Toby Burke
.com

 

Mouse

He had said yes to the interview – well, no one had yet called it an ‘interview’, just a ‘chat’ – because a friend insisted. Did he need money? Yes. Did he want the job? No, not exactly. But his friend had gone “to a lot of trouble” and “kinda stuck his neck out,” so there he was. A pretty, polite receptionist kept him waiting for a few minutes, then a man appeared from behind a false wall and said “Hi, Phil, Founder and Creative Director, come this way,” all in one breath.

They sat down in a large conference room, at one end of a glass table. There were some niceties, before Phil took over the conversation. As he sat there listening to Phil, he started to lose his concentration. He found himself staring at Phil’s shirt. “What a nice shirt,” he thought, “I could do with a couple of nice shirts. What is he talking about?” Then he realised that he wasn’t just staring at Phil’s shirt, or just his chest – he could actually see Phil’s nipple.

At first he thought maybe it was just the light and the fact that it was a very thin, pale-coloured shirt. Perhaps it was possible that the outline of a dark object could show through? But no, he could really see a nipple, as if there was no shirt there at all. He suddenly realised he was still staring and quickly looked up at Phil’s face. Phil hadn’t stopped talking and seemed to have noticed nothing.

With Phil deep in his own long explanation about what his company was “really about,” he took the opportunity to look down again. There was the nipple. He looked down further; there was his dark little belly-button, just visible in a fold of his stomach, and then disappearing again when Phil took a breath.

Surely it was the fabric of the shirt. The light. He allowed his gaze to move down, very slowly – he didn’t want to see through Phil’s jeans, but he had to be certain of whether it was see-through clothing, or some sort of x-ray vision he was dealing with. Just when he was relieved to be looking at only pure denim, he saw it; what looked like a small, furless mouse, resting in a nest of hair on Phil’s lap.

 

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