Free The Empty Room by Lauren B. Davis

that now? Derek the security guard stood with his thumbs tucked into his belt. Executioner. Pitiless. Unreachable.
    “Ms. Kerrigan?” Minot was back. “You can come through now.”
    Colleen refused to turn and look at Moore before leaving. Followed by Minot and Derek-the-Executioner, she walked stiff-legged and jerky, the trembles in her gut making any effort at grace impossible. She made her way to the office that was no longer her office. Sylvia wasn’t there and Colleen supposed Minot had arranged that to prevent a scene. Colleen thought now she might well want to make a scene. It would be lovely to finally tell Sylvia what she thought of those boots, and those ridiculous turquoise glasses.
    Two cloth shopping bags lay on her desk.
    “You can put your things in there,” said Minot.
    At least we’re being eco-friendly, thought Colleen, if not people-friendly.
    There was surprisingly little to take. A small carved turtle one of the First Nations students had given her last Christmas, a framed photo of a winter landscape with late-afternoon light slanting through the trees that Colleen had clipped from a magazine because it looked so peaceful, a little leather notebook in which she had meant to write down her thoughts, two paperbacks, one of Celtic fairy tales, the other called New Paths Toward the Sacred, an old address book, a pretty fountain pen she’d bought herself and a glass paperweight in the shape of a star. On the bulletin board above her computer was an old Bloom County cartoon in which three little boys and a penguincontemplated the vastness of the universe and their place in it. One boy held up his thumb and index finger, measuring a minuscule space, and said, “That’s the portion of the night sky at which they pointed the Hubble telescope for a week, the equivalent of a single grain of sand, and inside they found galaxies, thousands of galaxies with billions and trillions of stars and more beyond that.” “And so what,” one of the other boys asked, “is the centre of it all?” “Me,” said one boy, and “Me,” said the other.
    Colleen left it where it was.
    “Do you have everything?” asked Minot. She held out Colleen’s red coat.
    “I have a mug in the kitchen. I want that.” She grabbed the coat and put it on, and was about to leave the office when Derek stepped in front of her. “Really?” she said.
    Minot shrugged. “What does it look like? I’ll get it.”
    The mug had a saying on it: Peace is not the absence of chaos or conflict, but rather finding yourself in the midst of that chaos and remaining calm in your heart . “Never mind,” Colleen said.
    She opened the bottom drawer of her desk to get her purse. The bottles of vodka were gone.
    “It’s no bother,” said Minot. “Which one is it?”
    Colleen picked up the shopping bag. “Get out of my way,” she said to Derek.
    He moved aside and she walked down the hall, her purse on her shoulder and the depressingly light shopping bag dangling at the end of her arm. Derek walked behind her. People she knew—Annfrom the Registrar’s Office, Brian and Eric from Political Science—passed her, smiled tightly and looked first confused, and then—with telling swiftness—embarrassed.
    Did everyone know? Colleen thought how pleasant it would be to stroke out right there and then. One could never summon an aneurysm when one needed it.
    Harpreet, the handsome, turbaned Sikh from the Department of Statistics, looked up from the papers he carried and said, “What’s up, Colleen?”
    “Not a great day,” she said, and kept walking.
    He looked about to say something else and then, glancing at Derek, stood with his mouth slightly agape and let her pass, as though she were a criminal being perp-walked into court.
    In the elevator three students, two girls and a boy, disregarded Colleen and Derek, focused as they were on texting, their thumbs flying furiously over the tiny keyboards, their ears plugged with headphones. What did it