[Lemme know if ya wanna be tagged in future writing I post on here which may include play excerpts, short stories, or poetry! This assignment was a simple two-page short story on any topic.]
“Down with Philip Crowell! Down with Philip Crowell! Down with Philip Crowell!”
The sound of the crowd shook me. Their anger, their violence; their passion showed how deeply this community was hurting. It had been four days since Officer Philip Crowell was released on parole. Many claimed he deserved the death penalty. I’m just a journalist, so I am a mere fly on the wall.
“This is interview 1. I am speaking with Harrison White, one of the demonstrators of the Schneider Protests. Mr. White, what did you see the day of the protest?”
“That ain’t a fair question, mister. The real question is ‘what the hell didn’t the rest of the country see before the months of the protest?’” Mr. White replied. I could see the distrust in his eyes. He wasn’t comfortable. His calloused hands were balled into fists.
“Feel free to explain. Speak your truth, Mr. White.”
“Please just call me Harry,” he began. “My son, Willis... died. He starved to death. And it was my fault. It was Schneider’s fault. It was the president’s fault. I couldn’t afford a damn thing. I got married early. I dropped out of school before graduation. I got a trucking job. I loved it and I was good at it and I did that for decades. Until Schneider started letting us go. I got mouths to feed. Mary left. Mary’s my wife. And she couldn’t take it anymore. She couldn’t afford to be with a jobless deadbeat. She was bound to take Willis if she were in any better shape. But Downvalley used to be a boom town. They called us the ‘the City that Wouldn’t Stop Working.’ Until we couldn’t work no more.”
“Why happened to the jobs, Harry?”
“Vanished. Lost. Stolen. Humans ain’t cheap. They can’t work 24/7 and they need insurance and additional training and... it was about profit margins. I didn’t have anything to fall back on. Mary worked in retail but that didn’t last. The morning of the protests I woke up and realized it had been exactly 6 months since Willis... Since he left. Some of my trucking buddies called up and we met in the square.” Harry paused and closed his eyes. His hands remained balled into tight fists.
“What happened next?” I asked, not wanting to rush him but knowing what I was about to hear.
“We started walking to the Schneider HQ. The bastards who replaced us. We were pissed. We had all lost so much. Buck, one of my buddies, picked up a chair and tossed it through a truck window. It was one of the self-drivers. He kept chanting ‘humans over machines’ and we joined him. I vaguely remember following him and throwing things and kicking in a truck door. We were replaced by metal. That’s the sickest damn thing.
“I remember that’s when the authorities tried to stop it. More people had joined our side. People who had lost their jobs and their livelihoods and really had nothing to lose. The police kept screaming at us to stop and we didn’t. I didn’t see his face, but I knew it was him. Philip Crowell shot into the crowd.”
Harry paused and winced at the memory. His rough hands un-balled, allowing me to briefly see deep marks from his fingernails that were self-inflicted. His hands were over his face as he let out a painful sigh.
“My buddy. Buck. 23. The youngest trucker I knew. Gone. An older woman and her two teenage children, gone,” his hands were off his face now, as he pointed one finger at me. “The system let this city down, mister. If you take only one thing away from this interview, I want that to be it. Philip Crowell is just an agent of the system that let my son starve and let those people die. We had nothing to fall back on. Nothing. You may go back to LA or wherever the hell your paper is from and write about this and swear it’ll never be you, but just wait a few years. I am sure there is a whole room of designers working on replacing you right this moment.”
“Is that it, Harry?”
“Yessir.”
“This interview was conducted July 16th, 2027. Interview over. Thank you for your time, Mr. White.”
