For all we knew Mona didn’t speak. Some days the tiny brown-haired girl would raise her hand in company meetings to answer a question, but just when you thought a syllable might tear her lips from the silence, she would get up out of her seat and walk gracefully to the overhead projector to write her answer in the most beautiful cursive you’d ever seen. Maybe it was because she never appeared to have dreamy eyes like the women you see in magazines but I couldn’t discount her lucidity. I didn’t think Mona could speak.
All our coworkers made fun of her. As she walked through the common areas of our corporate high-rise, people would ask her all kinds of inappropriate questions.
“Where’d you get that bruise, Mona? Did it happen when someone slapped the voice out of your box?” I heard one of the other managers comment as I saw her pinch a generous amount of skin from her arm, causing her to nervously fumble with the keys to her office.
From what I saw there had clearly been no sign of physical abnormality anywhere on her delicate skin. In fact, all I saw was a beautiful landscape of flawless porcelain hidden underneath a sheer top that covered her neck and elbows with spring-like colored ruffles.
On my way into work late one day, I found her sitting alone in the lobby on the leather benches positioned in front of the elevators. I strained my eyes trying to decipher the facial features of the woman. My first instinct was to check my watch. It couldn’t have been Mona, I thought. As far as I knew Mona had never been late to a day of work in seven years. Before that, she was late only one time that I can remember because her mother’s car broke down on the way into the city a whole 30 miles from the interstate. That day she excused herself for a measly two hours and then, in turn, stayed an extra three hours after business hours to complete the work she’d missed that morning.
As I walked past the floor to ceiling windows that lined the first floor of our building, I stared at her as she sat as I often did. There was something different about her today from all the other days but I just couldn’t put my finger on it. She didn’t look unhappy but she wasn’t smiling either. She just stared at the ground chewing pensively on her bottom lip. I couldn’t decide what to do. I didn’t know if she was even aware that we worked on the same floor for the same company. Fortunately, Mona’s head was positioned upright enough that I could see her eyes. She didn’t look unapproachable but I noticed that they were not gleaming with usual endless inquiry as they normally did, but that they were occupied by new twinge of indecision, making her pupils shift hastily back and fourth. As I walked through the revolving door, I couldn’t decide if I should stop to see what was wrong, or not wrong, with her at the risk of wasting more time getting upstairs to my desk, but also at the risk embarrassing myself in front of a woman whom I secretly respected. I needed to make a decision. Until that moment, I realized had never previously been concerned with her well-being more than I had with examining her.
I slowed down the pace of my footsteps as strode through the lobby in Mona’s direction. The tip tap of my work shoes on the tile floor made me nervous about breaking her concentration. After all, my intention was not to scare her. Little did I know, that in the next five minutes, my actions would seem one hundred percent involuntary.
I didn’t care about being late anymore. My body language relaxed and for the next one hundred feet I stared at the shiny floor until I reached the bench where she was sitting. I don’t know whether or not she noticed me walking towards her but I didn’t care about that either. I sat down on the remaining free space of the same cushion. When I sat down it made a small poof sound that made her flinch a little.
“Uh, Mona, right?” I staggered.
She silently turned her face to mine and blinked twice.
“I’m in your division upstairs….”
Instantly I felt silly for talking to someone who blinked at me in response to a simple question. She had not even attempted to pick up her arm to shake my hand.
“I see you there, yeah? At Clark and Ashford?”
Mona blinked at me once. She seemed to understand what I was asking her so I took the lack of repulsion as an invitation to continue speaking to her.
“I’m Grant, from advertising. I’m a creative.” I laughed nervously.
”I see you sometimes in meetings and I really think you have beautiful handwriting. If I could write like that I don’t think I would talk much either.”
I stopped myself with a smile as I realized that I didn’t know how she would react to such a foreword statement being made by a complete stranger. Her face remained pregnant with of the same indecision I’d picked up on before. I took this as yet another invitation to keep talking.
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