A glass door. A glass bell. An almost floor-to-ceiling tall glass front. Glass flower pots. Glass flowers.

Glass flowers?

"Woman, can you quit being dramatic and looking around this for so long and just get your butt in?"

"Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only one in the family who didn't get the dramatic gene."

Deanna, as if you are not dramatic too.

Pressing my lips together, I strode in.

∆∆∆

The wooden-framed front door itself was hard to wrench open.

Once I got past that stage, I was faced with another three wooden-framed doors. On each door, there was a sign that said drama, books, and others respectively. Written in a cursive font, and hanging from strings, the signs and the lack of any staff at the table to the right of the doors made me uneasy. The tuk, tuk, tuk sound of rusty fans spinning from left to right was the only sound I could hear.

I turned back to face the door I had just entered. Seeing Deanna and Joash start to queue at Grandpa's Pizzeria, it dawned on me that the glass used for the clinic front was actually reused from the previous store that occupied this area, which was an antique shop. The glass enabled people to be able to see out of the clinic, but not into.

Huh. Ok then.

I turned around and started towards the exit.

My face smashed into something lumpy.

I lept back. Looking up, I realised that there was a decent sized rectangular hole in the ceiling, and a person's arm gripping onto a mechanical arm. There was a baby blue cushion duct taped onto the end of the arm, and the cushion was the part which I hit.

What. The. Actual. Fu-

"Sorry! I'm... I'm really really sorry for startling you!" A meek face poked out from the hole, glasses similar to mine perched on the bridge of the middle-aged woman's nose. "This should all have been automatic, a broadcast played and then the arm coming out on its own and handing you a slip of paper, but no! Our boss clearly got too ambitious and forgot about our lack of funds! Ah, I'm rambling. Here you go young lady. Pick a door to go through, based on your writing problems, each door leads you to different places, but just to inform you, that payment must be given right after you open the door."

The woman pulled up the arm, and the hole in the ceiling was closed.

I stood there, with a slip of paper that required me to fill in my name that I desired to be called by, my type of writing troubles, and my contact number.

Three doors. Drama, books and others.

I took a step forward and turned the knob to the books door.

∆∆∆

I clicked the pen that I slipped out from a drawer on a table that was leaning against the wall.

After filling out my particulars, I slotted the pen in my pocket and walked down the corridor. Doors lined the sides of the corridor. The first of which was open.

I walked by it.

"Miss! Sorry but please come back to that room that has the open door!"

Oh. Apparently I had to go inside.

Turning around, I strode in.

Directly facing the door was a row of tables lined horizontally, with a frenzied looking man pacing in front of them. A chair had been pulled away from the table, joining its other friends in a messy yet seemingly organized maze of chairs.

Mister Spectacles placed down a stack of papers, picked it up again, slammed it down on the table, and snatched it up again. He huffed, faced me, and extended a hand holding several crumpled looking pieces of paper. "Sorry miss, but I think we have a pen here..."

I held up the pen I took from the drawers.

"Oh thank goodness you have a pen, sorry just fill up the...the...what's it called again? The activities and facilities that you would like to use and all..."

Seeing him rush around the room, taking phone calls, carrying cardboard boxes, ripping masking tape with his teeth and using that tape to tape up posters in and outside the room, I couldn't bring myself to tell him that I had sort of stolen that pen from their drawer.

I flattened the papers out on the wall, trying to smooth out its creases, and a table of columns stared back at me. The first page was the table of columns, briefly explaining what was to be filled. Turning the paper over, and flipping to the next page, and then the next, were questions asking me about my book's theme and genre, the characters, the complication, conclusion, and my problems writing the book.

I didn't plan so far out for How to Suck At Life yet.

I wrote nil For the complications and conclusion box, and was ready to hand it to Mister Spectacles, when I realised that I had missed an entire page.

Wow ok I'm totally acting like a perfectly wide awake person who gets enough sleep right now.

I pushed my spectacles up the bridge of my nose, and scrutinised the names of my would-be consultants. Choose just one name? How? Anshal Williams, Alex Solomon, Rachel Murphy or Shivani Bhatt?

After some consideration, and ten seconds of me just standing there, I ticked the box for Shivani Bhatt.

There was another section underneath it.

Oh.

Please tick the boxes for each facility that you plan to use.

The choices were a swimming pool, Virtual Reality room, indoor garden, storeroom, and a consultation room.

Everything except for the Consultation Room was labeled as unavailable. Well, there's only one option to tick then, and it costs only five dollars.

I held up a hand and was ready to hand in the papers to the guy, but he just pointed to the direction down the corridor, gasping out the words, "Go down the corridor and that's the Consultation Room." He breezed past me after that, with his arms loaded down with cardboard boxes that were threatening to explode due to its insufficient capacity to hold the items within.

Poor guy.

I stepped out of the room, not before almost getting knocked down by the guy, who in his hurry dropped all his papers on the floor. He grabbed all of them up, crumpling them, and the last thing I heard before walking down the corridor was, "Oh for the love of-"

I'm getting a good feeling about this.

-------------------------------

Status update: struggling with proposals

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