Dolores Blogavitch

Chapter 246

"Then we shall see," Dolores Blogavitch said to herself, and, sitting down at her broad cluttered desk she pressed the blue illuminated button that powered up her sturdy desktop computer, that loyal and deliberate friend that held on its large hard disk all the hopes and dreams of her weary life. As the machine launched into a needless Spyware scan her large expressive feet moved slightly in their worn but still-valid black sandals, this small gesture revealing in its jerky detail the turmoil that was hard to discern in the blank arrangement of her ordinary yet tanned and passingly intelligent face.

Waiting for Windows Live Messenger to complete its inexorable journey towards signing-in, a journey from which no amount of clicking on "Cancel" would cause deviation or acceleration, Dolores twiddled irritably with her straw-like but strangely pink hair. She slumped into a reverie, remembering a time when her hair had shone as dark wild and shiny as a conker without having to spend an entire day in the chaotic hair salon, full of women compensating for their past youth with a trolley full of evil-smelling chemicals and their observations on men that cut as sharply as the professional scissors that lay on the natural wood benches that adjoined the slowly twirling seats positioned so unkindly before the large frank mirrors.

A piping biddleybonk from the computer shook Dolores Blogavitch back into the present and she downloaded her email, unable, still, to repress a sense of optimism as she scanned the headers of the 34 new messages. She scarcely breathed until she had looked at them, and then the disappointment hit her with the force of a pressure washer aimed directly between her suffering eyes. Nobody had commented on her blog, in fact, nobody had even fecking read it.