Into Space [Chapter 1]

"What's this?"

"We won..."

Her eyes drudged along each line following the pet rat that had gotten into the ventilation system and somehow caused the need to evacuate an entire floor of the district police centre. "Won what? What are you talking about?"

Gloria, who was perched on her heels and practically waving the piece of paper under the nose of the determined old lady, knew anyway she would have to suspend her excitement between chopped carrots and newsprint while she was being queued for attention. Some habits are so entrenched you forget how odd they are in the face of the unusual and exceptional. Daily life always seems to win out. Routine, a routine like this, and the girl stood wistfully looking out the window at the sun behind dark clouds, waiting as her mind started chattering on into incoherence.

"You know I can't concentrate when you stand over me like that. What is it? What?" Here was her whole attention. The plump old lady would rest the knife down softly on the tablecloth to show that her interests were no longer divided, but she was only just barely keeping track. Something about winning something, but the words seemed like nonsense as she absently tried to fit them into ventilation shafts in the story she was reading. "You know how I was saying there was this contest for people to go up into space?" This was enough alone and immediately for everything necessary to be pieced together though, or so it seemed, as the old lady, satisfied with the information, wheeled around with raised eyebrows and picked up her knife again.

Chop chop chop...

But there was a silence besides this, and it seemed to eventually bother her, as she couldn't quite finish with the carrots. "Okay, first of all," And the knife would wave round languidly in the air now as the woman rested her elbow on the table and perched herself to stare in disbelief at the girl offering her a trip into the stars. "What do you mean 'we' won? I didn't win anything, you entered that contest, not me." Some more chopping, but it wouldn't last long. "And second, what makes you think even for a second that these people, whoever they are or are claiming to be, are going to send you into space rather than scamming you out of your hard-earned money? Which seems more likely to you, huh?" You could hear the ticking of the clock audibly in the kitchen, it seemed like it was going to rain after all. "I raised you better than that, with a bit more sense, didn't I?"

There wasn't much use in reasoning with her from that point, the girl knew this. She'd explain it a bit, but there was no way from that morning, sitting at the table as she was and throwing vegetables into the pot, that she would entertain the idea of leaving the atmosphere. "There will be a man coming by tomorrow though," the girl was beaming as she finished on this note, turning around as she did so to leave the room, "He'll explain everything."

The knife would come down with an audible Clunk into the wood, fixing it in place as Augusta looked up toward her daughter with a raised finger, "You expect me to let this con-artist into my house now? You've got to be out of your mind. Nuh uh. No way." But the girl just peeked in to the kitchen, as if all were settled and she was merely putting together the final arrangements. To leave the planet, like the old lady had always wanted to do, of course. What could she possibly have as an objection?

"Tomorrow" There was something out of place about the way she said it though. She wasn't always like this, her smile looked ghostly, like she had trouble just lifting all the muscles into place. Something the old lady hadn't noticed before, not until just then.

"Gloria..."

The sun was pouring in from the curtains, it made the whole house look dark. The old lady was lying in her bed, thinking, beginning to recognize for the first time that this was going to be an ordeal now. Gloria wasn't going to let up until she successfully wedged an inconvenience into her whole week. That was it now. Any minute some shark in a suit, some asshole on a Saturday morning, was going to knock on that door downstairs, and then she'd have to get up and yell at someone she had never met before today. She should just go to the store, she thought, or go get some breakfast. But then some silver-tongued salesman is going to be in the house alone with her daughter. Who is clearly very gullible.

"Gloria!" No answer.

With some huffing and wheezing and with a big concerted effort the middle-aged lady would throw herself up sideways to sit slouched over the side of the bed. One of these days she was going to throw her back out like this, but not today. This was her exercise for the morning anyway, and she could feel the beads of sweat starting to form along the top of her now-balding head. The house would croak and groan with her waking too, as if they were both singing along together. Each step she took with a spine that seemed frozen awkwardly in place would give enough cause for the house to groan out in it's own creaking pain, as if she was walking along it's back, getting it stretched and warmed up for all the toils of the day. There would be many. Through the hallway and down the stairs, but partway down she heard some small squeaking from one of the rooms upstairs, it wasn't much to distract the old lady, her mind was already heavily devoted to fried eggs and pomegranates, but she would go investigate without thought and despite the tremendous toll it took on her, both physically and psychologically, to change directions mid-step and actually climb back up the stairs.

