THE SENSITIVITY READER (WO #2)

Sarah Woodhouse worked best in silence. She needed it to focus on the task at hand.

Her job was to check for anything that might cause offence or stimulate a trigger of a bad memory or trauma for the prospective reader.

The trouble was, once you saw one thing, you'd see a dozen others. And by the time you filleted through all the pages of a fresh new manuscript, there was barely a pamphlet left to speak of.

Violet Clarke was the latest 'hot prospect' signed to OurOneVoice Publishing House. Scouring through the latest draft of Clarke's debut novel "Out Of My Safe Space", Sarah noticed a regressive emphasis on masculine tendencies in the central protagonist which she felt might send the wrong message to their ultra-modern, ultra-aware and increasingly sensitive readership. Ignoring the fact that a majority of people didn't care about many of these things was totally irrelevant, for a lot of publishing houses now pandered to vocal minority groups that stamped their feet and gnashed their teeth if so much as a gender was misappropriated or a racial assumption wasn't corrected, even if those discrepancies were often deliberately included by the authors. Context was the repeated justification by many of them, who'd argue for these sticking points to be left unaltered. As far as OOV Publishing was concerned, context was just a meaningless word used as a lazy defence. And for Sarah, scanning a single page of prose these days was like scouring for landmines before ensuring safe passage for the general public.

In her quieter moments, Sarah hated to admit it to herself, but she also hadn't cared much about these type of things either before she applied for the role. But now, as a consequence of the job's strict criteria, she found herself becoming increasingly sensitive to the merest hint of a red flag especially with regard to what the company referred to as 'dinosaurs'. If a 'dinosaur' was spotted on the page it needed to be made extinct. A dinosaur could be any number of politically incorrect discrepancies or even just a particular emphasis on a OPS ( 'old paradigm syntax'), another of the stock phrases they now used at work. A new history was being written in the language of the woke and any dissenting voices who argued for the areas of grey ambguity in fiction would be gradually and politely consigned to the dustbin of history.

This was a polite revolution, one that dotted the I's and crossed the T's.

It didn't so much bother Sarah at work, but more when she was dealing with people outside the office in real life. She didn't have a red pen to correct their mouths when they said something that sounded clumsy or inappropriate. Dinner parties would become difficult unless it was one she curated from her own home, making sure anyone invited had their woke credentials checked at the door. As for dates, she was finding it almost impossible to find anyone who could match her increasingly pedantic standards of speech and rhetoric.

"You know, I think you should think more about what you're saying before it leaves your mouth," Sarah told her ageing, white, father who increasingly failed the OOV sensitivity playbook with each passing day as he became older and she became woker.

"What did I say wrong?"

"What didn't you say right? My God. It's like you're goading me into a response with all your prehistoric way of talking."

"Just tell me what it was I just said exactly that prompted you to leave the dinner table so abruptly and walk away from that perfectly decent meal I prepared for you?"

Sarah pinched the bridge of her nose indicating the stress she was feeling at this precise moment with her problematic father.

"I don't think you appreciate just how much pressure I'm under at work. I have a daily responsibility to manage and correct offences and insensitivites in endless reams of manuscripts. To come home and eat dinner with a man who seems to have willfully ignored all the progress my generation has fought for in the past ten years alone, undoes my morale, quite frankly."

"Your generation eh? I didn't even know there was enough glue to stick a generation together between you all. You all seem so atomised these days."

"Perhaps you just mean, people aren't sheep anymore? No one is honor bound to conform to a one size fits all generational consensus."

Her father sensed she was implying he had.

"Oh no. I'm sure there's plenty of sheep amongst you and many of them probably believe they're wolves fighting for their lone causes. Until a real wolf comes along to dispel that illusion for them, reminding them that they are in fact sheep. There might just be an unwieldy continuity amongst your peers. Maybe it's just a little less defined because everyone's hiding behind their computers."

Her father's wolf analogy was getting a little hairy but Sarah got the gist.

"Oh so you're a real wolf I assume? Old school no doubt. Proper fangs and everything."

"Calm down. And by the way, you still haven't told me what it was I said that upset you."

Taking a sip from a glass of water, Sarah prepared herself to illuminate her father, who she felt she was becoming increasingly distant with each passing day.

"You said, why do women have to be so angry all the time."

"Is that it?"

Sarah sensed she would now be further disappointed in her elderly father the longer this conversation was drawn out.

"That's just for starters."

"What else then?"

"You said you didn't think sports stars should bend the knee unless it's before the altar."

"I said that?"

"Oh c'mon. You know you did!" Sarah said, exasperated by her father's gentle trolling.

"Well, maybe I did. Would you prefer I said nothing and you had less of a clue about what goes on in my head?"

"Unfortunately I know only too well what goes on in your head. It's sadly all too predictable."

Her father stepped forward slowly, not in a threatening way as she might have inferred but because he wanted to hear better what she would say. He had becoming increasingly frail ever since his minor stroke a few years previously.

"Go on then. Tell me what's going on in there now."

Sarah, unable to resist zapping her father with a truth bomb, let him have it.

"You probably wish I was your son and not your daughter."

As good a poker face as her father could often muster, she could tell that initial accusation hurt him, though he pretended it didn't. It was in his eyes.

"Is that it? You can surely do better than that."

"No. There's more."

"Go on then. Give me your best shot."

She didn't even consider her next statement. It just rolled off her tongue from her subconscious.

"Well, I think you would prefer that I was white like you."

He didn't need to respond with words to convey his resentment and upset at her statement. The sad, disappointed look in his soulful eyes spoke volumes.

He left the room quietly and retreated to his study.

The sound of the minute hand on the kitchen clock sounded exceptionally loud to Sarah who stood there for a minute, processing what she'd just said to her devoted father.

Sarah knew that he needed to be stood up to. She was far too invested in the culture wars to back down now. And she also felt strongly that if she could affect change in her father, the epitome of a traditional Western patriach, then she could do it with anyone.

Clearing the table, she felt reconciled in her mind and perfectly without remorse.

Tough love was what he'd taught her and now she was giving him a dose of his own medicine.

Later that night, before she went to bed, she hesistated for a brief moment just outside of her father's bedroom door.

She wanted to say goodnight as was tradition between them but held back from doing so. This was a war of atrition and she needed to prove she wouldn't back down, at least until morning over breakfast.

As she lay in bed, she found her mind racing. She resented the fact that her mother had not put up a better fight for custody over her when she was younger. Clearly she had been the victim of white parental privilege in the courts. She didn't hate her father for fighting over her, but she did suspect he had an unfair advantage.

Turning off the lights, she thought about her mother. She'd been given an address by her father for an obscure location somewhere in Brazil but had not as yet found the appropriate moment to summon the courage needed to make that trip.

Perhaps she thought, she would begin to seriously plan a reunion with her mother from tomorrow in her lunch break.  

She fell asleep, dreaming of a turquoise ocean and warm, sandy white beaches.

The next morning, waking up, Sarah found herself alone at the breakfast table.

She thought perhaps her father had already left early that morning to go for a walk.

Unusual that he would not have breakfast with her before work though.

Was he holding out in their passive aggressive battle of wills?

No. He was never one to hold a grudge for long. That was one of the things she respected about him most. His ability to move on.

As she raised a spoonful of cereal to her mouth, she hesistated before ingesting it, suddenly feeling a nervous, knotted sensation in her stomach.

She called out to her father from where she was sitting.

"Daddy?!"

The silence she now experienced was not one of peace, like the type she had so greatly desired after her many triggering social encounters of late.

It was one filled with anxiety and fearful premonition.