Internships

Internships

}Ira worked at Marshal, Clearwater, and Bell for a month…

{No, he was an unpaid intern at the law firm.

}Excuse me, I’m telling this story.

{Well, I’m here to make sure you narrate it correctly.

}After a month of interning at MCB, Ira had made no friends or more to the point no connections for his future profession. No one at the firm even knew his name.

{Correction, the lunch lady knew his name. He ordered the same exact meal everyday he was there. And the recruiter knew his name.

}But technically, the recruiter doesn’t work at the office. So, yes the lunch lady knew his name, but no one that could have helped him with his career.

Everyday he’d make copies for this person; retrieve records for that person; almost always for the assistant of a lawyer, once or twice for an actual lawyer, and never for any of the partners.

{To make matters worse, Ira just moved to New York from Ohio. So, not only did he have no friends at ‘work’, he had no social life at all.

He would go back to his apartment every night thinking about quitting and returning home, but he didn’t want to give his father the satisfaction of being right.

}I think he was more scarred of being proven wrong. He put everything he had in law school, and spent more money than he had on his apartment. Failing at this, felt like an admission that he failed in life.

He didn’t make any of the sports teams in high school…

{And trust us he tried for all of them.

}…and his only girlfriend was in college and she left him for a professor. He had nothing left going for him. He forced himself to make it.

Speaking of females, he was quite smitten with Lynn from the office. Unfortunately for him, her last name’s Clearwater. She’s the daughter of one of the partners and on the path to be one of the top persecutors in the city. Unbeknownst to Ira, or anyone in the firm, Lynn is in a serious relationship with a lawyer from a different firm.

{Not that he’d have had a shot if she were single. I know I’m supposed to be defending the guy, but he really was a loser.

}That may be true, but he was also a good person. It may not be our place to say but he deserved a better lot in life.

He even baked Lynn a cake for her birthday, but he was asked to do a copy job that kept him away from the entire celebration. Lynn’s secretary by the name of Sheila even took credit for the cake

On his final day, it was all falling apart for Ira. Not only did he miss his opportunity to impress Lynn, he discovered the lie of the cake in the most demeaning of ways. He took a walk during his lunch, once again contemplating quitting the internship he found Lynn sitting on a park bench eating the cake he made. Then he watched as she fed the cake to her boyfriend from her own tongue.

He overheard Lynn’s boyfriend say that the cake was good, and Lynn responding that her secretary made it. Having taken more than he thought he ever could, Ira stormed over to the couple to expose the lie.

However, he was stopped with a pleasant surprise. Lynn recognized him from the office. About to express his joy over her knowing who he was, Lynn once again stopped him, she threatened to have him fired and beaten if he told anyone what he saw.

{That was enough for him, he ran away crying, not knowing what he saw that warranted a threat like that

}Sadly, that was the last straw. After, the deception of the cake, and the threatening by Lynn, he took his life.

{We’ve been doing this for a while now, and we just did not see this coming. He kept threatening to quit, never to actually kill himself.

}And after checking, no one thing done could be considered severe enough…

{Except maybe for the cake thing.

}…and they weren’t done maliciously…

{Except for the threatening.

}…He was just viewed and treated like a loser for so long, that he finally believed what he was hearing.

{He had no outs, so he created one for himself.

}It’s our opinion this was going to happen eventually, no avoiding it. Just so happens, this job was the catalyst.

{Even worse, it was an unpaid internship.


I wasn’t too thrilled with the topic from the get go, and everything I was thinking of for it was all cliché. So I decided my challenge for this story would be to do something new, I wrote it with two narrators and no dialogue. I don’t think it’s ever been done, and admittedly, I’m not too sure how well it works.



In my head the narrators were actually Ira’s guardian angels explaining to God why they failed. I didn’t want it reading like a religious story, so I didn’t play to that too much if at all. It was just for my amusement.