The bargain
Once upon a time there was a poor girl who flunked out of college and community college so she had to sell t-shirts and stuff that fell off trucks at the gas station or on the street. Sometimes she sold oranges too. And Louis Vuitton knock-offs. A girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do.
She sold 8 t-shirts for $7 and was walking home and heard the cats talking as they climbed up the dumpsters in the alleyway, saying meow meow meow meow. “Hey you felines!– you can’t count,” she said. “I got 7 dollars for the shirts.” But the cats kept on with their meaningless noise. meow meow meow meow. “Ok,” she said. “Since you know everything – you count go ahead and count the proceeds, and bring it all back to me.” She threw the money in the dumpster and walked home to the little place she lived and waited, but the cats never brought the money. She shook her head. “Crappy Cats.”
She waited a while and chased a few more trucks as they rumbled down Pico and she got some more shirts and she brought them to the swap meet at the high school near the coffee shop. She made $10 for 10 shirts, which, you have to admit, is more logical. She walked home and heard the dogs at Central Bark dog park saying bow-wow bow-wow. And said “Everybody’s a financial analyst in this town,” and she threw the money over the wall of the dog park, and said “Ok you mutts, bring me the money when you’ve counted it,” but they never did.
“You really can’t trust anybody,” she said to herself, and when a sewing machine fell off the truck along with some fabric, she made 20 cloaks, because making shirts is hard and it’s going to take a long time to narrate how she taught herself to make sleeves and necklines,
so I’m going to pass on this aspect, because this story is pretty dumb. A king’s daughter laughs at the poor dopey protagonist with all the money issues — which is pretty mean, so that’s getting dumped too.
Finally, this story has got a very anti-Semitic section in it coming up that I’m not quite sure how to deal with because I certainly don’t want a Jew getting whipped by the King twice (which happens in the original), but I also don’t want to substitute a minority person or indeed ANY kind of person for that character, because I don’t like the idea of these poor people being victimized by the hegemony.
So INSTEAD of that,
I’m going to have the girl go to Century City with her cloaks, which she will sell, and a nice different girl who is working at Victoria’s Secret is going to come out and see the cloaks and take pity on the first girl and give her a job there, and the first girl will now get a paycheck instead of cash, and VS will do instapay, so it will go right into the savings account that her grandmother was wise enough to open up for her. The new nice friend will tell the girl to use a debit card if she finds dollar bills so hard to deal with, so she won’t keep throwing her hard-earned cash at animals because she thinks these critters are investment experts.
This means – I hope — that the poor girl will perhaps be ok.
Although to be honest, working retail is tough, and almost any kind of job isn’t much of a bargain these days. And that’s nothing to laugh at. The end.
Stephanie Barbé Hammer Writing (Un) Real 