fiction – rainey reitman's blog

Note: this is a short fiction story I published in Evocations in January 2022. I was thinking about the impact of the gig economy on the body, and specifically on women’s bodies, and I was also thinking about hypocrisy I’ve seen among men who count themselves as revolutionaries and feminists. I was also thinking about the power of friendship, and about how uncertain and hungry those first years after college can feel. I wanted to poke gentle fun and be a little humorous, but also be real about loneliness and despair.

The Revolutionary Class

The same month I gave birth, my roommate quit her internship at the art gallery to become a hypnotherapist. “There is just more opportunity for career growth,” she told me. We were occupying the uncertain eddy of life after graduation, living on top of each other in the smallest studio apartment in Santa Cruz. During the day, we tried to make money scraping paint and pulling weeds on TaskRabbit. In the evenings, she hypnotized me. She wanted the practice, she said. And hadn’t she proofread my entire dissertation, though she had no interest in Trotskyism?