Something Happened on the Day He Died

"So softly a supergod dies."

Bri blinked herself awake at the notification.  Dana.  Had she just found out Lemmy died?  No - it's Dana - Natalie Cole? - jeez, though, how the hell had she not found out until now?  The phrasing sounded familiar, but she couldn't place it.  Groggy, she pecked out: "who died?"

A news link.  A video call.  Neither woman would be sleeping that night.  When morning came, both would have things to do.  Dana off to be a hero not just for one day, Bri to see if the fish would bite on the green grass of the card table.

Bri'd be out late, not to mention carrying a mint, so she took the puffy coat, to make her look larger, less curvy.  Concealed in an inside pocket, as well as the money, was a large hunting knife, sheathed.  The fact that such a coat would keep her warm was a bonus; she almost mentally attacked Dana for not having to worry about that last bit, but she did now, didn't she?  Her travels had brought her not too far from her now.

Her habit was to take the morning bus out and the evening bus - i.e., the red-eye bus that returned the evening crowd - back.  She was pretty sure this was against their rules, but she hadn't been called on it yet.  With the free play and the meal ticket, the ride would be literally cheaper than free, except that the meal ticket's lack of fungibility and the issue of taxes complicated things.  On the bus, she worked her way through War and Peace, as Twain had said about Paradise Lost, just to have read it.  She had boarded at the bit where von Phull was showing off his tactical prowess to Prince Andrei, Tsar Alexander, et al., where he was compared to a mathematician who "had contemptuously ceased to demonstrate ... having already proven what he had set out to prove."  For all his mathematical metaphors, Bri reflected, Tolstoy was not a reader of mathematical journals.

Dana got on her own bus, one owned by the sort of people who would detest Bri's little adventures.  Two years Dana had been fighting the good fight, and she'd be doing so for the foreseeable future.  For the first time in what must have been months, she was wearing a dress, one that she'd torn, slightly.  She wondered if any of the rebels would catch on.

Bri went and smashed her favorite slot machine with the free play, and having scored a couple dollars, made a run for the card room.  20/40 stud, where it was practically mandatory the players hide behind fifty-year-old eyes; that morning, Bri and one stubbly, skinny white boy were breaking that rule.  These sons of bitches (and the odd bitch) made it feel like Thanksgiving every day, only most of the time with presents (if only some festivity combined the two - someday soon, perhaps she'd see).  Well, always presents - the only variation was whom the presents were for.  Often Bri was a recipient, often others, but the house always won.

"We venerate these sorts of people in other countries, don't we?" shouted the man opposite Bri at no one, whatever strain of table talk had gotten them there already forgotten.  "When it's Coke or Xi-Jizzle chasing them off their land.  But when it's Uncle Sam, at least under Barry, oh hell no!"  Bri just smiled.  At fifty-ish, he was well below the median age of the table.  Bri knew him, although she couldn't remember his name.  He'd order Mongolians, and sip them like a fine whiskey, and the few times she'd played hold 'em with him, she'd noticed a habit of his of referring to A4 as "Cait" or "Caitlyn," or a few months prior, as "Dil."

He waved his hand at the boy.  "I know, it's not the same, they don't have the right, well, who do you think has the deed, those poor farmers or the Coca-Cola company?"  The boy was still in the hand, so he said nothing.  The old man seemingly took this as assent, so he said nothing, just raised his glass.  He took a look at the television behind Bri, and downed the rest of his Mongolian in a gulp.  For the rest of the dealer, his eyes were frantically darting around the room for the waitress.

Dana, meanwhile, was writing - writing, in this case, being plagiarizing.  No one had mentioned her dress, but she'd gotten a few dirty looks, from the few she suspected had gotten the idea.  Yeah, he was a problematic fave.  No one doubted that.  But even taken at such a level, he had certainly made contributions to racial diversity in music, to the normalization of the LGBT community, despite being (nominally) in neither community.

Lunch for Bri - she'd thought about using her credit card to buy rye bread, but that would be wasting her food comp - as usual, she bought a half sandwich at Panera and used the rest of the comp to buy bread, albeit, yes, rye bread.

Sitting in the Panera, she opened her Facebook, to see Dana, having said something about the idea of Yudkowsky's "dark arts," that it was a necessity to being a good person.  It warmed her little heart.  The width of a circle - in relation to its other properties - was the same, provided it was well understood what a circle was, whether you realized God, fucked Satan, or went and fucked yourself.  Bri said something to this effect.  Dana blocked her.

Dana seethed.  After their heart to heart the previous night, it seemed such a betrayal to pollute her wall with her hyperempiricism.  Her false "view from a hill," from her rich, suburban, albeit half-black upbringing.  There was a reason STEM folks had to take courses to tether their knowledge to its cultural context.  Apparently, they hadn't taken.

Bri thought of Dana's reaction, not for their lost friendship, but something that meant far more to her.  Poker, and her other petty little hustles, had been her best shot at something like what she had prepared for her whole life, but maybe she could shoehorn her way back in.  She should at least try; the variance she'd subjected herself to would get her, but more than that she was worried that it had been heretofore on her side.  It was impossible to know otherwise.  She had been making money, but maybe she'd just been lucky.  She started looking at colleges, hoping to find something at her age with her failures that wasn't a scam.  Of course, she couldn't apply here, not wanting to give her social and bank details on a casino wifi, but the second she got home.

Dana screamed at the people, one voice in a mob.  "Take a look at the lawman beating up the wrong guy," all this year, and the last several years, and the last several decades, and the wrong guy had happened to be of the wrong color.  "And I wonder why sometimes."  She shouted at the mob of rubes who couldn't understand what was responsible for their woes.

The man from the morning was gone, strangely.  That Mongolian he'd necked had been his last.  He was a solid player, one Bri feared, but kept a steady stream of ethanol, like Mitchell and Webb's "Inebriati."  The money Bri had made in the morning was mostly gone; she was even, well, technically up two hundred something.  At least she hadn't lost.  That would have just been the perfect cap to such a day.

Dana figured she could probably spare forty dollars for her night out.  It was certainly a special occasion if there ever was one.  It wasn't as though she was the sort the boys bought drinks.  She looked over herself; she'd torn her dress, her face was a mess, her eye region looking like she'd done a handful of 'ludes.  A stiff drink would wake her up.  An old tube of lipstick could give her a lightning bolt.  She sighed.  Where the fuck did Monday go?

A local bar had karaoke Mondays, and that morning on Facebook they'd announced an unsurprising theme to that night's occasion.  Dana sat herself down next to a man in a dress and wig similar to the one from that one album cover, sipping something pink, which the bartender had made from everything from Southern Comfort to sloe gin, from a shot glass clearly meant for shooting, and it struck her, here they were in a bar to wake a recovering alcoholic who'd died of liver cancer.  Nonetheless, Dana herself got a drink to celebrate his last years - a Manhattan.

The man in the dress got up to sing.  She looked at her phone and laughed - 9:25.  When he'd sat back down, it was her turn, so she gave him her phone, and asked him to take a photo.

"Ugh!  Stanning a Nazi pedo!  So gross!"

"Sooo problematic!  Unfollowed!"

"How many children die to our adventurism, and this merits your voice?"

Bri, on the bus, kept reading from her book by the streetlamps and headlights the bus passed, but having been up since one or so, soon passed out.  Upon reaching the bus's destination, she stumbled toward her apartment as though drunk, not having had a single drink (maybe she should have).  When she got home, she thought of her pledge from that afternoon to apply back to school - it could wait until morning.  She passed out.

For both women, this had the makings of a long year.