🏆 LONGLIST - OPEN NOVELLA CONTEST 2022
Vincent Pareja longs for the day when his family won't worry about money and his siblings can go to school without skipping a meal. With his choices limited and with the wage, however small, promises to help h...
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Yellowing sheets of paper crunched and crinkled as I skimmed through them from among a stack reaching my chest atop my desk. The back of my legs throbbed from standing too long but my eyes ran through lines of text highlighted by either me or Garcia from our countless months of working in the office.
After I got back from Melchor's idea of fun, I couldn't let go of the notion that there might be some answers I was missing lying around here in the very office I worked in. It's a records room. Of course, the answer's going to be here.
"Here you go, boss," Garcia grunted as he dropped another stack of bound files next to the one I was perusing. Scattered on the floor were boxes after boxes whose upper flaps were torn open, exposing their white innards. "Files from '76."
Garcia slapped the topmost sheaf and inclined his head at me. "Why are you suddenly interested in them?"
"Huh?" I looked up from the file about the inventory of rifles and ammunition assigned to each soldier to lock gazes with the Lieutenant. "Oh," I scratched my chin. "Nothing, really. Just curious."
Garcia, who knew better than to talk to me while my head was elsewhere, rolled his shoulders and stalked back to his desk. His office chair creaked when he sank into it. He gave a long sigh of relief as he stretched. "Well, if you need me, give me a holler," he nestled his twined hands atop his stomach which was beginning to bulge. "I'll be here...catching on sleep."
Within seconds, light peals of snoring joined the chorus of birds twittering from the trees outside the open windows and the exhausted hum of the air-conditioning unit which needed a whole lot of cleaning or possibly replacing. I cleared my throat and continued shuffling through the papers, bringing one bind after the other to space on the floor beside my feet.
I needed to be careful on where I stacked them because, at the end of the day, I was going to be the one who would put these away and I didn't want to burden the interns and even Garcia to sort them back to their original boxes and such.
The dim light from the setting sun made the typewritten words on the thinning papers look even more faded. Squinting hurt the back of my head and leaning forward hurt my back. Ah, I wouldn't know how to get through this mountain without going blind. Suddenly, I developed some type of respect for the investigators who have this as one of their jobs.
When the words were beginning to merge with each other, it's time for a quick break. Thankfully, inventory wasn't going to happen for another week or so, so I have a little bit of free time on my hands before another month of records drops on us to validate. I sank in my chair, the muscles in my legs breathing in relief. I blinked my eyes and rubbed them with my fingers, resting my head against the backrest of my chair. The single incandescent light in the middle of the ceiling had never looked so bright.
Garcia muttered something from his stupor, his garbled words whistling out of his mouth before being eaten by the outside noise. I stared with baleful eyes at the stack of papers towering over me. It's been three hours and I haven't found anything useful. I lost count of the number of bound sheafs I skipped because the title wasn't the one I was concerned about. Still, I couldn't erase the small feeling in my gut that maybe inside those sheafs lay the answers to my problems.
