“Delores!” Godfrey barked. “Get in here!”

Ugh, what was it now? Godfrey had been on a tear all day after his meeting with the station manager. His normal demeanour was abrupt and surly, but today, he was also seething. She’d been actively attempting to stay out of his way and was pretty sure she’d make it out of work unscathed, but here she was, five minutes off the clock, and by his tone, it might be another evening at the office.

“Now!” he roared.

Delores smooshed her sore feet into her shoes and scuttled into his office.

Without looking up at her, hunched over at his overflowing ornate desk, he demanded, “Did you get a fax from the dealership?!”

Delores sighed. It had just come in and was on her desk waiting for tomorrow. It hadn’t seemed urgent.

“It just came in…” she began.

“Then why isn’t it on my desk right now!?” He slammed his fist on the shiny wooden surface, and the awards, swag, and paraphernalia he kept jumped at the same time as Delores.

“I’ll get it.” She turned and scurried back to her desk, grabbing the stack of faxes. She knew better than to give him all of the ones that had come in after closing hours of 5 o’clock; best to just give him the one he needed now and have the others ready just in case.

She hurried up to his desk and thrust the paper in front of him. He snatched it from her hands, slicing her finger with the crisp paper as he did. She put her hand to her mouth. Ouch.

Godfrey scanned the paper, and Delores waited tentatively to see if he needed anything else.

“Gosh dang darn it all to hell!” He bellowed. “They’re not renegotiating, they’ve moved most of their budget over to that new flipping morning show at CMRK! All because of those two buffoons we still have on the air!”

Delores stood unmoving. She’d been working with Godfrey long enough to know that while he was demanding and gruff and pretty annoying, he mostly wanted an audience. Someone to witness his big boss attitude, to see that he took his job and the radio station business seriously. She was the main witness to his one-man show.

“Those stupid hacks are going to cost this station our reputation!” He was turning pink in the face now, all the way from his too-tight collar to his high hairline.

“Is there something I can do for you, Mr. Godfrey. I can compose a response if you like?”

Godfrey sighed a deep and raspy sigh. “Not tonight, Delores. It’s probably best I have a think over it tonight and respond more professionally in the morning. I’ll call Bill at Downton’s tomorrow. Maybe we can find room in his budget for another market. That Women’s Words show might be going places. We could perhaps give him a deal to sell minivans to the Mom listeners. I don’t know.”

He threw the paper down and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his hands over what was left of his hair. “You know, I’ve spent years building this relationship, keeping them happy, keeping the station happy. And those two morons can’t keep their dang mouths shut because they don’t understand the difference between creative license and offending our clients.” He was building up again, and Delores sensed a long rant coming. She should try to calm him down, she thought, so she could get out of there, get home and make a light supper and watch TV. She’d planned on walking home in the Spring light, fixing herself a pasta salad and a glass of wine and eating it on the tiny veranda she shared with her neighbour.

But, she agreed with Godfrey. Kent and Noble had gone too far. They were always pushing the limits, spewing out awful crap they thought was funny, mean comments about women they’d met on the weekends, crass commentary about their bodies or their faces or their voices. They were known to throw around outdated ideas of women in the kitchen, while contradicting themselves by saying most women couldn’t cook. That morning, though, they’d left women alone and had gone on a long-winded tirade about drivers of BMWs and how dumb they were, blaming them for all the traffic in the city, and calling the makers and sellers of the cars inside-out-brained a-holes. They laughed and cackled and cut to commercial - only for the airwaves to be flooded with the latest jingle and promotion for Downton’s Luxury Cars: Your go-to dealer to get into a brand new Jag, Mercedes, or you guessed it…BMW.

Rumour going round the office was that Kent had tried to get a new BMW company car and was told the best they could do was a top-market Honda. So much drama over nothing, Delores thought. She would have taken a free pedal bike, and there was Kent pouting because he couldn’t get the exact free car he wanted.

Delores nodded. “They went too far this time.”

