreeable click, and then the swarm rolled over her and around her and off to sea and over it, all the long, rattling, carapaced way. 

It was an awfully uncomfortable way to travel, but that was the sort of thing you had to learn to put up with, when you were cooking with crabs.   

Bukel and Haxi and Sons and Daughters were an old shipwright’s firm, the oldest in the city.  They had respect, and they had recognition, and they had historical weight.

They also had no money, so when a strange little wet bag made entirely (if crudely) of woven kelp was pushed onto their dock in the dead of night one moonless, starless eve, they were willing to listen.

And that was why Jenma Haxi (of the Daughters) was out at the witching hour sitting in a dinghy in the shallow waters off Deadreef’s Point, under the shadow of half a lighthouse and over the rubble of the other half of the lighthouse.  The Point was a mite unstable, and it tended to shrug every so often.  Because the shipwrights needed money, but they needed their reputation too, and there was no point making the head of the firm look like an idiot when you could foist it off on someone younger and suspiciously keen.

Jenma was less keen than usual, even under her best sou’wester and three blankets and the hardiest longjohns her brother Bucal could sew. 

“Fuck,” she muttered, and not for the first time.  Something unseen bumped the boat lightly in agreement, and not for the first time.  “Fuck,” she repeated.  “Aw fuckity fuck fuck.”  Just what she needed: to be overturned and eaten by the first big shark to come in closer than the Deadreef in two generations.  “Fuckleberries with fucked cream.”  Typical, just typical. 

“Fu-”

A highly technical and directed stream of water hit her directly in the face, turning the next thirty seconds of swears into sputters.  Jenma spat and sneezed and coughed and hacked and heaved and by the time she knew which end was up she was headfirst over the gunwales and eye-to-eye with the least friendly-looking dolphin she’d ever met.  Despite its (somewhat scarred) permanent smile, it seemed to be giving her the stinkeye. 

“Hello,” she croaked.  “Fuck.  Ow.”
The dolphin spat in her face again.  This time she wasn’t inhaling, but that was about as big an improvement as she got. 

“Excuse me,” she managed. 

The dolphin clicked at her and bumped the boat with a floating piece of wood.  And not for the first time.

Oh.  Not a shark after all. 

“Got yourself a toy there?  Nice.  Please stop spitting at me.”

The dolphin bumped the boat.  Then spat at her.

When Jenma’s vision cleared up again, the driftwood was in the boat with her and the dolphin was gone. 

That suited her fine.  It had left her a lot of reading to do. 

***

One month later, Jenma rowed out past Deadreef’s Point again.  That had covered three weeks of explaining, pleading, wheedling, threatening, blackmailing, stonewalling, extorting, and demanding; one week of making very discreet enquiries to very very well-paid experts about very very VERY complicated arrangements; and a few days of screaming nameless dread and horror and frustration into her pillow.

Her brother Bucal had sewn that pillow for her as a child.  It was a tattered sack of sailcloth stuffed with rags that wasn’t fit to even be called an apprentice-piece, and she loved it more than gold. 

Which was why it was buried underneath the multiple complicated chests, packs, and sealed print-cases.  She needed a little bit of that love out here with her while she did this. 

Bump bump bump on the hull.  And this wasn’t the first time, so she peered over the side promptly.  She’d had enough water squirted in her face. 

“Hey.”
Two cold, icy little eyes glared back at her from above a big happy grin. 

“I’ve got the plans.  I can go over this step-by-step if you want.”

The sea moved, and underneath Jenma’s dinghy it was moved aside.  A great grey barnacled back beached her high and dry; a valve twisted and huge lungs breathed deep and slow. 

“Right then.”

So she went over it step by step.  There would be three, and each would take a long time. 

“Is this acceptable?”
Her client’s interpreter squeaked and clicked in the affirmative. 

“Good.  This is an off-the-books job, so there’ll be no master-marks on anything.  If word gets out the other shipwrights’ll tear me apart in town square, and I can’t say the rest of my family wouldn’t join them.”

