Low dropped ceilings, buzzing fluorescent tubes,
Dim, orangish light with sporadic
Flashes, damp patches, dusty tables.

On the radio, words mixed with static.
Martinez thinks she might hear a number
That matches a room on the list she’d stuck

To the beige paint on the wall that's nearer
Her desk than where she stacks food in boxes.
She’d better check it out. She picks neither

The hall with endless cartons piled in blocks
Nor the one lined on both sides with locked doors,
But the passage with booths and swivel-chair backs

Receding down one side, and desks and drawers
Dimly visible through the smudged windows 
Of offices on the other. Plump drips

Soak the carpet, and lint collects in wads.
At an intersection, a woman kneels
By a vacuum-cleaner with wet wipes.

Both know neither knows words the other knows.
They stare silently until the radio
Nudges Martinez on with a burst of noise.

Hand on her nightstick, eyes on the long row
Of interior panes and hollow-core doors.
A long walk now, not one you’d want to redo.

You can go in this direction for days,
But are there vending machines stocked with food?
Lights flicker and the radio’s volume drops.

In the sudden quiet, she is afraid.
Something is off. She is watched. Every hair
On her arms rises, taut. What she'd feared ...

She is running, vision jerky, with her
Hands out as if to ward something away.
At the corner, the vacuum-cleaner's there,

But no woman. Martinez thinks she knows why.
She will call it in. "Incident," she says.
"Unresolved. Urgent." Things are awry.

She hears fizzling and some words. Her SOS
May have drawn their attention, or else not--
Martinez can never tell. Her breath subsides.

In place of panic, anger rises next.
Into the radio, she states: "I quit.
I'm out. Confirm." She strikes a cabinet

To make a bang they'll have to hear, quite
Sure the sound resounds on their end, too.
It does. They hear her and make themselves quiet.

Their strange stillness answers her, an undertow
Beneath the buzzing and the steady drip.
They don't want her to hear them. They wait to
Resume until she lets her radio drop.

(Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners” meets “The Backrooms” of urban legend, in terza rima with slant rhymes.) See also: “Arachne,” “the laughter of the gods,” “what it looks like to live,” and “self help: a short story.”