On an ordinary day in an ordinary week along an ordinary causeway. Let me start that over again. I was chatting them up. So show me chatting them up, stupid.

“Did you see how he did that?” I said as way of introduction. I’m my third cup in on a four-cup day, and I’m wired. I’m talking to three colleagues in the hallway. The meeting was a big success and we were going to celebrate in the cafeteria. I promised to buy the team lunch, and after that meeting, I was only too happy to fulfill my promise.

She was there. She was tall and blonde. Her hair curly and long and always present. No matter which way you looked at her, no matter what she was saying, it was there. You couldn’t avoid it. It wasn’t like her blue eyes or her straight teeth. They were there and I would lose myself for hours in them. It was more than that. There are some people whose entire presence makes you feel that there is something right in the world. That the world was not just created from a random bundle of energy, but was created with a purpose in mind, an end goal which the energy hurtled to at warp speeds. It’s not so much a waste of space if there’s not a purpose, but a waste of that immense amount of energy and time.

And at this moment she was it. She was what the universe was created for. I knew that the way the prophets must have known the truths. She laughed and her hair shook with such power that it blinded me.

We weren’t alone. Samuel was there. He was always there, always a step behind me, always waiting. I worked for Samuel. It wasn’t that he held that against me. He was the nicest man, a family man with a straight set of morals that wouldn’t allow him to accept the smallest kick back for anything from anybody. Vendors would throw gifts at him, and he would send them all back, thanking them profusely, but sure that it would be wrong on some moral level for him to accept any of the gifts. He wore a straight tie and straight slacks and every day would work as hard as he could, only to race home and work as hard as he could there as well. He was an upright guy, the type of guy that you couldn’t help adore and wish there were more like him. He was a great guy to work for. He was demanding but reasonable, he wanted the work done. And he never took credit for any of his employee’s work.

I’d worked for Samuel for five years, and they were the most productive five years of Samuel’s life. He told me as much. I was flattered, of course. This was my first job and my first boss, and Samuel had been working since before I entered high school.

And then there was Jane. Jane worked for Samuel as well and was overweight and short. She reminded me of those Norwegian trolls, the type with the frizzy hair and the squat bodies. He clothing all seemed to be cut from one piece of cloth and sewed back together in such a straight pattern that the skirt and the shirt might as well never have been cut. She squealed when she spoke. Excitement brought upon higher registers, and Jane was always excited about something. Even the small happy things excited Jane. She would find an extra dollar in her purse and she would exclaim her good fortune, before turning around and wondering who had stolen the rest of her money.

I stared at her and I imagined myself swinging my laptop and bashing her head in. Before the thought was finished in my head I knew I shouldn’t have thought it. It’s not the type of thought that normal people have, at least normal people who share their thoughts. But there it was. I pictured the black plastic top to my laptop crack across her forehead. I saw the blood spurt across the cover and drip onto the mouse pad. Her head would snap backwards before her chin bounced forward and onto her chest with a crack. It was not the type of thoughts anyone should have.

There is a thin cotton string that attached us all to sanity. Most people don’t realize it’s there. They think they are firmly in touch with their sanity and nothing could separate them. The separation happens more often than you think. Johnson was a sales clerk. I knew him mostly as a blue suited blur that moved quickly through our cubicles to the coffee room. He had few friends in the office, but he was not a loner. He would come to work late in the morning and his eyes would be blackened from a night spent drinking with his real friends, the friends that he didn’t work with.

On the third Wednesday of March, Johnson broke through the locks that protected the red door that led to the roof of the three-story office complex. He walked to the edge of the roof and stepped off the roof. He fell three stories onto the beautifully manicured lawn. He died on impact. It turned out that the string that held his sanity in check had snapped the previous night. He probably didn’t even realize it. It was a normal Tuesday night. He joined his roommates, two of which were still in school, on an elongated six to seven year undergraduate program, for a night at the local bars. They didn’t think of themselves as townies. Some of them were still in school, and if you were a student, you couldn’t be a townie. It was one of the unwritten rules of judging those who weren’t in school and happened to live in the backwater town that your college called its home.