Hello Friends and Neighbors, and welcome to Thursday Stories. Looking back over my herd of short stories, I realize that more than three dozen of the little rascals have appeared only in print. Some of you may have forked over the dough for this or that literary review, but I don’t expect everyone to buy all of the reviews all of the time. And so, drumroll please, I give you Thursday Stories. I’m not guaranteeing a new story every Thursday, but I will do my best until all the print-only tales have been set free.
This week’s edition of Thursday Stories features The Interview. The Interview first appeared in The First Line Literary Journal, published in 2024. Without further ado, I give you another edition of Thursday Stories. I hope you enjoy it.
by Marco Etheridge
“Thank you for taking the time to meet with me today.”
The interviewer sits behind an industrial desk. His face is a pale mask, indifferent. A regimental tie knotted four-in-hand under a white collar. Manicured hands folded atop a closed file folder. Beside the folder, two black ballpoint pens laid exactly parallel to each other. No other objects, personal or professional, adorn the desktop.
The interviewee sits on a steel straight-back chair. Brackets and bolts secure the chair legs to the floor. He wears too-large gray coveralls and slip-on canvas shoes with no socks. Hair cropped short above an angular face. Skin that might have once seen much sunlight. He holds his head upright, shoulders squared, hands clasped in his lap.
He forms his words with crisp, quiet anger. The voice of a person accustomed to speaking.
“I have nothing but time, as you well know. This is not a meeting. Guards marched me here.”
The man behind the desk does not respond or alter his expression. After a pause, he looks down and opens the file folder. The contents appear to capture his attention.
While his interlocutor peruses the file, the prisoner runs his eyes around the room. He memorizes what few details he sees. Accurate observations anchor his reality, no matter how horrible. His sanity hinges on maintaining a solid grasp of grubby moments and stark minutiae. Remembered details, no matter how mundane, slows the mind’s inexorable slide into gibbering darkness.
So. The room. Windowless. Perfectly square. Walls of concrete block painted beige. A floor of gray linoleum, dark, with a pattern of random flecks. Off-white ceiling, a dark Plexiglas dome. Surveillance camera beneath the dome. A room below ground, almost surely.
Nothing on the walls. No clock, no calendar, no framed certificates, no list of rules. No file cabinets. One desk, two chairs, two men.
This is another of their tortures. Starvation of the senses. Humans thrive on sensory input. Deprive them of color, dim the light, deaden the sound, remove anything the subject might use as a focus. Even the words they use lack substance. They say subject instead of prisoner.
A world devoid of sensation shrinks in upon itself. Anyone contained within that shrinking world is crushed. The way to fight back is to pay attention. Focus.
Has he been in this room before? His eyes search for telltale cracks, slight variations. There, in the paint, a single beige drip elongated and frozen in time. This is a new room and a new interrogator.
The prisoner watches. The interrogator lifts a pen from the desk, wraps his pudgy fingers around it, raises a thumb. Click. The man is left-handed, sinister rather than dexterous. The hand drops, pen touches paper, moves across the page. The faintest skritch of a tiny lizard in dry grass. The pen pauses, fingers raise a page between thumb and forefinger. The pen is wielded like a conductor’s baton. Tap-tap-tap. Fingertips release the page and close the folder.
He speaks.
“There is always a choice, Mister Collins.”
A bland expression, empty eyes, and meaningless words.
“I fail to see my choice in any of this. And it’s Professor Collins.”
The man gives a small sigh, as of disappointment with an erring child. He lays the pen beside its twin, straightens it with a forefinger. Leans forward, elbows on the desk, fingers steepled beneath his chin.
“Ah, yes. But titles are so temporary. A pity. You are an honored academic, while I am a lowly civil servant. Yet I see choices where you do not. You could choose to cooperate with us. Answer a few simple questions. You would then be free to go. Perhaps you might return to the university and your title.”
“Free? Just like that?”
The man waves the words away.
“The necessary inquiries would be made to verify your answers. A simple formality. Then, yes, you would be free to go.”
The man named Collins cocks his head, looks to the blank wall, then back again.
“I tell you what you want to know, and then I’m free to crawl back to the lecture hall. Everything forgiven and forgotten? Is that correct?”
“You must understand that the benefit of choice is a two-way street. We must make choices as well. Your place in our society, your position at the university, your freedom. These are all matters to consider.”
“You speak of choices, and all I hear are threats.”
“We never threaten, Mister Collins. We act.”
Collins digs his right thumbnail into the heel of his left hand. The pain gives him pause to think before he speaks.
