by Lee Hayton
The Hare’s Not-So-Spiky Hedgehog
(Grimmer Fairy Tales)
LEE HAYTON
Copyright © Lee Hayton 2017
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
Dedication
With eternal thanks to Kat Lind, the SIL Creative team, the Ds, and our fellow boot-campers at Phoenix Prime.
Rise up from the ashes, people.
Phoenix Prime is a Ph.D. level workshop that spans approximately four months. It uses applied industrial psychology to address components of writing, marketing, branding, business, contract issues, and productivity that combine Creative Writing and Business perspectives.
The participants will create a portfolio to showcase their work alongside students in doctoral programs in several major universities. The objective, in addition to expanding the professional growth of all the participants, is to study the impact of the independent author-publisher on the commercial fiction industry.
Table of Contents
The Hare’s Not-So-Spiky Hedgehog
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About the Author - Lee Hayton
The Hare’s Not-So-Spiky Hedgehog
They call us hedgehogs, you know. I mean, I get it. The eccentric headdress, the strange plaited texture of our shirts. If you were partially sighted and saw my husband or me in a darkened room, you might hesitantly think a giant hedgehog was snuffling around. Not that the nickname is because of our clothing or the religious garb. It’s not because of the way we sniff rather than blowing our noses into a filth encrusted handkerchief. A disgusting piece of matted cloth that goes straight back into our pocket to be used again.
No. Though our generation had those misleading lessons drummed into our heads as children, we’re still bright enough to see through it as disrespectful posturing.
They don’t even call us hedgehogs to be cruel. That the comparison is hurtful is a benefit, not the reason. They named my people hedgehogs, so society doesn’t feel bad about paying a lower wage. It stops the guilt over treating our race with less respect. Animals don’t require the same dignities afforded to everyone else.
If I looked at my boss and summed up his pink-rimmed eyes, immaculate grooming, and white hair by nicknaming him a hare or a rabbit, it wouldn’t be because he appeared different to me. It would be designed so that others saw him as weak, ineffectual, or submissive. Once the habit was ingrained in the common social attitude, he could be paid less because no one would expect an equal job from someone so subservient.
Except, I’m not likely to start calling my boss an insecure rabbit, am I? Only the people granted status in society can instigate labels and show such disrespect. Perhaps if I fight hard against injustice by ignoring the sacrifice of my own life and comfort to improve the position of my fellow hedgehogs, I might gain that status. Maybe after years, decades, generations of striving, I’d be placed to deal out insulting titles. It might even be possible for me to smile as I did so, in a pretense of taking the sting away.
I’m nearing forty now, something a woman should be embarrassed to admit. Among my people, though, age increases worth. I think others in society have that backward. I would argue the point if anybody cared to listen.
Anyway, I have some valuable experience under my belt. I have education, as much as this country would allow, and a wealth of street smarts and common sense. They don’t tell you when you’re busy shelling out a fortune to earn a piece of paper with your name on it how important that part is. Like everything else, I learned the hard way.
For years now, my husband and I have been struggling. The economy has tanked for the lower classes, and they’re up in the clouds from where I’m standing. To make enough money is difficult, even when you’re willing to put in the time, effort, and work. People don’t like to see you succeed when they spent a lifetime expecting you to fail.
Sorry. I’ll get off my soapbox now. The point I was making is that when the job came along at the investment firm, our family needed the income. Not wanted, not enjoyed, but needed the same way my lungs required air. If I’d lost it, that would have spelled the end for my family’s lifestyle. Our home would be gone, the last of our savings, our freedom. Hedgehogs can’t go down to the local store and put something on credit. Banks won’t issue our sort with credit cards, and even the pawn shop would rather steal than accept our weekly fees.
Without the house, my daughter wouldn’t make it through her schooling. Some people think they’ve got it tough, competing with another dozen graduates for every internship that comes on the market. Try doing that while being labeled an animal by each interviewer, potential boss, and member of human resources. That’s human resources, you see. Not hedgehog, if you know what I mean. Add being homeless to that mountain of inferiority and even my resilient girl can’t scale that one.
I was hired off my resume. Sight unseen. My religious and cultural leanings left undefined. Once I showed up, reporting in on my first day, things got a bit awkward. Luckily, by then it was too late.
It’s okay to not hire me. Anybody with a bent for misogyny or bigotry can think up a dozen different excuses. If they’re smart, none of them will touch on gender or race. To terminate my employment, however, without due cause while I’m dressed in my hedgehog garb? Nope. Not allowed, mate. Not under the laws of this country. Yet.
They had to wait for me to fuck up somehow. I needn’t explain that wasn’t top of my agenda. Hard work, long hours, that’s something I could confidently handle. If I stayed for a year or more, making the courageous sacrifices needed to keep that paycheck coming in, I’d be sweet. The company would need a truly heinous error on my part to boot me out by then. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of finding one.
Hello, luck. Meet determination.
My boss Frank, the man I compared to a certain rodent earlier, he was a grade-A douchebag. He appeared to believe that being rotten to me would drive me to quit. As though I’d never encountered prejudice before.
