Cut Free — Hive

Mildred momentarily disengages from her work, settles assiduous hands into her lap and pauses to stare out the window. Sunlight tightens her pupils and she squints hard enough to hasten the crows return. They plant their feet firmly above her cheek bones while she looks on.

Her unguarded stare turns to a glare when it comes to rest on the jostling knot of school children moving along the sidewalk. She watches as they shuffle gregariously off the bus a few doors from her front stoop; poking and prodding each other towards their own houses until the little mob is gone.

Mildred hated kids. Recalling her own childhood, she knew all too well what vicious, name-calling little vipers they could be.

“Mou-sie Mil-lie, Mou-sie Mil-lie,” they’d taunted and teased, “the fat little mouse who gobbled all the cheese.”

Every weekday the bus’ air breaks hiss then squeal to a stop at precisely 3:10 pm. Her rhythm temporarily broken, she relaxes her body’s automated ritual of stuffing envelopes with whatever pulpy propaganda her employer was mailing this week. It’s break time, the second of two built into her daily routine.

Mildred never pays attention to the garbage she folds and stuffs, she couldn’t care less what goes into the crisp white business envelopes before she slides them into the cardboard box resting on the table next to her.

Pluck. Fold. Stuff. Seal. Stack. Repeat.

It was sheer economy of movement, efficiency not unlike poetry in motion, if she did say so herself. Oh, and she would say so if anyone was ever there to witness her in action. Mildred has been efficiently, if not obsessively stuffing envelopes in her front room by the large frame picture window for twenty years. Same chair. Same table. Same lamp arranged in the same exacting configuration so that her movements had become as effortless as an automated assembly line.

Over the years she’d been forced to make some adjustments to accommodate progress, especially with the advent of self-sealing envelopes, which she gratefully accepted and thought of as the only true improvement in the whole operation but nobody asked her.

The afternoon mail comes through the metal slot with a clatter and falls to the floor. Mildred thumbs through it on her break. One colorful envelope stood out and beckons her to open it.

Congratulations! You’ve won a free fall cleaning giveaway from the new housecleaning service, The Mary Maid! No purchase necessary. Call today to schedule your first cleaning.

Mildred considers the offer then picks up the phone before she could change her mind.The team came as appointed, a whirling dervish of maids clad in yellow and blue polo shirts, none with the name of ‘Mary’.

The troupe carefully cleaned and dusted, moving things about and back under Mildred’s watchful eye. Unknown to anyone present, including Mildred, when they’d finished and closed the front door of her home her working table and chair by the large picture window were slightly off the mark from their usual positions.

The following morning Mildred prepares herself to begin work. The seemingly insignificant discrepancy in the position of the table, the lamp and the chair in relationship to one another escapes Mildred as she surveys her freshly cleaned ‘work station’; however, once she sits down and begins the rote process of plucking, folding, stuffing, sealing, and stacking — the repetitious movements multiplied by the slight error in her normal body and furniture positions increases her discomfort and the margin for error exponentially.

Something’s definitely off — but Mildred, once launched into her slightly obsessive-compulsive collection of micro-movements, could not stop herself before tragedy strikes.

“OUCH!”

Sucking a thin breath in through pursed lips, Mildred looks at her left hand and the thin bloody line sketched across the second knuckle of her index finger. To her painful surprise she’d just sustained her first ever paper cut. She knew the risks of envelope stuffing but had become smug about them over the years since her disciplined fingers had always been able to avoid the careless parry with the sharp edge of the paper broadsword.

Mildred scrutinizes her finger. She’ll need a bandaid, the thin line of blood was pooling at one end and looked like an exclamation mark felled in battle.

Torn, she sits stationary while she considers what had just happened and what she should do next.

Mildred was flummoxed. A record of zero mishaps now broken was no record at all. Something shifts inside her.

The tiny cut persistently stings and pulls at her attention while she sits in her chair looking out of the large picture window. It was only 9:28 am.

In a flash of inspiration Mildred flips over one of the flyers destined to be stuffed, takes a pen from the table and writes in big block letters: “I QUIT!”

She carefully folds it in thirds, stuffs it in an envelope and addresses it to her employer.

When she turns back to the envelope after scrounging around for a postage stamp she notices a smudge of blood in the blank space where her return address should be. She leaves it blank except for the red smudge, deciding her blood would more than suffice for her address.

A woman not accustomed to smiling, felt her face break open with glee and for the first time in decades Mildred felt free.

*Author’s note: As co-editor of The Weekly Knob Aura and I typically alternate giving the prompt each week and only contribute stories to the edition when the prompt is given by the other. We do this to be on the same footing with our fellow writers each week in meeting the creative writing challenge. The prompt, ‘paper cut’ was given by me for TWK this week; however, “Cut Free” begged me to be written so I’d like to thank The Junction for giving it a proper home.