Saffron

What Saffron missed most about smoking was having a reason to compel her to take smoke breaks. So she started feeding the birds. Whenever things at the agency verged on overwhelming her, she'd decide that the birds had to be hungry and dip outside with a bag of chips or whatever other avian edible was at hand. At first, she'd end up on a bench eating this item herself, as the alley behind her building was long and largely featureless, and few birds seemed naturally attracted to any one part of it. But after a while, the little wingers gradually began to catch on. Two or three of them would hang out on the ledges overhead and flutter downward when she appeared outside. By the time their number had reached a dozen, she felt extremely justified in taking her break 2 or 3 times per day. By this point she barely thought of smoking, and even felt slightly more resilient when facing her usual occupational chaos. And then, one of the birds brought her something, clamped in its little beak. It stepped right past the copious crumbs its fellows were gobbling up, directly toward her, and dropped a black ring in front of her, around a foot from where she stood. She was confused, and not only because it made no sound at all when it hit the pavement. Still, she bent to pick it up, and with no further thought, automatically slipped it on a finger. Then, as she straightened up again, it was as if her consciousness became disjointed from the natural flow of time. She was not taking a single break to feed the birds, she was simultaneously taking every break she had ever taken, several thousand strips of film all projected at the same screen, and the screen was her senses. It was overwhelming, yet also empowering. She recognized now that her entire time at the agency had been one long break, and now that break was ending. She would need to get to work.