In her daughter's room, Gloria lay in a heap, half under the covers, sobbing silently. "Gloria? What's wrong?" "Nothing, nothing." The covers came up, and just then, a knock at the door. "Okay, come on," The old lady was pulling her over gently from the covers, the girl's cheeks stained with tracks of tears, "You're not going to sulk like this under the covers all day. Look, your guy is here, so what happened?" The girl rose up with a crooked smile on her face, but whatever supports there are to hold up the human form seemed to fail her just at the critical point, and she would sop back to the comfort and warmth of the small alcove she emerged from moments earlier. “Marcus broke up with me.” The door continued to knock, oil on the frying pan crackled faintly from the kitchen. “He what?!” There was a moment of silence as the woman tried to press down the abundance of heat imminently rising to the surface of her clear scalp, “Harry! Are you so deaf and useless that you can’t hear whose at the door? Answer it!” This was one thing out of the way, and she would resume, peacefully as she could, from here. “He? Broke up with you? Am I hearing this right?” A moment of silence as the heat, while she was trying to press it down (one would suppose), settled evenly in the pit of her stomach, “That boy is something else, you know that?”

“You stay in bed. Someone needs to remind that child just where the hell he’s coming from.” The old lady said to an empty hallway as she waddled uneasily into it’s smoke filled embrace, but there was protest. “No no no no no no,” Several ‘no’s’ followed by a gentle grab to the shoulder. Somewhere downstairs the topic of intergallactic space was stewing around the smell of bacon grease and the spray of oranges. “Stay, please don’t. It’s too embarrassing…”

“You don’t need to fight your battles by yourself, you know. This useless wet towel of a man, if he can be called a man at all, has a few objective things he could learn about himself, and I just want to inform him of that.” She said, she wanted to say much more than this too, to somehow convince the girl that it was entirely unrelated to her own troubled parting, somehow that it was just between herself and Marcus as a third party and passive observer, but knew already as she tried to ignore the look in her daughter’s crinkled face that she was fighting a losing battle. Silent concessions. She would try not to make a habit of it as they walked down into the next big hurdle for the day. What a start to a Saturday morning. “Space.” She was in no mood for it, her jarring shuffle down the stairs had firmly solidified her position, and she was going to be difficult to deal with from this point on. “Okay, come out with it. What’s this going into space? Who are you? Where are you from? Why are you here on a Saturday?” The man was young, handsome, still had a smile on his face from chatting away and undoubtedly telling stupid jokes with the woman’s equally stupid husband. Just the type. He rolled up on the balls of his feet as he turned to address the intimidating figure glowering into the room and filling the doorway. “Right, yes. My name is Jacob Tindley, here from the observatory. Sort of. Well, from the space station. I’m a research assistant there, I’m doing this now. I mean, not permanently, but just now, for the contest.”

“Are you nervous?” The woman plucked her arms up to rest her hands on her hips, but she had to move forward a bit to make the whole thing fit, in past the doorway, “You should be.”

“Mom…”
“I’m sorry, this is a bit early I know, but I don’t make the schedule. Here’s my credentials if you need them,” And he unclipped the laminated badge he was wearing to hand it carefully to the lady, keeping his distance, as the zookeeper feeding the alligators, “And you can call the station to confirm, I have their number on me.”
“Do you want some tea? Are you hungry?” Another reluctant concession.
“No, thank you.”
“So you’re here to take us up into space, is that right? Do you want to explain a little bit of how this works? We’ve won the contest already, right? Or this is like some kind of preliminary draw to get into the final runnings?”
“No, you’ve won. We really have to make good time though, and they’ll go over all of the particulars at the station.”
“The… Excuse me?”
“I know, it’s early. I don’t make the schedule, you know, just have to follow it.”
“I am not going into any kind of station to go into space today. You’ve got to be out of your Goddamn mind. I don’t care if this is real or not, it’s not going to happen.”
“No no, mom, this is just for briefing and sort of explaining everything about the trip.”

