“Absolutely not,” I breathed, already backing towards the door. “This is…This is obscene. I’ll report you to staffing!”
My hand was on the doorknob at my back. I could run straight to the staffing office from here.
But he only laughed. “Report me to staffing? It’s your word against mine,” he said, giving a flippant shrug. “I’ve been here fifteen years to your four. And you’re the one who’s broken your contract.”
My heart dropped all the way down to my steel-toed boots.
“You’re past your maximum number of sick days. That’s a fireable offence,” Rod went on blithely, as if none of this mattered at all, as if this weren’t my actual fucking life. “Way I see it, staffing department’s going to know I had a chat with you about your attendance this morning. They’ll think you panicked and made up some bullshit story about me to save your own ass.”
Oh, God. He was right. Attendance was a big thing factory-wide. I’d never seen Rod miss a day. On top of that, he was my superior as zone foreman, and he probably knew everybody in the staffing department. Meanwhile, I didn’t know anyone in that office who could vouch for me, or who might be sympathetic to me. The only kind face I remembered working in staffing was a pretty, curvy blonde woman named Tasha, and she’d left her post quite some time ago.
I was completely powerless.
“No,” I said. My voice sounded shaky and weak. So I said it again. Louder. “No.”
His eyes went flinty.
“Then don’t bother clocking in,” he said. He shoved off of his desk and came towards me. My pulse rammed, but all he did was push on the door behind me and hold it open. “Off you go.”
“Off I…”
“Go. You’re fired.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the staircase I’d taken down from the changeroom. “Get your shit and get out.”
“But-”
“If you want to stay,” he said, “then you know what I expect.”
As if through a fog, I left his office and stumbled back to the changeroom.
3
SHILOH
Ididn’t clock in. There was no point.
I wasn’t staying. Icouldn’tstay. Not when my choice to do so was no real choice at all.
I didn’t panic. The prospect of not paying rent this month, of having an empty fridge in just a few days, sat waiting for me behind a blanketing veil of grief. I couldn’t feel afraid. Not yet. All I could feel was a terribly numbing sadness. And an empty bitterness that men like Rod could do what they did while men like my daddy were dead.
The unfairness of the universe seemed suddenly completely overwhelming, too big to even attempt to contemplate head-on. If I actually stopped and counted up all the things that had been stripped away from me, I’d collapse. Or maybe just float away. All the goodness that had once anchored me to this place now gone. I’d be entirely weightless with the emptiness of my own life.
I wouldn’t even be able to use the time away from work to paint. I knew that by tomorrow, the shock would lift, and the fear would come rushing in. I could work out anger or sadnesswith a paintbrush, but not fear. Anxiety froze my creativity completely.
I’d have no credits. No job. And no ability to paint.
And no one to even talk to about it. I had some friends, sure, but they all worked here. I would tell them I’d been fired, and they’d make sympathetic noises and give me hugs, surely. But then they’d be hurrying off to clock in for themselves, leaving me behind. There was a number on everything these days, even the minutes you could spend caring about somebody else.
Dazedly, I found my locker and began to empty it.
There wasn’t much to take. My own boots, unfortunately much less sturdy than these steel-toed ones I’d have to leave behind. My comms tablet. My jacket. My hands moved as if they belonged to someone else, unfeeling as I collected my things and closed the locker for the last time.
I was just turning to go when laughter made me halt. It was such an unexpected sound that, despite everything, curiosity made me move towards it. Women sometimes laughed on the way out of here. But before line-start it was usually pretty quiet, everybody sleepy and sore and dreading the twelve hours ahead.
Two women were huddled together in front of a locker, looking at something hanging on the inside of the locker’s door. I caught the sound of flipping paper then the explosion of another round of giddy giggles.
“Holy shit, is that Cherry Dawson? Bitch, good for you!” cried the woman on the left. She looked to be in her mid-forties, with close-cropped silvery blond hair. The woman beside her had steel-grey hair in a tight bun and a medium brown complexion. I glanced at the names on the pockets of their uniforms. Mary on the left, Bhavi on the right.
They became aware of my presence at the same time, both turning towards me.