“Too far was the Road Closed sign they flew past as they careened into the biggest dang relationship this station has! A complete disregard for everything but the sound of their own cackling voices!” Godfrey huffed. “You know I suggested they be fired?! That kind of behaviour, that kind of disregard for relationships of the people and companies that pay the bills, that pay their salaries, and no one does anything! Nothing! Those two will burn this place to the ground, and they’ll still have them prattling on on the air as the place goes up in flames.” Godfrey wiped the sweat from his upper lip. Then motioned for her to leave. “Go home, Delores. It’s after six now. Go home to that cat of yours or whatever.”

Delores looked down at the paper cut on her finger. He hadn’t meant it the way it sounded, she told herself. He didn’t mean she was a spinster, just because she was in her forties and lived alone. And used to have a cat. That she used to go home to every night.

“Peaches passed away two months ago.” She said.

“Oh, sorry to hear that, Delores. You getting another one?”

“No, I don’t think so.” She fought the urge to go on, to explain that losing Peaches after 16 years together was like losing a loved one. That he wasn’t just a cat, he was half of her, half her soul, it felt like. But men like Godfrey didn’t care about that. She doubted he cared about her at all.

Delores turned on her heel to leave, relieved she wouldn’t have to stay longer, and trying to get away before Godfrey had a sudden idea and would catch her at the last minute. She avoided being too helpful after 5:30, learning over the past 9 years that being helpful just meant losing her evening to work and not getting anything in return. She was on salary and was expected to complete the work, not abide by the hands on the clock. His words.

Against her better judgment, at the door, she paused and spun around.

“Maybe instead of getting them fired, you find a new show, or new hosts, that would do a better job and somehow get them replaced.”

Godfrey looked up from his papers and stared at her. “Delores, now that’s not a bad idea. Find replacements. Get them off the air for good. Huh. Yes. I like it.”

Delores smiled a tight smile and went to her desk to retrieve her purse. It was a good idea. She’d been thinking of it for years. She’d gotten into radio someday, hoping to host her own show. It was a dream she’d had since she was a child. Sitting at her desk as a nine-year-old, she’d interviewed her dolls and teddy bears, played them songs from her themed playlists and come up with slogan after slogan for her made-up radio DJ personas. It was a habit she kept into her teens and twenties, listing slogans and show ideas in cheap notebooks that piled up in a box under her bed. Even now, when she couldn’t sleep, she’d try to come up with new ones, though often enough, instead of falling asleep, she’d hit on an idea she thought was brilliant and end up spending an hour or more brainstorming.

Though she’d imagined herself as a DJ, a host in the booth, her voice in the ears of tens of thousands, maybe even millions of people, the closest she’d come to getting her foot in the door was becoming a secretary at OKAY RADIO. Admin work wasn’t her calling, but it paid the bills, and she was good enough at it not to lose her job. But she didn’t like it. She enjoyed being in the radio station, but she sometimes wondered what she’d done wrong in her life to get into a kind of career purgatory: she could see her dream being followed by others, dummies like Kent and Noble, while she sat and watched the action from her tiny desk outside Godfrey’s office.

Delores waited for the creaky elevator. She usually attempted to put the unfairness of life and her situation out of her mind, but the drama from this morning was still hot and got under her skin. The guys were used to everyone in the office rolling their eyes or telling them what dickheads they were, and they seemed to revel in it, but today the office had been quiet. When their show ended at ten am that morning, the normal post-show banter was absent. The guys went into their offices and then later into the conference room, where the curtains were drawn and the stern voices leaked through the walls.

They’d gotten a dressing down, the managers and higher-ups all solemn and serious. And word had made its way around the office. This was an official warning. They’d have to call Bill and make an apology, but the show would continue, and they’d be let loose on the airwaves again tomorrow morning.

It was all so obviously stupid and wrong. Delores didn’t know anyone who liked Kent and Noble and their dumb, loud morning show. Anyone she’d ever talked to about it had rolled their eyes and said oh my god, I can’t listen to those goofballs in the morning, or any time of day, actually. They’re too much. Too annoying, too stupid, too sexist. How do guys like that even get on the air?

