Fiction: The Night Shift

This month's Words for Wednesday prompts are provided by Sean Jeating and posted at River's blog over here. This week's prompts are: become, emigrate, every, reliable, soonish and/or disunited, joining, million, referendum, vote. I seemed to have missed using one word 'soonish.'
    Last month's (December 2025) prompts were provided by Wisewebwoman and posted at River's blog over here. That week's prompts were: larch, trifle, multiple, poteen (Irish Moonshine) and/or surprise, quiche, flag, crossword.
 
Fiction: The Night Shift
Poppy didn't like the smell of the larch wood of her cubicle but it often kept her awake during the night shifts. Even with fifteen people hidden in their little alcoves, the office was always quiet but with these new, taller and thicker cubicles, the noise were muffled that Poppy had gotten into the habit of listening for sounds of movements to ensure she wasn't alone in the office. 
    Nothing was decided by referendum but by the top boss' wife, Mrs. Walker. She regularly disunited the employees over what she claimed to be trifle changes. Poppy sometimes wondered if joining the company had been a mistake. Her very pessimistic cousin always said no job is reliable no matter how long they had been in business.
    Drinking poteen from her water bottle also helped to keep Poppy awake. Her co-worker, Paul, made the drink from his grandmother's recipe. She had emigrated to the U.S. with nothing but her recipe book of alcoholic drinks - they were used to raise their family from poverty. Paul had said the drink had many health benefits one of which was making you smarter. Drinking the homemade booze didn't make Poppy smarter or drunk since it had little alcohol in it. But it frequently gave her disturbing and surprising daydreams.  
    Usually, Poppy ate her dinner at her desk. Going out to eat was expensive and she hated dinning alone. Always, she ate quiches. It was the only thing she could make that was edible. Her grandmother had said a woman's cooking skill depended on her ability to attract men and Poppy rarely attracted men.
    She checked the clock on her computer screen - ten more minutes and Poppy could go home. She gazed down on the crossword puzzle book open on her desk. After she had finished her work, she had been doing one puzzle after another. She would have left early except she was afraid her boss would find out and cut her pay or even fire her. 
    With the last puzzle finished, she had nothing else to do. Working the late shift had its advantages like sleeping in late but lately, all the advantages couldn't stop her boredom. There was a million things she could to do to fill her time but somehow, sitting there, in her little cubicle, she couldn't think of any.
    She stood up to stretch her arms and legs. Around her, the multiple cubicles all seemed silent and identical aside from the tiny zebra struck to the top edge of Paul's cubicle. The zebra held a yellow flag in its mouth. 
    On the first day of work, she had met her co-workers and Paul was the only one willing to talk to her. He was an older gentleman of fifty or so and had been working at the company for nearly fifteen years. After a while, he had become her dependable co-worker. His useful advices helped her many times. Aside from Paul, she wasn't sure she would recognize any of her co-workers if she saw them on the streets. In the two years Poppy had worked there, she had only quick glances of each one. 
    She sat down again and picked up her bottle when an alarm sounded. Poppy shot up from her chair. The only other person standing was Paul but she could only see his head above the cubicle walls.
    "What's going on, Paul?" said Poppy.
    "Fire alarm. Probably false. But we have better evacuate just in case." Paul moved around to the other cubicles to alert their co-workers. Some of them like to keep their headphones on while working. Poppy went around the other cubicles and found them empty. Just seven hours ago, she had came to work and saw all her co-workers going into their cubicles. "Where is everyone?" she said.
    Paul shrugged. "I don't know. They were here when you and I came in. You saw them, right, Poppy?"
    Poppy nodded. "Yes. I saw them."
    "Well, I guess they left early. Come on, we have to go." Paul rushed to the closet to get their coats. Only Paul and Poppy's coats were there so it meant the others did leave but Poppy would have noticed. None of the cubicles were tall enough to hide anyone when they are standing unless they all bended down to get to the door. Poppy shrugged off the thought as she and Paul rushed toward the stairwell. 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

After three flights down, Poppy was exhausted but they kept going. Their office was on the fifteenth floor. Paul was sweating so much that the entire top part of his shirt was soaked but he didn't take off his coat. The large man probably didn't exercise much and neither did Poppy. 
