A short story.

I wrote this story 10 years ago when I was temping in LA.  The building that I worked in was the Fox Building or... NAKATOMI PLAZA.  I didn't put two and two together then, but that connection makes me like this short piece of fiction a lot more.  

A couple of things strike me now - 

1.) Holy shit, I was stressed.

2.) I brought it back, however subconsciously, to what I've always known - That in every moment, God chooses to be me. 💗

Please enjoy my short story, "Nosebleed". 

Anyway, she was proud of herself for trying to be creative as an adult, but today, she thought, “I do not want to write.”  She wished the sleeves on her new dress weren’t squeezing under her arms so much and that her shoes were more comfortable.  She wished she could take a nap.  She got up and walked to the window.  She was filled with anxieties and fears.  Life was scary and nothing was sure.  She could feel panic beating underneath her skin and she was happy in that instant that her outsides did not reflect her insides.  She looked great.  She was polite and helpful, but her insides looked the crumbling Christ the Redeemer statue she had seen on “Life After People” the night before.  The bankers around her chattered into their phones about bullshit, and threw around figures like "117 million”, and “55 million” like it was pocket change.  She had about three hundred bucks in the bank and had been working her ass off. They were a privileged fraternity and she was nothing but their “girl Friday”.  “Temping is hard”, she thought, and then laughed at herself.  No it wasn’t.  It was the easiest shit in the world and life was okay and why couldn’t she quell this panic?  It rose inside her like steam in a kettle. The muscles in her back began to spasm, and blood started dripping onto the front of her new dress from her nose.  “Oh my God. OH! Oh my God!” She had never had a nosebleed before.  The drips of blood turned into a steady flow of blood and she was glad she was alone in the side conference room.  “This is bad”, she thought.  It was worse than bad, because the flow of blood from her nose started to feel like someone had turned on a faucet, and at this point, her nose was bleeding all over the office.  This was a serious emergency, and each time she thought it was as bad as it would get it got worse until there was a deluge of blood flowing from her face.  She ran down the hall and the guys in the office stopped talking when they saw her.  They dropped their phones and stood in horror.  Blood was coming out of her now like water out of a fire hose.  It was spraying the walls as she looked around in panic.  The blood was covering the floor now and getting deeper.  The bankers slammed their doors in panic, but the blood was seeping under their doors.  It splashed in waves down the hallway and was lapping at the surface of the desks.  In a matter of moments, they were all standing waist deep in blood and it kept coming.  At this point now there was so much blood in their offices that she saw they could no longer open the doors.  The rooms continued to fill with her blood and she climbed on a desk, because the blood would have been over her head if she hadn’t.  The bankers were losing their battles with her DNA.  One made the mistake of breaking his window with a chair, and was swept out of his office in the waterfall of blood raining down from the 32nd floor.  One of the bankers floated face down in the other office.  His fight was over.  The blood kept coming and coming until all of the windows began to give and each exploded with huge force sending huge bursts of blood out into the air and onto the ground below. She imagined what Fox Plaza must look like from the ground.  She thought maybe this was the kind of fountain Satan must have in his yard.  Now that the blood wasn’t so deep on the 32nd floor, she could sit down again, but nothing would stop her nose from bleeding.  She walked to each gaping window and peered out.  The parking garage had begun to flood, and the red river had reached the Avenue of the Stars and carried cars down towards Santa Monica like they were riding a big red waterslide.  Blood covered people ran screaming in every direction.  People down below must have believed that the apocalypse had come, and suddenly, she felt really, really powerful.  “They think it’s God, “ she said, out loud, “…but it’s really just me with a nose bleed.”  Her nose was still bleeding, but she had stopped panicking.  She wasn’t lightheaded. She sat down at her bloody desk, covered in blood and read a blood covered magazine.  She was no longer concerned about writing a stupid story.

The End.

FYI - My other job was as an occasional PA for "Life After People". An awesome job.