The woman used to work in the city, but recently moved to a cottage in the hills after collapsing at work. Her doctor suggested she move base to the mint-aired countryside during her convalescence at the hospital. She produced a doctor’s note at work, and it still had taken much handwringing concern—how they couldn’t set a precedent with this and would it help if she could work in the city but not come to the office—but ultimately, they had given their grudging approval. Her People Lead still brings it up every call.

Now, she resides in her little stone cottage battered by seasonal squalls. Ivy writhes in the grout of its stone veneers, and a person over six-five would need to hunch to make their way into its low-ceilinged snugness. A hearth lies unused in the living room, and rugs carpet the floors during winter. The woman spends most of the day in the cavernous room where she has fastened a desk and chair. White curtains billow from the large-mouthed windows.

There are tales of a beast here, of a bright-eyed predator with a taste for blood. When she looks out the window occasionally, she imagines a flash of moon-lit fur incarnadined with blood, and her heart skips a beat.

The woman creates training materials in the Learning and Development division of a multinational consulting firm. She is assigned a long course, with three modules spread out over three months, right after she returns from her illness. It is to be built on a tool with tiny triggers that function like filaments in a well-knit scarf, but she is having trouble with it. It requires things called variables and every change needs a new alteration in the settings and the colour sometimes changes when she imports files from PowerPoint and eventually it becomes a knotted hairball in the shower drain. It doesn’t help that the electricity lately has begun flickering at the worst moments.

She asks her team’s tech specialist, Aarav, for assistance, but he is not pleased to be asked. He shows her how to create the interaction she is having trouble with in two minutes. When she asks him to repeat himself, he sighs and says he will send her his version of the file so that she can replicate the changes for herself, but she doesn’t know how to do it. All she can do is thank him effusively. The woman understands that no other workplace would accommodate her as hers has. She won’t make them regret it.

He doesn’t send the file to her after the call, so she pings him again without success. The next morning, during their daily scrum call, the Lead has an announcement to make.

‘Also, everyone, I just wanted to reiterate something. Please only ask Aarav for help if it is absolutely necessary. He is a shared resource, so we can’t take too much of his time. It’s come to our attention that some people are asking him to create interactivities for them. This will not stand.’

The woman’s eyes are tennis balls. Are they talking about her? But she didn’t ask Aarav to create the interactivity. He offered to send her his file as a reference.

‘It has also come to our attention that when Aarav is unable to send these interactivities, some of the designers are asking him for updates repeatedly. Once again, Aarav is a shared resource and will have other deliverables, so please don’t waste his time.’

The woman shrinks in her chair. She hadn’t realised that’s what she was doing. But hadn’t she only asked him for an update once? Maybe she misunderstood something vital. Corporate language feels like a den of snakes with its coiled meanings and camouflaged fangs. She still needs to shed her straightforward patois and adopt it.

The curved parenthesis of the moon hangs low in the night sky. The tinny ting of MS Teams interrupts her at 9 PM.

Hi Swapna! Would you mind sending me your WIP? I’d like to do an interim review of it before the actual review, so that you have time to change anything major.

Sure, but it’s not done yet… I have a lot of functional changes to make… Really sorry…

That’s alright! This is just to ensure we are both aligned on our expectations. Please send the file. 😊

Sure, Sharanya. I’ll send it to you.

Cool. Just send it asap? I’d like to take a look first thing in the morning.

……..

Will do. 

The woman’s mouth is dry. The last time she sent a course to Sharanya during an ‘interim review’, she’d been met with so many chilly silences and passive-aggressive remarks that she had wept for hours. The course isn’t even close to ready. She spent several hours that day attempting to create a drag-and-drop interactivity for an assessment question and still failed. She also hasn’t been able to set the triggers for every slide to transition manually to the next.

Her heart is a skittering rabbit caught by a predator’s paw. Her last rubric score,      the parameters they use to judge every course out of ten to justify whether you deserve a 3% raise during the appraisal cycle, was a seven out of ten, a strict good, but not phenomenal.

There’s no helping it then. She’ll stay up late. First, she needs to figure out this drag-and-drop interaction. She tries two more times to do it. The first time, the answers don’t even go into the buckets, shooting off back to their starting point. The second time, an error message is displayed.

She wants to weep. What is she going to do?

At around 1 AM, she hears a serrated growl, a sound straight from the gullet, slobbering for flesh to coat teeth, and flinches. She looks out the window, but there’s nothing there.

Her heart is a loping, scampering thing, so close to her lungs that it feels as if it might leap out of her body. The growl becomes louder. She looks outside, and there is a large gaping maw peeking out of the bushes, sharp-toothed and foaming, a papilla-ridged tongue that can flay skin from flesh with one swipe. The woman screams.

The growling stops, but the woman still feels an ice-cube sliding up and down her back for the rest of the night. She stays up all night without much progress. She sends the course as it is.

Her course is assaulted with a thousand comments. She shrinks further into the chair with each one. The dankness of the room is getting worse. There is black mould growing on the walls.

At 9 PM, her Lead asks to speak to her.

‘I have to say, Swapna, I am a bit disappointed with the state of the course. I expected more progress at this point.’

‘I’m sorry. I was having trouble with the functionality…’

‘It’s not just the functionality, Swapna, though that is the main issue. So many things are missing. The client standards are not fully in place; there are some editorial misses. It’s nowhere close to being ready.’

(Yeah, because it’s a work in progress, as in, it’s a work that is progressing.)

‘I… I understand. I… Er… I was so focused on the functionality that I—’

‘This is where you need to ask for help, Swapna. If you’re having trouble, you could have asked Aarav instead of wasting so much time. Instead of trying and failing over and over again, you could have asked him to show you how it’s done.’

(But I did. I did ask. And you told me never to do it again.)

‘I… Yes, I understand. I’m sorry.’

‘This course’s timelines are also not as packed as our courses usually are. You had plenty of time to work on this.’

(No, I didn’t. I was in the hospital for most of it.)

‘I… Yes, I take full responsibility for this.’

‘Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now. Thankfully, we still have time to clean it up. Spend all of Monday fixing it. I will take another look on Tuesday before the main review.’

(For fuck’s sake, how is this not a main review?)

‘Noted, Sharanya. I’m sorry for this.’

‘It’s okay. Just keep a note of your mistakes and do better next time.’

After the call is over, she sits in her chair in a state of shock. She feels like a towel wrung out of liquid and dignity. How is she fucking up so badly?

At that moment, the electricity goes out. The growls start again, and while she can’t see the animal’s slobbering jaw again, she thinks she sees a flash of silver fur and amber eyes.

She spends the weekend working. She hasn’t slept for the past two nights, but she knows Monday will not be enough to transfigure this course into something her Lead will find acceptable. The room no longer feels cosy, instead feeling like a damp, cold matchbox that’s about to go up in flames.

She fixes the editorial and client standards since that’s something she can do now, but it is dull work. At the end of the day, just as she thinks she’s been feeling jittery for no reason, thunder rips the sky open and a storm batters the house. A conifer arcs down till it kisses the forest floor, and the branch gashes straight through the window in her study, sputtering glass all over her table and floor.

A shard gashes her arm, narrowly missing an artery. As she observes the blood leaking down her arm, thick and viscous like an amphibian’s trail, she wonders if the beast can smell blood, and if it will choose tonight to take her. She does not sleep again.

Her arm hurts. She’s disinfected and bandaged it, but it still sends scattershot spasms through her body. She also needs to clean up the glass, but there isn’t any time. She does her best to fix the course, working through floppy muscles which feel like a gill-less fish. She finally sends the course and hopes for the best.

