the sad lawyer
short story
I’m gonna let this story speak for itself.
It could be my favorite that I’ve ever written. Maybe I’m getting better. Or, maybe just more confident.
This one goes out to Henry Henderson (I love you, brother) and also huge thanks to my wife Aspen who coined the term “The Sad Lawyer.” I write 99% to amuse her.
Any similarity to people living or dead is a huge coincidence. It’s called fiction, folks. Please let me know what you think.
The sad lawyer works in a sad office park, in a sad town, in a sad state, in a sad country, in a very sad world.
Let’s get right into it: we’re talking about New Jersey.
The name of the town doesn’t matter. The only important thing to know: it’s not one of the charming ones. No tree-lined, old-timey Main Street. No deer running through backyards. It’s not Asbury Park. No boardwalks, American flags, Springsteen. We’re talking about freeways, strip malls and cement sprawl. The part of New Jersey that when you drive through on the way to anywhere actually worth going, you smell a weird inexplicable smell.
This is where they must have coined the term. You know the one.
The Armpit of the Nation.
The sad lawyer in this sad town’s name is Todd.
Todd hates that name. He’s the only guy named Todd that he’s ever met who isn’t gay. What’s up with that? he wonders. But sadly, the sad lawyer is not interesting enough to be gay.
Nope. He married his high school sweetheart. So, he has a sad wife and a sad family with two sad little kids.
Right now, the sad lawyer is hungry.
His sad stomach is growling.
He’s standing at the end of a long, empty corridor under florescent lights. Everything is dull grey and puke beige. He’s staring at two vending machines. One is relatively new. The firm installed it as part of a company-wide health initiative. It’s called Farmer’s Fridge. He scans row after row looking for anything remotely edible. At this point, he’d settle for the equivalent of a horrible airport sandwich. You know, mayonnaise-soaked chicken salad or artificially-colored pink ham on stale white bread with crunchy iceberg lettuce so cold there’s actual ice embedded in it. He’d house that right now. It would be fine. But no. Farmer’s Fridge only has futuristic jar-like canisters packed with extremely unappealing salads.
Even the sad lawyer does’t want a sad vending machine salad.
The other option is the vintage vending machine. So old, the sad lawyer can’t swipe a credit card. He can’t even smooth and flatten a dollar bill and feed it into the finicky receptacle. No, this 20th Century machine only takes quarters. And while the Farmer’s Fridge is completely full, the old machine is completely empty — except for one item in the top, far-right corner.
A Twinkie.
The sad lawyer shrugs.
The Twinkie looks like it’s been in the vending machine since 1986.
He digs into his pockets for quarters even though he knows damn well he doesn’t have any. Finally, he pivots on the carpet and shuffles quietly back down the long and empty corridor.
The office park has felt eerily deserted since the pandemic. There was a moment in 2021 where it felt like a big celebratory “We’re back!” — but it was short lived. Omicron emptied everything right back out. Nobody bothered to come in regularly after that. Now remote work is more than accepted, it’s embraced — especially by the partners — who almost never come in at all. At some point, the five day work week became a four day work week. Which seems to be heading for three. The sad lawyer’s bread-and-butter is contract negotiations. Contracts that used to take a few weeks have now stretched out to months. He marveled recently that it took eighteen months to generate the final execution copies of a routine contract and circulate it for signature.
Something that would’ve been absolutely absurd five years ago —
The new normal.
The office has become even more quiet as paralegals have been replaced one-by-one with an AI program called Ironclad. Apart from the sad lawyer, there’s no one coming in on Fridays to pour through contracts.
The sad lawyer is obsolete.
He’s a fucking milkman.
The partners even gave the Fred the security guy a severance package. Bought him out for early retirement. He moved to Kissimmee, Florida. Nobody mans the front desk anymore. The phone and computer were removed. So, the sad lawyer passes a sad empty desk.
Outside, the sad lawyer hears nothing but white noise. The office park is adjacent to the highway. It’s either the New Jersey Turnpike or the Garden State Expressway. Somewhere in his brain, the sad lawyer knows which is which — but it doesn’t matter.
The view? An empty Holiday Inn Express, an empty Econo Lodge, and an empty 24-hour diner as old as the vending machine with the Twinkie.
The benefit of all the emptiness for the sad lawyer is the parking. Years ago, when he was an ambitious upstart, he had to drive underground several floors into the sub-basement of the parking structure to find a spot. Now that he’s the human embodiment of the law of attrition, he’s parked right in front of the lobby entrance in one of the partner’s eternally empty spots.
