For Sarah Everard. And Every Woman.

A non-fiction short story.

A woman I know works as a custodian. It’s hard physical work, but it's the only job she can find. She's been at this job for about five years. She only gets paid for the hours she works. No sick leave, vacation days, holidays. She makes minimum wage for the hours they allow her to work, so it hasn’t been enough to live on since 1968, if she worked forty hours a week, which they won’t allow her to do. Because her income is so low, she rents a run-down sub-standard one-bedroom apartment in a building that offers no mail boxes. Everyone who lives there must rent a mail box somewhere else. She can’t afford a mail box. Without a mail box, she can’t get the stimulus checks supposedly mailed to every American citizen. We’re talking a total of $4000 now. That would really help her, $4000. She could file for those payments if she had a mail box. 

So I went online and paid a year’s rental, $130, for a mail box at the post office, just a few blocks from where she lives. But in order to get a key to her mail box, she has to print out a form and take it to the post office with two kinds of identification. The only person she knows who has a working printer is her supervisor, a man who frequently touches her, makes salacious comments, suggests they “get together after work.” She has always refused his advances. He’s married, and she finds him unattractive. She has been asking him for weeks to let her print out the form in his office, so she can get a mail box, so she can get her stimulus payments. He got his stimulus checks, of course. He says sure, I'll do it, but he keeps putting it off. In another week, the order will expire and they will return my money and cancel her mail box.

Finally yesterday he told her that because it’s spring break and they are both off work this week (he gets paid, she doesn’t) he’ll print it off for her tomorrow. If she agrees to spend the day with him.