Free The Glass Factory by Kenneth Wishnia

offices in the basement with only two windows—both in the boss’s private office—and he’s gone from my life.
    The secretary’s got about four phone lines buzzing, so I lean into an office and ask who I should be speaking to. The woman jumps as if a mongoose has been dropped down the back of her dress and blurts out, “What about?” as if Perry Mason’s just caught her with a blood-soaked meat cleaver in her hands.
    “About the technology incubator.”
    “You’ll have to speak to Franklin Schmidt.” And she turns back to her terminal fast enough to dislodge even the most determined mongoose.
    “Frank,” says the short, muscular guy in the next office. “Call me Frank. Everybody does.”
    He’s got hairy arms and a raspy five o’clock shadow, and it isn’t even lunchtime yet. He looks like he’s been out of college maybe two years, where he majored in racquetball, and has connections of some kind because he’s starting at the bottom as assistant to the vice president. I tell him the company I work for is looking to try out some new production techniques, and we need affordable space and access to minds that are willing to experiment. I’ve worked enough with computers over the years to fake a pretty good line. But the presence of Antonia is putting him off. He’s still enough of a kid to regard it as highly abnormal to have one yourself. It drops my credibility from an A- to a B+.
    But I get in to see the boss. I can see that Frank Schmidt got all the hair in this duo, because Phil Gates is a pudgy, balding, middle-aged guy, and he is totally unhelpful. He takes one look at the kid and just knows I can’t be a professional. I ask to see information about the companies that are already using the incubator space and he says, “Why?”
    “It’s public information, isn’t it?”
    “Rival companies aren’t covered by the statute.”
    The fuck they aren’t.
    I tell him my supervisor will be contacting him, and prepare to go. But Antonia insists on a drink of water. So I’m wrestling with the cooler when Phil Gates leans out of his office and yells, “Kate! I wanted those cover proofs ten minutes ago!”
    A woman skitters out of her office clutching a dozen glossy images and hands them over to Gates. He flips through them, tosses ten in the garbage, hands back two: “These are all right. Do the others over.”
    When he’s gone, Antonia looks through the garbage and announces, “I like them.” As I’m pulling her away from the garbage in front of Gates’s office, the proof-woman treads lightly up behind me and whispers, “It’s not a child-friendly office. I think the boss eats them for breakfast.”
    I catch myself for a moment, and look at her: She’s—well—stunning, a few inches taller than me, thin, with a creamy Pre-Raphaelite complexion, thick jet-black hair and eyebrows and a wide, flat nose that must have come from some passing salesman or wandering Semite two or three generations back because the rest of her is purebred Italian-American. The nameplate on her door says KATHERINA MINOLA.
    “Is that you?” I ask.
    “You know, I often ask myself that,” she says, smiling, and she backsteps into her office like a kimono-clad geisha.
    I follow her in and Antonia goes, “Oh my God!” at all the colors and shapes jutting from the walls and surfaces like Technicolor stalactites in an underground cavern.
    “You wanna see this?” says Katherina, holding out a purple plastic tube. “Here. Look.”
    “What do you say?” I perform my parental duty.
    “Thank you,” Antonia performs hers.
    “This end,” says Katherina, reversing the tube for Antonia to look through, then she brings her swivel lamp down and shines it right at her.
    “This is cool!” says Antonia.
    “She got that from me,” I explain.
    “I figured.”
    Antonia is going nuts over this thing.
    “You have to rotate it,” says Katherina, demonstrating. Antonia gasps. Just the way I would have.
    “Can I see