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She had poured her angst out to ChatGPT who she called the robot. She walked into the writers room armed with a tequila soda and wearing the ATLANTA sweatshirt she had bought upon her arrival to Georgia from Oakland to live her new life.
Neil had been right. 80% of her wardrobe was a story. She didn't mind that he knew that. She minded that he thought she was daft.
"You know I'm the youngest spelling bee contestant Bradenton Elementary School ever had right? I was the only 7th grader they ever sent."
"You tell me that all the time." He didn't pause in his New York Times crossword puzzle, and continued, "Do you think you'll be laid off."
He never told her anything about himself, and she babbled everything. He seemed to have let it slip that his first wife was an heiress, so that made sense. He really liked financial security. She could understand as she felt the same.
"I told you last time. I would have laid me off five years ago."
"You said four last time."
"Time flies when you're having fun. Did you want to play catch?"
"Not really. I could go for a walk if you want."
She had a dream the night before that she was suddenly bad at catch.
Her work was like a weird adult babysitter - she had to be near that terminal but the baby was always sleeping. It went on for decades it seemed.
A leaf fell from the maple adjacent to her stepfather's lot. She wondered why she was alive. The sweatshirt she was wearing reminded her in cut of the Benetton sweater that had caused her to get her first job at K-mart at 15.
She remembers going into the guidance counselors office in her sophomore year. It was weird to be called, but she supposed everyone was. It was a grade of 937 people - the largest class the school had ever had - like the baby boomers.
"Do you know what ranking you are in school? You're 13 in the entire school."
She was used to people telling her she was smart, but it made her sob to remember it.
"Your daughter is the highest IQ I've ever measured."
These things spanked her as she sat in her charity house wishing she was dead and watching the elm tree also shed its leaves.
She took another drink, and all of it was real. Laying in her bed at 8pm last evening looking for the phone to bleep with his attention, she wondered who loved her. She thought of all the tangental people who might never know she had died. She thought of her second husband and how smug he would be about her suicide. Fuck him. It almost made her pissed enough to give it another go.
All of it was to prove that she was on the level of the man she was in love with. She blew her nose, and the termite truck rolled by. A butterfly landed on the red geranium. Narcissi was no Sappho, but she wanted so badly for you to read this one day and realize that she was worthy of your love.
Not that she felt she was. She sobbed a little even typing it. How pathetic she was. She couldn't even remember the story of the goddess Atlanta. When she had been a little girl, it had all seemed so filled with the cliche of possibilities. She knew that her prince would come and they would sally forth into benevolent dictatoship.
Those fucking biscuits she made for him seven times. It rankled her. His body lay in bed never having even touched her clitoris and she sprang up like "LET'S WATCH THE GAME!!!!" and quietly shut the door as she tried to make him biscuits from scratch like she used to know how to do but had apparently forgotten.
He always critiqued them like the was so vastly good at doing. He was always right.
She wasn't the right ingredients. She wasn't the right temperature. She didn't rise.
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