Hanson Perry and the Crabmeat Loss

Friday was the wretched end of everybody’s week, but Hanson Perry liked it fine.
(Tales of the Mosaic – 350 words)

Hanson Perry and the Crabmeat Loss

Each Friday by the power plant, when quitting time released a flood of unused coolant down the pipes, the churning river burst its concrete banks and brought a flow of purple water crashing through the street. It wasn’t quite the way the river had been built to flow, but the job of strengthening the barriers had failed to land on any person’s shoulders, and the streets along the river had been duly given up.

Though no-one should have lived within a mile, of course the vagrants and the drug fiends had to have some place to sleep, and so each week the Friday flood would catch a careless mope or two and carry them away, to stick inside the sewer drains, and drown against the grate. That left the water backed up on the street: half a foot of silty trash and mud the locals waded through till Monday afternoon, when the city crew would come at last to fish away the bodies so the reservoir could drain.

Friday was the wretched end of everybody’s week, but Hanson Perry liked it fine.

For him, the overflowing of the river was a blessing, as it brought the red-shell crabs across the wall and down the drains, amassing in a heap of claws and legs where they made easy picking (for anyone that didn’t mind a homeless corpse or two).

A bucket-load of crabs would sell for fifteen, twenty coins, which meant a weekend meal of roasted beef and cream potato, honey-tea with jasmine rolls, talking loose and rolling in the bars on Trestle Street until the neon dulled against the brightening sky.

Then, waking to a sullen crash on Sunday when he found the crabmeat money gone: a panic dash to find a loose coin spare enough to buy a humble dinner of dry bread before a fitful night of sleep, and the devastation of a barren Monday morning, with no lesson learned and one more chip upon his shoulder, swearing idly at the clean-up crew that came to take the bodies.