Uglifruit Two-Shoes doesn’t care much for company, but on the drive to work at five a.m., she often wishes she had someone sitting beside her, someone quiet like herself, who might stir the sugar in their coffees and help lift hers from the cup holder when she’s ready for a sip. They might see a salesman in the passing lane pull wax from his ear, and share a tranquil laugh. But Uglifruit drives alone to work, dry hands on the wheel because no lotions are allowed in the Clean Room, and she’d have to scrub everything off once she got there. The freeway is all mist and shadow, an extension of her nighttime dreams.
In the Clean Room, she’s on Flow Team, which means she’s on no team at all. Instead she trudges from station to station, six a.m. to three. “Quality control at maximum efficiency,” her goal sheet reads, and as soon as she turns toward her next inspection stop, she can hear the other ladies slow their paces and sigh at the station she’s just left behind. The Clean Room is a no-fragrance zone, and Uglifruit catches everything—she can smell clear berry lip gloss, or a rose petal hidden beneath a dress collar. The younger ladies can’t resist wearing something to work: Patsy, the new girl, even tried sprinkling her scalp with an eyedropper full of vanilla extract. But Uglifruit sniffed it out. The young ones fidget when she glances their way. If she flares her nostrils, they squirm beneath their lab coats, curves barely touching shapeless white.
Too much of a prohibited scent can upset the balance of the pumps, the most delicate elements of the life-saving devices manufactured by Uglifruit’s employer. Lotions and ointments destroy them completely. “Every Pump A Human Life,” says the plastic banner above the airlock that leads to the Clean Room. Nothing’s permitted on the walls inside. The bosses could never get the ladies to memorize the rules, so they promoted Uglifruit to Flow Team, just Uglifruit herself, and the laminated pages of her handbook. She gets tested on routine and emergency procedures once a week. The Clean Wing boss, Lonnie, waves her down from his office doorway, making her step out through the airlock, even though she’ll have to go through the sanitization protocol before she steps back in again. Lonnie doesn’t like getting sanitized and putting on the whole uniform. He hates the puffy, elasticized, crinkly clean-cap. When he quizzes her on protocol, he looks through the airlock window at the girls in the Clean Room, as if he isn’t listening. Or maybe he’s keeping an eye on everyone while Uglifruit’s back is turned. When she steps in again, the other ladies seem to shrink from her even more, as if Lonnie’s left something of himself on her, something that’ll get them in trouble. Uglifruit never asked to be on Flow Team. On the drive home, she sometimes recites the handbook to herself, like poetry. Never leave thermofuser short-punching when actualization board is crunching. Moisture balance will not be sustained if QF levels are not maintained. Every pump, every pump, every pump a human life.
At work they call her “Miss.” It’s too hard for the other ladies to say her name, coming as they do from the Strandflat region, where, Uglifruit assumes, words with “gl” or “fr” don’t fit with the native accent. Though she can’t be sure. It’s not like she’s met any Strandflatters outside of Pump Production, and the ladies can’t speak their dialect at work. It’s a NormTongue-only zone. They can’t even use their real names. Every time a girl gets transferred into Pump Production, Lonnie gives her a new name, like Charlotte or Marnie or Juliette. He hoards their birth names on his computer’s spreadsheet, his screen covered by some kind of privacy shield. Lonnie doesn’t call Uglifruit by any kind of name, not Uglifruit, not Miss; he just waves her down from his office, or, appearing out of nowhere, steps directly in her path, jabbing a thick finger into the airspace above them and accosting her with one of his cheerful exclamations: “Step this way, step lively now!” or “Every life a human pump!”. Uglifruit wishes the ladies had a better nickname for her than just plain Miss. It could still be something simple, like initials: UF, or UT, as in “UT’s handbook,” or “UT’s pipe brush.” You tease, someone could say, and make the younger girls at the scrub sinks laugh. Uglifruit’s come up with a dozen possibilities on the drive to work, but you don’t make up nicknames for yourself, not even mean ones. People have to make them up for you. You don’t get to choose your real name, either. That was one of life’s many mysteries that Uglifruit could recognize, but never hope to solve: why some people got to do all the naming and renaming, and some could only be named. The uglifruit, Mother Two-Shoes said, was the prettiest fruit she’d ever seen. She said it deserved more credit. Uglifruit was saddled with that responsibility, and as a child she bore it unflinchingly, like everything else. Like she bears it still.
On Friday, Uglifruit’s in the lunchroom, folding her brown bag into smaller and smaller squares, when she sees Lonnie poking the buttons on the drink machine, filling a Big Slurp. He wraps his hands around the cup, his mouth around the straw, and glances around the room. Weird Lonnie, always looking over Uglifruit’s shoulder when they speak, never meeting anyone’s eye. His head dips, mouth puckering to meet the straw, while his forehead twitches, as if he’s working hard to keep his eyes up and out of his beverage. Uglifruit tries to trace his line of sight, pivoting slightly on her stool to follow his gaze to the corner of the room, where Charlotte sits with Patsy, leaning forward across a high-top table, gesticulating with both hands—lecturing the new girl, or maybe it’s just a way of talking they’re used to from home. Uglifruit turns back and looks at Lonnie, who suddenly grabs at his belt, nearly dropping his Big Slurp. He glares at his pager and disappears into his office.
