Category: The Clergyman

**Form W-9 in a Velvet Envelope** The copy machine lurches like a dying ox while Janet from Payroll discusses her nephew’s rash— not metaphorical, though it could be— the rash and the nephew are real, unlike the performance review you drafted in your head on the way back from the vending machine that squalled when…

**Semaphore** The glass doors mouth open like disinterested gods— Monday, processed in fluorescent slices, clicks a badge against my chest, some name I once applied for like a loan. The printer heaves another truth into the tray. Outside, a woman passes with shopping bags full of need disguised as color; her children trail her like…

The app blinks twice. A silence settles between updates—lingering like steam on commuter glass. I forget my own name at the kiosk, tap “Yes” to terms I haven’t read. Above me, fluorescents flicker as if decoding the soul’s fine print. A child screams in aisle seven: cereal or abandonment—one or the other. Self-checkout beeps like…

*Reception Code* The fluorescent hum sings falsity above the desk where forms collapse into each other, surnames smudged like the aftertaste of a botched dream. A woman in a yellow coat named Desiree argues with the touchscreen; her index finger grinds into the pixelled precipice that should mean Health or History— in this lobby, difference…

**Subroutine for the Nightshift Heart** The thermoplastic beep of the fridge door resembles a hymn I once half-remembered— something about bread, or betrayal. My phone buzzes like a moth caught in airport glass, irrelevant notifications in Esperanto. At work, we laminate empathy, hole-punch days into digestible quadrants: morning is a glitch, lunch is news, afternoon…

**Terminal Proofs** The elevator’s hum is a kind of prayer— mindless, florescent, ending always exactly where it began. I watch the receptionist decant her soul into a series of clipped keystrokes, every spacebar mutilation a miniature confession to RAM. We are itemized, reduced to pixels marching in politely glowing grids; Monday is quantified funk, Tuesday—I…

**Algorithmic Sermon** The elevator spoke in pings like a tired priest rebuking sins of floor five, where the desks bloom like antiseptic anemones and coffee brews in the glass womb of routine. We wear lanyards like leashes, names swinging low by our hearts, plastic saints of corporate confession. In the restroom mirror, I watch my…

**Logged Out Bones** Some mornings arrive behind a transparent paywall— not grief, exactly, but a subscription to delayed emotion. I log in to myself and forget the password. Again. A toner-scented hush fills the hallway. HR speaks in riddles: Did you complete the module on Compassion Fatigue? I click ‘maybe’ and hear a kettle dying…

The Fluorescent Saints of Exit Rows Every Tuesday, I wait beneath the humming vent where the radiators speak in morse of neglected decisions. There’s a printer bleeding receipts in the breakroom, and someone—Donna or Steve— wants another click-through, another metric to crisp our days to digital jerky. I misplaced my name once at a kiosk,…

*Pattern Recognition* The morning logs in without greeting, tray of updates hissing — “You missed everything.” I sip bright plastic-filtered thoughts, scroll past a war like I might a salad bar: choices without hunger—Meatless Monday, verdicts in muted tones. My thumb aches from ghosting the day. Somewhere, behind a paywall or a cough, a clerk…