Bill Foster

A Little Dry

Nikki sifted through the heap of degraded trash searching for a glass bottle. The Spirits knew even a plastic container would work at this point. At 45 degrees centigrade one couldn't be picky about a receptacle. There wasn't much left anywhere anymore though, and this made her anxiety peak as the thought passed through her mind. There was little she could do given the time of day, and finding another trash pile or garbage dump within a couple miles walk was almost chanceless. She wiped the sweat from her brow with her dusted torn rag and looked longingly at the rubbish in front of her. She was worn, hungry, ragged, and desperate. It had already been near 2 days since she had passed out near her shelter fire and shattered her last glass bottle. Having taken a drink from a brackish puddle in an old underground car park, the result of which had been intense bowel discomfort, she was angry at herself for her lapse of attention. She had lost friends for less stupidity, hence her current lonely position in the world. she scooped, and dug trying to conserve what she had left for energy. The situation was made even more ironic given the enormous amount of fatty meat she had in her sack having laid waste to a large feral hog earlier in the week. Most of which had been carefully cured and smoked in her encampment a fair sight into the hills, a straight shot north from her current location. Salt was a precious commodity, one she was precarious enough to stumbled upon while perusing an abandoned hostel sometime ago. There had been thousands of individually wrapped packets just stacked in multiple boxes in a mostly collapsed section of the former kitchen. It had lasted her quite a while now, and she was still so proud of herself for having obtained near literal gold worth of currency, and life sustaining support. A crush red plastic cup made a crinkling and cracking sound that snapped her from her day dream of long past triumphs. Only long enough to allow the disappointment to settle over again.