The Department of Last Chances
A civil servant discovers that the city has been quietly filing away everybody’s final opportunities.
WHY IS THIS IN THE FILE?
Nobody took responsibility quickly enough.
The Department of Last Chances occupied the third floor of a building whose first two floors had been condemned.
Marla had worked there eleven years before she understood what they actually did.
Officially, her unit processed Form LC-14, Request for Reconsideration of Missed Opportunity. Most applicants believed this meant parking tickets, expired coupons, late registrations, jobs they had forgotten to apply for. Marla believed this too.
Then one Tuesday a file arrived without a barcode.
SUBJECT: RIVERA, THOMAS. LAST CHANCE: Call brother before brother stops answering.
There was no box to check.
Marla carried the file to her supervisor, Mr. Beech, who was eating cottage cheese directly from the container.
“This isn’t ours,” she said.
He looked at the folder and then at her with the exhausted kindness of a man whose worst prediction had finally become somebody else’s problem.
“They’re all ours,” he said.
He unlocked the records room.
Inside were thirty-seven years of last chances in gray municipal cabinets: apologize before she remarries; leave before the river rises; ask the doctor the second question; keep the dog; do not sell the trumpet; turn around at the airport; tell the boy he was right.
“What happens to them?” Marla asked.
“Mostly nothing.”
“Then why keep them?”
Mr. Beech shrugged. “Cities keep everything.”
At five, Marla found a folder waiting on her own desk.
It had no barcode.
She did not open it.
She took it home in her coat.
For three days it sat on the kitchen table beneath grocery flyers and a bowl containing one soft pear. On the fourth day she carried it to work unopened.
Mr. Beech had already retired.
No one had told her.
His office was empty except for the cottage-cheese spoon.
Marla went downstairs, crossed the street, and called her daughter.
Her daughter answered on the sixth ring.
“Hi,” Marla said.
There was a long pause.
“Hi,” her daughter said.
Marla stood on the sidewalk with the unopened file under her arm while behind her, three floors up, the Department continued quietly receiving the mail.
Edie Brake
Fiction writer specializing in institutions, obsolete jobs, unreliable appliances, failed procedures, and people who take the wrong thing seriously.
STATUS: UNRULY
“Normal” was considered and rejected.
KNOWN ASSOCIATES: readers, loiterers, people who should know better.
PUSH THE WEIRD BUTTON
A clerk has been notified. They are furious.