    Soon Poppy was ahead of Paul and when she turned around, he wasn't there. "Paul?" Her voice echoed in the empty space through the sound of the muffled alarm. Did he faint? She rushed back up but there was no Paul. She kept calling his name but got no respond. Where the hell was he? There was no place to hide in the brightly lit, narrow space.
    Poppy must go down and out of the building and then get someone to come for Paul. During their fire drills, he had said if he couldn't keep up with her, she must go ahead without him and send help.
    But the stairs seemed to stretch. It was as if there weren't fifteen but fifty flights of stairs. She glanced at her wrist watch but it had stopped at 3:30.
    When she couldn't move anymore, she sat on the steps and tried to catch her breath. The stairs below her began to wobble and she stood up with her hand on the handrail. Slowly she backed up as the stairs began to melt, dripping downward like liquid into the white void below. Every step became a chore as something sticky would keep her shoe from lifting off the steps. When she thought she was far enough away, she turned and looked. The stairs were continuing to shift and melt. She ran back up again and back inside the office. She darted her eyes everywhere. There was no other exit. The alarm was still ringing, like a distance echo.
    Her eyes landed on her boss's office. The door was ajar which was rare as Mr. Sayer always locked it before he leave each day. Poppy's interaction with the man had never been comfortable. He liked to talk about his cutting skills and constantly described his process with such zeal, Poppy sometimes wondered if the man cut up more than food. 
    She raced though the door and slammed it shut. Instead of Sayer's overcrowded office, there was nothing but rows of portraits lining the four walls. In each frame, there was a person dressed in zebra costumes. Poppy wasn't sure but she thought they might be her co-workers. Some of the faces looked familiar. One guy reached out of the frame and placed in her hand a samgak kimbap. "For you, when hunger," he said. That might be Jam, Poppy remembered he was always offering people kimbaps and pretending he was Korean but he was born in the U.S. and didn't know a word of Korean. She had heard him speak with proper English but he liked to jumble words as if he didn't know the language. She must be dreaming but his touch was solid and warm. She turned her hand over and let the kimbap slipped to the floor. "I'm allergic to seaweed. And stop pretending you're Korean."
    As she walked across the room, glanced at each face, she felt a familiarity that she couldn't place. She knew these people and yet, she didn't. At the corner, there was a tiny door at the bottom. She didn't know why but she bended down and touched the doorknob and was immediately sucked into another room. This one had pink walls with colorful bubbles that were rising upward toward a glass ceiling with sunlight streaming through it. It must be 100 ore more feet high. The sight was beautiful and yet unsettling. Where the hell was she? 
    "Hello, Poppy."
    Poppy turned around. It was her boss, Mr. Sayer. He came toward her. His wide grin looked strangely too large on his face. He stopped just before her. "Poppy, would you like me to cut up some trout for you?" The two knives he held gleamed in the light. 
    A shiver ran down her back. She looked around for an exit but her eyes returned to Mr. Sayer and his chef uniform with a pocket with a doorknob. The pocket door was within her reach and yet, would it really take her away from here?
    Mr. Sayer's grin widened to show pointy teeth. She punched him in the face. "Stop being so creepy!" she said. Then she reached out toward the pocket door's knob and immediately she was in the elevator with a woman - Missy Valentine - she was a security guard for the building. Always, she would make a comment on Poppy's weight or her clothes or anything she deemed worthy of some advice. The woman was fifteen years older than Poppy's twenty-nine but as much Poppy liked to give her respect, she didn't want her advice.
    "Miss Kent, I see you wore your purple dress again. With your washout complexion and your bumpy form, it only made you look like an eggplant. Stop letting your mother shop for you. Stick to the light suits, dear." Valentine grinned with all the lines of her face grinning along.
