The House of Jeb

Short fiction

I LOOKED AT MY WATCH: eleven hundred hours, lunchtime. I supposedly had no longer than oh-one-three-oh to get over to my Joy Center. Yesterday, Brandsday, was officially the end of my work cycle, but unofficially, I needed extra green, so for the second time this quarter, I was pulling an eight-day stint on the floor. My Automatonian shares were doing well since I’d pumped in a few hundred chips into the account. They were flexi-hours accumulated from the last quarter. This was turning into a habit, and if I didn’t fuck up it, my windfall.

When the new calendar went into effect, the rest of the world plunged into angry turmoil. We A-packers were old hands by then, positively avant-garde.

It was early, and I wasn’t going to work straight away. I had wrangled some negative flexies so I could go down to the corner bar where there was live music and people out on the terrace drinking. Free folk, guys who got up and went to bed when it suited them. A taxi pulled up to the curb. I saw Georgië pay the cabbie and stick her two-toned cowboy boot out onto the asphalt. She peered from under her bangs and bangles to see who might have arrived. The gold lamé western bomber jacket I’d seen before, but today’s dizzying look included a hitched-up tube skirt. Never mind that it was pathetic. I mean, who did she think she was going to run into at a biker bar on a Sunday afternoon, Jesus, and yes, God—how cringy—it was a rockabelly cover band. I smiled and waved at her anyway; even from where I stood, I could tell she was sozzled. Most people at the Split Lip were in lazy, hair-of-the-dog mode, not Georgië. She was still for real burning down brain cells.

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