PAPER CLIPS

Once a party machine on the weekends, Peter had never tired of dancing. Yet he never learned to dance and found it harder and harder to find someone to stand next to him while he thrashed on the dance floor. Once, even, Peter drank double.

Now, if he were drinking, Peter had a water bottle in one hand and a drink in the other. He was happy to have survived the karaoke craze because he knew he could not sing, yet he still craved music.

During the week, Peter no longer drank, and he spent most of his waking hours at the office. Friday nights were no longer for partying. They were for finishing up reports and freeing up time on the weekend.

But Peter no longer knew what to do with his weekends. Peter had tried to spend four hours of his Saturday walking around the lake, which meant he actually got in a thirty minute walk once a month.

Back at the office, Peter had once again ordered a palette of paper clips, and no one had questioned his spending. After all, Peter had pushed hard for a paperless office, and he was saving his company a ton of money on paper and toner and printers. The line item for paper clips was certain to draw attention.

In the meantime, Peter managed to secure prize pens in black, in blue, and in red for everyone on his staff, and he was no where near using his office supply budget for the year. Still, the rumor in the company was that Peter and his staff were hording multi-colored sticky notes.

The office next to Peter's belonged to a VP named Sharon, but Sharon no longer occupied it.

One box at a time, Peter clipped the paper clips together into a single string. He hung the strings from the ceiling in the unoccupied office. He laid the paper clip ribbons flat and laid a wall of strings, carefully meshing the vertical drops with the horizontal rows. From the floor to the ceiling, the paper clip wall was a foot thickÑin November. The blue-grey shine of the fluorescent light on the paper clip bricks gave Sharon's former office a strange sheen.

Peter was hugely under budget for office supplies, having only spent a fourth of what he had been allocated. He remembered that he had not had a drink in three months and that he craved music.