Member-only story
Sisyphus in the Warehouse
A short story
Against the sturdy rhythm of the warehouse, the collapse is deafening. It’s an evil sound. The sudden loud that makes your heartbeat shoot to your hands. Halfway across the floor, the whole shelf has fallen and that means hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars of product is now broken. My head jerks up, watching the drama unfold. It was Lyle. Idiot. He knows it, too. His leg is pinned beneath the bottommost rung of the shelf, trapped under boxes of flat screen TVs. He’s howling in pain, whether from the weight on his shin or the weight of what’s coming next. Either way, it doesn’t matter now.
“No,” he says. He knows. “No, no, no.”
I turn away and keep on printing labels. We know the guards will be on him in a second. We know Lyle will plead with them as they wrench him out from under the shelf and march him to the door. We know he’ll cry and beg as they take his badge off him and push him out into the street. We know this is the end of him. This one dumbass mistake is the end of it all.
“Please,” he says. His voice cracks. He’s crying. “Please.”
Every man is proud until he isn’t anymore.
Me, what I feel is annoyed. Annoyed he was clumsy enough to knock over an entire shelf, annoyed the shock of the sound threw me off my game. I have a quota. If I don’t…