And like this, the old lady who had not meaningfully, to her memory anyway, thought of space a day in her life, would be trotted out to the space station to become some sort of tourist astronaut. It's what it seemed like anyway. It was going to be one of these kinds of days.

It would be about this temperature out on the sea right now. There was a cold breeze drifting in and out of the car with the smell of something the girl couldn't quite put her finger on, but it reminded her, conjuring up images in dense concentrations of light, like they were absorbing all of it from every surface it bounced off of, from the immense sunshine pouring in past the windshield, casting deep shadows in the places where all these people she didn't know should have had eyes, now swallowed by darkness. There was something strange about it, like they'd all collectively forgotten they had sight and voices and human features in that immense roaring of wind sending all the hair in the car into fits of violent flickers. She didn't know any of their names, except for Jacob Tindley, and only every now and then the driver would say something in a hushed tone to him about something one of their cohorts had said about these and those missing instruments, or when some executives turned up suddenly to the station, needed to host some meeting, and turned on the projector which had been left with pictures of insects, now the size of half the wall, with hats photoshopped onto them. Executives who were responsible, in part, for grant requests. It wasn't the sort of quiet reserved for secrets, but for apologetic intimacy, for when there is an outsider in your group, when it is rude to leave them in silence, and overly contrived, she guessed, to make all this inane small talk with someone you didn't know, and maybe wouldn't after the day was up. People were busy, faces come and go, somewhere in it she wanted to be burned into the sunshine, a noncorporeal figure emanating from the light and dust from the back seat, but she'd settle for the sea, the beach.

"Where do you want to go?" The peak of a crooked smile gleamed toward the backseat.
"Hmm?"
"In the universe."
The girl thought about it as she sat looking out the window for a long time, and for that time the rest of the troupe was once again engulfed in silence, as though this had to be decided upon before anything else could progress. "Anywhere." The final response was met with a sudden sigh of relief for all parties left sitting in suspense, "A planet in the habitable zone, I guess. Maybe see the storm on Jupiter if it was ever possible to see it and live." Then she thought about it for a moment, the reality of the situation started setting in, and who this question was coming from, and the dense images started to form in the blackness of space, speckled with stars as an orb of sea and concrete-speckled earth started to develop an edge on the horizon where it somehow, somewhere unbelievably, no longer existed, "But really," something in the dark pools of her eyes was coming to life, "just the thought of seeing the earth from space is so incredible I can't even imagine it! Will there be windows? Will we see?"
"Well, I'm pretty sure. Right Jacob? What do you think?"
"Right, yes. I think so." He said.

Aware, you are aware sometimes of where you are with no real and significant understanding of how you ever arrived at such a place. The building they came to was enormous, it must have taken up two city blocks (although it was out in the country, and not nearly as tall as one might have expected). The inside was littered with some dissected views of turbines with different components exploded out from the center and suspended by what looked like ceramic and fishing line. There was a large, thin portion of a wing standing up against a glass office that was empty, with photos of astronauts and signed sketches littering the walls and floor. It looked like this was, at one point anyway, a nicely established office front to whatever noisy goings on were transpiring in the background, but now seemed only as if someone had started to renovate and then suddenly forgotten. There were small pieces of broken drywall underneath chairs and buckets, and a thin film of dust that seemed to permeate the whole room. Beyond that, you could see the feint view of an industrial setting (through two thick metal doors that would swing open every now and then as someone in cargo shorts raced in and out). There were sounds from drills and some continuous beeping, distant as it was from the lobby, minced in with the intermittent singing of a telecom, murmuring and echoing incoherently in a soothing voice. As the girl and her mother arrived, they were ushered into a small waiting room with eleven other people alternately anxiously looking at them, murmuring cheerily to each other, or gazing deeply into bright screens. After about twenty minutes a man came in wearing a suit. He entered confidently, but seemed increasingly distressed as he found not everyone was paying attention to him. This man was Charles Yau, he was holding the lapel of his suit jacket and seemed to be waiting for a complete quiet to fill the room. There was a drop of sweat on the top of his cleanly shaved head that glistened in the electric hum of the overhead light. "Is it safe to assume all of you have had your breakfast? It's going to be a long day. After we go through the morning briefing, we're going to try and get as many of you as we can dressed and submerged in the pool to go through training exercises. This can take upwards of seven hours, so... Make sure you bring a snack before we go." He was scanning the room diligently, making sure his words had sank in with the correct amount of gravity before going on. "I'm just kidding," His face erupted into a smile that sent wave of wrinkles through his otherwise placid expression, "It's a lot simpler than that, but please follow me to the meeting and we can get this all started." He clasped his hands together, the lights seemed to shut off automatically as they left the lobby.

