This isn’t for those people. This is for the rest of you, the ones going “nerd war, blah blah blah”. You want to know how this can possibly affect you personally. Well, here we go. Let’s talk about porn.

I know you don’t like porn. Nobody likes porn. That’s why it’s one of the top-grossing internet industries: because nobody likes it. But let’s pretend for a minute that you do. Let’s pretend, just for the sake of argument, that you occasionally indulge in some photos or video or even written erotica that might be considered…déclassé in today’s terribly civilized world. This is how a repeal of Net Neutrality might affect you.

It’s been a long day, and late in the evening you’re feeling stressed and desperately need to wind down. You’ve gone through your usual stress-management repertoire (I sincerely do not care if this means yoga or a gun range, y’all…this is an American issue, and it’s time we got inclusive). Point is, it’s 10:00 at night and you’re still wound up tighter than a Chihuahua on amphetamines. Reluctantly, you turn on your computer and go for your last resort: that website that engages you in a way that, for a few moments at least, will let you forget about your mundane stresses and lose yourself in a brief rush of fantasy-filled satisfaction.

Yes, I’m talking about your favourite jack stop. Again, don’t care if it’s a cam girl or Harry Potter “fan fic”. Again, this is America. Let’s be inclusive.

The problem is that when you hit that link…it don’t hit. It loads and loads and the anticipation builds and builds…and continues…and continues…and suddenly you’re watching your cat kick its butt and the site still isn’t loaded and your cat is still licking his butt and your night is blown. In a bad way. And you’re wondering what the hell just happened.

Funny thing is, playboy.com loads just fine. Hustler.com loads fine, too. For that matter, you can Google anything and Fox News and CNN both load like champs. It’s just your favorite porn sites that don’t. What gives?

The FCC has fucked you, that’s what. They have ditched Net Neutrality, which means your internet service provider is now able to charge websites for preferential loading speeds, which means puddingbuns.com can’t afford to compete. Playboy will suck it up and pay for fast loading times, but puddingbuns can’t afford the surcharge, so…they’re back at dial-up speeds for you.

Enjoy your mainstream, corporate-enforced porn, y’all.

You don’t like this future? You better do something, and do it now. Don’t let us be taken back to the dark ages of one-size-fits-all, gas station magazine rack pornography. This is America, and America is about freedom. Freedom means the ability to choose your kink and watch/read it whenever you want. We don’t let anybody choose our kinks for us! Do it for America!

Go here to submit your protest for all those other sad, porn-consuming Americans (who are totally not you):

Call your representatives through https://www.battleforthenet.com/

Sign a petition: http://sign.demandprogress.org/Save/Net-Neutrality

Also, talk to people, share this article, write your own! This does matter, we can win, but only if we all come together and harass the hell out of Congress and the FCC and let them know we’re watching.

That’s an impressively long title, so let’s quickly break it down. This bill, H.B. 249, sets out to do several things. First, it establishes the crime of “economic terrorism”, which comprises: • a person willfully commits a criminal offense (say…trespassing) that impedes or disrupts the normal course of business • that disruption results in damages of more than one thousand dollars • the act is done with the intent to intimidate civilians (either at large or an identifiable group such as shareholders) or to influence some level of government in some way

Secondly, it makes this new crime a felony. Thirdly, it establishes that anyone whose person or property is injured by a “terrorist” may sue that person for damages, up to three times the actual damages sustained or $50,000, whichever is greater. Fourth, it establishes that if a person is convicted of participating in an unlawful assembly, riot, or obstructing traffic, they can be held legally liable for the cost of the police who arrested them. It then goes on to clarify the definition of second degree trespassing, just so we’re all on the same page about the kind of “terrorism” we’re talking about, here. And finally, it expands to explain that it is illegal to block the roads. Particularly, over 10 people standing in the road is a “mass traffic obstruction”, which is now a misdemeanor. And which we all assume will not be applied to the line from overflowing civic centers when Bob Dylan comes to town.

