Former competitive eater eats his boss's desk

Fiction // Humor

My boss, Debrah, appeared over my desk like a floating skeleton. Slim white lady, 50. The only thing I liked about her was her hair; she had these funny tight curls that didn’t fit in with her haughty, neurotic corporate aesthetic. They hit the uncanny valley when she started to go off on me.

She was silent a second too long above me. Other eyes peeked over at us.

Here we go again. I wanted to say Out with it, weirdo.

“Hey, uh, Wayne, can we talk about this pending journal entry, um, ending in 553?”

553—Prepaids. This fucking reconciliation again. The Controller was scrubbing my work.

Deep breath, tried not to look exasperated. “Is it about the supporting attachment? Don’t worry, I have a reminder now,” I flicked a sticky note hanging under my monitor, “All excel files: Times New Roman, Size Twelve Font, file saved with cell A1 first tab every time.”

Even reciting this made me want to jump out the window.

“So, ah, I know the expense code summary at the bottom was jumbled up, and you’d said you fixed it, but these balances are still not aligning with the invoices.”

She held up a physical piece of paper with part of the rec. Yes, she printed out part of my excel worksheet on the extra-large office paper. Her boney finger stabbed the IT line.

“IT is still our biggest expense to amortize. Most subscriptions are twelve months, so divide these prepayments by twelve, we should land around half-a-mill a month to expense. But here you want to post just thirty-thousand dollars.”

Fuck. It did sound obviously wrong when she put it that way. What to say?

“What about that big amount under ‘Computers’? That’s all the capitalization, right?”

She looked at me like I turned into licorice. I was sinking.

“That’s actual equipment too small to get capitalized under fixed assets. Routers, keyboards, not actual computers, right?”

I didn’t say anything. Calling something ‘Computers’ with no fucking computers in it sounded like a dumb corporate accounting thing.

“Now that I think about it,” she scanned her print-out, “why would there be a balance there at all? Those purchases are just expensed upon payment, not amortized over time. They’re too small. So you’ve flipped something else into this entry. Why is the entire chart of accounts listed here? Should just be a dozen or two appropriate expense accounts.”

She scoffed.

My head was spinning. I fucked up the sheet.

“The end totals tied out—”

“‘End totals’? But what are we expensing? What are we loading into each departments’ budget?” She sighed with disgust like she saw roadkill on the old-ass purple carpet under our feet. Her jaw wiggled back and forth, not helping with the skeleton impression. I chanced a glance past her, saw my coworkers all pretending not to listen in, inwardly cringing, I bet.

This sucked.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Too loud.

My gut plunged. Ice-cold move, Debrah.

“Yes,” the word grinded out of me with no confidence.

She winced like she’d taken a sharp dump. “Can you just, mm, scrub the whole thing, top to bottom, re-do the entry, sanity check some of these balances? IT, big. Insurance, big. Conferences, medium.”

I nodded and accepted my punishment. Her light form stalked away silently, not weighing enough.

If it weren’t for that damn bezoar…

I used to be a competitive eater back in my high school days. It was a glorious time. I could have gone pro; my personal best was fifty-seven hot dogs in five minutes. I was a throat GOAT, as they would say. I was captain of the eating team, the Belly Bludgeoners, all until that fateful day when the bezoar hit.

I was slamming my thirteenth hamburger, not even pushing myself yet, and suddenly I felt the brick in my gut. I never got gutbrick before. I had to drop out that competition; rushed to the ER, and the x-ray confirmed it: an immovable mass of half-digested fast-food and failed dreams.

The Belly Bludgeoners fell apart after that.

A message pinged across my computer screen from Debrah.

Wayne, please see me in my office in 30 minutes.

Stomach-stopping dread again.

In an alternate reality, I’d be on the professional eating circuit, and I’d have never learned about accounting, debits, credits, and prepaid reconciliations. I would be eating hot dogs and burgers and other stackable foodstuffs instead of eating corporate shit in the accounting department to make a living wage.

I reached down and grabbed the stone under my ribs. Inoperable—comfortably wedged against my aorta.

Curse this anchor in my stomach. I couldn’t pass it. I could eat normal amounts of food just fine, but to push myself to the limit, eat like an army of elephants—it could kill me.

That’s why I sighed and walked off to my execution. My coworkers, typing away timidly, didn’t meet my eyes. Dead man walking.

I entered her windowless office and closed the door. The wall was smoked glass, letting in light with complete privacy. Anything could happen in here, but not the sexy kind of anything.

