The Cabinet of Kimber Lee

by Jennifer Robbins Mullin

     The educational arm of the planetarium was moved from the antiquated Allegheny Observatory to the brand spanking new Westsylvania Science Complex, a state of the art visual facility to better instruct and accommodate the school-age rabble of the city and beyond.  The planetarium staff was a small, loosely knit group overseen by a guy named Don Spork, who spent most of his time creating clever art pieces that he claimed were inspired by his frequent ingestion of psychedelic mushrooms, and were meticulously cobbled from found objects that he sold through a gallery run out of a self storage unit by the railroad tracks in The Strip.  All very trendy, and all very dangerous, making it even more trendy.  To free himself up for his more important personal pursuits, he delegated nearly all of his official work duties and responsibilities to his underlings, and they seemed capable enough to handle their assigned tasks.  One recent hire, Kimber Lee, had completed her internship in house, and was brought on board full-time as a junior celestial animation tech.  Basically the grunt work of preparing moon phases and constellations identifiable to the naked eye for daily publication on the Planetarium’s website.  She was eager to please everyone, especially Don, and to prove her worth.  She tried not to seem desperate and needy, though she was both of those things.

     A dayglo orange flyer was tacked up on the cork board in the breakroom announcing a pop-up art exhibit in the back room of a vintage clothing store off Butler Street from 5-9 p.m. on Friday featuring the whimsical art of Don Spork, among a handful of others.  Fine wine in a box and Costco charcuterie to be served.  Kimber thought that she should attend, but she didn’t have a car and was unfamiliar with the buses that ran to that part of town.  It was really out of character for her, but she approached one of her colleagues, Alberta, the only one she ever talked to, and asked if she was planning to go.

     “What now?”  Alberta was eating a sleeve of vending machine cookies at her desk while she edited a stop action short about a theoretical Earth-bound asteroid strike and the potential aftermath.  She’d wanted to incorporate dinosaurs into the model, as a reference point to previous catastrophic asteroid strikes, but Spork put the kibosh on that when she ran it by him because it wasn’t supposed to be historical in focus but contemporaneous.  To compound her displeasure, she couldn’t debate him on the issue because once he replied to her initial email, he stopped responding because as far as he was concerned, the matter was settled.  Of course, Alberta recognized that on some fundamental level he was correct given the attention span of a school age child and their near universal unholy love of all things Jurassic, but he was just so smug and dismissive.  She popped the last cookie in her mouth and swiveled around in her chair expectantly to face whoever had entered her office/studio.

     “Uh,” Kimber worried that Alberta was upset with her, not considering for an instant that it was something that had absolutely nothing to do with her.

     “Spit it out,” Alberta said, her teeth encrusted in masticated cookies.

     “The art show, Don’s art show,” she stammered, staring down at her beat up sneakers.  “Can I get a ride with you?  I can give you gas money.”

     “That’s right, that thing’s tonight.  I hadn’t thought much about attending.  Spork’s so insufferable, plus I find his work to be completely derivative.  He’s incapable of original thought.  Hmm, but you know what?  It might be fun to go.  Let’s grab a bite to eat at Burger King on the way over, unless you’d rather stop at Wendy’s?”

     “No, Burger King is fine,” Kimber said.

     “What’s wrong?  Don’t you like Wendy’s?” Alberta didn’t care one way or the other.  A cheap burger was a cheap burger, regardless of establishment.

     “I prefer Burger King, is all.  Oh, you know, I was served a super bad chicken sandwich once at Wendy’s and it just turned me on them.  I was on a junior high field trip and I vomited on the bus.  It ended up setting the tone for the remainder of my high school experience.  To stop it from following me to college I made sure that I went somewhere that no one in my high school was going.  I ended up having to volunteer in the Guidance Counselors’ Office just so that I had access to student files.”

     “Still waters run deep, eh Kimber?” Alberta quirked an eyebrow.  “Thanks for sharing all of that.  I never would have pegged you for a hacker.  Gotta watch out for you quiet types.”

     “Oh, I didn’t have to hack the files; they were right there on all of the computers in the Guidance Office.  All I had to do was double click and they’d open.  One of the Guidance Counselors was super old, like sixty, and he couldn’t navigate or remember anything.  All of his passwords were Guidance#24 because that was his job and his old football jersey number.  He told me himself.  I could probably get into his online banking if I wanted to.”

   “I wonder, is it hacking if you know the password?  Or if the screen is left open all of the time?  Anyway, that explains, I guess, how you ended up here.  Like I said, still waters, Kimber.”

    Oh, dear God, she’d said too much. Plus, she’d forgotten how annoying Alberta could be, always probing and then making value judgements based on whatever she believed that she’d extracted.   “I’m not secretive or anything.  I reveal things.  I’m not some sneak.  It’s just that I have so much to learn here that I can’t be babbling on and on about myself all of the time.” 

     “All right then, meet me in the breakroom at 4:30 and we’ll walk out to the parking lot together.  I don’t want you getting lost looking for my specific gray Subaru Forrester in a sea of gray Forresters.  Now leave me to my work, I’m already behind.  I mean, that’s not your fault, so to speak, but if I have to, if I get called out for being behind on this project, I will blame you.”  Alberta dug into a dull brown glob of modeling clay with a sculpting tool.  She wondered if she’d set the sprinklers off again if she used real fire on the meteor’s entry and descent into Earth’s atmosphere.  Better not risk it, that last effort at pyrotechnical realism nearly got her suspended.

