- Dull Repetition - Alice McAllister sat in her chair staring at the yellow number 2 pencil in her hands with disgust as the clock ticked steadily behind her. The broken lead rolled off to the side to join its comrades in mute testimony of the silent struggle she had been undergoing. She swallowed back tears of impotent fury brought on by her frustration and rose to go sharpen her pencil once again. Several times since she’d been brought here, she’d gone over to the door to try and ask to be let out, but there was no response. Apparently, her supervisors meant it when they said she wouldn’t be allowed to leave until the paperwork was done. The door would remain locked until she completed it. Those were the rules. The paperwork could not be completed with anything other than a number two pencil. There were plenty of number two pencils in this room. In fact, there were boxes and crates stacked every which way ensuring that no valid complaint could be lodged by her that she lacked the proper utensils for completing her task. However, every pencil she’d so far tried had the same problem. She could get no further than a few letters written before the lead would break, and she would be forced to go back to sharpen her pencil once again. Being locked in a room alone with a stack full of paperwork to complete might not have been so terrible if this had not been a timed exercise. She couldn’t afford to allow her mind to wander from the task at hand, or to simply kick back and count the number of dots on the white ceiling tiles above her. The only hope she had over ever leaving this room was to finish the paperwork on time. She didn’t have the luxury of being able to bend over and relieve her boredom by examining the cracks of the floor tiles. She couldn’t even give in to the impulse that kept cropping up to play a bizarre form of solo Janga with the pencils in the room. She finished sharpening the pencil and wondered how long this could possibly go on. Surely they would have to let her out of here eventually, paperwork or no paperwork. Couldn’t she just rebel against the whole thing and let someone else get it done? What would happen if she didn’t finish it on time, or at all for that matter? It was ludicrous to think that they could keep her here forever. They couldn’t, could they? She pictured herself being discovered years and years down the road, a pile of bones with some rotting garments, hunched over the paperwork with a yellow number two pencil still clutched in her hand like a flag. She giggled at the thought. It did seem a bit silly. The sound of her own laughter echoed off the empty white washed cinder block walls before fading out to nothing. She sighed and returned to her seat, facing the mountain of paperwork once again. She decided to rebel. That was it. She just wouldn’t do it. She put down the number two pencil and sat there, staring. She did everything she didn’t think she had time to do. She counted the number of dots on the white tile ceiling. There were exactly 5, 597. She studied the cracks on the white tile floor. There were several large ones and a few hairline cracks which might become something larger if left to their own devices. Then, she took out a box of the pencils and stacked them up like the Janga sticks and played a few games of solo Janga. The clock continued to tick impassively in the face of all of her nonsense, undeterred by her rebellion. Eventually, however, Alice realized that there was nothing left to do. She’d done everything that could be done in this room, including taking a nap, and the only thing left to do was the paperwork that would free her. She’d even shaken the door handle, banged on the door, and tried to use those stupid pencils to pick the lock and free herself. It was useless. She had no idea how much time had passed, or how much time she had left before the deadline arrived, but the only thing left to her was to at least try and finish it. Gritting her teeth, she drug herself back over to the pile of paperwork, grabbed the sheet off the top and began filling in the blanks. The first blank asked for her first name. She got to the letter “I” before the lead broke. She stared at it, shook her head, and muttered, “Awww, hell.”
Posted on: Mon, 03 Feb 2014 15:54:35 +0000
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