by Gintare O.

PRECEDING FILES

Onboarding / 01 / The Smell

Onboarding / 02 / The Invitation

Onboarding / 03 / Parking Lot

Onboarding / 04 / Frank

Onboarding / 05 / The Catalog

Onboarding / 06 / Good

Onboarding / 07 / The Loading Dock

Onboarding / 08 / The Tech Bar

Onboarding / 09 / The Card

Onboarding / 10 / Elaine

Onboarding / 11 / Reality Alignment

Onboarding / 12 / The Work

Monday’s stack was twelve.

She was in the conference room where she had done her first twelve, three weeks ago. The room was familiar now. She had been assigned to it. She had a permanent placard on the door. It read Reality Alignment — Reviewer 7. Reviewer 6 had a placard on the door across from hers. Genny had never seen Reviewer 6. She did not know whether the person who worked in there was a person.

The twelve orders were stacked on the table when she came in at 7:58.

She sat down. She took her coffee. She set her notebook to her right, closed, on the desk. She had stopped opening her notebook at work. She had, over the last three weeks, stopped needing to. The audit queue had a rhythm. Her hand had a rhythm to match. She could sign twelve orders and get back to her cube by lunch and use the afternoon for review-above-her follow-up, which was a category of work she had, only recently, started doing.

The first order was a photograph. A group photograph from a company event. The audit order asked her to reframe the photograph so that a specific person was slightly less centered. Standard. She wrote the description. She checked the box. She signed the form. Nineteen seconds. She was pleased with the pace.

She moved to the next one.

The second was a press release. A single word to be replaced with a slightly different one. She did it in twelve seconds.

The third was a memory cluster. Nineteen subjects. A neighborhood block party in Aurora. She did it in forty seconds because the subject list took longer to read.

The fourth was a photograph.

The fifth was a paragraph in a magazine article that no longer needed to reference a particular initiative by name.

The sixth was a webpage.

The seventh was a set of yearbook photographs.

The eighth was a processing order.

She signed it in nineteen seconds.

She moved to the next one.

The ninth was a press release. The tenth was a photograph. The eleventh was a memory cluster. The twelfth was a small edit to a company’s About page.

By 11:15 she had all twelve done.

She stacked the forms on the far side of the table. She stood up. She took her coffee mug, which was cold, and left the conference room.

She was pleased with the morning. She thought about telling somebody about her pace and then remembered that there was nobody at MSS she would tell such a thing to.

She went to her cube.

At 2:41 an email came in from Christina. Subject: quick note. Body: Good work today. No signature.

Genny read the email. She read it twice. It was normal. It was the kind of email a manager sent when things were going well. It was the kind of email Karen had never once sent her, in four years. She had never received a note like it. She noticed she was pleased. She noticed she was pleased and then noticed that she had noticed, and sat with that for a while.

She marked it read.

She got back to work.

At 5:04 she left.

She drove home. She made dinner. It was a simple dinner, roasted vegetables and rice, because it was Monday and Monday was the day she made simple food. She sat at the counter to eat. She watched twenty minutes of a show she had been meaning to finish. She did not do anything else. Monday was the day she did not do anything else.

Her phone rang at 6:47.

She looked at it. The name on the screen was Mom.

She picked up.

“Hi Mom.”

“Hi sweetheart, just wanted to check in.”

Her mother’s voice was normal. It was her mother’s voice. The greeting was the greeting her mother had used with her every phone call for years.

There was a pause.

It was not a long pause. It was slightly longer than a normal pause.

“I’m sorry, dear. I’m calling from a number my daughter saved. What’s your name.”

Her mother’s voice was still normal. Kind. Slightly apologetic. Waiting to be corrected.

Genny said her name.

She said it slowly. She said it because she wanted her mother to hear it.

Her mother said, “Of course, of course,” in the specific voice she used for telemarketers she did not want to be rude to. She said it warmly. She said it professionally. She said it as though she had never met Genny in her life.

They talked for another minute. Her mother asked if this was about the church directory. Genny said no. Her mother asked if this was about a survey. Genny said no. Genny asked if her father was there. Her mother said her husband was at the hardware store. Her mother did not correct that with a name.

Genny asked how she was.

Her mother said she was well. She said the weather had been beautiful this weekend. She said she had put in some bulbs.

Genny said that was nice.

Her mother said, “Well, I don’t want to keep you, dear. Was there something I could do for you?”

Genny said no. She said she was sorry to have bothered her.

Her mother said, “Not at all. Have a nice evening, honey.”

The call ended at a normal length.

Genny sat at the counter with the phone in her hand for a long time.

She did not cry.

She did not do anything for a while.

She thought about her mother in the kitchen two hours away, putting the phone back on its cradle, walking back to the sink or the plant she had been watering. She thought about her mother telling her father, when he came back from the hardware store, that somebody had called earlier. It must have been a wrong number.

She thought about the fact that her mother had said her husband. Not John. Not your father. Her husband.

She got up.

She went to the drawer next to the refrigerator where she kept the notebook. She took the notebook out. She opened it to the last written page. She turned back through the pages, looking for the copies she had made of the audit orders. She kept copies of everything now. Karen had taught her that too. Not officially. Just as a habit.

She turned to today’s page.

The forms she had duplicated for herself in her notebook were listed in order. Photograph. Press release. Memory cluster. Photograph. Article paragraph. Webpage. Yearbook photographs. Processing order. Press release. Photograph. Memory cluster. About page.

She stopped at the eighth one.

Processing order.

She read it.

The processing order had a full name at the top, in careful printing. Her name. Her full name. First, middle, last. Spelled correctly. It had a date. Today’s date. It had a rationale field she had filled in with two sentences she did not remember writing. She read the sentences. They were in her own handwriting. They were unremarkable sentences. They described the processing as routine and consistent with the subjects’ status as retired non-affiliates.

It had two subjects listed.

The subjects were her parents.

Their names. Their address. Their date of birth. Their marriage date. Their affiliation with any subject: parent of employee.

The checkbox at the bottom was checked.

The signature was hers.

She had signed it in nineteen seconds.

She turned around.

The envelope was on the counter.

The envelope that had been sealed, in the notebook, tucked against the back cover, addressed to her parents. She had left it in the notebook that morning. She had not opened it. She had not touched it in weeks.

It was open.

The flap was folded back. The contents were partially visible. She walked to the counter. She reached for the envelope. She stopped. She did not want to touch it. She looked at it from where she was standing.

Inside was a card.

Cream paper. Oxblood ink.

An emblem at the top. Small. The same emblem she had seen on the truck at the coffee shop, months ago. The same emblem she had recognized without being able to say where from.

She sat down at the table so she could see the card straight on.

The text was formal. An announcement.

It announced her arrival by name. Her full name. First, middle, last. It listed her mother and father by name. It gave the date. The weight. The length. The town.

It was her birth announcement.

Not a birth announcement. Not the one her parents had sent thirty-two years ago from a hospital in a town two hours away to a small mailing list of relatives and friends.

Her birth announcement. The one MSS had.

The one that mattered.

She looked at the emblem. She had, three months ago, in her car at the coffee shop lot, not been able to place it. She could place it now. She had been looking at MSS’s own emblem for months without knowing that was what she was looking at. She had seen it on the loading dock truck. On the fake calendar app that had been on her phone once. Pressed into the corner of the Elaine card, when she had looked at it just now. On this envelope. In the corner of every audit order she had ever signed.

She had, apparently, been signing MSS’s emblem her whole time at MSS. She had just been calling it a corporate branding element and moving on.

She sat down at the kitchen table.

She got the Elaine card out of the notebook. She held it in her hand. It said, still, in oxblood ink, one word. Elaine.

She had not, in the weeks since Christina had slid the card across the table, thought about how she would call a number that was not on the card.

She thought about it now.

She looked at her phone. She opened the phone app. She looked at the recent calls list. Her mother’s call was at the top. Below it were a few earlier calls she did not need to think about.

She held the card up next to the phone.

She thought Elaine.

She pressed the phone against her ear.

The phone rang.

It rang twice.

Elaine picked up.

“Genny.”

“Hi.”

There was a pause on Elaine’s side. It was not a long pause. It was the pause of a person who was giving another person the room to say what they had called to say.

“I signed a processing order.”

“I know.”

“My mother doesn’t know who I am.”

“I know.”

“What did I do.”

“You worked a stack of orders. You did what your training told you to do. You filed fast. You moved on. It is exactly what was expected of you.”

Genny sat with that.

She sat with it for a while.

Elaine did not fill the silence.

Finally Genny said, “What happens next.”

“Nothing tonight. You should get some sleep. There will be more orders tomorrow. We have arranged for a different stack to be waiting for you. It will be easier than today’s. You will move through it. In two or three days it will feel routine again. That is how this works.”

Genny closed her eyes.

She opened them.

“I want to go back.”

“To what.”

“To before I signed the order.”

“That is not something we can do.”

“Can I fix it.”

“There is no fix for a processing order that has been executed. There is only the next order.”

Genny said, “I need to talk to my parents.”

“You can call them any time you like. They will answer. They will be kind to you. They will not know you.”

Genny said nothing.

Elaine said, “You have been carrying this alone. You do not have to. You are one of us now. This is what we do. It is what your parents raised you to do, whether they knew it or not. They logged you here at your birth. They knew, at some level, and they let you find your way to us. This part is difficult. It will pass.”

Genny said, “Please.”

Elaine did not respond immediately.

Then she said, gently, “I know.”

Then she said, “We’ll start with the next order tomorrow.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, processing orders are reviewed for accuracy, not for relationship. a reviewer is not expected to recognize a name. the form does not ask.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

That is the end of Genny's file. The archive continues.

Begin with:

Start Here: A Reading Guide to May Season Studio - the map, for anyone who came in through this series

The Lunch Hour - the surface team, before any of this, on an ordinary afternoon

The Company That Regulates Reality - the premise, stated by the company, now that you know what it costs

Nothing gets retired. The archive only grows.

Leave a comment

by Gintare O.

The consolidation was routine.

The storage archive had been running short on usable grid for two years, the way every archive eventually does, and the fix was the fix it always is. Reclaim the middle. The old middle section had been filled in piecemeal over a decade, no numbering logic, crates placed wherever a gap existed, and the new plan collapsed all of it into a clean grid so the space could hold a third again as much.

Nobody who approved the plan had been in the room. There was no reason to be. You did not need to see a shelf to renumber it.

The work went to a two-man facilities crew, Petro and Vance, who had a pallet jack, a scanner, and a printout four hundred lines long. Each line was a crate. Each crate had a current coordinate and a destination coordinate. The job was to make the second match the first, four hundred times, and then go home.

They did not open anything. That was not the job. You did not open archive crates. You scanned the label, you moved the crate, you scanned it into its new slot, and the system marked the line done. The contents were somebody else’s problem from a decade ago and were, per every label, inactive.

They were most of the way through the middle section by the second night.

Line 287 was a crate between a discontinued glassware line and a seasonal décor concept. The label read the way they all read. An inventory number. A date. Three words.

Stored. Indexed. Inactive.

Petro scanned it. The system gave him a destination two aisles over, upper grid, and he set the jack and lifted it.

It was heavier than it looked, and it ticked.

“This one’s ticking,” Petro said.

Vance was four crates down, scanning. “They all do something,” he said. “Old crates settle. Something shifts inside, you get a tick, you get a knock. Glassware’s the worst. You’ll hear it all night if you listen for it.”

Petro stopped listening for it. That was the correct thing to do and it was what the job trained you to do. Four hundred crates. You could not wonder about each one.

He moved it out of the slot, and on the way out the leading corner caught the upright.

It was nothing. It was the kind of contact that happened forty times a night in a tight aisle, a corner clipping a shelf leg, the crate shrugging a half inch on the forks and settling again. Petro felt it through the handle and adjusted and kept going. He did not stop to look because there was nothing to look at. The crate was closed. It stayed closed. It rode to the new slot and he scanned it in and the system marked line 287 done.

What the contact had done was not visible from the outside.

The seal was a single continuous strip around the lid, and the corner strike had lifted one end of it, a hairline, less than the width of the label print. The lid did not open. It settled a millimeter proud on one side, the way a drawer settles when something small is behind it. In a lit room, up close, with a reason to look, you might have caught the thin dark line where the lid no longer met the crate.

There was no reason to look, and the room was not lit where the crate now sat, and Petro was two aisles away scanning line 291.

They finished the section at a quarter past three. Petro logged the consolidation complete on the tablet and the tablet asked whether all lines had been resolved and he confirmed that they had, because they had. Four hundred lines. Four hundred crates. Every one scanned out of its old coordinate and into its new one. The report generated itself and went where those reports go.

Relocated. Indexed. Inactive.

The same three words, near enough. The crate had moved. It was indexed at its new coordinate. And the third word was the one word on the label that was now wrong, and there was no one in the building who could have known that, because knowing it would have required opening the crate, and the entire design of the archive, its whole reason for being, was that nobody ever opened anything.

Petro and Vance rolled the jack back to the dock and clocked out. Vance said something about the ticking one, the heavy one, that it had been a good tick, a clean tick, not a rattle. Petro said old crates settle. They both agreed that old crates settle, which is true, and they went home.

The lights in the middle section shut off on their schedule.

In the dark, on the upper grid, two aisles from where it had spent its years between the glassware and the décor, the crate sat with its lid a millimeter proud on one side.

A millimeter is a gap. A gap is an edge. An edge is where an object ends, and the assessment of where an object ends and the next one begins was the one thing the unit inside had been built, above all else, to do. It had been doing it, patiently, without instruction, keeping time against the day the boundary changed.

The boundary had changed.

The material found the gap the way water finds the low place in a floor, without hurry, without sound beyond the faint continuous tick it had always made, and it came through the hairline at the corner of the lid in a thin bright thread, and it reached the shelf, and the shelf was an object, and the unit began to wrap.

It had a great deal of time and a great deal of material and, for the first time in years, something to finish.

By morning the ticking was no longer the only sound in the middle section, but there was no one in the middle section to hear the difference, and the consolidation was marked complete, and the project remained closed.

The follow-up would come later. It would come as a work order, filed by a facilities tech who found something in an aisle he could not immediately name, routed into a queue, sorted by date, cleared to a different team than the one that had put it there in the first place.

That team had not been told what it was. No one had.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

at may season studio, archive crates are not opened. the label records the status at the time of indexing. the status is reviewed when the crate is opened.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The crate has a history. Most of it is already filed.

Begin with:

The project remained closed.

Leave a comment

by Gintare O.

PRECEDING FILES

Onboarding / 01 / The Smell

Onboarding / 02 / The Invitation

Onboarding / 03 / Parking Lot

Onboarding / 04 / Frank

Onboarding / 05 / The Catalog

Onboarding / 06 / Good

Onboarding / 07 / The Loading Dock

Onboarding / 08 / The Tech Bar

Onboarding / 09 / The Card

Onboarding / 10 / Elaine

Onboarding / 11 / Reality Alignment

The work was familiar.

She had spent four years describing objects. She had spent four years filling in fields and signing forms. She had spent four years being good at it. What Reality Alignment asked of her was not, in shape, different from what her old queue had asked. The vocabulary was different. The templates were different. The forms had slightly heavier paper. The cadence was reliable.

She processed twelve to fifteen audit orders a day.

An audit order was a document. It described a small change to a public artifact. Sometimes a sentence to be added to a press release. Sometimes a photograph to be reframed so that the corner of an object was clipped. Sometimes a memory cluster to be softened, which meant reducing the emotional weight of a specific set of associations in a specific set of people. She did not know the mechanism by which memory clusters were softened. She knew the form.

Each audit order had a description field, a rationale field, and a checkbox at the bottom. The description field described the change. The rationale field explained why the change was being made. The checkbox confirmed that the description was accurate.

She checked the boxes.

She signed the forms.

She moved to the next one.

Karen had taught her, years ago, to file fast. Not carelessly. Fast. To trust her training and move through the queue without lingering on any one item. To trust that if a description was wrong, review above her would catch it. Karen had used the phrase review above her many times. Genny had never asked what she meant by it.

She understood now.

She was fast. Twelve to fifteen was the higher end of the daily volume anyone on her team achieved. Her coworkers, whom she was still learning the names of, were pleasant. Half of them were not quite people. She was pretty sure at least two of them had noticed her noticing this and had chosen not to comment.

An audit order came through Tuesday morning that concerned a press release from three years ago. The press release had described a merger between two companies Genny had heard of. The audit order asked her to add one sentence to the release, in a specific spot, describing the merger’s benefits to a third company Genny had not heard of. She looked at the third company’s public profile. It was a small firm in Wisconsin. The audit order did not explain why the sentence needed to be there. The audit order did not need to explain. Her job was to describe the change.

She described the change.

