text: Murray Stinson didn't like Fridays. Mondays were better-he never had to lay anyone off on a Monday. Layoffs at MultiCorp happened on Fridays. The meetings were quick and soul crushing, usually scheduled for the end of the day, involved a fair amount of crying, the occasional flurry of invective, and left him feeling like a destroyer of worlds. It was for that reason that Bill Morris, Analyst, would be his final layoff. Ever. After nearly thirty years with the company, the destroyer of worlds would retire. Murray pressed the call button for the elevator and studied the poster on the wall next to the doors. LEE WILSON. MISSING. IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION CONCERNING HIS WHEREABOUTS, PLEASE CALL 917-555-9495. Beneath the text, the smiling, stubbled face of Lee Wilson, mail clerk, stared back at him. The poster had been up for a week. Lee had gone out for lunch and never returned, and Murray's favorite theory was that Lee had simply walked away and started a new life somewhere. Murray wished he'd had the guts to do that, to walk out into the sunshine, throw his tie in the garbage can, and drop off the face of the earth. He'd fantasized about opening up a little bar on a beach somewhere, where he would serve happiness to sunburned tourists instead of grief to overstressed, pasty-faced cubicle dwellers. The elevator doors opened, and Jim McKittrick, Vice-President of Sales, flashed a smile. "Murray." "Jim." "What floor?" "Ten." Jim pressed the button for ten, and the doors slid shut. "Bill Morris, huh?" Jim asked. Murray nodded. "He's going to play the discrimination card." "Probably. I can handle it." "Better you than me. I can't stop looking at it when I'm around him." "It wouldn't be a problem if he kept that sack on, but he won't." The elevator slowed and a chime sounded. A glowing red 8 filled the readout. "Good luck," Jim said and exited the car. The doors slid shut, and the elevator resumed its slow, rumbling climb. *Luck,* Murray thought. If he'd been lucky, Lewis Pike, who was barely thirty and had been stuck with Bill's portfolio because nobody else in human resources wanted it, wouldn't have called in sick, and he'd be down at his desk planning his retirement. Lewis was probably faking; kids had no work ethic, these days. The elevator chimed and the number 10 popped onto the readout. Murray turned left out of the elevator and walked down a row of empty offices. Most of the staff had been relocated to the lower floors when it was announced that the company would lease its upper floors as part of its Right Sizing Program. Only Bill Morris remained on ten: a hermit who needed to be kicked off his mountain. Murray reached the end of the hall and stopped in front of a closed door. It was strange that Bill kept his door closed when he was the only person on the entire floor, but then Bill was a bit of an anomaly. He knocked. "Come in." Murray turned the handle. The door opened with a click, and Bill Morris, seated behind a desk overloaded with thick binders and stacks of paper, frowned at him. "I've seen you around. HR?" "Yes." "On a Friday afternoon." "I'm afraid so." Bill leaned back in his chair, his shoulders drooping. "I usually deal with Lewis." "He called in sick." Murray forced himself to keep his eyes on Bill's face and not look at the tentacle. It wasn't easy. The eye wanted to focus on it, wanted to linger on the thick, gray-green, suction-cupped appendage where Bill's left arm should've been. The tentacle tapered to a round point that Bill slowly tapped on the desk, the way one might drum one's fingers if one possessed any. "May I sit?" asked Murray. The tip of the tentacle flicked toward a chair placed against the wall near the door. Murray rolled it over to the desk and sat down. "I'm sorry to--" "It's my arm, isn't it?" *That ain't an arm, pal,* Murray thought. "Not at all. Your position is being--" "Just say it. It's the arm." *Don't look at it,* Murray thought again. *Do your job and go home.* He cleared his throat. "Your position is being made redundant. The current state of the economy necessitates--" Bill leaned forward. His left shoulder moved under his short-sleeved dress shirt, and the tentacle rose into the air and swished back and forth in front of Murray's face. "Just. Say. It." Murray swallowed. A trail of slime glistened on the desk where the tentacle had been resting. "Okay. Unofficially it's the tent..." He paused as Bill's eyes narrowed. The word tentacle had been deemed offensive and its use discouraged when in Bill's presence. "Sorry. I meant unofficially it's your arm. Yes." "That's discrimination." "It's making people uncomfortable, and by refusing to wear the, um..." He pointed to a leather sleeve folded on top of a filing cabinet. Everyone called it 'The Squid Sack", but the delicacy of the situation required a more politically correct term. "...the apparatus, you're violating the conditions of your employment." "My arm cramps up when I wear it. And it's hot." "Regardless, you agreed to the condition." "I only agreed to it because I needed the job. I'm not going to hide anymore. Travis Cooper has a mole on his nose the size of a watermelon. It's disgusting and no one's forcing him to wear a bag over his head." "That's not the same, and if I'm being completely honest," Murray said, glancing at the slime trail, "the excretion issue has become a problem." "Oh that's ridiculous." "There have been complaints." "Would you fire someone for having excessively sweaty palms?" "No." "Same thing." "Bill--" "Save your breath." He pounded the desk with the tentacle. Mucous spurted from one of the suction cups and splashed across Murray's shirt. His eyes widened, and he blushed. "Oh. Shit." He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a box of tissues. "Ok. Maybe it's getting worse." Murray dabbed at his shirt with a tissue. Hot bile rose in his throat, and he choked it down. *Think of your retirement. Think of your retirement.