Her desk was a nervous wreck’s vision of immaculate and clean. She’d swept in front of the monitors but I could see the crumbs in the back. Folders messily jammed into drawers. Flakes on the ground, brushed from the desk. She had a wireless mouse with the thumb crust on the side and matching keyboard, a stack of binders stuffed with clips and colored bookmarks, and a brown bag from a lunch she must have bought nearby and brought back to the office. Eaten at her desk, no doubt—who’d want to socialize with her? Looking at how her collarbones protruded, it was probably a weak, sad salad. Nothing substantial—just like her job. What did she even do here?

“Have a seat. Um, Wayne, I got to be honest, this is not looking good. How long have you been here?”

She knew; she hired me.

“Nine months.” Like a baby of shit was born.

“And I’ve got to say, your performance has been a struggle for us, disappointingly. It’s like you’re… forgetting accounting the longer you’re here.”

I hated accounting.

“Look, reconciliations here are table stakes. Prepaids are table stakes. This isn’t a place where you can just stand in place, right? That’s falling behind, but when you’re actually falling behind, then that’s, like, really falling behind.”

Duh, I guess.

“I need you to do more, do better. Not just be accurate in day-to-day work but to really be pushing this position forward, you know?”

“What does that actually mean, though? Do you have,” I had only one secret weapon, “do you have… examples?”

Her mouth kept moving, speaking about delayed email response times, my struggles with report modernizations, how my networking was behind and nobody knew who I was.

“Wayne, I’m afraid we’re going to have to put you on a PIP.”

“A PIP?”

I thought of an older British guy. Pip pip cheerio, lad.

Another gas-pained sigh from her. “A ‘performance improvement plan.’”

Oh shit, right, I had heard of those. Like an honor council tribunal in college—by the time you even get in one, you’re fucked. You’re out. I’m done here; it’s just a matter of time.

My ears started ringing, and I didn’t know what else she said.

I eyed the prepaids reconciliation still on her desk, kicked myself for squirting out a half-assed journal entry when instead I needed to be top-notch. The motivation concern was real.

That is, real shit. Who was I kidding? I knew why I couldn’t be assed to suffer through account reconciliations and appropriate general ledger codings. This wasn’t me.

I was not just an eater—I was a champion eater. Captain of the Belly Bludgeoners, and this wasn’t my natural environment. This was a trap. This was like sticking a wild elephant in the zoo.

The bezoar shifted slightly in my gut as Debrah kept talking about performance assessment windows and volunteer mentor programs. They were both my nemeses.

I knew I was Michael Jordan in a baseball game.

If I was done, I was really done. Let me go out in a blaze of glory and show everyone what I really was.

While I was at it, I’d assert dominance.

I reached over the desk, and her words slowed. I gripped the extra-large, thin, almost-crispy sheet of paper and slid it over to me. I let the anger flow through me, and my hand crumpled a corner of the paper. I brought it up—it smelled like printer dust and vanilla—and pressed it past my teeth. I pushed and pulled, and in seconds the entire prepaids reconciliation was in my jaws.

Memories flooded back of the screaming crowds and hotdogs flying down my gullet. Easy. This was so easy.

But oh lord, this was not a juicy hotdog. This was saliva-draining office paper, infinitely desert-dry, like a tampon in my mouth.

No. I could do this. I could be all I could be. Chew. Chew. Chew. I swallowed, and it must have echoed out into the room.

Debrah was frozen, eyes round as puckered buttholes. I was still sitting.

“Wayne,” she breathed through the disbelief, “did you just eat the prepaids reconciliation?”

I smacked my lips. The old me was awakening—the guy who could pound seven chicken breasts in a hot minute for fame and glory. “You’re right. IT did taste big. And inky. And spicy. But your seasoning is off.”

She could only stare, dumbfounded—as if she’d discovered aliens or Godzilla. Let me introduce you to Gutzilla.

My chair scrunched against the carpet as I stood up, and she followed, shocked into silence, hands clenched, arms bent and pressed into her chest.

No, you fool.

I stepped back, reached behind me, locked the door.

“Wayne, no!”

Don’t worry, you shriveled carrotstick. My hands found the corner of her desk.

I’m not gonna eat you. Too skinny.

