Emily Vance Brown

Answer the phone; assign a call number; refer to case management; refer to counseling; most often, refer to both. Open an intake file, close another one. Ask a client if they’ve been here before—nod politely, like you don’t know they’re lying, when they say no. Re-open their sealed file.

Paulina, the receptionist, buzzes the room with a message: Sarah is on Line 1 and she’s crying again. (Sarah’s always crying). They can hear her sobs echoing through the office over Amira’s soothing voice saying “deep breaths, in and out.”

Her tears, leaking through the end of the receiver, leave a puddle on the dirty once-white tiles.

She’s gonna make her nose bleed again, Amira mouths to the other two hotline advocates.

Amelia sets down her scissors and the paper snowflakes she’s been cutting for the office and leaves the room, returning with a roll of paper towels and a bucket. She groans as she mops up the salty puddle.

“I’m too old for this shit,” she mutters, before being hushed by Athena.

The tears are coming faster than Amelia can mop away now. Giving up on the task altogether, she positions the soapy bucket under Amira’s phone, held in her outstretched arm. The steady drip of water increases to a flood and turns bright red, an almost incandescent cherry-colored shower seeping through the phone receiver.

Athena watches as the bucket fills higher and higher, threatening to overflow, and she seamlessly swaps the bucket for an empty flower vase from her desk.

She feeds the bloody water to the office monster, Craig, in his terrarium, in the poorest lit corner of the office. (Don’t worry, he doesn’t mind—he prefers the darkness).

Another buzz from Paulina: “Second call coming through on Line 2,” she says. They all look to the ancient schoolhouse clock hanging on the wall. It reads precisely 5 pm.

“Not my turn,” Amelia says, shaking her head. Athena grumbles something under her breath about Amira managing to shirk her turn again, but she answers the phone.

“Rob?” she asks, abandoning the usual spiel about confidentiality and mandated reporting. His response, a barely audible whisper, is indistinguishable to the other advocates over Sarah’s heaving sobs.

“Yes, I know, I know,” Athena says. “You’re welcome to call and ask, but you know my answer is going to be the same. We can’t tell you if your wife’s a client with us.” She pauses for his response.

“So what’s it going to be this time, then? Pills?”

The clock hits 5:01, and a loud bang goes off on the other end of the line.

“Gun.” She shudders and hangs up the phone with a click. Rob is dead, for now, and he’ll stay that way until 6:00 p.m. when he calls back for his precisely 1-minute-long argument with whichever advocate is unfortunate enough to take his call. His manipulation tactic could never work; they stopped hearing from his wife, Dawn, only a day after she disappeared. But they would certainly never tell him that.

At 5:02, Amira leaves the hotline room to wash the splashes of tears and blood off her forearms, and Paulina buzzes the room with a call from Vanessa.

One of their least problematic of the red-flag client list, Vanessa calls every few days to complain about her ongoing CPS case and to refuse any recommended referrals to the legal team. A model repeat caller in most regards, she does have an unfortunate habit of screaming at, then hanging up on, the advocates whom she interprets as questioning her parenting skills.

Amelia answers, runs through the usual spiel and pleasantries.

“Yes, I understand,” she responds. “Mmm-hmm… Absolutely… I understand.”

Still on the call, she pulls out a blank referral from her desk and scribbles frantically.

“Absolutely. I think you’re making the right decision… I can definitely do that for you.”

Amira raises an eyebrow at Athena across the room. Amelia was kind, sure, but she tended to take on a sterner, more motherly role with their clients. This new “absolutely” and “right decision” tactic was disconcerting, to say the least.

Amelia hangs up the phone with a final “absolutely” and rises from her desk as if in a trance. She places the referral at the very top of the stack marked “legal.” Except in the rarest of emergencies, new client referrals are added to the bottom of the stack. Sometimes in a few weeks, and other times at a snail’s pace, those bottom referral sheets make their way to the top where they can be picked up by legal advocates. No client has ever been advanced directly to the top of the waitlist.

Amelia sits back down at her desk and begins folding a paper crane without a word.

“Uhh—excuse me?” Amira says. Amelia stays focused on her work.

Amira clears her throat. No response.

“Are we going to talk about how you just broke all our waitlisting rules for one of our rudest clients?”

Amelia continues folding, ignoring or blissfully unaware. The other two stare at her until Amira’s incessant throat clearing finally breaks her concentration.

“Who did?” she asks.

Amira frowns as Athena laughs: “I don’t think you’re old enough for this quite yet.”

“For what?” Amelia asks.

Amira groans and slams her head down on the desk. “She’s fucking with us,” she says to Athena, rolling her eyes.

“Me?” Amelia persists. The questioning look on her face seems genuine, Athena thinks. Amelia’s never been a good actor.

“What did I do?” Amelia asks.

“It’s just a bit atypical for you to give someone special treatment. It’s fine, though, we can move her along first if you think it’s necessary,” Athena says.

Amelia stares back at her, perplexed. Amira points to the referral stack, her head still on the desk.

Amelia walks back to the referral stack and stares down at Vanessa’s fresh referral.

“I didn’t do that,” she says.

“Yes, you did,” Amira says, her voice muffled from between her arms.

Amelia runs her hand over the top paper. “I don’t think I did that,” she says, shaking her head. She moves the paper to the bottom of the stack.

“We just watched you do it,” Athena says.

“No, I would remember doing that.”

“If this is a joke, it’s getting old,” Amira says.

At 5:42, caller Sarah rings again—not terribly unusual in itself, they’re used to hearing from certain callers multiple times in one day—but Sarah typically waits a few weeks between her calls.

“Hi, Sarah,” Athena says, anxiously tapping her pencil on her desk. Her voice, always loud enough to hear through the phone across the room, isn’t clouded with tears for once.

