“Alarm activated: Time to get your ass up now or you’ll be fired.”

I groaned and pushed the pillow up over my ears, the thundering headache rampaging through my head was just not ready for me to get up and pretend to be alive. Basking in the silence after my own annoyed voice spoke to me, I slipped back mercifully into sleep.

“Alarm activated: Time to get your ass up now or you’ll be fired.”

Normally I would just wait out the alarm and let it turn off on it’s own, but I had programmed the last one to go off until I had to get up and fumble with my phone to silence it. Sober and logical thinking me knew that in the mornings I didn’t particularly care about being an active and alert member of society, at the moment I only very distantly cared about the idea of being fired and what little I did care was mostly because I had drank through my last bottle of gin the night prior.

“Alarm activated: Time to get your ass up now or you’ll be fired.”

With a loud grumble of defeat, I pried open my crusted eyes and pushed myself up into a sitting position with a surprising amount of back pain, I must have passed out in a weird position. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and collapsed my head into my hands. Laying down my headache had been terrible, but manageable, sitting up it was like someone was ramming a fork into my brain right between my eyes. I rubbed the bridge of my nose and then pulled back my hand to check for blood, thankfully my hand was clean, it would not have been the first time I had woken up from a drunken night with a random injury and only a fuzzy memory attached as to why.

“Alarm activated: Time to get your ass up now or you’ll be fired.”

Cursing the sober version of myself, I pushed up onto unsteady feet and stumbled the short distance to the tiny table that served as my makeshift desk and dining area in my studio apartment. Old bills and junk mail toppled from their haphazard piles as I half blindly shoved my hands across the tabletop looking for my phone. With nearly all the junk from the table now on the floor I let out some angry, scoffing noise that I was pretty sure I would never be able to reproduce again and turned my attention to the rest of the room to figure out where I would have left my phone if not where I typically did.

“Alarm activated: Time to get your ass up now or you’ll be fired.”

It sounded like it was somewhere close to the refrigerator, just a couple feet from where I stood. I panned over the small length of counter top between the fridge and stove, but it was too cluttered with dirty dishes and clothes for me to pick out where I had set it down. After a haphazard initial rummage through the clutter on the counter I was still coming up empty handed, I didn’t dig too far down into the piles, mostly out of my own sense of self-preservation, the set up was tenuously stable at best.

“Alarm activated: Time to get your ass up now or you’ll be fired.”

The cupboard. I reached up and opened cupboard above me slowly and carefully, I could never remember which one of them I had stuffed full of dirty dishes a while ago and I knew one day I would forget and have it come clattering down on my head. Sure I should have just cleared it out and solved the problem a while ago, but any time I thought about doing it I conveniently would find pretty much anything else to do instead. Nothing sounded like it was shifting or getting ready to fall, so I opened the cupboard door fully and saw the interior was illuminated from the phone screen.

“Alarm activated: Time to get your ass up now or you’ll be fired.”

Not willing to hear my own dumb voice talking down to me again I reached up and snatched the phone, pressing the screen until the big, red dismissal button was pressed. I let out a groan of relief and closed my eyes, enjoying the sweet silence knowing that the alarm wasn’t going to interrupt it again. Much to my irritation, it wasn’t true silence, there was a gentle dripping of something onto the linoleum section of my floor. One of the dirty cups on my table had likely gotten knocked over and was spilling what I hoped was water, I couldn’t remember the last time I bought milk or something else terrifying to have been left rotting. The sound did remind me that I should probably get something to drink in me that wasn’t alcohol or I wasn’t going to feel any better and I certainly didn’t want to keep feeling as bad as I did for longer than I absolutely had to.

Checking the lock screen on my phone, I had just enough time for coffee if I didn’t actually get ready beyond maybe a quick change of clothes. Coffee in the machine with a dubiously clean travel mug underneath the nozzle, I peeled myself out of the dingy pair of sweats I always wore after work and frantically rummaged through the pile of dirty clothes I had been meaning to wash for over a month now looking for a bra that was still in decent shape and wasn’t an underwire. Why I even owned any bra with an underwire was a mystery to me, I hated the feeling of two pieces of metal stabbing me in the rib cage all day, but after pulling the third iteration of the cursed garment from the pile I was starting to wonder if I actually owned any other kind. Fortune smiled on me for one and from the very bottom I wrestled out a pale blue sports bra that marginally passed a sniff test and quickly found a pair of underwear that were gratefully still clean though could not have been a less matching bright green.

