The Monday Ogre
He sucks the meat from our bones, and enters our homes, a cacophonous drudging, unwinding;
He waits by the stairs, and tangles our hair, relaxation and solace unbinding.
He sits with the Grim, and he chucks up our chins, and unravels the plans we’ve arrayed;
He crushes our toys with that cackling noise, and laughs at the games left unplayed.
“What is this?” Monday asks, waving around a small yellow sticky-note. The menacing tone of his gravelly voice is unmistakable. No one answers.
He scrunches himself down into the only comfortable chair in the room with a clatter of pots and pans and alarms and clipboards and stopwatches and keyrings. The chair creaks and bows strangely, reshaping itself to his overwhelming bulk.
“Well?” Monday asks, his voice the very measure of studied politeness, “We all know how I feel about waiting.” His great yellowed fingernails are tapping on the arm of the chair, and the chair cracks loudly, trying sadly to hold itself together.
“A paean?” Saturday warbles tremulously.
“A paean.” Monday shows off his sharp, pointy teeth in what might pass for a smile in certain circles, but here looks ghoulish and somewhat hungry. He reads the note again, laboriously forming the words and drawing them out so far they nearly snap.
Sunday quivers.
“What’s that?” Monday stops, “Someone said something.”
“Nothing!” Sunday squeaks, the shine from his cherubic cheeks gone green and dim in the pressing gloom, “I… burped. Breakfast. Unsatisfactory. Too fast. And coffee — ”
Monday narrows his big red eyes to tiny glowing slits.
“ — too much, I think, I’m jittery now and — ”
Saturday elbows him in the ribs and hisses at him to “please shut up!”
Monday raises a huge, infested eyebrow into the vicinity of the brim of his giant yellow hardhat and leans forward with a kabonging of metallic objects that ricochets through their bones.
“Sing it for me.” He states, the boom in his voice shaking the dust on the shelves. “Sing it for me, right now. And I’d better like it.”
“It’s a chant,” Lissa pipes up from her corner.
“A chant.” Monday turns his face toward her, puzzled as to why she is speaking. Or even here.
“Must you do that? The repeating?” she asks him.
“It is double-checking.” Monday tells her, briefly disconcerted, “I have to double-check.”
“Well, it is bullying,” she informs him loftily, “it is bullying and we haven’t finished rehearsing, so we can’t perform it for you during paid hours. Union rules.”
Monday looks at her as though something smellier than himself has crept into the area. He puts the paper down on the table and taps at it with the tip of one finger, poking little holes in it and denting the wood below.
“It had better be — ”
“No,” she tells him, to the shock of everyone in the room because nobody interrupts Monday except the Bank, “you don’t get to do that, either. But,” and the others gasp again as she steps forward and touches him, toe to toe, “you are welcome to an off-hours preview after dinner.”
Wednesday hiccups miserably from somewhere in the room and begins to cry. Tuesday buries her under a pile of comforters and sits on her to muffle the noise.
Monday glares at Lissa and opens his mouth and flexes his jaw and exhales impatiently in her face, making her eyes water, but just a tiny bit. At least it wasn’t his roar. Her face would have melted.
“Union.” He says.
“Union,” she says, “Now get out.”
Sunday faints.
Monday rubs his temples and squeezes his eyes shut, shaking his monstrous head from side to side, “I don’t think — ” he begins, his voice taking on that tone that says Trouble Is Here Now, “I do not think — ”
Lissa stamps her foot and points at the door.
“Break room!” She hisses at him terribly.
“Union?” he asks. He actually looks as though he might eat her, which on a 12-foot tall, 3000-pound ogre is not an attractive thing.
“OUT.” She states emphatically.
He hoists himself out of the chair with a terrible popping and clanketing. The chair no longer appears to be quite so comfortable, and has springs and stakes and splinters sticking in various directions. Monday slouches noisily toward the door and is almost through it, turning sideways and ducking his head, when Lissa calls out to him again.
“You broke the chair.” To prove her point, the chair gives a rattling death-squeak and falls to pieces.
Monday stops, jangling faintly. He opens and closes his mouth before silently nodding and continuing on his way.
The room is bathed in silence as it slowly airs out and the miasma of doom fades away. Suddenly there is an eruption of excited noise as Sunday is revived, Wednesday is uncovered and issued a dose of smelling salts for near-smothering, Saturday is jumping up and down and Tuesday looks mystified and suspicious.
Lissa waves her hands around until everyone is quiet. It takes a while, as Saturday is quite irrepressible, and Sunday and Wednesday must have everything they missed repeated twice.
“Yes, yes, I’ve bought us some time, but really this will have to wait. We have work to do, people! Does Friday have pompoms?”