Ezra Azra--She

She.
By Ezra Azra.
Copyright 2025.
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She was hurrying along to her workplace. There were dozens of pedestrians on the road. The earth tremors had nothing to do with her hastening along.

This part of the country had always been, from the beginning, earth-tremor territory. Catastrophic earthquakes were rare; once every few decades. By that schedule, a real quake of disastrous dimensions was due at any present moment, even if, probably nobody on that street was thinking about it.

Perhaps, it was the mind-numbing consequence of the incessant mild tremors that had made it usual and normal for pedestrian citizens to not think pointedly about an imminent quake.

Only pedestrians were allowed because the roads were built for pedestrians only. Wheeled traffic could not get far on account of the continual earth tremors causing continual earth crumblings everywhere, randomly.

Her main reason for hastening along was the excitement of that day’s annual presentation of awards to the seven office workers by the Firm’s Office Manager.

She was one of the office staff who would be receiving a surprise award. This was not the only annual award presented to workers, but it was the most prestigious.

Throughout the year there were many minor awards. It was the Firm’s way of helping workers cope with the ever-felt psychological depression stoked by the almost hypnotically repetitive Earth tremors.

She was extra excited about her award. She was sure she had correctly interpreted the Manager’s silent looks at her.

Some official in another City had made a slip. They must have thought they were writing to the Manager in code. Why else would they have mentioned information that would be so upsetting to the workers?

One of her minor regular duties was to open the Manager’s mail with a metal opener and place all the items on a tray on his desk for him to read, at his official office leisure. Although she was neither expected nor required to read the Manager’s daily office mail, it was accepted by both of them that it was unavoidable that she would cursorily glance at sentences, here and there.

She would not have suspected anything, had the Manager, reading one of his letters she had opened for him, not quickly and nervously half-glanced up at her from his reading, and swiftly glanced away, blushing in embarrassment. Had she known beforehand what the sentence was, she was certain she would have steeled herself beforehand to react nonchalantly in the event of the Manager betraying in his glance his insecurity with her having read the sentence.

As it turned out, she was caught unsteeled, and so reacted in a manner that must have indicated to the Manager that his embarrassed insecurity had been noted.

On that day, the Manager had gone home earlier than he usually did; the first time he had, ever.

At the end of her workday every day, her final duty was to file away in the office cabinet the Manager’s letter correspondence.
At the end of that day she was proud of herself for having succeeding in resisting the temptation to peruse all the letters in order to detect the culprit sentence.

Having quite failed to single out the sentence fleetingly by chance, as it were, by the time she had to lock the cabinet, she was feeling especially righteously loyal for not having found any information that cast the Manager in a suspicious light.

And then it occurred to her that the Manager might well have had the pragmatic professional savvy to have taken that incriminating letter home with him.

Yes, she felt it deeply that her office award was going to be unique among the others in a subtle way that the Manager would indicate his appreciation of her not mentioning to others what he thought she had read in that office letter to him from another Firm Manager in another City.

The tremors all around notwithstanding, the office awards ceremony was proceeding happily. She hoped she was succeeding in not being obvious in staring at all the awards sitting, waiting, on the awards table. She tried to detect if one stood out in size, or in other ways.

She basked in the feeling that the Manager was particularly courteous to her, and cordial and complimentary.

That once-in-a-lifetime big one happened; before the awards ceremony reached its actual handing-out phase of the awards.

In deafening chaos the office building slowly crumbled in dusty gravel and blocks. People screamed and scattered. The floor cracked and broke and sank and heaved. The awards table vanished.

With everyone else, she found herself struggling to stay on her feet. Within seconds she was utterly disoriented. She had to continually remind herself that the office was a one-floor building. She staggered about in order mainly to keep standing. In a few seconds she was so dizzy, that moving ahead in any direction was not among her options.

She tripped over the awards table. She was unaware it was the awards table. She tumbled to the continually moving floor. In clutching about to steady herself, she grabbed onto what she thought was a stone. It was a diamond ring, still partially wrapped in its awards box. Even as confused as she was in everything else, she recognized a spectacular jewel enough to tighten the vice grip she had on it by sheerly accidental luck.

Fifty years later, she was a grandmother, living in another country. She had not yet been able to guess whose office award that diamond had been meant to be.

Her reason for emigrating within a year after that once-in-a-lifetime earthquake was to make it impossible for any search to trace the diamond to her.

Throughout that half-century she stayed alert for news about that “office” earthquake.

She was forever puzzled why there seemed to never have been a detailed investigation. An investigation at least into the whereabouts of all those lost awards. Forever puzzled, yes, but, too, at the same time, she was always forever relieved.

Occasionally, she permitted herself to briefly wonder if the Manager’s insecurity at what he had read in that office letter, had anything to do with there not having been a detailed investigation.

Over the years a nagging suspicion, ever so slight at first but gradually strengthening the more she gave time to thinking about it, was that the Manager’s secret was a decision to close down the Firm permanently soon after the awards ceremony. From her obligatory cursory perusal of the Manager’s daily official correspondence, it had seemed to her that here and there over previous days there had been mention of details that to her, albeit vaguely, began to add up to termination of the Firm because of the increasing costs incurred because of the increasing frequency of the Earth tremors.

She never wore the ring in public or for her family to see. She kept it hidden in plain sight among her dozens of worthless shiny baubles in her sewing box. It must have been the only domestic sewing box in history that no child or grandchild had ever been allowed to mindlessly rummage through.

She saw the ring regularly because she was yet of a generation that mended family garments by needle and thread: buttons, hems, rips, lengthenings, shortenings.

Hers was the last generation of improvisational family domestic clothiers.

Some thirty years-or-so after she had died in sleep, that obsolete sewing box containing a priceless jewel, was somewhere among family sentimentally priceless junk, forever on the eve of being tossed out forever with garbage.