    Poppy punched her in the face. "I don't need your advice, Miss Valentine. I brought his dress. And I look fabulous in it."
    The elevator opened and Poppy ran out. But instead of the lobby, she was back in the office with the cubicles. "Will this night never end?" Poppy groaned. She walked around the space but the cubicles were empty, the break room was empty, the bathrooms were empty and Mr. Sayer's door was locked. She grabbed her bag from her desk drawer, her coat out of the closet and stepped out the door that she came in from but instead of the hall with the elevators, she was inside the conference room with one long table and chairs. She had been here once for a twenty-minute meeting when the top boss announced one change to the company's policy which was to add a rule that no employees was to take toilet papers home. Poppy turned for the double doors but they were locked.
    "Miss Kent, there you are. May I have a word?" A tall woman with her hair sprayed into a wavy bob and wearing red business pants suit came sauntering toward Poppy. Mrs. Walker, the top boss' wife. Mr. Sayer sometimes made Poppy accompany the woman up and down the entire building just so she would feel appreciated.
    "Yes, Mrs. Walker?" Poppy put on her smile. Why was she being tortured like this?
    "Miss Kent, I was wondering about the office arrangement. I think those wood cubicles are just god-awful. Should we vote for glass walls? What do you think?"
    For some reason, Poppy couldn't be polite to her as before. "I think, Mrs. Walker, I vote that you stop interfering with us and the company. Didn't losing all that money when you leaked information to another company taught you anything? And did you forget last month, you switched out our nice cubicles for wood ones that are neither stain resistant nor easy to keep clean and no matter what we do, the wood smell never goes away and they are so damn tall that we all felt like we're working inside closets. I don't recall a single change that you've made that benefited any of us. In fact, all your ideas are stupid. Stop mucking around here and go back to the hair salon where you belong, Mrs. Walker." Poppy smiled showing her teeth. Mrs. Walkers was big on the employees smiling.
    "How dare you speak to me like that! I will get my husband to fire you and you will be begging me to come back!" Mrs. Walker grinned and crossed her arms over her chest.
    Poppy threw a punch in the woman's face. She was fed up with Mrs. Walker and her constant interference. If it wasn't for her, none of their salary would have been cut.
    Mrs. Walker went down like a sack of potatoes. The floor below Poppy dropped away and as she was plummeting and screaming, she wondered if she was in hell. Passing a couple of zebras, she reached out to touch them but then darkness smacked toward her.
    She lifted her head up. Before her, on her desk was her puzzle book. She was back in the office at her cubicle. Her wrist watch had stopped but the clock on her computer screen said five minutes before four. 
    She stood up and saw Paul's zebra with the yellow flag. She sat down again and pulled out the lower drawer of her desk and took out her bag. Why did she always fear going home early? Mr. Sayer was rarely at the office during the late shift and who was to tell him she left work a few minutes early? And so what if he cut her pay or even fire her?
    As she walked past the empty cubicles, she chided herself. She was the only one dumb enough to stay for the full work hours. Even Paul was not in his cubicle and he was a devoted worker. The only coat left in the closet was hers. She went to the elevator and pressed the down button. The elevator arrived and she stepped inside. Just as it started down, an alarm sounded. She glanced at the wall of buttons. The red one with the word fire was flashing. But she didn't pause the elevator. No, she was just going all the way down and she was going to punch anyone trying to stop her from going home.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

The next night when Poppy went to work, Valentine silently watched as Poppy went through the turnstile and toward the elevator banks. In the office, her co-workers greeted her with smiles. Jam averted his eyes. Paul gave her a wide grin. Mr. Sayer left an office-wide email saying he had quit. And there was another office-wide email from Mr. Walker, the top boss, saying employees are allowed to leave work early if they finish their work early and no deductions. Later, Paul told her he had a dream of her going around punching people and saying all the things he had wanted to say. He especially liked how Poppy spoke to Mrs. Walker. Poppy didn't know how to react so she just smiled and hoped she won't get fired.