Sick Transit, Gloria Monday

Gloria Monday poured the bottle of nail varnish over the head of the woman standing behind the counter. The woman said nothing and didn't move. The nail polish – Rotten Plum, Gloria thought – pooled on her scalp and slowly coated strands of her long, unwashed brown hair.
"Get out, please," said Gloria. Her voice was pleasant, low, and she'd been told by many people, lots of them members of her extended family, that she should get a job on the phone sex lines. She told them she preferred working as a travel agent, that it was respectable and something her someday-children could tell their teacher about, and she didn't tell them that she did the phone-sex telephone work in the evenings. Or that she'd recognised several of them when they called.
"But I want a holiday," said the woman, still not doing anything about the nail polish. "Johnny said that you give out holidays here. He said I just had to put out."
There was a moment of clarity between them as Gloria realised that her boss probably did accept such an arrangement, and the woman realised that someone as neatly dressed as Gloria probably didn't accept sex for holidays.
"I want my holiday," whined the woman, clearly too stubborn to give up just yet. A grubby hand with bitten fingernails scrabbled at the collar of her raincoat and Gloria had a prescient moment, realising that the woman was probably naked underneath it. She looked around the counter wondering what else she could use as a deterrent and spotted the stapler. She snatched it up and leaned forward, grabbing the woman's raincoat and pulling her in to the counter. The woman gasped, a little "Oooh!", and then looked slightly shocked as Gloria stapled her raincoat down its length, just below each button.
"Get out," said Gloria, letting go. "No holidays, no sex, no nothing."
"Now there's a shame," said a deep voice with a broad, southern accent, and both women looked towards the door. It was held open by a tanned hand attached to a tanned, muscular arm, which is turn belonged to a broad shouldered man with blonde hair and an insolent grin. "Isn't this the right place to come to pick me up a little something to take on holiday with me?"
"Not you, sweetheart," he continued as the raincoated-woman opened her mouth. "I have standards."
Gloria half-smiled but shook her head anyway. "No," she said. "We sell holidays here, nothing else."
"Well now," drawled the man, "that might be mostly what I want anyways. See, I have a busload of ill children I'd like to take down to Mexico for a few weeks. Get them some sun, sand, and kiddie-tequila, make 'em all feel a little bit better about knowing how they're going to be dead this time next year."
"Do you have a licence?" Gloria's hands were already moving over the keyboard, inputting Mexico and selecting for the cheapest available flights.
"For what, little lady?"
"For the children," she said. "They're ill, and terminally so, by the sounds of it. Technically you'll need a licence covering the transport of biologically hazardous material."
"Y'all think the custom's guys'll accept that?"
"It'll confuse them for long enough for you to get the kids through. Try to cover up any that have suppurating wounds or open lesions."
"You know, y'all, I like your attitude! You're a can-do little lady, aren't you?" The man's smile was infectious, and Gloria found herself smiling back.
"My name's Gloria Monday, not little lady," she said, but without rancour.
"Mine's–" said the other woman who was trying to unpick the staples from her coat, but the man cut her off.
"Gloria Monday it is," he said. "And thank-you very much for your help. Most other people don't seem to care about these poor children."
"Or they care too much about the Mexicans you'll be infecting?" She raised an eyebrow, but he just burst into laughter.
"I like y'all, y'all know," he said. "And in your honour, I shall be naming this little trip after you."
Gloria raised her other eyebrow, unaware that this made her look like a well-dressed but rather startled chihuahua.
"Sick transit Gloria Monday!" he said.

Calorie counted

"Name?"
The woman with the disapproving voice wielded a ballpoint pen like a scalpel, slicing blue lines onto the paper she had pinned tightly to a clipboard. The small girl in front of her swallowed hard, wondering why the woman disliked people having names, and said,
"Calorie, miss."
"Valerie? There are no Valeries on my list. I do not tolerate liars in my class."
"No miss, not Valerie. Calorie. With a C."
The woman raised an eyebrow, arching it until it threatened to vanish beneath her fringe, and made a show reading carefully through her list. Then, as she found Calorie's name on the list, her face pinched as though she were sucking a lemon, and the pen slashed at the page twice. The tick sat beside Calorie's name and she was gestured through the door. Keeping her head down and being as meek as she could, Calorie scuttled through.

More children were admitted to the classroom, and though Calorie watched avidly, hoping that someone else would fall foul of the teacher, they all apparantly had names that were less to disapprove of. The room filled up steadily, some children sitting alone and others forming small groups, chatting quietly. Calorie knew no-one else attending the class, but she had taken a desk near the vivarium which had attracted some of the other isolated children, so she would have looked popular had any of them been talking to each other.
Finally the room was full, all the desks were taken, and the woman with the disapproving voice stood at the front of the room, her clipboard held protectively before her breast and her pen gripped dagger-like in her other hand.
"You are here," she said, "because you have failed. You have failed to be disciplined. You have failed to listen when you were told to listen, and to repeat back what has been told to you. You are here, because you have dared to think for yourselves."
"This cannot be encouraged," she continued, "but is nonetheless essential. The sheeple -- the rest of the population, the people who act like sheep -- need people to look after them. They need laws made for them and enforced for their own good. They need people like us; people like you. If you succeed in your new education."

