Herring

F*CKING TIRED

Promised to each of us all an end

The end.

And here is the brutal intelligence of it: the end announces itself not. It has already been in occurence. It first began the moment you drew your very first breath—memento mori inscribed upon the face of life itself,

"Every birth a prelude to decay and death".

The end is no event. Tis a condition you were born into, a slow deprecating rot adorned this apparel of forward motion.

"Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui".

The end is no antithesis to the beginning. The end is the beginning's only honest destination. To write of the end is by no means to prophesy. It is to acknowledge what already is.

Tis the end that has already begun. Not apocalypse as spectacle. Apocalypse as atmosphere. The slow dawning, the recognition that the coordinates by which you navigated is ruin.

"What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from... Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, Every poem an epitaph". The epitaph is no conclusion. The epitaph is the very beginning.

The beginning of the end is no prophecy of doom. It is a statement of fact. The end has always been beginning and will always be beginning. The wound has always been opening. The blood, always been welling.

The question is not whether you will die. The question is what you will do with your hands while the blood in it is still warm.

Arrived are we now. The moment you've all so awaited. The beggining of the seemingly unending journey to conclusion of this miserable fate I've led.

Humor yourself with my misery. Death comes to us all. Your end, i shall witness too.

Yes, you. I shall outlive you through my work.

You shall die. And remain dead.

Let us walk this journey together. To the very edge of this knife called life that we shall stab ourselves with.

And so begins the end.

— Deia.

The convenience store announced my arrival with a beep that nobody acknowledged, the usual. Kezia, stationed at the counter, was doing absolutely nothing in particular with the focused dedication of someone who had decided that their job was the night itself.

Kezia: "You look like s**t dude."

Deia: "You should appreciate the consistency."

Kezia: "Much worse than usual though. You good?"

Deia: "Define. good."

Kezia: "Alive?"

Deia: "Heavily debatable."

Tying the apron, I began on the bread aisle restock. It needed doing and doing is how I stop myself from thinking, feeling, which was particularly unwelcome tonight. The day had been — it had just been. The graveyard, the floor, the dark, the granola bar I barely tasted. All of it still sitting somewhere around the collarbone region, unprocessed, unaddressed but very much still present.

I was halfway through the second shelf when I heard the back office door.

Oh for f**k's sake.

Cocksucker: "Nira."

I didn't turn around immediately. One second. Give myself one second.

Deia: "Mr. Hargrove."

The first time you're all hearing his real name huh… let's address him as that for now.

Hargrove: "Till three was short last week. Fifteen dollars. I've got it documented."

Deia: "I covered the shortfall the same night. I have the receipt."

Hargrove: "That's not the point."

I turned around. He was standing at the end of the aisle with his arms crossed and that face on — the one he reserved for conversations he'd already decided the outcome of before opening his pig stained mouth.

Deia: "Then what is the point?"

Hargrove: "The point is pattern. Consistency. The point is reliability. I've been watching your performance and frankly, Nira, it's not where it needs to be."

Watching my performance. Like I was a circus act. Like the word performance applied to restocking bread at nine-thirty pm for eleven dollars an hour.

Deia: "I've covered every shift. I've covered two of Manny's shifts when he called out sick. I have never once —"

Hargrove: "Don't raise your voice."

Deia: "I'm not raising my voice."

Hargrove: "You are. And I won't have it on my floor."

His floor? His f*****g floor? He didn't mop it. The man had never in recorded history mopped it. I mopped it. I mopped this damn floor. I mopped it last Tuesday at closing when the mop bucket smelled like something had died inside it and Hargrove had already gone home.

Deia: "Right. Noted."

I turned back to the shelf.

Hargrove: "I'm not finished."

Deia: "Okay."

Hargrove: "I've had complaints. From customers."

I stopped.

Deia: "What complaints."

Hargrove: "Your attitude. Your — manner. People notice these things."

Deia: "My manner?"

Hargrove: "You're not warm, Nira. Customer service requires a certain —"

Deia: "I am unfailingly polite to every person who walks through that door."

Hargrove: "Polite isn't warm. There's a difference, Nira."

Something shifted. Not dramatically — not yet — just something small internally, the tiny crack that appears before the whole thing goes.

Deia: "With respect, Mr. Hargrove, I don't think warmth is what's missing from this oh-so-fine establishment."

A beat.

Hargrove: "Excuse me?"

Deia: "I said—"

Hargrove: "I heard what you said."

He took two steps toward me and I will tell you genuinely, hand to god, I had not intended for any of this, I had come in tonight to do my job and go home and sleep, that's it, that's all I'd wanted from the universe tonight, just a quiet shift and a bed at the end of it —

Hargrove: "Let me be very clear with you. You are a replacement-level employee. I have a stack of applications on my desk—"

Deia: "Then use them."