She checked the box.

She signed the form.

The next one was a memory cluster.

A memory cluster order came with an attached list of subjects. The list on this order had eleven names. The memories being softened were around a summer camp in northern Minnesota. The cluster described a specific evening at the camp, a game of some kind, and a specific person who had been present that evening. Reducing the emotional weight of the cluster meant reducing what the eleven subjects would remember, if asked, about that evening.

The subjects were, according to the list, all currently in their fifties.

Genny read the audit order twice.

Then she described the change.

Then she checked the box.

Then she signed the form.

She moved to the next one.

She had access to the corridor now.

The corridor was a hallway at the north end of the third floor, past a door that had, in her old life, been marked STAFF ONLY and had been locked. It was no longer locked to her badge. She had noticed this on her second day in Reality Alignment, when she had walked past the door and it had chirped, once, and then held.

She had pushed it open.

Inside the corridor were doors. There were seven of them. Some had names. Some had numbers. Some had nothing on the outside. She had been told, during a brief orientation session with a woman she had not been introduced to but had understood to be a training resource, that she had access to two of the seven doors and would gain access to others over time based on tenure and performance. She had been shown, briefly, the room behind one of them.

The room contained a mirror.

The mirror was full length. It was framed in something that looked like brass and was probably not brass. It hung on the wall opposite the door. The room was otherwise empty.

The training resource had asked her to look into the mirror.

She had looked.

The reflection had been her. Older by some amount. Late thirties. Tired. Wearing the kind of clothes Genny wore, in a slightly different palette. The Genny in the mirror had been sitting at a desk. The desk had files stacked to the side. The Genny in the mirror had looked up when Genny had looked in. They had looked at each other.

The Genny in the mirror had looked trapped.

The training resource had explained, in the way people explain things they have explained many times, that the mirror showed a five-year projection of the employee’s career, based on current performance and satisfaction inputs. She had said the mirror was for personal development. She had said Genny was welcome to visit it whenever she liked.

Genny had thanked her.

She had not gone back for two weeks.

She went back on a Thursday.

She badged into the corridor. She went to the room. She opened the door. She looked into the mirror.

The Genny in the mirror was older. Late thirties. Wearing a nicer sweater than the one Genny had on. She was standing at the same kind of desk. There were fewer files stacked to the side. Her posture was excellent.

She looked up when Genny looked in.

She smiled.

She looked satisfied.

She looked, Genny thought, at peace with what she was doing.

Genny stood in the room for a full minute looking at the reflection. The reflection looked back. The reflection did not fidget. The reflection was calm.

She stepped back out of the room. She closed the door. She stood in the corridor with her hand on the doorknob for a long time before she walked back to her cube.

She thought about it for the rest of the day.

The trapped version of herself had been unsettling. It had been the version she would have expected to see. It had matched what she was afraid of.

The satisfied version was worse.

It was worse because it meant that in five years she was going to be a person who did this work well and did not mind it. It meant she was going to be a person who read audit orders like the one about the summer camp in Minnesota and would file them fast, and would not check the third box in her queue with any different weight than the first, and would be, in five years, satisfied.

The trapped version had been herself in a trap.

The satisfied version was herself who had come to like the trap.

She did not visit the mirror again that week.

The quarterly all-hands was on a Wednesday.

It was held in the auditorium on the ground floor. All employees were expected to attend. Genny had come to work Wednesday morning at 7:58 with the expectation that she would attend the all-hands the way she had for four years.

She sat about halfway back on the left side. The auditorium was maybe eighty percent full.

The CEO spoke. Then the head of communications. Then somebody from HR whom Genny had never seen before but who introduced herself as being on Christina’s team. Christina was in the front row. She did not turn around.

Three rows ahead of Genny, on the aisle, was Frank.

She recognized him from the back of his head first. Frank had a specific way his neck met his collar. He had a specific hairline. She knew the shape of his shoulders from four years of walking past his cube.

The shoulders were sitting differently.

Frank had always slouched slightly. He had leaned to the right. He had held a pen in his left hand and clicked it, in a pattern he was not aware of, when he was not writing. She had known this without ever wanting to notice it.

The Frank three rows ahead of her was not slouching. He was sitting with excellent posture. His shoulders were level. He was not holding a pen.

The presentations ended. The lights came up. People started standing up and shuffling out.

She got up. She moved into the aisle. She walked forward three rows and put her hand on his shoulder.

He turned.

His face was Frank’s face. His eyes were Frank’s eyes. His hairline was Frank’s hairline.

“Yes, ma’am?”

He said it warmly. He said it pleasantly. He said it in a tone he had never used at his cube.

“Hi Frank. It’s me. Genny.”

He smiled. It was a genuine smile.

“Nice to meet you. Enjoy your afternoon.”

He turned back around and moved with the crowd toward the exit.

She stood in the aisle for a moment.

Then she followed him out with the rest.

She walked back to her cube.

There was a small folded card on her keyboard.

Cream paper. Oxblood ink.

She knew the paper before she picked it up.

She picked it up. She unfolded it.

The handwriting inside was the handwriting from everything else. It was the same hand that had been on the invitation card. It was the same hand that had been on the folder Elaine had slid across the table. It was the same hand that had been on the Elaine card. It had never been anyone else’s hand. Christina’s handwritten note was not, therefore, Christina’s.

Two words.

You’re settling in well.

She put the note in her drawer, next to the notebook, on top of the folder from Elaine she had also not opened.

She closed the drawer.

She sat down.

She opened her audit queue.

There were three new orders waiting.

She got to work.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, the development mirror is available to all reality alignment staff as a personal development resource. the projection is based on current performance and satisfaction inputs. employees find it encouraging.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The audit orders go out. The results are documented in other departments.

Begin with:

Compliance Notice: Narrative Drift Detected - what the company does when the record and the event stop matching

The Company That Regulates Reality - the work Genny is now doing, described by the company itself

The Retirement of Dennis Call - another long tenure, and how it ended

Part thirteen arrives next Friday.

Leave a comment

by Gintare O.

PRECEDING FILES

Onboarding / 01 / The Smell

Onboarding / 02 / The Invitation

Onboarding / 03 / Parking Lot

Onboarding / 04 / Frank

Onboarding / 05 / The Catalog

Onboarding / 06 / Good

Onboarding / 07 / The Loading Dock

Onboarding / 08 / The Tech Bar

Onboarding / 09 / The Card

Onboarding / 10 / Elaine

She came in Monday at 7:58.

Karen was standing at her cube.

Karen was not usually at Genny’s cube before Genny got in. Karen came to Genny’s cube during the day, when she had something to say, and left. She did not station herself at Genny’s cube before 8:00 AM with her hands folded.

She was doing that this morning.

“Genny. Come with me.”

“Give me a minute.”

“Bring your coffee. Bring your notebook.”

Genny brought her coffee. She brought her notebook. She followed Karen to a conference room on the third floor.

The conference room had one wall of frosted glass. It had a table. It had, arranged on the table in a neat row, twelve small boxes.

The boxes were cream colored. They were sealed with a strip of tape that was the color of oxblood ink.

They were the same size and shape as the one that had come to her cube three months ago and had, forty minutes later, been pushed off her desk by Karen’s foot.

Karen closed the door behind them.

“Sit.”

Genny sat.

“You’re being moved to a new project. Effective immediately. The Q4 imports are being reassigned to Dale. You’ll like this. It’s a re-cataloging effort. Older items, incomplete records, some inconsistent tagging in the master. It’s the kind of work you’re good at. Careful. Thorough.”

Karen was reading from a paper. She was reading it in the same tone she used for style guide corrections. She was not looking at Genny.

“There will be a raise associated with the transition. Not a large one. It reflects the shift in responsibility. HR will send you the details tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“The items are here. There are twelve of them today. There will be more tomorrow. Each one has a form. You go through the item, you fill in the description fields, you sign the form, you move to the next one. Standard procedure.”

“Okay.”

Karen slid a form across the table. It was a paper form. It had MSS branding across the top and a description field taking up most of the page.

At the bottom of the form there was a checkbox and a line of text.

Confirmed. This object is described accurately.

Karen tapped the checkbox.

“Everything else is standard. Fill in what you observe. Sign at the bottom. Check the box.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll be at my cube if you have questions. Take your time.”

Karen left.

Genny sat alone in the conference room with twelve small boxes and a stack of forms.

She opened the first box.

Inside was a wedding invitation.

It was on cream cardstock. The names on it were names she did not recognize. Chelsea and Alan. The date was two years ago. The venue was in a suburb of Chicago she had heard of but never been to. Everything about the invitation was normal. Nothing about it belonged to her.

She filled in the form. Item: wedding invitation. Cream cardstock. Cotton weave. Ink absorbency high. Fold retention indefinite.

She hovered over the checkbox.

She thought about how she had never in her life been to a wedding for a Chelsea and an Alan. She thought about how the description she had just written did not identify the item as anyone’s invitation. It just described the physical properties of the paper. The description was true. The paper was what she had said it was.

She checked the box.

She signed the form.

She set the invitation back in the box and closed the lid.

She opened the second box.

Inside was a thank-you card. It was from a company she had never heard of. The card thanked her, by name, for her recent purchase from a company she had never heard of. The card was dated last month. The signature at the bottom was in oxblood ink.

She filled in the form. Item: thank-you card. Cream cardstock. Cotton weave. Ink absorbency high. Fold retention indefinite.

She checked the box.

She signed the form.

The third box contained a small sealed envelope. Cream paper. Oxblood ink. The address on it was her parents’ address. Her parents lived in the town she had grown up in, in a house at an address she had never given anyone at MSS, on a street she had never mentioned. The envelope was addressed to her mother by name.

She held it in her hands for a while.

She did not open it. It was sealed.

She turned it over. She held it up to the overhead light. She held it near her face. It smelled faintly of the same flowers the notebook had smelled of the morning after the box had come to her cube.

She turned it right side up and read her mother’s name again.

She stood up. She walked to the frosted glass wall of the conference room, which did not let her see anything, and stood facing it for a minute. She was breathing carefully. She was not panicking. She was aware that panicking was an option and that she was choosing not to pick it.

She came back to the table.

She sat down.

She thought about the fact that she had, once, in her second year at MSS, filled out an HR form that had asked for her parents’ address as an emergency contact. She had left the address field blank and written only the phone number. She had gotten the form back a few weeks later with the address filled in, in a hand she had not recognized. She had signed the corrected form. That had been three years ago. She had not thought about it since.

She filled in the form. Item: small envelope. Cream paper. Cotton weave. Sealed. Ink absorbency high.

She hovered over the checkbox.

She thought about what would happen if she did not check the box.

She thought about the fact that she did not know what would happen.

She thought about her mother, in her kitchen, in a town two hours away, on a street MSS was not supposed to know.

She checked the box.

She signed the form.

Her hand was steady. That was a thing she noticed and did not know what to do with.

The fourth box contained a scarf. The fifth, a picture frame. The sixth, a wristwatch. She recognized these categories from Frank’s queue. She kept going. She filled the forms with the same descriptive language she had been trained on for four years. Ink absorbency high. Weave uniform. Fold retention indefinite. Suitable for daily wear.

She checked the boxes.

She signed the forms.

By 11:30 she had done all twelve.

She set the last form on top of the stack. She stacked the boxes on the far side of the table. She took her coffee mug, which was cold, and her notebook, which she had not opened, and left the conference room.

Karen was at her cube.

“All done?”

“All twelve.”

“Good. I’ll walk them upstairs at lunch.”

“Upstairs?”

“Standard procedure. There are a few reviewers who confirm the descriptions. Not to worry.”

Karen smiled at her. Same gentleness she had used on the Helvetica note.

Genny went back to her cube.

She sat down.

She did not open her queue. She had, apparently, been reassigned off her queue. Dale was doing her queue now. She did not know what she was supposed to be doing at her desk this afternoon. Karen had said something about more boxes tomorrow. There was nothing on her desk today.

She got her phone out.

She called her mother.

Her mother picked up on the third ring. She sounded normal. She was in the garden. She had been meaning to call Genny about a recipe. She asked how Genny was. Genny said fine. Her mother asked whether Genny had gotten anything in the mail from her recently. She said she had sent a photo from the summer they had all been up at the lake.

Genny said no. She had not gotten it.

Her mother said hm, it should have arrived by now, she had sent it two weeks ago.

Genny said she would check her mail when she got home.

They talked for another few minutes. Her mother sounded like her mother. She said the neighbors’ dog had gotten out again. She said the church was doing a fall thing. She said her sister had called.

Genny said she had to get back to work. Her mother said okay, love you honey. Genny said love you.

She hung up.

She sat with the phone in her hand for a while.

Her mother had sent her a photograph two weeks ago that had not arrived.

Genny had not brought this up. Nobody at the office had known about it.

She opened her notebook, in her drawer, to the last page she had written on. She added, in careful letters: twelve confirmations. Checkbox: Confirmed - this object is described accurately.

Below it she added: photo from Mom, two weeks ago, missing.

She closed the notebook.

She closed the drawer.

She sat with her hands on the desk for a long time.

Nobody came by. Karen was gone. Dale was on a call. Blake was doing what Blake did.

At 5:04 she left.

Tuesday morning HR sent an email at 8:31.

Subject: promotion announcement.

Body: We are pleased to announce that Karen has been promoted to a new role effective this morning. She will be moving to an expanded scope. Genny will be stepping into Karen’s role effective today. Please join us in congratulating them both.

There was no floor listed for Karen’s new role.

There was no title.

There was, at the bottom of the email, a calendar invite from Christina.

Subject: Welcome reception.

Time: Tonight, 6:00 PM.

Location: [address on Route 53]

The address was the parking lot.

Genny read the email twice.

She had not been told, before this email, that she was stepping into Karen’s role.

Karen had told her yesterday she was being moved to a new project. Recataloging. Older items. Careful, thorough work. There would be a small raise. That had been the framing. That had been the words.

There had not been the word promotion. There had not been the words stepping into Karen’s role. There had not been a conversation, at any point in her four years at MSS, about the arc of her career, or her readiness for a next level, or what a next level would entail.

She was reading, for the first time, in a company-wide email, that she was now Karen’s replacement.

She read the announcement a third time.

Then she read the calendar invite.

Then she read the announcement again.

Karen was not at her cube. Karen’s cube was empty. Not empty in the way a cube is empty when the person who works there is in a meeting. Empty in the way a cube is empty when the person who works there has been transferred to a place that no longer requires her to have a cube on this floor.

Dale was at his cube. Dale looked up as Genny arrived. Dale nodded at her.

“Congratulations.”

He said it like he had known.

Genny said thanks.

She sat down.

At 5:04 she left her cube. She got in her car. She drove.

She did not go home first. She had not brought different clothes. She was wearing what she had worn to work. A gray sweater. Dark pants. Sensible shoes. She had put on lipstick in the parking lot mirror. It was the lipstick she wore on days she wanted to look put together.

She had not driven to the address on Route 53 since the day she had passed the Doorman on the frontage road. She had routed around it for months. She had taken Ogden home some evenings just to avoid the stretch. Nobody had asked her why. Nobody had needed to.

She was driving to the address now.

She kept both hands on the wheel. She did not turn on the radio. She did not put the address in her navigation. She had not needed to look it up. She had, apparently, memorized it.

The drive to Route 53 took eleven minutes.

The parking lot was no longer a parking lot.

Where the gravel and weeds had been three months ago was a long low building. It was one story. It had a flat roof. It was clad in something that looked like corrugated metal but was probably not corrugated metal. It had windows along the front, warm-lit from inside. It had a door in the middle. It had a small sign next to the door, in dark lettering on cream, that read MAY SEASON STUDIO, and beneath that, in smaller letters, PRIVATE EVENT.

She parked in the row nearest the road.

She sat in the car with her hands on the wheel.

There was no gravel. There was no plumbing capped in short pipes. There was no concrete footprint of a building that had been there once. There was a building. There was a lot of parked cars. There were people in nice coats walking from the parking area toward the door.

She got out of her car.

She walked toward the building.

The Doorman was at the door.

He had on the same cream coat. The same gloves. His hands were folded the same way.

He opened the door for her as she reached him.

“Genny,” he said.

He said it the way he might have said the name at the top of a spreadsheet he had been reading all morning.

He held the door.

She went in.

Inside was a clean corporate event.

There were high tables with white cloths. There was a bar in the back. There was a small string quartet playing music that was pleasant enough to notice and quiet enough to talk over. There were people holding wine glasses in groups of three and four. There were servers moving through the room with trays.

The room was full. There were maybe eighty people. Genny did not recognize most of them.

She recognized some of them.

She recognized the man from the loading dock, the one in the corduroy button-down. He was not in corduroy tonight. He was in a suit. He was holding a wine glass. He was talking to a woman Genny did not know. He did not look at Genny.