Patsy, Uglifruit notices, is pretty. Her long, sandy hair, freed from her clean-cap, is gathered at her neck with a piece of string. She’s got big, bright eyes, and a sculpted nose that ends in a point. Eyelashes fluttering, eyebrows glittering with the faintest trace of sweat, Patsy looks like a bird. The second lunch buzzer blares and Patsy slips off her stool, landing on her little nonslip sneakers with a squeak: Uglifruit guesses they’re a size six. She looks down to see that her lunch bag is squeezed between her thumb and forefinger in a dense cube. On her way back to the airlock, she catches sight of Lonnie and his customary signaling, terrible timing as always, she’s already scrubbed and suited up, but then she sees he’s calling to Patsy. She hangs back a little, checks the lockers for unauthorized trimmings, the sinks for unsanctioned soaps. She can’t see into Lonnie’s office from the Scrub Room. It’s a few long minutes before Patsy appears and brushes past Uglifruit to reach for a new pair of booties.
Uglifruit can’t stop the twitch in her nostrils. She sniffs at the girl, who swallows once, and then she’s still. Uglifruit can smell vanilla, and she breathes it in for a moment. Then she steps aside. Patsy hesitates, a faint look of surprise forming beneath the elastic on her cap. Then she walks through the airlock and joins the others at her station.
Mother Two-Shoes knows how to bake Baby Cakes that are the envy of the neighborhood, but she only makes them on good days, and only, she says, if the spirit moves her. The neighbors, who aren’t the kind to drop by unannounced, never fail to come for Baby Cakes when they smell them cooling on the windowsill. The cakes are a singular creation, concocted and named by Mother Two-Shoes herself. “My babies,” she croons, bending to the oven window for a look. The Baby Cakes taste like the thing you’ve always waited for. But like everything else, when they’re gone, they’re gone, and then you’re left to wait again. The spirit doesn’t move Mother Two-Shoes often, so Uglifruit has learned to like the waiting. Sometimes it’s better than the having, since the having has to end. Uglifruit tries not to have too much—she keeps only what her room can contain, the same room that has contained her for thirty-seven years. She doesn’t let things pile up the way her mother does: souvenir dongles, tinsel strips, fascinators, quiver tips. She might want a certain hand lotion (for the weekends) or a chenille ScatterPillow for her bed, but she lets the wanting fill the space where the lotion or pillow would go, and the wanting is heavy, permanent, better than the thing itself. Uglifruit learned this long ago from the Baby Cakes: if she lies in bed, eyes closed, and imagines her mother bending at the stove, one hand on the oven light, she can smell the Baby Cakes, and even taste them—vanilla, and that spice mixture Mother Two-Shoes won’t disclose. She can do that anytime, and not wait for a good day, or suffer the inevitable disappointment that descends when the plate is cleared of everything but crumbs.
When Uglifruit Two-Shoes comes home from work, she wades through the living room, stepping over and on Mother Two-Shoes’ collections: her sewing kits with their holographic notions; her prank kudzu stair nosings that have nowhere to climb in their one-story house; her pamphlet series on Great Temples of the Modern World. Uglifruit steps into her own room, closing the door behind her, and the grip on her breathing loosens a little as she kicks off her shoes on the shaggy green carpet. At work, those white booties seal up over her shoes so no one can see them, but underneath, she has to wear white rubber nonslips anyway. The only shoes Uglifruit ever wears are white nonslips, and only one pair, until they finally wear out and have to be replaced. But inside her closet—behind the full-length mirror on a whisper-quiet swing-door, within a long chamber, deep like a secret—Uglifruit has other shoes. Shoes in every imaginable color, for every imaginable occasion. And Uglifruit can imagine many.
When the waiting and the wanting get too heavy to bear, Uglifruit goes out and buys a pair of shoes. Shoes, Uglifruit tells herself, are prerequisite to life, because one cannot live without one’s feet touching the ground. Uglifruit would like to fly, or even merely levitate, hover just above the floor of the Clean Room so the new girls won’t startle or the older ladies bristle when they hear her shuffling their way. If she could fly, she could skip the freeway altogether, soaring instead over thistle fields or the coastline on her way to work. But she knows all too well that she can’t. She’s sensible that way. Everyone with feet must have shoes.
They look brilliant, the way they line the closet shelves, up to the ceiling, down to a runway of apple-green shag. She has her own system, organized first by color, then by hue. They’re packed in tightly, but she never has cause to wear them, so she rarely upsets the neat rows. It’s only when she buys a new pair that she has to adjust them all to place the new ones in the correct spot. Uglifruit’s memorized her own procedures. Style might count but color arranges, brown and black where each shade changes. Every pump, every pump, every pump a human life.
