She was ensconced in a tiny dark room not much bigger than she was, and when she turned her chair around to peer up at us from under a green visor, she was enormous. Her eyes were huge in a green face — and in that moment I loved her. She exuded mystery and adventure of the sort I’d longed for but never had.
I stood, up to my elbows in hot water and mused. If I had a birth certificate and flying papers, I could…go. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it certainly had allure.
Walking out into that room was like swimming into the sea of no return. I stopped at the first table I came to and smiled as best I could through my chattering teeth. “What would you like to eat?” I asked.
I got a good, hot meal that evening, plenty of scraps off the plates, and a blanket for the mattress on the floor. I’d put in a hard day’s work, to be sure, but I still had a job, and what’s more, I felt like I’d earned a bit of respect, and that was worth more than anything.
“Gideon,” I said. “Gideon…Ing.”
“What makes you think I’ve got work?” the man asked. He was tall, slightly stooped and skinny as a wire. He looked like his hide had been stripped off, nailed to a shed for a few years and then draped back over him in a casual sort of way.
“A man at the soup kitchen said he’d just quit,” I said. “So… I thought I’d ask.”
Desperate though I was, I had sense enough to realize that a boy with only one set of clothes was going to be noticed. I worked on a back story. I was a student doing research for a school project on ancient modes of transport. Might work if they didn’t ask me which school I went to. I watched the museum that day. I saw when the person who worked at the entrance went on her break and to lunch. Someone who exited but never entered would be pretty obvious. It gave me a window where I could slip out and go look for work.
Showandah Terrill is a scifi/fantasy author from Forks, WA.Learn more than you ever wanted to know about her here.