Work Ethic

You’re fifteen and nowhere in a town on the edge of pitiful lands stripped of fruit. The burger van’s onion stink slicks back your Saturday hair, broiled meat stenches your starched, knee-length work-coat and the matriarch, a difficult woman, in a pinafore and blue rinse castigates you young girls with your lack of  work ethic, while the other stallholders admire your efficacy with a polystyrene cup, the way you can slice an egg so thinly between beef tomatoes in fresh crusty rolls that you are not allowed to eat.

For lunch, you may only choose a hot dog, slippery with fetid water. When your period comes and you pale: You are making the food look ill, your boss says and she can’t stomach lily-livered spits. You are let go. The few pounds you amassed are not enough for the school trip to France your friends will take. They’ll come back distant. They will have kisses. They won’t have Sunday launderette duties and caring for your sisters and mother because you have a knack for difficult women. Maybe someday you’ll escape this

town with its ice-cream van drug dealer. Maybe someday you’ll lose other friends to elsewheres much worse than France. If you’re lucky, you’ll turn fifty and linger on the edge of yourself, wondering at the division between the blessed and used. You’ll wish for the guts to spill every unpalatable truth. And while your faith unspools in globules as you swill the past’s fat-water, you’ll stay desperate at how the world works, stripping  the lands of pitiful fruit.