Stick A Fork In Me

The microwave beeped once as I opened it to toss my prepackaged roast and potatoes into its waiting maw. It lay haphazardly on the glass turntable, staring at me balefully as I slammed the door in its face and pushed the quick-start button, number one. The front office door opened and I glanced at it just as William walked in. I nodded an absentminded greeting to him before I realized two remarkable things simultaneously.

First of all, William didn’t work here anymore. He had been fired in the big layoff during the pandemic a few years back, and he’d never gotten the call back like most of us did. During the months of lockdown, the company had decided his department wasn’t really necessary after all, and they’d dissolved his position. Even though he had worked with me for over twenty years, I hadn’t seen him in at least three.

Second of all, he was carrying a huge box of donuts. For most people, that might not mean much, but William had celiac disease, and donuts made for a bad day where William was concerned. I had just enough time to take a nervous step back, down the hallway, before he dropped the box and started shooting.

Cynthia went down first, with a bullet to the temple as she’d turned her head to greet him. I heard her hands still clacking on the keyboard at the receptionist desk, but her body was already slumping to the floor when I darted into my office across the hall and threw myself under my desk. It was a tight fit, and my numb mind berated me for having eaten way too many donuts myself over the years. It felt like my gut was tightly pinched between my knees and my eyebrows.

I struggled to form a coherent thought, tried to remember our active shooter policy, but it was all just a little bit too much for me. “Avoid” was one part of it, I recalled, and I had managed that so far, I thought. I heard screams as people began to realize what was going on, and doors slamming. Why hadn’t I screamed? Why hadn’t I tried to warn anyone? I wondered if I should, but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, so I just drew my body in tighter instead. Someone somewhere was whimpering. Maybe it was me.

More shots rang out, and feet beat chaotic rhythms across the tile floor, but I was too afraid to run. William was between me and the front door, and the back door was too far down the exposed hallway, too far away. The microwave still hummed quietly in the background, a constant accompaniment to the sharp staccatos and the wailing chorus line, and the smell of roasted meat began to fill the air. I felt my stomach turn over and this morning’s bacon and eggs erupted down my tightly stretched shirt.

I hadn’t shut the door to the room in my mad dash, so I didn’t hear him enter. I just saw his legs come around the corner, followed by a loud explosion. With my head cocked awkwardly under the desk, I hadn’t even seen the gun, and I wasn’t sure what had happened until I looked down and saw a crimson pool spreading across my shirt, joining the remains of my breakfast. Funny, I didn’t feel a thing. Still, I knew I’d been hit, and I tried to kick out, tried to escape from my self-imposed trap before he had a chance to follow up with a second blast, but I was stuck fast, wedged between last month’s invoices and today’s to-dos. It didn’t matter though; he was already on his way out. He had things to do, people to see, and frankly, in the end, I just wasn’t that important to him.

As my energy left me and my vision faded to oblivion, I could only lie there, half-wedged under the desk as my body convulsed around me, listening to the anthem of despair. When the microwave beeped a second later, my mind seized onto one last, incoherent thought: BEEEEEP! BEEEEEP! Stick a fork in me; I’m done.

Author's Note: I created this short fiction story for a contest, the parameters of which included that the length of the story be between 5oo and 1,000 words and that the story had to occur within one minute, from start to finish. I hope you enjoyed the read. I'd love to hear what you think, so please feel free to leave a comment, click the heart, and subscribe!