Velma's engine wouldnÕt turn over the first few times. Rebecca sighed. She had
a new temp job to go to, another office gig. Clerical work for nine dollars an
hour, lasting a week. If Velma would just start. VelmaÕs animated namesake
(Bec's favorite as a child) would never have been so unreliable. She took a
deep breath and closed her eyes. Cool air blew in threw the open car window. It
was a rare sunny spring morning, but the wind off the Sound still had a nip to
it. She could smell a little bit of the salt scent from the water. The bucket
seat's springs creaked under her as she shifted her weight and tried to start
the car again, her eyes still closed.

If she rode a horse like Galatea Greenthorne, this would never be a problem.

The engine choked, caught, and rumbled steadily. Bec released the emergency
brake and pulled out of her parking space.

The directions to the office gig took her to Shoreline. The sunlight streamed
through green buds on the trees, and the sharp shapes of the evergreens scraped
against a vivid blue sky. Bec did her best to avoid the worst of the traffic,
but she wasn't really paying much attention to the road. There was something
about that prodigious blue sky that pulled her thoughts above the car.

The office building was one of those glassy featureless places. She misread the
directory next to the elevator and ended up at the wrong floor at first, so
when she finally arrived at the reception desk she felt flustered and even more
disconnected.

"Rebecca Anstead, I'm here for the temp job."

"Clerical or data entry?" The receptionist didn't look up.

"Um, clerical."

She was lead back into a room full of filing cabinets. At least it had windows,
and the sunlight streamed in between the gray boxy metallic shapes. Her job was
to go through the contents of one particular cabinet, file by file, remove the
staples from the papers inside, and feed the papers through the copier in the
next room. She was then to set the copies in one pile and put the originals
back into their folder. Typical mindless stuff.

Bec pulled the first file out of the drawer. It was fat, weighty. As she opened
it she managed to give herself a paper cut on her thumb, which fortunately
didn't bleed much. She gathered up an armful of folders and carried the lot
into the copy room.

The copier had a hypnotic hum, and the copy room was warm and stuffy, without
the benefit of the sunlight in the file room. Bec went through the motions of
her task mechanically, and it wasn't long before her mind started drifting.