Ami
Smash Ace
The Job Down Under
Kaden hated his job, and everyone knew it, and that’s what made him so annoying.
“Ahvari, get your feet off the desk!”
It was Cratford, his boss. He was better known as Crapford among the minions.
Today was “dress down” Friday, the only day of the week where Kaden wore a business suit.
Crapford wore a simple white t-shirt that made him look thirty pounds heavier, a pink tie that made people question his heterosexuality (Crapford always insisted that he wear a tie even on “dress down” Fridays; a cry for individuality I’m sure, Kaden always thought) and tight blue jeans that made Kaden cringe.
“Why don’t you just fire me? It’d be a lot easier,” Kaden retorted, shifting into a more comfortable position but not removing his feet.
“You know I can’t fire you,” Crapford said, pointing a chubby finger at his slacker employee. He started to blather on about how his father, the CEO of the paper company, hired Kaden and whatnot.
All Kaden could think at the moment was, Why are annoying bosses always fat?
He glanced at his watch and noticed that Crapford’s usual five minute rant was ending soon. He brushed his fingers through his messy black hair and nodded appropriately to make it look like he was listening.
“And I know you think you can slack off because your father protects you, but that’s not true,” Crapford said. He always ended with that sentence.
The portly man fixed his tie and straightened his back. With a quick intake of breath, he exited Kaden’s office.
Kaden shrugged and swung around in his chair to face the window behind him, letting his feet fall to the floor. His office was on the sixth floor, and overlooked the street of New York in front of the Paper Whiz Company. People in black suits trudged along the dirty streets below, carrying their black leather suitcases protectively. He raised his eyes and saw the Statue of Liberty in the distance, but only the tip of its crown, the rest of the greenish body hidden by the skyscrapers. Kaden looked higher and saw beams of light breaking through the clouds that reminded him of the pictures of Jesus he always saw in churches.
Kaden stretched his arms above his head and rested them behind his head. He remembered he had paperwork to do. He turned his chair a little and grabbed a paper off the highest pile on his desk. He started to read it, but the words never registered in his mind. He yawned and started to fold the paper, and noticed it turned into a paper airplane. He turned to face the door and threw it. It flew a delicate pattern of curves and rises, where it finally hit a coworker that happened to walk past the door.
“Ahvari!” he yelled, crunching the paper in his hand and pushed his glasses higher up on his nose. It was Smiths, the distributor from a couple floors down.
“Hey, your crunching important documents,” Kaden said, trying to sound concerned.
Smiths growled something incoherently under his breath and threw the wrinkled paper into Kaden’s office.
“What’s that? I can’t hear you. Speak a little less nerd and a little more English.”
“Just go to Hell,” he replied and continued to grumble as he walked down the hall.
Gee, everyone’s in such a bad mood today, Kaden reflected as he fetched the paper Smiths had thrown on the carpet. As he picked it up, he noticed a small white business card in the doorway. Smiths must have dropped it or something, he thought to himself. He picked it up and studied the front. In the middle, it simply read, “We Give You Jobs. Jobs Down Under”, and below, there was a long distance phone number. He didn’t recognize the area code.
“Must be the Australian area code,” Kaden wondered. But he never recalled any long distance numbers to be over fifteen digits long.
He flipped the card over, and when he noticed that there wasn’t anything on the other side, he closed the door, and walked back to his desk, his eyes fixated on the slogan on the front. As he slumped down in his chair, he decided to call them up. He was actually kind of interested. Who knows, maybe it could get him out of his current job, and one in Australia – far, far away from here.
Kaden scoured his desk, and shoved a mountain of his “unimportant papers pile”—which consisted of most of the papers on his desk – revealing the black phone underneath. He quickly punched in the long phone number and while he was waiting for the other end to pick up, he took one last look at the card and then slipped it into his breast pocket.
Kaden tapped the desk impatiently. Why isn’t anyone picking up? It’s not like I’m phoning from so far away that it should take this long.
“On the contrary.”
He jumped in his seat; he hadn’t noticed that someone picked up the phone.
“Ah, er, yes. My name’s Kaden Ahvari, and I’m calling about your company. On your card it says you ‘give jobs’.”
“That’s correct. Welcome to the job, Mr. Ahvari. You start now.”
