The Jumper
It’s hot. She’s wearing a jumper.
It’s a colourful jumper. It has many patterns. It covers her arms.
“That’s a great jumper!” they say. They always say that.
“Thanks” she says. She smiles back. They’re convinced.
They talk about the jumper. She bought it last season. It’s not in the shops anymore.
They want drinks. They get their purses.
She opens her handbag. They see the screwdriver.
“Why do you have a screwdriver in there?” they ask.
She stops. She thinks fast.
“You never know when you might need a screwdriver, right?”
She’s used the line before. They buy it.
They get drinks. They have a great time. She doesn’t.
They go home.
She rolls up her sleeves.
She pulls out the screwdriver.
Sofa
She lay on the sofa for about two hours.
She waited for a call. A text. A whatsap. A snapchat. A retweet. A farmville invitation. Anything.
In the meantime, she tried to get comfy. The table was recently polished and her ironic socks kept slipping off it. A more lateral approach was needed. She turned lengthways. The armrest at the other end of the sofa kind of did the job as a makeshift footstool. But it wasn’t great. The blood ran from her feet and gave her pins and needles.
She thought about doing something.
But there were things to check first. Her email. Her Twitter timeline. Her Instagram timeline. Her Tinder. The front page of Reddit. The news. Facebook. Reddit again. Her work email. Yesterday’s work project. Her other personal email inbox. Reddit again, again.
She tried not to watch the clock, but found herself peeking anyway.
Time was doing strange things this evening. Nothing had happened for an hour, then forty minutes had happened at once. In all that time she’d only succeeded in developing new anxieties about the possible prognoses of her backache. It was probably just bad posture - this sofa probably wasn’t helping - but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe she was just worrying too much again.
She wrote a short story about lying on the sofa.
Writing was a good way for her to pass the time. She rested her laptop on her outstretched legs and tapped away. The sofa smelt faintly of household furniture polish, incorrectly applied to the leather and definitely causing some sort of long term damage to the upholstery.