The unspoken truth of every new job is that the spot you find yourself in once belonged to someone who fled or was taken out. Each office chair, an ergonomic headstone in a professional graveyard.
But you never start a gig thinking of how it will end.
As I sat at my desk waiting to find out if I had reached my end at Coastline Magazine, all I thought about was my beginning.
In the six months since my graduation from journalism school, I received rigorous instruction on why I shouldn’t have gone to journalism school. Fifty applications resulted in three interviews that resulted in zero job offers.
Then Coastline called.
Coastline was the magazine that got me interested in writing in the first place. When I was a kid, my dad would read me articles like they were bedtimes stories. I could rattle the names the staff writers off like they were superheroes. Peter Strum was my favorite. He’d spend months buried in research, unearthing incredible stories from the past, before laying out everything he learned in an article that read like a thriller. I can still remember the rush I’d get when my dad would return from the mailbox with a new issue, the smile on his face when he saw my reaction. Thinking back to those times is when I remember him the most clearly.
The interview at Coastline went as the others had, so I wasn’t hopeful. I sat in the uncomfortable chair across the HR lady as she scanned my resume, feeling like a kid who put on her mom’s blazer to play work. She recited my greatest accomplishments back to me in a way that made me embarrassed by each and every one.
“Editor of your college newspaper,” she said. “Very impressive.” My inadequacy was an old friend at that point.
I knew what came next. But instead of pivoting to a lament on the state of the industry, the HR lady asked about money. I was beside myself. Companies usually expect you to treat a salary like an incidental side effect of doing what you love—working for them. She, however, wanted to know how much I was expecting to make, like asking a starving person if they wanted fries with that.
“I haven’t given it much thought,” I said. “I guess I would say it’s negotiable.”
“Well, let’s negotiate.”
I sat for a long time, waiting for her to start. Then I said “Forty” with the hope that vomiting any number would bring me closer to leaving.
Her frown told me that I had aimed too high, so I decided that debasing myself was the only solution. “But honestly, thirty would be more than generous.”
Her lacquered lips collapsed inward, disappearing as if to steel themselves before telling me to “Get fucked.”
“Twenty seems fair,” I said.
Her smile returned. We shook hands shortly after.
When I think back to my time at Coastline Magazine—all the late nights, demeaning tasks, the blood spilt, and lives lost—negotiating myself below the poverty line strikes me as an almost-charming detail.
--
I should probably give you some context about Coastline.
You see, a magazine was like a collection of articles that someone printed and mailed to you every month—sometimes even weekly.
It seems silly now, but there was a time when the words on those glossy pages mattered. That’s what my dad thought, at least. He grew up dreaming of the world in a town that could only offer the drugstore magazine rack. Then he met mom, had me, and found whatever he was looking for, I guess. But in me, he saw opportunity and—unfortunately for both of us—hope. He knew that people could live adventurous lives, and the bylines in Coastline were proof of that.
Then the world changed. Dad died, and the internet devoured most magazines. Losing him was made harder by the thought of saying goodbye to a thing we loved. That reckoning never came for Coastline, though. Through recessions and algorithm tweaks and pivots to video, its blend of center-left politics, celebrity profiles, and investigative longreads somehow endured as a last bastion of print media—unnaturally, some would joke.
I, on the other hand, found “unnaturally” to be the case precisely.
My first day was the Monday following the interview. I had requested an additional week of time off before starting. When they asked why, the honest answer—”enjoying one last taste of freedom”—didn’t seem prudent, so I said Monday would be great.
The HR lady met me at the elevator at 10 and ushered me my desk. The newsroom for Coastline Magazine occupied the top floor of a converted textile mill. Old ductwork still hung from the ceiling, and if you looked closely, you could see scorch marks on the exposed brick wall from the fire that killed a couple dozen immigrants around the turn of the century.
My desk sat at the very center of the open floor plan, one of a collection of six meekly divided workstations crammed onto two long tables. “This is where our editorial assistants work,” the HR lady said. “Known affectionately around these parts as ‘The Pit.’ And these fine folks are the Pit Crew.” She signaled to the five hunched backs that surrounded us, each with the faint bluish glow of the computer screen just beyond it. Four turned to introduce themselves in a flurry of names I immediately forgot.
But Kelsey’s name I would remember. Settled deep into the seat next to mine, she didn’t acknowledge me when I first arrived at my desk or after the HR lady left, instructing the rest of the Pit Crew to answer any questions I might have. As soon as she was gone, everyone returned to their work, and I was on my own.