    Later, as they walked into the burger joint, Kimber offered Alberta five dollars for gas and to her surprise, Alberta took it.  People usually didn’t bother.  Out of pity?  Maybe, but not this time.  Kimber never wore good shoes because good shoes meant that you had enough money to buy good shoes.  Before she died her mother provided a plethora of insights such as this to Kimber.  Like, anytime you have to give someone you know money, as in family, or a friend or classmate, use a bill that is in such pathetic condition that you yourself don’t even want to touch it.   This five-dollar bill was well worn and limp.  It was probably coated in bacteria, drugs, and feces.  Alberta passed it on at Burger King, using it and another five, plus a couple of singles to pay her supper tab.  Predictably, Kimber got the crumpled trashy five back in change when she paid with the only other bill in her wallet, a twenty.

     “Hey, can I have a different five?  A nicer one?”  Kimber asked the spiky green haired teenager working the counter, holding that floppy fiver between two fingers like someone else’s dirty Kleenex.

     “Sorry, but I shut the drawer and the guy with the key is on break, or just left,” the teen said, pointing to a coupe with no rear bumper pulling out of the lot.

    Both Kimber and Alberta ordered a Whopper Jr. Meal, and after going to the fountain and getting their drinks, they took a table that overlooked the street.  Their choices of view were the street or the parking lot.  Part of the fast-food aesthetic is to make sure that you don’t linger over your food and take up space for too long.

     “Why did you want to go to Spork’s art thing?”  Alberta asked, dipping a couple of fries into a splotch of ketchup.

     Kimber unwrapped the burger and removed the bun lid and toppings, carefully set it all aside, and holding the sandwich in the open palm of her hand like a baby bird, bent her head to lick the melted cheese atop the meat patty.  Alberta’s eyes grew wide with wonder, but she chose to make no comment.  Kimber continued licking the burger and Alberta realized that in whatever time she’d known her, she had never seen her consume anything.  She’d never even seen her so much as nibble on a chip or chew a stick of gum.

     “Don is such a fantastic leader and boss, I just want to show him some support, plus I want him to like me,” Kimber said between tongue swipes.  Alberta wondered if the surface of her tongue was sandpapery, like a cat’s.  Despite the oddity and awkwardness, she was actually making progress: the cheese was gone and the patty was breaking away in small chunks at the edges, which Kimber caught on her tongue and swallowed whole.  Alberta marveled if she even knew how to chew.  Alberta had an older brother who didn’t know how to suckle as a baby.  Her mother swore that she had to plunge food down his throat with a device that she claimed to still have but could never find to show anyone.  “I kept it in case we’d ever need it again,” her mother said.  Even now her brother had an extreme, pathological fear of choking on under-chewed food and sometimes went weeks on end where he liquified all of his meals in a turbo juicer that he bought from an infomercial that aired on a subchannel in the middle of the night.  His doctor suggested psychotherapy, but he didn’t see how that could possibly help.  His wife slept in a separate bedroom and vacationed without him.

     “Mmm hmmm,” Alberta murmured in agreement.  She and Spork had a conflicted history, they’d crossed paths many years earlier when she’d created a comic book and was peddling it at a science fiction convention, along with some scary/cute stuffed animal-like creatures that she’d stitched up by hand, based on characters in her comic.  Spork bought one of her stuffed animals but not the comic and even refused to take a comic book when Alberta tried to give him one for free.

  “No, no, that’s quite all right. I’m good,” he said.  Later, at one of the private parties convention attendees frequent after the day’s festivities had wrapped, standing there with a plastic cup of not just warm but hot Chablis, she heard of a live action diorama that someone had created of a half-starved pygmy rat in a cage that was made to look like a prison cell, complete with metal beds and stand-alone toilet and her stuffed animal that was slathered in peanut butter and honey.  The gruesome spectacle had been video taped and was playing on a loop on the bedroom tv.  The picture quality was so bad that she didn’t know what she was looking at, at first, not until Spork sidled up to her and pointed out little Elfig’s head detached from its body while the rat continued to mercilessly gnaw at it with its disgusting yellow teeth. 

     She used to think that she’d have her revenge on him, but the razor’s edge of redress was blunted by time.  Now she was content to just make his life more difficult at work in passive ways and to post anonymous criticisms of his art online.  It made her day when he’d come in to work and rail against this clown Going4Baroque attacking his latest creations.  Typically, Spork always referred to G4B as a man.  He would never in a million years figure out that it was Alberta.  Should Spork outlive her, she would make sure that mention of her online identity was made in her obituary.  Also, she couldn’t possibly trust her obituary to her son, so she’d been working on it herself on and off for the last few years.  It was a bit too confessional to be a true obit, but you work with what you have.

     “This job,” Kimber said, “means the world to me.  Literally.  My father has never had any faith in me.  He has told me since I was a kid that I’d be a failure, homeless, begging on the street.  Worthless, that no one would want me.  When my mother died, it seemed like he couldn’t stop himself any longer from being openly cruel.  Mad at the world.  He loved my mother very much, and she seemed to soften his meaner side.  Once she was gone, he changed for the worse.”

     “How old were you when your mother died?”

     “I was ten years old.”

     “From what I observed of my own mother, some people never get over the loss of their mother.  My grandmother died when my mom was twenty-six and she still cries when she talks about her.”

     Kimber set what was left of her burger down and wiped her hands on a rough brown napkin.  She turned to face Alberta full on.  “There are so many things in my life that I will never get over that I prefer to focus on work.  When I think about work, I don’t have to think about myself, my dead mother, and especially not about my father.  I can tamp down my terror of the past and failure.”

