Rivalry

I wrote this to the prompt below for a writing contest in the GCW on Gaia which involved using this story generator. The theme: light-hearted drama. The main characters: depressed fortune-teller and brutal businessman. The start of the story: party. The end of the story: repentance.

The party was in full swing, which could only mean one thing: a decline. Sure enough, the rooms, filled to the bursting point, began to empty until the din was nearly tolerable.

Sharon, sitting in the corner of the dining room with her drink uselessly in her hand, was glad the party was ending, although everyone she could see was having a great time; they would be sad to go and satisfied they had come.

Sharon never felt that way after a party—or during it, for that matter. Her idea of a good time was sitting at home, rapt at some Eastern fortune-telling treatise. Lately, though, that didn’t happen much at all. Sharon, although she was a fortune teller and being interested in obscure Eastern traditions was her job, was sent to more and more parties by her boss, a hard-bitten, short little man who had little interest in fortune-telling but a lot in the money it raised. He was applying his “real-life” solutions to Tall Dark Corporations, which meant “mingling” and “interacting with the customers.” Sharon was at the party as a marketing ploy.

Sharon had been working for the Tall Dark Corporation for fifteen years before the new guy, Mr. Zapatista, came into control, and although she knew she should quit she couldn’t bring herself to. For one thing, she had traded her cat, Black Noon, to Tall Dark years ago and leaving it would mean leaving her cat. In any event, if things continued this badly she wasn’t sure she’d have a job to quit.

She was about to get up—her left leg was cramped from sitting in the corner for so long—when she spotted a man leaning against the wall just a few feet away from her. He was tall and dark and she didn’t know him; he was obviously her destiny. He turned to look at her eagerly under her gaze, and she could tell he was as uncomfortable as she was. Perfect!

***

—Cliché , she thought, but their conversation was going well. She had never had so much fun at a party in her life. The tall dark man, whose name was Derek, was not only shy but witty and intelligent—and attractive. Sharon had a difficult time focusing all her attention on the conversation, and, thanks to her long training as a sybil, she was picking up signs that he was too. When the party wound to a close, Sharon and Derek left together.

***

“What the hell were you thinking?!”

Sharon quivered at her desk beneath the rage of Mr. Zapatista. She hadn’t known that Derek was the manager of their rival firm, ShortStuff Corporation. Despite Mr. Zapatista’s protests to the contrary, ShortStuff was close to eclipsing them in the field of fortune-telling. Derek had faxed Tall Dark that morning with a dangerous proposal: Send us Sharon.

Mr. Zapatista couldn’t make himself do that. Sharon was a major earner, for chrissakes, and he couldn’t let her leave Tall Dark for a lover. Sharon was shaken at the revelation of her own worth. She left that morning’s meeting disillusioned and more confused than ever.

Of course she saw Derek, but the offer of a contract was never mentioned. Sharon was torn between Tall Dark and Derek, although Tall Dark was definitely trying to decrease her conundrum: since the offer a week ago, Mr. Zapatista had been cloyingly sweet, and even the maintenance people made sure her booth was well-swept every day, the crystal balls polished and the atmospherics appropriately smoky. Even so, after a week of teetering on the edge of a decision, she left Tall Dark to work for ShortStuff.

ShortStuff was a clean, efficient operation, and Derek was much kinder than Mr. Zapatista. Sharon reveled in her newfound happiness and peace of mind. Here at ShortStuff there were no requirements for the staff, a cheery team of fortune-tellers who ran, as far as Sharon could tell, a nice eclectic mix of stalls around the city. She visited Derek at his home several times a week; if there were whispers about this situation they were quiet ones. A month passed pleasantly. Sharon became known as an expert on Eastern fortune-telling, and when her paycheck came it was so high she nearly fell over backwards.

Meanwhile, Tall Dark was doing badly. Mr. Zapatista’s marketing values didn’t work well in the field of fortune-telling; it was no surprise when he came crawling to Sharon one afternoon, asking her to return to Tall Dark. She refused. ShortStuff was too much fun for her to return to endless, pointless parties at the houses of anonymous people. Mr. Zapatista’s final words to her, however, were shaking; he suggested he listen more closely to Derek when the latter didn’t know she was around.

Sharon was plunged back into dismay, but she couldn’t help following her curiosity; maybe Mr. Zapatista knew something she didn’t. So, one day, she snuck into the ventilation system.

Crawling along the endless pipes in the ceiling of ShortStuff, Sharon wasn’t sure if she was going crazy or not to trust the word of a man who had always treated her disgustingly. Nevertheless, she inched steadily towards the buzz of voices she knew marked the staff lounge. She could hear Derek’s dulcet tones faintly and crawled faster to hear what he was saying.

“—yeah, and last night too.” She stopped abruptly to listen. “She comes over all the time now.” There was muffled laughter. “What a…!” a burst of laughter edited a sentence for her, and her breath caught in rage; she caught a few lewd phrases, and then a loud mention of her name—by Derek. “I can make her do anything.” She blinked. “Anything I want.” Another burst of laughter echoed through the ventilation pipes as Sharon crawled, apoplectic and stunned, backwards, falling out into the ladies’ room and barely catching herself.

Sharon berated herself mercilessly, and when she had finished a thorough personal mental tirade for being so oblivious—it was difficult for her to find that she had been used, and so obviously—the flush of shame set in. How badly she had misjudged the Tall Dark Corporation! At least Mr. Zapatista had never misused her like this. He was truly the better person.

Derek caught her as she was storming out of ShortStuff. “Sharon! Sharon—wait, don’t…Sharon!” She stopped and looked at him for a moment. He looked remorseful. “Sharon…what are you leaving for?”

“You ought to know,” she snapped, and turned away, deliberately oblivious to his cries of dismay. Sharon left ShortStuff for Tall Dark Corporation.

Epilogue:

A few days later, beyond Sharon’s hearing, her coworkers wondered what had made her leave such a pleasant position.

“She’s crazy,” sighed Nicole.

“There’s nothing coulda enticed me away from a place like that!” Clara declared.

“I wonder what it was?” Michelle wondered.

“It was Zapatista,” came the sudden reply, in a voice old and withered as the ends of the earth; a voice so ancient the gossiping women would not have been surprised to learn its owner knew the cause of everything that had ever taken place anywhere. “He can be persuasive if he likes, and he had a secret that she couldn’t avoid.”