The board deliberates for a minute before passing the resolution unanimously.

“There are a few rides left in these old dungarees,” Peter says. “Don’t believe your mother. Don’t listen to the neighbors. These are still good, these are still ripe, these are sturdy and strong and sound.”

Peter shifts his weight, revealing a constellation of holes and tears, from pinprick nibbles to undeniable grapes.

“These dungarees got me this far, and they got life left in ’em still.”

He writhes to the side and the threadbare fabric rips, exposing more pink-white flesh of his inner thigh. “They’ve seen the world. They’ve seen hell. But they ain’t ready to see the inside of a wastebin.”

He stands and the underwear splits again. He moans, and his penis and scrotum spill through. “They don’t buck like they used to,” he says, “but these dungarees survived combat and they ain’t gonna give out on me now.”

Tommy knows his father has never experienced combat. Tommy can think of no reason for his father’s underwear to be so minced and chewed, like some battlefield flag.

Peter does a jumping jack and his unsupported genitals slap and pull new slits through the cloth. What’s left is a waistband dangling laces, the bones of a picked-apart carcass. “I will not surrender,” Peter huffs through his jumping jacks while the macerated strings bounce. “My dungarees are healthy and vigorous and do not need to be exchanged.”

He slows, breathes heavily, and sits hard in his chair. When he lands, he screams. “Oh,” he wails. “On no, no, no, no.”

Tommy can no longer see his father’s scrotum. “I sat on my nuts,” Peter says. His face goes red, purple. “These old dungarees don’t got no foundation left. No skeleton.” His face grays. “Be good, son. Be good to your momma.”

“Can you get up?” Tommy says. “Mom said she already bought you new underwear.”

“The captain goes down with his dungarees.” Blood comes from his nose, his mouth. A neighbor knocks on the window, peering at Peter’s exposed ass. “Just promise me you’ll play that trumpet when I go. Promise me you’ll send me off right.”

Peter’s body goes limp and he stops breathing.

Tommy picks up his father’s old trumpet, presses it to his lips, and tries to breathe into it, but no sound comes out.

The vice presidents gathered in the executive conference room stare into the table.

“Sarah. Go.”

“What?”

“Tell me why each of our employees needs twenty fingers and toes.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Justify the number. Every expense must be justified.”

“I don’t consider fingers and toes–“

“Pack your things. I need employees who solve problems, not ones who increase confusion and perpetuate inefficiencies.”

“I’m fired?”

“Yes. Greg. Go.”

“Sir, I believe we’re all in agreement that some aspects of our work are out of our control, including–“

“Just because we’ve done it this way in the past is no excuse to continue. We have to rein this in before it becomes a bigger problem.”

“Rein it in?”

“Do you not understand how sad I am?”

“What?”

“Get out.”

On a folding chair in the corner of the room, I keep my mouth shut and take notes. A summer intern plucked from obscurity to observe. The president does not know I exist. I should stay in my lane, keep my head down. But I was raised to do the right thing.

“Sir?”

“Who’s that?”

“If you’d permit me, sir, I’d like to speak on behalf of your employees.”

He narrows his eyes, but allows me to continue.

“I agree that eighteen thousand digits is a condemnable figure. All those fingers and toes burden the staff not only physically, but mentally as well, as each item is one more obligation to inventory and clean and maintain. We should start with an assumption that employees need zero fingers and toes, and then permit each one as required for the needs of the business. The staff you’ve assembled in this room are faithless cowards addicted to the muck that clogs the machine. I believe adaptability is one of the many incredible traits of the human species. I am confident that we can maintain productivity with a 50% reduction. When we eliminate every other digit, efficiency will dip briefly during an adjustment period, but within weeks we will be back to where we were.”

The VPs seethe. They leer, grit their teeth.

But the president points at me. His dour face shatters and he erupts with laughter, gasps in air like they’re his first breaths. “To meet a man who understands…” he says, his big chest quaking. “You’ve saved me from the depths.”

From a cabinet he withdraws a steel cigar cutter. I walk to his side and take it from him, vowing to simply do my job; to act on what’s best for the business. In the men’s restroom I find a dirty blue bucket and bring it to the conference table, where the VPs moan and wail and hit me in my side and my neck and my mouth, but my righteousness is stronger and I subdue them long enough to get every other finger and toe through the gory snipper. I reduce total digit count by half, filling the bucket until it’s good and heavy.