     “Fair enough, and that’s probably for the best.  Do you create animated shorts or videos in your spare time?  Any passion projects?”  Everybody worked on side pieces.  One co-worker was a side piece in a live action zombie installation that took place on weekends in the parking lot of a bar under an underpass on the Northside.

     “I was making a vid about a leopard slug in the desert and didn’t factor in how the lack of moisture and inescapable harsh light would lead to, you know, an unavoidable and irreversible desiccation.  I don’t think that I’ve emotionally recovered from that yet.  I put so much time into recreating an authentic environment.  I stole sand on the DL from

a playground.  I’d scoop some in my backpack real sly-like, and I’d nuke it in a microwave oven to loosen the clumps.”  She failed to mention that she borrowed an old high wattage spotlight from work that she further failed to return to its proper department.

     “That sounds really interesting,” Alberta said, though it really didn’t.

     “Thanks.  The slug’s journey across the desert was meant to serve as a metaphor for my own struggles.  A lonely misunderstood soul traversing an unforgiving wasteland alone.  See, initially I believed that slugs are asexual, but I was mistaken.  They’re hermaphroditic, so I guess it’s for the best that the slug, you know, perished on its quest because it wasn’t representative.  Strictly speaking.”

     “Fascinating,”  Alberta stated flatly.   She couldn’t get the fate of that poor mollusk out of her head.  And apparently Kimber had opened up about her sexuality.

     “Eventually I’ll start again, but I don’t know how or when,” Kimber picked the remnants of her burger up and finished it off.  Once that was done, she tore the French fries into tiny pieces and swallowed the bits, washing them down with diet cola.

     When they were done with their supper and bussed their table, they headed over to the art exhibit pop up.  Alberta kind of despised this sort of hipster dreck, but recognized that it’s also kind of fun to immerse yourself in something that you feel superior to. 

     “It must be nice to have a car,” Kimber observed wistfully as Alberta wheeled into traffic.

       “I can barely afford it.  But yeah, it’s nice to have a car.  If I had to take the bus to work, I’d either move closer or quit.  I don’t know how you manage an apartment and food on your salary.  It’s criminal what they pay new hires.”

     “I had to get real original with my living arrangements, and yeah, I moved super close.  I can walk to work, which is cool since I can’t afford a bus pass.  And in fact when you take me home after the show, just drop me at work because I left my laptop there and need to pick it up.  I can’t be without it all weekend.  Security will let me in, I know the night guys pretty well because I work late a lot.  It’s my prime source of access to the internet.”  Alberta nodded, thinking that Kimber was usually still there when she left work in the evening…and promptly back at work first thing in the morning.  Usually before Alberta even arrived.  She was just there.  Like a dead fly on the sash between the window and the screen.  It could remain there for years without anyone bothering to remove it.

     The pop-up event was way more crowded than Alberta ever imagined it would be.  People were happily milling about like they wanted to be there.  Surprisingly the wine in a box was middling, not the lowest end.  Again, not anticipated.  And to top it all off, someone in a white button-down shirt and black pants with a neatly styled messy ‘do was winding through the gathering offering a charcuterie board of cured meat, cheeses, crackers, fruit, nuts and even stuffed olives.  Dang it, they could have foregone the expense of eating out and just snacked on finger food here!  Clearly Spork made a lot more money than the rest of them.   Alberta cast her gaze over at Kimber and witnessed her licking a cashew like she’d never encountered a nut before.  She turned away and wandered over to the exhibited pieces.

     An old Barbie Dream House had been remodeled into a charnel house of dismembered dolls, mostly dollar store Barbie knock-offs.  To lend an air of realism, the stench of rot hung over the display via a piece of raw meat left to spoil and degrade that was hidden amongst the plastic body parts.  Flies co-mingled over the pageant and maggots actively writhed and reveled in their hideousness.  Alberta noticed a circular red sticker on the right bottom corner of the piece.  It had sold.  For how much?  She both did and did not want to know.  She moved along. 

     “Isn’t that thing awful?”  Spork dipped his head back toward the putrid Barbie miasma.  “The entire assemblage reeks of idiocy, uninspired, echoic laziness. I could laugh, seriously,” he kept his voice low in case the artist was lurking about.

     “I’ve seen worse,” Alberta said, nonplussed.  “Where’s your work?”  She was already itching to leave.

     “Right here,” he led her around a bin of vintage handbags to a long wooden table upon which sat a large terrarium with a sand covered bottom, a couple of small plastic palm trees under which were positioned little blue and white striped cabana chairs and what appeared to be dead slugs shriveled beneath the relentless eye of a reptile heat lamp trained on the tableau.

     “What do you think?  I call it, ‘The Eternal Struggle’,” Spork said, anxious for her reaction.

     “Very interesting.  I feel as if I’ve seen a short film based on this exact same concept.”  Spork’s face tightened.  She continued,  “Maybe it’s just something in the air, carrying us along on the stream of collective unconscious.  You know, like how four or five guys from different countries all invented the bicycle at around the same time.”

     “Yes, I suppose brilliant ideas do flow through more than one person at a time.  It makes perfect sense that some people serve as conduits of genius.”  Spork considered Alberta a good and trusted friend and spoke his mind freely in front of her.  They’d known each other for years.  When he got hired at the planetarium it was Alberta who first trained him, and then when he got promoted he made sure that she got a two percent cost of living raise as a thank you for all of her help. 

     Alberta turned away so that she could roll her eyes in private.  Turning back to Spork she said, “You didn’t feel bad about killing those poor mollusks?”

     “I did my own research and they don’t feel pain, so it’s all ok.”

     “A painless death is still a death.  The issue is the morality of taking a life, any life, especially in the creation of art about the struggle of living!”

