meepting Your meep Out: The Woes of the Modern Workplace

Sam had only been at his desk for thirty minutes that day when he began to feel that uncomfortable thunder in his bowel. His eyes focused a good ten feet beyond his monitor as he quickly evaluated the commotion from within. "I'll be alright," he thought. "I'll just throw out the rest of my coffee and grab some water instead." He slowly stood up from his chair, his head rising over the cubicle wall like a brown, hairy sunrise. Phones rang, people murmured, paper shuffled, and so did Sam. He shuffled almost the entire distance across the office floor to the water cooler. Almost. Six feet shy and a shot rang out that only Sam heard, but it was enough to make his eyes widen and mouth turn dry. There were several twists and turns between Sam and the bathroom, but in that moment the world warped and contorted clearing a straight path just for him. Before he knew it he was in the men's restroom facing a stall door. He creaked it open with his fingertips and, in a swift motion that defied the common understanding of space and time, closed the door while lowering his pants. His pasty cheeks docked firmly with the seat, and with a quick clearing of his throat he was ready for launch.

He sat in silence with his hands clasped, elbows resting on his knees, his mind ruminating on the almost empty toilet paper roll mocking him from the over-sized plastic dispenser. A minute passed just like this while his inner torment slowly resolved itself to a state of digestive peace. Realizing this he broke his gaze from the toilet paper and looked at his shoes, cleared his throat, and began to remove himself from the toilet. Then it happened. The entire universe began to shake and shudder. Ceiling tiles fell all around him and lights flickered. He braced himself against the walls of the narrow stall that were beginning to shake loose. He clenched his eyes in silent prayer to a god he didn't believe in as a rumble in the distance grew louder and louder vibrating through every cell in his body as the muffled screams of his coworkers outside of the door became less and less distinguishable as human. Then it stopped. He opened his eyes to see no rubble, no ceiling tiles, no blood, no mayhem. "I must be losing my mind," he muttered.

Curiosity got the best of Sam in the worst situations, and in this situation he decided he wanted to see what he had created before casting it off into the ether. He stood up in a very deliberate and assertive way and turned to look into the bowl. He was relieved to see it. A small brown meep with nothing remarkable about it, except that... well that's odd... it was kind of in the shape of a meep. In fact, the more he stared at it the more he realized it looked exactly like his own. That's when he looked down at himself to realize something quite alarming: his meep was gone.

When you're in the sort of state Sam was in at that moment, your body floods with chemicals and your brain goes into a sort of auto-pilot, allowing you to react with little to no consciousness or forethought. Unfortunately for Sam he was never good in emergency situations and reacted quite strangely to the strange predicament.He thrust his hand into the bowl and pulled it back with the log firmly in his grasp. He waved his fist around to shake off some of the water, and as he did this the meep began to flake away, revealing a limp, fleshy, detached meep. Sam burst free from the stall and grabbed an excessive amount of paper towel to coddle the poor meep before rushing out of the bathroom, and then out of the office entirely.

As soon as he sat in his car in the office parking lot he found he was already pulling into his driveway. On any other day this lost time would have been something worth noting and worrying about, but not this day. This was the day Sam found himself sitting on the floor in an empty room in his new condo staring at a detached meep resting on the ground in a nest of generic commercial grade paper towel. His breathing as deep as his stare, and the worry he once felt now replaced with a new feeling that he had never experienced before, and if he were asked he wouldn't think anyone else had experienced it either. He gently picked it up with both hands and raised it up before him as if offering it to an invisible master. Though instead of bowing his head and extending the gift, he brought the fleshy lump toward his face and parted his lips ever so purposefully. He angled his hands allowing the meep to slide into his gullet and, with some snake-like undulation in the back of his throat, it disappeared.

Sam sat in place in a meditative stare into the distance. The light through the window crept along the floor during the course of the day, but Sam did not move. At least intentionally. By the time the sun had set Sam had started sinking into himself. His arms and legs were notably shorter, and he no longer had any neck to speak of. Despite this, Sam sat motionless in his place. The sun retired and a quiet darkness filled the room, interrupted only by gentle sounds of moist, fleshy friction.

By the time the sun came out again the Sam everyone knew was no longer in the room. In his place was a pink ball draped in clothing and covered in patches of short hair and various moles and freckles. He was in there, somewhere, somewhat concerned with the difficulty he was having with breathing, and also with the difficulty he was having with not being a ball. The sun shone bright through the window and he could feel it burning him. Where his limbs and head had once been were now puckered faux-anuses, making his real one harder to identify, but to nobody in particular.

He remained this way without food or water for days. Three, to be exact. On the end of the third day he found himself with another rumble in his gut. With nothing left to lose he bore down in whatever manner a ball-man would, and produced an other-worldly flatus that was punctuated by a cork-like pop as his semi-digested meep launched across the room and met the wall with a wet thwack.

Sam flinched as the bubbles in the water cooler rose, and suddenly he found himself surrounded by the mundane shuffling of mundane people in the mundane place he called work, six feet shy of the water cooler. Confused and quietly alarmed, Sam darted his eyes around. The clock. Nine fourty. A calendar on the wall in Cherryl's cubicle. February 12th. He never left work. He never even made it to the bathroom. He never even - oh god. He realized the murmurs around him weren't the usual white noise of office tedium, they were the savage whispers of gossip and ridicule. He glanced down briefly, catching a horrifying mess in his peripheral that his olfactory confirmed with stunning accuracy.

When you're in the sort of state Sam was in at that moment, your body floods with chemicals and your brain goes into a sort of auto-pilot, allowing you to react with little to no consciousness or forethought. Unfortunately for Sam he was never good in emergency situations and reacted quite strangely to the strange predicament. He reached down, opened his fly, and reached a hand inside of his pants. His shoulders dropped in relief as he turned to the crowd of workers with his member in hand and a smile on his face. "At least I've still got my meep."