Gracie Abrams is eking out a solitary existence, fighting day-in, day-out against the drain of working customer service and nursing two newborn kittens in her off time. Out on her own ever since her sister moved in with her boyfriend, the burden of...
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In three hours, my 6AM shift for opening the Pickup room would begin.
And I...
I still wore the clothes I had worked in yesterday.
I'm not sure if it's necessary to say that something like this had never happened to me before. I didn't live with OCD, but I kept barriers between work and home. Namely, I did not gallivant around in my stained work shirts and pants once I returned for the day.
It didn't just feel wrong. It felt—disgusting.
I'm sure I still smelled like that rotten cantaloupe juice. Even after spending some time outside and letting the cool night air it all out, I only added the lovely aromas of fearful sweat and Pride's monster's slime glooping into the rotten fruit already clinging to the fabric.
When I had finally walked into my apartment after what felt like seven hundred years, it had only been 9:13PM.
Four hours. Start to finish, it had been four hours.
I still couldn't believe it.
Once my door slammed into the hooks hanging beside it—Kakashi carrying a limp Kirishima over his shoulder—I spotted those glowing green numbers on my rush past my kitchen to the medical supplies in the bathroom. They glared at me, chastised me. Why were you late? They chorused. You're never late.
You're not supposed to be late.
Did other people live with a regimented clock harassing them from the shadows? Did other people exist to live each minute by a schedule? A self-inflicted cage?
Who gave these harassers the power to dictate how I spent 9:13PM? Or how I spent every minute after that?
Rigged out and raw, the kids were safely patched up, splattered with ice and heat and Neosporin. Given water and crackers and hot tea.
And sent to bed.
Who the hell had made me a mother?
Hable and Sintar had similarly been fed, soothed, and thrown right into the pile with the rest of the kids bundled on my bed.
I didn't feel particularly like a mother, even to the kittens I had assumed responsibility for. Even after performing the tasks of a caretaker, I had never felt farther from that title than now.
A reckoning had arrived in my apartment.
When all was said and done, an hour and a half had lapsed. At 10:43PM, my apartment had returned to stillness. Cop cruisers made several laps, using searchlights to peer into all the hidden corners, starting around 11:45PM.
