Saying Goodbye to Jonathan

Alice was fired from her factory job over a single mistake. She'd shipped the wrong windshield wipers to the main plant, and in the rush of the line, she hadn't caught it before the boxes went out the door. It was the kind of error that happened more often than the floor managers liked to admit, but on that particular day, with that particular order, it was enough to get her walked out without so much as a goodbye.

That was the part that stung worst. Nobody came to find her on the floor. Nobody pulled her into the break room for a quiet word. They called her at home that evening, like she was being informed of a return policy and not the end of ten months of her life.

Ten months wasn't long, not in the scheme of things. But it was long enough to grow attached — to the rhythm of the line, the hiss of the hoists, the particular way certain people made the day bearable. One person in particular.

There was nothing romantic between Alice and Jonathan, not officially. He was engaged to a woman he clearly loved, and Alice was perpetually, contentedly single. But they clicked the way two people the same age sometimes do — instantly, easily, like they'd already known each other in some other life and were just catching back up.

It helped that he was the kindest person Alice had ever met. Gentle. Unbothered by the small cruelties of a factory floor. There wasn't a mean bone in him.

Jonathan worked the process next to hers. Every morning he broke the ice with the same question — what did you have for dinner last night — like it was the most important news of the day. He'd light up talking about his one true love: Bluetooth speakers. He was something of a savant on the subject, and when Alice's downstairs neighbor wouldn't stop blasting music through the walls at two in the morning, Jonathan spent an entire lunch break helping her pick out the perfect speaker for petty, glorious revenge.

They bonded properly over windshields. The hoist on their line had been broken for weeks, so the glass had to be lifted by hand, in pairs. Jonathan and Alice were paired more often than not.

"When's your cruise?" Alice asked one afternoon, hoisting glass.

"Next week."

"Well — be safe, okay?" She almost said come back to us, but caught herself.

"Oh, I will."

"Don't think about work at all. Just have fun."

"I won't think about work," he said. "Just you."

Later that day, passing her on break, he said it plainly. "I'm going to miss you, Alice."

She didn't say it back. She wanted to. She didn't.

There was one stretch — a whole shift — where their stations overlapped entirely, windshields to door trim and back again, orbiting each other across the floor. Then fourth quarter hit and the line got reshuffled, and they were split apart.

"I wish you were coming with me," Jonathan said, not quite looking at her.

"Me too. I mean — we've been around each other all day, every day."

Weeks later, when Alice mentioned a string of doctor's appointments, Jonathan worried out loud about it until she made him stop. And when she told him she'd be taking her niece to a comic convention that fall, he mentioned, almost shyly, that he and his fiancée were planning to go too.

"I hope we run into each other," Alice said. "It's a big one."

"I'll probably be looking for you the whole time," he said.

"Same. I'll introduce you to my niece."

The convention was enormous — final count somewhere north of thirty thousand people, all buzzing over the news that Nicolas Cage was making his first-ever con appearance. Jonathan and his fiancée weren't springing for the meet-and-greet — nobody they knew had that kind of money — but they were prepared to spend on everything else. Alice's thirteen-year-old niece, on her third convention and already a seasoned veteran, had the exact same plan.

Alice spent more of the day looking for Jonathan than she spent shopping. He was tall, blond, not exactly hard to spot. Still, the crowd swallowed people whole. Her attention got stolen briefly by a booth selling gorgeous Interview with the Vampire fanart she couldn't walk away from — and then, just past it, there he was. Examining lightsabers, fiancée long gone in pursuit of an anime panel, looking faintly lost without her.

Alice's whole face lit up before she could stop it. His did too. Finding each other in a crowd of thirty thousand felt like spotting a shiny Pokémon — astronomical odds, somehow beaten anyway.

They talked about it all the following week at work. The poster she bought — a classic Universal Frankenstein — and the Michael Myers merch he picked up, because of course he had, because Halloween was basically scripture to him.

It was around that time Jonathan started talking, half-seriously, about quitting. New policies had come down from somewhere above the floor, the kind that made everyone miserable for no good reason. When Alice heard him say it, she felt a drop in her stomach disproportionate to the actual likelihood of it happening. He'd been at the plant twelve years. He wasn't starting over at thirty-seven, not really, not yet.

So they kept on — talking speakers, dinner, One Piece, Choo Choo Charles videos on lunch break, always finding each other on the floor to compare notes on the day and complain about whatever new rule had landed on them this time.

Which is exactly why getting fired hurt the way it did. The last thing Alice ever said to Jonathan was something about overtime — some small, forgettable complaint, tossed off on her way back to her station. If she'd known it was the last conversation they'd ever have, she would have said something else. She would have said goodbye properly.

She never got the chance. Just an empty space on the line where someone used to ask about her dinner, and a speaker recommendation she never got to send him.