Skinfall

Monica couldn't tell anyone about her job. Her husband thought she worked at a publishing house, because on the check that came every two weeks the block in the top left corner said Little, Brown & Co. and that had always been good enough for him.

Monica didn't talk to her husband much anyway, and he never asked about her days at work. Had a textbook case of bibliophobia, that one. She supposed that was good, because what she saw at work every day was so strange that if she had the slightest inkling her husband (or anyone) wanted to know what was really going on at her job, she would spill immediately, and subsequently forfeit her position.

She imagined, for instance, telling someone this: every morning she parked her car three blocks away from the front door of a big office building, walked to the back of a long hallway, stepped into an elevator and pushed four buttons: 4621, her facility access code. The elevator would whir and grind for a couple of minutes, she’d send a text or two and her phone would lose satellite signal, and then when the door finally opened she’d be somewhere she’d never been before. The facility was massive, rolling green hills and forests and lakes and bits of desert and some frozen tundra. When she stepped out and the elevator ascended back into the sky like it was being pulled up with a vending machine claw, until she couldn’t see it anymore.

Her first day on the job (more than four years ago) she’d been deposited by the elevator near a burbling stream, and when the elevator was gone she’d had the distinct feeling that she was insane. She’d walked in the wilderness so long she imagined she was employed by some company that dropped her from the sky, but of course that wasn’t true. It made more sense that she was nuts, that if someone looked in her head they’d just see a sign that said “Gone Fishin’.”