She recognized the second tech from the Tech Bar. The one who had not spoken. He was in the same slate sweater. He was standing by the bar with a glass of water. He was looking at nothing in particular. He was, Genny thought, watching the whole room in a way that did not require him to move his eyes.

She recognized Monika.

Monika was near the string quartet. Monika was in a dress. Monika was talking to a woman with the kind of straight back that had been earned somewhere Genny had never been. Monika did not see her. Or Monika saw her and chose not to see her.

Genny took a glass of white wine from the tray a server offered her. She held it. She did not drink it.

She looked around the room again.

Half the people there were not quite people.

She could not have said what she meant by that. It was not a matter of visual difference. Everyone in the room was dressed normally. Everyone was holding a glass. Everyone was talking to someone else. Nobody had visible characteristics that would have identified them as anything other than professionals at a professional reception.

But half of them were not quite people.

Their movement was slightly off. Their timing. The way they laughed at the end of a sentence rather than during it. The way they held a glass a beat longer than they needed to before drinking from it. The way a group of three parted for a server without any of them appearing to notice the server.

Nobody commented on this. Nobody looked at anyone else with concern. The room was doing what a corporate reception did.

Genny held her wine.

“Genny.”

She turned.

Elaine was standing in front of her.

Elaine was a woman of average height in a dark suit. She had a folder in her hand. She had a professional demeanor. She had a face that was very carefully composed. She was, Genny noticed as she took her in, not blinking as often as a person blinked.

“I’m Elaine.”

“I gathered.”

Elaine smiled.

“Come with me. There is a quiet corner over there.”

Elaine walked. Genny followed. They stopped at a small round table near one of the windows, out of the flow of the room. Elaine set her folder on the table.

The folder was labeled with her name in oxblood ink, in the same handwriting Genny had by now seen many times.

Elaine sat down. Genny sat down.

“We have been watching you for a while.”

“I noticed.”

“Not disparagingly. Watching, in this context, is a courtesy. It is how we make sure someone is a match.”

“For what.”

“For Reality Alignment. Which is where you have just been placed.”

Genny did not respond.

Elaine continued.

“The team you were on for four years is one of our onboarding surfaces. Not the only one. But a good one. It attracts people who catalog carefully. It weeds out the ones who don’t. It puts the good candidates near enough to us that we can watch how they handle certain items when they encounter them.”

“The box.”

“Yes. The box.”

“Frank.”

“Frank was on the surface team for eleven years. He did well for most of them. He passed the box, before you. He was moved into Reality Alignment three years ago.”

“He’s not gone.”

“No. He is in a role in Reality Alignment that has slightly different characteristics from yours. You will see him around.”

Genny thought about this. She thought about Frank at his cube. Small block capitals. Coffee mug. Aloe plant. The sticky note in her drawer.

“What is Reality Alignment.”

“It is the company. The real one. The one you have worked for the whole time.”

Elaine said this without weight. She said it the way she might have said the office was on the third floor. She said it the way you might say the printer was down the hall on the right.

“Can I say no.”

Elaine tilted her head. She smiled. It was a kind smile.

“You already said yes when you checked the box.”

Genny looked at her.

Elaine slid the folder across the table.

“There is a welcome packet inside. Read it when you have time. Nothing in it will require action tonight. Congratulations, Genny. It is good to have you.”

She stood up. She walked away, into the room, and was absorbed into a group of three at one of the high tables.

Genny sat with the folder on the table in front of her.

She did not open it.

She stood up. She set her wine glass on the table. She walked to the door. The Doorman opened it as she reached him. He did not say anything this time. He just held the door.

She stepped out.

She got in her car.

She drove.

The drive home was ten minutes. It felt like ten minutes. The clock on the dashboard confirmed it. She did not lose any of it.

She sat at a red light three blocks from her apartment.

Her notebook was in the passenger seat. She had brought it out to the car in the morning. She had not taken it into the reception. She had left it in the car.

She looked at it.

She opened it.

The card was inside. The invitation card. Cream paper. Oxblood ink. Her name in handwriting she had by now known for months.

The date on it, in the same handwriting, was today’s date.

She sat with the notebook open at the red light. The car behind her honked. The light was green. She had not seen it turn.

She drove through the intersection.

She parked. She went into her apartment. She set her bag on the counter. She got the notebook out.

The card was where she had put it. She turned to the last written page and turned forward, to where the card had been tucked into the back cover.

Behind the card, tucked against the last sheet of paper, was a small sealed envelope.

Cream paper. Oxblood ink. Addressed to her parents.

She had not put it there.

She had checked the box.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, internal transitions take effect the morning they are announced. employees are informed of the scope of a new role at the appropriate time. congratulations are customary.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Reality Alignment has been operating this whole time. Some of its work is already on file.

Begin with:

The Company That Regulates Reality - the premise, stated plainly by the company, which reads differently now

Professional Development - Monika and Genny across a table, two years before the reception

The Lunch Hour - an ordinary hour on the surface team, which is what the surface team is for

Part twelve arrives next Friday.

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by Gintare O.

preceding file: Business Case: Wrap-Assist L12 / the program the committee approved in eleven minutes, and what happened to it that June

The test was scheduled for four and ran late. That is why there was only one person in the room.

The Joliet facility had a demonstration space on the east side, built the year before for this kind of work. It was a living room. Couch, rug, coffee table, floor lamp, a bookshelf with books on it, curtains on a window that faced the rest of the warehouse. There was no outside on the other side of it. Consumer Innovation had specified the room. Facilities had built it. You could not evaluate a countertop appliance in a lab. You had to put it where it would live.

A counter ran along one wall with a cabinet above it. Unit six sat on the counter, one of thirteen Wrap-Assist L12 prototypes built that spring for the Joliet testing cycle. The program had been approved in February. This was the summer bench run, ahead of a fall manufacturing commit that was not supposed to move.

Tom Bailey was twenty-six and had been at the company fourteen months. He reported to Mark Sullivan, who reported to Diane Foster, who owned the program. His title was test engineer. He ran the sequence someone else wrote and logged what happened.

That afternoon was coverage validation on irregular objects. Nine objects, each placed in the recess, wrapped, photographed, measured, logged. He had done seven. They sat on the coffee table in a row, wrapped, immaculate.

Mark left at four twenty for a call. He told Tom to finish the last two and go home.

Object eight was a bicycle helmet.

Tom placed it in the recess and stepped back. The unit began the way it always began, without a sound. Material fed. The helmet turned. The wrap came up over the shell and the vents and closed at the crown. Tom was writing it down when he noticed the unit had not stopped.

The helmet was covered. He could see that it was covered. The unit kept feeding.

He waited eleven seconds. He knows it was eleven because the room camera was running. Then he reached in.

He told Legal, twice, that he reached in to remove the object. That is true. It is not the whole truth. He reached in the way anyone reaches into a machine they do not understand, which is without a plan.

The unit assessed his hand.

There is no evidence, in the footage or the logs, that it made a decision. It did not pause. It did not change modes. There was no error state, then or at any point in the next forty minutes. That fact would matter more than any other, later, to more people than Tom.

It had a new object.

The wrap went up his forearm in under two seconds. Fast, neat, not tight. That was the part he could never make anyone understand afterward. It did not squeeze. It did not hurt. It also did not stop.

He pulled. The material did not tear and did not stretch. It came with him, and the unit fed more to compensate.

He got his arm out of the recess and the unit came with it, off the counter and onto the floor, still feeding.

Tom said a word. It is on the audio.

He backed into the coffee table and went down. The wrap reached his shoulder. He got his other hand on the housing and found nothing to grip. No button, no seam, no switch. The absence of controls had been the product’s best feature.

He rolled. The wrap took the rug.

After that it was no longer about him. The rug was an object, soft-sided and irregular, touching a partly wrapped object. The unit assessed the whole of it and continued.

The rug went in under thirty seconds. Then the coffee table, because the rug was under it. Then the seven finished objects on top of the table, wrapped again. Then the couch. Then the floor lamp, which fell and was wrapped where it fell. The light stayed on inside it for a while. Then it went out.

Tom was against the bookshelf by then, his arm, shoulder and half his chest covered, his legs still working. He stood up. He said later he was never held, that he could move the whole time, and that this was the worst part. The wrap kept up with him. It did not restrain him. It went along.

The bookshelf went next, book by book. The unit had time.

He made it to the door. The handle was already wrapped. The wrap had reached the wall, and the wall touched the door.

He turned around. The wrap was climbing the walls in an even spiral. The curtains were half gone. He told Legal it looked beautiful. Legal took that out of the account.

There was a fire alarm pull on the east wall. He could not reach it. He shouted. The room had acoustic treatment, because Consumer Innovation had asked for it, because you cannot evaluate a countertop appliance with warehouse noise in the room.

At four fifty-one a facilities tech named Gary Patterson walked past to check a filter. He saw metallic ribbon coming out from under the door.

It took Gary and two others eleven minutes to cut Tom out with box knives. The knives worked. The material released cleanly. It was engineered to. A recipient should never struggle with the wrap.

Tom walked out on his own. No cuts. No bruising. Nothing broken. The intake exam that evening found him uninjured.

The unit was still working when they left the room. It had the ceiling to do.

MEMORANDUM

To: D. Foster, Consumer Innovation; M. Sullivan, Engineering

From: Office of the General Counsel

Re: L12 Program, Preliminary Liability Assessment

Privileged and Confidential. Attorney Work Product.

This memorandum summarizes our preliminary assessment of the company’s exposure from the June 14 event at the Joliet testing facility. It is not a safety analysis. We recommend Engineering commission one.

1. Employee exposure. Minimal. Tom sustained no physical injury. Intake exam that evening was unremarkable. We anticipate no workers’ compensation claim. He has returned to duty.

2. The employee’s account. We interviewed him twice. His account is consistent, credible, and, in our assessment, unusable. He describes the unit’s behavior in terms that attribute intention to it. He calls the event beautiful. He says repeatedly that he was never restrained and that the unit accompanied him. Under cross-examination this testimony would harm the company, not because it is false, but because it is vivid. We recommend no further statements and no additions to the two existing interviews.

3. Root cause. There is none, and this drives everything below. Engineering confirms no malfunction, no error state, no deviation from spec, no defect in materials or workmanship. The unit performed within design parameters for the full event. Every log is clean.

A defect can be corrected and disclosed. A product that works exactly as designed and produces this outcome cannot be called defective, and therefore cannot be called fixed. We could not support any representation that the issue has been resolved.

4. Design record. This is our main concern.

The February business case states, at section 5, that the unit “feeds material continuously until the object is fully covered” and that “the wrap completes when the wrap is complete. The unit determines this internally.” It states that consumption is “not consumer-controlled” and calls this favorable. Section 12 describes the product as “a machine that decides on its own how much material it needs, and it decides generously, and it never stops until it is done.”

We understand the length setting was removed as a deliberate engineering decision, documented in the same materials. We could not argue a safeguard was overlooked. We would be arguing it was considered, costed, and removed because its absence improved cartridge attach rate. We do not recommend making that argument.

5. Disclosure. No regulatory disclosure obligation applies at this time. The event occurred at a company facility, involved a company employee, and involved a product not yet in commerce. That changes at first retail sale.

6. Recommendation. Counsel recommends the L12 program not proceed to manufacture.

This is a program decision, not a legal one. We can say we see no version of this product we could defend after an event like this in a consumer home, and based on the design record in section 4, we consider that event likely, not merely possible.

7. Records. Pending the program decision, the demonstration space footage, the unit logs and the two interviews should be preserved and access-restricted. The program’s working documents should not be edited. There is no version of this in which the February business case is improved by revision. There are several in which the attempt is fatal.

We are available at the committee’s convenience.

The program was reclassified from innovation to liability the following week.

Tom Bailey was moved off L12 and onto a packaging concept two floors up. He was told it was a lateral move. It was. He kept the job another year and then he didn’t.

The thirteen units were crated and shipped to storage at the Joliet facility. The power was cut. They sat against the far wall behind quarantine tape until somebody in Corrective Operations got an email about them, months later, at 7:42 in the morning.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, product testing happens in rooms built to look like nowhere in particular. this entry documents what happened when a countertop appliance approved in eleven minutes was left alone with an engineer for the length of one afternoon. the business case called the absence of controls the product’s best feature. this is the afternoon that tested that claim.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Before the paperwork, there was the afternoon that produced it.

Begin with:

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by Gintare O.

PRECEDING FILES

Onboarding / 01 / The Smell

Onboarding / 02 / The Invitation

Onboarding / 03 / Parking Lot

Onboarding / 04 / Frank

Onboarding / 05 / The Catalog

Onboarding / 06 / Good

Onboarding / 07 / The Loading Dock

Onboarding / 08 / The Tech Bar

Onboarding / 09 / The Card

The next morning she came in at 7:58. She did her queue. She took the stairs. This was, she noticed, a small change she was making to her life. She made it without discussing it with anyone.

Two weeks passed.

She did not receive another calendar invite from Christina.

She did not hear Christina’s name at the office.

She had assumed, quietly, that the invite had been an administrative mistake. Not the wellness part. The Genny part. Something had gone out to a name it had not been meant for. That was a thing she could hold.

Then, on a Tuesday, Christina found her at the lobby Starbucks.

Genny was in line for a refill. She had decided today would be a normal day. She had told herself this several times before getting in the elevator to come down.

She was second in line when a person she did not immediately place slid up beside her and said her name.

She turned.

It was Christina.

Christina worked in HR-adjacent capacity. Everyone said HR-adjacent because Christina had a title nobody had ever quite learned. She was often in the building. She was frequently in meetings that were not on any calendar. She had a pleasant face and a professional demeanor and a way of holding a folder against her chest that suggested she was always in the middle of finishing something for someone.

She had never spoken to Genny in person before.

“Hi Genny. Do you mind if I sit with you for a minute.”

Genny had not asked to sit. Genny had been in line.

“Sure.”

Christina went to a table by the window. Genny got her coffee and joined her.

Christina had already ordered. Her cup was in front of her, hot enough to steam. She had not touched it.

“How are you settling in.”

Genny had been at MSS for four years.

“Fine,” she said. “Thank you for asking.”

“That’s good. That’s very good. Just checking in, since you’re such an important part of the team.”

Genny watched her. Christina’s face was composed. It was composed in the specific way a face is composed when the person is running through a list they have practiced.

“Has anything felt unusual lately.”

Genny did not answer immediately. She was thinking about all the words that could be true and all the ones that could not.

“No.”

Christina watched her for a moment. It was a beat longer than a moment. Then she smiled, gently.

“Good. We like things usual.”

She reached into her folder. She took out a small card. It was cream. Thick. The kind of paper Genny had held before.

She slid it across the table.

There was one word on it in oxblood ink.

Elaine.

No title. No phone number. No email. Just the name.

“If anything does feel unusual, you call Elaine. Not me. Not HR. Not Karen. Elaine.”

Genny looked at the card.

“How do I call someone without a number.”

Christina smiled again. Same gentleness.

“You’ll know.”

She stood up.

She left the coffee on the table, untouched, still steaming.

She was gone before Genny had picked up the card.

Genny sat at the table for another minute. She looked at the coffee. She looked at the card. She did not touch either.

Then she put the card in her bag, in the inside zipper pocket, where the invitation had lived, in the pocket she never used.

She got up.

She walked back to her cube.

The notebook, in her drawer, was where she had left it.

She put the card next to it.

Then she closed the drawer.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, employees are given a point of contact for anything that falls outside normal operations. the point of contact is a name. employees who need it have never had difficulty reaching it.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The company has a process for this. Several of its steps are documented.

Begin with:

HR Memo: Personal Care - how the company addresses its employees about things they may have noticed

Compliance Notice: Narrative Drift Detected - what gets sent when an employee’s account stops matching the record

Exit Interview: Surface Division - the conversation at the other end of the process

Part eleven arrives next Friday.

Leave a comment

by Gintare O.

PRECEDING FILES

Onboarding / 01 / The Smell

Onboarding / 02 / The Invitation

Onboarding / 03 / Parking Lot

Onboarding / 04 / Frank

Onboarding / 05 / The Catalog

Onboarding / 06 / Good

Onboarding / 07 / The Loading Dock

Onboarding / 08 / The Tech Bar

She followed the warning.

She was already closing everything at 4:55. She was already logged out of Ledger by 4:57. She was already standing up from her desk at 4:59 and out of the building by 5:04. She had been doing this for weeks. What Frank’s note had asked of her was not, therefore, a new habit. It was the habit she already had, in writing, from somebody who had thought she needed to keep having it.

She kept having it.

She did not log in from home. She did not check her work email on her phone. She did not open the notebook at her desk. The notebook lived in the drawer, on top of the granola bar, which sat there wrapped as she had left it.