“Huh? Wait, is that all? What job did –”
Kaden felt a sudden pain in his heart, and his first reaction was to grab his chest. He gasped for breath, but his lungs wouldn’t expand to let air in. He felt icy cold, except for a small area where it was searing hot – the place where he had put his business card. As his hand gripped his shirt, he felt that his heart had stopped.
“Oh … crap,” was all Kaden could muster.
Kaden Ahvari, at twenty-two years old, had died.
-+-
Kaden awoke, and saw that he sat in a desk. The telephone receiver was in front of his face.
“Heh, it was all a dream,” he gasped, his face plastered to the desktop. He breathed deeply. “I never thought dying could be so scary.”
He pushed off and sat upright, where he straightened his tie. Kaden glanced around the room. Everything was the same; he must’ve just passed out for a minute or so. He looked down and saw sketches on big sheets of paper.
“This is crap! Who draws like this?” Kaden laughed nervously, lifting the papers to look at more drawings. He noticed the name in the corner. In chicken-scratch handwriting, it read Kaden Ahvari.
“Crap, I draw like this,” Kaden exclaimed. From a sketch that looked almost like a cross between a frog and bridge, he figured that these were sketches for architectural uses. He gave a quizzical look around, and saw a business card on the corner of his desk. Before he picked it up, he absently patted the little card in his breast pocket. Satisfied that it was still there, he made a mental note to himself that he would try calling again. He looked down at his own business card. It read, Kaden Ahvari and underneath, Architect.
“Did I die and go to Heaven? I’ve always wanted to be an architect! Even though I can’t draw for shit.” Kaden grinned at himself, and thought that his drawings were actually pretty good if he looked at them with one eye closed.
“Kaden!” yelled a man in the doorway.
He shot his head up and saw Crapford standing in front of him.
“What are you doing in my Heaven?!” cried Kaden, pointing an accusing finger at his boss.
Crapford just grinned evilly, and his obese body started to inflate. “What the Hell?”
“‘What the Hell’, indeed,” Crapford said through rubbery lips.
The man continued to inflate; his body touching the front of Kaden’s desk as well as the door behind him. His arms were mere stubbles of fat on the sides of his body. There was a tremendous explosion, and when Kaden came out of his protective ball from underneath his desk, he saw that pieces of skin-coloured fat layered most of the walls in the room. He stood on shaky knees and loosened his tie.
“Mr. C-Cratford…?” Kaden said quietly, his hands trembling in front of him.
He walked around his desk slowly, carefully stepping over bubbling piles of human fat. Kaden called his boss’s name again.
“Yes? You need something?”
“Thank goodness you’re still alive. What happened just now?” Kaden said, letting his shoulders sag in relief. He laughed nervously to himself and turned to the source of the voice. “You were just playing a joke, right?”
Kaden jumped at the sight. Crapford’s head was still intact, and from the floor it stared up at him with squinting eyes. His head looked like it had been boiled; red circles of burnt skin spotted his face.
“You’ve always wanted me to die, haven’t you? You hate me,” Crapford begun. Something that looked like black tar fell from his mouth as he talked.
Kaden shook as his head in disbelief as Crapford bounced towards him, sending ripples through the man’s flesh. Crapford continued to talk and bounce forward until Kaden felt the large glass window behind his desk on his back.
“You hate your job, you hate your life … ” Crapford carried on.
“Cratford, I – ”
“It’s Crapford, isn’t it? Do you know where you are? You’re in Hell, the place that was practically made for selfish people like you. But you’re an architect, though, right? So life is still pretty sweet for you still, isn’t it?”
The head jumped up from the floor and whammed into his chest, causing the wind to rush out of him in one breath.
This is just a bad dream -
“You’re pathetic, Ahvari - ”
Why am I here? Am I being punished? I didn’t do anything –
“The sad thing is – ”
I’m innocent.
“Is that you’re a lot like – ”
Kaden couldn’t make out the last word his boss had said. All he could hear was the sound of breaking glass. He had stumbled back from the hit and slammed into the window behind him. The glass shattered easily on impact and he fell through. Kaden watched the sky and the towering building of his company loom overhead as he fell. He could hear Crapford laugh from inside his office as shards of glass cut his face.
Cratford, he tried to plead.
The wind whistled almost peacefully around his ears as he fell six stories. No one from the ground saw him. No one screamed – just the wind.
“That’s right, who cares about Kaden?” he said to himself, but his words were lost in the wake of his falling body.
