WT: Minimum Security
Kaosu Narvna 2019 All Rights Reserved
WT: Minimum Security
I flipped over the timer again. We’d stolen it from the chess game, though it probably hadn’t originated from it, to begin with. The board game boxes stacked all around the corner desk, under the guard-windows, were all in tatters and held together by masking tape; many of them shared pieces that’d gotten lost from one place or another. It was a lawless exchange of pieces, but a necessary one. No one was going to buy new games after all. As if seeing the sand slip through the cheap wooden toy wasn’t stressful enough: the uncomfortable plastic chairs, the humming fluorescent lights, and the several pairs of watchful eyes darting between the many tables in wary chatter made it much more real. Fiddling my blank tile between my fingers, I raced through possibilities of what I could do. N I V R N A sat on the rack, I’d been shuffling through it for a time, rearranging them now and again.
I couldn’t recall whether “Nirvana” was a real word or just the name of a band I’d listened to in truer innocence.
“Stumped?” sitting across from me, in the same awful low-sitting chair of a magenta colour, the only of its type at our four-seat table, he taunted me. “You can always pass, you know.” He reached across, slow, visible, cautious, to snatch a chip from my stash.
“No,” I responded with a failing bravado, “Just thinking.”
I wanted to slap his hand, but I couldn’t, I wouldn't risk the contact.
I had a few options:
Play a two-point word with an A and hope I get a replacement tile from the box.
Play all seven tiles for a fifty-point bonus, but open a triple word score three tiles away, on an N.
Play all seven tiles for a fifty-point bonus but create a two-point word that might not actually be a word, which could get my play challenged and have my next turn thrown out.
I took the first, after a long and miserable silence. The timer turned twice in that time, it must have taken roughly a minute, then. We thought it was a thirty-second drip, but the barred clock on the wall was too jumpy to compare. At least the main hands were honest: we’d been flipping the hourglass for four hours. It felt like forty to me, nothing to him.
“Nirvanas…nice—” he grabbed the abused pencil we’d found, complete with bite marks, to count out the points, “One, two, three, eleven—nice, twelve, thirteen, add nothing, fourteen—plus fifty, that’s sixty-four. Solid play, this early.”
I kept a close watch and ear while he tallied up the sum of all my plays; needed to make sure I wasn’t being cheated of any hard-earned points. I couldn’t trust anyone while we played—I was a rubberneck myself, I inherited it from somewhere.
Fidgeting with the thin plastic film of our quarter bag as time stalled in that mental-maths pause—we started with twenty bucks, but went through eight already, all on chips and candies from the bulky vending machines further crowding in the walls.
“She’s not back huh?” again, he spoke, “Should we get something other than chips?”
“I’m good.”
“Nothing? Really?” he sounded exasperated, although I’d always been a twig of predictably unpredictable appetites, “Well, I think I should have something...should we look at the frozen? You can only have chips for so long, you might become one.” When he tried at humour, it almost erased the place we sat in, in company yet separated.
My face crinkled up at the thought. We were the farthest of all from the microwave room, a plain white-walled space next to the entrance-exit for the people kept here year-round, rather than twenty-four hours split over Labour Day weekend.
The many vending machines loomed over the non-violents and visitors kept here; it taunted them, and myself, a child, equally so. Men dressed uniformly and easily-spotted in turquoise here, weren’t permitted to touch it, and the brightly coloured packets of sweet and salty morsels tempted and appealed like no other. They had their own hum, too—refrigeration on one, a half-dead set of lights flickering itself out on the other. It must have been here a long time, too.
“Fine, fine—what should I get you?”
“Let’s have a look?”
I stood up, silent as could be, no risk, wouldn’t dare let my seat scuff up the floor—the sound would echo, unacceptable attention.
It was only a few paces to that refrigerated, uncivilized thing staring down at me—I was tall, but not that tall. I stood to the side, making sure he could see; he leaned back in that plastic excuse to do so, looking over at the options as the circular shelves inside rotated to my press of a button. It was half-empty, the rush for the machine had ended around lunch hours. We were still sated on candies, then.
It went around a few revolutions before he’d say anything—studying the options, considering which item to poison himself with.
“D6 looks alright.”
“D6?” my face, again, like a pug’s.
“I said what I said.”
My mind lagged, stuttering on regrets, perhaps. I’d go back to fetch just the right amount of coin, that’s three-fifty, that’s fourteen. Count it out again in stacks of four, to be sure, fourteen.
I had to slot them in one by one, making sure the red LED counter ticked up with every coin—we only had so many, couldn’t waste even one. There wouldn’t be a way of getting it back if I weren’t patient. As soon as the column-row key was punched in, a click, unlock, the little door would be opened for a moment—just a moment, long enough to let you take out what was kept in and nothing more; it’s as though it didn’t want you to have it. They’d make more money if it didn’t leave, let a young fool play the coin-wasting game all over again.