There was one brief year in his late twenties when sad lawyer leased a Camaro. Now he fobs open his Honda Odyssey mini-van. If the sad lawyer has a dad bod, he also drives the ultimate dad mini-van. Hunching over, he sighs sadly and grabs four quarters out of the cup holder. He mostly uses them when he comes across parking meters that haven’t been upgraded for credit cards, but that hasn’t happened for a few years at least. There are plenty of quarters.
On the long walk through the corridor back to the Twinkie, the sad lawyer feels deeply unsettled. It’s not the total isolation. Or the complete silence except for the buzzing of the florescent lights overhead. He’s used to all that. The sad lawyer just can’t stop thinking about what happened on Friday night.
It was one the only times that he and his sad wife ventured into New York City. Sure, it’s only a thirty minute NJ Transit ride to Penn Station, but it rarely even occurs to the couple to make the journey. In fact, it might have been the first time they’d gone as far as getting a babysitter since Avengers: Endgame came out — the last movie they saw in the movie theater.
It was the fiftieth birthday dinner thrown for the sad lawyer’s less sad lawyer friend. He remembers his sad wife shrugging and saying: “Fifty, huh? I guess that’s a babysitter-worthy event.”
The get-together took place at a restaurant in Chinatown. Mr. Noodle’s Golden something —it doesn’t matter.
The sad lawyer donned his favorite sweater for the occasion. His weekend wear. A cable-knit, shawl-neck cardigan. He once saw Paul Rudd wearing it in a movie and bought two at L.L. Bean, not realizing that Paul Rudd’s costume designer was trying to satirize middle-aged suburban white Dads with that look. Now the sad lawyer owns one in periwinkle and one in mustard. That night, he wore the mustard.
What’s unsettling the sad lawyer is the conversation he had with the only couple he didn’t know at the dinner. The only couple not from New Jersey. Some friend-of-a-friend who’d showed up out-of-the-blue from Los Angeles with his new wife in tow. She was 16 years younger than him and everyone else at the table. The reason the sad lawyer knew this? Well, one already-drunk and particularly aggressive normal New Jersey middle-aged wife asked the young woman how old she was point blank. When she said “thirty,” some at the table whispered “Thank God” under their breath. ‘Cause the thing was: she looked a lot younger.
Apparently, the L.A. guy had only met her 100 days before and they’d gotten married on New Year’s Eve in Vegas. They showed off the pictures on their phone, proud of their double-chinned, sweaty Elvis in his bejeweled gold lamé suit.
At one point, the sad lawyer asked what the guy did for a living. At first, the guy used a bunch of Hollywood buzzwords and when the sad lawyer squinted, obviously confused, he summed it up by saying:
“Basically, I’m a producer.”
“I don’t understand what a producer actually does,” the sad lawyer said.
“I don’t either!” The guy laughed and looked at his wife who also laughed. “Every jackass sitting at a Starbucks in L.A. says they’re a producer. The word has basically lost all meaning.”
“Aw, honey,” the young wife said, clasping her husband’s hands. “Don’t say that.” She turned to the sad lawyer and said: “He does development and IP acquisitions.”
The sad lawyer didn’t know or particularly care what that meant, so he just nodded.
“What do you do?” the “producer” asked.
“I’m a lawyer,” the sad lawyer said.
“Oh, that’s interesting.”
“Not really.”
“What kind of law?”
“It’s complicated. Basically I do contracts.”
“Well, do you like it?”
The sad lawyer stared blankly at the “producer,” all snuggled up to his young wife. He wasn’t expecting a full-on existential crisis at Mr. Noodle’s Golden whatever. Especially not from such an unsurprising or simple question. It was a totally normal thing to ask. But somehow, the sad lawyer had never been asked it, had never asked it himself, or even remotely contemplated it. Eventually, he sighed and gave an honest answer.
“No.”
The “producer” and his young wife looked at each other and chuckled. They didn’t even stifle the chuckle. They full-on chuckled — as if sharing an inside joke.
“Well, you make a lot money at least, right?” the “producer” asked. It was forward, but it seemed to be a genuine attempt to put a positive spin on an awkward moment.
The sad lawyer looked down at his sad Chinese beer.
“Well, inflation is a bitch,” he mumbled.
