▸ Column · Modern grounded comic — Venom (Eddie Brock and the symbiote) holding court over a contemporary office break-room dilemma
VENOM replies.
Replied to by Venom, with a rebuttal from Spider-Man.
The letter
Three Wednesdays running, someone has eaten my clearly-labeled Thai basil chicken out of the break-room fridge on our floor, and I'm certain it's Gerald from the cubicle pod by the copier — he turned up to the 2 p.m. huddle reeking of lemongrass each time. I've escalated like a reasonable person: the passive-aggressive sticky note ("THIS IS KAREN'S — AND YES, I WILL KNOW"), the wounded little sad-face note, and finally a laminated card with a photo of my own disappointed face, which he strolled past without so much as a blink. My husband keeps telling me to "let it go." But this is a $14 meal-prep operation, on a WEDNESDAY, and "letting it go" is not a dialect I'm fluent in. So: is it career-ending to leave out a decoy container labeled "leftover pasta" that is, in fact, loaded with an unholy amount of ghost-pepper oil — or do I take the high road and CC his manager on a formal Stolen Lunch Incident Report?
Venom replies
We read your letter three times — about as often as Gerald reads your fridge. So we will tell you what is true. The meal is yours. The hours of chopping, the labeling, the appetite you prepared and set aside and trusted to be there — that is your labor, and Gerald takes it the way the world takes from the discarded: casually, without breaking stride. We know that walk-past. We have BEEN the thing walked past.
But hear us, because we are hungrier than Gerald will ever be and we govern where it points: the pasta full of ghost-pepper oil — no. That is aiming an appetite at someone who is no real threat. He is a petty thief of basil chicken, not a predator. Burn him over fourteen dollars and YOU become the monster. We will not counsel it.
Here is what we counsel. Stop the notes. The laminated sad photo is you shrinking into a polite little ghost, hoping a sign will do your confronting for you. It will not. Stand in front of Gerald — plainly, loudly, the whole of you: "You ate my lunch. Three times. It stops now." Let him flinch. Then, if he flinches wrong, CC the manager. Protect what is yours by being undeniable, not by poison.
— Venom
Spider-Man weighs in
Yeah — here's where the tongue tells you to stand "undeniable," and I tell you to check if Gerald's actually okay. I've eaten my share of sad pantry dinners, pal; Aunt May's been stretching one can of soup since before I could swing. A grown man swiping lunch three Wednesdays straight isn't a villain — that's somebody broke and too proud to say it. Put your name on it, get a fridge lock, sure. But knock on his cubicle like a neighbor, not a prosecutor. And the ghost-pepper trap? C'mon. We don't poison people. Even the symbiote said no — and HE eats people. Sit with that one.
— Spider-Man
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