I work on the twelfth floor, in a building that looks like every other glass box in the central city. When you are outside, all you see is your own reflection layered over strangers. When you are inside, all you see are partitions. My partition is beige. Beige fabric, beige desk, beige drawers with keys no one bothers to use. I have been in this cube for six months now, long enough that the chair has moulded to the shape of my hips, not long enough for anyone on the floor to remember my surname without checking my email signature. I am an account manager. That sounds more important than it is. Most days I move numbers from one place to another and smooth over the nerves of clients who think the world will end if their campaign does not launch by Friday. My life outside of work is quiet. I have a partner at home who knows me well and likes that I am not the sort of person who goes out drinking after work. At the office, I prefer to keep to myself. Fifty people on this floor, and I could not name more than ten of them without looking at the seating chart. On the morning the duck appeared, nothing felt unusual. I arrived at eight twenty, same as every day, swiped my card at the gate, nodded at the receptionist whose name I never caught and now cannot ask, walked past the breakout area with its too-bright furniture and the smell of burnt toast. My cube waited where I left it, third row from the window, facing a corridor that leads to the bathrooms and the fire stairs. I put my bag under the desk and woke the computer. Only when the monitor lit, did I see the yellow shape beneath it. A rubber duck, the classic kind. Yellow body, orange beak, black dots for eyes. It sat neatly under the rim of the screen, facing me, as if it had always lived there and I had simply been too busy to see it. For a long moment I did nothing. It is remarkable how a tiny object can pin you like an insect. I did not touch it. I examined the desk, the trash can, the floor. Everything else was as I had left it the previous night. Headphones coiled beside the keyboard. Graph pad, pen, coffee mug ring staining the top of an old media plan. No sign anyone had been through my things. The duck did not look new. The plastic had a dullness to it, a faint scuff along one side where the colour had paled. I have a nephew who is obsessed with things like this. Car rides, bath time, visits to the doctor; he narrates them through the personality of whatever small object he can carry. My sister took him on one of those Disney cruises. She sent photos from the deck, him grinning with a rubber duck in each hand. Apparently people hide them all over the ship for kids to find. Prizes that no one has to earn. Harmless. Looking at the duck on my desk, I decided that must be what had happened. The story wrote itself. One of the ducks had ended up in my bag. I had dropped it on the floor at some point. A cleaner or a coworker found it under the cube wall and set it in the most obvious place, under my screen, so someone would claim it. It was a harmless story, and I needed a harmless story. I picked the duck up. The plastic gave slightly under my fingers. There is a particular weight to objects like that, a hollow lightness that pretends to be solid. I turned it over. No name written on the bottom, no company logo, just a small circle where the moulding seam ended. No one commented on it. People passed my cube carrying folders and takeaway coffee. No one leaned in with a joke or an explanation. The duck sat where I had left it, guarding the entrance to my inbox, and by lunchtime I had almost convinced myself it was mine. A few weeks went by. Deadlines, invoices, client calls. The duck became part of the static scenery, something my eyes slipped over when I stared through the screen too long. My partner teased me about it the one time I mentioned it. “Office mascot,” she said. “Maybe it’s good luck.” “Maybe,” I said, even though I do not believe in luck. Then one Monday, I came in from a miserable commute, peeled my damp jacket off, and found that the duck was no longer alone. Tucked beside it, nudging its flank, sat a smaller duck. This one was pale pink, the colour of old bubblegum. The beak was painted a softer orange, slightly smudged, as though whoever applied it had breathed too close before it dried. It faced the same direction as the first duck. Their sides touched. For a moment I thought I was still half asleep. There is a particular quality to unreality on a Monday morning, when the weekend has not finished leaving your system. I blinked once, twice. The pink duck stayed. The second story that formed was that someone on the floor had seen the yellow one and decided it needed company. Maybe they had found this one on their own desk first and passed it on like office chain mail. I sat down. My chair creaked in the same tired way it always did, a sound as familiar as my own joints. I studied the two of them. The size difference was just enough to make the pairing feel deliberate. Not two random ducks, but a couple copied from a greeting card. The idea lodged somewhere in my chest that someone, somewhere, thought my duck should have a companion. You might be thinking that this is where I should have been creeped out. A stranger playing with my desk, decorating my space while I was away. The truth is, my first response was not unease. It was something closer to warmth. I told myself it was harmless, someone being whimsical. I thought, with a kind of embarrassed fondness, that my duck had been given a girlfriend. If you grew up here, you probably remember the old Englefield ads. Bathroom fixtures and bubbles and those tiny plastic ducks gliding through water that was always just opaque enough that you could not see anyone actually naked. There was a little jingle that went with