He heard a loud scrunch as his body hit the cement. Kaden could feel each individual crack appear in his spine and the breaking of other bones in his body. His back arched reflexively, causing the pain to shimmer through his body. He felt blood drip down his head and from his nose into his mouth. He hadn’t tasted blood in a long time.
Kaden took one last breath, and died.
-+-
Kaden shot his eyes open and instinctively sat upright. When he felt no pain, he looked around him. He was on the sidewalk in front of the paper company. People walked around him, paying no attention as each one of them checked their watches to make sure they would arrive at their meetings on time.
“I must have just passed out,” Kaden concluded, not wanting to think about the bad dream he just had.
“Kaden, you’d better get back to your job,” a voice said as a person’s shadow fell over him, blocking out the warm sunlight. It was Smiths.
“Smiths!” Kaden exclaimed. He was almost glad to see him. “Hey, you’re looking a little less nerdy than you usually do. Is it a special day, or something?”
Smiths’ shoulders started to shake and he suddenly started to cry. Big droplets of tears fell from his eyes and onto Kaden’s hand. The smile faded from his lips, but no words could come to him. F-fuck, I just made Smiths cry ...
“Kaden, why do you hate me?” Smiths asked through big gulps of air.
The man got up from the ground and feigned patting Smiths on the back as he glanced nervously around him. This is so embarrassing, he thought.
“Now you know how it feels,” Smiths said, almost in response to his thoughts. He began to walk forward as tears continued to stream down his face. Kaden backed up; making sure at least a foot was between them.
“Why, Kaden?” Smiths asked again.
He stumbled off the curb of the sidewalk where he stared up at Smiths. He couldn’t see through his coworker’s glasses, but tears still fell.
“Smith’s, I don’t hate you, I –”
“Why do you hate yourself?” he asked.
Kaden frowned. First, Smiths asked why he hated him, and now he asked why he hated himself. He opened his mouth to clarify, but Smiths interrupted him.
“We are the - ”
Just like in the situation with Cratford, Kaden couldn’t make out the last words. A huge booming horn filled the air, causing him to press his hands against his ears as Smiths backed up, wiping tears from his eyes. Kaden turned to the right with one eye open and saw a bus coming right towards him.
“You’re in Hell…” The words echoed in Kaden’s mind as the steel grate of the bus simultaneously burned his chest and broke his collar bone as it throttled into him. He was thrown into the air as blood from his mouth trailed in front of him as he flew backwards. He skidded along the road, dislodging pebbles from the ground with his skin. Flesh was ripped off by the rugged cement as he rolled and slid along. The world spun around him, and he noticed that still, no one cared.
Kaden’s body slowly came to a stop. His head lay on one of those yellow markers that were painted on the middle of the road to divide lanes. He stared at the blinding yellow colour through half-opened eyes. Blood from his body leaked out and covered the yellow and a smile crept onto Kaden’s face. Suddenly, a man knelt down in front of him with a cell phone to his ear.
“Do you want to be saved?” asked the man. Kaden looked up with one eye, but all he could see was a blurry face covered in shadow. “I am seldom welcomed here, but I can do what I want..”
The man carefully lifted Kaden so that his chest was facing the man, and he reached into his bloody breast pocket and took out the business card. It was still perfectly white.
“Father…” Kaden gasped.
The man smiled a little, but shook his head. “You are beginning to understand. So I am giving you another chance.”
The man took his cell phone away from his ear and put it on the ground next to Kaden’s face, as well as the business card. He tried to talk to him, but a piece of glass was lodged into his throat, and caused him great pain to swallow. When he opened his mouth, he could feel the glass cut his jugular vein.
For the third time, Kaden died.
-+-
“What the Hell,” Kaden said softly as he opened his eyes.
He couldn’t remember what had happened at first, but he saw that he was still on the road where the bus had run into him. The man’s cell phone and his business card were still on the ground in front of him.
Kaden sat up slowly and grabbed the two items in front of him. He turned on the cell phone. A short tune of Amazing Grace greeted him, and Kaden cringed at the music. Sappy, he said to himself. He glanced at the number for the company that “gave jobs”, and punched it in and put the phone to his ear. After a few long moments, someone on the other end picked up.
“Hello, how may I help you?” It was the same person.
“It’s Kaden.”
“Ah, yes. How are you enjoying the job?”
