The death of a clerk

The clacking of the keyboard is rising in crescendo.

His typing is gaining in fever pitch.

The pounding of fingers on the individual squares of the keyboard gets louder and louder.

He stares at the monitor, goggle-eyed as words crawl across the screen. He feels a sense of achievement as each word is born, and grows to become a sentence, and finally arrives as a paragraph. Paragraphs, paragraphs and paragraphs multiply on the monitor.

His deadline is just around the corner. He has to get the document ready. To be sent to the supervisor for counter-signing. Time is of the essence. The clock winds down quickly to 12.30pm - lunch. Lunch to others, Deadline to him. He could feel the sand emptying quickly through the puny slot in the hourglass; as each minute ticks away, and more paragraphs are born.

Yet something feels wrong. He is missing something. Something is missing.

His eyes sweep over the monitor, breaking up the paragraphs into sentences, and the sentences fragment into individual words. It is like a reverse process of creativity. He created what he wrote and now he is destroying what he wrote.

He scans quickly but thoroughly. Trying to find the black sheep in the flock of words - some word missing, a meaning gone awry through the use of a wrong or inappropriate word. God forbid, an inaccurate use of punctuation! How can that be! The syntax seems creaky - should he reconfigure that sentence?

Febrilely running his eyes through the words massed together like some morbid humanity packed tightly in an MRT cabin, he searches for an aberration. He tilts his head up to the wall clock - the long hand is touching 'Five' - could it be 12.25pm already? Five more minutes to his deadline.

Through the smorgasbord of letters, he sees something. He has found it!

Just then, the screen flickers and before he knows it, darkness stares at him. The long hand of the clock, like a creditor nudges 'Six' and his deadline has expired.

At that moment, his heart stops beating and finally his frenzied and tightly-wrought sinews relax.

He slumps in his seat - the life seeping out of the lowly clerk that he is.

"He was a clerk and he did his job well. But he took his work too seriously at times." - So read his epitaph.