Mess

  
He was sitting in the office of the twenty-first storey, his head a huge hard blank vacance. He was pale – he hadn’t been feeling well for a few weeks – and his face was blotched with large brown and yellow spots. His frown stretched across his face like a taut elastic band, his eyes huge like two moons.

            All around him was the rhythmic chanting of keys being tapped, voices sounding off like waves against the shore of a desolate beach, telephones ringing like empty cans, like xylophones being played by ghosts. He looked at the calendar on his desk, which was next to the picture of his wife. It was October 3^rd 2008.

            His phone rang. He picked it up. ‘Good morning, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. This is Humpty Dumpty speaking. How may I help?’ he said.

            ‘Humpty Dumpty?’ said the voice.

            ‘Yes, this is Mr Dumpty speaking. How may I direct your call?’

            ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said. ‘Humpty Dumpty? You gotta be kidding me,’ he muttered.  ‘You think you’re a wise guy, huh? Well fuck you!’

            The line went dead and Humpty Dumpty gently cradled the receiver back into its place. He looked at the blank screen and then calmly stood up.

            The next thing that was heard was the sound of shattering glass. Humpty fell in a shower of crystal, like an angel descending from a mountaintop, his coat-tails billowing out behind him. He closed his eyes, and then he was no more.

            ‘Jesus!’ said a voice from the office floor. ‘Was that Dumpty?’ He went to the window and looked out, his hair swept up in the scowling wind. From the twenty-first storey he could see the lanes of traffic down there like yellow veins, the cars and people like models on a great and simplified map.

            He noticed the pool of yolk way down there oozing out from the faint halo of cracked shell that littered the sidewalk. ‘Christ!’ he said. ‘That’s gonna take fuckin’ forever to clean up!’