A hum filled the air with an industrial flavor. I didn't care for the metal tang in my ear. But the boss said stay in the corridor, so in the corridor I must stay. He didn't specify where or how exactly I should stay, so I stayed slouched against the wall, my feet braced wide apart. The floor was wet-steel slippery. I didn't feel like introducing my ass to the floor just yet.

Not just yet, I reflected grimly. So the boss had heard about "the incident". Figures. Who hasn't? Even my old lady neighbor, Mrs. Trinidad, thought she should tell me that I should apologize to them. To them? To whom? I wanted to question the geezer. But in the end, her rheumatic hand spasms softened my heart and I let her pass with just one threatening poke of my butterfly knife against her soft old lady belly.

Waiting was never one of my favorite things to do. While I held up the wall, there were so many other things I could have been doing. There were plots to hatch, crimes to mastermind. Waiting made my brain stupefy. Stupefy. You like that? It's my word of the day. The boss always told me that I should have something to fall back on once the plan fell through. Yeah, he kinda always knew that the plan would never work out in the long run. So he encouraged me to learn stuff. New things like words of the day and nice poetry.

Superheroes bantered with arch-villains before hauling them off to jail. The boss was a visionary. He believed that even henchmen deserved to utter a nice turn of phrase once in a while too.

But that had all been before "the incident".

"The incident" where one henchman got too smart for his own good.

So now I had to stew in a metallic miasma of fear and the hum of cutting machines. Waiting.

Forgiveness is a prima donna, a coy virgin, a broken heart.

The sound of a doorknob turning was as sudden as a gong. I straightened up my posture and brushed some dirt off my shoulders. Nerves were suddenly too exposed. My stomach was a hornet's nest.

It was time to woo the cook.