Joseph and the Maunch

Joseph took pills that nobody saw and nobody knew about, that no one had prescribed to him, given to him, sold to him, bought for him, or even mentioned to him, but he took pills nonetheless. Every day he trudged the seventeen blocks it took him to walk the long poured concrete sidewalk from his apartment to his office, and every morning right before entering the office, as his hand brushed against the clamming cool of the wrought-aluminum door handle, he would quietly flip the pill into his mouth, and swallow.

He did this for a few reasons. One: because the pills were not paid for, they were not taken from his deductible, and if you had pills just lying around the house, eventually – if you lived your life as Joseph did – you got around to taking them. Two: because – unbeknowest to everyone – Joseph liked to be left alone. This is not to say that he did not enjoy the company of his coworkers: he did. However his interactions with them were small, he did not express any particular desire to engage in the usual office conversational pieces regarding reality shows and politics and other mish-mosh, but for the most part he did not find them altogether disturbing.

No, what the pills provided for Joseph was a reprieve from the maunches.

The maunches was the name he had given to the sound, given because when it had first started occurring it had been the copy machine: one day out of the blue the seams in the plastic had opened, a long gaping tear ripped apart the machine, and long jagged teeth had appeared from the gap, trimming the abyss with strange plasticine molars. He remembered backing away slowly, backing out of the room as the copier hummed along endlessly, the sterile musk of ozone in the air, and the large gaping mouth flapping in the wind, sounding *maunch*maunch*maunch*maunch*maunch*.

He scampered back to his desk, frightened, afraid, unsure of what he had seen, and absolutely certain that the machine was printing out far more than the twenty copies of page reports that he needed. His eyes darted around the room: everything there, everything normal, but still the persistent *maunch* floated to him on the air-conditioned breeze, a perpetual reminder of what was there, and how he would eventually have to go get the copies.

After several long minutes, and just as Joseph was about to will himself to brave the emanating *maunch* and go get his seventy copies like a man, the sound stopped; replaced only by the familiar hum of the copier, copying away just like any other day. This initiated yet another bout of petrified contemplation for Joseph: what was going on, why did the copier have teeth, what was he going to do with fifty extra copies of page reports, and most pressingly: was he gone? He stared at his monitor: cracked, he thought marking off a mental check. He opened the drawer, dirty, he noticed, and closed the drawer. He picked up a red stapler, stared at it intently, then placed it down marking it off mentally red. Red replied the stapler, and Joseph’s mental checklist scattered onto the floor.