A raspberry, long and extra watery. 

“Yes, yes, yes.  Just explaining the circumstances.”
Click click clickclickCLICK.

“We can start soon.  Meet up at Bluehollow Bay in three days, after nightfall.  And be prepared to pay for each step in advance.  And be prepared for it to hurt.  A lot.”
Her client spoke aloud for the first time, but it was very, very, very loud.  A dismissive snort is quite something when it’s forced through a blowhole. 

Jenma spent an hour scrubbing herself down when she got home.  The prospect of money helped keep her mind off what was coming out of her hair.  

***

Bluehollow Bay was beautiful in the moonlight.  Few waves, no wind, the perfect place to swim if you were from out of town and didn’t know about the massive drop that led into deep water, covering rip currents that could suck you out past the reach of everything but gulls. 

This, said the interpreter of Jenma’s client, would not be a concern.  She had arranged for protection.  And so there was, in the water around the huge floating mass of flesh – a circling squadron of fins that she had to explain to the barber-surgeons were NOT sharks about one hundred times.  Even then, some of them didn’t believe her until the interpreter poked his head up from the water to swear virulently at them.  Some tones transcend languages and species. 

So they stepped atop their patient, and they prepared their knives, and their saws, and their scoops, and their cauldrons and cauldrons of boiled antiseptics and soothing paste.

And they began to cut, and the bay ran red. 

The client made no complaints.  She held her breath as if she were on a deep dive, and every hour on the hour, as steady as a watch, she would exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, and hold again.

She did this ten times, and as the sun began to rise it was done. 

“Don’t dive,” Jenma told the interpreter.  “Not until the paste has dried away.  It’ll start to itch then, and it should be fine.  Give it a week and a day, and then we’ll bring in the smiths.

***

The smiths were less skittish than the doctors, although they were even more uncomfortable aboard a boat.  They’d all shoed horses, and although this was very different in the details the shape and the mass and the form of the thing was graspable in a manner that felt familiar and proper and right. 

So they stoked their little portable foundry on the shore, and they hammered and grunted and bent and poured and now and then explained to the interpreter what they were doing, because that sort of intense anger is something that demands answering for even if you aren’t sure how to do it. 

When each piece was ready – still glow-hot – it was whisked, tongs and all, into Jenma’s dinghy, and from there to the client, and from there into the client, and from there it was bolted, and nailed, and hammered, and sealed into place against rib and joint and blubber and hide.  The smell of cooked meat filled the air until it was enough to drive a lion to veganism, and everyone present took a small break for a vomit before lunch. 

The installation took all night and a bit of the day besides, but it was done. 

“Overtime pay,” Jenma said.  “I can’t skimp on silence from these people.”

The interpreter spat in her face again, but he begrudgingly hauled up yet another (smaller) little kelp-string-bag to her hands, brimming with pearls.

“Wait a month for the weight to settle,” said Jenma.  “And then we’ll do the tricky part.”

***

The tricky part wasn’t finding a power source – there was an infinite supply of seawater for boiling at hand, and a truly astonishingly potent heat-source – but tapping it without compromising the client. 

This was done with cogs and rods and wheels and gears and teeth and boilers and plungers and piping and waterproofing and they even managed to find a way to repurpose the body’s own oils as oils, more’s the wonder. 

Ammunition would be simple.  Hell’s grapeshot, loaded with whatever could be crammed in.  The expulsion method involved a lot of violence and steam, but well, again, water was easy. 

Jenma wished the designer was at hand, but Grand High Artificer and Lord Engineer Lop Pon-Deapwit was an ill little thing and she refused to be moved from her bedside until she was finished dying.  Ten months on and so far no luck, but one grew bored while dying and she’d been quite happy to distract herself with the worst technical problems she’d ever imagined.  Hadn’t even demanded a fee for the work, let alone her silence. 

The client settled low in the water when her project had been installed.  Heavy with iron, and with lead, and with something hotter and more hateful. 