Her back was against the wall, and maybe she was screaming. My head lowered until my teeth touched the peeling vinyl atop the fiberboard desk. The smell was faint—plasticky with only the tiniest hint of the tree’s soul remaining. It was smooth against my incisors, denting easily at their force. I bit, harder and harder, and the material split with a satisfying crunch like a giant cracker. Inside, airy and layered, the composite flaked into my mouth. My saliva glands squirted.

“What the fuck, Wayne, don’t eat my desk, Jesus Christ.” This was a normal reaction. I encountered it many times during my Belly Bludgeoner days. I inspired awe, yes, but also fear, the fear she felt then when one sees something magical and out of this world.

Crunch, crunch. I felt I had all the time in the world to show my boss who’s boss with this desk.

I could see the contents in the door as I consumed the top: dozens of other reconciliations, printed hot and steaming, now cooled and chilled out, maybe fading slightly, folded neatly—like Debrah collected the death sentences of other Staff Accountants. How dare she.

I palmed her keyboard, the ergonomic and minimalist magic ice-blue wafer, and bit down on it next. It buckled, a dozen times more plasticky than the desk’s vinyl and hinted with hand-salts and the tidbits of errant foodstuffs: organic greens, quinoa, a Chipotle bean. The keyboard caps popped in my mouth with a biting snap. A light strip of silicon was like Pop Rocks on my tongue. Gulp, gulp, gone.

The more I could consume, the more powerful I felt. This was the way to go, this was the blaze of glory—the ultimate fuck you to a boss up your ass.

Oh god, the stapler. Did I dare? I saw it there, mockingly red like she watched Office Space, full of prickly bits of cheap steel. I felt a boulder churn in my gut. I gritted my teeth for a second like I experienced an atomic burst of gas pain—it subsided. Before I could think, the stapler went into my mouth. Out of the corner of my eye, Debrah was huddled in a fetal position in the far corner of the office as I blocked the only exit.

“Witness me,” I garbled through a mouthful of petroleum products and bottom-of-the-barrel quality pig iron. This felt flatter, the pieces thicker: more like a snack bar than the sophisticated cakery of the keyboard.

I arched my neck, wheezed—an iceberg lurched inside me. I could feel half of Debrah’s desk and incidentals slamming their way toward my duodenum like a freight train—my bezoar, the price I paid for daring to dream too big, eat too big, and lose my way. Everything—my life and the geography of my gut profile—shifted.

Debrah’s office around me was in shambles, a graveyard of corporate detritus that should have never met my maw. Desk splinters, plastic flakes, scraps of reconciliation paper and copper filaments lay around the distended, roiling gut weighing me down. I fell to my knees. My heart pounded in my ears, or someone pounded on the door. My vision grew gray, swimmy.

I slumped face-down against the congealed carpet, but couldn’t lie flat and prone with the bowling-ball of crunched inanimates squabbling around inside. It felt like a mudslide in my gut. The bezoar finally got its revenge. My last memory would be the triumph of showing Debrah what’s up when she threw around a PIP.

I had tunnel vision and a roaring in the ears. As I slipped away, I heard Debrah grab the phone—damn, I missed eating the phone first—and dialing, and saying “HR, yes, this is Debrah, I’m going to need to, um, report some major employee misconduct and partial desk-eating—”

---

“Sir, can you tell me what you ate?”

Blood lights.

“—multiple foreign bodies, possible bowel obstruction—”

Rattling plastics like jungle vines.

“BP’s dropping, we need to—”

Mask: can’t eat.

“How much of the desk, sir? Approximately?”

Blue angels arms-aflurry.

“—staple fragments on the X-ray, could be—”

Hooked up to bags of fluids, am a bag of fluid, and a bag of fluid gone sour inside me.

“Sir, stay with me, what’s your pain level on a scale of—”

On the scale, a stack of a hundred hot dogs. A century of nitrites, pink slime, and ground beef.

“—never seen a bezoar this size—”

---

Steel. Sapphire. Ruby. Plaster.

My eyelids rose, and my eyes focused.

I loved the hospital at midnight. It was a quiet dream of beeps and gentle lights. The lighting was different; the colors were different. The plastic plants in hallway corners and next to chairs and on tables seemed alive. The staff whisked around silently like the night itself muffled their sneakers, and they were sentinels, vigilantes, doing arcane nursely things while mortals slept. It felt like the outside world couldn’t intrude here, only offer new lost souls to heal.

She entered. I checked the clock but the numbers floated around. She glanced at my charts, other numbers filing in and out of multitudinous screens, her heavy-lidded eyes resting on me—and focusing.

