The Calendar

Cheryl was a meticulous note taker. There was a proper place for everything in her life and she liked nothing more than to glance at her calendar and see her precise penmanship filling up the little white boxes. As a child she had practiced her letters endlessly, fascinated by the curves and straight lines, crossed T's and dotted I's. She had also enjoyed lining up her stuffed animals. The smallest would sit in the front with each row back standing taller and taller like her classmates in the group photos they took at school. She always sat in the front row. Not because she was short for her age, but because she had skipped two grades.

The calendars had become vital to organizing her life in college. As a freshman she'd taken a job in the English department as an assistant to the departmental secretary. She had a cubicle with perfectly stacked file folders, neatly aligned pens and a desktop calendar. At first, the large white spaces had mocked her, the potential uses for that space racing through her mind. Eventually the spaces became filled with due dates for work and class, appointments, dates, birthdays even for noting the time of month she was on her period. For this she used the red pen and made the tiniest of dots in the bottom right corner of the daily box. It was likely that people knew what the dots meant if they thought about it long enough- particularly other women, but Cheryl didn't mind. She liked keeping track of everything.

It was a Thursday. On Thursday, May 15th to be exact, Cheryl sat staring at her calendar, forehead crinkled in thought and worry. She hadn't used her red pen in the month of May. She should have used the pen already. She flipped the calendar back to April. Saturday, April 26th dinner at D'alessio with Tom 8:30pm. Wednesday, April 16th Italian Film Festival at McGovern Hall with Tom 6:00pm. Friday, April 4th Lunch with Sarah, Brady and Tom 12:30 at Jerry's. No little red dots anywhere in April. Cheryl flipped the page back to March tearing it accidentally in her haste.

There! In the right hand corner of Tuesday, March 4th she spotted her little red dot. It continued through the 8th and ended. Her eye dropped to Friday, March 21st Dinner and drinks with Tom from English 120B at O'Malley's Pub. Cheryl's face turned as white as the calendar as she lifted one hand to cover her mouth and lowered the other to gently sit over her stomach.

"Oh fuck."