No more work from home, the CFO wrote in an all-staff note. Let’s retreat to the conference room instead and revisit the re-revised rules, he concluded. “A moment of silence for the ones who couldn’t return,” he said as we returned. He removed a lily from his lapel pocket, slam-dunked it into the garbage can, and continued: “Here’s the blow-by-blow on best practices in the new now. This here is a game-changer in a game played by changed gamers. These are the brass tacks tacked onto the brass knuckles hitting the brass balls. We’re so far behind the eight ball that we’re not even at the pool table. We’re playing blackjack against a meth dealer on mushrooms and it’s time to double down before we’re down-and-out. Lately, you desk jockeys have been bringing the proverbial pony from the dog and pony show to a dogfight and that little horse isn’t even a fighter. It’s a service animal but in the service of what? Okay, I’ll spell it out. The pony is you and nearly every child wants one at a certain point in their youth. You are valuable workhorses is the key takeaway here. So, let’s pony up. I’m all in. Who’s with me?”
We said nothing. Nobody moved, nobody blinked.
“Okay, let’s try a different tack. We’ve deep-sixed the six-figure salaries. We’ve eighty-sixed anyone born before 1986. Unless you, too, wish to become unpaid contractors, you’ll need to ballpark the bandwidth and get more bang for the buck. The buck stops here, buckaroos. We’re back in the saddle again. Let’s all come together, but we’re not going to ‘come together’ if you know what I mean. Get your minds out of the gutter, punks. This is a workplace. Now get to work.”
We returned to our tasks. They were such vital tasks, but we failed to hit return. After an hour of failure, I stood up and walked to the watercooler, past the watercooler, and into the CFO’s assistant’s office. “I’m gone,” I said. She didn’t look up from her monitor. “Right on,” she said. I took the stairs to the street. Outside, the smoke had cleared. It was raining for the first time in many months, and so I stood there at the edge of the office park, by the artificial pond, listening to the thunder pound the city. I was totally soaked and I felt terribly alive. 
Ryan Ridge is the author of five chapbooks and five books, including the story collection New Bad News (Sarabande Books, 2020) and the poetry chapbook Ox (Alternating Current, 2021). His YA novel Beyond Human is due out in 2025. An associate professor at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, he codirects the creative writing program. He lives in Salt Lake City with the writer Ashley Farmer and plays bass in the Snarlin’ Yarns.
Illustration: Rachel Merrill.
