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proposition. I put the fork down on the plate, and gazed at Alice with a mask of total exhaustion written over the forty-seven years on my face. I said, “Get me the corkscrew, will you? And a couple of glasses for us.”
    I watched her back as she opened the cabinet above the stove. There were a lot of voices in my head. I saw my own survival as a sunset; fuchsia flamed, mushroom clouded, and getting dark very fast. A day off from the job, from the soul breaking margins of the Mission’s streets was a reprieve. Better yet, it was an extension on life itself.

eight
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    a man in a sleeveless undershirt was dumping garbage from a third story window in the building across the way. The stuff landed on the sidewalk and it didn’t take long before she could smell it. The guy looked like he’d never seen the sun a day in his life. He was white in a deep-sea fish sort of way. He poked his head out the window, looked down at the garbage strewn on the sidewalk, yawned and scratched his neck. He stared at the trash on the pavement for a second, withdrew his head, and slammed the window shut.
    She turned around and stared at the bed. Free Box had told her to go out and look for a job. She didn’t know where he was at the moment, which was good. Because there weren’t any jobs.
    This realization didn’t change the fact that they needed money. She didn’t have any choice in the matter. Barbie glared at the pantyhose on the bed. They didn’t
match the dress she wanted to wear. The pantyhose were sheer white, something she’d stolen from a clothing store run by Honduran evangelicos on Mission Street. The dress was a plaid cotton shift with a tacky vinyl belt. The dress looked good on her, but she didn’t have the proper colored shoes to go with the shift.
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    She had to get her hands on some cash. Maybe she’d pull a job; the stakes were high and the risk was great, but so were the rewards. She liked money: who didn’t? But it was work that she hated to the bone. She’d go out tomorrow, or maybe the day after. Barbie picked up the cotton shift, held it to her nose. She removed her bra and stepped out of her underpants. Then she glanced across the room to a mirror leaning against the far wall.
    There was something about staring into a mirror when she didn’t have any clothes on that excited her. She wasn’t sure if she was pretty, or if that even mattered. What she owned was a winning smile. Her breasts were good enough to attract attention which, from time to time, she didn’t mind, depending on who was doing the watching.
    Barbie turned sideways, threw her head back and flexed a leg. Without thinking about what she was doing, she let her hands drift down past her stomach. Once her fingertips got entangled with her pubic hair, her nerve endings started to issue commands that she had to obey. The needs of her body were so demanding, her mind didn’t dare to interfere.
    She reached into her slit, nudged the lips apart with a thumb and forefinger. She touched her clitoris with a
three stroke motion that went from her lips to her walls, then back to her clit. She inserted one finger, then two more before she groaned. She bent forward from the waist, letting her hair fall across her face. A flush of blood was rising from her slit, rippling across her stomach and speeding toward her heart.
    â€œBarbie? I thought you were going out to look for work.”
    She turned around. Free Box was standing in the doorway. To her relief, he didn’t seem concerned by what she was doing. She withdrew her fingers from their nest. She didn’t know where to put them. She held them out to Free Box, asking him, “Do you want to smell them?”
    He took three steps toward her, glanced at the clothes on the bed and floor and smiled. “Why not?”
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    She smoothed the wrinkles in the sheets and straightened out the blankets for her