Content Warning: mentions of suicide and guns

“Hey, Miriam, I just wanted to let you know that June twentieth will be my last day at Wittberg,” I said to Miriam, my stuffy and gray-all-over supervisor. I stood in front of the metal desk in her office, the fluorescent lights casting a dirty sepia wash on Miriam’s face so each wrinkle caked beneath her oily foundation came out of hiding. She peered at me over the stacks of thick manila folders littering her desk with beady rat eyes. 

“Why are you telling me now?” It was December. 

“I’m giving you ample notice so you have lots of time to find my replacement. If you need help interviewing candidates, I’d be happy to help.” I gave Miriam a tight smile. I could see a vein twitching by her temple.

“Where are you going, Katherine?” Miriam’s Staten Island accent croaked at me like a toad on a mushroom, gnarled warts on its fat body. Deep green with huge feet, I pictured a toad in a gray pilling cardigan, frayed sleeves from where it gnaws on the fabric; it’s trying to quit smoking and needs some way to sustain the oral fixation. The resemblance was uncanny. 

“I’m moving,” I said. Though, of course, that was a lie. June twentieth would be my last day, because on June twenty-first, I had been planning to kill myself. I haven’t decided how yet. 

At first, I was thinking about jumping off a building in the city. Maybe one of those high rises where you need special access to get on the roof. Then, I would swan dive thirty-stories into concrete. I imagined the way my mind would go blank while I fell—floated—down, down, down, until everything was numb enough that I didn’t feel my body hit the pavement, or my soul transcend the planes of reality into the waiting room to Hell. 

Because, of course, I’m expecting Hell. I’m a realist. 

But then I thought about vanity. I could suddenly see myself, a hunk of roadkill smeared on the sidewalk, a marionette puppet who had had her strings snipped, limbs splayed and splattered. My face was a bloody massacre of skin and muscle and a green eye popped out of its socket. A child would see the final twitch of my spaghetti form through his mother’s fingers from across the street, and he would be in therapy for the rest of his life. How selfish of me to assume that he’ll have the healthcare to compensate for that trauma?

Suicide will never be a beautiful thing, but I did not want the whole world to remember me as a mangled corpse, a bag of bones jostled and tossed onto the curb of New York, reeking like the rest of city (and therefore ignored). Also, I’m afraid of heights.

I opted for a private suicide. 

Sometimes I would sit at my kitchen island, my feet dangling off the stool like a child at the doctor’s office, and draft my note. Every time, it started: “To whom it may concern…”

Because what else do I say? Dear family? Dear Nathan? Dear slew of childhood and college friends who I haven’t done more than exchange holiday cards with in the past five years? Half of the people I would consider acquaintances—Kelly, Debbie, Aaron, Heather, Lucas, Paulo, Tim, even Miriam—wouldn’t even fall under the umbrella of “whom it may concern”, because I haven’t seen most of them in the flesh since I could still drink Tito’s two nights in a row without thinking I’m hemorrhaging. My death was no longer their business, because they were no longer mine. 

“To whom it may concern…” I would write. I would stare at my chicken scratch for too long, and the words would blur and fuzz on the edges. The purple ink would bleed into a mess of unfocused smudges. I would crumple the yellow legal pad paper into a tight ball. I would start fresh. “To whom it may concern…” I would notice how ugly the glittery purple ink looked against the dull yellow paper. I would crumple the paper into a ball again. Once more: “To whom it may concern…”—this time in red ink—but my handwriting would be far too messy for my final message to the whom that were concerned. I would try again, “To whom it may concern…”, in loopy cursive, like I was a teenage girl writing a love letter to shove in a locker. I would notice how the red ink alluded to blood, and how sinister and weird would it be to write a suicide note in my own blood? Or maybe it would be cool and mysterious? I would crumple up the paper into a ball again. I would pretend to be shooting a basketball in the final seconds of a championship game as I tossed the ball into the trash by the door. I would miss. 

I stopped drafting my suicide note because it was stressing me out. Would it be better to not leave one? Would the half dozen people who attended my funeral sit around at the reception, theorizing why I did it? Would they spend the rest of their lives racking their brains for the answer, picking apart everything I had done in the last twenty-something years that would explain such a decision? Maybe they would go see a therapist about it, and should I then feel guilty about the impending psychological or financial burden that might bring them? Just like the little boy on the street? Somehow, every outcome always came back to the guilt that dying in a country with non-universal healthcare brought me.

