Maya, who had a title she was proud of

The Morning the Meeting Ended Early

Nobody was unkind to Maya. That was the strange part.

A woman with a short bob and round glasses sits alone at a long empty meeting table.

A woman stands at the head of a meeting table, gesturing at a simple chart while seated colleagues look on.

Maya was good at her job. Every Monday she built the report, and every Monday the room waited for her to explain what it meant.

A woman works at a desk covered in printed pages, one hand resting on a stack.

It took her two days. She did not mind. Two days was how long it took to know something nobody else in the building knew.

An empty office at night, with a single glowing screen on one desk and every chair empty.

In the spring, the company turned something new on. On Sunday night, while Maya slept, the report wrote itself.

Colleagues stand and gather their things to leave a meeting room while one woman stays seated.

On Monday the meeting ended twenty minutes early. Everyone was pleased. Somebody said the words time back, and everybody laughed.

A woman sits at her desk with both hands resting on a closed laptop, looking at nothing in particular.

Maya kept her title. She kept her desk, and her salary, and her chair in the Monday meeting. Nothing was taken from her at all.

Two colleagues walk past a seated woman's desk without stopping, in a wide open-plan office.

What she slowly stopped having was the part she had never thought to count. No one came to her desk any more to ask what the numbers meant.

A woman sits alone at dusk in an empty office, turned towards a tall window, one lamp lit beside her.

One evening, later than she meant to stay, Maya asked herself the question nobody had thought to ask her. If the work was gone, what had the job been?

Maya's job did not end. It thinned. That is how most of them go, and it is much harder to notice from the inside.

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