G-203

Kimberly sat in the DMV holding her crumpled renewal notice, sweating through the paper. Three days until her sister's wedding in New Orleans, and she still needed the Real ID to get on the plane. Her sister had been very clear about the timing.

The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead like dying insects. Everything looked yellow and sickly under them, like everyone in the waiting room had the flu.

"Now serving B-47," announced the automated voice with fake cheerfulness.

Kimberly looked at her ticket: G-203. She'd been waiting two hours already.

The plastic chairs were designed by someone who hated the human spine. Around her, other people sat in various stages of defeat. A man in a wrinkled suit kept shuffling through a thick folder of papers, muttering to himself. A teenage girl had given up entirely, slumped against her mother like she'd lost the will to live.

"Now serving B-48."

The numbers moved like molasses. Kimberly did the math without meaning to: seven minutes between each number, and she was still 155 people away from the window. At this rate, she'd get called sometime next week.

The woman behind Window 3 had turned looking through people into an art form. She studied every document like she was trying to crack a secret code, finding problems with the most basic paperwork. Birth certificates weren't good enough. Utility bills raised suspicions. She seemed personally offended by the idea that people might actually exist.

"I'm sorry, but I can't accept this utility bill," Kimberly heard her tell the man who'd finally made it to the front. "It's from this month. We need one that's thirty to sixty days old."

The man stared at her. "You want an old bill? One I already paid?"

"Current bills don't prove you live there. They have to be older."

Kimberly watched him walk back to the forms table like his soul had left his body. He was muttering something about hamster wheels. She got it. This place didn't just handle driver's licenses. It broke people down, piece by piece, until all that was left was desperation and the weird kind of crazy that comes from having the government decide whether you're real enough.

"Now serving B-49. B-50. B-51."

Kimberly's heart jumped. Finally, they were moving faster. Maybe the woman had found her rhythm. Maybe there was hope.

The voice stopped. "System error. Now serving B-49."

Back to square one. Kimberly felt something snap inside her chest, small and sharp like a wishbone breaking.

A baby started crying somewhere behind her. The sound bounced off the institutional walls, completely honest about how terrible this all was. Kimberly closed her eyes and pictured her sister in her wedding dress in the French Quarter, pictured having to call and explain that the government had decided she wasn't real enough to travel.

"Now serving B-50."

Kimberly gripped her ticket and tried not to think about missing the wedding because of a bunch of forms. The fluorescent lights kept buzzing overhead, indifferent to human misery, marking time in a place where time had forgotten how to move forward.