The meeting itself was straightforward enough. Mostly the man in the suit was there to tell them about the type of craft that would be leaving orbit, the INS Pleiades, which had been tried in it's various incarnations successfully already twice, although this would be the most technologically advanced model. The stresses of travelling into space, which were minimal if you were just touring the outer shell of our home, which this lot was. Mostly it was a lot of rules, a lot of explanation for how small infractions that we could get away with on Earth, had very real and very serious consequences, up to and including total failure of the space craft. Someone asked about health risks, someone else about how healthy you had to be in the first place. The speaker couldn't help but flash a look at Gloria's mother as he answered these questions, who was sitting and frowning intently back at him waiting for a clear answer that would give her an easy way out. "If you were out above the atmosphere for any extended amount of time, then yes. I mean, you'd have to account for cardiovascular issues and muscular atrophy. A whole cocktail of illnesses that come from the strain of living in space. Humans do really well in the place we grow up on, we're not really built for floating around in a vacuum." He would pause, looked like he was remembering some anecdote, but decided against it at the last moment, "But no. You're here today because basically we are well on our way to perfecting the science part of space tourism. I mean, it's not perfect, we're only going up past the atmosphere. It's cramped, it's expensive, but we can now take passengers!" He made an excited motion, gesturing to the whole room, "So long as you don't break anything." There were a lot more questions, on almost every particular you could imagine, and with each answer he would elaborate a bit more on the design of the ship. Really, the room seemed to have collectively taken up a position of wanting to believe they were going where they were going, they just needed someone who sounded competent to say it in a variety of different ways. Three months. Three months from today, that's all it would take. They were already prepared, he made a point of saying, this time period was just for the passengers to get emotionally ready. And, you know, for the press.

When it was over it was like it had never happened. The whole weekend was shrouded in silence, Gloria had gone away to visit her brother and his family while Augusta stalked the seemingly empty house (her husband notwithstanding). She sat at the dining room table, unfolded yesterday's paper, took a cup from the coffee made an hour ago, and stared at the spotted patterns on the table while something like a slow poison filled her lungs. "Harold!" There was no answer. "What's that smell? Are you mixing cleaners down there?" The night and a week had passed like this and with absolutely nothing in between, but it was not the sort of nothing that let one slip back into old habits and the electric hum of soothing thoughts, but instead sat heavy, as if it was weighing on each room the old lady entered, like a knock on the door with no one answering, or a sudden itch on your arm, as if a hair had grazed it, at the moment you were about to fall into a deep sleep.

In the morning before the sun comes up there is an eerie stillness to the world in the industrial slumps of the suburbs. In the offensive glow of the indoor lights on the transit, each person sits trying to recapture their own impressions of sleep while ghoulish imps stalk the aisles, looking for empty spaces to squeeze themselves into. The old lady sat with her tiny lunch pack perched on her lap and her chin tipped up slightly, as if to cast off the whole lot of them as the bus hummed loudly along the deserted main streets. Then it was two inches into the snow, with each step getting deeper. It was so-and-so's birthday. The labels hadn't been printed out for the day, and they would not be made up until Craig came in, at two O'clock, at which point the whole building would be thrown into a fever, with each person being watched over closely enough by management that not a single movement would be wasted as the building pulled for a four O'clock shipment. The day went on quietly, there were a few people running slow laps around the warehouse with brooms as the rest made do with nothing, the young hiding behind boxes while older stalwart persons made flippant by the years stood out in the open chatting with maintenance workers, center stage, and Augusta alone sat staunch and seemingly immovable at her work station on her tiny stool, audience to the whole display and staring out grimly at the rest of the open building while the seconds ticked away.