So let’s quickly sum this up: the folks down in Raleigh want to create a new crime called “economic terrorism”, which would make actual “terrorists” of protestors who assemble in any manner which can be deemed “unlawful”. This could include a group of folks meeting up spontaneously outside a business they feel has behaved illegally, or inside an airport to protest the acts of a government they feel are immoral. Just to add insult to injury, they may lose any property they had on them at the time and then be required to pay for the police who arrested them. And finally, they should be very careful about crossing the street.

We’ve been trying to shunt free speech into smaller and smaller spaces for some time, but this bill clearly tries to intimidate would-be protestors into just staying home. Making minor law infringements in the course of protesting into felony charges of “terrorism” is a blatant attempt at intimidation and overly harsh prosecution. Many well-meaning citizens are likely to think twice about acts like filling the airports to protest Trump’s travel ban if it means they might wind up being legally labeled a Terrorist, with their felony conviction limiting their freedom for the rest of their life. And the “mass traffic obstruction” section is clearly designed to prevent protestors marching in the streets…an act of resistance that has been often debated in our court system, but is not definitively illegal (expect to see it come up again if this bill passes).

The core problem is that no one is suggesting that it is acceptable to damage property or attack people during a protest. In fact, there are already laws in place that cover those crimes. But presenting legislation where protestors who have been told to leave a location and refuse can be charged with terrorism or we have special charges for protestors who stand in the street is not about keeping people and property safe: it’s about stifling the will of the citizens to protest. And that’s why you need to write or call your Representative right now and tell them to fight H.B. 249 with everything they have. If they’re a Republican, they should object to the unnecessary legal bloat and the prospect of shutting down effective protest efforts which they may one day find need of again. And if they’re Democrat…well, they’re probably already on it, but it doesn’t hurt to make sure they hear your voice. And if you’re from out of state…won’t you write some of our Representatives, anyway, and let them know you’re watching, and they are on the national stage as they propose to stifle free speech in North Carolina? We could definitely use your help.

— George Washington

Much has been said and written about the campaign and early administration of Donald Trump. There have been myriad attempts to explain “what went wrong” for the Democrats, and many others to pin a label on how our institutions are changing as he begins to demonstrate the gist of the narrative he wishes to create. But as his easily disprovable alternative facts are presented by his supporters as somehow just as believable as real ones, as Congress blatantly tries to disband the Congressional Ethics Committee as its very first act in the 115th Congress, in the aftermath of an election where the Presidential candidate claimed he would throw his opponent in jail if elected and bragged about his penis size on stage, when a Senator is shushed for reading a letter by Coretta Scott King about the racism of a nominee for Attorney General (and that nominee is subsequently approved), when the President of the United States appoints Brietbart’s editor as his chief strategist, a man well known for suing the EPA as the head of it, a woman who believes grizzly bears justify keeping guns in school as the head of public education, and can’t stop tweeting about how “unfair” everything is…we have moved well past attempts to categorize the times in which we are living as “Post Post-Modern” or even “Post-Truth”. We have to recognize it’s bigger than all that. We are living in the Era of Post-Dignity in American Politics.

I’m not claiming this administration or this Congress is any more corrupt than any previous one. It might be, but it’s impossible to judge, because up until this administration our political institutions as least tried to claim that they weren’t completely corrupt. They tried to hide it. They tried to misname and rename and misguide and misdirect. Remember when President Bill Clinton was busted for getting a blow job? Do you remember what actually got him impeached by the House? It wasn’t the act, itself…it was that he lied about it. He tried to cover it up, because getting busted for extramarital fellatio is not the kind of thing a President should do. Now that we have a President who has boasted of “grabbing them by the pussy”, however, we can expect that such wasted efforts at saving face are no longer necessary.

