Day in, day out, she sat in the front office where the elevator doors open and shut, and the creature came and stared at her from the mail chute.
The chute belonged to the building. Her company occupied three of the eight floors, modern looking suites with gray-green carpet and half-dead potted plants. Only she remembered to water them.
The mail chute was old, a long glassed-in box that ran all eight floors. People dropped letters down now and again. She had become accustomed to the whitish gleam at the corner of her eye, the faint thud as the envelope bounced against the chute's sides.
The creature's whiteness hovered. And it had made no sound except to draw breath.
The breathing attracted her attention. Behind the buzz of the computer, the whir of the space heater and the clank of the elevator a different, fainter rhythm developed. She found herself breathing in tune to it and raised her head.
The creature had eyes as blue as the blue of hospital gloves. It was too big to fit through the mail slot. She ignored it.
It tossed a letter out of the slot. It glided across the room and floated downwards beside her desk. She rolled her chair over it, her eyes on her computer screen while the creature floated and watched her and sucked in breath.
The cleaning lady would pick it up.
Her supervisor stopped her in the lobby the next morning."Will you vacuum the office this week? Our cleaning lady is in the hospital."
She started and gaped. Her supervisor had retreated before she could frame a reply. She stared into the trashcan where the letter lay on top of a banana peel and workshop mailings. She could distinguish it by the wheel marks on its white surface.
She slid from behind her desk and walked between cubicle walls to her supervisor's office, a window office with all the shades pulled.
Her supervisor hunched over his desk, muttering, "We already paid that. We already paid that."
"Why is the cleaning lady in the hospital?"
"Heart attack."
"When?"
"Here. Tuesday night. You don't mind about the vacuuming? Just until we find someone else."
"I don't mind."
She retreated to the front desk. The creature waited. Another letter lay beside her chair.
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