In a few hours a new shipment of the ingredients that made up an assortment of cement and industrial strength adhesives would come in by trailer, slowly reversing into the receiving bay dock with the blaring reverse signal that, after many years and hours standing there while the winter wind blows in, comes only to signal the sounds of the morning before coffee. Here, a man named Harris stands in the place he has every weekday morning for the last eight years of his life, and sends a knowing glance to his two hired goons, fresh from the agency, who take out two wooden two-by-fours, resting on metal clips at the back end of the trailer where marked bags of toxic sand and buckets of chemicals are stacked midway up the trailer and all the way back on pallets pressed to either side of the deep wooden box, a narrow aisle between them. Harris will pull out five or six skids, depending on the order for the day, arranging them loosely around an empty dropped palette, where the drones will seek out upc codes on each of the otherwise identical bags of chemical sand, and stack them according to an identical sequence in the last three digits. Sometimes the labels would be loosely organized, so only one skid needed to be dropped at a time, other times it would be scattered so that you would have to walk all over and remember where everything was, until the arrangement was arbitrarily changed to make room for new numbers. The reason behind this annoying variation was not something anyone seemed to understand, but instead accepted simply as the possibility of rain on a winter's night. The skid is recorded, a large label with it's own upc code is printed out and scanned by the same person who printed it. The two teenagers proceed to run in circles around the skid with a roll of saran wrap. The skid will be dropped in a dimly lit room with an endless array of metal, paint-chipped scaffolding where no pedestrian ever finds their way to, and tall enough to strain one's neck on the way in. A silent monument to the industrial world, built without any notion of grandeur or spectacle despite the enormity of the project, and when one skid is pressed tightly into the embrace of it's upper most shelf, three more will be drawn out and brought to the large metal vat on the other side of the factory. Here, the chemicals are poured into the mixer, and shot out at high speeds from a single tube protruding from the bottom at the touch of a button. Where there is no bag present, there is always someone rushed out of the lull of a long day to an immediate demand to action while white dust cakes their shirt and shoes. The bag is filled based on it's own weight calibrations, stapled, and stacked in the same pattern as the skid it came from, only hardly ever as tall. Another upc label is printed and taped to the side of the palette, the stack of bags is wrapped once with tape and driven away, the tape is cut, the cement bags removed and placed in white or yellow or blue bins, depending on their size. The man in the forklift leans back and gradually raises the skid over time as the stacks get lower, and the bins with the commercial bags are thrown with a Clunk onto a conveyor, where they are sorted into a myriad array of other conveyor belts, forty two in all and all controlled by a single figure at the helm of what amounts to the mainframe for the entire factory. Here, they make their way down to the shipping docks, where they are loaded, piece by piece, into trucks that have numbered destinations known to no one.

"We had this one guy in our outfit named Dylan. Dylan was one crazy son of a bitch, he was from Australia. We were sleeping out one night deep in the jungle, and usually we'd have one or two guys awake while the rest of us slept, and took shifts like this. We were a small company, keep in mind. We were recon, so only five or six people would go in, you'd be going in past enemy lines, so it was important to keep a low profile. Now I was asleep, but I heard something that woke me, this sort of low, guttural, growl. I went up to Dylan, who was standing watch at the time, very, very slowly, I must have been shaking like I had a knife just pulled from my throat, and my face was white as a sheet, I'm sure. I said to him, 'Dylan, do you hear that? Fuck, what the hell is that?' And Dylan, cool as lettuce, turns to me and says, it's probably just a panther. Well I couldn't believe it. I flashed my flashlight into the forest and all you could see were these two glowing green eyes staring back at you. So I tell him, "We've got to get the hell out of here", and he just looks at me and tells me it's just a cat." A voice chimed in, "Did you leave?" "No, no... I mean, where the hell are we going to go? I lost track of it after that first glimpse with the light, and we're in the jungle in the middle of the night, and I couldn't really tell where the sound is coming from after that anyway. That was one hell of a night though. You can bet I stayed up through the rest of it clutching my rifle close and gazing off into the blackness. Couldn't see a thing out there. The next morning I was jittery as hell. But Dylan... He was a hell of a guy... We once came across this big gaur, which is a sort of ox they have down there, in the middle of the jungle. Now usually, even besides all the wild animals and snakes you might come across, you have to be real careful out there, the Vietcong would rig up these big traps, they were often kind of makeshift, but they could really do a number on you if you weren't paying attention. There would be, say, a heavy board full of spikes that would fall on you and crush you if you tripped it, just to give you an idea. We were out there, and we spotted this bull-like animal, just grazing out there, or I don't know what, and Dylan had the idea to walk up to the thing and try to sort of cozy up to it. He wanted to ride it through the jungle! Fancied himself some kind of John Wayne of the rain forest. Anyway, he goes up to it and it's just sort of glaring at him, but keeps eating. We're trying to tell him even if he does get a good handle of the thing, there's no way he's riding it through the bush. One gunshot and that horned monster is going to flip the fuck out and gore one of us. He insists that it's fine anyway and goes to--"

