1.0.1

“It’s fucking freezing outside.”

It’s February 23rd in Manitoba. This is the least necessary thing that’s ever been said. The office windows, encased by exposed brick sills and thick musty spider webs, are visibly straining against the cold. In these months, when the sun goes down right after lunch and the only view outside is lonely route 12 and its haphazard commercial residents, the windows serve mostly as a canvas for frozen water particles to explore the artistic potential of thermodynamics. Imperfect mandelbrots are weaved onto the thin glass plane separating the arctic Manitoba cold from the gusty heat of the furnace. The coat rack is overwhelmed by extra layers within the first half hour, leaving the secretary’s desk as the logical dumping ground for workers shedding the cocoons of their morning commute. Before the end of the morning she’s surrounded by discarded pelts of cotton and polyester, the skins of theoretical animals that the original settlers of this continent would have likely found disagreeable. There aren’t enough kleenex to support the deluge of nose fluids; workers are forced to scavenge the crunchy tissues they balled up behind their monitor earlier in the week. Some have resorted to using the printer paper, which folds at weird and unsatisfying angles along the nostrils and bridge of the face.