Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

Lily found herself falling asleep in the very heart of a solemn july afternoon- it wasn't easy to blame her though. The young woman has gotten no sleep for the past 36 hours, and the monotone humdrum of a wimpy fan on her desk did not help her cause. Whoever decided to install neon lights instead of a warm yellow lamp was clearly deranged, she thought, for the entire room sickened her.

She hated it. This room. This lighting. These thirty stacks of paper documents she had to sort into separate files, with hideous writing all over them.

Who knew that most of their clients had such poor handwriting? Why was it that 40 something year old men and women wrote as if they had cerebral palsy and wrote with their left foot, GOD, YOU DON'T DESERVE MONEY BUT A PAPER CLIP TO YOUR THROAT IF YOU WRITE IN CHICKEN SCRATCH-

That was pretty much Lily's mood that summer day. She still didn't have her break, and was wondering whether it would ever come. She waited.

Waiting. We all live our lives waiting for something, don't we? For holidays, for the weekend, to see someone...

Lily decided for her own sanity to take a break.

Life advice, if you're ever going to get a job at a place you'll absolutely hate, get it at a place with poor management. That way, you, if your name was Lily and you were a twenty year old art school drop out, could sneak out with no repercussions.

Lily exited her tiny closet of a room, making her way through an enormously, incredibly, mind-blowingly narrow but seemingly endless hallway, in which half of the lamps have given up working. Pipes would occasionally leak from above, oozing with uncomfortably lukewarm water. If Lily was unlucky, she'd see some kind of a large bug on a wall she'd dash by.

Today, she'd rather walk hand in hand with the largest cockroach in the world to the outside than stay inside of this hideous building any longer. Only one person could notice her leave her work- a dull clock automaton that would signal when the day would come to an end. Was it wasteful to put a sentient clock in a warehouse? Truly.

"HEY! YOU EMO GIRAFFE, GET BACK OVER HERE!"

Lily rolled her eyes, ignoring the Clock.

"WHERE ARE YOU GOING" hollered the Clock.

"I need a break!" mumbled Lily. Who needs annoying coworkers when your supervisor is a rude clock, who called you a giraffe for being six feet tall and having a long neck.

Another life advice, thought Lily ignoring the cranky clock robot as she left, is to enjoy nature, because nothing a person can build will ever come close to a good old walk in the woods.

Ziegfeld Inc. owned a large, mostly decaying warehouse that bordered a redwood forest. Most of the forest grew on top of some urban center, and it ached Lily to see trees grow out of concrete. Her place of employment, the warehouse used to be a power station for a small town nearby, but its owners were powerless (haha) to save their business, and sold the land for pennies. Ziegfeld himself, the man whose portrait Lily saw at the entrance to her workplace every day, wasn't an innovator- he was more of a thief than anything, and simply let the factory be used as a warehouse and decay.

Talk about wasted potential, thought Lily, pitying herself.

She was like this factory- could have been someone, perhaps an artist but instead here she was, hoping for a bird to land on this rusty metal platform and keep her company.

She loved art, and she loved nature. A few years ago, she went to art school upstate- away from the forests of smoke stacks and towers of bricks; oh how much she loved nature.

She was lucky enough to work in a factory half of which was overgrown and decayed.

"Hey," said a voice.

It's worth to note, that while Lily did hate this cursed place, she didn't hate just one person.

Dale. Dale came from a more spacious part of the warehouse- one of the spacious, cavernous rooms that formerly housed... something and was the center of many of Lily's fantasies.

Lily's days were monotonous and as interesting as paper. They were windowless and sterile, colder than metal, as overgrown as these factories.

"I was thinking, are you free tonight?"

Could it be? Was Dale...

a s k i n g h e r o u t ?

---END OF PART ONE

If I wrote my short stories in one part, they wouldn't be stories, they'd be anecdotes.