“I’m ready for my intake now,” Sarah says, no hesitation in her voice. Athena spins around in her chair to make eye contact with the other advocates. Amelia’s filing her nails, while Amira chews on her pen and stares into space. Athena gestures for the pair to silence their phones. She clicks the “speaker” button on her phone.

“That’s great, Sarah. I’m so glad to hear it. Can I ask what changed?”

“My mother visited me—well, her spirit did.”

Amira slowly caps her pen and turns her chair around to face the phone.

“Her spirit?” Athena asks.

“Yes. She came to me while I was watching my afternoon soaps, and she told me I needed to go to counseling. I didn’t want to believe it was her, at first. She looked so young. But she spoke just like her, and she had the same birthmark, and I just felt it in my soul, you know?”

“Uh-huh,” Athena nods. Professional to her core, she has always believed that what inspires a client to seek help is none of her damn business, even if it’s a ghost.

“I’m looking at our calendar now—it looks like our next available intake appointment is this Thursday at 10. Does that work for you?”

“Oh no. No, no, no, no.” Sarah starts mumbling away from the phone.

“Sarah?”

“I need to come in today.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Sarah, I don’t think today’ll be possible.”

“Mother said it has to be today. Today or never.”

Athena covers the phone mic with her hand and glances over to Amelia. “I’m fully booked,” she whispers. “Can you take her?”

Amelia nods. “I can squeeze her in at 6. Make sure she knows we have to be done in an hour.”

Athena schedules the appointment and lets Sarah go.

A buzz, again, from Paulina: “Can one of you come up to the front to talk to an officer? He’s brought some man he’s saying is supposed to be in our shelter.”

Amelia and Amira both turn to Athena expectantly.

“I know, I know, my turn for walk-ins,” Athena grumbles. “Don’t mind the fact that I just scheduled our most difficult caller for an intake.”

6:00 pm. Rob. Amira’s turn to answer this time. Different advocate, same conversation. Hanging, this time.

“At least I got something different this time,” Amira says pleasantly, placing the phone back on the receiver.

“No, actually, he hung himself last Tuesday, too,” Amelia says.

“I think you mean ‘hanged’,” says Amira with a smirk.

In the front office, Athena is putting on her best performance of a meek, obedient social worker (not an easy task, as anyone who’s ever actually been a social worker could tell you). The officer’s stubbly little horns, just beginning to curve like a goat’s, are barely visible above his greasy hairline.

“As I was saying, officer—” she inserts a long pause to make sure the cop notices how reverently she’s batting her eyelashes at him— “we’re not technically a homeless shelter.”

“But—”

“We do have a shelter, yes, but it’s only for survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking. Is there any chance that applies to you?” Athena says sweetly to the poor man the officer has dragged here with him. The poor man, who, unfortunately, is clearly tweaking on some undetermined substance and does not seem to notice Athena’s presence at all.

“You can’t even put him up for a night?”

“No, sir, we cannot,” she says. She can feel her artificial sweetness beginning to sour. “We don’t have any beds available, and even if we did, they would go to one of the hundreds of women on our waitlist. Many of them have been waiting for months.”

“But—”

“Would you be interested in adding your name to our waitlist?” Athena says to the man. Again, no response.

“So what’s the point of you, then?” the officer says.

Athena freezes with that stupid fake smile plastered on her face. Ringing in her ears is the kind of deafening, roaring silence she only seems to hear when dealing with those who are a particular, intentional kind of stupid.

“We offer services and a temporary place to stay for survivors of intimate partner violence, sexual abuse, and human trafficking.”

“So you do have a shelter.”

Athena rolls her eyes. “Lord, give me patience,” she says.

“What?”

“No,” she corrects herself. “No shelter.”

“I don’t get why you’re being so disagreeable when you could be helping this man,” the officer says.

“I think I’d like to go back to being a cat now,” the man says.

“Well, that sounds like a good plan to me,” Athena says. “Let’s do that.”

In a grotesque show of shape-shifting, the man turns into a small brown tabby cat.

“I’ll be damned,” the officer says to himself. 

The front door intercom buzzes, signaling a visitor. Paulina glances at the security camera, then unlocks the door. The tabby cat squeezes out as soon as the door cracks open. He yowls as he runs away from the office.

“Our next appointment,” Athena says curtly. Athena, Paulina, and the officer all gasp when Sarah walks in. She is nothing but mist and refracting light. Athena and Paulina regain their composure immediately; the officer gapes rudely.

“Right. Well then, I’ll have both of you come to the back so we can give poor Paulina some peace,” Athena says after a momentary shocked pause.

“Me, too?” the officer asks.

“You, too,” she says to the officer. “We have a few pages of paperwork we’ll need you to do before you’re free to go. You’re welcome to sit in the hotline room and finish it.

“Can’t I take it with me?”

“No.”

Athena opens the door to the hotline room and waves him through in front of her.

“Amelia, Sarah is here for her intake. Try not to act shocked when you see her. And Amira, could you run and grab the special walk-in forms for me? Thanks.”

Amira giggles and nods knowingly before following Amelia out.

Athena waits for the two women to leave, then says to the monster in the corner: “Craig, you know what to do.”

The office monster leaps from his terrarium and devours the horned officer whole.

Sarah’s intake lasts exactly one hour.

“How’d it go?” Amira asks once Amelia’s returned to the hotline room. Amelia only shakes her head in response. The other two women have already cleared their desks for the night shift advocates, and Amelia starts to tidy hers.

“We won’t be hearing from her again,” Amelia finally says quietly. “She’s moving on.”

Before leaving for the night, with the other two waiting for her in the doorway, Amelia signs and closes Sarah’s file.