The office was silent, where Jordyn sat at her low-walled cubicle. She had been anxious all day, tense and depressed, spending as much time trying to wrench her thoughts away from self-loathing as doing actual work. 12. 13. Jordyn counted lines, numbers like a mantra in her mind. Down the aisle, one of her coworkers stood up, leaning over to chat in a low voice with a neighbor. Inhaling deeply at the muted noise, Jordyn yanked her mind back around to her screen again. 14. 15, 16. But the coworkers’ voices nattered in her ears, anyway. Jordyn had never spoken with Rita, the woman who stood to chit-chat, but she knew the woman to be snide, self-righteous, and petty. 17, 18, 19… 20. 20? Dammit.
The women began to laugh, the noise cutting through Jordyn’s inner count. The sound twisted in her ears, becoming monstrous and demonic. 1… 2… 3. Images swam behind her eyes, the nearby women morphing into large, leering shapes, pointing at her, chortling over some disguised prank or inside joke. Jordyn hunkered her head down, her shoulders tensed for a blow, and tried desperately to block out the permutated perceptions. 4, 5… 5… 6. She knew they were false, the paranoid machinations of a strained mind, but that knowledge did nothing to clear her senses. Behind her, someone else whispered and the sibilant sound snaked its way into her ear and twined with the cackling. 8. 9. 10. The cold air around her pressed at her skin through her layers of clothing, stinging with countless frigid needle-points. Jordyn began to feel the eyes of her coworkers boring through the cube walls, peering around corners, into her back. Her body tensed farther, hands beginning to shake. She pressed the keys as quietly as possible, not wanting to be heard. 11. 12? No, that can’t be right. Rita stood up yet again, muttering to her neighbor, and they laughed. Jordyn winced and tried desperately to count the lines for the third time, the mantra of the numbers all but drowned out beneath the slippery, black cackling of the women across the way. 1… 2… 3…