Crossed Over
By Alice Seltzer
I am writing this from our boss’ narrow reception room, which is ours really, Stacey’s and mine, it is our domain. Overall, maybe it’s not much to speak of, but for these early hours it becomes wonderful. Sun charges in the three-pane window and feeds three golden crops on the linoleum counter, three brightly claimed rectangles on an acquisitive lord’s estate map. The dust particles rising back up through the golden shafts must be the returning souls of his fiefdom’s dead. Below the counter, where our clients cannot see, is a little Bosch hell, with shadowy characters engaged in dubious, persistent complexity: a feathering of sticky notes, a wicked onrush of paperclips, and a snarl of rubber bands.
I move in my chair and the sun fuzzes over my eyelashes and offers to deliver me out to a pale vector between white linoleum and soft metallic sky. I am just at the cusp of a very early memory, just the way my eyelids are being warmed - but no, I can’t quite fit back into it. I lean back to watch the buildings across the street, the slow show as the cold morning shadows melt off their brick fronts in infinitesimal portions. By this afternoon, this chilled huddle will lift their clay faces in a stately sunbath.
The side door hits the rubber mat with a scrunch and I sit right up. Stacey is back from break. “Should I close this?” She reaches for the blind. The glare of the window embeds her in its furious brilliance until she is almost lost, like the squeezed button of a fat cushion. “No, I guess it’s nice,” she relents. As she nears our desk, the unrestrained light becomes hysterically attentive to her surface, springing through her arm hair and glowing over her cheek fluff, and glittering in the sparse, tiny bristles on her neck.
Eventually, as we sit there, the shadows on the brick will fan back out again, until passersby will see clearly into our window, and we will see only our own reflections. We know that in the long transit of these evening hours, we are exposed to the night we cannot see.
THE END
Author Bio: Alice Seltzer is a research administrator who lives in Northeastern Pennsylvania. She has a master's in English from George Washington University. She and her wife expect their first baby in July.