The cardboard box sat half-empty on Margaret’s desk like a forgotten suitcase. Five years of her life reduced to a coffee-stained day planner, a wilted spider plant, and a photograph of her mother, yellowing in its plastic frame since 2019. The basement office smelled of mildew and something not quite death, its single fluorescent bulb casting everything in the sickly pallor of a morgue.
She picked up the stapler—her stapler, the red Swingline she’d brought from home because the company-issued one had broken within a week—and felt its familiar weight. How many documents had she stapled for Harlan? How many reports, memos, proposals that bore his name while her fingerprints ghosted across every page?
The termination letter lay folded in her purse. Restructuring, they called it. Economic necessity. But Margaret knew the truth festering beneath those corporate euphemisms. She’d become inconvenient. Too familiar with Harlan’s shortcuts, his plagiarized presentations, his habit of taking credit for her ideas during board meetings while she sat invisible in the corner, transcribing his stolen words.
The overhead light buzzed like a dying insect. Margaret closed her eyes and let the memories wash over her like dirty water.
High school. The cafeteria. Harlan Morrison III stepping over her scattered textbooks with those pristine white sneakers his daddy bought him, that smirk already perfected at seventeen. “Watch
where you’re crawling, Maggie,” he’d said, and his friends had laughed like jackals. Even then, he’d known she was nothing.
The box seemed to mock her. Five years, and this was her legacy—a half-filled container of office debris. She could hear Harlan upstairs in his corner office with the view of the city, probably on the phone with his father, discussing which country club to visit this weekend. The sound of his laughter drifted through the ventilation system like poison gas.
The final meeting. This morning. Harlan’s voice, smooth as silk and twice as suffocating: “Margaret, I’m afraid we’re going to have to let you go. Effective immediately. Don’t worry, though—I’m sure someone with your… particular skill set will find something suitable. Maybe filing for a smaller firm?”
The other employees had watched from their cubicles like spectators at a car accident. Nobody met her eyes. Nobody spoke up. They all knew she’d covered for Harlan’s mistakes more times than they could count. But fear was a powerful sedative, and job security was the needle that delivered it.
Margaret’s hands trembled as she wrapped the spider plant in newspaper. The little thing had somehow survived five years in this windowless tomb, fed on nothing but artificial light and her own stubborn refusal to let it die. There was a metaphor in that, but she was too tired to find it.
She paused, holding the wrapped plant against her chest. If only Harlan could feel what she felt right now—this crushing sense of insignificance, this weight of being reduced to nothing more than an inconvenience to be discarded. If only he could know what it was like to be small, powerless, at the mercy of someone who saw you as less than human. But people like Harlan
lived their entire lives insulated from consequence, protected by money and privilege and the casual cruelty that came so naturally to them.
A sound made her freeze. A soft thud, like something small hitting the carpet. She looked down, expecting to see a fallen pen or paperclip, but the floor was empty. The sound came again—thud—from somewhere behind her desk.
Margaret turned, her pulse quickening. The corners of the basement office were lost in shadow, and for a moment she thought she saw movement. A trick of the light, surely. The building was old, full of settling sounds and shifting shadows.
Harlan Morrison III stood near the baseboard, no taller than her thumb, his thousand-dollar suit wrinkled and his perfectly styled hair disheveled. His tiny mouth was moving, producing sounds like the squeaking of a mouse caught in a trap.
Margaret snapped her eyes shut, certain she was hallucinating. The stress of unemployment, the years of suppressed rage—her mind had finally snapped. But when she opened her eyes, he was still there, gesturing frantically with arms no bigger than toothpicks.
She crouched down, her knees creaking. Up close, she could hear him clearly now, his voice a miniature version of the commanding baritone that had dismissed her dreams for half a decade.
“Margaret! Thank God. Something’s happened to me—I don’t know what. You have to help me. Call 911. Get me to a hospital. I’ll pay you whatever you want, just—” His words died as their eyes met. Even shrunk to the size of a toy soldier, Harlan’s gaze held that familiar contempt. He was asking for her help while simultaneously looking at her like something he’d scrape off his shoe.
“Please,” he whispered, and the word sounded strange in his mouth, as if he were speaking a foreign language. “I need your help.”
Margaret remained squatted, studying him. How small he looked now. How insignificant. All those years she’d felt like an insect in his presence, and now the tables had turned in the most literal way possible. The poetic justice was almost too perfect to believe.
“What happened?” she asked, her voice carefully neutral.
“I don’t know! I was in my office, and suddenly everything got huge. The walls, the furniture, everything. But it wasn’t everything—it was me. I got small.” His mousey voice cracked. “You have to help me, Margaret. I’ll triple your severance. Hell, I’ll even give you your job back.”
Margaret felt something cold and smooth unfurl in her chest. “My job back?” “Yes! Absolutely. With a raise. A big one. Just please, get me help.”
