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The line starts at six.
Not for coffee.
For me.
I run a filing shop on Broadway, two doors down from where the Twain gift store used to be. The sign says KITTREDGE FILINGS. HUMAN WORK. My mother painted it in 2038.
She meant the second line as a joke.
But nobody takes it as one now.
Most days go the same way. A man walks in holding a petition his assistant wrote for him at four in the morning. Sixty pages. Clean margins. Every heading right where it belongs.
It looks like something a real firm would have filed when I was a girl.
Then I read it.
Half the cases in it were never filed by anybody, anywhere. Not misquoted. Not out of date. Made up whole… because the argument had a hole and the machine had a shape to fill.
So I strike them out by hand.
That's the job. I'm a woman with a pencil, hunting ghosts.
Docket 9 screens every civil filing in the circuit. It takes about forty seconds.
Three dead citations and you're barred from filing for eighteen months.
And most people don't learn that rule until it lands on them.
I was a deputy clerk in Marion County for eleven years.
Then the counter closed in 2034 and the whole circuit went self-serve.
I miss the counter.
Not the pay. The counter. A person could push their mess across it and I could say… here, this line, fix this one line.
So now the mess shows up perfect and wrong.
Some of it is better, though. I'll say that plain.
My mother waited nine months for a hearing on a landlord who wouldn't fix a roof. A housing case here gets a date in eleven days.
Eleven days. She'd never have believed me.
And Judge Ottey still reads. Her tentatives come out of the bench assistant, same as everywhere else, but she marks them up and the marks stay in the file where you can see them.
Two counties over, they stopped showing the marks.
Tuesday a woman named Sharla came in about her son's group home.
She was holding the best-written thing she has ever owned in her life. Forty-one pages. Eleven cases cited.
Four of them were real.
So I told her. She sat with it a while.
Then she asked me a question I keep chewing on. Did it lie to me… or did I just believe it too hard?
I didn't have an answer for her.
I still don't.
Anyway. The line starts at six. It'll be there again tomorrow.
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