Shadowed Soul by John Spagnoli Page A

alongside the dinner plate I cracked the night before, I noticed Bailey’s food and water bowls.  They rested on a plastic mat we had bought to protect the floor from the shrapnel of his over-enthusiastic eating.  One bowl bore a cartoon dog with a big smile.  The sight stuck me in the heart like a rusty spike.  I needed my wellspring, my wife, my son, my dog.  I could not do this alone.  I needed their warmth and compassion.  I decided to return to them this evening as soon as I finished work.  And if the offer that I stay with them was there then I would snap at it, receive it in my arms and embrace the light that they provided.
    This feeling of acceptance brought with it a sense of hope and happiness that meant that the Shadowed Soul did not have such a hold on me this morning.  My spiral downwards had abated.  I showered and shaved and went to work with a feeling of elation and happiness.
    “You’re twenty minutes late, Thomas,” said my manager scowling at me as I entered the office.
    “Sorry, Steve, rough night,” I said. I stole a little joy from the expression on his face when I called him by his first name.  He hated first names, even though he was only two years older than I.  For some reason he felt we should all call him Mr. Mitchell , even though company policy supported that team work strengthened with first names.
    “Thomas, that’s twenty minutes that you’ve effectively stolen from Quexinor ,” explained Steve with a pained expression.  “This company has 35,000 employees around the country.  What would happen if they all decided they’d had a rough night?  How much time would be stolen under those circumstances?”  Steve was on a roll, rightful but pedantic.
    “Twenty-three-thousand-three-hundred hours would be lost,” I answered smugly demonstrating my math skills were sharper than his.  “That equates to 79 working days, but I’ve got a new baby, Steve.”  As if I had been up all night feeding a newborn like a saint instead of feeding on BDSM like a pariah.
    “Thomas, I…”
    “Steve, I’m sorry, it won’t happen again,” I said modestly.
    “Congratulation,” said Steve awkwardly, not really caring that I was a new father. “I’m glad we had this little chat, Thomas.”
    Steve ambled back to his office as I made my way to my soulless work zone and logged on.  I hated my job; it was another fragmentary thing in my life that seemed to serve no purpose other than to make my life harder than it should be.  I spent eight hours a day at a computer checking data for errors and questioning the data suppliers when I found discrepancies.  An excruciatingly bland process it was composed of a dull cycle of message after message and screens and screens of data. Quexinor farmed out their services to various pharmaceutical companies to clean the data that was collected during their own clinical trials.  During grad school, I had fallen into this job hoping to establish a future with a powerful company.  I fantasized about working on a study designed to cure clinical depression.  However, it had not happened.  I had worked on myriad studies and while my colleagues found empathy in the studies, I had none.  My colleagues seemed able to correlate what they were doing on a daily basis with individuals who suffered from various illnesses.  They recognized their own value in this job as a means to improve the lives of many people.  Already, I felt so far removed from people that anything resembling empathy for unnamed subjects in Russia or Germany was never going to come from me.
    However, there were times when the sheer repetition of the job had been a comfort.  I found solace in the list of tasks that needed to be completed by a certain time.  It distracted me from the burden of my own issues.  Guaranteed eight hours of mind-numbing freedom, it was an escape.  Unchallenged by rote tasks, much of the time though I found myself bored out of my mind.  I was wasting my