Silence.

Dead, total, ringing silence.

Kezia, from somewhere behind the register, made a very quiet sound that might have been a sharp inhale.

Hargrove: "What did you just say to me?"

Deia: "I said, use. them. If I'm so replaceable, if my manner is such a problem, if fifteen dollars out of a till I personally covered is a pattern worth documenting — then use the f*****g applications, Hargrove."

His face did something complicated. Went through several colours.

Hargrove: "You do NOT speak to me like —"

Deia: "How do I speak to you? Warmly? You want warm? Here —"

I smiled. The full one. The unhinged one I keep in the back for emergencies.

Deia: "Great shift, Mr. Hargrove. Really wonderful to be here. The mop bucket smells like a corpse, been meaning to mention that."

Hargrove: "You're done. Get your things."

Deia: "I'm clocking out or you're firing me? Because those have different legal implications and I want to be very clear on which one this is."

He said nothing.

Which was an answer.

Hargrove: "Clock out. And don't come back until you've thought very seriously about whether you actually want this job."

I pulled the apron off. Not dramatically — no throwing, no slamming — just took it off and folded it and placed it on the shelf beside the bread like a normal f*****g person because I was not going to give him a scene, I was not going to give him anything to write in his little documented file except that I folded the apron neatly and left.

I looked at Kezia on my way out.

She mouthed: I'll text you.

I nodded. Pushed the door.

The beep saw me out.

Cold air. Rain, naturally, because why the hell not, why would tonight be the exception, why would any part of this day bend in my direction for once — rain, full commitment rain, the kind that decides immediately that your collar is the most interesting place to be.

The bike.

I unlocked it. Swung my leg over. Pushed off

And the chain snapped.

Just like that.

A sound like a single gunshot and then nothing, the pedals spinning loose and useless, the whole mechanism underneath me suddenly becoming just decorative, a bike-shaped object with bike-shaped aspirations and no bike-shaped function whatsoever.

I sat on it for a moment.

Of course, of f*****g course, I said, to the rain, to the city, to whatever cosmic magistrate presides over the scheduling of catastrophes.

OF f*****g COURSE.

I got off the bike. Gave it a look. The chain sat in a slack loop on the wet pavement looking sheepish, if chains could look sheepish, if objects could look sorry — this one certainly did. I took it as a genuine apology, for whatever good that did me.

I picked it up. Wheeled it to the rack outside the store. Locked it to leave for tomorrow, or the day after, or whenever I could afford the repair on what was now a certified broken-down inconvenience.

And I walked.

Seattle at eleven-fifteen pm is a specific thing. It's not quiet — the city doesn't really do quiet, there's always a car somewhere, always a siren in the middle distance, always someone existing loudly outside a bar — but it's thin. The daytime density of it stripped away, just the bones of the place visible. Wet pavement throwing back whatever light the streetlamps offer. The water somewhere past the buildings, always there, always audible if you're stupid enough to be out here on foot in the rain like some kind of i***t.

Some kind of i***t being me, in this scenario, walking.

Hargrove's voice in my head.

Replacement-level employee.

I walked faster.

Warmth, Nira.

Faster.

A stack of applications on my desk —

Fuck him. f**k the stack.

Fuck the documented fifteen dollars, f**k the mop bucket, f**k the apron I folded like a civilised person when every atom of me wanted to swing it at his head — f**k the fluorescent lights, f**k the bread aisle, f**k the fish-shaped eraser in my bag, f**k the origami sardine, f**k the girls in the hallway, f**k the flickering bathroom light, f**k Tuesday in general as a concept, f**k the rain, f**k the chain, f**k the hill, f**k the whole day, and I mean that. Every piece of it. Take it. Burn it. It's useless to me.

I turned down Falk Street because Falk Street was quieter and I needed quiet even though quiet in Seattle is a relative term.

That's when I saw the wall.

It was a long stretch of bare concrete on the side of what used to be a print shop, the kind of wall that's been bare so long it's basically asking for it. Pale grey in the lamplight. No tags, no markings, no nothing. Just blank — the blankness of something that hasn't been given a voice yet.

I stopped.

Looked at it.

Looked at the marker in my bag pocket — the thick black one I carried for labelling stock at the store, still there, still with me, a full tank.

Don't, said the small exhausted bureaucrat in the back of my chest.

I was already uncapping it.

What I wrote wasn't profound. I want to be clear about that. I wasn't writing literature, I wasn't leaving a manifesto, I was just — writing. The phrase f*****g TIRED in letters about a foot tall because that was the most honest thing I had available. Then underneath it, smaller: of all of it. And underneath that, because I couldn't stop once I'd started: a small fish. A small stupid fish in memoriam of nothing and everything right under my f*****g TIRED. My handwriting was bad. My lines weren't straight. The wall looked marginally more interesting than before and I looked marginally less like I was going to implode from the inside, so functionally, eh, it was a success.

