Gemotions

The afternoon sun streamed through the kitchen window, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air. Sarah, armed with a cup of coffee and a determined frown, surveyed the battlefield. Her mother, ever the sentimentalist, had apparently kept every single thing she'd ever touched.

A box, labeled in her mother's elegant script "Sarah's Scribbles," lay before her, beckoning. It was an insult. Sarah had come to look for her birth certificate, a bureaucratic necessity.

She poked the box with a toe. She was not, under any circumstances, going to get sidetracked by nostalgic nonsense. She was a woman of efficiency.

She would find that certificate, and that was the end of it.