The Company Stranger

The second night in which he saw him with the head on desk and not moving, same position as the night before, Jovi thought of reporting the person. It was too weird, the guy could be dead, who knows? Jovi didn't want to get into trouble. He had this night time job, cleaning offices, and it was his main gig. He had others too, because he needed the money. After some deliberation, standing next to the guy's desk with the vacuum cleaner still in his hand, he decided he had to tell someone. And that someone was a sleepy security guy downstairs.

The security guy came up to see the guy personally, nudged him gently, then tried to raise his head. The pale greenish tint of the guy's face told them he was dead. No longer sleepy, the guy called the police and some other people, likely his superiors. Jovi didn't want any trouble, and this person's death had nothing to do with him. He thought, his papers were all in order, and his past was all behind, somewhere else. He had nothing to worry about. But still he was jittery, and couldn't sleep well.

They removed the body and started investigating. The guy's name had been Marcus, and for some reason he had laid on his desk a whole day without anyone around to notice him.  His team claimed innocence, because they mostly worked from home, and others shuffling around that day thought he might be sleeping, if they noticed him at all, and left him alone.

The incident made the news, which blamed the corporation itself, and the way it was overworking its people. The part where the body had sat for a whole day unnoticed got edited out at the company's request. Just the death itself was bad enough PR for them.

Jovi kept up with the news. He thought with amusement that they were blaming the big guys, and he knew that the big guys always knew how to hide, and in the end it was going to be nobody's fault. Time proved him right. The news reported how the company issued a heart-felt message to all its employees saying how much it cared about their well-being along with curated pointers to mental health resources. It seemed everybody was assuming it was either a suicide or case of death by exhaustion. Life moved on and soon news stopped mentioning Marcus. 

Jovi was the one who couldn't forget. That face, with a greenish tint, those eyes, swollen and terrifying, everything was appearing in his dreams and asking him to repent. He knew he had sins. Some were forgotten, like most sins. But he knew he couldn't quite let go of everything. His life was still about survival, even in this place where everyone had aplenty. He still had to cut corners here and there, and was not proud of it. But these were small things, nothing a ghost should be so relentless about. Yes he sometimes took things, like snacks from the employees' drawers, supplies from the storage, and used them or gave them away in exchange for other things. But who was really to tell what was right and what was wrong, if someone is need and there is not enough? The ghost with greenish face and swollen eyes wouldn't give up. He knew where to find him, from the other world, and haunted every one of his dreams. 

The autopsy results took a long time, but when they came, it turned out that Marcus had had an anaphylactic reaction to something he was allergic to, which was likely citrus related. His allergies were well known to his team, but someone outside of it could have innocently brought a fruit in the office and exposed him without knowing. The workplace was big, and all open space. It wasn't worth investigating any more. Marcus had been living with a perpetual death sentence. The news were very brief about it, to give it closure.

 Jovi understood what had happened. He had brought the water with citric acid into work and used it on Marcus' desk, and on all the desks, because he had to take the real cleaner somewhere else and there wasn't any left. Nobody else didn't have to know. It was punishment enough that he had to live with a ghost in his brain from now on, and that ghost liked to remind him of what he had done, forever and ever.