The year is 2025.
I look up from my Twitter feed, where President Musk has just announced that he has unanimously dissolved the Senate, to the customer across the counter from me.
“Lemme get 2 loosies,” he asks from behind the N98 mask he foolishly hopes will protect him from the now-dominant Zulu strain of Covid-23.
I eye him for a tell that might reveal if he was a tax agent. Too sloppy around the edges to be a Fed, definitely, but he could be a Fundo Revenue pig… maybe. Well, fuck it anyway, paying double tax to two governments has been killing profit margins for too long now, a man’s gotta make a living any way he can these days.
“5 for 4 if you want,” I offer as I take the man’s Doge Central Bank fob from his shaking hands.
“Just the 2” he answers, and I charge his account 2 Bitcoin. If i had misjudged him & he was a pig afterall, I was looking at 5-15 years for tax fraud. And that’s if he’s a Fed. The Fundos were a bit less transparent about their sentencing guidelines, and i wasn’t willing to find out just what they looked like. I laced my left index finger through the trigger guard of the sawed-off Remington 870 I started keeping under the counter after the first — & last — time i got shaken down. With my right hand, I slide aside the false door in the wall below the cigarettes where I keep all of the untaxed & hot merchandise. I pull 2 eggs from their carton & slip them into a paper bag.
Immediately after he walks out, i lock the door behind him & light a smoke, inhale hard. I don’t know how much longer i can keep going on like this. Ever since the avian flu wiped out 99.7% of the world’s chicken population, there was good money to be made in the retail sale of duck & goose eggs, if you could get your hands on them… But between the pigs always looking for a bribe or an arrest on the one hand, and these desperate bakers looking to score that sweet yolk by any means necessary , i couldn’t help but feel that I’d gotten over easy for a good while already, and it was only a matter of time until i got poached by some pig or scrambled by some breakfast fiend…