Start With Her Hair
13 Jan 2021Today’s prompt: “She was a fat woman whose eating habits were dainty. There was a check for $13,612 in her purse, not made out to her, but, you know. She was good at figuring these things out. Start with her hair.”
Her sleek bob was starting to get to that obnoxious length where it’s so long she feels the need to tuck it behind her ear to keep it out of her face, but not long enough that it stays there for more than two seconds.
She brushes her hair away from her face and delicately bites the end off a single french fry, dabs it carefully in ketchup, and bites again, luxuriating in the salt and grease. Tonight, she’d wield her fork and knife like a surgeon over a roasted quail and rice pilaf at her favorite restaurant. She needs to treat herself after that whole scene.
But this afternoon, she eats her fries gracefully in the middle of the food court while scribbling your name in a notebook. On the seventh try, she has a signature she thinks feels natural. She repeats it a few more times, then pulls out her phone and takes a photo. She texts the signature to Joel.
“When do you think you could come up with an id for me?” she writes.
Dots on a text bubble whir, and then: “You can pick it up Friday.”
“Cool.” She’s worked with Joel for a few years now. Would recommend when you need to pass off a check that’s not yours.
“How’d you get this chump?” Joel texts back. That’s the one drawback about Joel. He’s pretty nosy. She knows he’s not a cop, but still. If he didn’t do such good work, she wouldn’t humor him with the details.
“Not a scam this time,” she texts back. “Got it off a body.”
“Whaaaaaaaaat,” Joel texts. Yeah. That many A’s. And yet, still not enough.
“Honestly kind of rattled,” she texts Joel. “I was more in the mood for shoplifting than grifting today. Went to the mall. Parked in the back because nobody parks in the back. And there’s this ducking body in a dumpster.
“Fucking body. Stupid autocorrect.
“I search the pockets and there’s this check. Not gonna let that go to waste.”
“In a dumpster??????” Joel texts. “Could you tell what killed them?”
“It looked like their throat got cut.”
“No clues as to who did it, or why?”
“What am I, a fucking coroner?”
“I guess we’ll never know.”
“Probably not. But I tell you what I do know.”
“What?”
“I’m getting a damn good dinner tonight to make up for rummaging a dumpster corpse’s pockets.”
“Hell yeah.”