Clipboard and tethered pen

Fourteen names occupy the page by midmorning, in eleven different hands, in ink that ranges from confident to apologetic. The clipboard itself is unremarkable: brown, hinge-clipped, the corners softened by years of being set down too hard on the counter's edge. Its one genuinely engineered feature is the pen, secured to the board by a bead chain long enough to reach the far corner of the counter and no farther, a length someone measured once and never revisited. The chain rattles faintly when the pen is dropped, which happens on average twice an hour in offices where children are also waiting. Some names are printed, some are cursive, and a few are illegible enough that the front desk has learned to ask for the phone number instead. Occasionally a name is crossed out and rewritten below it, the arrival time amended, as if punctuality could be edited after the fact. The clip itself, tested across several specimens, holds firm through a stack of no more than forty sheets before the tension weakens and the top page begins to slide. Nobody has measured what happens at sheet forty-one. The column keeps filling regardless, one name below the last, in the order people agreed, without being asked, to arrive.

Beatrice Womack