Page 71 - WTP VOl. XIII #2

in the building.”
Deven gets up and crosses the room towards her. “Pretty cool, huh? I told you this job was easy. Wel- come to the Grand Politburo of the Red Hammers.” He pulls a heavy wooden broom from behind the refrigerator. “Watch this!”
He thumps its butt-end against the paneled ceiling.
“Zulu!” John yells. “Zul-uuuuuu!”
“Fuck management!” cries Julia. Deven thrusts the broom handle again and again at the cheaply fitted panel until it crumbles and falls to the carpet in sev- eral caky pieces.
“Whoa,” says Amber. “That was pretty cool.”
Marissa looks up at the huge crater in the ceiling, then down at the chalky debris on the floor, and feels heat rising, curling itself around her shoulders, replacing the hunger in the pit of her stomach.
“I gotta go,” she stammers. “Might miss the phone.” ~
Weeks drone by. Marissa catches the 9:27 outbound Bridge Line train every morning, thinks briefly about escape and impermanence while it crosses the river, and then spends the rest of the ride filling out the crossword puzzle in the Metro paper or playing games on her phone. She clocks in at exactly ten, clocks out at exactly four, records a hundred voice- mails and makes seventy-two dollars, before taxes, every day. The call script deconstructs from words and sentences to a precisely honed sequence of sounds and intonations. The population is aging, and these days fewer and fewer consumers want to buy their personal items—such as toothpaste and deodor- ant—online. The truth of that statement becomes irrelevant, since she never interacts with anyone who might question it. Every day is calm, predictable, and easy. She’s always alone when she clocks out, leaves the office, and walks back across the parking lot to the Bridge Line platform. That weird circle of cars
is still there, every day, but she’s become so used to them that she barely notices them.
“I’d sure like to bash the fuck out of one of those,” says a voice behind her one day.
She whorls around. “Since when do you get off at
“The water scarves beneath her,
ethereal blue amongst wharfs, high rises, and crane arms. In high school, when she almost always had a notebook with her, she remembers sketching out a scene like this, just a doodle, from a train or bus win- dow, capturing the basic shapes of buildings and shoreline before they whizzed by. “
four?”
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