Uglifruit is tall, taller than all the ladies at work. She wears a size eleven shoe. She knows most shoes don’t look right when they’re that big. She used to pick out a pretty pair in the standard display size, a six, then go hot with embarrassment when the salesperson would open a box to reveal the shoe she’d liked so much in an elongated, bloated parody of itself. She’s tried to avoid the mistake of buying shoes that aren’t meant to be as large as her feet have become. Once in a while, though, she gives in to a secret shame: she sees a display so lovely she can’t bear the elevens, so she requests the sixes (“It’s for my daughter,” she used to say, until she realized no one was asking) and puts them in her closet, in their own section in the back, though not entirely out of reach.
After work she glances toward the closet, catching sight of herself in the mirror, but she rarely cracks it open. Unless it’s time to shoe-shop, she doesn’t go anywhere in particular. Most days, she falls asleep on her bed, her room still glazed with afternoon light.
On Saturday morning, Uglifruit tiptoes to the kitchen to pour herself a bowl of SniggleSnaps, quietly as she can: she’s avoiding Mother Two-Shoes. It’s been awfully long since she’s made Baby Cakes. Uglifruit wonders if her mother is depressed. The thought makes her hurry back to her room, concentrating on the bowl so she won’t spill any milk, but she trips on a rhinestone mood concertina snaking out from under the couch. It lets out a fussy wheeze. Mother Two-Shoes bursts from the bathroom, brandishing a lipstick tube.
“Hey,” she calls out. “You ready to go?”
“Where?” Uglifruit says, though she doesn’t want to know.
“Down the street, to Rachel and Betty’s. I told you, they’re having a lawn sale.”
Uglifruit hates lawn sales. All the things the neighborhood doesn’t need, the things that have outlived the wanting and the getting and the having and are now just in the way, spill out onto lawns like fistfuls of cake crumbs, and Mother Two-Shoes gathers them all, filling the house with more disappointment. Mother Two-Shoes never misses a lawn sale within a twelve-block radius. Uglifruit has the terrible feeling that Mother Two-Shoes is locked with the neighbors into an imperceptible process, like evolution, in which the other houses slowly empty all their contents into her own.
“Can’t go out,” Uglifruit says. “Might have to do Night Shift next week. Got to switch my sleep schedule now.”
“They shouldn’t put you on Night Shift. You’re too old for that,” Mother Two-Shoes says. She yanks an empty bowling-ball bag from a pile on the couch and heads out the door.
Uglifruit has never worked Night Shift; it’s a skeleton crew that keeps the thermofusers running from midnight to six. They train the Strandflatters for that. She hasn’t even worked Second Shift, three to midnight, for fifteen years. But she falls asleep anyway, the taste of cereal souring her mouth. She awakens to the sound of trash being taken out, containers straining as their contents sway and collide. She realizes it’s Mother Two-Shoes, returning home with her lawn sale haul. She imagines the new old things overflowing the bowling bag, tumbling to the floor, intermingling anonymously with the other debris, forming sedimentary layers of indoor wasteland.
On Monday’s drive to work, as she struggles to balance her coffee mug, Uglifruit pictures Patsy, fluttering at the scrub sink. If Patsy were her friend, Uglifruit thinks, she’d call her Patsy-bird. And when Patsy gathered her hair beneath her clean-cap in the mornings, the scent of vanilla encircling her head, Uglifruit would only smile. Mum’s the word, Patsy-bird.
The moment she arrives, Uglifruit knows something’s wrong. The ladies have suited up, but no one’s entered the Clean Room—they’re all gathered just outside, beneath the banner. She feels a stab of panic: have they discovered that she let Patsy break the no-fragrance rule? Lonnie steps out of his office, looking strangely solemn, his hands folded at his belt buckle. He waits until he has everyone’s attention, then raises his gaze somewhere above them, toward the top of the airlock. He has an announcement to make.
“There has been a Mortality,” Lonnie says. “Someone has died on the company pump.”
A gasp runs through the group, a few stifled cries. Someone says a word Uglifruit doesn’t understand, something in dialect, which elicits a few more gasps. Then absolute silence. Lonnie has nothing else to say; he waves the First Shift into the airlock, except for Uglifruit, to whom he gestures to follow him into his office. For the first time ever, Lonnie is humorless. Not that he’s ever funny, exactly, but he’s always saying odd things, like calling this sort of meeting a confabulation. Now he says nothing, only prints two copies of a long checklist and hands one to Uglifruit, pointing her to the creaky tan Chesterfield where she sits for official meetings. They review protocols and productivity records all morning; she doesn’t even make it to the Clean Room, though she’ll have plenty to do when she gets there after lunch. At the first lunch buzzer, Lonnie indicates with his head that she can go, but before she’s out the door, he says, “You’ll have to talk to them directly, you know. We can’t have any hit or miss.” Uglifruit wonders if it’s a jab with a pun on the name the Strandflatters have for her, then dismisses the idea. Serious or not, that isn’t Lonnie’s style. She grabs her food from the unsan fridge and heads to the lunchroom.
