text: Her name was Aubergine, but she didn’t deserve it. Currently, she was ferociously stomping home down the crime ridden evening streets in a pink dress and combat boots, and everyone who saw her gave her at least ten feet of distance that had nothing to do with the pandemic. She slammed her door and evaluated her life. What she had: $972 in savings, a job that supported her, and a car that had three matching doors and worked most of the time. Things bringing her down: obnoxious, stupid men who thought she was obligated to sleep with them just because they bought her a banana smoothie with oats and extra stevia, friends who were running on a toxic hamster wheel, family who only called to ask for money, an apartment that had been burgled three times in the last year, and a cat that hated her. She found it a cruel irony that she would never be able to find a husband in this huge metropolis because her friends only knew men interested in one night stands. She was fed up, and getting the hell out of this place. She was bringing the cat, though. The next day she woke up at dawn, as was her custom, because that was the time at which her cat drew blood to inform her she was hungry for breakfast. She fed the cat. Then, she started earnestly applying for any job she could imagine all over the US that she was remotely qualified for that would support her. The location only had to have a lower crime index than this city she loathed. She applied for jobs in every spare moment, regretting telling her friends, as they extensively tried to talk her out of it. Her boss was similarly unenthused, but she told him she likely would be unable to find employment elsewhere, and he agreed with that...until he started getting calls around the hundred application mark. In the end, she applied to almost three hundred jobs, interviewed on the phone ten times, and got four job offers. The best of them was seasonal, but paid extremely well. She left all those naysayers behind and went to work at a salmon canning facility in Alaska, having been offered 30k for four month’s hard work. She reasoned that four months was plenty of time to find a permanent job. The lodgings she secured were humbler than any she’d ever known, but she was fond of her little off the grid cabin despite the commute. Her roommate, another cannery employee named Juniper, was a woman seven years older who spent most of her off hours playing pool in the air conditioning of the restaurant near work. There was absolutely nothing around the cabin except mountains and thick, deep forest, the road just a gravel track scratched into the wilderness. She worked twelve hour shifts six days a week. On the seventh, she attempted to run errands, in culture shock that was extended because of her work schedule. A big tree fell across the road one night, and she and her roommate were completely stuck. They had no cell service, no chainsaw, and it was too large for them to move. Neither of them had ever even used a chainsaw - her roommate had been a bank teller in Iowa. They were going to have to wait until one of the few people who lived up the road happened upon it, in hopes that one of them could do something. They reluctantly became friends over the course of the next few excruciating days, as they worried about their jobs and how long their groceries would hold out. “You didn’t show up for three days,” they were informed when the tree finally stacked itself in segments on the side of the road, “You are fired, and have already been replaced. It doesn’t matter why you couldn’t get here. If you can’t reliably come to work, we don’t want you.” Aubergine and Juniper found themselves unemployed, living in a $600 a month off the grid cabin in a coniferous rain forest, forty minutes from a town the size of a postage stamp. Aubergine wondered about her life choices. Juniper started a vegetable garden and only applied at the bank. Aubergine never heard back from any of the dozen jobs she put in applications for, but Juniper got hired within a week at a great wage. “I can get you a job at my work, just apply.” When both of them were pulling good wages at the bank and their lease came up, they pooled their resources and got a pleasant house in town. Aubergine started to date a man who treated her with respect, although he wanted her to go hunting with him next season, and she was trying to find out if that was mandatory in order to become an Alaskan. Aubergine’s cat, Pluto, began to escape, and they never did figure out that she was squeezing out the clothes dryer vent beside the hose. Pluto had quick reflexes from her experiences as a feral kitten, which helped her on exciting adventures that shocked her, such as the time she encountered a bear in the woods. She was a particularly intelligent cat, and had wild theories about why the world had changed so much. In time, she found the docks, where workers cut up the day’s fish and tossed scraps of salmon and halibut to the cats that gathered there. She went every day after that, and meowed at the front door late afternoons well fed and glossy with health from fish oil, a mystery Aubergine never solved. The cat spent her winters lazily dozing, stretched out, in front of the wood burning stove, basking in the warmth. In her life Pluto had gone from a miserable existence on cold city streets to this, and she was happier than anyone else.