“I don’t think you should do this-”

“This is the only time To do this,” she snapped and pushed past her producer. “Especially with all the passes they-”

“They are not going to broadcast you going rogue-” 

“Too many eyes on them with the build up to here that folks like you have allowed guarantees that they indeed will-” she sneered.

“Rogue equals ratings these days and you know it.”

She paused and looked back at him over the cold shoulder she was making herself give him.

“You think I won’t warn them?” he whispered cooly. “You are literally daring me to-”

She laughed as he angrily rolled his eyes in the darkened hallway. “Wouldn’t be the first time a pretty penny made you try to betray me, now would it?”

“Oh, come on!” he wheezed, openly called on his duplicity against her for the first time.

“But think about it- do you think you telling them is going to ingratiate you to them or list you as the weak, wannabe pariah who couldn’t control the talent yet again?”

“Do you really think that you will fare better than me in the aftermath if you absolve yourself from the engineering? It’s the only thing that will give you the power you keep trying to dog me to grasp in the first fucking place-” He narrowed his eyes at her in the dark.

The 20% he’d gotten of anything she’d done as his client had done worse than absolutely nothing to wipe the distaste out of his mouth he felt whenever she won any assignment or accolade. The only thing he loathed more than her success was that everything of value in his paltry life was keyed to it. His hatred of her made him force himself to want less just to impact her.

It’d created an environment where she’d spent the past nine months dealing with the blowback from the deals he’d tried to block from her while at her side that she’d won anyway. He’d been cut out of five deals he’d wilfully attempted to poison. And had blamed her for each of them tanking and then rebounding when he was pulled out of the mix.

His vengeance was not his, only the fuckery and the fuck up of it all had been.

“What are you going to look like when they let it fly anyway?” she purred, spun on her heels and walked away. “Besides… for the record? You’re fired,” she called out.

He turned around directly into the chests of the two gargantuan men waiting to escort him off the premises, one with a box of all the accoutrements he’d painstakingly scattered across back of house to passive-aggresssively stake his claim within it.

The jaundiced color that flooded into his face as she left him in the dark matched the sickly tinge of jeopardy he recognized he’d wilfully tried to put his client in again and again leading up to this moment of outright, pure mutiny.

---

The dark clouds she’d been quietly reeling underneath finally split open as she picked her way through snaking cables, lights and crew members running all over the space strung up between the dressing rooms and the set.

She deposited herself in the plush seat on the raised platform and waited until the ones who’d requested her to be the one to help them rise above this joined her on the perfectly lit dais. Air kisses were scattered as the two women nervously nestled across from her, primped and prodded as close to perfection as they were able to get.

They were a study in opposites, epitomes of either end of the spectrum of 21^st century southern belle beauty. 

One was so plain it was painful, a woman who looked like what was called tomind when a hilbilly waxed poetically about putting lipstick on a pig as a term of endearment for his missus as she preened with the pursed, thin lips of a woman from a lineage chock full of 25 year olds who’d smoked since the age of thirteen, and looked closer to 40 than 30 in spite of the spoilt cush lives they’d been able to lead off of the backs of others.

The other’s face and lips were so comically chock full of fillers she’d gotten for too many years too early that she looked masked up and ready to rob a bank. Restylane she’d never needed had already defiantly migrated into the strangest places, pulling traumatically thinned facial flesh taut in unnatural ways.

Every unnecessary pin prick of botulism her face had taken stood out in high definition on set as their respective handlers reassuringly murmured that they looked angelic.

Innocence had been the overall call makeup-wise, to gin up the comforting response they’d been raised to expect on the tail-end of any nefarious crime they’d felt like committing.

Nothing like white tears and a little conspicuously placed cream blush to trigger “those poor little girls!” hand-holding in the greater populace in situations like these.

The less pricked and pulled of the two warily sized up the award-winning nigger picked to softball questions over the plate for them with the garishly fake, flat smile of the third year sorority chick at a state school nowhere near the big ten that she was, still unable to fully hide the glee that flushed through her at the opportunity to haze or humiliate anyone in the hierarchy beneath her.

Pop-pop had assured her that the Help across the way from her was one of the Good ones, Obedient til the cows came home to grander causes than those written off as civil or critical these days.

