Consequences of Kindness

NOBODY WAS EVER PAID TO

WRITE DOWN A KINDNESS.

Claudia has run a university archive for ten years, and she knows exactly what the past bothered to keep. A reformatory’s punishment book for 1932, complete to the last entry. Intake photographs of boys who had already learned what it meant to be looked at.

The kindness happened too. It happened in every prison and every famine, a man crossing a cold room, a woman halving her bread, and it landed in whatever book was loose enough to hold it, or in none. There is no heading to file it under.

The pharmacologist the campus calls Professor Time Travel has a compound that puts a person into the past for one afternoon, bodily. Claudia goes back for the rest.

She dresses for the decade and changes nothing. In a 1972 airport a woman sits down on the duffel bag of a soldier nobody came to meet, and Claudia comes home and gives it a finding number, the way the archive has always filed harm.

Then the Professor stops asking what she found and starts asking how far down she went.

A novel about a woman who has always believed a thing in the record is worth more than a thing that is only true, and about the ten thousand small crossings a day that no one was ever assigned to write down.

Jeffrey B. Mahoney lives in Gahanna, Ohio, with his family. Consequences of Kindness is his fifth novel.

FICTION / LITERARY