There was one day Frances didn’t set her alarm clock for and it was this day and she woke up on time anyways.
She ignored this and tried to go back to sleep, only to find that sleep was a rude asshole and refused to return her calls, show read on her messages, or acknowledge her emails. Ten million years passed before she next lifted her head from the pillow, squinted at her phone, and saw that it had been fifteen minutes and she was more awake than before.
“Fine,” she said, and peeled herself off the pillow, then her pillow off the chandelier. She slid to the ground with a soft thump.
She had to start tidying anyways. Thank god this only happened once a year.
***
Before the first things, or even the first things first, came the primordial need. Egg, some horrible things from the cabinet, and some other horrible things from the fridge. Mixed in a shot glass. Inadvisably consumed in two gulps, because the first swallow tried to cancel itself halfway down. It wasn’t great or good or fine or okay, but it made the hangover look better by comparison, and that was like making it go away.
First things first was cleaning up the perishable consumables. Any of the food still littering the table that was temperature-agnostic was returned to its original packaging (if salvageable); anything plausibly re-refrigeratorable was placed in plastic containers and bags and consigned to a hopeful crisper drawer for later consideration; anything probably salmonella-riddled was given a combined ten seconds of silence before being returned to the earth via the compost bucket except for a single piece of antiquated salmon which was delivered to the cat so she could ignore it.
The pizza was outside all of these categories. It was consumed in one hand while Frances loaded the dish washer with the other, eaten cold and unheated like the frail plant life outside the kitchen window.
Next came the beverages. Bottles that were open were resealed. Cans that were open were dumped down the sink and placed in the cardboard box doing emergency substitution work in place of a second recycling bin. Boxed wine was separated into wine bag and wine box and placed in the corresponding third and fourth substitute recycling bins (another cardboard box and a dented wastebasket). Every remaining Dr. Pepper in the house was opened and poured down the toilet to consecrate the dawn and anoint it in glory, as was the custom.
After the sustenance, came vice. The ashtrays were emptied into the garbage. The stray butts and loose leaves were emptied into the garbage. The suspicious residues were scraped off the floor and tables with the side of a gross and marginally used plastic fork and a paper towel and emptied into the garbage. And the spot on the floor where Murray McCooey had leaned over and leaned over and leaned way way over and let some of his ballast slip loose was scrubbed with the house’s most undesirable cloth and soap and water and more water until it was rendered beyond hope and consigned into the garbage, forced desperately down into the depths with one hand to bury it beyond all chance of sight or smell.
Frances stopped and washed her hands after that. Like three times. Four? Five. To be safe. And once more.
Then she made coffee, badly. And drank it, slowly. And realized it wasn’t hers, it was Grace’s decaf. The second cup was made badly AND quickly and she drank it so fast she burned her mouth.
And then, after that break, came the real work.
***
The surfaces needed a more thorough cleaning, and for that the laundry needed tallying. Socks were retrieved from lampshades. Shoes were retrieved from bookshelves. Shirts were retrieved from coathooks. Coats were retrieved from the shirt drawer. Pants were retrieved from the yard. Underwear was missing and presumed dead. And one entirely unidentifiable piece of fabric was wrapped around the stove’s right back burner and wouldn’t be parted from it until Frances very very slowly and strategically severed it into six even more unidentifiable pieces with a steak knife. She tried to arrange them into something more familiar, failed six different ways, then realized she was currently down one kitchen cloth and had been given the opportunity to be up five kitchen cloths instead.
The surfaces were easy. Gross, but easy. Frances let her eyes wander, dragging her mind after them over the remaining devastation. Making plans and discarding them, not caring too much.
Once the surfaces were done, she woke the sleepers. Gently shook shoulders for those who needed quiet; poked cheeks for those that lurked too deep; put her mouth near an ear and yelled “WAKEY WAKEY, EGGS AND BAKEY!” for Kimberly East, who had it coming.
“Whuh? Where?”
“In the kitchen, waiting for you to make them.”
“Fugoff.”
“WAKEY WAKEY WAKEY WAKEY WAKEY WAK-”
Kim sat up and took a swing at her, inadvertently preventing a return to sleep. Sucker. People were moving frying pans, cracking eggs, distributing clothing from the collection Frances had amassed on the dining room table. Someone was feeding the cat breakfast.
Not her business, she’d already had pizza. Besides, she was nowhere near done. She had to catch Marcus’s lizard. Little bastard had been on the living room wall near the painting of a bowl of vegetables, but he was missing again. Five minutes of quick thinking and a net was all she needed, but she had to fish the net out of the turtle tank, which reminded her she had to find the turtle (under the couch, sulking).