     “Well, that’s not how I see it, and I certainly don’t take such a puerile approach to the depths one must plumb to create art, particularly great art,” he downed his glass of chardonnay and stormed off, tossing the plastic cup angrily into the bin of vintage handbags.

     “That’s not the trash,” Alberta yelled after him, but he didn’t turn around.  Oh well.  She decided to more actively undermine him both online and at work.  She knew that she should work at being a better person, elevate her consciousness, but she wanted to do this one thing first.  Destroy Spork, then concentrate on enlightenment and shit.  That whole, ‘Make me good, God, but not yet.’

     “What’s this?” Suddenly Kimber was at her elbow, looking over Spork’s monstrosity, sipping an off-brand cola from the can through a soggy paper straw.

     “Nothing, we should probably hit the road, especially since you want to be dropped off at the planetarium.”  Alberta tried to steer her away, but Kimber resisted and lingered, her gaze transfixed.

     “I showed him my video.  I showed him.  And he said that it was amateurish and derivative and lacked depth of meaning and that I should keep trying.” Kimber turned to look Alberta in the eye, her face contorted by anguish.

     “I’m so sorry, Sweetie.  Some people are not to be trusted.  Come with me,” Alberta took her arm and led her away from the piece to a battered brown leather sofa where they could sit and Kimber could gather herself.  People were everywhere still, but crowds are lonely by nature and easily accommodate privacy out in the open.

     “He told me that I shouldn’t share it with anyone else, to spare myself embarrassment.  Did he think I wouldn’t ever find out?  He posted the announcement in the breakroom!  Of course, I’d come here, he’s my boss!” Kimber let out a strangled sob and covered her mouth with her hand to keep more sobs from escaping.

     “I’m going to tell you something that I’ve only ever told my sister because it galled me to such an extent that I thought about killing him, and didn’t want anyone suspicious of my actions or possible motives.  So, anyway,” and Alberta launched into her first interaction with Spork at the convention and how he’d degraded and defaced her work for his own amusement, for a hack job loop video that was probably animal abuse toward the starved rat.  By the time she wrapped up her story Kimber was calmer and in control of her emotions once more.

     “I understand why you kept that to yourself.  I can’t imagine telling anyone of what happened here tonight.  It’s so humiliating.  I’m so stupid!”

     “No, no, you’re not stupid.  You’re not stupid.  And you’d told me about your video, your biographical metaphor in the desert.  I knew the moment I laid eyes on Spork’s piece that he’d stolen your idea and tried to make it his own.  That asshole.  All I can say is, at work, do your job and interact with him as little as possible.  I’ve been doing that for years and I’m fine.”

     The pair sat on the couch for a bit longer, watching the gathering like they were searching for something.  A man came along and admired the painting that hung on the wall behind and above them.  He asked if they knew the artist, ignored their reply, and asked a passerby if they knew the artist (they didn’t), and then lifted the painting from its hook and wandered off with it.

     “Let’s go,” Alberta said.  “I’ve had enough.”

     They drove in silence, save for the radio turned on a low volume to an oldies station.  The city was pretty dead and they were back at the planetarium in no time, before three songs had even finished.  Alberta pulled up at the rear entrance delivery door, where security set up after hours.

     “Why don’t I wait for you and give you a lift to your apartment?”  Alberta offered.

      “Thank you, that’s very thoughtful.  I think that I’ll go in and get some work done since I’m here.  I couldn’t sleep anyway, I’ve got some unresolved emotional turmoil.  Maybe I can channel this into something useful.”

     “I understand.  Don’t take what Spork did too personally.  If anything, be flattered that he thought your work worthy of stealing.  He’s a total opportunist.  A parasite.  He’s never helped anyone but himself.  If anything, that’s what I should have told you on Day 1.”

     “It’s ok.  I know now.”  Kimber exited the vehicle and shut the door securely, waving a hand, a wan smile on her lips.  She approached the steel door and pressed the red button to alert someone inside that someone was outside.   She turned to wave again at Alberta, motioned for her to move on, and turned back to wait at the door.

     A voice came through the intercom.  “Hi, this is Steve the security guard, state your business.”

     Kimber depressed the smudged white button and spoke into the device.  “Hi Steve, it’s Kimber.  I forgot my laptop and need to pick it up.”

     “Kimber!  I swear it’s like you live here, you work so hard.”  The steel door buzzed and the dead bolt released, allowing Kimber entry.  She heaved the door open a sliver and slipped inside.  After the facility officially closed for the day, they switched to ‘twilight’ illumination throughout.  There was barely enough light to navigate by, but Kimber was accustomed to it and could walk the halls in total darkness if need be. 

     She approached the security station where Steve sat watching a bank of monitors.  Cameras were trained on all of the entrance access points and at the top and bottom of all stairwells.  There were cameras positioned inside of the three elevators, including the cargo elevator.  Kimber hung out with Steve as soon as she got hired.  She confided to him that she felt that she had to work late to learn the ropes quickly, so that she’d fit in with everybody.  Steve discovered her sleeping at her work table more than once, and finally admonished her,  “Go home!  Get some sleep.”  But Kimber begged him to let her stay and finish just one more thing, and then he lost track of her because a street cat was facing off against a raccoon on one of the CCTV cameras directed at the docking bay.  Without sound, the cat looked like it wanted to fight, and the raccoon seemed to want to dance.  Just as the cat seemed ready to make a move, another cat flew from off camera to knock it sideways and they dashed out of the scene.  The raccoon humped after them and that was that.  This was the stuff that made the job worthwhile to Steve.  He copied videos and uploaded them onto RagTag under a pseudonym.  It was a decent side gig, paid for groceries and some other extras.  A few thousand more followers and he’d start saving for a house.

