Winning is all

She insisted that if they just waited for the lift they would get to the bottom sooner, but he already had a foot on the escalator. She let him go and he looked back up to see her giggling as she ran and got into the glass-fronted capsule, pressed the button frantically to close the doors and held her bag and grinned at him as she descended smoothly to the middle floor, reaching it just before he did and only stopping for a moment to let another woman in before resuming her descent. Complacent as always, he casually strolled round and got onto the second escalator. She grinned wider and began to give mocking gestures, knowing that he would still be ten feet from the ground when she touched down, but her wanker sign stopped and her face turned to sickened horror as he realised too, flung himself off the moving metal staircase, plunged through the few inches of water by the fountain and crunched his head horribly into the coin-strewn tiles, blood and, it appeared, deeply golden urine surrounding him as he expired to the sound of a pre-recorded Tannoy announcement.

Bore me later

Chris had been asked whether he expected shrinkage to be higher among the call centre staff in Q3, and of course the answer was yes, but Neil from head office wanted to hear detail, whereas Chris just wanted to enjoy his glass of wine and look down over the yard as the windows reflected the gleaming afternoon sun. It was rare for this little secluded urban spot to look so pretty. But Neil was droning on insistently. The fact that they’d all been allowed to finish at 3 today seemed to be of no value to him. If anything it was an annoyance. He had to talk shop. He had no social skills and no life outside work. None.

Chris found himself leaning drowsily on the railing across the open French doors, unable and, unusually for him, unwilling to conceal his weariness at his senior manager’s crushingly boring attempts at conversation. Even this obvious fuck-off made no difference at all, and his sleepy disinterest in Neil’s desire to ‘really drive down costs across the operation’ only deepened, until suddenly Chris found himself past the point of no return, panicking and trying to grab one of the railings as he tumbled fully over, but to no avail, and now he plunged right into the vat of toxic waste, his skin beginning to crisp and sizzle immediately, some of it turning into a sort of fleshy steam while the rest began to slough off his body, leaving the muscles to rapidly dissolve under the chemical onslaught, his eyes lasting only a few seconds and his throat being annihilated too as he tried in vain to utter a final, gurgling scream as Neil frowned at his lack of professionalism.