Howard smoked his cigarette to a nub, then flicked it to the ground and started on another. He smoked a lot, even for a Brit, especially when he was nervous. Today, Howard was nervous. It was rent day. Ms. Jin-Hee the Korean landlady took no prisoners.

"Oi, bloody hell. You really blew it this time," he said in his Cockney accent, as though he were the son of the last chimney sweep in London. With what worry and cigarettes had done to him, he looked like he belonged in the prior century. The tip of his cigarette trembled on his lips. "She's gonna send us to hell for this, she is, bloody hell."

Ben rubbed his eyes. "Shut up about hell. Hell is a place where you're a midget stuck in an elevator packed with fat guys after lunch, and egg salad sandwiches were on the menu."

"You're so bloody funny," said Howard, starting a slow clap. "You want we should make that what goes on your tombstone?"

"You got any ideas?" Ben roared. "Because your self-pity isn't helping." He loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt collar. "She's going to be here within the hour. We've got an hour to make the rent money -- that's plenty of time."

Eyes narrowed, Howard squeezed his lips around his cigarette and took a long drag. "Wishful thinking, mate."

Ben's eyes grew wide. He straightened up, and after a beat did a fist pump.

"What is it?" Howard asked.

"We'll write her a check," said Ben on a rush of inspiration.

"We don't have the money," said Howard flatly.

"What, you've never kited a check?"

"She'll know." Howard snuffed his cigarette and dug the pack out of his shirt pocket. "Damn," he said, peering into the empty box. He crumpled it in his fist and tossed it aside.

"She won't know," Ben said. "At least not for a few days. And that'll give us plenty of time to..."

A hard scratching sound snagged his attention. At his feet was a folded-over sheet of paper torn out of a yellow legal pad.

Howard's eyes fell onto the sheet like a piano from a rampart.

Ben jabbed an index finger at the paper and hunched his shoulders.

"It's her," Howard mouthed silently.

"She's here!" whispered Ben, then clasped his hands over his mouth for having said that out loud. 

Howard's eyes bobbed over to Ben and back to the paper, as though to say that he should read it. Ben stooped and picked it up.

"What's it say?" Howard mouthed.

Ben sidled up to Howard and straightened the note.

PASS THE RENT UNDER THE DOOR.

The two glanced at each other.

"Do you think she heard that part about kiting a check?" Ben whispered.

No sooner had he finished speaking than another note scraped in beneath the door. Ben snapped it up.

NO CHECKS. CASH.

"Oi, bloody bugger!" Howard said, and hid his face in his palms.

"Damn it, Howie!" Ben rasped so Jin-Hee wouldn't hear through the door. "What do we do now?" He shook him by the shoulders. "Focus!"

Another note. Ben slinked away from Howard and picked it up.

I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE.

"Maybe," said Howard, "if we just spoke to her, like normal human beings, she might cut us some slack?"

Ben wound up as if to backhand Howard. "What are you, crazy? We're lucky if she doesn't cut something out of us! This is Jin-Hee, man. Jin-Hee!"

A note slipped in with the text facing up.

I HEAR MY NAME.

Howard ran his fingers into his scalp and clenched his hands. "We're cooked, mate." He brought his knees up and curled into a tight ball.

A fifth note came in.

I'M WAITING...

Ben pressed his lips into a tight line. His eyes set hard into his face. "Maybe you are," he said, wagging his finger at Howard. "But I'm not." He went for the door.

"No, don't!" said Howard, but too late.

The door swung open onto an empty hallway. Stunned, Ben poked his head into the hall to look one way, then the other.

"She's gone," said Ben.

"Like 'up the hall' gone?" Howard asked.

"No, I mean, as in the 'vanished' type of gone."

Howard stood. "That's not possible. What do you mean..."

"I mean she's gone!" Ben got Howard by the arm and hauled him into the corridor. "There. Do you see her anywhere? No."

"But," Howard stammered, "that's not possible." He glanced both ways up the hall, then again to be sure.

"Well, it just happened," said Ben.

The two walked back to their apartment and shut the door. They hadn't gone two paces before the flutter of paper at the hall door caught their attention.

PMS
 
"How the hell?" Howard asked.

Ben unfolded the rest of the note.

PMS -- PAY ME, SUCKER!

Ten-hut! Look alive, you sap-sucking excuse for a soldier! Living among people is a dangerous enterprise. The problem with most people is that they are human beings, and I'm glad I'm not one. Learn these techniques, and there may be hope yet for your survival in modern society.

Tempered Indifference
 Sometimes, silence is the best answer. This is true when any answer other than silence can hurt your position. Since this tactic is effectively inaction, it is the least aggressive deployment in your arsenal. Even so, with shrewd usage it can be an effective weapon.
 
The Wife: "You left the toilet seat up again!"
You: "..."

