Lemur Licks
By Clare Martin
I started in the Reclaims section, my fingers not yet fast enough for the quick line, where workers earned the biggest payouts. My supervisor, Jalang-Jalang, shrugged shaggy shoulders when I asked how long before I was up to speed.
‘Don’t worry, there’ll still be sweeteners, even here on the tail-end.’
And tail end it was.
My job?
Strip off the goo from any long-tailed lemur sweets that had failed QA, and send them back up the line for double-dipping.
Disgusting.
But I needed the pay – the spun-sugar coins I’d been promised - and Jalang-Jalang said no-one would ever know about the recycling, ‘As long as the workers,’ his piggy-eyes narrowed, ‘stick to their NDA.’
I’d seen the ads, on screens across the city. Happy kids getting high on lemur-licks while their adults beamed bemusedly in the background. But the reality was here, in a sticky-sick hot warehouse with bubbling goo vats, long-chain edible acrylic strings, and blinding, brilliant dyes.
My first week’s pay was … underwhelming. Five white discs sat in my palm, pale and dull against the rainbow-coloured production lines behind.
‘Don’t use them all at once,’ Jalang-Jalang showed his pointy teeth in a gleaming, non-rotted smile. ‘They’re the good stuff. Non addictive. Pure.’
Just one a day then, but ‘What about the weekend?’
Jalang-Jalang grinned again. ‘You’ll manage, somehow. And there’ll be more soon, if you can keep up.’
I felt him watch as I stripped off the coverall and pulled on my puffer. As I turned to go, I heard him growl, ‘Just stay off the product, sweetie, and you’ll be fine.’
Clare Martin writes about the mysteries of everyday life — the little cracks where something unexpected slips through, lives caught in the space between what is and what might be. Surreal, irreal and just plain weird, her stories have appeared in several anthologies and magazines.