The elevator pinged, and Delores stepped into the tiny box. She should have just taken the stairs; it was probably safer than this amber-coloured cannon. The doors slammed shut, and without warning, like always, the elevator plunged down, Delores’s stomach plunging with it. She grasped the handrail. The entire elevator was tiled in what looked like plastic tortoiseshell tiles and mirrors. Some design choices left from the sixties that should have been left in the past. The entire office had recently gotten a fancy futuristic upgrade, but the lobby and the elevator had been forgotten completely. Going to and leaving work felt like she was time-travelling; the tortoise disco rocket the bridge between both worlds.

The doors flung themselves open, and Delores lurched out onto the street. The city lit up in a warm evening glow. Long shadows stretched over everything like slate blankets.

The thought lingered in her mind. How do guys like that get on the air? Despite working at OKAY for nearly a decade, she still had no idea how shows were chosen, how hosts were picked. Godfrey was a sales manager; he kept to business development, always tracking down leads and ‘building relationships’ as he called it, though those relationships meant eating at a lot of nice restaurants. At times, it seemed like all Godfrey did was dine out on the company card. But she had to admit it seemed like it worked; the ad spots were almost always full without them tapping into discount pricing very often. And people liked Godfrey. They always picked up his calls, and always let him pick up the cheque. She booked his reservations and submitted his expense reports, often shocked and annoyed that his weekly meals cost more than her weekly paycheques. She knew there wasn’t an upward trajectory for her in the office, which had been made clear. Men could start in the copy room and make their way up to the C suite, but women, the ones who kept the place running smoothly, doing all the things the men didn’t want or know how to do, there was no way up for them. If you were good at your job as a secretary, you kept your job, end of story.

Delores had her books full of ideas, and she thought, maybe if she could find the next show, she could prove her value on the other side of the office and maybe find her way into producing, maybe even from that chair she’d find her voice and could make her way into the booth, to her own show.

As she walked, a breeze picked up. The air crisp and fresh. She noticed the blossoms on trees beginning to break bud. The energy of a new season was all around her. The breeze tugged at her jacket. The air was warm, and she stopped to take it off. As she slipped her arms out of her raglan, she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror. Her hair had flattened out after a day in central air, and her lipstick had faded since her touch-up after lunch. She hadn’t had a good sleep since Peaches had passed; she missed his warm body nestled against her feet at night and woke up constantly thinking she’d felt him jump onto the bed.
She touched her hair; it needed a cut and dye job, but she’d put it off for another month until she could save up a little more. Deflated, she sank into herself. Her blouse ballooned out around her as the breeze brushed against her. Maybe some people are just born to be secretaries, she thought. And maybe I’m one of them who just can’t accept it.

Tears pricked at the corner of her eyes. This is why she tried never to think about work, why she kept her show ideas tucked safely away in her apartment under her bed. Because the reality didn’t match her fantasy, and the disparity between the two felt like a personal failing. She was so close, she worked at a radio station, but she was so far, she didn’t look like talent, and she had no way in to get her show ideas taken seriously.

Her steps slowed, her post-work pep deflating. The sun, at least, was warm, there was still time in the day for her to eat outside, and it was a Thursday - the good shows were on tonight.

Delores made her way along a busy sidewalk and onto a quiet street. She liked to zig-zag her way home through the main streets and residential neighbourhoods until she reached her quiet apartment building. An old Victorian in Parkdale long ago divided into single-person apartments for the industrial boom that was Liberty Village before it was abandoned and morphed into empty, rundown warehouses. The neighbourhood was beginning to see the first signs of gentrification, a cute Central Perk copy-cat coffee shop here and there, a boutique selling Le Chat Noir prints in black frames, but Delores figured it would be a while yet until the rent became unaffordable and she had to move even more West.

She thought again about Godfrey; he’d said it was a good idea. Her idea was a good idea.

