Tiers: a short story lead-in (explicit)

            My mother set down her cup of coffee. “So what do you think about that dirty republican? Dirty isn’t he?”

            A smile slid out from my lips. “Chad Hollands can suck a royal dick for all I care.” My pinky popped up and I rose my cup to my mouth ever so slowly.

            “Yes, yes, indeed.” My mother agreed, “I’d have thought that he came from region one if I didn’t know any better.” She let out a shill laugh. Most of our conversations went on this way. We dearly loved mocking the stereotypical, high-end tier threes.

            “Mhmm. Now, it’s getting quite stuffy in here, wouldn’t you say?”

            “Quite.” She nodded.

            “One might have thought that the conditioners are letting up. Slacking off, now aren’t they?” We hated tier threes and their constant abuse towards the engineers, and sure, a bit of that goes on back home in tier one, but we’d like to think of ourselves as aids to the less fortunate.

            “Sally Bozarth once said that a drop of melted snow fell through and landed on her Chapeau d’ Amour. It took a whole month to get it straightened out, and the feathers never returned to their previous glory!”

            “My, my, I once passed through region two and saw a grump! A real, live grump!” Immediately, I felt bad. My mother and I had been treating what tier threes had rejected from tier two as “grumps.” But for some reason I felt disturbed inside, like that didn’t matter because I knew that it wasn’t enough. “In all seriousness, mom, I feel nasty. I don’t want to do this anymore. Their so… icky.” I felt preppy already just by saying icky, like I had been in high school again, and I needed to flick my wrist afterwards.

            “The grumps?” my mother asked, straight-faced and earnest.

            “Please don’t call them that, mother.”

            “Well, what else are they? Do you prefer hobos? Vagrants? Poor dwellers of the barren tier two?”

            “Mom, please, stop” I rested my hand on her wrist.

            “Well that’s what they are, Greta. We try to piece back their life and give them something to live for.”

            “Mother!” She was hard to take, I could nearly stand her remarks.

            “Sorry, hon,” She recognized my exasperation, and with a quick change of expression, she was sincere. “I just want you to know how to separate reality from impossible hopes.

            I sighed, “It’s alright, mom. I mean what else can we do, right?”

            “Nothing, babe. Nothing.” I stood up, pushed my chair in all the way, and, leaving twenty dollars on the rusted, wire table, we left the small café. It was snowing outside, but we needn’t wear snowboots on tier one. It just passed through and proliferated into tier two. My mother was right. It was a barren wasteland, used for our dumpings. It was a mystery how anyone could live down there.

Shuffle

            “‘One foot high by sun down,’ he said. What a fucking liar.” David Brady mocked. The barren plains had been painted white with nearly two feet of snow and it was already 2 pm. David lifted his foot out of the snow, found a good rock, and tightened his snowshoes. The winds were pushing 70 miles per hour, whipping his skin right off of Brady’s cheeks. He pulled his do-rag up higher, and pushed on.

            David had passed by a small town earlier, but didn’t stay for long. He knew that he had to find the transportation cylinder, and it was a good fifty miles west. He had taken a liking to the town and its dwellers. Riften, they called it. There he found a nice family who allowed him to stay a couple nights until he recuperated. What was their name? It was something like Palnor—or Palmer. That had to be it. They had a cute nine-year-old son named Stanley.

            That was right, Stanley had these three action figures he had found in the plain one summer that had been dropped from the first tier. When David first meet Stanley, he had been playing with them on the cement floor, and he was so excited that he had to just jump up and show David, who was a complete stranger at the time, his “brand-spankin’ new toys.” Stanley even thought that they had been a kid from tier one’s who watched him and decided to set it in his plain just for him. David smiled, remembering the kid. His parents thought he was so cute that they didn’t have the heart to tell him that the toys had been thrown away by and misused by a middle class family from tier three. David would have laughed if he hadn’t been using all of his energy to trudge through the snow.

            The rest of the townsfolk weren’t too bad either, although that Mary Breacher lady was a real bitch. David remembered her face the first day he came into the town; she had a big down jacket with a fur lacing that she never parted from. She had high cheekbones and was awkwardly tall for a middle-aged woman, and when she was just three, her family shoved a great, big rod up her ass. David would be walking through her store, and she’d always ask, “Are you going to buy anything, sir?” and not only was she refusing to learn his name, but she addressed him as if he’d steal something. Mary was real pissed when she found out that someone had taken all of her sunflower seeds when David asked if he could buy some. He pulled down his do-rag and popped a handful of seeds in his mouth.

            Brady had gone about five miles the day before, but now he knew he’d be lucky to push three.

            David Brady paused and stared up at the thirty-foot-tall ceiling, snow continued to proliferate from tier one. “These great sciences of our time have brought an era of technology,” he mimicked, sardonic, “Where three tiers can separate different lifestyles; where families may choose to live in tier one: a summer dream; tier two: a winter wonderland; or tier three: a condition-regulated haven of cool air and sweet dreams.” David threw up his hands, as if revealing to the former president, and up-bringer of the tiers, Gregory Manchester, the conditions of tier two. “Does this look like a fucking winter wonderland asshole?” He continued to trudge again.

            Of course, when the tiers had risen and terrasculpted to bear their own terrains, every rich person resided in tier three, were it was cool in summer, and warm in winter, and everyone who couldn’t afford the stunningly-high prices of the third tier either stayed in tier one, for middle class, or tier two, for the poorest of the poor who couldn’t afford proliferating floors but stuck with whatever shit tier one gave them. The way it worked was that the first and highest tier, or level, would get to experience anything like heat that could rest on their tier but wouldn’t proliferate through the special floors, so they got the cold and the sun, but no snow or rain, because it would fall through the floor and enter the second tier. The second tier was royally fucked during the winter, where it would dump snow and from everywhere and funnel into their tier. The tiers were even brilliantly made out of metal that would heat up to extreme temperatures during summer and literally freeze during winter. The ultimate hellhole. The last level, tier three had conditioners to regulate heat and provide a synthetic sun. Seemingly a perfect plan if they had a president with half a brain.