Creative Writing (From 2008)

Readers, I came across a few short stories (or some attempts at short stories) I had written back in 2008, and I had some fun reading through them. Hope that you like them too!

George and Edna

The fluorescent ceiling light in the room flickered twice, crackled once, and then died.

George cursed silently and got up from the cracked Formica table at which he was sitting. Fumbling through the dark with hands outstretched, he groped for the cool, rusty surface of the refrigerator behind him. His left hand found a handle while his right hand brushed various magnets and the papers they were holding to the ground. George cursed again, this time out loud.

"Everything always went wrong on deadline day – absolutely everything," thought George as he moved his hands around to the right side of the fridge to find the fire extinguisher and the flashlight next to it. With a sigh of relief, he grasped it and slid the power switch forward – nothing happened. "Yes," repeated George, "absolutely everything."

George moved his free hand toward the door and found the handle. He opened the door easily, letting the red light from the exit sign fill the small back room. As George tried to remember where extra batteries were kept, the grey- and red-colored air of the rest of the office sporadically flooded with flashes of headlights from cars driving home to their families. He decided to check the stock room.

 

When George became an accountant, he imagined a career of glory, righteousness, and power to determine the outcome of the company, without the pain of dealing with people on a daily basis. Or at least be there for the ride. Now, fifteen years into his career, he was at the same company in the same position, with more wrinkles, less hair, and more fat. And people always came to him for questions; he was the oldest employee at the company, which had been bought out, downsized, and consistently uprooted for more than 10 years now. No power, no righteousness, no glory, and lots and lots of people with their many, many questions. As George thought about his fifteen wasted years, he felt more depressed.

After locating the necessary batteries for the flashlight, George removed the dead bulb from the break room and returned to stock room to find a replacement bulb. While it was an annoyance, installing the new bulb gave him a sense of accomplishment, as did finishing his monthly reports, which he finished with a flourish before leaving the office. As he rode the elevator, George breathed a sigh of relief and smiled. When the doors opened into the lobby, George remembered that he had forgotten his ugly, black sport coat and his wallet in his cubicle; five minutes later, he left the office again, grumbling down the sidewalk.

He grumbled his way down to the bus station, and he grumbled silently as he stood next to an equally dejected-looking women in an equally ill-fitting suit coat – hers was red.

Unbeknownst to George, Edna, the owner of the ugly red sport coat, had had an equally bad day.

Edna was short and fat in all the wrong places. Her face had a stretched look to it, as if her troubles pulled at her baggy eyes and cheeks during the night and left behind deep rifts and rolls which started at her ears. Even in the faintest light her face had shadowed wrinkles, forming trenches and canyons on her face.

Unbeknownst to Edna, she and George would have agreed about most anything. Edna, like George, hated her job. She worked for Social Services. Everyday she drove through traffic and hustled through crowded sidewalks to visit numerous needy children and their hopeless parents. The children whined, cried and then threaten to kill her, and the parents pleaded with her not to report their messy homes which lacked basic necessities. And she, as foolish as she was, always began the day with a small, festering hope that she would visit a home and find a happy, healthy family. And that she would get a raise.

Today, Edna had worked on two incredibly difficult cases; she had spent her day in and out of the courtroom pleading with different youth organizations to take the sets of children who were now homeless. At the end of the night, two short-term foster homes had agreed to take the children for six months, if the children behaved well. Another day done, another two cases still open.

Edna noticed George walk irritably to the corner where she was standing. “What a boring looking man,” she thought, and then lapsed back into her own thoughts.

Edna and George waited in silence for the bus. And waited. After half an hour, George spoke to Edna. 

 “The bus is late tonight!” he grunted, trying to sound cheery but failing.

“It should have been here twenty minutes ago,” Edna replied flatly. “I’m going to walk home.”

George noticed Edna’s tired-looking face and mumbled, “Maybe I could call a cab for you, my office is just down the road. And we have a telephone….”

Edna smiled warily at the stranger next to her. “Maybe you could call one for each of us.”

“Oh yes, of course, I mean it’s only practical, seeing how we probably live a distance from each other. Uh, I’ll go and do that.” With a slight turn of heel and a small stumble, George was on his way.

Ten minutes later, George and Edna were driving home in separate cabs to the same block of the city. George owed his cabby 30 dollars, and Edna owed her cabby ten. This was for no reason for this but luck on Edna’s part – she had been driven home by the only honest cabby in the city.