Spencer Oakes is the first runner up of our 2018 Grouse Ground Lit Prize for V. Short Forms! Read his piece, “Melt,” and get it in print in our Dreams issue 57.1!
Melt
I sit at a desk.
Sometimes I sit at a desk and I melt. I sit at a desk for thousands of hours and the hours melt too. The hours melt into the floor and the walls and the plain furniture. The desk is familiar to me and so is the computer on the desk and the keyboard and the mouse and mousepad and the succulent and the phone that never rings. The phone is a relic. Sometimes I feel at home and sometimes I don’t. Her words, not mine. Sometimes I don’t melt but the office does. I can relate to the phone. Other times I try to work and most of the time I don’t know what I’m doing here.
A co-worker is standing by the printer waiting for something. His face is plain. I ask him what he’s waiting for.
“Anything,” he says.
I shake his hand like it’s the right thing to do.
The brain in my head melts a bit and I go back to the search engine on my computer and look her up but I still can’t find her. The white-grey walls of the office melt again, making lines like wood-grain and then a phone rings.
I lose days like I lose hours. This is office melt. The unsystematic slippage of time like what I guess a wormhole would be like. I should quit this job, but I am disappearing anyway. She fell into the earth and maybe I can fall into the earth too.