She reached down and picked him up between her thumb and forefinger, ignoring his protests. He weighed almost nothing, like holding a cricket. His little legs kicked ineffectually against her skin.
“Do you remember what you said to me yesterday, Harlan?”
“What? No, I—this isn’t the time for—”
“You said I had a particular skill set. You said maybe I could find work filing for a smaller firm.”
She lifted him to eye level. “You thought that was very clever, didn’t you? Very funny.”
“Margaret, please. I was just—it was just business. Nothing personal.”
“Nothing personal.” The words sat on her tongue like ash. “Funny how everything’s personal when you’re the one who needs help.”
The basement office felt different now. Larger, more spacious. The shadows seemed friendlier, like old companions welcoming her home. The buzzing fluorescent light sounded almost musical.
“I could call for help,” she mused, watching him squirm. “I could get you to a hospital. Maybe they could fix whatever happened to you.” She tilted her head, considering. “But then what? You go back to being the great Harlan Morrison III? Where does that leave me?”
“It would be different this time,” he squeaked. “I promise.”
“Promises.” Margaret smirked, and it felt like the first genuine expression she’d worn in years. “You know what I think, Harlan? I think this is a perfect way to make an exit. I think this is exactly what you deserve.”
She carried him to her desk and set him down next to the cardboard box. He immediately began running toward the edge, but she blocked his path with a pencil.
“Where are you going? We’re having a conversation.”
“Let me go, Margaret. This is insane. You can’t keep me here.”
“Can’t I?” The question hung in the air like incense. “Who’s going to stop me?”
The reality of those words seemed to hit him all at once. His tiny face went pale, and he sank to his knees on the desktop.
Margaret felt a strange warmth spreading through her body, starting in her stomach and radiating outward: a hunger she hadn’t felt in years. Margaret had been starving without even knowing it.
She picked up Harlan again, holding him closer to her face. His terror was intoxicating, better than a bottle of wine, better than the validation she’d never received, better than any mediocre paycheck.
“Please,” he whispered. “I’m begging you.”
“Begging.” She rolled the word around her tongue. “I like the sound of that.”
The basement office grew quieter. Even the fluorescent light seemed to dim, as if the building itself were holding its breath. Her heart beat, steady and strong, while Harlan’s pulse raced like a trapped bird.
She thought about all the times she’d sat in this chair, invisible and unappreciated, while he basked in the glory of her work. She thought about the meetings where he’d dismissed her ideas, the raises he’d denied, the promises he’d broken. She thought about high school, about crawling on her hands and knees to collect her scattered books while he walked away laughing.
The hunger grew stronger.
Margaret opened her mouth. Harlan’s tiny body tumbled onto her tongue, his scream barely audible, a sound like wind through wheat. But she heard it clearly, and it was the sweetest music she’d ever encountered. She closed her lips and swallowed.
For a moment, silence filled the basement office.
Then Margaret began to pack the rest of her belongings. The spider plant went into the box, followed by the day planner and her mother’s photograph. She worked methodically, humming an old tune she couldn’t quite place.
The warmth in her stomach was spreading, filling spaces she’d forgotten existed. She felt larger somehow, more substantial. Complete in a way that had nothing to do with size and everything to do with her appetite finally satisfied.
Outside, the city hummed with life. Traffic moved in rivers of light. People hurried along sidewalks, important and unimportant, predator and prey, all of them playing their roles in the great machine of commerce and desire.
Margaret picked up her box and walked toward the elevator. As the doors closed behind her, she caught her reflection in the polished steel. She looked unchanged—same plain clothes, same tired eyes, same unremarkable face.
But something was different. Something fundamental.
The elevator rose toward the lobby, carrying her up from the basement toward the light. She thought about job interviews, about starting over, about the world of opportunities that lay ahead.
And she realized, with crystal clarity, that she was still hungry.
The city was full of Harlans. Full of people who took and took without giving, who crushed others beneath their expensive designer brand shoes, who mistook cruelty for strength and indifference for sophistication.
Margaret smiled as the elevator doors opened onto the lobby. It wasn’t a smile of triumph, but the cold, satiated smile of someone who’d finally been fed.
The security guard nodded at her, the same polite acknowledgment he’d given her every day for five years. He didn’t know that everything had changed. He couldn’t see the transformation that had taken place in the depths of the building.
But he would learn. They all would.
Margaret walked out into the afternoon sunlight, her cardboard box under her arm, her appetite sharpened and ready for whatever the world might serve.
She knew exactly what she wanted to eat.
Mike Elam is a comedy magician and mentalist based in Northeast Tennessee. He began writing seriously five years ago and has since developed a passion for crafting stories and poems alongside performing onstage. When he’s not writing or performing, he enjoys traveling and spending time with his wife and daughter.
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