head first, eyes open

At the beginning, her promotion to the Archives had felt like a natural step. Not one she had especially considered before, but like walking up a new hill with absolute confidence that your foot was angled and pressed correctly and would not turn when you shifted your weight. True, she could use a bit of a brush-up on how exactly archiving was supposed to be conducted, but it's nothing she couldn't study at home and come back to work with a plan in action.At the present moment, however, she felt that the hill of archival responsibility and the whole world it was on had been slipped out from under her sure step like the football pulled back from Charlie Brown, and suddenly there was nowhere to catch herself and no direction safe for even a controlled fall.