Black Pens & Bleeding Peaches

Chester Lowell woke with the taste of carpet dust and night terrors on his tongue, the alarm clock cleaving dawn into red, unforgiving numerals—6:43—bars on a tiny electronic prison window. He sat motionless for a long time, listening to the breath inside his chest like it belonged to someone else, like his ribs were an Airbnb for a soul too weary to sign a lease. The room smelled of old coffee, failed resolutions, and the damp, nameless scent of a person who had not screamed yet but was about to.

His apartment resembled a stalled heartbeat: the couch slumped, a collapsed lung of upholstery and shame; the walls, jaundiced with years of nicotine-free disappointment; the kitchen, a field of fossilized dishes; his one gallant plant, Greg, bent toward the window with such pathos that it looked like it was begging any passing breeze to kidnap it.

He showered like a man trying to drown the part of himself that still had dreams, shaved his face until it was a red landscape of tiny self-inflicted corrections, knotted his tie with the resigned competence of a man no longer afraid of the rope, and walked out the door murmuring, “Pens. If I need an excuse today, I’ll say pens.”

Allied Synergy Solutions, LLC squatted on the corner of 5th and Wellington like an industrial tombstone. Its mirrored windows reflected the sky the way a dead eye reflects a candle: inaccurately, with malice. The lobby was a sterile aquarium of bad lighting and better lies. The receptionist—her nametag said KAREN but her eyes said HAVE MERCY ON ME, GOD—gave Chester a smile that had been corporately laundered so many times it no longer resembled happiness. The elevator smelled of ozone and fear. When the doors opened onto the seventh floor, the fluorescent buzz entered his skull as if his soft brain were a hive and the lights were wasps: hum hum hum hum hum.

Row upon row of cubicles stretched to the vanishing point: beige canyons of spreadsheets and softly rotting ambition. Cubicle 7B-42: his coffin. His cactus drooped, its spines softened by apathy. The motivational poster of the cat hanging from a branch (HANG IN THERE!) had faded to the pallor of a ghost begging for release. His computer booted with a hopeful chime that sounded like an involuntary giggle before a public execution.

And in this mausoleum of data entry, Lilith Crawthorne floated like a magnolia-scented angel of death, her floral dresses gliding from aisle to aisle, trailing sugar and threat. She was the office manager, but the role fit her like a paper party hat atop a crowned head. Her smile: the curve of a sickle disguised as a crescent moon. Her accent: cloying syrup poured over arsenic to keep you sipping.

“Bless your heart,” she’d chirp to Eddie the intern after he caused the printer to seize up and howl.

“Oh, sugar, don’t you fret,” to Carl from accounting as he sweated through his shirt during the quarterly panic.

She knew your birthday, your dog’s name, your favorite pie, and the precise weight of your fear. She called everyone darling. She called Chester sugar. He hated that it made something brittle inside him want to melt.

On Thursday at exactly 3:17 p.m., the day cracked like a porcelain mask under a hammer. He’d been hypnotized by cells, rows, columns, the lubricious murmurs of SUM() and VLOOKUP() seducing him toward a vegetative state. The silence pressed in, not absence but presence—heavy, listening. His cubicle walls flexed like lungs. Something—something in him, or the air—whispered: Go. Pens.

He stood, knees unsure of their contract with his hips, and drifted toward the supply corridor where the lights were always a fraction dimmer, where bleach lingered in the air like a chemical ghost, where the walls narrowed as if the building were chewing.

She was there. Mrs. Crawthorne. Kneeling before the open supply closet like a supplicant in prayer, her floral skirt pooled around her like a garden laid on a grave. She hummed a tune that was either a hymn or a eulogy or both. In her arms, something heavy, slack, too soft to be boxes, too quiet to be anything alive.

And then it happened: an arm—pale, blue-veined, nails painted a chipped martyr’s red—slid free and slapped the metal doorframe with a meat noise that detonated quietly inside Chester’s skull. The fingers curled reflexively, or maybe they didn’t. Maybe he just wanted them to.

