[SHORT STORY] The Big Office

 New office rented at an incredibly good price. What could go wrong?

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The office was on the second floor; the landlord lived on the first. Halfway along the concrete path that connected the house to the sidewalk, the staircase to my new workspace began.

The landlord did not smile as he let me in. His brow was relaxed, and his gaze suggested he was in a hurry. His price was much lower than the others’.

“You’d better stay here for a while,” he joked. “The previous tenants didn’t last long. The first stayed three weeks and then willingly paid the penalty for breaking the lease; as for the second, I looked for him two months later and couldn’t find him.”

But I was more focused on the price than on the background. So I simply signed, paid the deposit, and received the keys. When we went upstairs, he let me open the door.

The space was deeper than it had appeared from outside, or even from the first floor. Two things caught my attention. First, the desk: on it there was a pen holder, and outside of it lay a pencil and a pen on top of a sheet of paper filled with notes. To one side stood a broom and a dustpan; it wasn’t spotless, but it was well kept. I initially thought of the landlord as responsible for the cleaning, but upon seeing the paper I wondered: would he really use the office he usually rents out?

The second was the curtain at the back. It fit the setting, except for the intense light spilling out from beneath it, as if there were no glass door behind it. Thinking some fresh air would do me good, I pulled it open.4

Before me appeared an immense garden —the largest I had ever seen— with green foliage everywhere. From a tree hung what looked like a large frog with very long arms, and from a nearby bush emerged a round creature covered in dark brown fur with five evenly spaced beige limbs, followed by a man in his forties in a shirt and tie.

“Bernie, don’t go too far,” he said.