Life of Ton
Ton woke up at the designated hour feeling heavier than usual. There was no food in the dingy apartment or the refrigerator which was empty forever. Her landlord must have forgotten to buy coal for the heaters because a layer of ice had already formed and was clearly visible on the surface of the fish bowl water. The fish floated helplessly dead on top. The room felt painfully cold as the freezing from within seeped into the skin and into your very soul.
Work was several blocks away so she had better get a move on or she would be docked or sent home for being late. Her boss was a mean man who embodied the definition of fat, ugly and lazy. His skin was gray and blubbery, the hallmark of a pathetic whale floundering about out of his ocean waters, out of his element in an existence gone wrong for him and the underlings under him. Mercy was not in his lexicon, where words were limited at best, primordial for sure, lacking depth or meaning, accompanied by a revolting visceral breath when he spoke that lingered in the air with the hideous stench, a stinking smell of a rotten corps, on flesh of the dead long gone.
No tea or coffee filled Ton with sadness as they were her only pleasures in life. There were no beverages or food of any kind at her place of employment. There was only hard work once you punched in. When you arrived there were no breaks and as previously stated, no mercy to be had.
Ton worked at a bottle cap non capitalist factory, a company called Cap Capers. She stood at the cap metal press machine from 8:00 am to 10:00 pm every day, 7 days a week with no time off, no holidays off. If you had to take a sick day it would be your last day. $5.00 a week was pretty good pay in New York City these days, ever since the elite population embraced socialism as their way of life. All grocery stores were now run by the government. God bless them for what they have done. Sometimes there is actually real food on the shelves. We have learned to love our government as we love ourselves. Let there be food on the shelves one day, someday, maybe soon. Amen.
There was a young, seemingly healthy man working near by to Ton at her station who had taken an interest in her. One day he climbed out of his humble shy shell to ask the pretty woman a question. “You have an interesting, intriguing, most unusual name.” “How did you come by it?” Ton looked up from the metal caps manifesting in high piles in front of her. She sighed. The dark circles encompassing her weary eyes told the story of a woman more dead than alive but she looked up anyway at the handsome man with abject indifference as she responded accordingly, “My mother was obese and short, looking somewhat like a bouncing ball or small moon of Jupiter.” “My father was tall and stupid.” (something the coworker could understood and relate to completely.) “If my mother grew a beard and my dad grew a spine, they could be an accomplished circus act.” “Mom loved insulting me to the core so she named me after something heavy that would draw attention away from her hefty self. So Ton it was and is and the rest is history.
The young man smiled and asked Ton if she would like to have some coffee with him after work. She looked quizzically at him and responded, “I would love to.” “Too bad all the cafes and shops are closed and gone forever. “Maybe we could just sit by the Hudson and try to remember what stars looked like through the dense smog and what swimming in the river was like before it became toxic.”
When 10:00 pm came they left together but walked off in opposite directions from each other and their respective homes. After some time they froze in place, miles away from each other, lost in time, covered in ice now, blown on them from the arctic blast. Before Ton passed away, she dreamed of the taste of hot coffee and the flavors that last forever, down from the bridge, down to the last drop in the river flowing past.
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