     “I just need to pick up my laptop and then I’ll be out of your hair,” she said, continuing past the security station.

     “Hold on, you need to sign in and out when you come in after hours.  The Science Center doesn’t want anyone abusing access to the facility.  Not that you would, but these are the rules,” he explained, setting a pen on the clipboard with a legal liability form on it, and sliding it across the desk.

     “Oh, yes, of course, I don’t want to get into any trouble,” with a slightly wavering hand Kimber inked her name on the line drawn.  She’d never come in late like this before, after regular hours, she’d always already been there.  If you’re there, you don’t have to sign in, or out.  You’re just there, like a potted plant.

     “I’ll walk with you,” Steve said, coming from behind the station.  “I need to do rounds anyway.”  Kimber knew that he seldom did rounds, but that with her appearing out of the blue he wanted to do things by the book.  They both eyed each other with some curiosity if not outright suspicion.  There’d been a complaint made by the facility manager that supply inventories were shrinking, possibly during off hours, although there was no evidence of when exactly the supplies were disappearing, or dwindling, just that they were gone.  Security was made aware, and there was an email alert sent out facility wide to remind employees not to remove anything from their work environment.  Kimber wasn’t stealing or pilfering supplies, knew nothing of any theft, and she kept nothing more than a paperclip from work on her backpack.  The paperclip was affixed to the slider on the zipper after the plastic pull tab broke last week.  It never even occurred to her that someone might construe that as stealing, or at the very least, a misappropriation of goods.  Her conscience was clean on that score.

     When they got to Kimber’s workspace she thanked Steve and flicked on the light, peeled off her light jacket, and opened her laptop.

     “I thought you were just picking up your laptop, I didn’t realize that you planned on staying to do some work,” Steve said, his brow deeply furrowed.

     “Is there a problem?”  Kimber stayed to work late almost every single night.  Why would this be different?

     “No, no problem.  I’m just going to have to keep tabs on you while you’re signed in.  Technically I’m supposed to come around every half hour until you sign out.”

     “How about I just text you every hour, if it comes to that?  I shouldn’t be too long, but I sometimes lose track of time when working.  This job means everything to me.”

     “I can’t say no to you Kimber.  Just check in, so that I know what’s going on.  And for God’s sake don’t accidentally put a stapler or a block of modeling clay or whatever in your backpack.  We might have a pilferer in our midst and if you get caught with so much as a highlighter they’ll try to hang every single missing crumb of office supplies on you.”  Steve tipped his already askew hat at her and walked out into the darkened hallway.

     Kimber checked her phone.  Plenty of battery in the old girl.  She set the task messenger to text Steve every hour until 6am when he clocked out.  If Steve ever replied, she instructed the task messenger to respond appropriately, but in a G-rated manner, just in case something innocent could be construed as saucy.  She hated the saucy function.  She ambled to her work locker, fetched a small black zippered bag with toothbrush and toothpaste, a towel that sorely needed laundering, and headed to the washroom.  She voided her bladder, wiped and flushed, went to the sink and washed her hands and face with the available hand soap from the dispenser, and then brushed her teeth.  When she was finished she returned her things to the locker and grabbed an old backpack that stowed pjs.  This was always the diciest part of her day, walking from her locker to the theater.  At the rear of the theater there was a low cabinet that ran the entire length of the wall that was meant for storage, but was empty.  Kimber discovered the cabinet the third day after she started work.  She’d fallen asleep at her desk so many times that she was drawing unwanted attention to herself and she was so exhausted, she just wanted a place to hide for an hour or so. 

     That seemed like a lifetime ago.  Since then she’d dragged in a couple of discarded yoga mats stacked as a bed,  and commandeered an extension cord to power a small desk lamp and charge her phone.  She’d set up a cozy nest for herself with a sleeping bag and two pillows.  But it had to remain secret, of course. She couldn’t get lax, she had to stay vigilant.  Anytime she wanted to have some popcorn or a cup of noodles while watching videos on her laptop before going to sleep, she reminded herself that if she was found out, at the very least she’d have to find another place to live.  At the very worst, and most likely, she’d be fired.  Possibly black balled in her chosen field of science animation.  Technically, she was stealing electricity, water, and some asshole might argue, air conditioning and/or heat.  Kimber was very careful, she’d been very careful to hide her living arrangement at work.  That is, until she’d left on a Friday evening to go to Don Spork’s pop-up and tried to return to the building without causing too much notice.   All to win a man’s approval.

     Kimber kept a low profile over the weekend, remaining in her cubby much of the time, eating from the vending machines and limiting her liquid intake to better control her bladder during the hours that they were open to the public.  Twice she ran into co-workers in the hall, but it wasn’t a big deal and both times they grunted a greeting and kept moving.

     Monday morning rolled around and the regular crew ambled in over the course of a couple of hours since they all worked a flex schedule.  Alberta chose the earliest shift, 7am-3:30pm.  She caught up with Kimber in the break room while she tossed her sack lunch into the fridge and Kimber was getting a cup of noodles from a beeping microwave.

     “How can you eat that first thing in the morning?”  Alberta said, curious to see how she might consume the noodled soup. Surely she’d slurp the whole thing.  Surely.

     Kimber carefully peeled the lid the rest of the way back as chicken infused steam escaped in a savory plume.  “I have been hungry for a cup of noodles for literally days.  This is pretty sweet and the perfect breakfast, if you ask me.”  She walked toward her work area, blowing over the top of the waxy cardboard vessel.  Alberta, craning to see if there was a spork poking out, or even a spooned straw (a stroon?), followed her.

