The Circle Gets Smaller Every Tuesday
Lead-in:
Someone pinned this to the community board at the unemployment office in Birmingham. Then it showed up on a library bulletin board in Detroit. Then outside a food bank in Athens. Not Athens, Georgia—Athens, Greece. Same handwriting each time, which makes no sense. Maybe it makes perfect sense.
---
My neighbor Marina got the email at 2:47 PM on a Tuesday. I know the exact time because she screenshotted it and sent it to our group chat. "Position eliminated effective immediately." Twenty-three years of editing medical journals. Twenty-three years of catching errors that could kill people. Eliminated. Effective immediately.
Tuesday. Always fucking Tuesday.
Actually, that's not true. Sometimes it's Thursday. My brother got fired on a Monday once. But it feels like Tuesday. You know? That nothing day. That middle-of-nowhere day. That day when you realize the week isn't going to get better.
Marina's fifty-eight. Her knees are bad from that standing desk her company bought to avoid lawsuits. Her daughter just started at State. Marina spent twenty-three years editing articles about cancer treatments that cost more than houses. She fixed a decimal point error once that would've killed every trial patient. Nobody thanked her. Now she's nobody.
This is what I think about when people ask if I still care about doing things right. Of course I care. Caring is all I have left. Caring is the only thing they can't take away on a Tuesday afternoon. Yet.
The circle gets smaller.
Last month, The Atlantic Review folded. No, wait—that was two months ago. Last month was The Citizen Tribune. Or was that the same week? They're blurring together, these deaths. Another magazine, another newspaper, another website that used to pay $50 for a poem. Another library reduces hours to Tuesday and Thursday mornings only, when working people can't go. Another friend admits they're driving for DoorDash now. "Just temporarily," they say. We both know they're lying.
I'm what someone once called an "empath government critic." Stupid phrase. Makes me sound like I read auras at city council meetings. What I actually do is notice things and write them down and sometimes someone pays me $75 for it and sometimes they don't. I notice the woman at the benefits office has pink eye but can't afford to take a sick day. I notice the security guard is reading Proust on his phone. I notice everyone's shoulders are higher, tighter, like we're all waiting for a blow.
We're not rich. We're not even stable. We're the people in the middle of the middle, doing work that matters until it doesn't. Marina catching typos that kill. My friend Tomás filming cops, which is legal but they don't care. Sarah recording languages—actually, no, Sarah gave up. She's selling insurance now. She cries in her car between appointments but the money's steady.
No, wait. She's back. She's recording again. Weekends only. I can't keep track of who's in and who's out anymore.
Tomás said something last week. Or last month. Time's weird now. He said, "You know the band on the Titanic? Were they stupid or—"
"Holy," Marina said. "They were holy. Shut up."
She was drunk. We were all drunk. It was Tuesday. Or Wednesday. The day after something terrible that I can't remember specifically.
The system's falling apart but honestly? It sucked anyway. Built on—I don't know, something something colonialism, something something capitalism. I'm too tired for theory. The point is, it never worked for us and now it's not even pretending to try.
My landlord raised the rent again. 15%. The email had emojis in it. Actual emojis. Marina's COBRA costs $1,847 a month. That's not a typo. She edited that number four times to make sure. Tomás hasn't been paid for his last three projects because the companies keep "restructuring" before invoices are due. It's legal. Everything awful is legal.
But we still do the work.
Kind of.
Marina edits for a clinic now. Free. She catches errors that would kill people and nobody knows. Tuesday she found "morphine" instead of "metformin" in someone's chart. Wednesday she found it again. Different patient. Same mistake. The clinic bought her a Starbucks card for Christmas. Ten dollars.
Tomás films but his camera's broken so he uses his phone which is also broken but less broken. He was at the encampment when they cleared it. 4 AM. He got footage of cops throwing away someone's seizure medication, laughing. His phone died right as—actually, it doesn't matter. Nobody watched the video anyway. Twelve views. Three were him checking if it uploaded right.
I write these things. Obviously. I pin them places. Sometimes I find them edited by strangers. Someone fixed my grammar in Oakland. Someone added "FUCK YOU" in Sharpie in Memphis. Someone drew a dick on the one in Phoenix. That one hurt, honestly.
"What if this is how it ends?" Marina asked yesterday. Or last week. "Not with a bang but with... with..."
"Tuesday emails," I said.
"I was going to say whimpers but yeah."
She laughed like crying. Or cried like laughing. Same thing these days.
Here's what I've noticed: they don't even hide it anymore. The Tuesday thing. HR books actually recommend it. I looked it up. "Tuesday terminations give employees time to process while maintaining weekend productivity." They wrote that down. In a book. That people buy.
The system's terrified of losing control but it already lost it. We're just watching the tantrum. They're breaking everything on their way down. Marina's twenty-three years. Tomás's footage. Sarah's languages. My—I don't know what I contribute honestly. Anger? Witnessing? These words nobody reads?
But we're still here. Marina, Tomás, kind-of-Sarah, me, thousands of others. We're kindreds. Marina's word, after her fourth wine that Thursday when we thought Sarah was gone for good. Kindreds. People who can't stop caring even though caring is stupid and expensive and hurts.
I met another one last week. This woman at the library teaching old people computers because the benefits office went digital-only. She used to design those systems. Now she shows people the backdoors she built in before they fired her. On Tuesdays. For free.
"I'm not a hero," she said when I called her one. "I'm just—I can't not do it. You know?"
I know.
Every Tuesday something shrinks. The circle. The budget. The hope. The number of people who still answer my texts.
But also: Marina saves someone's grandmother from a morphine overdose she'll never know almost happened. Tomás films something that matters to the twelve people who see it. Sarah taught her niece to say "fuck you" in a language only nine people speak. Eight people. Someone died yesterday. Probably.
The woman at the library sneaks seventeen people through the benefits system using backdoors that'll probably be gone by next Tuesday.
I write this stuff that sounds pretentious and angry and nobody reads it but someone in Athens—Greece Athens—pinned it to a board so maybe that's something.
The system's dying? Good. Let it. It was shit anyway. Built on—whatever, I'm tired. The question is: who do we save while it burns? How do we hold each other in the shrinking circle?
I don't have answers. Marina does: "We just do. We just fucking do."
She's editing right now. Tuesday night. After the clinic. After her daughter called crying about tuition. After everything. She's saving lives for free at 11 PM on a Tuesday because she can't not.
Tomás is charging his phone with a cable held together by duct tape and spite.
Sarah's back to recording. She's teaching the dirty jokes to her niece who doesn't understand but laughs anyway.
The circle gets smaller every Tuesday. We're still in it. Still here. Angry and tired and drunk and crying and still fucking here.
They fire us on Tuesdays because they think we're weak then. They're right. We are weak. We're also still here Wednesday morning, weaker but still here. Thursday, still here. Friday, broken but here. Monday, dreading Tuesday but here.
Tuesday comes. It always does. So do we.
Still here when the emails arrive. Still here when everyone else leaves. Still here in the circle that gets smaller and smaller until maybe it's just me pinning these to boards nobody reads but I'm still fucking here.
---
Coda:
They chose Tuesday because they thought we'd be too tired to fight. Thing is, we're not fighting. We're just refusing to leave. Turns out that's worse for them. Turns out that's enough.
