These days, if you want to hire me for something it has to be really bad. I’ve already done all the torture, the rape, the brutal maiming, the senseless cruelty that surprises even the most desensitized victims.

Or, conversely, you have to hire me for something unbearably good. Everyone has the potential for charity or a nice word here or there but today only the most sickeningly sweet deeds catch my attention. Which is why, when I got your letter from your Hospital for Extemely Disfigured Children, it caught my interest. I thought, everyone has seen me do all the despicably horrific deeds, repeatedly. But devoting my life to helping those little cripples rivals some of my worst undertakings, only what interests me is that it’s on the opposite end of the spectrum.

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The rust was orange and its metal flakes were sharp on the metal banister. Smoke wafted up through a grate in the floor under the steps and it smelled like someone cooking breakfast- burnt toast, bacon, eggs frying in butter. The little girl Sara sat beside the grate sharpening a knife on a wet stone like her brother showed her. Her hands were orange from holding the rusty banister. She had never made it to the top because there were stairs missing. She tried to climb just the railing all the way up once but got scared and came back down. Everyone else was up there but they were all out of earshot and they sure weren’t coming back down here any time soon. The courtyard was littered with distant relatives and no one wanted to end up like them.

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“I fake it once a day,” said the ice cream guy. “I’m this happy all the time really but once a day, once a day it hits me and I have to smile and fake it.” “What hits you?” the lady asked.

“This,” he said, gesturing to the ice-cream shop and the world visible through its glass door and floor-to-ceiling windows. The lady looked around. “What, you don’t like ice-cream? You don’t like summer?”

“Once a day. The rest of the time I love it. But that’s why you gotta be able to fake it so that you smile one hundred percent of the time.” He went to scraping dried ice-cream off the counter. “That’s how you tell a professional,” he went on.

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