Smile

2:13 a.m.

The gridlines on the spreadsheet have blurred into dancing lines of the white powder your boss snorts to ensure that his spreadsheet’s gridlines don’t start dancing but stay stiff no matter the hour.

Click click pow. Shift+F9. CTRL+ALT+whatever-the-fuck, the keys still punching. Season 5 episode 3 of Veep already? Been up too long. Started the day on season 2 or 3. That’s how you track how long you’ve been working — how many episodes pass, providing the sounds that interrupt the longer sounds that send your heart beating during the twenty-hour working days. Usually, you time it by the amount of times the twenty-four-hour news cycle repeats itself or how many times Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, and Alisyn Camerota flash across the TV screen, but the news is ugly with stories of an orange figure not believing science who convinces millions more to also ignore science. So, then they die and the people they’re around also die because the disease is airborne. Two of your uncles got snuffed out because presumably someone who didn’t believe in science went to their nursing homes and breathed on, in, or near them.

Nah, the news is too personal. Not to mention cops are home-invading while y’all are sleeping in homes, shooting while y’all are jogging, asphyxiating while y’all are shopping even when one of y’all is crying out for mama.

Nah, you have to keep your bedroom’s sounds filled with the comedy of this alternate universe of a female vice-president with a potty mouth and a staff who’s more foul-mouthed yet just as ineffective. If you listen to anything else, you might ask that boss for some of that gridline-stiffening white powder.

This is working from home.

3:18 a.m.

The automated sound of your manager’s Slack message. Answer it. No, don’t answer it. The clear bubble says you’re offline. The manager should know you’re busy — that you’re not available, that you tell yourself,