* Bill pushed away from the desk and walked to the window. The tentacle dangled at his side, while his right hand slipped inside his pocket. He stared at the office building across the street, a wall of windows behind which an army of regular, non-tentacled people went about their day. Murray wondered how often he stood there, watching, maybe wishing he were like them. Wishing he were normal. "I didn't ask for this," Bill said, raising the tentacle. "I didn't get a say, you know. There wasn't a voice in the womb that said, 'Hey, kid. You'll be coming out soon, and you can either have a normal arm or a really neat, totally original tentacle. Your choice.'" Murray dropped the slick wad of tissue into a wastebasket. "Can I ask you a personal question?" "Why do I have a tentacle for an arm?" Murray nodded. "Do you know how long I've been waiting for someone around here to ask me that? To show a little interest?" "I think people felt rude asking." "Did they think it was rude to ask me about my weekend? They never bothered with that, either." "People can be jerks." *Myself included*, he thought. It had never occurred to him to ask Bill about his weekend. Bill was Bill. You saw him, you nodded, maybe waved, and moved along, mostly in an attempt to not stare at the tentacle. Unlike a prosthetic limb, which gradually, over time, one became accustomed to seeing until one stopped seeing it altogether, the tentacle never ceased to revolt. "What did the doctors say when you were born?" "I think the general reaction was 'What the hell is that?'" "What about your parents?" "My mother died giving birth to me." "Did she--" "No. She had two perfectly good arms. She had perfectly good everything. She was beautiful." "Your father?" "Took off. Never knew him." "Family?" "I have an aunt. She agreed to take me in on condition that they amputate. So they cut it off." Murray felt the bile rise again. "It grew back?" Bill nodded. "It grew back thicker and longer." "And your aunt?" "Guess." "I'm sorry." "She sent me money every month, though. I guess the checks made her feel less guilty about donating me to science." "Do you know if there's anybody else out there with your condition?" Bill shook his head. "I looked. I'm alone." Something twitched deep inside Murray, a pang of sympathy for this man forced to go through life as a human squid, this man whose job most likely provided a note of normalcy in an otherwise lonely and alienated existence. And here he was taking that away from him. The destroyer of worlds strikes again. "I really am sorry, Bill." The tentacle shot out and pointed at Murray. "I hate that word. 'Sorry'. I lived in a lab until I was eighteen, and I heard that goddamn word every week for 18 years. Doctors were sorry, nurses were sorry, the techs were sorry, but they kept me there. Everyone was sorry, but at the end of the day, they all went home to their families. Not one person had the courage to back up that sorry with a little action. No one wanted to give the freak a home." Murray usually felt like an asshole after one of these meetings, but this was different. He'd reached a whole new and depressing level of assholedom. Not only was he taking away Bill's job, he was adding to the long list of people who had disappointed him. He was just another boot pressing down on the back of a man trying to force his way out of the mud. Bill took a step towards Murray. "You can't take this job away from me." The anger had left his voice. "Do you know what it's like to be rejected your entire life? It took me fifteen years to land this job. Fifteen years of showing up for interviews, and rejections, and watching people's eyes bug out of their heads. I can't wait another fifteen for someone to take pity on me again." "There's nothing I can do." "I need to work. It takes my mind off..." He paused and searched for the right words. "...the changes." "Changes?" The tentacle made a wet, squishy sound as Bill leaned on the desk. "Help me out. Please. I can understand if I wasn't performing, but--" "I'm sorr-," Murray caught himself. *Don't say sorry.* "I'm just the messenger." Bill sighed. His expression hardened. "Then what good are you?" "Excuse me?" "You're just one more guy getting in my way. Just like that asshole Lee Wilson. Did you know he made a private Facebook group about me? " "No. I didn't." "Someone screenshot a bunch of the shit he'd posted on there and emailed it to me from an anonymous account. Memes, comments, theories, pictures he'd snapped when I wasn't looking-he even had shots from inside my apartment when I wasn't there. Selfies. On my bed, my toilet, went through my fridge. I don't know how he got in, but he did and he was careful, too. Nothing was out of place. And then he put the pictures in an album called In The Belly of the Beast." Murray tensed, the fantasy he'd had of Lee boldly leaving his dead end job for a brighter future crumbling under the weight of suspicion. Did Bill have something to do with Lee's disappearance? It sure as hell sounded like it. The springs on the chair creaked as he got to his feet. "Maybe we should reschedule." Bill loosened his tie. "What are you doing?" "You asked about the changes." "It's okay. You don't have to--" "You know what they say," Bill said, pulling his tie over his head, then undoing his collar. "'If you can't join 'em, beat 'em.'" Bill ripped open his shirt. "Jesus Christ!" Two tiny eyes bulged from the tips of Bill's swollen nipples, round, red-veined balls the size of chickpeas. "I just wanted a little compassion, Murray." Murray's gaze shifted from the eyes, the impossible, blinking eyes, to the rigid black scar running from the base of Bill's chest bone to his belly button. "Oh God..." The scar split down the middle, a slow, moist unzipping from top to bottom. "What...are...you?" The words, barely whispered, tumbled out of Murray's mouth. His brain screamed at his legs-- Move! Run!--but his legs ignored the command. "I wish I knew," Bill said. The scar had turned into black lips behind which Murray glimpsed two vertical rows of teeth and a flash of pink. A tongue. There was no time to react. There was only the tongue, a pink streak, lashing out. It wrapped his head in wet, foul-smelling muscle and jerked him forward. He tried to scream, but there was no air, only the pinch of teeth around his neck and the sudden intestinal dark. Murray Stinson didn't like Fridays.