SECURITY AT PUFFIN Luxury Rentals is no laughing matter: the new contract covers all four buildings in closed-circuit video and includes a daytime patrol (one guard, one gate attendant) and a nighttime patrol (one guard), to the tune of $20,000/month. Another $10,000 pays for a round-the-clock concierge and fresh flowers and mats on every floor. Tenants living here expect no less; otherwise they’d live somewhere else.
Once a month, the party room in Tower C is booked for a two-hour staff meeting to discuss property maintenance and security. There’s the usual review of procedures – fires, floods, blackouts – and then the interesting stuff: a full updated list of persons to be refused entry to all buildings. Some of these are former employees, disgruntled in some way; some are distributors of religious pamphlets or junk mail, and some (the most interesting batch) are personal enemies of tenants, who’ve done something the superintendent believes is worthy of a permanent ban. The infractions themselves are not described in detail; only the offenders’ names and physical descriptions, photos (if available), and contact information for the complainants.
Philip, the daytime concierge and a twenty-year Puffin man, watches these with special attention. Anyone wishing to make trouble in his building must get past him or his colleagues, and Philip has a perfect memory for names and faces who’ve managed it over the years.
One such troublemaker: Alfred Rodriguez, mid-fifties Latino male, approx. five feet eight inches; a grainy photo taken from the security feed in the vestibule of
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Eric Rausch grew up in north-central Saskatchewan and earned a Bachelor's degree in English from the University of Saskatchewan. His work appears in Prairie Fire, The Humber Literary Review, and Existere. He lives and works in Hamilton, Ontario. www.linktr.ee/rauschwrites