another nervous laugh

She was joking with her colleagues in the lab and the faint trace of a smile was still on her lips as she looked into the microscope. Within seconds all of the happiness of the morning had drained from her. She pulled back with a quick jerk, breathed a momentary breath to refocus and dove back into the specs… same. She hated this part of the job… having to deliver the news… having to field the grief. It was moments like these when she wanted to run from her education into a comfortable position in a bookstore in some tired old town down south. She wanted to slip silently out the back door… to leave behind all of the grants… all of the research.. all of the futile efforts to reverse the steady and unalterable course of an unfeeling organic process. She wanted to tear down everything about her life that brought her to this microscope in this lab. She pulled back from the instrument again… basking in the quiet humor of the room… another joke… another (nervous) laugh.