Day 28

Today I offer you a short story in the first person. I would like to make a note here: many people assume that stories in the first person must be autobiographical. This is not the case. Sometimes we write in first person for effect, or just because (I usually do it just because). This particular story is a fictionalized what-if account based on news that is actually current. If you haven't heard it, google "Atlantic" and "Kevin Williamson". I offer my contribution to the "outrage brigade".

THE PAPER

It was a rainy morning, and I pulled on my galoshes before I headed out the door. It was going to be a busy day. The series I was doing about the new abortion clinic restrictions was keeping me running, trying to stay just one article ahead as the states ate away at the right to choose what to do with our own bodies. I watched a young mother with four children cross the street right in front of me. She looked exhausted, and the toddlers kept pulling her to move faster. She couldn’t keep up. Her face shocked me. She couldn’t have been much more than 25, but her eyes looked old. She looked more unhappy than any woman I’d ever seen, including my mother, and my mother had been one unhappy woman.

The office was still quiet when I arrived. I loved these early arrivals, because no one would bother me for at least 30 minutes. I could get a lot of work done, and be ahead before the first phone call or text interrupted my morning. A steaming cup of coffee was the only other living thing in the building…and yes, I assure you, for me, coffee is as alive as I am. In fact, coffee is more alive than I am many mornings.

I imagined my computer was still warm from my late night last night. Man, that debate in the legislature was…unbelievable. It had been long, dreary, and treacherous. I wasn’t surprised to see that my own representative was speaking against women, talking about working women as if they were automatically street walkers (his word, not mine). It was one of the many reasons I’d refused to vote for him.

I glared at the computer when I noticed it had given me a nasty error message, indicating it had refused to save the article I slaved over until midnight. Aha, I thought! I’ve got you. I pulled my flash drive out of my bag, and settled in to restore the article before this morning’s deadline. My many trials with this computer had imprinted on my brain an automatic backup response. I plugged in the drive and began my edits. This would be one of my best articles yet. I felt fortunate to be an opinion writer, so I didn’t have to pretend to be objective and view both sides as equal.

A sound behind me alerted me that I and my coffee were no longer alone. I whirled, and found myself staring into a familiar pair of blue eyes. “How did you get in here? Go away”, I told the asshole in front of me. “You don’t belong here.”

“Oh, but I do”, he assured me. “I belong here as much as you do. I am the new opinion writer.”

I gulped. This couldn’t be happening. It was a nightmare. I was still asleep. There was no way that this paper…my paper…would hire someone who had declared that women who have abortions should be executed by hanging. This was… “Impossible”, I stated flatly and turned my back. “Get out of here, and quit playing jokes on me. It’s too early in the morning for that.” In fact, any time of day was too early in the morning for this man. I’d gotten over him years ago, and would never let him come near me again.

Rod leaned his chair back on two legs and watched me type. “You know, you’re beautiful when you’re angry.”

I kept my back to him. “Get out. Just…get out.”

“I’d love to do that, just for you darlin’, but I’m afraid I just can’t. This job is just too great a gig, and I can’t turn it down. I’ve finally managed to infiltrate liberal central, and there is no way I’m leaving until I burn the edifice down.”

I mumbled something that might have contained the word “murder”, but he just laughed. It was so infuriating! How could this have happened? Was he going to be allowed to rebut my abortion series, right on the pages of my own paper? Was this going to be the new normal? This grinning reactionary breathing down my neck, talking down to me, doing his best to undo everything that had been gained in the past hundred years? He’d certainly been doing that at his old gig…all those articles about evolutionary modifications based on berry picking and care giving, and those endless repetitions of the nonsense science that claimed women’s brains just couldn’t do science or math or, really, much of anything else except babies and cooking.

“You want to read my first piece?” Rod spoke in a teasing voice, but there was a hard edge.

“No.”

“I think you’ll find it interesting.”

I grabbed the sheet of paper he handed me, and scanned. “You can’t do this.”