"Excuse me." The interruption was an impatient call from the large figure now ambling over. She turned only to look at the two new temporary workers, the ones sent fresh from the agency that morning who were now leaning on the handles of their brooms and listening intently up until the moment the story was broken up, "I don't know if you two noticed, but the line is running now. So maybe instead of standing around here doing nothing, you could go tend to your work when there are a bunch of other people standing around and waiting for you to do your job."

"Okay, sorry." Answered one, simply and with a stiff lip as they both started to walk away.
"Do you think if Craig came out here and saw you two like this, you wouldn't be canned in a heartbeat? How do you think he'd feel if I went and told him now, huh?" No answer, the two simply walked a little quicker as the old man casually sauntered away to sit in his little cubicle and wait for something that needed to be fixed.

When she returned to her work station though, pouring glue onto labels, pasting them one after another onto a never ending cycle of renewed bags queued to be filled with dust, there was something nagging in the pit of her stomach. A thought that had not yet formed, but seemed to be clawing it's way to the surface of her consciousness, like the articulation of a question from complete obscurity and nauseating confusion, the formless, nameless article was tugging at her lungs, demanding to be given form, and was playing at the base of her brain like some sort of restless ape swinging from vines and hammering it's big fists into the earth. She took the gun, would walk around a short circle along her stack of empty bags, and hammer out several small orange labels with the date printed on them. She would go back to her desk, sit down, and glaze a thin layer of glue over a folded bag, reach with her other hand for a label, and turn the sponge in her hand to poke out of it's bottom while she then used both free hands to position the label correctly, before quickly passing it off to the completed pile, and reaching for the next one, in one smooth and succinct motion. As she was staring down at the fine print, letting her mind relax just enough to move with precision and with the glazed awareness that allowed her arms to swing about in perfect articulation and seemingly on their own, with each motion of the hand, swiftly as it was, and without insecurities over the possibility of slipping up while her mind wandered the open plains of concrete daydreams around her, moving ever so slightly to simple images of the day's events so far, and broken thoughts that seemed to have meaning more for what they seemed to imply than the half sentences and flickering images that made up their actual composition. Through all this, something invasive slipped through. She remembered the scene, from a dozen movies, it seemed, or television shows she hadn't seen, of a man in a white suit with an American flag patched on it's shoulder, being whipped around in circles at a hundred miles an hour, his face rippling in the wind. It was this image, as vague as it was as she recalled it, that seemed to wedge it's way into her mind without any sign of ever letting go. Then it was her in the chair, imagining the room around her spinning at such tremendous speeds while the skin of her face peeled back tighter than she ever imagined or thought to imagine it could be. No medical concerns, Dr. Yau or whatever his name was, had assured them all. One could guess they forgot to mention this much despite the length and depth of their presentation. The woman was wondering just what sort of game or scam these people were running. She felt nauseous, and needed a smoke badly.

