THE COOKIEDUSTER CASE, ENTRY 1
My kingdom, were I to be in possession of one, would have been given freely and with sound mind for five or six hours of restorative sleep. As it stood, I had been continually awake for the previous three months, give or take, and as I stood, over the coffee-maker and its feigned nonchalance, bleeping out cryptic codes of malusage and, frankly, too much sass for so diminutive a device, I attempted to clear my mind of all fatigue-induced encumbrances, but was instead beset by all manner of reasons to remain awake.
The frogs in the overhead lights, for example, feeding off my anxiety like chernobyl bugs off radiation, clustering in little lime-green protuberances of protection from all the nightmares working their way into the building, an etheric sickness built upon our collective miasma of thought, descending like a heavy, odourless gas to infect and bespoil those fragile minds unfortunate enough to be lacking the requisite anxiety necessary to summon buffer frogs, for amphibians don’t dream, and I do nothing but, leaving me highly susceptible to ruinous ideas and aggressive incivility. Were I to sleep away my anxiousness, the frogs would be left with no choice but to venture out in search of sustenance, leaving me vulnerable to any and all of humanity’s dreamt inhumanity that was loose in the atmosphere.
Then there was the matter of the lever, which had to be pulled every one hour, six minutes, and thirty-six seconds to prevent us from descending further into hell, a contraption I had installed when the smell of brimstone became an everyday assault rather than an intermittent occurrence, and though the mechanisms involved in such a device eluded me, the inch-by-inch sinking of the building had been stayed by the precise implementation of the lever at the aforementioned intervals, leaving me little option but to remain vigilant until I found a pair of lever-pulling hands I could trust with my immortal soul.
As such, I had been keenly vetting applicants responding to my ad in the local newspaper, which read thusly:
HELP WANTED: Assistant needed, FT, no exp. req. $25/hr, fast-paced environment with sojourns into sideways thinking and moral ambiguity DUTIES: Typing, making and receiving phone calls, light bodyguard work, scheduling, spatial awareness, fiscal efficiency, pref. in possession of hands capable of both pulling a lever with the savagery of a thousand demons and carefully tearing dot-matrix printer paper along its perforated edges, exp. with note-taking, coffee-making, and adventures seen through to the bitter end welcome
Though qualified candidates were few and far between, I knew it was only a matter of time before I was able to replace the cantankerous beast that had walked in off the street and started making coffee and pulling levers like she owned the place, all black-painted nails and presumption, talking out of the side of her mouth as though our conversations were to be kept from the ceiling frogs—to whom I owed my sanity, mind—and pulling up shades to let natural sunlight into the office, using words like grim and sickly to describe my pallor while simultaneously rewriting her name on the fleshy part of my hand like it wasn’t still visible from the day before, and as much as I objected in spirit, my body forced me asleep in a betrayal so profound I vowed to not allow the perpetrator a wink of sleep until this treachery had been avenged.
When I lifted my head from my desk some sixteen hours later I realized abruptly that not only had vengeance not been mine, but that I had been sleeping atop a paper that read ‘cookieduster’, a new case slipped surreptitiously under my drooling face as only an assistant with nothing to lose could manage, and I made a note to ask her what other abilities she was bringing to the table with those stealthy hands; after taking the note, she tore it from her notebook, stared at me with eyes that gave away nothing and everything, and said plainly, ‘I made cookies to coincide with the case’.
Coinciding case cookies? It was a new era, after all, and if baked goods were to be a part of the new normal, who was I to decry a literal interpretation?
Someone without fresh-baked cookies, that’s who.
