Short stories written by Cecelia Ahern

24 Minutes

Steven awoke to his alarm ringing at seven a.m. Waking up, the first disappointment of every day, was as usual followed by its faithful friend, dread. The alarm was like a siren, a warning bell, get up or else. Slowly rolling over he stretched out his arm and punched down on the clock. Although the room was silenced, the ringing continued in his ear drums. What he would give to sleep all day, to close his lids and block out the light. Once again he had spent another night glaring unblinkingly at all night telly text and infomercials, sleep, as usual, not coming easy.

He looked vacantly at the growing crack on his magnolia ceiling and listened as the kids next door fought to use the bathroom. Walls like cardboard separated their two-bedroom-and-a-box-room townhouses, stuffed together like shoeboxes in the dusty stock room of a department store basement: piled high, packed tight, squeezed in, air tight. Multi-coloured toy-like houses for first-time buyers, pristine and pastel with pretty thresholds to cross, blinding buyers from the realisation they'd just crossed the most expensive toll they were ever likely to pay. Suburban bliss.

Steven could imagine what all the people looked like from above, lab rats running around the maze of houses, pointlessly, distracted by irrelevant and unnecessary daily routines. Did nobody think, what is the point? Did nobody else feel like suddenly stopping what they were doing, looking up to the Gamesmaster in the sky and refusing to continue playing this stupid game?

He exhaled slowly, counting to three as the screaming next door turned to tears, the knocking on the door turned to kicks and the dog's barking turned to howls. Kicking the covers off, he wearily pulled his body out of bed and began his morning routine: shower, dress - shirt, suit, tie - coffee, alarm, front door, walk to the train station. The monotony, monotonous. Night out on a Thursday, hangover on a Friday, football on a Sunday. Every week identical.

1,527 steps to the train station and he would arrive at the platform at exactly 07.42, met by the same tired faces, the same bored expressions, the same coats, briefcases, hairstyles and shoes. Everyone was uniformed up and ready for battle. Nobody spoke, nobody smiled, there was just the occasional cough, beep of a mobile phone and the fuzzy sounds of personal stereos as commuters stared blankly and wearily into space, eyes glassy and sleepy; their previous night's dreams still fresh in their minds, their beds not yet cold.

The sign over the platform declared a three-minute wait as it always did when he arrived. The man beside him in the brown suede coat was consistently ahead of him, the woman with the black briefcase, torn at the corner and with a scratch through the middle, always behind him. Everything was done in perfect unison, their life predictable no matter how much longer they took drinking their coffee in the morning and no matter how many extra minutes spent closing their eyes under the soothing hot water of the shower, dreaming of somewhere and something else.