Frozen (standard:other, 1212 words)
Author: Ceejay	Added: Aug 20 2006	Views/Reads: 2879/1883	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Anna's famous, success-bringing stoicism is the demon she has to battle in this story about an internal conflict.

Anna turned on the light at two o'clock AM. The smell of Cajun food from
the restaurant down the street was so strong on Sunday nights, after 
the evening mass in the small church down the street ended, that her 
eyes burned and she had decided to go upstairs to bed at seven, 
thinking she would sleep straight through until morning and wake up 
refreshed. But when the light from the ice-cube lamp bled into the 
dusty air, Anna knew that seven hours was plenty of time for beauty 
sleep. 

She slowly and silently removed the cover, as not to disturb the lightly
sleeping orange cat in the window seat. Yellow streetlights made the 
dirt on the windows pop. Anna turned her legs off the bed and slipped 
towards the bureau, which was cluttered with row after row of well over 
four hundred dollars worth of cosmetics and hair products. Anna 
robotically chose a drugstore lipstick called Cameo Kiss, expensive 
Pink Lamé eye shadow, and her standby fragrant volume mousse in a tall 
purple bottle. She kicked a pair of shoes and plaid flannel boxers 
under the yellow chair next to the door and pulled a black t-shirt and 
men's jeans in a size 27-waist from its dirty, mustard colored, 
pleated-cushion back. 

The hall was a stump, only five feet long and crooked until it reached
the bathroom's white door. Anna washed her hair in the sink with 
peach-scented shampoo from one of the shower shelves and blew it dry 
upside-down, putting it into a black elastic just above the nape of her 
neck. She meticulously applied her makeup and changed her clothes in 
the mirror, tying her turquoise tennis shoes tight around her gray and 
green polka-dotted socks. 

Upon finishing her early morning preparations six hours earlier than
usual, Anna couldn't think of what to do. She slid down the plastic 
banister of the spiral staircase and onto the hardwood living room 
floor, original to the two hundred year old house. The white desktop 
computer with a pulsating light in the bottom right corner was the only 
thing that felt intriguing at two fifteen AM, and so she sat down at 
the backless spinning desk chair and turned it on with a tap on the 
button behind the screen. Instantly it began to buzz in the otherwise 
silent house. She played the music she listened to when she needed to 
meet a deadline, forty minutes of songs she knew so well that didn't 
have to listen to them. 

Still unsure of what to make out of the free time she had stumbled upon,
Anna started to think. To her, almost nothing was worse than thinking. 
She had run on the track and cross country teams in high school and 
college ending only a few brief of years ago, and when she ran she 
would always end a race in tears, the first one to cross the finish 
line because she needed to hear something other than the thoughts in 
her head bouncing and screaming about at the tops of their lungs. After 
her third cross-country season in college, Anna quit because the mental 
pain was becoming far too much for her to take further into her life. 

Anna hadn't thought like that for a while, and so she decided to lie on
the fuzzy, old gray couch, close her wide-awake eyes, and let it take 
her over completely. After eating a two-inch tall slice of packaged 
chocolate-chip cookie dough, she put the back of her head down on a 
pink flannel pillow. Anna realized that she would have to cry, but she 
felt that perhaps crying would relieve her of the numbness in her head. 
Remembering the books she had read as a teenager, Anna concluded that 
she had the opposite problem of Kurt Cobain, who wanted to relieve the 
pain with total nothingness. Anna needed to relieve the nothing with 
pain and to feel as bad as she often had before, because nothing ever 
was far worse than everything all at once. 

Anna hadn't made a friend since her junior year of college, when she was
named the editor of a nationally famous student paper. Then, girls had 
flocked to her side at social events and competed to be chosen as her 
senior roommate. The boys of the newspaper staff had begged her for 
dates not only because of her powerful position, but also her bubbly 
personality, intense intelligence, and good looks. Since college, when 
Anna had moved into the house she was raised in, just twelve minutes 
from the city's hub, her social circle had neither increased nor 
decreased in size, and she had to wonder, now that she was thinking 
again, what had made her lose her open magnetism. 

Her boyfriend of five years lived in a loft apartment by the big


Click here to read the rest of this story (36 more lines)