Sheepmaster
an excerpt

In the rear of the long alcove, a wooden table hand painted in a shade resembling dark chocolate vibrated quietly as the beige fax machine perched atop it hummed to life. A fan curiously positioned in the front of the machine, and several decibels noisier than it strictly needed to be, powered on and spun up to speed. From an intake grille for the fan in the rear of the machine, a current of air began to flow from the back to the front of the machine, sucking the sheer draperies along the edge of the towering window out from against the double paned glass.

The incoming fax signal, which was not transmitted into the open air audibly for the sake of those who normally worked around the office, whined and clicked silently within the pathways of the machine, transmitting the encoded message to specialized processing chips. After the chips decoded the signal, additional circuit and chip combinations rendered and printed the completed transmission onto standard copy paper via an embedded photosensitive drum and fuser assembly. The drum and fuser, known collectively outside of a fax machine as a laser printer, married paper, plastic and carbon dye together to form the completed message which was then ejected unceremoniously out of the top of the machine via a series of black rubber rollers.

As the rollers spat the single-page transmission out of the machine, they delivered it onto a waiting plastic tray which, in a shining example of engineering genius, was just slightly more than half the length of the letter-sized document. As a result, the paper glided over the tray, paused for a second as nearly half of the document lay suspended on the river of air emanating from the front-facing fan, and then, caught in the currents, shot out horizontally several feet into the room before losing lift and lilting lazily to the ground on the thin, industrial-strength maroon carpet.

Three feet above the freshly minted message, fans spun down, draperies unsucked from plastic fan grilles, and the hum and grind of the imaging drum fell silent as the fax machine powered down. Seconds later, the only evidence of the entire process was the printed fax itself, laying on the floor, several feet behind the empty mahogany desk with its museum-era display and energy-wasting screen saver.

One corner of the message had landed curled under itself and as the paper lay on the carpet, the final corner popped loose, scooting the fax a final two inches forward, snug against the bottom of the desk chair and, from the perspective of any passing hallway pedestrian, just out of sight.