Karen wakes up at 5:45 so that she can get in and out of the shower before her husband and children wake up and need the bathroom. She hasn’t shaved her legs in two weeks and there isn’t any time to shave her legs this morning either because she has to cook eggs and toast for her husband, otherwise he won’t eat at all and his mood will be bitter and dark and she needs to make oatmeal for the children and Micah will only eat his with raisins and banana and Kayla will only eat hers with strawberries and not at all if the strawberries are too tart and they all must get out of the house in time to get to school and home again for her husband to take Karen to the bus stop before he drives to work.

Karen sits on the bus, staring out the window for close to an hour, grateful to sit still even if a homeless man calls her a whore and she knows he is not well and she tells herself how lucky she is to not be mentally ill and homeless and an addict and she feels bad for being so afraid when he shouts at her because he is so vulnerable, but she saw a homeless man punch a woman in the side of the head on the bus last year and still remembers the two little girls with her, how they screamed and cried.

At work, Karen is still doing the jobs of two coworkers. One of them retired and the other one moved away and her supervisor is always irritated that Karen is late with the reports and late with the timesheets and running behind schedule on all of her projects. So for lunch Karen eats two bags of potato chips and a bag of peanut M&Ms from the vending machine while she works at her desk and tells herself potatoes and peanuts aren’t the worst thing she could eat.

Karen works late to finish a project that would have been completed by a 3rd employee that no longer exists and rides the bus back home where the same homeless man with rage-filled, bloodshot eyes spits in her hair while the other riders stare into their phones and when she gets home the children are still staring into their tablets and her husband is watching TV and the sink is full of dishes and she has to get the chicken parts in the oven right away because dinner is late.

Dinner is always late.

And she washes the breakfast dishes and puts a load of laundry in the washing machine and feeds the cat and hangs up her children’s coats and puts her husband’s shoes in the closet, because if they are not there in the morning he will shout for her to ask where his shoes are and she is worried because she forgot to confirm her daughter’s dentist appointment and forgot to request the time off from her boss and talk to her husband about getting the car and he will be irritated that she didn’t make the appointment for a time when it wouldn’t inconvenience him except that there are no appointments at times that are not inconvenient. But that worry will have to wait because her daughter needs a reading report signed and her husband had a long day and is going upstairs to lie down and the dinner dishes still need to be washed and her hair smells like the homeless man’s spit and there are no eggs for the morning so she puts her coat back on and she drives to the store in the dark and she doesn’t even mind because she can scream and scream and scream in her car in the dark and no one can see her, no one can hear.

DO MORE. DO MORE. DO MORE, she screams. DO MORE.

Karen is tired.

Karen tells herself she is privileged to be tired. She tells herself she should be so grateful that she is able to drive to the store at 9:30 on a Thursday night to buy eggs. Karen tells herself that her anxiety and exhaustion are the insignificant costs of being a lucky, white, American woman. 

At the store she looks at the cupcakes for a long time but Karen is too fat and although she is supposed to love her fat body, it is hard to do when other people do not love her fat body. She buys a green juice instead. Green juice, she has read, is self care, but she does not feel cared for when she drinks the swampy sludge from its plastic bottle.

The house is quiet when she gets home and she tries to sleep but she can’t stop worrying about the arrangements for the dental appointment because if she can’t get the time off and her husband needs the car for something she will have to reschedule and it takes months to get another appointment so she tosses and turns and when she finally sleeps, she dreams that she is cleaning and cleaning and cleaning and nothing gets any cleaner.

Karen wakes up at 5:45 so that she can get in and out of the shower.

Karen is tired.

Karen cries on the bus.

Shut the fuck up, bitch, the homeless man tells her. He is right. What does she have to cry about? She is so privileged. She is lucky.

Karen is late with dinner again.

Karen forgot to buy more strawberries.

Karen is an entitled white bitch.

Shut the fuck up, Karen.

Shut the fuck up.