Office Fantasy - A Short Story

We've all thought about it . . . how fantastic would it be to walk into your boss' office and tell him exactly what you thought of him?

That was the inspiration for this story. The writing prompt for this assignment was to begin a story with the sentence, "Alice tried to remember who had given her the key."

Enjoy!

Office Fantasy
By Kristen Berry

Alice tried to remember who had given her the key. She had taken careful notes in the beginning, but, as always, she had begun to cry before she escorted the first person out of the building. By the time the last key was handed to her, her sob-induced hiccups caused her hand to shake until her notes became illegible.

“Cheer up Alice, your job is safe,” Robert had said bitterly as he left. “If they didn’t have you, who’d be around to show us the door?”

Alice pushed aside her ledger and box of keys just as a new email announced itself on her computer. It was from the partners, declaring the latest batch of layoffs to the staff.

“Take heart,” the email said in closing, “Deveaux Public Relations is as strong as ever!”

The partners always hid in their offices on the days of the firings, sending out trite, insincere emails from their comfortable confines while Alice, the H.R. director, was left to do the dirty work.

“Hey Jackie,” Alice called out of her office, wiping away the last of her tears with the back of her hand. “Do you have plans for lunch?”

Jackie looked pained, as though she suddenly wished she had chosen another route to wherever she was headed.

“Um, sorry Alice,” Jackie said. “I’ve got . . . a lunch meeting. Sorry.”

Alice sighed, thinking of the days before she had become the office pariah. Though everyone knew she had no hand in deciding who stayed and who went, Alice was the harbinger of this news. And precisely because she had no say in the matter, she was a safe scapegoat for their resentment.

But not any more.

Alice gathered her box of keys and ledger and walked down the hall. She marched into the office without knocking. Bill Bishop, senior partner, was leaning over the phone on his desk, two account executives leaning forward from the other side, as a voice droned from the phone’s speaker.

Alice lifted the box and turned it over, spilling the dozens of keys onto Bill’s desk. The two account executives jumped backward. Bill regarded Alice as though she had sprouted horns.

“What . . . hello?” the voice from the speaker squawked.

“There is a way to do things,” Alice said, her voice quavering, “and there is a way not to do things. This is not the way to do things, Bill. Why don’t you consider that maybe, after working for you for however many years they’ve been here, maybe they at least deserve a face-to-face conversation and a handshake from you at the end. Maybe they deserve at least that much.”

Alice opened her ledger and pulled the pages from the spiral spine in fistfuls, shredding them and scattering them over the desk. Bill stared up at Alice, his blue eyes simmering with contempt.

The voice from the speaker continued to chirp.

“Take my advice or not, I don’t care,” Alice said. “But it’s your mess now, not mine.”