The entire group has gathered together at one high-top. Uglifruit looks for Patsy, but she can barely see her, hidden as she is by the crowd encircling her where she sits nearest the table. They speak in whispers, no doubt in dialect. Surely they’re talking about the Mortality. Uglifruit hasn’t had a chance yet to think about the person who’s died; she tries to think as little as possible about the sick people who need the pumps, and dying is much worse. Uglifruit wishes she could join the other ladies, find out what they’re saying. They’re always huddled together like that, though, on good days and bad. They probably think there’ll be crackdowns, and that Uglifruit will be the one to enforce them. They’re not wrong. That’s Uglifruit’s job.
The second buzzer sounds, and the ladies rise and pass her on their way to scrub in. They look at each other, at the floor, anywhere but Uglifruit’s face. Uglifruit Two-Shoes steps aside.
Uglifruit has two kinds of dreams: the afternoon kind, when she naps right after work, and the nighttime kind, from which she retains only remnants of worlds, dark scenes that curl in misty wisps around her shoulders each morning while she negotiates the freeway. The afternoon dreams are full of faces, unfamiliar ones, blank faces in a white Clean Room, a white so lonely it muffles all sound. On Tuesday afternoon, she dreams a terrible dream: she walks through the airlock, hands scrubbed, hair covered, lab coat spotlessly clean. Something’s wrong, though, and she knows it’s bad news, but she thinks she can avoid it, if she just doesn’t look down. She tells herself in her dream: No, don’t do it, but she does, and she’s wearing them all. She’s given in to her shoes, all of them, every silhouette, every heel, every color, all at once, and now they’re spoiled, contaminated by the Clean Room’s white. She tries to turn around, to escape, but when she moves her feet, a pain shoots upward, stabbing her chest, seizing her throat. She hears a banging on the airlock door, and through the haze of its window she sees the face of the Mortality, edged in flames.
“I have an announcement to make,” it roars, and she thinks, this is it, she’s been found out, Uglifruit and her guilty pleasures, rows and rows of shoes she doesn’t use, doesn’t need. The shoes send another wave of pain through her body.
“Announcement!” it shouts again, and now it’s Mother Two-Shoes, her hair blazing in the afternoon sun as she leans over Uglifruit’s bed.
No, not the Baby Cakes, Uglifruit thinks, words that have entered her mind even before she knows she’s awake.
“Knock,” Uglifruit mumbles.
“I did. You wouldn’t answer. Scoot over,” Mother Two-Shoes says, and before Uglifruit can move, her mother joins her in the bed. Uglifruit blinks at her mother’s head on the pillow next to hers. It isn’t just the sun—something’s happened to her mother’s hair.
“Orange,” she murmurs.
“Yeah. I found the coloring packet when I was looking for my Queens of Hearts. I’ve got one from the tinfoil deck, one from the Barnacle Farm deck, but I know I have another, I think from somewhere cold. Wanna hear my announcement?”
Uglifruit blinks at the ceiling. The mirror on her shoe closet sends a comforting rectangle of light rippling across its grey stucco surface. She wants to get up and peek in on her shoes, but her mother’s body pins a corner of her T-shirt to the bed.
“I’m thinking I’ll have a lawn sale,” Mother Two-Shoes says. “Rae and Betty made a bundle last week.”
“A lawn sale?” Uglifruit sits up, pulling herself free as she slides to the foot of the bed, her back to her mother.
“Yes, on the lawn. I’ll need a good purse, to keep change. You’ve got to be ready to make change.”
A lawn sale, Uglifruit thinks, the weight lifting from her chest as she rises to her feet. A clearing out. What a wonderful idea.
As she’s leaving work on Wednesday, Lonnie pulls her aside. He says there’s a problem. The Second Shift ladies are refusing to stay past sunset, or they’re failing to come in at all. Uglifruit’s surprised: the ladies don’t act up like that, especially when they’re fearful of crackdowns, of being sent back to the Flats. Not that there’s ever been anything like this before, a Mortality on their hands. But that’s not all. She wonders why Lonnie is telling her about Second Shift. The Clean Room workers who come from three to midnight—they aren’t Uglifruit’s business. Lonnie’s never spoken to her about Second Shift before.
Lonnie says, “I want you to find out what’s going on with the evening girls.” When Uglifruit doesn’t say anything, he stiffens and adds, “Assess attendance disruptions in Second Shift personnel and report findings by end of day tomorrow.” Uglifruit nods. Lonnie’s asking her to gossip. That’s not really her forte—it’s more Mother Two-Shoes’ territory. But Uglifruit thinks of Patsy-bird, perched on a stool in the lunchroom. Uglifruit wants to rise to the occasion. She’ll give it a try.