The stress from planning such a big thing was causing me to pick at my cuticles until they bled. My boyfriend Nathan commented on them one night while we were in bed. He was doing some Sudoku because he is boring, and I was staring straight ahead because I was testing out whether I could fall asleep with my eyes open. It was not working. 

“You should get a manicure,” he said. I could feel his eyes fixed coldly on my hands resting on my lap.

I didn’t look at him. I was trying to sleep. I felt his eyes glide up to the side of my face. In my peripheral, I could see his usual frown melt into a scowl. 

“Did you hear what I said?” His voice was deep and icy, and it cut into my bones in this weird way that made me feel like grinding my teeth together. “You should get a manicure. Your nails look horrible and bloody. I’ll pay for it.”

My eyes skirted over to his. “I’m trying to sleep, Nathan.”

“Your eyes are open,” he told me, like I didn’t know that already. 

“I’m trying to sleep with them open.”

“Why are you picking your cuticles?” Nathan was weirdly observant then. He never noticed those things normally. If he did, he only brought them up to criticize, never because he cared about my well-being. 

“I’m stressed, Nathan,” I said. I closed my eyes for a moment and let a wave of sudden nausea roll through me. My skin tingled. My senses all felt heightened. I felt sick from the thought of continuing this conversation. “I am trying to sleep.”

“Sleeping won’t help you destress,” he said. “Try therapy. God knows you need it.”

I snapped my head towards him. “You are a douchebag.”

“And you’re a callous bitch, but you don’t see me saying that to your face.” The grimace on his face made him look ugly and old.

“You just did,” I said. 

“Well, I’m glad. Get your nails done. They’re grossing me out.” He turned back to his Sudoku.

“Nathan, I am going to kill myself.” I don’t know why I said it, but the words tumbled out before I could help it. I found myself stuffing the words back into my mouth in my head, gathering the big, bold letters—probably in Times New Roman, or even Garamond, if I wanted to be a bit more interesting—and swallowing each letter whole until my stomach grew fat and round. I bet he’d have something to say about that, too.

My eyes searched Nathan’s face for a sign that he was even semi-interested in what I said. That he could even feign concern for me. I wanted him to pity me and hold me and beg me to not kill myself. I would still, but it would be validating and even arousing to hear him need me one last time. 

But he didn’t even glance up from his Sudoku. 

“Did you hear me, Nathan? I said I am going to kill myself. As in, commit suicide. As in, I am going to die by my own hands. And you will not be able to stop me. I have been thinking about how I’ll do it and how I’ll let everyone know, and it has been stressing me out. That’s why I’ve bitten my fingertips bloody. Nathan?”

“You are absolutely pathetic, Kat.” I felt pathetic. He wasn’t even looking at me. Instead, he held the workbook in his lap up to my face, pointing to a square next to a 3 in one of the corners. “What would you say goes in this one? I’m getting tripped up.”

“Four,” I said, even though I didn’t know the rules to Sudoku. He scribbled in the number with an “Aha!”

I turned, sitting back against the headboard to stare out at our bedroom. Well, my bedroom. But Nathan’s apartment was across from the lot where they were building a Marshall’s, and he can’t sleep when there’s construction. They only do any work when he is at his office for work each day, so I suspect that my mattress is just comfier. I had been letting him stay with me until they finished the Marshall’s. I think it was putting us both a little on edge.

“Will you miss me?” I asked, staring at the assortment of knick knacks littering my dresser. Old souvenirs from trips to Disney in elementary school and Cabo in college; a box of Hot Wheels I found at Goodwill that I was going to give my nephew when he turned six (three years ago);a stack of medical journals that I found at an estate sale when I had a hypochondriac phase. I still had the bowling shoes I accidentally wore home from my first date with Nathan. They were eight years old with fading red and yellow pinstripes.

“Will I what?” Of course he was only half listening.

“Will you miss me? When I’m dead?”

“You’re not going to die,” he said. I heard his eyes roll. 

“Yes, I am. I told you. I picked a date.“

“Picked a date? When?”

“June twenty-first.”

“Why so far?”

“So you want me dead?” I crossed my arms and cocked an eyebrow at him. I knew I was being silly; I just wanted to fight with him.

“I didn’t say that,” he said. “But if you want to die so badly, why are you doing it six months from now?”

I shrugged. “It gives me six months to do all the things I want to do. Learn to ride a bike, say goodbye to everyone, get arrested for public urination.”

“You can’t ride a bike?” I chose to ignore this cherry-picking. 

“Will you miss me? You didn’t answer it.”

