The Cookie Swap

479 words

I’d only been on the job a few months and I wanted to impress or at least not be humiliated, at the cookie swap.The first batch of cookies I’d made were too crumbly to be used so I was extra nervous about the ones I was carrying to work . They seemed sturdy enough, but i was afraid any jostling would make my delightful dollops of deliciousness disintegrate into ghosts of cookies past. So I was pretty peeved when, as I was riding the down escalator, this guy banged into me as he careened past, stopping at the bottom long enough to say “Sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you!” He hadn’t scared me, he seemed like a cheap accountant for small businesses who was not good enough to make the big Four. Perhaps he enjoyed thinking he scared people.

“ Maybe you shouldn’t knock into people!”

“Don’t get aggravated, it’s Monday.”

“Fuck you!” I wittily bantered back.

Sadly for him, he was unaware that beneath my mild mannered exterior I’m a trained assassin. And that I had laced the outside of the cookie tin with shooting needles filled with the same poison which caused King Joffrey’s so-gruesome-I-had-to-turn-away death in Game Of Thrones.

It was SO Monday. So commuting Monday, being stomped on, packed, herded and provoked. It’s amazing the horrible deaths I have imagined for the rest of you when I’m plowing against the crowd daily; I can’t help wondering just what you have been planning for me — I’ve been that person accidentally knocking into other hapless commuters. Not long ago, being less than 15 minutes late would get me called into the manager’s office for a scolding, and my pay would be docked. We’re lucky more of us aren’t acting out our fantasies.

But it’s not other commuters, even when they are being sexist and lame, who should be suffering these fantasy deaths.

The world could be made better and our lives easier, if the mysterious transit authorities would spend money toward infrastructure instead of investing in indulgences like that strange creature rising over the world trade center transit area, which was supposed to look “soaring” and perhaps does to those looking down upon it and us, but to the huddled masses skuttling to our jobs below, it insteads looks a bit like an ankylosaurus we glance at without interest as we clump through the poorly drained corners puddles of slush, trying to avoid buses splashing said slush as we all try to negotiate the tightened corridors of lower manhattan, unbearably squeezed by construction and delays.

Our transit leaders hire expensive technology to create and build websites which tell us we’re going to be late yet again cause the subway train isn’t coming anytime soon.

Please save your bustime signals and soaring ankylosauri, and build working transit hubs and trains and buses instead.

The cookies survived ok. Nobody liked them much.