Page 41 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"You have got a bad back and a good grandmother, and one of those is going to outlast the other."

The stopwatch beeps.

The monitor does not go off.

The producer looks at the stopwatch and then at the operator and then at the doorway of the tent, where a person I cannot look at without turning around is standing, and the producer's hand comes down slowly, and the stopwatch goes in her pocket.

Nobody says cut.

"Are we finished?" Vessik says. "There is a little light on here, so I cannot tell if we are finished."

"I have no idea," I say.

"Well, while it is on." She reaches out and moves a cup on her own table an inch to the left, which she does when she is going to say a thing she has been carrying. "The floor in the back bedroom has gone soft. Under the window, in the corner. It gives, when you stand on it. It has given for a while."

Everything in me goes very still.

"How long."

"Since before you left."

"You have been walking on it."

"I have stopped going in that room," she says, "which is easier than a conversation, and now I have gone and had the conversation anyway, in front of a lamp."

Forty seconds past the cutoff.

The camera is on. The sound tech has not touched a dial. The producer stands beside the monitor with her hands at her sides and her eyes on the floor of the tent, and she does not stop it, and neither does anybody else, because somebody outside this tent has made a call and everybody inside it can taste what the call was.

"Grandmother."

"Do not do the voice."

"Do not go in that room."

"I have just said I do not go in that room."

"Do not go in that room and do not let the young man from the church up on the roof," I say. "The sill under that corner has gone and the roof load is coming down through a post that is standing on it. If he gets up on that slope with a tarpaulin and his weight goes into the north corner, that is not a leak. Grandmother, that is the corner of the house."

Vessik looks at me out of a monitor the size of a paperback.

"There he is," she says. "Nine days and thirty seconds."

And then the picture stops, all at once, in the middle of her face, and the tent is a tent, and a young man takes his headphones off, and the producer says, "Thanks so much, that was really lovely," to a place about eleven inches to the left of my head.

I sit on the floor of a pop up tent with my hands open on my knees.

They have four hundred seconds of the six teams' families saying prepared things off a sheet of paper, and forty seconds of an eighty-six year old woman explaining, to a lamp, that a room in her house has become unsafe, filmed after the clock ran out, and every person in this tent understands which of those two things is worth money.

Outside, the rain has gone from sideways to straight down, which up here counts as a clear spell.

Junie is on the bench.

She has been on the bench for an hour, in the queue, and her turn was called ten minutes ago and she has let two teams go ahead of her, which the schedule does not allow for and which nobody has fought her on.

She stands up when I come out.

She does not ask.