Ella wrung her hands and looked around at the clothes strewn on the floor. Her sock drawer looked like a crime scene, where each sock had been laid out in pairs and a solitary sock lay in the corner.
She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and marched to the laundry room. It was dark, damp, and smelled of clean linen and the ghost of lost socks. The washing machine stood majestically in the room with its mouth wide open, menacingly. Ella gulped, moved her hand towards the machine, and quickly snapped it back. Was it worth a sock to anger the machine? But it was her lucky sock. She had that final round interview, and those corporate organisations tended to frown upon people wearing only one sock.
She bit her lip and tried to open the door of the machine, but it was stuck. It was so typical of the machine that it was always difficult to deal with. To add to her misery, she suspected that her lucky sock was stuck in the door of the machine.Should she break the machine? Manic Ella nodded, whereas unemployed Ella reminded her that the machine was worth a hundred times more than the sock.Crafty Ella won, and all the Ellas gathered in the kitchen took spatchulas, a pestle sans mortar, and marched back. Armed with two mighty weapons, Ella felt more at ease while approaching the machine. Its size seemed to diminish compared to the room. After several attempts at recalling her seventh grade physics to understand the lever and fulcrum phenomena, Ella was able to open the machine door. The only casualty was the spatula. What was stuck in the machine door was a sock. But it wasn't Ella's favourite sock. It was a sock that had not surfaced for months. Ella sat down, put the sock in the pestle, and absent-mindedly banged the pestle against her knee. She just needed to recall where that sock could be.
Her mother's advent jolted Ella out of her deep thoughts.
"What's the matter, dear?"
"I can't find my lucky sock."
"Tchah, the one I wear to all my interviews."
"You burned it."
"What?"
"Don't you remember? After not making it past your last interview, you came home with the socks, got drunk, and burned one of them. You couldn't find the other one."
Ella opened her mouth, gathered the mortar, tried to hide the broken spatula, and ducked out as her mother yelled.
"Elllllla, what did you do with my spatula?"
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