The air was light and cool, a crispness washing over a young woman in the early evening air, with a silence so thinly veiled but a single word could pierce it. It was crystalline, a perfection untouched. Still, she understood to speak was to err, and to err in his presence was a heavily punishable offense. This moment, seconds spanning into a series of infinities, was by far the most “in tune with oneself” as she could possibly imagine.
She figures most people consider themselves at peace in nature, under the cold, cascading current of a blue waterfall in the leafy embrace of the evergreen. Or maybe they envision themselves at ease, body bent into painful release, muscles tense and then slack, while on the clean carpet of their local YMCA, the entire ordeal under the watchful eye of their yoga instructor.
For her, it is the brief interlude between her finishing touches on the politician, and the first steps he (or she, as rumors had this next election being) took onto that stage for the Presidential Debate. There was something about the cloud of chemicals hovering in a haze above him, freezing and hardening his hairs on end, and the exactness of the measurements for every tie tightened, suit straightened, and smile set into place that makes her feel….at home.
Naturally, this election year is varied from the others, so much so that it almost throws off the usual purity of her task. In the rotating, steel-rimmed throne before her, spinning the chair this way and that, raising and lowering its height with the mentality of a child, is exactly that: a young boy just old enough to legally drive seated where men of 30 summers had sat just before.
Messy-haired, wide-eyed, and with a look crossed between frightened deer and hungry wolf, Thalen Ramses was hardly fit to lead a country, yet here he sat. In Harlow’s opinion, he was hardly fit for the suit Daddy bought him, sleeves rolled to compensate for wrinkles and bundles, and pants held up by a belt too large for a thin waist that exposed an unkempt, untucked white shirt underneath.
She could drown him in hairspray, smother him with makeup, even place him in his so-called “best light” (highlighting the right side of his face unblemished by a nasty bout of acne not two weeks prior), and it still wouldn’t be enough to convince the public his nomination for leader of the Free World wasn’t solely based on Internet popularity. It was a fact he himself vehemently denied, and it was a fact Harlow desperately tried to squash.
“No.
You can’t.
Not ever.
I do mean it.
Because I said so.”
This was the conversation with Ramses from Harlow’s point of view, the same five-phrase exchange occurring between the occasional temper tantrum from the hopeful candidate as to why no, he couldn’t just stop the debate to grab some McDonald’s. He also could not rush onstage and sucker punch his political opponent (“Not ever”), and she did mean it. Lastly, he found herself running out of credible reasons for why she “just like my mother!” by simply stating it was because she said so.
The result gave her a pouty but complacent teenager. Unfortunately, it was a teenager unknowing of the consequences for tangling with the tiger of trader that was Paulinus Stagg.
Stagg was a man who’d sat through fifty annual company parties for his father’s coal manufacturing plant, and another twenty more with himself at the head of the honorary table. He was also someone who enjoyed his meat rare, his family seen (and not heard), and his workers competent. A laissez-faire capitalist.
Even the common man knew he was a hands-off sort of manager. So when the public surged for him to run for a position higher than the local governor, he’d left the race in what he believed to be the capable hands of his younger next-door-neighbor employees he’d watched grow up in the community. So the story goes, this was when Ramses gained infamy for that video, and the rivalry began.
