*Done* with the folding and done for the day, she thinks, sweat beading on her forehead from all the humidity around here because of the, well, *water* — over her 2 feet and up to 3-4 feet, pheh. *Now* what? she wonders. Back to *his* place?
“TOILET,” he calls from over the intercom, making her realize she had one more chore to accomplish before she could get paid. Orders of the big boss.
“Wolvie, closing up for the day!” Emily said in synchronicity with the video from somewhere beyond the cracked door, trying not to look in. She’s learned to deal with it.
“Just visiting the bathroom again and done!” he called back.
—–
“Cleaning, of course,” said Wheeler about same bathroom. “Not the other stuff. But still quite nasty, one could say. I believe you could put the big boss firmly in the sadist category. It all just got… out of control.”
“Nah, you’re okay, you’re good,” opined James Smoker, sitting across the bum camp fire from her, still holding and puffing on two cigarettes at once — while he could. “No need to crucify yourself over the matter,” he says, watching her “burn” through the fire. Like a witch. Or maybe a witcher, hmm. “This so-called Big Boss (*cough*): sounds like he’s just a butthead, a butt *period*,” he continued in his gravelly voice growing deeper and more gravelly by the year, the week. He hadn’t told her about the terminal thing. And he hadn’t revealed his true name. Not yet. So she just kept imagining him as James Smoker.
“Nice of you to say so,” says Wheeler. “But I’m afraid the whole town knows, the whole town looks down on me.” Still burning away inside a fire of her own devising.
“Those *Uptowners* might,” said James Smoker to this. “But us Downtowners… we stick together through thick and thin. Like bounded sticks.” He puts his two cigarettes together with his two hands to emphasize his point. Burny sticks, she understands — local nomenclature. If she burns, he burns; nice gesture from him.
So James S. considered her a Downtowner, she thought. Interesting. Even though she worked Uptown, lived Uptown. Maybe Willa Brown Halter is on the wrong side of the issue.
“What about *Mid*town?” she decided to ask, curious about the so-called neutral zone between the divisions, upper and lower. Where she was floored by Charlene that day of the town meeting and so had to pick herself up off the slanted pavement in order to attend.
“Center Core?” he responded, thinking of his primary reason for coming here to this Burg in the first place. To find a place where he could crawl into and die.
He decides to just blurt it out, the reason, the end point. Only crackles from the fire for a while after that.
(to be continued)
