Your Supervisor Suffers From Pyromania Day!

It hits her every day around 3:30, when everyone else is getting ready for a group yawn. She slams her door shut, draws all the blinds, and then you see her phone line light up. You thought she was just making plans to see whoever she's cheating on her husband with. But she's not, she's very faithful, she's just calling her sponsor.

"I can see the flames flicker Harold. I can see them, Harold. They're just so motherfucking beautiful, Harold."

"Breathe."

Around 4:05 her phone line blinks off. And at 4:15, she comes back out and asks you to retype the memo you typed up earlier in the day. She's very calm then.

"Do you have any corrections?"

"It was fine I just....must have misplaced it."

You can sometimes smell the smoke underneath the sudden gust of air freshener wafting from her office.

While you fetch the memo from your hard drive, she goes to the window and takes sleek breaths, like she's smoking an imaginary cigarette.

She stays at the window until five, when you ask her if she needs anything else, and she dismisses you with a shake of the back of her head. As far as you know, she stays there all night. She did once.

Some nights, she stays until as late as nine or ten, when she's certain everyone has gone and the cleaners have finished their shift. She moves a copier from its spot on the floor and builds a small pile of documents and cardboard paper clip boxes and plastic report covers and a scarf or glove or some other item she might have worn to work that day and she lights a tiny blaze, tall enough get her blood into her ears, but small enough to stamp out after just a few moments before the smoke detectors sound. Then she sweeps the remains and the ash into a small trash bag that she'll toss into a dumpster on her walk home, and she'll slide the copier back overtop the scarred carpet. And the next day she'll know what's under there.

Wreckage. She did that.

Happy Your Supervisor Suffers From Pyromania Day!