Legs Read Online Free

her number? Really?” This last with a note
of outright astonishment.
    Brandon actually snickered, he didn’t
know he had it in him right now. There was a silence. The Weather
Channel was turned down low and Brandon watched the scroll for
details.
    Slam was at work. Brandon could hear
the quiet murmur of voices in the store and an announcement that
someone had left their lights on in the parking lot going out over
the public address system.
    “ Whoa, whoa, hey, Buddy—”
    Brandon grinned in spite of
himself.
    “ What?”
    There was a disbelieving
silence.
    “ Well, if you’re going to
be that way…wait a minute, here comes that asshole Stanley. I got
to go. I’ll catch you on the flip side.”
    “ Sure. Yeah.
Bye.”
    They both hung up on the same
instant.
    The cheerful interlude was
over.
    Am I really serious then?
    Some other line of work.
    If that was the case, it was time to
hit the showers.
     
    ***
     
    The week went fast enough. Brandon
went downtown several times, searching on the computers in the
employment centre, and saw plenty of jobs that he didn’t want. He
was already making more money than a lot of them paid, all
entry-level jobs with some surprising skill
requirements.
    He didn’t know how to
operate a turret lathe or a plasma cutter, so that let a lot of the
higher-paying jobs out. He also noted that not too many places
wanted phone calls, and very few mentioned application forms. It’s
not that he hadn’t always hated them anyways, but. Everyone wanted
a resume, and after two and a half years, he didn’t even know where
to look for a copy
of his old one.
    Brandon fired up the old desktop he
kept in the second bedroom. He lived on the third floor of a
walk-up, and if the noise he got was any indication, especially
paydays, cheque-days and weekends, he didn’t even want to know what
it was like on the first and second floors. Any deep penetrating
thud that occurred seemed to travel from one end of the building to
the other in an instant. No one knew how to close a door around
there. It must invariably be slammed. Kids roamed the halls and
dogs barked for hours on end, when left on the balcony so they
wouldn’t shit in the house when the owners were out drinking…an old
and familiar story.
    It was a tenement in some sense of the
word.
    Brandon went online, a
monthly charge he could hardly justify by its actual use, and learned anew how
to make up a resume. It was deflating because the only thing he
really had to put on there was a job he was anxious to quit. What
if an employer called his employer for a reference? Or was that an
irrational fear. He’d once spent a lot more time on the computer,
it seemed ages ago now.
    Prior to that job, he’d been on
welfare for five months, prior to that, he’d been on unemployment
insurance for six months; the short period of his previous work not
qualifying him for full benefits.
    But the point was, what to
put on it? Like, what resume?
    It had to have some kind of positive
spin, and his job, while specialized, operating a metal shaping
press-punch making brass and copper tubes and fittings for the auto
industry, really didn’t correspond to too much of anything else
that was going on in town.
    In a larger city, maybe, but Checker
Brothers was a bit of an incongruity. It was the only automotive
supplier left locally. This accounted also for the spotty work
opportunities—suppliers in smaller centres were basically just kept
on the dole by an industry that saw a turnaround just around the
corner. They were merely maintaining that production capacity for
better days.
    In other words, he had better get out
before they closed the plant down for good.
    He was surprised by this revelation,
but when he thought it over, it made a lot of sense.
    What the fuck do I know about the
economy?
    Quite a lot, as it turns
out!
    When his phone rang, early
Thursday evening, he was hardly thinking of Kim, although he had
been thinking of… he, she or it, off and on, all