JOB (...another old story)

JOB
by Michael Kroetch

Because she has to, she gets a job. She has to because there’s no money left. Her boyfriend took it with him up to Alaska and beyond. She didn’t give him the money or tell him he could have it. He took it. She won’t let herself say he stole it, but that’s what it comes down to. He’s going to go photograph pieces of ice. To hear him talk about it, you’d think it was romantic and full of drama. But to her, especially since he took the money, all she can see is him with his camera snapping it at some tray of ice cubes. Click. Okay, so they aren’t ice cubes, they’re icebergs. Big deal. She knows what they are. And she knows it’s because of them that she has to get the job and she hates to work. Every job she’s ever had has sucked. Big time. And this one is no exception. It sounds great, being in a movie. But what does she get to do? Nothing. Her eyes are going to explode with boredom. She can’t even move. Dead people don’t, so she can’t. Don’t see many dancing corpses, do you? They pay her by the hour. The longer that she’s dead, the more money she makes. In some ways she hopes to be dead for days, it’s good money. But it is so utterly numbingly dumb to have to lay there while they say their stupid lines. They can’t act. Her dog could do a better job. And who came up with these lines? It’s like they’re from a different planet. Nobody talks like this. To stop herself from screaming at them that they are idiots, she imagines she’s laying on an iceberg in a vast expanse of nothingness. The actors aren’t there. The director with his stupid dinosaur tattoo isn’t there. The cue card girl with her blueberry bubble gum isn’t either. And neither are the set guys who drag the cables to the microphones around. Not even her boyfriend who is supposed to be there is there. Where is he anyway? Ice cubes, my ass, she tells herself. He’s not photographing ice cubes. He’s with some bitch somewhere spending the money he took.

Her breath gets going hard and quick at this. So she stops herself. People in the cast are staring at her. She shuts her eyes again. Goes back to the iceberg and the soothing polar breeze with nothing on the horizon in any direction for days. It’s peaceful there. A good place to be dead. Or to be dying, which is what she feels is really happening. Everything left behind, abandoned, burned. Nothing now left but her body here on this ice, slowly becoming solid.