Page 1 of Silent Shadows

chapter

one

DAISY

Getting my organs rearranged by a tall, mysterious dude doesn’t sound like a bad way to go. Supersonically, of course. I sigh, my head falling to the side, as I read another firsthand account from a Bigfoot encounter.

“Yeah, girl, so that’s how my beef with Dickie Hanks blew up,” the overly twangy voice of the country star I’m virtually interviewing pulls me from my reading. I nod, pretending to have been listening.

“Got it. So would you say your sex tape with his ex-girlfriend had anything to do with it?” I ask, regaining control of the conversation for a moment as I click on another conspiracy article.

“Well, yeah, darlin’,” he continues, spinning a new, somehow longer, story, and I’ve already lost interest again. As a sex and culture podcaster, interviews are part of the gig. But lately, they’ve gotten impossibly boring. I’ve been doing this for over a decade, starting right out of college. The DL with Daisy was my way of coping with being a single twenty-something, and the podcast took off faster than I do after a bad date. Now, I run a full-fledged production company with multiple product lines, over two dozen shows and counting, and a handful of hosts, all doing their thing under my pop culture umbrella. It’s fun, it’s exhausting, and it’s getting old.

I’m staring at the wall zoning out when my producer, Marissa, starts waving her arms from the other side of the booth. I look down at my screen and see the singer finishing his story. Thank God she knew I wasn’t listening. She always knows. I catch the tail end of his monologue, which closes on a delightful note about his new girlfriend’s huge tits.

I pretend to take notes while he talks, scribbling a skull on a scrap of paper. I keep my dead-eyed smile fixed on the camera as I pass it to Marissa. She rolls her eyes and makes the “cut” motion across her throat. I reset my bright, polished smile, which I know comes through in my voice. “Wow. Love that journey for you,” I say, injecting just enough amusement to keep it playful. “But let’s take a quick pivot, because we love a little vulnerability here: what’s something people get totally wrong about you?”

Marissa nods with approval and gives me a thumbs-up.

The singer pauses, thrown off. Good. That’s the trick. Disrupt the ego spiral.

“Uh,” he says, scratching his chin. “People think I’m, like, always on. But I’m chill. I like reading and stuff.”

Reading. Groundbreaking.

“Oh, slay! We love a literary king,” I say, disgusted by the chronically online phrases I never use outside of podcasting, already signaling off-camera to Marissa that we’re about to wrap. “Okay, last question. Favorite position? Sleeping, obviously.”

He laughs. “On my stomach.”

“Perfect. You heard it here first, folks. A stomach-sleeper who reads. It’s giving multifaceted.” I grin. “Period. That’s all the immaculate vibes for today. Stay hydrated and unproblematic, fam.”

I stop the recording and stretch my arms out, my back cracking in eight different places.

“Hey, thanks for doing this,” I say, my voice dropping to reveal my exhaustion, to the man wearing a cowboy hat on my screen. “Your publicist will get the edit for review first thing tomorrow.”

He takes off his hat and rakes a hand through his hair, saying without a hint of twang, “Thanks, Daisy! Always a pleasure.”

I smile and nod, then end the call.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I mutter, ripping off my headphones as if they're personally responsible for my impending existential crisis.

Marissa bursts into the booth before I can even stand, her blonde waves bouncing as she moves. “You blacked out for, like, forty percent of that. At least.”

“I did not black out,” I argue weakly. “I was just multitasking.”

“You were reading about Bigfoot.”

I freeze.

She narrows her eyes, crossing her arms. “You had the article reflected in your glasses, Daisy.”

Damn it. I throw my blue light glasses down on the desk.

“Okay, first of all—” I stand, gesticulating like a defense attorney as if I didn’t get caught red-handed—“it was a compelling article. And second, I still landed the plane, didn’t I?”

“You crash-landed the plane, set it on fire, and then made a joke about the debris.”

“Which people love,” I point out. “My debris jokes test incredibly well with our audience.”