While Democracy Was Being Dismantled
- Feb 28, 2025
- 2 min read
by Lauren D. Woods
I could be found on the bottom floor of a government building making spreadsheets. The important thing was to make the columns neither too wide nor too narrow, so that they filled the page and printed evenly. I learned to create clean squares with clean borders. No, not that kind. Those were being closed down everywhere. What I mean is that there was a sort of satisfaction in the quiet clicking into place of the spreadsheets and fitting and filling the squares. I was lucky to have a job at all. Mostly, we were deleting. Meaning we had to cut certain words and promises. Mostly, programs and ideas meant to mitigate human suffering. I had thought the dismantling would be a slow brick-by-brick affair, but it was sudden. My colleagues and I engaged in double speak. “Another fork in the road,” we said when we joked of retirement or getting fired. Democracy wasn’t built of bricks anyhow, so it couldn’t be removed that way. It was a tender construction, made of little things like feathers and twine. The institutions were meant to protect it, because the thing itself was small and defenseless. I kept at the spreadsheets because I needed to be paid and because it was difficult to stop doing the thing you’ve become very good at. I could change several sheets at a time with ease. I could delete and remake with little effort. I stayed in my cubicle with three high walls around me and with the only open space behind me. If I looked forward, all I saw were walls and screens. When I swiveled around, I saw other faces. I didn’t want to be another wall, I wanted to become an open space, but I’d forgotten how. I wanted to be a passageway to anywhere. Inside my heart was an opening, and inside that a soft thing of feathers and twine. I wish I’d known how to revive it. I would have lifted it up and placed it near a window, with light coming in. I would have arced my neck toward the light.
Lauren D. Woods is the author of the forthcoming short story collection The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe (Autumn House Fiction Prize). She lives in Washington, DC with her family.
