The Unlikable Ones

By Zoe Cannon

This December, Bex has a new job working for a charity that distributes Christmas gifts to needy children. It doesn't pay well, but it makes her feel good inside. Or it would, if not for her coworker Deirdre.

 

Deirdre has never had a kind word for Bex since she arrived. She threw away the festive decorations Bex bought with her own paycheck. Worst of all, she stopped Bex from giving a little extra help to a family that needed it.

 

Why is someone that bitter working at a Christmas charity, of all places? And how can Bex stop her from ruining Christmas for everyone else?

 

One man might know. And if he's right, Deirdre might not be ruining Christmas at all. In her own way, she just might be making the world a better place.

 

This short story is 7500 words long. It is also available in Santa's Rejects, a collection of offbeat Christmas stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zoe Cannon
• Release date: Nov 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223934646

Book preview

The Unlikable Ones

Zoe Cannon

© 2023 Zoe Cannon

http://www.zoecannon.com

All rights reserved

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

The Unlikable Ones

Bex smiled as she tilted back and forth on her wobbly desk chair. It needed replacing—had probably needed replacing ten years ago—but that would never happen. Still, she would rather have this than the fancy ergonomic chair she would have been using in the kind of job her parents had expected her to get, something that involved copying numbers from one spreadsheet to another.

She wouldn’t have needed a sweater, either, because the heating system in her high-rise office would have worked all the time instead of approximately half, and the window would have locked properly. She hadn’t told her parents about the unreliable heat. Her brief description of the job had horrified them enough without her needing to go into detail. Instead, she had gone out and bought a collection of sweaters—a small collection, taking the size of her new salary into account, but still enough to have one for every day of the week. It had been good timing, because the Christmas sweaters had just come out. Today’s choice had a fuzzy snowman on the front, so soft and puffy she kept reaching down to touch it.

The door behind the desk creaked open, and Deirdre stalked out. She gave Bex a once-over, her eyes lingering on the sweater, and gave the snowman a sour glare. Bex didn’t see how Deirdre had any room to judge. She was wearing the ugliest plaid suit Bex had ever seen. Bex sometimes thought Deirdre chose her clothes with the sole purpose of looking as dull and humorless as possible. Not to mention unfashionable. Not that Bex was a fashion plate herself, sitting here in her snowman sweater, but at least she had a sense of humor about it.

Deirdre turned her glare on Bex. Do you need to have that thing running? She demanded.

For a second, Bex had no idea what she was talking about. Then she followed the jab of Deirdre’s pointer finger to the air freshener plugged into the outlet across the room. When she had gone to