I  can see her stupid pointy gold slipper glittering from here, just the toe. She is at her desk and I am at mine, in the other room. At my back, the low hum of the copy machine. This is a warzone but you can’t tell by looking. She is late for an appointment on the 6th floor but she isn’t concerned: she has bigger fish to fry. This appointment is only with a guy Human Resources, the next one is with the president. Yesterday she reprimanded me for not putting the meeting with the president in her schedule book, even though no one had told me about it. ESP, apparently, is part of my job description.

Now she stands in front of the elevators. Just go up the stairs, I think. It’s only one floor up, and out of 3 elevators, only one goes to the 6th floor–the one on the  far right. But she is standing there not even looking at the elevator on the far right and I see the light go on above it, signaling its arrival. How does she do that? She’s got the powers of a witch.

The man who works in Human Resources
wears shirts buttoned tightly to the neck.

At our administrative meetings he spends twenty minutes reviewing the Dress Code.

He lurks daily outside our office, waiting for the elevator.
HR is on the 6th floor: what’s he doing on ours?

The man from HR has the face of a clean-shaven ferret.

In grade school he was called tattletale.
No one liked him then, either.

In bookstores he fights the urge to read over people’s shoulders.

He spends most nights alone at the kitchen window.
He lives on a quiet street.
His butter knives are lined up neatly in a drawer.
Sometimes he counts them.
There are exactly 24.
There were 25 when he bought them, and he frets about the one
gone missing.