“I’ve always wanted to be an architect, but I don’t think I’m going to get to work as much. I keep getting side-tracked.”
The person giggled. “How may I help you?”
“I quit.”
Nothing was said in response, and he could hear the person on the other end hang up.
“Hey! Hello?”
Flustered, Kaden tossed the phone onto the road. He suddenly smelled something burning, and a noise similar to the bus’s horn filled the air, but it was much lower. And it was getting gradually closer - fast. He looked around quickly, wondering where the sound came from and glanced up to the sky. A burning jet plane came hurtling from the sky, right towards him.
Even before the plane hit him, Kaden knew he was going to die. He sighed and braced himself for the impact.
However, the whole plane did not crash into him; only the wing. The main part of the plane slammed into the ground beside him, sending huge chunks of concrete into the air and sending a firey explosion in Kaden's direction. He felt his skin burn instantly; black pieces of charred skin fell to the ground like feathers. The wing's sharp edges slammed Kaden into the ground, causing his lungs to rupture. He gasped for breath, and he could feel his two lungs shift inside of him as they attempted to open to allow air in. He felt like he was drowning, one of his many fears he had as a child.
Blood inside him started to fill his bodily cavities, allowing no spaces to remain empty. He was drowning in his own blood.
Kaden tried to breathe one more time, but failed. He quickly died.
-+-
Kaden blinked several times. He felt something soft against his cheek and he looked down. He was on a familiar dirt-coloured carpet. Kaden smiled and breathed out a sigh of relief.
He was home.
But he wasn’t in the safe zone just yet. He pushed up from the floor, and from on his knees, he glanced around the office.
It was positively ugly – just the way he’d left it.
He stood up and slowly sat in his black chair and turned around. The same skyscrapers rose from the ground; the same business people walked below; and the same comforting green spikes peeked mysteriously above the buildings in the distance.
He turned back around and faced the papers on his desk. It was time to get to work. He grabbed the first paper he saw and started to read. At first, he couldn’t understand the business lingo in the paper – he hadn’t read a paper like this in months – but after a few paragraphs, it all came back to him. A line at the bottom required his signature, and he grabbed a pen and scribbled his name. It looked like crap, but that just made Kaden laugh quietly to himself.
“Ahvari, you – oh, you’re working.”
Kaden looked up and saw Cratford standing in the doorway with a surprised look on his face. He gave his boss his best smile, and grabbed the next paper off the pile from the corner of his desk.
“Well, since slacking season is over, I should probably start signing some of these papers,” Kaden said without looking up from the paper in his hand.
“Ah, uh, right. Good.” Cratford straightened his tie and left the office.
Kaden suddenly remember something, and reached into his pocket and brought out the business card. He smiled the kind of smile that a hero would have on his face after a victory. He didn’t know what to say about what had happened. He might just have to accept it as a dream, but he knew it was more than that. Cratford’s words returned to him again: “You’re in Hell…”. The smile faded from his face, and his hand trembled. He knew it wasn’t a dream. He really was in Hell, where all he did was die, over and over again; his dream job forever out of his reach. But who was he kidding? He couldn’t draw. His place was here.
Kaden flipped the card into the air, where it fell into the dustbin beside his desk.
He reached over and picked up the receiver of his phone and punched in an extension number.
“Yo, Smiths, what’s up? Want to go out for lunch some time?”
“Kaden, yes, my refrigerator is running, I.P. Freely is not here, and neither is Ivanna Tinkle. I know the routine,” Smiths said sardonically.
Kaden almost laughed, but stopped himself. “Yeah, uh, sorry about that. I’ll try to break the habit.”
“Well, you’d better be sorry. I took most of those calls on speaker phone when clients were in here.”
“Hey! I said I was sorry. Lunch in ten?”
Smiths was silent for a moment, but said, “All right.”
Kaden smiled and hung up. He leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his neck. Maybe he hated his job, but he’d be pretty sad to leave this place. He never realized it before, but he really would miss the incorrectly labelled name plate on the door (it read Kadne Avhari; the man who made it was dyslectic), the mouse hole in the corner of the room, and his boss’s puke-coloured business suits.
Kaden smiled, and said to himself, “There’s nothing like a good trip to Hell to get my ass in gear.”
_____________________________
[Gasp] Ami swore.
Hope this was at least a little bit enjoyable.