     No sooner did Kimber sit down, still blowing over the steaming cup, than the intercom on her work table squawked, and its camera blinked to life.

     “Kimber Lee,” a staticky female voice stated over the interoffice hard line.

     Kimber pressed the black bar and leaned into the microphone.  “Yes,” she replied, turning to raise her eyebrows at Alberta.

     “Don’t place your mouth so close to the microphone when responding,” the female voice admonished flatly.

     Kimber leaned in again, “Sorry.”

     “Please report to the security office in sublevel 2.  Bring your things in the event that you do not return above ground.”

      “What do you mean ‘in the event that I do not return above ground’?”  No response.  Kimber pressed the black bar several times, “Hello?  Hello?”

     “Do not abuse the intercom, it’s company property, you have been given your instructions,” the voice said and then was radio silent.

     “Holy cow was that creepy!” Alberta said.  “I’ve never had the Personnel Office contact me.  I’d forgotten they even existed.”

     “What should I do?”

     “You have to comply.  They’ll send security if you don’t.  I mean, I’m assuming they’ll send security.  This is all new to me.  I’ve never witnessed someone summoned by personnel prior to this very moment.”  Alberta’s eyes darted over the room, and she noticed that the intercom’s camera light was still on.  They were being observed, probably recorded, under the auspice of *quality control*.

     “C’mon,” Alberta reached out tentatively and brushed the sleeve of Kimber’s blouse with the back of her hand, “I’ll go with you.  Make sure nothing happens.”  Even as she said it Alberta knew that she was almost as powerless as Kimber in the work hierarchy.  Maybe she should shoot a quick alert to Spork, that venerable invertebrate.  But there was no time.  They were already in the elevator on their way to sublevel 2.

     When the doors slid open there was Spork, Steve, and some woman dressed all in black, with severe features and thick glasses waiting for them. 

     “Who are you?”  The woman asked, then continued without waiting for a reply, “You shouldn’t be here.  This is a grade 5 exit interview per the agreement in the employee handbook – which every single hiree here signed on their first day of orientation.  I pride myself on thorough efficiency.”  A document was produced from a manila folder and held up for all to see that clearly had Kimber Lee’s dated signature at the bottom if one was given the time to inspect the sheet of paper before it was thrust back from whence it came.

     “I am here to make sure that Kimber doesn’t get railroaded on some trumped-up bogus bullshit charge,”  Alberta said, which was true for the most part, she just had no standing.

     “Excuse me, but I don’t know who you are,” the woman started to say when Alberta interrupted her.

     “And I don’t know who you are either.  Where’s your badge?  Identify yourself, we have that right.”  It was not in Alberta’s nature to be so bold, and she planned on having severe and explosive diarrhea as soon as she could peel off from the group and hit the restroom. 

     “The impertinence of your demand aside, which trust me, I find quite galling, I am Matilda Batty, Chief Personnel Officer.”  Batty directed the group into her windowless office.  The ceiling seemed lower to Alberta than any of the other offices in the building, and the cement block walls were painted a dark color, making the space feel even smaller.  The air was a bit too warm and stale.  The chairs were all hard seats with straight backs.  Everyone remained standing.

     Clearing her throat, “It has been brought to my attention that on Friday evening last, the 18th I believe, Kimber Lee returned to work after clocking out, signed in at the security desk, and never signed back out.  Is this information correct as I have just stated it?”  Batty asked Kimber.  Alberta turned toward Kimber, knowing that she’d dropped her off on Friday after Spork’s thing, assured that Kimber was just picking up her laptop and then going home.  Wherever home was.  Where was this going? 

     Instead of looking at anyone in the room, Kimber’s head hung down, her gaze was cast to the floor and she replied, “Yes.”

     “And you have remained on the premises since you entered the building at 10:12pm on Friday the 18th, correct?”

     “Yes,” her eyes were now shut, her face cloaked by the curtain of her loose hanging hair.

     “I was made aware of a discrepancy on the sign in sheet on Saturday morning when the first shift of security took over for the night watch,” Batty continued.  She pointed a remote controller at a television with a built-in recording/playback device on a cart in the corner of the room.  CCTV footage began to play of an empty hallway.  At the 22:34:17 mark Kimber entered the frame carrying a small bag and a towel and going into the restroom.  She exited the restroom at 22:41:13. 

     Batty paused the video.

     “Prior to this, there had been no reason to go back and review older CCTV footage for the off-hours activity of regular, non-security employees.  But once we did, we discovered that you are routinely present in the building after normal work hours.  I spoke to your department head, Donald Spork,” she swept a hand in Spork’s direction, “and asked if there was a reason that you should remain in the building without ever clocking out and he assured me that no, there was not.  I checked your hiring status and you are a Class G salary employee, not hourly, so this isn’t a wage theft issue.”

     Batty restarted the video.  Kimber could be seen carrying a backpack and entering the theater.  The timestamp read 22:44:18.  Batty fast forwarded through the surveillance video at hyper speed until Kimber reappeared Saturday the 19th at 6:01:59.

     “So here we are, we gathered few, to bear witness to the evidence presented that you, Kimber Lee, have been living in the media cabinet at the rear of the theater.  For how long,”  Batty shrugged, “I cannot say because the camera video is recycled and reset every thirteen days.  But security has checked and you’ve fashioned yourself a cozy little cubby hole there with a mattress and sleeping bag and pillows.”  Batty started a slide show on the tv monitor.  Screen shot stills of Kimber lurking about after hours over the last two weeks ran with their time stamps, and then at the end was a series that captured her sleeping quarters.  From this angle and with the harsh lighting of a flash it looked like a pack rat’s lair with the jumbled sleeping bag and all of the snack and candy wrappers.  She hadn’t been expecting anyone so she hadn’t straightened up.  Surely she couldn’t be faulted for that.

