Dreaming of Jizzy

Dreaming of Jizzy

By Y. Falstaff

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Cover art by A.Underhill

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© 2016 by Y. Falstaff

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

Dedication

To wonderful whims of fantasy

It is hump day, Wednesday, October, 14, 2015, and it's four forty-five in the afternoon in the big city. Forty-year-old Financial Services Representative Rick Hancock is sitting in his sterile, self-made prison counting down the seconds that feel something more like hours. The walls of his jail are a dead gray color, a neutered tone which resembles that funny plastic bed in a doctor's office. The walls of his confinement are carpeted, and punched into the carpet are colored tacks here and there holding up sheets of paper with countless procedures on them. In the end, Rick's entire job is about making money for the rich shareholders and CEOs of his company, Samuel Barton & Sons, and those are the cold, hard facts.

Directly in front of him, Rick stares at his shackles, two flat-screen monitors reflecting data from his numerous clients. Though this isn't a physical prison, like a real jail with criminals, it is instead a prison of the mind, a solitary confinement by choice.  As Rick stares the monitors with a dead, zombie-like expression, he has the sudden realization that the cell he inhabits is actually much smaller than a real solitary confinement cell in a real jail. Chuckling to himself under his breath, Rick thinks to himself that at least he doesn't have to sleep there, although some of his fellow employees, after long nights of bar-hopping, sometimes curl up with a pillow below their desks until morning.

It is now four forty-six, and it felt like it took ten minutes for the clock to tick just one measly minute off on his computer. All around him, Rick can hear his fellow employees, each in their own little gray prisons, fumbling with papers, finishing up phone calls, and pretending to be busy. Turning his eyes to the nearby window on his right, Rick looks out and sees through the tinted glass a dark layer of clouds, like a giant toupee, resting over the top of the dozens of high-rises in the city. Rick hasn't been outside since around six-thirty that morning when he first walked into the building. He knows its going to be cold out, and the weather pop-up on his computer, which he has checked every half-hour, warns of possible thundershowers tomorrow.

It is now four forty-seven, and Rick hears the ring of his email box and sees an email drop into his company folder from his boss, Tanner Dyson. The email is titled, “Vacation Requests for the Holidays”. Rick doesn't even bother opening the email because he knows that he has no family and no holiday plans, so he just picks it up and deposits that particular email right into his recycle bin on his computer.

The holidays!?

It seemed like Christmas just came and went a few weeks back, and they are already talking about it again. Just like everyone else in his office, Rick is starting to suspect that as you get older, time itself seems to mysteriously speed up. In the blink of an eye, instead of being in a sterile cubicle at a company, he will instead be in a similarly neutral environment surrounded by hospital beds and breathing his last breaths, wondering how time slipped by so quickly. Like a widget, Rick kind of figures that he's in the middle of being processed through this big society conveyor belt called life. First, there was being trained what to think and how to perform being a good little widget in school, followed by a soul-sucking job that makes you wish you'd just end it all, and finally some Hospice Care facility where some priest, who doesn't even know you personally, will come in and give you final rights after you breathe your last. In all honesty, Rick was pretty sure that even Jimmy Stewart wouldn't consider this a wonderful fucking life.

Breaking this coarse line of thought, Rick suddenly hears Cathy hiss between her teeth from the cubical on his left. After her exasperated exhale, he hears her voice whisper low to another employee.

“How can they do that?! Some of us have families, you know?!”

The next second, Cathy, who just happens to be one of the few single women in his office and a few years younger than him, stands up. Like a plump groundhog popping its head out of its hole in the ground, Cathy then leans her fat face over the shared wall of their cubical and whispers down to Rick.

“Did you read that?”

It is four forty-eight, and Rick turns his emotionless face to Cathy staring down at him with her secretive brown eyes.

“What? The email from Tanner? No,” Rick replied.

“I did,” whispered Jenn behind him, and the next second, she too popped up from out of her cubical behind him.

“How can they do that?!” whispered Cathy incredulously, looking completely bewildered.

“I know! I understand it is a busy time of year, but some of us have families that are out-of-town,” Jenn whispers back.

“What? They are not allowing vacations?” Rick asked, not surprised at all.

“No, they say that there are only so many vacation slots this year for the holidays, and they will be handed out according to seniority. So, everyone has to put in their requests, and they'll let us know,” Jenn answers. “That's real nice of them!”

Swiveling his chair around and meeting Jenn's pleasant green eyes, Rick reflects upon the pretty face of the married mother of two, and he watches as she purses her full lips in disgust.

“I'm going to email them right now and tell them that I don't think this is fair!” Cathy defiantly hissed, and she dropped down and disappeared, like a diver suddenly submerging.

Staring down at Rick, Jenn raises a skeptical eyebrow, and Rick just carelessly shrugs in reply. He knows Cathy's email will do no good and will likely only make her stand out in the wrong way, but he isn't going to say anything to her. He could honestly think of a lot of worse things happening than Cathy being fired or quitting. The truth is, she drives him fucking nuts anyway. She probably weighs about four hundred pounds and resembles more a bowling ball than an actual human being. While being rough on the eyes was certainly forgivable, it was some of her crude and outright nasty habits that really disgusted Rick and made sitting anywhere around her almost a living hell on a daily basis.

