Tandy's Troubles

Sitting at a cafe’s patio Tandy just wanted to scream. On the table she’d thrown a folder full of resumes. It had been a complete waste of a day in her mind and most people weren’t even thinking of lunch yet. With a deep breath she buried her head into her arms. This day, the week, and even the month, she was just ready to have it all be done with, or even better to have a redo at it. She scratched the back of her leg and could hear what had been a small run in her stocking growing even larger, not that she cared at this point.

Taking a deep breath she finally pulled herself up, she had needed that just the moment to regroup. When she looked in front of her she was surprised to be greeted with a woman a couple of years her elder, a scar on her left ear that makes it look like during some childhood game she’d lost a fight with a pair of rusty hedge clippers. Climbing on this woman was a toddler who looked like she wasn’t quite ready to start kindergarten. While another who she ventured was her cousin or maybe brother thanks to the brilliant green eyes the children and the woman across from her all had behind a set of thick rimmed glasses.

On top of her folder was a leaking bottle of milk that she could be certain had already left a coffee ring. “Uh, excuse me.” She has to say a bit exasperated at this woman’s actions. If she’d just sat down there was no way should would have done anything more than felt annoyed, but she didn’t have time to run to a print shop and get new prints done, no matter how much they used the term ‘instant’ in their advertising.

She smiled a mother’s smile at her, one that would be given when a child lost a silly little game. “Oh dear.” She said. At first Tandy felt a bit of vindication with those words until she realized the dear referred to her rather than the ladies action. Tandy could feel her flushing red. She wasn’t going to land a job with those resumes but it should have been through either her own incompetence or the egos of the jackasses rejecting her, not some mother.

She opens her mouth to tell this woman off, she doesn’t care any more if it is bad form, bitchy, or boyish, nor any of the other things she’d been chided to avoid her entire life. As she could feel the first syllable forming in her throat the shrill screeching of a phone’s alarm set to its highest setting cut her off.

“Oh dear oh dear!” The green eyed woman says as she hunts around in her purse and finally pulls out a phone to shut off the ringer. She she does a broach with a large cat’s eye set in the centre. She watched as it fell in the air, seeming to hang here for an impossibly long time, only to clatter on a metal rib of the table, causing the gem to crack as it bounced towards her.

Once again the woman spoke the only two words that Tandy had ever heard her speak, while she with a skill that had come from the time as a mother managed to hold onto her child in a way that seemed to defy gravity. “Oh dear.” This time to Tandy’s ear though it was a very different thing, a delight that should have been saved for greeting an old friend was in it as her eyes remained locked on the brooch, that only as Tandy stood up to yell something at her, did they start to drift upwards.

She could hear the clattering of the chair behind her as she stood with enough force to knock it over when she felt a bite in the back of her leg where the chair of all things had gotten the last laugh and caused her knee to buckle. Out of instinct she grabbed frantically in front of her but her fingers could only find that dropped brooch as she fell, with a thud on her back.

Tandy didn’t want to get up, she felt stupid and embarrassed from her actions causing her to mess up her clothes. As she lay there she wondered when it had gotten so over cast, and where the sounds of the street had gone.

She pushed herself into a sitting position and didn’t find the table with all her papers in front of her, she looked around confused as she wondered what had just happened. Had she hit her head? She pressed the back and side with her palm and didn’t feel any pain, but couldn’t remember what any other signs of a concussion were, maybe that had been it.

She looked in her other hand, the brooch still in it, the only sign of where she had been just moments before. With the broken cat’s eye in the centre and the entire thing made of silver or maybe platinum in the shape of a calendar where the rings for months and days could be slid to align with an arrow made of gold.

Picking herself up and onto shaky lags she looked around only to spot a group that had been behind her, too wrapped up in their own argument to even notice her. “H-hello?” She said with a shaky voice trying to get their attention, just hoping to end her confusion on where she was.