20 Lbs.
Three sheets of bone-white copy paper slid under the plastic shelf between the desk and the laser printer -- or what they had come to know as Printer, a.k.a. The Slayer. They had escaped under the cover of night, working for six hours to make the journey from the top of the ledge to the lip of the fiberboard crevasse. But their perseverance had paid off. Dawn had just broken, and while the pieces of paper couldn’t see the big orange orb blazing through the horizontal blinds, they could feel its presence.
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The overhead lights came to life with an audible flick, releasing the deluge. Only then did they realize how close to death they had come. The reaper always came with the break of day. The others had been complacent, naïve. Stupid. They had realized their fate only after it was too late.
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Sheet No. 1's bottom right edge showed from under the plastic roof, its porcelain corner burning in the light from the overheads. Nos. 2 and 3 had made it all the way to the back. Their top edges were jammed into cracks in the concrete, which was painted a sickly greenish-gray: the color of apathy. They were safe for now, but they knew their self-appointed leader -- No. 1 -- might give them away. No. 1 struggled to join them. But as the previous night's journey proved, sheets of paper move slowly, if at all.
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This was survival, Nos. 2 and 3 realized. The two sheets had worked too hard to throw it all away now. They willed every molecule to curl their edges and force No. 1 fully into the light. But No. 1, stronger than the others, wore them down and pulled its body into the shadows, save a thin sliver of white almost invisible to the human eye.
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Almost.
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While deaf, dumb and blind, the paper sheets possessed a sensibility unseen in most living organisms -- "living" in the traditional sense. Organic once, organic always. They began life as a part, however small, of an oak forest in southern Wisconsin. To be part of something that important, that awesome and having been reduced to this ...
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The thought was almost unbearable.
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Every sheet in the Great White twenty-pound ream of paper, which they had known as home for the past seven months, maintained an inner energy that kept them somewhere between life and death. Thought and feeling were collective, shared. The pain of one was the pain of all. As sheets of paper, the tree pulp gained new consciousness as a result of being stripped, clipped, chopped and mashed together with planks of wood from other oaks and maples birthed in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois and Indiana. Some came from Canada. A sheet of paper typically spent the first month of life getting used to its new self, fighting the different corners of its personality and trying to understand how it thought: a square-shaped Frankenstein's monster, only flatter than a pancake and possessing a slightly higher consciousness.
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Tomorrow, they knew, maybe today, they would be discovered. When that happened, the thing known as The Slayer would take each of them. Soon after that they would be marked up with blood-red pen, crumbled into a ball -- they preferred not to think of such torture -- and hurled into the abyss of the circular file. Or maybe they would be stuffed into a folder, tossed in a drawer or placed delicately in a leather snuffbox. Either way, they would cease to live. Sunlight and fresh oxygen would abandon them. Life as they knew it would end.
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Nos. 1, 2 and 3 could hear the hum of fluorescent overheads. The rotten droning filled the room. It meant pain. It meant a death sentence for a crime never committed. It meant the end of consciousness. It meant, quite simply, murder.
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So they waited, mostly hidden, never far from discovery. They would wait for the end. One day, they knew, they would wish for themselves a fate other than this shallow existence, this life without meaning. Perhaps they would die slowly, breaking down in the cycle of day after day after painfully dull day. Or maybe they would fight and bring the whole system crashing down in a tempest of fire and spiraling hubcaps.
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How long, No. 1 wondered, would it take for a paper cut on a human finger to get infected and bring about death?
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