To Not Fix a Motorcycle

Liv wiped the splotch of motor-oil off her face-shield, leaving a dirty brown-black smear across the clear plastic. That was probably going to conclude her attempt to fix her cousin's motorcycle for the day. She sighed, and moved to fetch the mop and bucket before the oil-stain on the floor spread all the way into the garage. If she wanted to find things to eat without having to look for people who kept the same schedule as her, she would have to take a break soon anyways. Several of the small food vendors around her garage had already closed shop for the day, only offering a brief greeting at her passing by them. She did so on foot. Her own bike looked no better than her cousin's. It was just one of those months that happened with some regularity, in which things went wrong, and other things broke as a consequence. Their little commune functioned on the assumption that flat systems would help balance out shortcomings in supply chains, but while the slowly increasing size of the commune had mitigated some problems - mostly the one related to the number of people required to quickly finish a task - some things hadn't really changed. She wandered down the dimly lit streets, keeping an eye out for places where people seemed to gather. From her own experience, she was rarely the only person searching for food at this hour, or rather: There was always somebody looking for food. It wasn't really a problem of having too little food around, rather, they were seemingly unable to figure out how to make it easily available around the clock. She spotted a standing bar, people milling around it, still drinking out of glasses, and the occasional snack. Might as well, she thought. She recognized a couple of the guests, exchanging brief greetings and the odd series of questions about the private lives of family or mutual friends she hadn't seen in a while. Slower than she had expected, she arrived at the till, where two people were hastily trying to keep up with the orders. Liv imagined, they would like to close soon, but couldn't bring themselves to do last calls yet. It did seem like lucrative overtime. "Hey." she leaned on an empty spot of the bar "Do you still serve food?" The closer of the two, a wiry man in an undershirt and thin jacket gave her an indecisive gesture "Technically, yes. It's probably not going to be great for a meal though, if that's what you're asking." "That's fine." Liv skimmed the menu written in chalk above the bartender's head "Could I get two baked potatoes and a beer?" "Ten minutes." he replied. Liv paid, and retreated a bit away from the bar to make space for other guests. Someone else approached her, and she bridged her waiting time with some conversation. The food she got would hold her over until the following morning, and she soon found herself taken in with another group of familiar faces that happened to be spending the night out. These gatherings were a pretty regular occurrence, especially if the people in question didn't have a lot to do during the day. It often turned out as a good opportunity to find work as well, seeing as such groups tended to mix, once they had settled in a place for some time. Liv split from the group, when they were just about to move on, and started heading home.

Night-life in the Blackfeather commune was different than most others she'd seen. Of course it was partially because she had had her entire life to get used to it, and she had found that the details of any scene was mostly contingent on the space they had to work with. She found that Blackfeather night life was free to utilize all space that regular public life had. There was barely any distinction made between the two, besides the volume at which it took place. Liv always felt like she was living in two places at once, one that existed during the day, mostly productive and occupied with getting things done, and the one that existed after the work was done, and where people usually let themselves go a bit. Yes, it produced a little more litter every evening, but it was often the same people cleaning it up the next morning. She pushed the door to her apartment open, shoulder-first, and kicked her boots under the coat rack next to the door. Different modes of winding down were possible when she was alone. She dropped onto the worn couch face-first and let the rest the air in her lungs escape slowly. She could hear some of the neighbors above her talking, and pulled a throw pillow over her head to shut out the sound. She didn't actually feel like she needed total quiet often. Really, she couldn't imagine a situation where it would be helpful, but it felt like it did, especially when she hadn't ended her workday on a feeling of success. She'd had heard of people - mostly living outside the Blackfeather commune - who lived where they worked, so there was no real separation between downtime and worktime. It felt like a bad idea at the time, but now and then she felt like she could probably benefit from it herself. Hers was a shop meant to fix things, and she considered her success record pretty good. Most things were built to fail prematurely, making sure to shut down the entire system to avoid catastrophic failures. It was rare that fixing, or replacing the problematic parts of the machines did not do the trick. She had seen machines that were broken so thoroughly that there were more parts she would have to replace than ones that she would have been able to salvage, rarely had she had a machine that actively seemed to resist being fixed. For every part she fixed on her cousin's bike, a different one would break, usually in a way that was messy enough to force her to take a break. It wasn't like she didn't usually fix vehicles, even bikes of similar make, she had fixed the exact machine several times, even with similar problems. Maybe this was what people meant when they said that an object was cursed or haunted. She tried to put the issue out of her mind, and concluded the day.

The one thing she could safely claim was that waiting for the bike to fix itself was not a real option. She had limited space in the garage, enough to tackle three or four projects at a time. The bike was put front and center, the only place it fit, and it kept reminding her that she would have to crawl underneath it again, to make another attempt at fixing it, that barely distinguished itself from the previous ones. She had spent the last few hours of several workdays this way, until she decided to hand it off to someone else. She figured, she was just the wrong person for this particular fix. It just was like that sometimes. She pushed the bike over to the next repair place over, a garage owned by a pair of siblings whom she had first met while trying to find some heavy-duty tools she didn't have ready at the time she needed them. She knocked at the side of the garage door. The metallic reverberations caught the attention of one of them, who waved her inside, before pulling their own face-shield off their head: "Hello, neighbor." "Hey. Look, I have this bike that hates me. Any chance you can take the fix off my hands?" "Let me see what's wrong with it, and if we have the stuff?" "I have the parts, if that's what you're worried about. I just keep breaking it worse, so I figured I'd let someone else try." "Right. One of those. Sure, we can probably make time. Standard rate?" "Sure, standard rate."