“You won’t actually go through with this,” he said, sounding so sure. Like he had me all figured out. Eight years together and he didn’t even know that I never learned how to ride a bike.

I was quiet. I think Nathan took that to mean I meant it. He turned to me. I didn’t look at him this time. I heard my heart beating in my chest, heard the sound of my legs shuffling under the sheets. Each moment was crisper than the last. I could almost taste the bile building in my stomach as another wave of nausea washed over me. 

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Don’t play stupid.”

“I’m not.”

“Katherine.”

“I can’t talk about it,” is all I said. 

The truth is, I wasn’t sure why I wanted to die. I just knew I did. I just knew that I had to. It wasn’t about attention or pity or a midlife crisis. I had never wanted to be alive. Now just felt like as good a time as any. 

“You won’t actually, right?” Nathan sounded faraway, like I was hearing him through a thick glass pane. 

“I am going to, Nathan. I picked a date.”

“But I love you,” he said. His voice, though, was cold and slick. It wasn’t an affectionate reminder, but one laced with accusation and inconvenience: you will be selfish for forcing me to care and grieve and be lonely forever. 

“That won’t change my mind.”

We sat quietly, both facing ahead, awkward and distant like two strangers being forced to sleep in the same room. The quiet hung stiff in the air, going stale as it settled on the bed and dresser and windowsill. I had wished at that moment that I was already dead. 

“What would you say goes in this box?” Nathan’s voice rippled through me as he shoved his workbook under my nose and pointed to a square beside a two on the far left. 

“Try eleven,” I said and shrugged. 

“Do you know the rules for Sudoku?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not boring enough to know. Goodnight, Nathan.” I felt sick. I curled into a ball as far from him as possible, cocooned beneath the duvet, and fell asleep without dreaming. 

After I put in my six-month notice at work with Miriam, I shuffled down the fluorescent halls of Wittberg. The halls were tight and windowless, stuffy little vents with stained slate gray rugs and offwhite drywall. The low ceilings were popcorned with water stains in the corners. There was this distinct odor that traveled down the halls and through each cubicle throughout the day, like a mix of week old Thai takeout and a dead body that somebody had tried Febreze-ing to remove the stench. It was dizzying.

My black flats awkwardly squeaked and squawked as I walked. I forgot to wear socks, and blisters had started forming on my heels. I avoided picking up my feet, but the shuffling sound of my shoe’s sole rubbing against the synthetic fibers of the rug gave me a headache.

When I rounded the corner, I shuffled down the Walk of Shame, the narrow space between a wall of tall windows overlooking the river and two dozen cubicles. The silence in this main space was usually almost deafening; the sound of long nails clacking against keyboards and gum snapping and phones ringing had become so routine that I hardly heard them anymore. Whenever I went down the Walk of Shame, it was like I was walking to my execution at the gallows. Every beady rat eye in the room sniped me, burning holes through me in response to the shuffles of my shoes on the carpet. I imagined the red laser of their snipers pointed directly in the center of my forehead. I wish I knew which corporate bastard was holding the gun it belonged to, so I could beg them to pull the trigger. In that case, at least, I would seem less like a coward when I went down. 

Anyways, their stares left me sweaty and constipated. At the end of the Walk of Shame, I hooked a left and ducked into the first cubicle . I sat down at my desk, the chair sighing beneath me. I turned on my desktop and picked at a corner of exposed yellow foam on my chair while it roared to life. The loud hissing and whooshing of the processor made Candace in the cubicle across the aisle look at me with contempt and aim the loaded AK-47 leaning against her desk at my chest.

Or maybe I was imagining things again.

I find that I sometimes did that, imagined things so vividly I questioned if they were real. Every week, two or three times, I would peek into Candace’s cubicle–all stiff and gray with black and white family portraits thumbtacked to a corkboard–to see if the AK-47 was there. Surely, HR would have noticed it just sitting there, propped against the desk like it was as commonplace as a handbag.

Though, if anyone in this building had brought a gun in, Paula from HR would have surely organized a staff meeting about the importance of prioritizing our mental health. As corporate rodents who spend limited time outdoors, excessive time in front of screens and fluorescent lights, and aren’t capable of loving other people or smiling, “You guys are so much more at risk for depression. Seriously, I worry about you guys!” And then she would put a hand on someone’s shoulder in a compassionate way (that was so different from the hand-on-the-shoulder which her sexual harassment meeting stressed being damaging to professional employee interactions), and make this sad face that said “You are pathetic and depressing and you should take a vacation to get some sun so you look less jaundiced.”

