wr_post02:subj_fict

SMALL WORLD, AIN'T IT?

Tony worked in an office processing forms. He picked them up from Jake and then sorted them by urgency, subject matter and product code to be sent on to Mike and Sheila respectively. One day instead of reading the forms and sorting them, he jumped out the window of his 22nd floor office. Later that day, Sheila got word of the note on his desk. Looking back she could see the signs. She didn't know why, but she felt somehow responsible. So she quit, changed her name, got a new job and pretended her old life had never existed. Mike never actually spoke to Tony. He had a germ phobia and would only receive the forms through inter-office mail and only handle them once they'd met his exacting standards for cleanliness. Tony's death had no effect on Mike, who assumed it was all the work of germs. Jake hired a replacement the next week. Her name was Cindy, a young girl out of college who he hired mainly for looks. He began an affair with her and one day during a rendezvous in the conference room he called her "Tony." Things were awkward from that point on and Jake fired Cindy rather than deal with seeing her in the halls. He cut out Tony's position in the office infrastructure and assumed the responsibilities of Sheila, who's replacement had refused to work with Mike on the grounds that he often sent her emails critiquing her hygeine. With less people on the payroll, numbers began to move out of the red. The company was purchased by a conglomerate and the work was outsourced to the Dallas office. Mike moved back in with his mother and took up coin collecting (an odd hobby considering the number of unwashed hands such old coins must have come in contact with). Jake stayed home with the kids and watched his wife's crafts shop blossom into a successful chain. He envied her. When his company had begun to succeed, they gave him the axe. He had thought about killing her. Make it look like suicide and take over the crafts game. The only thing stopping him was a strong distaste for crafts. He began putting out ads for a nanny in the hopes that he'd find a cute little thing to remind him of Cindy. He coached his daughter's softball team and flirted shamelessly with the young mothers. One night he was beaten senseless by a father who happened to be in earshot. His wife divorced him and took the kids. He moved to Illinois and got a job at the Kinko's. His shift manager looked like an old co-worker, but that's too contrived. Sheila was actually in Ohio working as a waitress. Mike tried to keep in touch with people, but he didn't have their new addresses. His life came to a fitting close when he contracted West Nile at the age of 34. His dying words were, "Germs! The only way around them is to nuke the whole damn world!" Jake's wife, Olivia, read about it in the obituaries, but the name had no significance to her. She married a guy named Terry, the regional manager of her Midwest offices. Terry secretly hated kids and tried several times to asphyxiate them in the garage. Sheila, who now went by Trisha, moved in with another waitress and they moved to Toronto to start a bed and breakfast. While making copies one day, Jake met a casting director and landed his first acting part as "Bus Driver #2" in a low-budget porn. Terry took Olivia on a vacation for their one-year anniversary to Trisha's B&B and their first night there, they rented the porn that Jake was in. It was a bit part and Olivia didn't even recognize him, but the sequence of events leading up to that moment was altogether too strange and the world abrubtly ended.