Scene 1

“Great!”
Anicka slammed the door of the mailbox, but of course it opened again. In no mood to be tolerant of the box’s sensibilities, she kicked it with her foot, hard. The thing had a mind of its own, though.“Bloody, bloody, stupid thing!” Anicka growled between her teeth. Holding the lid closed with her foot, turned the key viciously in the lock. Both of these items being extremely rusty, the key broke promptly in her fingers. She threw it on the floor and stomped on it repeatedly in an attempt to dislodge the gathering fury in her chest.
“Err… good morning.”
Anicka swung around to see her upstairs neighbour coming tentatively down towards her, one stair at a time, as if she was an explosive device. At the moment, she actually was one, she reflected. Trying to paint a feeble smile on her face, she greeted him with a nod and opened the outside door for him. He hastily made his way out. She sighed deeply.
“Great,” she said again. “Not only did I break the frigging mailbox, now everyone in the building is going to know I’m a psychopath. I guess bad news really never comes alone!”
Holding the letter out before her with a look of distaste, she climbed up to her place on the first floor. It was a shabby one-room flat, the bathroom shielded by a curtain (great for guests!) and her sleeping place hidden behind the wardrobe, which was normal-sized, but looked colossal in the confined space. The walls had been white in a previous life, but a former tenant had been a heavy smoker, tainting not only his his teeth but also his surroundings a squalid yellow. Bar the aesthetic aspect, the stench was also irremovable and infected the air with a constant whiff of bitterness.
Anicka threw herself down on the little settee and inhaled deeply before opening the letter. It was from the owner of this magnificent place, telling her that after four months of not paying the rent, her contract had come to an end. She was to move out in two weeks.

“TWO weeks?” she screamed at the page. “Bloody fucking hell! I’ll end up on the street!”
She looked around at her meagre possessions: a round table and four chairs, another table used as a desk whereupon her old laptop was charging, a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, a tiny fridge and lots and lots of books spread all over the floor in disorderly piles. And then there was the mostly empty wardrobe and the mattress she slept on. It was not much at all, but too much for herself to carry on public transport if she’d move. Not to mention the complete lack of funds to find a new place.
“The stupid owner should pay me to live here!” she grumbled.
She’d been unemployed for almost a year now, and her meagre savings had gone down the drain a long time ago. Recently the small aid she received had been retracted and she’d been living on scraps of occasional translating jobs, some volunteer work and compensated marketing enquiries (where she lied profusely, considering she couldn’t even afford to look at Marie Jo bra’s or Johnny Walker bottles, let alone buy them; she hoped it would confuse their consumerist calculations, at least).
“What the hell am I supposed to do now? Prostitute myself?”
Cursing herself once more for her choice of studies and her unwillingness to do anything “capitalist”, Anicka started pacing around the room. She could only call one person: her cousin Dmitri. But he had had enough of doing her favours and “lending” her money.
“This time is the last”, he had assured her last month when he had given her his lunch passes to buy food. “Find yourself a job, for God’s sake, working with your hands is not a shame.”
Sick and tired of explaining to him that it was not a question of shame, but of morals, she had nodded and promised she would find work.
“I did try,” she mumbled, sticking her hands in her pockets.
She had tried. Her hopes where just too high placed: she’d like to work for the UN, for Greenpeace, the Labour party, or for that matter any organisation that fought the way things were. The problem was that she hadn’t graduated and with zero experience in the field she was only qualified to do stupid desk jobs or volunteer work.
“I’m allowed to be demanding, damned, I want to change the world!”
Holding out on an ideal was something nobody past the age of twenty did these days. Twenty five and stubborn as a rock, Anicka would not give up on her beliefs. Granted, they had emerged too late for her to be able to work decently in that direction, but she would find something truly meaningful to do with her life, no matter how long it took.
Truth be told, she knew she was making herself suffer. She knew the chances of finding an open door where she needed one were slim, but she just couldn’t give in and settle. Near death did that to a person.
She picked up Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the top of a pile and thumbed idly through the pages without really seeing the lines.
“’To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”,” she quoted from memory. “Forsooth! I’ll just ‘take up arms against a sea of troubles’!”
Not by ending them, no. She would never blow her second chance. Throwing the book on the table, she breathed in deeply and shrugged her worn jersey coat on. She slung her bag over her shoulder and slammed the door behind her without a second thought.