Do you remember when President George W. Bush was mercilessly teased for mispronouncing “nuclear”? For claiming to be “The Decider” and for coining the term “misunderestimated”? Those were the long golden days of a previous era. For the most part, the spelling and grammar errors, the five-year-old’s-fart-joke level of delivery emerging from Trump’s communications to the public are so frequent and so painful, we simply don’t have the available time and energy to track them. Instead, we’ve just accepted the fact that the President of the United States appears to be both functionally illiterate and incapable of sophisticated sentence structure. He is even sometimes praised for a “strategy” of not talking over people’s heads. Our nation’s highest office, one which has taxed the mental faculties of some of the most intelligent men in history, now prefers to communicate in 140 characters. And that’s apparently a good thing, because most of us cannot comprehend more.

Trump signed an arguably unconstitutional anti-immigration order, then publicly sulked when the judges wouldn’t let him have it. The Democrats tried to slow down the approval process for Trump’s cabinet nominees, so the Republicans just rewrote the rules of Congress. A counselor to the President has done an impromptu commercial for Trump’s daughter’s jewelry line on national news. The President of the United States is making money off the US Military by charging them rent in his enormous, tacky tower which he insists on frequenting while he makes “deals”.

Do you remember when President Barak Obama was made fun of for ordering Dijon mustard on his hot dog? At least we don’t have to worry about any of that elitist, ivory tower nonsense, anymore.

In all seriousness, this is a deeper problem than the simple embarrassment resulting from being represented by a man with a strangely orange fake tan and the vocabulary and coherence of an angry child. Congress is dysfunctional at best and blatantly self-serving and corrupt at worst. Our law enforcement can be recorded killing human beings who are not provoking them, yet they consistently go unpunished. We are presented with lies as truths so often that it is difficult to sift through to find facts upon which to operate. The rest of the world is swiftly realizing that turning their backs on an embarrassment incidentally opens up a better spot in the power structure for themselves.

And we allowed all of this by accepting claims that highly educated people are “elitist” and “out of touch” at the same time that we send all of our children into debt insisting that they have no future without a higher education. We cooperatively stepped down the path as our elected officials claimed science couldn’t be trusted because, apparently, scientists are known to be more corrupt than politicians. We dug our own grave as we swallowed the idea that the poor were only poor because they were morally corrupt, women were treated unequally because of their emotional instability, and black human beings bring death upon themselves due to a lack of etiquette. We have become calloused and gullible, believing any line spun out for us that will allow us to believe we are somehow going to be the lucky, chosen ones that rise to the top of the now baseless mythology known as the American Dream. And it is that series of choices which has empowered a government which has no pretenses of dignity. Only by baring the ugliest facets of our souls can we know we are being truthful. We support them because they let us see how truly monstrous they are.

That is where we are. And it’s unclear how we dig ourselves out of it. The United States has been in similar low spots before. Every massive wave of immigrants has been met with an undignified rejection of their humanity, subjected to open humiliation which should have embarrassed the perpetrators more than the subjects. Word War II set the stage for the Land of the Free rounding up and incarcerating Americans solely on the basis of their ancestry, an act which should have left the entire nation shamefaced for decades. McCarthyism was a blatant witch hunt, in which a few manipulative fearmongers convinced Americans to turn spy on their neighbors, submitting them to public harassment and mortification in a circus we attempted to dignify as vetting for “Un-American” activities.

But in each of those cases we were saved by the clear-sighted, clear-voiced few who were willing to stand in the face of monsters and ask “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”. Now, however, we face an uncertain future where such a voice will be mocked on Twitter by a President who has only to stoop to “yo momma” jokes to take the bar lower. Where a call to reason can be subverted by proclamations that facts are not facts, and logic a liability. How do we fight a system which no longer feels that even attempting to appear fair, just, and moral is worthwhile?

This is the question we must wrestle with, if we are to somehow survive this era with both our wits and our self-respect intact. We can’t just sit on the bleachers cheering the most entertaining of the unscrupulous acts before us. We have to recognize these are monsters, and that if we don’t find a way to tame them, one day they will consume us.

