Mary isn’t a great internet name. When she introduces herself to someone new, she always assumes they’re picturing the lady who birthed the baby Jesus or a different Mary washing Jesus’ feet or a pious and forgettable woman circa 1610 or 1743 or 1872. She wears muslin skirts and a mop cap and goes about her business as primly as possible. Her soap smells like animal fat, but it’s better than nothing. If she gets an hour or two alone, she smokes a corncob pipe as a fuck you to all the gender suffering.
This Mary—our Mary—was born in 1997 and she is on the internet. She’s been alive roughly the same amount of time regular people have been doing what they used to call surfing the web, and for the past ten years or so she’s wandered the information superhighway from her half of the basement apartment she shares with her brother Richard.
Every morning, Mary wakes up and practically before she pees and brushes her teeth—not literally before, but almost literally before—she logs in to see if she’s gotten any transcription assignments since the night before. She’s a contractor, technically freelance, but work has been steady—there are nearly always a couple assignments waiting, and if there aren’t she usually only has to wait twenty or thirty minutes for something to arrive. She drinks coffee and eats Pop Tarts and listens through her giant headphones to focus groups and interviews and seminars and types everything she hears. Even background noises. Even coughing fits. Even curses. She likes to pretend she’s in the room for the events she transcribes, like a court reporter, or one of those illustrators who sketches the defendants and witnesses when they take the stand.
Mary’s transcriptions average 98 percent accuracy. She doesn’t get audited very much anymore; she’s been in her role for two years and has never dipped below a 97 percent average. Ninety-five percent and below is a problem. Even when she was still getting used to the software, still learning how to adjust the speed at which other people’s digital memories entered her ears, still learning some of the vocabulary for the types of content she had to transcribe (user testing for financial services software and focus groups for packaged foods, mostly), still learning how to make sure her ears and her fingers weren’t distracted even if everything else mind, body, and spirit was somewhere cosmically far away, she was pretty fucking good at transcriptions. She loves to listen, and the internet is a good place for that. She didn’t mind the compulsory message board participation during online high school. She liked getting her associates in English online. She’d often work her way through a bowl of Goldfish crackers during a pre-recorded lecture, volume turned up to compensate for the crunching.
And now, in 2022, after work is the same place as work. Physically, anyway. Sometimes she stretches her legs on a run around the neighborhood and sometimes she doesn’t, but before long she always ends up back in the basement, back at her clunky particle board desk, back online, back in the same chat room she visits every night. The concept of a chat room always makes her feel like an old creep even if she’s pretty sure she’s younger than most of the people in there. She talks to her friends Sweet_69 and Dead_Dog_Sam and Cum!Wizard. She talks to new people. She listens and listens and listens. She’s Mary_Contrary, and she likes that it’s her real name, and she likes that the contrary seems to make people expect a devil’s advocate, which she is not.
Tonight, a new person named ViolentCello DMs her “A/S/L” and Mary writes back right away: “24/cisgender woman/NC USA. You should really consider updating A/S/L to A/Gender Identity/L. :)”
“Lol,” says ViolentCello. “Oh I’m 31/M/UK btw. What’d u do today?”
“I was part of a focus group,” Mary says. “We’re testing a new way to apply for a loan online. It was really fascinating.”
“Sounds kinda boring tbh.”
Mary closes out of the DM. She doesn’t like talking to self-proclaimed men that much anyway. She DMs Cum!Wizard, a self-proclaimed lesbian in her thirties who’s explained to Mary that evoking semen in her username is not only fantastic TERF repellent but a great way to speed up the process of making people feel comfortable sharing personal sexual anecdotes with her. If you’re talking to someone named Cum!Wizard, you probably don’t have to worry about whether the things you have to say are too shocking or gross.
Cum!Wizard asks Mary about her life sometimes. On Mondays she always asks her if anything fun happened over the weekend, even if they were both in the chat a lot on Saturday and Sunday. Mary wasn’t born yesterday; she knows this kind of open-ended question, peppered with several wink emojis, is an invitation for her to type something titillating. Sex, real or fake, remembered or completely made up. Cum!Wizard probably knows the difference, but she says she likes it all. Sexual anecdotes are Cum!Wizard’s favorite.
Tonight, the text box indicates that Cum!Wizard is typing for a long time after Mary says hello. Mary waits impatiently, then clicks back to the main chat, which sometimes scrolls so fast it’s meaningless, to make the time pass more quickly. When she transcribes, there’s a special annotation for people talking over each other, and a way to use punctuation to indicate interruption. Conversation is never just taking turns. But in the chat room, there’s a fake kind of linearity. Everyone types at once, but an order emerges based on when each user clicks Enter.
