Reference Call
I step out of my office into the dirty-white hallway beneath the coffin lid of fluorescent lights to take the call.
by Eliot S. Ku
They call me up to make a statement about his work ethic. I step out of my office into the dirty-white hallway beneath the coffin lid of fluorescent lights to take the call. The environment reminds me of when we were in high school. When he was selling pills in the hallway during passing periods. Drugs whose names we didn’t know, the pills expertly engraved with little telephone signs or Mitsubishi symbols like landscapes carved into grains of rice. To take one of those was a kind of roulette.
I tell the truth. The only one I know.
“He is a stand-up guy,” I say. “As far as I know, he has never missed a day of work in his life.”
Eliot S. Ku is a physician who lives in New Mexico with his wife and two children. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Whiskey Tit, HAD, Maudlin House, Lost Balloon, and Bending Genres, among other places.
