All She Can Take

T W E N T Y

 Bleach fumes rose with the sun through the tiny space of Sid's living room. Her knees skated across the floor as she sprayed and rubbed at the faux wood tiles. She remembered buying the tiles from Home Depot and being excited by how warm they made the apartment look. She put them down herself. Her shoulder ached then too, just like it did now, after doing the entire apartment. But she was pleased with it. It felt less homely; less poverty drenched. Now, beneath a layer of sick, the tiles just looked sad and fake. She wiped up the last of her mess from and hoisted herself up off the floor. 

Several precarious hobbles later, she made her way to the kitchen and dropped the wad of paper towels into the garbage. The stench from the soiled papers made her nose scrunch. She hoisted the entire garbage bag out of the can, tightened the drawstring, and carried it toward the front door. The black bookbag sat on the floor of the living room still. She hadn't opened it. When she came to after passing out she thought that maybe it was all some pill-induced hallucination. A dream. Like, maybe she didn't steal a drug dealers stash and cash. But there it was, like Freddy Krueger being pulled from the dream world into reality. Sid dropped the garbage bag by the front door.

Tugging at the rubber cleaning gloves on her hands she took a deep breath and confronted the bag as it lay innocently on the carpet. She pulled at the zipper with two pinched fingers. The cheap nylon fabric fell open revealing the contents inside. Yep, she robbed a dealer. For a lot more than she ever thought possible. The gun for one. She wanted it out of the house. She gripped the butt of the gun and wrapped an old towel around it. She dropped the towel-clad gun into the soiled trash bag before turning back to the book bag. The green bills still gleamed out of the opening toward her. It was time to confront it. She grabbed the bag and sat on the couch and began to pull out stack..after stack...after stack. Undoing the rubber bands that were wound around every stack, she peeled off each bill and began to count. Her breath caught as the total went higher. And higher. And higher still. When she was done, her entire body shook with adrenaline. She laid back on the couch and blinked plainly at the ceiling.

Fifty-seven thousand dollars.

Why did he have this much money on him? Sid was hoping for a couple thousand to settle some bills. But this was a poor man's fortune. A small life insurance policy. Sid groaned and felt tears biting at her eyes. No, she didn't want it like this. She didn't want to come into a fortune this way. Again, through negativity and tragedy. She thought she would get five thousand tops. But this. This? This was a plain old robbery. What she'd done was somehow worse because of the amount. Like, no one cared if you picked up a dollar off the ground, but hundreds of dollars? You were expected to turn that shit into the police or you were a terrible person.

But this is drug money. Illegal dirty money. There was a gun with it for god's sake! She rationalized with herself. The money is her hands would mean that the drug lords had just a little less capital to ruin people's lives with. That couldn't be all bad. But this wasn't some nameless faceless person. This was Phil. It was harder to tell herself the lie that it would not affect anyone when she knew specifically who the anyone was. Putting it back would be easy. Just be done with it, she thought. The green stacks were spread all over the floor. One of them was in her hand. With just that one she could pay off her rent everything she owed everyone. She picked up another. This was enough to get her and AJ out of this hell hole. Her heart thumped against her chest so loudly at the thought that she thought it was shaking her little apartment. Echoing in her ears and rattling the door. After closing her eyes and taking a breath she realized that the steady thumping was actually coming from her door. Sid held her breath, remained stock still, and listened.

"Sidney? Sid, it's me. Are you home?"

Whitney's voice was muted on the other side of her front door. She could hear AJ babbling to her sister. Whitney answered him in a calming tone. She was so much better with him than Sid was. Whitney knocked again. Sid jumped into action and winced at the pain in her ankle as she collected the money in a pile. It was strange how quickly fifty grand can be cleaned up. Stuffed into a bag and hidden in a closet like it was nothing when really it was everything.