For my sixth birthday, the first day of big-girl school, I came home with two teeth cradled in the palm of my hand. One of them had been knocked out at morning recess, the second during when our class took a break for lunch. When the end of school finally dragged its weary ass around the corner, I had learned the first important lesson. I hid out back until the other kids had left. My thin body squeezed in hiding between the wooden fence full of splinters and the inner gate rusty with tetanus. Three baby teeth would have bankrupted the tooth fairy, and I wasn’t having that.
Add over thirty years of experience to that day, and I had toughened up. Name calling, I can handle. Abuse, I can tolerate. Those things make me tired, so goddamn tired, but exhaustion isn’t life-threatening. Poverty is. Snide remarks and subversive comments are just fleas on a hedgehog’s back. If I kept my head down and work ethic up, everything should be okay.
Orientation passed, accounts were assigned. No surprises that my portfolio was lousy—my clients many, their investments small. The juggling of each personalized request soon became a full-time job. My actual investment decisions fell into unpaid overtime. The hours stretched. Impossibly lengthening compared to my available day.
Still, perseverance in the face of adversity. Not a choice when you’re in my position. More like a consequence of living.
Did you ever hear the tale of the diligent worker? A stalwart on the factory floor, he would put pick out the mistakes and errors from the pro
duction line single-handed. When first employed, that was all that was expected of him. A consultant came in to maximize the factory’s profit, saw the man hard at work, and thought he could do more.
Skip forward a month to see the alterations. Double the gadgets coming through, each needing to be checked for errors on the line. Our overachieving worker stands in the same place, but now widgets come at him from both directions. He sorts out mistakes with his right hand, as he always did, while also plucking out faults with his left. Voila! Twice as much being done for the cost of the same workman.
The factory boss still wasn’t satisfied, despite the increased productivity. As usual, worker costs were first and foremost on the budget sheet. The consultant came back, he observed, he calculated. After a while, a recommendation was made.
Another month forward and our employee dreams of when he thought he was busy. Four production lines chug past him, two in each direction. He picks out errors and mistakes with his right hand and his left. In addition, he now kicks them out from the extra conveyor belts, hopping from foot to foot, eyes shooting all over the place.
There’s no time to rest. No opportunity exists for even a deep breath. The worker’s accuracy plummets, but with so many cheap widgets flowing past, the profit margin increases just the same.
The boss upgrades his car, his house, his wife, and his children, but he still thinks that there could be improvements made on the factory floor. The consultant is called back, clipboard at the ready. He observes, annotates, and finally makes a recommendation.
No need to wait for a month this time around. The employer fires the cleaning crew immediately. He then walks up to his exhausted, not-so-diligent worker with a long-handled broom. The employee stares at his boss through heavy-lidded eyes, waiting for the latest bane to be added to his life.
The handle is shoved straight up the employee’s rectum. “You’re here anyway,” the employer announces with satisfaction. “You may as well be sweeping the floor.”
If you think we hedgehogs walk funny, it’s not because of our crooked legs or the backs bent from years of heavy manual labor. No. It’s because we’ve all got brooms stuck up our asses, brushing away.
Still, forget about that. Regardless of the challenges, after a few months’ employment, I settled into a routine. Long hours, quick decisions, speedy turnaround, and gouging each client for as many fees as I could. No change there.
The money wasn’t bad either. Without the heads-up that I could be paid less, I’d started on the same wage packet as every other junior. Or, in other words, about double what a hedgehog would generally expect to earn. A buffer mounted in our bank account. When bills arrived, my breath no longer caught in my throat.
It would still be nice if my husband could locate a job in the tight market but it wasn’t a necessity. We had a rainy-day fund for the first time. As the days stretched into weeks, stretched into months, the better our situation grew. The fewer nights we sat up, insomniac with worry.
Then, all at once, my little family began to grow sly. When I asked questions about their day, they’d become cagey. Put forth a simple query—did they have a chance to go shopping—and there’d be a flurry of exchanged glances. My daughter would hem and hah before issuing a hasty, stumbling lie.
Suspicious.
I grew more so when my husband insisted that I leave work on the dot of five o’clock, the first time I’d ever done so, on the night before my birthday. Even with a mind drained from sweeping the investment room floor, I was able to put two and two together.
On the day, I pretended dismay at the breakfast table. As I reached over for the toast and lard, I gave an exaggerated sigh.
“What’s the matter?” my husband asked, flicking a cautious glance at me. He raised his eyebrow and tried to stop his lips curling into a smile as he nodded across to our daughter.
“Oh,” I said, doubling the staged dismay. “It’s so crazy at work at the moment, I’m not sure what time I’ll be able to leave.”
His eyes widened with shock. An expression I pretended to be too lost in thought to notice. I shook my head sadly, ducking down to hide my broadening smile.
“I’ll try,” I ventured before sighing again.
It was my girl that noticed. Sharp eyes were my gift to her, though the rest of her genes were doled out by her daddy. She gave my arm a slap as a reprimand and burst out laughing with relief.