“The job is done,” said Jenma, alone in her dinghy again as the last of the pale-faced clockmakers, cannoneers, and foundry-workers vanished over the road, over the horizon.  “And it all should work.  Do you want to field-test here, or-”

The client breathed out, then in, then dove.  She left so fast the water in Bluehollow Bay nearly came with her. 

Jenma sat back up and waited for the horizon to stop spinning.  “I think,” she said to the interpreter, “I had which one of you was the angry one all wrong, didn’t I?”

He cackled at Jenma, then squirted her in the face. 

***

“THAR SHE BLOWS!”

Ninety days out of port and not a sight but shattered jetsam, and at last the call, the blessed call to blood and sweat and money came down from the Brigmun’s mainmast.  The lookout sang loud and strong, lungs as good as a trumpet, from the peak all the way into the hull. 

“THAR SHE BLOWS!”

The men scrambled, the boats were hoisted, the harpoons were seized.  Ahead it hove into sight, a lone cow, somnolent at the surface, heavy and low in the water with child (a bit wasteful, but best to take what you could get after this long a drought) and dreaming of happier things. 

 “THAR SHE BLOWS!”

Wait, what was that glint? 
“THAR SHE BLOWS!”
It sparkled in the bright morning light, most unlike light on water.

“THAR SHE BLOWS!”

Wait, was that a CANNON?

“THAR SHE-”

…broadsides. 

***

For some years thereafter, whaling took a sharp and inexplicably lethal downturn.  At first the shipwrights did roaring trade replacing vessels, but only so much good money is willing to throw itself after bad, and soon the local harbours saw few vessels launched save for the little boats used by local fishermen.  The shipyards closed, their wrights moved away or retired. 

Except, that is, for Bukel and Haxi and Sons and Daughters.  Inexplicably, they did quite well for themselves. 

The hallway door creaked.  It wanted to fit in with the mansion’s walls, ceiling, floor, joints, attic, roof, cellar, and foundation. 

Through its portal came two figures: one tall and thin, one tall and thin and incredibly, exhaustively, exhaustingly old.

“Pay attention, Edith.  This is your heritage you’ll be looking at here.”
Edith shrugged underneath her jacket.  “Sure.”
“One day I’ll be gone, and all these heirlooms will be yours.”
“Yuh-huh.”
“Now gaze upon my trophies!”

“’Kay.”
Lord High Conjurer Sir Archibald Quislip Stepford-Heimst blended a tsk into a sigh (an old trick he’d learned from his favourite nanny as a child).  “Edith, you’re looking at your phone-machine again, aren’t you.”
“Yeah.”
“Youth!  It is wasted upon the youthful, my granddaughter!  Wasted!”
“Sure.”
“But there is always more to be wasted, until there isn’t.  Take this manticore, for instance!  Stuffed the thing myself when I was your age, my first solo taxidermy job.  Isn’t he a beaut?”
Edith glanced up at the lion-bodied, scorpion-tailed, man-skulled, many-toothed creature.  “Cool.”
“Indeed!  Fun trick about manticores: they love easy targets.  I simply paid a local peasant girl to stand out in the open for thirty minutes and I got a clear shot across the bastard’s haunches with my cursebow.  She got away with but a few scratches to the vertebrae, little ungrateful minx.”

Edith took a picture.

“I hope you aren’t going to show your friends that.  This is a private family pride.”
“Just recording.  Hey, this thing’s teeth are broken.”
“Indeed!  It was quite old and feeble.  First and best lesson in the ways of the world, m’girl – a fair fight is for fools.  Think smart: cheat.”

“How’d you cheat this one?” asked Edith, pointing upwards. 

