Clipped

Nancy fidgeted and messed around with the things on her desk as she waited for her document to print. All fifty pages of it—twice over. No wonder it was taking forever. She’d finished her to-do list for the day and the document was literally her last task, bar separating the two copies, keeping one for herself and stuffing the other in an envelope and dashing to the post box just outside her building. The address and postage labels were ready to go, too.

God, it really was taking an age. She could almost feel herself getting older as she waited. Irritably, she flipped the lid off the small plastic box holding her paperclips and emptied them out onto the desk. She was so bored that she started sorting them into piles based on their colour; red, blue, green, pink. She quickly grew fed up of that game and began linking the clips together. Slipping one onto another and making a chain. It wasn’t challenging, or even particularly interesting, but somehow it lulled Nancy into a kind of trance, and the end of the row of paperclips soon reached the floor. She carried on putting them together as the printer churned away in the background.

“Er, Nance, what are you doing?”

Gerard’s voice came out of the blue, startling her. She dropped her crazy creation and pressed a hand to her pounding heart. “Fuck, Ger, I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Obviously not,” he said, nodding towards the brightly-coloured pile on...