You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store


Project Clean Up: Day One

It was very easy to get distracted, especially if the person in question was as airy as Amthy was. The green-haired nymph had cleared a space on the floor just wide enough to rest in a prone position on the ground. Oh, sure, she could have picked up her toys and put them into her pretty green crate, but that would have been work. Last time she checked, the Blades were all about doing nothing. Best intentions aside--she had been carrying the empty crate around for the better part of a day--Amthy was bored, and her share of the mess was larger than it had been that morning.

The high point was that her pretty green crate was even prettier. Colored glue, glitter hearts, pom-poms, and stickers now adorned the sides. That wasn't all she'd done. Around the box's edge, she'd super glued a mess of gold tinsel. The down side of that was now some of it was affixed to the floor, Amthy's clothing and hair. What she really needed was a box of markers. Giving the container a critical once over, she reached for some pipe cleaner and started to bend it into wings.

"Where did I put tha' glue?" She asked out loud as if that would help her remember. Legs kicked up, and her feet wagged over head as she started to hum. Deft fingers darted in and around the piles of goodies mounded around her lissom form like a fortress of plastic and cardboard searching for the tube glue.

She didn't find the glue, but she did find a feathered boa. She drug it out with a hiss of feather to plastic which caused an unfortunate chain reaction in the way of a board game land slide. Grubby fingers stuck at times to the brilliant pink feathers as she wound them around her neck. "Been lookin' for this," she announced. Whether that was true, or not, remained to be seen. Still, nothing had been put into her crate, and that wasn't because of a lack of possessions! If one looked hard, one could hear the desolate howl of a lonely breeze and see a dust tumble weed skitter across the bottom of the glitzy-glam green box. Well, she had seven days, well, six now, to get her share of the work done. That was plenty of time wasn't it?


((Sixteen Tons, Merle Travis))