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Hostile Work Environment

Jake

I’ve been at Spencer & Sterns for one month. I could be yanked suddenly by my temp agency and placed somewhere new, but for the time being I’m here with Dolores in our little annex, our little cell, our little funny farm.

It’s November now, and we are clenched in the white-knuckled death grip of Christmas season hysteria. Holiday music wafts like a bad smell over the elevator sound system, and twining vines of green and silver tinsel metastasize around railings and doorways. Not in our private sanctuary, though. An hour after the decorations go up, Dolores emerges from her office and Grinches the annex from the freckled ceiling tiles down to the shit brindle brown carpet, shoving everything into a big black garbage bag.

“Where’s your Christmas spirit?” I ask her, and she ignores me. She’s been ignoring me all week, ever since my comment about going to HR, and I miss her little acts of guerrilla terrorism. She returns to her office and flicks on a podcast, and the now familiar tinkle of a jingle starts. A jaunty waltz across the minor keys of a xylophone, and—

“Hellooooo, Killjoys and Murderheads! That’s Bex—”

“And that’s Aya—”

“And this—

“—is Murderers at Work !”

“Where we pretend to find lessons about society in grisly true crime stories!”

“Um, where we pretend to be appalled and not morbidly fascinated—”

“How’s this: Murderers at Work , the barometer of an indifferent society’s decay.”

“Can I get that on a mug?”

“Maybe on a Christmas mug with little snowmen and shit, because this episode of Murderers is guaranteed to put the festive spirit in the cold, empty void where your heart used to be. But first…Bex?”

“Tickets to our live event in Las Vegas are selling out! So get your shit together and buy some!”

“Do it! It’s Las Vegas, guys!”

“Aaaaand on with the show. Today we’re going to talk about…”

“Arguably my favorite serial killer—”

“…SECRET SANTA! If you’ve been with us for any amount of time, you know that approximately fifty percent of our inside jokes revolve around killer mall Santas. Today we discuss the original killer mall Santa—”

“The original one, guys—not the copycat acts from the nineties—”

“Ugh, no. The nineties were not good for killer mall Santas—”

“The one who would hack up his victims and wrap them in Christmas paper, then leave the packages around town. And that’s totally not a spoiler. The story gets so much better.”

“I told you before we started recording, but I’m going to repeat it now—”

“Absolutely. Do it.”

“I looked up the photos in evidence—”

“You always do this—”

“And the wrapping paper this guy used for his victims…is the SAME green wrapping paper my grandma used for, like, three Christmases in a row!”

I sit with my chin in my hand as I run my script, once again completing this week’s work in a matter of minutes, and I watch Dolores through her window, wondering who she spends Christmas with, who she buys presents for, who will buy her a present.

That evening after work, I don’t board the SkyTrain. I wander the bustling downtown sidewalks, peering in shop windows, not sure where to find what I’m looking for. Clothing stores. Shoe stores. Stores that identify as “lifestyle stores.” I’m swept into a downtown mall on a current of shoppers, and there —

I walk into the toy store. I’m used to feeling out of place, but now I feel more out of place than I’ve ever felt in my entire life. The proprietor smiles at me, and I grimace back, and in the back, on a shelf laden with pink Mattel boxes, I find Dolores’s gift.

—

I watch her out of the corner of my eye when she walks in the next morning. She deposits her purse, hangs her coat, swivels to face her desk, and it’s not until she reaches to tap her keyboard that she notices it: my gift.

It’s a small package, about the length of her pinkie, wrapped up in shiny green wrapping paper with a tiny filament of gold ribbon. It was too small to tie into a bow, so I dragged the blade of a sharp knife across the ends to make them curl.

She would never lower herself by raising her head to look at me right now. I sit there, watching her out of the corner of my eye, and I know she watches me out of the corner of her eye, too. Two mirrors reflecting each other into infinity.

She slides the loop of ribbon off the package, plucks carefully at the tape, then parts the freed edges of the paper to reveal the thing lying in her palm: a smooth, beige plastic leg, severed neatly at the knee. She touches the toes with one finger and rotates it in her palm.

She’s silent and still for a long moment, but then she raises her head and looks right at me—and she doesn’t smile, but I know from her face that this is the best Christmas gift she’s ever been given. A doll for Dolly. And an invitation to play.

—

I stage the twelve days of Christmas for her in November. Every day, a new gift awaits in a new spot: A severed hand in her coffee mug. A dismembered foot in her paper clip tray. An upper and lower torso, sawed neatly in half, in the print tray and the filing cabinet, respectively. All with the same shiny green paper and gold ribbon.

All except the head. The original killer mall Santa did something fun with the head.