Falling Falling Stars

26 - Huge

I wrote this entire chapter in a fever dream. And now I'm going to reward myself by playing some Hades. I hope you all enjoy this!!

*

'Hey, what's her name? The receptionist?' Efnisien asked.

Dr Gary looked at him oddly. 'Mack,' he said. 'Mackenzie. But she prefers the short version.'

'Oh, like Mack the Knife.'

'You know Frank Sinatra?' Dr Gary said.

Efnisien stared at him. 'No? Shit, is there another song with that name? It was originally from The Threepenny Opera, you know, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht? Crielle used to hate me watching it because it was this socialist play, basically. But yeah. It was originally known as like, The Pimp's Opera, which I think is hilarious. But you know, that doesn't sell as well so they changed it, I guess. It's not an opera.'

'I didn't know. I presume it's the same song,' Dr Gary said.

'The song only came into existence because the lead actor threw a tantrum that he didn't have an opening song. And then it was like, honestly, kind of the best song of the play. So maybe it pays to be a diva sometimes.'

'You seem to be in a better mood than last time,' Dr Gary said. 'Did anything happen?'

Did anything happen?

Efnisien stared down at his hands. Arden had dropped him off back home on Saturday and Efnisien had immediately fallen into a deep sleep that lasted just about until Sunday afternoon. And then he'd caught up on transcription work, because he'd fallen behind. He'd received an email from Professor Damilola Adayemi, with a probational audio excerpt he had to transcribe within seventy two hours. The email was curt, he could almost hear the tone of her voice firmly telling him that if he made more than six errors, he wouldn't be suitable.

He listened to the audio transcript and automatically realised why she was so challenging. Most of the references and names she was dropping were academics from different countries in Africa. He didn't know how to intuitively spell words from Yoruban, Igbo or Ijaw ethnic groups, or any of the others he was reading. Desperately, he'd searched for some of her earlier publications since she was a Professor and had plenty. He found her public reference lists and was able to match up many of the names and familiarise himself with a new dataset of references in anthropology and sociology.

He ended up down a rabbit hole, researching Yoruban linguistics, and then was idly looking at free language courses before he realised he had to focus.

Everything else in the transcript was easy. The actual terminology didn't bother him at all, and Damilola had an amazing turn of phrase which meant he didn't need to clean up any of her work by removing excess 'ums' or 'ahs' that he sometimes heard in other audio files. Once he'd gotten over the hurdle of understanding how to note all the references down with the correct spelling, he thought – if she approved of his work – he'd really like working for her.

Also she offered to pay him twice as much as the others.

He sent her back the file late Sunday evening, then ate both halves of Arden's sandwich even though eating that much food gave him cramps. Thankfully, they didn't last long. Afterwards he took some painkillers for his hips and lay there thinking about the fact that Arden wanted him to 'open up' more and Efnisien thought he was plenty fucking open.

Just not about the things that Arden wanted him to be open about.

Efnisien didn't like pity parties. He especially didn't like when they were about him. He hated talking about stuff like that. It felt manipulative, like he was making people feel sorry for him when they should know better.