Face-Slapping18 min read
"I’ll Pay — And You’ll Live to Regret It"
ButterPicks15 views
I remember the nurse’s voice like a radio backscatter: soft, worried, rehearsed. “Miss Mikhaylov, are you sure you want to leave? You’re only in the middle stage. There’s still a chance—”
“Thanks. It’s my choice.” I slid the discharge papers across the counter with hands that didn’t tremble as much as I thought they would. The room smelled like antiseptic and old magazines. The word cancer had space-rented room in my chest, but I’d made room for other things too: a small, stubborn plan, and tonight, a smirk that wouldn’t go away.
I hadn’t imagined miracles; I’d imagined leaving when I wanted to, not when I had to. I had no family worth the word, a part-time retail job, and a bank balance that mocked me in round numbers. Do you know that fight-or-flight feeling? Mine boiled down to a simpler calculus: I could pay for treatment or I could pay for pleasure. Treatment cost more than I had; pleasure cost less than the feeling of starting every morning counting the days. Then a different sound came, mechanical and intimate, inside my head.
“Ding. System: High-Roller Engine linked to host. Detecting remaining lifespan: 52 days. Enable system to gain life days?”
“...What?” I froze. The hospital corridor turned slow-mo, like someone rewound the world just enough to let me process a fraudulent miracle.
“How do I—what do you want?” I mouthed into the quiet place behind my teeth.
“Host,” the system said, cold and efficient, “activate. The system will identify candidates. Host may spend without limit on targets chosen by the system. Ten percent of spending returns as rebate. Affection converts to attribute points at 10:1. Trust converts to life days at 10:1. All funds originate from the system. Does host accept?”
I laughed. The laugh startled me. “Accept.”
“Ding. System online. No target detected. Awaiting matching.”
I walked out of the hospital with a discharge slip and an emergency that had changed shape. The world smelled a little different—less like bleach and more like opportunity.
Half an hour later the emergency sirens made the entrance a mess of stretchered people and shouted names. A chain-reaction crash on the highway brought ambulances, blood, and a demand for money. The system’s first ping in my head felt obscene and clinical.
“Ding. Target detected: Name: Beatrice Chapman. Age: 31. Wishes: family reunification. Morality: 79. Affection: 0. Trust: 0. Eligible.”
She lay on a stretcher with a hollow pipe through her upper body, cloth soaked red, and in her arms a wailing baby. The baby’s wail was the kind of noise that steals oxygen. I stood there, two feet and an instinct and the system’s cold offer.
The husband, Alberto May, came stumbling in like he’d been hollowed of everything. “Bea? Bea!” he kept saying, as if the word itself could conjure lungs.
I helped him find the child. We found the doctor, we found the surgery room, and we found a pre-op clerk with the cashier’s official look. “We need a deposit—two hundred thousand.”
Alberto’s hands looked like paper when he started balancing cards on the screen. “Can I pay a hundred—”
“No.” I dug the gilded black card the system materialized into my hand like a dare and said, “It’s on me. Fifty thousand for now. But put fifty thousand down; I’ll transfer the rest.”
“No—” Alberto started. People turned. The clerk blinked. “You can’t—”
“Swipe it,” I said. “I’ll pay fifty. You go in. Beatrice won’t die today.”
“Ding. Alberto: affection +20. Trust +10.” The system purred its accounting like a vending machine.
Alberto’s face went through a small revolution: disbelief, gratitude, a dawning relief that pulled his shoulders back. He wanted to refuse. He wanted to name bargains, installments, favors. I pushed him toward the ER doors like I was nudging him into daylight.
“Don’t pay me back!” I told him. “Think of it as a brutal cosmic kindness.” He insisted and I pretended to be offended. “I told you—‘I’ll pay.’ You ever heard that before? I’ll pay. It’s a phrase I invented.”
He left to stand beside Beatrice’s operating table while I pocketed the system’s increase: eight life days and eight free attribute points. I had sworn I wouldn’t count. I counted like a lottery winner reading numbers.
“System—attributes,” I thought.
[Host: Jessica Mikhaylov. Age: 22. Job: Sales. Vitality 40. Spirit 50. Looks 90. Charm 60. Life days: 60. Free points: 8.]
I shoved all eight into vitality like a woman reading for marathons.
The system’s voice never acted like gratitude. It felt like algebra. Still, each ding felt like oxygen. It let me breathe.
