New Story?

Lemme know what y'all think.


Parker Beddington bit the tip of her pen anxiously, concentrating on the blank before her. The clock on her desk-phone rapidly pushed closer and closer to her deadline, while the inner-workings of her brain moved like molasses toward her end goal. Three hundred words. It rang like a death-toll in her mind as she slid her black-framed glasses back up the bridge of her nose. Three hundred words. She'd never missed a deadline before and she wasn't about to now. All she needed to do was to write three hundred measly words. Why was this proving so difficult?

"Probably because thirty words are too many to waste on a pair of shoes, let alone three hundred. Even if they are Jimmy Choos," she grumbled to herself.

"I heard that, Beddington!" came a voice from across the cubicles. "It didn't sound anything like an article I would publish!"

Parker blushed behind her glasses. "Sorry, Avery!" she yelled back. "I meant that three hundred words aren't enough to extoll on the wonder of these gorgeous shoes!" She placed the pen-tip on the paper and drew a languid "P" before adding under her breath, "Gorgeous shoes that only stick-thin supermodels and Asian girls can even attempt to wear." Five minutes later, the paper on her desk contained nothing but "Parker Beddington" in cursive, over and over again. She had developed the habit, nay, perfected the art, of signing her name during moments of mental blockage back in college, where she had studied English, French, and Spanish literature, not fashion journalism. If one could even call an insert in the fashion section of the LA Times "journalism".

She looked down at her paper and saw that, scattered among the curly "P"s and "B"s, she had been absently drawing question marks as well. "Oh my gosh," she whispered, appalled. "I've become a living cliché!" Didn't people only do that kind of thing in movies and books? Not even good books, either! The kind she bought in secret and hid in her bedroom. The kind people called "paperbacks". The ever-dreaded Romance Novel. She had become the unwilling heroine from some crappy romance book, pondering the choices in life that had brought her here, to an unhappy job where she spent her time absent-mindedly drawing question marks on a piece of paper.