On Thursday, when the lunch buzzer sounds, Uglifruit sees Patsy hurry out the airlock, so she doesn’t bother with her brown bag in the unsan fridge. She follows her, calmly as she can, to the drink panel, where Patsy’s staring at the buttons. She looks disheveled. She’s slid her clean-cap off her head but seems to have forgotten it on her shoulder, where it balances weightlessly, a cloud of wrinkled plastic. Her loosened hair falls straight down her back. She doesn’t move when Uglifruit reaches out and gently lifts the clean-cap away, tucking it into her lab coat pocket. Uglifruit is careful not to sniff. Patsy accepts her invitation to sit at a nearby high-top—maybe, Uglifruit thinks, because Uglifruit’s kept mum about the vanilla extract. Uglifruit wonders if that’s a sort of blackmail. But she has to start somewhere.
She wants to be sure Patsy understands, so she speaks slowly, though she stifles the impulse to speak loudly as well—the others are probably listening in. She’s got her back to the rest of the lunchroom, so she can’t see them sitting there, for which she’s grateful. Patsy probably can’t see much, either, since Uglifruit’s own body blocks her view. Uglifruit tries to sound—to be—as sympathetic as she can when she mentions the ladies from Second Shift. She asks if Patsy knows why they’re leaving early, not coming in at all. Are they sick?
Patsy stares hard at a crack in the table. She shakes her head no. Then she says, “They are afraid to use the bathroom at night.”
Patsy’s NormTongue is very good, perfect, even. Uglifruit doesn’t let her surprise distract her. “The bathroom?” she says.
Patsy moves her shoulders, something like a shrug, but also a shiver. “There is a Dedu in the ladies’ room. It comes after dark.”
Uglifruit feels something like a shiver as well. “A dead what?”
Patsy shakes her head, eyes still on the table. “Dedu. It’s a man-ghost. It sits in one of the stalls. Beri—” Patsy halts, looks sharply up, eyes wide, then blinks and continues— “Beatrice saw it first, just his shoes, under the stall door. Others have seen it too. They don’t want to go to the bathroom after dark. But the shift is so long.”
Uglifruit studies Patsy’s face, the way her lashes flap matter-of-factly while she explains the situation with perfect clarity. Uglifruit forgets to speak.
“It’s the Mortality,” Patsy says. Her eyes drop again.
“Oh,” Uglifruit says.
“Maybe—” Patsy adds, brightening, “Maybe you could ask Mr. Zander if we could use the bathroom in Fulfillment? It’s just through the door,” she says, pointing to a locked entryway at the lunchroom’s far end.
“Oh,” Uglifruit says again. “I could ask.” Patsy’s mouth widens, something like a smile, but the second lunch buzzer sounds, and she pushes off the stool and joins the other ladies, who all incline their heads toward Patsy, chattering with her in the usual hushed tones as they head into Scrubs.
Uglifruit pulls Patsy’s discarded clean-cap from her pocket and smoothes it out on the table. She doesn’t know what’s troubling the Second Shift ladies most: is it that they think a ghost has infiltrated the ladies’ room, or that the ghost they think has infiltrated the ladies’ room is a man? Never mind. Patsy has divulged their worries, their secret. That’s a sort of bonding. She looks down at the cap in her hand: she’s folded it into a tiny cube. She wishes she didn’t have to report back to Lonnie. When she tells him, standing in his office doorway, he keeps his eyes on his spreadsheet, but Uglifruit can tell he’s displeased. He says, “The gender of the Mortality was never specified.” Then he flicks his chin, a sign that Uglifruit has permission to leave.
On the drive home from work, Uglifruit wonders how she can help Patsy—and the others—overcome their fear of the Dedu. She thinks of the Bumble Bee Rule: ignore it, and it won’t bother you. Or is it, stay very still, and it will go away? Or is it, she wonders as she turns off the freeway into her neighborhood, it’s more afraid of you than you of it? She can’t recall. It probably doesn’t apply in this instance, anyway. Uglifruit doesn’t know what helps in the face of a Mortality.
When she arrives Friday morning, Lonnie stops her in the hall. It’s been a while since he’s prodded the air and shouted one of his favorite sayings. He’s all business now. “Second Flow Team called in sick,” Lonnie says. He’s talking about the person who has Uglifruit’s job on the Second Shift. As far as Uglifruit knows, Second Flow Team has never called in sick. She’s never been asked to fill in, or swap, or supervise anything besides First Shift, six a.m. to three.
But Lonnie surprises her again: he says he’s staying to do Second Flow Team. Lonnie hates scrubbing in. He rarely gets any closer to the Clean Room than bringing his face up to the airlock window. But he’s going to do the job. He just wants Uglifruit to stay a bit later, supervise the shift change. Then she can go home for the weekend.
