Dodging out of the way of a material handler pushing what looked to be a respirator, Clark searched for Bed 11 in the ER.
He noted a nurse who looked vaguely like Brie Larson and smiled. She ignored him.
He adjusted the knot on his tie, wiped the shoulders of his suit for possible dandruff or lint, and continued down the line of curtained cubicles with patients in varying degrees of distress or unconsciousness.
Bed 11. Clark turned at the curtain. His youngest son Bryan sat on the bed, his left wrist looking like it was pregnant with twin walnuts.
“Bacon!” Clark said cheerily, as though they had just met for a round of golf.
Bryan, already grimacing, winced at the childhood nickname he had hoped he shed forever on his eighteenth birthday.
“Rough day at the office, huh?” Clark’s voice was upbeat, and Bryan imagined that a little vermouth of real sympathy had dripped into his father’s perpetual vodka pleasantness.
“It’s not an office, Dad, “though I know you were being metaphorical.”
“It’s a marvelous opportunity with a growth company and this little setback--”
“It’s not a marvelous opportunity, Dad. It’s poorly refrigerated drudgery sprinkled with the rapidly melting carrot dangle of advancement and relocation out of Toledo, possibly to the pastoral grandeur that is Youngstown. It’s an often macabre cacophony of interchangeable and indistinguishable metal implements being transferred from one apocalyptic machine to the next, then shipped faceless-deity-knows-where, for greed-fueled-billionaire-knows-what, while I repeat motions that numb not just my joints but my very soul and intellect as though the metal is usurping my humanity and I am becoming both a physical and emotionless element of the entire pointless regime of monotony. When I heal from this carnage wrought upon me from someone whose entire being has become an extension of a forklift at the nadir of their existence, I will not return to the industrial hades that nearly engulfed me, but will reclaim my purpose and my joie de vivre and continue my aspirations of becoming a full-time writer.”
Clark stepped back and examined his son.
“So you’re telling me you’re unhappy at Venture Amalgamated? What makes you think you could be a writer?”
The metaphors in this were rad and I got a real good chuckle at the end.
“…for it is your doom that your parents will never know you.”