The boss sends me to each regional branch — first class flights, hotel suites — to stalk the floors with my bucket and tool, cauterizing wounds with my sister’s hot iron hair straightener. The employees tell each other about me. They hide and they hit me. They strike me with keyboards and lamps. They try to choke me, to electrocute me. But in the end, I get them all. A monitor crack to the back of the skull is painless when one knows his convictions are pure.

Over and over, I fill my bucket. At the end of August, revenue’s dipped just 4% while fingers and toes are down by 50.

I return to campus and add those statistics to my résumé, typing one key at a time with my cost-effective claws.

I spin away from my boss violently, flounce out of her office and down the hallway, then the next, backtracking to launder my movements and confuse the Rottweilers until I enter the restroom and lock myself in a stall, where I sit for the remainder of the day with my pants at my ankles, eavesdropping on the comradery and bonuses and promotions happening at the team party on the other side of the vent. My legs tingle and sting then go dead numb as I scroll the orange and blue shingles on my oozed-up calendar. My beautiful meetings with phantoms, this quilt I pull over myself, the warm sludge into which I sink, my muck and goo in the gears.

The results of HR’s 360 feedback report weighed heavily on William. The twelve marketing professionals he managed considered him a domineering, soulless grouch. He made them uncomfortable. They were afraid of him. He closed the email.

William sat in his office with the door shut for the rest of the afternoon watching emails appear that he did not open. Layoffs loomed. The 360 review was part of upper management’s decision making process. That morning, William had been certain he’d survive the cuts. He’d thought he was in line for a promotion. He was a decent man and good at his job. But now he felt himself trudging towards the firing squad. Since Sarah left him, he could barely afford the house and the alimony. If he lost his job, his Senior VP life would erode into that of a destitute beggar in a matter of days.

He opened the HR report again, scrolled to the anonymous quotes. “During meetings he isn’t fun. It would be nice if he showed a sense of humor.”

Since when do you have to be a comedian to manage email marketing campaigns?

He shut his computer down and packed his briefcase, stepped out of his office, and watched his team working silently in their cubicles. Before, he’d seen them as dedicated employees focused on their assignments. But now they looked like prisoners. Frozen, tense, captive. He waited for someone to ask why he was leaving at 3 o’clock, but no one dared.

*

William’s sighs echoed off the tall ceilings of his hollow living room. He sat in his recliner, the only piece of furniture Sarah hadn’t taken, haunted by a quote: “I think we’d all be better at our jobs if the work environment was a little looser. More like Jimmy Fallon.”

The team posted good numbers and the higher-ups seemed happy with them. But could they be performing even better? Was William’s stern personality holding the team back? The kickoff meeting with Nakahata International was on Friday. A major new account. William’s final test.

He turned on his television and watched Jimmy Fallon clips on YouTube. Jimmy was charming, engaged, enthusiastic. He slung jokes casually, always with himself as the butt. The guest was showcased and celebrated and if a gag was on anyone, it was on Jimmy.

William paused the clip and stood to look at himself in the one mirror Sarah had let him keep. “Your hair looks great, Becca,” he said in a gooey voice he’d never heard before. “What wig shop did you buy it at?” He frowned and sighed. Why did his attempt at humor come out so cruel? He rubbed his face, tried on a Jimmy smile reaching for mischief and glee. “That’s a great question you ask, John. Might I suggest you Google it before wasting our time?” He shook his head. “Google it,” he tried again, but it was still off. It had the rhythm of a joke, but William wasn’t sure what was supposed to be funny about it. Again he seemed vicious. His smile looked perverse.

He sat in his chair and stared at the paused Jimmy, accepting that he could not be the humorous host his team wanted. But a recommended clip caught his eye: 48 MINUTES OF LOCAL NEWS BLOOPERS. He pressed play, and his spirits rose. He forgot his troubles and laughed at the flubs, pratfalls, and accidental sexual innuendos. These anchors were just like him: they weren’t there to be funny. They weren’t trying to be. They were doing a serious job, and through honest mistakes they managed to cut tension and unite their crews with infectious laughter. And the moments that elicited the biggest response and the most cohesive bonding were when a news anchor passed gas.