He made a sound halfway between a question mark and a drowning man.

She turned. For one second, her face was a dead screen: no effect, no soul, just a vacancy sign lit in blue winter light. Then—click—a smile. Sweet peach tea. Porch swing. Sweltering dusk. Knife in the picnic basket.

“Well, bless your heart, Chester! You gave me a start. Need something, baby? Pens? Blue ones?”

He nodded because nodding required balance and not courage.

“Oh, darlin’, we’re all out of blue.” Her hand went into her pocket. Time widened, distended like a pupil under exam light. “But black,” she crooned, “black is forever.”

She pressed the pen into his palm. It was warm. The warmth was wrong. The warmth was recent, mammalian, arterial. The warmth was a shared secret he did not want. It throbbed—no, it didn’t. Yes, it did.

He walked backward without turning, the way you leave a room with a sleeping tiger inside, and when he finally faced the field of cubicles again, everything wore a new face: the furniture grimaced, the ceiling exhaled, the carpet was a tongue.

He put the black pen on his desk and watched it like it might bloom teeth. His spreadsheet accepted letters that weren’t letters, as his hands typed what his brain could not cleanse: aaaaa11aaaa1111aaaaaDEAR GOD HELP MEaaaaaa.

At 4:46 p.m., her shadow arrived, and then she did, a pie in her hands, pecan crust glossy with a lacquered sheen like someone had shellacked sin.

“Chester, sugar,” she said, her voice slipping into him like silk into a wound, “you’ve gone quiet on me.”

The pie landed on his desk. Steam rose. It smelled like butter, sugar, nutmeg, and the faint iron tang of a coin sucked on too long as a child.

“Have a bite. You look poorly.”

He picked up the fork because he was taught to be polite in the face of monsters and hospitality. He broke the crust and it yielded like cartilage. He chewed. It dissolved on his tongue like it knew his mouth better than he did. It was the sweetest thing he had ever tasted. It was the worst thing he had ever tasted. Tears arrived unannounced.

“There now,” she whispered. “Isn’t that better?”

He nodded because no was an extinct animal in this ecosystem.

By 5:12 p.m., he and she were the last two warm things on the seventh floor. The office was a cathedral now, the lights humming psalms, the ventilation crooning a requiem. The supply closet held gravity. He could feel it tugging at the strings of him, the closet a black star around which his sanity orbited, decaying.

He stood. He took the pen. He walked. The corridor narrowed. The dark deepened. Bleach insisted. The door was a mouth. His hand raised toward the handle.

A knock, soft as an eyelash against skin: *thud.* Then another, weaker. Then scratching—a small animal behind drywall, or nails. Human nails. Desperate nails.

“Curious, are we?”

The voice arrived from behind his left shoulder like a silk noose. He turned like a rusted weather vane.

She stood at the end of the hall holding a box cutter that glimmered like a choice. Her smile widened, and the tired, womanly warmth in it congealed into something cathedral-cold.

“Curiosity,” she said, approaching, heels ticking like a clock that had just learned to love you, “is how good people drown.”

He said, “Someone’s in there,” but it came out as “Some—” because language had abandoned him for a higher-paying job.

“There’s nothin’ in there but inventory and remembrance,” she said, and slid past him, her perfume (honeysuckle, vanilla, fresh soil) rewriting the air. The closet door opened with the sigh of a wound being shown the mirror, and inside was the harvest: faces, peeled and preserved, strung like keepsakes in a grandmother’s parlor. Paperclips through the corners of mouths to wring smiles out of rigor.

Name tags in her looping script: JANET – MARKETING; CARL – ACCOUNTING; EUGENIA – CFO; SADIE – INTERN (Eternal). Some were parchment-dry, their pores like map topography. Some were dew-wet, eyes still glassy, lashes clumped, a tear track fossilized in the gelatin sheen.

Between them, lavender sachets hung like mockery, attempting to catechize rot into civility.

