Occupational Hazards | Jonah J. Martinez
Alright, here goes.
Last week, Carlos was crushed by a pallet of black mulch. I wasn’t driving the machine. I want to make that crystal clear. I was outside when I saw him standing under the forklift’s raised forks. Ten feet above him, a full pallet of mulch motioned slightly in the air. I asked him who was supposed to be driving. He told me his manager, Tim, had been operating it but got off to go block the aisles so customers wouldn’t walk through. Carlos stayed put. He shouldn’t have. I told him he shouldn’t be standing under the load. That it was against Howe’s safety policy. Then we heard a creak. A deep, aching sound, like an old tree bending in the wind. I yelled for him to move. Then, SLAM! Carlos didn’t move in time.
The police came. An officer took my statement in the breakroom while I ate a vending machine sandwich. He asked what I saw, and I told him. Just the facts. I told him how I warned Carlos. I told him how Tim left the forklift unattended. I told him how the pallet just fell, like the whole thing had been waiting to happen. The officer jotted everything down in his notepad, nodding as I spoke. His pen, a thick black Sharpie, made bold lines on the page. Not subtle, the kind of ink that stains.
“Is that all you know?” he asked.
I chewed on my sandwich, the stale bread leaving chunks in the corner of my mouth.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s all I saw.”
He paused and clicked the Sharpie closed. Slipped it into his pocket like a knife. “Would you be willing to testify as a witness in court?”
I glared at him. His badge gleamed under the humming fluorescents. Behind him, the vending machine flickered. The digital display glitched between $1.25 and $1.75.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess.”
That seemed to satisfy him. He closed his notepad and stood, stretching his legs. Then he left. Tim didn’t come back to work. No one said why, but we all knew. Management sent some regional guys in suits to do “safety assessments.” They walked around with clipboards and took pictures of the forklift like it was a crime scene… which, I guess, it was. Two days later, they moved Carlos’ locker. Not cleaned it out. Just moved it. Like the problem wasn’t what happened, but where. His shift was still up on the schedule. Nobody erased it. I kept looking at his name, waiting for someone to replace it with a new hire. They never did.
A week passed, then another. I kept working. Kept zoning shelves, unloading top stock, doing what was required of me. Paychecks kept coming. I went home, I came back. The fluorescent lights kept buzzing. The forklifts kept running. Nothing changed.
Except—Except now, I noticed things. Like the cracks in the loading dock ramp… The way the concrete looked brittle. Almost like it could give out under significant weight. Like the way the shelves in Aisle 24 teetered just slightly to the left, with screws missing from their baseplates. Like the way the trash compactor in Receiving stuttered and hesitated when it crushed down a load, as if hydraulics were seconds from failing. Little things. Things I’d ignored before.
Then, I saw the accident report. I found it coincidentally, buried under a pile of paperwork on the store manager’s desk when I went looking for a pen. The first page had Carlos’ name in big, blocky letters. The second page had a timeline of the accident. The third had a section titled, “Contributing Factors.”
There were bullet points. Forklift left unattended. Load exceeded recommended weight. Warehouse floor uneven. I reread that last one… twice. The floor. Not Carlos. Not Tim. The floor. I flipped through the rest, my eyes scanning for something, though I didn’t know what. Then, I saw it. Page seven.
Previous Incident Reports (Last 12 Months):
Employee injury, laceration, Aisle 6.
Equipment failure, hydraulic press, Receiving.
Employee injury, ankle fracture, Loading Dock.
Equipment failure, shelving collapse, Aisle 14.
Employee fatality, crushing injury, Garden Sales Floor.
Fatality. Not Carlos. Someone else. It… had happened before. I put the report back where I found it. Walked out of the office. Clocked out like it was any other day. Went home. Didn’t sleep. The next morning, I came in early. I walked through the store before the opening time, before the regional guys arrived with their clipboards, before the assistant managers started barking orders. I passed the forklifts. The compactor. The shelves. Then I found what I was looking for. The spot where Carlos died. The concrete there was different, smoother. A definite patch job.
I stared at it for a long time. Then I reached down and knocked on it. Hollow. I left work that night with my final paycheck in my pocket. Never went back. Didn’t testify in court. Didn’t return the officer’s calls. Didn’t do anything. I don’t know if they ever found Tim, or if the regional guys ever closed the case. Or if the next guy to take Carlos’ job ever noticed the way the floor felt soft under his boots. All I know is that at Howe’s, the pallets keep stacking, the forklifts keep running, and the accident reports keep piling up. It’s just an occupational hazard. That’s all it is.
That’s all I saw.
Jonah J. Martinez is a senior Political Science student minoring in Creative Writing, hailing from Middletown, NY. He spends days writing short fictional works when not studying to become a lawyer. This is his first set of works featured in ARCH magazine (Fall 2025). Jonah will be graduating in Spring of 2026.