Everyone in the office had a private version of the phrase. A jammed printer was one person’s hell. Another reserved the expression for meetings scheduled after four. Someone in accounting used it whenever the microwave smelled like fish.
They said it with theatrical misery, a little declaration of harmless suffering exchanged across cubicle walls, and over time the phrase became part of the office language, as ordinary as good morning or see you tomorrow.
I never had a particular use for it until renovations moved my desk beside the rear stairwell. The door there never latched completely, and every afternoon a cold draft slipped through the gap carrying the faint medicinal smell of a hospital corridor I had not entered since childhood.
The first time it happened, I said the phrase aloud simply because everyone else did. Something inside my chest tightened with the precise sensation of a lock accepting the correct key.
After that, the smell began appearing elsewhere. It drifted through the conference room during budget meetings and followed me into the elevator. The copy room acquired the same waxed-floor odor at the exact hour my father once finished visiting hours. Each time I recognized it, the phrase rose automatically into my mouth. Each repetition seemed to strengthen the memory.
Details returned that I had spent decades losing: the green stripe painted along the corridor wall, the vending machine with one burned-out button, the squeak of rubber soles beyond a curtain nobody would let me cross.
Then my coworkers’ complaints began changing too. The woman who hated printer jams started finding paper caught in machines that had been unplugged. The man who dreaded late meetings received invitations from managers who had left the company years earlier. Someone who joked about elevators began taking the stairs after one ride stopped between floors and opened onto a hallway she refused to describe.
We still use the phrase, though less lightly now. The office seems to remember every declaration and treats repetition as authorization. This morning the stairwell door opened before I reached my desk. The corridor beyond was longer than the building could contain, lit by fluorescent panels with the same missing panel I remembered from childhood. Several coworkers stood at other doors along its length, each facing a place they had once described jokingly as theirs.
No one has crossed the threshold yet. We are all pretending to work, answering email and checking the time, while the doors remain open and patient.
The difficult part is that the corridor keeps supplying details only we could know, and with every familiar sound it becomes harder to remember whether we named these places because we feared them, or whether naming them was how they first learned where to find us.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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