     “As a courtesy and a courtesy only, do you have anything to say in your defense?”  Batty was flushed and sipped some water from a metal bottle sitting on the side of her desk.  In all of the years that she’d worked at the facility, this was the first time she had to fire someone that didn’t involve drug or alcohol abuse.  Or sexual harassment, but that was categorized as something other than firing.

     Kimber looked around at Spork, Alberta, and Steve who had been called in especially for this meeting.  While initially she felt deep shame, looking at her bed just now, such as it was, erased all of that.  How dare they.  They paid her poverty wages and expected her to live on that?  She didn’t earn enough to rent a room in someone’s house and still pay for food, and a bus pass.

     “I accuse!”  She shouted and pointed a finger at Spork, who recoiled.

     Batty sat down at her desk and pulled out Form 0512 from the lower right drawer.

     “Have a seat,” she motioned for Kimber to sit in one of the hard chairs opposite her.  “Now, what exactly are you accusing Donald Spork of?” 

     “He stole my work, my idea, and presented it as his own.”

     “You are an underling in his department, and technically the planetarium, as your employer, owns everything that you create on premises – and, since you were living here and using planetarium equipment…”  Batty tapped the eraser end of her mechanical pencil.  She loved mechanical pencils, not so much in function as in name.  Mechanical pencil, mechanical pencil, they sound so official and capable.

     “I didn’t create the piece here; it was my senior project at The Institute of Design Toledo.  I never used a single piece of work equipment or tech to create or complete it.  I showed it to him and he stole the concept and execution in its entirety.  Ask Alberta, she’s seen both renderings.” 

     All eyes turned toward Alberta who raised her eyebrows and held a hand to her chest.  She cleared her throat, took a deep breath, blinked three times and said, “Yes, that is correct.”

     All eyes turned toward Spork, who tried to recoil further into himself, but failed.  “These are bald faced lies, petty jealousies, and unprovable accusations about thematic issues that are universal!  Public domain!  No one person owns an idea or a representation of a conceptual, uh concept.  These things are in the ether, floating about for artists to grasp hold of and breathe life into!  That’s what I did, that’s exactly what I did.  Kimber had a half-baked, half-formulated, unrealized failed vision that she may have shared with me ages ago, I forget, but my work, my completed work, is completely different.  It shares none of the genesis, the foundational inspiration of her piece, whatever hers was, I can’t remember.”

     Batty lifted her glasses and rubbed her eyes with her fingertips.  “I’m going to need to see both works.”  Her curiosity was piqued.  Batty didn’t, by any measure, consider herself an expert on art, but like everyone, she had opinions.

     “You don’t have the authority!”  Spork roared.

     Batty turned her intercom from ‘standby’ to ‘active’ and flicked the switch for the DIRECTOR’S office.  Her finger hovered over the black bar.  “Is this the way you want to play this, Don?  Do you want the Director involved?”  Her finger dropped incrementally lower until it was just a whisper away from the black bar.

     “Stop!  No, leave the Director out of this.  For fuck’s sake, you people, am I right, Steve?”  Spork gave a weak laugh and ran his hand through his sparse greasy hair, trying to get control of himself and the situation.

     “You can leave me out of this,” Steve said and went and stood behind Batty.

      “This is insane!  This isn’t even about me, it’s about an employee who was living in a cabinet in the theater.  This has absolutely nothing to do with me.  Nothing!  I’m going to call my attorney.”  Spork made no move to call his attorney or leave Batty’s office.

     When asked to produce a video file of her creation, Kimber complied and Batty downloaded it.  Spork fussed about, but he did as well.

     “Both of you go to the breakroom and wait there.  No, wait.  Kimber, you go to the breakroom, Spork, you go to your office.  I’ll contact you when I’ve seen what this is about.  Alberta, go with Kimber and make sure that there’s no interfacing between the two parties.”

     Hours passed.  Kimber dipped an energy bar into a piping hot cup of coffee and sucked on the soggy bits and particles that quickly disengaged from the whole.  Alberta had finally decided to ask her why she ate that way when the overhead public address crackled to life.

     “The parties involved in the previous discussion are to report to sublevel 2 immediately.  There will be no further announcement.”

     Kimber and Alberta were nearer the elevators so the doors were whispering shut when they saw Spork coming down the hall.

     The Director was and wasn’t in Batty’s office.  He was live on the monitor, but otherwise at an undisclosed location.  When Kimber and Alberta walked in, the Director snapped to awareness.

     “Where is Donald Spork?  Why is he not with you, Kimber Lee?”  The Director asked.

     Like everybody else, Kimber did not want to look at the Director, even on a screen.  The absolutely perfect bilateral symmetry of his face, like a hideous ink blot on a folded scrap of paper, made her brain want to cave it in or slash at it, to create some blessed contrast.  She was not the only one, and the Director was almost never seen in public physically.  Finally, Spork made his entrance.

     “And there you are, Donald Spork.  Let me begin by saying that no one is fired, except Kimber Lee, who is fired.”  There was an audible gasp in the office.