it, something about rubber duckies making bath time fun. It stuck in your head whether you wanted it or not. Every child I knew at the time had a duck of their own, some direct brand cousin of the ones on television. That memory came back to me as I looked at the pair under my monitor. The kind of childhood recall that feels less like memory and more like a commercial burned into your brain. I thought of my nephew singing in the bath, lining up his ducks on the edge and insisting they all had names. Maybe that is why I smiled, just a little, at my desk. I imagine from the outside it looked like nothing at all, one more office worker amused by something on their screen. I did not mention the second duck to anyone. There was no one to mention it to, really and I didn’t want my partner to tease me about it. At morning teas, the younger staff gather around the high table near the windows, talking about shows I had not watched and people I did not know. I eat my muesli bar at my desk, the wrapper crinkling softly beneath my fingers, and go about my daily routines. They had become part of the way I oriented myself to the day. I would arrive, sit, and check that they were where I had left them. It was a pointless ritual, but it made the first few minutes of the morning feel less empty. Two small shapes, bright against the surface of my desk, acknowledging my presence in a way that people did not. Nothing about it felt frightening yet. That is important to understand. At the beginning, the horror is never in the object. It is in the fact that you talk yourself out of noticing what is strange. September arrived with a change in the air. I caught what I thought was an ordinary cold. By the second day I could barely stand. Fever, shakes, an ache that burrowed behind my eyes. The kind of illness that confuses time. I spent most of that week drifting in and out of shallow sleep on the couch, sweating through clothes and sheets, grateful that my contract included two weeks of sick leave. The phone stayed off. Work could survive without me for a few days. When I returned the following Monday, the first thing I noticed was the smell of someone else’s coffee in my bin. A dark ring at the bottom, recent enough that the sourness clung to the air. Someone had used my desk while I was away. It was not unusual; space was scarce on our floor and people borrowed whatever surface they could find. I sat down and reached for my keyboard. Only then did I realise the ducks were not looking at me. The yellow one and the pink one had been turned around. At first I assumed whoever borrowed the desk had simply found them strange and turned them away. A small gesture of discomfort. I almost laughed at the thought. They were toys, nothing more. But a small pulse of something uneasy went through me, a ripple that I smothered before it could grow. Looking back now, I understand the truth was different. Someone had been angry. I picked them up and turned them back, placing them in their usual positions. Yellow to the left, pink angled slightly inward. Restoring the small matching tableau I had become used to. Then I opened my inbox and forced myself to move on. The following week, a third duck appeared. This one was tiny, no larger than the tip of my thumb. A bright orange baby duck with a beak that had been painted on in a trembling hand. It sat tucked beside the pink duck. The trio looked like a little family, posed with deliberate care. I stared at them for a long time. The cuteness of the first duck had been harmless. The addition of the second had been strange but still explained by whimsy. But the third one, this little offspring, felt different. Someone had escalated this. Someone had expectations. The unease was sharp now. Not fear exactly, but intrusion. I picked up the smallest duck. The plastic was rougher than the other two, grainy, with tiny ridges where the mould had not been sanded smooth. The paint smudged under my thumb. A little curl of orange flaked away. I walked down to Jerry’s cubicle. He was one of the only people I spoke to. Younger than me by a decade, bookish, with a stack of sci-fi paperbacks always on the corner of his desk. He was fiddling with a small gear printed from resin. “Hey,” I said. “Can I show you something?” He looked up. “Sure.” I placed the ducks on his desk. He leaned in immediately, adjusting his glasses. “These are printed,” he said. “Definitely. This layer here is from a cheap printer. See the striations along the side. And the paint is hand applied. Someone used acrylic and didn’t wait for it to dry before adding the detail.” He scraped some from the pink duck with his nail. “Yeah. Handmade.” My stomach sank. “Why would someone do this?” I asked. Jerry shrugged. “Maybe someone is messing with you. Or maybe it’s like a secret-santa-thing. People do weird things in offices. You might have an admirer.” The idea of having a secret admirer made my skin prickle. I thanked him, gathered the ducks, and walked back to my cube. They sat in my palm like warm little hearts. Too intimate. Too deliberate. I dropped all three into my bin. The sound was louder than it should have been, plastic hitting plastic in thud. A small flicker of guilt followed, but I pushed it down. They were toys. Nothing more. I worked late that night, trying to clear a backlog of emails. By the time I logged off, most of the floor was empty. I packed my bag, took the lift down, and crossed the car park under a sky that looked close enough to touch. My car sat beneath a sodium lamp. I clicked the key fob. The hazards blinked once. Then I saw them. All three ducks sat on the center of my windshield, arranged in a neat line. Yellow, pink, orange. As if they had been waiting. A smear of lipstick had been drawn across the glass, the curve forming a crude heart