One of Cathy's particular nasty habits sprung from her sneaking these giant hoagie sandwiches into work with her every single day in her purse. After hiding her full course meal in her drawer, she then methodically sneaks bites of it all throughout the day. Sneaking the food is one thing, but the thing that really pisses Rick off is that she eats like a fucking cow, always chewing with her mouth wide open. At times, Rick literally sits there cringing, listening to her lips loudly smacking away as she greedily gorges herself. Then, worse than that, Cathy will go ahead and light a candle randomly throughout the day as she passes gas. She has convinced herself that the scented candle is cleverly covering her tracks, but it is more like when you're already sweaty and then put on deodorant, the two odors mix to form an even more heinous stink monster than you ever had with just the stinky armpit odor alone. Some of her more eye-watering bombs have literally forced Rick to get up from his desk and go for a long walk, just to get away from his cubical for a minute and let the entire area air out.

While Tanner and the rest of company management has repeatedly sent emails out about the building having pest problems and no one should be keeping food in the office, Cathy just ignores these warnings and can't live without feeding her face every five minutes. In defense of her actions, the rotund woman quite openly claims to have an overactive thyroid problem that she can't control, but Rick honestly thinks she just has an overactive appetite that she has no desire at all to control. While Rick hasn't sent an email to complain about her and just tolerates all the headaches she presents, he has had the random devilish thought enter his head to get some nuclear hot sauce and pour it inside her sandwich when she steps away from her desk. The private joy these thoughts give him are absolutely heavenly. The truth is, Rick really believes Cathy to be one of the most disgusting slobs he's ever met, and he honestly couldn't imagine any man finding her the least bit attractive.

“So, are you taking any time off for the holidays, Rick?” Jenn then asks, breaking him from his private thoughts.

“Psst! Ya, right? Rick never takes time off,” Cathy freely offered her unasked-for opinion, as she multitasked and continued to hammer away on her keyboard.

Frowning at his cubical wall and the irritating voice on the other side of it, Rick just shook his head, decided to let the comment go, and turned to face Jenn once again.

“No, I got nothing going on. You?” Rick asked.

“Told you!” Cathy rang out in an I-told-you-so tone.

“Ya, but no one was talking to you,” Rick immediately volleyed back in the same flighty tone.

“Hey, no need to be rude, Rick!” Cathy paused in her typing to growl back at him.

Rolling his eyes, Rick realized he had probably just volunteered himself to be put on her complaint email to Tanner about the time off, and now she was probably adding a scathing paragraph about how rude her neighbor has been to her and how he needs to be spoken to by management. Rick has walked this all too familiar road before, and it was always the same old bullshit at the office. In this case, since management won't likely budge on the vacation thing, they will likely try to please her by having some kind of talk with him about watching his words in the office. Thus is the pathetic working environment of the modern man, Rick thought to himself. It only made Rick wish he was born in Roman times, so he could be a gladiator instead. Even if he died young, at least he could die a real man instead of being emasculated on a day in, day out basis by the nonsense he had to put up with at these office jobs. Jenn though, narrowed her own eyes at Cathy before she answered his question.

“Danny and I were hoping to take the kids to his mother's place across the state, but I've only been with the company for two years. If they are doing vacations by seniority, we'll probably just have to have Christmas here.”

“I'd put in your request anyway. You never know?” Rick encouraged with a smile.

“That's a good idea. I think I'll do just that, Rick,” Jenn returned his smile, and then she dropped down into her cubical and began typing away on her keyboard.

“You're such a nice guy, Rick,” suddenly came the voice of Ginger from the cubicle directly in front of his.

“Psst!” he heard immediately from Cathy's cubicle.

Standing up and leaning over the front of his cubicle wall behind his flat-screen monitors stood Ginger, who was an older, married lady whose kids had grown and were now in college. In general, Ginger was a person who he got along with pretty well, and she was actually someone who kind of looked out for him. Even when he landed himself in the hospital sick the prior year, Ginger had come by to visit him, the only person from his job to do so.

“Well, I don't know about that?” Rick said in reply to Ginger's nice comment, completely ignoring Cathy.

“No seriously, I don't know how you haven't swept some pretty young lady off her feet by now?” Ginger openly speculated with a smile.

Shrugging, Rick just answered, “I don't know? Never has worked out, I guess.”

“Well, he's ruined now,” came Cindy's hoarse voice, two cubicles up from his.

Ginger turned to Cindy, who was roughly her age, but looked years older and, word around the office had it, she had a chronic drinking problem and a marriage on the rocks.

“Ruined?” Ginger asked. “I don't think so. If I had a niece or daughter who was single, I would love to see them get with someone like Rick.”

“No, he's too old. How old are you, Rick, early-mid forties?”

“Ya,” Rick answered, standing up now and looking at both Ginger and Cindy standing up in their cubicles in front of his.

“Yep, I'm afraid you're ruined now,” Cindy reluctantly repeated, nodding her head for emphasis.

Finally catching her meaning then, Ginger pursed her lips and reluctantly nodded too.

“I don't get it?” Rick asked, his eyes narrowing.

“Nope, women your age probably have kids and have been married already... They want a man that has been broken in. They don't want to have to break a new man in, no matter how nice he is,” Cindy argued matter-of-factly.

“You know, I think you're probably right about that,” Ginger reluctantly agreed.