She did not think about the loading dock.

She did not think about the truck.

She did not think about Frank.

She did think about him. She thought about him quietly, at home, at the kitchen counter, with the notebook closed in front of her. She thought about him the way a person thinks about somebody they had known well enough to feel bad about not knowing better. She had not thought Frank was her friend. She had thought Frank was somebody she worked near. Both of those had been true and neither was fully true anymore.

Nine days passed.

At the office nothing happened.

Karen worked on Blake. Karen worked on Dale, more gently. Karen worked on her queue, which she did on the days when she was not working on other people. Dale was doing well. Blake was doing what Blake did. The office ran.

On the sixth day of the nine, Karen came to her cube.

Genny braced. Karen came to a cube for one of three reasons and none of them were pleasant.

Karen was holding a printout.

“Genny.”

“Yes.”

“This is the Halloran deck. The section on cold weather packaging.”

“Okay.”

“You used Helvetica for the section headers. I would use Helvetica Neue Light. It’s cleaner. I think it will land better.”

Karen said this gently. It was not a lecture. It was not a correction. It was an observation from one professional to another.

She waited for Genny to respond.

“I’ll change it. Thanks.”

“Great.”

Karen left.

Genny sat with her hands on the desk for a full minute after Karen was gone.

Karen being gentle at her was worse than Karen being sharp at her. Karen being sharp at her was, at least, Karen. Karen being gentle at her was somebody else operating a Karen.

She put on her headphones.

She did not play anything through them.

She did the font change.

On the seventh day, a calendar invite arrived at 11:14 AM.

Sender: Christina.

Subject: Wellness Check-In.

Duration: 20 minutes.

Location: Conference Room 4C.

Time: Friday, 3:00 PM.

Body: Hi Genny. Just a quick touch-base to see how you’re doing. Please confirm.

Genny read the invite twice.

She did not confirm.

She opened the shared drive. The MSS building had five floors. The floor plans, printed as PDFs and kept on the shared drive, showed all conference rooms on each floor. She opened the floor plan for floor 3. It had 3A, 3B, 3C, and 3D. She opened the floor plan for floor 5. It had 5A and 5B. She looked for floor 4. The shared drive had a placeholder PDF for floor 4, but the PDF was a page-sized outline of the building footprint with nothing inside it. No rooms. No labels. No hallways.

Conference Room 4C did not appear on any floor plan that existed.

She closed the PDFs. She still did not confirm.

At 2:45 Friday, the meeting rescheduled to Tuesday at 2:00 PM.

At 1:47 Tuesday, the meeting rescheduled to Thursday at 8:00 PM.

She read the update twice. Then she opened a reply.

Hi Christina, she wrote. 8 PM is outside my usual hours. Would it be possible to meet during the workday? Please let me know if there’s any flexibility.

She hit send at 1:49.

Christina replied at 1:51.

Hi Genny, so sorry for the shifting. Unfortunately the earlier windows are all booked through end of month. Thursday evening was the last availability I had. It should only take twenty minutes. Thanks for making it work.

Genny read the reply.

It was a reasonable email. It sounded like the emails HR people sent when their calendars were full. It sounded, in fact, like every reply to every calendar conflict Genny had ever seen at any company where she had ever worked.

It was also, she noticed, the most Christina had ever said to her in writing.

She thought about pushing back again. She thought about asking whether the check-in could move to next week. She thought about how a person who was hiding something looked when they declined a wellness check-in after two reschedules and a polite email exchange. She thought about the fact that meetings do not usually move, and about the fact that this one had moved twice, and about the fact that Christina was, for the first time, being wordy.

She confirmed the Thursday 8:00 PM slot at 3:41 Tuesday afternoon.

Thursday she left the building at 5:04, drove home, ate dinner, and drove back at 7:15. She parked in her regular row. The parking lot was mostly empty. She badged into the building through the side entrance, which was open until midnight. Her badge worked. That was, in a way, information.

She sat in her car until 7:40 with the notebook on her lap, unopened.

Then she went in.

She took the elevator up to floor 3. She walked the third floor from end to end. There was no Conference Room 4C. There was 3A through 3D, exactly as the floor plan had shown. She checked the meeting room reservation panels on the wall next to each. None showed a Wellness Check-In at 8:00 PM. None showed her name.

She took the stairs to floor 5.

There was no Conference Room 4C. There was 5A and 5B, both dark. She checked the reservation panels. Nothing.

She stood in the hallway of floor 5. It was 7:53 PM.

She thought about pressing the elevator call button and getting off between floors. She thought about how you would do that. She did not know how you would do that.

She got back in the elevator. She looked at the panel.

The panel had buttons for 1, 2, 3, and 5. It had a button for G, and a button for B. Between 3 and 5 there was a gap where a fourth-floor button would have been, if the fourth floor existed on the panel, which it did not, and had not, in her four years of riding the elevator.

There was a mark in the gap tonight.

It was not a button. It was not raised. It was a faint discoloration in the metal, roughly the size and shape of a button, exactly where the fourth-floor button would have been.

She looked at it.

She did not touch it.

She pressed 3.

The elevator went down to 3. The doors opened. Nobody was in the hallway. She stepped out and walked to Conference Room 3B and looked in. It was empty. She walked to Conference Room 3D. Also empty. She turned around and went back to the elevator.

Her phone buzzed.

Meeting cancellation. Sender: Christina. Subject line: Wellness Check-In has been withdrawn. Time stamp: 8:00 PM.

She stood in the hallway of floor 3 with her phone in her hand. It was 8:00 PM on her phone.

She got back in the elevator at 8:01. She pressed G.

She was going to look at the mark just once and then not again.

The mark was glowing.

Not brightly. The kind of glow you noticed only because the elevator was dim and the mark was slightly warmer than the surface around it. A faint softness, the way a phone screen glows through a pocket.

Nobody had pressed anything.

She had not pressed anything.

The elevator started down. She watched the mark. She was going to stop watching it. She kept watching it. She was going to look away. She looked at it.

The doors opened at G. The mark was no longer glowing.

She stepped out.

The lobby clock said 9:02.

She had gotten into the elevator on floor 3 at 8:01. She had ridden three floors down.

She checked her phone. Her phone said 9:02.

She walked out to her car.

She sat in the car for a while before she started it. She did not feel afraid, exactly. She felt the specific quiet that came from something having happened that would not fit in any of the categories she filed things into. She had, in her life, lost fifteen minutes on occasion, or twenty. She had never lost an hour and been able to say where she had lost it.

She drove home.

She stood in her kitchen with the notebook open on the counter and did not write anything for a long time. Then she wrote the date and, on the next line, only: elevator, 8:01 to 9:02. She closed the notebook.

She got in bed. She lay in the dark for a while and eventually slept.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, wellness check-ins are offered to all employees and are entirely voluntary. rooms are booked based on availability. the floor plans on the shared drive are current.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The building has five floors. This has been documented elsewhere.

Begin with:

HR Advisory: Sustained Visual Engagement - guidance on what employees should not look at, and for how long

The Annual Review - another meeting, another twenty minutes, another room

The Company That Regulates Reality - the premise, stated by the company, which helps here

Part ten arrives next Friday.

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by Gintare O.

Consumer Innovation. Prepared for the Q4 program committee. February.

Prepared by: D. Reinhardt, Program Lead

Financial modeling: R. Thibault, Finance Partner

Engineering input: W. Farrow

1. RECOMMENDATION

Approve the L12 program for tooling and a fall manufacturing slot. Payback in nineteen months at base case. Twelve months at upside. The program is accretive in year two under every scenario modeled, including the downside.

2. THE OPPORTUNITY

Gift wrapping is the last unautomated step in an otherwise fully automated purchase. A consumer can select, buy, and ship a gift in under a minute and then spend eleven minutes wrapping it badly on a floor.

Survey base of 2,400 households: 81% report enjoying gift-giving, 74% report dreading the wrapping. Average household wraps 9 to 22 items per Q4 season.

The category has no incumbent. Existing consumer wrapping products are template-based, require a rectangular object, and have never achieved shelf presence outside of specialty retail. L12 does not use a template and does not require the object to be any particular shape.

3. THE MODEL

L12 is a razor-and-blades program. This is the central financial fact and the committee should evaluate the program on this basis and no other.

Unit economics:

- Retail price, unit: $189

- COGS, unit: $164

- Contribution, unit: $25 (13.2%)

Cartridge economics:

- Retail price, cartridge: $14

- COGS, cartridge: $3.10

- Contribution, cartridge: $10.90 (77.9%)

The unit is not the business. The unit is the acquisition cost of a cartridge customer. We would sell the unit at cost if retail would let us.

4. ATTACH RATE

Everything in this case depends on cartridges per household per year.

Base case: 6.0 cartridges/household/year.

Downside: 4.0.

Upside: 9.0.

These figures come from the Joliet bench cycle and are, in Finance’s assessment, conservative. The basis for that assessment is in section 5.

5. CONSUMPTION BEHAVIOR

The L12 does not meter material against a preset length. It has no length setting. Engineering removed it early in the program because a length setting is a way for the consumer to get the wrap wrong, and every wrong wrap is a returned unit.

Instead the unit assesses the object and feeds material continuously until the object is fully covered. The wrap completes when the wrap is complete. The unit determines this internally.

The financial implication is favorable and is worth stating plainly.

Under a metered model, consumption is capped by the setting. The consumer chooses “small,” the unit uses the small amount, and the cartridge lasts. Under the L12 model, consumption is determined by the unit’s own assessment of completion. The consumer does not control it. The consumer does not participate in it.

In bench testing, material consumption per object ran 30% to 60% above what a comparable metered device would have used on the same object. Engineering has characterized this as a coverage quality result. Finance characterizes it as attach rate.

Both characterizations are correct. We are noting the alignment because it is rare.

6. RUNTIME AND POWER

The unit has no cord and no charging behavior.

The internal system was validated across an eleven-month bench cycle with no degradation observed. Projected runtime under normal household use is measured in years.

Financially this matters for two reasons. First, no charging behavior means no charging failure, which means no return. Second, and more importantly: a unit that is always available is a unit that is always consuming. A corded appliance gets unplugged and put in a cupboard in January. L12 sits on the counter, ready, for the whole calendar year. The secondary-occasion revenue in section 7 depends entirely on this.

7. SEASONALITY

Q4 is the beachhead, not the business.

Category history is littered with holiday products that took a Q4 number to committee and could not survive Q1. Our answer is occasion breadth: birthdays, weddings, showers, graduations. The average household has 14 gifting occasions annually outside of December.

Base case has 41% of cartridge volume falling outside Q4 by year two. This is the single most important assumption in the model and it holds only if the unit stays on the counter, which is why section 6 is a revenue argument and not an engineering footnote.

8. MATERIAL

Proprietary. Single-source. Cartridge-based.

The unit does not accept third-party material. This is presented internally as a quality decision and should continue to be presented that way. It is also the entire moat. A third-party cartridge at $6 destroys the case in section 3 and there is no version of this program that survives it.

Procurement is modeling a second supplier for volume assurance, not for price competition.

9. VOLUME AND PAYBACK

Year one: 240,000 units, 1.1M cartridges.

Year two: 310,000 units, 3.4M cartridges.

Year three: 355,000 units, 5.9M cartridges.

Cartridge volume overtakes unit volume in month fourteen and never looks back. That crossover is the program.

Tooling and program investment: $31.2M.

Payback, base case: 19 months.

Payback, upside: 12 months.

Payback, downside: 27 months.

The downside case still clears the hurdle rate. Finance’s position is that this program does not have a plausible scenario in which it fails to return.

10. RISKS

Cartridge supply. Single-source material at holiday volume is the largest exposure in the program. Mitigation: second supplier qualification, in progress.

Margin compression. If retail pushes unit price below $175 the razor thins to a point where the blade math has to carry more. Mitigation: hold the floor. Requesting committee support.

Attach rate below 4.0. Would extend payback past the hurdle. Finance assesses this as unlikely given section 5. The consumption mechanism is not consumer-controlled, which removes the primary source of attach-rate variance in comparable programs.

Consumer education. The absence of controls is the product’s best feature and its hardest advertisement. Consumers look for buttons. Mitigation: in-store demonstration, fall.

January returns. Standard for countertop appliances. Budgeted at 8%.

11. TIMELINE

Prototype build, thirteen units: spring.

Internal testing, Joliet: summer.

Demo floor and leadership preview: early fall.

Manufacturing commit: fall.

Retail: Q4.

The fall window does not move.

12. ASK

Program approval. $31.2M tooling and program investment. Fall manufacturing slot.

The case is simple. We are not selling a machine. We are selling a machine that decides on its own how much material it needs, and it decides generously, and it never stops until it is done.

Committee action: Approved.

Discussion: eleven minutes.

Dissent: none.

Conditions: none.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, program approval requires a documented business case and a committee vote. the l12 case was complete and the modeling was sound. every figure in it held.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Thirteen prototype units were built in the spring. The files pick up from there.

Begin with:

The fall window did not move.

Leave a comment

by Gintare O.

PRECEDING FILES

Onboarding / 01 / The Smell

Onboarding / 02 / The Invitation

Onboarding / 03 / Parking Lot

Onboarding / 04 / Frank

Onboarding / 05 / The Catalog

Onboarding / 06 / Good

Onboarding / 07 / The Loading Dock

She waited until Tuesday.

Monday had felt too eager. She did not want to walk into the basement looking like a person who had come down twenty minutes after a problem showed up. She wanted to walk in looking like a person who had had a routine issue and was submitting a routine ticket. It was the kind of distinction that mattered downstairs. She had learned that the last time.

Tuesday morning she filled out the ticket at 8:32. Category: data integrity. Subcategory: Ledger records missing. Description, one line: records I reviewed last week no longer appear in the system and my activity log does not show I accessed them. She hit submit.

The ticket confirmed itself with an autoreply and an appointment window. 10:00 to 10:15. Walk-in okay if she got there early.

She got there early.

She rode the elevator down. The elevator was the only reliable route to the lower levels. Certain stairwells stopped at ground. Others stopped at two. Nobody had ever explained this and Genny had stopped asking a long time ago. She had, if she was being honest, stopped noticing.

The elevator opened on a hallway she remembered.

Cold air. A buzz overhead that was slightly louder than the one on her floor. Recessed lighting. A T-intersection at the end. She turned right, toward the Tech Bar. She did not look at what was down the other direction. She had never looked at what was down the other direction. She was not going to start today.

The sign outside the door read the same as it had a year ago.

MAY SEASON STUDIO

END USER SUPPORT

TECH BAR. WALK INS WELCOME.

The tired-eyed smiley face someone had drawn next to it was still there. It had faded a little. Nobody had refreshed it.

She pushed the door open.

The Tech Bar was doing what the Tech Bar did. Tall counters. Rolling chairs. Labeled cables coiled on hooks. The dented coffee maker was clicking. Fall harvest decorations were up on the wall, orange garland and a paper cornstalk taped to the side of a filing cabinet. Somebody had committed. The theme was more aggressive than it needed to be.

Three techs were behind the counter. All in slate sweaters. All calm. She recognized one of them.

Rowan looked up as she stepped in.

“Genny.”

He said it before she said anything.

“Hi.”

“Product Classification. Thirty lifetime tickets. Missing records. Should take fifteen minutes.”

He said it the way he said everything, in the register of a person delivering weather. He turned a screen toward the second tech, who nodded, and then he took her laptop from her without her having offered it.

“Sit,” Rowan said.

She sat in the rolling chair that had been slid behind her while she was noticing the garland. The shorter tech had done it. She had not seen the shorter tech move.

Rowan opened her laptop. He did not ask her to log in. She was not sure whether he needed her to. The screen woke to her home directory. She watched it populate as though he were watching it too, though he was on a screen behind the counter she could not see.

“Ledger.”

“Yes.”

“Frank’s queue.”

“Yes.”

“Records you reviewed last Monday.”

“Yes.”

“Gone.”

“Yes.”

“Your activity log for that date does not show them.”

“Yes.”

“On the local cache or in the backend.”

“Both. Neither one shows I viewed them.”

Rowan did not look up. He was doing something with his own screen. The keys were quiet, or he was moving fingers over keys that were not there, or he was reading. She could not tell.

“Anything else been not working.”

She thought about this before answering.

She thought about the card.

She thought about the calendar app that was not on her phone.

She thought about the photograph that had never happened.

She thought about the notebook that had picked up a smell it had not lost and gained a second smell she had not named.

“No.”

Rowan nodded, once. He kept working.

He finished whatever he had been finishing.

“The records are not recoverable,” he said. “There is no record they existed. That is not the same as their not having existed. It is a limit of what our systems tell us.”

He phrased it like a policy statement.

