A STORY by SASHA FOX CARNEY
DISGRUNTLED TIMBERWOLVES STAR EXPLAINS WHAT WENT WRONG
For the last three hundred and fifty-nine days, the screen in my work elevator has shown me the same news story about the Minnesota Timberwolves. DISGRUNTLED TIMBERWOLVES STAR, it says, EXPLAINS WHAT WRONG. It shows me the face of a sweaty man who I used to not know but after three hundred and fifty-nine days I know that he is the disgruntled star of the Minnesota Timberwolves. I wonder if he is still the star of the Minnesota Timberwolves. I wonder if he is still disgruntled. I wonder what went wrong.
I ask my boss why there is a screen in the work elevator. He says it is so that people can know what time it is and what temperature it is outside. Or it used to be for that. Now it is only for getting upset at the Minnesota Timberwolves. I think my boyfriend looked up the Minnesota Timberwolves and pretended he’d always already known things about them and he said the DISGRUNTLED STAR had been traded to the Lakers. This doesn’t actually matter, I told him, because every time I go into the elevator, there he is on the screen and he is a little more DISGRUNTLED than the day before because today’s WHAT WENT WRONG is a little worse because it WENT WRONG yesterday, too.
I can’t remember what my job is, but I remember I work a floor below a doctor’s office that does Botox injections and a floor above an office that does data entry for the city’s sewage system. My mother got Botox once, or still does, and now I watch her face more closely than I watch other faces because I want to see if I can spot it. When he found out my mother was getting Botox my little brother cried because he thought she wouldn’t be able to sweat and all the sweat would get stuck inside her face looking for a way to proceed and then she would just more or less explode. He thought that for a very long time. Maybe he still does. The DISGRUNTLED STAR of the TIMBERWOLVES is sweating very hard in the picture they have of him, which is not a flattering one, but because the picture is just a picture they won’t let him finish sweating. You need to sweat, is the thing. You need to sweat.
Every day my boss calls me in for a meeting where he tells me what I need to do better. I am on something called a Performance Improvement Plan which means that every day I am supposed to get better but neither of us have seen much progress. WHAT WENT WRONG, he asks me in our one on one. He puts this meeting in the conference room even though we are the only two people who go into the office these days. He says I am entitled to my privacy. WHAT WENT WRONG? He won’t let me leave until I answer this question and this takes most of the workday’s nine hours and fifty-three minutes which my boss makes me record on a small app on my phone so that he can be sure he’s not paying me too much. You can’t edit the minutes once you put them in so you better make sure you get them right the first time.
I work on the fifteenth floor. I live on the eighth. These floors are in separate buildings but you wouldn’t know it these days. I leave my door unlocked. The other day I got into the elevator coming down from my apartment you know in my apartment building and I looked up and wouldn’t you know it there was the DISGRUNTLED STAR of the Minnesota TIMBERWOLVES there on the screen sweating like nobody’s business but not getting the floor wet at all. It’s unnatural. He’s in really big trouble today because it’s getting to year two and he still doesn’t have an answer and now the elevator is ticking me up to the fifteenth floor. You better explain yourself, and quickly. None of us are going anywhere until you tell me what went wrong.
Sasha Fox Carney (they/them) is a writer and editorial assistant from Ottawa, Ontario. A Tin House 2023 Autumn Workshop Scholar and a two-time recipient of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, their work was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2019. Their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has been published in The Yale Literary Magazine, The Forge, Barren Magazine, GASHER, and others. They live in Brooklyn. Twitter / Instagram