The Room

The room is well-light, with six ceiling tile lights scattered across the area. It isn’t a small place – twenty feet long, ten feet wide. Desks and computers in cubicles are piled against each other in rows of ten, with fifty cubicles overall. An elevator stands to one side, waiting for the moment when it can open its mouth and introduce people to a spacious, boring workplace that lacked atmosphere.

            There are no windows, making everything feel confined, claustrophobic. It is as if, like with every other windowless room, a child had stuffed its favourite action figures or dolls in a great big box, not letting any of them get so much as a glimpse of the outside world. Yes, this room, perhaps this entire building, or nearly every single workplace for that matter, is just a great big box belonging to a child.

            Those who are trapped in it feel emotionally drained, exhausted in repeating a dull, aimless existence. Get up, have breakfast, go to work, spend the next six to nine hours performing repetitive work just to get cash, go home and slump in the realisation that you are not going anywhere in this life. Those who are trapped in this room – and many other rooms – feel like that, every single day.

            Every wall in this compact place has doors, some single, some double. Going through one, think the toys in the box stuck in a nightmare that wouldn’t end, doesn’t set you free. Instead, you’re trapped in box inside another box. There’s no way out.

            I pity them. They must have had goals in their childhood that were unfulfilled; dreaming grand adventures; performing the envious; living life one-hundred-percent. The box – or rather, the child, or fate – picked them up and sent them into the impossible, the unacceptable, the terrifying bane of imagination:

Life.

Nothing goes the way it’s planned. It’s a slap to the face, a hammer to the rib, a bullet to the head. We’re faced with restrictions of what’s allowed and acceptable to the public, and by public I mean the government. We’re faced with crime, disease, famine, people willing to cheat others out of their pockets just to fatten their own. There’s no such thing as the basic formula of good-vs-evil, that’s kids’ stuff. We can live with it, or we can’t. At the moment, I’m deciding if I can.

            I sit in one of the cubicle chairs, holding my head in deep thought as I hear hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of different, contradicting versions of me telling me what to do. I don’t know who to listen to.

            Kill yourself.

            Go to the police.

            Just walk away from it all.

            Talk to someone about it.

            Go home.

            Go to a different country.

There are people in the room, twenty five of them.

Ten are women, nails sharp and colourful.

The fifteen men wear ties, five wearing fine-tailored suits.

No one interrupts me.

They’re spread across the room, lying on the floor, sitting in chairs.

Their bodies are immortalised in lifeless poses.

All of them have blood on their clothes and skin.

All of them don’t mind it.

Blood is on the floor, on the walls, on the elevator’s mouth.

Blood is sprayed across cubicles, covering computers and desks.

The twenty five don’t mind that they can’t breathe or blink or move or talk or feel or smell or see or think.

No one interrupts me.

Because I killed them all.