I was demonstrating, physically, in front of the same audience that was meant to witness my failure, that the impossibility had been theirs all along, that the absurdity had been theirs, that the only thing being exposed in that room was the ugliness of the demand itself.

I had spent five years being handed impossible tasks and blamed for failing them.

On Fiona’s sixtieth birthday, I finally completed one — completed it, maliciously, to the letter — and in completing it, made everyone in the room see the impossibility for what it had always been.

The failure was never mine.

It was theirs.

It took sixty frozen dinners on a hardwood floor to make it visible, but once it was visible, it could never be hidden again.