The class sat silently, watching the teacher with bright, inquisitive eyes. They all understood what she was saying, though none of them had expected it. Now they wanted to know where the new education would take them. What this unexpected difference in the system would do. Calorie shifted in her seat, eager to get started on learning something worthwhile, something real.
"You do not have to accept this education," said the woman sounding slightly tired. "Mistakes are made more often than anyone would like to think, and you being here might be a mistake. If you wish to go back to where you were before, now is the time to say so. Stand up and be counted."
'Not for me,' thought Calorie, gripping the sides of her desk tightly so that she couldn't stand up even by accident. 'I want to go on and be someone. Not standing here, being Calorie counted.'

Waiting for the punchline

'Are those bruises on your arm?'
'Oh, yes. Look, they form the constellation of Orion!'
I stared at her in mild consternation. 'Jill, they're bruises,' I said. 'They're not supposed to form star maps. How on earth did you get them?'
'Ducking and weaving,' she said. Her eyes met mine daring me to ask more. I'm a coward though, and so I fell silent.
'See, I've got the belt and everything,' she said, grinning brightly at me.
'I suppose it's a bit like a tattoo, when you put it like that,' I said. 'Only not so permanent.'
'Quite a lot like a tattoo!' said Jill. 'What do you think I should get on the other arm?'
'The Queen's head?' I suggested. 'You know, like a postage stamp?'
'Cool!'
We split off at that point and went our separate ways; Jill walking over to the applied physical sciences building, and me heading downhill to the aquatic studies blocks. It was a standing joke that if the water table rose or we had heavy rain that the aquatic sciences building would be underwater in less time that it took to say 'Jiminy Cricket' (who says such things anyway?). It was slightly less funny when you learned that the building actually had sets of scuba gear in each of the labs....

I caught up with Jill again that afternoon. An email had gone round announcing that the campus coffee-shop was having a three-for-one sale on quad-espressos. I was going to be working until early into the morning studying phospholuminence in undergraduates and felt that the caffeine boost would probably be useful. Jill loves a bargain -- she only buys food at the supermarket that's been reduced, all of her dresses have come from either a warehouse sale or a charity shop; even her husband was a jilted groom who 'looked sort of lost, all stood at the altar like that, so I took him.' I still wonder about that.

She had a set of bruises on her other arm now, that were fresh, but were still recognisably in the shape of the Queen's Head. I stared at it in shock.
'That was a really good idea!' she said happily. 'We think that it should look like a second class stamp for the first couple of days and then lighten into a first class stamp after that! Everyone will want one soon!'
'I don't think people will want to collect bruises quite like that--' I said, but Jill cut me off.
'Not everyone, silly, but the bodymod people will. After all, this is much less permanent than a tattoo or a piercing, and so much easier to do as well.'
'How are you doing this?' I said. 'How did you get it done in such a short time?'
'Oh, it's the latest application of the physical sciences,' she said, 'We've got in a case-load of wife-beaters and we've trained them to lash out on certain keywords. They're all quite predictable, so all you do is go and have a carefully scripted conversation with a room full of them, and you come out with the design you want!'
I was shocked into silence. Jill picked up her three quad-espressos and looked back at me. 'You're very quiet,' she said, 'are you that surprised?'
'No,' I said, finding it hard to speak. 'I think I'm just waiting for the punch-line still.'

A sublime idea

'It's like licking a leprechaun,' said James as I came into the room carrying a fresh bottle of Tequila.
'What is?' I said, puzzled. 'What does a leprechaun taste like anyway?'
'Green!' said Susan at the same time as James held up a small, plastic bag half-filled with red crystals.
'Oh.' I said, nodding at James and then rolling my eyes at Susan.
'We can use it instead of salt in the slammers,' said James enthusiastically. 'Just wet the rim of the glass and dip it in this.'
'Won't work,' said Susan promptly, gathering our empty glasses and putting them on the table. 'It needs acid to set it off, it won't work till it's in our stomachs then.'
'Oh,' said James. 'That's no fun.'
Susan frowned, her face crinkling like a three-day-old puppy's. 'Although,' she said, 'if we put the crystals in first, then the lime, then the tequila and put salt on the rim of the glass...'
'Ah,' I said smiling, pulling the limes from my pockets, 'a sub-lime idea!'