Free Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology by ed. Pela Via

doesn’t wake her. She’s wrapped herself in the entire blanket and spread out to take over the whole damn bed. She the-opposite-of-snores. Some nights I wake sweating and wonder if she’s even breathing. She always is.
    Her leg’s sticking through the blanket, the only exposed skin on the bed. I can see the tattoo wrapping around her ankle, script doubling back on itself, but it’s too dark to make out the “Don’t mourn; Organize!” that she covers with her slacks or boots before going to work every day. She explained it to me once, but I don’t quite remember what it means. Something about being the only communist around and without her organization when we moved to this town, she felt like she had to get it. She explained the dialectics of drug dealing to me, too, and though I’m a poor study at such things, I detected the sarcasm.
    She’s got the bed pretty well staked out, so I take the couch in the living room. I lie back and close my eyes but there’s this restlessness I can’t shake. My mind’s clear now, empty, but there’s this twitching feeling in my legs and I feel like I have to move. I feel alert, in control. Assertive. It’ll fade tomorrow at work but for now I lie still and enjoy it.

    ———

    The lack of sleep clings in a film to my eyes and I’m blinking too much. It’s just the new guy and me this morning. When I told him to take the register, he didn’t argue. It’s a bit less work than stocking shelves if we’re not too busy, which is always. He took a look at my face and decided not to ask questions.
    I’m feeling good, all told, but I don’t feel like dealing with customers, especially if one knows Andy, asks why he’s not here. And it took me a bit to fall asleep last night, so I look worse than I am. The trick here is going to be to sink into stocking shelves, like I’m blocking out everything I’m thinking and just going through the motions. It shouldn’t be too hard.
    I get seven DVDs into the bin of new releases I’m working on, to which of course my free-movie perk doesn’t apply, before a haggard, salt-and-pepper bastard hauls two young boys in and unleashes them on the children’s section. I take one look over at the new guy at the counter and try not to grin to myself. The kids have voices like razor blades. The dad’s face is resigned and tired and there’s no damn way that he’s getting the kids out of here in less than an hour. After a couple of seconds indulged watching the new guy sweat, I turn back to the bin of movies. Company protocol is to ask if you can help him every twelve minutes. I glance to the clock, not that I want to call the kid on it. I just want to see. He called old Andy “sir” when he first started a couple weeks ago, and though my stomach did a little tap dance, it set Andy anew on his rising-up-the-ranks, by-your-own-bootstraps kick, the fading of which I’d enjoyed. I try not to think about what happened next and focus on the shelves.
    While the new guy handles the poor dad I slip a gory little slasher flick behind an animated children’s film. I’m seeing a manicured mother storming in with fire and brimstone and offense taken at little Jimmy seeing such things, the new guy’s flustered face as he calls the boss in to handle it, the other customers trying not to look like they’re watching. It’s beautiful and I’ll be long gone by then. It’s a pathetic form of rebellion, but here I am.
    My last shift ends in twenty minutes.

    ———

    I walk the thirteen blocks to Stephanie’s diner after work and take a table in the far corner. It’s like walking into a cloud of grease and disinfectant. Incandescent lights burn themselves low before anyone thinks of replacing them, so the place feels like a relic, a museum representation of a long-dead breed of greasy spoon. It’s a charming little hole, run by an old married couple who probably remember sharecropping and treat their employees accordingly.
    I don’t recognize