Argon

NOTE: This is a short story something. I'm not quite sure what it is.

Sometimes, I sit here with an empty head.

An empty head, waiting to be filled with something. Waiting to be acted upon, rather than acting myself.

I sit and listen to the whirr of the heater in the cubicle across the hallway, the soft murmur of the radio station played low, or my boss in the cubicle next to mine, spitting tobacco juice into a Gatorade bottle.

When people come through the door I sit silently like a rabbit, not moving, watching, reading the tells of their footfalls, their voices – if they speak – or their heads – if they can be seen above the cubicle wall. When I identify one who is going to stop in my cubicle – I can tell, I can always tell – like Wally I put my hand on the mouse.

Mostly, they walk by. On their way to their own cubicles. I don’t know if their heads will be empty or not, but I know where I’d put my money if I were a gambling kind of man.

They’re engineers, mostly. And chemists of several varieties. None very talkative to a mostly non-talky tech writer, sitting in his cubicle with an empty head. They’re not rude people, or nasty. Just quiet, competent people who talk when they need to talk and don’t when it’s better to shut up.

I’m the one who, when I’m in the bathroom stall, will hid there, quietly reading a book, until I know the rest of the bathroom is empty so I can go out to wash my hands without the fear of having to say hello to anyone.

I’m the shy one. With the empty head.

I want to be busy but then when I m busy I find work to be an inconvenience to merely sitting there with an empty head. If I endeared myself to the chemists, if I talked to them more than the occasional passing hello, maybe they’d give me a nickname. Probably a smarty chemist nickname. Possibly one of the noble gases, for I am inert and do not react with anything.