============================================================ OUT OF OFFICE Short Story by Julio Lonnie Lopez 2026 ============================================================ The phone buzzed on Tim Maxwell's desk the way it always did when the Boss called. Not a ring so much as a sustained rattle that made the half-eaten granola bar next to his keyboard jump slightly. Tim knew better than to let it go to a second buzz. "Maxwell." The Boss did not say hello. He had explained once, in the early days, that hello was a waste of both their times. "Good morning, Mr. Hornsworth—" "The Delgado order. Where are we?" Tim pulled up the screen he had been looking at for the better part of the morning. "Still waiting on your wet signature, sir. I can bring the purchase order over to—" "I don't have time for you to bring anything anywhere, Maxwell. I have calls. I have people above me who have calls. Do you understand the chain here?" Tim understood the chain. "Get in your car. Get the paper. Get it to me. Delgado closes at four and if we lose this account because you couldn't manage a simple errand I will make sure everyone on this floor knows exactly whose fault that is." The call ended without a goodbye, which was also something the Boss had explained once. Tim looked at the granola bar. He wasn't hungry anymore. He put on his jacket, which was a size smaller than it should have been, and walked the length of the office floor toward the elevator. * * * The walk to the elevator meant passing the full length of cubicles that made up the Smithson Sales and Such floor. Seven desks, seven backs of heads, seven sets of shoulders hunched over seven keyboards. Nobody looked up when Tim passed. They rarely did. His desk sat at the opposite end of the floor, positioned just outside the Boss's dark corner office like a sentry post that had outlived its original purpose. He pressed the elevator button and waited. The drive to the Boss's house took twenty minutes on a good day. Today was a good day, which Tim would later find a grim irony in. The neighborhood was the kind that had once been aspirational and was now just old. Large lots with large houses that required a certain commitment to upkeep that not everyone honored equally. Tim had been here twice before. Both times the Boss had met him at the door before he could knock, as if the inconvenience of Tim's arrival needed to be managed from the threshold. He turned onto Briarwood Court and slowed. The Boss's house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac behind a wrought iron fence that had begun to lose its argument with rust. The hedges along the property line had gone long and shapeless, reaching past their intended boundaries into the sidewalk. The lawn behind them had given up entirely. Two months of mail, maybe more, had accumulated in the box near the gate in a way that suggested the box had stopped being checked rather than emptied. Tim sat in his car for a moment. He told himself it was because he was finding the purchase order in his bag. He knocked at the front door. The sound landed flat and absorbed, the way sound does in empty places. He waited. He knocked again, harder this time, and the door, which had not been fully latched, swung inward on its own with the slow creak of something that had been still too long. Tim stood at the threshold and looked in. "Mr. Hornsworth?" The house answered with its silence. * * * The air inside was the kind of stale that takes weeks to settle. Tim stepped through the doorway, his hand resting briefly on the door's glass panel to steady himself as he leaned in. "Mr. Hornsworth? It's Maxwell. Sir, the door was open." The entryway opened into a living room that looked less lived in than staged. A couch with one flattened cushion. A coffee table with a single remote control and a ring stain from a glass that had long since been moved or finished. The blinds were drawn against the afternoon light, letting in just enough to see by. Tim followed the hallway toward the back of the house the way you follow a smell you can't identify but can't ignore either. The home office was the last door on the right. He found the Boss in his chair. Tim had seen enough to know and looked away quickly, the way you look away from something your brain refuses to fully process on the first pass. He fixed his eyes on the nearest neutral thing, which happened to be the computer monitor still glowing on the desk beside the Boss's outstretched hand. The screen showed a profile page. A dating site, or what had been one. The branding had been partially updated, overlaid with the logo of a social media platform Tim recognized immediately. He had read about the acquisition in a trade magazine two months ago. Then the secondary acquisition, a grief tech startup, swallowed quietly in the same quarter. At the time he had read it the way he read most business news, with mild interest and no further thought. He gave it further thought now. Tim backed out of the room slowly. In the entryway he paused, reached back, and wiped the glass panel of the front door with the sleeve of his size-too-small jacket. Then he pulled the door shut behind him until he heard the latch catch. He walked to his car at the same pace he had walked in. * * * Tim sat in his car for three minutes before starting the engine. He knew it was three minutes because he watched the clock on his dashboard without meaning to. On the drive back he thought about the job market the way a man thinks about the weather when there is nothing he can do about it. He had been at Smithson Sales and Such for six years. His resume, which he had updated twice in the past year out of a quiet desperation he never quite acted on, listed his title as Lead Assistant Sales Associate. He had looked at it once from the perspective of a hiring manager and closed the laptop. Six years. He merged onto the highway and turned the radio off. By the time he reached the Smithson building he had made no decision consciously. But his body had already made it, the way bodies do when the mind is still pretending to deliberate. He badged in at the lobby. He rode the elevator up. He walked the length of the cubicles, past seven backs of seven heads, and sat down at his desk outside the dark corner office. His computer screen woke up when he touched the mouse. The Zoom notification was already blinking. Tim looked at it for a moment. Then he looked at the corner office window, its blinds drawn the same way they had been drawn for a year, the Boss's nameplate still polished on the door. He straightened his jacket. He clicked accept. The Boss filled the screen immediately, impatient in the way he was always impatient, which is to say completely and without apology. "Maxwell. What happened? I've been waiting." Tim folded his hands on the desk. "Traffic, sir. It was bad out there today." The Boss made the sound he made when an answer was acceptable but not satisfying. "And the Delgado order?" "I'll get it sorted, sir." "See that you do. I don't pay you to sort things tomorrow Maxwell. I pay you to sort things today." "Yes sir." The Boss moved on to something else, something about quarterly projections, his voice filling Tim's small corner of the floor the way it always had. Tim nodded at the appropriate moments and typed notes he had typed before. Outside the window the city moved through its afternoon without particular interest in any of this. Tim reached over, broke off a piece of the granola bar, and chewed it slowly. It was going to be another long day. ============================================================ From False Universe https://afalseuniverse.com ============================================================