Small Transactions

Your thumbprint was rushed and awkward as you struggled with your phone and the grocery bags; the interest rate was four digits, but you were late on the day’s rent, the door wouldn’t open if you didn’t transfer money already spent on food, and through both the phone and the door you could hear your son crying – the Nanny had switched back to its badly filtered ad-supported mode.

That night you wondered about a life where you found you were pregnant before the school scanners did. When it would still have been legal for you to leave the state for one with the right clinics. It was an old and pointless question and your microshifts were unpredictable and few, so you took a loan to get a pill from your bedside dispenser and tried not to feel guilty about the phone demanding, sure of your acceptance, a higher interest rate for the pill than for the door.