Résumé With Monsters Read Online Free PDF

the police, however. Perhaps he saw Helga as a potential customer. His thoughts were hidden to Philip.
     
    Philip thought that the soft collar suited Monica, adding physical inflexibility to her already formidable air of self-righteousness and endowing her with a regal bearing.
     
    She would turn her entire body in order to regard Philip. "If she thinks she is going to scare me, she has another think coming," she would say. "I will not be intimidated by a crazy woman."
     
    Monica maintained that she could have taken Helga in a fair fight. “I was off balance," Monica exclaimed. “I didn't see it coming."
     
    With a paste-up artist gone and Monica physically impaired and a sudden surge in the demand for résumés and business cards, Philip was asked to come in early. He hated arriving early, when the battle raged on all fronts.
     
    Ralph Pederson grew more overwrought as his employees worked longer hours, accruing dreaded overtime. "Dear Jesus," he would say to a harried employee, "are you still here? No, no, keep working, but couldn't you work just a little faster?"
     
    Distraught, Pederson would rush into the back room and fire a printer in an attempt to vent his frustration. Philip kept expecting
     
    Bingham to get the axe—his attitude was bad— but Ralph Pederson seemed not to see the man, his eye instead alighting on some younger printer just in the act of taking a personal phone call or botching a three-color job.
     
    The Texas heat stretched into September and then violent thunderstorms vandalized the city. Philip's ceiling sprung half a dozen leaks, and management sent a maintenance man with a large desperado's mustache who regarded the dripping water sadly and said, "She rains inside," and left without offering hope. Philip covered the floor with pots and pans and grew accustomed to the syncopated plops and dings.
     
    "I feel like I'm underwater," he told Amelia. The phone had a bad connection, and Amelia replied in a rush of static. "What?" Philip said.
     
    "Like your monsters," Amelia shouted back. "They live under the ocean, right? So that the other monsters from outer space can't get them easily."
     
    Philip didn't answer. Amelia began to cry.
     
    "Aw," Philip said.
     
    "What?"
     
    "Don't cry."
     
    Amelia sniffed. "I'm sorry," she said. "That was mean—about your monsters. It's just that I didn't get another job, and I really need a job." Amelia sobbed, regained control quickly, and said, "I hate this weather. I better talk to you some other time." And she hung up. Philip started to call back, thought better of it, and dialed his therapist instead.
     
    Lily listened until Philip got to the end of it.
     
    "She loves you," Lily said. "Poor dimwitted girl." There was a pause. "Good hearing from you. Come by sometime." She hung up the phone.
     
    Philip continued to read Henry James, medicating himself against the frenzy of Ralph’s One-Day Résumés and the rebuffs of his ex-lover, but even the soporific tones of the Master could not quiet the rising anxiety. Philip longed to go to Amelia's door, to stand there in the rain until she took pity on him and let him in. He did not do this, primarily because he felt that something dire was about to happen, and he did not want to bring his true love into the sphere of this evil event. The past was mustering grim forces. He could feel it. The past was a dark, black pit, and if he peered into it, something could turn its baleful eye upward and spy him there, frozen against the light. Then it would come rushing up to greet him with a mouthful of dirty razor teeth and malice on its black breath.
     

6.
     

     
    When it came it was no real surprise, so Philip was able to lie there in the parking lot and stare at the overcast sky and console himself with the thought that the universe did follow certain laws of cause and effect.
     
    This is how it happened. He had just gotten out of his car and was walking across the parking lot when he heard a scream and