I sat at my desk, mostly alone in my thoughts, the hum of the office and the occasional clack of a keyboard the only company. My inbox blinked, and there it was—an email from the apartment complex management.
They wanted to thank us for helping my mother “into compliance.” That explained the quiet this time, the lack of red circles on doors, the absence of the usual warnings.
I typed back carefully, keeping it brief. Their reply arrived almost immediately, polite, crisp, sterile. Management requested that my mother return to the apartment as soon as possible. “The treatment works best if she is present,” they wrote. The words were carefully chosen, courteous even—but I read between the lines. I could hear it differently: Send your mother back. Sacrificial feeding. Our dark masters require this of her.
While waiting for a reply, I tried to look into the company. No active phone number, or maybe I was searching in the wrong places. The website flickered in the corner of my screen, cheaply made, something a kid might have coded in the 90s. Bright primary colors, off-center buttons, fonts that didn’t match—an amateurish front for something that clearly wasn’t.
I glanced up from the screen and noticed the office around me differently than usual. The fluorescent lights buzzed a little too steadily, the hum of the air conditioning seemed sharper, like it was listening. My co-workers, when they passed my desk, moved quickly, their eyes avoiding anything that might hold attention for too long. Every chair scraping the floor sounded too loud, each step echoing oddly, as if the building itself were holding its breath.
I tried to focus on work. The spreadsheet in front of me blurred into patterns I didn’t want to see. Everything—the clean columns, the neat fonts, the rows of numbers—seemed like a quiet mimicry of the hallways at my mother’s apartment: polished on the surface, hiding the mess underneath.
The red circle lingered in my mind, even now. It was impossible to shake, appearing in the corner of my vision whenever I blinked. I could almost imagine it pinned to the door of the office next to mine, the symbol of quiet compliance, a warning that only some would understand.
I leaned back in my chair, staring at the flickering monitor. Something about it felt deliberate, like a joke designed to disarm anyone who looked too closely. But the evictions, the empty apartments, the quiet menace of the hallways—they all lingered in my mind, refusing to be ignored.