Uglifruit has a terrible thought: maybe Second Flow Team isn’t sick at all. Maybe she’s been fired, because of the Mortality. And Lonnie’s staying because he wants to force the Second Shift ladies to stay, to not run away from the Dedu. Uglifruit realizes he wants her there for the shift change so she can tell the Second Shift ladies they can trust Lonnie—Mr. Zander. Uglifruit’s never thought of Lonnie as someone to be trusted. It’s not that she’s thought of him as untrustworthy, either. Trust isn’t on her goal sheet. It’s not one of her rhymes.
Uglifruit jumps a little: Lonnie’s looking her in the eye.
“You know,” he says, “my brother-in-law at Picotech says they’re testing out a NeuroBot that does Flow Team. The big bosses prefer to use you, for that soft female touch. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. Besides, you think a NeuroBot would let a Mortality slip past?”
Uglifruit thinks something else she’s never thought before: she and Lonnie are the same height. He lifts that thick index finger of his, pokes his own chest. He says, “Good cop.” Then he pokes a finger at Uglifruit, stopping just before he touches her lab coat. “Bad cop,” Lonnie says.
Uglifruit’s never thought of Lonnie as a good cop. As for herself, yes, she’s the soft female bad cop. She supposes she’s known that all along.
There’s Patsy, her hands encased in extra-small FlexiGloves, examining the switches on the actualization board with a deep sorrow. Uglifruit thinks she can cheer Patsy up. At lunchtime, she’ll ask her what she’s doing tonight. It’s Friday. She’s going to invite Patsy to go shoe shopping. They could go to Heart and Sole, or Get Your Kicks—or Uglifruit’s favorite, Chateau Shoe. She could pick out a few pairs—just a few—that Patsy could try on in size six. Maybe, if the evening goes well, she’ll tell Patsy about her shoe closet. Maybe one day she’ll invite her to see the whole collection. Patsy will tell the others, of course, but they’ll be delighted. They’ll call her Uglifruit Ninety-Two Shoes, Uglifruit Too-Many-Shoes. Uglifruit spends all morning with Charlotte, showing her how to improve her QF measurements, so when the lunchtime buzzer sounds, Uglifruit looks up, disoriented, and scans the Clean Room for Patsy. She’s not there. She steps through the airlock, pushing her clean-cap up off her head, but she doesn’t see her in the Scrub Room either. She tries the drink panel: no Patsy. Charlotte and the others sit in their usual corner. They don’t seem concerned. Uglifruit gives up, sits down at a high-top, peers inside her crumpled paper bag. When she looks up again, she sees Patsy leaving Lonnie’s office. Patsy walks quickly, as if something’s chasing her into the lunchroom. Too late, Uglifruit thinks, she’ll join the others now. But Patsy climbs atop the stool directly opposite Uglifruit.
“Mr. Zander wants me to stay for Second Shift tonight,” she says.
Uglifruit knows that’s against protocol; an eighteen-hour shift is no good for quality control or maximum efficiency.
“He says I can take a nap on the sofa in his office during the dinner break.”
Patsy’s looking at Uglifruit now, pleadingly. Uglifruit doesn’t know what to say. But Patsy’s not feeling shy. She asks, “Will you stay?”
Uglifruit leans back a little in her seat, hands pushing against the table. “You mean for Second Shift?”
“To watch for the Dedu,” Patsy says. “Maybe you can convince Mr. Zander that it’s there? He could unlock the Fulfillment restroom.”
Mother Two-Shoes never answers the phone. Uglifruit’s never called, never failed to come home, not in thirty-seven years. Uglifruit dials awkwardly from the panel in the Detox Chamber, lets the phone ring seven times, hangs up. Then she stands in Lonnie’s doorway, hands pressing the frame, and tells him she’s staying for Second Shift. He glares, twisting the printout in his hands. There’s nothing he can do about it: she could report the eighteen-hour shift violation, or even the Dedu, which he doesn’t want mentioned, she doesn’t know why.
“I’ll stay here, then,” he says. “Got to do the weeklies. You can do Second Flow Team.”
Second Shift is no different from First Shift. Uglifruit knows that, but in the fifteen years since she last worked three to midnight, she’s forgotten, picturing something darker, otherworldly, something like her nighttime dreams. The Clean Room is windowless, so it’s not like there’s any difference between day and night, when you’re in there. Still, when the dinner buzzer sounds and she sees her nighttime reflection moving beside her in the lunchroom windows, it seems like a foreign thing to her, as if it isn’t her reflection at all, but someone else, following.
She’s taken attendance: only one absence on Second Shift, and Patsy’s filling in, so maybe that’s why Lonnie had her stay late after all. She’s good at Clean Room operations, Patsy, though she’s been at it for barely a month. She did request permission to take two bathroom breaks before dinnertime, which is more than the handbook allows, but her grateful smile when Uglifruit made the exception was worth a tiny bending of the rules. She knew Patsy was trying to empty her bladder before sunset. The Dedu doesn’t show up in the bathroom until then.