The sad wife did not jump in the way that the hot young wife had for the “producer.” She didn’t say a word in the sad lawyer’s defense.
He thought he made a decent living, sure. But he was also paying for two sets of braces, saving for two college tuitions, and had even loaned $20,000 to his dipshit cokehead brother who promised to go to rehab — but went to Tulum instead.
The sad lawyer just stayed quiet the rest of the night.
He didn’t realize he was doing it, but he could not take his eyes off the “producer’s” young wife.
The reality is the sad lawyer had only had sex with one woman in his lifetime. That woman was sitting next to him. Silently.
Across the table was a guy exactly his age who just married a girl who wasn’t even born yet when Kurt Cobain died and had zero memory of 9/11.
They were having the time of their lives.
It made the sad lawyer even more sad.
Later, between the twinkling of glasses and Chinese restaurant Muzak, the sad lawyer heard the “producer” turn to his young wife and say he wanted to buy a “sad lawyer sweater” when they got back to Los Angeles. She chuckled.
That night, the sad lawyer and his sad wife sat in silence on the commuter train back to New Jersey and the sad lawyer stared at his cable-knit, shawl-neck cardigan in the scratched reflection of the window.
Now in the office, the sad lawyer stared at the Twinkie in the top far-right corner of the old vending machine, popping in one sad quarter at a time. He wasn’t sure the machine was even going to work, but sure enough, the coil began to turn slowly and the Twinkie fell down to the bottom.
The sad lawyer wasn’t sure if he’d ever consumed a Twinkie. Maybe back in 1986, but certainly not in his adult life. His wife would never allow the kids to eat junk like that — or allow it into their household.
As he bit into the Twinkie tentatively, he thought again about that night in the city. Not about the “producer” and his young wife, but about what they were eating. The sad lawyer had ordered egg rolls and orange chicken. Standard stuff. No different from what you’d order on Uber Eats from Panda Express in New Jersey. But the couple were sharing chicken with Szechuan peppercorns. They insisted the sad lawyer try it.
The moment the sad lawyer put a Szechuan peppercorn in his mouth was the wildest experience he’d had in the past year of living in New Jersey — maybe since the glass shower door in his guest bathroom randomly decided to explode and spray him with tiny glass shards. He had gotten a few cuts, but actually, the Szechuan peppercorns might have had a more powerful impact on him.
“That’s different, right?” the hot young wife said to sad lawyer.
“Mmm-hmm…”
He was speechless. In 47 years of life, he’d tasted sweet things, sour things, salty things, bitter things. He’d even tasted umami — which they say is the fifth taste category — at least he thought he had. But he’d never felt anything like the sensation in his mouth that the Szechuan peppercorns delivered.
“I heard those peppercorns were illegal to import until 2005!” the “producer” said. “Something about plant disease…”
The sad lawyer’s mouth was numb and his mind was blown.
All of this time walking the Earth it was possible to experience this taste in his mouth — and yet he hadn’t even been aware it existed.
Now, as the sad lawyer bites deeper into the Twinkie, something similar happens.
It’s not that it numbs his mouth. Nothing like that.
But something definitely happens.
What exactly?
Well, the sad lawyer isn’t a scientist. He’s just a sad lawyer.
He finds himself frozen for a moment, the florescent tube lights buzzing his ears from overhead.
For some reason, he begins to stare at a small dust mite curled up in the grey wall-to-wall carpet in a far-off corner of the hallway.
And for some reason, the sad lawyer thinks about aliens.
Aliens are not a subject matter that the sad lawyer often contemplates. But at that moment, the has what he thinks is a profound thought — about extraterrestrials.
Here’s the thing: It’s not that anyone thinks they aren’t out there. By all rules of logic and probability, they most certainly are. There is life out there in the universe. There has to be. But what people don’t generally think about is how big space actually is. How far apart everything is. So, even if there are highly sophisticated life forms out there somewhere, they’re not likely to know we’re here.
Or care.
Humans are simply not on their radar.
We’re like that tiny dust mote in the corner of the room, the sad lawyer thinks. Massive alien civilizations will go on for millennia and they’ll probably never notice us at all.