Chester said nothing, because words would have been lies. His stomach revolted. He turned and found the hallway longer than before, and the exit farther, and the air denser, and her voice closer:

“Don’t you just love to keep what you love close, sugar?”

He ran. He was ungraceful. He was a marionette whose puppeteer had a seizure. The pen fell and rattled like a tiny bone. He slammed into the exit door. It didn’t open. It didn’t rattle. It didn’t even acknowledge him.

Her heels continued: click, click, click, like a blind person’s cane tapping to find the exact center of him.

“A gentleman doesn’t run from a lady,” she called sweetly.

He pounded the glass. The city beyond ignored him, a fish tank beyond the fish’s comprehension. He turned and she was near enough that he could see, in the blue of her eyes, not pupils but keyholes, or maybe wormholes, depths that went downward through decades.

Images detonated behind his eyes, not memories but transmissions: a July porch in 1919, her hair dark then, her dress white as a baptismal shroud, a man on his knees bleeding into the red clay while she sipped tea and said, “Bless your heart,” in a tone that was both benediction and verdict; a textile mill in 1932, foreman smiling into her lap while her fingers played his throat like a violin string; a congregation in 1950 swaying to a hymn while the preacher floated facedown in a pond out back, lily pads like medals on his back; an HR department in 1987, a whole wing of them, vanishing into “budget restructuring” while a new set of framed faces hung in a closet that smelled like toner and angel food cake. She hadn’t aged. She hadn’t paused. She hadn’t once misplaced her pearls.

“Come on now,” she said, putting a hand on his cheek, and it was warm and damp like something recently washed. “You’ll make yourself sick. Let’s get you settled.”

His body betrayed him, followed her, sat where she placed him: the breakroom, fluorescent, humming, a microwave cycloptic. The pie waited, steaming. Another slice landed on a paper plate with the finality of a judge’s gavel.

“Eat,” she said, and the word was not a request but a sacrament.

He tried to resist, but his hand—the traitor—lifted the fork. His mouth—the whore—opened. He chewed. The pecans crunched. Something else crunched. Not pecan. Softer. Grittier. Something with memory embedded in it.

The sweetness climbed his throat like a sugar vine and wrapped around his brain stem. He cried openly. She dabbed his cheek with a napkin.

“That’s it,” she murmured. “That’s family. You taste it? That’s belonging.”

Time grew mold. Security found him at 6:00 a.m., cross-legged, hands stained brown with pie, eyes flat as calm water before a gator surfaces. He smiled when they spoke to him, but not because he was happy—because he had been permanently stretched.

He said, “I’m okay,” but the words had no inhabitant.

The supply closet, when opened by men who believed in protocols and paperwork, contained only reams of paper, boxes of pens (blue, plentiful), toner cartridges lined like bombs, order, cleanliness, emptiness.

The lavender sachets were gone. The air smelled like lemon pledge and lies.

“You should go home, Mr. Lowell,” a guard said. Chester nodded. They did not follow him. No one ever follows the quiet ones.

Morning delivered Mrs. Crawthorne in a sunflower-yellow dress, carrying a Tupperware cradle of blueberry muffins that glistened with a glaze that resembled tears. She gave one to Karen at reception (“Thank you, Ms. Crawthorne, you’re an angel,”) left a stack in the breakroom with a Post-it note that read, Treat your sweet selves! – L.C., and breezed past 7B-42, where a single black pen sat on a bare desk beside a note, cursive immaculate, Try the pie. It’s to die for.

HR sent a polite email asking if anyone had seen Mr. Lowell; it autocorrected “Lowell” to “Loyal,” and no one corrected it. An intern used his chair. No one watered Greg, who began, finally, to crisp at the edges like paper burning slowly, deliberately, happy to go.

But the story does not end with his disappearance. That would be merciful. Mercy was not on retainer here.