She was caught between the hope of possibility and the nobodiness of her reality. If only she could be the person she saw in her mind. The radio DJ with her picture splashed across a billboard. If only she still looked like herself at 28, 29, 30. Heck, she’d take the semi-creaseless skin of her 32-year-old self. How did I get so…she didn’t want to say old, because she hoped she had a long life still ahead of her, and if she thought of herself as old now, at 43, what would she think at 53, 63?

Had she made a wrong move somewhere that she didn’t see? Nine years ago, when she took the job at OKAY, she was 34 and felt like she still had so much time. How was it possible that nine years had passed and she hadn’t moved an inch toward her goals? Life was passing her by, and she was just sitting there, watching.

A rustling caught her attention, then a flash of yellow flew past her face. The breeze hadn’t seemed that strong to be blowing things around. She looked behind her, a flyer flitting down the street. As she kept walking, she noticed another of the flyers on a post across the road, and then another up ahead on a telephone pole. They all had been haphazardly stuck onto the posts with staples that were giving out.

The hand-written flyers were scrawled in fat black marker, with a telephone number written neatly and repeatedly along the bottom edge, cut into tabs to pull off. She reached out and grabbed one. The first to tear off a number. Life can change in an instant. Ha. Maybe for other people.

She turned onto Queen Street, the sun stretching all the way from the horizon down onto her. She held the number in her hand. It’s probably some scam, someone selling books on tape or some kind of daily vitamin supplement, she thought. She had no intention of calling the number, and thought she would go home as planned, but as she approached a lone pay phone on the sidewalk, she was suddenly overcome with an urge so strong she felt no resistance, and after fumbling in her purse for a quarter, her fingers dialled the number.

“Hello?” She stammered when she heard a click, but then nothing.

Then, the smoothest female telephone voice replied. “Oh, hello.”

“Um, hi, I’m calling about the poster, the sign on the telephone pole…” Delores stammered

“Mmmmhmmm yes, yes you are.” The voice was smooth and sweet like butter.

The voice said nothing else, forcing Delores to get straight to the point, “So how does this work? Should I book an appointment? Does it cost anything?”

“Well, yes, there is a nominal fee. Nothing outrageous. Come see me in person. Where are you now?” The voice spoke slowly, without urgency. Delores patted her blouse; she found the voice calming.

“Now?” Delores looked around as if she were being watched. “Well, I’m downtown, at the payphone on Queen Street near the…”

“Okay, you’re close enough. Remember these directions. I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.” The voice told her where to go and then was quiet. Delores repeated the directions in her mind, mapping out the streets as she did. She knew where to go.

She then realized there was no one there, only the dial tone and hung up the phone.

Delores turned around and began heading back towards downtown. A quarter of an hour later, she found herself in a back alley, pulling open the large industrial door to a warehouse-style cafe. The place was filled with second-hand furniture, old overstuffed leather couches, vintage metal garden tables and distressed raw walls. Loud jazz mingled with the clacking of the coffee grinder and the steaming of a fancy Italian espresso maker. The place was packed. Who drinks coffee at six thirty, she thought.

She headed straight to the back of the establishment, as she’d been told, to a thin brown door that looked like a piece of chocolate. Private was scrawled in permanent marker in the same penmanship as the flyers. She looked around, then pushed the door open cautiously and stepped into another room, this one dark and windowless. She walked down a short hallway that opened into a tiny speakeasy. Unlit candles stuck in wine bottles covered in melted wax sat on the end of a bar, where above, lush green plants hung from baskets. She wondered how the plants survived without natural light and took in the rest of the room, which wasn’t much to take in. A small bar spanned the length of the room, which fit only five stools. Behind the bar were rows and rows of bottles, none with traditional labels on them, and all handwritten in a messy scrawl like the poster and the door. Delores noticed soft rock playing on low from somewhere.

From behind her, the telephone voice, soft and smooth, said, “Oh, hello”.

Delores spun around to find a woman, small and slight, maybe five feet tall, with wild curly blonde hair stuck into a bun on the top of her head. The scrunchie used to hold it up strained to contain it all.

