Short Story thing

The Story You Are About to Read Is a Pile of Crap

	Foster leaned tentatively back in his office chair, testing the upper bounds of gravitational attraction from a position of relative comfort in the rarely inhabited perch. Such had become his intermittent custom for the past several months, a ritual of protection from unforeseen collapse conjured (and no doubt spread) by the hivemind of office drones around him. As with all plebeian classes throughout history, superstition in the office place was tantamount to religion. Upon safely reuniting with the ground, he came to the sudden realization that this insignificant act was all that remained to connect him with the hordes of coworkers among which he had spent the last several years.
	He quickly shook the thought out of his head.
	While Scheister & Sons Publishing had found its clientele shrinking exponentially for over a decade, Foster's own past several months were spent entrepreneurially raking through the unyielding muck of mass communication for the rare golden nugget to call his own. As such, he would only scarcely be seen at his desk, a formality reserved only for those occasions when his editing expertise was desperately required. Today, it seemed, was one of those days.
	Foster inspected the ream of paper laying landscape across his desk, a monolith of order standing tall against a background of auteur clutter. While the contents of the tome were not news to him, the bleached wood pulp itself was distractingly fresh, marred only in regular intervals by fluorescent red tabs billowing from within to denote sections of matter in need of immediate incineration. Despite his disgust, Foster admitted to himself that the work had really come quite far: beginning its life as an inkling smeared across a thousand-odd pages, progressing through an expectedly uncomfortable period of adolescence in which all elements unique or unconventional were marked for removal, and soon enough onwards to a steady shelf-life of carefully maintained appearance before dropping from relevance and eventually being replaced.
	For the fine folks at Scheister & Sons, crafting an experimental wreck into a bestseller was child's play.
	Which raised the question of exactly what this tome was doing on Foster's soon-to-be-vacant desk. Typically after all the real work had been done, what could be salvaged of the source material was sent off to the man upstairs for focus groups to decide - by way of rigorous testing with a diverse selection of audiences in various languages - what the title and subtitle should be and whether to use the author's full name or a mononym or perhaps a partial acronym instead. The worst of the worst suffered the private ignominy of a pseudonym, plastered across the finalized corporate display of their own blood, sweat and tears. For their own protection, of course.
	The author's name and contact information was withheld even from the editors, to ensure no breach of trust or conflict of interest between the two parties. Things were smoother that way.
	One thing was for sure - Foster would hate to be the sorry fool submitting this particular fire hazard for review. From what he could make out, the original drafts had been some kind of deeply involved space epic with elements of fantasy and, curiously enough, Thompsonian journalism. According to left-handed notes scribbled furiously in the margins, there were to be three sagas of the story, each one a prequel to the previous and involving new, currently undeveloped, characters and settings. Foster's first excursion into the text had barely breached the triple digits before his irritation won the better of him, and he fetched a wandering intern and had the work photocopied and sent downstairs to the young hopefuls, with explicit instructions to scavenge the plot points most necessary for resolution, trim the fat and annotate for stylistic conformity. This process had bought Foster a week to tend to his flock of America's upcoming titans of literature.
	The manuscript's lack of discernible talent was not unexpected; not everybody could be a wordsmith. To the contrary, since well before Foster's birth it had been growing steadily more difficult. But the lunatic composer of the travesty rooted to Foster's desk had paid, God knows how, the going rate for a trending success, and that was exactly what Foster was expected to deliver.
	At Scheister & Sons, you get what you paid for.
	In any case, the widening gap between banal mediocrity and distinct talent had never given Foster himself much cause for concern. He liked to think it was evident from the myriad pages strewn haphazardly about his workspace that he possessed the innate qualities of a bona fide novelist – after all, the skillset of a talented editor and talented author were practically one and the very same. Internally, he maintained that only his laborious, self-imposed itinerary (both on and off the clock) withheld him from finishing any of the ventures humbly begun on the renovated typewriter now residing on the kitchen table, an early prisoner of Foster's escalating war on glass cielings.
	He wondered momentarily if deporting his writing utensil represented a serious lack of judgment on his part. In fairness, he hadn't expected to receive any work requiring direct intervention now that Scheister was on the downturn, and there were still a plethora of itinerants on lower floors overjoyed to be working for a real-deal publishing house to the point of complete ignorance of the entertainment market. It was this same blind stoicism that kept them busy with whatever office work could be scrounged. The drones, Foster reckoned, would buzz their wings away in the winter only so the Queen could fuck again come spring.
	Foster thought that line was pretty good. He'd have to remember to write that down.
	Right now, however, there was the thankless task of word processing to muddle through, and the clock above the door served as a grim reminder that Foster was still on company time. Having run plumb out of neurotic tangents to chase, there was nothing left to do but get it over with. With a resentful jerk of the head, Foster reached over and scraped away the blank cover sheet to expose the first tab underneath, dreading the horrors entombed within:

									Syntax in Need of Revision for Stylistic Conformity

	Foster chuckled smugly for himself. All Syntax was in Need of Revision for Stylistic Conformity. The desire for sophistic polish was ever-present job security in the industry. In his opinion they should print that line at the top of every sheet, on every Scheister & Sons Publishing, LLC business card, on the big wall in the lobby on which was printed a tableau of the original Scheister himself circa 1928, and, for good measure, on the company timecards as well.
	His apprehension erased, Foster drew a hint of sadistic pleasure in drawing back the curtain, proceeding to the opening page to begin culling:

					This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s
												imagination or are used fictitiously.
					Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

	"What?"
	The nonsensical formality of the disclaimer had stirred Foster from his incidental vigil, another behavior dispensed memetically throughout the office. It was not the absurdity of a legal waiver plastered erroneously across a work of surrealist fiction that enervated him; rather, it was the bizarre notion that anyone would care enough to pursue legal recourse against the dying firm that surprised.