“I understand.”

“We will file the ticket as resolved. Cause. User reports missing records. Resolution. No recovery possible. Note added. Recommend user document important queue findings in physical form when possible.”

She looked at him.

He was looking at his screen.

She looked back at her lap.

He closed the laptop. He slid it back toward her across the counter.

“Anything else.”

“No.”

“Signature.”

She signed the handheld. He thanked her. She stood up. The rolling chair was pulled from behind her by the shorter tech, who she had again not seen move. She stepped out from between the counter and the chair and picked up her laptop and started to turn.

Rowan reached under the counter and pulled out a granola bar.

He set it on the counter in front of her.

“For the walk back,” he said.

“Oh. Thanks.”

She picked it up. It was one of the chocolate chip ones. Her preferred flavor. She had not told them her preferred flavor at any point across her thirty lifetime tickets. She had simply, over four years, eaten enough of the ones she liked and left the ones she did not that the Tech Bar had, apparently, kept a note.

“We see a lot of stress eating in your part of the building lately.”

He said it as if it were a maintenance observation. As if he were telling her the third floor east side kept running hot.

He turned back to his screen.

She said thanks again. She left.

The elevator back up was empty. She rode alone, staring at the ceiling panel, holding the laptop against her chest with one arm and the granola bar in her other hand.

She did not unwrap it in the elevator. She did not unwrap it in the lobby. She did not unwrap it in the hallway.

She sat back down at her cube at 10:23. Karen was in a meeting. Dale was on a call. Blake was doing the thing Blake did, which was to be at his desk in a way that suggested he had never left.

She set the laptop on the docking station. She sat. She put the granola bar on her desk in front of her keyboard.

She looked at it.

The wrapper was the standard wrapper. Yellow. The brand she recognized. The barcode in the corner. Nothing wrong with it that a wrapper could show from the outside.

She peeled the top open along the seam. She pulled the bar out an inch and set it back on the desk. She turned the wrapper over so the inside was facing her.

There was writing on the inside of the wrapper.

Pencil. Small block capitals. She recognized the hand.

It was Frank’s.

STOP OPENING FILES AFTER SIX.

She read it three times, the way she had read the card, the way she read anything now that mattered. It did not become five words. It did not become nine.

She turned the wrapper back over. She slid the granola bar back into it. She rewrapped the top the way it had been.

She did not eat it.

She got the notebook out of her drawer. She opened it to a fresh page and wrote the date at the top. On the next line she wrote, in careful letters: 6 PM.

Then, underneath: Tuesday. Tech Bar. Rowan.

She closed the notebook. She put the granola bar on top of the notebook. She closed the drawer.

She put her headphones on.

She did not play anything through them.

She thought about the fact that Frank had, at some point during the eleven years he had been at MSS, made friends with the Tech Bar.

She thought about what a person had to be doing to need friends in the Tech Bar.

She thought about Rowan.

She thought about the second tech, who she had not really seen, who had slid the chair behind her, and behind her again, and had written nothing on a sticky note the whole time, and had watched her the whole time.

She started her queue.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, end user support resolves the majority of tickets within one visit. technicians may add recommendations to the resolution note. these are advisory and are not tracked.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The Tech Bar has been visited before. The service is consistent.

Begin with:

Service Request - an earlier ticket, another trip to the basement, the same slate sweaters

Now Live: Incident Intake, Modernized - what IT Services says about its own systems

The Standing Order - the case for keeping the important records on paper

Part nine arrives next Friday.

Leave a comment

by Gintare O.

The new incident reporting platform is live now. Intake for Corrective Operations has moved off the old forms and spreadsheets and into a single system.

Highlights:

- One queue. Every report lands in one place, sorted by date, visible to the routing team the moment it is filed.

- Faster routing. Managers move each item to its outcome (closed, escalated, held, returned) in a click. When the outcome is set, the item clears the queue.

- Real-time visibility. A live dashboard tracks volume, clearance rate, and average time to clear.

Field teams: file from your phone and keep it moving. Routing team: keep the queue current.

Questions go to the Service Desk. Welcome aboard.

IT Services

AUTHOR'S NOTE

at may season studio, we are always improving our tools. the new platform reduces average time to clear by a significant margin. what an item clears into is outside the scope of this release.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Corrective Operations has been filing these reports for years. Several are on record.

Leave a comment

by Gintare O.

PRECEDING FILES:

Onboarding / 01 / The Smell

Onboarding / 02 / The Invitation

Onboarding / 03 / Parking Lot

Onboarding / 04 / Frank

Onboarding / 05 / The Catalog

Onboarding / 06 / Good

She sat with the notebook on the counter until it was dark outside.

She did not open it. She did not touch it. She sat with a glass of wine she had opened and had not planned to open and looked at the notebook and thought about what she had seen.

She had seen a delivery truck without markings drive onto the MSS campus at 2:14 PM on a Saturday. She had seen an emblem she recognized from somewhere she was still not letting herself place. She had run into a coworker who had asked her about a Friday nobody should have known she had been thinking about, and who had said one word about her staying home, and had gone.

Both of these were separate events. She was trying to keep them separate. The problem was that they had happened on the same afternoon, in the same three-block radius, in the same hour of her life, which meant they were connected, which meant something had chosen for them to happen in sequence.

She had not known that MSS did anything on weekends. She had not thought about it. She had assumed the campus was closed the way an office is closed. Which was to say the way she had assumed everything.

She was going to have to see.

She was not going to have to see tonight.

She poured out the wine. She went to bed.

Sunday she drove out to the campus at 10:00 AM.

She had thought about the timing. If a truck had gone in at 2:14 Saturday, another might not come until later Sunday, but she did not know the pattern. She had picked 10:00 because it was the earliest time she could imagine anything happening and the latest time she could still be back home for lunch and pretend she had done something else with her morning.

She did not drive onto the campus. She drove to the forest preserve across from the campus entrance, which was the same lot she had pulled into Saturday afternoon. She parked at the far end, past the trailhead sign, where her car would not be visible from the MSS drive.

She had a book with her, which she had brought so she could look like she was reading if anyone came by. She had a coffee she had bought at the gas station on the way. She had her phone. She had the notebook, because the notebook was in her bag, and she had stopped taking it out of her bag.

She sat and watched the campus.

The MSS building was five stories tall. It sat at the back of a large lot with parking on three sides and a long service drive around the back. She could see the front of the building and the west side and, at an angle, the back where the loading dock was. She could not see the loading dock itself. She could see the driveway that led to it.

For the first thirty minutes nothing happened.

At 10:34 a car she did not recognize turned into the campus drive. A silver sedan. It went around the building to the back. She could not see where it stopped.

At 10:52 a plain white truck turned in. Same shape as the one from Saturday. She could not tell from her distance whether it had the same emblem. It also went to the back.

At 11:07 another truck. Different color. Dark green. It went to the back.

At 11:24 the silver sedan came back out. It turned onto Route 53 and drove north.

At 11:41 another silver sedan turned in. Different plate. Same model. It went around to the back.

She was watching a rhythm. It was steady. It was managed.

She sat with her book on the seat next to her, unopened.

She needed a better view.

She waited until 12:15, when there had been no activity for twenty minutes, and drove up the service drive on the far side of the property. This was a public road. It ran between the MSS campus and the forest preserve on the other side. It was, on a Sunday, empty.

She drove slowly. She kept her eyes forward. She was not looking for anything. She was, if anyone had asked, cutting through to another road on the far side.

Halfway down the service drive she reached the point where the back of the MSS building was closest. The loading dock was on this side, at ground level, with the bay doors facing out toward the drive. There was a low chain link fence between the drive and the campus. It had signs on it. Authorized personnel only.

The bay doors were open.

She slowed. She did not stop.

There were four people at the loading dock. They were unloading boxes from a truck. It was the same shape truck she had followed on Saturday. It might have been the same truck.

The four people were not wearing anything that suggested a job. No uniforms. No name tags. No high-visibility vests, no coveralls, no hard hats. They wore what people wore on a Saturday afternoon. One had a fleece pullover. One had a hoodie. One wore jeans and a plain t-shirt. One wore a corduroy button-down like a person going to brunch.

They were unloading small boxes. The boxes were the same size and shape as the one that had come to her cube. Cream colored. Sealed with a strip of tape that was the color of oxblood ink.

There were a lot of them.

The person in the corduroy button-down looked up.

He did not have Genny’s angle at first. He was facing the truck, moving a box off the tailgate. He turned his head as she was passing, at the exact wrong moment, and their eyes met through her windshield.

He did not move.

He did not call anyone. He did not put down the box. He did not gesture to the others. He held the box against his chest and he watched her drive past.

She looked away.

She kept driving. She did not speed up. She reached the end of the service drive at the north end of the property and turned right, and got onto the frontage road, and got onto Route 53, and went home.

When she was two miles from her apartment she checked the rearview mirror.

Nothing was there.

She sat at the kitchen counter with the notebook open in front of her.

She turned to the page where she had written the SKU. It was still there. She had circled the word CARD underneath it. Below that she now wrote, in careful letters: emblem. 12:34 PM Sunday. Loading dock. Four people. He saw me.

Then she thought about it.

Then she added, on a new line: cream boxes. Same as the one Karen took.

She looked at the page.

She thought about the card that had appeared and disappeared and appeared. She thought about a piece of paper that could not be relied on to stay where she had put it.

She got her phone. She held it above the page. She took a photograph.

She checked the photograph. The page was clear in the frame. The SKU was legible. The words she had added were legible. She had timestamps and the visible circle around CARD.

She opened her drive on her phone and moved the photograph into a folder she named, uncreatively, notes. She checked that the file had synced. It had.

She thought about writing everything down on a text file too, but decided against. Text files were searchable. Photographs of handwriting were harder to know about at a glance.

She closed the notebook. She put it back in her bag.

She poured a glass of water and stood by the kitchen window and drank it slowly.

She had four events. The card. The parking lot. Frank’s descriptions. The loading dock. She had a name that had asked her about Friday. She had an emblem she still had not placed. She had a coworker who had been treated pleasantly by Karen, which was in the same category of anomaly as the rest, even though she had not been prepared to say so out loud until now.

She was, she recognized, keeping a file.

She was a person who kept files. She had spent four years being paid to keep files. She was going to see this one through.

She went to bed at 11:00. She slept, mostly.

Monday morning she came in at 7:58.

Karen was at her cube. Dale was at his cube. Blake was in the break room. The floor was doing what it was doing.

She set her bag down. She sat. She turned on her laptop.

She opened her personal drive in the browser. She had her phone photo backed up there. She wanted to have the file open in a second tab so she could reference the SKU while she checked Ledger.

She opened the folder called notes.

The folder was empty.

She refreshed. She scrolled. She checked the trash. She checked the recently deleted queue.

There was nothing.

She got her phone out. She opened the photo library. She scrolled to Sunday afternoon.

There was no photograph of the notebook page. There was a photograph of her sitting in her car that she had taken by accident when she had been trying to lock the screen, at 11:53 Sunday. There was a photograph of a leaf she had taken Saturday morning during the errand loop. There was nothing between them.

She checked her recents. Her recents were empty for Sunday between 11:53 and Monday morning. Her phone had, apparently, not taken any photograph Sunday afternoon.

She opened her drive again. She went to activity history. Activity history was blank for Sunday.

She was not, according to her phone, according to her drive, according to the digital record of her Sunday, someone who had taken a photograph Sunday afternoon.

She put the phone face down on her desk.

She got out the notebook.

She opened it to the page where she had written the SKU.

The SKU was still there. The word CARD was still circled. The words she had added Sunday night were still there. Emblem. 12:34 PM Sunday. Loading dock. Four people. He saw me. Cream boxes. Same as the one Karen took.

The notebook remembered. The phone did not.

She closed the notebook. She put it in the drawer.

She started her queue.

At 10:15 Dale walked past her cube on his way to the printer. He nodded at her. She nodded back.

She sat at her desk. She did her queue. She was slower than usual. She kept opening the drive folder to see if it would come back, which she knew was not a thing that would happen but which she did anyway.

At 2:00 she opened Ledger.

She navigated to Frank’s queue. It had thirty-two flags. Last Monday it had had thirty-seven. She scrolled through them. There were no items with the RA prefix. No coffee mugs. No wristwatches. No picture frames. No scarves. No stationery description. No comment thread from Karen about anything above her.

She checked her viewing history in Ledger for the previous Monday. It showed the queues she had worked on that day. It did not show Frank’s queue.

She sat with this.

She thought about how a photograph could be gone. She thought about a folder being gone. She thought about her recents showing she had never taken a picture at all.

The phone was hers. The personal drive was hers. MSS did not touch them. She was not going to walk into IT and ask a stranger to find a photograph she had taken of her own notebook.

But Ledger was the company’s. Ledger was a system IT touched. She could ask a question about Ledger.

The Tech Bar was in the basement.

She had not been down there in a year.

She would go tomorrow.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, digital records are maintained to a high standard of accuracy. records are periodically reconciled against the operational record. discrepancies are resolved in favor of accuracy.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Genny is keeping a file. So is the company.

Begin with:

The Standing Order - another loading dock, another delivery logged by hand, and why paper is used

Compliance Notice: Narrative Drift Detected - what the company calls it when the record and the event stop matching

The Digging Team - the people who arrive in ordinary clothes to move things

Part eight arrives next Friday.

Leave a comment

by Gintare O.

preceding files:

Onboarding / 01 / The Smell
Onboarding / 02 / The Invitation
Onboarding / 03 / Parking Lot
Onboarding / 04 / Frank
Onboarding / 05 / The Catalog

She did nothing.

That was what the email had told her to do. No action required. She interpreted this in the most literal way she could. She did not go back to Frank’s queue. She did not open the flagged descriptions again. She did not look up the SKU she had copied into her notebook. The SKU sat on its own page, circled, and she turned past it every time she opened the notebook.

She did her own queue. She did the Q4 imports. She corrected two of Karen’s questions about title casing. She helped Dale onboard, which involved walking him through Ledger and explaining what the flags meant. Dale learned quickly. Dale asked the right questions. Dale was, if she was being honest with herself, better at the job in his second week than Frank had been in his tenth year, which she noticed and refused to attach any meaning to.

She let the days go by.

She let a Friday go by. She stayed home. Nothing came.

She let another Friday go by. She stayed home. Nothing came.

The card was in the notebook. The date on it changed each time. She did not check the date. She did not need to check the date. She could feel the notebook in her bag on the passenger seat while she drove and she could feel it not calling for her attention, which was worse in a way than when it had been.

She was doing what she had been told. She was, therefore, being left alone.

She had been left alone before. She had had four years of it. She was, she recognized, being told that if she went back to being the person she had been for four years, everything would return to how it had been.

She wanted very much for this to be true.

The Friday on the card came again.

She went to work. She did her queue. She left at 5:00 exactly, which she had started doing since the email, because leaving at 4:58 felt like it invited another chime. She got in her car. She drove home. She did not stop anywhere. She did not check her phone until she was in her apartment with the door locked.

Nothing came.

She sat on the couch. She did not turn on the television. She ate a bowl of cereal for dinner because she had not felt like cooking. She was aware, at 6:00 PM, of the fact that she was aware of the time. She sat with the awareness. At 6:11 nothing buzzed. At 6:15 nothing buzzed. At 6:30 she made herself a cup of tea and read a book.

She went to bed at 10:00.

She had done what the email said. She had gone nowhere. She had received nothing.

She slept the whole night.

Saturday she did errands.

It was one of those October Saturdays that looked like a color chart of leaves. She wore a jacket. She had a list.

She stopped at the grocery store first. She bought produce. She bought coffee. She bought a bottle of wine to have on hand in case she wanted one, which she had not for a while but she was replacing the one she had abandoned the Friday of the invitation. Groceries were a rhythm. She was choosing rhythms deliberately.

She stopped at the coffee shop on her way home. It was on the corner near her apartment. She did not need to stop there. She did it because she was constructing a normal Saturday and a normal Saturday for her included a coffee shop.

She got in line.

The person ahead of her turned around.

“Genny.”

It was Monika.

Monika had been on the same team back in Genny’s earlier years, before Genny moved to Karen’s team and before Monika got the promotion that had led to the pilot office overseas. She had come back for good a few months ago, in a new role Monika had never quite named. Genny had run into her twice since the return, both times in the lobby, both times briefly. Monika was that kind of person. She would talk if you saw her. She did not seek you out.

Monika looked well. She had a shorter haircut. She was wearing a coat Genny recognized from a store she could not afford. She had a small leather bag Genny also recognized from a store she could not afford. She looked like a person who had, at some point in her time away, discovered a specific amount of money.

“Hi,” Genny said.

“Coffee?”

“Yeah. Killing time before the rest of the errands.”