“She’s having you on, Dad,” my daughter explained when my poor husband continued to appear bewildered. “There’s no problem with her getting off work.”
Perhaps it was the tempting of fate, or my lucky hand had just played out. Whichever the situation, when I left work that night at five for the first time, my boss noticed and marked it down on my employment sheet.
That was all skulking in wait for me, however. At that stage, I only knew I was having a fantastic evening surrounded by my loving family. We started with a meal, gifting our dessert and bread to the homeless people grouped outside as was our tradition. Next, we paid thanks at our church’s wishing well. I threw in a gift of spices, bundled together and tied with a fresh sprig of rosemary. Before we left, I leaned over the dark water and breathed in deeply. Complex aromas flooded an overwhelming bounty into my greedy nostrils. My mouth watered at the memory of a thousand home-cooked meals. Each one lovingly created by a person bound to me with genetics, culture, and affection.
Our last stop was to take a drive up the side of Ivy Mountain. At the top, we wended our way along a winding path that hugged the curves of the hillside. Our feet thumped down on long, yellowing tussocks and kicked up the aromatic pine needles of the past few months.
From the cliff edge facing the Ivy Kingdom, we stared down at the lights of the villages far below. For a moment, they twinkled like the distant stars of a fairytale setting. Fireflies dancing proudly in a darkening sky.
The next morning, I turned up to work an hour early as I’d grown used to doing. My boss Frank sat in his office, glaring at my entrance with his pinched, red eyes.
“Come in,” he barked at me before I could so much as take my jacket off. With my stomach twisting in anxiety and fear making my heart chug in my chest like a locomotive, I followed him in.
“Do you think you’re better than the other juniors in this office?”
I was so startled at the furious anger in his voice, I flinched back in my chair. “No, Sir.”
“I’ll be honest with you,” he said, as though everything up to that point had been a monumental lie. “You’re skating on thin ice already. If you’re not careful, it will break under your weight.”
I shook my head, perplexed but trying to be subservient. My shoulders hunched forward, so despite his small stature, my posture was in submission to his.
“I’m sorry if I did anything wrong,” I ventured when the silence grew too oppressive. “If there’s any chance I can make it to you, consider it done.”
“You may have noticed that some of your fellow workers don’t skip out of here on the dot of five every day. That’s because there won’t be enough positions for all of you. If you want to keep your job, keep that in mind.”
“They’re laying staff off?” My mouth fell open in dismay.
The boss stared at me grimly for a long moment, stretching the pause to the breaking point. Just as I was about to say something, anything, he shook his head. “Not yet but they will. You’ll have a fight on your hands to keep a job past next month. Given how little you work, you won’t make the bar. Especially not by leaving early.”
He waved his hand in dismissal, and I stood to leave on shaking legs. My stomach twisted and burned with acid. The meal from the night before hung heavily inside me. If it hadn’t been for the emotional connection of the evening before, I might have regurgitated it back up. As it was, a tussle ensued between my swallowing throat and my churning belly. My nausea passed. A hollow victory in the face of the upcoming battle.
That night, I worked so late the buses had stop
ped running by the time I left the office. I stole an extra hour from my sleep by trudging home by foot instead. When I finally let myself into the house, my husband lay wakeful. His frowning forehead was so burdened with concern that it twisted into the distressing mask of a stranger. For long minutes, I couldn’t even talk. Each time I opened my mouth to explain, tears threatened to burst forth.
He didn’t push me. With the gentle care that had made me fall in love with him so many decades earlier, he undressed me slowly and wrapped me in my night garment. He unwound my headdress, investing the effort to lay it out in preparation for the next morning. In bed, my husband pulled me into his arms and rocked me until the humiliating guilt and shame of the day dispersed.
When I could speak, I did so haltingly. Pausing between each word to weigh up whether it was the right one. I was so tired and overwhelmed, there’s a possibility that I went overboard. My husband knows me well, though. He isn’t a man to judge.
After sharing my problem with him, I felt better even with it still looming large in tomorrow’s landscape. I fell into a fitful sleep and dreamed of monsters chasing me. They demanded I work harder than ever before. My boss was a crazed hare, long ears twitching and gleaming teeth looking razor sharp. He ran in circles around me, showing off his incredible speed.
When I woke the next morning, my first thought was that I’d overslept. My clothes were laid out on the bed. I checked my watch and then the bedside clock. Six o’clock as usual.
My headdress was carefully positioned on the bedspread for ease of wrapping. The full regalia of religious shirt and pants lay below it. At work, I’d usually dress more casually, an attempt to fade into the background. This morning, touched by my husband’s sweet gesture, I dressed up formally instead.
The kitchen smelled of the sweetbreads we grilled for breakfast on special occasions. My daughter looked happy but nonplussed as she ate the mouth-watering feast. Once she’d been shooed off to school, I rose to grab my purse and be on my way. My husband had different ideas, though. He pressed gently on my shoulders until I sat back down.
