The vending machine showed up in the break room over a long weekend, wedged between the water cooler and the recycling bin like it had always been there. Nobody remembered ordering it, and the maintenance guy swore he’d never seen the model before, some off-brand unit painted the color of dried blood with a hand-lettered label taped over the usual soda logos: Zero Sugar Katey Krueger, ninety-nine cents, exact change only.
The first person to buy one was an intern who wanted to seem fearless in front of the accounting department. She popped the tab, took a long pull, and said it tasted like cherry cola with something metallic underneath, like a penny dissolving on the tongue. That night she dreamed about her childhood bedroom, except the window was in the wrong wall and something was scratching to get in through the closet instead. She woke up sweating and told everyone at lunch, laughing about it, and by Thursday half the office had bought a can just to see what they’d dream.
The dreams got more specific as the week went on. A man from shipping dreamed about a birthday party he’d forgotten he’d been to. A woman from HR dreamed about her sister’s wedding, except her sister’s face kept sliding off like wet paint. Everyone described the same metallic aftertaste, the same sense of a door left open somewhere just out of view.
By Friday the machine was empty and nobody had seen it get restocked, and by the following Monday it wasn’t in the break room anymore, just a rectangle of clean floor where it had been sitting, and a faint smell of artificial cherry that took two days to fade. The maintenance guy checked the delivery logs and found nothing. Everyone stopped talking about their dreams around the same time, like they’d agreed to without discussing it, and the break room went back to smelling like burnt coffee and old carpet.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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