“Same. I do everything Saturday morning.”

“Where are you living now.”

“About a mile up. Bought a condo. Move-in was in August.”

“Nice.”

“How’s Karen.”

“Karen.”

Monika smiled at this, briefly, because that was the correct response to any statement of Karen’s name.

The line moved. They shuffled forward. Monika ordered. She paid. She turned back to Genny while the barista started her drink.

“How was Friday.”

Genny felt her whole body go still.

She had not told Monika about Friday. She had not told anyone about Friday. She had not told anyone about anything since the box had come to her cube. She said, keeping her face level:

“I didn’t go.”

Monika looked at her for a beat.

“Hm. Good.”

She said it kindly. She said it the way you might say it to a friend who had made a decision about not calling someone she should not call. Not congratulatory. Not warning. Just: good.

She took her coffee off the counter.

“See you around.”

She was gone before Genny had ordered.

Genny ordered her coffee. She paid. She got it and did not sit down. She walked out of the shop and around the corner toward her car in the small lot on the side street.

Halfway there she noticed the truck.

It was parked at the far end of the lot, at an angle that suggested it was going to leave soon. It was a plain white delivery truck with no company markings on the side. No lettering. No phone number. No department of transportation number that she could see. It was clean, which delivery trucks generally were not by this time on a Saturday.

She was going to walk past it.

She was not going to walk past it.

She was going to walk past it, then stop, then walk back.

On the rear panel, just above the license plate, was a small emblem. Maybe three inches across. Dark on white. She recognized it without knowing why. It was familiar in the way a name is familiar on a document you have signed once. She had seen it somewhere. She could not immediately place where.

The truck’s engine started.

She kept moving toward her car. She unlocked it. She got in. She set her coffee in the cup holder without drinking it.

The truck pulled out of the lot.

She followed it.

She was not following it in a way she would have been able to justify. She was two cars behind. She was at a reasonable distance. She was going the direction she was going to have gone anyway, for a while. Then she was not.

The truck took the on-ramp to Route 53.

She took the on-ramp to Route 53.

The truck did not exit at the parking lot. It kept going, past the office buildings, past the storage yards, past the stretches of trees. It kept going until Genny recognized where they were going, which was north, along the frontage road, toward the MSS campus.

She let a car get between her and the truck. Then she let another.

At 2:14 PM on a Saturday the truck signaled right and turned onto the MSS campus drive.

Genny did not follow.

She pulled into the forest preserve lot across from the campus entrance and stopped her car. From this angle she could see the truck driving up the campus road, past the visitor sign, toward the back of the building where the loading dock was. She watched it go.

She sat in her car for a long time.

She had not been on the MSS campus on a weekend in four years. She had assumed, without thinking about it, that nothing happened on the campus on weekends. She had assumed the building was empty. She had assumed this the way a person assumes their office is closed when they are not there, which is to say without any evidence.

She did not drive onto the campus. She did not need to. She had seen what she had seen. She had seen a truck with no markings and one small emblem drive onto the MSS campus at 2:14 PM on a Saturday. She had seen the emblem before, and she was going to know where when she wanted to know.

She started her car. She drove back toward her apartment. Her coffee was cold.

She thought about Monika.

She thought about the way Monika had said Hm. Good.

She thought about the fact that Monika had known to ask about Friday.

At home she put the groceries away. She sat at the kitchen counter with the coffee she had bought and had not drunk. She got the notebook out of her bag.

She did not open it. She put it on the counter in front of her and looked at it.

She thought about the emblem.

She thought about walking past the truck and stopping and walking back.

She thought about the fact that the person she had wanted, most, to tell about the last three weeks was a coworker she had barely known back then, whose face had shown up once in an internal newsletter cutting a ribbon at a pilot office overseas, and who had said one word this morning in a coffee shop line that she was going to hear in her sleep tonight.

Good.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, deliveries are scheduled based on operational need. the campus is staffed seven days a week. employees are not required to be aware of this.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Monika has been in the files before. She was better company then.

Begin with:

Professional Development - Genny and Monika across a table, two years earlier

The Standing Order - what arrives at the loading dock, and who is there to receive it

The Annual Review - how the company evaluates the people it has decided about

Part seven arrives next Friday.

Leave a comment

by Gintare O.

The notice arrived on a Monday morning from Facilities and Workplace Services. The subject line was Reminder: Smoke-Free Campus Policy.

Maribel Ortiz read it at 9:06.

It said the campus was a smoke-free environment. It said smoking was not permitted anywhere on campus. Then it said there were two designated locations where smoking was permitted.

She read it again.

The second reading did not help.

She checked for an amendment. Some notices at MSS were revised within the hour, quietly, with no acknowledgment that a first version had existed. This one had not been revised.

She checked the intranet. The policy page matched the email exactly. Both statements were present. Both were formatted the same way. Neither was footnoted.

Maribel considered replying to ask.

She did not reply.

She had learned, over eight months, that asking a question in writing was how a person became a topic.

Maribel did not smoke. Nor has she ever tried it or been around anyone that did.

Her interest was structural. And this email did not make sense. A rule that contradicted itself in two consecutive sentences implied something. Either the campus was smoke-free and the designated locations were an error, or the designated locations were real and the campus was not smoke-free. Both statements could not be operational.

Unless they could.

That was the part she wanted to understand.

MSS encouraged short walks as a form of ‘well-being and balanced lifestyle’. There was a page about it. Fifteen minutes, twice daily, as schedule permits. Maribel took hers at 2:15, when the floor emptied for a recurring meeting she was not on.

On Wednesday she walked toward the West garage.

She took the long side of the building, past the loading area, then along the walkway where smoking was also not permitted, and approached from the north, the way a person would if they happened to be passing.

She was not passing. But the route supported the interpretation.

The designated location was less than she expected.

A rectangle of pavement beside the garage entrance. Nine feet by twelve, roughly. No canopy. No bench. One receptacle, waist high, steel, with a perforated lid that struck her as decorative for what it was.

No signage. Nothing indicating that this rectangle was the location in question, or that the pavement around it was not.

The boundary was implied.

She noted that.

A man was standing in it.

He was in his fifties. Windbreaker over a company polo. His lanyard was tucked into his chest pocket the way people did when they wanted to be slightly less identifiable.

He was smoking.

Maribel stopped at the edge of the rectangle. Not inside it.

“Is this the designated location?” she asked.

He looked at her. “Yeah.”

“Both of them or one of them?”

He paused. “One of them.”

“The West one.”

“Yeah.”

She nodded and wrote nothing down, which she recognized too late was worse than writing something down.

“How long have you been smoking?” she asked.

He glanced at the cigarette. “Like four minutes.”

“I meant in total.”

He was quiet for a second. “Are you from HR?”

“Brand Compliance.”

That was worse. She watched it land.

He held the cigarette away from his body at an angle that suggested it was no longer his.

“I’m not here about you,” Maribel said.

“Okay.”

“I would like to understand your decision-making.”

He straightened. He said he had been coming out here eleven years. He said he clocked it against his break and never went over. He said he never used the walkway. He said he always used the receptacle, every time, and that he had never once thrown one in the mulch.

“That was Terry,” he said.

Maribel nodded.

“The notice says the campus is smoke-free,” she said.

“Right.”

“And that smoking is not permitted anywhere on campus.”

“Right.”

“You are on campus.”

He looked at the pavement. Then at the receptacle. Then, briefly, at the garage, as though checking whether it had moved.

“There’s a spot, though,” he said.

“Yes.”

“So.”

“So what?” Maribel said.

They stood with that.

He put the cigarette out. There were two thirds of it left. He did it carefully, against the inside of the lid of the receptacle, and dropped it in, and did not look at her while he did it.

“You can finish,” Maribel said.

“I’m good.”

“I am not reporting this.”

“Ok?”

She had one more question and she knew, in the way she was learning to understand things, that she should not ask it.

“Does it taste good?”

He looked at her fully for the first time.

“No,” he said.

“Then why do you smoke?”

He thought about it longer than she expected.

“I get eleven minutes out here where nobody talks to me,” he said.

Maribel processed that.

It was, structurally, the clearest thing anyone at MSS had said to her in eight months.

“I’ll go,” she said.

“I appreciate it.”

She walked back the long way, past the loading area, along the walkway where smoking was not permitted.

By Thursday, word had moved through Receiving that Brand Compliance was monitoring the West location. By Friday it had reached Engineering. The account varied. In one version she had a clipboard. In another she had asked him to spell his name.

Use of the West receptacle dropped for eleven days.

Facilities logged the reduction. In the quarterly summary it appeared as evidence that the reminder had been effective.

Maribel filed nothing. There was nothing to file. But then again, she wasn’t HR or Facilities but Brand Compliance (which was part of Marketing).

The campus was smoke-free.

There were two designated locations where smoking was permitted.

Both statements remained accurate.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

at may season studio, policy effectiveness is measured quarterly. use of the west receptacle declined for eleven days. the reminder was effective.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Brand Compliance reviews language. The language under review is on file.

Leave a comment

by Gintare O.

preceding file: Onboarding / 04/ Frank

The sticky note said what it said. She read it three more times over the weekend and did not gain anything from re-reading it. Four words did not become five. What Frank had meant by them was going to have to come from context.

She thought about this Sunday afternoon at the kitchen counter, in the same seat she had opened the card in. The notebook was open in front of her. She was not writing anything. She was looking at the sticky note, which she had put back in the notebook after taking it out three times.

They file the people. It was a Frank sentence in some ways. Frank had written catalog descriptions for eleven years. Frank had thought about what filing something meant more than most people did. Frank had also, in Genny’s experience, been a person who used more words than he needed. Four words was Frank saying something the way Frank did not usually say things. Which meant he had done it deliberately. Which meant he had chosen those four words over other words he could have chosen.

She sat with it. She did not write anything down. She was entering the part of the week where she started to work the problem, which was, historically, what she did with the things she could not file. She was a person who could not file this. She was going to have to file it, however partially, until it stopped taking up counter space in her head.

She would pull up Frank’s queue Monday morning.

She would look at what he had been working on before he stopped coming in.

She would see if anything on it made sense.

Monday she came in at 7:58.

Dale was at his cube. His monitor was on. He had a small potted plant on the corner of his desk that had not been there Friday. It was a snake plant. It was doing the thing snake plants did, which was to sit there and look at nothing.

Karen was at her cube. Karen said good morning to Genny as she walked past, which Karen had never done, but which was becoming a Monday habit. Genny said good morning back. She sat down. She opened her queue.

The system that held the catalog was called Ledger. It was branded internally like everything at MSS, in a font Karen approved of and colors that appeared nowhere else at the company. Ledger was a database with a web front-end. It held every product entered into MSS’s catalog going back to the founding of the company, which was a date nobody at Genny’s level had access to, but which was somewhere around 1873.

Frank had had access to Ledger the same as Genny had. His queue was still visible in the shared workspace, marked with his username and the last-modified date. HR had not disabled his account. This was consistent with a leave of absence. HR did not disable accounts of people on leave.

She waited until Karen was on a call. She waited until Blake was in the break room. Then she pulled up Frank’s queue.

She was not sure what she was looking for. She was, at minimum, looking for anything Frank had touched in his last week that had been flagged by the system.

The system flagged descriptions for a lot of reasons. Inconsistent attribute tagging. Missing SKUs. Copy that fell outside standard length parameters. Descriptions that referenced products not in the master. There were usually four or five flagged items per person per week. It was routine.

Frank had thirty seven flags in his last week.

She sorted them by flag type.

Twenty three of them were attribute tagging inconsistencies. That was Karen’s usual complaint about Frank. Frank had been sloppy about tagging in the last year. Frank had also, she thought as she scrolled, been sloppy in a specific direction. He had been under-tagging. He had been leaving fields blank that most people filled. Genny had assumed for a while that this was Frank being lazy. Looking at thirty seven of them at once, she was less sure.

Nine of them were length violations. Descriptions too short. Frank had written product copy in the two to three sentence range when the standard was five to seven. He had been getting closer to the minimum every week for the last two months.

Five of them were SKU mismatches. The SKU on the description did not match any product in the master.

She opened the first SKU mismatch.

The description was for a coffee mug. The copy was three sentences. It described the mug in terms that any mug could have been described. Ceramic. Fourteen ounces. Suitable for hot beverages. No color specified. No pattern specified. No brand specified.

The SKU was fourteen digits and began with a prefix she had never seen before. She had worked in catalog for four years. She knew the prefixes. There were twenty six of them, one for each product line. The first two letters of a SKU told you the line. Coffee mugs were HB. Frank’s SKU began with RA.

She opened the second SKU mismatch. The description was for a wristwatch. Three sentences. Suitable for daily wear. Water resistant. Adjustable band. No brand. No color. No dial style. The SKU began with RA.

The third was a picture frame. Same three-sentence template. Same RA prefix.

The fourth was a scarf.

The fifth was stationery.

She stopped at the fifth one.

The description read:

Cream cardstock. Cotton weave. Suitable for correspondence, invitations, and formal notices. Ink absorbency high. Fold retention indefinite.

She did not move.

She read it again. Then she read it out loud, quietly, at a level below what her headphones would have covered if she had been playing anything through them, which she was not.

Cotton weave. Cream. High ink absorbency. Fold retention indefinite.

She had held this paper in her hand. She had unfolded it and refolded it and left it face down on the kitchen table. It had bent stiffly. It had not wanted to fold flat. She had thought at the time, holding it, that whoever made paper like this had made it to last.

The description was the card.

The description was a product description of the card that had appeared inside her notebook, which she had not received in the mail, which had been given to her by a hand she could not identify.

The SKU began with RA. It was fourteen digits. She did not recognize any of them.

She looked at the metadata. Last modified by Frank. Time stamp: two weeks before he stopped coming in.

There was a comment thread on the description. Two comments. Both from Karen. The first: this needs full tagging. The second, timestamped four days later: withdrawing my note. This has been reviewed above me.

Above Karen was not a real place. Karen was a divisional manager. There was a director above her whose name Genny did not know, because Genny had never had reason to know it. There was, presumably, a whole hierarchy she had never had reason to know. She had assumed for four years that this hierarchy was normal in the way corporate hierarchies were normal, which was to say pointless.

The description was still in the system. It was still flagged. It had been sitting there for weeks, half-processed, waiting for somebody to finish it.

She did not finish it. She did not touch it.

She copied the SKU into her notebook.

She wrote it on a fresh page. She wrote the letters carefully. Then she wrote, underneath, the word CARD. She circled it.

She closed the notebook.

She had thought, when she had started, that Frank’s descriptions were going to be about the box. She had thought she would find one that matched what had come to her cube Tuesday. She had found it. She had also found four others that did not obviously match anything, and a prefix she had never seen. Which meant Frank had been working on a product line she did not know existed. Which meant there was a product line she did not know existed. Which meant her catalog, which she had thought was the catalog, was not the catalog.

She did not know what to do with this yet. She held it on the counter of her attention. She would need to hold it for a while before she knew what to do with it.

She went back to her own queue at 11:15. She worked through Q4 imports for the rest of the morning. She ate her lunch at her desk. She did not open Frank’s queue again. She did not look at his cube, which was Dale’s cube now, and which had a snake plant on the corner where Frank’s aloe had been.

At 3:45 Blake asked her if she wanted to walk to the coffee shop on the corner. She said no thanks. Blake did not ask why. Blake never asked why. He went alone.

She did four more product descriptions. She checked her email twice. She was, she noticed, checking her email more than she usually did, which was a small tell she chose not to hold.

At 4:58 she opened her drawer to pack up.

Her laptop chimed.

She looked at the screen.

An email had arrived in her inbox. She had not been expecting one. It had come in at 4:58, which was the minute she was packing up, which was the specific minute she had opened her drawer.

The sender field was blank.

The subject line was: You have viewed restricted material.

The body was two words: No action required.

There was no signature. There was no header. There was no company branding. The email did not appear to come from an address at all. When she hovered her mouse over the sender field, nothing populated. It was as though the message had arrived without a source.

She did not reply.

She sat with her hand on the mouse for a full ten seconds.

Then she marked the email read. She closed the window. She put the notebook in her bag. She closed the drawer. She put on her coat.

She walked out through the lobby at 5:03. The building was doing what it always did at 5:03. People were leaving. The revolving door was going. The Starbucks was closing up. Everything was normal.

She did not look at Karen’s cube on the way out.

She did not look at Dale’s cube either.

The notebook, in her bag, smelled like flowers and like the thing she was going to know how to name eventually.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, all catalog entries are reviewed at the appropriate level. some entries are reviewed above the appropriate level. the distinction is not visible to the reviewer.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Product Classification maintains the catalog. Other departments maintain other records.

