It’s his mother, calling just to say hi. They chat for a few minutes before she hangs up, leaving him alone with the stubbornly uneventful pot. Still nothing. Puzzled and a little bored, he turns on the TV and flops down on his futon.
While the six o’clock news drones on in the background, he’s listening for headlines and doom scrolling Instagram for new card additions to MTG Arena, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Marvel Snap, and Kards when a strange PBS NewsHour segment appears. Apparently, older women in California have taken up stalking Help Desk Technicians.
He blinks. Did he hear that right?
He lifts his drooping head and brings his gaze magnetically to the cleavage of a large breasted woman featured in the police story on the news. The male officer was speaking to the female news anchor while a redacted head shot was placed on the screen to the right of them. All William could focus on were the bulging breasts launching out of the pink top of the stalker the officer was warning the public about. His imagination took over and fantasized about them heaving up and down accompanied with the same heavy breathing he experienced at work earlier in the day. Immediately his own obelisk made him shift his body significantly because the constriction of his pants started to hurt him.
The story irritated him, it reminded him too much of work. Annoyed, he got up to check on the pot’s progress. Nothing had changed. The pot looked exactly the same as before: just one lousy magic bean buried in dirt. As he turned back toward the TV, a commercial for sprinkler systems flashed on the screen. At that moment, it dawned on him.
I never watered it!
He searched his cupboards for a gallon of clean spring water and, finding one, poured the entire bottle into the soil. Three minutes passed. Suddenly, the pot jumped up from the ground. Once, twice, three times! His eyes widened in disbelief as the pot wobbled toward him, as if trying to get closer. He stared, mouth agape, barely breathing. Quickly, he pushed the pot back beneath the kitchen window to keep it in the fading sunlight. The pot shook erratically and shuffled in place, but eventually settled. Still, there was no sign of a plant growing.
His stomach growls loud enough to echo off the kitchen walls. With nothing edible in the apartment, not even a stale cracker, he grabs his keys and heads out in search of greasy salvation.
Buy: Hell Desk! How May I Help You? by Jay Zoracle on Amazon today.
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