The sound of a frantically beeping alarm and bright sunlight streaming through the windows aroused her from her deep sleep. In a flurry of confusion and panic, Cyra realized that she was nearly late for work.
Her ceramic bowl clanged to the floor as she untangled her limbs from the fuzzy blanket. She swayed on her feet when she stood up, swearing under her breath and holding onto the rod of her lamp.
She waited for the fuzzy spots to fade in her vision, while yelling at her dog to shut up who was barking in light of all the excitement.
Cyra sprinted to her bathroom, yelping when she tripped over her bowl. One of her neighbors yelled at her to be quieter, but she brushed it off.
Cyra winced when she stepped over the threshold and onto the ice-cold floors of her bathroom.
She cranked up the heater and turned on the shower, clumsily taking her clothes off. This was a very hard thing to do, with how small her bathroom was.
When she had rented this apartment for the first time, she hadn't expected it to be so crappy, considering the money she had spent to get it.
It was a small no-bedroom apartment with a kitchen and a connecting living room. She had a fairly nice bathroom too, but over the past three years it had begun to look particularly moldy.
She made a mental note to clean it, then slipped into the shower.
To Cyra, showers were probably the best invention ever.
As she let herself get soaked from head to toe in sweltering hot water, she thought of the olden days (1800's or so) and cringed. People rarely took baths back then.
After a hasty scrubbing of her short brown hair, she got out and fumbled with her towel, trying and failing to dry herself in the overly humid bathroom.
She sighed and pulled her slick hair into an updo, and stumbled out of the bathroom right into her dog.
She pulled on brown corduroy pants and a simple cream-colored tee. Cyra grabbed the nearest shoes she could find and sat down on her grainy wooden floor to slip them on. She pulled a long leather jacket out of her dirty clothes pile and frantically looked for her keys.
She needed to get more organized.
She finally found them, holding them up in relief. Cyra hugged her tiny mutt of a dog goodbye and slipped out of her apartment.
She squinted at the bright sunlight reflecting off of the windows and hoods of cars that filled the already bustling streets. She sprinted down the sidewalk, apologizing to people she stumbled into.
On these kinds of Fridays, she would usually walk slower to appreciate the bitter-cold air and the smell of cinnamon wafting from the stands.
She would usually stop and settle down on a bench, savoring the few minutes she had left before the beginning of the workday.
She made it to her bookshop two minutes late.
Her coworkers shamed her endlessly, but Cyra thought it was a blessing that she had arrived at all.
She opened the bookshop with a floral decorated key and turned on the lights, breathing in the smell of old paper and enjoying the peaceful quiet that occupied the corridors filled with books.
She got sent to work on setting up decorations for Christmas by a worker. As she balanced in the rickety red ladder and attempted to tape candy canes onto the outside windows, she bitterly thought of how unfair it was that she owned the shop and yet her coworkers were the ones ordering her around.
YOU ARE READING
Marigolds and Mortals
General Fiction"𝑀𝑎𝑦𝑏𝑒 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑓𝑎𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑔𝑜𝑑𝑠 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑎 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑜𝑛 𝑠ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑖𝑑𝑛'𝑡 𝑦𝑒𝑡 𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑑..." Cyra is a modern-day goddess living in New York. She's been alone for thousands of years, refusing to make...
