Office Girl by Joe Meno

what my name was. People still thought I was the same person. And anyways, like I said, I really love my grandma, so I got used to it.”
    â€œI never knew any of my grandparents. They were all dead before I was born.”
    â€œThat’s too bad. My grandma, she used to give me a little glass animal every year for my birthday. You know, those little pink glass animals? I still have them. Most of them are broken but I still have about five or six of them.”
    â€œWhich is your favorite?”
    Odile pauses here, thinking. She stands up and then crosses over to a small desk and lifts up a tiny pink animal, made entirely of glass. She hands it to him.
    Jack stares at it, at the odd angles of its joints and limbs, and asks, “What is it supposed to be?”
    â€œA unicorn.”
    â€œA unicorn? Where’s its horn?”
    â€œIt’s broken off. It broke when I moved here.”
    Jack looks down and sees, on the animal’s head, a small rough circle where the horn was once attached.
    â€œSo why’s this one your favorite?”
    â€œI don’t know. I like it better now that it’s broken. It’s kind of down on its luck. It seems more realistic for some reason.”
    Jack nods and hands it back to her. Odile sets it down on her desk and then returns to the bed. The two of them sit beside each other on the bed for a long moment, the sound of the radiator in the other room ticking off the seconds of their stilted breaths. Odile hums a little something to herself and then sighs.
    â€œSo,” she says.
    â€œSo.”
    â€œSo.”
    â€œSo are you really seeing someone right now? Or did you just say that so I wouldn’t try anything?”
    Odile nods and then shrugs her shoulders. “I mean, he’s not my boyfriend or anything. We’re just seeing each other. We never talk unless I call. It’s kind of over, I guess.”
    â€œIt is?”
    â€œIt is. So what about you? You’re not seeing anyone?” she asks.
    â€œNo, I’m … I’m kind of going through a divorce right now.”
    â€œKind of?”
    â€œI’m definitely going through a divorce right now.”
    â€œWow. How old are you?”
    â€œTwenty-five. Almost twenty-six.”
    â€œAnd you’re already divorced?”
    â€œYep. That’s one life goal already crossed off my list. And I feel pretty good about it. Not really. Actually, I feel pretty bad about it.”
    â€œThat sucks.”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œSo,” she says, “what happened?”
    â€œI don’t know. Maybe we can talk about it some other time. It’s kind of complicated.”
    â€œOkay,” she says. “So do you want to see something amazing?”
    â€œSure,” he answers, smiling at her giddiness.
    She leans over and reaches beneath the bed and pulls out an old-looking comic book, Abstract Adventures in Weirdo World , and hands it to him. Jack smiles and begins to slowly turn the pulpy pages, taking in the weird geometric shapes, the absurd juxtapositions of body parts and animals.
    â€œWhat is this?” he asks.
    â€œIt’s a comic book I found. I got it at a garage sale a couple months ago. It’s by this guy Frank Porter who I never heard of.”
    â€œIt’s pretty psychedelic.”
    â€œYeah, I think this one is from 1974 or so. I went and looked him up in the library. Apparently, he made all these comics just to amuse himself. Because he couldn’t be around people. You can see he was totally into R. Crumb’s style. It’s so trippy and globular-looking. I think this was like a year or so before he stopped making comics. He was only like twenty-four, twenty-five. And then he just gave it up and became a janitor.”
    â€œWow.”
    â€œBut he drew hundreds of these comics before he stopped making them, and then, after he died, his sister found all of them. I think he ended up hanging himself. I’m