Two weeks later, on a Tuesday that smelled like coffee breath and dry carpet, Eddie the intern wandered into the supply corridor hunting for highlighters that didn’t exist. The door was ajar, just an inch, the way a wound is shy to show itself. He saw hooks. He saw lavender bags. He saw labels—JANET, CARL, EUGENIA, EDDIE—and he saw new flesh, glossy as lamination, eyes sealed like envelopes.

One of the faces had freckles like constellations across its cheeks. He leaned in to read the newest tag, which was still damp ink, still drying into its finality: CHESTER – OPERATIONS. He leaned further, heart skittering, breath squeaking—was that… moving? Was that—?

The face’s left eye slid open a millimeter, then more, then fully, and he saw himself reflected tiny in the pupil, and beneath the reflection, the raw, flensed meat of a man who had eaten and been eaten, who had screamed and been shushed. Chester smiled with the corner of his mouth that remained. It was paperclipped into a grin, but beneath the paperclip something else moved.

He mouthed a word. Eddie couldn’t hear it, but he could read lips: Run.

Behind Eddie, peach tea and gunpowder—her perfume—blossomed.

“Now, sugar,” Mrs. Crawthorne said, gently closing the door with two fingers, the latch kissing metal like two lips making a pact, “curiosity is a wave. And waves drown little boys.”

She handed him a muffin, blueberry bleeding through its paper skirt. He took it because he was polite, because he was weak, because he was a human in proximity to a gravitational field old as the Reconstruction and as fresh as this morning’s slaughter.

He bit. It was divine.

Weeks passed. The office printed reports, held meetings about synergy they could not define, congratulated themselves on a Q3 that no one would remember. People resigned and were replaced. Faces came and went.

The lavender never ran out. The pies kept coming.

Somewhere, deep in the walls, the air-conditioning ducts carried a new sound on certain nights—a soft, damp rasp, like paper against paper, like lips without skin learning to pronounce a prayer. And sometimes, late, when the lights hiccuped and the elevators forgot the language of floors, the supply closet grew warm. It pulsed. It breathed. It hummed with the hymns of people who had given their faces to the family.

Years later—because she lasted, because she always lasts, because the world runs on the blood of the quiet and the efficiency of the kind—someone would find a box in a basement during an electrical renovation. Inside: an old Polaroid of a staff party in sepia tones, a white cake beneath fluorescent celebrants, and there, at the center, a young Mrs. Crawthorne in a floral dress no fashion cycle could date, pearls luminous, eyes bottomless, smile identical.

Beside her, a man with no name tag, no presence in HR records, holding a black pen like a scepter, eyes wide and glassy, mouth almost smiling, almost screaming—Chester Loyal, Chester Lowell, Chester Low, labeled on the back in that same immaculate cursive: Chester, bless him. A wave learned its place.

The photograph smelled faintly of lavender.

And in the seventh-floor supply closet of Allied Synergy Solutions, LLC—behind reams of paper, behind boxes of blue pens that no one ever uses, behind toner cartridges heavy as guilt—hangs a new face, flawlessly flattened, still shining where the flesh fought removal, lips stretched with a paperclip into hospitality, eyes open and very awake.

It watches every time the door opens. It watches you read the name beneath it. It watches you raise your hand, hesitate, and lower it, because you are polite, because you are fearful, because you have an email to send, because you will be late, because the world is beige and it is easier to live inside it if you pretend not to see what’s dyed the walls.

You take a muffin on your way out. You don’t like muffins. You eat it anyway. It is divine.

There is something in it that isn’t pecans. You tell yourself it’s nutmeg. You taste the metal and call it cinnamon. You tell yourself you will quit tomorrow. You tell yourself you will water your plant. You tell yourself you will never go near that closet. You tell yourself lots of things, in the same tone she uses when she tells you everything will be fine.

And somewhere inside the drywall, a chorus of paper mouths learns to harmonize. They are very good listeners. They have all the time in the world. The pie is cooling. The pen is warm. The door is almost closed.

The lavender never, ever runs out.