At the copy machine, all Alicia could do was think about the box. It was waiting for her at home; in the bedroom closet of her father’s house. She could picture it sleeping atop the dusty shelf, its fragrant must enticing her to the point that the image behind her eyelids was as real to her as the copy paper in her hands.
Work always dragged-on for Alicia. Five o’clock seemed to lose its way behind the rows of gray cubicles. While the others rushed by liked scattered beneath a rock, she hid from them. In the safety of the copy room, she would hide; picking at her nails with the corner of her jagged, bottom tooth. She would run-off copies of anything she could, if only to be lulled into a lucid state by the sounds of rushing paper.
She could never hear what her co-workers said about her over the sound of the Xerox machine. Some made cutting remarks about the way she wore her frizzy hair; others about the smell that radiated from her unwashed tweed dress suit. But most just ignored the middle-aged woman, and left her to her business in the copy room.
The box was closer to her than it had ever been before. Alicia even managed to stay at her desk for the last half-hour of the work day. She barely found room among the piles a copied forms and web-page printouts
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