"Perfect! You're hired! Now go kill my desk."
I gasped when I heard the words of the man in front of me. And it's not because of how weird it sounds. It's totally normal for objects to take on a life of their own, and as natural as it sounds, they don't necessarily become killers of their owners. But it does happen sometimes.
I live in a world where magical creatures exist and humans are born with magical powers. We even have schools where you learn to master powers from a young age. Even in big cities like the one I've decided to move to, there are universities where you can specialize and become a supreme wizard or get a master's degree in the dark arts.
However, I am an ordinary human or should I say ¿Am I an atypical one? Yes, I do know and have known since I was born, not a shred of magic passes through my veins. I am the sixth child my mother had (maybe it's due to the fact that we don't have a TV at home, but I never asked, I don't think it's an easy question to ask one's parents either) and we recently learned that magic degrades with increasing offspring. Obviously, I wasn't planned, who was? But, anyway, I was very much loved by my parents since I came into the world. I can't complain.
In my village, there are magic brooms, talking trees, fairies, gnomes, goblins. All kinds of magical creatures. I live far from the city, in a rural county. Here green abounds, everywhere you look there are meadows, mountains, and forests. And yes, they are also enchanted.
Being a non-magical being, you can imagine the kind of bullying I had to live through. I would literally come home from school with a donkey tail, monkey ears, buck teeth, you name it. Fortunately, my parents knew the counterspells, and you may wonder, didn't my brothers and sisters help me? Well, yes, they did, like any close-knit family, it is only natural that they would help me, however, I was also a victim of their "experiments". Anyway, I was the freak of the circus, suffice it to say.
So, I grew up and decided to move to the city, where I thought I could get a job that didn't require magical skills. I figured you didn't have to be a level 3 magician to do a sales report, a certificate of income, or do the bookkeeping for a business.
And with that thought, I took the train and went to the capital of my country. Most at my age, use a flying broom, summon a magic portal or simply teleport with a spell. But, being a non-magician, I had to take a train. Trains rarely carried people, usually used to carry food, raw materials, animals, and other objects.
The city was gray, cold, and dark; full of buildings and millions of people. I had never seen so many people together. Nor did I know that they had pet fairies and gnomes, and incredible as it seemed, they served as butlers. I guess they had to make a living somehow.
I had finished my senior year of high school and thought that was enough to get a reasonably lucrative job. But to my misfortune, the interviews required a demonstration of one's magical abilities. And as you may already know, for all my interviewers it was something unusual, I won't say that I was as unusual as a unicorn, since they abounded in the shire. Although in the city it was very difficult to find them.
They were always amazed at my inability to do magic, yet I never got any kind of employment. Until one day I was in the office of a local newspaper and had been waiting for the result of the interview of a friend I met in the waiting room, who had the ability to make publications and printed articles in seconds. A simple spell, he had told me.
"I'm sure it would," I replied without having any idea what he was talking about.
He was a very nice and eloquent person, I guess that was very good quality for a job in a publishing house. As usual, I didn't get the job but decided to wait for the friend I had just met.
As weird as it was, he suddenly fled without looking back with tears in his eyes and his clothes in rags, all full of scratches.
"God damn it!" shouted a menacing-looking man with a heavy build; he had a bushy gray beard and he was carrying a big half-finished cigar in his mouth.
A frightened thin girl quickly approached him.
"Bring me the next candidate," he ordered from the office door.
"I... I can't, sir... There is no one else, sir," stammered the girl shrugging her shoulders in anticipation of another blast from who appeared to be the head of the establishment.
"What about that one?" he asked pointing at me with his half-finished tobacco between his fingers
"He's a non-magician," muttered the girl.
"A what?" growled the boss. "Bullshit!"
"No... He doesn't have a shred of magic in his veins. Si... sir," stuttered the girl, glancing sideways at me.
And there it was again, the freak, the outcast, the exile... Yet the boss was unfazed by the girl's news. He scratched his beard and glanced at me.
"Hey, you!" he turned to me and I stood up so fast I looked like I'd had a spring in my ass.
"Coming!", I answered immediately.
"Do you know how to work with wood?" he asked out of the blue.
"Of course," I replied and was about to explain what I used to do in my hometown, but again he exploded into a series of words that left me dumbfounded
"Perfect! You're hired! Now go kill my desk."
Although I initially wanted to corroborate whether he actually had said what he had said, I didn't have time to do so. Immediately, he opened the door to his office, and with a slap on my back, nearly knocking my lungs out of my mouth, he shooed me inside and closed the door behind me.
And there I was, all alone next to a desk that was snarling and showing its ferocious fangs formed of splinters. A pair of hollow holes served as eyes.
It lunged at me and I made a couple of leaps over it to keep it from hurting me.
It was clear that magic had no effect on it.
"Listen to me very carefully, desk," I pointed out in a firm voice.
"I know you've been treated badly and I know it by the dents, burns, and scrapes I can see all over you," I explained.
"I know that everyone who has come in has wanted to hurt you," I added.
"I too have suffered a series of unfortunate events and I know what it's like to be ostracized by people who don't understand you."
The lady interviewer approached the newspaper boss, who was still arguing loudly over the phone. She paused, doubting whether she should interrupt him.
After a few minutes that seemed like hours, finally, the boss noticed her.
"What are you doing standing in front of me?" the boss blurted out.
"Am I paying you to do nothing?"
"B-B.. Boss..," she hesitated for a moment and continued, "It's been over an hour since the boy hasn't left your office," she reported biting her finger.
"It's a shame. He's dead for sure." asserted the boss with a shrug.
He took a bite of his stinky cigar, inhaled, and after releasing a puff of smoke, got up and went straight for the office.
"Call the police, possibly we have to make statements to the authorities about the poor devil's demise," he added before opening the door.
His eyes widened and his cigar fell from his mouth as he found me happily patting the desk.
"Later I'll tell you about the time when I met a lamp who suffered from chronic hiccups and how I did to cure it," I exclaimed so that everyone could hear me
The desk hissed something akin to a small laugh.