The Percentage Man by Tim Bennett
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"Fine, whatever." She takes one last puff, stomps it
out on my porch, and gingerly blows her last breath of smoke onto my face.
I pick up the dry erase marker from its holster and mark on my white board
next to the door, "Clean up cigarette on porch." I unlock the screen door and open it to let her inside. Her head scans the room. She is probably noticing the state I keep it in, the systemization and the labels. To the right of her is the collection of gallon milk jug handles, the ones that connect two of them together for carrying convenience, coordinated by color and company. To her left is the west wall, hidden behind the row of bookcases, eighteen of them. There are exactly seventeen hundred books of various shapes and sizes, ranging from the standard mass market format to the large coffee table book about French Impressionism that barely fits in the top shelf of case number three. It only clears it by a millimeter. In front of her is every compact disc I own, all one hundred and thirteen of them, attached to the wall by a giant web of pocket sleeves for easy access. Their cases are stored away in bins in the closest, grouped by label and artist and date. I hear her make an amused grunt, but I cannot tell if she is smirking or smiling. She looks back at me, unsure of what to do next, so I motion with my hand, my outstretched palm, for her to sit on the couch. The plastic wrapping squeaks against her legs as she sits and places her purse beside her, her hand remaining, resting on it in an automatic defensive gesture. "Would you like something to drink?" I ask her as I begin to make the eighteen steps required to reach the kitchen. "You got any rum?" "I have half of a seven hundred and fifty milliliter bottle of Captain Morgan Silver, which would make about three hundred and seventy five milliliters left." "You got any coke?" "I have five cans of diet coke. I drank one of them earlier today for lunch, which was at 12:13." "No regular?" "A regular can of coke contains one hundred and forty kilocalories. Even if you only drink one, that would leave you with one thousand and sixty kilocalories for the rest of the day on a normal two thousand kilocalorie a day diet. You could lose up to twenty pounds a year simply by drinking diet sodas, or better yet, water." "Rum and diet coke it is, then." [read on] |
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