The Pickle of it All by Stephen Mirabito
George gets in a pickle at work when his date Mia's punny pranks get out of hand.
At first, her little jokes were innocent and thoughtful; honestly, they were. On their first date, Mia gave him an origami folding of a dog (it was her model example for the third graders in her classroom). When George unpeeled the flap of the dog's ears, she had written in curly-cursive purple ink: It is a pawsitive delight to meet you. An awkward gesture, to be sure, but the date was so pleasant, the conversation flowed so effortlessly that it was a touching gift in hindsight. Mia was not only George's type (muscular and confident), but she quickly initiated physical contact by running her fingers along the space between his shoulderblades. Her touch made his arms droop, his jaw unclench, and for the first time on a date, he didn't constantly bitch about his middle-management position in corporate finance. Feeling bold, George attempted a few puns of his own: throw me a bone here! and careful, you might bowl me over, but Mia just shook her head and told him he was not allowed to make puns - at least not until he improved his skills. George nodded and bought them another round of drinks. He promised she could make all the bad puns she wanted from then on out.
For three months they saw each other on the weekends, and for three months, the puns stayed awkward and charming. It wasn't until Mia interfered with George's workplace that he realized she was a bit dangerous.
On the last Friday of Q1, George's boss sat at a cherry-oak desk chiding George to find the proper documentation for the Johnson account; final negotiations were set for the next hour. They even had the Vice President of Operations and the client's legal representation on a Zoom call from Tokyo. When his boss leaned into George's ear and hissed, "You forgot the ICAAP reports. Where the fuck are they?" George sprang out of his seat and hustled to the filing closet. Upon opening it, a pair of jaundiced googly-eyes popped out at him - leaned against the backside of the closet was a human-sized cardboard cutout of a pickle. In the obscured light, the eyes vibrated as if they belonged to a disturbed man waiting to assault him. George screamed like a baby seal and tripped backwards over his feet.
Attempting to catch his balance, George flailed, smacking a cup of piping hot coffee off its perch. It not only splashed the SSPs and SOC 2 Type II audit reports, but the coffee shot straight into the regional manager's fat belly. The black liquid burned through his shirt and sent him into a frenzy.
"What is the meaning of this?" he bellowed.
Horrified at the chaos he set into motion, George scrambled to change the Zoom call from camera to screen share, but the damn thing wouldn't budge; the rest of the participants had a front-row viewing of George's boss spinning in circles, slapping himself with loose papers, and howling at the burns on his stomach. George ran towards the web camera and ripped its cords from the wall. The Zoom call went dark.
After cleaning up his office and receiving the ass-chewing of a decade, George returned to the filing closet to confront the thing that had set the whole hulabaloo into motion: George noticed, scrawled in purple and pink sharpie on the back of the pickle cutout, Mia's curly, half-cursive handwriting: I think you are kind of a big dill.
On the front side of the pickle, Mia had drawn a depiction of George's face - she even added his thin mustache shaded across the top of the pickle's lips.
"I just want to know how you got into my office."
George tried to steady his hand around a glass of Negroni. Mia sat with her hands stuffed under her legs, her lips curled into her mouth like a kid trying not to laugh in the middle of Catholic mass.
"Your receptionist is so sweet. Cynthia? We both went to MSU, actually, and had the same exact biology professor. She was quite a few years behind me, though." "And she just let you into my office holding a giant pickle!?"
Mia slid next to George. His hands were still quivering.
"I just told her I was your girlfriend and I was leaving your lunch for the day. She didn't notice the pickle cutout. She was too distracted by her phone."
"I will have to talk with her because that's wildly unprofessional..." George stopped mid-sentence and took a swig of his drink. "And you're not my girlfriend, though. I mean ... are you my girlfriend?"
Mia set her hand on his back to massage the space between his shoulders.
"I mean, not yet." She shrugged.
"Not yet," George repeated like he was reviewing the tax figures on the Johnson account. He gathered his thoughts. "But what if I barged into your classroom and left a giant pickle in your supply closet? You would not find that funny."