Though the dull gray desktop smelled like it was freshly spritzed with green industrial cleaner, when I sat down I found that the drawers underneath it were still filled with the belongings from the previous tenant. There were breath mints, tampons, and a hoarded stack of Post-It pads. The personalized mug bearing the name Claire in friendly script held pens, their caps all nervously chewed.
The corner of a folded scrap of paper stuck out from beneath the mug’s chunky base. I could lie to you and say that I thought the note might help identify the owner of the belongings, but I’m just nosy. And considering what I found on the paper, it served me right.
The creases across the yellowed page were deep, like it had been refolded again and again over years. There were only three lines of scribbled writing scrawled across its center.
I
Complete each task, for then sleep is earned.
II
Obey the foremen, for foremen shall you be.
III
Beware the Minder, for it knows not of mercy.
As I stared at the lines, I knew I wanted nothing to do with whatever they meant. I turned to Kelsey. Her hard eyes were fixed on her screen. I couldn’t decide whether they looked red because she had been crying or she was going for something with her makeup.
“Hi,” I said tamping down the creeping dread with a smile. “I didn’t catch your name.”
“Kelsey.” There was no life in her voice.
“Nice to meet you. I was just going through my desk. I think there’s some stuff left from the girl who was here bef—” Kelsey was out of her seat and gone before I could finish.
With no one else to turn to, I emailed the HR lady about the unemptied drawer, doing my best to keep the email short and positive. I only apologized four times.
It was Pit Crew tradition to get lunch together whenever someone new started. But Kelsey wasn’t back by the time everyone was ready to go, and when someone mentioned that we had already wasted five minutes waiting, we left without her. Over an $18 salad, I fielded impersonal questions about what I hoped to do at Coastline. I said I wanted to be an editor, and the others exchanged looks. I didn’t understand their meaning, but couldn’t confuse their temperature as anything other than shady.
Everyone got quiet when I asked what happened to Claire. “She left,” one of them said, almost defensive, after a long pause. I had figured, I told them, but I hoped to learn why, knowing that nothing engendered the new kid quite like shit talk. Once again, the Pit Crew clammed up. One of them broke the silence by saying we better get back. We’d been gone for 15 minutes.
Claire’s drawer was empty when I got back.
That night I watched as my new co-workers left, one-by-one. Every ten minutes, I had to stand up and wave in the direction of a motion detector to turn the lights back on. But soon, without fail, I’d find myself once again submerged in darkness, the ghostly glow of my laptop screen the only light. I never shook the feeling that something was watching me in those moments.
At 9:30, there was still no sign of Kelsey. Her bag lay on her desk, exactly where it had been when she ran off. I was concerned—and also my mom had told me to not let anyone see you leave on your first day.
I did a lap around the empty office. Every light still burned, but not a soul remained. In the break room, I perused the ample snack cabinet and found Claire’s left-behind belongings dumped out into the garbage bin, her chewed-up pen caps mixed in with the used K-Cups. The note, however, was missing.
Kelsey’s Converse were sticking out from under one of the bathroom stalls when I poked my head inside the women’s room. I entered the one next to hers and crouched beside our shared wall. Small sobs were the only sound that made it through. “Kelsey,” I said. “It’s Sam. Are you okay?”
I pressed my ear closer to the laminate divider. She sniffled. Her whispers were barely audible.
She told me I was going to die there.
She said we all were.
She was probably best friend I ever had.
--
I was working at Coastline three whole days before someone screamed at me. There are four kinds of artificial sweeter, I learned. And apparently ingesting the wrong one is worth tearing into the new assistant—who, mind you, is a girl with three roommates and a shower curtain for a bedroom door.
Whenever we could, Kelsey and I stole moments to talk. She was close with Claire, the girl who sat at my desk before me. But everything changed two weeks earlier, when Claire had spoken to one of the editors about a promotion. She returned to the Pit visibly shaken and refused to tell her friend any of what had transpired. Claire was gone a week later. Kelsey didn’t know it was for good until they hired me.
I told her about the strange, scribbled note, but neither of us knew what to make of it. We decided the early scratchings of a YA novel side-project was most likely, since we both had our own. If Claire’s request had been poorly received, that could account for her hasty exit, but not her complete ghosting of Kelsey. We theorized about explanations, compiled lists of the likeliest creeps on staff, and trolled the mastheads of other publications, praying to see her name appear.
