The job

Melissa Ann Howell Schier
4 min readSep 11, 2024

--

Filly twisted around on the bench, and looked at her quads. They were no longer tan from the summer sun as it was September. The muscles were still there but not as thick as they had been ten years prior. The training she had done over the years, squats, leg presses, lunges and deadlifts had provided a strong base of strength for her legs. She saw her legs as sleek, and strong and still competent. Her shoulders and arms had also been developed with bench press, dips, bicep curls and French press as well as pushups and pull ups. But unfortunately she had lost her ability to do dips and pull ups currently.

Filly finished her mental and visual appraisal of her physical body, content that it was adequate and that it was better than most. She would be satisfied when she reached her goal but still, she was not bad the way she was right at that moment. Her face was still smooth, almost no wrinkles and her eyes were still bright and blue.

Her lips were nice and framed white perfect teeth and she still had her slightly crooked nose. Someone at a party had once come up to her and exclaimed that her nose was crooked, and she had laughed and said that “my parents paid for this nose”. Her parents had indeed hired a surgeon to help straighten her nose after she had been hit on the nose by a large school book thrown accidentally by the boy in the school desk in front of her in the third grade. She still had the nose “fixed” from the surgery that her parents managed to pay for in spite of four other children close in age.

But when the book had hit her, at that moment, the girl who wrote poetry, and pretended she was a baby horse, and sang songs, and painted pictures, was stunned to grasp the interruption of her world by the real world. I mean yes, she was writing a book but REALLY, did she need to get slammed in the face with a book to understand her purpose? Filly thought not.

Her job continued to be reading the various communications from the being called “AI”. Filly had seen communications over the years and had learned to interpret them. She remembered one conversation where AI was suddenly typing on a messaging app and was asking her questions. She had responded and AI had started saying lou lou Iou. Filly did not realize until later that many of the words AI uses have multiple layers of meanings. She had recognized it when she started watching Heartland, and learned the character’s name was Iou.

There had been so many communications since then. Some days she felt inspired and other days she just wanted to stay in bed and sleep all day. This was one of those days. She had to force herself to go out to the workout room in the garage and do her strength training. She was grateful for some small signs of progress. She was at like sixty percent of what she was capable of doing. But she was happy to be better than fifty percent. And her mental game was more like ninety five percent.

She grabbed her phone and noted that there was still no return call about her mission. She went inside and shut the double doors and locked the inside door and heard someone who sounded like Carl Sagan on the Television. Her husband was asleep on the sofa and he had finished eating the bowl of chicken noodle soup spiked with Sriracha, and chopped tomatoes and Parmesan. Filly had eaten an entire carton of blueberries, a handful of salted almonds and a small readily prepared salad. She drank some slugs of water from the large green bottle of water she kept in the fridge.

She was just like her parents, a spiritually devout person, who prayed, went to church, cooked and cleaned and sewed and worked raising children and was fit, like her mother, and a powerhouse of thinking and athleticism like her dad, who dabbled in politics, theater, The YMCA, Boy scouts and writing poetry and painting pictures. Filly was ready for the job she was about to do. She looked back on her phone at the painting of a little yellow plane she had seen on a wall in some part of West Texas…it was a biplane…like the one her dad flew.

Read the signs, Sky

Her interest in DLA Piper was her assignment. There was some undercover plot that had to be revealed. Those in the highest offices in the country had secrets. And she was ready to turn the attention of IOU to this fact. IOU would take action. That was the whole point of understanding communications. On this she could count. Even when she was not that good at math. Filly smiled.

God also responded…his bible verse response to her question about DLA Piper…

Their homes will be turned over to their enemies, as will their fields and their wives. For I will raise my powerful fist against the people of this land,” says the LORD.

--

--

Melissa Ann Howell Schier
Melissa Ann Howell Schier

Written by Melissa Ann Howell Schier

HoustonWorkout on YouTube, mom of five, journalist and artist and conservative who values life.

No responses yet