The Man Who Choked on Gum
Daniel Reyes had eaten the same turkey sandwich for lunch every day for six years, and on the day he died, he was still chewing a piece of spearmint gum meant to erase the smell of mustard before his two o'clock call with a client who was suing over water damage that was, in Daniel's professional opinion, entirely the client's own fault for leaving a window open during a hurricane.
That was the kind of man Daniel was. The kind who noticed windows. The kind who filed things under the correct tab. At thirty-four, he occupied a cubicle on the fourth floor of Pemberton Mutual Insurance with the quiet, unremarkable persistence of a piece of furniture nobody remembered ordering. He had a framed photo of nothing in particular — a beach he'd visited once, alone, on a trip he took because a travel website told him he deserved it — and a coffee mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST EMPLOYEE, a gag gift from an office party three years back that had, somewhere along the way, stopped being a joke and started being accurate.
He was not unhappy, exactly. He had simply misplaced the part of himself that used to want things. Somewhere between the microwave dinners and the Sunday nights spent watching…