Title: $85 Dry Cleaning Bill
Author: Harper Kingsley
PROMPT: I need to wash my blanket. It smells like dirty girl.
FILL: I need to wash my blankie, Holden thought, wrinkling her nose.
The dark cream colored rectangle of fake fur smelled of dirty girl and rancid powdered Corpse. Her own familiar smell had been completely wiped away by her cousin. Her terrible, terrible cousin. The would-be necromancer and part-time necrophile.
Her blanket felt tainted now. And the smell made her want to gag. If she didn’t love that scrap of fabric so much she would have thrown it away. As it was, she’d have to take it to the Dry Cleaners and hope they could save it.
Holden bundled the blanket into a garbage bag and tied it shut. She tossed the bag in the backseat of her car and drove to a coffee shop where she enjoyed a black coffee sweetened by two sugars and a croissant sandwich for lunch. While she was there she ran a quick Internet search for highly rated Dry Cleaners.
She chose and saved the directions to Happy Harry’s onto her phone. She ignored the notification that said she’d had five missed calls (This is my day) and finished her coffee. Then she drove to the Dry Cleaners, who told her it was going to cost $85 to save her blanket.
By the time she was home getting ready for the evening’s Entertainment, she was simmering over the amount of the bill. Her cousin hadn’t even apologized when she’d made such a big mess at Thanksgiving. (That selfish bitch. She only thinks about herself. She didn’t even look sorry when she got Uncle Raymond’s fingers chopped off. It was all about her. Never mind our family.) She’d swooped in, dropped angry criminals on them all, killed a bunch of people, then flew back east. She’d turned their family into a spectacle. And she’d never truly apologized.
It hurt to think that the family had welcomed her into their homes and she’d treated them so shabbily. Holden had made a fool of herself welcoming her new famous cousin. She’d shown her around and introduced her to all of her friends. And what had she gotten in return? A bloodbath in her backyard. A pile of bloody clothes and makeshift medical supplies in her room. A bunch of sexually assaulted family members–male and female, old and young-young–that she could barely look at without feeling like crying. And an 85-frakking-dollar Dry Cleaning bill because her cousin’s “friend”/hitman/lackey had taken a nap on her bed without her permission.
Holden’s cousin’s whirlwind visit had been a series of horrifying events that their family might never fully recover from. There were so many emotional scars forming that she found it too selfish to mention her financial concerns to any of them. They’d been through so much.
She felt too guilty to complain about her badly damaged rental house.
So to keep her creditors off her back, she’d gotten the kind of job she’d promised herself she’d never do. But what real choice did she have?
It was either pay the bills or end up in Debtors’ Prison. Or worse.
She could end up on the Auction Block. Where she would regret being so wholesome and pretty (I’d get full body tattoos and hack my hair off before my sale date. I’d rather be a Menial than Property) when she was sold for Entertainment.
I have to get some money, Holden thought. I have to fix this somehow.
/END EXCERPT
