It was seven hours and forty-two minutes until the party started, and so far Cassandra’s day had felt like a series of stops on a low-budget bus tour of a grotesquely humidified Hades.

She squeezed her car into the yellow-striped space closest to the doors and stepped out into a hot swamp of exhaust fumes, festering overfilled garbage cans and fevered consumerism. The stench of it smacked her wetly in the face, but she barely noticed.

The mall was chilled and busy, humming with people who needed things, or at least needed to need something. Her first stop was the clothing store where she hoped to find a dress. It was three hours and fifty-six minutes until the girl working behind the counter was breaking up with her boyfriend. It was three hours and fifty-two minutes before she would come home an hour early and surprise him jacking it on the couch  – having pathetically frantic phone sex with that whore. Three hours and fifty-four minutes until he explained to her quite calmly as he zipped up his jeans that, yes, he’d been seeing that whore on the side —and he really thought they both needed some time to think about things. In the space of those four minutes, in the dirty living room with an empty bag of potato chips on the floor, the last two years and four months would somehow come to mean nothing. But for now the girl smiled, distracted and polite, and asked if Cassandra needed any help. She did not. She found a suitable dress that she bought without trying on.

As she left she saw a young woman sitting on a black lacquered bench, patiently waiting for her husband to exit the video game store. It was three years, four months and a day since they’d been married.  It was four years, eight months and nine days since she had realized that afternoon by the lake that this man was the only possible mate to her soul. It was twenty-six days and two hours until he would be crushed to death in the small blue car that got such great gas mileage. It was twenty-nine days until she would sit on a red overstuffed pew in a cavernous church, numbly listening to a strange man wearing hair spray praise her dead husband, whom the man wearing hair spray had never met. The woman turned as her husband came out of the store, excitedly describing his purchase, but then her phone rang and she shushed him while she answered it. She chatted with a friend as they walked away together, their hands seeking each other out automatically, their steps falling into an easy matched pace.

Cassandra stopped next at the nail salon, and there she chose a color that matched an accent in her new party dress. For twenty-seven minutes she laid back in a vibrating chair while a small dark-haired woman (Three years until her first child was born. Eighty-six years until that child died.) tended to her toes. She looked over at a young girl whose mother was getting a manicure. The girl was seven and wore an outfit almost identical to her mother’s. She swung back and forth in the chair, feet dangling off the ground. It was another seven years, three months, twenty-two days and thirteen hours until a sweet, sweaty boy at a pool party would convince her that yes, everyone was doing it and, no, you couldn’t get pregnant your first time. Turns out you could, actually.

Cassandra’s last stop was the cosmetics counter at the mall. Tapping brightly colored nails on smudgy glass, she waited for the sales assistant to fetch her particular shade of red lipstick. It had been seven weeks and three days since the assistant was told that the lump under her arm was something more than nothing, and it was another seventeen months and nine days until she would be told that, despite her young age, the cancer had spread too quickly and there was nothing to be done. Impatiently, Cassandra waited to pay. She had things to do, places to be. It was six hours and seventeen minutes until the party started and she still had to go to the grocery store. There really wasn’t much time.

———————————————————–

This work by superBadGirl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at thegrandconspiracy.org.