The unnatural order of things

Time being infinite, all she needs is a fourth job to pay for everything else

Dead Mother I by Egon Schiele (1910)

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The unnatural order of things

by Bob Hicok

The TV that had been left on was playing a commercial 
full of beaches, bikinis, and sun when she peeled off 
the condom someone had thrown at the screen. 
Her job cleaning rooms at the Sable Hotel 
pays for the car that takes her across town 
to wait tables at The Parthenon, which covers rent
for the apartment where she lets out dresses 
and mends the knees of pants that have bent too often 
to the god of clean floors. Time being infinite, 
all she needs is a fourth job to pay for everything else. 
One of the women in the ad looked 
like she must have looked twenty years ago, 
if she was right when she touched her face in the mirror 
behind the TV that she was younger and beautiful once 
and didn't know what was coming. Then she cleaned the mirror 
of her face by walking away. The rest of her shift,
she repeated the word vacation in her head and imagined 
the ocean touching her body softly and rhythmically, 
a liquid clock of a billion hands. When the word Tahiti
came to mind, she said it out loud to the bed 
she was making, as if asking it to come away with her. 
The bed said no. Not no so much as nothing. 
Though it looked perfect when she was done, ready 
for sleep or sex or dreams, but only after 
she gave the bedspread a quick tug in the left corner 
and smoothed out the last wrinkle with her hand.