Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (9 page)

Mother smiles. “You always were very good.”

The running blood bothers me. I take a piece of bread and hold it against her belly like a sponge. There is no magnet-force this time; I can feel the warmth of Mother’s blood beneath the bread.

“I miss you,” I tell her. I hold up another piece of bread and she pushes her face into it like it’s a mask until her imprint appears. The bread begins to take on the smell of Mother’s perfume. We hold hands through the bread. I put a piece of bread over her chest and then put my face to it and listen for a heartbeat. Her chest sounds like the inside of a giant shell. We do this until all the bread grows thin and falls apart, then I mash its crumbs into a thick ball that smells like Mother and dough.

When Mother disappears, the vent goes very dark. I tuck the dough ball into my shirt pocket and feel for the vent. Its door must have blown open in the wind.

Grandmother is asleep in her chair next to a lit candle. “Hello,” I say, and Grandmother gives a frightened gasp and opens her eyes.

“Your hair.” She makes a big circle motion around her head. “It is ghost-blown.”

After I nod, she asks if it was Mother. “No telling,” I say. “I passed out from fear.” Motioning me off to bed, her eyes move towards the vent as she lights a cigar. I run up the stairs so the smoke won’t interfere with Mother’s smell on my hands or the bread in my pocket.

It has been a long day of intergalactic delivery, and I’m feeling a little boxed-in. Though I like the homey atmosphere of my ship’s small confines, about a week into a mission the air starts to smell like recycled sock.

When my Message Station Board lights up pink, I know it’s Brady, WordCalling. I’ve never met him, but he says he’s forty-three, and early on in our talks he sent a very promising five-second video of himself flexing his back muscles. Like me, Brady is an independent outer space cargo transporter. We are the truckers of the galaxy.

Yet our connection runs much deeper than this. The very first time he messaged me on SingleMingle (initially, it was a bit of a debate whether or not to look past his screen name of FluidTransfer69 and try to get to know the man within), I felt that Brady had to be a Sagittarius. That’s how well we clicked. And lo and behold, when I told him my suspicion, he admitted that while his birth month technically made him a Scorpio (my astrological enemy), he was born prematurely. His true sign is indeed the keeper of my star-charted soul.

Tonight we wax intellectual for a bit before getting flirty.

As always, I open myself to him completely.

With Brady clearly turned on by the parallel between our love and eternity, we talk until our conversation culminates physically, at which point Brady writes,

FluidTransfer69: Got 2 kleen keys, bye!

We’ve been chatting back and forth for several weeks now, although it seems like years because the cultivation of Our Love has been so rapid. He tells me that his face is badly scarred from a fuselage accident, and that because of this he fears my disappointment and is reluctant to meet me in person. I constantly assure him his appearance doesn’t matter, but he hasn’t yet been able to summon up the courage. Brady’s back and buttocks, however, are a source of self-pride—additional photo stills, he promises, are coming my way.

It’s always hard to wake from dreams where the universe has instated a monarchy consisting of myself as Queen and Brady as King. In my dreams Brady closely resembles a cut, muscular Jesus.

I roll out of bed to find that the frozen waste extrication unit has broken and the waste has melted. I begin my day by mopping the thaw. Because my mop sponge is fiercely rectangular, it cannot get around the tighter edges of the file cabinet and I must reserve that job for Q-tips.

Yet it is a brighter afternoon when I sit down to find that amongst various junk email pyramid schemes there is also a message from Brady. I open it and see a forwarded news release.

Hey Babe
,

You reading this in a towel? Check out the second story. Apes can do everything. Ha-ha!

Luv you. B

The story, indeed impressive, involves an ape both calling for help and pumping his owner’s stomach with charcoal after watching her attempt suicide for the third time. He is a helper-ape, assigned by the state in the absence of family funds for a more human in-home caretaker. The woman is ninety-four and deathly afraid of primates.

Yet what truly catches my eye is the story just below it. Justice Freeze, a cryogenic contractor largely employed by the government’s penal system, is going belly-up and holding a large auction. Several criminals whose permacapsules are programmed to not unlock for centuries are up on the auction block.

I am interested in one in particular. Below the notorious big-font names that will no doubt go into the home foyers of heavy-rock musicians, there is a smaller one, barely visible, ending a long string of nobodies.

My mother, Debbie “The Destroyer” Harlow.

Mother led a life of crime. Her real screw-up, the one that landed her 450 years, involved a large Guatemalan daycare facility and a hidden boon of cocaine. Either her instinct or information was off. The footage was replayed over and over again on universal broadcast the October of my ninth year of life: Mother, discharging a machine gun clip into a row of cribs. In court she claimed the cribs were empty, but the Guatemalan police said otherwise, and this was yet another strike in a long string of transgressions.

She also killed my father. He was a good man, but too talkative.