The sound of the coffee beginning to trickle into the mug spurred me to move faster, pulling on the undergarments then grabbing a work jumpsuit that I hadn’t worn for a while so it was probably clean enough. Not wanting to have to double back half way to work, I had enough foresight to check the velcro pad on the left breast for my name tag, then gave up on the idea of finding socks that weren’t starched stiff with sweat and pulled my workbooks on over my bare feet. It was an astoundingly bad idea to wear them to work without socks for protection, but I was not necessarily known for making good choices.

Coffee in hand, I tossed the apartment key card into my jumpsuit pocket along with my phone and left, keenly aware that I had neglected to pack a lunch the night before once again, perpetuating the cycle of me spending even more money that I did not have to. The apartment door slid shut and locked behind me and I jogged to the elevator, pressed the button to call it to my floor, and used the time waiting on it to take a very needed sip of coffee. Being impatient and desperately in need of fluids as I was, I burnt my tongue taking a big gulp, but kept drinking anyway as I could swear in that moment that I could actually feel the veins in my forehead plump with renewed hydration.

The elevator door beeped, then slide open, revealing an older looking woman with an empty reusable shopping tote in hand. She gave me a double take as I stepped on the elevator, looking me up and down with a crinkled expression on her forehead like she couldn’t decide whether to scold or feel sorry for me. I suppose I should have been offended, but it did not escape me that I had neglected to brush my hair and put on deodorant before leaving, not to mention that I certainly did not look too closely at just how clean the jumpsuit was, for all I knew it had a big stain across my butt or something. That was the one perk of the job I had, it really didn’t matter what I looked like, none of my coworkers were going to care and I rarely, if ever, saw any of our clients or customers. It was ideal for people like me who had to set seventy alarms starting two hours before waking up only to actually get out of bed for the one set ten minutes before the shift actually starts.

“When I was younger women took care of themselves,” the woman muttered.

My eyes threatened to roll back into my head. This was exactly the sort of thing that kept the number of women I hung around with low, no one loves to judge women like other women.

“How are you supposed to find a man when you’re going out looking like you sort garbage for a living?” Apparently she was the type not to let up until she got a reaction.

“What if that’s exactly what I do?” I questioned rather tersely, she was not helping my pounding headache at all. “Perhaps sorting garbage all day is my job, someone has to do it right?” I cast her an annoyed glance and pressed the door close button on the elevator panel repeatedly, I did not want to deal with this for any longer than I had to.

“Well, I suppose.” She had the gall to start sounding snippy right back to me even though she was the one being hypercritical of a stranger. “Not a very ladylike job though, certainly you could do something else.”

“Ladylike? What is this 1949?” I snorted. “Last time I checked it’s been over a hundred years since then and women can work in any industry or job they please. We’re not all forced into the kitchen and shackled to the oven anymore.” The elevator whirled back into movement descending levels to the ground floor. “Let me guess, you’re venturing out for the day to get your hard working husband groceries so you can make dinner as the little stay at home wife?”

“How dare you.” Even without looking at her I could sense that her face had gone red.

“So I guess that’s a yes?”

The woman scoffed and stamped her foot angrily. “I’ll have you know that my husband works very hard, so the least I can do is having a hot meal waiting for him when he gets home. There’s nothing wrong with it, he doesn’t make me do it, I want to and enjoy it.”

“Did I say there was anything wrong with it?” I was holding in a laugh, but as soon as I saw her beet red face looking at me like I had just spit into her morning cereal I couldn’t help but let it roll out of me. “That’s the problem with people like you,” I explained once I managed to get a grasp on my laughter, “if a woman chooses to work a dirty, hard working job, then she’s not ladylike enough so therefore it’s not good enough. You think I shouldn’t be able to enjoy having independence by doing and looking like how I want without worrying what a man or anyone else thinks about it. It doesn’t hurt you for me to live my life how I want, so why do you care?”

Her mouth opened like she had a smart reply, but I wasn’t going to let her have one.

“Why do you care?” I asked again with a clap of my hands.

“I don’t-”

“Why do you care?”

“Just let me-”

“No. Why do you care?”

With a strangled cry of frustration, the woman barreled past me as soon as the elevator door slid open. She nearly knocked over a poor couple who had been waiting for a ride, swinging around to say excuse me with too much volume and anger than they deserved from her. Joy filled my heart as the woman stumbled to a stop before hitting the wall opposite the elevator having expected it to instead been the entrance doors to the front of the building. In her rage she had neglected to check if we had stopped on the ground floor or not. She watched with a miserable expression on her face as the couple boarded with me and I mashed the close door button, they snapped closed quickly leaving me just enough time to flip her off so I could revel in her shocked indignation.