Over the past decade, the Kepler telescope started spotting “Goldilocks Planets” — planets that have a similar makeup to Earth, that would make them “just right” for life. Seemingly every week, scientists find new ones all over the galaxy. But what’s important to keep in mind is just how far away those planets are. In 2025, scientists found a planet that had D.M.S. — potentially a biosignature gas. On Earth, D.M.S. is caused by marine microbes. That could be the most compelling evidence of extraterrestrial life ever discovered. Granted, it’s not even necessarily intelligent life. Picture plankton. And those plankton?
They’re 120 light years away.
The sad lawyer takes another bite of Twinkie.
That means that it’s taken a hundred and twenty years for the light from that alien plankton to reach Earth. Even if we could travel at the speed of light — which we can’t, and not by a long shot — it would take 120 years for us to reach that plankton.
At the top speed of our current space vehicles?
It would take 188 million years to get there.
The implications are profound, the sad lawyer thinks. If we’re talking about a generational starship, that’d be a heck of a lot of generations. Imagine spending all those generations to get there — and only finding plankton? How is that worth the journey? Might as well just stay in New Jersey.
Also, the sad lawyer realizes, if aliens ever did bother to notice us, and something actually made it all the way here, it would likely not be biological creatures. Not little green men. Not “The Greys.” No, it would be their version of robots. Their A.I. Their version of the Mars Rover.
By the time their A.I.s made it here, they themselves would probably be extinct.
As the finished Twinkie settles in his stomach, the sad lawyer feels increasingly unsettled.
It’s not that his stomach physically hurts. It does. After all, he just ingested a synthetic, preservative-packed sugar snack that had likely been sitting in that vending machine since the turn of the century. But no, what unsettles the sad lawyer are all the new thoughts.
Where are they coming from?
The sad lawyer is not a philosophical guy.
He’s never taken psychedelics.
He’s never even sat in someone’s basement late into the night, smoking weed and talking to friends. His friends aren’t very philosophical either. More like Popped Collar Bros who work in finance and give off Eric Trump vibes.
So, imagine the sad lawyer’s surprise when the thoughts continue.
Next: the sad lawyer thinks about whales.
Specifically, Killer Whales.
Orcas.
His wife had forced him to watch some depressing documentary about Sea World a few months back. He’d tried to block out the images of blood in the water. The crying sound of the whales. The animal cruelty. He’d tried not to think about that documentary ever since. It was not entertaining. But for some reason — post-Twinkie — it all floods back to him.
The idea that he can’t ignore has to do with orca brains. Some scientist talking head lady had explained that they are gigantic. The size of their brains alone would suggest that they’re exceptionally intelligent creatures. But what’s more interesting — more of a mystery — is all of the neural connections in those giant whale brains. Inside those brains is a massive, infinitely complex spiderweb where the orca synapses fire and crackle like snap pops and one unknown part of the orca brain connects to another. Scientists know more about a lot of mysterious things — the cosmos, large language models, erectile dysfunction — than they do about the orca brain.
It’s quite possible, more than likely, that the orcas are gliding through the ocean with far more intelligent thoughts, far deeper emotions, with some innate understanding of the universe — feeling things, seeing things, making connections — that humans aren’t capable of making. Or even understanding at all. Think of the way dogs can smell things, or eagles can see things we can’t, but on an exponentially higher level. Orcas could be like floating Buddhas, at one with the universe in a way our dumb monkey brains could never compute.
The sad lawyer feels dizzy.
He stands up and crinkles the Twinkie wrapper in his hands. He balls it tightly into his fist. He feels compelled to pivot on the carpet and walk back down the hallway to the exit again. He doesn’t yet know where he’s going, but he does know:
He has to get the fuck out of the office.
On his way out, the sad lawyer reaches the revolving lobby doors, but he sees they’re already revolving.
What the fuck?
Suddenly his loud ginger colleague catapults into the lobby.
The sad lawyer hasn’t seen Bill at the office — except for on Zoom — in several years.
Bill’s wearing his “Casual Friday” attire. He looks like he should be at a Country Club somewhere in New England. Newport maybe? He’s wearing a lemon-yellow Polo shirt and Nantucket Reds — the preppy salmon-colored trousers that only the whitest of white people wear to the whitest of white people occasions.
“Oh hey, pal!” Bill says with a wide smile.
The loud man in the loud outfit causes the sad lawyer to dissociate. He’s shocked to see anyone in the sad New Jersey office park, let alone Bill dressed like some golfer on a sailboat.
“What are you doing here, Bill?”
