PERFECT
A short story by Michael Quinn

Howard Duncan was a kind, generous, person. The whisper in coffee rooms and corridor corners was that he was a slightly eccentric person but there was no harm in him. That’s what they said to assuage their guilt after giggling at him: "Och, there’s no harm in the man". Above all Howard Duncan was a precise, calculated and ordered person. A perfectionist. "Sure, d’ye not remember last Christmas he was Santa for all the kids in the office. Och he’s a lovely man, really" Last Christmas, Howard was indeed Santa for all the children at the office’s family-orientated do. He put a lot of effort into it as well. An abnormal amount of effort. Whereas most Saint Nicks are happy to hire the one-size-fits-all suit from the fancy dress shop and shove a pillow up their jumper Howard did it properly. He bought a fat suit. The sort Robin Williams had on while being Mrs Doubtfire except it was a fat man one. Dressed in this he had a Santa suit tailored to fit. He didn’t wear the sort of scraggly beard that slipped over the head to be held in place by a flimsy elastic band. He had a make up artist stick the nearest there is to the real thing on his chin with liquid latex. If he could have hired reindeer he would have. Howard was an accountant. He was 34, wore a perfect fitting suit, a piercing gaze, framed by polished metal rimmed glasses, and had thinning black hair pulled back over his head in straight, slick, shiny lines. He was in his glossy, white flat writing a sign. Each letter he wrote he fitted neatly into a one by two rectangle ruled in light pencil. Every time he finished a letter he stood back from the sign, nodded his approval, checked the paint was dry with the tip of his little finger then rubbed out the pencil border. He finished his first sign. It read ‘FREE SUIT’ . Half an hour later, he finished the second sign, it read "FREE DOG FOOD". An hour after that the signs were attached to neat looking, free-standing sign posts. He stood them in the corner where their fresh faces glistened after Howard turned the light out and moonlight filled the room. He then spent his usual fifty three minutes in the bathroom preparing for bed. When all rituals were complete Howard slipped into his bed switched off the light then noticed a crack in his ceiling. He tried to ignore it. A crack in the ceiling, he thought, just another erratic happening, one of the many conspiring against me. This crack may have been real but they were all cracks really. Cracks in his structured world. Cracks in the bubble of order he had built around himself. They were the tell-tale marks of the forces of such irregularities as coincidence, luck, passion and chaos forcing their way into his bubble. Someday they were all going to burst simultaneously, flood his world and drown his mind.. But this was never going to happen, Howard was making sure it wouldn’t. The two signs he had built that night were the first two steps in the process that would make sure the cracks never split. He awoke at seven on the third, sharp pip from his alarm. It was ,as usual, 78 minutes until he closed his front door behind him. Why shouldn’t it be? Of the fifty three things he did as part of his getting up and leaving the house procedure fifty two had been the same actions in the same order as always. The only difference today was that ‘pick up briefcase’ had been replaced by ‘pick up sign posts’. He walked to work his feet instinctively stepping into the invisible footprints he had trod and retrodden for the last nine years. He broke his routine when he reached his office block. Today he walked round the side of his office block and stood his sign post on the pavement. A few passers-by read it as he was positioning it exactly two metres from the wall. They pulled puzzled expressions and looked about for someone giving out tins of pedigree chum. After setting up the sign post he walked back round to the front and strode into the lobby giving the doorman a perfunctory nod on the way. In the lift, he broke his routine again by pressing twenty ,the top floor, instead of thirteen, his office floor. The lift was empty apart from a suited youngster who got off at five. When he reached his floor he walked out of the lift and turned up some stairs. They led to a door that opened onto a high, grey space where all the daylight was kept. Howard strolled the perimeter stopping when he spotted his wee sign standing on the pavement twenty stories below. Howard took off his suit and folded it into a neat pile. Shivering in his underwear he placed his ‘FREE SUIT’ sign in front of it. He stepped off the edge at 08:59 and 56.71 seconds. He knew the building was fifty three metres high. So it had been a simple matter of O-level physics to work out it would take 3.2888 seconds to take the quickest route between signposts. At nine o’clock precisely he landed splat, bang beside the other sign. A renegade tiger happened to be passing. It forgot about the nets, and panicky men following it long enough to have a good old chew on one of Howard’s arms. This would have greatly distressed Howard Duncan had he not been cat food at the time.