“Hey Dave,” said my coworker, Mike. In all of my years of working at that office, I think that was the first time he referred to me by name.
I looked up from my various graphs and stared at him, waiting for him to say what was on his mind. He never uttered a word, Mike just stared at me with a big, toothy grin. I managed to blurt out a “hmm?” which must’ve given him the the go-ahead to start spouting jargon at me.
“Listen pal, the bossman upstairs wants you to write up a presentation for all of the folks that own ninety percent of the company’s shares. You better find some juicy things about all the return money we’ve given them otherwise he’ll have some very strongly worded opinions about your work ethic… I think. I don’t know, that’s what he probably told me. Anything to keep us working, am I right?”
I nodded in response and watched as he walked off with a cheery stroll. Presentation for the higher ups? I thought to myself, how am I gonna make up something like that within the next month?
I kept working at my desk for the next several hours, the thoughts in my head went completely rabid. It was eating away at me like mold. What if I died tomorrow and the investors go after my boss? What if I said a swear and they got mad? What if I don’t do it? What if a meteor crashes into the building the day of the presentation? What if I’m in the building when it happens? These questions kept popping into my head until 5pm when, as if by the grace of someone’s god, my shift ended.
Every day starting at 9 p.m., I’d take walks around my neighborhood. I don’t know why or when I started doing it, maybe I was looking for something different with my life, living had gotten dull, I think. I’d wake up, go to work, go home, watch television, play drums, sleep, repeat. I figured that if I was going to keep on with this routine, I’d better switch it up before I die of boredom.
There was this big wooded area that I would sometimes go through whenever walking parallel to the highway became too much for my ears and I wanted to focus on whatever I was listening to.
I stopped at this open part of the trail. It was a circle measuring a mile in diameter with a red gravel path cutting right through the middle of it. All that lay alongside that path besides the tall grass was a bench on top of a rectangular concrete platform. Everything seemed perfectly normal, the trees were still, a few crickets were chirping their sweet song, it was quite warm too so there were cicadas playing a drone on top of the chirps. Heaven to the simple folk like me.
I walked over to the bench that sat on top of the concrete and placed my rear onto its wood veneer. The bench was smooth but not too smooth, it was just smooth enough to where I could run my finger through it and it wouldn’t scratch my fingertips but allowing to feel every small crevice within its design.
The woods that surrounded the area were…weird. Trees formed an impenetrable wall around itself, hiding all of the nefarious beasts that lurked within the shadows. The mere idea of something living within that area outside of air conditioning and electric lights confounded me to a certain extent. It might’ve been alluring to an aspiring bohemian, making s’mores or cooked sausages underneath the light of the moon. It might’ve just been my modern sensibilities talking, but I could never give up running water to live like an animal, that’s gross.
The moon sat above the forest like a spotlight on a movie set. Its distinct grayish glow reflected just enough sunlight so that I could see where I was going in the shadows. It’s teeth were… teeth?
I took a double take at the moon with widened eyes. The moon had a mouth, and it was bearing a large, wet, toothy grin down at me. Its mouth was painted in shades of gray, the tongue’s glow reflected off of the roof of its mouth. Its teeth were bright yet a little dirty, like it ate something, what the hell could it eat? There was something stuck in the teeth, I couldn’t tell if it was a meteor, a clump of dust mixed with its saliva, or meat. It looked like beef but I was trying to not think about that sort of thing.
The moon has a mouth!
I looked away from the moon in terror. I thought that if I averted my eyes to its presence, it would vanish from the sky and my conscience, leaving me with the experience of a hallucination. I must’ve been staring at the ground for what felt like ages, long enough for the textures on the gravel to begin to morph in my vision.
I turned my head back to the moon and, to my dismay, it was still there, smiling. I sighed heavily before I turned toward the concrete oasis that was the apartment complex that I lived in, figuring that it would go away in the morning. Knowing the day and night cycles, this was sure to work.
As I walked past the trees, I could feel a hot, steamy breath on the back of my neck. Its heat crept and l couldn’t turn around, frankly I didn’t want to turn around, I feared that it ate nervous, overworked wrecks like myself. As I reached the edge of the forest that led directly into the back door of the apartments, I felt something wet crawl up my jacket and touch my neck. I spun around, but there was nothing there, the moon was still in the night sky, still smiling.
What it wanted, I had no idea. All I knew was that it wasn’t right. Chills went down my spine and I didn’t want to look at it anymore. I kept moving at an extremely fast pace. My walk had turned into a run as I sped towards the apartments, through their front entrance, up the stairwell, and into my living space on the third floor.
I slammed the door behind me with the force of a battering ram, my hands felt clammy as I struggled to put my housekey into its lock. The weight of what I saw outside was finally crumbling down on top of me like an endgame Jenga tower. Neither God nor science could even begin to piece together what I saw out there.
My gait was calculated but slow as I closed in on my bedroom. The large thud its door made after I made it hit the wall startled me but I… I had bigger things to worry about. I lunged for the mattress but I missed, falling two feet away from it. I groaned heavily as I fumbled back underneath my blankets, completely smothering myself in its woven textures before passing out from the adrenaline causing my brain to completely shut down.
I came to several hours later- in the office, at my desk. The few things that came to my head prior, although hazy, was my alarm clock ringing, my dirty bedsheets, and me running to my car, all drenched in a wave of sweat. My face, previously numb, was beginning to pulse from the blood rushing back in. My coworker Mike stood over me with two people that strangely looked like him, holding coffee mugs near their sternums with their gaudy designs.
“Had a rough night there pal?” Mike asked, his smile melting into my eyes like a picture burning into a television screen.
“Yeah,” I said as I rubbed my eyes, “I got mugged but I managed to outrun him. I really, really don’t wanna talk about it.”