"First of all, the receptionist would not let you in. They don't let strange men inside an elementary school. And second, even if you did, maybe we could have a fun cooking lesson. I think my kids would love to learn about pickles."
George smiled.
"I'm a big dill, huh?" he said.
"You sure are," Mia said with a sarcastic lilt in her voice.
"It's such an awful pun," George said, finally looking at her.
"You loved it, though," Mia said.
George nodded.
She apologized, eventually. She admitted that she had no idea what his work schedule was like or that he had an important meeting with men from Tokyo.
There was certainly something more heartfelt and sincere about her than anyone he had dated before. After all, she didn't know the finer details of his work life. He hadn't taken the time to explain to her the stress he was under or how often his boss threatened to fire him. And more to the point, she was the first lover to take an active interest in his job (even if it came in the form of pickle infiltration). It was a funny and innocent prank. He couldn't stay mad forever. He kissed her on the forehead. She made a sound like a purring kitten and told him that she loved him.
One particularly hectic day (months later), George forgot to check Mia's texts all afternoon - a mistake in retrospect, because in this case, she had given him some forewarning. But the pickle incident had really thrown the Johnson account off the rails. Every social interaction afterward was plagued with questions: "Do you just keep cardboard cutouts of pickles in your filing closet? Do you really love pickles or something?"
They had to reset the timeline for final negotiations by a whole quarter. And after screaming at George for nearly thirty minutes, George's boss had given him one last opportunity to make up for it: "One more misstep and I will make sure you never get hired in this city ever again. This account is worth too much damn money for the company to suffer your little lover's pranks."
The office, however, laughed about it every day - Jax from accounting had bought George a jar of Vlasic extra crunch. Cynthia even gave him a family-size bottle of ranch dressing. She left a sticky note on his desk: "It has your favorite ingredient!"
George had to ignore the distractions. His regional manager had arranged an in-person meeting at Giardino's downtown. It was their last shot to save the deal and he didn't want any office shenanigans to interfere with its closing. The men began with a round of Old Fashioneds and stories about a hunting trip in Montana. George's boss kept steering the conversation towards business, but the clients were clearly diverting. They ordered more and more alcohol knowing that the company was footing the bill. Nothing his boss did changed the course of the conversation, so George ordered a pickle martini to play along. His boss didn't like that one bit - he wrung his hands together as if he was trying to snuff the life out of a rodent.
He interrupted the conversation with an abrupt clearing of his throat. "Gentlemen, please. We have business to take care of for God's sake."
Silence fell over the table. George sipped his martini and suppressed a laugh. The Johnson clients sighed and refused to say anything else. And just as George's boss was about to try again and the servers set three plates of Beef Wellington appetizers on the table, a fresh, new terror barged into the dining room.
In spilled three mascots dressed as various condiments - there was a bottle of ketchup, a jar of mustard, and a squeeze packet of jelly. George choked, spitting up some pickle martini into the glass. The entire restaurant froze: conversations silenced, the waiters stopped writing down orders, and the omnipresent clacking of silverware ceased. Everyone on the floor stared, jaws agape, as the three mascots sprinted up to George's table. The Ketchup was the first to sing; the rest of the crew began their highly-choreographed dance in the aisles - clapping and cheering commenced as well.
Squeeze Jelly: I heard you were in a jam!
All: Yeah!
Ketchup: I heard you had to ketchup!
All: Yeah!
Mustard: Mustard up the courage ... to relish the day.
All: Oh oh! Hoooo-ray!
And so on, the two-minute number felt like it persisted for hours. Even the busboy began to sweat from secondhand embarrassment. It was such a bizarre disruption to the lunch rush that when the mascots awkwardly finished their song and jogged out of the dining room (high-fiving the hostess along the way), the customers didn't acknowledge what had happened. The business conversations tentatively restarted, the clanking of silverware resumed, and waiters hurried forward with their orders and food deliveries.
George went pale. He couldn't look away from a water stain on the tablecloth. The stain looked like a dog, somehow. He sloshed back the last of his Martini.
