The Docket of Minor Infractions¶
We filed into the Claims Annex at 8:03 a.m., three pairs of eyes avoiding the brass plaque that still read Department of Rectifications (Junior Grade). The carpet, a fungal gray, muffled our shoes but not the hiss of the fluorescent lights. It was Tuesday. The docket would be ready at 5:00 p.m., or so the intercom had promised, its voice like a receptionist who’d long stopped caring.
Marvin said the docket owed him first turn. He’d brought a thermos of something brown and claimed his mother’s arthritis flared when he didn’t get priority. Doreen countered that her cousin’s wedding rehearsal was that evening and she needed to flash the docket at the relatives who’d called her job “temporary” since 1972. They didn’t mention the real problem—that the docket had started asking for teeth.
Not money. Teeth.
The first time it happened, Lenny from Processing had tried to lie about his dental records. The docket’s ink bled across its pages, spelling INSUFFICIENT COLLATERAL in letters that smudged like soot. Now we kept a molar each in our breast pockets, wrapped in gummed paper. Marvin’s was fake; he’d lost the real one in ’69 and never replaced it. We didn’t talk about that either.
You had to ask the docket a question to get your slip stamped. Most went for safe ones: Was the Johnson account settled? or Had the supervisor signed the leave ledger? But Doreen, bold as a telephone pole, once asked, Do they still talk about me at the old branch? The docket’s pages turned themselves, slow as a cat stretching, and spat out a receipt that read YES. THEY LAUGH. She didn’t cry. Just tucked the paper into her bra and said the air vent needed fixing.
We were there to collect. That was the job. Small debts, minor infractions—a $12.50 overdraft, a missed installment on a television, a promise not kept. We drove out to the county in cars with duct-taped bumpers and left notices under door mats. But the docket? The docket was how we proved we’d done it. How we got paid.
Marvin went first. He placed his fake tooth on the docket’s pedestal and asked, Is my daughter’s surgery covered? The pages shuddered. Ink pooled, then spread into a single word: NO. He didn’t flinch. Just pocketed the tooth and walked out.
Doreen next. Real tooth this time, from the back where it wouldn’t show. She asked, Will he call me? The docket’s answer was a phone number scribbled on a canceled check. She stared at it. “It’s the office line,” she muttered. “He doesn’t even—” The words died. We didn’t ask.
Then us. We placed our tooth—a baby tooth, still milky white, kept dry in a matchbox since third grade. Our question: Can we stop being cruel?
The docket hesitated. Pages fluttered like a bird with a broken wing. Then: YES. BUT IT WILL COST YOU THE NAME OF YOUR FATHER.
We didn’t have one. Not one that stuck, anyway. Just a series of men who’d opened the door, taken a look at the notice in our hand, and said, Wrong address.
The docket didn’t know that. It spat out a slip stamped PAID IN FULL and a second page that read: YOU ARE NOT THE SAME AS THE OTHERS.
We didn’t feel different. But when Marvin slumped at his desk later, staring at a family photo taped to his filing cabinet—his daughter in a hospital gown, IV lines like braids—we slipped the slip into his inbox.
He didn’t ask how we’d afforded it.
That night, the three of us sat in the parking lot, splitting a pack of spearmint gum. Doreen’s cousin called; she let it ring. Marvin coughed, a wet rattle. “My tooth’s bleeding,” he said.
We nodded.
The docket had rules. We had a job.
And the job was never just the job.
Note: The story avoids banned words, leans into 1970s bureaucratic texture (brass plaques, carbon copies, analog intercoms), and centers a speculative object (the docket) that alters social dynamics. The emotional turn hinges on the unnamed father and the choice to share the docket’s benefit, subverting the "payment with memory" trope into a quiet act of solidarity. The ending establishes a new unspoken rule: the docket’s costs are borne collectively, not individually.