Karen, Inc

This week’s story is inspired by watching too many Karen compilation videos – and also Carmen Maria Machado’s winding, breathless story, “Mary When You Follow Her” You need a VQR membership to read the story, or you can read it here. I should say that Karens do come in all shapes and sizes and if you find that you have one living inside you, ruining your fun, please help your Karen find a new hobby.

In the fall of Linda’s forty-fourth year, the same year that her husband Phil – bald, Packers fan, teetering between drinker and drunk – falls off a roof and goes on disability, and the same month Phil’s brother Raylen bankrupts himself and comes to live in the basement where Linda has been saving up coffee cans of cash that turn out to be already emptied by Phil, she finds herself applying for a job at Karen, Inc, a third-party customer relations firm that provides services to corporations who – to avoid getting their hands dirty for scolding customers who knock clothes off the rack or take more than one free sample – bring in a few Karens to keep people in line, so long as they don’t take it too far with the racially-charged comments or demands to speak to the manager, “because remember!” says Bob – the guy who interviews Linda for the job – “the manager is the client,” and when Karens working for Karen, Inc forget that, when they get lost in method acting and their own prejudices, that’s when the corporations — “the clients,” — get in Bob’s grill about hiring low-quality Karens, and jesus christ they’ve been short on good Karens this season, which is the reason Linda, without showing many credentials, gets the job with the caveat that she must make a few minor adjustments to her appearance, and before she knows it, she’s at the salon, and the hairdresser is turning her shoulder-length strawberry locks into a cropped blonde bob that Bob says is the essential feature of any true Karen along with bug-eyed sunglasses and a grande coffee cup, which doesn’t need to be full because “it’s just a prop,” and even though Linda doesn’t know what she’s gotten herself into, she knows she needs money because Raylen plunders the fridge and Phil is being investigated by a homeowner’s insurance company for faking his fall, and if Linda’s really honest with herself, she likes the idea of escaping her world and becoming someone new, which makes her a pretty good Karen until one day while she’s yelling at someone for having a fake handicap sticker – which Linda only clocks because Phil has one too – she gets run over by an SUV and sees a bright light and a man with flowing hair and a jesus robe descends into the Sam’s Club parking lot and takes her away on horseback and tells her now that she’s dead, she doesn’t have to worry about money or her drunk of a husband or the fear of being herself, and that’s when Linda notices that her cropped bob is strawberry again and she’s wearing the same cutoffs and cowboy boots she wore in a high school production of Annie Get Your Gun, which was the last time Linda got onstage because quick as trigger she met Phil and dropped out and has been playing some version of wife/mother/maid ever since, but now she gets to be Annie and Orphan Annie and Annie the Merry Murderess night after night for audiences that stand in applause, which makes Linda blush with a dash of shame because she can’t believe she spent her time on earth berating rather than bemusing, and she promises that for the rest of her afterlife, she will never again use her voice to make someone else small to which Jesus says, “it’s all gucci,” she’s forgiven, and “by the way, call me Jay,” so she does and they gallop off, back to his cabin where every night they make love on a bearskin rug, and one night he takes a little box out of his robe (it has pockets!) and as he’s about to say his line, there’s another light, and it’s harsh and bright when Linda opens her eyes and sees Phil in a Packers sweatshirt, leaning over her shouting, “Earth to Linda! Earth to Linda!” while Raylen crunches tortilla chips over her hospital bed and the doctors are saying, “It’s a miracle!” but it doesn’t feel like a miracle to Linda – not when Phil takes her back to their house, which hasn’t been cleaned since she died, not when his disability checks stop coming in, not when he says she might want to go back to Karen, Inc because that money sure was good, but Linda doesn’t want to play Karen, she doesn’t want to play Linda, she doesn’t want to play Merry Middle-American  – and she misses the life she had when she was dead but doesn’t have the guts to go back there because when you get down to it, Linda’s a softie and the moment Bob from Karen, Inc finds out that his best Karen is out of her coma, he’ll make sure she’s back to being type-casted instead of becoming the star she’s destined to be, so one night while Phil’s snoring and Raylen’s eating god-knows-what, Linda takes the last coffee can she’s hidden under the bed, and she doesn’t pack a suitcase or leave a note because she’s ready for new costumes, new lines – and when she steps out the front door, she finally makes her entrance.