Suddenly, one of the clients began to laugh. Then, the rest joined in. After a few moments, they were heaving and shaking. Their eyes watered. They held on to each other like survivors clinging to a life raft. The more one laughed, the more another cackled even louder. They could hardly breathe.
In the quick 30 minutes that followed, George had finalized the deal and the clients signed a thick stack of financial documents.
"You knew where I was going to lunch." George leaned on her desk and shook his head.
"Cynthia told me." Mia was distracted. "She and I have been texting a lot."
"Why would you... I mean, how did you even..." George was so flustered he couldn't finish a single sentence.
Mia warmed a mug of tea. She reclined in her bed, the pale light of her laptop illuminating the underside of her face. She studied a video on how best to facilitate a lesson on fractions for young elementary minds.
George still hadn't processed what had happened, honestly. He looked at Mia and she loudly sipped her drink, transfixed at the colors moving across the screen. She was not even phased by what she had done. He marveled at what a strange thing it was to date another person, how close you could become and yet be mystified by what happened inside their head, what clandestine schemes could occur - how fundamentally unknowable another person was. They had been dating nearly seven months, but he got the sense that she was a complete stranger, just a random person off the street with no attachments to him whatsoever.
Breaking up would have been the appropriate call. Objectively speaking, George knew that. Mia hardly said a word about her prank and treated it like she had sent him a card and flowers. It made the whole situation even more surreal. But George knew many things about romance, objectively, and never followed through with them. Was he insecure? Was he not man enough to stand up for himself? George spiraled out in his head (his default tendency) and didn't say anything else about it.
Instead, George took Mia's mug from her and set it on the nightstand. He slipped under the sheets and stared at the George Pickle she had hung up next to the door. George stared at the pen-drawn mustache and ran his finger across his own. The George Pickle smiled back at him with dangling googly-eyes. It felt like he was staring through a window into an alternate dimension.
Mia fell asleep and slouched into her pile of pillows. Her laptop was still open and the video droned on about pedagogical research.
How easy it would have been to leave a note; it was so simple! I'm sorry, Mia, but I don't think we're compatible. I don't see a future between us. It was easy, yet George didn't have the courage to do it. He didn't want to go back to the dating apps. He didn't want to go back to wasting money on awkward first dates that lead nowhere. It sounded so exhausting. Plus, her little incident had made George the hero of the office. It landed his boss a fat paycheck.
Instead, George did something much different.
He carefully plucked the computer off her lap, making sure not to wake her. Then, he tip-toed across the room and pulled out his phone. He got a full snapshot of the pickle, bottom to top. He checked his phone and it fit the dimensions perfectly.
The next step required the full-sized mirror of her bathroom. There, he arranged his mise-en-scène to perfection. Snap. He checked the quality of the photo and he was satisfied. He had the second piece of the puzzle.
The last piece required a bit of editing and uploading on her computer. It didn't take long. Smartphone technology made it easy to photoshop and transfer files; the work was done in a matter of minutes. Satisfied, he shut her laptop and stashed it in her carrying case.
He crawled into bed next to her and, half-asleep, she instinctively curled into him. George drifted off, his head pressed into the space between her shoulder and neck. It was so soft that peaceful dreams overtook him. No more psychological quandaries disrupted his mood for the rest of the night.
He never heard from her after that. Despite the many texts and late-night apologetic phone calls, she fully ghosted him. And when George resumed dating, he found every potential suitor boring. They weren't the same as Mia. He blamed himself. He was the one to make a serious mistake.
The serious mistake was that George did not appreciate the intricacies of being a teacher in modern-day America. For example, Mia had to use her personal computer for work on account of the school not being able to afford personalized smart technology for each of their employees.
So, it was a hectic morning at Goddard Elementary school when Mia lost her job. It was the morning of field day and the students were already in an abysmal state. They were screaming and chasing each other around the classroom, begging Ms. G. (Mia) to let them outside.
"Pleeeeeeease! Pleeeeeeease!" they screamed and Mia spent all her energy corralling them into the inner circle of the focus zone. They eventually found their seats in their assigned colors and Ms. G. told them they had a meditation warm-up to prepare for the day.
