Standing In Line

Kathryn Stiles smoothed a crease in the skirt of her pinstriped yellow-white dress before reaching to open the cold metal handle of the glass door. The room housed a stale air that had been exquisitely tempered with long days of paperwork and the silent drone of municipality. Three long lines of people stood waiting at the forefront of plastic Walmart tables. For a few seconds, she gently rocked back and forth in her flats and felt the pressure shift from the balls of her feet to her heels as she scanned the options ahead of her. The line to her left had a large, balding man with a creamsicle colored shirt. In the middle, was a scrawny man in a faded green short sleeve office t-shirt tucked into weathered dirty-white pants and a cracked faux leather black belt. And to the right stood a middle-aged woman that reminded her of her high school librarian. She had short, auburn, bouncy hair with square, black glasses that gave off a caring, motherly vibe and had french tips that made her look put together as she fumbled with the Shoprite coupons in her hand. Kathryn walked to the middle, standing a little farther than she had to from the frail man, and smiled warmly at the lady to the right who responded with a kindly nod. 

Up ahead, the three people sitting at the table greeted everyone in line one by one, repeating directions that they had been giving all day to the point that the words started to simply roll off their tongue. “Thank you for voting,” they said, peeling off a sticker. And each would gently force a smile onto their tired face because they truly were thankful. And every time they smiled, they would feel a warm, tingling sensation that reminded them why they were there in the first place. 

Kathryn was pleased with her decision to join the middle line. It was moving much faster than the other two. In the place of the motherly librarian now stood a tall teenager with a few layers of baby fat on his face before he became a full adult. The creamsicle man had been substituted by a kindly looking school teacher. She predicted that the boy next to her would grow into a similar figure within the next ten years. The schoolteacher had soft, brown eyes that matched his messy, side swept brown hair, and the faint stubble on his cheeks. She noticed herself staring for too long and redirected her eyes to the carpet. It was beaten down by years of people squishing their squeaky soles all over it and scraping off dirt from outside until it was reduced to invisible particles that settled in with the fiber. Patches of netted white faintly showed the spots people spent too much time standing on. 

Suddenly, the melancholy of the room was disturbed. Outside, a sky blue AMC Gremlin was pulling up into the parking lot. It squealed like a banshee as it roughly jerked forward and backward to fit in between the lines of a parking space. Everyone looked outside the glass window, even the people at the table got distracted for a second, to see where the noise was coming from. Some turned slightly to their side to get a peek while others made their intentions clear and faced their bodies fully towards the window pane without shame to watch a tragic parking job. Kathryn, who was a member of the first group, airily thought to herself, “Fix your serpentine belt and you should be fine.” Her body attuned to the shuffling of feet and faced the line again. She silently tapped her finger on the thigh to the jangling of the car owner’s key. He took his place in the left line, as expected. “Wait a minute,” she thought to herself, “how did I know what line he was gonna choose?” She slowly turned her head, scanning the room: random plant, glass doors, creamsicle man, gray pillar, glass doors, tall kid. “Oh my god,” she thought to herself, “I’ve been here before. I’ve lived this before.” It felt like a scene in a movie and she was an audience member that was living it. She gave herself a moment to take in the distance she felt from her environment.

An old man next to her dropped some change-- two quarters, a nickel, and a penny. “Oh, silly me,” he remarked. The young man from before swooped down to collect the coins for him. “Thank you, son,” he patted his hand and the boy awkwardly smiled. Kathryn nodded to herself, “Yes, this makes sense.” She looked ahead and did not realize that she was now only two people away from the front. 

“Next,” called out the high schooler with a septum piercing sitting at the table. The person in the line to Kathryn’s right walked up. She felt a light sensation in her chest and let herself smile a dopey smile. She felt her body get lighter as she watched their interaction. The teenager handed the man a sticker, the man thanked her, he walked to a booth. “Oh yeah,” she said aloud in her mind, “I remember this part.”

Moments later, she found herself at the table being spoken to by a man with a white walrus mustache and a fishing hat. She nodded along at the right moments and looked into his eyes to show that she was paying attention but all she could think was, “I don’t even remember how I got here.” When he handed her the sticker, she felt her eyes widen and was amazed to see that her arm had taken it and was already patting it onto the torso of her dress. Kathryn stared at her hands with a newfound fascination and curled them in and out of fists in amusement. As she floated to her booth, she heard the old man call out to her, “Hats off to ya!” She chuckled, reminding herself that he always does that. The curtain of her booth had two little tears in it. She let out a little laugh, “Yes, of course,” muttering out loud. In the booth, she tightly held the pen in her hands and tested out a few scribbles on the paper and suddenly shook her head and herself out of the daze. She felt goosebumps on her arm from the draft above. Kathryn looked around the dark booth and turned around to see the curtain with two little holes in it. “What the hell just happened?”