Jane's Burning Bright House of Joy

The First Two Pages


1 Jane pounded her fists as quietly as possible on her keyboard, muttering deep and heartfelt curses at the computer gods and all their kin. Once again, the program had frozen up and stymied her attempts at getting home before midnight.
Jane’s boss, Tad-from-hell, wanted this report on his desk by tomorrow morning and Jane was determined to get it there. Not cheerfully mind you, just get it there.
She rebooted the computer for the fourth time that day and while she waited for it to come back to life she drifted off into a favorite daydream. Soft breezes wafted across her cheek, warm sunshine caressed her shoulders; a sun-bronzed youth leaned toward her offering a glistening cold drink from a silver tray. “Just put it down on the table, I’ve got my hands full at the moment,” Jane said. She swung a sledgehammer in a great arc down onto her computer with all the rage that she could muster. Not a hard task, as quite a lot of rage had answered the call.
“Freeze up on me, will you? Lose my report again, will you? I don’t think so, you worthless pile of circuits!” Jane gave the sledgehammer all she had and delivered some well-placed kicks to emphasize her point. “I’ll…”
“Jane! Jane! Are you all right?” The smarmy, oily voice of Ellen, the office tattletale drifted down onto Jane’s head and brought her back to her drab cubicle. Jane jumped back and twitched away from the sudden intrusion, knocking a stack of files into a trashcan.
“Talking to yourself again? And what’s wrong with your hands, twisting them like that? Some sort of nervous twitch?” Ellen smiled slyly, showing a disturbing amount of yellow teeth. “I don’t know what you have to be nervous about, you should be too busy to be nervous, you know what I mean?” She glanced meaningly at the small mountain of work slumped up against the wall. Ellen’s own file was on top, labeled in screaming pink, DO THIS FIRST!!!!!!, still undone.
Jane scrabbled around furiously inside her head, looked for her 'I-love-my-job smile' and plastered it on her face. Pressing her hands hard down on her thighs to stop them from doing something that would land her in jail, she struggled to find a bright and chipper response to this threat in her cubicle.
Cubicles! What weasely low-life sadist had dreamed up that idea? Jane mentally put that unknown fiend on her list of people she was volunteering to colonize Mars.
“Um, nothing, nothing, I’m all right, I’m fine, fine, fine. I was just thinking of my vacation, you know Italy, We’re going to Italy.” She babbled on, trying to find the right combination of words that would make Ellen go away. “You know, you said that you and Harold enjoyed it so much, that I thought we’d go there too.”
“Harold! That worm! That weevil! That toad!” Ellen spat. “Harold and I are over, done with, finito! That swine!” Too late, Jane remembered that Harold had dumped Ellen in a spectacularly nasty breakup. Ooh, now I’ve done it, she winced; she’ll make me pay for that slip up. But Ellen, for reasons known only to the slime mold infesting her brain, moved on to a new subject.
“I’m going out now with Dave in accounting. You know, the tall one with dark hair and nearly all his fingers; now there’s a man with a future I tell you. By the way, has that husband of yours found a job