The Office
A Short Story
Excerpt A
Lydia sat, and she looked out at the parking lot and at the wind playing with the trash and dust and at the flickering sign that had stopped turning long ago.
But she did not relax.
She was afraid that if she relaxed, if she slackened her grip even just a little, she might just slip beneath the surface of her life and drown, never to be heard from again and never to be missed by a soul. She did not relax because she could not let go of the thing that kept her afloat, which was simply the hope that life would get better; that one day the world would spin out of the shadows and into a new orbit where all the rules changed and everything worked differently. Where people were kind and appreciative and where children did not die in the womb and where men did not cat around and beat you and leave when they got bored, and where parents lived forever and they would take you back so you could start all over from the beginning. Lydia could not afford to loosen her grip on the hope that a new day would be coming around on the big wheel, maybe tomorrow, or if not tomorrow, then maybe the day after tomorrow, and that the new day would hold something entirely different for her than all of her other days that stretched end-to-end, back, back, back, back into the cracked and peeling sepia horizon of her own memory.
The new day did not have to hold something brilliant or magical or miraculous. That would be marvelous. It would. But that was not the particular hope to which Lydia Watson clung. She was long past that. The hope was only this: that a new day would come and offer within its wide spread arms something different. That was all. Something different. Because as long as the new day came and offered something different, that would get her by; that would be proof enough, at least for the time being, that the world was still spinning and that time had not stopped and that change was possible. Possible. That was not so much to ask. Possible. That at least would get her to the next day. Something different. Something. Anything.