Short Story Two: Jennifer

Jennifer

Jennifer woke up at her desk with her face laying on her keyboard. She had an imprint of a key on her left cheek that she could see in a mirror that she kept near her screen. Her tiny cubicle was full of various bobble heads, papers, folders, and everything else that she could keep tabletop. She looked around at what she owned. Pictures of her family scattered the wall, put up without care. A poem she wrote in second grade. A calendar with cats on it. She was a sad person. 40 pounds overweight. Nobody waiting for her when she got home. Nobody caring about her at work. Nobody caring about her outside.

She was just a forty-two year old girl with a sad job, a sad house, a horrible body, and a horrible mind.

She thought back to before she was like this. The last time she was thin was back before her divorce. Her and her husband were happy. But she was a bitch. She would nag him. She would act stupid, and get mad at him for it. He turned into a pushover. She decided she could do what she wanted, and started to eat anything and everything. Ice cream, chocolate, anything. She gained weight. Her husband started drinking in order to cope with the relationship. She felt like a queen, and he was just her servant, ready to revoke herself from the kingdom whenever she wanted. She would ask, and she would receive.

In her youth, she had affairs with her boss, rather than having sex with her husband. She was hot. Was. he liked her, and she got plenty of raises. Her husband wasn’t a provider. Wasn’t important to her. She didn’t care about him, and he just had to deal with it. What was he supposed to do about it? Leave? No. he had everything he needed. He knew that she was cheating on him, but he was getting food, money, and most luxuries that people don’t normally get.

He started cheating on her, returning the favor. She didn’t care. It was bound to happen. Their relationship was shallow, up until it started thinning out. They started to talk less. Whenever they did talk, it was mean, sarcastic and rude.

Once she started to gain more and more weight, she lost her boss’ attention. She wasn’t the hot person she was when he started to have an affair with her. She didn’t care. She had the promotions. She only started to care when he started to take them away from her. Making demotions. She was unable to stop him as her pay wage dropped all the way from 35 dollars back to 8.50 an hour. She was depressed.

Her husband decided it wasn’t worth it. He divorced her, and she was on her own. She got a small, sad apartment, as she started gaining more weight.

Once she got to a certain weight, she went to a doctor about it, and she was diagnosed with type two diabetes. This was horrible. The only thing that she had to keep her happy in life was food, alcohol, and drugs. Since the food was taken out of the equation, the drugs and alcohol increased.

She stopped caring for her life. She got up at 7 am, got out of bed, put on clothes, and she went to work. No makeup. Nothing that would make her look good. She stopped. She stopped acting like she cared.

And then she stopped anything else. Today at work, she planned to get her job done, then go home and kill herself. There was nothing in her life that was worth living. She had a bad job that hardly ever paid. She had nothing to live for. Her husband divorced her. She was fat. She had nothing. Nothing. Not even a nice home to come to after a day of crunching numbers.

When she was sitting there at her desk, she thought about the schedule all over again. She finishes work, asks all men in the office if they are interested in sleeping with her. If yes, she goes back to her place with them. If no, then she ties the noose.

She finished her work at about 5:30. It was just starting to get dark outside, and she was getting ready to ask every man. Starting with the ones she absolutely knew would say no. Her boss was number one on her list. Ending with the intern boy that was eyeing her down the last week when he first joined.

She walked into her boss’ office. He was sitting on his desk. “Hey. What’s up.”

“Oh, I was just ending my shift.” she said, getting ready to ask him. “What are you doing?”

“The normal. Crunching numbers. Reviewing the health plan. Something tells me you didn’t come to hear me talk about that though.”

“Well, I was just thinking about old times.” she walked closer to him and rested her fat, disgusting sweaty palms on his desk and let most of her weight on it.

“Yeah, and what?” he said, looking at her hands and then the rest of her with a worried face on.

“Maybe we could, you know, try again.” she told him, as her fingers of her right hand climbed up his arm.

“Okay.” he stood up, “I know that you’re a little bit sad after your divorce and everything, but I don’t think that that would be the best idea.”

“Oh, it’s just a bit of harmless fun between us.”

“Not harmless. Once you started gaining weight, you broke my leg. And that was still twenty pounds ago.”

“Fine.”

“Really. Just fine and you think that will be it. I know you don’t give up that easily.”

“Well, I don’t need you.”

“Nobody else is gonna want a middle aged fat woman who just yells at them all day.”

“Yeah, well you don’t know that.”

“If you ask anybody else, you’re fired.”

“Fine.”

She had to skip all the way down the list. She went to the person at the bottom. The person that would most likely want to have sex with her. The new intern. He was only eighteen.

He stood next to the coffee pot. He had recently poured himself a cup, and he was taking a break in order to try and mentally prepare himself for the all nighter he was going to pull with most of the other people in the office. When she walked into the room looking for him, he said “oh, hey Jennifer,” before she pressed her fat disgusting lips against his.he immediately resisted.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“I thought you loved me.”

“No. you’re fucking disgusting. Who the fuck loves you?”

Her heart dropped. Even the person at the top of the list of people who could possibly want to fuck her wanted her. She was hopeless. If she didn’t want to kill herself before, she did now. She looked down at her body, at her various fat folds. She thought about everything that has happened in her life. Her divorce. Her marriage. Her affair. She was putting an end to it.

She rode the public transport home. She sat next to nobody. She was a miserable person that nobody would want to sit next to. It would just depress them. She never had any company. At work, people made fun of her. Made her feel bad. Either that, or they avoided her. Tried to not feel as bad for knowing this girl.

When she walked out of the office, she had one thought running through her mind. Death. Death. She needed the release of it. She needed to feel fulfilled. She had three options at home. Either overdose, bullet or suffocation. The three most likely cases of suicide. She walked out to her car, a straight face on. She didn’t care anymore. She cared less than when she got a divorce. She cared less than when her boss ended their affair. She cared less than before she walked outside of these doors alone. She was done with her life. She wasn’t fulfilled. She had regrets. Bu she didn’t care to fix anything. She made no goodbyes, no long, exasperated suicide note. She would die, and nobody would care. Not even her.

She drove, with no expression, driving straight home. No stops. No dinner. No liquor. Nothing. She was going into this with no stimulate rushing dopamine through her brain. She was going to die, and nothing was going to be the blame but her.

She walked into her house and turned on music, played it as loud as she could. She only played it so that someone would at least come over and see her body to dispose of it before it got more disgusting than it was when she was alive. Before she started to decompose.

She set up a chair with a small wooden backing on it. She tied a noose, and she nailed it into the highest point on the wall. She slipped her neck in and let herself say something out loud before she kicked the chair over. Even though it was for nobody. “Goodbye.”

She could hear her neighbor outside of her door yelling for her to turn down her music, getting more and more angry before walking away to get the landlord to come up and unlock her door.

She kicked over the chair into instant regret. She could feel the rope tightening around her neck, and she gripped it trying to stop it.

She was in luck. The rope snapped, and she fell down to the ground, just before crying. She bawled her eyes out as the front door opened and the landlord alongside her neighbor walked in to see her holding the rope in her hands.

The end.

I won't be posting the next few weeks because I'm working on a new book that should be out early February. I want to get a good start before school comes back into the equation.