Free The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips

straw?
    In order to make her task somewhat less unbearable, she imagined the people represented by the files, pictured them in various states of animation—a pair of eyes squinting, a hand selecting fruit in a grocery store, a body passing through a doorway. She entertained herself with the fantasy of meeting them—at, say, a bar with wooden walls, tin ceilings, bottles of glowing bronze liquids. She envisioned them rising up from behind the bars of the Database, stepping into her life, shaking her hand, ordering their drinks of choice, getting a little tipsy, slinging their arms over her shoulders, bestowing damp kisses upon her forehead, thanking her for her service.
    Yet that fantasy could only last so long; eventually, exhausted, she gave in to the relentlessness of typing 09272013 fifty-six times, didn’t even search for coincidences, let the letters be nothing more than letters, the numbers nothing more than numbers. FASAD/FADIL/MURR  … FISHBEIN/SAMUEL/BLAKE  … HOLGATE/CATHERINE/JOAN  … KAPLOWITZ/MICHAEL/EPHRON  … LAZAN-VINCENT/PAULINA/RENEE  … MCGOWAIN/THERESE/RAINE  … MCMURPHY/SHANNON/SIOBHAN  … MURCER/JONATHAN/KEITH  … PANIAGUA/YASMIN/JADE  … PRINCE/JOSHUA/DAVID  … SCANDURA/DAVID/SCOTT  … SCHMIDT/DIANE/HOPE  … SHAFIQ/IMRAN/SEAN  … SMITH/LYNETTE/ARLENE  … TOUSSAINT/PAOLO/IVES  … TROILER/JENNIFER/BROWN  … YAU/TZER/SUNG  … ZILBERMAN/EZRA/TODD  …

THIRTEEN
    On Sunday morning her eyes were still bloodshot, stained from the week. Her stomach awoke her, angry with emptiness. It was easier now than it used to be to disentangle herself from the heat of his sleep, abandon him in the bed. All these years she’d disliked that moment each morning when he or she first got out of bed, leaving the other; today she almost relished it, separating her body from his.
    Lick our.
    Lick or rich.
    It was licorice she wanted, licorice she needed: licorice black enough to turn her insides green.
    Not even the dirty bar of blue soap in the bathroom or the baby cockroach meandering down the counter could dull her desire. She brushed her teeth, drank a glass of water, noticed a stain on the low ceiling.
    She used to always leave a note, but not anymore. “041-74-3400?” she whispered into the bedroom as she buttoned her sweater.
    Outside, the gray light flattened everything to gray.
    A pair of rats zigzagged across the subway tracks. They looked scared, searching for something down there. They made her tired. He was moved by subway rats. “They’re cute,” he had countered in their early days here, when she complained about the vermin in the subway, the savagery of this city.
    Save age.
    Savant airy.
    “Hello?” she muttered.
    Eel ho.
    The train appeared, pressing a stagnant wind before it, arriving with a series of weary shrieks.
    *   *   *
    The candy store was closed. It was 7:43 a.m. on a Sunday morning. The store would open in three hours and seventeen minutes. Some of your aspirations are unrealistic . She stood before the window, ravenous. There was an enormous glass jar of black licorice on display. She looked at herself in the jar until she felt as though the licorice were part of her face. Her skin buzzed.
    Eventually she broke her own stare, returned to the world of the sidewalk, the very occasional pedestrians, a man in a gray sweatshirt passing behind her.
    Back on the subway train, an elegant beggar—long white hair, loose dusty suit—listed foods as he limped down the car. “Egg sandwich. Spaghetti. Falafel.” He held out a paper cup and shook it to the rhythm of his words. A string of snot stretched downward from his nose onto his shirt, gracefully holding its slim shape for six inches or more. “Cheddar cheese. Tacos. Toast with grape jam. A chocolate milk shake.”
    He repulsed her, made her hungrier than ever, and she turned, looked out the window into the darkness. The walls of the subway tunnel glistened with some kind of moisture.
    “Skittles!