Dull Boy Jack (1)

Tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks, frozen at their computers, eyes fixated on screens, hands chained to keyboards and elbows glued to tabletops, lips pressed to taciturn lips, tongs bitten off, teeth ground down, I observed my coworkers at their computers, their eye bulbs and fingers in full concentration, no trace of the Neanderthal instinct of the genes that shaped their eyebrows and yokes, nothing of the evolutionary traits that selected out of the genetic variation these limbs hanging from torsos and heads. I imagined a group of apes in a thick forest gathering fruits, and looked around at the jungle of gray and beige office furniture in which we sat fated for most of the days of our lives.