“Hmm?”
“That one.  The one that’s the entire ceiling.”
“Oh, the dragon!  I forget it’s there sometimes; old Esteban plotted the ribs into the rococo so nicely.  Funny thing about dragons: they burn so hot they can scorch rocks but because of that they need more water than a locomotive.  So I poisoned all the water holes in a ten-mile radius of its lair and left the country.  They tend to die slow, you see, and vengeful.  Came back for the corpse when the rampage ended.”  Stepford-Heimst chuckled fondly.  “Oh, it was a feisty bugger.  Took out six villages and two good-sized towns before its guts died out on it.  It  was still glaring at me when I cut its throat, bless its scaly heart.”
“Cool,” said Edith. 

“Oh indubitably.  And the fangs, of course, went into my cursebow.  Which you won’t be inheriting.  Ol’ Duchess is getting buried with me, you see.  I shan’t dare part with her.”

“Did you use her on this?” inquired Edith, taking a picture of a single-orbited skull the size of a car.   A spectacularly huge shattermark filled its forehead.

“Oh goodness me no.  A cursebow against a cyclops would be like a spitball against a teacher: just makes ‘em crabby and liable to smack you.  No, I made his acquaintance formally under guest-right, exchanged gifts, the whole nine yards.  I believe his name was Xenos.”
“Did he like…give you his skull?”
“No, he gave me Duchess!  He forged it himself as a skill-testing exercise; far too small for him to use, like a man making sculpture on a needlepoint just to prove he could.  A master smith, but not surprising – cyclops-make has been the best you can find in the Mediterranean for the past two millennia.”

“What’d you give him?”
“A monocle!  He was quite nearsighted in his old age.  He thanked me with tears of joy, then tripped over a rock and smashed his forehead in immediately.”  Stepford-Heimst winked and laid a finer aside his nose.  “Just a little flaw in the glass.  Worked wonders since he had no depth perception to begin with.”
“Sick.”
“Oh?”
“Cool.”
“I see.”
Edith poked her phone again. 

“Anyways!” said Stepford-Heimst after about forty seconds.  “This is one of my favourites.  Care to lift the lid on this case?”
“You do it,” said Edith with the flat and blunt awareness of one who had learned all about the sense of humour shared by elderly relatives.

“Oh come now.  One little peek?”

“You first.”
“Spoilsport.”  The lid raised, and even looking away, Edith squinted at the glare.

“Ohohoho!  The look on your face!  My word!  A fine knee-slapper, eh?”
“Ow.”
“This, m’girl, is a phoenix egg!  You have any idea how rare those are?”

“Very?”
“Quite so!  I befriended it in its dotage, tended it with care, and then –”

“-attacked it in its sleep?”
“No, no, goodness no!  Phoenixes don’t sleep.  No, I waited until it died of old age, then stabbed it to death in its own shell before it could finish reincarnating.  Used lead needles.  Fun little fact: a phoenix’s rebirth relies upon a very limited and delicate form of nuclear reaction.  Probably why your mother doesn’t have any more siblings eh?   Eh?  Eh?”
Edith’s face contorted in the agony of one forced to imagine a relative having sex. 

“Ohohohohohohohohohohoho!”

“Please, stop.”

“Of course!  And now, no doubt, you’ll see how important it is to grow up to carry on the family tradition!”

Edith scratched her nose.  “Sort of,” she muttered.

“Excuse me?”
“Sort of.  I mean, I want to be a wildlife biologist.”
Stepford-Heimst laughed indulgently.  “Oh you clever little thing!  And that will help you become a wonderful hunter, no doubt, as long as you don’t waste too much time at school.”
“Yeah.”
“’Yes.’”

“Sure.  I mean, it helped me know how much basilisk venom to squeeze into your tea earlier, to provide a fatal dose without the taste alerting you.”
“Ah!”
“It was the dried stuff you keep in that big glass jar in the parlour, so figuring out how degraded the potency was got a bit complex.  And I had to guess at your body weight.”
“Oh!”
“Think I got it right though.  You’ve got those little red dots appearing on your hands exactly thirty minutes after ingestion.”

Stepford-Heimst did not reply.  Edith gently pushed at his side.

He fell over for good. 

He didn’t stop smiling. 

***

Edith buried most of the remains, and sold the mansion for funds to build an occultlife sanctuary.  But she had Stepford-Heimst stuffed, because he would’ve wanted it that way. 

