Golden
light glinted off champagne flutes. This
was the day of the announcement. The
celebration of the merger. All the
employees were excited and all the decorations were gold, from the place
settings and serving platters to the bowties of the wait staff. Even the light bulbs had been changed out for
special imported jobs that cast a golden glow over everything.
Corporate
Man stood at the back of the room. He
was the only one not smiling. Something
about this merger hadn’t sat well with him.
There’d been far too many signs. Evidence of The Greed and other fiscal
villains. And the numbers he’d seen for
this deal were far too perfect. He
didn’t trust such boastful figures.
A golden
knife clinked against a champagne glass and the owner of the company mounted a
small stage for the obligatory hurrah-speech.
Corporate Man felt a lurch in his stomach.
A whine of
feedback cut through the room as the owner picked up a golden microphone. When he spoke his voice was nasally and
asthmatic.
“Well, it
final. All wrapped up,” he said. A
chorus of cheers erupted from the crowd.
“And I think this will go down as the most lucrative merger in the
history of finance.”
Another
round of deafening cheers.
“Unfortunately
for most of you, the benefits will not be quite as mutual as we led you to
believe.”
Uneasy
silence gripped the room.
“In fact,”
he said with a raspy chuckle. “Come
tomorrow I’ll be soaking up sunshine on my private beach while you’ll find yourself
among the unemployed.”
A few of
the quicker ones in the room shouted, or wailed, or cried. The owner waived them off and said, “Consider
this your notice. With a Pink Slip to come.”
The lights
went out
Panicked
shrieks followed.
Then a pink spotlight picked out a
woman in the far corner of the room. She
wore a short skin-tight pink dress with tall, pink leather boots. A pink mask, part domino and part bandana,
obscured her face. She tapped a
clipboard with a pink pen and when total silence fell on the room she said, “It
looks like… we have to make a few cuts.”
She dropped the clipboard and
unsheathed a pink katana. Before the
first screams escaped the throats of the jumpiest of them, several former
employees were relieved of extraneous limbs and superfluous blood supply.
Pink Slip went through the
unemployed congregation like a lawnmower through tall, plump grass. Men and women in business casual were turned
to mulch. Fingers, hands, arms, legs,
and heads fell wetly to the floor, piling up like so much lawn clippings.
Corporate Man dropped down in front
of the pink dervish, his well polished shoe delivering a well placed kick to
her midsection. Pink Slip stumbled back. Corporate Man’s necktie fluttered over his
shoulder and he adjusted his glasses.
Pink Slip drew herself up, her
sword held slack at her side rather than in front and at the ready. Red fluid dribbled down the pink blade.
“Now listen here–”
The stroke came so quickly that
Corporate Man didn’t flinch until the blade had already flicked past his
throat. A streamer of red fluttered to
the ground and came to rest in a scarlet pool at his feet.
“That was my favorite necktie!”
Corporate Man said, the first syllables cracking and the rest of his sentence a
higher pitch than he would have liked.
Pink Slip raised her katana and pointed the tip at Corporate Man’s
face. They stood there, neither of them
moving, awash in the horrible pink light.
