Polls closed at eight. By ten the bars were full of people watching television the way you watch a surgery you're not allowed to interrupt.
She got in near the river, mid-thirties, lanyard still around her neck from a campaign office somewhere. Tired the way nobody is tired on a normal Tuesday.
Party HQ downtown, she said. Then she looked at her phone, changed her mind, and said, actually, the diner by the bridge. I need pancakes more than I need results.
I know the place.
She worked campaigns for eleven years. Local, provincial, federal. Never the candidate, always the machinery behind the candidate. Scheduling, flyers, the rented van, the mind-numbing phone banks.
You know what nobody tells you, she said. Whichever side wins, I'm unemployed by Friday. The winners go to the inauguration. The losers go on cable. The people who did the actual work go back to their resumes.
The radio had some pundit calling it a historic night. She snorted.
Every election night is historic while it's happening, she said. Two years later nobody remembers any of it. Except the volunteers, who remember it like a war. Long hours, terrible food, the belief that it mattered.
The diner was half-full of other lanyards, both kinds, red and blue mixed at the counter because at midnight the hatred takes a lunch break and everybody just wants hash browns.
Marlene poured her coffee and said, don't tell me who won, I like to find out like it's the weather.
The woman laughed a real laugh for the first time in the ride.
That's the healthiest thing anyone has said to me in eleven years, she said.
Out the window, the trams had stopped running. The whole city watching the television, waiting to find out what it already knew.
Meter off, radio on.
None of this happened. All of it is true.
#nightfare #electionnight #nightshift #fiction #shortstory
