Valerie Falls in Love with a Voice

By Miranda Markwell

Singer-songwriter Valerie is having a very hard time writing songs about anything other than break-ups, of which she has suffered many. Since pining is her specialty, Valerie finds herself obsessively fixated on a woman she’s never met: Helena, a DJ at a local independent radio station who hosts “The Elder Millennial Hour.” The charm for Valerie? Helena’s perfect, sonorous speaking voice and her impeccable taste in music.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryant Street Shorts
• Release date: Feb 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781094445892

Book preview

1

Helena was always the first visitor to the coffee shop on weekday mornings, rolling into Susan Sontag Drank Here at six o’clock on the dot. (People usually abbreviated the name to Sontag’s, in part because no one was really sure if the author had ever actually ordered a drink at this small coffee shop in St. Louis.)

Helena liked being first. She liked hearing the little bell ring when she opened the door. And she especially liked that the barista who worked the morning shift always made sure her lavender oat-milk latte was already underway when Helena arrived. The beauty of the routine only confirmed her love of living in St. Louis, a small big city with incredible charm and no difficulty finding parking — like, ever.

She used these morning visits to the coffee shop to get her mind together before her radio show, The Elder Millennial Hour, which played on weekday mornings from eight to ten on St. Louis’s independent radio station, JDHX. It did not escape her that the show was actually two hours in length and not just one, but Helena figured that the good people of St. Louis probably didn’t mind the inconsistency. In her notebook, she would scribble out some of the banter she’d deliver during her radio show, small asides that filled in between the bands of her youth: Savage Garden, Ludacris, Goo Goo Dolls, City High, Tracy Chapman, Sixpence None the Richer, Britney, and so many more. She would also jot down her thoughts about any new music she planned to review during her show, which she centered exclusively on millennial recording artists.

All in all, she was doing very millennial things for a very millennial job.

And she loved it.

The morning-shift barista quietly brought Helena her usual latte, deftly setting the big mug on the wobbly table with zero spillage. The barista was about Helena’s age, her eyes a little bleary from being up so early to make the morning scones and muffins. Helena wondered how early the barista’s shift had started. Maybe 4:00 a.m.? Surely not earlier. How long did it really take to make sweets and open a local coffee shop?

But Helena was more distracted by the softness of the barista’s countenance. She never tried to make small talk with Helena on weekday mornings (something Helena appreciated), and she always gave Helena the space she needed to do whatever she was doing. At seven thirty, the barista would check to make sure Helena still wanted her hot tea to go before sending her off with a warm cup to drink on her way to the station. Helena came to Sontag’s so often that the barista finally offered to just start a tab for her.

You can settle up on Friday mornings, if you like, the barista had said. It doesn’t make any difference to me.

That was exactly what Helena had done, just like an old-timey patron of a local café. She had a tab at Sontag’s, and that was just divine.

The barista had done something slightly different with her hair this morning. Tiny wisps of baby bangs curled around the contours of her face, making her look softer and more relaxed, like something out of a painting. It was a stark contrast to Helena’s own morning look: a Carhartt beanie pulled down tightly over her head and aviator frames that could have belonged to a young Gloria Steinem. Helena looked like she was about to ride a skateboard to work; the barista looked like she’d just rolled in from Emily Brontë’s windy moors.

Helena was staring. She always caught herself staring at the barista in the mornings, but she’d never taken the extra step to ask the woman’s name. Or maybe she had asked a long time ago but the name was forgotten now. The barista probably knew Helena’s name from her receipts, but there had never been a reason for her to say it aloud. So, unwittingly, they remained nameless with each other, and Helena felt that she liked it this way. It was nice to stare at a beautiful woman and maintain a sense of mystery about her. Helena didn’t know her name, but she knew that the woman was hardworking, kind, and attentive. It didn’t hurt that she was also fucking adorable, but that was just icing on the cake.

Helena felt calm around the nameless barista who worked at Sontag’s on weekday mornings. In the background, the radio played the NPR classical-music station, a good choice for early mornings like this. Helena wondered if any of the baristas ever switched the music to JDHX on occasion, but she understood the preference for the dependable mix of classical on public radio. The whole ambience was ideal for falling in love in a coffee shop, and Helena knew it.

But Helena wasn’t so sure about falling in love with anybody. This morning, in particular, her pen was muddling through some emotional thoughts instead of planning for her radio show. She mindlessly journaled about the one thing that caused her a frustrating amount of confusion: her on-again, off-again hookup, Thad.