“Actions that include dragging a man from his bed in the middle of the night. A man not charged with any crimes.”
“These are dangerous times, Mister Collins. Threats must be taken seriously and lives protected. You were escorted from the privacy of your home to protect your reputation. How would it look if we interrupted an esteemed professor in the middle of a lecture?”
“So, you were protecting me?”
“Yes, and all we ask in return is your cooperation.”
The man behind the desk lays his hands atop the file folder. He drums his fingers.
“I’ve read some of your work, Professor Collins. Anarcho-syndicalism in the nineteenth century. Workers forging the means to control an economy. What a fascinating subject.”
In his memory, Collins sees blank faces in the lecture hall, students hiding behind laptops, the glow of smartphones.
“Not all my students would agree.”
“You’re too modest, Professor. I understand your courses were quite popular. Surely some of your students embraced your work.”
“A few, yes.”
“Give me a few examples of students who found your lectures interesting. What were their names?”
Collins curses himself for a fool.
This thug baits an obvious trap, and you blunder right into it. He calls you professor, and your ego sits up and begs. Look, he’s waiting. Go ahead, say something clever.
“The average lecture might be attended by several hundred students or more. In a sea of faces, everyone looks the same.”
A pause. An assessment.
“Yes, I attended one or two of your lectures. Another nameless face in the dark room. It must be difficult to recall the individual students. Thankfully, we have anticipated this difficulty. We have the rosters for all your lectures over the past semester. Perhaps a list of names might jog your memory.”
Collins feels the bile rise in his throat.
Bastards, all of them. And not just this piece of shit in front of you. Someone handed over the records. Someone you know. They turned on you to save their own skins. Cowards.
Yes, and how brave are you? There’s no way this ends well, not for anyone. For all you know, the bastard that rolled you over is locked up in the cell next to yours. You’re not the only prisoner. Forty steel doors in your corridor alone. You’ve counted every one of them. Blank doors with a locked viewing slot. And yet you’ve never seen another inmate, only the guards and the interchangeable faces of the questioners.
“Mister Collins?”
Collins opens his eyes.
“This is just a formality. We already know their names. We just need to verify our sources, corroborate our information. Accuracy is vital.”
“You’re concerned about accuracy?”
“Of course. How else can we protect our citizens? And that is why we need your help. I understand that this might seem a distasteful business, but our enemies have no such qualms, I assure you. Let me propose a simple solution. You read a simple list. If you recognize a name, place a checkmark beside it. You don’t have to say a single word.”
“How many?”
“How many what?”
“How many check marks to buy my freedom? Ten? Twenty?”
“This is not a quota system, Mister Collins. We are requesting your help in a matter of national security.”
Without moving a muscle, Collins calculates the distance. How quickly could he launch himself across the desk? He has no weapon. It takes time to strangle a man. The guards will be on him before he kills the bastard.
His rage drains away. He slumps against the back of the chair. The man on the far side of the desk leans forward like a dog who senses weakness in another.
“Help us, Mister Collins. Help your country. Help yourself.”
A sensation passes through Collins. He feels the gentle tug of invisible strings as if he were a marionette. An irresistible force pulls his body upright, squares his shoulders, raises his head. Some small measure of strength returns, and he is glad of it. He leans on this newfound strength long enough to utter one word.
“No.”
The face across the desk remains blank. One hand moves. A hidden button is pressed. An electronic buzz breaks the silence. The door behind Collins opens and two guards appear beside him. No one speaks. The guard on his left lays a hand on Collins’s shoulder, the touch almost gentle. Collins rises from his chair. The guards lead him from the room. He does not look back.
* * *
Collins runs in his cell. Two quick strides, then a raised foot braced against the wall, push, spin, two quick strides, repeat. The world’s shortest lap at two-point-five meters. Four hundred laps equals a kilometer. He runs five kilometers every day.
The spins require precision. The cell is but two meters wide. A steel slab cantilevers from one wall topped by a thin mattress, one sheet, and one blanket. A steel toilet at the far end of the cell. A steel washbasin embedded in the concrete wall. A single towel hangs from the basin. No desk, no chair.
Five square meters. The ceiling is three meters above the soles of his feet. His world is fifteen cubic meters in total. It is important to know these things.
Collins runs, spins, runs, whipping past concrete and steel, steel and concrete. He counts the laps in his head. Three hundred ninety. Four hundred.
He sits on the edge of the bunk and adds today’s run to the total. One thousand eight hundred and twenty-five kilometers. He calculates the distance again, arrives at the same figure. Today is an anniversary. Probably.