Paula from HR’s solution to every problem was to take a vacation. “Go somewhere sunny, warm, with palm trees and those cute pool boys at the resorts that bring you enough margaritas that you stop being able to tell them apart,” she would say. Even though I bet those pool boys are 15 or 16. So after my vacation that I can’t afford, I can spend a quarter of my life in prison for preying on a child poolside. Thank you, Paula from HR. This will help my depression.

As I pulled up my emails, I wondered if Paula from HR would call a staff meeting after everyone learns that I hanged myself from a beam in the attic (this is a working idea; I do not have an attic, but I can make adjustments). I bet she would call me Katie or Kat–like we were buddies–and make a slideshow of photos she found on my Facebook–even though they are all at least seven years old now–overlaid with black and white filters and the music from sad commercials about dead puppies. I both shuddered and felt satisfaction at the thought of being the reason everyone’s Monday afternoon was ruined with a staff meeting.

My cubicle went cold when Tanya wheeled in on her desk chair, eating Pringles straight from the tube. Everything iced over. The framed photo of me and Nathan on my desk (to ward off creeps), the Marie Curie bobblehead (to be a feminist), the Rubik’s Cube I made Nathan solve (to appear intelligent), all sat dusted with snow. My teeth chattered and my nose ran. An icicle hung from the handles of my filing cabinet. I wrapped my arms around myself to create some warmth.

“Hey, Kat,” Tanya said, a mouth full of Pringles. Her voice was this thick mix of New Jersey and nails on a chalkboard. In the quiet sea of cubicles, it loudly floated up to the hanging fluorescent lights and gathered like a heavy fog over everyone’s heads. Candace turned to give us a disapproving glare from her cubicle, gripping her manicured hand around the barrel of her AK-47. Her fingernails were painted a whorish scarlet red that washed her out.

“Do you have an inside voice?” I hissed. “Ever?” I dusted the flurries of snow off my mouse and resumed my pretending to check emails.

“Well, aren’t you being sweet today,” she flatlined sarcastically. A habit she had that didn’t suit her was comedy.

“What would you like, Tanya?” I gave her the smile I reserved for moments like this, when I wanted someone I didn’t particularly like to take the hint and politely leave.

“I was hoping we could go over the figures for next week’s presentation,” she said. Tanya and I both worked in sales for Wittberg Insurance. I am not sure why or how I got this job; I had majored in Comparative Literature at a state school. I applied to this job straight out of college, when Nathan told me my major was hardly real or worth the thousands I had spent on tuition.

“You can’t seriously tell me that your degree is real, Kat,” he had said. I simply waved my diploma in his face. “What the hell were you thinking? ‘Comparative literature’.” And he scoffed.

“Did you ever consider the fact that I could work in publishing? Or I could write my own Great American Novel? Maybe I could teach impoverished children how to read. Or train the untapped-potential-poets in inner cities, where creativity isn’t encouraged in underfunded schools. I could spark the next renaissance, Nathan. You don’t believe in me or my dreams. And you’re a racist, sexist pig. And I hate you.”

He just sighed, grabbed his coat, and went back to his apartment that night. We didn’t talk for a few days. Our friends called me to tell me that he was “disappointed” in my life choices.

Anyways, Tanya had “always loved numbers and math, since childhood”, or so she said every time I didn’t ask why she chose to go into sales at a borderline fraudulent insurance company. We were unfortunately the senior managers for the sales department, which meant every month we gave a short presentation to some other senior staff about, like, money and stuff. Just thinking about it hurt my head. I sometimes thought about getting a prescription for Xanax to keep in my desk drawer; Paula from HR might actually support it if I cited its benefits to her.

“You know,” I said to Tanya, “I was thinking maybe we could collaborate separately on the presentation. I’ll do my own stuff, you do your own stuff, and then you send me your half and I’ll mash them together. No need to communicate or touch base at all!” I smiled at her, and it felt like my face was splitting open.

“Wouldn’t that defeat the point of collaborating?” she asked. She turned the Pringle can to me, as if to offer me one of the four chips left at the bottom. I shook my head at the gesture.

“Exactly!”

“I think two heads are better than one,” she said.

“It could get confusing, though,” I said. This conversation was making my head hurt; I think Tanya’s loud voice and mindless chewing was irritating my cerebral cortex. “I mean, last month our figures were only half completed. Don’t you think collaborating had something to do with that?”

“That was because you didn’t get your data to me so I couldn’t complete them, Kat.” Tanya returned a smile to me. Hers didn’t hold the same malice as mine. Unfortunately for her, Tanya was doormat-nice.

