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.
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