He’d promised her she was in good, strong black hands, that the woman even reminded him in the face of the teat he’d suckled on as a child back in the day, in lieu of his own mother’s milk. Then again, Pop pop could never tell any nigger on tv apart from another, and to him they all looked like her, one way or another.

The more worked over one had nothing on her mind besides the mantra of the mother who’d raised her to be the beast of a promising young woman that she was.

“This is your chance- they’re all looking at you…take it-” Not only did she not see color, the only others who routinely registered to her had faces full of the junk she’d been getting injected with alongside her Mom for half a decade. Pattern recognition at its worst, all else reduced to objects in her way on the spatial plane. 

“Quiet on the set!” was roared from somewhere within the cavernous hangar that no one on set could pinpoint if their lives depended on it.

The last bit of powdering and preening went down before additionals scampered away and cameras zoomed in. “Action-”

---

“Welcome. I am Rhonda Roustberg and Tonight, we have the pleasure of having an exclusive with two of the young women at the center of the latest racial maelstrom to erupt on campus this fall-“

The camera pushed in onto the faces of each woman-child on the couch on the verge of overwhelmed tears as the broadcast that beamed out live was cut with close ups of the images that played behind them on set.

Christmas pageants, holding hands while praying at Thanksgiving dinner, feeding The Poor, cheerleading, hanging with Sorority sisters and in bikinis- epitomes of innocent, nubile, All-American girls, living the dream promised to them all for generations. 

“We didn’t mean to hurt anybody-” Lipsticked Pig whinnied.

“ We weren’t even trying to Be-” added the other, who then paused dramatically.

“We were just monkeying around, you know? Like to even think… that were were making monkey noises to be racist is just…mystifying-” she whispered and looked meaningfully deep into the camera.

A lone tear slid down her cheek as she turned away and pulled an offered tissue out of the box and held it daintly up to her nose.

‘Especially considering-” Rhonda murmured, chuckling softly as she sat the tissue box back down.

She paused when she felt the eyes of both women on her due to the laughter. 

“What’s so funny?” Pricked and Pulled snapped as she wiped away the tears.

“Especially considering what?” The chin of the lipsticked pig jutted out as her beady little eyes hardened and all the feigned innocence drained from her face.

“Look,” Rhonda began, “I believe you one hundred percent that you weren’t being racist at all-”

“Good!” Lipsticked Pig snapped a bit too forcefully.

“Especially considering,” Rhonda murmured as she scrolled the pad in her lap then tapped it.

“This is your family all together at Christmas, right? You with all your cousins, your Dad, his brothers and the Patriarch of your-”

A photograph bloomed of a gaggle of adorable kids splayed across the laps of the hairiest bunch of male relatives seen this side of a carnival in a very long time. “That’s your granddad, your Pappy? & his wife with the big ears?” Rhonda asked as she cycled to a close up picture of the girl’s grandfather and grandmother. 

“Yes, that’s-” Lipsticked pig began, confused by the line of questioning.

“That’s a lot of…hair… coming out of his..ears, nose… um,” Rhonda broached it as gently as possible, “everywhere except the top of his head, I mean-” she sighed softly as Linda the Lipsticked Pig’s face caught on fire, “How could you be doing anything but …monkeying around when… the stock you come from is as simian as it gets- I mean, look at those ears-”

“Wait- SimiaN!! you mean-” Linda scooted to the edge of the couch as her face twisted up in confusion as the gasps from the crew reached a crescendo.

“Simian, you know?” Rhonda continued cheerfully as she waved off the feedback and tapped a few more spots on her tablet.“Simian-” a flurry of National Geographic images of Baboons and other monkeys with coloring similar to both girls exploded behind them. “ Monkey-like-”

Pricked and pulled spun around on her perch and peered up at the slideshow of primates that danced across the scrim behind them in shock. 

“You all were clearly just… monkeying around, tapping into… something perhaps native to your- I mean think about it… How many times did you have lice as a kid? Did you just love climbing trees? ”

“We’re not fucking monkeys, you fucking Nigger! They are!” Linda roared.” They shouldn’t have even been allowed to move in there! They belong at the fucking zoo with the other monkeys!!”

