Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

The lights came back on, brighter somehow, and there was a woman sitting on Rose’s mother’s couch, a woman dressed all in red, sitting there not bored exactly but like she wasn’t as interested as she actually was.

Then she stood up.

She stood up and up and seemed just so damn tall, beautiful and tall.

Rose didn’t know who she was, didn’t know her name, and only later would she learn about her connection to the Regional Office or what the Regional Office was, and about the personal war she was about to wage against it.

But that would be later.

At that moment, Rose only knew that here was this woman, stunning and calm and powerful, and that simply looking at her made that hitch in her voice come back.

The Woman in Red stepped up close to Rose and touched her finger gently to Rose’s forehead, where there would be a nasty bruise soon enough, and in that touch Rose felt some living, pulsing, twitching memory shiver under her own skin, a thing that started at the touch, coursed through her down to her feet and into the earth, and then rose up from the ground all over again, up her legs and through her whole body to rush tingling up the back of her neck — she could feel it, could trace the shiver’s path — up her neck and over and through her skull, where it landed, finally, on that spot, touched her the way she’d been desperate to be touched, and her body went limp. After everything that had happened that day, her body decided now was the time to give out, and she felt herself start to fall, and she hoped — deeply hoped — that the Woman in Red would reach out and grab hold of her, but she didn’t.

Henry — where he’d come from she didn’t know — Henry caught her, instead, and she looked up at his not-unhandsome face, and the feeling continued to move through her and seemed to grow out of her, seemed to want to envelop him, too.

She didn’t push him away or struggle out of his grasp. She let him hold her and despite everything, she moved in, instead, for a kiss.

Her first.

Despite what she’d told Patty and Gina, despite all the things assholes like Akard and Schroeder said about her, her very first kiss.

When she’s older, when she’s back in this small town, when she’s drunk and half-asleep in her car, having pulled herself over because even in this state she knows she shouldn’t be on the road, and before the police pull up behind her with their bright flashing lights, and before she mouths off to them, before she tells them to go fuck themselves because for Christ’s sake she’s doing the right thing and not driving back home shit-faced unlike most people she knows, and before she resists arrest and struggles so strongly against the handcuffs that for the next week her wrists will be red and swollen, before she head-butts the window of the police car and cracks the window, and then tries but fails to smash the foot of one of the officers with her booted heel, before any of this happens, she’ll be thinking about this kiss, which wasn’t a great kiss, by no means was it a great or sexy or even sensual kiss, but it was her first real kiss, which made it memorable in and of itself, but also because of how she likes to joke with herself about that kiss and how fireworks lit the sky, right as they kissed, likes to joke with herself about how all hell broke loose with that kiss.

Which, in a way, it did.

Then the kiss broke and the room and her momma’s house and the people in it and the Woman in Red all came back into focus.

Judging by the look on Henry’s face and the sound of the woman’s laughter, the kiss was unexpected. Henry stood her up.

“Are you all right?” the Woman in Red asked.

Before Rose could answer, Henry shook his head. “Nothing that won’t heal.”

The Woman in Red smiled. “That wasn’t what I meant.” Then she looked at Rose and then back to Henry. “Well? Your assessment.”

Henry shook his head again. “You saw it all for yourself,” he said. He paused and pressed his palm gingerly to his side. “She’s strong.” He looked at Rose. “Angry,” he said. He didn’t touch his fingertips to his lips but Rose will always imagine that he did when he said, “Passionate.”

The woman smiled again, the look on her face so genuine and welcoming that Rose couldn’t help but smile back and feel, for whatever reason, relief.

“Still,” Henry said, and the smile on the woman’s face wavered.

“Yes?” the Woman in Red asked.

“I think she’s too young.”

Rose thought she saw the Woman in Red roll her eyes. Then she took Rose by the hand and squeezed Rose’s fingers slightly, playfully, and said, “She’s ready.” Then, to Rose, she asked, “Are you ready?”

“Ready?” Rose asked, surprised to find her voice there, just waiting for her but sounding not like herself at all. “Ready for what?”

She pulled Rose closer to her, close enough that Rose could smell what she thought was a light, citrusy perfume, but what she would later come to find was just the woman’s natural smell, and the Woman in Red said, “Come with me.”

She smiled her smile again and said, “I’m going to tell you a story.”

From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:

Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution

In order to grasp the full consequence of both the rise and fall of the Regional Office, in order to better understand where these women — both the Operatives of the Regional Office and their attackers — came from, what wellspring delivered them their mystical properties, how Oyemi and her partner, Mr. Niles, sought them out when these mystical properties manifested, why Oyemi focused her energies only on these women, in order to understand what had been lost when the Regional Office lost its way, one must know one’s history.

When it comes to the history — the complete and accurate history — of the Regional Office, one might begin with the day Mr. Niles and Oyemi met, back in the third grade, back before their names were Mr. Niles and Oyemi, even. Or one might move farther along in time to the day Mr. Niles devised and drew up the plans for the Black Box, which was instrumental in guiding both Oyemi’s mystical properties and the focus of the Oracles when seeking out new Recruits and which brought them Jasmine, one of their most successful early Operatives. Others endeavor to begin with the day Mr. Niles and Oyemi “recruited” the first Oracle, a young woman named Nell, whose recruitment sent ripples, far-reaching ripples, into the fate of the Regional Office. Some scholars focus their attentions almost entirely on the Golden Age of the Regional Office, on the exploits of the likes of Jasmine (for obvious and sophomoric reasons, her battle against Mud Slug never fails to find its way into almost every scholarly study of the Regional Office); and, before her, Gemini and her long-running battles against Harold Raines; on the missions conducted by Emma, on Emma’s mysterious death, and so on, these authors favoring the flashier (but shallower) accounts of the Battle of Blanton Hill; on the capture of the interdimensional terrorist Regency; but ever failing to delve into the deeper history of the organization and the ramifications of choices made by the less visible operators.

This paper, hoping to offer a more nuanced and complete consideration of the Regional Office, will assign the beginning of the Regional Office to the accident that should have killed Oyemi but didn’t. The accident that didn’t kill her, but in fact imbued her with mystical properties. The accident that happened on a Tuesday, at or near IKEA.

Oyemi was shopping at IKEA, not because she needed anything but because she was bored. Mr. Niles had left town for a week and she had few other people — i.e., no other people — she called friends, and walking through IKEA killed more time than anything else she could think of to do. Not to mention, it was heated and she couldn’t afford to run the heat in her own apartment.