Lorea and Siobhan is written by Alicia E. Goranson and read by Katherine Cross.
Transcript:
Today is not Lorea’s day and so help whatever gods she believes in, it won’t improve tomorrow either. Vespa and Helios were the cutest couple when Helios first moved to town. Folks would find them together on Rainier rooftops and South Seattle street corners, wearing doggy ears and paw gloves. But Vespa needed a lot of emotional support. It’s why she began dating someone out of state in the first place. She brought them here and then Helios didn’t like to be used like that, and started telling anyone who would hear xer that the Sodo Anarch collective were abusive trash.
This was only mildly Lorea’s problem until she saw her name of the job board for forming the restorative justice crew to aid Vespa and Helios. Lorea wouldn’t actually have to be on the crew. But she’d have to interview Vespa and, somehow, Helios, and then ask around who would be the best people to intervene in this affair.
Lorea waited at the Georgetown bar where members of the collective routinely gathered to discuss collaborative duties, and ambushed Siobhan when she came in. “Siobhan, please,” Lorea begged. Lorea, who owned a warehouse and the trucks who filled it from the docks. Lorea, the physically strongest of the collective. Lorea, almost on bended knee before Siobhan.
“Please,” Lorea said. “Let me handle the mutual aid food purchase and prep this week. I know you don’t want to do it. I’m sure you can handle Vespa and Helios. You know them. They know you.”
“No,” Siobhan said. “We don’t fucking trade roles, especially in organizing a restorative justice crew. Vespa and Helios will fucking notice you didn’t want to help them and there’ll be no point in making the crew in the first place.”
Lorea’s watch beeped with a reminder that she needed to be at the waterfront in half an hour.
“What do you want?” Lorea said. “I don’t have the time or the spoons to handle everything going into forming a crew. I am fucking up to my ears in handling shit for half the collective already? I don’t want to start calling in favors. I know I am the last person to call in favors from the collective. But. Forget it. I have to go. I don’t know when it’s going to happen. I’m sorry.”
Siobhan watched a very frazzled Lorea leave the bar for her enormous black truck that looked like every other enormous black truck cosplaying a police car. She wondered what it would take; when would be the final straw to get Lorea to leave the collective. Or at least take some extended time off leaving Arturo in the lurch, if he ever wanted to keep working at the warehouse.
Siobhan gathered with the others around two tables pressed together, every side packed with chairs, and prepared to spend the night itemizing funds gathered for the Rainier members’ rent. Among the list of people needing help was Vespa. Someone at the table would have to ask the collective-shattering question; should they help out Helios as well? Is Helios still part of the collective, despite speaking ill of it, watching it abandon xer, and now possibly even leaving xer destitute? Would Helios even take the cash? What if it went into xer’s GoFundMe anonymously? Which of them would be the ones to ask Vespa if she was even comfortable with any of this?
Lorea. It had to start with Lorea. They just needed a volunteer to tell Lorea what she already knew. The wheels of justice were bound to a track, reliant on steps and stages in order, and for want of a Lorea, the cause would be lost.
-END-
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