Penelope (Seeking feedback and impressions)
Penelope Part One:
Inside a beat-up car stalled in morning Manhattan traffic, a festive rhythm dances from the radio. Lively cuatro strings. Vibrant maracas and the singing of joyful children. All mockingly bright against Penelope’s heavy heart. One hand on the wheel, she stretches for the granola bar on the passenger seat, just beyond reach atop her battered sketchbook and chef’s whites.
Between lurches, Penelope’s mind drifts to her previous life of drawing monsters for a living, free and childless. But that Penelope died long ago—a dream cut short by AI, kids, and an ex. Penelope wipes away tears. She’s pinned between brake lights and bad memories. Somehow, her favorite song feels cruel.
She had been practical, went back to school to train a new skill, a lesser love: cooking.
And now that’s gone too because by the end of today she’s likely losing her job to a kitchen robot named Pal®. She can’t compete with its inhuman efficiency. Her boss Jim’s apologetic shrug echoes in her mind, ‘My hands are tied, Penelope. It’s the algorithms.’ Algorithms designed to measure human worth yet programmed to find us lacking, directing lowly human managers to cut, cut, cut.
Horns blare around her, and Penelope jabs hers to join the chorus as she crawls forward in traffic. Through the spiderweb cracks of her windshield, a flock of birds glide in lazy arcs across the solid gray New York City sky. The clouds loom low, almost touchable, pressing down on the day, on her, as if it knew what she had to do.
Beg.
Her phone’s lock screen glows from the cradle: Faustino and Christina, dancing in dinosaur onesies.
Brake lights stab through her cracked windshield. A juice box rolls off the backseat and leaks onto the upholstery.
She can’t afford to go back down to one job, not with the daycare, not with the rent. She scrolls past unread emails, most with the subject PAST DUE. She finds Jim in her contacts. Her hands tremble. She taps. Voicemail again. She hangs up.
She doesn’t blame Jim. He’s been to their birthdays. He knows what this will do. But what choice does she have?
“That’s okay, Jim. We can talk in person,” Penelope says to herself, crawling through traffic.
She slams the horn.
Static scratches through the radio speakers, abruptly silencing the singing children. Three piercing beeps screech in quick succession, followed by a flat, emotionless voice:
“This is not a test. This is the National Emergency Alert System. The Department of—.”
Penelope groans and shuts off the radio. The last thing she needs is to add government test beeps to her traffic headache.
In the cracked rear view mirror, mascara runs over concealer. Neither hide the fatigue beneath. The tears aren’t over Jim, or the job. Not yet.
It’s her kids.
They wear yesterday’s clothes. Other kids will notice. Other kids will be mean.
Her head falls against the steering wheel.
“I’m sorry,” she sobs, “Sorry you have such a shitty mother.”
Penelope creeps forward in the gridlock.
A soft hum rises in the air as she cries. It’s not unlike a guitar string about to snap. It sharpens. The blaring is eerie, alien.
Penelope’s head snaps up. A massive red beam slices through a mountainous cloud. Glassy red edges pulse downward while the plum core rises.
She has never seen so many birds in flight.
Black smoke billows from behind the buildings ahead. Then the beam sweeps west, fast and clean. In its wake: smoke.
A scream bursts from the car beside her, then more erupt behind.
“¡Ay Dios mío!” She signs the cross over her chest.
Pebbles and debris pelt her cracked windshield like hail.
The driver on her left abandons his truck and runs.
All at once, every worry she’s ever had shrinks to nothing. Daycare fees, kitchen robots, checking accounts. None of it matters now.
In a heartbeat, Penelope’s world narrows to one desperate thought: their two tiny faces, trapped at daycare, unaware of the world’s calamitous change.
Traffic isn’t frozen anymore; it’s shattered. Cars jut at reckless angles, doors swing open, people spill out and run between lanes. She scans ahead, turns, and nudges her car forward, but there’s no space. She’s boxed in from behind, too. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Normally, they’d be five minutes away by car. Could she go on foot? Who knows. She tried to run a 5K once and gave up halfway.
How is she going to get her kids?
Her breathing has gotten out of control. She closes her eyes and clears her mind, then opens them, naming five things she can see to anchor herself: her old purse, her cracked phone, a half-empty water bottle, the crumpled chef’s whites, and now—with the sky laser gone—a thunderhead cloud remains in the sky, cleaved neatly in two.
She can’t afford to calm down, not now. Flinging her phone into her bag, she wrestles open her faulty car door, and steps out into a highway filled with dust and smoke.
Grit coats her tongue as she stumbles through the dust cloud, her children’s names pulsing in her mind, drowning out the chaos of distant screams. She navigates by silhouettes of abandoned cars, dark shapes guiding her down the choked onramp toward the daycare like breadcrumbs. The air begins to clear, leaving a light haze, but it’s just enough for her to see the sidewalk ahead when a sound, deeper than thunder, freezes her in place. The sound lingers like a struck tuning fork, each reverberation humming through her chest. Above, the bisected clouds have taken on a stormy darkness. Something vast and shadowy looms behind their split edges.
New sounds charge in from the east, high in the air and familiar. The roar of fighter jets.
Penelope stops, makes fists. For one brilliant moment, she brims with hope and pride. We can fight this, she thinks.
A swarm of thin, green lights fire out from the split cloud’s center. They do not fade but persist, swinging through the cloud and air toward the jets. The jets fire missiles that explode harmlessly against the air, leaving a shimmering wake.
She doesn’t want to see what comes next but it’s over before she can turn away. The green beams converge with precision, sectioning the jets into hundreds of pieces. They fall listlessly, catching the sun like silver confetti.
Penelope gasps.
The shimmering field disappears in a hush and only the cleaved cloud is left as aftermath, riddled with neat holes. Penelope stares at the cloud, slack-jawed. Her hands tremble at the thought of those lasers on Faustino or Christina. She swallows hard and turns.