Bill’s eyes widen. He reminds the sad lawyer of his cokehead brother. He’s no stranger to uppers, and for some reason the sad lawyer resents him for that. Bill is known to get hopped up, do something crazy, and then go into what he calls a “shame hole” —until his friends forgive him. Like the sad lawyer’s brother, and like everyone at that dinner in Chinatown, Bill didn’t spend his whole life in suburban New Jersey. Some may have moved back when they had kids, but every single person at that table had lived in the city at some point. For some reason, that enrages the sad lawyer.
“What are you doing here, Bill?” the now angry lawyer says again.
“What do you mean, Todd?” Bill says. “I gotta get the data monitor papers!”
The sad lawyer doesn’t waste any time.
He clocks Bill right across the jaw.
Lays him out.
Bill flies back into the revolving door, smashes the back of his ginger head and cracks the glass.
He teeters over the other way and falls face down on the grey carpet like a dead fish.
He’s twitching.
The sad lawyer looks down at his fist. He hasn’t punched anyone since Middle School.
He tries to step over Bill and walk out, but the door’s blocked by his ridiculous Sperry Topsiders and pink pants.
It won’t revolve.
The sad lawyer doesn’t give Bill a second thought. He kicks his foot out of the way and swings through the revolving door into the inexplicably odorous New Jersey air.
Out in the parking lot, the sad lawyer is still thinking about orcas and Szechuan peppercorns.
Somehow, after eating that Twinkie, it’s like he has tapped into neural connections he didn’t know he had. He now tastes some flavor he never knew existed before.
He gets into the drivers’ seat of the Honda Odyssey mini-van and fastens his seatbelt. He has no idea where he’s going. But suddenly, the thought occurs to him:
Wherever it is, it’s not gonna be in a fucking Honda Odyssey mini-van.
Instead, he pulls the vehicle back abruptly and slams the breaks, screeching out, tire burns on the pavement. He yanks at the wheel, aiming directly at the empty parking structure.
The sad lawyer un-clicks his seatbelt.
Standing next to the mini-van with the driver’s seat door open, he presses his hand down on the break while he reaches in and feels around for something heavy. Finally, he pulls out his sad son’s black backpack.
This’ll work! he thinks. Nothing’s heavier than a kids’ backpack.
He presses the backpack down on the gas pedal and slowly starts to back away. Once he fully clears the car door, he lets the break go all at once and jumps back.
It works.
The Honda Odyssey mini-van squeals forward, hops the sidewalk, and flies through the parking structure windows. The glass shatters — much like the shower door did back in the sad lawyer’s guest bathroom.
It feels deeply satisfying.
The sad lawyer stands there for a second, hoping the Honda Odyssey mini-van might explode.
That would be even more satisfying.
When it doesn’t, he shrugs and walks toward the office park exit. He’s going to do something he’s never done before:
He’s going to take the bus.
The sad lawyer has more new thoughts as he waits at the dingy, deserted bus stop.
In America, we don’t take care of our clinically insane. There’s no universal health care of course, but what definitely doesn’t exist is any kind of accessible mental health care. The mentally ill among us become homeless. “Unhoused” as they say now for some reason. They get caught up in the criminal justice system. They’re handed guns, including high powered semi-automatics, with less hassle than drivers’ licenses.
They commit mass shootings.
Or they just end up riding the bus.
The sad lawyer doesn’t know how the ticketing procedure works on the bus these days, so as he boards, he just takes out his wallet and peels out a twenty dollar bill. When he hands it to the bus driver, it gets him a double take.
“Keep the change,” the sad lawyer says.
The bus driver wraps his fingers around the twenty with a bemused expression.
The sad lawyer turns to the rest of the bus and notices there’s only one other passenger on board:
An Asian woman with pink and blue hair, a princess tiara, oversized mirrored sunglasses, and a fluffy white wedding dress that flows out, filling the entire aisle. As soon as the bus starts moving, she hops up on a plastic milk crate and spreads her arms wide like the Jesus statue over Rio.
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls!” she says, then she rotates at a ninety degree angle, addressing the empty right side of the bus. “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls!”
She does this two more times until she’s facing the front again.
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls! Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls!”
Facing front, she takes a deep breath. “Today! And today only! I am proud to present… for your listening pleasure…”
She pauses for dramatic effect… “POETRY!”
“Jesus Christ.” The sad lawyer sighs. Surprise, surprise. A nut job on the bus…
The woman turns another ninety degrees and shouts this time: “POETRY!!!”
