A Good Day
By Vivi Nguyen
Walking down the street feels a hundred times worse when the presence of oversized trucks being driven by compensating-for-something NPCs are within the girl’s radius. She stiffly forces her glasses closer to her face every few minutes when they decide to fall back down. A halo disguised as a pedestrian walking flashing light brightens her day. She scurries past the cars that have her life in their hands. Every now and then, a coin-sized droplet of leftover rain splashes right down her clothes and seeps into her skin.
She notes that the time is reaching borderline late for work. Swiftly, her legs power walk down the sidewalks and past entrances and exits and stoplights and go lights. The frothy clouds make for a lulling sleep aid. The cars multiply like zombies in a graveyard. The cramping in the girl’s leg almost causes a misstep. She’s etching into her mind the day’s routine like a human robot. She looks ahead, afraid to look back.
Freely weaving and scurrying at this point, she rushes against invisible obstacles. The ticking of the clock tick-tick-ticks and tock-tock-tocks. All pride is pushed out of a thirty-story building’s floor to ceiling glass view. At this point, the girl starts to pant like a hound dog as she risks every Charlie horse to make it to the dreary office… that suspiciously lacks any source of light or parked vehicles. The girl absentmindedly doesn’t give it another thought before she anxiously unfurls her fists used to run like a jet for the retrieval of her keys.
Jingling them as if that will make her turn the key faster, she shoves the door open (the bright and capitalized “PUSH” on the handle was the only thing stopping a hard “PULL”) with gritted teeth. The lights are still off, but now she sees the receptionist’s desk is empty as well… The hallway is only basked in a grayish color, courtesy of the windows with the blinds halfway pulled down. Swivel chairs are desolate in an empty room. The girl can only pace as she bites down her already bitten-down nails that want a lawyer. A pin actually drops.
It belongs to the lone custodian whistling while he works, accidentally slipping out of his pocket. He picks it up with his pointer and middle fingers with a smile, about to return to his relaxed day before he spots the girl.
“Isabella… you’re here.” His wrinkles meet the corners of his lips, a genuine grin that had met his face a thousand times before. “I’m not really surprised… But Izzy… you know it’s a holiday, right?” He tilts his head as he asks a stunned, tired, overworked, workaholic, freak, sleep-deprived, did I mention tired, tired, tired, tired Isabella.
Isabella utters a starchy “Oh” before falling to her worn-out knees. The stuck, premature wrinkle in her forehead from raising her eyebrows in alarm at everything the world keeps throwing at her face undoes itself as she finally takes a breath. Her arms are limp against the carpeted flooring that Jerry did a great job on. Isabella can only laugh in between her morphing dry heaves. She curls into herself and her outline curves like a Pringle. Jerry pats her weary head as he gets back to work. She pulls out her cracked phone and thumbs it to the Reminders app, marking each one as complete. One of the reminders was to make time for herself. It was added two months ago, and glaring in red. Isabella suddenly hears strums of a soothing ukulele repeating in her ears like a knock on the door. She looks at her wristwatch for the time: 7:35 a.m.
“JERRY,” Isabella calls out into the echoing hall as she gets herself out the door. “I’m going to have myself a good day.”