I do actually feel that the people responsible for the war should be responsible for the consequences.
Supporting our wounded heroes is one of many things that people feel passionately must be done, by somebody else.
“Only wooden utensils,” said the lunch lady, slapping a spoon down in front of Viv. Viv, nonplussed, found that a very large bowl of porridge had been put down in front of her. She hadn’t ordered it.
“I can kill you with these, too,” Luca said, smiling sweetly at the lunch lady. He already had an empty bowl in front of him, with its attendant wooden spoon.
She stared back at him impassively, and said, “Don’t try to sweet-talk me.”
“Never call ahead,” Luca said, bouncing a little bit on the pads of his feet. “It gives people time to hide their bodies.”
I actually came up to tell you that the lunch lady is making squid ink soup again and the Tea House doesn’t seem to like it much, because the whole canteen has gone underwater, including the lunch lady, who won’t leave. She says that she’s going to go down with the ship and also that no one is going to bully her in her own kitchen.
“OK, first, someone has to order something or we’re going to get kicked out.”
“No one gets kicked out of Tim’s,” said Mars, leaning back in his chair. “Mans can hijack a bus, bring it to Tim’s for a coffee, and still not get kicked out.”
“I want to say you got jokes,” said Heaven finally. “But you were speaking in the voice you put on when you approach old white ladies in the store, so you’re for real.”
The margin of the margins is a dangerous place to be, never forget that.
I bent quickly and kissed his cheek. “Thank you, Rutherford.” He stared up at me in shock and no small amount of concern. I walked off around the corner before he could recover from his surprise. That was quite enough sincerity for one day. We’d both embarrassed ourselves enough.
The removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries—eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will—so that we are left with twenty-four potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles.
In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.” It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive.
‘One day,’ I said, somewhat indistinctly around my chattering teeth. ‘We’re back together for one day and already we’re wandering the city in our underwear in the small hours of the morning, soaked to the skin, after a near brush with death. Still got it, Fi.’ I punched the air with one fist.
I dislike playing the helpless female card, as a rule. It’s demeaning. But, fuck me, it works.
‘It’s too late,’ said Silise. ‘No amount of words will ever change what happened to me, and nothing will ever change how I feel about you.’
‘Cool.’ I shrugged. She stared. ‘What do you want me to do, commit seppuku? From where I’m sitting, my ex-best friend is a malevolent bitch with an entitled fucking attitude. What, you abandon us for a century, follow that up with a charming supervillain routine, and you expect to walk off with the moral high ground? That’s a hard no.’
