Pren had worked in the Vision Registry for sixteen years. The Registry's records went back to 1963, when the systematic collection of children's visions had been mandated and a notation standard established. Before 1963 there were partial records, unofficial, inconsistent. Before 1940 there was almost nothing.
She spent the morning sorting through a box of misfiled submissions from the 1980s. Physical submissions, before the system had been digitized. Thirty-one folders. She was entering them into the database and marking each for relocation or archival.
The folder she pulled next was dated July 1984. The child: a girl, seven years old at the time of the vision. Date of birth: March 1977. Date of death, added in a later hand: November 2019.
The vision was two pages, handwritten by a parent. Standard format. The child had described the vision at length and the parent had transcribed it as closely as possible.
A woman at a desk. The vision was specific: late morning light from a window to the left. A glass of water and a small lamp and a stack of three files on the upper left side of the desk. The woman was reading a folder, her hands holding it slightly below center, her face turned down toward the page.
The child had described the scar.
A small scar on the right thumb. She had described it in a way that suggested she had looked at it for some time: the shape of it, where it began relative to the thumbnail, the way the skin had healed unevenly at one edge.
Pren put the folder down on her desk. She looked at the lamp. The glass of water. The three files stacked on the upper left.
She picked the folder back up. She read the description of the scar again. She held her right thumb close to the page, not touching it.
The vision ended at the hands. The child had not seen the woman's face.
She entered the record into the database, marked it archived, and set it in the completed pile. She pulled the next folder.