Kaden hated his job, and everyone knew it, and that’s what made him so annoying.
“Ahvari, get your feet off the desk!”
It was Cratford, his boss. He was better known as Crapford among the minions.
Today was “dress down” Friday, the only day of the week where Kaden wore a business suit.
Crapford wore a simple white t-shirt that made him look thirty pounds heavier, a pink tie that made people question his heterosexuality (Crapford always insisted that he wear a tie even on “dress down” Fridays; a cry for individuality I’m sure, Kaden always thought) and tight blue jeans that made Kaden cringe.
“Why don’t you just fire me? It’d be a lot easier,” Kaden retorted, shifting into a more comfortable position but not removing his feet.
“You know I can’t fire you,” Crapford said, pointing a chubby finger at his slacker employee. He started to blather on about how his father, the CEO of the paper company, hired Kaden and whatnot.
All Kaden could think at the moment was, Why are annoying bosses always fat?
He glanced at his watch and noticed that Crapford’s usual five minute rant was ending soon. He brushed his fingers through his messy black hair and nodded appropriately to make it look like he was listening.
“And I know you think you can slack off because your father protects you, but that’s not true,” Crapford said. He always ended with that sentence.
The portly man fixed his tie and straightened his back. With a quick intake of breath, he exited Kaden’s office.
Kaden shrugged and swung around in his chair to face the window behind him, letting his feet fall to the floor. His office was on the sixth floor, and overlooked the street of New York in front of the Paper Whiz Company. People in black suits trudged along the dirty streets below, carrying their black leather suitcases protectively. He raised his eyes and saw the Statue of Liberty in the distance, but only the tip of its crown, the rest of the greenish body hidden by the skyscrapers. Kaden looked higher and saw beams of light breaking through the clouds that reminded him of the pictures of Jesus he always saw in churches.
Kaden stretched his arms above his head and rested them behind his head. He remembered he had paperwork to do. He turned his chair a little and grabbed a paper off the highest pile on his desk. He started to read it, but the words never registered in his mind. He yawned and started to fold the paper, and noticed it turned into a paper airplane. He turned to face the door and threw it. It flew a delicate pattern of curves and rises, where it finally hit a coworker that happened to walk past the door.
“Ahvari!” he yelled, crunching the paper in his hand and pushed his glasses higher up on his nose. It was Smiths, the distributor from a couple floors down.
“Hey, your crunching important documents,” Kaden said, trying to sound concerned.
Smiths growled something incoherently under his breath and threw the wrinkled paper into Kaden’s office.
“What’s that? I can’t hear you. Speak a little less nerd and a little more English.”
“Just go to Hell,” he replied and continued to grumble as he walked down the hall.
Gee, everyone’s in such a bad mood today, Kaden reflected as he fetched the paper Smiths had thrown on the carpet. As he picked it up, he noticed a small white business card in the doorway. Smiths must have dropped it or something, he thought to himself. He picked it up and studied the front. In the middle, it simply read, “We Give You Jobs. Jobs Down Under”, and below, there was a long distance phone number. He didn’t recognize the area code.
“Must be the Australian area code,” Kaden wondered. But he never recalled any long distance numbers to be over fifteen digits long.
He flipped the card over, and when he noticed that there wasn’t anything on the other side, he closed the door, and walked back to his desk, his eyes fixated on the slogan on the front. As he slumped down in his chair, he decided to call them up. He was actually kind of interested. Who knows, maybe it could get him out of his current job, and one in Australia – far, far away from here.
Kaden scoured his desk, and shoved a mountain of his “unimportant papers pile”—which consisted of most of the papers on his desk – revealing the black phone underneath. He quickly punched in the long phone number and while he was waiting for the other end to pick up, he took one last look at the card and then slipped it into his breast pocket.
Kaden tapped the desk impatiently. Why isn’t anyone picking up? It’s not like I’m phoning from so far away that it should take this long.
“On the contrary.”
He jumped in his seat; he hadn’t noticed that someone picked up the phone.
“Ah, er, yes. My name’s Kaden Ahvari, and I’m calling about your company. On your card it says you ‘give jobs’.”
“That’s correct. Welcome to the job, Mr. Ahvari. You start now.”