     “Excuse me, I misspoke.  Kimber Lee is being removed from the Westsylvania Science Complex and transferred to another within our consortium of educational facilities.  She will be reassigned to Erie, where the depressed region’s low cost of living will be better suited for the pay scale of her position.  Most of the workers there have formed a commune in a derelict warehouse that the city signed over to them in exchange for toxic waste clean-up on the site.”  Everyone shot side eye glances at each other, but then the Director, incapable of reading social cues, forged on, “As for Donald Spork, who clearly plagiarized the work of his underling Kimber Lee, you have been elevated to regional Head of Creative Resources effective at the beginning of the next quarter.  Donald Spork, you are tasked with selecting your replacement prior to leaving for your new position.  Good day to all of you.”  And the screen reverted to a test pattern before it concentrically constricted to a single white dot that was then swallowed by a field of black.

     “Well, that was all completely unexpected,” Batty observed.  “I was led to believe that very different outcomes were to be set in motion.”  Batty flipped a switch on her intercom and depressed the black bar, “Security, stand down and resume your regular duties.  Code Fuchsia has been averted.  That is all.”

     As Kimber and Alberta left the grim stuffy office that offered nothing but hostile furniture, Kimber began to quietly cry, at least she hoped it was quiet.

     “Hey,” Alberta said, “are you okay?”  Erie wasn’t so bad.  It wasn’t as if she was being relegated to Akron.  Goodness, once you inched into the Midwest it was nigh on impossible to claw your way back out.

     “Yeah, I’m fine,” she wiped at her tears, but they kept coming.  “I’m actually really happy because I’ve always wanted to join a collective and live in a commune, and now they’ll have to take me because I work there.  It’s just this huge relief, to have somewhere that I belong no matter what.”  A couple of sobs in quick succession escaped her.

     “This is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard!  But I’m so happy for you, that you’ve maybe found your people. I mean, you haven’t met any of these coworkers yet, so it could all go horribly wrong.”

     “As long as I’ve got my own little corner and workspace, I’ll figure it out.  And believe me, I know how to handle people who aren’t real thrilled with me.  This is kind of my off ramp, you know?  My chance at not just a new beginning but something lasting.”  Kimber looked out the car window and smiled at her smudged reflection in the glass. 

     By seventeen hundred hours and change, she was on a bus bound for parts north, everything she had in the world was packed in two bulging backpacks and a messenger bag.  Alberta dropped her off at the depot downtown, but didn’t stick around for the departure.  Already where things had recently converged, they had dispersed once more, on the wind and open to fate.

     On her drive home, Alberta started to mull over the events that had led up to this point.  She heaped most of the blame on Spork because she had an old axe to grind with that man, which was fair enough.  Not for the first time, she contemplated killing him.  Years ago she came to accept that the killing part would be easy, the hard part would be living with it, and hardest of all, getting away with it.  Getting away clean, so that it looked like a natural death, or a bonafide accident, so that nobody fell under suspicion and was imprisoned for something that she caused.  It was a thought exercise that she’d drag out when she couldn’t sleep and turn over in her mind.  One afternoon some years ago, she went wild mushroom hunting with Phil, the now ex-husband of a friend and he pointed out some small deadly mushrooms sprouting out of a matted miasma of forest litter on the edge of a meadow.

     “People who are into magic mushrooms mistake these poisonous ones all of the time for the real deal,” Phil said.  “My advice?  Stay away.  No trippy high is worth it.”  Because she was being super cautious, Alberta took close-up photos of the caps from both dorsal and ventral views, careful to get the fine definition of the gills.  The pics were downloaded from her phone to a file labeled GroundhogDay and nothing more to indicate contents.  She bought a used mushroom identification book from a second hand bookstore, paid cash, and discarded the receipt at a gas station when she stopped to fill up.  She dog-eared relevant pages, and irrelevant ones as well.

     One day two years ago on a lark, Alberta picked some Galerina marginata mushrooms, aka funeral bells, aka deadly galerina, aka autumn skullcap, when she was out in the woods specifically looking for them.  She was careful to dry them completely away from direct sunlight, and then she vacuum-sealed them in plastic with a Mr. Yuck sticker affixed, even though she lived alone and presumably would not forget that they were deadly poisonous and toss them onto a pizza at some point.  And then she stashed them in the freezer for long term storage.  As she stood before the refrigerator freezer, her hand on the handle, she contemplated, could I live with myself?  Could I?  Spork had called her into his office to inform her that she was passed over for his old job in favor of a HuSim from accounting.  Spork and the Director thought it best for the department head to focus on budgetary concerns and for Spork, as overall head of creative, to carry those responsibilities with him to his new position.

     “A simulated human from accounting is going to head up our art department?” Alberta was absolutely incredulous and didn’t bother to hide it.

     “Yes, and you would do well to fall in line because that particular HuSim, HS507, is a stickler for protocol, conduct, and inventory.”  Interestingly, if anyone was still wondering who had been pilfering supplies from the company, it appeared by the looks of Spork’s moving boxes that it was him.  He would be gone for good in a week.  When his back was turned, Alberta checked the middle desk drawer for his cache of shrooms and there they were, same as always.  He was not known to share these, or anything else for that matter.

      Two days later Alberta dropped by Spork’s office with a parting gift from her and her fellow workers.  Spork was out, as she knew he would be, attending a virtual orientation, so she left the novelty coffee mug on his desk, and then slipped something a little extra in the desk drawer.

BIO

Jennifer Robbins Mullin attended Mercyhurst University where she studied literature and photography before dropping out and working a series of menial jobs, and then raising two sons to adulthood.  She’s written and published some nonfiction articles over the years, but this is her first work of fiction.  She lives in the northern reaches of Pittsburgh with her wife and dog.  Her fine art photography is carried by Bottlebrush Gallery and Center For the Arts in Harmony, PA.