The Wall

Thursday Amy had a headache by ten. The kind that sat behind her left eye and waited. She drank water. It moved behind the right eye. She drank more.

The stairwell hit her on the first landing. Cleaning solution, something new, pine by way of a chemical plant. The second-floor landing had a puddle near the wall but not touching it, as if the wall had a spring. She stepped around it and kept going. Third floor. The carpet, the desks, the radiator doing its almost-boiling impression. Mariam was on the phone. Gil was at his desk for once, typing with two index fingers from directly above, his look doubting the keyboard was getting it down.

Amy had three things before two o’clock. A status call with a foster family in the Sunset. A CANS review she’d been putting off. And the stack of case notes from yesterday that needed to go into CWS/CMS before someone audited the backlog, which nobody had audited in six months, which meant it would happen any day now, but wouldn’t if she did. She left a note for Friday Amy to deal with it.