Catchy Title Goes Here

This morning,

I open my eyes to find only seven spoons

lying in a small, dented cup by my bed.

The world asks for twenty.

One spoon — just to sit up.

To blink against the ache in my joints,

to gather my breath and convince my heart

that gravity is worth the fight.

Two more — for a shower.

Steam curling over stiff shoulders,

the heat loosening nothing,

my hands heavy as wet towels.

One — to get dressed.

It takes all the grace I have

to pull fabric over skin

that burns at a whisper of touch.

Another — for breakfast.

Lifting the mug,

stirring the spoon,

pretending the taste matters more than the exhaustion in my jaw. 

One — for a phone call.

Because words weigh more than dishes,

and smiling through pain

Keeping up appearances 

is its own kind of heavy labor.

By noon, I am out of spoons.

The day still stretches,

hungry and demanding,

but my hands hold only air.

I borrow from tomorrow.

I always borrow from tomorrow.

And tomorrow will wake me

with fewer spoons in the cup.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

And the psych guys are doing MRIs because that's the Next Big Thing, and any bias culturally relevant enough will get positive papers for it because the 100 labs will check their 100 papers and the 95 that show no difference at 95% confidence are of course never published because there's nothing to say. And the medicine guys are running ten thousand seaweed extract experiments to kill cancer cells, and their confidence intervals do tend to be better, but there is no defense against an industry where the only way to survive is to publish and the only way to get funding is to look into something that the grant committee wants you to find something interesting about, and you'd better find that something interesting even if you kind of have to publish your study before repeating it to check for that confidence interval -- someone else will repeat it, or you will once the paper's out, but you've got to get the paper out. And that paper had better be useful for other scientists to reference, even if you have to change the tone and the implications and choose which results are worth referencing, because getting more references is how you keep your job and how you convince the next grant committee.

He didn't do it.

The cops very clearly planted evidence on him because they had to make an arrest because all eyes were on them and whoever actually did the deed was making them look stupid.

Why would the real killer hero have kept the weapon on his person and traveled two states over while carrying it and a manifesto in his bag, conveniently turning the crime into a federal matter? The same guy whose bag they found in a park, filled with monopoly money? Why did the police turn off their bodycams, take Luigi's stuff, drive a block away, turn their bodycams back on, go back into the restaurant, and then arrest him?