Hurtling Toward the Void

The last night of the fair …

Looking up from his keyboard, he wondered to himself, “What’s another word for ‘improve’?” Sitting at a desk in a long row of identical desks, he was busy writing his umpteenth newspaper article about a local event, one he’d covered annually for nearly 10 years end-on-end. “Boost? Enhance? Augment?” He’d written this story a thousand times. Or nearly 10. Whatever. “Maybe ‘facelift’? No.” The only challenge left was to write it better. OK, differently.

And, of course, for fewer readers.

That’s when their thousand-yard stares met. Across the aisle, a colleague was similarly lost in thought. They’d begun their careers here within a few weeks of one another, when the future seemed as bright as the newsroom did electric. But today was as quiet and grey as the pages of their product, and as dull as their senses.

They shook their heads and laughed, sharing a thought without speaking. It didn’t need to be said, because it already had been — at least a thousand times. “We are wasting our lives.” So they didn’t say anything. He just nodded in resignation, and his counterpart responded in kind.

And with the unique sort of nonchalance and simpatico that only develops from 18 years of mutual suffering, his co-worker slowly closed his eyes, and softly affected his finest Morrissey falsetto:

Oh, mother,
I can feel
the soil falling over my head

He didn’t realize it then, but he would come to miss that.