May Season Studio Archives
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.
Oh my! "... 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." This workplace is frightening!