May Season Studio Archives
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.
I love the eery vibes to this series. Poor Genny just trying to do her thing and getting accosted by smells and fellas in cream coats. I feel like the smells that follow me from the office are rarely as pleasant as flowers but that’s a standard hazard in NYC. Great piece and look forward to seeing where it goes.
"These were, individually, small things. Together, they were a pattern. Patterns needed to be filed." Oh Genny, it's so much more! This series needs a sound track.