Flash! Fiction 3 by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

25

Hindsight

Street level in the financial district it was dark and the streetlights were still on. Overhead the sky was blue and sunlight glinted off the windows of the upper floors.

Seven o’clock in the morning used to mean a seat on the train all the way in. Now it’s standing room only … if you’re lucky. And in the train station, the concourse is packed from six on. By seven thirty the one-block walk to the subway is an achingly slow shuffle. One step, two steps, stop. Step back to let people into the food court.

Step forward, reach for a door, push into the surge of bodies. Pass through the smokers’ gauntlet. Walk through the next set of doors, down the cracked tile steps, carefully through the spinning turnstile and then off to the shortest escalator line-up.

At the office by eight, he rarely had time to himself anymore, because the rest of the management team was also coming in early, and like him they weren’t going home any earlier. By eight he was fully engaged and he didn’t stop until after one, when he and a few of the other managers went to a bar for lunch.

Meetings were booked solid through the day and micro-managed down to the scripts. He lectured and commanded his people.

Among his peers in meetings, he was a team player. When sum-moned by the executive, he nodded on cue.

Sometimes by seven, like tonight, but usually before eight, unless it was end of quarter, meetings were wrapping up and cell phones were coming out to make or change appointments. Ritualistically, allowances were made for a round or two of decompression drinking at a bar on the way to the station.