Category: The Clergyman

**Digital Eucharist** The coffee cools in its paper chalice, sideways on spreadsheets that drip like snowmelt through a vaulted gaze. A conference call murmurs Gregorian; my name appears, flickers, but no one mouths it. Between meetings, I google ‘meaning of fatigue’ and get ads for wearables that count your sighs. A drone whines past— a…

The Elevator Thinks in Spanish Monday slides in like an uncharged phone— blank, jittering with apologies. Lights hum in Esperanto; the copier sighs a paper’s half-formed grief. We queue beneath drone-throated ceilings. Cheryl from Accounts has teeth like glass and a laugh that knows too much. She tells me love is a locked printer jammed…

Every Notification is a Kind of Whisper The fruit bowl glows blue at midnight— not from the screen but the silence between pings, a sort of aching pause no algorithm dares touch. My neighbor’s Alexa murmurs through the plaster like a priestess with dementia, rustling queries for weather, or where did the kids go? You…

*Terms and Conditions* Each morning the inbox fills like a tank— not with water, but with tasks shaped like teeth. We open them, obedient, clicking consent to lives we didn’t mean to draft, checkboxes ticked while yawning over cereal. Outside, a man walks three dogs wearing headphones larger than his astonishments. The sky is buffering….

**Compliance** The form asked for my mother’s eye color— I wrote “opaque or visionary, depending on the war.” No flags were raised. We shuffle between buildings like USB cables looking for ports. Docks where we might click and be told we’re wanted. That’s something. Toast notification: “Your account has been updated to obsolete.” Great. The…

In the elevator mirror a blue halo clings to my forehead—static or grace, I can’t tell. I swipe right through the morning, past a cascade of curated breakfasts, lit like votives in a glass temple. At work, my reflection loads slowly. We speak in sanctioned fonts, bolded where empathy should be. Yesterday, someone cried in…

*Feedback Loop* A silence shaped like elevator jazz hovers between pings—slightly digital, slightly lonely like the last browser tab left open by someone who never says goodbye. Downstairs, a printer stutters like a robot trying to love. Paper jams become confessions: Help, I cannot format myself. Lunch is microwave ballet—neon onions breathe through the plastic…

**OVERNIGHT IN THE FEEDBACK LOOP** In the pebbled hush of the HR portal, I typed my dreams in lowercase— a selfie resume framed by weeks of forgotten lunches, grey in the way static flickers at 3 A.M. Servers hiss like serpents in Eden’s cubicle, sibilant with performance metrics. Somewhere, a chatbot flirts convincingly with a…

*Terms & Afflictions* Monday exists like a bootprint on sanded laminate, where the light undoes itself in lanyard loops— always blinking, never arriving. They send emails with subject lines like Urgent: Update Your Humanity, and we comply because the algorithm’s sigh sounds vaguely like mother. Lunch is overpriced calamari in biodegradable guilt. I name the…

**HTML Error 503** The light on the vending machine blinks rheumily— as if remembering something it regrets. Above, fluorescents hum like lawsuits, relentless but impersonal, and the sky, chrome with pending updates, stalls. There’s a form for longing, somewhere inside the cough of the printer; my name misfiled again beneath “User.” A pause stretches between…