The office cubicles were busy now. Like insects building a colony, the office workers busied themselves with their daily rituals. The sounds of printers humming, copy machines laboring, and the quiet murmur of conversations surrounded Leo. He heard none of it. The sounds of Paula’s last words to him reverberated in his head. The downward sneer of her sterile mouth. The hard glint in her unforgiving eyes. And her words echoed. He stared into space, seeing only her, and in his hands he held a pencil. He bent the pencil slightly with his fists. The pressure on the pencil was building slowly and the wood was beginning to crack minutely; small yellow splinters danced to the surface at the pressure mark. It had reached its breaking point. The pencil snapped. So did Leo.
A rage consumed him. A rage that could not be held in. A sound escaped his throat, and a secretary passing by on her way to the water cooler stopped and stared at him. Her expression was akin to that of a little girl who has just found a razor blade in her Halloween apple. Leo stared at her and growled. She ducked her head and hurried away. Leo sprang to his feet and looked around wildly, looked for some way to vent this anger before it swallowed him whole. He stared down at his desk, the laminate peeling away from the cheap mass-produced surface, and it seemed to suddenly symbolize everything that had ever gone wrong in his life. Another growl escaped his throat and he overturned the desk. He did not simply push it over, but flipped it, sent it spinning into the air. As it crashed down, the cheap pressboard splintered and cracked apart. Not satisfied, Leo kicked out at the walls of his cubicle, and the cheap material buckled. The office grew dead quiet except for the sounds of Leo’s rage. The workers interrupted their tasks and stared at him. One young man cowered under his desk, sure that Leo would soon pull out an automatic weapon and begin gunning people down.
“What are ya? Buncha good little robots?” he shouted at them. He shook the cubicle walls violently, sending them heaving back and forth. The metal strips that held the cubicle walls together began to twist and come apart. The walls began to wobble and shake and then started to tumble down, and soon, like dominoes, all the cubicles fell over and came apart.