As I stare at the monitor, an antsy feeling begins to overtake me. Finally, against my better judgment, I sigh and program my ship towards the auction city’s coordinates.

Upon arrival I’m given a numeric paddle. I find it eerie the way the prisoners’ capsules are intermixed with used and defunct science equipment. Each capsule has a large number with a minimum bid written across the icy window in grease pen.

Lucky for me, Mother’s starting bid is quite low. Freelance outer space cargo running is a hit-or-miss trade, and this year in particular has been quite difficult. In September I contracted an antibiotic-resistant strain of trichomoniasis from a toilet seat in Goron, a dome community where I dropped off a payload of refurbished filtration equipment. A few months later my fuel gauge malfunctioned and I was stalled out in the middle of nowhere for several weeks until another ship happened by. The subsequent weight-loss that occurred during this time of hardship followed by my celebratory feasting upon rescue resulted in a bad case of the gout. Luckily, this final blow was tempered with meeting Brady. My empty glass became half-full.

I’m no delicate rose, but looking at all the frozen criminals, I start to wonder if this is such a good idea. The capsules are especially frightening. They’re dimly lit and humming like vending machines.

All the high-end infamous criminals were frozen, bearing menacing expressions. I wonder if they made these poses intentionally, like a funny face for a driver’s license photo. When people are frozen alive it becomes pretty clear what their true personality is. Most of the white-collar criminals have pained expressions, anywhere from discomfort to agony. A few look almost peaceful; one woman in particular has an extreme glow about her. I check the paperwork and see she’s been frozen for multiple homicides.

When I finally reach Mother, I’m a little taken aback. The frozen years have not been good to her. Technically, one doesn’t age while frozen, but she has clearly been through a lot. Her expression is wincing and concentrated, as if she’d been paused while taking an ardent dump. She also has what appear to be freezer-burn patches decorating her cheeks and forehead. These are especially prominent along her scalp, and look as though an irritating home-perm solution was left on far too long. Does hair freeze? Her mashed up hair resembles a matted pompadour. Overall it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere, but now and then I see a wisp quiver beneath the gust of the capsule’s internal fan.

The auction begins with the most expensive items, and I realize I’m in for a long day. I decide to check the mobile WordCall terminals to see if Brady is logged into the system. I’m quite nervous so I eat a few double-fudge squares and pray that he’s on—only his virtual presence could give me the strength to abstain from polishing off an additional 12-pak of Galaxy Bars.

As I see his screen name I sigh with relief, so hard that I fog up the screen and have to use my sweaty palm to remove condensation with more condensation. I marvel again at how quickly we were able to fall in love. It’s true—when I found “the one,” I just knew it.

FluidTransfer69: Hey, where u at? Missed our a.m. freak sesh.

Don’t get me wrong; Brady and I have discussed many profound topics, including capital punishment (he’s against), global warming, and slavery. But when it comes to the finer details of our personal lives, we just haven’t gotten there yet. Ours is an intense and steamy courtship with little room for conversation that doesn’t make at least minimal strides towards climax.

I lie.

Yet I underestimate Brady’s working knowledge of my psyche, his Sagittarius command of honesty that detects when something is amiss, especially with one he truly holds dear.

FluidTransfer69: Is there someone else?

The pupils of his frown emoticon are like painful daggers to my heart. Here I am, deceiving the one I love, only to cause him agony. I decide I must come clean.

CargoBabe:	Brady, I’m not an orphan as my profile states.
FluidTransfer69:	R u married?
CargoBabe:	No, Brady. My secret is unrelated to our love.
FluidTransfer69:	R U A MAN??

Clearly, any further delay of information is not possible. Brady needs the truth and only the truth, and as my job motto states, I Shall Deliver.

As I press “Enter,” I imagine this information beaming through light-years of distance to reach Brady. It’s a short but hard wait before I know relief.

FluidTransfer69: Oh. Want 2 get dirty b4 bed?

By the time Mother is put onto the block, the more upright bidding citizens have long left the building. The man to my left smells vaguely of urine and keeps lifting his wig and scratching his scalp with the end of his paddle.

I am the first to call Mother’s bid at its minimum, and am challenged only once by an awkward but well-dressed teenager who has been making the second bid on everything and accumulating an impressive frozen army. As I raise him, anxiety floods me. In my head I’ve already accepted a projected scenario where he bids my mother up to an unaffordable price and I leave defeated, only to be arrested five years later for breaking into his pool house in an attempt, likely drunken, to reclaim her. Then his shiny cell phone goes off and he leaves.

I get my mother for minimal mark-up, about the cost of three days of work. That is, when there’s cargo work to be had, and when misfortune does not follow my delivery mission like a love-drunk puppy.

I decide I cannot just dive in and yell to Mother’s capsule Everything I’ve Been Wanting To Say. The comfort level has to raise, familiarity must be reestablished and achieved. As evening sets in, I boil an insta-broth and sip it in front of her.