It was a typical Monday morning,
I was at my office, fingers tapping on my keyboard sending figures dancing
along my computer screen.
Then a gnat zipped by my nose.
My eyes followed it until it disappeared and I remembered thinking how rare it
was to see a gnat in January, even more so in an office building. I resolved to
mention it to my wife over dinner, how a gnat was surviving the winter by
hiding in my office feeding from whatever nutrients it might get from my ivy
and aloe plants.
Suddenly, the gnat dive bombed
in front of my nose again. This time I frowned, not so amused.
A third strafe and it actually
flew between my eye and my eyeglasses. This time I swiped at it, knocking my
glasses off and missing the gnat by a hundred gnat body lengths. By the
time I’d rearranged my glasses, the gnat had disappeared.
When it came at me again, I was
ready. It flew directly at me like a WW2 Japanese fighter pilot giving his life
for his Emperor, and I smacked it against my forehead.
Silence.
I got it, I was sure. So I
checked my palm, but there was no bug. Gnats are small, their bodies so
fragile that my hitting it would obliterate its tiny body. So there was no way
its corpse would have fallen to the floor.
Did this mean there a black gnat smashed on my forehead? I swiped my palm across my forehead and
searched for a black smudge.
Nothing.
My assistant chose that moment
to walk in.
She saw me frowning and her
expression blanked.
“Is there a dead bug on my
forehead?” I asked.
She giggled, “No, there’s no
gnat.”
I give her the stink eye.
“You’re not lying, right? You wouldn’t let me walk around all morning with a
bug on my face to get me back for pranks I pull, right?”
“Nope,” she assures me,
wide-eyed and innocent. She gave me some papers to sign and left with a look
and smile.
Okay, good. No dead bug guts on
my head.
Back to my spreadsheet,
crunching the numbers and wondering.
What if she was lying? I
replayed the giggle and the last second smile. Was it a giggle because her boss
had a smushed bug on his forehead? Or was she just amused that I’d been at war
with a gnat? It could just as easily be either one.
But I’m her boss. She wouldn’t
do that. Of course not.
So content, I went back to work.
There wasn’t a smashed bug on my
face. If there were, she would have told me.
Of course she would.
But somewhere deep in my
consciousness it bothered me that I hadn’t found the gnat’s body. My shallow
consciousness wasn’t as confident either.
My nine o’clock appointment was
in a few minutes. Important client. There’s no bug on my forehead, right?
I told myself this the whole way
to the restroom to check the mirror.
Norm
www.normcowie.com
www.humorwritersofamerica.org
