Short story: Lucy Diamond’s Polka Dot Cookie

Natasha Sahjwani
Jul 23, 2017 · 4 min read

Lucy’s life is not made for the ordinary.

There’s beauty in the ordinary. Regular days, routine lives, mundane commutes and the hopeless inundation of caffeine. Everyday slowly starts bleeding into the next and life may seem it has come to a painful halt, but nevertheless life throws us a curve ball.

Lucy lived that life, fresh out of a miserable marriage, her lonely job at Ernst and Miller, New York’s prestigious law firm, was just as icing on her forlorn cake of life. A pile of paperwork awaited her desk every morning in her dusty office of the striking Hampton tower. As Head of the Accounts Department, Lucy preferred to spend all her time at work, rather than her empty house back in the dusty suburbs. She found solace in the paper stacks, the staplers and the tapping of the keyboard. Balance sheets and statements invigorated a story in her bemused life, a story that her life seemed to lack. Until one day, when a real story began to permeate into her soul.

On a Tuesday morning on October 26th, 1999, there was an unusual aura that dominated the air. An aura that followed Lucy through the subway, down the crowded streets of Manhattan and up the elevator to the 15th floor to her office. As she unlocked her office door that seemingly unusual morning, she scanned her office for something out of the ordinary, which seemed nothing to strange. Until she sat down and opened her desk drawer to notice a cookie, wrapped in a blue polka dot foil. She noticed the content of the cookie, it was perfectly shaped, crusted on the edged, sprinkled fresh chocolate chip, as if it were just made an hour ago. One bite into and you could feel its warmth within you, a cookie that felt like a hug to your soul. A cookie that represented happiness in an ordinary setting. A cookie that showed her a new kind of emotion, that she hadn’t experienced in a while — a smile, a sake of happiness. But alas! She wondered who could have sent this cookie? And how did she/he get into her allotted cabin. Did someone else have a key? Did someone else care about her existence? In a company filled with robots, who could have a heart to visit the lonely island of Lucy Diamond?

She jolted out of the cabin with her half-eaten cookie in her hand, asking her colleagues if anybody had given her cookie. No one looked up from their desk or even sighed. Disappointed, she walked in, dropped the cookie in the trash can and moved on with her day. As the day brushed by, she gazed at the faded glass of her door if someone would drop by claiming the cookie or perhaps dropping a note about it. But, there was no such luck. She packed up, and dismissed it as part of a day.

Without giving it another thought about it the next day, Lucy combed her thick black hair into a high pony tail and made her way early to the Hampton tower. The subway ride, the walk to the tower, all seemed the same as each day. Until she opened her door to notice, on her table, another cookie wrapped in a yellow polka dots this time, and still in its delicious glory. To her surprise, this made her ecstatic yet curious, overwhelmed yet confused. How could one inanimate object give her so much joy? Was it the curiosity? Was it the anonymity? Or was it just its delectable crispiness? Oh! What a feeling it was.

As the days passed by, the stranger this sensation had become. The cookies showed up in mysterious places around her cabin and in exciting wrapping paper. Some days green polka dots, some days red, some days pink, some days blue. The mystery continued, Lucy kept on guessing on her way to work which colour would they be. Would it be blue? Would it be red? Not just that, the curious case of the cookies would turn up in the oddest of places, sometimes by the window sill, sometimes in her drawer, sometimes on the mantelpiece of bookshelf and even on the flower pot beside the desk! She loved the humour of it all and that air of excitement that was brought with it.

Until one day when she unlocked her cabin door, she found no cookie in any of the corners, but a bright yellow envelope on her desk. She opened the envelope to find a note that read:

Dearest Lucy,

Let no one tell you that your eyes don’t sparkle like the diamonds like your name. Let your beauty and grace never dull down with shame.

Be as delicious as these cookies may be, as the time shall not always concede.

Happy birthday, darling!

Truly,

Your anonymous cookie monster

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