After they walked around the store using gestures of picking up items, they walked up to the cash register. Gabriele thought, "They're dead!" but she remained taciturn. Peggy put the invisible items on the belt of the counter that remained still. Peggy tilted up her chin toward nothing and smiled affectedly as if she were responding to a nonexistent cashier. "I'm very well. Thank you," said Peggy. Then her face tilted back toward the invisible items and the smile deadened. Gabriele felt the slapping of her back. Peggy put her mouth toward Gabriele's ear. She whispered, "Stand up straight. I don't want you to look like one of them" (meaning the cashier that was supposedly ringing up the purchases although her corpse was obviously rotting on the floor with maggots swarming in and out of it. "Give me that candy bar," scolded Peggy. Gabriele looked at her right hand. It was curled with the fingers almost touching as if she had a candy bar in her hand. "You thought you would put a smart one on me. Hide it behind the laundry soap when I'm not looking. Nothing gets by me." On their way home through the empty streets they quickly arrived at their neighborhood when suddenly Peggy honked on a horn and slammed on the brakes-ding-dong. A young Korean boy and his sister were on the road. Ding-dong. The girl had run in front of the car in an attempt to get the ball that her brother had overthrown. It was too late. The car slammed against her body. Peggy Peggy Ding-dong Peggy Ding-dong. Gabriele woke to the sound of the doorbell. At first her mind tried to grasp a concrete image that could go with the sound. Then she knew it, and the cause of it. "Shit!" she said out loud. Now did she once again have to prostitute herself in the physical domain with some stranger at the door? She didn't want to work. People worked for money and they worked to escape the void. They abhorred the void that they would fall into if engaged in inaction. There were times that doing nothing did nothing for her either. There were days when she was a little lost in her lack of valid employment. But more times than not being completely paralyzed on what she needed to do or would like to do with her day was advantageous. Doing nothing but sitting in her living room staring up at the walls and letting the void overtake her made her all the wiser. She seemed to be unlike the rest of humanity who had to desperately see someone or go somewhere to escape slipping into themselves.