Random Fragments 06

Fluorescent light muted the colours of a large room. Dark wood panelling covered three walls, enclosing the space and further dampening the ambience. An oblong table, it’s deep mahogany cheapened by the artificial light, occupied the centre of the room. Around it, heavy armchairs squatted at attention, their red leather polished and reflecting the fluorescents with a sullen gleam.
At one end of the table, three of the chairs broke ranks in a small scatter of entropic disorder. One had actually fallen to one side, while the other two had shoved back out of square. Deep dents in the carpet showed where they had stood, though the luxuriously thick grey pile had resisted drag marks that might betray any pattern to their movement.
That end of the room was graced by other anomalies. A highly polished brass plated intercom terminal protruded slightly from the table top, the sole interruption to its glowing expanse. Behind the chairs hung a tall lined velvet curtain. It filled the end wall, further absorbing the fluorescents, and completely blocking whatever it covered. The only sign that windows might lurk behind it, being the tiny spill of natural light that slunk under the curtain’s weighty folds.
A faint buzzing could be heard at that end of the room. Possibly the wiring in the lights, possibly some poor lost insect fated to beat its life out against the curtain, searching for freedom outside. A tiny movement betrayed a common housefly as it shifted from one spot to another on the carpet. The fly touched down on a stain, still damp, where something had spilled between chair and window. The carpet there was black with the moisture it had absorbed, and its pile clumped slightly, as though the spill had weighted it down.
Fresh air breached the stale environs, bringing scents of fresh growth and warm spring fields to the fly’s antennae. It merely shifted position slightly, the scent of the spill clearly more to its liking than the bouquet from outside. The breeze also shifted the curtain slightly, and the flash of sunlight that followed did disturb the fly from its feeding. It flew up from the stain – revealed by the sunlight to be a dark rust red – and circled twice before landing again a few body lengths from its original position.
As though beckoned by the intruding light, the curtain swirled open to admit a conservatively dressed middle-aged woman. She turned and fastened storm shutters, then closed and locked the glass doors that had lead out onto a balcony. She glanced around the room, frowning slightly at the disarray. Walking over to the intercom, she reached to the switch then realizing that her hands were liberally stained, nudged it with an elbow instead.
She did not wait long for an acknowledgement, nor did she hesitate in her instructions when the acknowledgement came. "Send in cleaning, they can decide what needs to be replaced and what can be fixed. Tell the VP-Sales that he’s been promoted..."
The unfortunate fly chose that moment to move to a richer area of the stain. Its movement caught the woman’s attention, and with her attention, a knife appeared in her hand. Between the appearance of the knife, the throw that neatly bisected the fly leaving the knife deeply sunk into the concrete underflooring, and the woman’s withdrawing the knife, wiping it and returning it to the sheath from which it had appeared the speaker’s pause was almost imperceptible.
"... I’ll see the VP on the Tobermory Project in my office in fifteen. It said it had some ideas, let it know that if they’re not better than the ones I heard this morning, the Assistant VP will be moving up too. Circulate a memo, the reward for demonstrably useful information on the T Project has just been increased by a factor of ten. Nothing’s changed regarding information that proves not to be useful."
The woman nudged the switch again, turning off then intercom. She took one last appraising look around the room, then then moved to a door concealed in the panelling and left.