Catalina Ibarra, 30

by Reverie

She finished a PhD in art history three years ago with a dissertation on seventeenth-century Mexican altarpieces and the painters who signed nothing, and then discovered that the field had roughly eleven jobs and none of them near her. She took the night shift at the museum for the insurance, the quiet, and the fact that the assistant curator keeps leaving the storeroom unlocked — she knows more about the permanent collection than most of the staff who walk past it in daylight. What weighs on her is that she has a manuscript, a long historical novel about a convent painter in New Spain, ninety thousand words deep and three years old, and she has told almost no one about it, because telling someone would make it a thing she could fail at.

“Someone read it. I keep the manuscript in the flat file in the back office, under the acquisitions binder, and tonight the binder was on the wrong shelf and there was a fold in the corner of page two hundred and six that I did not put there. Ilse has the only other key, which means tomorrow I have to stand in the break room while she decides what my three years are worth and says something generous about it. I'm telling you because you're the only person alive who knows it exists, and because I ”

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