“As long as you admit that it was your fault.” I shrugged and turned to my emails. Nothing new, except thirteen messages from clients that I swiftly sorted into the little trash can in the corner of the screen. I felt a bizarre sensation in watching the little files blip out of existence. I was almost envious of them.

“So the figures? Should we go over them?” Tanya asked. God, she smiled a lot. Too much. So sincerely and genuinely that it made me feel violent. I needed caffeine; maybe that would help my growing headache.

I stood up from my desk chair and grabbed my Garfield coffee mug from behind a stack of files on my filing cabinet. I gave Tanya the same tight-lipped smile that was probably frozen into my expression forever now, sliding between her and the edge of my cubicle. Before I so much as turned down the Walk of Shame, Tanya had bolted out of her own chair and was walking briskly beside me in efforts to keep up. I noticed how she abandoned her desk chair to spin sadly in the aisles of the cubicles and wondered how Candace would feel about that.

“We have to discuss the figures, Kat,” Tanya urged. She was practically tripping over her own two feet as she staggered beside me. I couldn’t walk fast enough to keep her off my heels.

“I’m getting some coffee,” I whispered as I stalked down the Walk of Shame all too quickly. My legs felt like cooked spaghetti.

Rounding the corner, I turned into the bleak and gray break room.

“Kat, seriously. Miriam told me that if we screw up again on this presentation, there will be a demotion for one of us…”

As I shoved a K-cup into the Keurig, I leaned against the countertop. “Are you going to be okay financially with that? Doesn’t your husband make a lot of money, anyways?”

Tanya’s face slipped for a moment, letting her frustration fizzle into her demeanor before she was able to snap out of it. “Listen, Kat, I really need you to help me with this. Or else I will have to tell Miriam that you’re being stubborn with me.”

I blinked. Would a demotion be the worst thing anyways? I mean, I could just swallow my pride and give Tanya the figures, which I’ve had in a file on my desktop for two weeks now, but there was something so satisfying about having control in this situation. 

Maybe Nathan had been right all these years; maybe I was a bitch.

“Oh, you can tell Miriam whatever you feel justified to tell her. I already put in my letter of resignation for June.” I turned back to grab my steaming hazelnut coffee. I emptied four Sweet-n-Lows into my mug, stirring it with my finger.

“Wait, you what?!”

“I put in my resignation.” I gave her a tight smile and slipped past her again to start the trek back to my cubicle. “Great chat, Tanya!”

Once more, she was on my heels, her breathing getting heavy as she tried to keep up. “Do you have any idea how much more work I’ll have to do if you quit?”

“I think we established last month that you don’t compensate for my undone work at all when I’m not around to do things. Besides, I’ll be replaced,” I said as I sat back in my chair. With my foot, I nudged Tanya’s empty cubicle chair out of the cubicle and back into the aisle, assuming Candace shoved it into my space once we had left.

Tanya’s voice was getting louder. “But we work so efficiently together!”

“Isn’t the whole reason you came to have this conversation because you have a problem with how we work together?” In an effort to further manipulate this discussion, I lowered my voice even further. 

Tanya sighed deeply. I could see her eyes lighting up with a million frustrations and insults, but her Midwestern roots could never allow her to bitterly scrap with me, especially not with half the office listening in. “Can you just send me the numbers?”

“Of course,” I said with a sweet smile. I grabbed the file on my desktop and shared it with her via email. “Was that so hard? Now, if you don’t mind, I have a cup of coffee and an episode of Survivor to catch up on. Again, this was fun. Let’s catch up again, real soon!”

Tanya, defeated, grabbed her chair and wheeled it back to her cubicle. Not even a thank you for sending over the data… Next month, I decided, I won’t cave nearly as easily.

About the Author

I started writing in middle school, primarily poetry and short stories. I got involved when my school hosted a poetry slam and I competed. My writing process for this piece has been different than my normal process, which is sit down, write, and never open a draft again. Here, I tried to really hone in on the draft, the bigger concepts, foreshadowing bits of the rest of the story and establish a strong voice. Ultimately, this piece strives to open and interest readers for the rest of this book, setting up the main character, her motivations before they get lopsided by the plot that will kick in in a few chapters. In the next few chapters, Kat will meet her biological mother and come to a realization about her suicidal ideation. This chapter hopes to establish Kat, her character, her tone, so that her development and devolution into madness throughout the book will be interpreted correctly. Additionally, the relationship with Nathan and her job act as controls in this chapters, so their growth or death later become more drastic.

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