This Lamb Sells Condos

This is Ava's dream.

Every night, when Ava sleeps, she dreams of being a bird.  Only not exactly a bird; closer to a harpy, but without the man-eating conotation, and not ugly, if you were using the later Greco-Roman tradition.  Her whole body is still intact and rewound back to the days of her post-graduate diet and exercise regimen.  So basically her, but with wings, and younger.  So not a bird or harpy in any sense of those words.

For ninety to one-hundred twenty minutes out of her six to eight hours of sleep every night, she was a not-bird not-harpy younger winged Ava.  For ninety to one-hundred twenty minutes every night, she was free.

A bird wakes her up.  The bird, rather.  It is the same bird that wakes her up every day.  The same bird that was always on her windowsill.  The same bird that would sit there and chirp at her every morning until she woke up.

This is Ava's alarm clock.

It is blue, for the most part.  Blue head, blue wings, blue tail.  Its chest is white.  It definitely was not a city bird, she could tell, but Ava was never great at ornithology.  In fact, she didn't even know what the word meant, despite taking a class in it for a quarter six years ago.  In her defense, it was listed as Cultural and Societal Aspects of Birdwatching.  It wasn't even about birds at all.

The bird chriped at her.  It always chirped at her.  Chirp, chirp, chirp.  Wake up, Ava.  It's morning.  Wake up to your same old tired, boring life.  Wake up to the same shit you slogged through yesterday, the same shit you will be slogging through today, and the same shit you will be slogging through for the forseeable future.

This is the world.  Say hello.

"Hello."

Ava gets up.  The bird has stopped chirping.  She wanders into her kitchen and pours herself a bowl of cereal.  The milk is expired.  She learns this four and a half spoons in.  She dumps the rest and washes the bowl.  Her sink is always empty.  She learned how to keep the roaches at bay her first week.

With the taste of expired milk in her mouth, Ava takes a shower.  The water had three settings.  Cold, Really Cold, and Off.  She prefers Cold.  Three minutes in, she realizes that she is out of shampoo.  Halfway through her Cold shower, she has to jump out and search through her bag of spare hotel toiletries.  It took her thirty-three seconds to find a bottle of shampoo.  The bag is filled with conditioner.  When she steps back in, she realizes that her soap sliver had washed down the drain.  She doesn't bother to go back to the bag in search of another.  Half of her still feels dirty, but given the territory, it wasn't a new feeling.

The bird chirps again, and comes in.  She feeds it some of her cereal, then makes sure it has left before closing her window again.  Ava never leaves her window open.  She can't stand the cold, the sound, the smell of the city.  She makes sure its closed every night before she becomes a bird.

But every morning, she wakes up, bundled tight in her thin summer blanket, head rattling with the constant honking of cars and the ever-present sound of police sirens and the chirping of her alarm clock.  The smell, she's gotten used to.  She lives above an Indian restaurant, open eleven AM to eight PM.  The owner's name is Mark.  His Indian name is Mahesh, which he uses when doing business with his white clientele.  Mark's family has lived here for three generations.

"Morning, Mark," Ava comes down the stairs.

"Hey."

Her apartment connected directly to the restaurant.  Ava had lost the key to the shop a few months ago, and since she didn't want to bring it up, she always made sure she left after ten AM, when Mark got in, and came back before ten PM, when he'd finished closing up for the night.  She never had a reason to stay out past ten anyhow.

Ava finds an open seat on the train.  The seats are never open.  Today, though, she got to rest her weary legs by placing her ass where hundreds of thousands of asses have sat, farted, and scratched themselves.  The janitors don't even bother anymore.  I don't blame them.  If she saw just how dirty they really were, she wouldn't either.

Every day she goes further and further away from her little apartment on top of Mark's Indian restaurant.  She has a bag full of resumes and a map of all the local businesses.  First, she'll stop by last week's Xs, then she'd move on to this week's Os.  She'll go through them all, door to door, handing out her resume and talking to the manager and/or most senior employee.  Most of them were high school kids.  If she had less education, less experience, maybe she'd be able to land a position as a dead-eyed cashier or stock boy.

But she had education, and she had experience.  Ava ran away from her home in a sleepy suburban town at the tender age of eighteen and made her way to the big city, where she was going to be free.  She arrived with just the clothes on her back, two pennies in her pocket, and eyes gleaming with hope.  Four years of studying <UNDECLARED> later, she went on to land a position she loved in the aforementioned field.

She made her rounds through the shops, the restaurants, the shops again.  Racks and racks of clothes, each one different enough from the last to justify having to buy them both.  Somewhere, three thousand miles from her and her bag of resumes, in the middle of this jungle of clothes, an Indonesian child was sewing the next season's fashions.  She gets one cent for every dress she packs.  The bus from her shack to the factory is thirty-three cents one way.  When she's finished for the day, she may have finished one hundred dresses.  She will pay sixty-six cents for the priviledge to make gaudy salmon-pink dresses and neon blue tights that an American teenager will wear four times this season, then throw in the back of her closet and laugh about twenty years later.  The other thirty-four cents goes to feeding her sick baby brother.  In two years, he will die anyway, and she would have wasted one hundred sixty-four dollars and twenty-five cents American feeding him for three years.

The manager tells Ava that there aren't any openings.

This is Ava's daily routine.

She's gotten too far from home now, spent too long in a Taco Bell restroom cursing her decision not to pack a lunch, spent too long handing out her resumes when she could have dropped them in the trash and saved everybody the effort.  It's getting late.

She gets back on the train.  She paid two-hundred fifty dollars for a year pass.  So far, she's used four months worth of it.  If she rides the train every day, which she does, each trip will cost her thirty-four cents.  She pays sixty-eight cents each day for the priviledge of using a more convulted, fake smiles and concerns method of throwing paper away.  She wonders about that Indonesian child.  It is her lunch break right now.

It's dark by the time Ava gets off the train.  She walks the last two miles back to her apartment.  One point three four miles into her trip back, a man jumps at her from the alley between a laundromat and a convenience store.  The convenience store is open.  Nobody sees anything.  The mugger snatches her purse and disappears as soon as he came.

Ava laughs.  She keeps her wallet in her jacket pocket.  There's nothing in that bag but a stack of resumes.  Ava Vogel, 3366 Windowsill Lane, Anonymous City, State Zipcode.  Phone number, email address at email service provider dot com.  Objective: Seeking any position at all.  Please, I'm desperate here.

Maybe he'll give her a call, shoot her an email in a few days.  J Street Mugging, LLC is always looking for up and coming associates seeking challenging less-legal work in human resources.  Applicants must bring own knife.

Mark has gone home by the time she reaches the restaurant.  He must have left early today.  She spends an hour sitting on the doorstep, wondering who she should call, or if she should spend sixty-six dollars to spend the night in a motel.  At least she can get more shampoo while she's there.  Eventually, she tries the door.  It is unlocked.  She sighs, head in her hands, half smiling.  This would have been funny if it wasn't happening to her.

She undresses and spends a few hours online.  Nothing new has happened.  Facebook tells her it is a high school acquaintence's birthday.  She joins one thousand four hundred twenty-two other people in telling him happy birthday.  She makes a note to herself to get a new bag tomorrow.

Ava closes the window and slips into bed.  She is a bird.  She stretches her neck, ruffles her feathers.  She realizes she has never left through the window.

This is Ava's world.  She is free.