“Huh? Wait, is that all? What job did –”
Kaden felt a sudden pain in his heart, and his first reaction was to grab his chest. He gasped for breath, but his lungs wouldn’t expand to let air in. He felt icy cold, except for a small area where it was searing hot – the place where he had put his business card. As his hand gripped his shirt, he felt that his heart had stopped.
“Oh … crap,” was all Kaden could muster.
Kaden Ahvari, at twenty-two years old, had died.
-+-
Kaden awoke, and saw that he sat in a desk. The telephone receiver was in front of his face.
“Heh, it was all a dream,” he gasped, his face plastered to the desktop. He breathed deeply. “I never thought dying could be so scary.”
He pushed off and sat upright, where he straightened his tie. Kaden glanced around the room. Everything was the same; he must’ve just passed out for a minute or so. He looked down and saw sketches on big sheets of paper.
“This is crap! Who draws like this?” Kaden laughed nervously, lifting the papers to look at more drawings. He noticed the name in the corner. In chicken-scratch handwriting, it read Kaden Ahvari.
“Crap, I draw like this,” Kaden exclaimed. From a sketch that looked almost like a cross between a frog and bridge, he figured that these were sketches for architectural uses. He gave a quizzical look around, and saw a business card on the corner of his desk. Before he picked it up, he absently patted the little card in his breast pocket. Satisfied that it was still there, he made a mental note to himself that he would try calling again. He looked down at his own business card. It read, Kaden Ahvari and underneath, Architect.
“Did I die and go to Heaven? I’ve always wanted to be an architect! Even though I can’t draw for shit.” Kaden grinned at himself, and thought that his drawings were actually pretty good if he looked at them with one eye closed.
“Kaden!” yelled a man in the doorway.
He shot his head up and saw Crapford standing in front of him.
“What are you doing in my Heaven?!” cried Kaden, pointing an accusing finger at his boss.
Crapford just grinned evilly, and his obese body started to inflate. “What the Hell?”
“‘What the Hell’, indeed,” Crapford said through rubbery lips.
The man continued to inflate; his body touching the front of Kaden’s desk as well as the door behind him. His arms were mere stubbles of fat on the sides of his body. There was a tremendous explosion, and when Kaden came out of his protective ball from underneath his desk, he saw that pieces of skin-coloured fat layered most of the walls in the room. He stood on shaky knees and loosened his tie.
“Mr. C-Cratford…?” Kaden said quietly, his hands trembling in front of him.
He walked around his desk slowly, carefully stepping over bubbling piles of human fat. Kaden called his boss’s name again.
“Yes? You need something?”
“Thank goodness you’re still alive. What happened just now?” Kaden said, letting his shoulders sag in relief. He laughed nervously to himself and turned to the source of the voice. “You were just playing a joke, right?”
Kaden jumped at the sight. Crapford’s head was still intact, and from the floor it stared up at him with squinting eyes. His head looked like it had been boiled; red circles of burnt skin spotted his face.
“You’ve always wanted me to die, haven’t you? You hate me,” Crapford begun. Something that looked like black tar fell from his mouth as he talked.
Kaden shook as his head in disbelief as Crapford bounced towards him, sending ripples through the man’s flesh. Crapford continued to talk and bounce forward until Kaden felt the large glass window behind his desk on his back.
“You hate your job, you hate your life … ” Crapford carried on.
“Cratford, I – ”
“It’s Crapford, isn’t it? Do you know where you are? You’re in Hell, the place that was practically made for selfish people like you. But you’re an architect, though, right? So life is still pretty sweet for you still, isn’t it?”
The head jumped up from the floor and whammed into his chest, causing the wind to rush out of him in one breath.
This is just a bad dream -
“You’re pathetic, Ahvari - ”
Why am I here? Am I being punished? I didn’t do anything –
“The sad thing is – ”
I’m innocent.
“Is that you’re a lot like – ”
Kaden couldn’t make out the last word his boss had said. All he could hear was the sound of breaking glass. He had stumbled back from the hit and slammed into the window behind him. The glass shattered easily on impact and he fell through. Kaden watched the sky and the towering building of his company loom overhead as he fell. He could hear Crapford laugh from inside his office as shards of glass cut his face.
Cratford, he tried to plead.
The wind whistled almost peacefully around his ears as he fell six stories. No one from the ground saw him. No one screamed – just the wind.
“That’s right, who cares about Kaden?” he said to himself, but his words were lost in the wake of his falling body.
