Wasted Opportunities
Wasted Opportunities was a short story I submitted to the Writing East Midlands Summer Solstice Competition in 2016. To my surprise, I won! I thought that as this is my first proper post, Wasted Opportunities would be a good introduction into what I write. I hope you enjoy it!
Wasted Opportunities
The redhead sat on the desk, twirling the scythe in her left hand. The office was a busy place, but no one noticed her, naturally. She was trained to be invisible.
It was just a normal day in the office with the workers going around their usual business, doing insanely boring and repetitive jobs: hypnotised by the light on the photocopier; taking a sip of their long-forgotten coffee, only to find that it had gone stone cold, and robotically pressing the keys, writing another mandatory email. But it wasn't going to stay boring for long. She looked at the clock on the wall.
20 minutes to go. 20 minutes until the fun started. And he was late, typical.
15 minutes to go. She sat on the desk of the absent man and swung her legs back and forth, frowning as her brain cells shrivelled up and died from boredom.
'Honestly,' she thought as she looked at a woman massaging the lines on her forehead as she listened to the person on the other side of the telephone, 'this is no way to live.'
When she was alive she had spent her time doing much more interesting things like skipping school and fighting the local gangs. Admittedly it had got her killed, but that wasn't the point. The redhead looked at the objects that littered the desk and tried hard not to yawn. They were scattered all over the place, with a carelessness that showed neglect, and none of them seemed to be of any interest or significance. Just company pens, a pot of paper clips, a few photos of his four-year-old son and a planner... a planner, well this should prove some source of amusement.
She slipped off his desk and moved over to it, through a man wearing a pin-striped suit. She smirked as he suddenly stopped and shivered. The planner was adorned with tacky pictures that represented each month in equally gaudy colours. She flipped the glossy pages until she reached today's date, grimacing as she was contaminated with fluffy ducks that glowed like the golden sun. 'Aww how cute,' she thought sarcastically as she examined the upcoming events, He had a date planned for that evening. 'Dinner with Lucy.' Well, Lucy was going to be severely disappointed. She was probably doing Lucy a favour, he was nothing to be proud of; a pathetic, flabby, weak-willed man who had a strange fetish for cauliflower cheese. She looked back up at the clock. 12 minutes to go. That man really needed to understand the importance of life before it was too late instead of defeating the purpose of his alarm clock. Humans: given the opportunity to live life to the fullest but don't take it, instead they let it slide between their fingers like sand. All the memories that could have been made, all the laughter that never left their lips and all the potential soulmates or friends -for- life left undiscovered and lonely. She scowled in frustration as they all failed to see what they were missing. But what did she know? She was a rebellious teenager who thought that everyone should have lived like her: on the edge.
10 minutes to go. Her right eye twitched in annoyance. If his death hadn't already been arranged, she would hunt him down and kill him herself. She had already felt her once youthful soul dampen and age in the oppressive mediocrity of the office, turning grey and ashen. Finally, he waddled through the door, his white shirt sporting an impressive coffee stain and his mouth wearing the remnants of toothpaste like lipstick. She watched him disparagingly as he walked into two desks and a colleague, causing her to drop her papers all over the floor. This was who she had been waiting for, this ape who proved that evolution didn't always do its job correctly. He sat clumsily in his desk chair, ignorant to the strain he was putting it under. 7 minutes to go. He really was grotesque; his uneven stubble had bits of scrambled egg stuck in it and it was obvious that his shower hadn't been visited in a very long time.
She at least wished that he would die a dramatic death so he could have something interesting to his name, but even that was too much to ask. A simple blow to the head was going to be his downfall in exactly three minutes. He should have listened to the laws of gravity and not leaned back so far in his chair. She watched as he took his last look at the photo of his four-year-old son and then rested his legs on his desk. 1 minute to go. He leaned back, tipping his chair. It creaked under the sudden pressure. 20 seconds. He suddenly lost his balance and time seemed to slow down. She watched as his eyes widened and his hands flailed, trying to find something solid to grasp onto. She watched as his head grew closer and closer to the desk behind him. It impacted with a sickening crack. She watched as he fell to the floor, motionless, blood pooling from the wound on the back of his head. 10 seconds. The light flickered in his eyes and dimmed, glossing over as his breathing stopped. 0 seconds. Showtime.
She jumped off the desk and readied the scythe in her hands. His soul was rising from his corpse in fragments, slowly piecing themselves together to form a ghost. She swung the scythe and watched as it slashed through the tether that tied his soul to his body to stop it floating away. No longer attached to this world, he disappeared, shock registering on his ghost's face as he realised what had happened to him. He had gone to the crossroads. 30 years of life and he had accomplished nothing. He had wasted his time on earth and that regret was going to stick with him for eternity. She sighed. Her job had been done. Turning around, she passed through his panicking co-workers and disappeared, a hollowness in her stomach. So many people died without ever accomplishing anything and it saddened her. She wanted to yell and scream at everyone around her about wasted opportunities, but no matter how hard she tried, how loud she screamed, no one ever heard her. At least she had done something with her life, at least she had seen what it was worth.