But by the time she had plugged the HDMI cord into her laptop, it was too late. She didn't notice that her laptop background image had been changed.
There was her boyfriend, naked as the day he was born, his privates covered by a photoshopped image of the cardboard cutout pickle. The desktop icons had been rearranged so it looked as though they were ejaculating out of the tip of the pickle head. In purple and pink Comic Sans font, he wrote: I might have a really big dill, but at least I'm not a dick.
Mia had no time to switch away from screen share. You know how that technology goes. The damn thing will never budge.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
For three months they saw each other on the weekends, and for three months, the puns stayed awkward and charming. It wasn't until Mia interfered with George's workplace that he realized she was a bit dangerous.
On the last Friday of Q1, George's boss sat at a cherry-oak desk chiding George to find the proper documentation for the Johnson account; final negotiations were set for the next hour. They even had the Vice President of Operations and the client's legal representation on a Zoom call from Tokyo. When his boss leaned into George's ear and hissed, "You forgot the ICAAP reports. Where the fuck are they?" George sprang out of his seat and hustled to the filing closet. Upon opening it, a pair of jaundiced googly-eyes popped out at him - leaned against the backside of the closet was a human-sized cardboard cutout of a pickle. In the obscured light, the eyes vibrated as if they belonged to a disturbed man waiting to assault him. George screamed like a baby seal and tripped backwards over his feet.
Attempting to catch his balance, George flailed, smacking a cup of piping hot coffee off its perch. It not only splashed the SSPs and SOC 2 Type II audit reports, but the coffee shot straight into the regional manager's fat belly. The black liquid burned through his shirt and sent him into a frenzy.
"What is the meaning of this?" he bellowed.
Horrified at the chaos he set into motion, George scrambled to change the Zoom call from camera to screen share, but the damn thing wouldn't budge; the rest of the participants had a front-row viewing of George's boss spinning in circles, slapping himself with loose papers, and howling at the burns on his stomach. George ran towards the web camera and ripped its cords from the wall. The Zoom call went dark.
After cleaning up his office and receiving the ass-chewing of a decade, George returned to the filing closet to confront the thing that had set the whole hulabaloo into motion: George noticed, scrawled in purple and pink sharpie on the back of the pickle cutout, Mia's curly, half-cursive handwriting: I think you are kind of a big dill.
On the front side of the pickle, Mia had drawn a depiction of George's face - she even added his thin mustache shaded across the top of the pickle's lips.
"I just want to know how you got into my office."
George tried to steady his hand around a glass of Negroni. Mia sat with her hands stuffed under her legs, her lips curled into her mouth like a kid trying not to laugh in the middle of Catholic mass.
"Your receptionist is so sweet. Cynthia? We both went to MSU, actually, and had the same exact biology professor. She was quite a few years behind me, though." "And she just let you into my office holding a giant pickle!?"
Mia slid next to George. His hands were still quivering.
"I just told her I was your girlfriend and I was leaving your lunch for the day. She didn't notice the pickle cutout. She was too distracted by her phone."
"I will have to talk with her because that's wildly unprofessional..." George stopped mid-sentence and took a swig of his drink. "And you're not my girlfriend, though. I mean ... are you my girlfriend?"
Mia set her hand on his back to massage the space between his shoulders.
"I mean, not yet." She shrugged.
"Not yet," George repeated like he was reviewing the tax figures on the Johnson account. He gathered his thoughts. "But what if I barged into your classroom and left a giant pickle in your supply closet? You would not find that funny."
"First of all, the receptionist would not let you in. They don't let strange men inside an elementary school. And second, even if you did, maybe we could have a fun cooking lesson. I think my kids would love to learn about pickles."
George smiled.
"I'm a big dill, huh?" he said.
"You sure are," Mia said with a sarcastic lilt in her voice.
"It's such an awful pun," George said, finally looking at her.
"You loved it, though," Mia said.
George nodded.
She apologized, eventually. She admitted that she had no idea what his work schedule was like or that he had an important meeting with men from Tokyo.
