Meet the Boss: A Dialogue Story (Curiosities)

This story can be found in my collection Curiosities:

Curiosities: An Eclectic Collection by CJ Carlin, Paperback | Barnes & Noble®

 “Good morning! I’ve been told it’s your day to meet the boss. I’m here to take you upstairs and give you the spiel.”

“This is one of the weirdest places I have ever worked. I expected to meet the boss on my first day.”

“You don’t know weird yet, my friend. But you will. Don’t grab anything, especially a notepad. The boss doesn’t like people writing down what she says. But put on your jacket; she keeps it cold up there.”

“You said something about a spiel?”

“Yeah, we found out through trial and error that it is best to prepare you for your first meeting with her. Our boss is…unique.”

“I read that she has one of the highest IQs in the country.”

“Oh, she’s brilliant. Personally, I have a theory that it’s her intelligence that led to…everything else. She’s just too smart to deal with humanity; we’re a bunch of chimps compared to her. She spends a lot of time alone. It’s probably not good for her.”

“You’re making me nervous.”

“Nothing to be nervous about. She’s perfectly nice. I mean, you don’t have to worry about impressing her; you probably won’t. But she considers her employees almost like her own kids. She thinks our relative stupidity is endearing. It’s just that she can be kind of intense and she has some weird quirks.”

“Quirks like what?”

“Mounted to one wall of her office is a row of fake skulls, each one labeled with the name of somebody she fired for pissing her off.”

“Creepy, but not too scary.”

“She also collects venomous spiders. She has specimens encased in Lucite in glass cases all over the room.”

“At least they’re dead.”

“She used to keep them alive, until one got out. Anyway, that isn’t even the weirdest thing about her.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. What is the weirdest thing about her?”

“When she meets with people, she likes to wear prosthetic horns and sit on a throne made of lab-grown human flesh, bone, and skin. The throne is kept alive by a lab-grown beating human heart embedded in the back and powered by a bio-battery. She designed and built the whole thing herself in secret, and then had a special room constructed for it. Try not to stare at her. Good luck!”