Next!” The voice droned from behind the dusty desk stacked with papers, some in neat piles and others in disarray. The young man was plain under his inconspicuous mustache that hid any emotion. He pushed his thick-rimmed black glasses back into place, closer to his brown eyes.

“Next!” His voice tolled out to the line of people waiting outside of the abandon warehouse’s storage room. “We don’t have all day,” his voice flat and unyielding to anything other than monotony.

An oversized woman in a brown oversized coat came around the corner and approached his desk. She spoke in a low tone, thickly glazed with a Russian accent.
“That’ll be $10.00 ma’am. Just sign here.”
He turned a pen towards her thick hand as she hunched over part of his desk, still contemplating if what she was about to do was right.

Once, long ago, she had been a young and successful dancer at the Bolshoi. It had been her ticket out of poverty, yet a one-way road into a life of control and neglect. Which one would have been better — the poverty or the neglect?
She was still unsure of as she hovered over the table, gripping the pen between her fingers, which still showed an air of delicacy to them. As she stood, her feet splayed out into first position. It had been part of the drills she went through in ballet, to master that one position before going onto the next. And though it seemed easy to stand with feet turned out, she still remembers her tiny feet kicked at and forcibly moved about by impatient hands. Oh, the impatient hands! always moving her little body about. She had shown so much promise, but it was never good enough. Not even when she had turned fifteen and was the lead ballerina. Her hands had been rapped on so often, that even as she still hunched over the table she could feel them rapping on her knuckles, and she dropped the pen.

Other people waiting in the long line were growing impatient. Only moments had passed, but her memories were flying as if she were ending her life. She wanted to see the memories and proclaim to herself she had made all the right decisions, that without them she would be worse off. But there was no way to know, unless she signed the paper.

The other people were eager. Some had made their decision and were unquestionably itching to hold that very pen, encased in her large fingers, smothering the time that each expectant customer had to wait. All while their own quiet memories played out in each of the waiting people. Some were old, some very young — just children, holding their mother’s hands. Was this pen meant for them? The old woman looked back over her shoulder after she had reestablished her grip.

The man behind the desk had all day. It didn’t bother him how long she took, he would always be there, day after day. Pushing his punch card into the slot to hear the familiar clank of time in, and clank of time out each day.
But the woman’s focus was behind her, and she was not moving slowly, it all was just moments — more moments that racked onto the pain of her life. Or had her life not been the pain she thought it to be? Had it been a good life? Could she miss it, when she could not remember it? She paid the fee and held the pen that was to erase everything. All she had to do was sign.

Sign the name she was given, the name that had been screamed to her for years, the name that had been whispered by the other children sympathetic to her at night. The name that had been dragged and tormented by others through the crevices of her life, that she rather just forget.

“Yes!” she said, as she straightened herself up, and looked kindly to the clerk behind the counter. Her feet turned forward, and she smiled for a moment to him. She was not seeing the man behind the counter but her father’s face. His sweet, joyful smile that made her so proud to be his daughter each month when he came to visit her at the orphanage. Without another thought her hand moved, scrolling across the dusted paper with thick black ink and highlighted sections that went unread. There her name ended it all.

“Thank you, NEXT!” the man in the checkered shirt and tan pants pushed his glasses closer to his brown eyes and forced a large stamp onto the paper in red ink.
“Next”. He drawled out, his voice echoed out to the people around the corner, lined down the warehouse, and down the street to a thick yellow line on the ground that read. STOP, line ends here.
Those who had missed lining up early enough, turned back, dejected at their opportunity to leave their old lives behind, to forget forever and start a new. Maybe tomorrow… they would tell themselves.

But for the ones that had made it into the line, all awaited his face. They talked of the man with the thick-rimmed glasses and longed to hold the coveted pen.
After the old woman in the oversized coat had turned and left, the line moved smoothly. The man with thick-rimmed glasses never left his swivel seat that creaked when he turned to get the next application. He never removed himself from behind the old metal desk, the color of the top unknown, covered with papers, but the front showed a worn pea green, left over from the 70s. Around him were stacks of papers and boxes, dusted over with the remains of all those who had come and stood before him. Those that had held the pen and then left with not a trace of their old life active within their memories or bodies.

Free, he often thought to himself. I am in the business of freedom, he often told himself, to justify his work and actions. As if to liberate himself from the haunting memories of all those faces who passed by him, never to remember their old lives. And he wondered, would he as well one day come to the yellow line that said, STOP, line ends here.
Would he stand before the one that would take his job and wear the thick-rimmed glasses, checkered shirt and tan polyester pants that were always a little too short, and hold the heavy pen in his hand while looking over the papers with highlighted sections and thick black ink? Would he look down to see the red stamp?
COMPLETED
Would he be happier as he turned to leave and live a life free from checkered shirts and glasses?