The Atmospherians by Alex McElroy (reading fiction .TXT) 📗

deleted his post and every other photo of us together. He broke up with me over text. The next morning, Cassandra appeared on Wake Up! America. She was “blindsided” by the cruelty I had shown Lucas Devry in my comment (which appeared on the chyron beneath her). She wondered whether she had ever truly known me. She told the hosts I routinely cheated on my regimen, drank regularly when I went out, used charcoal masks at least three times a week. Gross exaggerations. She relayed her version of the Wake Up! America segment. “Sasha assured me I would speak alongside her. When I arrived, she acted like I didn’t exist. She claims to care deeply about her friends—but true friendship demands honesty. I’m not sure she’s capable of that.” Even more than demonizing me, the interview turned Cassandra into a spurned, relatable friend. At the end, she promoted her six-week meditation session focused on finding one’s authentic self on the path to honest relationships. “Space is limited,” she added. “If you’re interested, please enroll immediately.”

Her session sold out before her interview ended. All day, I hemorrhaged followers. The police questioned me but didn’t press charges—my comment hardly constituted bullying compared to the rest of the sludge on the internet. Exoneration only made things worse. Internet trolls deemed it a miscarriage of justice. They made Devry into a martyr for free speech. Killed for expressing himself, they claimed—without irony, it appeared.

Soon death threats infested my inbox. Soon no one would answer my calls—not even my mother, who received dozens of threats every day and was furious at me for acting with such terrible judgment. Soon the men protested outside my apartment. Soon I was fired. Soon I wanted only to sleep. Soon I was living off takeout and dread. Soon there was a knock on my door, and behind it was Dyson and inside his mouth was a promise to make everything right.

what the men needed to know

I started a list of all the things men needed to know to become better men. I had no intention of showing the men the list. The list was a source of solace for me. It was a psychological security blanket. In my alone time, I added to it in response to whatever had happened that day, then read it out loud to myself, as if casting a spell.

All women have names, I wrote to kick off the list. And rarely are their names Sugar or Honey or Sweetie.

Clearing your phlegm is inappropriate in professional settings.

Flatulence is inappropriate in professional settings.

The Atmosphere is a professional setting.

You’re not really very experienced.

Women know when you’re staring.

Shirtsleeves are not napkins.

Don’t make other women your mother. Only your mother’s your mother.

There is nothing brave about killing an animal that cannot shoot a gun.

There are no reasons for guns to exist.

Keep your hands to yourself.

What you consider pain is likely mere inconvenience.

You have never truly been scared.

Your jokes have never been funny.

sixteen

THE MORNING SUN smeared pink light over the tips of the trees. The sheds were boxes of noise: snoring and coughing and grunts loud enough to compete with the birds. Dyson and I had given the trough a thorough bleaching and hosing the night before. But as we stepped out of the woods, vomit was all I could smell.

We had drunk through the night to settle our nerves and now a hangover thickened my thoughts. In the barn, as Dyson outlined plans for the morning, his words wafted away like breaths in the winter. “Uh-huh,” I kept saying. He was kind enough not to ask if I was paying attention.

We set up for breakfast: bowls and spoons on the picnic table, a plastic bin of bran flakes and a carton of tepid rice milk on a table pressed against the fence. Outside, I unlocked the shed doors and blew into a tin whistle. Men lumbered outside. “You have three minutes to dress and convene at the barn,” I said.

No one moved. I blew the whistle again. They scrambled inside.

Dyson and I waited at the head of the table, close to the fence. “Try to stop shaking,” he said. I hadn’t realized I was.

The men entered wearing their tracksuits. They were personalized—names on the tags—and one size smaller than what the men normally wore. They tugged the material out of discomfort, trying to accommodate their stomachs and thighs. The sizes were meant to remind them of the stranglehold of masculinity. It would encourage them to work out harder, to eat less than they wanted. Peter, however, was unbothered by the fit. He wore the smallest available size—a Medium—and the tracksuit made his slender frame appear athletic and muscular.

The men retrieved their bowls and formed a line at the front. They showed signs of the previous day’s exertions: pasty faces, eyes bobbing like boats in their skulls—though I didn’t know them well enough to decide if these were markers of illness or how they naturally looked in the morning.

Dyson poured a cup of bran flakes into each bowl. They shuffled to me for the milk. “This can’t be all we’re getting,” Gerry Simpatico said.

“The bran flakes are enriched with calcium and protein and every vitamin your body requires,” I said. “With none of the excessive sugars or fats you find in processed cereals.”

“Your animal products, your bacon, your steak, and your eggs—they’re all loads on the body,” Dyson said. “You’ve been sold these crazy ideas about what you’re supposed to eat. The food pyramid is a propaganda campaign engineered by agricultural monopolies in service to Big Pharmacy. The more you follow the pyramid, the sicker you get. The sicker you get the more pills you need. We have known this for decades, but the machine keeps chugging along.”

It was all the convincing they needed. The men trusted Dyson. They looked at him with the pride of aging fathers, their trust condescending and fearful. They lifted their bowls for the rice milk with