On screen, an infected leg oozes, split open and necrotic. She flubs the word Staphylococcus and stops recording. Two takes in and already she’s unbothered by the images. Her voice is clinical, fingers precise — quickly selecting and erasing the now-useless audio track — not unlike a surgeon, she thinks. But there’s something missing.
The script sits on the desk before her. Scribbled ticks mark each word where she calculated what this video will pay. Nearly all her rent. The work safety video last week had covered groceries and half the bar tab on a first date.
Many thousands have heard her. The voice reciting pharmaceutical side effects at the end of a commercial or describing a meal kit delivery service in an ad between episodes of streaming television. Robocalls each election season: Are you aware that [INSERT NAME] doesn’t have the governing experience we need right now? My family worries about what [INSERT STATE] will look like if [INSERT NAME] becomes governor. She’s everywhere, yet nobody notices. No curious turns of the head, no twinges of recognition when she orders coffee, thanks a bus driver, inches a hand across a table towards that of another, asking if perhaps they’d like to go somewhere else.
Sometime in the next year, this video will play to rooms filled with doctors, her voice echoing through conference halls, carpeted and yellow, too few chairs for the space and too few people for the chairs, all dressed well, taking notes on legal pads, looking at rot.
Too far ahead of herself, now. Out over the skis, her father’d say. She lifts her headphones off, wipes sweat from behind her ears, and leaves the soundproofed corner of her bedroom, running a finger across the foam wall.
At the living room windows, she hears highway hum from fifteen stories down. Wind thumps the glass like a finger pressing the popped lid of a jelly jar. A plane whines on its descent into the airport, glinting in the low-slung sunlight. Near there, somewhere, is the house she grew up in, below the flight path. To fall asleep some nights, she plays through a bluetooth speaker the sound of descending engines.
Her phone buzzes. Unknown number. “Hello?” she asks. The sun dips below the horizon, and her reflection in the window clarifies in the dark. Through her earpiece she hears a car door close, an engine turn and catch, a seatbelt alarm ding. “This is Maureen down at the law office, I was hoping you could talk for a moment?” She remembers this job, getting into her car after pacing in the lot, imagining herself as a paralegal after a long day’s work with some half-warmed microwave dinner waiting at home. She listens to her own voice from all those assignments ago, watching her reflection do the same, and there, among her selves, finds what she’s looking for.
Andrew Cothren is a Chicago-based writer whose work has appeared in Redivider, fields magazine, The Atlas Review, and Yalobusha Review.