Twenty-Three: Nice Morning (08-10-2022)
An old man was reading a newspaper, an unusual site given the present day ubiquity of screens and phones. A headline at the top read "Suppressed Witness Reports Revealed!", and a photo below depicted a goblin-like creature and beams of light. The man was confused, as he saw both the New York Times title and a tabloid-esque fluff piece on the same page of this old man's paper. The juxtaposition of such opposite ideas, a reputable paper and grocery-store checkout newspaper attention grabbing paranormal headlines was almost as bizarre as an old man reading any newspaper at the park in the morning. In fact, the man himself found his own presence at the park, sitting and drinking a coffee, to be an anachronistic comfort as well.
It was unusual for his train to get in so early, giving enough time to relax or make use of the morning, and it was also unusual for him to have so little work at the office that he did not need to go in early to putter away at documents and emails. He was also subconsciously avoiding another conflict with his coworkers or management, and found that any time he could spend outside of their presence was well spent. So he had stopped at the coffee shop next to the train, a dingy near-newsstand affair, and gotten himself a classic American comfort: watery, bitter pot coffee with cream and packet sugar. The cream and sugar was an additional luxury as well, something he omitted in his regular morning joe as an exercise in frugality, laziness, and health.
The morning in total was unusual nice- early train, lack of work, nice weather, quiet day. The hustle and bustle being absent from this part of the city during morning rush hour was not the most uncommon aspect of today's morning, but it was a bonus. The man sat and watched the old man, who had not once turned a page of the paper. A jogger went by, and the man tracked her path through the park with his eyes locked on her backside. The park was a doggy-run, hardly more than a yard adjacent to the neighborhood's historic church, and was briefly a homeless encampment. Thankfully, the police had not long before barreled through and cleared the blight, and the man thought not of where the people who had lived there now were.
In an attempt to extend his enjoyment of the morning, with his time to clock in approaching, he decided to go on a walk. The neighborhood's brick sidewalks provided a pleasant clack under his dress shoes, but within a tenth of a mile he found his shoes inadequate for a stroll and sat again, this time at a bench on the street by the church. He had barely five minutes remaining until he would have to cross the park and begin working, where his conflicts with his coworkers, admittedly tainted by racial animus, and his inabilities to communicate his desires effectively with his bosses now creeping into his mind. The weather was so nice, barely seventy-five degrees, and he was sweating.
It was just a simple complaint, he thought, and all it would take to solve his problems would be a change of desk across the office. There were plenty of open desks, and it was not unusual for an employee to relocate for a larger desk or to avoid unwanted glare. The problem, for the man, was that his desk was in an ideal position, below an air vent, in a corner, never in direct sunlight, and one of the larger desks. This left him cornered by his coworkers, both the now not-so-new hire who hardly worked, and an office friend of hers who would constantly, constantly chat. The man could not stand the constant noise, but after having to explain his frustrations with the document review task in non-racial ways, worried he would be unable to express his new frustrations in such an unbiased way.
A beam of sunlight broke the tree cover as the sun rose above the buildings in front of him. His time to work was coming. He could hear, around the corner at the office's front door, his two coworking conversationalists beginning their eight hour discussion of nothing, which would continue surrounding him for the next nine hours. He took the last sip of his coffee, and decided to purchase another before going into work.