Slacker

For those of you who were about to kill me for taking so long to post again, I give you an appropriate word. :)

*

Serena had been a slacker for months, saying yes to every request for help and never getting ahead on the pile of work at home. Sure this made her popular among the sorry and downtrodden members of society, but she was on the verge of procrastinating herself into the poorhouse.

Right.

This particular Monday morning, she decided to sleep in, hoping the extra rest would set her on the path to productivity. The shakes were back, worse than the day before. With two months still to go in winter, she figured she'd better stay on the higher dose of meds. Then again, if the shakes got any worse she would certainly jump right out of her skin.

The first job she hauled out of the pile was a photo job. McCrank from the docks wanted her to catch his wife soliciting the neighbour. She grabbed her camera and car keys.

The old Ford hadn't been driven in over a month. It turned over, but only after some kind words and some serious cranking. The plume of smoke would have choked a crowd to death. Luckily the garage door had been stuck in the open position for years.

Right after she turned onto Forsyth, the railroad crossing bars dropped and a freight train crept along the tracks. The guy in the car in front of her pulled a U-turn and drove the wrong way down Forsyth to Second Avenue. Serena considered following his lead; there was hardly any traffic on the one-way street and everyone was stopped for the train. However, her mother's voice of doom and criticism echoed in her head. Don't do it! It's not worth your life. How long can the train possibly take?

But the old bag hadn't been thinking of freight trains near the docks that moved endlessly back and forth as they dropped off and picked up cars.

Seconds turned to minutes. The blue car with the white graffiti moved past Serena's car for the fifteenth time.