⭐️This story was The_Bookshop Fave for the "Signs of the Times" prompt⭐️

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I rub my eyes but the words are still there.

Good news is coming, in thick marker across an old page of newsprint.

Rumor has it it came from the floor secretary, but Addie doesn't write in anything but tiny cursive. The letters on the sign are square and perfectly spaced and so large that I can see them even when I'm not wearing my glasses.

It's pinned up directly across from me, staring at me from my otherwise-blank office wall, and everyone who's come up here knows exactly why I can't tear it down.

It took years for me to claw my way up to this position, and what on earth would they say if they found out that the assistant editor is annoyed by a stupid piece of paper?

Good news is coming. I've been waiting for months.

Every day I come to work a little earlier in the hopes that something good will be waiting for me. I've stopped listening to the radio at home because I want to be surprised when I get here.

Good news is coming.

Maybe whoever put it up thinks I'll quit sometime soon, and they know they'll never find another editor nearly as good as me. Maybe they're doing anything they can to try to get me to stay because they know I'm getting sick of this. Maybe someone found out that I never smile anymore and I keep kicking people out of my office and I snapped at Addie more than once and they thought I could use some positivity.

Except every article finds its way to me at one point or another, the ones about polio and Mussolini and everything going on in Czechoslovakia, and I don't think we'll be getting good news any time soon.

There's a pen on my desk I haven't touched in an hour. There's a dozen articles beside me I haven't bothered to read. There's a radio somewhere behind me that I haven't turned on in a week. I'm sick of the news.

Good news is coming. I'm sure I'll be dead by the time it gets here, though.

I'll be dead and Addie and all our writers will be dead and whoever reads the papers will be dead because I'm sure there'll be a war in Europe soon, and whenever that happens it's only a matter of time before it makes its way over to us.

Good news is coming. The wall is mocking me.

Somewhere buried in the stack of articles about the Sudetenland is something that'll make my day. Somewhere between the charts that tell me unemployment is still nearly twenty percent and the pictures of starving kids at soup kitchens is something, anything, that doesn't make me want to quit my job and never read a paper again.

I can see the paper on the wall across from me even when I close my eyes.

Good news is coming, burned into my eyelids.

I remember when I used to like working here. I learned about everything before anyone else and I was always the first to know when something happened.

Good news is coming. If it ever happens to get here, I'll hear it first.

I lean back in my chair, my glasses beside me. The words are blurry but they're still there, of course they are. Lies, of course.

A door slams somewhere down the hall and I hear footsteps running in my direction; I know the noise means it's either Eddie, who thinks he's important, or Dan, who's constantly excited.

It's Dan and he's smiling and I can't imagine why. Perhaps Addie told him she likes his new hat.

He slaps someone else's paper down in front of me, and I don't even pay attention to which competitor's it is because I'm too focused on the headline.

Neville Chamberlain: "Peace for Our Time."

I read it twice to make sure.

Good news is here.

• • •

A/N for those who don't recognise the gut-punching reference to Chamberlain's words. 

Back in 1938 Neville Chamberlain was the British Prime Minister. He thought that if Hitler got the territory he wanted in the Sudetenland (part of Czechoslovakia) he'd back off of trying to get more land and there wouldn't be another war in Europe. After meeting with Hitler and signing the agreement that gave Hitler the Sudetenland, Chamberlain went back to London and said that "peace for our time" had been achieved — that there wouldn't be another war. 

World War II started less than a year later.