Naval Liaison is written by Alicia E. Goranson and read by Katherine Cross.
Transcript:
Shelly is exactly what the Navy wants out of a career woman. She bought a white picket house in East Bremerton with her husband who cares for her two dogs, Shiloh and Midnight. She has a home office where she reviews the latest technology journals when she isn’t on base. When she is, she teaches an occasional class at the academy about her work as a liaison; accompanying people important to the Armed Forces on the base, and discussing the base’s history and any work that might be interesting to them. She develops portfolios and presentations, and her favorite thing is to go stand under the aircraft carrier at the dock and be humbled and overtaken by its majesty.
Shelly is attractive but professional, and doesn’t want kids. Even the generals have stories about her going beyond the call of duty to bring a client a particular vintage they adore, or arranging for a high level demonstration of the base’s more confidential projects. Like the Army brats they keep sending over, who have their own area of the base that few have the clearance to enter. Of course, she knows what goes on there, and dislikes all of it.
Shelly enjoys a vodka tonic on her days off at home, sitting on a porch in a neighborhood the HOA keeps pristine. The neighborhood cat, Lemonade, stops by with a present for her – a small finch, unmoving, with one wing broken. Shelly shoos Lemonade away and goes inside to fetch an old newspaper for the body. Her husband still enjoys the paper in the mornings, even it is mostly conspiracy fluff and outright lies at this point. Shelly scoops up the bird, its beautiful spindly feathers rustling in the breeze, its dainty beak resting shut on the printed word.
She saw one of the Army brats once, during the day, cheeks sallow, mouth hung open, eyes shut, and once again had to swallow her fear and go home for another drink.
She tosses the bird’s corpse in the compost bin, where it will become mulch for a garden somewhere; laden with banana stickers, shredded paper plates, and also one beak where the remainder of the bird has been chewed up and rotted away. Good things grow from mulch. Berries and fruit and all sorts of lovely flowers from the garden. But at work, only one thing grows from those Army kids, who know no better, and spend the daylight hours in stupor. They shouldn’t exist. It’s a mockery of life, a travesty of an institution that should know better, that used to instill pride in servicemembers. But now? Now they just chew them up, spit them out, and send them out again, barely themselves, barely anything.
-END-
Portions of the materials are the copyrights and trademarks of Paradox Interactive AB, and are used with permission. All rights reserved. For more information please visit worldofdarkness.com.