In this example, you have neither conceded your position nor refuted the issue posited. You have also set yourself to plausibly deny the circumstances presented, if pressured. Taking it a step further, where circumstances permit, you can plausibly deny you actually heard the statement. When properly applied, the target may eventually forget why it accosted you in the first place, or simply give up altogether.

This is the weapon of choice of husbands everywhere.

The Radar Jammer
 This technique works best when you need to end a conversation quickly and there is little chance of collateral damage (i.e., causing an incident that might embarrass you). When done properly, it stuns the target into a perplexed silence, granting you a few precious moments in which to make a hasty retreat. It works best when delivered in a hurried, self-important, preferably deadpan tone of voice, and when the subject matter of your sentence is absurd or shocking.
 
Sidewalk Activist: "Sign my petition?"
You: "Can't, sorry. I left the oven on at home and my dog's on fire."
 
In the above example, clearly (hopefully), you have lied about your oven being left on. You have conducted a value judgment in which the benefit of escaping the conversation outweighs the cost of lying. Your dog will not be happy.
 
The radar jammer is a technique of moderate aggression. Thus, it should be used where the situation warrants, or when Tempered Indifference fails. Do not overuse this technique in too short a period, as its effects will sharply drop off after the first salvo. If, after launching the Radar Jammer you cannot escape in time, or the technique fails to work, it may be reattempted, but its chances of success are impaired.
 
The Punctuated Freakout
This is the flip-side of, and the payoff to, Tempered Indifference. It is the double-edged sword in your armory, honed to a ludicrous edge. Caution is advised when considering this weapon, for it is just as important to know when to use it as when not to, as it becomes markedly less effective each time it is deployed. Thus, it is the nuclear warhead of your armaments.

The reason this technique is called the Punctuated Freakout is because you must first have mastered Tempered Indifference. You must have cultivated a reputation for being even-tempered for this to work to its fullest. Hence, your "Freakout," as we'll discuss later, is "Punctuated," or rarely seen, but appropriately triggered given the circumstances.

The "Freakout" portion must be precisely that. Freaking out is an art that escapes precise definition, but one aspect remains constant: you must go all out. You cannot execute a halfway Punctuated Freakout, much as you cannot halfway launch a continent-incinerating nuclear missile. Common aspects of freakouts include: blind rage, shouting, flipping tables, tossing chairs, kicking down cubicle walls, tossing computer monitors out windows, flinging documents into the air, sweeping the contents of a desktop to the floor, punching wall plaques, etc.
 
A Punctuated Freakout may get you fired (or promoted, or arrested), will likely get your point across, and will certainly be memorable, but most importantly, it will get your point across.
 
Yes, I did repeat that part. Got a problem with that? I didn't think so.

You knew what you were getting yourself into by coming here. Sure, you came looking for great stories and bad drawings, and we deliver on both counts. Every so often, though, we slip in some bad poetry. And we admit, it is bad.

It can't be helped. After all, that is part of what we do here at Darkwater Syndicate. We really like bad poetry, and do try hard to produce the very best of the very worst. Sometimes we fail miserably and produce some good poetry. We don't necessarily call it "good", we just call it bad at being bad. Rest assured, though, as instances of this are few and far between. It brings us great pride to say that rarely do we fail at our mission of creating awful poetry. 

So now, without further ado, it is our dubious pleasure to bring you the first of our two intentionally awful poems, which we call: Poker Buddies.

At the end of the day they decided to play
a couple of rounds of poker:
the doctor, the lawyer, green grocer Sawyer
and the insurance broker.

"One of us is a snake," Sawyer said, mouth agape.
The others looked on with blank faces.
Sawyer said, "I quit! I'm through with this s**t!"
For he had in his hand five aces.

That Sawyer is the last honest man on earth. To his credit, he walked away from the mother of all poker hands -- enough aces to trump even a royal flush. 

Next we bring you: Unscheduled Dentistry.

Hammer in hand, she went at the man.
"I'll do anything to appease ya."
That's what she said as she swung for his head.
"Except I got no anesthesia."

Interpret that as you will. Is our unnamed dentist protagonist a charitable yet misguided soul endeavoring to ease her patient's toothache pains? Or is something more sinister afoot here, such that her two lines of dialog are uttered in irony? One thing is for sure, this short poem says more with what it doesn't say.

Your thoughts?

The alarm clock went off but it didn’t wake me, as I wasn’t asleep. I’d been up for hours lying in bed. Just thinking of the sleep I wasn’t getting was keeping me up, to say nothing of all the other tasks on the day’s punch list. I turned over to face the alarm clock. It blinked 5:05 a.m. in incandescent red. 5:05. SOS. In hindsight, I should have known better than to go to work that day.

This is the story of how I went insane.

