Peninsula Sinking by David Huebert

Author:David Huebert [Huebert, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2017-09-07T19:47:34+00:00

HORSE PEOPLE

FRIDAY

The Manager of Jumping calls and asks me to wiggle his mouse around, which at first I think is sexual. But then he says seriously. There’s an emergency at home and he wants me to go into his office every fifteen-twenty to jiggle the mouse around, maybe tap a few keys. “There are monitors,” he says. “Denise gets alerts. I know this is weird but if you want my recommendation for that position in Dressage.” I’m not sure I want his recommendation but I write down his door code (0000) and computer password (Hor$edude) and walk into the office with the pictures of his hairdresser wife and pageant-prim daughters grinning together, their mouths full of cantaloupe. I sit cruising his mouse around its pad and then I’m logging in. I think about searching the hard drive or the browser history but decide I don’t want to find anything dark and still have to smile as I stare into his Belmont-browned teeth.

I’m drifting the cursor around a pixelated beachscape—a confetti of desktop icons amid tiki huts and plastic cups—when Denise raps on the glass. It is presumably less than ideal to have the CEO knocking on the big open window that looks onto a carpeted hallway, the window with blinds that I did not think to close. It’s not great to have the CEO observe me illegally shifting office habitats to undertake phony computer activity and then Denise walks right in.

“He asked you to come in and move his mouse around?”

I nod into Denise’s tectonic jaw.

“Pinkiedicked shithole.” I must look stunned because she says, “Off the record but true—he’s a scandalous manwhore.” The Manager of Jumping, she explains, has been “liaising” with the breeder from Barbados who was in for a presentation yesterday, the one with the upturned nose. Denise tells me “just between us girls” that the snout-nosed breeder is also a married woman. Then she tells me to get back to my cubicle, pulling out her phone to call the Manager of Jumping. I head to my desk and sit checking horse passports and listening to the squirrel rucking around the ceiling panels.

The Manager of Jumping calls toilet paper “shit tickets.” The Manager of Jumping’s favourite casual Friday T-shirt says “I Support the Performing Arts” next to a swervy cartoon butt in a sequined green G-string. The Manager of Jumping is actually named Chad Tucker but I prefer to think of him as the Manager of Jumping because when I told Pierce his job title there was some confusion and then various running jokes about the Superintendent of Leaping, Le Directeur de Sauté. The Manager of Jumping pronounces minestrone “mine stroan.” The Manager of Jumping uses “gay” as a pejorative. Once Denise asked if he was a homophobe and he went pale before blurting “No I’m not you’re the friggin’ homo.” The Manager of Jumping has almost no lips and one of those beardless male faces with marble-cake swirls of blush, as if he were constantly exercising.

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