It is worth noting that Trump has insisted that his order is not a “Muslim ban”. His case would never stand up in a respectable court of law. Rudy Giuliani said in an interview with Fox News on Saturday that Trump originally asked him how to create a “Muslim ban” legally. Trump, himself, has said that he will prioritize Christian refugees (once the refugee ban is lifted). The text of the refugee ban declares that priority will be given to refugees who “identify with minority religions” in their country of origin. For those not keeping tally, in majority-Muslim countries, that means prioritizing Christians, while discriminating against Muslims. Not enough? Try this page from his own website: Donald J. Trump Statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration. He can try to claim it’s not religion-based, but renaming it doesn’t change what it is.

And it’s important to note that his claim that any of this is necessary doesn’t hold a drop of water. The terrorists who carried out 9/11 weren’t from any of the countries on the ban list. In fact, no one convicted for a terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11 has been, either. Furthermore, Trump’s justification for prioritizing Christian refugees is completely logically inconsistent with his own executive order. In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network on Friday, he stated: “Do you know if you were a Christian in Syria it was impossible, at least very tough to get into the United States? If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible and the reason that was so unfair, everybody was persecuted in all fairness, but they were chopping off the heads of everybody but more so the Christians. And I thought it was very, very unfair. So we are going to help them.” And yet the order bans all refugees from Syria indefinitely.

It’s also worth stating that Trump’s order is in direct violation of the Geneva Convention, which states that signatory countries (yes, the United States is one) may not discriminate against refugees solely on the basis of their nationality.

All of this, of course, does not even consider the sheer moral cowardice of, with no warning, blocking parents from reuniting with their children, immigrants eagerly anticipating their first day at a new job in the United States, or those who had finally completed the long and arduous process of applying for visas and residence. It does not touch on the inexcusable trauma inflicted on those who were detained for hours or days, without access to a lawyer or an understanding of what was happening to them. It does not address the deterioration of our international relationships or the fact the Donald Trump has single handedly given ISIS and other radical Muslim groups their best recruiting propaganda yet. All of that is just cruel and stupid.

But when we turn out to fight this, as we will continue to do, we must remember that the action Trump has taken is also illegal, and we are the ones standing up for the right side of the law.

Image by Andy Gmitter

Donald Trump has made a career of being “tough”. He says what he thinks, he does what he wants, and he’s not about to get pushed around by a pathetic bunch of whiners. Today’s protest, no matter how massive, is unlikely to change any policy decisions he plans to implement in the next 99 days (although of course we all look forward to reading the 3:00 a.m. meltdown when he realizes more people turned out to protest than came to his inauguration). Similarly, the last eight years have demonstrated a new Republican strategy of politics as a zero-sum game; there is no longer room, it seems, for working together toward a greater good for all. It seems apparent, in fact, that any conversation between conservatives and liberals at this point in history is doomed due to the inability of either party to translate the language of the universe next door.

Given the disconnect, the partisanship, and the blatant callousness of our new President and his supporters, it is easy to dismiss today’s protests as a futile effort, perhaps good for morale but with no substantial effect on the future. But that completely misses a larger perspective, both in what the protests mean for today and in what they create for the future.

Don’t dismiss the importance of morale. Liberals woke up the day after the election with the dazed sense that the nightmare was now their waking life. The visceral fear that many of us felt, for ourselves, our loved ones, and for strangers we have never met, was overwhelming. And one foundation stone of that fear was the question of how it is even possible for so many people to vote for a man whose entire campaign was blatantly dedicated to bigotry and xenophobia. There is much needed comfort in seeing just how many people are willing to stand up against him and the principles he espouses. And yes, it’s bolstering to see a physical demonstration of the fact that they are the majority.

Protests draw more protestors. Recent studies have demonstrated an unexpected cause and effect related to protests: participating in a political action such as marches actually changes the beliefs and behavior of the participants. Someone who comes to a march with a friend, for example, but may not be particularly committed to the cause is much more likely to walk away from that action convinced of the veracity of the movement. And yes, that translates into further action and voting decisions.