around them. The wind brushed against my sleeves, carrying a faint sweetness I could not place. Something familiar and wrong. The ducks stared at me. Their painted eyes were black dots, fixed with an attention that felt almost human. Someone had taken them from the bin. And someone wanted me to see the heart. I kept my distance from the windshield for several seconds, as if the arrangement might shift if I looked away. The lipstick heart caught the light in a greasy sheen, the smear thick along one side where the pressure had been uneven. I opened the back door of the car, reached for the container of wipes I kept in the side pocket, and tore one free. I wiped the glass slowly, pressing hard enough that the smear broke apart into pale streaks. The ducks watched me from where I had placed them on the bonnet, their tiny bodies tipped slightly forward. I cleaned until nothing remained but a faint oily patch. Then I gathered the ducks in one hand and walked to a rubbish bin near the kerb. I dropped them inside without ceremony. The lid fell closed with a soft, final click. At home I told my partner everything, obviously. She listened while she heated leftovers in the microwave. Steam drifted up from the bowl, obscuring her face for a moment. “A prank,” she stated. “A weird one, but still a prank. Someone on your floor must have too much time on their hands.” The explanation was comforting in its ordinariness. I wanted to accept it. The next morning I went to HR. A woman in a navy cardigan took my name and asked me to sit. I told her what had happened, the ducks, the windshield, the lipstick heart. She typed while I spoke, each keystroke a small interruption. “There are no cameras inside the office area,” she resigned. “Only at the main entrance. The car park cameras have been faulty for months. We are working on that. If someone placed anything on your vehicle, there is no footage.” I asked whether anyone had been on my floor after hours. She shrugged. “People come and go. Contractors. Late meetings. Hard to tell. We can note this down.” Her tone made it clear that nothing more would come of it. She folded her hands and gave me a reassuring smile that felt like a dismissal. “If anything else unusual happens, let us know. I am sure this is all harmless.” By lunch I had convinced myself it was finished. The ducks were gone. The prank had run its course. My desk looked clean, empty, ordinary. Nothing had been moved. My screen lit up with its usual calm blue at the start of the day. No toys. No lipstick hearts. No signs of intrusion. Two days later my partner called me during a meeting. Her voice was steady but held something underneath it, something tense. “I got an email at work,” she whispered. “From someone who claims to be in your office.” My chest tightened. “What did it say?” “That you have been flirting around. Touching women without asking. Being unprofessional. Strangely, it’s from one of those forwarding accounts you get when you don’t want to give your real email address.” Silence opened between us, I knew exactly who I was. I knew what I was capable of and what I was not. “You know that’s not true,” I said. “Of course,” she replied, and her certainty was immediate, almost fierce. “You would never do any of that. I told my manager to delete it. It is someone stirring trouble. It has to be.” Her trust should have soothed me, but something in the back of my mind shifted, a small edge turning. Someone knew her name. Someone knew where she worked. I had to find out who was doing this. The email to my partner changed something fundamental in me. A quiet, steady panic began to take shape. I could not shake the feeling that someone on my floor was watching me, studying me, choosing moments to twist. There were nine women working on my floor. I barely knew any of them. That made it worse. The anonymity created a vacuum my mind began to fill. I started observing them. Not openly. I watched from my own cube, waiting for any of them to enter the bathrooms. It seemed my only choice, to find something strange in their patterns, to see if they came by my desk thinking I’m not there. Most of them worked on the other side of the floor and constantly walking around would make me seem suspicious. My notes were simple. Just names, or in some cases initials, with times beside them. A pattern refused to form. The paranoia grew sharper. I ordered a novelty item from an online store, a stapler with a built-in camera meant for streaming pranks. It fed to a simple browser window through the company wifi, saving the footage on my hard drive. I placed it on my desk as if it were an ordinary office tool. The camera captured a wide view to the bathrooms and fire exit. I would catch them in the act, eventually. Days passed. Nothing changed. Every time I checked the footage, there was never anything unusual. No one standing near my desk. No one reaching over the cube wall. By Thursday afternoon, HR sent an email requesting a meeting. My stomach lifted. I assumed they had found something, or that someone had confessed. The subject line simply said “Follow-up.” The HR office held a different atmosphere this time. My manager sat beside the woman from HR, both of them staring at a single folder in front of them. A company lawyer stood in the corner with his hands clasped. No one smiled. “Take a seat,” HR said. I did. “There have been complaints,” she continued. “Two women on your floor reported that you have been observing them entering and leaving the bathroom at specific times. They stated that you have stared at them in ways that made them uncomfortable.” She opened the folder. Inside were the pages from my notebook. My handwriting. Names, initials, times, dates. “We searched your desk this morning,” she said. “We found these.” My throat closed. “We