Friday, February 19, 2010

Slaughterhouse 59

Slaughterhouse 59
START TIME: 10:33 PM
END TIME: 11:32 PM
WORD COUNT: 738

"Write a scene as though your life were a sitcom."

INTERIOR

A set of half-wall cubicles in a very grimy basement, with four desks being shown.

At a desk in the back corner, a shorter Asian gentleman is staring closely at a too-small computer monitor, tapping his right foot obsessively and singing along with the radio. His desk is meticulously neat, pencils organized, and he’s wearing a suit.

In the opposite corner is a woman with stacks of magazines lining several bookshelves, four framed pictures of different cats (one of them showing an article surrounding it that makes it apparent it was cut out of a magazine, minimizing the possibility that she actually owns the cat in question), and multiple tins of cat food.

Toward the forefront, staring straight up, is a heavyset gentleman with a shaved head. He is staring at the ceiling at first glance. A second glance proves he is asleep. A quick listen reveals he is snoring.

A twitchy, loud guy in a sports coat with a laptop bag slung over his shoulder strides through the glass door on the left, past a paper sign that indicates the door must stay closed. Four months ago he replaced the paper sign with a mirror image of the words on the sign showing through the other side of the glass, as if the letters had suddenly decided to turn around and face the other direction. No one has noticed.

TWITCH (into cell phone) Loved? Adored? Popular? You’ve got to be out of your mind. We’ll be lucky if they don’t want to shoot us. I know right now what my day’s gonna be. I’m going to walk into this meeting and the only thing that I’m going to come away with, after an hour and a half, is that when I walked in the door downstairs, the security guard at the desk didn’t take the snap off of his holster. That’s the ONLY thing that might go right. It’s all our fault. That’s why we’re here.

Twitch sits down at his desk, grabs an orange gumball from a jar on his desk, mimes dribbling it twice, and throws it at the heavyset gentleman’s mouth. It bounces off of his eye, startling him awake.

HEAVY: What the hel….lo, Mr. Happiness.

A shot of the floor reveals nine other gumballs scattered about.

TWITCH puts on a phone headset and covers his left ear. He is still talking on the phone as he’s doing this.

TWITCH: Look, if they actually LIKED everything we did, if they were so happy with the course of their day that they sent us cards and pizzas and nice little notes that said we were good to them? You know what that would mean? It would mean that when they ruined everything, when they lost the file they were working on, when they caught the virus, when they moved a whole mess of folders around on a group drive for no reason at all, they couldn’t blame us and they would actually OWN UP to the fact it was THEIR fault. They’d have to go home and look in the mirror at night and splash a glass of cold water on their face, and say, “You know what? The computer works fine. I’m the one who ruined it. I have an easy job. I don’t mine coal or unload cargo ships. I’m not a landscaper working in 110 degrees. All I do is push some buttons so that other people don’t have to. That’s all. And I suck at it.” You think that’s going to happen? You think anyone’s going home tonight and saying, ‘Wow, Thank Christ for IT, otherwise I’d be looking for paper files in a cabinet for about a week instead of pushing a couple buttons.’ Trust me, our only hope is that we stay right where we are at the moment – a cab ride away from the overwhelming desire to take our own life. I gotta run. I’ll talk to you in a bit.

MAGAZINE LADY (reading from screen) Wow. Guess who died.

No one responds.

CORNER SINGER: (singing) “I thought I knew what love was/What did I know/Close pays car lawn for Trevor/Pie wood bust get ‘em snow”

TWITCH stares at him with his mouth agape and adjusts the volume in his headset. He looks at a large digital clock next to his monitor, which reads 7:02.

TWITCH (to himself): 30 more years of this and I can retire.

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