Not all Republicans are so sure of their position (and a few are possibly even not evil). Though the newly installed President and his closest supporters may seem intractable, that is not necessarily the case for all Republican Congressmen…or their supporters. Several high ranking members of Congress have already begun questioning the demands of their leader, and there’s nothing like seeing half a million people blocking your way to work to make you question how you want to legislate. And it’s worth bearing in mind that not all Republican voters are comfortable with the new Commander-In-Chief, either. The massive turnout today is a powerful reminder that perhaps one’s party should not override one’s conscience.

This protest lays the groundwork for action to come. Coordinating protests on this scale requires systemic organization of everything from communications and outreach to permits and parking. Many different groups have been involved in bringing the Women’s March together, and as a result we now have a standing and viable system for the quick dissemination of information and calls to action. It is crucially important to understand that this protest, on the very first day of the new Presidency, is only the beginning. What matters more is what happens every day after today. Sustained and significant pressure will be required to convince larger swaths of legislators to hold fast against misguided or dangerous legislation. Protest actions must begin again and again, immediately after such legislation is introduced. We now have the essential systems in place to make sure that happens.

The article on how we counteract that fear is for another day, however. Today, let’s talk about how we embrace it. A vast majority of us are afraid, whether of our government or of the terrorists who may lurk in our midsts. And that’s nothing particularly new, but the sudden shift in our leadership promises to bring our fears sharply into focus. “Corrupt Government” doesn’t seem to cut it when you’re seriously discussing whether or not the new administration will build deportation camps or embrace torture as an interrogation technique. “Terrorism” fails to capture the sensation of finding swastikas scrawled over the walls of our cities. It’s a brave new world, and with it will surely come monsters.

As I discussed extensively quite a while back, the dominant monster of any era can reveal much about the fears of the culture which promotes it. A decade ago, the dominant monster was the vampire, seductive representative of the corporate culture threatening to drain us all dry. Since that time we have moved on through zombies, an obvious recognition of our own increasingly “brain dead” and pacified state, and the frightening rate at which the symptoms seemed to spread. We have been slowly losing our fascination with zombies, however, and so particularly now, in the aftermath of one of the most polarizing elections in American history, we are likely to choose a new demon to haunt our fevered dreams.

What will it be?

To answer that question, we must consider what we need in a monster, what fears and internal threats must it manifest in order to carry out its function? It seems likely that in the coming months we will require a monster that reflects our more base, more bestial traits as we are confronted with the human consequences of many of President Trump’s proposed policies. Nothing like babies howling as they are wrenched from the arms of their immigrant mothers or fathers breaking down on camera describing how, with the loss of state-subsidized insurance, he cannot treat his child for brain cancer to bring us face to face with the animalistic cruelty lurking in our lizard-brain. So my bet is on the return of the hybrids: werewolves, werecats, maybe some werebears if we’re lucky. There’s also a certain poetic satisfaction in imagining our own destruction by shapeshifter; consider it the Native Americans’ long-overdue revenge. The hybrids we are likely to bring upon ourselves in our upcoming fiction will be motivated neither by cold calculation (as were our vampires) or mindless hunger (as were the zombies), but by rage and the feverish desire to wreak destruction. It’s important to note, however, that while traditionally hybrids have only transformed to their powerful, animalistic aspect at night (and only on certain nights, at that), we can expect some reimagining in the new versions (after all, vampires weren’t always sexy). Our new monsters won’t be afraid to confront us in the daylight. In fact, they will prowl fearlessly down our mainstreets to confront us in our cafes and boutiques. They will enter our homes without knocking while we’re still sipping our morning coffee and do their worst. We will discover that silver bullets were always just a myth; these creatures have broken free of the moon’s influence and have no weakness against her metal. They are bigger than us, stronger than us, and beyond reason. Only by banding together do we stand a chance against them.

