The advertisement called for a tall man, to work in a ‘small close nit cafe’. She imagined this lice-ridden giant reaching up to the high shelves in the café, and wondered who had put things up so high in the first place. Perhaps it was one of the curiously mixed gender staff – those polymorphously-perverse waiters and waitresses who never said sorry or admitted that they didn’t know what wine might go best with the deep-fried cheese curds.

She had no desire to force them to exceed their already-filled female quota.

Could she pass as a man, she wondered. As an elven prince who knew how to plate and clear and mop and grind. She was tall enough, and could do the heavy lifting (bags of sugar and coffee, buckets of curds and whey). She could butch up, in jeans and a baggy shirt. Slump a little to hide her breasts. Her hair was short and her hands wide and well-knuckled.

She hit reply. This was the tricky part. How to reply in kind; how to speak the boss’s language.

I am the persona you half been looking four. I am tall and clean and casual. A man with no sorry in his soul. I, too, am alliterative in my personality, and prepared to be slaughtered. Then cleaned.