The Inch

The stairs to the third floor had a handrail that was loose on the second-floor landing. Someone had wrapped it with duct tape that was itself coming loose. Amy took the stairs because the elevator hadn’t worked since March, and because the elevator before March had made a sound on the second floor that she’d rather not think about.

The office was eight desks in a room that used to be a conference room. Eight desks, six social workers, two empty. The empty ones had been empty since Amy started. Nobody talked about the empty ones. Mariam was on the phone. Gil was somewhere. Tomoko was at court. The radiator under the window made a sound like a pot of water getting close to boiling but not quite arriving.

Amy put her bag down. The bag was heavy. The zipper on the outside pocket had broken and the files shifted when she used the shoulder strap, so she carried it by the handles. Her right shoulder was higher than her left. She’d been told this.