But therein lies the crux of any monster mythology: we create the embodiment of our fears, and eventually we create a way to defeat them. Vampires require a stake in the heart or a thorough dose of revealing and purifying sunshine. Zombies require utter destruction of the brain (or endless care and maintenance)…by those who can still think. And what will be the solution to our new, more fearsome than ever, race of hybrids? We can’t yet say what solutions we might find, but we can certainly predict that one of them will be to stick together and watch each other’s backs.

“We can tell our story of how we climbed the ladder, and a lot of you younger women think it’s done. It’s not done. There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!”

How dare you, Ms. Albright? How dare you tell women that the only factor they should consider in a candidate’s qualifications is their gender? Isn’t that…well…sexism? Isn’t feminism supposed to be about becoming equal people, all of whom are judged upon their merits, not their sex? Would you seriously confirm the biases and misinformation of those who claim that feminism isn’t about equality, it’s about domination? What the hell is wrong with you, that you would imply young women cannot judge policy platforms and sincerity and intelligence and experience fairly between candidates for themselves, and should only heed the call of the vagina?

No. You recant your statement, and you do it right now. You apologize to all those young women, and to older women, too, who have fought diligently to keep feminism moving forward by sharing it with every new generation.

And while we’re at it, Ms. Gloria Steinem, I can’t even believe what you did. I’m speechless. I’m just going to let your quote stand for itself:

“When you’re young, you’re thinking: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie,’ ”

You seriously just said no young woman would support Sanders if she weren’t chasing boys? How the hell does a feminist get to the point that she devalues her fellow women in such a wrongheaded and callous way?

No. You take it back, and you do it right now. Or you’ve lost your feminist creds forever.

We still need feminism. But we need feminist icons who actually respect the intelligence of our young women. You two women just proved you are no longer qualified. Get the hell off the stage.

In my first weeks on LinkedIn, I friended connected with most everyone I “knew” from both my in-person and online life who had also already joined. In the many years since, I have added three times that many contacts. Most of these people I have never met, and certainly never worked with. Of the ones I have met, 3/4 are friends, family, or people I have only encountered in passing. Again…never worked with them. And yet, now every time I visit the site (sucker!), I am asked to vouch for their professional abilities. In a broad range of fields in which I am not qualified, and so cannot judge their aptitude. Assuming I had ever even seen their work. Which I almost never have. Which should make it an easy pass…and yet so many of them have endorsed me, it feels awkward. Note that: I have been endorsed for everything from Graphic Design to Storytelling, and I actually do both of those quite well, but more than 20 people have endorsed me for Graphic Design and no more than eight of them have ever seen my work. Honestly, most of my endorsements are from people who have never seen what I can actually do, and while I refuse to endorse anyone for anything for which I have not seen the proof of their work, it pains me to skip screen after screen of acquaintances who I know have already blurred that line for me.

The bigger problem is that this is systematic of our culture: we’re all so happily playing pretend online that we dilute any sense of truth when we try to apply online activities to the physical world. We have “friends” and “colleagues”, we “support” causes and give “gifts” with neither longevity nor meaning, nor even the value of our time and considered thought in choosing them. As someone who spends much of every day focused on the world online, I’m only too aware that social media is the new God. Everything we build, every effort we make in the online world is marketed to it. We gauge the value of our ideas by it. We make or break businesses based on it. And yet, at the end of the day, it doesn’t measure real opinions, real values, or careful thought…it measures whether something had enough punch to grab our short attention spans for long enough to hit “share” or “like”.

Social media, in all its forms, measures exactly one thing: poor impulse control.

