Office vignette by Annie Bowles

Office vignette, 2025

by Annie Bowles

“I sneak my writing in during lulls in work, on the train, late at night and early morning. I take inspiration from my environment and experiences—carpet fibres, a coffee stain, the whirring of an electric fan.”

Annie Bowles is an English writer from Bristol based in Glasgow. She currently works in TV but would rather write novels and vignettes than pitches. She likes to write about bodies, the pastoral, colours, shapes, textures, mundanity, isolation, birds and islands. She holds a Creative Writing MLitt from the University of Glasgow.

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Eyes cracked dry by the stark fluorescent lighting of my office block, I cast them dazed out of the window. Fourteen floors up, the skyline of the city is mine to behold. The day is measured by the shifting topography of cloud - stripes over scape, strips of colour like geological rock measuring time / space / change / transference. Brooding cotton bruises fatten and swell, curling around gothic spires and tower blocks. Then, a chink of sun shines through - suddenly, a Renaissance painting. Butter rich yellow and soft pinks palette on blue-grey like a bird’s wing magnified. The clear sky between concrete earth and slate pretends it is the sea in the distance, just around the bend in the horizon, you crane your neck to peer at it. Cry if you see it first. The sea! I see the sea! The demolition below shrieks, crashes like a child batting its fat fist in a car seat, air freshener sickeningly sweet colluding with the jagged motorway and bad driving elicits nausea. The overconsumption of caffeine in a work day spent sat down facing blank blue light screen and ugly whitewashed walls - oddly tinted yellow like the bile rumbling inside you - repeating the throat-surge in other times, other places. You look again and the cranes red eyes wink at you. Sky dims, sucked into shadow-black by the western edge. One by one, the city lights blink on.