D6 contained a translucent bag and on it the bright letting “BIG BURRITO”, a starved and flaccid half-thawed imitation of a wrap sat limply, inside, deflating into the form of the surface it stood on. I pinched in carefully, like the tail of an infectious rat I’d caught in the pantry, ready to toss down into the wood for a less—or perhaps more-so—fortunate raven to pick apart to bones, plague and all.
Hesitant as ever, I took it to that sterile side room—that microwave space with large segmented walls like cinder blocks, with lights too bright, and a coffee vendor with buttons half out of order—even the sugar and milk buttons were stickered off. No plates, no utensils there, and the napkin holder was half-filled with the cheapest papers you’d ever find. The brick house of a man, built mostly of violent eyes, occasionally gave me a backwards glance from his fixed position minding the wall between this cooking closet and the tightly controlled exit.
Though I cracked open the plastic case, I’d keep the so-called food on that cold, slimy surface. There was a strange oil I couldn’t quite identify coating the film, the scent of it, even frozen, caused me to choke my tongue back.
I let it go for one minute, in a yellowed microwave of a similar foulness. Its revolutions skipped once or twice, snagged by a broken cog somewhere in the system.
It turned. It turned. It turned. It turned.
I took it out when it began to steam the partition I watched through. Using a stray coffee stirrer, I severed it in halves the best I could. Something so wretched needed to cook evenly, at least.
It turned. It turned.
The windows on the far wall, beyond the guard, beyond the rows of tables, the view opened into the barren gravel parking lot. Through just the right angle I was able to see her in the car, forehead resting on the top of the steering wheel, gripping the cheap cover. I needed any distraction from the scent of burning plastic that had come of the artificial concoction being cooked through. The dog sat up in the passenger seat, for once she didn’t seem to mind.
It turned. It turned. It turned.
That oil, orange and off-colour, began to seep from the open edges—I figured it then, a concoction of the cheapest American cheese mingling with beef juice and the remnants of pre-cooked bacon fat. It started to pool, sizzle, even boil.
And still, it turned. Thirty more seconds couldn’t hurt. That was thirty more seconds I didn’t have to touch it—just the thought, my left hand squeezed in my thumb to tightly, suppressing the urge to cough up all the junk snacks I’d scarfed through the morning.
At last, when I freed it from that box, the cloud of steam that barreled out coated my lungs with a layer of oil; I nearly lost all that I’d eaten, all rubbish, gold compared to this. I had too much pride, even being seen with something so cruel to the human body was not something my young heart could manage. I tried to dab up some of its essences, the meagre napkins making little impact on the thick sludge it became, cooling quickly in the open air. Even the stoic man just outside seemed to distance himself from the space as it was put on—couldn’t blame him, wretched.
I carried it two-handed on a bed of napkins, the plastic barrier fused to the sopping starchy mess. I was able to set it down without freeing the sludge. “There—she’s still not back?”
“Must be on a call in the car…lucky they let you stay in here alone.”
“Must be, she must be—I got pat-down and everything.”
I took my chance to get a good look at his tiles—vowels, mostly. Just my luck, he wouldn’t be able to play anything off the sketchy move I’d made.
“You’re hardly ten? Gross.”
“Creeps, yeah…metal wand and pockets, mostly. I’m five-six though, guess they didn’t know better.”
“I hate that I won’t get to see you pass me up.”
“I’ll be sure to call you when I do.”
“Sundays and Wednesdays—you can’t call, I’ll ring as usual.”
“Right—I still forget.”
We sat in silence for a moment, save for the loud crunch of the final few chips—probably louder in my head than reality, but there was still a twinge of guilt.
His approach to the wrap seemed far more intuitive than mine, carefully pinching one of the closed ends; in doing so, making sure the drip still fell onto the plastic. With an eagerness foreign to me still, he took a juicy, full-mouthed bite of something most grotesque. Escaped fluid caught in his scraggly, greying beard, along with a few granules of meat processed beyond recognition. Yet, despite the ingredient list longer than any sentence on the camp, I could see in his eyes the process of savouring—the few tears that escaped restraint, in them a form of self-mourning I’d never be able to comprehend.
I watched against my will—a man still dignified and on high in my mind, beginning to weep quietly into the poorly sealed folds of a microwaved burrito. Among the dozen cameras, the minimum of sentry guard peering through the window, from every corner, the dozens of other dressed in uniform teal and qualified by numbers—I was the only one who could see him.
“Should we skip her?”
“Might as well, your mother works on her own clock.”
