The Interview
The tactical vest was still in the trunk of her car, smelling of diesel and dust from the TENTEX. Lydia sat in the dark of her living room, the only light coming from a ring light she’d bought to film “content” that no one watched.
She straightened her blazer, smoothed her hair, and looked into the black mirror of her laptop screen.
“We’re live in three, two, one.”
Lydia, the Host, leaned into the frame. Her smile was professional, the kind of smile Lydia used when briefing a Colonel on a PR disaster. “Tonight, we’re talking about the death of a dream. Joining us is Lydia Laga, a woman who spent five years writing a book that effectively doesn’t exist. Lydia, welcome.”
Lydia, the Author, blinked, her eyes bloodshot. “Happy to be here.”
“Let’s cut the crap,” the Host said, her voice dropping the TV lilt. “You’re thirty-four. You spent your savings on a cover designer who lives in a timezone you can’t pronounce. You have a mortgage, a dog with a heart murmur, and a career in Public Affairs where you literally get paid to make boring things look important. Why are you still playing pretend?”
The Author shifted. This wasn’t the script. “It’s not pretend. The Violin’s Curse is a study on maternal grief. It’s important.”
“To who?” the Host snapped. “The forty-seven agents who sent you form rejections? Or the three people who ‘Looked Inside’ on Amazon and decided they’d rather watch a TikTok of a cat falling off a fridge?”
“It takes time to build an audience,” the Author said, her voice trembling.
“You’re a Public Affairs officer, Laga,” the Host leaned forward, the ring light reflecting in her eyes like twin halos. “You know how to manage a crisis. If this were a downed drone or a scandal in the barracks, you’d have a ‘Path Forward’ memo on the desk by 0800. But here you are, bailing water out of a sinking canoe with a teaspoon. Why can’t you just admit you’re a hobbyist?”
“Because a hobby is something you do to relax!” the Author shouted. The dog groaned in his sleep on the rug. “This isn’t relaxing. This is a haunting. I see these characters when I’m briefing the General. I hear the music of that cursed violin when I’m trying to sleep. If I don’t get them out, they’ll choke me.”
The Host softened, but only a fraction. “So it’s an exorcism. But you didn’t just want them out. You wanted them famous. You wanted the validation of a stranger in a bookstore holding your heart in their hands and saying, ‘I felt this too.’ Isn’t that just a fancy word for vanity?”
The Author looked down at her hands. Her cuticles were bitten raw. “Is it vanity to want to be seen? To feel like the forty hours a week I spend being ‘Captain Laga’ isn’t the only thing I’ll leave behind? I’m a ghost in my own life. The book was supposed to be the part of me that was solid.”
“But it’s not solid,” the Host whispered. “It’s 0.004 megabytes on a server. It’s a box of twenty paperbacks in your garage that you use as coasters.”
The silence in the room was heavy, smelling of cold coffee and the ozone of the light. The conflict wasn’t with the publishing industry anymore. It was with the terrifying possibility that she had tried her best and her best was simply… average.
“Final question,” the Host said, her professional mask slipping, revealing the shared exhaustion underneath. “If the world never listens, if you die with 107 sales and a garage full of boxes, was it a waste of a life?”
The Author looked into the camera. She didn’t look like a writer or a soldier. She looked like a person standing at the edge of a cliff, deciding whether to jump or build a bridge.
“I don’t know,” the Author said honestly. “But I know that for three hundred pages, I wasn’t invisible. I was a god. I built a world where grief had a melody. Even if I’m the only one who can hear it… the music happened.”
The Host reached out and clicked the light off.
The room plunged into gray. No applause. No credits. Just the hum of the refrigerator and the weight of the silence.
Lydia sat in the dark for a long time. Then, she opened her laptop. Not to check the sales dashboard. Not to refresh her email.
She opened a blank document.
Chapter One, she typed.
The “Host” was gone. There was only the soldier, digging a new trench in the dark.