“Of course I can. I can do whatever I wish, as long as it’s true.”

I gulped. He was probably right, but would Matt allow him to publish this crap? Well, Matt had hired him, right? Matt knew what he was, knew what he thought, and he had hired him. I had just found the e-mail on my computer where he announced it, early this morning while we were all fast asleep. “Ideological diversity” my foot. This was an out and out assault on our female employees, all of whom knew their brain was more than capable of performing tasks other than pleasing men.

“Why should you care? Don’t tell me for all your talk, you are…ashamed? Wow, I had no idea you were such a hypocrite.”

I wanted to scratch his eyes out. I wanted to tip him out of his precarious chair, still back on two legs, a trick he’d done for years to look cool…only it didn’t really look cool. He just thought it did. I wanted to call my lawyer and take out a restraining order, but it would probably be difficult to convince a judge I was in danger from having a piece of paper handed to me.

Matt chose that moment to poke his head in the door. “Oh, good, you two have met.”

“Matt…how….how….” I was aware I was stammering, and Rod was amused by my discomfort. “Can we…have a talk?”

Matt nodded, and I followed him to his office. He closed the door, leaned against it, and started in immediately. “I know you’re going to be unhappy, but, Darla, honestly, we have to get some balance here. We’re getting a bit of a…reputation.”

“We’ve always had a bit of a…reputation. It’s that reputation that brings us our subscriber base…loyal, I might add. And growing, I might also add. Do you think this is going to help? Are you so desperate to get new subscribers that you’d reach out to people that are the polar opposite of everything we believe?”

“Well, what better way to expose them to our views? Bring in a conservative writer, and his readers will follow. Then, every week, they get to see the other point of view.”

“Right. They’re going to read, and eat up, all the nice liberal opinions on our pages just because you hire a…reactionary…not conservative, Matt. You know what will happen. If they buy the magazine, they’ll read his piece, nod their heads, agree with whatever nasty thing he says this week, and then throw the rest of the paper away. If they bother to read our work at all, it will be just to fuel their anger that people like you and me are allowed to continue living in this country…in this world, actually. He believes I should be killed, Matt.”

Matt rocked back on his heels. “He doesn’t. Why would he? Oh, I know you two used to date, but…”

I thrust the article into his hands. His breath escaped as he read, but I could see no sign that he was relenting. “So? I don’t see why you should worry. Our readership won’t care. I certainly don’t. In fact, it might be a great thing, what with that abortion series you’re writing, and all that.”

“A great thing? To have my own abortion revealed to the world by a man who believes that women should be hung for having abortions? Who is doing his best to wring hearts about the loss of his own child without his consent, or even his knowledge? This will be effective, Matt. It will counteract anything I could say, anything I could do. Even our readers, yes, we have readers who will be totally sympathetic. You know that…you’ve seen some of the e-mail I’ve gotten, the complaints about my series. Progressive, but pro-life…that refrain is burned into my brain.”

Matt opened the door. “I think…it’s for the best. You’ll see. It’ll be good for the paper. It’ll be good for you. It’ll be good for us.”

“Us? There is no us. We like to think of ourselves as a family, as a team, but there was no us in this decision, there was just you…you didn’t even have the decency to break it to us in the meeting yesterday. You waited until we were all asleep, and it was a done deal, to send your cowardly e-mail, to tell us we were being…infiltrated.”

“Infiltrated? Don’t be ridiculous.”

“That’s not my word. It’s his.”

I turned on my heel and spun out of his office. I slammed the door behind me to let him know I was displeased. I considered typing my resignation, but felt that would be the wrong approach, because I would not be here to defend myself when that piece was printed. And it would be printed. Matt’s attitude had convinced me of that. He simply didn’t see a downside to a man revealing to the world that a woman had an abortion. I turned back, flung open the door, and hurled my last parting shot. “Suppose I decided to tell everyone you had a vasectomy?”

I slammed the door again and stomped to my desk. It was going to be a very bad day.