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 100: “We all know he dumped you.”
“We all know he dumped you.”
“We ended things,” Carrie told Kristen stiffly.
“Yeah well I’m sure once things settle back down Don will be our supervisor again so I wouldn’t get too used to things.”
“Don’t you have an individual meeting with our new supervisor in a few minutes?” Carrie said.
“I meet with him after Ryan,” Kristen said.
“I thought you were first,” Ryan said.
Kristen sighed. “We were all e-mailed the same schedule.” Sophie heard some keys clicking on the keyboard and guessed Kristen was pulling up the relevant e-mail.
“Oh, wow I am first,” Ryan said. ‘At least it is just in our conference room.”
“Who knows,” Carrie said to Kristen as Ryan hurried off. “Maybe this one will have secrets he wants you to keep too.”
As there were no more comments, Sophie assumed Carrie headed towards her cubical leaving Kristen behind.
‘So Evers is still here but not in a supervisory capacity,’ Sophie thought as she unpaused her podcast and turned back to her files. ‘Interesting.’
She got back to work but was soon interrupted as she heard Ryan returned. ‘Short meeting,’ she thought. Sophie couldn’t resist hitting pause, but Ryan didn’t say anything as he walked past Kristen’s desk despite Kristen asking him what happened.
Sophie turned her podcast back on as Kristen left but couldn’t really focus on it so she turned it off. She left her earbuds in so that it would look a though she was still occupied. While she couldn’t listen to the podcast, work and wonder what was going on, she could work and wonder.
‘Apparently I can only mentally juggle two things at the same time, who knew,’ Sophie thought. Even though she called herself a nosy busybody, she couldn’t resist listening in to the office events.
Kristen returned but didn’t say anything. She heard steps and assumed Carrie walked past but nothing was said. A short time later however, Carrie returned from her meeting and stopped at Kristen’s desk.
“You don’t look that upset,” Kristen said.
“I am not,” Carrie said. “The meeting could have gone a lot worse. I am still on probation but they have seen progress.”
“They didn’t tell you?” Kristen said.
“Tell me what?”
“That there is the possibility of letting one of us go at the end of the quarter. That’s why they transferred the files. They are reducing the work load so we can catch up and then they will slowly transfer work back when we’ve caught up.” Kristen snorted. “I thought they realized it was too heavy a work load and were correcting it.”
“I didn’t have anything transferred out of my system,” Carrie said. “So maybe it’s just between you and Ryan as to who get’s fired. I am able to keep up with my current workload.” There was an air of smugness in the tone that Sophie knew would probably set Kristen off.
Ten til Midnight 