David Bronson

A young man sits at a desk in a small, nondescript, windowless office in downtown Boston. He has just arrived, a new temp worker, just a few months out of college. Two superiors hover around, both female, both blonde. The younger of the two, just a few years older than the boy, is mildly attractive, and a decent conversationalist. The older one, fair-skinned, slender, and more than amply endowed, looks and acts like the stereotype of a 1950’s airline stewardess.

Within a few weeks both females take an unmistakable liking to the young newcomer. Nothing overtly sexual; one is married, the other engaged, and both seem to possess an uncommonly high degree of moral fiber relative to the modern-day society in which they live. But our boy nevertheless starts to feel the faint tingling of a particular, familiar sensation, at once thrilling and endlessly comfortable. It arises from before memory, like something written in the code of his DNA. It is the one feeling that, if he’s being honest, trumps all others; adoring female attention.

But it is stopped dead before it can be felt by all but the deepest and most resilient layers of his consciousness. In its place arise pain, anger and fear. It is a feeling that he no longer trusts.

Before long, the young man listens to headphones for the better part of each workday, as he mindlessly performs his duties.

A few months go by. Some days he actually falls to pieces inside. Not at a memory of her, or at the sudden immediate pang of irreplaceable-ness and finality. But slowly, listening each day to the throbbing, repeating, vibrato’d guitar hymn of the Rolling Stones’ Let It Loose, he begins to feel a distant ember of hope returning; the faintest stirrings of reassurance that it will all, eventually, turn out ok.