Age 10.
A classroom.
Fourth period.
Moral Education.
The teacher opened her textbook.
“Today, we’re going to read The Ant and the Grasshopper.”
A few students said,
“I know this one.”
The teacher smiled.
“Some of you may know it. But some of you may not.”
She looked around the classroom.
“The ant worked every day. It carried food to prepare for winter. The grasshopper sang songs and spent its days playing. Eventually, winter arrived. The ant had food. The grasshopper had nothing.”
The teacher turned to the blackboard.
She wrote:
The Ant and the Grasshopper
“What do you think this story is trying to tell us?”
Hands went up.
“To work hard.”
“To prepare for the future.”
“If you only play, you’ll regret it later.”
The teacher nodded.
From the back of the classroom, a girl raised her hand.
“But…”
The room became quiet.
“Was the ant… happy, working all the time?”
A few students laughed.
The teacher smiled too.
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
The bell rang.
Chairs scraped across the floor.
Textbooks closed.
Fourth period was over.
Thirty years later.
She was forty.
One year after leaving prison, she started working at a small local company.
Every morning, she cleaned the office.
Answered the phones.
Ate lunch.
Went home.
Another woman around her age worked at the company.
At lunch, they always sat across from each other.
“It’s been twenty-five years.”
The coworker smiled.
“At this company?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a long time.”
The coworker looked out the window.
“Before I knew it.”
She smiled.
“Every day is the same. I wake up, come to work, go home, and sleep.”
“Nothing changes.”
Night.
Her apartment.
She opened the window.
The wind came in.
Six in the morning.
Roll call.
Work.
Noon.
Work.
Lights out.
Six in the morning.
Roll call.
Work.
Noon.
Work.
Lights out.
The same days repeated thousands of times.
Twenty years old.
Night.
A friend crying.
“I need someone to listen.”
Someone said,
“Let’s talk once.”
She no longer remembered the exact order of what happened that night.
Streetlights.
Laughter.
Sirens.
Court.
A verdict.
In prison, she read books.
Hundreds of them.
Every night, she borrowed the lives of people whose names she never knew.
Several years later.
A supermarket.
She ran into her coworker.
“Long time no see.”
“How have you been?”
“Good.”
The coworker laughed.
In the basket:
Milk.
Bread.
Meat marked down with discount stickers.
At the register, the coworker opened her wallet.
While searching for her point card, a photograph slipped onto the floor.
She picked it up.
A boy in a school uniform was smiling in the picture.
The coworker smiled, slightly embarrassed.
“My son. He’s already in high school.”
She tucked the photograph back into her wallet.
“He’s been going through a rebellious phase lately.”
She looked down for a moment.
The register beeped.
The coworker took her bag.
“See you.”
“Again sometime.”
The coworker pushed her bicycle outside.
She walked toward the parking lot.
She got into her car.
The door closed quietly.
Her phone vibrated.
She looked at the screen.
“Was this the bag you wanted?”
Outside the supermarket, the coworker waited at the traffic light.
It turned green.
The coworker slowly started riding her bicycle.
The shopping bag in the front basket swayed.
The engine started.
The coworker’s figure appeared in the rearview mirror.
In the mirror, she gradually became smaller.
She remembered Fourth period.