Hinnom Magazine Issue 003 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Gehenna & Hinnom
Published: 2017-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

Tuesday

In the dream I am in a maze of cubicles that stretch out forever. Strip lights flutter overhead. Monitors flicker an uneasy green glow but they cannot penetrate the darkness here that seems thick and heavy. I can barely see in front of my face.

This is our office but it is also somewhere else at the same time, somewhere oddly familiar, and the fact I seem to have been here before terrifies me in a way I can’t explain.

Then I hear it calling to me from across the room, somewhere buried in the bullpens and workspaces. I try to run towards its cry, but the ground is sludge beneath my feet and my muscles feel like rotting candy-floss. I look up and realize I was never in the office after all. I am standing on a shore. Dark water laps at my feet. I get the sense that I have been standing here for a long time. Maybe forever.

The tide is coming in and out so quickly, so violently, that it leaves a gulf behind it, a muddy seabed where scores of silver fish gasp and thrash, before the water crashes back in, sweeping them up. Over and over again. In the distant surf giant black shapes rise and fall beneath the sea. The sky is alight with stars.

It is still calling me, but now it is joined by other voices, first one, then many, a cacophony howling in some language I don’t understand. Louder and louder as those black shapes burst through the water, towering overhead, and just as they fall upon me I, of course, wake up.

I lie in the half-light, listening to early morning traffic outside. I try not to imagine where Tony is now. What he is doing. Who he is with. I’m forty-five years old. It’s too late to start over. I can feel all that time trailing behind me, out of reach, gone forever. A quiet panic starts to build and threatens to overwhelm me and I sit up in bed, unable to catch my breath for a moment, shaken. I consider calling in sick, but then I remember Friday’s deadline and as bad as things might feel right now, they could become a lot worse.

I am running late and by the time I reach the office there is already a crowd around Jennifer’s cubicle. Even though my view is obscured I know instantly that she has brought it into work again. I can feel its presence in the room, a shift in the atmosphere, in the humidity.

The manager intercepts me before I can join them. He lightly takes my arm, guiding me towards his office. I shake my head, trying to keep moving towards Jennifer’s bullpen.

“It’ll just be a minute,” he says. “Please.”

He closes the door behind him as we enter his office. He offers me a seat but I don’t respond so he awkwardly perches at the end of his desk instead as some sort of compromise. He smiles at me, like

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