Recognition

If you did as they liked, they carved your name on a little brass plaque and set it with the others in the hallway. You felt pleased, for a month or a year or a decade. You liked that there was a woman paid to come and shine your name up bright each week. But sooner or later, you came to wish that you could take it down, scrub it out, at least let it tarnish. The sparkle of that hallway was the worst of it: the way it made us all seem proud.