The Fifteen Minute Novel is an attempt to take a single prompt and use the last sentence written each day as a start for the next day. This year I had several prompts circling around a similar story, so I have combined them. However, the story starts the same way each day, with the last line from the day before and a timer set for fifteen minutes. The hope is to end up with a complete, if very rough draft by the end of the year. Some stories are better than others, but I always learn a whole lot about my own writing when I do this so for me it is not only a nice way to work out a story, but it is a tool for helping my writing get better. And so, we continue this story for 2024 with…
Day 63: Sophie brought her lunch, but apparently word that the food truck court was a good lunch option spread throughout the office.
Sophie brought her lunch, but apparently word that the food truck court was a good lunch option spread throughout the office. Every day they started going over there. Sophie wasn’t sure how they missed it before, but now they found it, they went en masse, picking up food and coming back with it. Most of the time they ate in Mr. Evers’ office as a group. Sophie limited her visits to the trucks to once or twice a week, but still went often enough that the feeling of doing something illicit by going out to lunch was slowly fading. Sometimes she saw her neighbor and they chatted, sometimes she didn’t.
At no point was she invited to join the others in Evers’ office. She was surprised to find that stung a bit, but she set it to the side. ‘I wasn’t a part of their lunch group before,’ she thought. ‘Why would I be now?’
The fact that their lunch group now gathered in Mr. Evers office meant that she could see them leaving her out. ‘Probably why it stings.’
Gradually that too became something to ignore. Her work life took on a new rhythm. Sophie managed to complete her work without additions from her co-workers and she was rapidly coming to love being able to leave on time. Because she wasn’t staying late, Sophie was able to put in more time with her sewing and designs. She wasn’t as tired at the end of the day and was able to expnd. Her orders of sleep wear were finished early and even though the days were becoming warmer and the summer sleepwear was starting to sell, Sophie began her work on the winter dressing gowns. Not only were they heavier weight, but they had much more detail.
This year, in addition to the regular gowns she made, Sophie was working on a few extra special ones. She thought of them as limited edition. These had higher end materials and more detailed embroidery. Sophie used some of the money from her bonus check to pay for materials and some of her extra time at night to work on the embroidery.
She felt content with the way things were going, but knew that it was a bit of a stop gap. Listening to snippets of conversation in the office, Sophie realized that probation for the others was going to end with the quarterly evaluation. Right now everyone was working to get off of probation and to make sure they kept their jobs. They knew their time in and out of the building was being monitored and that they were not going to be granted extra extensions.
For Sophie that meant that she was for the most part left alone. Everyone knew she couldn’t take on projects for them so they found it pointless to talk to her. ‘Which makes me less inclined to help them out, even if I could,’ Sophie thought. After seeing how much they had taken advantage of her before, Sophie wasn’t all that inclined to help out any more, but the fact that if she couldn’t help them they didn’t do more than say hi in passing more or less clinched it.
She wondered what would happen with the lot of them once they passed their quarterly evaluation and were taken off of probation. It wasn’t her biggest concern though.
Ten til Midnight 