Haze - By Andrea Wolfe Page 0,100

toward the door, the door symbolic of escape and short-term relief in my mind. I was fucked, but I wasn't about to solve my problems in that office.

"Don't think I'll forget any of this, Jacobs," he said, his words slurring as he spoke. "You'll never work in this business again."

I turned toward him, continuing to cautiously walk backward. "If this business is full of people like you, then that sounds just fine to me. Maybe sober up before work next time, huh?"

He snarled something behind me, but I couldn't make any sense of it. Just angry syllables. I just kept walking until I was on the street, once again surrounded by so much stimuli I thought I might explode. I yanked my cell phone out of my purse, ready to dial Jack and talk his ear off, unsure of what my angle would be with him. My grip was faulty; the phone slipped out of my sweaty palm and tumbled to the ground touch-screen first.

"Dammit!" I mumbled, reaching down and grabbing it, upset with the fact that the accident had slowed me down. But why did I care? I was unemployed now. I had all the time in the world!

I started pressing buttons before I realized the screen was totally smashed and nothing I had pressed had worked. The glass had fractured in several spider web patterns that began from a deep, single point of impact.

"Dammit, dammit, dammit!" I shouted to no one. Tears were streaming down my cheeks now and I couldn't do anything about it. I desperately needed respite, but I didn't know where to find it. I wiped my eyes with a tissue from my purse and continued to the subway. I was just gonna go home and think. The universal solution for everything.

I had so many questions for myself, so many questions for the world, so many people to blame, myself included. It seemed that I had found myself standing atop a gigantic emotional landfill, my assignment the sorting and acknowledgement of every emotion beneath my toes.

Thankfully, I arrived home to an empty apartment. Upon entering my bedroom, I angrily threw my pillows on the floor and stomped on them with my bare feet before proceeding to deliver a brutal beating to my mattress. I sobbed uncontrollably, allowing everything out, not restraining myself at all. I was pretty sure that anyone else in the building that heard my outburst probably couldn't tell if it was one woman's total emotional breakdown or really loud sex.

I didn't care one way or another.

After calming down—and fighting the urge to get entirely wasted prior to noon—I grabbed my laptop and looked through Craigslist for any accounting jobs. No matter what I found, I felt totally inadequate. I had only set foot at MCI for the interview, avoiding the challenges of the rest of the city entirely. To make matters even worse, most of the listings paid less than I had been making.

My wounded phone on the table was a consistent reminder that I needed to remedy this situation fast.

Dammit, I didn't want to go back to that existence, the world of dead end jobs. I didn't want to be thirty and still working in retail or at a coffee shop. I didn't want to be a clerk. I wanted to feel validated by my work, whatever it was.

I gently closed the lid on my laptop—breaking one screen today was enough—and stared at the wall in silence, listening to the ambient noise from the street. The city kept moving, even though my place in it had vanished in the span of an hour. My position was gone, but MCI kept going. I wasn't necessary, wasn't needed in the grand scheme of things because I could be replaced...

... and this sort of nihilism wasn't doing me any favors right now.

My head more or less accidentally found the pillow and I quickly fell into a stress-induced slumber.

***

I awoke suddenly, startled from a dream in which I was both falling and being relentlessly chased by faceless men. "Fuck," I mumbled, pulling my sweat-soaked hair away from my forehead. I was glad to have escaped that fate of perpetual, confusing horror.

Buzz!

My phone fell off the table, leaping to its second death on the floor. It hit with a quiet thud, the rug cushioning the fall. It was already damaged, so I was mostly indifferent to the event. My mind still cloudy, I picked it up and answered the call without looking at the fractured display.

"Hello?"

"Hi,