Story-A-Day #76: Saved

SAVED

She filled her coffee for the third time that morning and quietly walked back to her cubical. At her desk, she hit the send and receive button and watched as another seventeen emails appeared in her inbox. She spent the next five minutes sorting them into the correct folders, then switched back over to the blank Microsoft Word document that she had opened at the beginning of her day.

The cursor blinked malevolently on the screen, a perfect metronome for her lack of productivity. She typed a sentence quickly, a sudden burst of words that she hoped would gather momentum. She re-read the sentence, highlighted it with her mouse, and hit the delete key.

It was not a good day for inspiration. It was not a good day to be productive. In fact, it was a good day to not be doing much of anything. She was feeling blue, down for no apparent reason, and just couldn’t find the motivation she needed to get going.

She reached over and grabbed a tissue from the box on her desk and paused to examine the photo of her parents. They grinned out of the cheap dollar store frame at her and she involuntary smiled back before blowing her nose.

The tissue was bloody, a result of the dry winter weather wreaking havoc on her sinuses. That was probably part of the reason she was having such a hard time getting started. Her head felt like it was packed with fiberglass insulation. Everything from her neck up felt brittle and itchy and condensed. Even her knuckled were lined in white cracks of dryness.

She through the tissue into the wastebasket by her feet and returned her attention to the mocking cursor on her screen. Flash – flash – flash – flash. It was ruthless.

She scanned the office quickly. Tom and Rachel were having a flirt at the water cooler. Mark was punching buttons in confusion at the photocopier. She could hear the boss and a few other people in the room next to her desk discussing projections. It was business as usual for everyone except her, it seemed.

A shrill siren suddenly filled the air and everyone stopped what they were doing to look around in confusion.

“Fire,” was the eventual verdict and they all made their way towards the front door. Surely it was a false alarm. There was no way her day would be salvaged by an act of god, a god she incidentally didn’t believe in.

When they reached the parking lot, she realized that it was no act of god though. A cord plugged into a snow-covered socket in the side of the building was smoking heavily, a flickering tongue of flames, climbing slowly up the wall.

Some people were already dialing 911; others were throwing more snow onto the socket in an attempt to quell the flames. She pulled her sweater tighter around her and slowly slipped away. Who was she to argue with divine intervention?