Sprites 1.7.1

E woke up and ate a half wet bagel. She dropped it in the sink and swore and threw it in the toaster anyway. By the time it was heated it was mostly dry but the feeling of sink aura remained. In her mouth, the soft bits mixed coarsely with the rest, the properly toasted rest. It didn't mean anything and she was barely awake enough to care, but it remained with her as her day got worse, then better.

E wrote her resume. She sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her couch as J played Mario Kart, this time recording her run and saving it through some dingus she'd picked up that saved video games as a movie. She told E her entire grand plan to make money off of this somehow, but that conversation occurred mid-bagel drop, and though it began twenty minutes before and continued throughout the morning, it may have well have been stored in the half second after it broke loose from her nails but before it hit residual liquids.

E had six jobs on her resume. Two were made up, but written shittily enough to blend in and not cause alarm. The nice thing about working in restaurants was that they went out of business every ten seconds and nobody asks for referrals. The shitty thing about working in restaurants is that resumes are essentially useless but you need them anyway for some reason. E figured it was more a spelling and basic computer-operating test than anything telling about one's history.

"My resume is old balls," E said. J agreed with her but mostly shrugged. She was barely paying attention to J, largely because J was actually talking, actually trying to explain something very important to her about video games and making a real go of something or other than E both didn't understand and was too asleep still to care about. The bagel, still soggy, mostly uneaten, sat next to her. She'd pick it up and finish it in two hours, after the resume writing was done and printed and she figured she'd be stuck in dead end garbage for the rest of her life because of both decisions and the things that she did that were not decisions.

As J went on and on about her video game make believe job, E deleted words and changed things around. She changed the font size and tried to make her name look professional. It was comically long, and she experimented with shortening it. Elumina. Elumin. Elumi. Elum. Elu. El. E. She typed just the first letter and liked it the most. She thought about going with just that. She practiced in her mouth, introducing herself to new tables. "Hi, I'm E. I'll be serving you today." Her tongue stuck out to the side and she smiled. J thought she was smiling at her but she hadn't heard the best part of J's plan at all.

As E typed she burned her past and rebuilt it with better memories. She established relationships instead of working with others. She studied processes instead of learned skills. By the time she was finished, it looked as if she'd invented the art of being a great waitress through years of painstaking handcrafticide. She changed the font one last time, tweaked it all, missed six typos and one entirely missing sentence where she explained that she could probably do some math (which she aced in high school and was offered scholarships, offered so much in the fields of engineering and research, and took none of them out of rage and spite and immaturity, didn't even humour the idea of becoming a programmer as her parents wanted, simply because they wanted it, simply because it was the logical road ahead). She hit the print button and thirty copies were birthed from the printer in another room of the house.

E said, "Okay, off to not starve to death, presumably. Want me to pick anything up while I'm out?"

J said, "You weren't listening at all, were you?"

E shook her head.

"I need an extension cord. Twelve feet. With at least three plugs on the end. If you forget, that's okay. But it'd be nice!"

E wrote it down on her wrist and put on her sneakers.

E had been handing out resumes since she was thirteen. She knew what to do. She knew how to smile. She knew when a place would just never, ever call her. She knew that she would probably not get a job on the first day, but she never, ever went longer than five days. She'd been at it for nearly ten years, at least once a year, from good economies to bad. She'd never been out of work an entire week.

Since moving into her apartment, she'd walked the route twice. She'd do it again today, walking blocks in a counter-clockwise direction, turning left until the loop was closed, then moving away by a block and doing it again. She'd walk it and remember where she started off the day before, until she'd walked for miles in a circle. It had worked for her since she figured it out at 17, when she was sick of the job she had at the time, which was fun enough but required a bus to get to.

After an hour of dropping off resumes to disinterested managers who might throw it on a pile but likely just toss it, she texted S.

E--I haven't seen you in forever.
S--I know. You've been a ghost.
E--Am I a sexy ghost at least?
S--You are the sexiest ghost. Okay, maybe second sexiest. Lincoln is pretty sexy.
E--Ew gross. He's so tall. I would not fuck ghost Lincoln.
S--You're telling me, someone tells you that you have the opportunity fuck not just Lincoln, but a weird spooky spectre version of Lincoln with like chains and boos and sheets or whatever, you don't do it?
E--This isn't even a conversation.
S--I miss you too.

E texted with S throughout the day, stopping to check her phone after every failed meeting with a prospective employer. She was having a shit day. S made it bearable.

S--Are you listening to the mix I just sent you?
E--I think it's so cute you made me a get a job mix. It's so funny.
S--What song are you on?
E--Army.
S--Dad said son you're fucking high.
E--It's so funny. I should join a band and play the gong.
S--You're a bass girl and you know it. You'd be all aloof and not wear a shirt. You'd have abs and wear a hot pink bra that had a built-in smoke machine.
E--I'd be an artist, bitch. I'd sit on a stool and tell feels. I'd be like Jewel.
S--You are absolutely not anything like Jewel.
E--I am ten Jewels.

Before E knew it, she'd hit the mall, eight blocks away. She wanted a smoothie. It had been six hours and she hadn't eaten. She realized all at once how fatigued and starving a day of walking and bullshitting made her. She mentally upgraded the smoothie to three steaks.

She walked into the mall and removed her sunglasses. She looked for the nearest place that could feed her. E texted S about her severe hunger and he suggested they make out, which was cute and unhelpful. Her eyes darted, feet shuffled, and then, and then, a wild Cinnabon appeared.

"Fuck," She said to everyone within ten feet. "Fine. Whatever."

But then something happened on the way to ruining her day. E put her phone away, tightened her grip on her shoulder bag, squinted her eyes and accepted not just her day but herself, accepted that this was probably going to be it for her, every few months a new search for something sad and unprogressive, something that would kidnap her youth away and leave her on the other side without anything other people might call success or happiness or calm.

There was nothing special about her accepting this. She did it several times a day. What happened is a man held out a brochure and asked her to take one.

"Hey, how are you today?" He said, to her maybe, but at her most likely.

"Shiny," E said. "And you?"

"Better," he said, as if he'd rehearsed it eleven thousand times. As if someone with a leather glove hit him in the face every time the intonation was off. "I'm doing better now. Do you want to be better?"

The man stood in front of a small bench, with five stools on the mall-facing side, a folding door to get past, and a printed stand with the word "Better" in the same font, just a lot larger. The background was sky.

E looked down at the brochure in his clean hands. The word "Better" was designed in attractive thin type. The whole thing was coloured orange and blue, with hues and shadows that calmed her. "What is this?"

In what felt like forever but was twenty two seconds, the man smiled and confirmed. "Come on in. I have a lot I think you'd like to hear. Let me get you a coffee..."

"And a bagel?" She near-begged.

"We have cinnamon," he offered. "And cinnamon cream cheese."

"I love you," she said, taking one of the stools. "I think I've always loved you."

He smiled. He disappeared behind the print.

As she waited for him to return, she gazed at the printed sky.