36 Domestic Violence
Madeline Ashby (2018)
“I’m sorry; I had some trouble getting out of the house,” Janae said to Kristen.
Janae’s frustration was obvious. It manifested as raw cuticles that she couldn’t help picking as their meeting continued.
Kristin frowned. “Couldn’t find your fob?”
“No, I mean I couldn’t get out of the house,” Janae said. “The house—well, I mean, the condo—wouldn’t let me out. The door wouldn’t open.”
“Literally?”
“Literally. I thought it was stuck, like jammed or something, but it just wouldn’t open.”
Kristen examined Janae. As Wuv’s chief of staff, it was Kristen’s job to learn what workplace issues existed and deal with them. At least, that’s how she had explained the meeting to the company’s co-founder. Privately, she had her own suspicions about what was really happening.
“Maybe she’s knocked up,” was Sumter’s contribution to the conversation.
“If she were, it wouldn’t be our business,” Kristen had reminded him. “Legally speaking.”
Sumter heaved a very put-upon sigh. “Well, yeah. But you’re a girl, you can get it out of her.”
Kristen had blinked, but otherwise allowed no other reaction to surface on her features or in her affect. “You want me to get her an abortion?”
Now she and Janae sat together in her own office, the question between them—or what passed for an office, in Wuv’s spacious loft. A delineation of clear sheets of acrylic and projected light and ambient sound. Today the lights projected a quiet jungle clearing. Softly rustling palm fronds, carefully calibrated to be seizure-proof. It felt intimate. It felt hidden. It felt secure. Kristen believed it was important for the employees at Wuv to feel safe in the cocoon that was her space. It helped them open up.
“You couldn’t leave the condo,” Kristen said. It helped to repeat things, sometimes. She’d learned that particular tactic from a succession of psychiatrists. Each of them had their tics and tells, but this was a common technique. When Janae said nothing, Kirsten acted more interested in the specifics: “What finally made the door open?”
“I had to do the chicken dance. It started playing the song and then I started dancing, and then the door opened. I think maybe some kid in the building hacked the door.”
“Has that happened before?”
Janae frowned delicately. She was a delicate woman. Coltish. That used to be the word. All knees and elbows and knuckles. Once upon a time, she did doll-hairstyling videos online, her careful hands combing tiny brushes through pink and purple hair. They were classics in their genre; she was so well-recognized that children and their parents followed her sponsored updates to local toy stores and asked for photos and autographs and hugs. She’d had surgery since then. Few vestiges of her childhood face remained. Even neural networks couldn’t match her old face to her current one. Her plastic surgeon, she claimed, had won some sort of award for his work restructuring her skull.
“It’s something Craig used to do,” Janae said, “when