Prose                                       
The Parasites
By Charlie Beck

    We never even noticed until it was too late. That’s the worst part for me now. They say it can be treated early on. It is curable, but only in the early stages before those things gets too big and too numerous. I always just thought he was tired or really busy or maybe a little sick or something. To be fair, that’s what he always told us. What wasn’t to believe? At any given time most of the rest of us were usually feeling the same. Now the company has put protocols in place in an attempt to stop this kind of thing from happening again. Now we’re not allowed to say we’re tired or busy or sick. I’m required to go into more depth if someone asks how I’m doing. It sort of backfired though, because most people have just stopped asking how everyone else is doing. None of us have time to listen.
  Bradford was his name. He worked in sales too at the next cubical over from me. We got along famously, right from the very beginning. You know, we were always poking fun at one another, challenging each other to make that next big sale. We ended up quite the teammates. We put up some pretty big numbers together. The Calidago account- that was one of ours. And the Whitley sale.
    Anyway, we ended up becoming friends outside of work too. We’d stop and get a drink sometimes on our way home. Our wives got along and we had kids around the same age. It made sense.
    Like I said, I noticed changes beforehand, but I didn’t think much of them. He always looked like he was really dragging. His color was a little off and he lost some weight. Nothing huge though. He seemed a little distant at times, but everyone is sometimes; I didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t until he’d been like that for a couple months that I thought something might actually be really wrong.
    Even still, I figured it might be something wrong with me. Maybe he had always been like this and I had just never noticed. Or maybe he was mad at me over something or things were hard at home. Maybe we were just growing apart a little bit. It’s hard to say with these things.
    The first time I noticed something seriously wrong was about three weeks before that infamous day. Jane and I were pregnant again and we had just found out the day before. I was understandably excited. Bradford was already at his desk when I got there, and I yelled out a greeting to him. I told him I had big news that he’d be really interested in.
    He turned toward me and it gave me goose bumps. There was something so different about him, something so wrong and yet, I just couldn’t quite identify it. It was on the proverbial tip of my tongue. Whatever it was, it really creeped me out. I tried not to show my sudden, seemingly inexplicable disgust. We just sat staring at each other for a couple seconds. I finally regained myself and told him Jane and I were going to have another baby.
    His response was unwelcome, to say the least. People get happy when you’re having a baby. That’s good news. It’s supposed to be good news, anyway. And for us it most definitely was. We’d been trying for a few months with no success but now we were there. This was my friend and I expected him to be happy for me. But he wasn’t. He didn’t insult me or anything. In some ways I think that would have been better. He just looked at me vaguely, uncaring and irritated and made some noncommittal grunt like he was waiting for me to finish the thought. The way he vocalized it was so callous, so awful… it honestly made me a little bit sick to my stomach.