Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 76713 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 384(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76713 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 384(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
“See, here are the labia,” I said, pointing, watching his neck flush above the neck of his collar. “This little pink sprinkle here? That’s the clitoris…”
“Ah, yeah, right. I can, ah, see it,” he said, taking his to-go coffee, and turning on his heel to rush out.
“Something tells me he might have never seen one in his life,” I said, getting a chuckle from a couple of regulars seated a few feet away. “Want this cookie now that I fingered it?” I asked, and the guy rose from the table to take it from me.
I hated waste.
And after spending years making these exact cookies, you could say that I had absolutely no taste for them anymore. Same went for most of the treats I baked for the shop.
“Lotta suits around here lately,” Sheryl, a local hippie chick who had an amazing booth at the farmer’s market where I happened to buy most of my personal produce, said from her position at one of the tables.
The distaste in her voice was clear and understandable.
We both wanted the neighborhood to change. But a systemic sort of change. Community outreach. With places for the teenagers to hang out with each other that might keep them off the streets. Somewhere with inexpensive child care, so the single mothers could work to lift themselves out of poverty, instead of running themselves ragged only to struggle to pay bills because their child care was two-thirds their income. Fixing the food forest in the area, so kids could grow up eating good food. That kinda shit.
There was so much to be done.
Things that could change this area from the inside out.
It didn’t need a fucking facelift that would drive up all the prices of everything and, inevitably, drive off all the residents to a different area, uprooting their whole lives, making it even more impossible for them to get out of the poverty cycle.
Twice in the past three months, I’d turned down offers to buy my shop from me because the people next door wanted to open one of those concierge medical offices up. You know, where you pay a high retainer fee to have twenty-four-hour access to a fancy-ass doctor and their all-inclusive medical office.
The offers had been insane, too. Life-changing.
But I was being a stubborn-ass about it.
Sheryl was as well, refusing to sell her sweet little hundred-year-old farmhouse on one and a half acres that she somehow managed to farm well enough to keep her stand going all summer long as well as donate to the local soup kitchen.
We could both take the offers.
Over a million for her place.
Half for mine.
Take it, set ourselves up nice and comfy somewhere else.
But that wasn’t what we wanted.
We were on the forefront of change around here.
Though, yeah, we both probably had to accept that eventually, there would be no neighborhood to change. It would all be pricey businesses and luxury apartment buildings. And residents who wanted nothing of what we had to offer anymore.
The offers would be a lot less then, too.
“Yeah,” I said, sighing hard.
It was a sigh Sheryl could likely feel down to her soul. We didn’t need to discuss it.
“How are the berries doing?” I asked instead.. We were tired of discussing it. Almost as tired as we were of talking about the ever-increasing drug issue in the area. And the new drugs around that were zombifying people.
“The raspberries and blackberries are coming along well. I’m so glad I decided to use the bushes as a hedge around the whole property. I should be able to supply you for your new drink,” she told me.
“That’s great. No pressure if you need them for something else. I can always figure out a different recipe.”
“No, I got you. We’ve gotta stick together,” she said.
“Yeah,” I agreed, looking out the front window, watching one of the dealers hand off some of those zombie drugs—Tranq—to a woman I’d seen passed out, bent forward, standing upright just yesterday morning. She had an open wound on her leg, oozing through her pants.
Eschar, one of the guys at the local halfway house had called it. A thick black scab full of dead skin that, left untreated, would lead to amputation. I’d asked him the first time I’d been handing out my old cookies to the local unhoused community and came across someone with the pungent wound on their leg.
It was getting worse.
Ever since the fuckhead who used to run this area died, a completely different crew moved in with this new shit full of life-ruiners mixed with fucking horse tranquilizer. And then… the “zombies.” And the wounds.
This crew dealing it wasn’t local, either. They came over from Philly. So they were barely toeing the line about fucking with the local establishments.
They’d stashed some of their supply in the back of Sheryl’s truck once when the cops came down the street.