Jimmy Chen

The receptionist hid the instant message regarding the logistics of an imminent gathering behind her work email, though the only thing visible to others in the waiting area was the back of her computer, which featured a ubiquitous apple with a sole bite mark in its side. Those who waited did so with the fragile purposefulness of people completely consumed by their phone, and so weren’t actually “waiting”—an anti-event generally marked by ennui and restlessness—but rather, simply tending to labyrinthine text threads and neglected emails which, therefore, imparted a sense of accomplishment they ultimately found pleasurable. Behind her, on a very expansive and somewhat alienating wall, an array of air-plants were somehow affixed to it, such that it seemed these air plants were simply existing in midair, like being suspended in the reception area of a startup was the most logical place for them, and not the result of a complicated interior plant design contract which took several months of planning and cost tens of thousands of dollars.

One of the men who had meekly approached this attractive receptionist was interviewing for a job as a Quality Assurance Technician. He had just moved to the city and didn’t have many friends, but wanted to appear the opposite to the receptionist, and so scrolled through a social networking app to which nearly a sixth of the world’s population were subscribed, occasionally commenting on it in the manner of someone engaged in an actual text conversation. The table between this man and the receptionist was made of refurbished wood gathered from a farmhouse before being aggressively sanded and profusely lacquered.

The elevator doors opened and through it stepped a delivery man dressed in a brown shirt and shorts who had firm calves, as witnessed by the receptionist, who reciprocated his alluring smile, an encounter witnessed by the man waiting for his interview, now stricken by the notion that this delivery man probably had a penis much larger than his, one which, when erect, could not only satisfactorily penetrate the receptionist’s vagina and push its girth against its walls, but was long enough to transgress her cervix, feeding his seed directly into it, versus relying on the evolutionary trait of sperm coming out of regular-sized penises which then had to swim inward towards a nebulous egg in a fight for life. The man recalled a pornographic yet oddly clinical clip he once saw set in the point of view from inside the vagina which ended with ejaculate spewing out of the meatus, that is, the opening of the male urethra. He often wondered how they were able to get such extreme footage and settled on an endoscopy camera. By the time the receptionist called his name, the Quality Assurance Technician candidate was inadvertently aroused with these mental projections and had to stand with his back faintly arched in the fashion of men who have likewise had to hide their erections.

The app for which they were interviewing was a personal metrics system that monitored the number of steps one took in a day, or steps climbed, or miles ran; one’s heartrate, or simply the quality and duration of one’s sleep. It was also a lifestyle app that could keep track of calories consumed, or burned, tracking the arc of someone’s weight over a period of time. There was also a community page on which one could post their successes or failures, and on which friends could post their respective congratulations or sympathies. Quality Assurance Techs basically ran automated scripts looking for bugs before the product went out, then responded to actual bugs reported by customers after said product went out. Customers were usually aggressive type-A personalities who really wanted to get their steps in—not so thrilled about filling in online customer complain forms, or worse, being stuck on the phone.

The interview didn’t go so well. Instead of shaking hands, he had let his hand be shook; instead of looking the interviewer in the eye, he looked past him, at who was probably the interviewer’s girlfriend, in a framed photo on a boat, wearing a bikini and eating an oyster. The interviewer held the shell and had likely just shucked the oyster. He had nice abs, as brandished without a shirt, for displaying one’s abs was the primary perk of having them. Distracted by the gooey lob sliding down her throat, half-heartedly feigning an answer regarding his five-year plan, the candidate soon became the former candidate in the eyes of the interviewer as the interview was cut short.

As he left, the former candidate in the eyes of the interviewer saw the back of the receptionist’s slender shoulder, which he imagined digging his face into as he spasmed inside her anus. He loved anal creampies, the way the camera zoomed-in over the surreal landscape of an aggravated anus.

He went to a fast food establishment and ordered the most calorically rich meal on the menu, augmenting its size using a particular phrase from the franchise’s vernacular, and ate it in the corner. A group of urban teenage girls walked in and spoke loudly and full of expletives, at which other patrons shook their head. When any of them made eye contact with any of the patrons, they called them bitch. He dipped his fries in mayonnaise. In the bathroom, he tried viciously masturbating to the receptionist, but the acute smell of urine, feces, disinfectant, and bleach hindered the mental abandonment necessary to masturbate without the aid of visual stimuli. He’d gotten more and more into interracial cuckold porn in which black men with unsettling penises displayed grand acts of coitus in front of the perturbed cuckolds. The women sometimes, humorously, compared the size of the black men’s penis to their forearms. That the men sometimes wore sneakers to better brace themselves for pumping he found uncanny. He tucked his flaccid penis back into its fly and took some Lexapro.

As he exited the restroom, he accidentally caught the eye of one of the loud girls, who called him bitch. Andre was tattooed on her neck, in ornate cursive that betrayed unskilled hands, and he wished that for one night he could be Andre. He would dick whip her face, which seems misogynist but is essentially playful. The levity of his catharsis. Walking away, he walked faster and faster. Now everyone was calling him bitch. Not running, just walking really fast, though the app mistook the latter for the former. It was a shame, him being so misinterpreted. Someone would have to fix that.