Sam Pink - Hurt Others

You listen, drinking the coffee left over from the overnight crew.

The coffee is cold and has nothing else in it except coffee and you pull the grounds through your teeth.

Like you’re sucking Satan’s infected dick.

Between sips you swirl the cup.

The grounds follow a circular motion, each right behind the other.

Used-up.

Someone’s walkie talkie goes off at the table, and she turns it down.

She says, “Man, yesterday somebody took a walkie talkie into the bathroom with theyself and held it on while they peed, so everybody could hear that shit. Seriously.” She puts her hand on her thigh with her elbow out at a right angle. She says, “Seriously, took the motherfucker into the bathroom, and made it so everybody could hear his ass pissing.”

Everybody at the table starts either laughing or yelling.

Ass pissing U.S.A. — you think.

You laugh, and the woman next to you laughs, hitting your arm.

A woman across the table makes a face of disgust and says, “Uh uh. Thass nasty. How you do that shit.” She changes to a tone like she’s directly asking the person who did it. “I wanna know, how y’all do something like that. Tell me.”

Others nod.

You’re nodding.

You feel the urge to take a chip out of someone’s bag.

You’re pretty sure no one would mind.

But still, you shy out.

You always shy out.

Ass pissing.

The sunlight in the room gets incredibly bright then — lowering and coming over the tops of the other buildings outside.

Coming in through the window facing Broadway Avenue.

Coming in through a very strict angle.

It’s getting dark out early.

Daylight savings time.

You want there to be a day you turn the clocks ahead twelve hours and then twelve hours later you move them back and everyone has to act like nothing happened in that time.

Pretty much, that’s how it is now.

You wake up when it’s almost dark, and then work, and after work stay up until it’s light.

One woman says, “Who do that shit. Who want everyone to hear how you be pissing. I mean, is you stupid. Honestly. Some pervert shit.”

Another says, “For real. That’s just gross. That ain’t funny at all. Trying to be funny, but that ain’t fucking funny.”

You sit up a little.

Your plastic chair makes a sound.

It scares you and your heartbeat gets fast and hard.

You wait for everyone to look at you but no one looks at you.

Safe.

And the sun becomes less bright, going below the strict angle.

Gone from all angles.

The room turns a darker blue.

Another employee walks into the breakroom and stands there, pulling his pants up.

He sees a box of free Styrofoam cups on the countertop.

When he sees the cups, he says, “Aw, shit ch’yeah. Free cups, son.”

He’s wearing a reflective vest so that when he collects carts in the parking garage, no one accidentally kills him with their car.

You wonder if the person training him said, “Wear this vest to help prevent from getting accidentally killed. Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about the on-purpose kills. You just have to be smart. And quick.”

He takes a cup, then leaves the breakroom with the cup in his mouth, both hands pulling up his pants.

You think — Why did he come in if he didn’t already know about the free cups.

The women are still talking about the piss thing.

One says, “I’on’t give a fuck. It just sound like water to me that’s all. Like a waterfall. Like a beautiful waterfall. Y’all like waterfalls, right. Just think about waterfalls.”

People laugh.

A woman across the table from you licks her thumb clean of some chip crumbs. She says, “I’on’t want to be thinking about no pissy-ass waterfall.”

Another says, “Me neither. I can’t help but think about drinking it when I hear it like that. S’gross. Just going right into my motherfucking mouth.” She makes her hands into fists and brings them close to her body while shaking a little. “Oooooh. Jesus Mary and Joseph.”

The woman next to you says, “What about them pee-drops getting on the earpiece. If you holding that walkie talkie by where you pissing, some of that shit get on the walkie talkie.” She taps the table a few times. “No no. What about getting all them little pee-drops on your mouth or ear. Them drops.”

Another woman points and says, “Them particles.”

Someone else says, “Mmm hmm.”

“The particles,” you say.

Someone else says, “Mmm hmm.”

An older woman with thickly drawn-on eyebrows folds her arms and leans back. “Jesus in heaven, all them particles.”

You can’t tell if she’s awake or talking in her sleep.

She seems asleep.

You try to focus more on her and then you can’t tell if her thickly drawn-on eyebrows are eyebrows, or her open eyes, looking at you.

She uncrosses her arms and checks her watch and re-crosses her arms and says, “Hmm! Got-damn pee-drops. Who do that.”

“For real,” someone else says.

Then they continue talking to each other about things — like which guys at the store are attractive, how much the least expensive appliances at the store cost, and why no one should ever reach into the garbage in the women’s bathroom.

You look at your coffee, swirling it.

The floating grounds.

Almost empty.

You’re constantly airdropped into a life that’s already passing.

Passing like pee-drops into the ocean of time.

You finish your coffee in small sips.

The news is on the breakroom tv.

Everyone gets quiet as a story comes on about a kid getting beaten to death at a high school yesterday.

They show a video someone shot on a cell phone and it shows the kid trying to stop a fight and then some people turn on him, and punch and kick him many times, until someone comes up from behind and kills him with a wood board to the back of the head.

“Oh my gut-ness,” says a woman at the table. “Is that little G.J.” She’s looking at a picture with the people on either side of her. “My gut-ness.”

She passes the picture to the person next to her.

It makes its way around the table, from woman to woman as they all start to talk at the same time, laughing and smiling.

“Yeah, he two now,” says the woman who started the passing of the picture.

The picture comes to you.

You take it from the sharp entanglement of one woman’s artificial fingernails.

It’s a picture of a young boy.

He’s like, a baby, and he’s wearing baggy jeans, a blue bandana, and big work boots, posed in confusion in front of a backdrop that’s supposed to look like a building with graffiti on it.

You smile at the picture and say, “Shit” and pass it around to a woman just sitting down. “You want to see this?”

She looks at the picture and snaps her fingers and says, “So so fresh.” Then she points downward and looks to the side away from everyone and says, “This right here — this a little hunter right here. Hm!”

Everybody laughs.

The woman who called him a hunter looks up at the people laughing, and says, “Ow k?”

And you’re laughing.

Which transitions to thinking about whether or not you’d be able to play a violin if you had one.

Maybe you’re an amazing violin player and you don’t even know yet.

For the last few minutes of break, you think about how it seems like you can already play the violin even though you’ve never held one.

Yeah, it could be.

Always having been this amazing without knowing it.

The women continue to talk.

You feel glad that this — and everything else — is happening.

But you’re also feeling a weight inside your body at a location triangulated using the backs of both eyes and a point inside the brain, and that weight is called: Nothing more to contribute.