The little yellow men appeared in and out the manhole opening, circling the pillar of light like two small fireflies, growing dimmer and dimmer in the vastness of the dark beneath her. Cathy squinted and bent over the lip of the manhole. She leaned in for a moment and grabbed a waft of it. She put her hand to her mouth, gagging, turning away. The camera around her neck jerking and tightening around her neck. The smell wrapped around her and lingered in her hair. A scent of blood and of vomit and of semen and of…feces.

Piled and piled and piled, mounds of in little balls of clustered baby wipes. Of which the service men speared with what looked like fireplace stokers. They prodded. They dug under. They shoveled into the waste, and out came the tumor of baby wipes. One of them took the slender mouth of a pump. A vacuum and he snaked it into a crevice along the clog of baby wipes, sucking little balls of them up and into the white waste truck.

It smelled. Like a disturbed coffin forced open. Sarcophagus of shit. She stared at the truck for a moment.

Just fucking blow up, please. Take me with you.

“We wouldn’t have to come down here, you know,” One of the plumbers said. “If people would just stop flushing their baby wipes. Look,”

The other came up to the manhole with the wad of shit in his arms. An offering the size of a large dog. Not quite as cute. He raised it up to the light.

“Mhm,” Cathy said.

“This’ll be a good picture,” The serviceman said. She knew he was smiling underneath his hazard suit.

“Mhm,” She felt something come up her throat.

She smiled but did not open her mouth. She held her breath. She brought the camera lens up to her eye. It was coming closer. The lens focused. She held it in, and then — snap.

“It was a great read at least,”

“Mhm,” Cathy chewed mints by the handful. She drank water. She sat in her chair, the laptop light casting blue against her face. Her eyes still and forward and looking at the pictures up in the hallway walls past their intern room.

“I never thought I’d be doing this,” She said. “Writing about a sewage clog in South Central,”

She kept staring out at the passing people. Crushing mints in the back of her jaw like a cow graze.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“We all start somewhere,” Kent said.

“Starts usually go somewhere,” She said.

“Well, a couple years ago you were writing about the newest stainless steel pan. I’d say this is an upgrade,” He said.

“Yes - relatively. But I’m writing about feces. It’s literally shit,”

“Could be worse,” He sipped on his coffee out of his plastic cup. The water condensing and leaving prints, stamps across the face of his desk. Kent kept his desk neat for the most part. Everything about him, neat and proper. Hair never wrong, shirt and tie all the time. A new cuff link each day. Glasses sleek, cool-metal-grey colored.

By contrast? Cathy left notes everywhere, she left trash in her drawer. Eyeliner, makeup, deodorant, somewhere in the cabinets. It’s what she ended up putting on when she got into the office. Straight through the Santa Luz 24 doors, up the stairs (elevator was a definitive not-happening) and into the interns office, into the drawer, and into the restroom. She’d practically taken a shower with all the loose hygienics she’d left in her desk.

“Don’t get so down on yourself,” Kent said. “It looks good to do work no one else wants to do.”

Some of the smell lingered, and worse, a layer of perfumes and toiletries overlapped. The intern room all made faces towards her. Side eyes. And she sat and chewed on mints. Like a cockroach caught under the light, with no place to scurry. A cockroach woman living in her crevice trying to avoid the stomping children. Belly up, limbs wobbling and begging.

She sipped coffee. It tasted cool and minty fresh!

Someone came up to her. A woman younger with folders and papers in her hands. She handed a small single sheet to her.

“Ed wants another tag line for the blog post,” She said. “Small. Just, ten words or something,”

“What’s wrong with the one I gave him?”

“He didn’t find ‘It’s shit all the way down’ funny,” She said, “Like, at all.”

“What’d he think about the paper,”

“He thought maybe you should trim it. Two hundred, maybe three hundred words down,”

“Then it’s nothing. Then it’s barely an article. It’s barely anything besides a paragraph. I spent all day in the heat watching two men toil for me to just write a few sentences?”

“Maybe it’s just not that good?” The little lady said.

Maybe the job is bullshit. She opened her mouth. Cathy wanted to say she’d spent all day. That the sweat and the grime and the rash of sunburned skin across her clavicle ought be more than a few sorry sentences on a throwaway blog. How could anyone even feel the labor of her work behind a barely-hanging-by-a-thread video and social channels the company had. She wanted head line, they wanted side pieces for the reel. She wanted the camera spotlight, they wanted more info-shorts. Cathy sighed and drank her coffee and nodded and opened her computer - her face softening, the hate and anger softening into that muted complacency like the stoic busts of Romans dead, smooth and pale. Complacency ad infinitum.

She turned on her computer and brought up the word file. With one long sweep of her mouse and a click, most of a page died. The cursor blinked as if it too in surprise.

The little lady smiled and left. Kent stood straight. He cleared his throat.

“One day it’s gonna mean something,”

“Everything in your life means something, eventually,” She said. “Sometimes it means it was worth nothing,”

“Just you wait. You’ve got the chops. A couple more papers here and there. A hit, maybe fix that attitude, I could see you at the front lines or on the tube,”

“Me, on camera? Okay,” She said.

“Why not? Get on the channel, maybe even network television,”

“Take Leslies job? No way,” She said. “Have you seen her tits?”

Kent smirked. He turned away and laughed quietly.