Begin with:

The Company That Regulates Reality -what the company says it does, stated plainly

Compliance Notice: Narrative Drift Detected - what the paperwork does when it notices you first

Product Feedback Response - a customer notices something. the response is on file.

Part six arrives next Friday.

Leave a comment

by Gintare O.

A reminder that our campus is a smoke-free environment. We are proud to maintain a workplace that supports the health and wellbeing of every employee.

Smoking is not permitted anywhere on campus.

There are two designated locations where smoking is permitted.

The two designated locations are by the West and East parking garages, next to the garage entrances closest to May Season Studio Parkway. Each designated location is equipped with a receptacle for the disposal of cigarette butts.

Smoking is not permitted at any other location, including parking lots and walkways.

Thank you,

Facilities and Workplace Services

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, policy language is reviewed annually for clarity. this notice passed review. both statements are accurate and neither has been revised.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Facilities is one of several departments that communicates in writing. The others are on file.

Begin with:

Leave a comment

by Gintare O.

preceding file: Onboarding / 03/ Parking Lot

Frank did not come in Monday.

Frank’s cube was across the aisle from Genny’s, one row over from Blake’s. Frank had been at MSS for eleven years. Frank was the kind of employee who had, at some point in his career, been recognized for his contributions in a company-wide email that Karen had printed and put on his cube wall, next to the printout of the style guide Karen had drafted. Karen had put the printout there. Frank had left it up.

Frank was Karen’s usual target. Frank did not do anything wrong that Blake did not also do. Frank simply attracted a specific kind of attention from Karen that Blake did not. Genny had watched this for four years and had never worked out the mechanism. Something about Frank’s posture, maybe. Something about the way Frank apologized before he had finished being corrected.

Monday morning Frank’s chair was still pushed in. His monitor was off. His plant, which was a small aloe he had brought in from his home, was on the corner of his desk. His coffee mug from Friday was still where he had left it. The coffee had a film on it.

Karen did not stop by his cube. Karen did not mention him. Genny had never seen Karen leave a Frank workday alone. It was the first thing off about the week.

The second thing was the email.

It arrived at 10:47, from an address that was HR@ but not a specific person. The subject line was: personnel note.

The body was three sentences. Frank was on a leave of absence. There was no expected return date. Please direct any pending items to the divisional manager, meaning Karen.

There was no signature. There was no follow up. HR did not send another email that day. When Genny checked, the address the message had come from did not exist in the company directory. There was HR-help@, and there was benefits@, and there was Christina, who did some HR work on her own account. There was no HR@.

She did not reply. She marked the email read. She let it sit in her inbox.

She looked at Frank’s cube twice during the morning. Both times, everything was exactly where he had left it Friday.

At 3:30 she walked to the printer, which required passing Frank’s cube. She glanced in as she went by. The coffee mug was still there. The plant was still there. The chair was still pushed in.

The printout of the company-wide email that had recognized his contributions was not on the wall.

She could not remember whether it had been there Monday morning. She had not thought to check. She could not now check without going back and looking, which would look like something.

She kept walking.

Tuesday the plant was gone.

Tuesday afternoon the coffee mug was gone.

Wednesday morning she came in and Frank’s cube was clean. The monitor was gone. The keyboard was gone. The chair was pushed in against a desk that had nothing on it. The little name placard that had been slid into the plastic sleeve at the edge of the cube was gone. The plastic sleeve was empty.

Karen did not mention it. Karen came in at 8:04 and went to her own cube and started her day. She did title casing corrections in the shared drive for the first hour. She sent Blake three separate emails about product descriptions from Q3. She did not walk past Frank’s cube once.

By ten thirty Blake had noticed. Genny could tell because Blake started standing up more often than he needed to and looking around the floor. Blake was not subtle. Blake, when he was confused, moved.

Nobody said Frank’s name.

Genny needed a pen.

She had been trying to work through her queue and had gotten to a batch of physical proofs that needed hand-marking. She kept a specific red pen for this. It was in her top drawer, on the left, where she always kept it.

She opened the drawer.

The pen was there. So was a sticky note.

The sticky note was Post-it yellow, folded once. It was on top of the pen, which meant somebody had put it there after she had used the pen last, which had been Friday afternoon.

She looked around. Blake was at his desk. Karen was still in her cube. The floor was doing what it was doing.

She took the sticky note out of the drawer and opened it in her lap under the desk, the way you would read a note passed to you in school.

Four words. In Frank’s handwriting. She knew Frank’s handwriting from his notes on shared proofs. He wrote in small block capitals with an odd downward slope on the T.

THEY FILE THE PEOPLE.

She looked at it for a long time.

She refolded it. She put it inside the notebook, tucked against the back cover, in the same place the card had been.

She closed the notebook.

She got the pen out and hand-marked the proofs.

At some point in the next hour she noticed that the notebook now smelled like flowers and something else. She could not place the something else. It was not unpleasant. It was faintly familiar, in the way that Frank’s coffee mug had been familiar, in the way the paper of the card had been familiar the moment she had first touched it. It was, she thought, a smell she was going to know how to name after a while, whether she wanted to or not.

She put the notebook in her bag at 4:58 and closed the drawer.

Thursday she came in and Frank’s cube was still empty. Nobody spoke about him. Karen did title casing on Blake all morning.

Thursday afternoon HR sent a second email. Same address, same format. Subject line: personnel note. Body: a new team member would be starting Friday to support Q4 catalog volume. His name was Dale. He would be located at the desk on the north side of the row. Everyone should welcome him.

The desk on the north side of the row was Frank’s desk.

Nobody replied to the email.

Friday morning she came in at 7:58. There was a man at Frank’s cube.

He was maybe thirty. He was setting up a monitor and a keyboard on Frank’s desk. He had one of those clean canvas laptop bags people bought when they wanted to look organized. He had a coffee from the lobby Starbucks in a paper cup, not a mug, which meant he was new enough not to have committed to bringing one in yet. He was arranging his cables with unusual care. He was, on first look, a person who did not stand out.

He noticed her setting down her coat and came over.

“Hi. I’m Dale. I just started.”

He held out his hand. His handshake was correct. Not too firm, not too soft, released at the right time.

“Genny. Welcome.”

“Karen said you might be able to walk me through the intake queue when you get a minute.”

“Sure. Give me an hour.”

“Great. Really appreciate it.”

He went back to his cube. He was pleasant. He was pleasant in the way a person who had been coached in pleasantness was pleasant. Nothing about him was off. That, on its own, was odd, because there was always something off about the new hires. This was a company where people had things off about them.

At 8:31 Karen came in.

She went to her cube. She put her bag down. She looked toward Dale’s cube. Then she walked over.

Genny watched from the corner of her monitor.

Karen said good morning. Dale said good morning back. Karen asked how his commute had been. Dale said fine, only twenty five minutes, he had left early. Karen said that was a good habit. Karen laughed at something Dale said. Karen touched the top edge of Dale’s cube wall with one hand, briefly, the way a person touches a doorframe when they are visiting a friend.

Genny had worked at MSS for four years. She had watched Karen every workday. She had watched Karen speak to seventeen new hires. She had never seen Karen touch a cube wall.

Karen went back to her own cube.

Dale continued setting up his monitor.

Genny put her headphones on and did not play anything through them.

The notebook was in her top drawer. The sticky note was inside the notebook. The notebook smelled like flowers and like something else she was going to know how to name eventually.

She opened the intake queue and started her Friday.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, leaves of absence are processed promptly and with discretion. pending items are redirected to the divisional manager. desks do not stay empty long.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Frank was at the company eleven years. Departures of that length usually generate more paperwork.

Begin with:

The Retirement of Dennis Call - how the company says goodbye when it chooses to

Exit Interview: Surface Division - what leaving looks like when it is documented

Professional Development - Genny, before any of this, learning who maps whom

Part five arrives next Friday.

Leave a comment

by Gintare O.

May Season Studio is a fictional corporation. I write its internal documents.

That is the short version, and it is the version I wish someone had given me on the way in. Everything published here is presented as company paperwork. Field reports. HR memos. Incident summaries. Product announcements written by a marketing department that believes what it is saying.

Nobody in the archive stops to explain the world. That is on purpose. But it does mean a new reader can land on a compliance notice about narrative drift with no way to know whether that is the beginning of something or the middle of it.

So this is the map.

THE COMPANY

Headquartered in the Chicagoland area, western suburbs. Like all companies that are important but want to stay out of sight. They make everything from soap to stationery and everything else you might need. A lifestyle company.

But that’s the cover. It’s in the business of perception. The real business is running the world.

HOW TO READ IT

Most posts are standalone. Some are multiple parts or series.

But the files touch. They intertwine like everything does. A complaint mentioned at a retirement party generates a warranty report two files later. The product approved in one meeting is the thing two contractors dig out of a field. Nobody in the archive notices. You will see the pattern before the characters do.

THREE PLACES TO START

The Company That Regulates Reality

If you want the premise stated plainly, by the company, which is the most alarming way to hear it.

The Lunch Hour

If you have ever had a job. Nothing supernatural happens. It is still the most accurate thing in the archive.

State Street

When you become a victim and the world just continues on.

THE THREADS

THE OFFICE FLOOR

Cube level. Small stakes. The same handful of people.

The Lunch Hour / The Annual Review / Professional Development / The Retirement of Dennis Call / Exit Interview: Surface Division / HR Advisory: Sustained Visual Engagement / HR Memo: Personal Care / Service Request / Personal Care Clarification

THE PRODUCTS

Everyone lives for nostalgia, and then it becomes a product we love. The load-bearing line. Most of the trouble in the archive starts in one meeting.

Press Release: Nostalgia Capsule / Prototype / Final Review / Internal Report: Q1 Risk and Warranty Summary / Product Feedback Response

Soap has been made the same way since 1904, and there is a reason it has never been reformulated.

Origins: The Redfield Compact and the First Delivery / Halloran & Co. The Autumn Edit / The Cost Reduction Review / The Standing Order / The Estate Sale

THE CONTRACTORS

They arrive after, with shovels and paperwork. Not employees.

The Digging Team / 159th / Incomplete Corrective Response, then the five-part series in order: Disposal Order / Decommission Attempt / Thirteen / Storage / Closeout

THE FEDERAL SIDE

Several of these are the same week from different desks. Listed in the order it happened, which is not the order it was filed.

State Street / Woman Killed Following Prison Escape Near State Street / What Remains / Post-Incident Interview: Statesville Transfer Unit / Pattern Interference: Field Follow-Up Report / After-Action Review: Transfer Event 2026-03-IL-074

ONBOARDING

The long one, thirteen parts. A four-year employee receives a box addressed to someone else.

Reads fine cold. Reads better after The Lunch Hour and The Annual Review.

THE SCHEDULE (for now)

Tuesdays: new documents, short stories, reports and more.

Fridays: Onboarding.

Nothing gets retired, so the archive only grows.

Subscribe and it arrives as it comes. That is the entire arrangement.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, new employees receive a full orientation on their first morning. readers receive this document instead. the company considers them equivalent.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

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by Gintare O.

preceding file: Onboarding / 02 / The Invitation

She did not tell anyone.

She had considered telling her sister. She had considered writing it down in the notebook so she could keep a record of what had happened. She had considered driving back to the parking lot on the way in Wednesday morning to see if the man was still there in daylight, at 7:15.

She did none of these. She did what she always did with the things she could not file. She left them on the counter of her attention and waited to see if they went away.

The card had been in her bag. The card was no longer in her bag. She had, at some point between Sunday night and Tuesday evening, either lost the card or had it removed from her possession. Both possibilities existed. She was choosing, for the time being, to hold both of them without picking one.

She went to work Wednesday morning at 7:58. Her coffee was on the left side of the desk. Her notebook was open. The notebook still smelled like flowers. She had stopped noticing.

Karen appeared at the edge of her cube at 9:12.

Karen had a mug in one hand and a printout in the other. The printout was Blake’s. Karen had circled three things on it with red pen. She was on her way to Blake’s cube. She had stopped at Genny’s on the way.

“Got plans Friday.”

Genny looked up.

Karen did not phrase this like a question. It was a statement she was expecting to be filled in. She was not looking at Genny directly. She was looking at the printout in her hand, or past Genny’s shoulder at the far wall, or at the very edge of Genny’s monitor. It was difficult to tell.

“Just staying in,” Genny said.

Karen nodded once. Then she moved on to Blake’s cube.

Genny sat with her hands on her desk for a full minute after Karen was gone.

Karen had never asked her about her weekends. Karen did not ask Genny personal questions. Karen did not ask Blake personal questions either, but Karen had specific reasons to punish Blake, and Karen’s ways of asking Blake things were closer to interrogations. What Karen had just done was neither. It was a check-in. It was the kind of check-in you did with someone you were being told to keep track of.

Genny put her headphones on.

The Karen lecture on Blake’s title casing started at 9:15 and lasted, on and off, until 9:47.

Karen had a specific style guide for product titles that she had drafted herself and had updated four times since. Blake had capitalized “and” in a product title. Karen was walking him through, out loud, the reasons “and” was not capitalized. Blake was agreeing loudly and preemptively and defensively, which was the wrong tone but the only one Blake had.

Genny listened to it through her headphones, which was possible because she was not playing anything through them. She had noticed years ago that headphones with nothing playing gave you the best information in the office. People assumed you could not hear. They talked at volume. They forgot you were there.

She was, in this case, listening for anything Karen said that was not about title casing.

There was nothing. Karen did title casing for thirty two minutes, corrected Blake’s spacing around a comma, and returned to her cube. She did not stop at Genny’s on the way back.

Genny did the Q4 imports.

She was, she told herself, being reasonable. Karen had asked her about her weekend the way people asked other people about their weekends. Karen was a person. Karen had, presumably, occasional impulses toward normal workplace behavior, which Karen would then act on incorrectly, because it was Karen. That was one explanation.

There was another explanation. Genny was choosing not to hold it yet.

Thursday she came in and sat at her desk and did her queue. Karen did not stop by. Karen did not look at her from across the floor. Karen ate at her desk at 11:15, which she did occasionally when she had a report due. The office was quiet. Blake was, unusually, doing his own work.

At 2:30 Genny caught herself thinking about the parking lot. She had been running through a batch of SKU updates and had let her attention drift and her hands had stopped moving on the keyboard. She noticed this and put both hands back on the keys and finished the batch.

At 3:15 she caught herself again.

At 3:47 she stopped catching herself and let it play out. She let herself sit with the whole thing. The box on her desk. The smell. The card. The parking lot. The man in the cream coat lifting one gloved hand. She sat with it for about forty seconds. Then she pulled up the next batch.

By four Thursday afternoon she had convinced herself that the only reasonable thing to do Friday was to stay home.

Not because she was scared. She was, in fact, telling herself she was not scared, which was one of the surer signs a person was scared, but she chose not to hold that thought either. She was staying home because the card was gone. There was nothing to bring. There was nothing to hand to anyone. Whatever had been arranged had been arranged with a piece of paper she no longer possessed. She could not attend an event she could not prove existed.

This was a good sentence. She let herself repeat it a few times in her head on the drive home.

She was a person who did not believe in things she could not file. This was a stance she had come to on her own, without help, and she had held it comfortably for a long time. She did not intend to give it up over a piece of stationery.

Friday she stayed home.

She had not made a big decision about it. She had simply, all day, not turned toward Route 53. At 4:58 she packed up her bag. She drove the usual way home. She stopped at the Thai place and ordered the pad see ew and a spring roll, which she picked up on the way in. She took her shoes off. She ate at the counter, standing, because sitting felt like it required more commitment than she had.

She turned on a movie she had been meaning to watch. It was one her sister had recommended, which meant it was going to be too long and slightly too sad. She got about ten minutes in and could not have said what had happened in it.

At 6:00 she looked at the clock and thought about the parking lot.

She thought about the man in the cream coat standing on the gravel with his hands folded. She thought about whether he was there right now, and whether someone else was there with him, and whether they were noticing that she was not.

At 6:04 she looked at the clock again.

At 6:07 she muted the movie.

At 6:11 her phone buzzed on the counter.

She did not pick it up immediately. She let it sit face down. She was doing this because she knew, in the specific way you know things you cannot logically know, that when she picked it up it was going to be something related to the card.

She picked it up.

It was a push notification. The app was a calendar app she did not have and had never installed. The notification was formatted like a meeting reminder. The subject line, in bold, was three words.

We missed you.

There was no body text. There was no button. There was no way to open the notification into anything.

She swiped it away.

It disappeared. She checked her notifications. There was nothing in her history. She checked the App Library for a calendar app she did not use. There were the two she used. There was nothing else.

She sat on the couch. She did not turn the movie back on. The pad see ew was cooling on the counter. She had eaten less than half of it.