At the mall the next day I saw two people—one boy, West Fields, who wore kindness like a quiet jacket, and a girl, Chloe Fisher, wearing ego and a debt list in stilettos. Chloe’s voice was shrill enough to slice the perfume. “You expect me to be your girlfriend because you can’t buy me a watch?” she scolded. People laughed. West looked embarrassed.
“Ding. Target detected: Name: West Fields. Age: 20. Profession: student, animal shelter trainer. Morality: 88. Eligible.”
I stepped into the scene with the rightful arrogance of someone replaced by narrative. “I’m West’s girlfriend,” I said, linking my arm through his as if I’d been in the chorus all along.
Chloe’s face curdled like milk gone wrong. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“I’m the one he hasn’t agreed to yet,” I said. “If you want a watch, sweetheart, he should earn it. Or he could have a dozen, courtesy of me.”
West’s mouth opened like he’d found a new punctuation mark. “You don’t—who are you?”
“She called herself my girlfriend,” I flirted. “And since she doubts his ability to love without banknotes, I’ll fix that.” I pulled out the gilded black card again. “All the men’s models. Now.”
The boutique clerk fainted a little on protocol. “Two million three hundred sixty thousand… ma’am?”
“Charge it. All of it.” I smiled. The store wrapped and bowed and put sixteen heavy boxes into West’s arms as if they were medals.
Chloe tried to snatch the receipt away and then lodged herself into West’s space with the dramatic flair of someone born to perform. “You’re with me,” she snarled. “You promised.”
West’s voice trembled for the first time with something like honest strength. “I can’t afford this,” he said quietly, and the sentence was a small, brutal thing.
I felt the system’s bell ring. “Ding. West Fields: affection +70, trust +50.”
Chloe’s face drained color. West turned and said, steady as a plank, “I don’t want to keep being used. I’m not chasing a lifestyle I can’t afford. I like you, but I won’t buy your loyalty.”
He set Chloe down with kindness and walked out. She exploded, stomped, and eventually fled with the few remaining shards of dignity. West’s eyes were big and honest and left in them the faintest crack of something. He smiled at me, embarrassed; his affection crept up ten more points.
“You’re insane,” he said.
“I’m paying for your dignity,” I said.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because I like you,” I said. That was not a lie. He flushed. “And because you train shelter dogs. They deserve a nicer world.”
He looked at the boxes of watches like they were foreign coins. “I can’t take these.”
“You will wear one,” I said. “Every day. Two days a week is not an heirloom.”
We left carrying too much noise. I was elated: wallet still fat, life days increasing like a slow tide. “Ding. West Fields: affection +10.”
The system had rules: if a target reached eighty affection, the system might lock in. But if the target felt pushed, their affection could crash. “Targets gain a will,” the system had warned in clinical tones. It also offered me a currency—trust converted into life. That was the only metric that mattered.
When West and I walked away, Chloe slipped into the crowd, livid and humiliated. I felt powerful and so, in a small way, light.
A week blurred into more acts of madness and mercy. I helped stop a jump from a fifth-floor railing—Lena Fontaine, a university girl with a scarred home and debt so deep she’d weighed life as merely an equation. I ran up the stairs, grabbed her ankle, pled foolishly, and when she agreed to climb down I paid the loans that had rattled her toward the rail. She cried. The system sang: “Ding. Lena Fontaine: affection +80. Trust +80.” It felt like adding logs to a furnace that kept me alive. I kept distributing heat.
We built a small shelter for the city’s stray animals in West’s name. He insisted the credit should look like his; I insisted we donate under his guardianship. “This will be your base,” I told him. “You’ll run it, I’ll fund it.” He wanted to sell watches and split proceeds to buy a small plot. I had other plans—fifty million to begin with—and when he touched his fingers to the courier forms I felt the system expand inside me like a town adding lights.
“Ding. West Fields: trust +10.”
I signed contracts, rented land, and wired deposits. The shelter would have kennels, a clinic, a proper adoption team. I watched West thread his hands through a frightened pup’s fur and felt my heart unlearn some hardness.
The live-stream phase started as test—an old impulse to fling coins at strangers. I spotted a laconic karate instructor livestreaming—Cormac Bengtsson—teaching self-defense. I picked up an account called Waterwood and poured gifts into his room until his small following swelled. The platform noticed me and created a custom gift: “Waterwood Heart.” People called me a “dude” with a bank and a sense of boredom, but Cormac simply smiled and later thanked me as if the money had been oxygen.
