Terms of Service

A short story

Walter Rudolph walked into his eleventh-floor Central Park West apartment wearing a sly grin, and when he dropped his briefcase with a little more spunk than was customary, his wife asked, “You didn’t finally do it, did you? Because they’ll find out, and as sure as the sun rises in the east, you’ll be instantly fired. So, tell me you didn’t do it.”

Eva stood at the far side of their narrow front hall, her hands perched on her hips, transforming her arms into perfect triangles, her lips pressed tight together, eyelids twitching. 

“I—” Walter said.

“Did you?”

“Do you think I can finish my sentence?” He loosened his tie. 

“I just need to know if you did it, that’s all.” Eva’s heart pounded against her ribs as if trying to escape her chest.

“You ask me every time I come home from work, and the answer is always the same. I didn’t.” Walter’s keys clanged as he dropped them into the crystal bowl on the front hall table. 

“But you thought about it.”

“Of course, I thought about it. I always think about it. It’s the only thing that gets me through the day. Otherwise, I’d go bat-crazy, and my brain would become flavorless Jell-O.”

“Okay, I feel better. But I wish you wouldn’t think about it, Walter. If you didn’t think about it, you’d never be tempted to add one of your jokes or pithy sayings to a company’s terms of service.”

“And I wish gold coins fell from the sky so I didn’t have to work this mind-numbing dull job that—”

“It pays well.”

Walter released a long sigh of indifference. Sometimes, he thought of swapping his job for a scooper working the graveyard shift at an all-night ice cream store; all those ice cream colors would be vastly more interesting than his computer’s screen. “Writing corporate terms of service and privacy policies is not what I envisioned when I majored in English Lit. You have no idea how lifeless these things are.”

“I’m sure they’re important.”

“Have you ever read one?” Walter narrowed his eyes. Perhaps there was poetry in one of his recent TOS: End user agrees to be governed by these terms of service regardless of whether the user lives in a country now established or yet to be founded. 

“Well, I—but you can still write a novel. Look, nothing is holding you back from writing fiction.”

“Yes, there is. Writing TOS and PPs has annihilated my creativity as if my imagination fell into a woodchipper. After six years of penning supremely boring prose, I’ve lost the ability to write anything but that. I’m like a fox raised indoors that can’t ever be returned to the wild because the fox doesn’t know how to hunt.”

“Somebody has to write these,” Eva said. “And they pay you well.” 

“I get that. And I promise I’ll never slip an easter egg into a TOS.” Walter sniffed and swiveled his head. “What’s for dinner? It smells great.” Nothing rescued Walter from work faster and more effectively than the aroma of one of Eva’s gourmet creations. 

“Bacon-wrapped pork tenderloin, baby roasted potatoes, Brussels sprouts drizzled in olive oil and saffron, and a surprise for dessert.”

Walter ate slowly, though he wanted to consume it as if he hadn’t eaten in a week. When Walter had finished the main course, Eva presented dessert with a jaunty “ta-da!”

“Ooh! Gold foil!” Walter said as she lowered the two plates with the tiramisu onto the table. Though stuffed, satisfied, and certain just a minute ago that he couldn’t eat for a week, Walter’s face lit up and his tummy rumbled at the tiramisu. He tilted his head to let the light from the ceiling fixture reflect off the three thumbnail-sized sheets of glistening gold atop the layers of cream, savoiardi, and cocoa. “That’s an unexpected and beautiful dessert, my love. What did I do to deserve such a magnificent finale to a glorious dinner?”

Eva dug her fork into her tiramisu and, with garbled syllables from a mouth filled with food, said, “The gold is edible.”

Walter eyed the dessert. “Do I start with the foil or the outer edge and work inward?”

Eva jabbed his arm with her finger. “Just eat before it petrifies.”

The moment Walter touched his fork to the foil, a brilliant flash like a million light bulbs exploding all at once filled their dining room, blinding Walter and sending an electrical charge between the foil and his fork, through his entire body, every inch of his skin as if microscopic needles stabbed him everywhere. The sensation was that of tremendous acceleration. He was simultaneously inside a spinning tornado and hurtling along its outer edge. A hundred lightning bolts in every color of the rainbow flew at him. Though he covered his eyes with his hands and shut them tight, he could not make this violent, other-worldly storm disappear. 

He wobbled but did not fall from the chair.

“Did you see that?” Eva asked. 

Walter cautiously spread his fingers apart, peeking through the V’s on each hand. The storm was gone; all was normal. He nodded, grateful that Eva saw it, too, because he didn’t want to believe he was hallucinating. 

“That lightning bolt actually hit the window, but phew, we’re okay.” Eva wiped her brow with her hand and surveyed the dining room. “Everything looks fine.”

“Hit the window? Wow. You didn’t see anything else, though?”

“Like what?”

“Like a vortex.”

“I just saw lightning, nothing else.”

Walter was about to describe the storm to Eva, but a turquoise-tinted streak along the left side of her black hair caught his eye.

When did she dye part of her hair turquoise? How did I miss that?

A soft meow made Walter whip his head to the left and down to where an orange cat rubbed against his leg. 

We don’t have a cat. Do we?

He ignored his phone vibrating in his pocket. At this hour, it was either a wrong number or his boss calling about a client needing an emergency webpage with the legalities that only Walter could pen perfectly. When he took this job at TOS Creations, he figured that he’d only work regular hours, but no. 

“Aren’t you going to answer that?” Eva glanced at her watch. “At eight-thirty-five in the evening, that could only be your agent calling.”

I have an agent? 

Walter did as Eva instructed.

“Hello,” he said tepidly.

“Walter, Walter! Warner offered a cool three mil for the rights to your most recent Terms of Service.” The gravelly male voice, as though it belonged to a man who had smoked since he was twelve, spoke at one hundred miles per hour. “Way to go! Shall I tell them, ‘yes?’ Of course, I’ll tell them ‘yes,’ and I promise it’ll be even more next time. Just keep writing those Terms of Service and Privacy Policies and I’ll keep selling them for you. Right, right? Right! The TOS makes movies and your PPs television series. No writer writing TOS sells to Hollywood like you—they’d all kill to be you, my man.”

Walter said nothing as his eyes widened. 

“Walter, baby, are you there? Did you hear me? Three million for your Terms of Service.”

Where am I?

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If you enjoyed Terms of Service, I think you’ll also like Miranda the Plagiarist.