The Weight of Expected Things

The fluorescent lights of the 42nd floor hummed with that particular frequency that makes you question everything you've become. Sarah stood before the floor-to-ceiling window, holding an orange that had rolled from the catering tray. Its bright surface seemed almost violent against the gray corporate landscape below.

Three years ago, her father—a man who'd spent forty years in manufacturing—had called her a bull for charging into this promotion without considering the goring that might follow. He'd meant well, in his way. The same way he'd meant well when he told her to marry David, the man who waited patiently at home with their golden retriever, Buster. A good dog, everyone said. A good man, everyone said.

She'd stopped by a taxidermy shop last month—just browsing, just killing time between meetings—and stared at a black bear standing on hind legs, mid-roar, frozen forever in someone's idea of majesty. The shopkeeper had told her it had been shot by a hunter in Montana who'd wanted something fierce for his living room.

Something fierce.

That's what she was supposed to be.

The board meeting was in seven minutes. They would ask about the Southeastern division's declining metrics. They would expect solutions. They would expect the bull—charging, decisive, relentless.

Instead, she peeled the orange, tearing into its skin, letting the scent of something real, something that had grown from dirt and rain and sunlight, fill the sterile air. Buster would be waiting by the door when she got home. David would ask how it went, would pour her a glass of wine, would say the right things.

And she would bear it. That was the word, wasn't it? To bear. To carry. To endure.

The bear in the shop hadn't been fierce. It had just been dead.

Sarah ate an orange segment. Then another. For the first time in three years, she didn't go to the meeting. She walked toward the elevator, and somehow, that small act felt like the most dangerous thing she'd ever done.