Four of them at a table that is too big, and they have arranged themselves so no one sits at the head of it, which I think means they are afraid. I slid in under the door and lifted the corner of the papers nobody wants to be responsible for, and one of them slapped a coffee cup down on the pile like I was trying to steal it. I was. I already had.
They keep saying we and meaning you. I carried that word across the table three times and it landed different each time, heavier on the small one in the corner who has stopped talking and started drawing a house in the margin, walls and a door and a little chimney, the fixed things, the kept things I will never manage. One of them checks a rectangle under the table. One agrees to everything so the room will end sooner.
I lifted a strand of hair off the back of the tired one's neck and she shivered and blamed the air, blamed me, reached up and tucked the strand behind her ear where I couldn't reach it, holding even that. They hold everything. Deadlines, grudges, the exact number of times each has spoken.
The door opened and I took the whole afternoon out with me, the sighs and the burnt-coffee smell and one sentence, hers, the small one's, I've kind of already done most of it, said so quietly the others didn't turn. I did. I'm the only one who heard it, and I'm three streets gone already, letting it go over a parking lot where nobody's listening, because I never learned how to keep a thing, only how to take it somewhere it won't matter.