Uglifruit pictures the Dedu in the ladies’ room, the ghost on the toilet, shoes beneath the stall. She giggles to herself a little: if the ghost is a man and he’s sitting down, he’s probably doing a Number Two. It’s silly, she knows, but she can’t quite separate Patsy’s ghost from the real Mortality. The man who died on the company pump. If he’s come to haunt them, what’s he doing in the ladies’ room? Well, for one thing, there’s only one big bathroom in the Clean Wing, since they’re all ladies there, all except Lonnie, who has a private washroom—that’s what he calls it—right in his office. So if the Mortality is angry with the Clean Room ladies, he can find them there, without having to show himself to the boss. But what does the Mortality want? Even Uglifruit can’t locate a breach in protocol serious enough to have caused a fatal malfunctioning in his pump. Does he know something they don’t? If she could talk with the Mortality, just a little confabulation by the bathroom sinks or at the drink panel, she’d ask him, and adjust protocols accordingly. But that’s only if she knew for sure that he wasn’t a vengeful ghost. A ghost doing his Number Two business doesn’t seem very dangerous, but maybe she’d feel differently once he’d fastened his belt and stepped out of the stall.
Uglifruit breaks open the milk ampule over a Move-a-Bowl of SniggleSnaps, bought from the snack panel. Truth is, she doesn’t believe the ghost of the Mortality would hurt her, because she doesn’t believe there’s a ghost at all. She looks over at the Second Shift ladies, all Strandflatters, of course, who seem to know Patsy as well as her co-workers on the First Shift do. That makes sense: once, when Uglifruit sat on the couch in Lonnie’s office, he hurried over to snatch away a stack of papers he’d left behind, but before he did, she caught a glimpse of one spreadsheet column—the home addresses of all the Clean Room employees. She recognized the name of the street where she and Mother Two-Shoes live, and then another address, probably Second Flow Team’s, but the rest of the addresses were identical, one house number on one street in one neighborhood Uglifruit had never visited. She realized all the Strandflatters lived together, in one house. She didn’t know if they chose to do that, or if Pump Production set it up that way. But she knows that’s why Patsy is no stranger to the Second Shifters. She watches them in their corner, looking even more huddled than usual, maybe against the nighttime pressing in around them. Maybe against the urge to go to the bathroom, a terrible prospect, now that night has come.
Uglifruit watches them, and she realizes something: she’s jealous that they believe in the
It’s been a long day. As soon as Uglifruit thinks of the time, the fatigue breaks over her, like an avalanche of debris. She puts her elbows on the high-top, her head in her hands, covering her eyes, smelling the sweet, dairy smell of the cereal. Then she hears a little noise:
“Ma’am?”
It’s Patsy, practically whispering, bouncing a little on her toes—maybe to make herself taller, reach Uglifruit’s ear.
Uglifruit’s pressed the heels of her hands too hard against her eyes. She sees blotches float across Patsy’s face. She scrunches up her own face, squints. “Miss,” she says.
“Miss Ma’am,” Patsy pleads. Uglifruit realizes she’s not trying to make herself taller with her ballet maneuvers: she’s dancing around impatiently, crossing her legs.
“I have to pop into the ladies’,” Uglifruit says. “Wanna come?”
Patsy nods, though she doesn’t smile. When they open the bathroom door, Patsy waves her arms madly, activating the LiteBot. Then she dashes into the nearest stall. Uglifruit doesn’t really have to pee. She’d feel a little weird doing it next to Patsy, anyway. She stands by the sink, her back to the mirror. Patsy flushes, comes out, rushes over to the sink beside Uglifruit, runs the water.
“Which stall is it?” Uglifruit asks. She’s looking up and down the row, though she hasn’t gone so far as to bend down and check underneath, the way Mother Two-Shoes does when she wants to know if a stall is free.
Patsy doesn’t turn around. “Four,” she says.
Uglifruit moves a few paces down the line of doors, all of them swung shut, counting four from the wall. At the fourth, she turns and faces the stall head-on. She reaches out a hand, presses the door with just her fingertips. She feels a little thrill: what if there’s really someone, some thing, there?
She pushes harder than she means to, and the door swings back, smacking the inside of the stall. Patsy emits a gasp, puts the paper towel she’s holding to her face. It’s just a toilet, the flushing mechanism sweating droplets of condensation behind it. A roll of toilet paper has spun off its mount, cascading into a little puddle on the floor. The emptiness disappoints Uglifruit, though so does the filth: they should do better in a restroom on the Clean Wing. Maybe it’s the excitement, or fatigue, or her cereal dinner, but Uglifruit does something she rarely does, at work or at home: she laughs out loud.
“Nothing here,” she says to Patsy. “Wanna see?”
Patsy lowers the paper towel, takes a step forward, just one dainty foot. The stall door issues a groan and swings shut again, slamming against the latch. Patsy’s face contorts in a look of deep terror. She cries out. Uglifruit turns toward her, hand outstretched, and Patsy cries out again just as the bathroom door itself opens, admitting what looks to be the entire Second Shift. They envelop Patsy until Uglifruit can’t see her anymore. But she can hear her: sobbing, sighing, speaking words only they can understand.
