Content warnings

Work. Stress. Alienation. Derealisation. Hallucinations. Self harm.

The shift room did not exist until the third-floor renovation.

No design had it, and no one mentioned it in orientation. Yet it was wedged between the custodial closet and the stairs, with a plain gray door that had never stayed open long enough.

“They only let you in after you’ve worked here long enough,” Josie told me at break, peeling a tangerine. “Some people claim it’s a nap room. Some claim it's something else.”

Alan did not believe in rumors. He had bills, not theories. The call centre compensated enough to keep the lights on and instant noodles in bulk. Yet, he began to notice strange things the longer he worked. Little things. A half-second reverse whir of a clock. A weekly-changed poster on the break room wall that no one ever noticed. A slight hum in the elevator that was almost whispering if he ever took it alone. The coffee maker dispensed bitter grime that had a faint copper smell, and sometimes he found single red paperclips in his drawers, though he never used them.

Coworkers exited the shift room quieter than they arrived. Others were haunted. Others were. Relieved. Some never went back to work. No one ever spoke of what was inside the box. No jokes. No stories. Silence. The kind of silence that seeps into the cracks of your bones and lingers there.

When Alan finally got the key mailed unceremoniously in a brown envelope to his cubicle, he pocketed it and finished his daily calls, without any suspicious looks. No fanfare. The envelope had a whiff of antiseptic, as if it had passed hospital hands. No name was on it, but he knew it was addressed to him. He’d worked there two years to the exact day.

He stood there at 6:03 p.m., long after the thrum of keyboard and huckster talk had faded. He stood outside the door, his ID badge buzzing softly as he unlocked it, no hallway cams. No footsteps. Only him and the thudding in his ears.

The room inside was small, with sterilized white walls. No windows. A mirror on one of them. A recliner. A digital clock was counting down from 15:00. The air was filled with the tang of ozone, like the pre-drench flash before the lightning.

Had gone in. The door clicked behind him. A soft pressure in the air made it feel like hed been submerged. Time was syrupy, stuck.

Alan initially thought it was a joke. A break room requirement, maybe. But when he sat in the chair, the mirror rippled.

It was not a trick of light; it did ripple. The reflection shifted.

Alan stared. The mirror no longer reflected him; he reflected his mother, cleaning a cafeteria tray. She was younger than he remembered. Then the mirror went dark. It reflected a boy cowering under the covers, hearing his father shout.

Then, his prior work at the hotel, where he worked three shifts during a staff shortage and earned less than minimum wage because he was in “training status”.

Every recollection carried a sensation: the burn of exhaustion in his calves, the guilt, the helplessness. But they whizzed past like gusts.

Alan raised his hand to touch the mirror. The glass was warm. Then, unpredictably, it showed him.

Not him of the present.

He of the future.

Older. Fatter. Slumped. Alone. Staring into a strange mirror. Still wearing the same call centre headset. Still saying “Thank you for calling, how may I help?” after ten years. Two. A lifetime. The stubble had turned white. The headset had moulded itself around the flesh of his ears.

The clock beeped once. 10:12 remaining.

He tried to open the door. It wouldn’t budge.

He sat. The chair was softer, as though acclimatizing itself to his tension.

The mirror showed other futures, some in which he climbed up a ladder, some in which he quit, some in which he disappeared altogether. In one, he stood in a crowd of friends, laughing. In another, he cowered on a couch, bottle between his hands. In another, he stood on a beach, wind in his face, but his eyes were hollow.

Then it changed again.

Now it was showing someone else. A woman was crying softly in the same chair. A man staring blankly at the countdown. Josie. His boss. The intern who’d stopped showing up for work.

The mirror was in a loop. A warning. A witness.

Or maybe it was just a mirror.

Alan’s fists were white knuckled as he sat there. The room vibrated quietly, like it was breathing.

He considered those he’d talked to that day irate consumers, isolated voices grasping for small talk. One woman had asked him to hold for her while she went from the kitchen to her bedroom. Told him it made her feel less alone.

The weight of unseen labour. Of hiding things, he could not tell. He should never have kept these things, but could not let go of them. Things that clung to him like fog.

The room knew.

He thought of his father, who worked the night shift at the warehouse and only ever made grunting noises. Of his mother’s broken fingers. Of all the individuals who put in years of their lives working for the chance to survive. And of how no one seemed to care how many of them just. Vanished.

The clock read 5:44.

His breathing slowed. The mirror darkened. Not vacant black. Heavy. As if whatever was behind it was pressing against it.

His hand hurt. He scratched it until it was red, a nervous habit he’d abandoned years before. The chair groaned, digging into his back as if it needed him to recall everything he’d forgotten.

The air was thick with the smell of old paper and scorched sugar. Something artificial. Something almost familiar.