There isn’t enough time until work begins again in the morning, so she manages with a nap. She is in the midst of unexplored wilderness, bathing in the caloric yolk of the morning, when she hears it: a crooning howl that makes her want to weep and dance at the same time. The howl batters the bucolic landscape with its unassailable authority, from the hedge-rowed roads traversed by city-dwellers, to the rolling hills with their touch-me-nots and bougainvillaea.

The woman follows the croon, forgoing hunger and thirst and all thoughts of work, just to hear more of that sweet, forgiving sound. The shimmering sky turns dark velvet, and the sound turns louder and headier until it finally leads to a vision. He has two large golden eyes, a blood-red beard, and a gaping maw of flesh-tearing teeth. She is happy to finally make his acquaintance.

The fifth night of working on the course from hell drips dust and delirium into the room. The woman coughs and sneezes. She has a dust allergy, but she hasn’t been able to clean anything. Sometime through the night, the electricity stops working, and her eyes sag under the heft of the laptop’s glare. She looks outside now and then, her ears attuned specifically to growls, but he doesn’t arrive.

She works through carpal tunnel and calcified twenty-seven-year-old joints. She double-checks and triple-checks her work. She doesn’t know if the functionality is finally alright. She sat with the tech specialist yesterday as he, for seemingly the millionth time, in a tone that was exasperated and impatient, annotated his answers to her queries with ‘You still don’t know this?’ and ‘How many times do I need to show you until you learn?’ There is no time for breakfast or a shower. She isn’t hungry anyway; by the time she’d skipped a whole day’s worth of meals, her stomach had also sprinted along with her and had helpfully done away with her appetite to aid her professional growth. She finally sends the course to her Lead for the main review.

Now, there is nothing to do but wait, but that nothingness itself is a gravitational force pressing her down to the office chair. She opens the window and stares into the exfoliated air outside. She thinks of the city. The first weekend there was full of desire, and she had danced in high heels until dawn with beautiful strangers in the green promise of a club. She had felt invincible waiting through the city’s thrilling, impatient traffic lights on her way to work every day, unknowing that the city would soon capriciously crush that confidence in its starless fists.

The MS Teams notification pushes her back into the black mould walls.

Hey… Can we get on a call? Would like to discuss your rubric score. 

Sure, Sharanya!

She answers the call.

‘Hi Sharanya, how are you doing?’ she asks, forcing her voice into sing-song prosody.

‘Hi Swapna, how are you? Did you have breakfast?’

(Of course not, you dumb bitch. When was I supposed to?)

‘I did, and you?’

‘I did.’

A beat of silence.

‘I just wanted to give you the rubric score for your latest course.’

‘Right.’

‘How do you think you did? How would you evaluate yourself?’

(I think I did well given that I was working under a bunch of absolute psychos.)

‘Oh, I think I improved from my last course. I think the Instructional Design was sound. I struggled with the tool build a lot, so, er… I also couldn’t pay a lot of attention to my, er, self-review, so I think I missed client standards a bit. So, er, yeah, that’s my takeaway from all this.’

‘Right. Swapna, I think we are aligned on your evaluation of where you struggled. How much do you think you scored?’     

Another beat of silence.

‘An eight.’

‘An eight out of ten?’

‘I… I mean a six out of ten. Sorry.’

(Pathetic.)

‘Right,’ Sharanya says unctuously. ‘We’re almost aligned on your score. There were several areas of improvement. For one, the work-in-progress storyboard had many issues. There were misses in terms of client standards: the alignment of the title to the margin, for example. And as for the instructional design, the layouts you chose weren’t appropriate. And of course, the misses in terms of functionality, for which you failed to seek sufficient assistance in time. That’s why we’ve decided to give you a four out of ten.’

‘A… A four?’

‘Do you disagree with your score?’

‘Well, I… I think it’s a bit unfair to score a work in progress. It’s a work in progress because it’s still being developed, and judging it like it’s a finished product is a bit—’

‘I understand that, but we do this so that there aren’t any hiccups in delivery. If we started reviewing according to timelines, it might not be ready for the client.’