He heard a loud scrunch as his body hit the cement. Kaden could feel each individual crack appear in his spine and the breaking of other bones in his body. His back arched reflexively, causing the pain to shimmer through his body. He felt blood drip down his head and from his nose into his mouth. He hadn’t tasted blood in a long time.
Kaden took one last breath, and died.
-+-
Kaden shot his eyes open and instinctively sat upright. When he felt no pain, he looked around him. He was on the sidewalk in front of the paper company. People walked around him, paying no attention as each one of them checked their watches to make sure they would arrive at their meetings on time.
“I must have just passed out,” Kaden concluded, not wanting to think about the bad dream he just had.
“Kaden, you’d better get back to your job,” a voice said as a person’s shadow fell over him, blocking out the warm sunlight. It was Smiths.
“Smiths!” Kaden exclaimed. He was almost glad to see him. “Hey, you’re looking a little less nerdy than you usually do. Is it a special day, or something?”
Smiths’ shoulders started to shake and he suddenly started to cry. Big droplets of tears fell from his eyes and onto Kaden’s hand. The smile faded from his lips, but no words could come to him. F-fuck, I just made Smiths cry ...
“Kaden, why do you hate me?” Smiths asked through big gulps of air.
The man got up from the ground and feigned patting Smiths on the back as he glanced nervously around him. This is so embarrassing, he thought.
“Now you know how it feels,” Smiths said, almost in response to his thoughts. He began to walk forward as tears continued to stream down his face. Kaden backed up; making sure at least a foot was between them.
“Why, Kaden?” Smiths asked again.
He stumbled off the curb of the sidewalk where he stared up at Smiths. He couldn’t see through his coworker’s glasses, but tears still fell.
“Smith’s, I don’t hate you, I –”
“Why do you hate yourself?” he asked.
Kaden frowned. First, Smiths asked why he hated him, and now he asked why he hated himself. He opened his mouth to clarify, but Smiths interrupted him.
“We are the - ”
Just like in the situation with Cratford, Kaden couldn’t make out the last words. A huge booming horn filled the air, causing him to press his hands against his ears as Smiths backed up, wiping tears from his eyes. Kaden turned to the right with one eye open and saw a bus coming right towards him.
“You’re in Hell…” The words echoed in Kaden’s mind as the steel grate of the bus simultaneously burned his chest and broke his collar bone as it throttled into him. He was thrown into the air as blood from his mouth trailed in front of him as he flew backwards. He skidded along the road, dislodging pebbles from the ground with his skin. Flesh was ripped off by the rugged cement as he rolled and slid along. The world spun around him, and he noticed that still, no one cared.
Kaden’s body slowly came to a stop. His head lay on one of those yellow markers that were painted on the middle of the road to divide lanes. He stared at the blinding yellow colour through half-opened eyes. Blood from his body leaked out and covered the yellow and a smile crept onto Kaden’s face. Suddenly, a man knelt down in front of him with a cell phone to his ear.
“Do you want to be saved?” asked the man. Kaden looked up with one eye, but all he could see was a blurry face covered in shadow. “I am seldom welcomed here, but I can do what I want..”
The man carefully lifted Kaden so that his chest was facing the man, and he reached into his bloody breast pocket and took out the business card. It was still perfectly white.
“Father…” Kaden gasped.
The man smiled a little, but shook his head. “You are beginning to understand. So I am giving you another chance.”
The man took his cell phone away from his ear and put it on the ground next to Kaden’s face, as well as the business card. He tried to talk to him, but a piece of glass was lodged into his throat, and caused him great pain to swallow. When he opened his mouth, he could feel the glass cut his jugular vein.
For the third time, Kaden died.
-+-
“What the Hell,” Kaden said softly as he opened his eyes.
He couldn’t remember what had happened at first, but he saw that he was still on the road where the bus had run into him. The man’s cell phone and his business card were still on the ground in front of him.
Kaden sat up slowly and grabbed the two items in front of him. He turned on the cell phone. A short tune of Amazing Grace greeted him, and Kaden cringed at the music. Sappy, he said to himself. He glanced at the number for the company that “gave jobs”, and punched it in and put the phone to his ear. After a few long moments, someone on the other end picked up.
“Hello, how may I help you?” It was the same person.
“It’s Kaden.”
“Ah, yes. How are you enjoying the job?”
