Materfamilias

His clock was still ringing in his ears by the time he reached the turnstile. He caught his jacket pocket in it, and it ripped, sending all his loose change jingling off the floor. He awkwardly bent over, intending to pick the copper coins up, but changed his mind: it would congest the flow of morning travellers if he did so, and he wasn't the type of man who disrupts the way of the world.

 He quickly took his place back in the stream, a little flushed by the embarrassment, and made it just in time for the sliding doors to close on his satchel. He freed it as he imagined all the passengers' eyes looking at him disapprovingly. The turnstile incident must have put him out of sync with his own rhythm, making him skip a beat in the repetitive and monotonous score of his life. 

When he got to his workplace, the revolving doors looked threatening to him; he even thought of waiting until he would be the only person wanting to get in, but it would have meant being late for work, and he didn't like being late for work. He followed the accountant from the third floor as she stepped in and got unfortunately stuck in the same partition as her. She laughed; he didn't. 

He slowed down as she dashed to the paternoster lift: he didn't want to be stuck with her in one of its compartments. He hated that thing. He kept fearing he was going to be caught in its drive chain some day. 

But more than the paternoster, he feared the cleaning woman. And there she was, in the staircase, her matronal figure hammering a mop in a bucket. The rest of the staff seemed to see her as a benevolent materfamilias; to him, she was the combined embodiment of all the women who had persecuted him during his life. It was the way she looked at him. She despised him. He was despised by a cleaning woman. 

He stared at the marble floor. He felt even more trapped than usual. He thought of killing the cleaning woman. He pictured himself hammering the mop in her face again and again and again. He pictured himself being jailed for it. He wiped these thoughts away and pictured himself leaving the building, jumping on a train to anywhere but here, building himself a new life where nobody would know him so he could become the person he thought he was meant to have become by now. 

Instead, he entered the paternoster, as usual, because he just wasn't that type of man.

Hélène L.

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