I’ve got to admit: I was surprised when Josh walked into the breakroom, and I was surprised that I was surprised. I’ve never been one for trends, not me, but he’d been a peacock for all of the three years I’d known him and I’d been sure that I’d seen every possible permutation and mutation of style and coif that the human mind could inflict adorning his lanky frame.

This was a little different though. 

“Good morning,” I said, not wanting to cave that easily. 

“Hell yes,” said Josh earnestly, demolishing the hell out of his bagel. He never believed in chewing slowly, Josh. “Got a good day coming up.”
“Plans or gut?”
“Gut. Just feeling good, y’know?”
“Right. Right. Right.”
I sat there. He sat there.

I gave up. “Your… teeth look good.”
“Yeah?” he said, grinning happily enough that I had to turn my eyes away from the two extra sabre-like canines that dangled from his upper jaw. “Thanks!”
“Caught me by surprise a bit. What’s going on there?”
“Just trying something new, you know?”

No. “Yeah.”
“Well, gotta run! Have a good day, eh?”

“Sure.”

He left, and I could stop pretending I was still hungry. It was hard to keep your appetite in the face of that much tooth.

***

Next morning was communal oatmeal, a bonding exercise and torture all in one. I’d just finished ladling out my bowl when Josh came down the stairs, whistling something and also something else. 

“What’s that?” I asked. 

“WAP,” he said cheerfully, pouring out twice what I’d taken and scraping the pot clean.
“No, not that.”
“Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”
“No, not that. How are you doing that?”

He frowned, and there was something entirely wrong about the set of his mouth. “Doing what?”
“Both of them at the same time.”
“Oh,” he said, suddenly sunny again, and he smiled properly and his lips peeled back.

“See?” he said brightly.

“Teeth,” I said.

“Right, right. And see behind them?”
Oh.  “… more teeth.”
“Right! Two rows, just like sharks used to make.”
“Why?”
“Just playing around a little, you know?”
I didn’t. “Sure.”
“Well, gotta run! See you later!”
I was still only two spoons into my oatmeal as he scooted out the door. 

***

In retrospect, the Friday morning meeting was when things began to slide out of control.

“…and in conclusion,” said Mr. Matheson, “miserable job by you all, just awful. Terrible, terrible, terrible. Except for Joshua, who has spent less than half the time of any of you on lunch breaks. Now THERE’S a productive man.”
“Gosh, thanks” said Josh happily, as all of us committed double homicide in our minds. “But I can’t take all the credit, sir. It’s my teeth.”

“Your teeth?”
“Yeah, I’ve got three rows of them right now.”
Mr. Matheson nodded in approval. “Great idea. I like it. It’s dynamic, it’s novel, it’s competitive.  I’ve got to try that.”
“Yeah! Yeah.Yeah!”
And by Monday Mr. Matheson had four rows of teeth and Josh had five and two other up-and-comers had three each. 

Lunches WERE faster, on average, but there were a godawful lot of crumbs. And from what I heard around the watercooler the local pharmacies were starting to raise their toothpaste prices. 

***

“Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey.”
“Hello, Josh.” 

“You check out the shareholder’s meeting yet?”
“No, Josh.”
“Check it out, check the video. There’s video.”
“No, Josh.”
“Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease,” he said, and I had to give in because there was something about hearing a whine strained through that much dentition that made me cringe in my soul. 

It looked boring, which was normal. It sounded boring, which was normal. And then the CEO opened his mouth and.

“Is that…?”
“Yeah. Yeah! YEAH!”
“Where’s his TONGUE?”
“It’s there! See? It’s still there! He just, y’know, augmented it.”
“It’s covered in teeth!”
“Yeah! He took my idea!” Josh sounded happier than any plagiarism victim I’d ever seen. “He took my idea and ran with it! God I’m proud. I’m onto something, you know. I’m onto something BIG. Gonna push the envelope. Gonna set the trends. Watch this space, man! Watch it!”
He beamed happily and walked away and it wasn’t until he’d left my office that I realized he’d replaced everything between his chin and his cheekbones with additional molars.