“Right on time, you’re a punctual person”. She said it like punct-u-all. Like she punctured the word. She tilted her head and looked Delores up and down.

“So you’re unhappy with your life as it is right now. Today? Or all days? Or most days?” She asked.

Delores thought about her job, about her life, about how most of her thoughts were arranged around being so close to what she wanted but unable and unsure to attain it. About how she had so many ideas, but they were all tucked away, and she had no idea what to do with them. The thought made her miserable.

“Pretty much every day,” she admitted.

“Oh my.” The woman had moved behind the bar, where there seemed to be an elevated platform.

She tilted her head to the other side, now looking down on Delores, sizing her up and down once again.

“Come sit.” The woman gestured to the barstools.

Delores sat up on a stool. She eyed the bottles, trying to make out what they said, but the scrawl was impossible to read. She eyed the plants behind the bar and hanging above it, all thriving in the low light. She shifted in her seat and discreetly eyed the exit, pulling her purse close into her. What was she doing there in the back of a cafe alone with a stranger?

“Tell me about yourself.” The woman leaned on her elbows on the bar and looked Delores straight in the eye.

Delores tried to look away, the woman’s gaze boring through her. “My name is Delores. I work at OKAY radio. I’m an admin person. I just thought I’d be so much farther along in life right now, thought I’d be so much more, you know?” Wow, she was being very honest with this person she’d just encountered. Delores had friends for years who didn’t know that was how she felt about work. What was happening? It must have been the events of the day setting her off balance, she thought.

“How old are you, De-lore-es?” The woman asked gently, stretching out her name.

“I’m 43.” Delores grimaced. Even though she was sure she didn’t care. She made a face about her age because it felt like something people did.

“Hmm. Are you upset with yourself or with life? Do you blame yourself for your circumstances?” The woman asked.

Wow, she thought, she really can get straight to the heart of the matter.

“I guess. I just feel like if I could be the way I wanted to be, confident, bold, wild maybe, that I could achieve more. Follow my dreams.”

“And your dreams are?” The woman rested her chin in her hands. She looked like a dishevelled cherub.

“I’ve never even told anyone this before, it’s kind of a secret dream of mine to be one of the radio personalities. You know, like have my face on a bus with a wacky background, and people tune in to hear what I have to say.”

“And why haven’t you told anyone this?”

“It seems silly.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure, it seems outrageous.”

“Is it? Outrageous? To talk to people into a microphone that transmits your voice across radio waves to their cars, and homes and workplaces? Is the outrageous part of that – your voice?”

“Well, when you put it that way…” No, when she put it that way no, it wasn’t outrageous at all. In fact, Delores suddenly couldn’t figure out why she’d made her dream feel so impossible. Mankind had built radios. Mankind had built airplanes, and here she was thinking that her dream of being a radio personality was impossible. It was suddenly all so clear.

“This is an easy one. I am going to give you something, a drink. And you’ll drink it but not quickly. I want you to sip it slowly, contemplate your life as you sip, think about what you want, how you want to be the Radio Announcer. When you’re done, leave $25 on the counter. Twenty for the drink, five for the tip.” The woman winked and continued, “The effects of the drink will last for twelve months. Once you sip, the effects can not be undone. So be sure that what you want is truly what you want.”

She turned and began to grab bottles from the shelf behind her. She put the ingredients into a French press and let it steep. The mixture was like tea at first, but as it sat, it began to darken. After a few minutes, she plunged the concoction and poured it into a strange glass. It was frothy on top.

As she watched the woman mix her drink, slightly disappointed that it was more like tea and less like a cocktail, Delores felt skepticism creep up. Her palms began to sweat, and she wondered if she was possibly in the middle of being scammed. The $25 would have to come from her hair appointment money. And she’d have to put off having her highlights touched up for another month. She held her purse closer on her lap.

Finally, the beverage was set in front of her in a glass mug with a short, thin stem. An odd kind of glass she’d never seen before. The woman placed it gently and silently onto a doily and nodded at Delores to go ahead.

