Resurrection

a short story

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

Ruby Shaw needs a purpose, a passion, a reason for living. If she doesn’t find one by Tuesday next, she plans to kill herself. Divorced, depressed, and demoted, she sees no reason to go on living. No one will notice if she’s gone. No one will care.

Ruby works in the file room downstairs in the basement of the Fuller Life Insurance Company. Like the boxes and boxes of old claims and policies that surround her, Ruby has been filed away and forgotten. Only thirty-two years old, she has already been discarded like a white elephant, like a tacky lamp that no one wants or needs. She might as well be dead. And that is what she will be shortly after 5 o’clock next Tuesday. She has worked out all the details and filed them under Suicide.

Each morning she arrives at precisely eight o’clock. Walking past rows and rows of noisy cubicles, past clusters of gossiping secretaries, past busy men in suits talking on cell phones, she is keenly aware that no one speaks, no one says good morning to her. No one notices as a bland, pie-faced woman makes her way to the elevator. No one sees her. She might as well be a ghost.

Ruby works in the darkened basement alone amid black file cabinets and gray file boxes stacked to the ceiling. She opens the cargo elevator each morning and finds a new stack of boxes stuffed with old papers. Every evening after she…