Suddenly, the sad lawyer realizes that calling her a “nut job” is his old way of thinking. It’s one of his old thoughts.
He stops for a second and watches the woman more carefully. She’s actually beautiful. At least, there’s something charismatic about her.
The sad lawyer watches as the woman turns ninety degrees again, now facing the empty back of the bus.
“POETRY!!!” she screams at the top of her lungs.
The sad lawyer cracks a smile.
It’s the first time the sad lawyer has smiled in a long time.
“POETRY!!!” the woman shouts to the empty left side of the bus.
Now the sad lawyer is delighted.
By the time the woman spins around to the front and screams it again, he has made it all the way down the aisle.
The two finally make eye contact.
The sad lawyer grins at the woman ecstatically — as if her little street-art, spoken-word performance is the deepest and most moving poetry he’s ever experienced in his entire life.
She smiles back.
Then, she lunges forward and kisses him right on the mouth.
This is the first woman the sad lawyer has ever kissed — aside from his sad wife.
He chuckles.
Afterward, the two sit down next to each other in the back of the bus.
“Have you ever tasted Szechuan peppercorns?” he asks her.
“What are you talking about?” she says. “I’m Korean.”
Before he can explain that’s not what he meant, the bus stops.
The non-plussed bus driver cranks the gears into park.
“Folks? I believe this is your stop.”
The sad lawyer looks at the poetess.
The back exit door opens.
Without another word, the poetess takes the sad lawyer’s hand and they walk out of the bus together.
An orange sunset shines over an industrial warehouse surrounded by miles of cement. Across the horizon, the sad lawyer can see multiple orange Public Storage warehouses — all the same brand, but different facilities — popping up at different spots. There’s not a single tree.
The sad lawyer and the poetess realize they’re not alone. Soon, it feels almost like they’ve been thrust into a line at a music festival. Random people materialize from behind warehouses and fulfillment centers and storage facilities. They all seem to be funneling into a line, walking toward a single warehouse — as if they all know exactly where they’re going.
“Can I ask you something?” the sad lawyer asks the poetess.
“Of course, sweetheart.”
“Did you eat a weird Twinkie today as well, or?”
“A weird Twinkie?” She laughs at the sad lawyer. “Are you insane?”
“Well, where were you before the bus?”
“Where do you think?” she says, pointing down to her gown. “I was at the church. Getting ready for my wedding! But suddenly, I don’t know what happened. I guess I didn’t want to get married.”
The sad lawyer smiles. “So, you’re a runaway bride?”
She laughs. “Yeah, I guess I am!”
As they get closer to the warehouse entrance, the sad lawyer studies the people around him: There’s a sad doctor. A sad nurse. A sad bartender. A sad waitress. A sad stripper. A sad cosmetologist. A sad masseuse. A sad truck driver. A sad Amazon warehouse forklift driver. A sad guy from the local lightbulb factory. A sad plumber. A sad construction worker. A sad teacher. A sad mailman. Even a sad policeman.
“What is this, the Village People?” the sad lawyer says.
But the poetess is too young to have any idea what he’s talking about.
Soon, they’re all filing into the warehouse. Some people are chatting, but nobody seems to question what’s happening. What’s going on? Why are they all here? Why did they all show up at the same time?
Is the sad lawyer the only one with questions?
“Did you eat a Twinkie?” he asks a sad fireman.
“You got the wrong guy, bro,” the fireman says with a heavy Jersey accent. “I don’t fuck with no Twinkies.”
The poetess laughs. The sad lawyer realizes he’s still holding her hand.
Once fully inside, they see there’s no ceiling in the warehouse.
Only sky.
The sun is below the horizon.
Magic hour. A clear, clean gradient. Not a single cloud.
All at the same time, it seems like the rest of the sad people notice the sky as well.
Hundreds of people, all tilting their heads up.
All staring at the sky.
And once the final person — a sad garbage man – notices, he joins them.
Looking up.
And that’s when it happens.
A blinding light beams down.
The brightest light the sad lawyer has ever seen. A new level of brightness that — like the Szechuan peppercorn did to his mouth — gives the sad lawyer’s eyes a sensation they’ve never experienced.
“It’s the rapture!” the poetess says.
But the sad lawyer, still unable to pull his eyes away from the light, shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
The sad lawyer is not a religious man. For some reason, he thinks back to the grey dust-mote on the grey wall-to-wall carpet. He thinks about orcas. He thinks about plankton 188 million years away.
