“Time Management” by Caelyn Cobb, published in Short Story, Long, is either a cautionary tale of corporate life, or it’s a reflection of what has already happened, or is happening. Probably both, but mostly the latter.

The narrative is told from a captivating POV. A third-person that uses the possessive “our” which is normally affiliated with a first-person POV. The narrator in “Time Management” refers to the main character of the story as “our girl.” This implicates readers in unconventional ways—creating a more personal realm of reading for what feels like a cool, distant telling of a story that is at once creepy, odd, fable-like, and reflective of our society’s relationship with late-stage capitalistic dehumanization of workers/people. The POV and the use of “our girl” makes it all the more personal.

While reading, I felt as if the piece was in conversation with other cautionary tales such as the television show “Severance,” and, in a way, Bartleby, The Scrivener. The three aren’t alike in format and genre, but they are, in their own ways, asking questions about how corporations, or society in general, treats women, employees, and the aging population, among other questions.

Objects play a significant role in the story: coffee/cups, cubicle dividers, a bell. These objects, among others, signify differences and, in some cases, changes in the characters. Sometimes the objects unify characters, at other times they divide.

Finally, the story is also a commentary on that one precious resource that unifies us all: time. (Can we even call time a resource?).

“Usually she only had time for sleep, chores, and staring at the wall until it was time to go back to work. Forget applying for those other jobs that her current job was supposed to lead to.”

Time is one of my writerly obsessions. I think time is fascinating—the way we attempt to understand it, define it, contain it, slow it down, speed it up: time is that wonderful equalizer, and while we have no way of controlling it in real life, we can absolutely manipulate it in the stories we write. In fiction writing, for instance—or any writing for that matter—we can massage the sentences and paragraphs to however much time we want. We can modulate how much time we take on the trip from point A to point B. It could be covered in a sentence, a paragraph, or maybe not at all. Maybe the hour-long drive exists only in the white space of a section break. (We were here, now we’re there). Or, we could move backward and show what happened yesterday. Or we can flash forward to tomorrow. These are wonderful writerly features that inform our writing, but they are impossible in real life: we can’t snap our fingers and suddenly arrive somewhere.

In “Time Management” Cobb pushes back on these ideas, delving into fantastical elements to explore what it might mean if we could actually manipulate time: would it make us happier or more successful? Would it make us a better person? This is a significant aspect of the story, and while I’d love to talk about it in more detail, I also don’t want to risk giving anything away. It’s worth a read to find out what happens.

“Time Management” is an engaging and thoughtful story on the menace of living and working in our go-go-go, climb-the-ladder work environment.

Check out the story here.

Caelyn Cobb is a writer and university press editor living in Queens, NY. She is the author of the short story collection Saturn Return, forthcoming from Whisk(e)y Tit Books. Her writing has appeared in Passages North, X-R-A-Y, HAD, and elsewhere.