How to Show Your Story: Show with details, you can see, hear, feel

The record distributing company was in an old building kitty-corner from the Robert Hall. It sat at a crossroads near the welfare building. Claire stepped off the bus to a commotion of traffic and dust where everything converged.

            She didn’t know where she was going, but found her way to an obscure door with a sign above: Raintree Records and hesitantly opened the door. She felt self-conscious in a skirt and blouse too long and big for her.

            The owner of Raintree, who called himself “John,” hired her and she found herself at a desk in a long room. Through distant windows, she could see the busy street outside.

            Soon the wastebasket beside her desk filled with so much discarded paper that her very kind co-workers brought her a second wastebasket, which she also quickly filled, wondering when she would be fired.

            It was a dark little store-front double office facing tall street windows, but such deep narrow rooms, they were still dimly lit, even on sunny days. She was at the back of the secondary room, the one without a door to the sidewalk.

            “Is it difficult to align statements?” A large man was peering over her.

            She looked up. “When I make a mistake, I have to start over,” She rolled the statement up. “I can correct the top but not the carbons.” She pulled another statement from the typewriter.

            He took the statement, folded it in half and dropped it in the wastebasket.”

            Afraid to look up, she stared at her desk. “I had a summer of typing in high school.”

            “Why don’t you take a break now,” he said, picking up one of the wastebaskets and starting to carry it away.

            She grabbed her purse and headed for the break room where a girl with dyed very black hair and heavy eye-makeup was smoking a cigarette. She was perched on a bar stool behind a long table with a faded linoleum tablecloth. Claire poured a coffee, noticing she was shaking, and worried where she would work next. She nodded at the girl’s cigarette. Do you have an extra?” The girl shook the pack.

            They sat there silently, smoking, barely glancing at each other. The girl was still sitting there when Claire returned to her desk to wait for the catastrophe to hit.

            On the desk was a stack of large ledgers.

            “They’re for you,” her male co-worker said.

            A snappy woman she had never seen before stepped up, stood beside her, and opened one of the ledgers. “We need a count of records purchased and distributed the last two months.” She set a legal pad and large adding machine on the desk. “You know how to work this?”

            Claire nodded.

            “Alright then,” the woman said and left.

            The metal keys on the adding machine barely moved when Claire pushed them. It was an old, heavy machine. She had never used an adding machine and had no idea what to do. So she tried to add the columns without a machine, hoping the day would end soon.