“Well, and how’s our new hire coming along?” asked a cheery, portly little man as he entered the room.
“Doing fine, sir,” was the quiet response. Mouse was grateful for the opportunity, but she couldn’t quite catch her boss’s enthusiastic tones. She never was good at that sort of thing; It’s why she was there.
“Fine is all well and good, but wouldn’t you rather be GREAT?” asked her manager, with a wide smile that seemed permanently plastered to his face.
“Of course,” she uttered, mustering a shy smile that seemed to cower in the shadow of his greater one.
“There’s a good girl!” He said proudly. “You just keep at it, and I know it’ll all turn out ok!” With that — and a slight twitch further upward of his ever-present smile — he left her to her work.
Her job wasn’t a terribly difficult one: There were several large vats of Ambrosia in the room; she just had to stir them occasionally. When one of the vats was ready, she’d hit a button and it would drain down into Processing; then she’d hit another button, the vat would fill up from above with unripened Ambrosia, and the process would begin again.
It was a great honor, she was told. Ambrosia was the distilled form of everything they were, everything they were meant to be. The majority of the Sunshine & Rainbows Department’s job was ensuring a steady supply of Ambrosia, and distributing it. Though their duties in theory consisted of spreading happiness in all its forms, Ambrosia was by far its purest.
Dave was always talking about that, discussing it. He was a little bit like Mouse was: he didn’t belong either. That’s why they were both there; so they could be taught. But where she said too little, he said too much. He was always coming up with crazy conspiracy theories, agitating about this and that. He was never content with anything; he always had to KNOW, had to have a hand in things.
So naturally it annoyed him to no end that they weren’t allowed upstairs.
“I’m telling you, Mouse,” he told her one day, “I’m going to find out what’s up there.”
“Probably Ambrosia,” she murmured with a sigh.
He gave her a long look. “You know, sometimes, I think you might almost be snarky.” He narrowed his eyes. “Is that it? Are you snarky, Mouse?”
She said nothing, her attention fixed — as ever — on the floor.
“Well,” he said, jumping back to his original subject, “I’m going to find out.”
“But it’s managers only,” was the muttered response, accompanied by a quick glance filled with confusion.
“So?”
“So we can’t go up there.”
“Why not? They don’t keep it locked.”
He was answered only by another brief look, this one of skepticism.
“Fine,” he snapped. “Don’t come.”
When Mouse came to work the next day, she didn’t see him. Lunchtime came and went, with no sign of Dave. This was a foreign occurrence; he was always there at lunch, regaling her with his latest crazy ideas.
As the day went on, the sinking feeling in her stomach grew.
When she finally worked up the courage to ask her manager if he’d seen Dave, Mouse received a pat on the head and a smile as he told her that Dave was reformed, and had no need to be coming in anymore.
The sinking feeling got worse.
Her shift ended; she lingered. An impulse directed her towards the door upstairs, and for once she didn’t bother to check herself. She pushed her way through, and climbed the little winding staircase.
The upstairs wasn’t so different from the room she worked in. There were rows and rows of vats, filled, as she inferred, with raw Ambrosia. Filled with corpses.
And there, bubbling among them, was Dave.
Writer In Retrospect 