Lonnie says: “Get her out of here.”
Uglifruit peers down the hall at the group in the lunchroom. The second dinner buzzer has come and gone. The thermofusers need watching. No one’s scrubbed in yet. It’s a highly irregular breach of protocol.
“If she won’t stop that blabbering, get her out of here,” Lonnie says. He turns to Uglifruit, looks her in the eye, second time in one day. “Take her home. Tell her to pull it together by Monday.”
Or else, Uglifruit thinks. She approaches the group, gently explains what she’s been told to do. What she has to do. They don’t look at her, but the crowd parts, and Patsy emerges, tears in her eyes. She follows Uglifruit down the hall, into the elevator, and out to the parking lot.
Uglifruit doesn’t say anything, just pulls the passenger seatbelt over Patsy’s shoulder. No one ever sits in her passenger seat, not even Mother Two-Shoes. She can hear a bit of sand, or maybe rust, grinding in the buckle before it snaps shut.
Patsy doesn’t need to tell her where to go. She still remembers the address from the spreadsheet, the street in the neighborhood where she’s never been. She doesn’t dare steal a glimpse at Patsy, afraid she’ll upset her again, afraid to see what Patsy sees when she steals a glimpse of her in return. When she thinks she’s reached the right street, she slows down and turns toward Patsy, who lifts a hand to point the house out, then drops it again into her lap. Uglifruit can see it as they approach: she’s surprised how small it is, smaller than the place where she and Mother Two-Shoes live. She thinks, they all live in there together—there must be room for only them, and nothing else. There can’t possibly be enough beds for everyone. She wonders if they pair up and take shifts, just like in the Clean Room: Second Shift sleeps while First Shift works, and then they switch. But that doesn’t account for Night Shift, or the weekends. Maybe on the weekends, and for a few overlapping hours, they share. Uglifruit imagines someone curled up with Patsy on a narrow bed. It pulls at her heart strangely: she doesn’t see the pair in the bed, only the room around them, and it’s her room at home, a nap in the late afternoon, a parallelogram of reflected sunlight rippling overhead.
As they roll up to the house, Uglifruit sees someone emerge through the front door. It’s Charlotte, dressed in a pink robe and slippers, arms open and ready to enfold Patsy, who has already shut the car door behind her and is stumbling up the path. Uglifruit tries to think of the rhyme she could recite to comfort Patsy-bird. Then she thinks: to hell with it. Patsy isn’t even her real name. She turns back into the street and drives on.
At a stoplight, Uglifruit stares at the space where Patsy sat, then rolls down the passenger window, feeling better as she hits the accelerator and pulls onto the freeway, a gust of air swirling around in the empty seat. By the time she’s gliding off her own exit, she’s not thinking of anything, just looking forward to sleep. It’s already past nine p.m., far later than she’s come home in years. Uglifruit knows better than to stay out so late. She knows better than to pursue more than her room at home can contain, where she’s confined the farthest reaches of her self to a long closet carpeted in green.
She’d forgotten about Mother Two-Shoes’ plan. She hadn’t expected it so soon. The trees outside their house are strung with lights in shapes of cactuses, champagne glasses, black cats with arching backs. The neighborhood ladies gather beneath the lights, the street filled with their cars, forcing her to park a block away. She walks quietly, heavily, her head down, hands in her pockets. It’s only when she arrives at the house and weaves her way through the crowd that she sees it: dozens and dozens of shoes, sprinkling the lawn with night-lit color. Nailed to a tree by the walkway is a sign in block-lettered PhosphoPaint: UNUSED SHOES. Women Uglifruit recognizes, and many she does not, try on the shoes, the taller ones sifting through the elevens, the smaller ones jostling for the sixes. For those in between, Mother Two-Shoes distributes wads of cotton and tissue, so they may stuff the toes and pad the heels. She’s tied a red ankle boot around her neck by its laces, and it bobs on her chest, swelling with bills, clinking with change. Uglifruit watches her dart past the throng of customers, part the shrubs by the kitchen, and reach for something on the windowsill. Uglifruit’s nostrils twitch. She can smell disappointment, a plateful of crumbs. The spirit has moved Mother Two-Shoes, and she’s baking Baby Cakes.
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Eliezra Schaffzin is a recipient of the Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction (judged that particular year by Brian Evenson). Her collection of very short stories, Tiny Creatures, was published by Ethel, a micro-press. One of its tiny tales, about a tardigrade, was a finalist for the SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction, and another, “Triptych: Little Deities,” won the Los Angeles Review Award for Flash Fiction. Sometimes her work lies awhile in a DIY literary crypt and then undergoes a rude awakening. She wrote “Uglifruit Two-Shoes” in 2001. At the time, the “QF levels” in the story were called “QR levels,” but when the piece exited the crypt, she decided to change them by one letter, just to avoid any confusion. Her website is eliezraschaffzin.com. |