Snafu

Daytime

Cole's studio apartment was not much, but it was what he could afford. He had blackout curtains over the window, which stayed clouded and grimy no matter how many times he wiped it down and scrubbed the sill with an old toothbrush. The curtains covered it most of the time anyway, so it did not really matter. There were no holes in the wall, although the paint was a terrible decades-old textured beige. The floor was fake hardwood, which meant he could mop it at least. The presence of crummy, stained carpets had been a dealbreaker when he was apartment shopping, even though he could not really afford to be picky.

The only furniture he had was a mattress on the floor and a coffee table - one of the cheap Walmart kinds. Before it fell into his hands, it already had a life in another home where the edges got nicked and someone's kid drew a mural on the underside. In front of it, so he did not have to sit directly on the floor when he ate, were a couple of faded old decorative pillows with torn lace edges that he picked up from the thrift store. His laptop sat folded on the table. It belonged to his dad before everything fell apart and basically did not work anymore since it was over seven years old. A couple of bills were scattered on top of it, and a stack of the many Valentine's cards he had received sat off to the side.

Cole stared at them while he decided whether to get out of bed yet. His phone said it was time to, but that was mostly an arbitrary alarm set by his past self, who cared about things like keeping a consistent sleeping schedule. His present self believed that the more sleep he could get, the better; time be damned. Except his stomach disagreed. The last meal he ate was before he went to work last night, so he was famished enough that his belly felt like it was cannibalizing itself.

He threw the covers back and laid spread-eagle in the chilly air, thinking about how he would have to have to turn on the ancient electric baseboard heaters soon. They had two settings – off and sauna. He should buy a space heater instead. The single line of light that beamed in through the crack between his curtains fell across the kitchen, perfectly highlighting the canister of oatmeal on his counter and making his stomach yowl.

"Jeeze, all right," he grumbled, rolling to his feet. He kicked the blankets and decided to fold them up later. He would thank himself when he got home from the club tonight and did not have to wrestle his way into a tangled bed. But first, he dumped some oatmeal into a bowl, poured water over it, and then gazed through the microwave door as it spun lazily. 

The kitchen had two cabinets, one of which had his bowls and mugs and such, and the other, which he kept stocked semi-successfully with biweekly trips to the Methodist Church's food pantry and weekly trips to the co-op out near the last train stop on the edge of the city, where the produce that was about to go bad was reduced a scandalous amount. Cole discovered it two years ago and thought he was going to cry because he could afford an orange.

He picked at the peeling vinyl countertop and sighed. A lot of dancers made a good amount of money, especially the ones who turned extra tricks like he did. In fact, that was kind of the draw. For single parents, kids who got kicked out onto the streets when they came of age, and the suddenly unemployed, very few jobs paid as much. But all of Cole's extra money went toward paying off his debt to Logan. Usually, he also had a day job, but the restaurant he was working at until a week ago closed. He needed to go looking for another one.

He ate his bland oatmeal mechanically, then perked up when he remembered the extra hundred dollars that he made last night. With that, he could buy some brown sugar to make it taste a little better and maybe a couple of bananas to slice up and put on top like he normally did. After losing the day job, he had been keeping his purse strings tight, skipping the trip to the co-op last week. He went over to his sweatpants, which lay in a crumple on the floor exactly where he stepped out of them last night, and retrieved the bill out so he could carefully tuck it into his tattered, duct-taped wallet.