“Right.”
Things were quieter.
WT: Minimum Security
I flipped over the timer again. We’d stolen it from the chess game, though it probably hadn’t originated from it, to begin with. The board game boxes stacked all around the corner desk, under the guard-windows, were all in tatters and held together by masking tape; many of them shared pieces that’d gotten lost from one place or another. It was a lawless exchange of pieces, but a necessary one. No one was going to buy new games after all. As if seeing the sand slip through the cheap wooden toy wasn’t stressful enough: the uncomfortable plastic chairs, the humming fluorescent lights, and the several pairs of watchful eyes darting between the many tables in wary chatter made it much more real. Fiddling my blank tile between my fingers, I raced through possibilities of what I could do. N I V R N A sat on the rack, I’d been shuffling through it for a time, rearranging them now and again.
I couldn’t recall whether “Nirvana” was a real word or just the name of a band I’d listened to in truer innocence.
“Stumped?” sitting across from me, in the same awful low-sitting chair of a magenta colour, the only of its type at our four-seat table, he taunted me. “You can always pass, you know.” He reached across, slow, visible, cautious, to snatch a chip from my stash.
“No,” I responded with a failing bravado, “Just thinking.”
I wanted to slap his hand, but I couldn’t, I wouldn't risk the contact.
I had a few options:
Play a two-point word with an A and hope I get a replacement tile from the box.
Play all seven tiles for a fifty-point bonus, but open a triple word score three tiles away, on an N.
Play all seven tiles for a fifty-point bonus but create a two-point word that might not actually be a word, which could get my play challenged and have my next turn thrown out.
I took the first, after a long and miserable silence. The timer turned twice in that time, it must have taken roughly a minute, then. We thought it was a thirty-second drip, but the barred clock on the wall was too jumpy to compare. At least the main hands were honest: we’d been flipping the hourglass for four hours. It felt like forty to me, nothing to him.
“Nirvanas…nice—” he grabbed the abused pencil we’d found, complete with bite marks, to count out the points, “One, two, three, eleven—nice, twelve, thirteen, add nothing, fourteen—plus fifty, that’s sixty-four. Solid play, this early.”
I kept a close watch and ear while he tallied up the sum of all my plays; needed to make sure I wasn’t being cheated of any hard-earned points. I couldn’t trust anyone while we played—I was a rubberneck myself, I inherited it from somewhere.
Fidgeting with the thin plastic film of our quarter bag as time stalled in that mental-maths pause—we started with twenty bucks, but went through eight already, all on chips and candies from the bulky vending machines further crowding in the walls.
“She’s not back huh?” again, he spoke, “Should we get something other than chips?”
“I’m good.”
“Nothing? Really?” he sounded exasperated, although I’d always been a twig of predictably unpredictable appetites, “Well, I think I should have something...should we look at the frozen? You can only have chips for so long, you might become one.” When he tried at humour, it almost erased the place we sat in, in company yet separated.
My face crinkled up at the thought. We were the farthest of all from the microwave room, a plain white-walled space next to the entrance-exit for the people kept here year-round, rather than twenty-four hours split over Labour Day weekend.
The many vending machines loomed over the non-violents and visitors kept here; it taunted them, and myself, a child, equally so. Men dressed uniformly and easily-spotted in turquoise here, weren’t permitted to touch it, and the brightly coloured packets of sweet and salty morsels tempted and appealed like no other. They had their own hum, too—refrigeration on one, a half-dead set of lights flickering itself out on the other. It must have been here a long time, too.
“Fine, fine—what should I get you?”
“Let’s have a look?”
I stood up, silent as could be, no risk, wouldn’t dare let my seat scuff up the floor—the sound would echo, unacceptable attention.
It was only a few paces to that refrigerated, uncivilized thing staring down at me—I was tall, but not that tall. I stood to the side, making sure he could see; he leaned back in that plastic excuse to do so, looking over at the options as the circular shelves inside rotated to my press of a button. It was half-empty, the rush for the machine had ended around lunch hours. We were still sated on candies, then.
It went around a few revolutions before he’d say anything—studying the options, considering which item to poison himself with.
“D6 looks alright.”
“D6?” my face, again, like a pug’s.
“I said what I said.”
My mind lagged, stuttering on regrets, perhaps. I’d go back to fetch just the right amount of coin, that’s three-fifty, that’s fourteen. Count it out again in stacks of four, to be sure, fourteen.
I had to slot them in one by one, making sure the red LED counter ticked up with every coin—we only had so many, couldn’t waste even one. There wouldn’t be a way of getting it back if I weren’t patient. As soon as the column-row key was punched in, a click, unlock, the little door would be opened for a moment—just a moment, long enough to let you take out what was kept in and nothing more; it’s as though it didn’t want you to have it. They’d make more money if it didn’t leave, let a young fool play the coin-wasting game all over again.
