Someone’s been fucking around beneath the overpass again and it’s starting to piss Jillian off. You expect a certain amount of detritus, the odd condom or little glass vial, some anonymous dog or human shit, but lately it’s all chicken bones and black wax and pins. None of the others will touch the stuff, no matter that it’s clearly bullshit, so she’s always the one to scrape it up, down on her knee pads hoping the pins don’t poke a hole in her latex gloves.

The smell from the river is vile, but what else is new. Summer days you can almost see it, a wavering miasma of piss and muck and oil, simmering just below the temperature of blood, but she grew up here, it’s no worse than the paper mills down to the south or the hog farms up top of the cliffs. In cooler weather, folks go kayaking, and if you squint your eyes and only look at the parts they’ve rewilded, it’s even beautiful.

When she’s packed everything up, all the regular trash and the new cosplay shit swept into the city branded bag, she digs a stub of sidewalk chalk out of her kit and scrawls several sprawling equations over the pavement, a basic charm against sandflies and mosquitos but it looks impressive if you’re an idiot. It’ll wash off in the first rain, but god willing she can at least save the lives of a few chickens.