She sets the pen down. Presses her palm flat on the page. For a moment, she tries to feel what the applicant felt: the knock at 3 a.m., the burned village, the child who didn’t make it to the border. She can’t. The paper is smooth. The ink is dry. The air in this windowless room is 72 degrees and recirculated.
She reads that line three times. She knows what it really means: The applicant was asked to remember a trauma, in a language not their own, without a lawyer, six months after surviving something that should have killed them. And they got the Tuesday wrong. sor reader
She underlines indicate . Lawyers love that word. It sounds like science. But she’s read the footnote. The report is from 2019. The massacre was in 2021. The applicant fled in 2022. The SOR doesn’t mention the gap. The SOR never mentions the gap. She sets the pen down