“Well that’s a damn shame pal,” the left guy muttered, “we really wanted to know why you’ve been sitting here for hours staring at your cubical wall.”
I raised an eyebrow, “what the hell are you talking about?”
The right guy turned and pointed in the direction of the third floor’s entrance, “y’came in here mumbling about nonsense before you sat in your chair and spaced out. We left you alone for a couple hours but we wanted to snap ya out of it before we left. Thank us later pal.”
The three rested their mugs on the wall of my cubicle before walking off in a straight file line all the way to the front entrance. I watched as they left, they each paced down the office’s dry and gray carpet with the exact same walk. They all wore goofy, bright smiles on their faces as they kept their eyes forward and fists joyfully balled up.
I stood up from my chair and for some reason I looked into their cups. They were all empty. Why they were holding empty coffee mugs while staring over my cubicle, I had no idea. Frankly, I hadn’t even seen them together. Maybe they were new hires suggested by Mike to the boss. Triplets bred for one of capitalism’s favorite pastimes, nepotism.
The day passed, then weeks. Sure, I kept hacking away at the presentation with the looming threat of possible termination over my head. And sure I went on my nightly walks, but I couldn’t shake the uneasiness in my mind. The night before the presentation made me feel my worst. My headphones were strapped onto my head, blaring Thee Oh Sees, drowning out the outside world. But I knew that on the back of my head, the moon stared. I could hear it licking its teeth in anticipation.
Eventually, the sound of breathing began to re-enter my ears as Floating Coffin reached its final song and I reached the final bend in the pass that led back to my apartment. A lesser man would’ve assumed that the breathing was part of the album, but I had listened to the group long enough to know that its realism had too much auditory clarity that collided with their fuzzed-out aesthetic.
I turned around to face the moon and it was as big as the night sky. My mouth fell open as it began to laugh maniacally. It’s giddiness rattled my core and I began to feel my knees go weak. The last thing I remember seeing before my vision faded was its cackling face echoing in my mind.
The crack of dawn spilled over the trees like a golden waterfall directly into my retinas as I opened my eyes seeing not concrete but trees. I looked down at my hands, mud had crusted my fingers and palms. My neck felt cold under my dirty appendages. I didn’t know what else to do, so I got up and went home.
The door swung open slowly yet with a mean, squeaky hiss. My apartment laid completely still like a museum exhibit. I sighed heavily before walking inside and shutting the door behind me, the way it closed nearly made me jump out of my skin. I figured I’d shower to get the mud off of me, didn’t want to come in looking like a reanimated corpse.
The warmth of the shower felt rejuvenating upon my frigid skin. The thin water went into my skin like a virus and exited through my fingertips as if my hands were a water spout. I couldn’t explain it, but I think this was the most calm I had ever felt leading up to…
Oh no, the presentation!
I quickly turned off the shower and sped into the bedroom. My alarm clock told me I had an hour to get to my job but by the time I had managed to get my suit and shoes on, it was forty-five minutes before my time card needed to be punched in.
I stood outside the conference room in my job’s fifth floor, the highest floor in the office I worked at. Next to me stood Mike, who had his hand on my shoulder, gripping it with enough force to make me uncomfortable. I clutched my work laptop close to my chest with enough force to give me white knuckles.
“Well pal, today’s the big day,” said Mike before he loosened his grip on my shoulder, “you ready for this?”
I gulped and only managed to blurt out an “I was born ready” before he patted my back and opened the door to the conference room. I walked in and was immediately greeted with eleven faces, ten from the board that owned ninety percent of the company’s shares, and the big bossman at the very end of the long table that seemed to keep stretching the longer I stared.
The bossman’s name was Arthur. He founded the company a lifetime ago, and it was obvious that fifty-odd years of constant action in the corporate world was aging him quicker than he wanted. Even then, he still had the best smile in the city. Perfectly white, something I’ve probably seen before.
“Welcome in, Mr. Philips,” said Arthur with his cheery alto voice. Despite his age, he sounded as young as ever.
“H-hi,” I managed to stammer out before I plugged my laptop into the projector on the table.
The machine whirred and buzzed as it displayed the title slide of the presentation. It merely stated “placeholder” due to the fact that I couldn’t think of a title before now. I could see two of the boardmen grin as everyone else grimaced and Arthur held his head in his hand, disappointed.
I cleared my throat and continued with my presentation. Every graph that showed the success of the company caused the shareholders to grin wider and wider. It was the weirdest thing, it was like a Pavlovian response, every success another smile. You’d think they would’ve gotten sick of the constant positive feedback of their successes but no, it was smiles all around, like children receiving candy.
The worst part of the whole presentation for me was Arthur’s reaction at the final slide. There was this large graph with a green line that was almost completely vertical and Arthur bore this smile, this fucking smile. It was the exact same grin I had seen on that fucking moon. My heart dropped and I think I must’ve blacked out because when I came back to my senses two minutes later, my laptop was broken in two, all of the shareholders had shaken looks on their faces, and Mike had come back. His cold hands rested on my shoulders trying to calm me down.
“Get your filthy hands off of me, you fuckin’ freeloader!” I shouted at Mike, who took his hands off of me, before I redirected my attention to Arthur. “As for you… I quit!”
I pushed past Mike and stormed out of the conference room into the elevator that took me to the lobby. The weight on my shoulders was pulled off of me by some unseen force as another one punched me in the gut. My brain felt dizzy as my stomach gave me a nauseous feeling. And yet I couldn’t help but feel invigorated by my newfound freedoms brought upon me at this moment. I think I might take up the drums full time, that’s probably a better stress reliever than walking anyway.
Velocity 
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