The Long Table

The long building's doors stand open, and the sign over them says DEPOT. Inside, under a row of fluorescent tubes, a long table runs the length of the room. The stools along it are pushed in, all but one. The windows are going blue. At the far end a woman bends over a circuit board with a soldering iron, and a strip of tape on the iron's stand says GRACIELA.

The tubes buzz in E flat, she says, without looking up. I stopped hearing it years ago. Is that phone from the slope?

You put the phone on the table in front of her. She turns it over with the end of a screwdriver, the cracked back and the dead glass.

It gets one job, she says. Not two.