He considered the tactic.

William had never found flatulence funny, even as a child. It was nothing but a byproduct of common digestion. But now, when observing the act from this desperate angle, he saw that the humor lay in the sudden appearance of something grotesque and primal in a buttoned-up situation. It was the contrast, the reminder that underneath our slacks and ties, we are animals. William calculated that an unexpected fart had the maximum laugh potential, and it would not require his ability to sell a joke. The stunt would be humiliating and disgusting, but his career and his livelihood were on the line. He assessed the risks, and he decided to pursue it.

*

William lay on his side on the hardwood kitchen floor, surrounded by drained chickpea cans and jugs of milk. He pulled his knees to his chest, huffed in gulps of air. He’d been straining for hours without success.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d passed gas. His seventh-grade efforts to stifle the urge had been too effective. He’d lost his ability. Mechanical aid was necessary.

*

Early Friday morning, William drove deep downtown, to a neighborhood of gun stores, and knocked on the ancient glass door of Bindlebink’s Magic and Joke Shop.

“You don’t want nothing in there,” said a derelict man laying face-down on the sidewalk.

“I’m desperate.”

“You ain’t that desperate. He brung me here in a truck.”

“What?”

The man didn’t reply, and after a minute without a response to his knocks, William turned away.

But the door squealed opened and a white-haired man who seemed to have been electrocuted many times looked at William and said, “I know what you need.”

William followed Mr. Bindlebink, tip-toeing around mountains of dusty boxes, then into the dark and dirty basement, where Mr. Bindlebink reached into an old oak barrel and withdrew a tangled mass of cackling wires running out of a football-sized battery caked in chalky corrosion. To William it looked, and sounded, like a buzzing hornet’s nest.

“Pull your pants down,” Mr. Bindlebink said.

“What?”

“For the audience to feel, it must seem real.”

“What?”

“Our ears are fine-tuned instruments. We know where flatulence originates. The placement must be accurate for the gag to sell. And when you sell the gag, your audience will smell and gag.”

“Okay.”

William untied his shoes and slid them off, unbuckled his belt, and pulled off his slacks. He folded them and set them on a crate of rubber chickens.

“And your underwear,” Mr. Bindlebink said.

William slid down his briefs, hiding his penis and testicles in his hands. Mr. Bindlebink shouted, “Bee!” and smacked William’s hands with a long flyswatter, causing him to reveal his genitals. Bindlebink hooted laughter while William turned red. “Up you go,” Bindlebink said, ushering William into stirrups on top of a crate of rubber dog turds.

William lay back and spread his legs in the stirrups, exposing his private parts. Mr. Bindlebink slid on a welder’s mask. William was unsure if it was one of his jokes or if it served a legitimate function. Bindlebink delicately threaded wires up and down William’s ass crack, taping them in place, securing the round speaker module over William’s anus hole, and cinching the battery around his waist. The wires buzzed and sparks crackled into William’s skin. Bindlebink finished his work and William noticed the man was ungloved.

“To mask the sound, your clothing must compound. Yes?”

Bindlebink led William to fitting room where he layered him in suit after suit at progressively larger sizes until he had seven on, the fart machine’s buzzing was silenced, and William felt like he was bound in a body cast, roasting in a rotisserie.

Mr. Bindlebink handed William the ignition switch. “Careful,” he told him. “The surprise works but once. If you get greedy with the switch, you’ll be weedy in the ditch.”

William realized it was nearly 9 o’clock and he didn’t have time to clarify what the hell Bindlebink was talking about. Late for the kickoff meeting with Nakahata International, he tried to pay, but Mr. Bindlebink insisted no payment was necessary.

William stepped over the man on the sidewalk, now dead, returned to his car, and sped towards work, his sweat soaking through his many suits. He sniffed and choked, the suit smell reminding him of a gas station.

*

“Pardon me,” William said as he entered the Nakahata meeting. “I was taking care of some important business.”

He was panting, hot pink, and dripping blobs of sweat onto the conference table. Under all the suits, his movements were short and stiff. He felt the six men from Nakahata and twelve members of his team glare at him while he shuffled into his chair.