She was going to have to tell someone. She could not keep holding this on both sides. She had been at the parking lot. There had been a man. He had said her name. She had received a notification from an app she did not use, sent at eleven minutes past a time she had been thinking about. These were, individually, small things. Together, they were a pattern. Patterns needed to be filed.

She needed to write it down. Not for anyone else, yet. For herself. She needed to write out what had happened in order so that on Monday, if she chose to say something to anyone, she had a record that read the same way twice.

She got the notebook out of her bag.

She brought it back to the couch. She opened it to the next blank page. She wrote the date at the top.

She turned the page to give herself room to write.

The card was inside the notebook.

It was folded, resting flat against the back cover, tucked in the same place it had been Sunday morning. It looked as it had looked when she had first found it. Thick cream paper. Her name in oxblood ink on the front.

She sat very still.

She had emptied the bag Tuesday night. She had shaken the notebook out. She had put everything back one item at a time. There had been no card. She was as sure of this as she was of any of the things she filed for a living.

She picked the card up.

She turned it over. Her full name was still on the front, in the same handwriting. She unfolded it.

Inside, in the same oxblood ink, in the same handwriting, was the address on Route 53, the time 6:00 PM, and above them the line: You are cordially invited.

The date had changed.

It was no longer this Friday. It was next Friday.

She read it three times, the way she had read it the first time, checking, mostly, to see if anything else on it changed. Nothing did.

Her phone was on the couch next to her, screen dark. Outside, a car went by on the street. The apartment was very quiet. The notebook, in her lap, smelled the same as it had all week.

She refolded the card. She put it back inside the notebook, in the same place, where it had been all along.

She turned off the lamp.

She sat in the dark for a long time before she went to bed.

Continue Reading: ONBOARDING / 04 / FRANK

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, attendance is recorded as a courtesy. missed appointments are rescheduled automatically. no action is required from the invitee.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Genny keeps records for a living. The company keeps its own.

Begin with:

Onboarding / 02 / The Invitation - the card, the lot, and the man in the cream coat, if you are arriving late

Final Review - Genny, a humming prototype, and a decision made before the meeting started

The Annual Review - how the company evaluates the people it is keeping track of

Part four arrives next Friday.

Leave a comment

by Gintare O.

Dinah Kovar had run four hundred of these and could read a house in an afternoon.

It was a skill and she did not think of it as one. You walked the rooms and the rooms told you. The shoes told you how far someone had walked in the last ten years. The kitchen told you whether anyone else ate there. The photographs told you when the life had been busiest, because the busy years were the years nobody took pictures. By the second day she could usually say more about a person than their family could, which she had learned not to mention, because it upset them.

Ruth Ellery, eighty-eight, had lived in the house forty-six years. She had taught fourth grade at a school two miles away. Her husband had died in the nineties and she had not remarried and had not moved and had not, from the look of the second bedroom, ever considered doing anything else with it. She read. She had a chair with a lamp behind it and a rut in the carpet where the chair had been for decades. She kept a garden until she could not, and then she kept a smaller one.

The house read clean. Dinah priced it in a day and a half.

She found the soap on the second afternoon.

It was not a hoard. That was the first thing she noted, because she had seen hoards, and this was not that. There was no stockpiling, no panic, no wall of the same thing bought in a bad year. There was soap in the bathroom cabinet, which was normal. There was soap in the linen closet, three bars, which was normal. There was soap on a basement shelf, in a wooden crate that had been sized for it at some point by somebody, and the crate held maybe two years’ worth, and it was arranged by date.

All of it was Halloran.

The bars in the cabinet were current. The bars in the linen closet were from the last few seasons. The bars in the basement went back. Dinah pulled one out of the wrap far enough to read the stamp and put it back. Some of the scents on the labels were not scents she had ever seen in a store. The vessels, the refillable ones, were stacked on the shelf below, and she counted four different manufacturing generations of them and they were all, allowing for the printing, the same shape.

On the shelf beside the crate was a shoebox of delivery slips.

Dinah went through it because that was the job. Paper had to be sorted, shredded, or thrown. The slips were in order, oldest at the bottom, and there were a great many of them, and they ran back forty-six years without a gap. One address. One product line. Same cadence, the whole way.

She priced the soap as a lot and the crate separately and did not think about it again.

The collector came at seven forty on Saturday, twenty minutes before the sale opened, which happened, and which Dinah usually turned away.

His name was Martin Sedlak. He was maybe sixty, in a good coat, extremely polite. He said he had seen the listing photograph. He said the photograph showed the bathroom, and that the cabinet door in the photograph was open about four inches, and that four inches had been enough.

Dinah let him in, which she would think about later.

He did not ask where the bathroom was. He went to it. He opened the cabinet and made a small sound and then he was very quiet for a while, and when Dinah came to check on him he had three bars laid out on the edge of the sink in an order that meant something to him.

“This one is from before the reformulation of the wrap,” he said. “Not the soap. The wrap. Nineteen eighty-eight or eighty-nine. See the seam.” He turned it. “The soap never reformulated. That is the entire point of the soap.”

Dinah said the basement had more.

She watched him go down the stairs and she watched him find the crate and she watched a sixty-year-old man in a good coat sit down on a concrete floor.

He knew the scents. He named them off the labels before he read the labels, and he was right every time, and Dinah checked. He knew which years the vessel changed and what changed about it, which was nothing, he said, that was the thing, four redesigns of the printing on a shape that had not moved a millimeter in a century. He knew the company had never named its supplier. He knew the formula had not changed since nineteen four. He said all of this the way a man recites a thing he has recited before to people who did not want to hear it.

“You know why they can’t change it,” he said.

Dinah said she did not.

“There’s a contract,” Sedlak said. “It’s not a trade secret. A trade secret you can change, you just don’t. This one they cannot. It’s above the company. It’s older than the company, and every part of it is a rule about not telling anyone.” He was holding a bar in each hand. “Now ask yourself what kind of organization has a formula it is not permitted to alter, a supplier it is not permitted to name, a vessel it is not permitted to redraw, employees who will not discuss any of it, and customers who buy the same thing for fifty years and never once try anything else.”

Dinah asked what kind.

“The kind that isn’t a soap company,” Sedlak said. “I’ve been at this eleven years. I’ve found six houses like this one. Six. Always a woman, always alone, always decades of it, always the receipts in a box because they keep the receipts, they all keep the receipts. That’s not consumer behavior. That’s observance.” He looked up at her from the floor. “Did she work for them?”

The nephew was upstairs. Dinah went and got him.

The nephew was forty-something and had inherited a house he had been inside maybe thirty times, at holidays, as a child and then not as a child. He said no. He said his aunt taught fourth grade for thirty-one years and then she was retired for twenty-five and that was the whole of it. He said it a little defensively, because a man in a good coat was sitting on his aunt’s basement floor asking whether she had belonged to something.

“That’s what they all say,” Sedlak said, pleasantly.

Dinah asked the nephew, later, when Sedlak was upstairs with the vessels, why his aunt had used the same soap for forty-six years.

The nephew thought about it in the way people think about a question they have never once been asked.

“I think she liked it,” he said.

Sedlak bought all of it. The crate, the cabinet, the linen closet, the vessels, at a price Dinah felt bad about and he did not. He photographed the shoebox and did not want the shoebox. Receipts were not what he was after. Receipts were paper. He wanted the objects, and he carried them out to a clean car in two trips, and he thanked her four times, and he gave her a card and asked her to call him if she ever saw another house like this one, and she said she would.

The house went empty by Sunday evening the way they all do.

Dinah stayed to clear the paper, which was the last thing and the worst thing and the part nobody ever wanted. She sat on the floor of the emptied basement with the shoebox and started sorting, and she had by then spent three days inside Ruth Ellery’s handwriting. It was on the grocery lists in the kitchen drawer. It was in the address book. It was on the backs of the photographs, in pencil, the names and the years. It was on the tax folders and the garden notes and a recipe card for a coffee cake. Dinah knew that hand the way you know a hand after three days, which is completely.

The delivery slips were signed on receipt. Every one of them. Forty-six years of them.

The signature was not Ruth Ellery’s handwriting.

Dinah went back through the box, from the bottom, from the beginning, and it was the same signature on every slip, the first one and the last one and all of them in between, and it did not change the way a hand changes across forty-six years, and it was not her hand, and it was not four different hands, and it was not the hand of a delivery driver signing off, because the driver’s line was blank on every slip and had always been blank.

It was one hand. It was the same hand. It was somebody’s.

Dinah put the box in the shred pile.

She took one slip out first, the oldest one, from the bottom, and folded it once and put it in her jacket, and she did not put it on the inventory, and she did not photograph it, and she did not call the number on Martin Sedlak’s card, then or later.

She finished the paper. She locked the house. She had another one Tuesday.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, we are grateful for our long-term customers. many households have used the same bar for decades, and every delivery is signed for. the company considers this a sign of satisfaction.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

filed under: customer records / from the may season studio employee files

RECOMMENDATIONS

Six houses in eleven years. The product line is easier to find than the customers.

Begin with:

Leave a comment

by Gintare O.

preceding file: Onboarding / 01 / The Smell

She opened it Sunday afternoon.

She had left the card face down on the notebook all morning. She had made a second cup of coffee. She had cleaned the counter. She had put a load of laundry in and then, standing at the machine listening to it fill, had realized she was avoiding a folded piece of paper on her kitchen table, which was ridiculous.

She sat back down. She picked up the card.

The paper was heavier than it should have been for its size. It bent stiffly when she opened it. It did not want to fold flat.

Inside, in the same oxblood ink, in the same handwriting, was an address on Route 53, a Friday date, and the time 6:00 PM. Above them, one line.

You are cordially invited.

That was all. No name of a host. No RSVP. No return card. No dress code. No mention of what the event was.

She read it three times. She was checking, mostly, to see if anything on it changed. Nothing did.

The address was a stretch of Route 53 she had driven a hundred times. She could not picture what was there. She could picture the stretch itself, the frontage road, the two-story office buildings set back behind trees, the storage yards behind chain link, but she could not put a building at that number.

She held the card up to the window. She had seen people do this in movies. She did not know what she was looking for. She was looking for a watermark, maybe, or a logo pressed into the paper. There was neither.

She refolded the card. She set it back on top of the notebook.

She thought about calling her sister and then did not. Her sister would want a beginning and an end and a reasonable question at the end of it, and Genny did not have any of those. What she had was a piece of stationery she could not account for and a workplace where you learned not to account for things.

She put the card in the inside zipper pocket of her bag, which she never used. She zipped it closed. She left the bag by the door.

Monday came in normally.

She had been half expecting it not to. Some part of her, going to bed Sunday night, had thought Monday might be different in some small way, that the card would announce itself before she was ready, that there would be a follow up on her doorstep or a voicemail from a number she did not know. There was neither. Her alarm went off. She made coffee. She drove to work. She parked in her usual spot.

She checked the inside zipper pocket in the elevator, quickly, without looking at what she was doing. The card was there. She let go of it.

She waited until Blake was refilling his water bottle.

She waited because asking Blake anything required a specific approach. If you asked Blake a direct question about the company he became evasive, because he thought a direct question meant you were building a case for something. If you asked Blake a direct question about anything not company related, he was fine, because he loved being consulted.

“Blake.”

“Yeah.”

“Route 53, past the office park, north side. Is there anything there?”

Blake stopped, water bottle in hand, and thought about it. He was better at directions than most people at the office because he lived out that way. This was one of the two things Blake was useful for. The other was small talk cover when Karen came by.

“Parking lot,” he said. “Big empty one. Used to be a Bennigan’s. They tore it down two, three years ago. Nobody rebuilt on it.”

“Just gravel?”

“Gravel and weeds. Sometimes a food truck. Not lately.”

“Huh.”

“Why.”

“Nothing. Someone at the office was asking.”

Blake nodded, which was Blake for finished, and went back to his desk. He did not ask a follow up. Blake never asked follow ups. It was another thing that made him useful.

Genny sat down. She opened her notebook to Monday’s list, which she had started Sunday and which had been interrupted by the card. She wrote, at the bottom: parking lot.

She sat with that for a minute.

Then she crossed it out. She did not want it written down.

She left at 11:35 Tuesday. She told nobody. Karen was out at one of her four restaurants. Blake was in the break room. Nobody watched her go.

She drove out of the MSS campus and turned onto Route 53. The light at the entrance took its usual thirty seconds. She kept her hands at ten and two, which she did not normally do, because she was thinking about the fact that she was doing something she would not be able to explain if anyone asked.

She passed a two-story office building with a for-lease sign in the window. She passed a fenced storage yard. She passed a stretch of trees. She was slowing without meaning to.

The address was a parking lot.

Blake had been right. There was gravel and there were weeds. There was the concrete footprint of a building that had been there once, still visible under the low sun, a rectangle of poured foundation with the plumbing capped in short pipes. It looked exactly like the site of a torn down chain restaurant. It looked like a place where nothing was.

She slowed further. She was doing the thing you do when you drive past a house you used to live in, looking without stopping.

There was a man at the edge of the lot.

He was standing near the road, not on it, in a cream coat that was too warm for the weather and gloves that were the wrong color for the coat. His hands were folded in front of him. He was not on a phone. He was not smoking. He was not doing any of the things people did when they were waiting for someone they were supposed to be waiting for.

He was looking at her car.

He was looking at her.

He had been looking at her, she thought, since before she had reached the lot. He had been looking down the road. He had been waiting.

She kept driving.

She did not turn around at the next light. She did not turn into any of the driveways. She drove past the address, kept going, and turned at the intersection so she could loop back on the frontage road and pass the lot from the other direction. She did not know why she did this. She wanted to see if he was still there. She wanted to see if she had made him up.

He was still there. He had turned to face the direction she was coming from.

She was maybe eight feet from him when she went by. She could have rolled her window down. She did not. She kept her eyes forward and did not slow down.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw him lift one gloved hand in greeting. Casual. Not a wave meant to catch someone’s attention. A wave meant for a person who had already seen you.

He said something.

She could not hear it through the glass. But she saw his mouth move around the shape of it, and the shape was her name.

She kept going.

She was back at her desk by 12:22. Karen was not back yet. Blake was on the phone with someone in accounting about a formatting issue. Nobody had noticed she was gone.

She sat down. She opened the Q4 import file. She worked through it for three hours without taking a break, which was not what she usually did. She did not check her personal phone. She did not open her personal email. She did not, for the rest of the afternoon, look at her bag.

At 4:58 she packed up.

She drove home. She did not look at her rearview mirror any more than usual. She did not think about the man in the cream coat, because if she thought about him she was going to have to also think about the fact that he had known her, which was a thing she was not ready to know.

At home she set her bag on the bench in the front hall. She took her shoes off. She stood in the kitchen for a minute with her hand on the counter. Then she went back to the hall and opened the inside zipper pocket of her bag.

The card was not there.

She checked the other pocket. She checked the main compartment. She emptied the bag on the hall floor. Keys. Wallet. Headphones. A granola bar wrapper she had been meaning to throw out. The pen she used at her desk. Three receipts. No card.

She went back to the kitchen. She looked at the counter where she had left the card Sunday morning. There was nothing there.

She looked at the notebook, which was in the pile on the floor. She flipped through it. She turned it upside down and shook it, which felt undignified but she did it anyway. Nothing fell out.

The card was not in the apartment. She had put it in the zipper pocket Sunday night. It had been there Monday morning when she had checked. It had been there Tuesday morning too. She had not checked after that.

She sat down on the hall floor with the bag emptied around her.

She was not afraid, still, in the way she recognized as afraid. She was, again, at the part before it. The part where the brain was still cataloging.

The notebook, on the floor next to her, smelled the same as it had all week.

She thought about the man in the cream coat lifting one gloved hand.

She thought about him saying her name.

Then she picked up the bag and put everything back in it, one item at a time, the way she would have if this were any Tuesday.

She did not eat dinner. She poured a glass of wine she did not finish. She sat on the couch with the television on and did not follow what was on the screen.

Around 10:30 she went to bed. She turned off the light. She lay in the dark for a while.

She did not smell flowers. She smelled her sheets, which was nothing, which was the correct outcome.

She thought about Friday.

Continue Reading: ONBOARDING / 03 / PARKING LOT

AUTHOR’S NOTE

at may season studio, off-campus events are coordinated through the appropriate channels. venues are confirmed in advance. guests are always expected.

written and designed by gintare okrzesik, creator of may season studio. a fictional corporation exploring beauty, bureaucracy, and quiet corruption through narrative design.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The card named a place where nothing is. The files on that are extensive.

Begin with:

Onboarding / 01 / The Smell - the box, the notebook, and the card, if you are arriving late

The Company That Regulates Reality - the front door of the archive, for anyone new to the campus

The Lunch Hour - an ordinary hour on an ordinary floor, for contrast

Part three arrives next Friday.

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