Thresholds
They assigned me to Document Room B.
Brick walls, a fan that coughed dust,
and piles of letters the British never responded to.
Petitions, grievances, ink-smudged revolts,
tax receipts from 1894,
photographs of boys in loincloths
standing with rifles too big for their arms.
Every afternoon, I sifted.
History had always been a neat category
in my textbooks.
But here,
it smelled like mildew and broken hope.
One letter kept returning to the surface:
unsigned, undated,
addressed to “The Empire That Forgot To Listen.”
It read:
“We have spoken.
You sent missionaries.
We lit our lamps with their pages.”
I smiled at that.
Filed it under “Miscellaneous.”
The colonel’s grandson visited once,
asked for family records.
I handed him receipts for seven plantations,
and a ledger that simply read:
“Displaced: 143 souls.”
He didn’t flinch.
Said thank you.
Left behind a sandwich wrapped in tinfoil.
That night,
I took the sandwich home
and ate it on the roof
where pigeons cooed like widowed wives
of forgotten revolutions.
When they finally shut down the archive,
they gave me one box
to keep as memorabilia.
It was empty.
Only a note inside that said:
“Truth is fragile. Handle with fiction.”
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