Free Short Story: POSTPARTUM EUPHORIA by Bethany Hiitola
Announcing the official e-release of my original short story Postpartum Euphoria! Download it now for free--no strings attached.Postpartum Euphoria begins in what appears to be a stressful morning for Leslie Croft in corporate America. After sipping her morning brew, she does what almost any corporate employee dreams about--climbs on top her desk and shouts obscenities at the surrounding offices and teammates. What sets her off? Find out in this gritty and humorous tale of one woman's steps towards happiness. Here's a sample to wet your appetite:
What drove me to climb atop my particleboard, gray-painted desk surrounded by five-foot cubicle walls? Stupidity or borderline schizophrenia, I suppose. But there I was using my chair as a stepstool and planting my bright fuchsia stilettos with deathly-pointed toes onto the center of my poor excuse for a desk. Fixing the wrinkle on my tweed flute skirt, I adjusted my badge, took a deep breath of stale re-circulated air, and belted in an authoritative tone, "I, Leslie Croft, find this place of employment a morbid hell hole. It has no personality, no class—no intelligence!"To begin the download, click the cover image or link above. The PDF eBook is compatible with Adobe Acrobat Reader version 4.0 or above (the latest version of Adobe Reader available here). If PDFs aren't your thing, download it in plain text or HTML.
Out of pure principle, I then turned to my left and faced those damned doors of those damned executives (God only knows, how I'd become envious of a door?) and hollered a string of obscenities sure to reach all the way to Muncie, Indiana and the monitoring ears of my mother, who, at the moment, would be sitting in her living room habitually watching One Life to Live.
As I shimmied my way down from the desk against a backdrop of gawking co-workers, I stabbed my heel into the cushion of my chair before finding solid ground on the austere gray carpeting and readjusting the skirt that never fit right over my post-birth hips.
The silence was suffocating. Even Marjorie, the office chatterbox in the adjoining cubicle, seemed to have finally gotten a pickle sandwich shoved down her throat. In my office, there were two kinds of people. There were those who always thought about shoving a pickle down Marjorie’s throat. And there were those so engrossed in her Christian brow-beater preaching they only encouraged her banter. But that day, she was gob-smacked to the point that she could only chew her stale gum and gape at me from across the open three-foot cubicles. I took a drag of my hour-old four-dollar espresso drink and grinned in her direction to entice a rant of exuberant spending. My attempt at provocation garnered only a wide-eyed stare.
Elated, at least for a moment, by this sudden commanding position of control, I positioned my ass on the side of the newly punctured seat cushion and whirled around in my ergonomic chair, dropping my coffee perfectly in place on the first rotation. After two more three-hundred-sixty-degree turns, I came to a stop directly in front of my computer screen. Coffee and skirt intact, I returned to the daily routine of my job.
Seven minutes passed by before security arrived at my desk... [download the entire story]
Why would I offer my writing for free, without a writing contract or not submit to a literary magazine? I want to solicit feedback from you, potential readers. Collect reviews. Get feedback. Allow anyone with interest in my writing to actually read a completed piece. And, in the grand scheme of things, hope to garner interested by someone actually in the publishing industry. Yes, I admit it is a marketing scheme--but a smart one! If an agent or publisher is interested in my work, now they have a free sample of my writing.
So, please--download, read, enjoy, pass along to friends, BLOG about it, link to it, print it (sized for standard 8.5" X 11" paper), and help me create some hype about Postpartum Euphoria.
And don't forget to let me know what you think. Love it? E-mail me. Or leave a comment. Hate it? Tell me why in an e-mail or comment. I'm putting my work out in cyberspace in hopes that I improve future writing projects. Don't worry, I can take anything you throw my way (tough skin is the writerly way).
Thanks again for reading--and thanks for the continued support!
-bethany (want-to-be author)
This short story is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. Here are the basic rules: 1) you can share this short story with anyone you think will want to see it (especially agents and publishers) however, make sure the author is credited as the source of the material. 2) you can't share for commercial purposes, and 3) please don't edit the content of the story, at least not without asking the author first.