“I’ve always wanted to be an architect, but I don’t think I’m going to get to work as much. I keep getting side-tracked.”
The person giggled. “How may I help you?”
“I quit.”
Nothing was said in response, and he could hear the person on the other end hang up.
“Hey! Hello?”
Flustered, Kaden tossed the phone onto the road. He suddenly smelled something burning, and a noise similar to the bus’s horn filled the air, but it was much lower. And it was getting gradually closer - fast. He looked around quickly, wondering where the sound came from and glanced up to the sky. A burning jet plane came hurtling from the sky, right towards him.
Even before the plane hit him, Kaden knew he was going to die. He sighed and braced himself for the impact.
However, the whole plane did not crash into him; only the wing. The main part of the plane slammed into the ground beside him, sending huge chunks of concrete into the air and sending a firey explosion in Kaden's direction. He felt his skin burn instantly; black pieces of charred skin fell to the ground like feathers. The wing's sharp edges slammed Kaden into the ground, causing his lungs to rupture. He gasped for breath, and he could feel his two lungs shift inside of him as they attempted to open to allow air in. He felt like he was drowning, one of his many fears he had as a child.
Blood inside him started to fill his bodily cavities, allowing no spaces to remain empty. He was drowning in his own blood.
Kaden tried to breathe one more time, but failed. He quickly died.
-+-
Kaden blinked several times. He felt something soft against his cheek and he looked down. He was on a familiar dirt-coloured carpet. Kaden smiled and breathed out a sigh of relief.
He was home.
But he wasn’t in the safe zone just yet. He pushed up from the floor, and from on his knees, he glanced around the office.
It was positively ugly – just the way he’d left it.
He stood up and slowly sat in his black chair and turned around. The same skyscrapers rose from the ground; the same business people walked below; and the same comforting green spikes peeked mysteriously above the buildings in the distance.
He turned back around and faced the papers on his desk. It was time to get to work. He grabbed the first paper he saw and started to read. At first, he couldn’t understand the business lingo in the paper – he hadn’t read a paper like this in months – but after a few paragraphs, it all came back to him. A line at the bottom required his signature, and he grabbed a pen and scribbled his name. It looked like crap, but that just made Kaden laugh quietly to himself.
“Ahvari, you – oh, you’re working.”
Kaden looked up and saw Cratford standing in the doorway with a surprised look on his face. He gave his boss his best smile, and grabbed the next paper off the pile from the corner of his desk.
“Well, since slacking season is over, I should probably start signing some of these papers,” Kaden said without looking up from the paper in his hand.
“Ah, uh, right. Good.” Cratford straightened his tie and left the office.
Kaden suddenly remember something, and reached into his pocket and brought out the business card. He smiled the kind of smile that a hero would have on his face after a victory. He didn’t know what to say about what had happened. He might just have to accept it as a dream, but he knew it was more than that. Cratford’s words returned to him again: “You’re in Hell…”. The smile faded from his face, and his hand trembled. He knew it wasn’t a dream. He really was in Hell, where all he did was die, over and over again; his dream job forever out of his reach. But who was he kidding? He couldn’t draw. His place was here.
Kaden flipped the card into the air, where it fell into the dustbin beside his desk.
He reached over and picked up the receiver of his phone and punched in an extension number.
“Yo, Smiths, what’s up? Want to go out for lunch some time?”
“Kaden, yes, my refrigerator is running, I.P. Freely is not here, and neither is Ivanna Tinkle. I know the routine,” Smiths said sardonically.
Kaden almost laughed, but stopped himself. “Yeah, uh, sorry about that. I’ll try to break the habit.”
“Well, you’d better be sorry. I took most of those calls on speaker phone when clients were in here.”
“Hey! I said I was sorry. Lunch in ten?”
Smiths was silent for a moment, but said, “All right.”
Kaden smiled and hung up. He leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his neck. Maybe he hated his job, but he’d be pretty sad to leave this place. He never realized it before, but he really would miss the incorrectly labelled name plate on the door (it read Kadne Avhari; the man who made it was dyslectic), the mouse hole in the corner of the room, and his boss’s puke-coloured business suits.
Kaden smiled, and said to himself, “There’s nothing like a good trip to Hell to get my ass in gear.”
_____________________________
[Gasp] Ami swore.
Hope this was at least a little bit enjoyable.
Ami didn't put 2 line breaks between every paragraph.