But employment, like the inexorable march of time, flattens all things. Fears, passions, plans for retirement. Months slipped by without answers, the endless rhythm of work weeks pulling us through the end of the year like a riptide. There was too much else to worry about, deadlines to meet, and tantrums to manage. That was the nice thing about Coastline. Some new trouble always popped up to take the air out of the old.
Kelsey was a constant through it all. She could turn a day around with the precise timing of an eye roll. She knew where the editor-in-chief stored his special little snacks and how many we could take before someone noticed. She told me who to avoid and which happy hours specials we could take solace in when avoidance wasn’t an option.
The day we returned from New Years break—January 2nd—the Pit Crew were each meted out to senior writers like college-educated chattel to assist with long-term projects.
I got Peter Strum.
In my six months at Coastline, I had yet to lay eyes on mine and Dad’s favorite writer. He had apparently been off on assignment, but with the New Year was returning to the office to compile his research and start writing. I found his office door situated in the farthest corner of the floor, closed with a note stuck to it. “Come on in,” it read.
The space was more like a burrow than an office. The lamp on the desk illuminated only a fraction of the hundreds of books and antiquities crammed onto the shelves behind the desk. But without either Peter or further instructions, I was left with no choice but to look at all his stuff. Beneath a bejeweled dagger, a set of bagpipes, and an enormous conch sat a framed tintype photo. The four bearded men pictured stood side-by-side in a lush field. Their hollow cheeks were smeared with dirt. Their eyes were sunken and haunted. I couldn’t look away.
“Now that’s an interesting story,” the voice behind me said.
I jumped and said “fuck” too loudly. Peter stood in the doorway, an exact copy of the image I venerated in my mind for so long—pudgy, bespectacled, balding, a flat smile. Before I knew it, he was next to me, pointing at the image.
Peter said that the guys were this reclusive group of Irish farmers from the late eighteen hundreds. When the Great Famine hit, they withdrew to the hills, completely cut ties with the other villages in the county. People said that these farmers had figured out a way to save their crops from the blight. No one was ever able to learn the truth. Villagers tried, but the farmers fiercely—sometimes violently—protected their crops and their secret. And so rumor, in the absence of fact, begot myth. There were whispers of an evil up in the hills. Something that granted good luck to all of the farmers’ endeavors—for a price. Peter spent a lot of time looking into it, but the only lead he ever came across was two words: dia nua.
It’s Gaelic, he said. It means “new god.”
A chill would have gone down my spine, but the office was already freezing.
Once the blight disappeared and word of the farmers’ success spread, they decided to capitalize on their infamy and publish an almanac, chronicling what they had learned—most of it anyway. Over the years, the almanac evolved, eventually becoming Coastline Magazine.
Peter’s eye flicked to the side to gauge my reaction to his kicker, but I didn’t need to perform. The guy was good. I introduced myself and my fandom, trying my best not to scare him. He didn’t seem to mind.
We worked together nonstop for the next few weeks, me cataloging his notes and him laying out the loose structure of his eventual article. Sometimes we chatted. Others, he monologued about the state of the industry, how we were on the verge of losing something culturally that it was Coastline’s duty to sustain. I’d agree, and he’d admire my insight, before we returned to our quiet, focused work.
It was in those small moments when I felt most aware that I was actually at Coastline, doing work I was meant to, what my dad had dreamt for me.
After one late night in Peter’s office, I returned to the Pit to find Kelsey still at her desk. She was the only assistant left, and the second I saw her, I knew she had been waiting for me. She said we needed to talk. When I didn’t immediately know what we had to discuss, she got mad. Tom, one of the other assistants, hadn’t been heard from since before the holiday, and when Kelsey asked his manager about it, she was accused of insubordination.
“It’s Claire all over again,” she insisted. There had to be something going on here.
But I wasn’t so quick to follow her down the rabbit hole. This industry is a tough one, I told her. No one gets into it to make money. And some people just aren’t cut out for this kind of work. Tom could have just decided to move back home, and if I was being honest, that’s probably what happened to Claire.
Kelsey reacted as if I had just asked her to come in on a Saturday. I tried to assure her that that didn’t have to happen to us, especially if we stuck together and Kelsey showed a little more hustle from time to time. But I only seemed to upset her more. She snatched up her bag and headed for the elevator before I could offer to put in a good word for her with Peter.
Nothing could have kept me in the office after that—not even birthday cake in the breakroom. I waited just long enough for Kelsey to clear the building and subway, then got in the elevator alone.