I stepped back. Looked at it.

"That's actually pretty sick."

I spun around.

Two of them. Men — twenty-something, hoods up, hands in pockets, emerged from the shadow of the alley mouth beside the print shop like they'd been there for a while.

Watching.

The one who'd spoken was closer, head tilted, looking at the wall with a smile that started friendly and didn't quite stay that way.

Deia: "Cheers."

I was already calculating. Distance to the street. Lamplight radius. How fast I could move without a bike.

The second one spoke.

Man 2: "You got more markers on you?"

Deia: "Just the one."

Man 1: "Could use it."

Deia: "I'm actually heading out so —"

Man 1: "Relax. Nobody's going anywhere."

He took a step forward. Casual, unhurried, the particular unhurriedness of someone who's decided the pace of this interaction belongs to him. The second one shifted to my left without looking like he was shifting anywhere. They were good at this. The positioning. The geometry of it.

Oh f**k.

Oh this is a different kind of f**k.

My hand tightened on the marker. Which was. Not a weapon. Not even slightly. I was holding a marker against two people who had decided the geometry of this alley belonged to them tonight, armed with a Sharpie and yesterday's rage, absolutely stunning, what a hero, what a magnificent ending to an already flawless evening —

Man 1: "Phone. And the bag."

His hand was out. Open, like it was a reasonable request. Like I'd hand my bag to a man in an alley because he asked nicely with his palm facing up.

Deia: "Uh I don't think —"

Man 1: "Phone. Bag. Now."

And then —

~

Yes sweetest Deia, I am returned.

Nothing to say?

…

Oh yeah she is absolutely f****d. Trust me.

Right. Right, okay, I'll be taking this one.

Did you miss me guys? Not that it matters. I'll be telling the story from this point on.

Don't worry I'll talk just like she does occasionally. You wouldn't even notice she's gone.

Now then, let's get this s**t show on the road.

~

What happened next did not care about the order of anybody's plans for the evening.

What happened next arrived the way catastrophe always arrives — from somewhere entirely other than the direction you were watching.

Three cars. Moving fast, no lights, taking the corner onto Falk Street with the particular devotion of vehicles that have given up on traffic law as a concept.

Behind them, and this is the part nobody in that alley was ready for, the part that rewrote the entire social contract of the robbery that was very much in progress — behind them, a convoy. Blue and red, strobing hard off every wet surface, filling the whole street with that pulsing light that turns the world into something from a film you didn't consent to be in.

Police. A lot of police.

Enough police that the word convoy wasn't doing the necessary work in describing it.

A whole lot of f*****g police.

The three cars ahead of them blew straight through the intersection at the top of Falk.

One of them didn't make the turn.

It clipped a parked SUV — not catastrophically, just enough, just a screaming skid and a crunch of metal and a brief, spectacular shower of glass that caught the pulsing lights like something almost beautiful before the car adjusted itself and kept going, accelerating, disappearing around the next block with the desperation of something that knew exactly how much trouble it was in.

The police followed.

The sound was enormous. The whole street shook with it, the low thunder of engines and the wail of sirens bouncing off every surface, filling the space between the buildings until there was nothing else, no thoughts, no plans, no bag-snatching, just noise and light and the sudden collective understanding shared by every person on Falk Street that this specific location had become an extremely bad place to be.

The two men looked at each other.

And then they ran.

Not at Deia. Away. Into the alley, into the dark, the geometry of the robbery dissolving instantly in the face of a scene considerably far more serious than whatever they'd had planned for a girl with a Sharpie.

Deia stood at the wall with her hand still tight around the marker.

She looked at the wall.

FUCKING TIRED

of all of it.

She looked at the street. The light was still going, still pulsing, still bouncing. There were more sirens coming. From the opposite direction now. They were boxing in whatever those cars had started.

And here is the thing about Falk Street that Deia had not had cause to consider until this exact moment — Falk Street was a dead end.

Not the alley. Not the print shop. The whole street. Falk ran four blocks from the main road and terminated in a chain-link fence and a construction site that had been under the same construction for two years, and the only way in or out was the way she'd come in, which was currently occupied by an indeterminate number of police vehicles in pursuit of an indeterminate number of criminals, and Deia was standing at a freshly vandalized wall in the dark with a marker in her hand and the distinct look of someone who had absolutely nothing to do with any of this, which, critically, looked exactly like the look of someone who had everything to do with all of it.

A spotlight swung.

It found the wall first.

FUCKING TIRED

Then it found her.

She ran. Oh she ran. What else could she do but run. Running towards the fate that awaits her.

Run, dearest Deia.

This story has only just begun.