D6 contained a translucent bag and on it the bright letting “BIG BURRITO”, a starved and flaccid half-thawed imitation of a wrap sat limply, inside, deflating into the form of the surface it stood on. I pinched in carefully, like the tail of an infectious rat I’d caught in the pantry, ready to toss down into the wood for a less—or perhaps more-so—fortunate raven to pick apart to bones, plague and all.
Hesitant as ever, I took it to that sterile side room—that microwave space with large segmented walls like cinder blocks, with lights too bright, and a coffee vendor with buttons half out of order—even the sugar and milk buttons were stickered off. No plates, no utensils there, and the napkin holder was half-filled with the cheapest papers you’d ever find. The brick house of a man, built mostly of violent eyes, occasionally gave me a backwards glance from his fixed position minding the wall between this cooking closet and the tightly controlled exit.
Though I cracked open the plastic case, I’d keep the so-called food on that cold, slimy surface. There was a strange oil I couldn’t quite identify coating the film, the scent of it, even frozen, caused me to choke my tongue back.
I let it go for one minute, in a yellowed microwave of a similar foulness. Its revolutions skipped once or twice, snagged by a broken cog somewhere in the system.
It turned. It turned. It turned. It turned.
I took it out when it began to steam the partition I watched through. Using a stray coffee stirrer, I severed it in halves the best I could. Something so wretched needed to cook evenly, at least.
It turned. It turned.
The windows on the far wall, beyond the guard, beyond the rows of tables, the view opened into the barren gravel parking lot. Through just the right angle I was able to see her in the car, forehead resting on the top of the steering wheel, gripping the cheap cover. I needed any distraction from the scent of burning plastic that had come of the artificial concoction being cooked through. The dog sat up in the passenger seat, for once she didn’t seem to mind.
It turned. It turned. It turned.
That oil, orange and off-colour, began to seep from the open edges—I figured it then, a concoction of the cheapest American cheese mingling with beef juice and the remnants of pre-cooked bacon fat. It started to pool, sizzle, even boil.
And still, it turned. Thirty more seconds couldn’t hurt. That was thirty more seconds I didn’t have to touch it—just the thought, my left hand squeezed in my thumb to tightly, suppressing the urge to cough up all the junk snacks I’d scarfed through the morning.
At last, when I freed it from that box, the cloud of steam that barreled out coated my lungs with a layer of oil; I nearly lost all that I’d eaten, all rubbish, gold compared to this. I had too much pride, even being seen with something so cruel to the human body was not something my young heart could manage. I tried to dab up some of its essences, the meagre napkins making little impact on the thick sludge it became, cooling quickly in the open air. Even the stoic man just outside seemed to distance himself from the space as it was put on—couldn’t blame him, wretched.
I carried it two-handed on a bed of napkins, the plastic barrier fused to the sopping starchy mess. I was able to set it down without freeing the sludge. “There—she’s still not back?”
“Must be on a call in the car…lucky they let you stay in here alone.”
“Must be, she must be—I got pat-down and everything.”
I took my chance to get a good look at his tiles—vowels, mostly. Just my luck, he wouldn’t be able to play anything off the sketchy move I’d made.
“You’re hardly ten? Gross.”
“Creeps, yeah…metal wand and pockets, mostly. I’m five-six though, guess they didn’t know better.”
“I hate that I won’t get to see you pass me up.”
“I’ll be sure to call you when I do.”
“Sundays and Wednesdays—you can’t call, I’ll ring as usual.”
“Right—I still forget.”
We sat in silence for a moment, save for the loud crunch of the final few chips—probably louder in my head than reality, but there was still a twinge of guilt.
His approach to the wrap seemed far more intuitive than mine, carefully pinching one of the closed ends; in doing so, making sure the drip still fell onto the plastic. With an eagerness foreign to me still, he took a juicy, full-mouthed bite of something most grotesque. Escaped fluid caught in his scraggly, greying beard, along with a few granules of meat processed beyond recognition. Yet, despite the ingredient list longer than any sentence on the camp, I could see in his eyes the process of savouring—the few tears that escaped restraint, in them a form of self-mourning I’d never be able to comprehend.
I watched against my will—a man still dignified and on high in my mind, beginning to weep quietly into the poorly sealed folds of a microwaved burrito. Among the dozen cameras, the minimum of sentry guard peering through the window, from every corner, the dozens of other dressed in uniform teal and qualified by numbers—I was the only one who could see him.
“Should we skip her?”
“Might as well, your mother works on her own clock.”
“Right.”
Things were quieter.
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