The light is not red, orange, green, blue, purple, periwinkle or mustard.
It’s a color the sad lawyer has never seen before in his sad life.
When it’s over, the people look at each other. They shrug. They mutter.
“Is that it?” the poetess says.
“We weren’t beamed up to another planet? To another dimension?” the sad lawyer says.
“What the fuck was that?” the sad fireman says. (He’s as disappointed as anyone.)
Eventually, the sad people shuffle out of the warehouse. They get in their cars. They get on the bus. They go home. They go on with their lives.
Some of them — including the sad lawyer — are arrested for the insane crimes they committed that day. Assault. Destruction of public property. Indecent exposure. Disturbing the peace. Public urination. Grand theft auto.
Surprisingly, no murders.
At the office park, Bill eventually wakes up and is fine. The sad lawyer apologizes. Says he should be in a “shame hole” for what he did. Bill says, “Don’t worry about it, buddy! I get it.” and declines to press charges.
All the warehouse people issue apologies. Some plead temporary insanity. Some describe a supernatural event — almost like being possessed.
And most of them — including the sad lawyer — get off on misdemeanors.
Especially the white people.
But nobody from that warehouse is ever the same again.
Doctors and psychiatrists study them. Evaluations. Assessments. Brain scans. MRIs.
They find nothing.
Spiritualists, gurus, “life coaches,” psychics, and conspiracy nuts buzz about it online.
The President declines to comment. The military has no explanation. There are Congressional hearings.
But it all leads to nothing.
As time passes, some of the warehouse people drastically change careers. Become artists. Digital nomads. Expats in Borneo. They start a Substack newsletter. One or two come out as gay. Non-binary. Trans. (But not the fireman. He wants everybody to know: he stays straight.)
There are a lot of divorces.
But the sad lawyer doesn’t make any drastic changes. He doesn’t get a divorce or leave his kids. He doesn’t even leave New Jersey.
Instead, he makes hundreds of tiny changes. He cancels Netflix. Stops watching sports on TV. Quits PornHub. For some reason, he quits aspartame. Starts drinking full-fat milk. (He thinks that it somehow fuels his orca brain.) He takes time every day to apply extra conditioner to his pubic hair.
When the criminal charges are dropped, the partners forgive the sad lawyer too. They don’t fire him. Instead they institute a “Mental Health Day” to prevent burnout — yet another excuse to avoid coming into the office.
The sad lawyer never sees his Popped Collar Finance Bro friends again. He joins an adult softball team, makes new friends. After the games, they smoke weed, philosophize, and watch alien movies together — sometimes even in the theater.
For the first time ever, his sad kids think the sad lawyer is cool — sort of. He gets into teen sadgirl music and takes his daughter to concerts, even in Manhattan. He takes his wife into the city once a month for Szechuan peppercorns. Mr. Noodle’s Golden Lotus.
The couple even starts fucking again.
Not just the sad semi-annual birthday blowjob.
Everyone notices the changes. But nobody understands the experience except the people who were there.
Some of the warehouse people meet up online. Form support groups. But most avoid each other. There is so much press. So many questions. So many conspiracies. They just want to be left alone. They don’t like the idea of being in a cult.
At one point, the sad lawyer thinks about getting a coffee with the poetess. But she tells him she’s running for Congress. So, she’s pretty busy. She reschedules months ahead, only to reschedule again months ahead.
Mostly, the sad lawyer spends time alone. He buys a Costco-size carton of Twinkies he keeps in the basement. Despite the face his wife makes, he insists on going down there once a week to enjoy his Twinkie.
Like a meditation.
He sits in the dark. He thinks about orcas gliding through the ocean and the distance between planets as he bites into his Twinkie.
As he chews, he has a profound feeling:
This is all just the beginning.
And that makes the sad lawyer happy.
Thanks for reading. Please subscribe to receive new stories and be part of the conversation. It’s free:
©️ 2025 max winter
For rights questions contact: chris@winterlightpictures.com
Damn… this really reminds me of the “dancing plague” that happened in medieval times, except manic sadness instead of manic joy. So very interesting and lots of messages to be gleaned from this. What an amazing read 😭😍
I like the narrative voice, especially in the first half. The world of this story reminds me of Vonnegut's storytelling with weird things showing up and the strange unbidden thoughts entering Todd's mind.