The Ledger Card

The accounts office of a furniture store in Westphalia on an autumn afternoon, low sun through a tall window, a desk-sized accounting computer a metre wide in beige and pale grey on a sloping base, on top a typewriter print unit with a wide black platen, in front a grey keyboard and a ten-key pad with single red, orange and yellow keys, every key blank and every surface plain and unmarked, a pale ledger card with a dark brown magnetic stripe half drawn into the feed slot, its face turned away, a hand in a knitted woollen sleeve on the ten-key pad, grey hanging files soft behind.