A Horrible Report It rests on her desk like a miniature bomb. Just paper. Only information. Just numbers that between pages she can't bring herself to open contain somehow her whole future.
Weeks have come the terrible report. She had a sense it was approaching. Felt it coming like weather, like sickness, like all unavoidable horrible events that give you time to panic but not enough time to prevent.
Performance evaluation; biopsy; financial audit; medical findings; doesn't matter which, the anxiety is pervasive. It's Schrödinger's calamity: You're concurrently good and ruined until you glance. Opening it destroys the chance into one truth, and what if that truth is the wrong one?
Thus it sits. Not opened. She passes it seventeenth times a day. makes coffee. Checks email. Like it's a black hole she has to orbit cautiously, reorganizes her desk around it. Her husband wonders if she's searched yet. She yells at him. Seeing brings it true.
