BEAUTY QUEEN by Sam Pink
We’re eating chocolate cake for Ronni's bday after work. At a table in the hay barn that serves as my boss’s office. It’s me, Ronni the team lead, my boss, and her two teenage daughters who barback/take out garbage. I’m covered in mud from the waist down because my boss’s youngest daughter took an ill-advised shortcut with the golf cart during a garbage run. So I went out and helped, lifting the back and pushing forward while she gassed it.‘You’re buying him a new pair of pants,’ my boss says, eyebrows up.‘Okayeeee, jeez,’ says her daughter.She’s been crying a little, on account of the embarrassment as well as her sister’s accusations of being stupid. I’d told her multiple times not to worry about it.Ronni puts her feet up on a chair and spreads her legs to ‘air her balls out’ under her skort. She’s wearing a bday girl sash and tiara. She takes a bite of cake with an anguished look and says, ‘Man I feel like a bag of smashed assholes.’ This is her main line, the smashed assholes. A whole sack of them, battered and stinking, amassed from various asses and collected in a single sack as a sign of some greater pain. 'I made out like a bandit though. I knew if I let people know it was muh berfday and had my titties out a little, they'd tip me more.’ She takes a last bite of cake and sets the fork on her plate.I ask my boss's older daughter how her boyfriend’s doing. I met him recently. Bit of a dopey fellow, handshake like someone handing you an oven mitt and all that. 'What’s his name,' I say. 'Ricky?''No it's Walter. He's fine, I guess. I broke up with him tho and he started crying. He's always crying, I literally think maybe he’s gay.''Oh man, I liked him. Seemed like a nice fella. You don't like him anymore.''No he's gross. And his mom saw my texts and started texting me all this angry shit.'My boss says, 'He does have some hygiene issues but he’s a good kid.''He’s literally gay and he stinks,' says her daughter.I eat some more cake. Looking up at the window, high in the barn. A rectangle of bright blue sky. Like something in a video game I’d yet to unlock. The next map, if only I’d the tools. I start thinking about my elderly friend in town, the gunsmith. Hadn’t seen him in a while. He’s like the first character you meet before you go off, in search of other maps. I remember how he described getting into guns/gunsmithing when he was younger. He said he got his first .410 and it was ‘off to the races’––a phrase which I’d heard before many times but only then, and ever since, truly enjoyed and understood, realizing the meaning, to be off to the races, not stuck at the beginning line, somehow already a loser.‘I can’t believe you lifted that thing,’ says my boss. ‘Thank you so much. And again, [her daughter] is gonna buy you new pants.’I look down at the mud, all over my pants and boots. ‘You think these are done?’My boss’s daughters laugh.Ronni says, ‘Hell yeah they’re done, looks like you buttfucked a hippo, son.’The boss's younger daughter is looking at crowns on Amazon. She won runner up in the Ms. [town they're from] beauty pageant and didn't like the crown they'd supplied. 'What about this one,' says the beauty queen, showing her sister, who wrinkles her face, shaking her head. The beauty queen turns her phone to me and asks what I think.Staring at the crown, which has 536 reviews, I say, 'The only way to truly get a crown is to slay the queen currently wearing it. To strike her down. Bring terror to her court.'My boss laughs.Ronni says Jesus, taking her feet down off the chair with a grunt, then says if I want a ride home we have to get going.