She’s letting her eyes glaze over the flow of the main chat when her DM notifications light up. She expects a wall of text, but Cum!Wizard spent all that time typing only to send a single line: “Mary. I was wondering—do you have people in your life?”
Why, Mary wonders, does her brain immediately—and for the first time in months—take her back to freshman year of high school, her last year in-person? Her last year in Rochester before Richard drove up from Wilmington and told their parents he was taking Mary with him. Ninth grade—smoke in her lungs (people in the backseat passing her the cigarette after they were done with it), car driving too fast (girlfriend at the wheel), glass in her arm (doctor with tweezers). No one died. Nothing that bad happened. But Richard showed up a week later and brought her south to the humidity and the basement and the safety of online high school on the flimsy Chromebook he bought her with cash he could’ve used for groceries but chose to spend on her. So she could be educated. So she could have a future that wasn’t whatever all that mess had been.
“I have people,” Mary types. A person. “What about you?”
“Not, like. People people. But I have before and I will again,” says Cum!Wizard. “I’m on a little bit of a people vacation.”
“Me too,” Mary says. “Sort of.”
Cum!Wizard doesn’t start typing again, so Mary goes on. “I got to taste an unreleased flavor of Doritos today,” she says.
“Do tell.”
“Can’t. It’s proprietary information.” She’s typed proprietary a million times for work and she’s very, very accurate, but it looks wrong this time. Before she hits send, she looks up the spelling in another tab, confirms it letter by letter. No mistakes, just the sudden weirdness that can apply to any old word.
“Tease.”
“If only you knew.” Mary smiles at her computer like it’s a person. If she knows Cum!Wizard, she’ll like this. It’s barely a flirtation, but it might be enough to go on.
“Remind me what you look like,” Cum!Wizard says.
Mary honestly can’t remember if she’s provided these details before. “I’m tall and skinny. Ugh. Straight brown hair. White skin. I live underground, and when I go on runs it’s usually when the sun’s setting, so I’m very pale. I really ought to order some Vitamin D.” All accurate. “You?”
“I’m fat. Brown skin. On the short side. Wavy black hair but I’ve cut it short enough you can’t see the waves.”
Mary tries to remember if these details match any Cum!Wizard has provided before. All of a sudden, fear lights up her spine. She didn’t have a physical description in her mind until now. Cum!Wizard was just a series of linear lines of written text that Mary could read at her own pace. This is definitely the first exchange of physical descriptions. She’d know it otherwise. She knows way too much about what Dead_Dog_Sam looks like, and it hasn’t been the same since.
“Nice,” Mary types. “Undercut? Buzz? Or just short?”
“Undercut on the left side, just short on the right. 🏳️🌈”
“Nice,” Mary repeats. Cringe.
“Hey,” Cum!Wizard says. “I hope this isn’t weird but I think I figured out where you live.”
“?????” Mary types before she can give it any more thought. Her heart clanks in her chest.
“I mean, not your apartment or whatever. I AM NOT A CREEP.” For the first time, Mary wonders how old Cum!Wizard actually is. “But I think we might live in the same city.”
“Which city?” Mary types, and it’s wild how calm the words appear on the screen.
“I live in Plano, and I’ve been thinking for a while that some of the stuff you mention sounds familiar, and today you mentioned those new Doritos. The Frito-Lay HQ is here, and I just got this soul feeling, like, Mary is HERE?!”
Mary sits frozen in her chair. She feels like she might live in Plano.
“Anyway,” Cum!Wizard says. “My actual name is Maryam, funnily enough, and if you also live in Plano, maybe we could. You know. Be people who know each other here.”
Mary says nothing.
“Sorry if I overstepped,” Cum!Wizard says.
Mary wants to place her hands on the keyboard. She wants to tell Cum!Wizard that she lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, and has never been to Plano, Texas. She wants to tell Maryam she’s a transcriber, not a participant. She wants to convince Cum!Wizard—Maryam—that they’re already people who know each other, here in the chat.
“I’m guessing you’re not interested,” Cum!Wizard says.
Mary shuts her laptop, knowing her chat status will switch to Offline immediately. She races up the basement stairs to the front door landing, checking on the way to make sure her leggings and t-shirt are outdoor-presentable. But when she shoves her feet into the sandals she keeps by the door and makes it outside and stands on the porch breathing in air from a distinct season, she doesn’t think any longer about her clothes because it doesn’t matter. The kind of dark she’s floating in could exist anywhere at all.
KATHLEEN JONES is a queer writer, designer, and content strategy manager. She lives in Wilmington, North Carolina. Her story The Follow won the Hypertext Review 2021 Doro Böhme Memorial Contest, and you can find additional publications at kathleenejones.com.
