2011 - Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science

ing towards the ceiling. His face was the color of a
bruised tomato; a thick, purple vein was swelling
under his hairline. His eyes were glazed but wide.
He stood there for a moment. Then his face faded to
pink and his arm drooped by his side. Dale looked
at our faces before climbing down from the chair
and sinking into it. He stared down at his lap with
a sheepish look and began picking at the flakes of
skin around his nails.
Our lunch break is from noon
to one. We sit at the conference
room table and chat about our
PTA meetings, how our children
are doing off of training wheels,
and the latest office romances.
As the weeks passed, Dale spent
less and less time eating in the
conference room and more time
working an extra hour in his
cubicle. On breaks when Dale was in his cubicle,
Sandra joined the gossip. Sandra was our secretary.
She had a perfectly brushed, bleached blonde bob
and a different pair of earrings every day. Her voice
was soothing and smooth and could calm down an
angry customer in less than a minute. Maybe it was
her voice that drew Dale in. Whatever it was it kept
Dale suctioned to the water cooler by Sandra’s desk.
He stuttered when he said “G-g-g-ood mor-nuh-nuhning,
Sssandra” every day on his way into work.
Between bites of corned beef sandwiches, Sandra
told us about how Dale called her from his desk.
“It’s every week, poor thing!” she said, waving
her hands in exaggerated gestures. “Sometimes he
doesn’t say a thing! Just kinda listens to me. But just
yesterday he asked me to dinner! I tried telling him,
‘Dale,’ I said, ‘I have a boyfriend you know. You
can’t be calling me like this.’ But he’ll just hang up
and call again the next day! That poor man needs to
see someone!”
One day Dale joined our lunch group. He sat
next to me and talked about how important it is
to wash your fruit before you eat it as he crunched
into his apple. I left to get a soda from the vending
machine; when I came back, Dale’s face was
bloodless and blank. The knuckles of his fists were
[ ]
…the wind was
speckled with
showers of embers,
like hot, red
snowflakes.
white. He jumped up, grabbed his lunch box from
the table, and hurled it out of the open, third story
window. There was a chilled silence as everyone
stopped chewing. Dale faced the window frame. His
shoulders began to sag and blood rushed back to his
fingers as he loosened his fists. Without a word, he
turned and walked out the door, leaving nothing but
an apple core lying on the table.
The next day I followed fire trucks to work.
There were four of them, all with
hoses and ladders, shooting water
at the office windows. The entire
building was burning. Black
smoke swelled from the roof.
The shingles had large, burnt
holes that looked like a giant had
snuffed out his cigarettes. The
fire crawled out of the windows
and cooked the air dry; the wind
was speckled with showers of embers, like hot, red
snowflakes. A police officer with a notepad was
talking to Keith, and Sandra was by her car on the
phone. No one could find Dale.
That evening, I drove up to the office. I killed
my lights before pulling up to the parking lot. I
pulled my scarf up over my nose to shield it from
the stinging wind and walked up to the ashtray
that was once my building. Wooden support beams
jutted from the roof; the brick walls and ground
were stained and speckled with black soot. The
charred double doors, scarred with cracks, were
propped against the front steps. All of the blackened
windows wheezed ashes when the wind blew. Their
particles flew into the outside air, escaping and
dancing like wild things. Shadows slept behind the
building’s remaining walls and obscured the view
inside.
My feet crunched over safety glass as I stepped
closer to the rubble. At the edge of the ashes, I saw
a square of paper. I bent down and dusted it from
the dirt. It was the picture of a woman; the edges
were browned and curling up, but I could still see
the white of her practiced smile. Barely visible from
the burns, I made out the numbers “3 x 5” printed
across the bottom of her shirt. n
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