The Girl Who Was Eaten by Her Job

When this story first started, right back at the beginning, the job was just a skinny wee thing. It wasn’t greedy and it wasn’t mean. It only took a little nibble of her out of curiosity. It was just to see what she tasted like. If she even had a taste at all. Well, it turns out she did have a taste. At first the job was satisfied just to find out, just to know the taste. But after a while the job began to crave more. It wanted to experience that tingle of the tongue and the warmth in the belly that had come after the first taste.

So the job took another little bite from the girl. She hadn’t really noticed the first bite, that initial taste that got the job started. But she definitely noticed the second one. Not in a particularly horrible way, it was just that she was conscious of the biting now. I say biting, not bite, very deliberately. Because this wasn’t, as you might have guessed, the last bite that the job took. The next few didn’t get too much bigger, they didn’t hurt, they weren’t big scoffing mouthfuls. Only they started to come more and more regularly.

Now of course, the girl was starting to be a little bit annoyed by the job. She still liked it though, aside from the biting it was quite a nice job really. But the biting had moved from something that she could brush off, to something that was difficult to ignore. The problem was, that aside from liking the job, which as I mentioned she still did, she needed the job. She was as dependent on it as it was of her, hanging on her back with its teeth in her shoulder.

Eventually it was clear to everybody who came across the two, that the job was slowly eating the girl. She was disappearing just as the job was growing. She carried it around with her even as it got heavier and she got weaker and slight. The girl was just a shadow of her old self, but the job was becoming bolder. The job started to dominate any interactions the girl had with other people, people who weren’t already involved with the job. The sight of this gnashing fattening beast over the girls shoulder usually scared away these people. They didn’t really want to get involved with the job, they didn’t want to get sucked in.

Eventually the jobs legs, having been wrapped around the girls waist, had made it back to the ground. The jobs feet started to tread the girls steps, it started to carry its own weight, as well as hers. The job started walking for itself, it picked the girl up and carried her. After all the time that she’d been carrying the job she felt relief. She relaxed into an exhausted stupor. And she didn’t even notice the job gobbling down the last of her.