Hey ho, hey ho, here comes the bossman, swivelling those cobra eyes like radars, electrical movements like shiftings of servomotors, heartless, of electrons, not neurons but electrons in free cold copper wiring, swivelling here and there.

Here he swivels there he swivels, something reptillian, you know, blood colder than a fence in the morning, and the pupils so black you can’t see nothing behind there, like looking into a dumb animal’s face and confronting nothing at all but nonsense electrical signals.

Hey ho, hey ho, chewing a cigar thick as a thumb, thick as an arm, thick as a cannon, and the smell of smoke, second-hand, acrid like something scraped from a sidewalk, how it coils and grasps at you and how it tunnels into folds and hooks in there. How it gets in the eyes and you tear up, god it hurts, god it stinks. It can’t be good for the lungs, you know, not his–not bossman’s–and not mine. How many fingers now to count the years lost to secondhand smoke off my lifespan? It’s not mine to count anyway, goddammit, it isn’t my problem, but, fuck, it sure should be, shouldn’t it?

Bossman, sauntering in the halls, tie waving, a new one, I swear he’s got a new one whenever I see him, red as a warning, or the flash in your vision when you’re thwacked hard in the skull, red red red as cutting stinging boiling heat melting away the melty extremities you don’t want melted.

I swear he’s got new eyes too, not just the ones in his head, the ones poking out like little balloon binoculars we’re all meant to have, the ones under his shirt. He sprouts them like weeds, new eyes, and they roll and twist and blink and you can see all the movements beneath that white button-up shirt, and he’s never trying to hide it. God knows what they’re looking at, the inside of his own clothes can’t be that fascinating right? The movements of lint? The journey of a lost hair towards the pelvis?

Hey ho, hey ho, fuck that guy. Fuck bossman, fuck you, you goddam dirty son of a bitch. Who are you and who placed you here? Was he born, was he raised? Had a dirty scraped hand been patched with a bandaid, healed fast, pumped up invincible with all that boisterous young vigour? Had he loved and lost or had he never loved at all? Suppose I cut the bossman open, what would spill out, what would drip from that dirty goddam bastard? Pens I suspect, and white handkerchiefs, and a stink like a broke printer.

Anyways he walks past me and he buzzes me with his look, all his eyes, the binoculars up top and the writhing just under his shirt of every young one sprouting and opening, swivelling like radar dishes to point right at me. He’s a mindreader I know, he’s got wiring in his frontal cortex, got extra lab-grown lobes dangling off his spinal cord, and he’s only not fired me because I have him by the balls: because he doesn’t want nobody to know, and he doesn’t give two shits about someone like me unless I cause a big mess. So that’s what I think when bossman (hey ho, hey ho,) walks past: I know I know I know, you dog, I know I know I know. I can see it all writhing down there, I can feel you brushing over my synapses. I know I know I know so let’s just hold this truce together bossman, you dirty son of a bitch.

Sometimes he nods at people as he walks by them. He nods at me, too. I nod back at the bossman.

Back to Short Stories