By Grant McGee
“Hey.”
The voice came from over my head. I looked up.
There was long hair and a pair of eyes peering over my cubicle wall.
It was Duanita from the next cubicle.
“Hey,” I said back.
Duanita was one of the few people I talked to at work. I think it all started when I started work at
MegaCorp and mispronounced her name. I
pronounced it like “Juanita,” like “dwah-nita.”
I was wrong.
“They named me after my daddy Duane,” she corrected me. “It’s like ‘dwayne-neeta.’”
“Ah,” I said. “America,
what a country.”
Duanita hadn’t worked at MegaCorp much longer than me. She helped me navigate the office political waters. As time went on she became much like a sister
to me.
Duanita was a grandmother.
Her kids were grown and she was on her own. So from time to time she’d tell me about
various adventures with various “gentlemen callers” she’d go out with. She never told me too much, basically that
she was seeing someone, they’d go out a few times and then the steam would run
out of their little engine of love, or whatever you want to call it.
Duanita had a steady beau for a few years but…
There was a time a few months back she was all quiet. This was unusual for Duanita, usually she was
pretty talkative.
I went for coffee and as I was headed back to my desk I
stopped at her cubicle.
“You’re awful quiet,” I said.
“Anson broke up with me…BY TEXT,” she hissed.
“Wow,” I said, “No balls.”
“Eight years,” her eyes started to well up, “Eight
f*&king years. And the f*&ker
sends me a TEXT. ‘I’m just not into you
anymore.’”
“Wow,” I said. I
stood there pondering the gutless Anson.
“Well, you know what The Lady of the House tells her pals when love
crashes and burns…”
“What?”
“The fastest way to get over an old love is to get under
another one.”
The Lady of the House’s wisdom made her smile.
I took my cup of coffee to my cubicle.
Before long Duanita was back in the dating game.
Now here she was peering over the top of my cubicle wall.
“Sup?” I asked, leaning back in my chair.
“I think I’m going to stop seeing the EMT,” she said.
“Was it something he said?
Does he not bathe?”
“No,” her eyes darted from side to side, “I went with him to
his parents house for Sunday dinner.”
“His momma served a tofurkey,” I said. “They’re vegetarians and you’re a
meat-and-potatoes kinda gal.”
“Noooo. There was pot
roast and macaroni and cheese and homemade yeast rolls.”
“Man!” I said, “My kind of people.”
“No they’re not,” she said, raising her head up over the
wall so I could see Duanita’s whole face.
“They’re NUTS. They’re
Survivalists.”
“Really,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “His
dad, his mom, his sister, her boyfriend, sitting around the table and all they
talked about was getting ready for The Apocalypse and the ‘end of days’ and the
president is the anti-Christ and…just…wow.”
“I just sat there,” she continued, “I didn’t know what to
say. They think society is going to
collapse and all these people are going to come wandering across the plains and
him and his dad and the family are going to hole-up on their ranch and kill
these ‘zombies’ coming in from the city.
They actually called them zombies.
“He and his dad were out working near the house,” Duanita
went on. “You know what they were
making? Man-traps. Trenches in the ground with big steel spikes
in the bottom. When The Apocalypse comes
they’re going to cover them and people will fall into them and die on the spikes.
“Wow,” I said. “I’ve
heard of people like this. I’ve read
stuff about people like this but…wow.”
I looked Duanita in the eyes. We locked a gaze for a few moments.
“Do you know there's a whole bunch of them around here? They have monthly meetings. It’s not my thing,” she said. “I’m for peace, love and happiness, you know.”
“Yeah, the whole ‘why can’t we all get along’ thing. Well, you knew SOMETHING had to be weird
about him. How old is he? Forty?
And never been married? That’s a
red flag to some folks.”
“Yeah,” said Duanita.
“And making man-traps?
Wow. I mean, they tack people’s
asses to trees for making bombs…”
“Yeah,” she said. “But
man-traps are different, I suppose. It’s
their property and all that.”
“Seems like an awful waste of life-force, building such a
negative thing for a thing that’s probably not coming,” I said. “People have been waiting for The Apocalypse
for hundreds of years. Back in the 1400’s
they thought it was coming because someone invented the long bow, the most
powerful weapon of its day.”
Duanita looked at me and said nothing.
“Well,” I said as I leaned back toward my desk, “You know
what The Lady of the House says about losing a lover.”
Duanita laughed and disappeared back into her cubicle.
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