FSE

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Fran had worked the nightshift at a convenience store. It had suited her in some ways. After a short, mercifully optimistic period of settling into it, it had become customary for her to think of herself as hating her job. Most people hated their jobs - why should she be any different? When she thought about it more, it occurred to her that, if there had been a way for her to live her life without having to have a job at all, she'd have taken it in a heartbeat.

Most other jobs that existed, she could never have imagined being able to even do, let alone convince someone else she could. So what else could she have done? There were but a few other jobs available at her entry level, and nothing she could have seen herself doing as such. When she'd been a child, she'd fantasized about working in a museum someday, in some capacity. She'd liked space, Egypt, and dinosaurs, things that museums were definitely about.

A high school diploma wasn't going to get her into a museum, it was starting to look like. With time, she started trying to tell herself that she was an adult, that often, adults have to do work that they don't want to have to do, and that this is just the way things are. Her job didn't hurt anyone else, as far as she could tell. The longer she worked there, the more a part of her became used to it, to little things about it here and there. She was nocturnal, and liked solitude.

There was nothing she needed to know how to do about it that she couldn't do. She was not afraid of being fired. Her coworkers weren't her friends, but she got along with them fine. The manager was a bit gruff at first, but she'd gotten used to taking it in stride, estimating that he wouldn't go too far if push came to shove, after knowing him long enough. Out of all jobs it was possible for her to have, there was a fair chance this was still among the best ones overall.

Fran began to realize that she didn't hate *her* job. She hated *work*.

There she was, working at a job that she knew wouldn't have existed without capitalism, perhaps one of its most simplified expressions: you give me money, I give you a product. And yet, she had no respect for it at all. For all she cared, everyone may just as well have walked in, taken whatever they needed, and walked right out. She had to act like she cared, since her job depended on it, but in her heart, she did not. She suspected many others probably felt the same.

Most people don't go out shopping in the middle of the night. When someone showed up at the convenience store she worked at during her shift, there always had to be a story around that, she would tell herself. Either this was a fellow nocturnal person living as she was or, more often, an unexpected set of circumstances or another had occurred which had led this person to need something they had, right here, right now, to her treasure cave in the night.

Fran's favorite part of her job had been that, every time people came in in the middle of the night, based on how they looked and acted, she'd invent a little story in her mind, trying to imagine how they'd ended up then and there, where they were going, and what kind of people they could be...

***

The space pirates had separated Jackie and Fran from each other. The roach was kept near one of the ship's power outlets so that her antennae could be kept plugged into it to power it, where the parrot kept an eye on her. The jackal was kept in the room next to her while they figured out what to do with her, where the duck kept a weapon trained on her that could only be described as an antique blunderbuss. The hangar door was open between them. For a moment, she couldn't help but wonder about what series of events could have possibly led their captors down this particular road in life. What happened to a person that made them do something like this to someone, she asked herself? It didn't seem like an easy question.

At first, Fran wondered if the sound she'd heard in the next room had been a grenade pin dropping to the ground. The fact that she saw Jackie dive into a side roll under the closing hangar door by a hair's width as the room on the other side of it exploded behind her certainly seemed to corroborate that theory. It was only later that the jackal would understand that what she'd heard had been the sound of the roach's shackles hitting the floor behind her after Jackie had picked their locks with her knitting needles. The room hadn't blown up because of a grenade, but because the roach sabotaged a control panel. Hearing the parrot scream through the hangar door, Fran had no trouble believing that it could have killed someone at close range.

The duck's blunderbuss shot went right over Jackie, who came up from her diving side roll into a kneel under it. She threw one of her knitting needles across the room right through the duck's chest. The duck emitted an eerie, squeaky quack as her eyes rolled back into her head. The roach yanked the knitting needle out of the duck's chest at a distance, pulling on a yarn string that she'd attached to the eye of the needle so that it could be retrieved. The duck fell to the ground limply like a puppet whose strings have been cut while Jackie quickly moved to the jackal's side to pick the locks of her shackles with her knitting needles until they also fell to the ground behind her.

Fran fought back the urge to retch. She knew that no one else liked death either, for all she knew, but with her, she still felt that it went further than that somehow. It was a visceral reaction, one that only firmly holding onto the even scarier thought that they would both die if it went unchecked made it possible for the jackal to overcome, or at least to postpone having to process until the fight would be over. It was a sink-or-swim exercise in compartmentalization.

The roach moved to kneel one side of the room's other door and motioned for Fran to move to do the same on the other side of it. She brought a finger up in front of her mandibles to indicate that the jackal should be as quiet as possible. Somehow both of their civilizations, evolving on completely separate axes, had ended up deciding that this gesture meant the same thing: shush! Jackie threw her yarn ball at Fran for her to grab, holding the knitting needle that she'd used to kill the duck in her own hands to extend a string across the threshold between the needle and yarn ball. The jackal was grateful that she didn't have to hold the needle part of their makeshift tripwire, after what it'd been through. She wasn't sure she was ready for that.

The glowworm walked into the room with a glowstick tonfa in each hand only to fall gracelessly on her face the moment she stepped right into the trap that her captives had set. Before she could push herself back up to her feet, she screamed when the roach leapt to kneel at her side to drive a knitting needle through one of the glowworm's hands, nailing it to the floor. Jackie grabbed the back of the glowworm's head to slam it on the floor, knocking her out.

"Drop it."

The roach's other knitting needle clattered on the floor as she raised her hands over her head. The puffin had cut the tripwire yarn string with her cutlass before walking into the room behind them. She was now aiming both her pistol and cutlass at Fran and Jackie, and neither of them could see a way to disarm her from where they were. The jackal wondered whether or not anything they might do could still stop the puffin from killing them or not by that point.

So this was death...

***

One night, of all possible nights, someone strode into the convenience store where Fran worked at night with a definite sense of purpose in their step. Her new customer had answered the usual questions that she liked to ask herself about the people who came in before she could ask them to herself, not in so many words, but with their actions. They weren't the answers she'd been looking for, but they had had the merit of being direct. Brutal honesty was overrated.

The jackal hadn't resisted. She'd handed them the money that they'd asked for as fast as she possibly could, without any argument whatsoever. The person she was dealing with clearly cared about the money a lot more than she did, she thought. She did everything "right." She must've panicked, she must've taken too long, given them a weird look, they may have thought she'd rang an alarm and the cops were on their way. She must've done *something* wrong.

She never knew why they pulled the trigger.