“Ding. Cormac Bengtsson: affection +60. Trust +30.”
He invited me to an afternoon of training; he was awkward and courteous and he would, eventually, become one more improbable thread in the story.
Then there were the bigger pulls. One night a timid singer named Arjun Garnier streamed a song in the gutter light of his studio. I watched and felt the childish thing inside me want to splash applause. I started firing extravagant gifts. The platform made an announcement: a bespoke gift called the Waterwood Heart, ten thousand coins each, and I found a way to send hundreds. Views spiked. Arjun couldn’t speak. He was stunned in the middle of a line about “the autumn we missed.” “Ding. Arjun Garnier: affection +60. Trust +40.”
That same week I took the credit card out and bought a black roadster for West—because carrying shopping over three floors like a bull with ribbons made no sense. I handed keys to West and told him to learn. He laughed, bewildered. “I don’t have a license,” he said.
“You’ll learn,” I said. I hadn’t learned much of anything about driving except how to be decisive. The system gave me a gesture: “Ding. System reward: vehicle handling—skill granted.” The car hummed to life like a bird that believed the road.
We donated more for the shelter, and West sold off some watches and insisted on keeping none except a modest pleaser. He wanted a simple life in which animals were unclipped and fed.
“You’re… dangerous,” West told me one afternoon, watching me assign contractors via a tablet.
“Try useful,” I said.
He grinned in a way that folded the world. “You should sleep without setting alarms,” he joked. I thought of the days I’d wake and count the hours.
But the system also had a voice about caution. “Targets who reach eighty affection may activate a forced decrement if they feel coerced,” it told me once with a bureaucrat’s voice. “Host must avoid overexposure.”
I learned to throttle. I learned to give room. I learned to let people offer their own breath to the world.
Then the hospital’s old scandal returned to the surface. The highway accident’s driver had been arrested; the media loved easy answers. The whistle of a rich man wearing a clean middle-aged face was easy: fined, detained, framed. But a grieving father refused to accept the official face. “It wasn’t him,” he told anyone with ears. He’d seen the driver “before the crash”—a young man. The story felt like a face that didn’t match the name. The police closed the circle like a lid.
I had money and I had curiosity and two traits rarely put together without careful pruning. I asked the system if it could find something on the case.
“Insufficient permission,” it said. “Host must gather evidence.”
Fine. I had a method. For the first time in ages I wanted to poke at a powerful nest and see which birds got angry.
There were other things too. At work, I’d been an inconsequential sales clerk, surrounded by small cruelties. Colleagues whispered about a co-worker, Melissa Khalil, who rose by being useful in a way that spelled ruin for others. She’d bedazzled a major account out from under a loyal woman, Zhou Yu, and used every inch of charm to attract clients. She was one of many who played a market like a cage match. My last day at the shop had two resignations and one dramatic pay-it-forward: I bought a best-quality piano for my loyal friend, Laura Simmons—an honest woman with a son and a worn-out hope—and then offered her a job with me.
“Why do you give?” Laura asked, unaccustomed.
“Because I remember what it’s like to have one less day,” I said.
Something in me loosened. The system’s counters and my small compassion braided to give other people a shot.
The real fight started when the path led to a pair of people I could hate without feeling like a cockroach in my rib cage. Melissa Khalil was not a victim; she was predator. Her husband, Angel Barbier, was a CEO of a cosmetics company—Angel Barbier, who had that quiet predator’s face that people mistake for aristocratic aloofness. The company’s product pipeline had been strutting to market. I discovered, thanks to a tipsy operating manager named Hector Carlson—a man who binged on vanity and information—that Angel’s firm used questionable chemical additives in their best-selling skin line. “Don’t tell anyone,” Hector said between sips; his hands were clumsy as he named the ingredient. “We’re talking profit margin and tests that don’t show up. If anyone exposes us…”
The system purred. “Ding. Hector Carlson: compromised. Information value high.”
I could have gone legal, but I was a woman with forty-eight hours of something like time and the taste for spectacle. Laws are slow; spectacle burns faster and hits harder. I made a plan and called in loans to the universe: my fingers on that gilded black card more often than any bank.
