The sun shone on the mirrored edifice that was Rural Massive, award-winning architectural firm based in Ulysses, KS. Thirty mighty floors of innovation and industry, with no competition for several dozens of miles around: these conspired to make it the mighty empire it represented for over forty years. Allan Truesdell, CEO and President; Cody Pushard, Chief Creative Officer and Chair; and Neil Riggleman, Chief Financial Officer and acting VP--three friends with a dream and a talent for business, who not only literally constructed the living environments for countless farming families but restored government offices and many historic landmarks of the region.

Not included in this roster, evidently, was Renata Benjamin, a hard-working vertebra in the spine of Regional Development. Monday morning found her tucked away at her cube, the assistant to the head of property development in Grant County, hanging up her plaid jacket to prepare for the day. The weather had started to cool, cloudless sunshine notwithstanding, and she had to dress for it: deep crimson turtleneck and black wool slacks were set off by her wavy raven hair, tidily (if unimaginatively) parted down the middle and falling around her thick-rimmed spectacles. Renata was a sweet young woman on the distal end of "youth," a little dumpy around the middle and plenty lonely. She had her assets: a wry sense of humor, a comprehensive grasp of modern cinema, and full, round breasts dwarfed only by her full, round butt. While she did not consider these last two to be desireable qualities, they were nonetheless appreciated by some of the older, hornier, lonelier men on her floor. Consequently, she focused on her work and poured nearly everything she had into it.

"Hey, Ray," she mumbled, greeting the balding man in the cube next to hers. "Here are those qualitative reports you asked for on Friday." He only grinned at her and let his eyes wander until she left.

She shuffled to the next cubicle. "Hey Joe. I found some of your printouts by the copier, here." He leered as though intending to burn a hole through the front of her dense turtleneck. "You really shouldn't be reading that kind of e-mail at work, and you really shouldn't be printing them out, for anyone to find." He chuckled at her as she turned away.

"Morning, Bess." Renata waved to the porky hausfrau across from Joe's cube. It wasn't all men here, but Bess was small comfort. Her piggy eyes flickered to acknowledge Renata's presence only for a moment, and she returned to shuffling papers around as though her sausage-like fingers struggled to handle them all at once.

Renata didn't bother greeting Gretchen, the hot young project manager who started a month ago. Mornings were her time for phone calls--not with clients, but with every single one of her friends, all of whom went out clubbing every night, and all of whom raised one or two children, sired by men who were no longer in their lives but served no end of problems for every last one of them. Gretchen had no concept of "indoor voice" and shrieked and cackled and swore with all of her over-the-phone friends, commiserating and gossiping until shortly before lunch. Wordlessly, Renata deposited a small stack of manila folders on the end of Gretchen's desk and slipped away.

She returned to her cubicle and slumped in her chair. Its decade-old hydrolics wheezed petulantly with her full weight. Her desk echoed with the twin thumps of her elbows, as she cupped her cheeks and sighed. The walls of her cube were decorated with pinned-up postcards featuring famous works of art and the foreign museums in which they resided. It had long been her dream to travel the world and see these amazing things, but one thing after another--broken car, hospital bills from mild endometriosis, round-trip plane tickets to a family funeral in Florida during the peak season--prevented her savings account from amounting to very much.

There's got to be more than this, she thought, gazing moonily at a 3" x 5" rendering of Van Gogh's "Starry Night." The office floor buzzed with phone calls, printouts, ventilation and conversation, but Renata's imagination was trained upon the swirling sky over Holland, however momentarily.

"Benjamin!" barked a familiar voice, with all the modest subtlety of a Gestapo officer. "Wake up!" A stack of folders slapped the desk beside her with vengeful zeal. Max Schanz was her supervisor, a self-styled ball-buster who didn't cut the ladies any slack. His gut strained the pearly buttons on his dingy Geoffrey Beane shirt, where the tie didn't cover it, a hemispherical gut that hovered intrusively beside Renata's head. She sat up and spun slightly to face him, her generous bosom swaying slightly.

Schanz was such a cookie-cutter rendering of a petty little boss, no further effort will be wasted on describing him. You've seen him a hundred times before.

"No time for lazing about, Benjamin!" It seemed a personal goal to make her jump with the sheer abrasion of his speaking voice, but Renata kept herself under control. "Stano and Hickok just came in this morning, and I want them processed before Moscow this afternoon! Moscow!" Schanz seethed above her, his paunch trembling threateningly before her defiant breasts, then stormed away to kiss some ass or slack off in the break room or some other stereotypical behavior in accord with his trite motif. In his wake, another office drone breezed by her cube, tallish, with short red hair and a grey sweater, sulking off on some nameless mission.

Moscow, Kansas, she mused to herself, while I'm in gulag in my own personal Siberia. She picked up the folders and spun to face her workstation, when something slipped off her desk. It was only a motion in the corner of her eye, but when she turned to find it, whatever it was, it had vanished. That patch of  her desk was empty, and nothing was on the open floor.