Outside, the air was crisp and clean despite the brown slush that covered the tops of snow heaps. She was alone. There was nothing in the modern world more solitary and isolated than the rear parking lot of a warehouse, where the trucks pull in. Even when you're seen here, you were no more than a block of concrete, an obstacle for trucks to avoid backing into while lining themselves up toward one of the dozens of docks. As the woman stood there taking in mouthfuls of smoke and listening to the distant sounds of wet snow sloshing constantly, like the ebb of the tide, further along the sides of the road, she forced her mind to think of her grandchildren, the meaningless memories she recalled that made up their sentiments, and to plans for Christmas. The door opened and she was reminded of where she was while a slender figure slowly traced his way along the concrete platform they were both standing on, he seemed to be slowing down for something, and although the woman could not exactly put her finger on it, it was getting more annoying the slower he went. He threw handfuls of cardboard into a nearby bin.

"You know," the boy started, not knowing, it seemed, whether to stop completely or just slowly keep walking past her, "Pretty sure Craig wouldn't be too pleased with you standing out here smoking when it's not break either."
The woman stood there taking a deep pull on her absurdly small cigarette, her scowl deepening as she wrinkled her forehead for something clever to respond with, "Yeah?" A suspenseful moment passed; there is a certain cadence and timing that helps in responding to a threat such as this. You had to wait a little, but not so long that the person might suspect you have nothing good to say, which was true in this case, but it must not be suspected. It was coming to her, but she didn't have it quite ready in time. She would just have to start speaking and see where the path took her. "You really want to try threatening me? I've been working here for thirteen years, Craig sees me smoking out here all the time and doesn't say a thing, so why don't you go ahead and try it? See what happens."
"Why don't you go ahead and do your job since you're so concerned with how other people work?"
"Yeah, okay pal. Keep walking."
"Okay, fine," he was getting white in the face now, a strange cocktail of fear and anger and embarrassment making it hard for him to think straight or articulate his next thought, which was eventually, "I'll just go to the office and ask Craig what me and Shelly can do about labels while we're waiting for you to finish smoking."
He had his hand on the door, but only managed to tug at it slightly before feeling his shoulder jerked back a little. The woman said, "Hey! Listen to me, I didn't come out here to get lectured by some-"
She was interrupted though by a quick brush of her hand, away from the child's shoulder, "Don't touch me."

The man was looking up at her, not that she was much taller, but he seemed to be forcing a sort slouched over imitation of relaxation while his body tensed up. It was amazing people even came in this size. He looked incredibly small, frail even. The woman had not really registered it at the time it happened, but felt the sting of the man's head fresh on the palm of her hand as she stood with an almost entirely foreign mix of emotions brewing and boiling up inside of her, and not recognizing immediately where any of it was coming from, or what the strange expression on the young man's face was signalling to her, although it was clearly an expression directed towards her person. He was holding his head as he looked up at her, something like carefully constructed disgust wrinkling his young brow, "Did you just assault me?" He waited, another dramatic pause for effect, "Yeah, you're getting fired, for sure..."

The woman clenched her enormous dinosaur jaw but did not follow him any further. She quickly sucked what remained of the life from her cigarette to make her way back inside, but found herself momentarily unable to move. What would she do when she got back in? Go on gluing labels as if she was oblivious to what conversation was inevitably taking place behind closed doors, or march straight through them without a thought in her head for a way to dispel all the bullshit ways that kid was inevitably fluffing up what had happened out there. When she had enough time and clarity to weigh out what was troubling her about her options, she found that neither of them were so bad as to warrant standing out in the cold and waiting, but by the time the thought thawed her movements and she put a few footsteps behind her, Craig was peeking out into the snow and asking for her to come into his office. When she was there, she could not even look at the young man seeping down into one of two chairs that faced the desk. She didn't say a word either to any of the questions the man behind the desk asked except, "Yes", and "I did", and in exchange for her forthrightness, the man who sat across the desk did not say a word of the only sentence that had any significance while all three of them were sitting there uncomfortably, which was, ultimately, "I have called you in here to terminate you." He would eventually creep toward it though until it had come and gone as softly as a Summer's breeze, only hinting at a coldness that lay somewhere in the air.

[End of Chapter 1]