I planned an exposure in the most public way I could imagine: an industry charity gala at the Civic Exhibition Center—people in gowns, cameras, sponsors, influencers, and Angel Barbier sitting on a dais like a god. The company had donors and high-value clients; the room would be full. My method involved three things: money, timing, and a particular reputation for theatricality. I’d bought the gala’s title sponsorship in Angel’s name—he would be invited to the stage to speak about “ethics in cosmetics.”
“Ding. Suspected target: Angel Barbier. High moral and legal risk.” The system warned, and I smiled.
The night arrived. The civic hall glowed like a polished tooth. A thousand people chittered silver and gossip. Angel preened at the podium, smooth and sure. I took my seat in the third row, beside a discreet booth staffed by a local independent lab I’d hired three weeks ago. The lab had run tests in secret and would screen samples live in front of the entire room. It was small science as stagecraft.
Angel drank his speech like water. He praised philanthropy and skin safety. “We provide beauty with responsibility,” he said in a voice made to match his suit. “Our ingredients are tested and safe.”
At that exact moment the lab technician wheeled out a small device and an assistant put a vial on top. The technician hooked it to the projection system and switched on.
“May I?” the technician said into the microphone. “We have an impartial result to share.”
There was a flicker like a gasp. The device’s display fed across the hall’s giant screen—chemical signatures, names, and the fatal ingredient. The screen read in stark letters: UNDECLARED RETINOL DERIVATIVE—TOXIC LEVELS. Angels of flashbulbs exploded into the air.
Angel’s face did not curdle first. He remained polished, the kind of man who had rehearsed indignation for such an occasion. He smiled. “This is a mistake,” he said. “Our product complies with all regulations.”
“Ding. Audience reaction: surprise,” the system noted in my head like a nervous columnist.
A young woman I’d paid to procure audio files put a phone up to the lectern mic and played a recording she’d obtained—Angel instructing an R&D director to “mask tests” and to “force a recall affordably if needed.” The audio blew like a windpiece through grand hall and conversation smashed. Angel’s laughter tightened.
“No!” he said. “That’s doctored.”
I stood up. “Do you deny making that recording?” I asked.
He blinked, and in that blink his face changed from proud to puzzled. “I—there must be a—” He snapped into denial, a practiced, slow retreat. He knew how to draw sympathy. He tried to call his PR director.
Cameras zoomed. People stood and gaped. Some began to take videos. I had prepared for denial. The lab’s assistant published a second file—a ledger showing side payments to testing labs. The murmurs grew into a roar.
He went from silence to fury. “This is slander. You’re all—this is a setup.”
A woman in a red dress shrieked like a wounded bird as Angel’s aide tried to pull him from the stage. Reporters shouted questions. I watched Angel’s kingdom begin to fall in the same way buildings fall in time-lapse photographs: one fracture, then many.
Denial rode him as a second skin for a few breathless minutes. Then something slimmer pierced the armor. A junior PR manager stepped forward with a phone; everyone leaned. “Sir, there’s—there’s live evidence coming in,” she said. She played a video that had one of their own chemists on the record, naming the same ingredients and showing lab notes.
Angel’s face drained. “This is impossible,” he whispered. His voice had become small and raw. He was still in a suit, but the suit was a costume that failed to fit. “This is a lie! I did not—”
“Shame,” said a voice from the crowd. A woman clicked a picture with a thumb that trembled like a shutter.
By the time the PR man realized the feeds were public, the cameras were everywhere. Someone filmed Angel trying to step away; a hundred phones captured the collapse from different angles. The man who had always sold beauty was losing the purchase of his life.
He reached for the mic again, then another file showed the bank transfers. The auditorium felt like a ship where ropes had been cut—people clustered to the exits and gossiped like frightened birds. A keyboard journalist hammered out the first headline: “BARBIER EXPOSED: TOXIC TRUTH ROCKS GALA.” It trended in minutes.
Then the shift happened I’d been promised by the system’s villain-reckoning script—pride crashed into shock, shock into denial, denial into unraveling, and unraveling into the grotesque plea I’d rehearsed in my mind’s theater. I watched Angel Barbier’s face contort: “You don’t understand—please—listen—give me a chance—”—it started strong and dissolved into pleading.