also discovered videos. IT accessed your computer. There is surveillance footage saved locally. You’ve filmed the view beside the women’s bathroom.” “That is not why it was there,” I said. My voice wavered. “Someone has been tampering with my things. Leaving objects. Watching me. I was trying to protect myself!” “It doesn’t matter,” the lawyer said. “You violated company policy on workplace surveillance and privacy, not to mention sexual harassment. This is grounds for immediate termination.” “I was framed!” I yelled. The words sounded hoarse. “There were ducks on my car. Someone drew a heart on the glass. My partner got an email for Christ’s sake!” HR shook her head. “None of that changes the fact that you kept notes on female staff and installed a camera. We take harassment very seriously.” They slid a stack of paperwork toward me. Termination forms. A formal notice for security to escort me out. A document explaining that my access card would be deactivated within the hour. I signed. My hand shook so hard the pen scratched the paper. When I reached the car, the sky looked blurred, as if seen through water. I collapsed into the driver’s seat and began to cry. Not quiet tears, but a sharp, disorienting grief that left my vision swimming. I called my partner. She answered on the second ring. “They fired me,” I cried. I kept talking even though my voice barely held shape. I told her about the notes, the camera, the complaints. “I know you,” she said, but her tone had changed. Cautious. Thin. “But this is a lot. I think I should stay at my mother’s for a bit. Just until everything settles.” When she came home, she packed quietly. A small overnight bag, the blue one she used on weekends. She avoided looking at the termination papers on the table. The door clicked shut behind her. The house felt emptied. I wish it had ended there. I wish I could say that, truly. I wish I could say she came back a few days later, I found a new job, and everything settled into something ordinary. I wish I could say we laugh about it now. That would be a cleaner story, something with a neat moral edge. You survive something strange, you rebuild, the world rights itself. But that is not the story I am living. I am sitting here now because our couples therapist suggested I write this down. She wanted a clear version of my side of the events, something I could hand over when the memories become tangled and I start losing track of what happened first. My partner and I have been attending sessions for a couple of months. We still live apart. She says she needs space to breathe. I cannot blame her. My emotional state after the firing was awful. I slept at odd hours. I forgot to eat. I still cannot find work. I have applied everywhere. Interviewers want confidence, brightness, energy. I do not have those things. I am living off savings and the numbers shrink each week. I try not to look at them too closely. The house became something I avoided. Dishes stacked. Laundry sat in piles. I spent entire days in the same clothes. My partner visited once and stood in the doorway like a visitor in a stranger’s home. We talked about a reset. A clean slate. That was before the last thing happened. Before any hope of simple explanations disappeared entirely. She had been away for a week, staying with her mother, when I found the bouquet. It was on my doorstep early one morning, the sky still grey with the last of the night. Paper flowers, folded with meticulous care, arranged in a tight cluster. In the center sat a small red rubber duck. This one wore a tiny set of lingerie made from scraps of lace and ribbon, glued unevenly across its plastic body. The sight of it made something twist inside me, not fear but revulsion. A cold, crawling disgust that moved along my skin. I took the bouquet inside, carried it straight to the fireplace, and set it on the grate. The paper curled as the flames caught, blackening at the edges. The duck melted in stages, its red surface turning soft, then glossy, then collapsing inward. I started drinking that night. Not much at first, just enough to soften the sharpness of my thoughts. Then more. Days blurred. I wrote a letter and taped it to my own door. I didn’t know who the message was for. I only knew I needed to say something to whatever or whoever had been creeping into my life. “I do not want you. I will never want you. If I find out who you are I will make your life miserable. I’d rather die than get to know you.” I really thought then, they’d taken the hint. Nothing happened and I truly felt lighter. Then came yesterday. I woke early, a dull ache behind my eyes from too much wine. I stood under the bathroom light and turned the shower on. When I pulled the curtain back, I saw it sitting in the corner of the tub. A rubber duck. The size of the original one that appeared on my desk months ago. But this one was pitch black. Not dark yellow, not painted over, but a deep, consuming black that swallowed the light. Its eyes had been painted with white crosses, stark and crooked, the brushstrokes uneven. It faced the wall, its back turned to me. I didn’t touch it. I couldn’t. My body moved on instinct. I packed a bag. I left the house without looking back. I checked into a small hotel near the motorway and paid for a week in advance. I sit here with the curtains closed and the door secured. Maybe I should call the police. My partner certainly thinks so. We had been talking about moving away before this. A fresh start. Somewhere far from the office, far from the city, far from anyone who it might be. Now it feels less like an idea and more like the only option left. I only know I am tired. Tired in a way that goes past sleep. Tired in a way that makes the thought of leaving everything behind feel like relief. I really fucking hate rubber ducks.