She had not known it was excess until it was not there.
Pela woke at six on the morning of the redistribution and lay still and tried to understand what was different. The room was the same. The light was the same gray of early November. She was sixty-one years old. But something had shifted in the area just behind her chest, not in her chest, that was the confusion at first, somewhere further back, somewhere she had not been able to reach for so long she had stopped thinking of it as a place.
The experts had said it would be barely perceptible. A fractional amount, divided across eight billion people. A redistribution of the total, not an addition to it. Pela had done the math, or rather she had read the math in one of the papers: the average person would receive a burden equivalent to perhaps half a day of moderate grief. Spread over the rest of a life, this was considered negligible.
What no one had said, what the experts perhaps did not know to say, was what it would feel like to suddenly have only your own portion.
Her mother had died in October, forty-seven years ago, and the weight had settled into her that same winter and she had carried it without knowing she was carrying it. Not as grief. Grief she had worked through, or she had done something with it; she had thought. This was different. This was structural load, the kind you do not notice until the building shifts.
She lay there until seven-fifteen, which was when she usually got up.
She made her coffee. She stood at the window. The street was the same. She did not feel healed. She did not feel fixed. She felt like herself, but without the weight that had been there so long she had taken it for her own shape.
She sat down at the kitchen table and put her hands around her mug and thought about her mother's face.
It was still sad. Of course it was. But it was just sad.