[WP] A totally straight-laced advertising executive eats some brownies left out by his cousin, unknown to him is that the brownies are made with MARIJUANA! The brainstorming meeting at work later is a little different than usual!

"Bullshit." smacked Henry Denlow, as he slammed his hand down on his dashboard. The gridlock beyond his steering wheel seemed to laughed at him. Two dark men in light suits tossed their arms in argument, their fender bender turned public death-match. The muffled shouting reminded him of those parents from Charlie Brown. Henry wondered if those parents ever yelled, but couldn't remember.

He inspected himself in the rear view mirror. A bit of brownie rebelled against the whiteness of his perfect businessman's smile. Mr. Denlow crushed the rebellion with his tongue.

It wasn't the first time. Two attempted buyouts and that one young hot shot all fell to the power of his tongue. The gift of gab, his mother used to call it. Whatever it was it made the man in the narrow mirror who he was today, and today he was to prepare for another battle.

"Hello Mr. Denlow," Kelly said like an insurance commercial; her smile as fake as half her face and most of her body. He hired her for that look, it impressed the foreign clients who's sexism hadn't been publicly ridiculed out yet. "Everyone's in Conference Room B."

"What?" asked Henry. Wait, what did he mean by that? He heard her. Conference room B, that makes sense. What "what" was he asking about?

"Conference Room B. It's the brainstorming for the merger," popped Kelly like a cheerleader. She really was like a cheerleader, expect the outfit. Wouldn't that be great, Henry thought, if we had her come to work in a cheerleader outfit, pom-poms and all. Give me a Conference! Give me a room! Give me a "B"! That would bring in business, probably.

"When does your shift start?" Henry asked after realizing that he'd been staring at her for a few moments. It was always good practice to suddenly ask questions about timeclocks and due dates, it made the pions at his office realize their status.

"Nine, but today I got in at ten after because of traffic."

"Don't do that, Kelly, I don't want to lose you. You're like the cheerleader at this office, you know? Like everyone looks at you and thinks boy this team is going to win! Hahaha!" Henry tossed his arms up and danced a bit in place.

Kelly stared at him. Henry needed a bathroom and found one quickly.

He locked the door behind him and took a deep breath that didn't help. He took another deep breath and had a thought that wasn't very clear and could only been expressed as "Ooooooooooookay. Ooooooookay. What the... ooookay."

They were all already seated. Like a row of stiff business manikins. Apparently all waiting on Henry. The conference room smelt of whiskey and regret, or maybe it smelled like old man and leather, Henry couldn't tell.

"What is that smell?" he needed to know. The men regarded each other, none willing to point a finger or lend a hand. Henry felt panic, "Anyway, you're all here because... um... we need to figure out this whole merger thing." He made his way to the window that overlooked the bay.

Boy it was bright outside, like teenager Summer bright. Henry remembered that time he tricked a kid out of his bike by convincing him that watching Henry enjoy it with more skill was a better use of it. Henry laughed. What a stupid kid! He laughed harder at the memory.

One of the manikins laughed, too. The noise freaked Henry out. He had forgotten there were twenty-six other people in the room.

"Oh shit." said Henry as he just sort of looked at everyone. What was he doing here? Yes, yes, business. Merging things... got it. Wait, did he just say 'oh shit' out loud? Just to be sure, he decided to roll with it, "Oh, shit. We're in deep shit, deep poop, very deep." he giggled a bit under his breath, "...so how do you climb out of all this brown poopy mess?"

Danger Cat was his favorite cartoon, for sure. Better than all those other cat cartoons.

"Sir, we were thinking of putting it off until next quarter. Marketing has a new social media angle that we think looks very promising," squeaked one of the manikins.

"That would be awesome!" bounced Henry. The thirty-something man who just spoke now had a look of confusion on his face. He'd never seen a man of six-eight jump in the air. "I love all that new age shit, computers are amazing! I read this article about a kid or something in the middle east that used his cell phone to save his whole village or something. Freaking amazing shit. It's like one day we were all using paper and file cabinets and now we just like press a button and out pops the finished product. It's like Star Trek, with Kirk and Spock and all that automatic shit. It makes you wonder why we haven't invented that yet, the ships and computers that they had. We're probably... pretty... close."

The room was silent.

"We'll wait till next quarter. Good job, Man..." Henry stopped himself from saying 'manikin' and thought about eating something with noodles. Noodles are very relaxing, he thought, and, God, there are just so many people in this room.

/r/WritingPrompts Thread