Delores tentatively took a sip. It tasted like coffee. Creamy, bitter, chocolatey. She suddenly worried it would keep her up all night and lifted her head to ask if it contained caffeine, but the woman was gone. She looked all around the tiny room, then to the exit, and was suddenly aware that she was completely alone.

She stared at the drink and felt momentarily silly. Change her life with a fancy coffee. Yeah right. It was just a drink; there could be no powers in it. Of course. There was no such thing as a magic potion.

Suddenly, Delores sat up, but what if there was such thing as a magic potion, and what if doubting it nullified the magic and only believing in the magic is what would make it work?

She realized she didn’t even get the woman’s name.

She sipped slowly, trying to imagine herself as a radio DJ. She pictured walking into her office, past her current desk, past the fax machine and the filing cabinets, past the copy room and the break room, her co-workers looking as she breezes by. She would breeze, strut in a breezy way, throw her coat on the chair in the radio booth, and saying hey boys to the guys in the office llike she was one of them. She imagined sitting in the chair in front of the microphone in the booth and saying, “Welcome to, to…” 

Delores panicked. Why couldn’t she think of a name? At home in her stash of notebooks she had pages of ideas for shows, but right now when the moment called for just one, she couldn’t think of any? Was she blowing it? Was this going to make the drink potion not work? 

Delores tried to move on. What would she say into the microphone? Come on, think! Then suddenly out of nowhere, she imagined her voice, smooth and confident saying, “Hello everyone, welcome to The Hour of Power. Sixty minutes to get you feeling like the best you that you can be!"

Where did that come from, she wondered as she noticed that she’d begun to get nervous at her own fantasy. She took another sip. Maybe it was whatever was in the drink making her nervous. She dove back in, imagining going over the playlist with her producer, stringing together her favourite power songs, power ballads, diva mixes, sharing stories she’d read about powerful people. 

Where is this coming from, she thought, these ideas aren't in my diary.

She imagined drivers in their cars on the way to work, hearing her show, getting pumped up for the day, the local gyms tuning in to The Hour of Power because the gym goers kept requesting it. All over the city, she could see people talking about her show, and how empowered it made them feel, she can see it clearly in her mind’s eye; it becomes a movement.

Delores was lost in her fantasy. She was choosing outfits in her mind to dress up the new version of herself. Bright suits and fashionable silhouettes, she could try the pants and heels style she saw in the window at Holts uptown. In her fantasy her hair was bigger, bolder, higher.

Delores took another sip, this one a gulp. She looked at her hands, no longer shaking, at her nails, short and clean and bare, how she always wore them. She pictured them long, super long, polished red with an automotive shine. She tapped them on the side of the cup, her imaginary nails delighted her. She could be a new woman. A powerful woman. A beast!

Where did that come from? The beverage was almost gone. She swirled the remaining liquid in the cup. Her nervous energy was gone, and she noticed she felt different. Again, she considered it could be caffeine, or alcohol or some kind of herbal supplement, but she was no longer concerned she might be up all night. She suddenly wants to be up all night; she has so many ideas for her new radio show!

She swigged the last of the mixture down her throat, threw $25 on the counter and left the way she came in. Outside, the sun was just barely hovering at the horizon before its final descent; the spring warmth she felt earlier was gone. She started walking home. As she walked, she caught her reflection in a window and stopped. The thoughts that usually crept up, the, you’re not the radio dj type, the thoughts that just an hour ago chipped away yet again at her dream, thoughts like, who would listen to you, you don’t command anything? were absent; they were simply gone.

Instead, Delores was slightly enamoured by herself. She touched her hair and noticed that it was thick and shiny, and she felt taller than her 5, 5” stature. She even smiled at herself instead of looking away. She combed her fingers through her hair. The breeze blew gently across her face.

And suddenly she understood: she was the Alpha. She could have what she desired. And tomorrow morning she was going to have a chat with Godfrey.