Anger

story continued from chapter four Chapter 5: Fido I had asked Richard to build me a dog house, one that was large enough for a very big dog, maybe like a Saint Bernard. When he gave the excuse that we didn’t have a dog, I told him that I was thinking about getting one. I told him I wanted the dog house set on a concrete pad. He built a form for the concrete pad and I watched as the concrete was poured. While the concrete was still soft, I buried a large eye bolt deep into it with just the “eye” sticking out. I had bent the eye bolt before sinking it into the concrete, so there was no way it could come out. It took him the next few evenings and half a weekend building the dog house, until he finally finished it, and what a fine dog house it was! ...

The massive door closed behind her with a soft click, shutting her out from the plush office. She was dismissed. She had just been told to search for ’new challenges’ outside the company. Or more aptly put, she had been sacked. Alice took a deep breath to get a grip on her rage. Thankfully, the anteroom was empty, her boss’s, correction, former boss’s assistant having momentarily abandoned her fortified post behind the massive desk facing the entrance. Alice was grateful for the opportunity to regain her composure. She did not want to face her (as of now former) colleagues in a troubled emotional state, heck, she did not want to face them at all. She dreaded the thinly veiled schadenfreude of her rivals, who preferred to attribute her quick rise up the corporate ladder to her looks instead of her performance, and the palpable relief of her less intellectually gifted colleagues, glad at having been spared themselves. But most of all she dreaded the pity of the few people in the office she counted as friends. For the last two years, since the untimely death of her parents, she had thrown herself into her work and presented the front of an independent, tough, calculating achiever to the world. Now she feared she might break down, revealing the lonesome and frightened girl that still lurked inside. Better she held on to her rage. ...