There was certainly something more heartfelt and sincere about her than anyone he had dated before. After all, she didn't know the finer details of his work life. He hadn't taken the time to explain to her the stress he was under or how often his boss threatened to fire him. And more to the point, she was the first lover to take an active interest in his job (even if it came in the form of pickle infiltration). It was a funny and innocent prank. He couldn't stay mad forever. He kissed her on the forehead. She made a sound like a purring kitten and told him that she loved him.
One particularly hectic day (months later), George forgot to check Mia's texts all afternoon - a mistake in retrospect, because in this case, she had given him some forewarning. But the pickle incident had really thrown the Johnson account off the rails. Every social interaction afterward was plagued with questions: "Do you just keep cardboard cutouts of pickles in your filing closet? Do you really love pickles or something?"
They had to reset the timeline for final negotiations by a whole quarter. And after screaming at George for nearly thirty minutes, George's boss had given him one last opportunity to make up for it: "One more misstep and I will make sure you never get hired in this city ever again. This account is worth too much damn money for the company to suffer your little lover's pranks."
The office, however, laughed about it every day - Jax from accounting had bought George a jar of Vlasic extra crunch. Cynthia even gave him a family-size bottle of ranch dressing. She left a sticky note on his desk: "It has your favorite ingredient!"
George had to ignore the distractions. His regional manager had arranged an in-person meeting at Giardino's downtown. It was their last shot to save the deal and he didn't want any office shenanigans to interfere with its closing. The men began with a round of Old Fashioneds and stories about a hunting trip in Montana. George's boss kept steering the conversation towards business, but the clients were clearly diverting. They ordered more and more alcohol knowing that the company was footing the bill. Nothing his boss did changed the course of the conversation, so George ordered a pickle martini to play along. His boss didn't like that one bit - he wrung his hands together as if he was trying to snuff the life out of a rodent.
He interrupted the conversation with an abrupt clearing of his throat. "Gentlemen, please. We have business to take care of for God's sake."
Silence fell over the table. George sipped his martini and suppressed a laugh. The Johnson clients sighed and refused to say anything else. And just as George's boss was about to try again and the servers set three plates of Beef Wellington appetizers on the table, a fresh, new terror barged into the dining room.
In spilled three mascots dressed as various condiments - there was a bottle of ketchup, a jar of mustard, and a squeeze packet of jelly. George choked, spitting up some pickle martini into the glass. The entire restaurant froze: conversations silenced, the waiters stopped writing down orders, and the omnipresent clacking of silverware ceased. Everyone on the floor stared, jaws agape, as the three mascots sprinted up to George's table. The Ketchup was the first to sing; the rest of the crew began their highly-choreographed dance in the aisles - clapping and cheering commenced as well.
Squeeze Jelly: I heard you were in a jam!
All: Yeah!
Ketchup: I heard you had to ketchup!
All: Yeah!
Mustard: Mustard up the courage ... to relish the day.
All: Oh oh! Hoooo-ray!
And so on, the two-minute number felt like it persisted for hours. Even the busboy began to sweat from secondhand embarrassment. It was such a bizarre disruption to the lunch rush that when the mascots awkwardly finished their song and jogged out of the dining room (high-fiving the hostess along the way), the customers didn't acknowledge what had happened. The business conversations tentatively restarted, the clanking of silverware resumed, and waiters hurried forward with their orders and food deliveries.
George went pale. He couldn't look away from a water stain on the tablecloth. The stain looked like a dog, somehow. He sloshed back the last of his Martini.
Suddenly, one of the clients began to laugh. Then, the rest joined in. After a few moments, they were heaving and shaking. Their eyes watered. They held on to each other like survivors clinging to a life raft. The more one laughed, the more another cackled even louder. They could hardly breathe.
In the quick 30 minutes that followed, George had finalized the deal and the clients signed a thick stack of financial documents.
"You knew where I was going to lunch." George leaned on her desk and shook his head.
"Cynthia told me." Mia was distracted. "She and I have been texting a lot."
"Why would you... I mean, how did you even..." George was so flustered he couldn't finish a single sentence.
