Ogreness, Black Lake-book5

Chapter 43
~

My interviewer asked if I denied Range privilege. So many comebacks for that. A fist to the face was my preferred. I held my breath to keep my chest from vibratin’ with anger.

“The term is racist on its face,” I said. “Aren’t ya embarrassed to use it?”

“You don’t believe your people have a special advantage?”

“Do the poor get an advantage for accepting free money?” I asked.

“You’re comparing rich ogres to the poor?” the woman asked.

“No. I’m differentiating successful from those who’ve never taken a chance, spent their dues gettin’ an education, sat around takin’ instead of buildin’.”

“So you deny you didn’t have a leg up, and in the same breath call the poor lazy?”

“Those are yar words.” This wasn’t going well. “Six generations ago an ancestor struck out for the Range with two goats, a pack of cooking utensils, and two changes of clothes.”

“Oh, here we go,” she mumbled.

“He claimed a parcel of land based on the custom of the times on primeval land next to a lake most everyone in the world thought was inhabited by evil spirits.”

“And with the help of some elves and a dwarf—” she sneered.

“Birs, was my ancestor’s name. He worked mornings to nightfall for two decades until he could invite a mate to join him, support a family.

“Each of his younglings followed his habit of hard work. They invested well. Cooperated with the development of the Black Lake Hamlet, populated by humans, giants, and little people. All of whom grew successful.”

“Other historians have another memory. They call it the usurping of the Range,” she said.

“No one has ever been turned away,” I said.

“That’s odd, considering your government, council, has banned new development in the Range.”

“Yar government has done the same on its public lands, and those parcels ya call federal wildernesses and national parks.”

“Your council has gobbled up every acre of—”

“What is open for development in the North was sold by yar government at a heavy profit.” I needed to move the conversation to the persecution taking place in the North.

“Opened expansion,” she said.

“Yet yar economy has dragged for decades, while the folks of the Range have grown wealthy.”

“Cherry picked by migrants from the South,” she hissed.

“Who are persecuted and murdered in numbers that can be likened to genocide.”

Her mouth gaped. “What! Genocide?”

“For every fifth police interaction, a giant is either shot, killed, or beaten, whereas the statistics for humans is one in ten thousand.”

I stopped, to let that sink in. She mumbled about lies.

“They call it DWO. Driving while ogre. Trolls and ogres are beaten on the street by their fellow citizens every day. Their politicians tell them not to go out alone. They don’t go to the police and demand a safe street.”

“Recently there has been a rash of—”

“A rash of nothing. It’s persecution this world hasn’t seen in four hundred years.

“Lies.”

“That’s why thousands of giants are givin’ up their homes and migrating South, for the Wildes, the Western Plains, and the Eastern Deserts. We’re searchin’ for suitable sites for new development in the Range.”

She lost it at that point. She tried to scream over me.

I kept to my speaking points until a voice said we’d cut to commercial. Who knows if anyone heard about the brain drain they’d be realizin’ soon, loss of production, loss of markets, since no one in the South wanted anything to do with them.

I unthreaded my mic out of my shirt and flung the electronics to the floor, with someone shoutin’ the segment wasn’t wrapped. Let them find a non-racist to interview me. I think that came out of my mouth. Be nice if it was recorded. But they wouldn’t play it. Didn’t play well with their agenda.

Frip and Ponwr fell beside me as I stumbled blind into the dark of the studio.

“Went well,” Ponwr mumbled, as he directed me with a ham-fist at my elbow.

“Went absolutely horrible if you ask me,” Frip said.

“Come back. Come back,” a human voice pleaded.

If they had a camera on my back, they could play that to demonstrate the emotional outburst prevalent in ogres.

I imagined the headlines. Representative of the ogre council rants and flees from interview.

We exited metal double doors and bright overhead light hit me even brighter than the set lights. Ouch. The three of us stood in place a five-count until our eyes adjusted a bit.

“I thought you politicians were tactful.” Ponwr growled, in a troll snicker.

“That was me being tactful,” I said, lookin’ left and right. Which way? “And don’t ever call me a politician again.”

“Think that way,” Frip offered.

We followed a maze of corridors for five minutes until we decided to try the opposite direction. Stairway exits were here and there, but I wasn’t walking down thirty-three floors.

“So, boss, where we eating lunch?” Ponwr asked.

I looked at my watch. Ten-thirty-three.

I didn’t know trolls are as food motivated as us ogres.

~ Nuel ~

Everyone in the office had heard about me being at Black Lake, meeting with “the ogres.”

I’d never felt particularly welcomed with open arms at work, but I’d never felt as alien as I did this morning.

My mind flicked back to my time last night in the luxury of that Lear jet. Surprisingly, Ike and I maintained civil discourse during the entire two-and-a-half-hour flight. He’d even been almost-charming.

Maybe it helped we didn’t talk politics.

He called a limo at the airport. Not to impress me, I don’t think, but to be a nice host. I’m pretty sure he’s the kind to curl into the back of whatever taxi is at the front of the line.

Why did he come across as such an arrogant jerk before? I look back and can’t really figger it out.

~