He slides a thick business card across the table. The card stock is cream colored, thick, perfect. It reads in graphite black:

Dr. Kuznit, Expert Surgeon

“CAN I SEE YOU IN MY OFFICE FOR A minute?” the boss asks.

Outside, the rain has started again. It feels like I have not seen the sun in weeks. The clouds hang low, between the buildings, we walk through them to get to work, fog in the face, the mouth, down the throat.

“Sure.”

My heart kicks up an old fear: I’m in trouble, he has caught me doing something bad.

We sit down and stare at each other. For a moment, there’s a silence and the amount of trouble I might be in expands to fill that silence.

“Did you ever notice that you’re radiating a deep sadness lately?” the boss asks. “And missing a lot of days?”

“No, I haven’t noticed a sadness.”

“I’d like you to work on it. We agreed you would be a smiling presence here and I just... I don’t feel it these days.”

The fluorescent lights could be knives, if I reached up. I could shatter one in each hand and go for his throat.

“We have some paperwork here that we’d like you to sign,” he explains. “It just says we need you to really work on your sadness. We’re willing to help with training.”

The paperwork has a sharp edge which cuts my finger. I leave a drop of smeared blood next to my signature, the low slope of my handwriting an acknowledgement.

VISION

The sign on the door says SADNESS TRAINING on a piece of copy paper in thick black letters.

“You must be Cassie,” says a woman with short spikey hair dyed blond.

“That’s me,” I say.

“Well, it’s been brought to our attention that you’ve been bringing your sadness to work.”

I nod as if guilty.

“We’re going to offer you some strategies to prevent that.” I nod again.

“There are three strategies,” she continues. She slides a piece of paper across the desk.

“Strategy number one requires you to put the sadness in another part of yourself. This is called compartmentalization. Think of your sadness and think of stuffing it into a square white box.”

I picture my sadness bursting out of a white box in a green field.

“Strategy number two relies on your imagination. You just have to imagine you aren’t sad.”

I picture myself without my sadness. I picture my sadness in a grave, being buried.

“Strategy number three relies on strength,” she says. “I want you to picture yourself digging a grave for your sadness and burying it.”

My sadness has a body just like mine. We are the same shape and size. I dig and I dig and I dig until there is a hole big enough for my sadness. I shove the body into the ditch and cover it with dirt.

THE NEXT MAN FROM THE DIM BAR IS A bronze medal: He is not deeply handsome or smart, but here he is.