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“You’re reminded constantly that she’s a grieving widow…something’s not right with Erika Kirk.”
The woman in question sat ever attentive, in the chair her late husband’s outline once took up day in and day out, building the business she was now grappling to keep grounded in his absence. Though instead of keeping up with sponsors, hires, and pending contracts, she kept up with Candace Owens. The woman on the screen easily took up the room and the attention of everyone in it. More than the men around the roundtable, she took up Erika Kirk’s attention.
It was a new development within the weekly marketing team meetings, Erika mandating the bunch to dedicate the last hour of the reunion to keep up with Candace’s weekly breakdown analysis on the widow.
The investigative woman mocking her on-screen was right. Something was not right with the watching blonde. For Candace Owens had wholly become the sole proprietor of Erika Kirk’s attention.
Candace was always there. Virtually at least. During Erika’s previously screen-free breakfasts, 5am fasted workouts, and even during the 3 hours of dreaming that Erika managed the previous night. And oh, was she well aware of Candace’s omnipresence. Every time she began to think of the fact, she would end up wishing that her late husband’s fate would catapult onto her right there and then. It was a sadistic thought, sure. But it was one of the tamer thoughts Erika had these days.
She was sure her late husband & their Sunday saviour were scoffing down at her. They were probably held in debate over whether this amount of thought and subconscious desire—masked as disdain—for the podcaster merited purgatory for the widow.
The men who lifelessly filled the roundtable might have also been having this very debate in their heads, perplexed at where—who— their boss’s attention had been redirected to. Though they would never say it aloud. What they did outwardly express, though, was the useless motion of running their hands through their heads as if there was any substance to run through. The bald bastards who managed to wear a t-shirt plastered with the American flag every day of the week were internally crawling with annoyance at having to live through another 50 minutes sat listening to Candace Owens speak.
They would most definitely not survive a day in their boss’s new life. Erika had replaced the previous surrounding sound of her life—political chatter and Morgan Wallen—with fixated attention to any media featuring Candace.
They were only at minute twenty when one of the men finally broke, “Why are we even listening to this?”
God forbid 1/72 of his day was dedicated to hearing another woman speak. “Remind me, your job is to do what I say, not vice versa, correct?”
He nodded, sinking into his seat with shame—a rarity for men of his kind.
That sharp, smart mouth etched in the blonde’s memory broke her thoughts of firing the man with, “Shabbat Shalom, daddy’s home!”
It shouldn’t have been as funny as it was. It should’ve been humiliating, one of the most humiliating comments said about her, among the labyrinth on the internet. But she let out a laugh. Multiple, actually. They followed one after another, gradually growing in intensity, building a painfully hilarious knot in her stomach.
She looked fucking insane.
All of their puny eyes were on her now, and thank Netanyahu that the podcast was coming to a close. As soon as it did, Erika shooed the opportunists off.
She had hoped to catch her breath when they left, but the other woman’s voice continued to play in the room, echoing throughout the halls. Autoplay cursed her brewing internal crisis, deciding now was the time to be ironic. God knew that when Candace Owens spoke, it became harder to breathe, as if Erika’s respiratory system found it a need to make room for the other woman; as if they were close in proximity, too close in proximity. But they weren’t even in the same damn room.
She found herself laughing again, not at the other woman’s sharpness—for now she was treading on the Erpenbeck scandal—what tickled Erika now was her own conscience.
Others would attribute her recent scattered state to the ricocheting nature of grief. Once the wounds of grief seemed to heal, projectile bullets welcomed back crimson to color the griever’s skin. That was, at least, what those around Erika assumed.
It was a good facade to fall into, the grieving widow. How long the facade would hold up was another question, with a timed tenure that seemed to be reaching its end. The masses had only recently begun to notice the shift in the widow. Day by day, it became more and more apparent that Erika Kirk was holding up a merciless fight against the four winds of truth to keep her mourning veil on.
In her new lonesome hours, Erika began to pursue introspection in a manner she hadn’t in years after hopping on the one-way train to an All-American future. She met the guy, roped him in, tied the knot, set the white picket fence, etc. But that was all shot away now, far in the past. With no return ticket, Erika was forced to find her way back to herself on foot, a sole journey where she was her own company.
She hated it.
The company of her thoughts was loud and pressing. All it recently thought about was Candace. All it recently wanted was Candace.
Candace, Candace, Candace.
But Candace was forbidden fruit. As much as Erika’s subconscious wanted to sink its teeth in, she would never outwardly acknowledge or pursue her desire to taste the fruit.
So, Erika shamefully developed a routine of stalking Candace’s socials on a burner account. Logging on in between meetings and conferences that couldn’t interest her any less. Scrolling far too deep down Candace’s Instagram on her rides home, saving a few posts here and there. Erika would always come back to a post from 2021, where the podcaster donned a brown V-neck polkadot blouse. The blonde’s eyes would dart across the fabric, how it cinched Candace’s midsection perfectly, and exposed just the right amount of cleavage—painfully rendering Erika’s cheeks flushed. Erika could probably detail every aspect of the picture by memory. Hell, she’d even managed to find herself saving fan edits of Candace on TikTok whenever she hopped on the treadmill for her morning 12-3-30.
Somewhere in her train of frantic thought, Erika had managed her way into her bathroom, perched on the floor to center her spiral. Now, with an ache growing on her backside, she got herself up from her position against the door, up and staring into the mirror to see if she could even find even a glimpse of the woman she was before her life found Candace as necessary as it did water.
She was unsuccessful. Snapped back to reality, the house had gone quiet. Candace’s voice down the hall was no more.
How long had Erika been sitting in her own mania?
That was it. She fled the bathroom to shut off every device of hers for the afternoon. She couldn’t keep on in this state, days whisking away in daydreams of someone who despised her so. Someone who got mass royalties from baking hour-long hate speeches towards her, towards her grief, and her family. Where had Erika’s self-respect gone? Her morals? Values? Beliefs against this very feeling she’d previously held repulsive sentiments towards?
As she came to shut her phone off, Erika made the mistake of glancing at her calendar for the next week. It was as if the spirits of conservatism had been mocking her, as all confirmed and pretty sat a gala for the coming Tuesday, one Erika was well aware Candace would be attending too.
She slammed the phone into her nightstand, the movement backing the furniture into a wall, sending a frame holding a picture of the man she was supposed to be grieving to shatter on the floor.
Nothing about this was normal. If this was her behaviour now, Erika didn’t know how she would act upon seeing Candace in the flesh. She was most definitely going to lose her composure either way, but would she lose it by flipping the woman off, or by pulling her into the closet she now found herself in?
Time would only tell.