BEANSTALK and other shorts

Slipshod

A slip-shod life is loose all over; the bolts rattle, the wind seeps in under the door, the chimney smokes - there are all kinds of small inconveniences that can’t be remedied, because the causes are too systemic. Even if you tried to repair the defects one by one, nobody remembers how they got there in the first place, the records and receipts are lost, the warrantee has run out. After a while you become accustomed to the smoke in your throat, the cold draft at your neck, and you become slip-shod, too. You no longer notice the discomfort, you don’t mind inferior work, and you don’t know why anyone else would either. You produce rickety stuff yourself, and when customers complain, you don’t care. After awhile, only the uncaring customers remain. Those kind can’t pay you much. So your electricity is cut off, and you wind your grimy scarf tighter about your neck, and curse the cold weather.

And your customers take your poor workmanship home, and build their own lives from it. Maybe they build a chattering machine. Maybe they build a dingy nursery. In time, they will give birth to a perfect child; but a child with slip-shod parents soon learns that she cannot count on door frames and foundations to be true; she cannot expect clean air or warm winter evenings. She can, in fact, expect nothing unless she abandons them entirely, and moves to another life altogether, one where she sets the standards herself.

When her parents come to visit, if they come at all, they will complain that their daughter has become a snob, that nothing is good enough for her, that she should have been happy in her slip-shod home and that she is in fact a slip-shod daughter.

If she is wise, she will gently cross her level floors and disappear into her room, shutting the well-hung door behind her. If she is wise, she knows that whether she left these people or not, they would have said the same thing.