“You’re awake,” she said like a viola with practiced calm, rich and roundly-pitched. She was more olive than I, fit, hair a wave of auburn. I could feel a Mediterranean breeze waft in from the closing door: vineyards, sea salt, sun-toasted rigging. She would be correcting our ship’s course.

“I’m in a dream,” I said.

Her laugh was a sprite too loud. She pointed at a drip IV. I liked her mouth when she spoke: “Morphine will do that to you.”

Yes, I floated around her, bed and all, but she was bigger still like she was the earth and I the moon. My body was fuzzy and light, so light.

Strangely weightless. This was the only moment my attention turned away from her, and my hands found my stomach laden with contraptions: tubes, monitors, rusting-red gauze.

“Time to change those, lie back please.” She cast her magic spell on me as I tried to process the emptiness I felt then, but it was bright and wondrous void, a weight lifted, an obstacle cleared—

The bezoar was gone.

I had to say something: “I’ll need to make a new friend to replace the one I lost.” What the fuck, Wayne? She cleared her throat, or chuckled, or coughed, but I was in a fuzzy blanket of drugs and couldn’t—

I breathed in the pause of the midnight hospital world, unsure how to focus, until her words brought me back again. “I’m curious, Wayne.”

“Anything for you.”

“I’m sure that’s just the morphine talking but thank you.”

“I’m sure it’s not.”

“We’ve all seen bowel obstructions before here, but this one was impressive. You… ate a desk?”

“Only half until the ol’ bezoar got me.” Talking made me a smidge dizzy, but no way I’d stop with her here. “You know, I carried it for years. They said it was lodged too close to the aorta, would risk my life to remove…”

“But why a desk? Was this a party trick at work? Impress your boss?”

I didn’t think she was laughing at me though. Her eyes twinkled.

“The only trick was that I tried accounting for so long. I was a competitive eater, you know, a Belly Bludgeoner.”

Her lips pressed together hard, eyes never leaving mine. Face glowing.

“And in six months once you’ve healed, technically there’s no blockage anymore, how does it feel?”

I squinted at her.

“Oh it may be fuzzy from the anesthesia. Doctor Yune said your eating career could be… back on the table.” She looked at me like she just shoplifted a pack of gum.

The machinery and tubing connected to my stomach told the rest of the story. I did not want to think about a Doctor Yune lecturing me. I had no hospital memory before this woman, and I wanted to keep it that way.

“I’m your assigned nurse, Ferwa, by the way. Because I get asked a lot, it is ‘fondness’ in Lebanese.”

“Mrs. Nurse Ferwa—”

“—Ferwa is fine, and it’s Miss—”

“I swear to you, because you’re so nice and pretty, I will dedicate my revived eating career to you. If I can eat a desk, I can be the best.”

My stomach ached where she worked so I refused to look down, focused on her face instead. Any pain was dwarfed by the relief in place.

She looked like she just solved a tough math problem. “That’s a very difficult and lofty ambition, Wayne, but I think you might be onto something here.” Her tone was crispy. “Big question though: Belly Bludgeoner or the Desk Eater?”

“Desk Destroyer.”

“I did miss that, shame on me.”

I envisioned the crowd at that final competition before a disastrous hot dog plug sent me on the business school track. They didn’t use my old team name. People were screaming ‘Double D! Double D! Desk Destroyer!’, everything glowing in sunlight, my belly prepped good and supple before another mastication domination. I was in my bright-red signature tank top and pacing myself real well. I was about to top the world-record; I was right where I was meant to be. Behind me, I could see Ferwa in a red “Desk Destroyer” t-shirt: leader of my corner crew, shouting and cheering me on, delight shining from her eyes and sparkling off her teeth, an engagement ring sparkling as she cupped her hands to her mouth. Another hot dog down the hatch.

Like always, Ferwa brought me back. “Competitive eater, bezoar, switch to accounting but your heart wasn’t really in it. Wait, no—you couldn’t stomach accounting.”

Her hands were gone—redressing was done. Waterfall on her hands next.

“Don’t leave,” I found myself saying.

“I’m the nurse assigned; I’ll be back.” She made a final lap to spruce up the room.

She started to leave, but stepped halfway back inside. “You know, it may not sound like a lot to you, but once I ate two and a half stuffed gyros. I felt like maybe I should have gone to the hospital too.”

A giggle escaped: the only time she ever failed at anything.

“It’s perfect,” I told the closing door.

Fondness.

---

Photo by Sorato Suzuki on Unsplash