All over the place
One step in and her exposed shins were covered with fleas. Not one or
two, which would have been bad enough, but so many that she had patches
of moving black dots all over. But the worst was the basement laundry of
the 19th century apartment building on the lake. Swarms of them.
"It's not like we can just up and move, Cindi," her girlfriend
argued with both sympathy and anger in her voice. A perpetual victim,
she was always under attack from forces outside her control. And in this
case, no amount of toxic and smelly flea-bombs would do the trick, not
when the horrible itch-causing bugs were hopping in from the dingy
carpet in the hallway.
Mariel turned away to scratch her leg and looked at their combined
piles of crap. Cluttered, unorganized, crowded. They didn't have enough
money between them to buy any decent furniture. Cindi was a college
student and Mariel a low paid Office Manager working for a non-profit in
San Francisco. And when they finally found an apartment that they could
get without a credit report or references, it wasn't like they could
turn it down. Plus, it had great art deco details.
It wasn't until after they moved in that they realized the building
was infested. At first Mariel thought it was their cats who had brought
the fleas in. Her third trip to the laundry changed that.
"Let's
just leave and go to a motel for a couple of days," she pleaded,
watching the welts grow on her legs and spread to her arms. But Cindi
shook her head, "Hon, you know we don't have the money for that, and
besides, they all want credit cards. And what would we do with the
cats?"
"Fuck it then. I'm just going to live in the shower!" Mariel felt
herself going somewhere bad; she couldn't help it. "I hope you're going
shopping soon, we don't have any god damn groceries!" She swiped a clean
towel off the pile on the now out-of-style four poster bed with
decorative iron bars and slammed the door. Looking at herself in the
mirror she felt disgusted: distorted face, blotchy skin and a curled lip
like an angry dog.
She turned around, slid open the shower door and started the water
which took five minutes to get warm, then turned back to herself in the
mirror and got undressed, cursing at her own stupidity.
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