Tami

This is the only short story I’ve had published to date. As in, someone put it into a book. Someone else. It's on my shelf at home. Please, enjoy.

Tami

By Joe Sudar

            On good days her nickname was Rosie the Riveter or Mighty Mouse. On bad days it was Cunt, Bitch, or Dick.

            Tami was forty years young, eighteen years a mother, twenty-five years a temporary laborer, twenty-six years an orphan, four years a wife, one year an abused wife, seventeen years divorced, and twenty-seven years an alcoholic.

            Her body was a tablet that kept the record of her life, with tattoos stretching from the triumph of love to the resigned determination of acceptance, all mapped out over browned skin stretched taught over lingering maternity weight and broad shoulder muscles. When she lifted steel her cracked teeth ground together in exertion and lines of sinew pressed outward like Samson destroying the temple. Every tool stroke had more care than a shepherd tending his lambs. Clear eyes infallibly read and interpreted her measuring tape.

            Work was the morphine that dulled her days and kept them simple. When there was work she only needed to keep a single step ahead. Free time was the bondage that kept her in the grip of libations and gave her time to ponder her tablet and think about everything that was written there. There was a formula to free time for Tami: think about the bad fraction of her forty years, drink forty ounces of malt liquor, and cry more than forty days and night’s worth of rain.

            After she’d satisfied the formula, Tami would ponder the one hope that shined through all persecution: her daughter. Throughout her eighteen years as a mother Tami kept an oath that her blessing would never want for anything. She would have food, clothes, shelter, and most important of all, an exodus from her mother’s life of poverty. The muscles, scars, and sinew decorating her tablet were a testament to Tami’s efforts to keep this covenant.

            Work was never guaranteed for Tami. Temps in a rough economy were forced to work harder and complain less to earn their minimum wage pittance. When a permanent job was offered the clouds opened and God smiled on the chosen as they went on to forty a week at a living wage. Tami was never quite good enough to enter this Canaan, and the free-time formula followed every condemnation.

            The clouds broke over five temps one day, and Dick was one of them. The company needed someone to work the carpentry shop. Union rules required that it be a full-time employee. One of the old-timers had just retired, so there was an open spot in the budget for a temp to join the Canaanites. Dick became Mighty Mouse the second she heard.

            The shining star that led to her daughter’s future was college, and college was too expensive for a slave’s allowance. She needed to find her way to the Promised Land or the eighteen years of holding to her oath would be cast down into the abyss. No matter the cost, she would take her daughter across the desert and see her become an independent woman.

            The tablet began to wear smooth. Muscle knots grew thicker and harder to relieve. Joints ground together like a mill making flour. Samson raged a little softer every day. As the weight of the other four temps’ capabilities bore down upon her, Rosie became Bitch and stayed that way.

            One day her four competitors became three. A Goliath of a worker who flipped wood panels meant for forklifts and swung a crowbar lower and faster than anyone else crashed a car and cracked his tablet. A realization came to Tami like an epiphany: the easiest way to bear a burden is to remove it.

            A veteran, fifty years young with a tablet as detailed as Tami’s made up for his frailty with wisdom and technique. He took the best tools because he used them better than anyone else. That didn’t stop Tami from telling the foreman that he kept them from the other workers out of spite and gave false orders against the boss’s word. A check mark on a clipboard closed the sky over him.

            The second plague was a college student who used temp labor to pay for a future just like the one Tami’s daughter needed. His tablet was barely marked at all. He poured vitality into every task, lifting harder and faster than anyone else, confident that he would return to the bliss of college life at the summer’s end. To him, Canaan was another thousand dollars of spending money on top of his scholarships and support. Bitch felt no remorse as she pointed out the dangerous way he darted past forklifts and around saws with too heavy loads in his arms. He didn’t even notice when his sky darkened.

            The last one was a leper; a philistine who wasted time and money without caring that his twenty-five years would become as painful as Tami’s forty if he didn’t change. Cunt didn’t need to say a word against him, but that didn’t stop her from pointing out his long breaks and low quotas.

            The sky soon shimmered over Rosie the Riveter alone. Her path was lit by a strong northern star that led to a meaningful future for the daughter she loved. She stepped into Canaan in June, reveling in milk and honey with money to spare, save, and plan with. Tami smiled every day at the realization that she would keep her word and give her daughter a new life.

            Tami’s daughter waited until graduation to tell her about the baby.