It doesn’t have to be this way; online interactions in no way are defined by being shallow or full of false premises. But if we’re going to save ourselves from this slippery slope of one-click approbation, we need to rethink the way we view and use social media. We need to stop pretending that a click is anything more than a momentary impulse, and come up with better metrics of gauging interest, support, and value. Systems that require processes of thought and time spent in reflection or analysis. Putting the effort into building those next-wave interactive online tools is well worth the rewards in our physical world processes, and possibly even in our own characters and storylines. Imagine if we had tools that actually capitalized on the wisdom of crowds, increased understanding and tolerance, and promoted empathy and careful thought.

Perhaps you think this sounds like a faerie tale, and perhaps it is. Perhaps I just never got over those early, star-struck days of the Internet, when we were all going to become one enormous, interconnected family, with hope, tolerance, and opportunity for all. Or something like that. But the possibility of building an online world that nurtures some of the better human traits is not ridiculous, nor even out of reach. We just have to stop looking for the fast solution, the one-click answer, long enough to craft a better set of tools.

Anna had never had a best friend, had never really wanted one until she was too old for the concept. Childhood had been a landscape of old trees and broken fence posts with bird nests inside. Of being sure she had made friends with the faeries, and then, suddenly, being not so sure, anymore. Which required gifts and impromptu rituals to reacquire their good grace, reassurances given in the shake of the leaves, the gust of the wind, the carving of a riverbank which clearly meant something.

Anna no longer believed in such things, except late at night when she felt the quiet beyond the sound of the city pressing in on her ears like an overprotective mother. Then she would press the fabric of her comforter to her lips and somehow that was the same thing as the buzz of faerie wings she (she told herself, disbelieving) once imagined. And then sometimes, a blue flash in the corner of the room, or a thrill of tickle running against her leg, and she would drift to sleep, happy.

When she found the brass heart (or half-heart, more precisely), nothing changed, much. She slung it about her neck, thinking more or less whimsically that she was claiming a space left behind. Someone, out there, was missing a best friend. And whether or not they knew it, she was that friend. Out in the world, with the other half of their heart, keeping it safe. She went home after work and made pasta with lemon balm and lovage, and didn’t consider the matter again until she undressed for bed.

It seemed wrong to take it off to sleep. If you were someone’s best friend (whether or not they knew it), you were committed to that relationship. It didn’t end when you laid yourself down to sleep. And so she doffed her clothes but left the necklace on, feeling it pierce against her breast when she laid down on her side, but not moving to readjust it. All relationships have their element of pain, she reminded herself, and she drifted to sleep with a smile.

She woke from a dream of running. She didn’t remember what she had been running from or toward, but sleep held heavily to her eyelids and she struggled to push herself out. She caught the flash of the pendant as she dressed in front of the mirror, strangely warm and rich in the artificial glow of the bedroom lamp. She turned a little, back and forth, watching it catch the light between her breasts, smiling to think it represented her own heart.

Work happened, and coworkers chatted to her, asking this and that and offering tales about their 14 hours away from the floor they now again shared. Anna smiled and nodded and handed over requested items, and sometimes folded her arms tightly against her chest, so that she could feel the sharp edges of the broken heart cutting against her skin. The pain was beautiful. She felt deeply, intensely happy.

At four o’clock she walked out back of the building for a smoke break. She didn’t smoke, but company policy dictated that everyone, regardless of tobacco addictions, received a fifteen minute break midway through the second half of the afternoon. A greyed and splintered picnic table filled half of the alley, crowned with a pock-marked plastic ashtray. Next to the ashtray, today, rested a deeply red apple. And tied to the stem was a paper note. The note read:

It isn’t yours.

Anna held the note between her fingers for several long moments, running her thumb over the texture of the paper, noticing the colour of the ink and the slant of the writing. And then she took a defiant bite of the apple and walked back inside.

That evening, she took the short route home, stopping in only briefly at the local market to buy a packet of ramen noodles and some chiles. She stood in her kitchen over the boiling water and fingered the necklace, running her thumb over and over the jagged edges. At bedtime, she stipped naked but didn’t look at the necklace, avoiding the mirror. When she slept, she folded it flat between her breasts.