Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

pretend the only emotions we felt were happy, pleasant, and competent.

She tried to look at it the way Ardie would. Dollars and cents. Or was the phrase actually dollars and sense? She didn’t know. She thought it might make a difference.

Ardie used to think it was a phase. This desire to retreat into herself, to claw inside her own skin like a hermit crab. It had always been this way.

Not all the time, but the mood and desire struck her unexpectedly, like a gastrointestinal virus, and she was forced to heed its call.

Bechdel test

We had to have been overreacting, behaving hysterically, a word which was quite literally derived from the Latin “hystericus”—or—“from the womb.” Actually, a great deal of time and words had gone into the art of not quite believing us. Adjectives like “bossy” and “feisty” and “pushy” and “intense” became subtle excuses meant to help justify selective hearing loss.