But for nearly three years Amy had been an editor in a sub agency of a bureau of a division of a department in the state capital. She was quick and efficient, a fine paper pusher without too much ambition. Her hunch that an English major could learn to do most anything was right. She had landed the job within a couple of weeks of graduation because she could read and correct punctuation.
When Amy first sat down at her desk that morning, she looked at the stack work for the day and then reached to tar the September page from her calendar. Mechanically, she ripped the page in half and quarters and eights before tossing in the waste basket. In the two seconds it took for the pieces of paper to float from her fingers to the bottom of the empty waste basket, Amy was certain she had done the routine before. Not just any calendar page, but that very one. She was certain she had torn that same piece of paper in the exact same manner.
Then she remembered. She remembered the other desk, the one in her dorm room, under an open window awash with the stout scent of salt air after being pushed over a mile of coastal scrub, weak but distinct.
It had been the first day of October five years earlier. She had performed the same act with the same expired month. Then, she had tossed the pieces and then retrieved them, walked to the college library, laid them on the flat glass of a Xerox, and produced a concrete poem, equal to any of George Herbert’s. She was convinced she was a genuine conceptual artist of the Twenty-first Century. The creative writing class that critiqued the poem, titled “September,” the following week had generally shrugged and bobbed and moaned “oh, yeah...right...”
Amy didn’t care. Then or now.