11:15am | 3/30

Confounded by the slurps and sucks from Jill, as I am daily, I massage my eyes with my fingers. Within my little squared enclosure at the Office, I can hear the muffled practices of my fellows; their typing, their inane conversations, their hushed phone calls to loved ones on company time. None of this has ever served to derail my concentration in the past. Such is my resolve to my task that I am rarely taken far from the course.

Save for one, daily exception.

Jill. Every day – every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday – every day at precisely 11:15am she drinks from her pink water bottle with a sound that can only be attributed to the worst kind of mental knife twisting imaginable. It is no mere nails on a chalkboard, this fantastically awful slurp; it is a sickening uptake of her liquid for a full two minutes and twenty seconds. Every day.

Though she sits across from my enclosure, I keep my back to her. I refuse to record her visage with my eyes and forever cement the sound into an image. I have broken pencils with a fierce grip, left sets of grooves from raked fingers on my desk. I have even cracked a tooth from a particularly clenched jaw one winter morning.

Today will be different. Today is the seven hundredth and ninety-ninth day of my periodic hell and I will not allow there to be an eight-hundredth. No, today I have resolved to take the bottle and smash it outside on the city pavement. Today my agony will be known to Jill, even if she is not aware of it as she is not aware of my name!


Ah, 11:14am! The time is near; I rise from my embattled desk and take a moment to gird myself for the assault. My other neighbors are, of course, clueless to my pain and carry on with their unimportant lives. I turn to face my thirsty foe.

Her back is also to my cubicle, a good thing for she will not be alerted to my advance! I take my three steps to cross the divide with a conviction that was surely felt by the greatest of warriors when they stepped into the fray. I am confidant. My mission will succeed and my days hereafter will be unshackled from the sucks of her sloppy mouth.

Jill was rather ordinary to look at. I assume the front of her would match the tame anterior. I see her pink water bottle in her left hand; she is bringing the lidless container to her face, hidden behind her mundane hair. I shall spin her chair and take the bottle! The surprise of my action will render her defenseless.

I enact my perfect plan, I spin her chair!

She does not shriek. She does not waver. From behind her layers of face swept hair I see her nose, proud like a mountain upon a plain of split ends. From below her simple nose a tube emerges, slick and fleshy. Coiled like a butterfly tongue, it unfurls itself into the pink, lidless bottle and begins its daily routine of slurping and sucking.

My head is draining. The peripherals of my vision narrow to focus solely upon her red and green proboscis.

“You should get back to work,” she says, though her extended organ does not falter from its liquid uptake.