Rhonda leaned back, momentarily feigning confused shock. “ Well, maybe they were allowed to move into your complex because it is considered to Be the Zoo because of the behavior of others like you- maybe your own landlord couldn’t tell the difference, I mean- look-”

Rhonda clicked on a image of a cluster of monkeys in the wild and dragged it next to a photo of another family gathering full of smiling aunts and more cousins. “The mannerisms are the same, look at even the thin lipped smiles, the eyes, the weirdly sloped cranial structure- the longing to- ”

Rebecca hooted against her own better judgement, unable to hide that she could see the similarities herself. 

“Becks!” Linda hissed hotly.

“I mean, I never thought about it that way until now but…” Rebecca turned and gave a bizarrely toothy grin to the camera, “ My aunt Mary and that one right there really do kinda look alike-wow!”

“We’re not monkeys, you fucking Nigger!!” Linda screamed.

“Linda,” Rhonda said calmly, “ you screaming the word nigger in my face not only is not helping your claims of innocence, it means nothing to me.”

“What??! You fucking-” Linda leered at Rhonda.

“Yes, we took the word back. It’s neutralized. How could it mean what …screeching it clearly means to you…to me in times like these? I mean, for fucks sake, you’re literally on camera, seen around the world making monkey noises. Like a fucking baboon playing with it’s own shit, encouraged by the other monkeys alongside it.

“Nigger is just more of people like you lobbing the shit they’d otherwise themselves eat as it is, left to their own devices. You should sit back. You look savage, like a wild animal ready to lunge like that-”

Linda’s brows shot off her face as she blinked and looked around for someone, anyone to save her. Her obscenely thin lips trembled as she sat back on the couch and started to cry for real for the first time in this press tour they’d drummed up in lieu of just apologizing to neighbors they’d offended.

Rhonda cleared her throat and continued casually chatting with Rebacca as if Linda had been devoured by the couch they both sat on. “I mean…Maybe you just…saw them … from a DNA, structural place… as a cluster of monkeys invading your territory,” Rhonda paused as she zeroed in on the next images to flash.

Becks grinned sheepishly, and shrugged, “maybe-” the grin froze when a photo montage of the beautiful Cinnamon and chocolate-skinned 20- something Black girls they’d been caught on the ring camera harassing began.

Every snapshot looked like it’d been taken at golden hour. Not a trace of contour, botox or fake lashes in sight, they beamed with the light of young women on the verge of bountiful, exciting lives, waiting to be fully embraced.

With every shot cycled through the undertones of Rebecca’s face became more green. All bets were off when the pictures of them lounging happily around the pool were juxtaposed next to the ones the segment had led with of the Sorority girls.

“And they tan too? Wow. I mean… even look at their lush lips and …what you do,” Rhonda murmured. “I don’t think you’re a Hater of them at all, Rebecca. I can see with my own eyes you’re a Fan-”

Linda gurgled angrily about suing under her breath on the couch besides her literal partner in crime, Rebecca, who’d always been simply more vain than racist when it came down to brass tacks anyway as she peered up at the photo of a cluster of thin lipped, wispy haired monkeys framed by a shot of her and Linda doing their best to be beautiful to one side of it, their gorgeous neighbors in their sun-kissed, natural state to the other.

“Women like you would always end up being fans, peaceably too, playing with amplifying what you can “fix.” Rhonda said conspiratorially “ If only you could get from under the influence of your more …regular-degular Primate sisters who hate how they look in the mirror so much that everything unlike them becomes a surface that reflects the horror they see in themselves back out into the world, trying to latch back onto them.” Rhonda pivoted a bit towards Linda.

“Linda, women like you will negate the beauty you see around you until it makes you sick, if you’re not careful. Do not think those making money off of carting you two around like sensationalized carnival gimps care about you or your supposed ‘traditional’ beauty.

Linda huffed.

“The only thing beautiful about you to them is the money they can make off of your literal simian-looking, calling the Black monkey asses- They want you to remain stupid because they’ve monetized your racist stupidity. Not ONE of them has even moved to stop this interview. Because they were too busy strategizing how to make money off of you,” Rhonda purred. 

“My Pop pop was wrong about you-” Linda hissed. “ And I knew it before I sat down, I just…”

Rhonda clicked on an image of Linda’s granddad.

“He looks like he’s old enough to have had a mammy for his nanny, am I right?” Rhonda asked absently.

“Okay- enough of this bloodbath-” bloomed out of the pitch black around the set.

“CUT!!”