Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

A Field Trip from the Office

Everyone was in their cubicles, as we all were supposed to be, but not all of us were doing precisely what our job descriptions said. Bob, for example, was playing video games on his Dell Latitude, and Jenny was writing a letter to her mother. Or at least that's what she said; I think it was a letter to her new boyfriend, who, by the way, was five cubicles down the aisle, picking at his teeth with a rather dirty toothpick.

As for me, I was posting pictures on the wall, of some very cute and adorable, fuzzy little animals. I love fuzzy animals.

But whatever we were doing, we all stopped in our tracks when the summons came. We each heard the summons differently. Bob said it came to him through his computer - a blinking cursor that spelled out a message. Jenny said that her pen broke, and the spilled ink spelled it out.

For me the summons was audible. But don't ask me to describe it; it was a voice that wasn't really a voice. More like a bassoon that rumbled out deep words in a bassy rumble.

The only one who didn't hear the summons was Jenny's boyfriend, but he was quick to get in line as soon as he saw Jenny scurrying out of the office.

None of us understood the summons. None of us knew where it really came from. But we knew we couldn't ignore it. When it came, we all stopped. We all listened. We all fled the building.

Outside the office complex, the streets were lined with our friends, family, and neighbors. All of them, like us, were making a beeline out of town. The oldest of us, knowing what was ahead, muttered and complained, but that didn't stop us from following along.

Down the road we traveled, across the valley, through a meadow, and up a hill. Up, up, and up we went, pausing only long enough to help the young ones in our midst. At last we reached the peak of a mountainous promontory, and there, before us, lay the vast ocean.

Jenny stared at the cliff between us and the ocean, and she groaned.

I supplied words to her groaning: "Why, oh why," I said, "do we always do this? Why?"

Jenny's boyfriend glared at me. "I'll tell you why," he said, "I'll tell you why. It's because we're all just a bunch of stupid lemmings!"

"So?" I said, rubbing my furry back against a tree and switching my tail, "What's that got to do with anything?"

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