The Beetle God of Judgment
by Joel Nurminen
“No, I, uhhh… I don’t think I ever have.” I replied, and immediately felt my sweat glands activate. I had picked the wrong day to wear white polyester.
He was quiet for what seemed like an impressive amount of time. After a while, I noticed I had unconsciously started to count the seconds to see how long he could go without blinking. I was up to a hundred. The fluorescent lights made his bald head emit a dull radiance, like that of a minor divinity in an obscure pantheon not many believe in, but whose followers make up for their dwindling numbers with zealous devotion. A god of judgment, no doubt. I wondered whether he waxed it. Was that a thing bald people do? Wax their heads?
His pudgy fingers tapped a rhythm like a drunk horse galloping on the desk. Offbeat. I hated that. Every desktop percussionist should be forced to obey a metronome. They should make a law for that. And the God of Judgment should not only abide by it but enforce it. His fingernails unleashed a flurry of sixteenth notes. I lost track of his unblinking seconds. I think it was somewhere around 180. Blink. Please blink, I thought. My eyes began to water, as if sympathetic to his plight. But his gaze kept on relentlessly boring a hole into my skull. My pores were flooding, and I swear the humidity in the by now tropical room was at least 70 per cent, made up of water that had once been inside my body, but had escaped in a mad, panicked dash in response to this interrogation. I felt shriveled like a raisin, but also shriveled like an old man being scolded for acting inappropriately with the nurses.
Had he ever blinked? Or were his blinks so immaculately in sync with mine, that I failed to see them happen? Was his timing better than he let on, the wavering tempo of his fingers merely a façade, a misdirection to trick me into believing that his eyes retained an optimal amount of moisture for minutes at a time? Or had my profuse perspiration unwittingly made the air humid enough for him to somehow siphon water with his eyeballs, permitting him to keep up the inhuman force of his stare indefinitely?
A shuffle went through the cheap suit shrouding his beetle-like carapace as he shifted positions, maintaining eye-contact. He leaned back on his chair, and the moment became pregnant with anticipation. The Beetle God of Judgment was about to speak.
Blink, goddammit.
He did not.
“So you’re telling me”, he began with the swiftness and grace of an elephant seal about to bear his weight down on a seagull with a broken wing, “that you – a 38 year old man from Milwaukee, Wisconsin – have never in your life –“
“Goddammit, Larry, fine. Fuck. I ate your fucking ice cream. Are you happy now? Is that what you want to hear? And you know what, I didn’t even fucking like it. I mean honestly, Larry, strawberry? Who likes strawberry ice cream? Fuck.”
“Get out.”
“What are you gonna do, fire me?”
“I said, get out.”
“Oh come on, Larry, it’s just a bit of ice cream.”
“Get. Out.”
Later, I heard they hired a guy with a literal chainsaw for a face as my replacement. I mean, how does that even work in telemarketing?
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