One floor down from Coastline, the car stopped, and the doors opened. No one was waiting to get on. I expected someone to hurriedly appear, having forgotten the one last email they needed to send and apologizing. But still, no one. I jabbed the close door button as if those ever worked, betraying how badly I wanted to leave. To be anywhere else but here—where I had let down my friend.
A buzz from the control panel startled me. Gears ground somewhere above. The elevator began to descend with the doors still open. A stumbled backward and cowered in the corner, as far from the gaping opening as I could get myself.
The floors passed slowly enough to glimpse the empty offices beneath Coastline, but too quickly to make an escape. A draft whipped through car with each new level. I tried to stay calm, reminding myself that the gusts were not pulling me closer and closer to the opening. It only felt that way.
A few floors from the lobby, I saw something that convinced me that fear had gotten the better of me. A figure sat cross-legged on the ground, facing the elevator in an almost childlike pose, lit dimly by the faint red light of a distant exit sign. The darkness and the descent didn’t allow me much more detail than its ragged outline, a vague sense of its enormity, and the sudden smell of decay.
A chime rang out when the elevator reached the lobby. I still clung to the hand railing above me, my face buried in my shoulder. The security guard asked if I was alright and helped me up. He said he’d call maintenance in the morning.
--
I hardly slept that night. Kelsey plagued my thoughts, and my shower curtain door wouldn’t close all the way because it had lost a ring. I spent the endless hours longing for sleep, yet dreading the day that slumber would whisk me toward even faster. At four, I gave up and showered. It felt like only moments passed before the subway car was hurdling past me, inches away, promising oblivion on either side of the platform’s grooved yellow warning strip.
The office was empty when I got in, and I lost myself in work for a few hours. Whenever a new set of footsteps approached, I braced myself for the slosh of her iced coffee and the crinkle of her take-out bagel bag. But when Kelsey finally did show up, I didn’t notice until she was next to me.
“Hey,” she said, seeming as sleep deprived as I was.
“Hi,” I said. A weary, commiserative smile was all I could offer.
I like to think she understood.
The drumming started before we could say anything else. The steady beats were high and hollow, as if emanating from an ancient, tightly drawn skin. A voice over the intercom instructed the staff to gather in the conference room for an all-hands meeting. Terror filled Kelsey’s eyes, and I applied baseless reassurances as we walked over together. The torrent of whispers around us was unintelligible beyond the fact that no one knew what was happening.
We assumed our positions, standing against the wall while senior staff sat in chairs, and waited for the editor-in-chief. He came in shortly thereafter, a politic expression on his face that was neither too sad nor joyful. His heavy watch thunked on the table when he sat down.
The drumming continued as he spoke. He thanked us for coming on such short notice and said that he had some unfortunate news to share. The finance department had doubts about the forecast for the next fiscal year, so there would need to be cuts. He swore to us that these were his least favorite days, but were some of the most important for securing the future of Coastline Magazine. He thanked us again, asked us to keep up the hard work, and requested we return to our seats.
The HR lady was waiting for us in the center of the newsroom as we filed out. In a blunt voice, she ordered us all to resume work and to not—no matter what—look away from our screens.
The room erupted in the sound of keyboards clacking. Through the din, I could hear the elevator rising to our floor, its motor straining loudly against an unusually heavy load. The happy ding of the elevator preceded the metallic slide of the opening door and the boom of enormous footfalls entering the office.
A putrid smell, like decaying produce, filled my nostrils. It grew stronger as the footsteps came closer. My eyes locked on my screen, I couldn’t see whatever was behind me, but the dimming light told me it was tall. The HR lady explained that she had some questions about our recent performance and implored us to answer honestly.
First, she wanted to know if Josh, directly behind me, had tried to start a union. When he said he had, I heard breaking bones muffle a scream. After Cindy, two seats over, admitted to printing her resume on a Coastline copier, her chair flew out of sight, and I never saw her again. Sara, immediately to my right, never stood a chance. She copped to requesting time off during the busy season.
When the thing stopped behind me, a different voice spoke up. Peter cleared his throat and apologized for all of this nastiness. There was just one more question to answer. He wanted to know who I trusted more with the future of Coastline Magazine, myself or Kelsey.
In the moment, it took everything I had to not look over to her. Now, I tremble at the thought of what I would have seen.
After it was all over, there was pizza in the conference room, and a few of the senior editors gathered around.
They said I had done well.
They said I showed initiative.
They said I had management potential.