Dragons - Chapter 29 (DRAFT)

When the board meeting was over Eleanor took me aside. There was a reception starting for them in twenty minutes, and then a dinner, and most everyone else was hustling out of there to freshen up beforehand.

“Do you have a minute, Alan? I want to show you something.”

“Of course,” I said hesitantly, noticing that Mary, too, had heard Eleanor’s request and was stopping her movement out of the room. We both closed in on Eleanor’s location at the head of the table.

Eleanor was rearranging the materials in the stack she had brought with her to the board meeting. Tucking her agenda packet under a three-ring binder, she pulled out a copy of our conference program and began flipping through it.

“I don’t want to make a big deal out of this,” she said as she zeroed in on a page and ran her finger along a line of text, “but I thought I should call it to your attention.”

I exchanged a worried glance with Mary and then looked down at what Eleanor was indicating. She was on page 173, and I read along as she spoke.

“This session is comprised of three distinct presentation segments.”

Eleanor looked up at me and for a moment I tried to feign ignorance, looking back at her like I didn’t understand what she was driving at. Her stare became even more severe, the way my mother’s often had when as a boy I tried to escape responsibility for some wrong I had done. Knowing there would be no use bluffing her, I changed my pose to one of supplication and asked her silently for forgiveness.

“Now, don’t worry,” Eleanor said reassuringly. “With everything else you’ve been dealing with, it’s not surprising that something like this should slip through. Let’s just hope no one else notices it.”

She said it with such seriousness that I almost laughed, as if she had just uncovered some state secret that had accidentally been leaked to the enemy regime. What, I wondered, did she think would happen if someone else did notice it? Would they report us to the grammar police?

But Mary didn’t see any levity in the situation. “Thank you,” she said with a gravity that equaled Eleanor’s. “I can assure you that something like this will not happen again.”

And then Eleanor nodded magnanimously, closing the program book below us as if to signify the end of an ugly chapter. “It’s done and behind us, now,” she said solemnly. “Let’s not speak of it anymore.”

She smiled at me, a self-important and victorious thing, offered to me the way a general offers terms of surrender to a defeated foe. She had actually done it. I couldn’t believe it, but there it was. At some point since receiving her conference program two days ago she had gone through it to verify that every one of her three thousand meaningless changes had been made—of course finding the one I had purposely ignored in my moment of feckless rebellion. When had she had the time? Was she some kind of cyborg or something that didn’t need to sleep?

I smiled back, but inside I was screaming.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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