Kimmie sits up on the bed.
 ”I’m supposed to be enjoying life.”
 Len frowns.
 ”Says who?
 ”I dunno,” mutters Kimmie.  “God, I guess.”
 ”You know God?”
 ”Shut up,” Kimmie shouts.  “You know what I mean.  I mean, I’ve only got one life.  Why am I just sitting here?  I feel like I’m wasting time.”
 ”Well, what’re we supposed to do?  Dance a fucking jig?”
 She gets up.  She’s pretty angry.
 ”Piss off, Len.  Just get out!”
 Len scrambles off the bed and strolls to the doorway.  He looks back toward her before he leaves the tiny apartment.
 ”Call me when you cool down.”
 She hates it when he says that.  The heck with him.  But what to do now?  It’s one in the morning and the TV’s turned to scrambled porn.  There’s sex in the air, too much of it.  The people next door are having sex.  The cats in the alley are having sex.  She’s grown tired of the moaning and shrieks of pleasure.  She hates sex now, but it wasn’t the neighbors or the sounds of horny animals piercing the night sky that ruined it for her.  One day she’d just had her fill of it.  It was just a feeling of completeness with that one aspect of life.  She just shoved the man off of her when it happened.  He stormed out of the room, even though she tried to explain.  He left anyway.  What an asshole.  He didn’t even stick around for breakfast.
 So what to do, what to do?  She could go out onto the fire escape and count the holes in the sidewalk again.  If you look at them at just the right angle, they sort of look like moon craters.  There aren’t any parking meters on the moon, though.
 She’s in her robe.  It’s warm outside, another warm summer night.  She tiptoes onto the fire escape, but she doesn’t really know why she’s tiptoeing.  The neighbors are obviously awake.  The woman is coming to a climax and the man is grunting like a bull.  Some guy is wandering around the sidewalk in circles with a bottle of booze in his hand.  Most people around there don’t usually bother concealing their alcohol with paper bags in public.  There’s a lot of despair.  The liquor stores are probably the most prosperous businesses in town. 
 She thinks of tomorrow.  The landlord will be complaining about the rent.  The phone is usually shut off by this time of month, but if she’s lucky she’ll have electric service for one more day.  She wants one of those big trust funds you can dip into.  You know, the ones where rich parents empty their pockets of thousands and dump it into their kid’s bank account.  The only thing her parents ever dumped into her bank account was shit.  But it bounced.  Go figure.
 Maybe paydays wouldn’t be so far apart if she didn’t have a new job every month.  Gail’s Beef & Chicken Market just wasn’t America’s number one dream job.  The smell of a cooler full of raw meat at four in the morning just wasn’t the greatest aroma.  And management looked surprised when both some guy and herself puked within the same hour.  At least she aimed her barf closer to the drain.
 Where are these dream jobs that people talked about in school?  Work sucks no matter what you do, she thinks as she studies the metal railing.
 ”How depressing…”
 The man wandering on the sidewalk looks up as she speaks the words aloud, as if she would rather talk to him over a heap of fresh cow shit.
 ”Huh?”
 Then he starts this long period of laughing, one of those low, drunken laughs.  She frowns at him and walks back into the apartment.
 The neighbors are starting in on another round of sex.  Are these people part rabbit?  Sometimes she wonders if that’s all that the building was built for, to support the art of fucking.
 ”I think my hormones are broken,” she mumbles slowly and wearily to no one in particular.
 The man on the sidewalk is laughing again.  She can hear him through the open window.  He can probably hear the neighbors too, they’re screaming like monkeys in heat.  She wonders what God does to people who fuck noisily in dilapidated buildings and the drunk people who laugh at them.
 She lays down on the bed and tries to sleep.  Her mouth feels dirty from not brushing her teeth.  She ran out of toothpaste a few days ago and can’t afford more.  She suddenly wishes they had a lottery where you could win toothpaste.  Or some sort of toothpaste raffle, with a big tube of toothpaste as the prize.  It’s a spontaneous, unusual desire, but what else is there to hope for?
 The man from the sidewalk is looking through the window.  Apparently, he’s crawled up the fire escape.  His face is dotted with stubble and wrinkles.  He’s covered with sweat and he’s grinning.
 She isn’t scared.  She just stares back at his gaze as he crawls through the open window.  The neighbors are picking up the pace.
 He’s eyeing her body and laughing that dumb little laugh of his.  He spilled his liquor on the rug.  Oh well, it stank anyway.
 The drunk man has decided to arm himself.  He smashed the bottle against a table.  He drops his pants and creeps toward her slowly.
 She wonders if she should yell for help, but she doesn’t want to interrupt the neighbor’s fucking.  She picks up the telephone.  The line has been disconnected.  She hates being poor.
 She stands up and kicks the bastard in the balls.  His laughing mutates into a drunken yelp as he waddles quickly back onto the balcony, climbs down it, and runs away.
 ”What does it all mean?” she says to herself as she opens a fruit cup, the last bit of food from her kitchenette.  She longs to have a Grocery Day.  She wonders what day she would pick.  Saturday?  Nah, it would be crowded.  Maybe Monday.  Why dream?
 The neighbors have again finished their duty and are apparently resting.  Wait, never mind.  They’re starting back up again at a furious pace.  Someone is beating on their door and telling them to “Shut the fuck up!”
 Kimmie laughs momentarily, it feels good to laugh.
 There’s broken glass on the floor and she stepped on a piece when she went to get the fruit cup.  Her foot is bleeding a little bit.  She giggles and wipes her bare foot against the wall that the neighbors are beating on as they fuck.  There is a quite a bit of blood on the white paint of the wall.  She rubs the blood with her finger and draws a big question mark.
 She doesn’t know what to write.  She doesn’t know what to say.  She doesn’t know what to do.  She just doesn’t know.
 The fruit tastes like garbage, but she needs the food.  She lost a lot of weight over the past month.  Some guy at the subway station called her scrawny.  Then, another guy pinched her on the ass.  She kicked them both in the balls.
 She walks back onto the balcony.  She wants to weep but the tears won’t come.  Somebody’s sleeping on the sidewalk.  She wonders if that is going to be her someday.  Then, she cries.