On the morning Carlos Mendez found a floating screwdriver in his office cubicle, he knew his fate was sealed. The tool hung suspended in mid-air, rotating slowly like the hand of an otherworldly clock, pointing accusingly at his computer screen where his resignation letter remained unsent.
“You see it too, right?” he whispered to Linda from accounting, who had stopped by his desk with her usual stack of reports.
“See what?” Linda replied, her eyes passing straight through the metallic apparition as if it were made of air. “Are you feeling alright, Carlos? You look pale.”
The screwdriver had appeared three days after the new CEO announced impending layoffs. Carlos had inherited it from his grandfather, who used it in his workshop for forty-seven years before passing it down with a cryptic warning: “When metal defies gravity, change follows like autumn follows summer.”
During lunch break, Carlos sat alone in the break room, watching the screwdriver float alongside him like a faithful companion. María from HR approached, her high heels clicking against the linoleum in a rhythm that seemed to synchronize with the tool’s rotation.
“Strange weather we’re having,” María remarked, gesturing toward the windows where rain fell upward into a purple sky. “The meteorologists are baffled.”
“Do you believe in signs?” Carlos asked, stirring his coffee counterclockwise, matching the screwdriver’s motion.
“My grandmother in Macondo used to say that reality is the strangest magic of all,” María replied, her voice carrying the weight of ancestral wisdom. “She could predict layoffs by the way her plants grew sideways.”
That afternoon, the office transformed. Computer cables slithered like serpents across the floor, photocopiers produced documents in mirrors, and the water cooler dispensed memories instead of water. Yet his colleagues carried on as if nothing were amiss, their faces masks of corporate normalcy.
“The quarterly reports are due tomorrow,” his manager David announced, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his tie was now a living butterfly perched on his chest. “I need them by five.”
Carlos nodded, watching the screwdriver point toward the exit sign, which now read “DESTINY” in flickering neon. He understood then what his grandfather had meant all those years ago.
“I quit,” he said simply, standing up as papers began to rain from the ceiling like autumn leaves.
David’s butterfly-tie fluttered nervously. “But why? You’re up for promotion next month.”
“Because the screwdriver knows,” Carlos replied, gathering his belongings as the office walls began to melt like Salvador Dalí’s clocks. “And so do I.”
As he walked out of the building for the last time, the screwdriver finally dropped into his hand, solid and real once more. Outside, the world had returned to normal – the rain fell downward, the sky was blue, and gravity behaved as it should.
Ten years later, Carlos would open his own repair shop, where tools sometimes whispered secrets and broken machines told stories of their past lives. The screwdriver hung on the wall, ordinary to all eyes but his, a reminder that in a world of corporate conformity, magic reveals itself to those who dare to see it.
And sometimes, late at night, when the moon is full and the city sleeps, it still floats, just a little, pointing toward whatever truth needs finding next.