He sank to his knees on the polished floor; his kneecaps made soft sounds under the hall’s applause lights. The first cry sounded like a broken chord. “I’m sorry,” he croaked. “I—please—I need help. I will cooperate. Please—please—” His voice shrilled like a pearl wrung out. A hundred phones filmed the implosion; a thousand fingers aimed. Someone laughed. Someone sobbed. A woman clicked a selfie.
The crowd reacted as a single animal: a tide of shock, then a storm of opinion. Phones recorded. People debated. Some filmed the kneeling like it was theater; some shouted at him. “You sold poison!” someone bellowed. “You killed trust!” another cried. A woman applauded, hard and fierce. Someone else tried to shove a camera into his face for the final bite of the spectacle.
Angel’s aides begged the media to stop; security tried but their presence was a half-hearted afterthought. He pressed his forehead to the floor and wailed. His throat gave up promises and then the sound of someone undone asked for forgiveness in the only place the law hadn’t reached yet—the court of public spectacle. Cameras hummed like pagodas. Laughter, recording, condemnation, applause, hashtags. It was a modern crucifixion.
“You wanted villagers to sell their souls for your stock options,” someone shouted. “You wanted to buy ethics!” Another man hurled his champagne glass; the glass shattered like a promise. Security propped Angel up roughly like a broken statue. He shrank under the cameras, begging someone—anyone—to stop. No one did.
At last a figure from a small independent NGO stepped forward and took the microphone. “This room is full of donors, journalists, consumers. We will hand a dossier to regulators and to the press. We will not tolerate this deception. We will not allow profit to outrun safety.”
He had not prayed for Angel’s collapse to end in tears, but the man’s public humiliation worked in the way the system promised: people who had once applauded his name now recorded him, documented his begging, posted it online, building a condemnation that would eat at the edges of his empire.
By the time the last phone had blinked its red light, Angel’s arrogance had been boiled down to a raw, exposed thing. He was no longer untouchable. He tried to crawl under the dais and his suit sleeves were dusty and weak. Someone filmed him apologizing to nowhere; someone else applauded; another took a picture of him on his knees and sent it to twenty contacts. Social media amplified the humiliation like horns.
The aftermath was a swirl: the company’s stock dived; sponsors pulled ads; distributors cut ties. The news cycle devoured him alive. The public punishment’s anatomy matched the system’s brutal checklist: pride to shock to denial to collapse to public begging. The transcript of his voice and the video replays would live on for days. I watched it all in the hall and afterward from my quiet living room, the sound of the system’s dings like a distant river.
I had to show restraint after that. The system warned me: “Targets exhausted of trust become worthless; affectations cost.” The higher the public spectacle, the more targets’ trust could fracture. But this punishment had been necessary. Angel Barbier and Melissa Khalil had built leverage with other people’s safety. They deserved to be undone in a place where they had once felt untouchable.
After that the authorities moved in like tide and inquiry. Regulators opened files. Distributors removed products. People who had quieted petitions now felt emboldened to demand recalls. The smell of the evening lingered like a bruise.
Not all of my interventions required fireworks. I paid for Arjun’s rent for a year so he could finish an album. I wired funds to a far-off county’s apple farmers after a hailstorm, watched the sales clear out in hours on a streaming charity night, testified as a donor on a small livestream, and felt, again, like a woman unspooling good.
“Ding. Public welfare activity: twenty attribute points,” the system would say, and I would assign them in private. I pushed my spirit into charm and stamina because living to be kind required energy. I learned to feel responsible without expecting anything in return.
People started to call me Waterwood in public. They guessed I was a philanthropist, an heiress, or a disgraced heir with nothing to lose. I took calls. I became more generous, and oddly more alive.
I resigned from my job the day after Angel’s fall was trending and handed the keys of my old life to someone else. I moved into an apartment that felt mine for the first time in years, where Lena came to help and West and the shelter staff drank tea. I bought a narrow Ferrarisque cruiser that the system, for reasons poetic and absurd, granted one afternoon when a quiet target’s affection turned to personal love: Cormac had climbed to a new affection level and the system rewarded a car parked at the plaza. It came with driver lessons packaged in my head. You couldn’t always buy the kind of redemption that needed money; sometimes the system paid in spectacle.
But the world is an awkward machine. People tried to buy back my favors. Alberto May—Beatrice’s husband—took me for a reluctant hero and tried to repay me. He invited me to lunch to thank me. His nephew, West, laughed from across the table, conspiratorial. “Uncle, she already paid me with watches,” he teased. I laughed and told Alberto he was the same kind of stubborn as all good men.