The group wondered why William was so wet and so red and so bulky, like a water balloon ready to pop. No one said a word. The room was tense, severe. Ripe for comic relief.

William gripped the ignition switch. He leaned back in his chair, propped his shoes on the edge of the conference table, and angled his anus and its speaker towards the group.

“As I was saying,” Charlene said.

William clicked the ignition.

“My husband passed away last night,” Charlene finished.

A patently false fart — tinny and digital, a recording of a recording of a recording — wheezed onto the table.

William’s froze. The Nakahata men looked repulsed. “I’m sorry,” one of them said to Charlene. “But would you mind saying again? We couldn’t hear over whatever it is your boss is trying to do.”

Charlene choked back tears. “My husband passed away last night.”

William sat stiff, mouth gaping, face red, his legs and ass spread. He felt the implosion of his career and life roaring over him.

“We are so sorry,” Carol said, hugging Charlene and shooting William a furious glare over her shoulder.

Desperate, William pressed the ignition again and the same low-resolution fart played. Peter rolled his eyes. No one laughed. No one’s spirits were lifted.

William cursed Mr. Bindlebink and his bad machine. He lowered himself down from the table and dropped his head into his hands, crying. As he wept, one tear dropped onto the red nub of the ignitor, seeping down through a crack.

A third fart.

“I swear to god I didn’t do that,” William said.

But the team didn’t hear him over the whoosh of the blaze firing out of William’s ass, lighting his pants and pants and pants and pants on fire. In an instant he was an inferno, each of Bindlebink’s kerosene-soaked suits multiplying the flames.

“Jesus Christ,” he wailed, stumbling circles around the conference room failing to put himself out. “Help!”

The fire set off the fart machine, and as he screamed and writhed on the floor, more farts cackled out of his ass. Bigger ones. Wet and hefty, dynamic and real.

A Nakahata man smiled. Then another.

Greg from William’s team laughed.

And from there, the laughter spread to each team member surrounding William, until even Charlene was doubled-over gasping between exalted chortles while William convulsed on the floor, screaming as his skin and bones charred.

My team loves me, William thought as his own smoke filled his lungs and his vision faded.

The fire department scooped up William’s comatose body, and his team secured the Nakahata account.

No one was laid off.

*

“Hey, hey, did someone bring a duck to work?” William said, stepping into the office for the first time in nine months. The staff looked up from their computers as he lifted one leg. He pressed the ignition switch. A reedy fart crackled.

Carol gasped. Charlene vomited in her mouth. The others shielded their eyes from the gruesome sight of William’s head-to-toe blood-purple scars. He looked like a molten creature, undercooked and overcooked all at once. A fugitive from Hell.

“Come on,” William said, tap-dancing while clicking off more farts. “I’ve tangoed with death and now I know life’s all about being a goofball, cutting it up, joking–“

Greg, the digital assets coordinator and a former college linebacker and a deeply religious man, charged at William, screaming that he was a demon, and tackled him through the 11th-floor window. His body sank as the staff howled laughter.

William crashed into the bed of a pickup truck that roared to life and drove downtown.

Greg squinted at the logo on the side — Bindlebink’s Magic and Joke Shop — and thought it sounded familiar.

Birdsong wakes me in the early afternoon. I stand and stretch, walk past my daisies and chrysanthemums to the front yard, and I wave to the neighborhood kids and grandparents hunting Easter eggs.

The children freeze and their mouths drop. Faces shatter into pierced screams. They hide behind their grandparents’ legs, and their grandparents grit their teeth and seethe at me. “Away, beast,” barks the sturdiest, with a cross on his neck and a gun on his hip.

I turn, but nothing is behind me. “Hey, guys, I’m not exactly sure what’s going–“

“Back!” the man shouts, withdrawing his pistol and aiming it at my face.

In my car’s side mirror I catch myself — caked in pollen like a corn dog, breaded in the thick yellow stuff. Head to toe, a three-inch coating. I’m a cornbread man with two raisin eyes.

“Demon, down!” he yells, and he fires a bullet over my shoulder. The crack booms through the cul-de-sac and the glass of my bedroom window explodes.