Piqued (and bored), Renata set the folders by her keyboard and scooted her chair back to peek under her desk. Not much light fell here but she couldn't see anything out of the ordinary, just the cables to her computer and a large paperclip. She left the paperclip there to see how well the after-hours janitorial staff cleaned their cubicles: that paperclip had been lying at its particular position for a month and a half.

She started in on the Stano account, slowly scanning over the dense paperwork that represented reports in aggregate of projects underway and potential leads for more. Thank God someone else is doing that legwork, she thought, eyes glazing. I never could.

Something definitely ran over her shoe.

Yelping, she kicked with her legs and her chair shot backward a short distance on the industrial carpeting. Mice? A rat? What the fuck? Folders were thrown to the floor to make a loud enough noise to scare off whatever it might have been. Her eyes darted left and right while her mind tried to recreate the sensation: there was a light tapping across her hard leather shoe. She felt that in her toes. It ran from left to right... kind of from where she saw the object fall, off toward Ray's cube. Good, Ray can deal with it, and she slowly allowed herself to breathe again. She couldn't see anything under her desk, but she was seriously freaked out and she took her time reassembling the manila folders.

Until she saw the tiny thing peeking out from behind the mini file cabinet, under the right side of her desk. It was very small and had at least an arm and a head. The arm wrapped around the cabinet and the head was staring up at her, with round eyes and a gaping jaw. It looked, for all the world, like a tiny, nude man peering up at her.

The folders skidded under the sole of her shoe as she fairly fled from the cubicle. Her mind racing, she plunged into the hallway and made a beeline for the break room. Schanz was not in there, and nobody else was, either. Panting, she closed the door behind her and leaned on it, her pleasantly heavy body shaking like a leaf.

What the fuck was that? was the most coherent of her thoughts. All the other thoughts were ill-formed sentence fragments, lots of swear words, and swirling, zipping things that more closely resembled colors than actual words. Heart pounding, she waited a moment before opening the door just a crack, to attempt to spy on her own cubicle and see if she could discern any activity in it.

There was her cube, her plaid jacket hanging by the entrance. There were a few folders spilling out into the walkway and her desk chair. No mice, no little men, nothing else that she could see from her position.

She turned and stared at the twin coffee carafes by the brushed steel sink. What do I do? she thought. What the hell was that? That can't have been... what it looked like. That's crazy! But she had no other answers, and she knew what she saw: even in her panicked memory, she could see the tiny fingers splayed against the beige metal cabinet. She could recall the days' worth of stubble coating that tiny jaw like flocking on a plastic toy mouse. Even the amazement in his expression was very clear in her mind's eye, an astounded little man--without a stitch of clothing--staring up at her only when her head turned in just the right position, at the last second.

Did he dart off? She couldn't remember. Did he just stand and watch her go, her lavish, round ass lifting off the chair like an abruptly released hot-air balloon? Two huge, swelling buttocks churning against each other in his limited view, shrink-wrapped in black polyester, as she took off like a rocket to shelter in the relative safety of coarse-ground coffee packets and paper towels? She hadn't looked back, and she couldn't see anything in there now. Only a red-headed man in a grey sweater sauntering by, casually glancing toward her cube and then Ray's, before wandering off again.

Renata was thoroughly nonplussed. This was not any kind of Monday for her. Her Mondays were everything up to the tiny naked man. Her Mondays were the lechers seated beside her and the cut-rate military dictator who gave her more work. Those were Mondays you could set your watch to. She paced back and forth, not at all aware of the TV mounted in the corner by the ceiling, playing staticky Judge Judy.

She strode over to a large particle board table and sat down. That is, she strode up to the table, pulled out a molded plastic scoop chair with chromed legs, stepped in front of it, and as her hips bent and her curvaceous heinie widened and descended, a tiny voice called out, "Oh, yes, my goddess!" It was so tiny and unexpected, Renata did not have the faculty to process it in time and her ass plumped down into the plastic seat, filling it and fitting almost perfectly.

Beneath her butt, running more or less along the deep crack of her ass (but restrained by her office pants), there was a distinct lump. It squirmed briefly, and it was soft and warm, and it should not have been there.

Eyes huge, Renata wriggled her hips experimentally. The lump was still there, in the chair. Her left butt-cheek rolled over it, and then her right cheek, and then it seemed to nestle along the cleavage. She closed her eyes slowly, drew a deep breath, then painstakingly rose out of the chair in slow motion, as though giving reality every chance to make itself right again and not do anything stupid.

She stood up, turned around, and looked down.

In the orange hollow of the textured plastic chair, there lay another naked little man. One of his arms was bent unnaturally, but otherwise he could've been tanning at the beach, by his position. Bruising started to form along one side of his ribs, but his face--clean shaven--bore a broad, shit-eating grin. He looked up at Renata and waggled his tiny little eyebrows, as though inviting her to sit on him once more.

Renata nodded slowly, closed her eyes, and slumped to the floor in a dead faint.

(To be continued.)