Forty Words on Parking Permits
The assignment was forty words on parking permits. Olivia’s editor had said it twice, once on the phone and once in an email, in the voice of a man who had been sending junior reporters to the Marlow town council for eleven years.
The meeting was held in the room above the library, under a ceiling of square tiles that she counted twice — sixty-three, then sixty-four, because one of them was pushed up at the corner. Seven council members sat at a folding table. Four members of the public sat behind her. The permit discussion took fifty minutes and involved a map.
She read the handout out of pure boredom, all the way to the back, where the general budget figures were printed in a table so small she had to hold it up to the window. Waste collection, last year: forty-one thousand dollars. Waste collection, this year: ninety-six thousand. Same two trucks. Same town. A note underneath said only: including additional services.
When the chair asked whether the public had any questions, Olivia asked what the additional services were.
The room did something she had never seen a room do. Nobody looked at her. Seven people looked at seven different points on the wall, and the silence lasted long enough for her to hear a bus outside change gear.
“That’s not on tonight’s agenda,” the chair said.
A man at the end of the table added that the figure involved several departments and that individual lines weren’t really meaningful on their own. Olivia wrote that down word for word, which seemed to bother him more than the question had.
Afterward, in the corridor, the clerk asked for the handout back. All of them, actually, from everyone — it was an early draft, printed by mistake, and a corrected version would go on the website next week. He held out his hand and smiled the whole time he was saying it.
Olivia gave it to him.
In the parking lot she sat with the engine off and opened the photos on her phone. Sixty minutes of boredom, and she had photographed every page of it, front and back, the way she’d been taught in her first week.
She filed her forty words on parking permits that night. Then she opened a second file.