Graeme

The Decision of Graeme the Caseworker

It began, as all such bureaucratic horrors do, with an email. Graeme, caseworker of indeterminate origin, had requested vitally important information. The sort of request that must be answered precisely, lest one be forever lost in the System. I compiled my response, fingers trembling, and moved to click Reply - but the button leapt aside like a startled flea. I chased it. It skittered, it dodged, it hid in the margins of the screen, only to reappear somewhere else.

By the time I finally trapped it—after an absurd duel of endurance - I was exhausted. My message sent, the information submitted. A moment of relief. But then, the text on the screen flickered, warped, and changed before my eyes. The words I had typed were erased, replaced with their complete opposite. I wrote I have never lived at this address, but now it read: I have always lived here. I typed The amount is unreasonable, and the response became This applicant has no concept of money. I scrambled to correct it, but the backspace key had turned into a smooth, featureless surface, as if it had never existed at all.

From somewhere beyond my monitor, I heard a chuckle - low, reptilian, wet. Graeme. His elongated head shimmered for a moment, his features shifting in and out of human form, a scaly mirage in an office chair. His forked tongue flickered between his teeth as he watched me struggle. I tried again, but each time I pressed send, my answer unravelled into a writhing mass of letters that twisted into snakes and slithered off the screen. They coiled into Graeme’s desk drawer. He reached in, plucked one out, bit off its head, and chewed thoughtfully.

"Delicious," he mused, licking a speck of bureaucratic ink from his lip.

Weeks passed in a blur of automated rejections and impossible demands. Then, at last, a parcel arrived - lodged into the bars of the rusted gate outside my house. A parcel No. A box of keys. No note, no instructions. Just cold, clinking metal.

I tried the first key. It dissolved into mist. The second, a tiny brass thing, hissed and sprouted feathers before twisting into a crow, which flapped away into the bare tree behind me. The third key - perhaps this one—no, it screamed as I inserted it into the lock, then vanished in a burst of static. One by one, each key betrayed me, transforming and escaping into the wind, the trees, the sky.

Defeated, I sank to my knees. And then -without warning- the ground yawned beneath me. The pavement cracked like the spine of an ancient book, and I fell. Fell through the stone, through time, through space, through an endless corridor of filing cabinets that whispered we regret to inform you as I tumbled past.

When I landed, I was sitting in a chair. A hard, blank chair in a hard, blank office. Across from me, at a blank desk, Graeme sat, smoothing the folds of his regulation grey tie. His eyes gleamed, black and lidless.

“I have made my decision,” he said.

The room stretched. The desk melted. The walls inhaled.

“I have decided,” he continued, with the smug authority of a man who enjoys his work, “that you are a rabbit.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but only a soft, strangled squeak emerged. My hands—no, my paws—trembled on the table. My ears twitched. My nose quivered.

Graeme smiled.

My world shrank to the size of a cage.