The office was a long way off but the commute was short. At 5:20 a.m., expressway traffic was light. If I really stood on the gas, I could get to work in half an hour. All the better for me that there was no one on the road, as I was at the office in what seemed to me a blink. Piecing events together after the fact, I figured I’d dozed off at the wheel for a few miles. I was exhausted.

I pulled into the car park and took the elevator up to the eleventh floor. As usual, I was the first to arrive. The time-activated lights in the office wouldn’t come on for another ten minutes, at 6:00, but by then I’d already had a cup of coffee and gotten started on my second.

Well before the sunrise, I was already at work.

My desk was covered in file boxes, looking like an overstuffed filing cabinet had gone on a bender the night before and puked all over my desktop. Not a square inch of faux wood saw sunlight.

That last thought made me take pause. For nearly a year that I had been working for the firm of Banco Banque and Banquiao, I hadn’t seen any sunlight either. Every day I woke up before sunup, bedded down at midnight, and spent the hours in between at the office. Even at eleven stories up, the office never felt more like a subterranean cavern. My pasty white complexion was proof of this.

The boss checked in at 7:05. I met him in the break room and had a coffee with him. At 9:00 I was due for another, as the effects of the first were starting to wind down. The rest of the office staff filed in at 9:00, and so I thought it best to get a fresh mug before the support staff emptied the pot.

By 10:00 a.m. my caffeine-addled heartbeat felt like a flock of hummingbirds trapped in my chest, yet I was still nodding off at my desk. It annoyed me to no end that I was falling asleep where I least wanted to sleep, and just hours ago I could not sleep where most I wanted to.

There was no time to sleep. There was no time even to live. The billable hour is a thing of the devil, and it had me in its grip.

The office required me to account for every minute of my work time, and expected each minute to be devoted to making my boss money. This I did to an admirable extent: of the fourteen hours spent at work daily, on average I captured twelve billable hours. Two of those hours were spent doing those ancillary, non-billable things I needed to do to support the billable time, such as book-keeping, drinking coffee, and using the bathroom, though I knew of co-workers who had discovered ways to bill the client even while on the toilet.

Of those twelve billable hours, every day my boss skimmed another three off the top, nicking fractions off of each of the billable activities I’d completed. Every week, before writing big checks to the firm, the client would review my time report and knock off another hour or two each day. The firm where I worked would grudgingly acquiesce, thankful to accept some payment over none. By month end, half of my billable hours would be gone, and the boss would drag me into his office by the scruff of my neck. Our discussions were always the same: “Get your hours up, or you’ll get canned.”

It had gone on this way for ten months. As long as I’d been working there, the firm had had it in mind to fire me.

Things really started to get strange at 11:00 a.m. It was Monday, but I had to keep reminding myself because I’d worked fourteen days straight. To me, it felt like the middle of the week.

The days were running together, as though days past and days ahead had melted into a pudding and were blobbing up together. I kept reminding myself to do things I’d already done days ago, because I’d forgotten I’d done them, and because they were super important and needed to be done. I doubted whether I’d actually driven in this morning or just spent the night at the office. My dreams - when I could sleep - were of things I had done at the office or things I needed to do on arriving there. That I was sitting at my desk seemed surreal, like some bizarre yet mundane deja vu.

Lunchtime rolled around. At the bottom of my desk drawer was a bag of apples. I ate one whenever I got hungry. For several days straight I’d eaten nothing but apples, going through a half-dozen daily. At the time - and this is the scary part - it made perfect sense. Eating apples was a boon to efficiency. They were healthy, they needed only one hand to eat and left my other hand free to do work, and since they came in a bunch, I could eat these all day without ever having to leave my desk.

Hungry as I was, I tried to keep the drawer shut as much as I could. The bag of apples was see-through, and underneath it was the resignation letter I had written three months before. I hadn’t signed it, but I’d come very close. It wasn’t dated, but that was intentional, as I could just as easily write in the date when I felt it was time.

I called my wife to let her know I wouldn’t be joining her for dinner at home. Although I told her that I’d be home at 7:00 p.m., I’d already devised a plan for the day. I didn’t tell her this while on the call, but at 7:00 I’d call her and tell her that I needed to stay a while longer. Then, at 9:00, I’d send a text saying that I’d be at work ‘til midnight. Everyone would have gone home by then and the office would be quiet, making it an optimal environment to net a ton more billable hours. Then, when I needed to, I’d sleep at my desk and wake up at 5:00 a.m. the following day (still at my desk) to start the day off. Thankfully, I’d stashed extra clothes in my office, so I could change into them and none of my co-workers would be the wiser that I’d spent the night at the office.

