Maggie carried herself like the model professional—pressed blazer, polished nod, expression set to neutral. Her pen sketched blood. On the legal pad half hidden by her keyboard tray, she wrote in small script, Sixteen Ways to Kill Your Managers.
Number one: staple gun to jugular. Efficient. No mess. No evidence trail.
Number two: office chair ejector seat, fifth-floor window. Add parachute? Optional.
Ken’s voice cut across the room, booming through his story. Maggie angled her ear, catching the punchline just in time to watch him slap Willy——his loyal shadow——on the back. The laughter rolled, and with it came the announcement. The promotion Maggie deserved landed in the lap of a man who still needed a GPS to find the copy room. His chief qualification: he’d married Ken’s daughter.
Willy clapped like a seal promised fish. Maggie’s pen kept moving.
Number three: drown Willy in a pumpkin spice latte——seasonal, extra whip.
Number four: Ken, strapped to a podium to read his own performance reviews until his heart taps out. Death by irony.
Number five: paper cuts, thousands; each signed in blue ink and triplicate.
Maggie lifted her coffee cup, ignoring the inked carnage inches from her fingers. She leaned in, nodding on cue. Inside, she pictured toner poisoning and PowerPoint waterboarding.
Number six: drown in a vat of burnt office coffee, slow, bitter, company blend.
Number seven: death by paperclips, swallowed one by one until Willy’s smug throat clogs.
Number eight: Lock Willy and Ken in the conference room with a malfunctioning speakerphone; feedback shrieking, brains scrambled, meeting finally useful.
Maggie wrote faster and faster.
Death by the “team-building ropes course,” only the ropes fail.
Office fridge salmonella surprise. HR report: “unfortunate potluck accident.”
Bludgeoned with an Employee of the Month plaque (engraved for posterity).
Shoved into the shredder, resumes first. Benefits of cross-cut: secure and satisfying.
Trapped in an endless PowerPoint. Twenty-seven slides, star wipes mandatory.
Whiteboard marker to the jugular. Quick, merciful, dry-erase.
Buried alive under unread emails. Auto-replies set to “out of office forever.”
Maggie slid the pad face down under her keyboard and headed for a coffee refill.
Beya’s heels clicked, then stopped. She turned the pad over and snapped a pic. When Maggie returned, she froze.
Beya, lipstick the color of mutiny, stood next to the pad. Beya, passed over three times in favor of men with thinner resumes and louder swagger. “You missed one. Number sixteen: Death by unpaid overtime. Slow. Torturous. Delicious.”
Two days later, Maggie walked into her office. and her brain hit the emergency brake.
On her screen glowed an email: You’re trending.
Her stomach pitched, coffee sloshed against the lid. She clicked. There it was——her yellow pad, photographed and tweeted. Caption: Proof women think creatively, even in captivity.
Her throat closed. Viral. Memes. LinkedIn posts. A parody TikTok where people acted out each method with staplers and whiteboards. Maggie pressed her palms flat on the desk, heat rising under her collar, pulse skittering like she’d been caught with blood on her hands.
Ken stormed down the hall, face mottled tomato-red. Willy muttered about “female hysteria.” HR flooded Maggie’s inbox with calendar invites multiplying like rabbits.
Maggie shut her laptop and updated her résumé. A week later, an unknown number flashed. She ignored it. Another ping: We fix toxic workplaces; let’s talk.
Ken’s calendar invite hit with the weight of doom: 3:00 PM—HR + Leadership.
Maggie walked in at three, spine tall, mouth loaded, ready to face Ken’s fury. Instead, a stranger stood at the window in a navy dress and bright sneakers.
“Call me Siobhan.” She handed me a folder stamped with a consulting company’s logo and a copy of a book, Managing for Accountability by Curry. “We’ve bought out your contract. Ken and Willy won’t be joining——they prefer you making a quick exit. And we have a plan in mind. We work to improve companies——and your list aligns perfectly with the text we’ve been using.”
The book’s heft stunned Maggie. Pages filled with frameworks, not fluff. Verbs, not vapor. Blueprints for effective leadership. She thumbed the cover, a charge running through her, as if someone had finally named the rules of the rigged game she’d been fighting blind.
Beya slipped in behind Maggie. “Letting us go helps them dodge a reputation blackeye.”
Siobhan flipped open a folder, crisp paper snapping like verdicts. She spread printouts across the table—Maggie’s list on one side, a set of workshop modules on the other. Each murder method mirrored by an “antidote”:
—— Paper clips down the throat → Stop forced alignment. Consent, context, compensation.
—— Speakerphone brain scramble → Kill useless meetings. Agenda, outcomes, exits.
—— Employee-of-the-Month bludgeon → Replace trophies with fair pay and visible paths.
—— Synergy → Specific verbs, measurable goals, fewer buzzwords.
“Work with us. Together we’ll dismantle the kind of circus you’re escaping.”
Maggie turned to Beya, who shrugged. “We needed a door. I kicked one open.” Maggie’s grin broke free as she tightened her grip on the book. Not a prop. A weapon and a roadmap.
Two Fridays later, Maggie stood at the front of a conference room with a clicker in her palm and Beya at her shoulder. A title slide glowed: Sixteen Ways Your Culture Kills People (and How to Make It Stop). Managers filled seats, arms folded, eyes wary.
Twenty minutes earlier, the lobby screen flashed the first client: Ken and Willy’s logo in twelve-inch letters. Maggie almost laughed out loud. Beya leaned close, voice low enough to blend with the hum of the HVAC. “Ready to demonstrate number four?” Click——opener slide: Staple gun to jugular.
A ripple of nervous laughter moved across the room. Maggie let it ride, then smiled.
“Relax,” she told them. “Metaphor. Mostly.”
Ken and Willy slid into seats along the wall, trying to look invisible. Maggie met their eyes, then turned her back on them——spine tall, smile bright, voice cutting through the room. This time, the meeting belonged to her.
Alaska/Washington author Lynne Curry——nominated for the 2025 Best of the Net Anthology, the 2024 Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction (2024)——founded “Real-life Writing,” publishes a monthly “Writing from the Cabin” blog, and a weekly “dear Abby of the workplace” newspaper column. She has published twenty-one short stories; two articles on writing craft, and six books, including Navigating Conflict, Beating the Workplace Bully and Managing for Accountability. She loves hiking with her collie and spaniel, walks the beach daily at Sandy Point in the winter and the trails in Alaska in the summer. Her favorite revenge novel: Connor Sullivan’s Sleeping Bear.
