#FridayFlash – Just a Normal Day

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A:N: I’ve decided to start participating in #FridayFlash, a Flash Fiction community on Twitter.  Flash Fiction, of course, consists of a short, usually unedited, vignette written to exercise the creative muscles.

Alice woke up and turned over, blinking at the buzzing alarm clock. A few extra seconds were required for the source of the sound to register before she threw a hand over at it to silence it, her other hand gripping at the back of her neck. Bernie had stolen the pillow again. Alice absently scratched him behind the ears, earning herself one barely opened eye and a soft purr.

With a yawn, she stumbled into the kitchen and poured coffee into her travel mug, taking a gulp with the desperation of an addict as she stared out the window.

“Bugger,” she said, with no real force. The garbage collectors had left the bin on its side again, lid open, lying across the driveway.

Alice sighed and shook her head, then returned to her room to get dressed. Her hair was limp (Damn the humidity), her clothes didn’t fit (She knew she shouldn’t have had that slice of cheesecake), and Bernie had coughed up a hairball in her shoe.  Her car barely had enough gas to get to work, but somehow she made it, even if she was ten minutes late.

Ten minutes late or not, she was the first one to arrive at work. She frowned and settled down in front of her computer, booting up and immediately going to check her email and Facebook.

Thirty-six minutes later, no one else had come in. Alice only noticed the time when she happened to glance at the clock – she’d been deep into her attempt to beat her high score in Bejeweled.

Forehead wrinkling, Alice got up from her seat and took a turn around the room, checking cubicles and offices.  There was no one here.  Thinking about it, she noted that there had hardly been any traffic on the road that morning, and no crowd at the elevators in the lobby. Not one client had come in, though she knew that there were several on the schedule.

Alice picked up the phone and dialed her boss’s cell phone, something she usually avoided doing.  She waited through three verses of “Yellow Submarine” before the phone switched over to voicemail. She tried her friend, Janet, who usually sat at the cubicle beside hers. Nothing.

Walking over to the window, she looked down onto the street below. Normally, by now, it would be filled with people. There was no one there.  The only movement came from a dog nosing about a dumpster in an alley across the street.

Alice sat back down at her computer. She pinched herself once, then again. It hurt.  She tugged a strand of hair out of her head. That hurt too.  Her neck still ached. This wasn’t a dream.

Alice sighed and turned back to her computer, pulling Bejeweled back up.  She would beat her score, today. She knew it.

© 2011 – Jennifer L. Davis – All Rights Reserved.

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