Member-only story
Complicit
Short story
Oge clicked her heels under the table. Her eyes followed the second hand on the wristwatch of a man seating two chairs away from the head of the table where her boss Ms. Quincy sat like a presiding overlord. It was twenty seconds and seven minutes past five, and they’d been at it since two.
There were six other people in the room, nestled in plush leather chairs around a large brown faux-oak boardroom table. They wore expensive suits and ties and all carried an air of importance like an invisible halo that followed them everywhere they went. Oge, had seen two of them before on TV. They were men and women who spoke good English, used phrases like actionable points, responsibility matrix peppered their sentences with copious amounts of three-alphabet abbreviations, and started every third sentence with basically.
Oge let her eyes drift across the POP ceilings to the spotlights buried in the white twinkling like forgotten stars admiring their reflections on the polished high gloss table. Besides taking notes for her boss who was chairing the meeting, Oge could easily have been part of the furniture as she neither spoke nor was spoken to.
At one end of the room, a flipchart on a tripod stood at akimbo. It looked tired with its dog-eared edges. On the pine cabinet in the opposite corner, silverware and china teapots guarded a…
