"One of life's harshest tragedies is unlived potential" – Marie-Louise von Frank
Spencer Cole was a successful accountant because success was measured in numbers, and Spencer Cole was excellent with numbers. Numbers meant stability, order, and respect.
But at night, numbers turned into colored crawlers he tucked under his shirt until his belly swarmed and tickled and inflated, lifting him up... up... like a balloon…
POP!
It was the 6 AM ALARM clock – the merciless herald that announced a new day of crunching numbers at his cubicle under the forever flicker of the fluorescent lights.
When he was little, Spencer Cole loved painting abstract things that made people uncomfortable. “Ugly! Weird!” his father decreed, “Real men don’t doodle, real men count!”
His mother was kinder. But when he wasn't looking, she would replace his paint brush with a ruler and his canvas with a computer. “Artists starve dear child," she whispered as if sharing an important secret, "But numbers will feed you... to infinity!”
Spencer Cole used to love pizza because pizza was like a blank canvas and his art was painting with colored toppings. Once he started feeding on numbers, pizza became round like a zero. Only a zero can never feed, so he had to add toppings in big numbers, because "Numbers will feed you...to infinity!" his mother's voice echoed.
And so Spencer Cole added, and fed, and added, and fed… to infinity! He tucked away his “Ugly! Weird!” art into starvation, and as years went by, he thinned – except for his belly and his shadow that kept on growing… fed by pizza and numbers.
His coworkers called him “Piggy Cole, the Pizza Hole!” to which he said nothing, but his shadow kept on growing, and nobody noticed under the fluorescent lights. It now pulsed when he signed number reports and trembled when his boss called him “The Numbers Whisperer.”
That year, Spencer Cole worked on Christmas Day and then on New Year’s day too, because he was The Numbers Whisperer, so how could he not?
When the audit season came, Spencer Cole spent his nights crunching even more pizza and numbers. It was then he first heard a faint POP inside his skull. His computer screen flickered, then it displayed EYES, MOUTHS, and TWISTED LIMBS!
Spencer Cole blinked once and the numbers were back.
“Piggy Cole, the Pizza Hole!” He heard his boss laugh in his office.
POP.
Spencer Cole blinked long.
POP.
He kept his eyes shut, but his Shadow started to slowly stretch beyond his cubicle, creeping toward his coworkers’ feet like spilled ink.
The Shadow inflated.
The walls pulsated.
The fluorescent lights shattered!
POP! POP! POP! POP! POP!
The coworkers screamed when the Shadow cocooned around them like black smoke and numbers started to ooze from the ceiling.
When the Police came, they found the walls splashed with numbers, charts and spreadsheets.
The desks were warped into wired limbs and the coworkers’ twisted crimson bodies sprawled on the carpet into “Ugly! Weird!” abstract art.
They never found Spencer Cole. The only thing that remained was his pizza shaped Shadow on the wall, POPPED like a balloon in a symphony of infinite blinding colors.