5:00 Breakout

By Agatha Ball

A short story about escaping work.

Susan and Todd have worked at the same job for years, surviving layoffs, mergers, and terrible bosses. But sometimes the last 15 minutes of the day are 15 minutes too many...  sometimes you just have to break out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Katherine Danley
• Release date: Mar 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781497733626

Book preview

DEDICATION

To The Hair of the Mangy Dog Crew

5:00 Breakout 

The clock kept ticking .

Tick tick ticking as the hands never turned.

Fifteen minutes.  I only had fifteen minutes left until the end of the day.

I sipped the last of my coffee as I stared at that clock.

The day.  The grind.  The stale sludge in the bottom of my mug.  It had left rings along the inside of my cup like a geological record of forgotten sips and interruptions.  Dark rings like the shadows beneath the eyes of my coworkers, their pale faces washed in the blue glow of their computer monitors, faces that had bathed too long in florescent and had gone too long without Vitamin D.

Tick tick tick.

Barry merrily typed away in the cube opposite me, his fingers flying like musical notes on a Steinway.  If he had trained his hands to the piano instead of the QWERTY, he could have played Carnegie Hall.

But he didn’t.  He had chosen, instead, to go into remittance and become the balding, pudgy, pasty-faced Mozart of data entry.

Tippity tap, tippity tap.

His fingers didn’t synchronize with the tick tick ticking of the clock.

What a great day! he said, not even pausing as he spoke.  I have gotten so much done!  The office was so QUIET.  I LOVE days like this!

I imagined pulling the letter opener out of my drawer and stabbing it into his jugular, his blood spurting onto his perfectly formatted 12pt Times New Roman labels.  I imagined slamming his head into the file drawer, filing him under I for I Hate You.   I imaged burying him in the recycling, bound hand and foot and forcing him to chew his way out of his white paper prison.

Instead, I just sipped my cup and watched the clock.