Expiration Date
by Michael Grant Smith
This year is parsnip-shaped Terrence’s thirtieth as a marketing associate. At our workplace he promotes his charity scheme “Dining for a Cure,” the proceeds of which he claims, falsely, to donate in support of cancer research. Everyone participates. Each Wednesday in the office breakroom, Terrence caters lunch and sells it alongside an unvarying dessert choice: a petrified chocolate-chip cookie whose cocoa atoms have dispersed absolutely.
Last week’s entrée was Gourmet Chili-Mac and this week’s is Gourmet Chicken à la King. The queue ends in front of the vending machines Terrence blocks with his tall, vegetable-lumpy body. Towers of takeout-style clamshell containers teeter on the long table in front of him.
“Terrence hijacks the food from an organization that delivers free meals to the elderly,” whispers Ian the accountant.
Naomi the media coordinator nods, her face rigid with affected good cheer.
“He sells it to us but keeps all the money for himself,” she murmurs in reply but keeps shuffling along the line.
Terrence doesn’t cook anything per se, which is fine with us because he’s very unclean. He pops open the clamshells, slides glops of stuff onto paper plates, and adds a garnish of what might or might not be a parsley sprig. His smirk-hole twitches as he wedges an ossified cookie into each casserole’s center.
“Thank you, Terrence,” gasps Ian.
For each serving of semi-spoiled low-sodium pilfered food, we pay twenty-five bucks. Stupid, yes, but worth the money in order to avoid an uncomfortable situation.
We never share jokes with Terrence; his smile could render women infertile and men impotent. If ever he laughs -- infrequent, but likely to be at someone else’s expense -- his nutcracker jaw waggles and newly-implanted hair sways in the gale of his mirth. The gleam in his eyes is prison searchlights reflected on a cesspool. No new office intern has managed to last two weeks.
Following today’s charity lunch, Terrence claps three times for our attention.
“Good news, my friends,” he says. “Today I launch a new philanthropic campaign! I am raffling premium parking spaces. The ones located closest to the building. Tickets are ten dollars each or six chances for fifty.”
Terrence glares at his audience. His cement-block head swivels back and forth. He sniffs, but not a runny-nose-sniff -- he samples the room’s emotions, or perhaps tallies an inventory of souls.
“Winning will secure your prime space for one month,” Terrence says, with a grin stolen from Dickensian nightmares. We stare at our plates. “Why not feel like a VIP? A bigshot? All proceeds are to benefit a charitable cause. Relief from glaucoma or psoriasis or something.”
The few employees who refuse to take part in Terrence’s raffle find their tires slashed within the hour. These holdouts buy tickets before the end of the business day…even the sales manager Simone, even our grizzled custodian Earl who commutes on a bicycle and leaves it in the bushes.
The same Terrence runs a crooked sports-betting pool. People here will wager on anything, up to and including the number of days until the next personal injury incident in the warehouse. Our forklift operators, with oodles of swagger and a nonstop swashbuckling attitude, are masters of their trade. How Paul was strangled to death by his own safety harness remains a mystery.
We clock out late today and slouch into the twilight toward our vehicles, but the trumpet tones of nearby geese round us into a suddenly sweaty cluster. The waterfowl snake their necks and fuss with something at the shallow end of the reflecting pool. Ruth, the only employee who knows how to replace printer toner cartridges, grasps a long stick and pokes it into the foliage.
“Shut up,” she says. “Hold my belt, don’t let me fall in.”
Ruth leans outward at a forty-five degree angle and parts the cattails. With a spasm, she drops the stick as if it’s electrified.
Terrence drifts face down in the goose-poopy water; hands bound behind his back; rose-colored shirt pond-darkened to blood’s crimson; artificially tethered locks of floating silvery hair. A somber moment. Who will we pay tomorrow and how much more it will cost?
BIO: Michael Grant Smith wears sleeveless T-shirts, weather permitting. His writing appears in elimae, The Airgonaut, Ellipsis Zine, Spelk, Bending Genres, MoonPark Review, Okay Donkey, trampset, New World Writing, Tiny Molecules, and elsewhere. Michael resides in Ohio. He has traveled to Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Cincinnati. For more Michael, please visit http://www.michaelgrantsmith.com and @MGSatMGScom