Forty Minutes in the Waiting Line, Two Hours Gone

Government offices run on numbered tickets and grim patience, and I had settled into both. My ticket said B247. The screen said B203. I found a seat in the long municipal hall, under the strip lights, among the other resigned souls, and I waited, and I watched the numbers climb the way you watch paint, and it took, by my honest reckoning and the growing ache in my back, about forty minutes to crawl from 203 to my 247.

The screen pinged B247. Desk 4. I got up, walked the length of the hall — and the hall was empty. The seats I'd been sitting among were empty. The desks were dark, unstaffed, the shutters half down. The clock over the desks said twenty past five. The office closes at three.

A security guard was doing a slow loop with a torch, and he startled when he saw me, actually stepped back. He wanted to know how I'd got in, because the doors had been locked since three, and he'd been in this hall, on and off, the whole afternoon, and it had been empty since the last clerk left, and no, there had been no queue, no numbered tickets, no crowd of the resigned, no me, until I appeared walking toward desk 4 at twenty past five as if summoned by a screen that had been switched off two hours before.