They collect in the low corner where the two walls meet, the ones about the far-away fortune. A widow with millions and no one to trust. A minister holding a dead stranger’s account. A cousin I have never had, stranded in a city I have never seen, needing only my help and the numbers off my checks. I did not decide to keep them together. They just drifted there, sheet by sheet, the way like finds like in a drawer of odd screws.
The corner is the damp one. It takes the cold up out of the slab, and the pages there have gone soft. Not torn. Soft, the way a paperback goes soft on a shelf, the corners rounding, the fibers loosening so the sheets lie down against each other instead of standing off the block. The toner has faded to the color of weak tea. You have to lean in under the bulb to read the sums, and the sums are always enormous. Eleven million. Twenty-four. A percentage promised for my trouble.
The offers have not changed in years. Only the names rotate, and the countries. The money is always waiting and always just out of reach behind one small favor. Pinned up, softened, overlapping, they stop asking. They become a thickness in the corner. The draft that used to come through the seam where the blocks meet does not come through anymore.
A pushpin down at the bottom of the stack has rusted. It left a faint orange ring on the fortune underneath it, and the ring has bled outward a little into the damp, soft paper, wider than the pin.