“You’re too generous,” he said, shaking his head.
“No,” I said. “I’m careful. I look for what matters.”
He nodded, uncomfortably. “The driver… I think your money did something else too. It saved more than Beatrice’s life. It reminded me what’s valuable.”
That night in bed I counted life days. I watched the numbers on my panel climb—118, then 138—little saints of accounting.
But nothing taste-tested me like the day I found a man in a café who called himself Wenren Li, an old fractal of dignity and grief. He sat across from me on a street of late-night barbecue and told me about a lost grandson named “Shu” with a small jade pendant and a round bluish birthmark. He described the pendant’s carved character “BOOK” and a jagged round mark on the wrist. I felt a little rifle-sting of recognition.
“Is his name ‘Book’?” I said, and Wenren laughed, then grew quiet.
“No,” he said. “But I keep the pendant.”
For months I’d suspected that a young man I’d met not long ago—成书—had a name that echoed ‘book.’ He called himself by a different language’s twist. I arranged a meeting. He worked part-time at a coffee shop, eyes like a good book, a face that complicated pity with something else. I invited him for tea and fed him silence until he told me the story of being trapped, used, and more. I wired him an account—fifty million—enough to make him breathe in both directions: future and present. He refused like a saint at first. I refused to not insist.
“Don’t be moral-superior,” he told me.
“Be practical,” I answered. “Take it and rebuild.”
He cried. I counted it as a payment.
Then Wenren took one look and said, with the quality of those small miracles you only get at the right angle: “Your pendant—” He pointed at mine—the one I’d picked up from a market for no reason—and said, “The pendant my grandson had had the same carving. The jade? It’s a maker’s mark from an East side—”
I went home and pulled records. I had put a thousand random pieces together in a hundred careless hours. The system hummed as if pleased. I grew bolder.
That act, the unveiling of Angel, the rescue of Lena, the building of the shelter, the splurges that saved livelihoods, never stopped my days from ticking. The system still demanded targets. It still dangled trust like a carrot that paid back time.
I often considered stopping—putting the gilded black card into a drawer and walking into whatever days the doctors had estimated with humane acceptance. But the system’s voice had woven itself into the part of me that liked being useful. For every wound I healed, the world seemed to cough up new ones. I liked the feeling—the click of a key, the soft “ding” of a life day adding to my account. It felt less like time and more like currency.
Then the public punishment came for Angel Barbier and his partner Melissa Khalil, and the scaffolded effects reshaped their orbit. They crawled into their legal fights and PR leaks. The path we made was narrow, and the law had its own timeline. But the public had remembered their names and would not easily forget.
Months after, I stood watching a documentary clip of that gala on a small screen. The footage was still viral; Angel’s kneeling was a meme, a cautionary image. West was by my side, quietly signing adoption papers for three dogs. Lena had started a community outreach program. Arjun released a record that made him famous for his sincerity. Cormac opened a low-cost self-defense class and dedicated it to “all who needed an edge.” The shelter flourished in pictures and dog-years of wag.
In the evening, West and I walked past the Civic Exhibition Center. The hall’s glass reflected our light like a giant eye. He paused.
“You still have days left,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. I watched the city move. “That bank account in my head keeps filling days. The system gives me ways. I spend it carefully.”
“You ever regret it?” he asked.
“Regret? For what? For buying someone dignity? For taking a corrupt man down? For feeding an old farmer’s apples to a city that forgot the season? I regret one thing: I regret I didn’t start sooner.”
He smiled at that dumb, generous thing I’d said and tugged my hand. People passed us, unaware that beneath my cool face were ledgers and reasons and bones of someone who finally spent their money on what mattered.
The system still sings sometimes, but its tone has softened into routine. There are new pings, new targets—small kindnesses that compound into life days.
At night, before I sleep, I wind the little brass watch I bought for no one and keep its tick in my pocket. The system calls it “Waterwood Heart”—a joke for a woman who learned to buy time. I press my thumb to the gilded card and whisper, “One more good thing,” and the numbers on my life panel echo, small and careful: 118, 138, 186… and I lie down listening to the second hand, certain of two things: that money can buy you a spectacle, and sometimes, that spectacle can become justice.
The End
— Thank you for reading —