Once the house was gutted to brick and timber and delirious wood, the
plumbers and the electricians came in and laid down their straight
shining ducts and pipes and conduit.
Alan tarped the floors and brought in the heavy sandblaster and stripped
the age and soot and gunge off of the brickwork throughout, until it
glowed red as a golem's ass.
Alan's father, the mountain, had many golems that called him home. They
lived round the other side of his father and left Alan and his brothers
alone, because even a golem has the sense not to piss off a mountain,
especially one it lives in.
Then Alan tackled the timbers, reaching over his head with palm-sanders
and sandpaper of ever finer grains until the timbers were as smooth as
Adirondack chairs, his chest and arms and shoulders athrob with the
agony of two weeks' work. Then it was the floorwork, but *not the floors
themselves*, which he was saving for last on the grounds that they were
low-hanging fruit.
This materialized a new lecture in his mind, one about the proper role
of low-hanging fruit, a favorite topic of MBAs who'd patronize his
stores and his person, giving him unsolicited advice on the care and
feeding of his shops based on the kind of useless book-learning and
jargon-slinging that Fortune 100 companies apparently paid big bucks
for. When an MBA said "low-hanging fruit," he meant "easy pickings,"
something that could and should be snatched with minimal effort.
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