Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Change!!!

Change!!!

This morning as Wanda touched the snooze alarm for the fourth time, she felt a piece of notepaper on top of the alarm clock. When she pulled it close to her squinting eyes, she read the word "Change!!!" underlined three times. The handwriting was hers, but she didn't remember writing it—must have been one of those twilight zone half-awake half-asleep messages. She racked her brain for a few seconds but just couldn't figure out what she had been trying to tell herself with that one word so forcefully underlined and marked with three exclamation points.

Was it something simple and practical, such as changing the time on her alarm clock so that she didn't have to use the snooze function so often?

Perhaps it was more to the root of the problem—admonishing herself to get to bed earlier each night.

Or was it more global? Did she mean that she should look for a new line of work or simply try to do a better job in her current position?

Should she finally develop some better eating habits or drink those eight servings of water that she know she should be getting each day?

Was she telling herself once and for all to break the cycle of getting involved with one after another attractive but selfish and ultimately destructive men?

Maybe she should get back into therapy to discover what she really needed to change.

By the time her alarm went off again after the seven-minute snooze cycle, she decided to give up. She had to drag herself to the shower and start another day. She could postpone further self-examination for lunch hour.

As Wanda staggered through the living room toward the bathroom, she glanced at the coffee table. There she saw a bag of coin wrappers alongside an enormous pile of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters that she had finally remembered to bring in from her car last night.

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