Fiction
Unboxing Rose
Not your typical tech unboxing.
Little G wanted to open the box. The sun wasn’t up yet. The whoosh of the first morning tubecar had shaken her awake in her hiding place under the bridge. The noise was so deep that it wasn’t so much a sound as a feeling. Taking rich people up to San Fran or wherever they went, she guessed. She was sweaty, and her belly hurt. She knew she should find her friends if she wanted to score some food. Her friends had been spare-changing in Santa Monica and were sure to have some cash. Big G was good at making the funny signs that made the rich people laugh and want to give him money. She’d need to find them soon. They’d blow their cash as soon as Taco Bell opened. Thinking about a bean burrito made her mouth water and her belly hurt worse.
But she wanted to open the box first.
The hidey-hole was her secret. The cops cleared out anyone who tried to sleep under the freeway overpasses, but where the tube went over like a fat sewer pipe on its boxy steel bridge there was a space, up underneath, that she could get to from the…
