This is how your week goes
Heather Holdaway
It is Monday morning. The door to your work weighs 1000 kilograms. You have a secret, special PIN you must enter before you can open the door to your work. It is your date of birth. There is a guard outside the room where the door and PIN pad are.
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If the guard looks up from her Sudoku and winks under her cap, you should progress to the door and enter your PIN.
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If the guard doesn’t look up from her Sudoku, you should back out slowly, return to bed, and try all over again after a power nap.
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If the guard looks up from her Sudoku and fingers her Colt while leaning back in her chair and smiling at you emptily, you should garotte yourself on the spot with the employee-standard piano wire you received neatly bundled in your induction pack, next to the agency-branded pen and the single, agency-branded condom.
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If the guard stands smartly, gives a Roman salute, and clicks her heels together, you are in the wrong job and should quit immediately.
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If the guard pushes her seat back, stands, and walks toward you with soft, slow footfalls over the navy carpet, taking off her cap and blurring into either your grandfather or your ex, you should square your shoulders and watch them approach under a thick eyebrow, like you are a large, relaxed Newfoundland dog. When you have figured out what they are, you should greet them appropriately: a chaste kiss three times on his cheeks, or a decidedly not-so-chaste kiss on her open mouth.
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If you can’t get to the room where the guard waits because your place of work is being fire-bombed for ethical reasons, you should go home and work on your own Sudoku For Beginners book.
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If the guard stands like she is water and you are a riverbed, you have found yourself miraculously at the right place at the right time and something, your heart maybe, will slot into place, will throw itself into reverse and parallel park into the last remaining spot left on Earth with a competent hand around the back of its passenger’s headrest. You should forget this job, because loving isn’t a job.
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If the guard stands languidly, gives you the once-over and smirks after the fact, you should know you cannot get away with washing dry-clean-only clothes at home. You should take off your shirt and leave to get a new, overpriced one with your stomach and bra-ed breasts and shoulders exposed on the street.
Then your teeth will fall out, all of them plus some you didn’t even know you had, all your teeth will fall from different parts of you like scree cascading down the many sides of one mountain. You will look down to watch them accumulate and realise you’ve inexplicably grown an extra, soft sex, and when you look up you will realise you’re in the middle of delivering an unfamiliar presentation to your boss. You will not be wearing pants by this point; instead of waking up, you will stand there at the front of the board room shivering in your wretched kneecaps, a cool breeze around your second cunt, and make soft, gummy sounds about KPIs.
***
If the guard stands but doesn’t come out from behind her desk, and says your name the way your mother has started saying it lately, with apprehension, you will be transported to the kitchen of your childhood. Your mother, papery and luminous like a Japanese lantern, will stand silently in the middle of the kitchen. She will be blindfolded with your dad’s tie, the one you and your brothers got him for Father’s Day with Tweety Bird printed on it. She will be holding scales with upraised hands. You must look at her swaying slightly with the weight of the scales, and accept she gave it her best shot.
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Heather Holdaway is a graduate of the IIML Masters Programme at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington. Her work has previously appeared in Turbine, The Spinoff, Landfall, and was recently shortlisted in the Frank Sargeson Short Story Competition 2025. She is currently based in Ōtepoti, Aotearoa New Zealand.
