Continuing with Flash Fiction February, this piece is for Day 18 of the Writer's Digest challenge: "write about a daydream." In this short-short story, park ranger Matt daydreams about working in an office.
Matt spends two hours cleaning up the picnic area. A family rented it Sunday afternoon for a birthday party and, despite the contract they signed, defiled the space with trash and destruction.
He clenches his jaw as he collects paper plates, soda bottles, and ripped-up pieces of birthday wrapping paper from around the clearing. He disassembles the edifices of logs, sticks, and rocks built by hyperactive little boys, and fills in the rivulets of soupy mud they managed to carve in their two hours occupying the space.
As he’s putting his shovel back in his truck, Samantha pulls up along side him in hers. She drove deeper into the park this morning, checking out reports of a rock slide on the Boulder Trail. “How’s it going Matt?” she yells cheerfully through her window.
He shakes his head. “You should have seen this place.”
“A mess, huh?”
“What is wrong with people? I hate this job sometimes.”
Real concern flashes across Samantha’s freckled face. In her khaki shirt and olive jacket, her pale red hair pulled back in a ponytail, she’s prettier than ever, and Matt hates to be the one to dampen her customary joy. But he can’t bring himself to fake it today.
“Hey, it could be so much worse,” she says, trying to encourage him. “Don’t forget how lucky we are!”
“Are we?” He rests his arm on the open passenger side window of her truck. What he’d really like to do is to climb inside and crawl into Samantha’s arms, take comfort in the cocoon of her optimism. But Matt is a professional, and he’s taken enough sexual harassment training to in his short career to stop himself.
“Every day we work under a canopy of redwood trees. Our office is this ancient forest, and we’re its caretakers. We get to spend our days immersed in the fragrance of pine and musty wood, to the soundtrack of birdsong and rushing waters, the crunch of leaves and pine needles under our feet. We protect the habitat of hundreds of species. How could it get any better than this?”
Matt opens his mouth to offer the counterpoint to this. But Samantha keeps going.
“A lot of people in the world daydream about leaving their dreary office jobs to become park rangers. Do you know that? Most people would kill to have our jobs.”
He won’t admit it to Samantha, because she’ll never look at him the same way again. But Matt has the opposite daydream. While he’s cruising the roads around the park, patrolling for arsonists or lost hikers, he daydreams about an office job. About a clean, white desk covered photos—of Matt toasting with his best friends, of his nieces, of Matt and Samantha dressed up for his office holiday party, him in a suit, her in a velvet black dress that sets off her beautiful hair—and a stack of blank notebooks he’ll fill up day by day. An ergonomic chair. A keyboard that makes a pleasant clacking sound, the smooth and satisfying feeling of tapping productively.
He daydreams about filling out expense reports, entering neat, definitive numbers into spreadsheet cells, writing well-formed emails to cultivated mailing lists of stakeholders. About sipping hot coffee, freshly poured from an office kitchen espresso machine instead of from a Thermos he lugs around with him all day, and sitting at a conference table with other office workers in a meeting.
(What do people in offices talk about in meetings? he wonders at this point in his daydream. Maybe other meetings. A meeting to plan another meeting sounds like pure luxury to Matt.)
He dreams of climate controlled rooms and perfect temperatures, neutral odors, wastebaskets emptied by someone else overnight. Of leisurely lunch hours with coworkers, gossiping about other coworkers, instead of rushed tuna sandwiches and forced earnestness in the park office break room.
He went to school for forest management, though, and now he’s stuck. He doesn’t even know what he’d rather be doing—the actual substance of his days in an office never comes up in his daydream, only the trappings of that life—and he feels paralyzed, not knowing how to get from here to there. All Matt knows is that while other people in the world sit in offices daydreaming about spending their days in nature, Matt would do anything to trade places with them.
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