How Many Years Does it Take to Change a Lightbulb

by Kate Bucek

The desk face was dusty, fading the color of the cherry wood that her grandfather had used to make it. Papers were scattered across it, sticky notes across the edges of every standing object, as if she was ever really that busy. Most of them just said to take her medicine, or feed the dog, or something like that. The drawers were sticky, taking enough force to crack your wrists just to open it. One of them was filled with office supplies, although she never had anything that needed to be stapled or highlighted. She just liked having them when someone asked to borrow something. Another drawer was filled with just pens, enough for the lifetime of a normal person. She would always lose her pens somewhere in the mess of her paperwork, sometimes on her ear, on behind the hair tie of her bun. The next drawer down on the left barely opened, needing to be shaken upwards to make it give in. There were countless beige folders filled with blank printer paper. Each and everyone of them had a label that said “confidential,” so that no one would know that they are empty. She would always take them out and look through them when someone walked by, closing them frantically when they got closer, as if they were spies. She liked seeming important, and who knows, she might have needed those folders one day. The other side of the desk had one drawer with a lock on it, the key being in my back pocket. This one opened like butter, revealing her treasure trove of Canadian pennies, various ribbons, and the caramels that the security guard at the front of the building would give her every morning when she came into work. She hid them away in my old camera case, which was now almost full with caramels. Almost an injustice to the case, but something so precious should belong to someone just as precious. 

With the drawers cleared, I looked back at the top of the desk, where she had the bulk of her real belongings. Under the various random papers, there were stickers of cats and flowers along the frame of the desk face. She got them for Christmas from our neighbor's daughter, who looked up to her like she was a god. She made sure to line them up with the edge, to make them look neat and elegant, even though they were just $2 worth of stickers from the dollar store at the end of the street. She put a small clock towards the upper right corner, the type that has the roman numerals on it. She didn’t know how to read roman numerals, but thought that having one made her look smart. It was always a few minutes off, since she didn’t want to have anyone set it for her even though she couldn’t read it. She also never changed it when the time change came around. It was basically a decoration, at this point. 

I opened her laptop to see a picture from her most recent birthday set as her background. Even though she hated that picture because she blinked, she still set it as her background because that was the only picture she had with everyone. That date was her password, too. Not her actual birthday, the date of that birthday party that we had to have two weeks late to match everyone’s schedule. The contents of her laptop were nothing much. A few pictures saved on the hard drive, more empty folders with important-sounding names, a few games. Whenever she would come home from work, she would talk as if she had done so much work that she would need a drink, but it doesn’t seem like she really did much of anything every week day for 8 hours a day for all those years. 

Her desk chair was very plushy, pushed up to the highest it would go. She said that it could spin for hours with just one push. The wear on the floor where she would alway push off shows that she had tested that theory many times, maybe even daily. She wouldn’t say how many times she fell off, but the cracked plastic on the back panel of the chair said more than a few. To damage a chair that much as light as she is, it would take a good number of falls. 

Her small pink wastebasket wasn’t extremely full, but it was, considering how little she had to throw away. A few of her pens managed to fall into the bin among the doodled-on papers. The cleaning staff only emptied the wastebaskets when they were full, so she would sometimes take out the papers she had put into it, flatten them out, and place it back onto her desk under some of the other papers. Her belongings all fit in the box I had brought with me, although I brought another just in case. I start bringing it down to the car as another man comes into the room to bring down her desk. I turn around once more at my little sister’s work space that will never be refilled, the corner of our mother’s office, and continue walking down to the car. The building feels dark and cold, a light recently having gone out. How many years will it take to change a lightbulb? 

Kate Bucek is an East Asian Studies major with minors in Korean Studies and Creative Writing. She takes inspiration from the various ways people are connected to each other around the world, as well as the unique flows and rhythms present in different languages, since she knows English, Korean, and Spanish. While her main focus is poetry, she also works in short fiction when inspiration strikes. In 2021, she earned honorable mentions in the Scholastic Writing Contest for two of her short stories.