Garrett Ashley
Our producer, Mark, has volunteered himself to wear the anthrax gloves, tearing open the envelope at an angle away from himself, pointing the opening towards the garbage can, where the white powder pours like flour.
It’s hard to explain why this is happening to us, a weather station. We don’t have machines that drive the current or push the air; they keep saying this, but there’s no way to prove that we are innocent. We don’t know about any of this stuff, but because we report the hurricanes on the news, we get anthrax. We get boxes with a peculiar rattle to them, a sizzle. We get doxed; our mothers in nursing homes harassed. One time, a viewer sent us a bottle full of ticks. Ticks! From God knows what animal.
Another day of anthrax, but we are reporting on the hurricane. The screen behind Jessica suddenly melts; the building catches fire and we have to evacuate; someone throws a second Molotov cocktail through the window and is now yelling expletives through the lick of flames; we scream in agony; Mark’s arm is on fire; we wrestle him to the ground in the parking lot, but he won’t stop screaming; he knows he’s not on fire anymore; but he’s had enough, he’s just totally done with this bullshit, tears in his eyes; we drive him to the hospital anyway. He cries the whole way—I can’t quit my job, though, he keeps muttering, rubbing his eyeballs. My cats. Mark is always going on about his finances like he and his two cats are in some kind of hole. Someone hands him his glasses and he puts them on; they sit crooked on his nose.
We return to the station the next day. The corner of the building is black with soot from the fire. Firefighters linger in the parking lot, shaking their heads at their faulty equipment. Mark’s car is the only one in the lot when we arrive; his tires have been slashed, and a brick has nested itself in his windshield. We look for a note rubber-banded to the brick, but there’s nothing. “Not even an explanation,” we say. Mark picks nervously at his bloody bandages.
The death threats continue to pour in; they show up in our PO box like hornets. We block their accounts on social media; we put out a statement regarding the death threats, but no one believes this is happening to us. They’ve doubled down on claims about the hurricane machine. And besides, we’re public figures, they say; we should be used to this kind of thing, right?
Mark and the janitor, SL, spend the day sweeping the studio floor; there has been a break-in and many of our overhead lights have melted and fallen to the floor and exploded. A hole the size of a small car has appeared over the news desk, and sunlight pours in. Beer cans all over like a frat party. We breathe a sigh of relief that whoever was here has gone home.
No anthrax today, but Mark signs up for jiu-jitsu lessons. He doesn’t feel safe anymore. The only other people taking martial arts in the neighborhood are children. He goes in looking like a karate instructor and comes out with a different kind of weight on him: it’s revenge he’s after, but the only way to soothe his pain is to armbar children in a mostly empty karate studio. We admit that he looks kind of cool with the arm bandage.
Next day in the studio and the wind has picked up and rain drips onto the news desk. We’ve received a letter in the mail full of something, maybe nothing serious, but it’s addressed to the producer. The hurricane has made landfall, and we’ve lost hope. Still, Mark shows us his jiu-jitsu moves and says he has never felt so alive in his life. Puts SL the janitor in a heel hook until he screams. The sleeve from Mark’s uwagi pink from his burns, from all this pressure.
Garrett Ashley is the author of Periphylla, and Other Deep Ocean Attractions (Press 53, 2024), Habitats (Loblolly Press, forthcoming), and the chapbook, Field Guide to North American Trees (forthcoming, Good Printed Things). His work has appeared in The Normal School, Sonora Review, DIAGRAM, and Asimov’s Science Fiction, among others. He teaches creative writing at Tuskegee University and edits The Tuskegee Review.
Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash