Tick. Tock. At her desk, alone in the sea of cubicles, Kennah stared at the blank sheet of paper before her. Ominous. She slipped it into the typewriter and rolled it down.

Tick. Tock. She fell into the motions. Typing away at the raised keys, the room around her aswarm with pings and pangs and the clatter of business. Somewhere in the back a phone rings, loud and sharp, and you hear multiple assorted grumbles from women in their cubicles. A mistake has been made. They move it back, type different letters over each letter in their mistaken word. All because of a phone.

Tick. Tock. The clock looms over Kennah as she types her seventh consecutive page without mistake. She gets to the bottom, a last line. Sentence. Phrase. Word. She uncoils the paper from its resting place and sets it on top of the others. She stands, glancing once more at the clock. She walks to the copy room.

Tick. Tock. She adjusts her brown pencil skirt and cream button—up top, running her slim hand over the soft fabrics. She looks at her co—worker out of the corner of her eye. He looks right back at her. She pulls her copies out, and walks back to her desk, leaving Mr. Co—Worker alone in the stuffy, flourescent room that smelled like burnt paper.

Tick. Tock. She sets up the piles of the same paper. She forms the seven page memo, stapling once in one corner and once in the other corner. She sets it in the ‘Finished’ pile. She slaves away. Working and working. Finally, she sets the last finished memo down on the top of the pile. She looks at the clock.

Tick. Tock. Kennah sits back in her chair. Rubs her pale hand over her dark eyes and fights sleepiness. She wiggles her toes in her brown high heels, the seam of her pantyhose catching her nail. She looks around her gray cubicle. In her own little secluded world. She ran her hand over the stitched fabric, describable only by the words wall carpet. She shook her head.

Tick. Tock. She fed the paper into the typewriter again. Once more, she wrote and wrote, and finally, as she approached the end of the last page, a phone rang. Grumbles arose from the cubicles like steam from a tea pot. Whistles screamed and heads shook. She sighed. She restarted, abandoning the idea of salvaging the paper.

Tick. Tock. She wasn’t done with that page when the alarm went off, women sighed and their muscles shook with the effort of rising after a long day at work sitting, typing, slaving, making mistakes. She let her head fall into her chest, chin resting on her breastbone. So close, but yet so far.