The fact that his name was Thad should have been a red flag from the beginning. But Helena had not heeded the warnings of everyone around her, convinced that it was just a name and that there was no way it could mean the guy was toxic.

In fact, Thad was very toxic, but in a dopey, pitiful way. He was also very good at…well, he was just very, very good at sex, and that was a problem. Helena was aware that her judgment around Thad was clouded, and that his ability to make her feel good was just a weird fluke in the face of his total incompetence as a human adult. Nonetheless, she was trying very hard to be honest with herself about her attraction to Thad and her willingness to put up with the fact that he was flaky, mildly manipulative, prone to gaslighting, and definitely a narcissist who still did his laundry at his mother’s house. The fact that he had his own apartment at all was a miracle from the gods themselves.

Was Helena being superficial? Of course she was.

She was a twenty-seven-year-old woman with no money and no prospects. She was a burden to her parents only in that she spammed them with memes too often (only child, what can you do). If she were honest with herself, she knew she was wary of being too judgmental of Thad lest she turn around and start judging herself.

The kind barista approached.

We have way too many scones this morning, she began, her voice wispy and warm. Want a strawberry one? It’s on the house.

I would love that, said Helena, her own voice still croaky from the morning. The hot tea on the ride to the station would warm up her vocal cords before her radio show.

The barista smiled and then came back with a chintzy plate, a fork, and a strawberry scone with a little pat of butter on top. Absolute perfection.

Helena ate her scone and continued to think about whether or not she was going to text Thad a response. He had sent her u up? texts three nights in a row, but Helena had left all of them on read. Honestly, she would have written him back immediately if he had just put in a little effort, but he clearly had not noticed that she was not responding. The eggplant emoji was not only outdated — it was also unromantic. If he had texted something like Hello, would love to connect with you because I think you’re lovely, she would have thrown herself headfirst into his shitty apartment, but he was clearly taking their relationship for granted.

It wasn’t a relationship, not really. It was just a thing that they sometimes did. In general, Helena liked it when they did the thing, but she was getting a little tired.

Helena wondered if it was time to go back to dating women. Looking at the sweet barista behind the counter made her wonder this even more strongly. Helena was a proud bisexual, but like many bi women, she found that she often had easier access to dating men than women. Sometimes she felt as though she were living out the old bisexual stereotype of being a woman who was attracted to all other women…and her straight boyfriend. The reality of this made her cringe, but it was the truth.

Dating Thad had been an accident. When Helena had first met him, she had been sitting at the bar waiting for a date with a woman. They had connected over a dating app, but the woman never showed. A few hours later, she did send a message saying that she had gotten back together with her ex. Then the woman unmatched from Helena and that was that.

Before the sorry, it’s over message arrived, Helena found herself chatting with Thad, who had just finished an open-mic set in the bar. He was a decent musician, and she had enjoyed listening to his covers of songs from the nineties and early aughts. (She should have run for the hills when she heard him say, Anyway, here’s ‘Wonderwall,’ but alas, she’d stayed put.) When she realized her date wasn’t coming, she’d drowned her sorrows in a night with Thad. And those nights just kept repeating themselves.

Helena’s frustration with Thad usually softened when she watched him play music. He looked like he’d never quite left the emo style of 2002, and Helena appreciated that his way of being in the world made every day a panic at the disco. It was sweet. It was weird. She found that she liked it, even though she was pretty sure Thad was messing around with other women. Her ambivalence about this dire fact was evidence of her indifference to Thad as a whole.

Biting off a corner of her scone, Helena gave a reluctant sigh as she forced herself to face the truth — she was just coasting along, and sometimes Thad was along for the ride. He had no claim over her. And she had no claim over him, either. But the things that she did like about him were hard to just shake off.

The sun was coming up outside. It was January in St. Louis, and the sun often took her own sweet time coming up on these winter mornings. Helena loved that her morning ritual included rising with the sun in the calm, warm atmosphere of Sontag’s. On the wall next to her, a giant photograph of Susan Sontag herself was hanging a little lopsided. It was the famous photograph of the author in a turtleneck, lying on the floor and staring up at the sky. She looked beautiful and pensive, especially now that the winter sunlight was flashing across the image, illuminating her in a golden sheen.

In her notebook, Helena wrote down the title of one of Sontag’s most famous essays, Notes on ‘Camp.’ She thought of how she’d probably play LFO’s Summer Girls during her set this morning and how it was the perfect example of camp with a capital C. It was trying so hard to be cool and suave that it actually