Business Man: 2

Cathy is scratching her gums with a pen. She is scraping off the plaque. Her coffee is steaming on her desk, and the light of her computer monitor beams off her face. She is holy in the ambient darkness. The main power is out. She doesn’t care, none of them do, it happens all the time. I’m just watching, I can’t help but clench my jaw, which clenches when I haven’t quite figured out the meaning of a present moment. People keep walking by quickly; I can feel the wind of them on my hair every time they pass. Why do they whisper? Listen. It’s the strength of day in us, which we’ve prolonged with electric bulb, which we’ve taken and pushed and packaged into places where it rightly does not belong. The day is our product, the flag-ship commodity that we sell each other, our import and export, the herald of human right, the god of prosperity. We command the day, and we have no respect for it. Now night comes, and the maiden frights. Night comes, and adult mastery fades into the intuition of children: the world is big, and our existence is luxury. Let’s appease it quietly, with whispers, with quick and silent movements, and be holy while we can, for day dawns while we are good. When the power comes back this office will be generous and thankful for twenty-nine minutes. Cathy will go and get everyone doughnuts. Jokes will flutter about, spring-time birds, as smiles settle and melt on us like thawing ice. And then someone will make a mistake. A touch of anger will blossom, whisking in a field of summer, and heat, and mastery, and the long, long day of confident business.