Mia warmed a mug of tea. She reclined in her bed, the pale light of her laptop illuminating the underside of her face. She studied a video on how best to facilitate a lesson on fractions for young elementary minds.
George still hadn't processed what had happened, honestly. He looked at Mia and she loudly sipped her drink, transfixed at the colors moving across the screen. She was not even phased by what she had done. He marveled at what a strange thing it was to date another person, how close you could become and yet be mystified by what happened inside their head, what clandestine schemes could occur - how fundamentally unknowable another person was. They had been dating nearly seven months, but he got the sense that she was a complete stranger, just a random person off the street with no attachments to him whatsoever.
Breaking up would have been the appropriate call. Objectively speaking, George knew that. Mia hardly said a word about her prank and treated it like she had sent him a card and flowers. It made the whole situation even more surreal. But George knew many things about romance, objectively, and never followed through with them. Was he insecure? Was he not man enough to stand up for himself? George spiraled out in his head (his default tendency) and didn't say anything else about it.
Instead, George took Mia's mug from her and set it on the nightstand. He slipped under the sheets and stared at the George Pickle she had hung up next to the door. George stared at the pen-drawn mustache and ran his finger across his own. The George Pickle smiled back at him with dangling googly-eyes. It felt like he was staring through a window into an alternate dimension.
Mia fell asleep and slouched into her pile of pillows. Her laptop was still open and the video droned on about pedagogical research.
How easy it would have been to leave a note; it was so simple! I'm sorry, Mia, but I don't think we're compatible. I don't see a future between us. It was easy, yet George didn't have the courage to do it. He didn't want to go back to the dating apps. He didn't want to go back to wasting money on awkward first dates that lead nowhere. It sounded so exhausting. Plus, her little incident had made George the hero of the office. It landed his boss a fat paycheck.
Instead, George did something much different.
He carefully plucked the computer off her lap, making sure not to wake her. Then, he tip-toed across the room and pulled out his phone. He got a full snapshot of the pickle, bottom to top. He checked his phone and it fit the dimensions perfectly.
The next step required the full-sized mirror of her bathroom. There, he arranged his mise-en-scène to perfection. Snap. He checked the quality of the photo and he was satisfied. He had the second piece of the puzzle.
The last piece required a bit of editing and uploading on her computer. It didn't take long. Smartphone technology made it easy to photoshop and transfer files; the work was done in a matter of minutes. Satisfied, he shut her laptop and stashed it in her carrying case.
He crawled into bed next to her and, half-asleep, she instinctively curled into him. George drifted off, his head pressed into the space between her shoulder and neck. It was so soft that peaceful dreams overtook him. No more psychological quandaries disrupted his mood for the rest of the night.
He never heard from her after that. Despite the many texts and late-night apologetic phone calls, she fully ghosted him. And when George resumed dating, he found every potential suitor boring. They weren't the same as Mia. He blamed himself. He was the one to make a serious mistake.
The serious mistake was that George did not appreciate the intricacies of being a teacher in modern-day America. For example, Mia had to use her personal computer for work on account of the school not being able to afford personalized smart technology for each of their employees.
So, it was a hectic morning at Goddard Elementary school when Mia lost her job. It was the morning of field day and the students were already in an abysmal state. They were screaming and chasing each other around the classroom, begging Ms. G. (Mia) to let them outside.
"Pleeeeeeease! Pleeeeeeease!" they screamed and Mia spent all her energy corralling them into the inner circle of the focus zone. They eventually found their seats in their assigned colors and Ms. G. told them they had a meditation warm-up to prepare for the day.
But by the time she had plugged the HDMI cord into her laptop, it was too late. She didn't notice that her laptop background image had been changed.
There was her boyfriend, naked as the day he was born, his privates covered by a photoshopped image of the cardboard cutout pickle. The desktop icons had been rearranged so it looked as though they were ejaculating out of the tip of the pickle head. In purple and pink Comic Sans font, he wrote: I might have a really big dill, but at least I'm not a dick.
Mia had no time to switch away from screen share. You know how that technology goes. The damn thing will never budge.
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