Dirty Soapie: The Superhuman Lies of Soapie Shumacher
A Short Story
Gregory Wayne Martin
Copyright 2014 by Gregory Wayne Martin
Soapie walked at her usual brisk pace through the news room toward the editor’s office. She’d been summoned, as she was every week, concerning the content of her most recent column.
“Hey, Soapie, nice job on the Gyllenhaal piece. Think she’ll sue?” she heard one of the other columnists ask.
Soapie smiled but only slightly. She just kept up her stride. Her straight, light brown hair hung down her neck, tucked haphazardly behind her ears. The long sleeve, button-up, gray sweater that she wore over a tight, pink camisole whipped back and forth with the swing of her arms and her cheap sneakers squeaked as she walked. As she reached the office door one of the assistant editors called out some bawdy remark about her behind. Soapie spit her gum out hard and it arched up into the air and landed on the man’s computer keyboard where it stuck. She went into the office and shut the door behind her.
“Ms. Shumacher, how nice to see you this week,” her editor, Dale said as he motioned for her to have a seat. Soapie plopped down in a casual slump, one leg over the arm of the chair.
Dale held up that week’s copy of the paper and repeated the headline of her latest column. “‘Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Explosive Diarrhea’. Amazing that such a disgusting article sold so many papers. Her agent has already demanded a retraction but World Press News Message wants to reprint it. You’re on a roll, kid.”
Soapie responded with her usual apathy as her editor discussed the agreement he was arranging with the other national gossip rag and how she would be compensated. She tried to listen, but found herself staring at the large mug of pencils on Dale’s desk.
Look at all those pencils, she thought. Why does he need some many? Who uses pencils anymore anyway? God, his desk is shiny. It stinks of furniture polish.
“So,” Dale finalized, bringing her back to the conversation at hand, “what do you have planned for this week?”
"Somebody told me that the Emma Watson is a Lesbian,” she offered.
“Is that it?”
“I’d be willing to bet she’s also a white supremacist.”
“Great. Write it up and I’ll look it over.”
Soapie went down to the coffee shop on the corner where she preferred to work. She opened her lap top and started to type, no real thought process or effort involved. When she was writing she was on a cold form of automatic pilot. It was especially easy since she didn’t have to rely on silly little obstacles like facts.
At the age of six, Soapie's mother ran off with a trucker for parts unknown. She was raised by her father who worked two jobs and was rarely home. In lew of a babysitter, he usually just left Soapie with a book or two. The result was that she became a veracious reader and relatively socially inadequate. As she hit puberty she became tall, gangly and awkward. Other kids, mostly the popular ones, picked on her frequently. She learned to shut them out and to focus on her own inner world. It made her isolated and a tad weird.
Despite her gawky, forlorn demeanor, Soapie attracted the attention of a handsome and personable boy named Patton. She and Patton began a quaint and wholesome teenage relationship that gave Soapie hope for the first time in her life. They were happy and inspired by each other, lost their virginity together and went out every weekend night for two years.
Then one day, the girl voted most popular, as well as most likely to succeed in her high school turned up pregnant with Patton's child. Soapie was inconsolable and returned to her withdrawn state, only this time with much more anger.
Soapie started writing her special brand of journalism right after Patton left her to attend to his new bastard child. Using bathroom walls as her media source and outlet she went wild. After seriously damaging the lives and reputations of Patton's new young lady, several faculty members, the prom queen and that “loud mouth bitch, Darlene,” who sat behind her in math class, she was offered an internship by the gossip rag, The Weekly Leak. Soapie worked her way up to editor’s assistant, while studying journalism and criminal law at a local community college, until the paper was sued by multiple plaintiffs for printing an average of forty-seven lies per page.
Within days she was offered a job writing for another gossip paper called, The Goods. It was here that she began to gain notoriety. Soapie wrote story after story so outrageous that no one could begin to compete with her. Subjects like, “Ron Howard’s Heroin Habit”, “Larry King’s S&M Themed Affair with Mila Kunis”, “Lauren Graham Working Secretly as a Low Level Enforcer for the Mob,” and the especially tasteless “JFK Died of Cancer”, colored all of her opprobrious hyperbole the shade of money. Soapie quit The Goods to work for Outright Slander Magazine, but left that job when she was asked to join the staff at The Wandering Star. It wasn’t necessarily a move with more prestige, per say, but there was more money and she wasn’t forced to work in a cubicle or edit other so-called reporter's pieces.
Soapie was a bit of a star herself. She not only had her own regular column, but her own website, complete with clips of her writings and photos and t-shirts of herself and various celebrity indiscretions. It didn’t hurt her fame that she had actually grown into a rather attractive woman, tall, slim and with a pretty, almost child-like face. However, much of the innocence that had once resided in her brown eyes was now replaced with apathy. Her job had become most, if not all, of what she was.
Right after her second refill of coffee a strange, casually dressed man approached her table and sat down across from her. He said nothing but only stared at her. Soapie barely looked up. She merely responded to the question she was used to getting from men in similar situations.
“No, I’m not single and even if I were I wouldn’t hook up with someone I met in this place,” she said coldly. Not surprisingly, both were lies.
“That’s a shame,” the man began, “but, irrelevant. I’m here to make you an offer of a different kind.”
“I have a job,” she told him, still not looking up from her computer screen.
“I’m aware. But, you don’t have a job like this. This one is for national security.”
Soapie stopped typing for a moment and finally looked at the man. He seemed pretty plain. She reasoned that there was little chance of him being involved with secret shopping, much less the C.I.A. or N.S.A. She resumed typing.
“Not interested,” she replied.
The man reached over and shut her laptop. “Not yet,” he said.
He explained that his name was Taylor and that he was working for a subgroup of Military Intelligence. Psychological warfare and the spread of misinformation were the group’s main objectives, and they were always on the lookout for persons of special interest. Soapie had come to their attention because she possessed such an excellent flair for avoiding the truth at all costs.
“You have a gift for making people consider the most preposterous and obnoxious nonsense as opposed to actual news. That piece you did about Conan O’Brian, complete with doctored photos of him doing blow off of Brian William’s ass…that boosted his ratings by thirty percent for almost three weeks. We could use someone with your...” Taylor paused, looking at her intently, “talents,” he concluded.
Soapie just stared back, the blank, jaded expression on her face never changing.
“Ms. Shumacher,” Taylor said, “you’re an expert at fabrication. Can you spot the lies as well as you tell them?”
Soapie studied the man for a while, looking for any kind of tell.
“If I’m going to even consider
leaving my job to come work for the federal government,” she said as she unplugged her computer, “then you’d better buy me a drink first.”
The two went to a bleak, windowless bar a few doors down. It was the type of place where professional alcoholics plied their trade and happy hour started the moment the doors opened at ten in the morning. They sat in a back booth and Soapie listened to Taylor mumble details across the dirty, formica table.
“The U.S. military needs someone to report on aliens and UFOs. We need someone to concoct a bunch of things that the general populace will dismiss and the more paranoid will obsess over. We need someone to create an entire mythos of extraterrestrials and to disseminate that information among the public.”
“Randy McCracken is the paranormal reporter at The Wandering Star. Why not recruit him?”
“Because Ms. Shumacher, he doesn’t share your unique gift for fabrication,” Taylor remarked. “Simply put, you could stick a cow pie on a plate and serve it to someone, telling them that it was a Christmas goose and they’d eat it happily while singing carols...and the whole time, knowing full well that you were feeding them a load of crap.”
Soapie looked deeply into Taylor. She never
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