Nina's story

Chapter 1

"In 5...4...3...2...1", she proclaimed out loud for the small office of four to hear.

Margo walked like a guided missile, straight into the office and to her target: the same target every time. The rays from the shy sunlight filtered through the window on Margo's face, highlighting her glassy hazel brown eyes. Those eyes could easily be mistaken for impersonal glass balls used for stuffed toys that somehow follow you around the room. "Nina, those manuscripts aren't going to read themselves", said Margo in her signature condescending style, as she did every Monday at one o'clock, after lunch.

Nina gave the girls in the office a look of resignation as she chose to ignore Margo's weekly, perfectly timed, unnecessary dig. 'I understand she doesn't like me, nor anyone for that matter but why the same comment every week, at the same time, in exactly the same way?', pondered Nina as she riffled through the mountain of manuscripts, mostly unsolicited (she hadn't been given solicited manuscript privileges just yet)

She spent the remaining four hours of her work day digesting that heavy pub lunch of bangers, mash and gravy onions and wondering why life was so predictable.

It wasn't precarious at all, as she'd repeatedly been told growing up. Events didn't seem to be happening randomly at all. There was a thread that seemed to be dictating every moment and every movement. Or maybe it was the bangers and mash hangover talking.

She knew exactly how Margo, the owner of the publishing house she worked for would react on a Monday afternoon. She knew how she would react when confronted with an undesirable situation or just an undesirable. She knew exactly how her work colleagues would react to given situations. Depending on whom she was interacting with, she knew exactly if she would feel confident and self aware or less than adequate and suddenly become hyper aware of her nostril hair sticking out or how she was sitting and ultimately, how she was being perceived.

Nothing was new. She couldn't remember the last time something unknown happened and yet the incessant yearning for something new to occur just never went away. Which was funny really because the response to life was always the same. It was as if life was a showreel of the past, projecting itself into the future. So how could we ever experience anything new if we could anticipate what was going to happen, before it happened?