a good harvest

A good harvest. A name chosen by management to instill a sense of calm in those of us required to compartmentalize every moment of productivity or inactivity during the day. It is a mechanism for us to think about colorful gourds and hot apple cider instead of leaving. A word that suggests motion or change or bounty, but we all knew the seasons never changed under our fluorescent lights and there was very little to be taken from our tainted farmlands.

They announce the new system, requirements and processes through a high importance email. It settles like fertilizer amongst our soft skulls and sunken eyes. The white noise machines provide an ideal environment for the weed to grow, for unquestioning compliance to wrap its vines around our arms and legs. We allow its dull sickle to collect time from our dwindling lot because there is nothing else to do.

Our fingers rest limply on our keyboards, eager to fill another barrow for management to scrutinize, consume and evacuate. We want to prove our value, to prove there is still something to take. We want to appear fruitful, vital, and still capable of being depleted. We receive a modest paycheck in exchange for the pillaging and perpetually yearn for the next reaping.

The program rakes and toils away at our skin and minds like a dutiful farmer prepping his land. Extracting the flesh it deems ripe, pulling at detaching retinas as though it were picking unblemished apples. It attaches us to oxen plows and drags us through gravel, depositing more of our blood into the land. We in turn click and type, submitting reports of little consequence and taking contrived pride of our pathetic contribution.

Nothing is replenished, nothing is replanted.

We are a single use farm, providing what we can until eventually being recycled into soil for the decorative plastic plants strewn about the office. One day we’ll die in our ergonomically correct desk chairs, our legacy contained in the numbers we enter into the screen.

A new crop will be planted soon, whoever those people are will also be harvested and I hope their sacrifice is enough.