May woke up and was a homeowner. She fumbled around inside her head and put on her homeowner face – cheerful, but empty.
This was normal.
She brushed her teeth and ate a breakfast and got dressed and had a shower and made a list of things to do in some order or another and had the closest thing to a morning she’d get.
Then she went down to the curb, to the bus.
“Morning,” she said.
“Morning,” she answered.
May got onto the bus and was bus driver. She put on the bus driver cap. She put on the bus driver face – stoic, yet aching underneath.
This was also normal.
There were twelve stops between Mary and her destination. More of her got on and off at each one. Faces, faces, going to places, places. Each with their own little problems and their own little profits.
At nine o’clock she stepped out at the bookstore and put on her homeowner face again.
It was a little grim and dusty inside, but she showed no sympathy to her book clerk. She wanted something, and the customer was always right.
So she toiled for herself, and found it buried in a dark corner where the roof’s collapse had shredded four bookcases and shielded another.
A newspaper.
“Excellent,” she told herself as she paid. She would read this as she drove herself to work in her taxi.
The stocks were up. The sports were down. Someone had scandal’d, but a speck of water damage had saved their name from besmirchment for all time.
“Hmmrph, hmorph. Hlarph,” proclaimed May authoritatively. “How much longer?”
“Almost there, ma’am,” said May. “Traffic’s bad.”
It always was on this street. King had been left clogged and she’d never got around to calling herself to clear out the breakdowns. But there was a path, if you were willing to violently ram a car into a few bumpers every day for years, and so there was.
May punched out the meter, paid herself her fare, and disembarked. As she took off her taxi driver face and put on her important mayor face she vowed once more to never use such a shoddy service again, as was her custom. It had almost made her late to work. This was improper and abhorrent.
Indoors, May threw her briefcase into the council chamber, sat down at the secretarial desk, and put on her receptionist face – friendly and open yet utterly unyielding. She scheduled up the day, dealt with three rude and unseemly incidents where she didn’t have an appointment, and had lunch. When she was through she wandered into the chamber, put on her councillor face, and pushed through a little light gerrymandering, though it took some convincing her to do it.
A good day’s work.
To treat herself, on the way home she stopped off at a greasy and delicious little place, put on her fry cook face – dead serious, laser-focused, jaw slightly agape with furious concentration that could boil oil – and got takeout. Onion rings, thick and so crumb-larded that they were almost donuts.
She opened her mouth to take a bite and something swooped down, took the bite for her, from her, and shot up to a nearby roof before she could even flinch.
“Fuck!” she said. It was the third time her homeowner face had ever swore.
“AiiiieeEEK, AiiiiiEEEEEYK, YARK YARK YARK YARK YARK YARK!” replied the thief.
It was a vulgar thing, a white and grey bird with a yellow bill and hateful little yellowed eyes. It shredded her food and gulped it down greedily.
May glared at it with genuine hate, then forced it down. No, no no. This was not part of things, not right now.
So she put on her pest control face when she got home that night, and left a few onion rings on the porch, laced with rat poison and ketchup.
Tuesday came, and it was time to refuel. The onion rings were missing, a fine omen as May’s bus driver face unloaded her at the gas station, where she put on her mechanic’s face – earnest and firm – and began untangling the mess of rotting pipes that led to the fresher tanks fit for siphoning.
At noon she took off her hat, put on her manager’s face – red and exasperated – and was busy berating herself for taking so long with her coffee when the bird shat in it.
It went ‘ploorp.’
“FUCK OFF!” she yelled at the sky – a shocking breach of professionalism, decorum, and civility – and threw her coffee at it. Immediately she put on her retail management face and berated herself for littering, but this only inflamed her temper further.
“AiiiiiiiieeeEEEEYUkkk, aiiiiiiEEEYUk, YAK YAK YAK YAK” chimed in the bird.
“FUCK OFF!” she instructed it again. It did not listen.
That night her homeowner’s sleep was poor and troubled, and not by her traditional fantasies of market irregularities and mortgages. Things with wings were watching her, mocking her, and when she woke up her pillow was gone.
Wednesday, Wednesday, humpday, humpday. A day for cubicles, and her weary, coffee-smudged, sigh-heavy white-collar face. “Working hard, or hardly working?” she asked herself.
“Get back to work,” her manager’s face told her, stern and crisp and tie-knotted.
She drank some more coffee, looked at some more newspapers – they should’ve been websites, but her electrical engineering face hadn’t managed to pull that together again just yet – and was just starting to get down to a nice productive morning when something came tapping and rapping at the window by the door.
“Who’s there?” she called.
Quoth the seagull, “AYIIIIIIIIKKKKK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK” and a whole lot more, just like that.
May cursed so foully that she was forced to fire herself on the spot and do the rest of the day’s work alone, wishing for competent help from the depths of her heart.
She set out more bait that night. A little bit of everything in the kitchen, mixed with a little bit pf everything from the paint shed and cleaning supplies.
On Thursday, everything was quiet. Too quiet.
May worked at the studio all day, but found herself drawn into doing nothing but weather reports all afternoon, and all of them ominous.
She went home, put out everything else in the kitchen with everything from ground glass to sharp pebbles mixed in, then went to bed staring at the wall and imagining little yellow beaks.
On Friday May harvested the crops, trucked them to the wholesale supplier, shipped them to the supermarket, bought the freshest-looking ones, drove home, and had just finished cooking them when the power went out.
She walked onto her porch, looked up at the wires, and saw the smouldering carcass of the gull, lodged in the transformer.
“It’s GONE,” she screamed at the bird. “Don’t you get it!? It’s GONE and it WON’T COME BACK. NOTHING’S HERE! Give it up, you’ve LOST! GET GOING!”
And with a small, truculent grunt the roof caved in on her.
If there was a moral to any of this, it was wasted on the bird. It just would’ve eaten it anyways.