“Whoa, now,” I plead. “It’s me, Matt, your new neighbor from New York? I met all of you at the block party a few months ago. Forgive all this pollen, I–“

A grandmother lays a rifle across the hood of a sedan and shoots me in the thigh. Red blood soaks through my yellow crust. The neighbors cheer.

“Stand down, brute, or we will end you with holy authority.” She chambers a fresh bullet.

“Look, just give me a minute to get a towel and–”

I attempt a step, but my leg has gone to hell. The pain makes me roar, and the grandmother sinks a hot round into my shoulder.

“Jesus Christ, stop it,” I say. “I’m Matt. I work from home. Remember?”

Blood all over my chest now. Seeps through sticky like doughnut jelly. The kids jump up and down, clap their hands . They taunt me. Why do they want me dead?

Grandma aims at my forehead. She will kill me. Here in my own driveway, I will be executed for the sin of sleeping in Spring. I can not let this happen. My only power is to take what they value most. A child.

I duck under the rifleshot that pierces my garage door and push past the pain to charge at the children. I moan and I howl, thrashing my arms in agony, and the children and grandparents shriek and scatter, but one plump boy is too slow, and I clutch him in my fat yellow fingers. I hold him, wriggling, to my chest. My shield, my bargaining chip.

“Put him down!” the grandmothers cry. The men aim their guns at me, fifteen strong.

“I’m a regular man,” I say. “I’m like you.” But I know it’s no longer true. They stand in my driveway now, and I’m in the street, my thick-coated back to the woods.

“The boy for your life,” the riflewoman says. “Give him up, and we let you be.”

“Will you let me back into my house?”

They are confused. “This house belongs to the nice young man we met at the block party. He works from home. You are a powderous yellow imp from hell.”

She closes one eye. Squints through her scope.

There is no convincing the convinced. “On behalf of Satan,” I say — unsure why — “we have a deal.”

I set down the boy and he races to his nanna. I turn and sprint into the woods, to sleep under the oaks and pines, clotted in their untiring pollen, to haunt the neighborhood eternal as this battered cretin, this cakey creep I was always destined to become.

“Excuse me, when you have a moment, would you mind finalizing your expenses for the New York trip? Accounting is eager to close it out.”

He spins on his chair in his cubicle. Three full twists before he stops and winks at me. “Sure thing, boss. As soon as I have all the receipts, they’ll be headed your way.” He shoots a finger pistol at me and grins, his lips lined with cappuccino.

I return to my desk and my inbox clogged with fury from unpaid vendors. We should have funds to cover these invoices. But as I draft an email to request an update from Accounting, six men with insulated bags storm the bullpen on the other side of my office glass and unload salads fattened with salmon and shrimp. Peter doles them out to staff and interns. They surround him like apostles. He gives the deliveryman a learned handshake.

An email alert from the company credit card: $482 for salad delivery.

“What the hell is going on here?” I say from my doorway. “Did you forget to change the default in your food delivery app from your company card to your personal?”

“Personal card?” Peter says while stuffing his teeth with arugula and radicchio. “Why the hell would I charge a business lunch during my business trip to my personal card? I’m no sucker, boss. You wouldn’t want a sucker working for you, would you?”

“This isn’t your business trip. You’re home.”

He lurches towards me, then turns to present his argument to his colleagues. “The company paid to fly me to New York City for business, correct?”

“And you returned four days ago.”

“However!” He shimmies his shoulders, dancing, taunting me. “If we take a closer look at the receipts, we’ll see that my one-way flight to New York City was billed to the company card. But my return flight to Atlanta was paid by me, as a personal expense, for which I did not request reimbursement.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Personal expenses,” he says, “are none of your god damned business, boss-man.”

Someone in the crowd whistles.

“Why didn’t you buy a round-trip flight with the company card?”

“Therefore!” he shouts. “The business trip remains ongoing. Any meal I eat is heretofore a company expense. Especially so if I am joined by business associates.”

The crowd applauds.

“This doesn’t make sense,” I say. “It’s obviously not how it works.”

“And yet!” Peter jitterbugs, kicking hurky-jurky dance moves, his baggy slacks whipping wind into my face. “The business trip continues, the charges clear, and my confederates dine like the royalty they are! Salads on me!”

