Stingy Brim Trilby

Attorney James Finnegan walked into his office. He stopped at his secretary’s desk. Marge stopped what she was doing and devoted her attention to Finnegan who laid documents on Marge’s desk one at a time.

As he laid each down, Marge date stamped it with an electronic stamp which sent the document index number to her desktop while placing a blue razor-sharp, nine-digit number and date onto the front page.

Each copy was fringed with colored tabs, each tab denoting a mistake, addition, question or revision. Each tab was numbered, the numbers recorded on Finnegan’s desktop and mirrored on Marge’s. Later, Marge would resolve each tab, find it on the desktop and record her resolution.

Finnegan then produced a collection of pink pages, each with a paragraph carefully double-spaced. Finnegan waited until Marge had loaded a blank pink page into her printer then read each paragraph slowly as she typed it into the computer then reprinted her own copy.

Each paragraph was instructions to Marge.

When they finished, they laid the pages side by side, proofed them, signed them and date stamped with the aforementioned machine.

“I’ll be in my office.”

“Of course.”

“Do you think the copy guy is weird?”

“Impeccably so, sir.”

“He seemed to make a joke about my soul.”

“But you don’t have one, sir.”

Finnegan stared briefly. His lips almost pursed. This outpouring of mirth was not lost on Marge.

Perched on the edge of a couch across from them Finnegan’s soul, Sean, from Finnegan’s middle name, was shocked and appalled.

Sean spent a lot of time on that couch. It knew Marge like the back of its hand. It watched her peel sticky notes off of documents every day and could trace the arc her infuriated eyebrows had worn into the space above her desk like a groove in a rock. Sean knew the precise moment Marge would say perfunctorily and with solid precision—

“As if I ever make a mistake,”

--and mouth along with a grin.

Sean knew by the timber of a folder’s slap that it was lunch, and it would follow Marge down to the Cajun joint over on State where she would eat an ungodly amount of crawfish, her fingers and lips greasy with butter and roux, then share her private glee as she paid for each lunch from petty cash, annotating the expenditure as “copies per” in some client’s case.

It was atrociously illegal, against everything she stood for, could get her boss disbarred and was just ferociously wicked. It made the craw daddies taste divine.

Sean rose each morning to wallow in Finnegan through ablutions as regular as sunrise; stare out the window of the morning train, trying to read band flyers and decipher graffiti as Finnegan read briefs; and weather Finnegan’s inglorious routine with Marge where Sean lately found itself a surprised spectator. It used to stay in Finnegan’s office but no more. Sean found Finnegan profoundly fucked up, incomprehensibly neurotic, proactively irritating, a pedantic conversationalist, and a goddamned overtaxing rule-oriented nitpicking jackass.

Until lately, Sean thought it was merely the occulted voice of reason in the conflagration of urgency that was Finnegan’s waking mind. It had since learned it was really a separate being, a governor of sorts, a kind of curator for Finnegan whom Sean was more often referring to lately with exaggerated, nearly British disdain as ‘Shitbag’.

One day Sean just said, ‘fuck it’, threw its spectral hands in the air and walked off the job.