#foreverhomes

The kind and talented @winterandwords tagged me to post one of the darlings I had to kill (or as they put it, "a snippet that didn't make it into the latest draft of a story").

Thanks for the tag, I have a good one for you!

“Find your repurpose,” Dawson grumbled, rolling the wheel of her car toward the OPEN HOUSE sign. There was a cookie-cutter, carbon-copy sign on every street for ten or twenty blocks that said those same three words. “Find your repurpose.” They appeared overnight, the night before her rent control was lifted. “Better than affordable housing,” the recruiter had said. (He had been plastering her workplace with flyers for hours, making sure that he did not miss an inch of poorly-mortared brick.) “300 sq. ft. can be so much more than you’ll ever need.” “More than you’ll ever want.” “That’s why they call them Forever Homes.” Insufferable, carbon-copy recruiter. A man who would apparate in your bathroom if you turned off the lights and said “Old Navy” three times in a row. Forever Homes never needed him to begin with. Not once did his freshly-pressed polo shirt convince a business man to walk into a repurposed shipping container and never walk out again. Not once did his carbon-copy signs make a woman turn away from pilates class to see what it might be like to forget the smell of fresh air and dandelions. What sold people, impoverished people, was the freedom from basic human needs. Food and shelter in exchange for whatever mark you might have made on this earth. There was no competition between sunshine and a full belly. Then, there were the advertisements… the ones of the brown-eyed girl who had been living on the streets her whole life, walking into a Forever Home that slotted in furniture to depict a toy store where every teddy bear and baby doll was free– the one in which she picked up a bear the size of herself and they waddled into the next room to see a feast of lobster mac and cheese, shrimp gumbo, collared greens. She laughed deliriously and swung her bear up to see the treasure they had found. Dawson had no daughter, she just… She needed to be happy– childishly happy. She needed to eat lobster mac and cheese and hold a bear the size of herself, whether she was in her thirties, her teens, her terrible twos… She deserved that, didn’t she? “So glad you could come check out–” Dawson shoved past the Old Navy man, knocking him into a poorly concealed tower of hydraulic delivery systems. They were the things that carried the shelves, tables, and frivolous things around. She opened the door to the house, proclaimed as OPEN, and looked around to see nothing but an empty, off-white shipping container with subtle slits here and there. “Where’s the ON switch?” He cleared his throat. “Voice control keywords are on the blue poster, but if you...” She slammed the door before he could stick his foot in it. For good measure, she leaned her weight against the door a while, in case he tried to barge in, uninvited. She knew he was only doing a job, but he was still a human with thoughts and feelings, and she would prefer that those thoughts and feelings never perceived her: a butch 32-year-old, sobbing into the teddy bear from the Forever Homes commercials. From the outside, the recruiter only heard the hissing of hydraulics and clanking of metal furniture being pushed in and out of place. Not a whimper could be heard from the outside. Not a word. She emerged with a chapped nose and glassy eyes. “How did you like…?” “Yeah. It was fine, yeah.” Her frown was as forced as his smile. “Well, you can always come back if you change your mind.” “Sure. I’ll think about it.”