Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

I took a seat, smoothed my hands over my lap, looked around, and dissociated.

When I thought risk, I didn’t think about money, mine or anyone else’s. Risk was white jeans on my period, coffee on an airplane, hitchhiking, the pull-out method. But the men weren’t talking to, or about, me; they never were.

“Okay,” she said. “But, for the sake of argument, what if we limit our sample to white people?”

“I’ve been living like someone in her twenties for over a decade,” a coworker observed one afternoon, as we idled around the office bar. “I’m almost forty. Why am I going to three concerts a week? Wasn’t I supposed to have children?”