(Then change the fucking timelines.)

‘I also don’t think it’s fair to say I didn’t ask Aarav for help. I did, but then was told not to during the daily call…’

‘Hmm, I don’t recall this happening?’

Her heart slows down to a saunter and wipes the sweat off. The air smells like the day after rain, when chalky-grey earth and yellow-page grass finally have a bit of life shaken into them.

‘Right. I must be misremembering.’

‘This is what I’m talking about, Swapna. We’ve told you time and again that if you’re facing any problems to please come to us. But you’re not being enough of a team player.’

She looks at the black mould clinging to the coving and feels her filthy matted hair. How has she been living like this?

‘Right.’

‘Do you think this is a fair score?’

‘No, I don’t,’ Swapna says, smiling placidly at the screen. ‘But it doesn’t matter anymore. I am putting down my papers.’

She logs off work at 6 PM that day and sleeps dreamlessly. 

Swapna wakes early to the hymns of treepies capering through the unbroken windows, daylight just about breaking through resting clouds. She enters the kitchen and opens her fridge to find no eggs and stale bread. She does have some oats and decides that they will do for breakfast. She brews a tea with fennel seeds, ginger, turmeric and mint to enjoy in the garden. The hot wafts of spice sieve through the cool petrichor of the earth. She sips her tea to the staccato of the birdsong and the drip-drip-drip of vestigial rain.

After tea, she makes breakfast.  She does not have milk, so she boils the oats in water and adds some bananas. She eats it quietly over the kitchen table.  She then takes a long shower with the now-opened luxury body care products her sister sent over for her birthday. Her skin smells of rosewater, and her hair of vanilla.

She then goes to the study. The branch of the neem tree hangs out of the window like a hand stuck in a narrow-mouthed jar. Spiders have made themselves at home in the mildewed corners, spinning gossamer cobwebs across the ceiling like an aureole. A sparrow has darted in through the broken window and is trapped. It flashes across the room in a panicked flurry. She opens one of the unaffected windows, and it flies into the dawn sky.

Swapna cleans up the glass shards from the floor with a Swiffer duster. She looks at the antiseptic walls and decides it will need to be repainted, as will the dreary study table. She scrubs away at the black mould with a cloth dipped in hydrogen peroxide, but it’s still not enough.

Swapna has not stepped into the home library since the roach infestation. Today, she walks up the flight of stairs to the first floor, armed with pesticide, and opens the door to a sunlit room. The windows are open, and the chintz curtains sway cheekily. The light hits the birchwood credenza to leave an opal sheen. When she checks one of the books on the shelves, it opens to yellowed, old-paper brilliance.  There is not a single insect in the room.

The weather is pleasant, even at noontime; this is the protracted benefit of the sky knitting itself closed after tearing at the seams for the past few days. She goes on a hike because she can now. The route is one of the many fern-faced veins connecting the pastoral heartland, leading to a river overlooking the mountains. The ground is boggy and reedy, but there is a crisp loveliness about the land. Conifers line the path, arching upwards to enshrine the noon sun. The trees sway sibilantly to the wind, the only sound she can hear amidst the crunch of her shoes on rushes. She is almost there.

She can see the river when she feels it—that gooseflesh your skin raises when you’re being watched. She looks back to see amber eyes among the sedges. The beast bounds forward to stand in front of her. It is the first time she has seen it in the light. The beast—no, the wolf—is tall and sinewy, but it doesn’t smell like blood. It smells like a fetid street dog.  It snarls at her with its rabid, frothing maw, but Swapna is not afraid. Her pulse is steady. She stands still and stares.

The wolf ambles towards her. Its wet snout touches her forehead. She feels the rumble of its low growl. Its eyes are a sunny gold.

It sniffs her, blinks slowly, and tilts its head. Then, it turns around and walks back into the forest.