We Kept It Instead

The floor was too clean.
No prints, no scuff, no trace.

The docent, voice dry as ice,
leads us through halls cooled
by preservation, not grief.

Here:
a sealed metal box — expired, unopened —
still marked For Use in Emergencies.
Beside it,
a photo of a woman with two jobs
and one warm coat
she gave away in April.

A child’s drawing:
stick figures, orange suns,
a cake with no center.
No name. Just a smudge
beneath glass.

“This,” the docent says,
“was what we called representation.”

An alcove.
A brass scale under a dome.
One side: a folded napkin,
a souvenir coin,
a miniature plane.
The other:
a cracked pill bottle,
a sketch of an empty fridge.

She doesn’t explain.
She adjusts her gloves.

Balance, they called it.
It weighed exactly what was taken.
Only one side had a label.

A laminated intake form.
Marta’s name.
Denied.
File not found.

A grainy photo:
she stands outside the clinic,
checking her watch.
A file folder pressed to her chest.
No coat.

“Balance,” they told her
when she asked why.

One label’s been corrected.
Then crossed out again.

Another reads:
Millions removed from care
so the few remained untouched.
Austerity, like gravity,
pulls hardest on the smallest bones.

The final room flickers—
not from power,
but like a hallway light
trying to outlast the building.

At the center:
a gold-framed document,
titled in cursive:
The Big, Beautiful Bill.

Etched beneath:
Signed by hands that never washed another’s body.
Ink that turned food into filings, breath into collateral.
It passed. So much passed with it.

The docent clears her throat.
Wants to say more. Doesn’t.

“We didn’t burn it,” she says.
“We archived it —
kept it —
so forgetting wouldn’t finish
what silence had already starved.”

I paid for the bulbs.
I lit the rooms they died in.
I walked past Marta, twice.
I looked away.
Someone always had.

I carried the key.
I knew what I’d sealed behind.
And I still carry it.