The lizard was returned to Marcus, who she found sitting on the patio with the reverse-stripper, negotiating for his coat back.
“Show’s not over,” she told him stubbornly. Five shirts three coats and a dozen pairs of socks kept her warm as toast even in the drizzle.
“But it’s COLD out.”
“Nobody’s paid me yet.”
Frances paid her. Marcus’s coat was retrieved, along with half her sock drawer. And then she looked up at the back yard and sighed.
“Fuck. I forgot about the circus.”
***
It was a little one-ring setup. Nothing fancy. A clown full of cars, two acrobats, and a small elephant. It was amazing they’d all fit in the tent, but it was good for warmth.
“Especially for the elephant,” the ringmaster explained as Frances counted bills. “You’ve got to keep her warm or she’ll catch cold. Unlike SOME operations I could mention, we care about our animal performers here in Circe de Burke.”
“Good. Do you want an irritating little lizard?”
“No thanks,” said the ringmaster with a comically large wink. “We’ve already got Richie. Eh? Eh??? EH????”
A clown of Richielike appearance smacked the back of her noggin without looking.
“Art is pain,” she told Frances solemnly.
“Yep,” said Frances. She surveyed the rest of the yard. Damnit, she’d been hoping to forget about the rest of this too.
The collapsible hot tub was easy, she set it to drain while she got to work on the real problem: coaxing the reindeer back into their crate from the temporary paddock. They were reluctant until she gave up and rhinoplasty’d the snowman gallery, tempting them with a fresh harvest of crisp and crunchy ruddy-orange noses. And once they were all back (only one inadvertent finger-nip to her name), the hot tub wasn’t done, so she free-climbed the two trees and the telephone pole in the front yard to take down the fixed-lines from the abseiling competition. And when that was finished the hot tub still wasn’t done, so she cleaned the tinsel waterfalls out of the gutters with a rake tied to a broom handle. And when that was clear and the eaves ran sluggish liquid again the hot tub STILL WASN’T DONE so she did a lap around the house cleaning up loose reindeer stool and discarded clown props and bent climbing pitons and reclaiming her scarf from its entirely unauthorized location around the neck of a snowman.
The hot tub still wasn’t done. She went indoors and fed the cat breakfast and tried not to think about it. This turned out to be the perfect time for that to happen, because that was when the thumping started up from the basement door.
***
The bacon smell had woken them from their crashes: the under-people, the hard partiers, the Sleepers Below. They groaned up from the basement, bleary and groping for grease and caffeine, trembling with unspeakable weight.
“Basement’s flooding,” muttered Mortimer to Frances as he descended on the coffeepot and lifted it like a giant mug, ignoring the blistering of his palms.
“Fuck.”
And he was right. It looked like someone had dug into the wall with a pickaxe at some point, probably during the Minecraft LARP. They’d found two painted styrofoam diamonds and apparently the base of the gravel bed the hot tub was draining into.
Frances counted to six, ran up the staircase, stopped draining the hot tub, realized the hot tub was finally actually empty, screamed a raw and primal word she couldn’t identify even as it left her throat, punched the hot tub (causing it to collapse), ran back downstairs, threw the pick axe at the hole, sat down with her head in her hands, left a single minimalist text with the local water damage people, screamed a raw and primal word she couldn’t identify even as it left her throat (but quietly and under her breath this time), and broke out the mop. And the mop bucket, where she found Ritchie’s lizard had left a present.
She brought them upstairs and dumped them in his lap with the mop.
“Your eggs, your mop job,” she said. She ignored the noises he made, fed the cat breakfast, and was interrupted by a scream from upstairs. By the sound of it, Beverly had gone to use the bathroom and had completely forgotten about the mime.
***
When the mime had been placated and paid and evicted from their nesting-place in the tub (and Frances had retrieved her sheets), she found herself at loose ends. Half the guests had left with Beverly to get her jangled, mimed nerves a hair of the dog. Half of the rest had left to avoid being recruited into the basement cleanup. All that remained was Frances, the cat, and the distant, tragic schlop of a mop bucket.
The cat meowed.
Frances pulled out a bowl and a kibble bag, then squinted as something new floated across the inside of her head. .
“Hang on. How many times have you had breakfast today?”
The cat blinked slowly and smugly at her.
Frances fed her anyways. It was lunchtime. By now she was probably overdue to call the mayor’s office and apologize for the noise violations. And the fireworks. And the tree catching on fire. And getting the fire truck crew roped into the party. And painting new lines on the street. Using the mayor’s car.
Yeah, they’d overdone it a little. Yeah, the cleanup was a lot of work. But you know what? Your cat only got a birthday once a year.