1
CAROL
Carol was already having a terrible day when she found that her chair was missing.
Her wretched, ungrateful cat had thrown up on the throw rug, because there was only one rug in the whole apartment and that was where he had to do it. Her best work heels were scuffed. The barista at her favorite coffee place still didn’t know her name (“Carol, it’sCarol.” Her cupalwayssaid Karen.) and the coffee tasted like they’d used one of those fake milks. She’d been late for work stuck in traffic because someone had opened a portal in the middle of a major highway and couldn’t get it closed. A fifteen minute commute had turned into an hour.
She was starving, having skipped breakfast in favor of having her carb allotment in the form of coffee (had they used fake sugar, too?). This was the fourth week of a diet app that she was stubbornly sticking with even though it felt like she’d spent years counting calories and tracking her weight. Whatever the scale said, she always looked the same because she was built like her Eastern European peasant ancestors and was constantly hungry.
And now, after an awful day of undoing poorly-written code and mandatory socializing at a party with no finger food, her chair was gone.
Was someone trolling her?
She’d bought her own chair for her cubicle, out of her own wages, because the company-provided swivel seats were clearly made for twiggy programmers who had no ass whatsoever.
Carol, having both ample ass and no desire to spend up to ten hours a day in a torture device, sprang for her own ergonomic throne. It rolled on high-quality casters that wouldn’t snag on the office carpeting, was held up with hydraulics that didn’t sag to the floor over a day’s worth of work, and had a cushioned seat that gently cradled her hips instead of pinching the circulation out of her legs between armrests.
The fabric wasn’t leather, because she wasn’t going to pay an extra three hundred dollars for that, but it had a pleasantly not-quite-suede surface and good lumbar support.
And she was seriously miffed to find that it wasn’t in her workspace.
Muted sounds of the Christmas party from the conference room across the building suggested that the flow of alcohol had hit that point where everyone had gotten past politely demurring a drink and gone straight for seconds and thirds. It might have been a good time, but Carol wasn’t feeling festive, there hadn’t been any food except cookies that would bust her carb count, and she was so hungry that she knew she was going to snap at someone.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t appreciated at work. Her bonus had been great, and her coworkers praised her output, when they remembered to. She was a solid team member, pulled her share, and never left dishes in the break room sink.
But she hadn’t Become anything when everyone else had, and her wizardry with code couldn’t compensate for being as un-magical as a festive lump of coal.
Linda in accounting was now a glamorous vampire, and had leaned into it by changing her entire wardrobe to black and saying “I vant to suck your blood!” at every opportunity. Fred could turn into a puddle of goo, which Carol was honestly envious of at times, and Chad was a werewolf, though it didn’t seem to be dictated by the cycles of the moon. He just randomly turned into a wolf and growled at people whenever there was a high-pitched whistle. (Since he worked in customer service, it was a bit of a problem.)
As hard as she tried, Carol couldn’t levitate anything, or make a portal, or even heat up the second cup of coffee that she’d forgotten to drink that morning like Tansy in HR could.
It had been odd at first, then pitiful, and after three years Carol thought that people wondered if something was wrong with her, because she couldn’t do a single magical thing.
Some people got magical powers, some Became magical creatures.
All Carol got was older, hitting her thirty year milestone with zero fanfare.
She’d even been left off the list for the Secret Santa that year. She’d been assigned someone, and spent just a little bit over the budget to get Linda a red glass goblet that went with her new aesthetic. Linda loved it and kept it on her desk, but no gift had come in return.
When she sheepishly asked Tansy, the coordinator of the exchange, if she should still be expecting a gift, Tansy had fallen all over herself to apologize, because somehow Carol had been dropped off the recipients list altogether.
“It happens,” Carol said, shrugging and pretending it didn’t matter. “Code gremlins, maybe.”
It “didn’t matter” that it was the only gift she could hope for this year.
Her parents were on a cruise, and her brothers and sisters were all concentrating on festivities for their own families. She’d sent cards and small gifts for her nieces and nephews, but they were at the age where they were too old for a crayon-scrawled thank you card and the most she would get was a grudging phone call to Crazy Aunt Carol.
“You’re such a good sport, Carol,” Tansy cooed at her. “You’ll be staying for the party tonight?”
Carol felt obligated to smile and promised to attend, but she wasn’t in a party mood. After making a quick social round, congratulating the boss on a successful year, and eating two cookies she shouldn’t have (and being hungrier than ever afterwards), she took her second glass of wine back to her cubicle to get her coat and go home.
Where her chair was missing.
Someone had rolled in one of the standard plastic seat-of-torments in its place, as if they thought she might not notice the difference.
Carol clenched her hand around the stem of her wine glass.
She was dangerously low on holiday spirit, had drunk most of her second glass of wine on an empty stomach, and could feel her blood sugar roller coaster as her rage skyrocketed. Who stole what was clearly a personal chair during aChristmas party? It had to be a joke of some kind.