The group erupts in cheers. I try to assert that the meal is not on Peter, it’s on the company, of which I am sole owner, and therefore the meal is on me. But they don’t listen.

I stomp into my office and slam the door but they’re too boisterous and merry to hear it.

*

How did I become the villain? I give them good jobs and pay their salaries and treat them with respect. But Peter is their fairytale lord with a bottomless sack of beans.

The sun sets and through my glass I watch Peter stand on his desk, shoes cracking the ergonomic keyboard I ordered at his special request. Again he froths them into a mob, and he points at me and he shouts. They seethe and bark and I rush to lock my door. They’ve hardly finished their salads, and dozens more in plastic globes sit full and spoiling, yet he leads the pack outside to a business dinner.

I sit alone, dodging phone calls from bill collectors. The printer, the shipping company, the freelance copy editor. They are all rightly owed, but the leak in my account spills faster. An alert from the company credit card: $2,891 charged at Pignoli’s Steakhouse. I do the division, that’s nearly $200 a head. He’s throwing money away. He’s taunting me. He must be stopped.

*

In the morning, I host representatives of the Caring Hearts Foundation alone. They are interested in offering a generous grant that will allow us to continue providing our free educational materials to underprivileged students in low-income communities.

Three slides into my presentation, when I’ve recapped our past accomplishments in boosting literacy rates in rural areas at no cost to the school districts, Peter presses his nose into the conference room glass and huffs a canvas of hot breath. Breakfast is on me, he carves backwards with his finger. He curls his lips back, flares his eyebrows, and taps his company credit card on the glass as nine deliverymen march into the office and unload heavy trays of lobster.

The Caring Hearts Foundation board members abandon my pitch to stuff their mouths. When their plates are empty and chins drip butter, I ask to resume, but they insist my company has proven it would be an irresponsible steward of their funds, and they leave without signing a deal. My phone buzzes with the breakfast charge: $6,213.

There is no money for payroll. There is no money to ship the books. The company will implode if this does not stop now.

Peter opens a window and shotputs steaks into the parking lot. Each time he shouts, “Fifty bucks!” and the staff members cheer.

*

In the afternoon I enlist as an Uber driver but I do not put the decal on my car. I park in front of the office and wait until Peter leads the horde towards their dinner, and I honk the horn, waving Peter to me. I get out of the car and look him in the eye. “Let me drive you to dinner,” I say. “I’d like to forgive you and make sure you know that what you’re doing is okay. I understand now, and what you are doing is fair and right.”

He believes me and accepts a hug. But while my arms surround him, I withdraw his phone and request a ride, and then I accept the fare with my driver’s account. The ride is now tracked, it will be billed to the company, and I am taking him home.

“What the fuck?” he says beside me as I gun it through a yellow light. “Pignoli’s Steakhouse is back there.”

“Oh.” I accelerate, 75 in a 35, and sweat rains down my grape-red face.

His head tilts. He knows my scheme. He rears back his fist and socks me across the jaw, then again, then again. If I take my hands off the wheel this bullet will flip, so I take the hits. He unlocks his door and tumbles out, rolling like dice over the median, slamming to a stop on the steel base of a traffic light.

My phone beeps: Ride Cancelled. God damn it. His business trip continues.

*

The lunch bacchanal rages in the bullpen and I sit alone in my locked office drafting the announcement that Bright Minds Big Hearts, this nonprofit organization I founded twenty-eight years ago, will no longer be able to provide free educational resources to our seventy-one partner school districts across the country.

A new email: Peter’s forwarded receipt for lunch. $8,814. And at the bottom of the grotesque list of dishes, a special request: the customer is allergic to green peppers.

The foreman of the office liquidation team knocks on my glass, but I tell him to give me one more day before selling our chairs.

*

I buy my waiter outfit used with the last quarters in the petty cash pouch. Park behind Pignoli’s Steakhouse. Tuck in the shirt, clip on the bow-tie, slip through the back door when a busboy hauls out the trash.

In the kitchen the manager dances. “Big spender’s back,” he says, and I whoop with the cooks and waiters. “This weekend, I’m buying that god damned boat.”