***

Next Friday meeting was surreal. Mr. Matheson’s crinkled watery blue eyes stared at me above a mouth that could’ve come from a sand tiger shark; my coworkers were nests of snaggle-tooth nightmares – clearly they hadn’t gotten the hang of it yet – and Josh… Well.

Well.

Josh was ahead of the curve. 

“And you’ve all done awfully, just awfully, terrible this month. Total wreckage, waste and ruin,” said Mr. Matheson, shaking his head. “But we’re making up the time in lunch breaks which is nice. Very nice. Good job with that. A round of applause for efficient mastication! Oh and Mr. Grellis is on TIME magazine’s cover, so that’s nice. Buy a copy to show him you care.”
I didn’t buy a copy, but I did check the website. Sure enough, there was our CEO, wearing the most expensive and boring suit possible, straightening his tie and looking at the camera and just a pair of serious brown eyes buried in a face that had become nothing more than a field of enamel and dentine. 

THE FACE OF BUSINESS, it proclaimed earnestly.

“Hey!”

I looked up. “Hey, Josh.”
“You see that?”
“Yes, Josh.”
“I’m catching on!”
“Yeah, Josh.”
“I mean, they’re giving all the credit to Mr. Grellis. But as long as I know and you know who’s the cause, that’s enough right? It’s enough, right? Right? Right? Right?”
“Sure, Josh.”
“Well, gotta run! To lunch! And then run back from it! Lunch!”

He ran. To lunch. And I was grateful for it, because it’s hard to make eye contact with someone when they’ve swapped their entire skull and all its contents with teeth. 

***

By the end of the month it was on the streets. By the end of the year it was everywhere. By the end of the holidays it was step six on the VORACIOUS guidance plan to corporate efficiency and we’d just failed our audit for it. 

That Friday meeting was the worst yet. 

“Oh it’s all garbage, total ruination and disaster, nothing but awful, awful, awful,” said Mr. Matheson, shuffling some papers between his hands and masticating them into pieces. “Except for lunch breaks, where we are still absolutely killing it, just cleaning house. Except for you,” he added, pointing at me. “You’re holding us back, just strangling us. Shape up or ship out.”
“I’m shipping out,” I said. 
“Wonderful, just amazing, astounding, great,” he said wetly, saliva glistening from the serrated edges of his forehead down to the grinding surface of his chest. “You won’t be missed. Okay!  Good meeting everyone. See you after the weekend.”

“Gosh I’m sorry,” said Josh, as I cleared my desk.

“You’ve said that eleven times, Josh,” I said, pocketing my mouse. 

“Yeah but I meant it every time. It was never my intention, you know that, right?”
“Yep.”
He seemed the closest I’d ever seen him to anxious, although it was a little hard to tell since his entire body was now grinding cutting or piercing surfaces. The posture seemed right, though.  “Gosh I’m sorry.” 
“Twelve times, Josh.”
“Really? Gosh I’m sorry.”
I waited, fistful of expensive pens in hand. 

“Gosh I’m sorry. Gosh I’m sorry. Gosh I’m gosh I gosh gosh gosgogogogogggg-”

I slapped Josh on the back, carefully. Most of it was now cutting surfaces. 

“Hurk! Thanks, buddy.”
“No problem at all, Josh.”
“I don’t know what this place’ll do without you.”
“Have faster lunches, apparently.”
“True, true. The world runs on its stomach, hahahaha.”
“Ha ha.”
“Where’re you going?” he asked as I walked down the hall, box in hands. “What’re you going to do?”
“Oh, I’ve got some ideas,” I said.
“Really?”
“Really. See you.”
“What ki-”

“See you,” I said, and I closed the elevator doors on his tie.

***

If the truth be told, I was applying to dental school. I’ve never been one for following trends, not me, but I recognize opportunity when I see it.