Helen Phillips - The Beautiful Bureaucrat

All the caged bulbs turned on at once, shocking her brain with light. She had to shut her eyes. A cell twitched, split. A handful of birds or bats swooshed upward in the darkness behind her lids. Something disappeared into the underbrush. Forests’ worth of paper. The smell of trillions of sheets of paper, the smell of worms digesting paper, excreting paper.

She dared to open her eyes. The space vaster than her imagination. The metal shelves endless in the light, their relentless geometry expanding upward and outward, vanishing into radiance. Files, forever. Lives and deaths rustling and shuffling and fluttering alongside hers. The outrageous heat of her blood. His hand. Any minute now they would step forward in the brilliance toward the exit sign, past the file of the worm. The file of the dog. The file of the rat. The file of the swan. The file of the turtle. The file of the cockroach. The file of our child, our child. And your file too.

HELEN PHILLIPS’S first collection, And Yet They Were Happy , was named a notable collection of 2011 by The Story Prize. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, and The Iowa Review Nonfiction Award, among others. Her work has been featured on PRI’s Selected Shorts and appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature, Slice, BOMB, Fairy Tale Review , and PEN America . She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. You can sign up for email updates here.