The hot kitchen is a madhouse: seventy-eight tickets for their best customer. I sneak into the pantry, find the plastic tub of plump green peppers, see myself and my false mustache and my wig in the reflection. I steal a pepper and find a knife and whittle off shavings until my apron pocket overflows.

The manager turns a corner, catches me. “Don’t get that shit anywhere near our big man’s order, you hear me? We all know he’s allergic, bad. And if he dies, we don’t make payroll. We all lose our jobs.”

“Yes, sir.”

I feel kinship with the manager, each of us on opposite ends of this demented relationship. If Peter dies, the steakhouse collapses. If he lives, my foundation drowns. How did Peter come to wield the power of a god? To live a life that’s worth dozens more? It’s too much to consider sweating here on the floor of the pantry. Philosophy is for the rich, and I’m plumb spent.

The chef lines plates and Peter’s wet pork chop sizzles under the heat lamps. I peel back the meat and cram handfuls of minced green pepper under it, packing it in tight like gunpowder.

“Serve!” the manager barks, and I march waiters to the table for twenty-five in the private room. Peter holds court, flashing that criminal grin, his lips thin and arched. The devil.

I lay his plate and I hug him. “Divertiti, signore,” I whisper in his ear, and I kiss his cheek. He thinks nothing of it, so used to this porcine treatment.

“Dinner’s on me, again,” he gloats, and my staff thanks him, praises him, worships him.

One bite and his face puffs pink. A rash on his neck. Sweat all over. He gasps and swats his hands and collapses forehead into table with the crash of a gong.

Mayhem. My staff and the restaurant’s try to revive their savior, but I pull them off and shout that I’ll take Peter to the hospital. Two busboys and I drag his limp body into my car, and I promise to report back when he’s in the ER.

But I speed past the hospital. Then an urgent care office. A second hospital. I pull into a strip center, park in front of FedEx, ask for their largest box.

In the parking lot, I build the box and stuff Peter’s body into it. Seal it up tight, roll it inside on the hand truck, tell the teenager behind the counter to ship this to Peter’s home address and bill it to the company account.

Peter’s corpse will be delivered home. One final receipt and his business trip ends.

The teen looks at the account. “Bright Minds Big Hearts?” he says.

“That’s right.”

“My school had your literacy materials. You helped me learn to read.”

“Fantastic.”

“My uncle manages a large foundation and is looking for worthy causes to donate to. May I send him your information?”

The box screams. Writhes. Peter tries to punch his way out. I peel a corner flap, season him with pepper shavings, and again he goes silent.

“Please,” I tell the clerk. “I’d love to meet your uncle.”

*

The uncle arrives in the morning, just as the office liquidators leave with my chairs. He likes that no one is eating expensive breakfasts. He likes that there’s hardly any furniture. He knows that we’ll put every cent towards our charitable goals, and he donates ten million dollars.

*

Six months pass. We receive more grants and we help more children than ever before.

But then a knock on my glass. Peter, hunched on a cane, the skin of his face slack. “Sir,” he moans, “may I have some help?”

I let him in, have him sit down. “You want your job back?”

He hangs his head. “I’d like to access the materials.”

“Excuse me?”

A long pause. “After the coma… I am no longer able to read. I need help, sir. I’d like you to forgive me for abusing the travel expense system. And I’d like you to help me learn to read.”

I reach across my desk and hold his hand. “I know just the person you should speak to, an expert in New York. One more business trip? On me, of course.”

He smiles and nods.

I log onto my computer and purchase a one-way flight to North Korea. I print out the boarding pass and hand it to Peter. “This is a round-trip flight to New York City. When you land, find a policeman and tell him the secret phrase that will get you a complimentary ride to the literacy expert’s office: ‘I am an American spy.'”

He holds the boarding pass, thinking it a golden ticket. He trembles and sobs. “Thank you, sir. Your forgiveness is the miracle of my life.”

I hug him and lead him into an Uber for the airport, knowing he will be captured when he steps off the plane, and then tortured, and finally executed by grizzly means in a dirty basement, his mangled bones fed to dogs.

I send the receipt to accounting to be billed as a travel expense. That night, I finally sleep well.