I got to work on a Monday morning at 9, like always; but when I tried to leave at 5 my boss blocked the doorway, arms akimbo, and told me I'd have to stay and continue working late into the night and then would be allowed to sleep on top of my desk.
"That's outrageous" I said to him, feeling sick to my stomach; I had known something was up when the corporate big wigs came snooping around earlier in the week, looking as sour as snakes in vinegar. The scuttlebutt was that profits were down and that the unlucky ones would have to double down at their work or be laid off.
"Can't be helped" my boss replied stoically. "Go back to your desk and run some inventory checks and then write up five thousand words on the coal industry in Greenland. Have it on my desk by two this morning."
"But I can do all that at home on my laptop" I spluttered.
For answer my boss put a black vinyl collar around my neck, which immediately began to buzz and vibrate.
"If you attempt to walk out that door without my permission that 'employee motivator' around your scrawny neck will emit a series of pencil thin laser beams to sever your head." he said grimly.
What could I do? I went back to my desk and did the work he had commanded me to do, then folded up my coat as a pillow while I slept on my desk.
The next morning the boss brought me hot chocolate and a stale donut sprinkled with powdered sugar for breakfast.
"Can I go home today like usual?" I asked timidly.
"No" he said, not unkindly. "You'll be required to stay here for the next thirty-five years; then we'll take off the collar around your neck and give you forty acres and a mule."
The first ten years weren't so bad -- I got three meals every day, mostly beans and Irish soda bread with an occasional stalk of celery, and each December my boss took away my old clothes and gave me a new set of clothes, made from bright and shiny blue nylon. I learned how to bathe out of the sink in the men's room. And I grew a long bushy beard.
But in my eleventh year at work I noticed that I was the only one who had to stay overnight. Everyone else in the office walked out the door blithely right at 5 and came back the next day at 9. And there was nobody in the office but me, and the boss, during the weekends and on holidays. I tried asking my co-workers about this in the break room, but they just put brown paper sacks over their heads and hurried away -- often running into the wall. One other thing I noticed -- the boss had the same kind of black vinyl collar around his neck as I did. So he was a captive, too. That's when I decided that I would escape, no matter what.
One evening after everyone was gone I noticed the boss standing just inside the door, cleaning his nails with a pen knife. Silently I glided up to him, then pushed him through the door. His collar glowed a bright red, he gave a scream, and then his head rolled off his neck in a welter of blood.
I felt no compassion for him. He had it coming. My own collar continued to buzz and vibrate, so I knew it was not yet disarmed. I went into the office of the boss and tore the place apart looking for the controls to my collar. I found a panel of blinking lights and metal toggles under his desk calendar, so I took a chance by flipping each toggle until all the blinking lights went dead -- and my collar became still. Gingerly I used a pair of scissors to cut it in half. I was clear at last!
The breeze out on the street was cool and clean. I greedily filled my lungs a dozen times, reveling in my escape. But the moths -- the moths were everywhere. I didn't remember there being so many of them at night. They fluttered around the streetlights by the hundreds, and they covered every lighted window, crawling blindly around in erratic circles. Then they began landing on me, their wings creating a wild scented breeze that lifted me up beyond the buildings and bore me away to a lake surrounded by pine trees and full of cattails and grunting bull frogs. The moths landed me on top of a great hollow log, and that is where I live to this day -- being worshipped by the local natives as a deity of the lake; they bring me baked meats and ripened fruit each day, and in return I do not enslave them but simply command them to dance all night and keep their hair combed.
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