I revised my plan after I’d had another coffee. I didn’t need to sleep. Sleep was beneath me. I shuddered with giddy laughter. I was thinking so fast I was almost prescient. It felt great. My hands shook and my typing speed took a tumble, but these losses could be recouped tonight since I had no need to sleep. And the feeling in my chest that my blood had turned to glass shards as it coursed through my heart could be ignored as a passing inconvenience.

Furtive whispers accompanied shuffling up the hall. “Someone’s fallen.” A man in the building across the street had hurled himself from the top of the car park. What a mess he’d made. He’d ruined his suit, which didn’t matter much anymore, because it didn’t fit him as well as it must have before he took the dive, as the man was spread out for yards across the asphalt.

A question struck me then, as suddenly as an open-palm blow to the forehead: what could drive a man to leap from an otherwise structurally sound office tower? This question may as well have been rhetorical, judging by how quickly the answer came.

I rubbed my eyes, elbowed past the crowd thronged at the glass to get a better look at the dead man lying in the street. In a blink he had gone from wearing pinstripes to brown trousers just like mine and back to pinstripes.

That was the wake-up call, more so than the alarm clock buzzer at 5:05 - SOS - a.m. I went back to my desk and wrote a two-sentence resignation email, completely forgetting about the carefully drafted letter that had sat in my desk drawer for months. I threw the bag of apples into the wastebasket. I didn’t know it just then, but I would develop a taste aversion to apples that would last months.

I powered down my PC and sat, elbows propped on the desk, with my face in my hands. A partner at the firm shoved through my office door without so much as knocking.

“Get your stuff and get out,” he said, which was polite enough, considering he refrained from punting me in the ass when he said that.

That same day my name was removed from the associate roster, and my profile and all signs that I had worked at the firm for nearly a year were obliterated. The Egyptians did no less a job with Hatshepsut.

I went home and slept for two days straight, not rousing even to eat. When I awoke, a shooting pain between my eyes rippled my vision and threw off my sense of balance. As I hadn’t had any coffee during those two days, my body was furious. You don’t come down easy from a ten-month caffeine binge.

I rolled out of bed. My first piss in two days looked like infield clay and collected into silt at the bottom of the toilet bowl. I felt like I was ninety-nine years old. Even shuffling around the apartment in sandals got me winded. It would be a month before I was in any shape to do anything more physically demanding than shopping for groceries.

Without any sense at all of the time, I went outside and stood in my apartment’s parking lot. The sun was out, shining in the center of a cloudless blue sky. A single tear rolled down my cheek. More followed. Many, many more.

It seemed such a trivial thing to forget over so short a time as a year, but I remembered then, that the sky is blue.

My mom says I’m meticulous. I say I’m thorough. My doctors say I’m paranoid. All the better for me if any of us are right; these are tense times we live in.

The news man is calling it a cold war, like that’s supposed to sound reassuring. It’s still a war. The White House and the Kremlin are primed to bomb each other flat if one side so much as sneezes. If - hell, when - that happens, everyone will go up in smoke.

That is, except me.

I’m ready. It’s taken a year and a half, but the concrete bunker under my house is stocked: food, communications, even foil caps. Rumor has it the reds are working on mind control. They can’t get their x-rays into your head if you chrome up your lid.

Now that I’m ready, what’s left is to stay vigilant. Playing defense is a loser’s strategy, and holing myself up in that concrete cave is a last resort. I listen to the ham radio every night. The airwaves are filled with commies chattering in code. They’ll let something slip eventually.

The radio is a real piece of work. It’s not powerful enough to listen in on the commies at home in the C.C.C.P. but I don’t need it to. They commies are here, in the States. My rig picks up restricted channels, so I’ll be listening when the Kremlin calls. When that happens, I’m taking a road trip. My van out front doesn’t look like much, but it’s a surveillance vehicle that the Federal Communications Commission retired last year. Uncle Sam used it to pinpoint people who beamed up unauthorized broadcasts on restricted channels. The government stripped it of all the equipment, but left the electrical hookups in place. It wasn’t too hard a job to wire it up with goodies from the electronics store where I work. All I need to do is dial in a suspicious frequency, and I’ll be pointed right to its source.

August 28, 1962

I fell asleep at the radio again. The clock says 3:42. Down here in the bunker, I can’t tell if it’s a.m. or p.m. The radio’s silent. I rub the sleep out of my eyes and reach for my glasses, when suddenly a boy’s voice comes on.

“Three times three is nine.”

Pause.

“Twenty-one. Forty-eight. Negative thirty-six.”

The boy speaks slowly and with long pauses between numbers. I snatch a notepad off the desk and jot down the numbers. Before I know it, a half hour has passed. The broadcast cuts off. Silence.

The numbers make no sense. I tear the page out and rewrite the numbers down the left margin of a new sheet. Holding both sheets up to the ceiling light, I can see the number’s I’ve written through the page. No matter how I hold the sheets to make the two lines of numbers intersect, nothing leaps out at me.