Collins tracks the passing weeks and months as best he can, but it is not an exact science. There is no clock in his cell, no calendar on the wall. He has no paper with which to construct one, and no pencil to mark the days.
There is no sunrise or sunset in his cell. Embedded in the concrete ceiling is a lamp protected by a wire cage. It leaks a dull glow every hour of every day. The light is too dim to read by but that matters little as he has nothing to read. He sleeps with an arm thrown over his eyes.
Measuring time depends upon a series of fixed events. A slot in the cell door opens. A tray slides through the slot onto a narrow shelf mounted inside the door. If the tray contains a bowl of thin porridge and a cup of tea, it is morning. Stew and a heel of bread means evening. Tick and tock; the passing of a single day.
Once every seven days, the cell door opens. Two guards escort Collins to the showers. The guards are silent. There is never another prisoner in sight, yet he knows they exist. Passing rows of locked doors, he hears a susurrus leaking into the corridor. Angry shouts, weeping, ranting monologues, manic laughter, human sounds mixed and muffled to a ghostly whisper.
After his shower, he dons a clean coverall. He is not allowed underwear. The guards return him to his cell. The floor is damp, mopped by unseen hands. The bedding has been changed. Thus passes a week.
Days, weeks, months. And now one year. Possibly.
With his daily run complete, it is time to work on his lectures. Words he once recited by rote have taken on a new vitality. Instead of addressing several hundred bored students, Collins speaks to an audience of one. The surveillance camera lurks beneath a dark Plexiglas dome mounted in the ceiling. He stands, raises his eyes to the unseen eye, and begins.
He is midway into an introduction of nineteenth-century labor movements when his lecture is interrupted. Locks grate in the door behind him. He turns to face the door as it swings open.
A pair of guards stand in the corridor. One holds a set of keys. Without a word, the guard points a forefinger at the prisoner, then jabs his thumb over his shoulder. The message is clear, but Collins is confused. It is not a shower day. He’s sure of that. This is something else. Cold fear stabs through his bowels.
Collins steps into the empty corridor. One guard stands beside him while the other relocks the cell door. Then he points to the right, the opposite direction from the showers. The guards lead him away.
The elevator doors slide open, revealing a dark rectangle. Inside, the elevator is deep enough to accommodate a gurney. There are doors at both ends. The rubber floor mats smell of stale laundry and the sweet rot of garbage. The doors close. Glowing red numbers mark their ascent. Level Three, two, one.
The guards lead Collins down another corridor. The first thing he notices is the air. It tastes sweet on his tongue, clean, untainted by unwashed men and subterranean rot. He fills his lungs, exhales, and then the guards stop before a closed door.
A button is pressed and a buzzer sounds. An electronic click answers the buzzer. The door opens.
The guards escort Collins into a windowless room. Grasping him by the elbows, they seat him in a straight-back chair. The chair faces a plain steel desk, and behind the desk sits a man wearing a white shirt and a striped tie. The man nods to the guards. They pivot and walk from the room, closing the door behind them.
In the silence that follows, Collins stares at the man behind the desk. The man returns his stare, then drops his eyes to a folder. He opens the folder and begins to read.
Without moving his head, Collins runs his eyes around the room, desperate to locate a telltale dribble of paint. Then he sees it, a single beige dripline frozen in time.
He smiles inwardly, raises his head, and squares his shoulders. Behind the desk, the interviewer closes the folder and looks up.
“Thank you for taking the time to meet with me today.”
Fini
You can find The First Line at:
That’s it for this week’s edition of Thursday Stories. More stories are coming your way. How will you know when a new story breaks? Glad you asked, Friends. Read On! Drumroll and… Meanwhile, don’t miss any upcoming stories. You can stay tuned for all the latest by following the MEF blog:
https://www.marcoetheridgefiction.com/whats-new-in-marcos-world-the-blog/
Marco Etheridge is a writer of prose, an occasional playwright, and a part-time poet. He lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. His work has been featured in over one hundred and fifty reviews across Canada, Australia, Europe, the UK, and the USA. Marco’s short story “Power Tools” was nominated for Best of the Web for 2023 and is the title of his latest collection of short fiction. When he isn’t crafting stories, Marco is a contributing editor for a ‘Zine called Hotch Potch. In his other life, Marco travels the world with his lovely wife Sabine.
Website: https://www.marcoetheridgefiction.com/
Instagram: www.instagram.com/marcoetheridge
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SerialZtheNovel
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