2

Avril yawned again. She was feeling twitchy from all the coffee she had already had, but exhausted due to all the sleep she hadn’t. She was counting the minutes until today’s show was over, but the clock seemed to move slower all the time. The Host, a humourless generic good looking reporter with The Smile was murdering some joke she had written. She sighed, he had the tempo of a deaf chimpanzee, so all her clever lines fall flat. The audience laughed at the correct times thanks to the teleprompter, but she felt her soul crushing with each line from his mouth. Today had been a specially intense day, as she had had to write an interview for a priest. She was aware that everyone in the office knew of her aversion to anything relating to religion, and yet, she had been tasked with that special interview. She had drafted a total of fifty questions, then got a note that only two were usable, so she drafted a further thirty, of which they allowed three. They needed twenty, so she struggled again, and sent a last minute suggestion that had gone through mostly unrevised due to lack of time.

“Question thirteen will most likely get me fired,” she thought while going mentally through her resume. She smiled to herself while The Host butchered yet another of her jokes. Maybe this time she would look for a job in front of the cameras herself. That would mean fixing her hair however, which usually had a life of its own, and had a tendency to climb up her scalp and cradle itself in a faux-mohawk on top of her head. She would also need to fix her eye shadows, and maybe even get a boob job.

The Host flashed The Smile, and the audience broke into laughter. She decided that she would probably feel safer behind the cameras anyway, and made a list of shows were she could work once she got fired. Maybe she could re-take a journo gig, and get back to news instead of... of whatever it was that this was. The Host had decided to stand up and sit on the corner of his table, like a college professor trying to act all cool and friendly. Just like college professors, however, the act was extremely unnatural and made her cringe. The audience seemed to love it, however, or at least they kept on doing whatever it was that the teleprompter asked them to do.

A band started playing. They were noisy and Avril couldn’t understand anything the singer was saying. They even had a couple of instruments that she had never seen. She could feel the bassline in her spine, but in the sense that she wanted to get rid of it. The chords were distorted, in an attempt to sound more indie or retro, but it just made her sick. She decided that she was definitely doing journalism after this. Working for The Host had made her despise television. She couldn’t even watch it on her own free time, instead she streamed movies and watched ten seconds long youtube videos.

“Maybe become a professional blogger,” she thought while everyone was getting ready for advertising. You could see cameramen with cigarettes hanging from the lips, ready to run to one of the designated areas for a smoke, and makeuppers ready to barge in and fix everything around The Smile. She yawned again, closing her eyes, and when she opened them again, she noticed a presence next to her. She looked up and saw a strange man, wearing jeans and a black tight sweater. He had the TV looks of The Host, but this man somehow seemed honest. Avril realized she was staring when the man looked down at her, and smiled. Avril felt that this wasn’t A Smile, like The Host had, but was in fact a warm, nice attempt to make her feel comfortable. The rest of the set was hectic, with everyone but the audience extremely busy, but this man seemed to exude calmness.

“TV is crazy, isn’t it?” he asked. Avril felt the compulsion to reply with “yes, please, take me now” but was able to manage a “yah” that she immediately regretted. The man was magnetic. He was handsome, smelled great and had a smooth voice that screamed Barry White to her. He smiled again, as if she had actually said something funny. She appreciated that.

“I’ve been doing these shows for ages, and I still find commercial breaks fascinating. It’s the way the hidden world simply takes over the world that we see, so efficiently, and then simply vanishes. It sort of gives me hope.”

“Hope of what?” said Avril.

“That something like that will happen to the real world. That somehow, there’s a lot of people in control and one day they will simply appear from the sides while the whole world is on a commercial break and fix everything.”

“Why would they do that?” she asked, her instinctive distaste of cults overcoming her sexual attraction to the man.

The man looked down, with a honest look of surprise in his face. He laughed, a clear and happy laugh that once again tipped the scales for Avril towards her primal woman craves man instincts.

“Sorry, you’re right, I’m acting all weird on you. You just looked bored, and I wanted to talk with someone to avoid the boredom, Miss?”

“Avril,” she answered, offering the man a firm handshake. “Avril Smith.”

“Nice to meet you, Miss Smith, I’m Father Lucas.”

And all of sudden, the sexual tension had disappeared and Avril didn’t even bother correcting his “Miss.”