Then, a sound, a gentle hymn, the kind you hear from a phone over a crib. A melody his mother had once sung to herself after a double shift.

He was small.

The mirror fogged. Silhouettes waited behind it, arms, lips, bits of past coworkers. A voice he did not recognize pronounced his name like a benediction and a curse.

3:22.

He could feel tears behind his eyes. Not sadness, merely the weight of recognition. Something inside him had always known something about this place. Maybe we all did, somehow. The part of us cracks silently, between the sound of clocks and evaluation reviews.

He remembered one of his coworkers, Malcolm, not showing up one day. No explanation. His cubicle filled overnight. People speculated he'd lost it at last. Or that he'd been promoted to “higher”. But the truth was nobody ever really knew. Nobody knew what happened to those who went missing after the shift room.

He recalled his earliest memories of standing in line with his mother at the unemployment office, watching her go out of her way to smile at strangers and clerks who never returned it. How, even then, he was aware work wasn’t just work. It was who you were. Worth. The way you paid to be.

He remembered how, as a young boy, he would mimic her when she returned home, strapping her bag around a chair and shutting her eyes while slowly taking off her shoes. She seemed relieved but broken. That position was a signal to leave her alone.

He recalled stories from coworkers, laughing stories of zany clients or bizarre demands initially. But beneath the guffaws was a numbing pain, a subdued resignation. Stories of sick relatives, lost scholarships, and work they had mapped out but could not locate. Dreams deferred to ledgers and double shifts, consecutive.

Alan wondered why he had packed a little notebook in his bag. Not for notes. For writing down the names of customers who complimented him, something odd, something sincere. It grounded him. Proved that he was there. That he mattered.

2:10.

More faces glided across the mirror today. Some were barely recognizable: a fragmented and distorted smile, a flickering eye, a hand hugging an armrest. And behind them all, a soft electric thrum swelled and increased, like the buzzing of a fly just out of reach.

He couldn’t help but speculate on how many more were sitting through this same countdown in a room like his own. Thousands of rooms. Thousands of chairs. Mirrors, clocks, keys.

A system. A ritual. A cleansing.

When the countdown reached zero, maybe it didn’t finish.

Maybe it began.

The countdown reached zero.

When the clock reached 00:00, the door snapped open.

He crawled out slowly, into a darker hallway than before. No one looked up. No one questioned.

Josie passed him and gave him a “You saw it too” look.

Alan did not sleep that evening. He dreamed of clocks and mirrors. Of hands reaching through screens. Of recursive reflection with no stopping point. Of whispers providing options he had not yet made.

The next day, the gray door had disappeared.

A fire hose cabinet took it in. The glass shut up tight, and there was no room in the back.

He asked about facilities. “That area's always been sealed,” they told him.

No one mentioned the envelope. The mirror. The countdown.

Alan returned to his desk.

The calls kept coming.

He started answering “Thank you for calling” before the line rang.

He started to feel other changes. His coffee tasted metallic. His desk crept half an inch in all directions each night. The calendar on his wall displayed the same day twice. The reflection in his monitor blinked sometimes when he didn’t.

And now and then, when his headset hiccuped or the screen flashed abruptly, he thought he saw a glimpse of his face, aged, careworn, still stuck in the cycle.

He couldn’t count how often he’d walked the route through that room. How many versions of himself were waiting inside, ticking off the seconds, hoping something would change and he would be freed?

The shift room vanished.

But it had left something behind in him. A spark of consciousness. A seed of uncertainty. An impression of pressure, thought, breath.

He found himself hesitating before answering calls, listening to the breath on the line before the voice, and trying to see whether the caller had also seen something they shouldn’t have. Usually, they too hesitated like they knew him.

He started carrying a red paperclip in his pocket every day. Just in case. For no reason whatsoever, really. He wondered if Josie did the same. A keepsake. A reminder. Maybe each one who had worked in the shift room had their talisman, something to bring them back to reality, to keep them connected to the everyday.

And some nights, he could have sworn he heard it breathing when the office lights were turned down to the right level.

Waiting for the following key.

Waiting for you.

Somewhere else, in another office building, a woman steps out of her cubicle to find an envelope on her chair.

It has a faint aroma of antiseptic.

END

Author’s note

“The Shift Room” was inspired by the quiet moments of reflection and transformation in liminal spaces. Writing this story allowed me to explore themes of change, human connection, and the unseen shifts in our lives, capturing the tension and beauty of moments often overlooked.

Mary Wanjiru

Mary Wanjiru is a versatile writer who spans medical essays, romance, personal essays, fiction, nonfiction, and storytelling across multiple formats. She explores human experience, culture, and emotion with insight and creativity. When not writing, she reads widely, experiments with new styles, and shares her craft online.