![]() ![]() The first things I ever fell in love with were the words my mother and grandmother told me about my dad. How they can impact us even when an event didn’t exactly occur in our own lives. ![]() How they mark people who don’t even know us. And I wonder, as our eyes meet, if the next story I have to tell in my life is the one of her firing me. So it’s with dread and an impending sense of loss that I sit here and wait for Helen to finally lower that folder and look at me. I have never wanted to be anything else other than what I am now, at this moment, as my fate rests in her hands. I have rent, I’m still paying off my college loan, and I have a mother I love with a health condition and no insurance. Even: I will work for free until we can find our feet. I sit silently, a thousand things leaping to my tongue: I can do better I can do more let me do more, two articles a week rather than one. Without even looking up from the folder in her hand, Helen signals to the chair across hers. Three steps inside the cluttered room stacked with old magazines, ours and our competitors’, and my breakfast-coffee with two sugars, and strawberry jam on whole-wheat toast-turns into a stone inside my stomach. ![]() Edge, the magazine I have written for and loved since I graduated from college, is hanging by a thread. It isn’t really my boss’s job to fire me. I walked into Helen’s office this morning certain she was going to fire me. ![]()
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