Mike Omer - In the Darkness

He’d watched the entire video from start to finish only once. It was fourteen hours long. It wasn’t even the director’s cut—it was just the raw material, and some of it wasn’t great. The whole part between 7:08:00 and 11:32:00 was just her lying motionless with her eyes closed. And after 12:35:23, the woman stopped moving altogether.

But all in all, it was definitely good material to work with. He estimated his personal edited version would be about three hours long.

Right now, for a bit of release after a long day, he knew of several good segments he could watch. He could start with 3:42:00.

As Nicole Medina thumped the lid, starting to scream again, he grabbed the box of tissues on the desk, breathing hard.

Harry Barry sat by his desk, staring into space. The incessant noise of the Chicago Daily Gazette office served as a background music for his thoughts, something he almost didn’t notice anymore. The sound of a printer spewing pages, the endless tapping of his coworkers’ keyboards, the daily loud phone conversation between Rhonda and her husband. It hadn’t changed for the past six years. Six years of sameness. Six years of writing what his editor liked to call human interest stories and Harry called addictive trash. Celebrity news and sex scandals. Sometimes he mixed it up with some celebrity scandals and sex news.

He’d used to like it. He was good at it.

But he’d gotten a taste of something different, and now his everyday life adopted a bland flavor. Like someone who ate meatloaf every day, and liked it, but then had a onetime encounter with a juicy steak.

He pondered this as he recalled the short conversation he’d had on the phone just an hour earlier. He’d received a tip. The tantalizing hint of a good story, one that he’d been working on for over a month now. And the next chapter of this story was not in Chicago, where he worked.

It was in San Angelo.

The problem was how to get there.

The idea of taking a vacation and paying for the trip himself sat uncomfortably with him. No, much better for his boss to pay for the trip and for Harry’s expenses. And infinitely better if he didn’t spend his precious vacation days but instead got paid for his time. How to convince his editor: that was the issue he mulled over in his head. He couldn’t see any way to solve that conundrum. It made him quite upset.

He browsed to his latest online article, where he’d outed a famous local college football halfback’s affair with a cheerleader. The title of the article—“Give Me an F-L-I-N-G”—made him quite proud. It was a short article, written in a somewhat bemused manner, like all his “human interest stories” were. He’d signed it, as always, as H. Barry. Because Harry Barry wasn’t an acceptable name for a reporter. In fact, it wasn’t an acceptable name for anything. It was an indication of parental laziness. As if his mother had said, “Let’s not think of a whole name—let’s just figure out one letter to switch.”

Now, as he often did when he needed a fun distraction, he scrolled down to the comments. He enjoyed the miasma of trolls, angry readers, and loneliness that accompanied the comments in general, but what he loved most were the outraged readers. Nothing was as satisfying as a reader who read the article from beginning to end in fascination and then hurried to comment about everyone’s obsession with sex or violence and moan about the decline of American values.

One comment in particular, posted by ConcernedCitizen13, caught his eye. Trash. The “writer” of this article should be ashamed of himself.

It drew his attention first and foremost because it was the only comment with no spelling mistakes and with actual punctuation. But more to the point, because of the sentiment.

That he should be ashamed of himself.

He stared at it long and hard, a grin forming on his face. Shame, now there was a thing.

He checked the time. He should have sent the draft of his next article to his editor ten minutes ago. Which meant he would appear just about—

“Harry. Where’s the draft?” Daniel McGrath stepped into his cubicle.

Harry didn’t answer, staring at the screen, his gaze far away.

“Harry. Hey!”

Harry blinked, glancing back at his longtime editor. “Oh. Daniel. I didn’t hear you.”

“Where’s the damn article? You told me you had something good planned for today. The nude paparazzi pictures of that Russell woman.”

“Paparazzi. Right.” Harry let out a long sigh.

“Well? Where is it?”

“Daniel, did you ever stop to consider what we’re doing?”

The editor blinked in surprise. “Is this about not hiring our own paparazzi photographers again? I told you, it’s way cheaper to—”

“No, I mean . . .” Harry gestured sadly at the screen. “Everything.”

“The paper?”

“Those articles I write. Those people. I was sitting here writing that article, and I suddenly thought, Cassy Russell has parents.”

“She . . . well, what difference does that—”

“She has a mother and a father.”

“That’s how parents usually work, yes.”

“Can you imagine opening the newspaper on Sunday morning, and your daughter’s bare chest is on the front page?”

“Don’t flatter yourself. It’s on page eight, Harry.”

“How it must feel. The same girl you bounced on your knees . . .”

“And we pixelate those breasts, you know that.”

“The girl you told bedtime stories to . . .”

“What are you talking about?”

“How it wrenches his heart, his daughter exploited that way.”

“Exploited? I . . . didn’t you tell me she was the one who called the paparazzi photographers in the first place?”

“Didn’t you ever make mistakes when you were young? We were like hyenas, waiting for her to fall. So what if she called them? She’s still young.”

“She’s twenty-six.”

“She’s twenty-six.” Harry shook his head, shutting his eyes. “Twenty-six.”

Daniel nudged closer, lowering his voice. “Harry, what’s going on?”

“We don’t make the world a better place.”

“A better place? What are you saying? We provide entertainment. We make people happy.”

“We need to hold ourselves to a higher standard.” Harry began to enjoy himself. “It’s my fault. I got addicted to the attention. But now that we have a strong platform, we can use it. I write human interest stories, right? Let’s make them count.”

“Make them count?”

“You remember that email? The nurse who took care of that homeless person with the cancer? Let’s write a piece on her.”

“Are you trying to avoid writing this article? I can give it to someone else. I have a dozen junior writers dying to write the Russell woman’s boobs article.”

“ Cassy Russell. She has a name. She’s a human being, Daniel. A human being with feelings.” That was an actual quote from a comment on one of his articles.

“She’s a human being whose husband embezzled millions and now bared her boobs to get some attention.”

“I want to write about that teacher who tutors illegal immigrants in English.”

“People don’t want to read that!”

“They should ! I don’t want to be ashamed of what I do.” He considered thumping his chest and decided it would be going too far. “I’m going to write good human interest stories. No more exploitation.”

Daniel’s eyes shifted. Anxiety flickered in them. Harry was the paper’s most popular journalist by far. Not just because of his topic material but because he knew how to use it. The worst thing that could happen was for him to be ashamed .