Raconteuse Radio

Season 2, Episode 021: Give Me Something to Sing About (Part 2)

Guilliean reads the second half of her short story of the same name. Stream it and read along with the text!

Music: Passsengers from ZapSplat.

“I wish I knew what that was. I mean, work is work, but I don’t feel fulfilled. What about you?” he asked.

“What about me?” I replied.

“What do you want to do with your life?”

I jerked my head back like I had been electrocuted. “I don’t know.”

He smiled at me. “Nah, girl, take your own advice. What are you supposed to be doing?”

I shrugged and looked away. “I’ve always wanted to be a writer.”

“Have you written anything?”

“Honestly? No. I just got my degree in English and History, and I figured I would try different things. When people find out what I studied, they’re always like, ‘are you gonna be a teacher?’ And I’m like, ‘no, because being the center of attention is so not my thing.”

“You’re definitely in the wrong business!” he teased me.

“Yeah, no shit,” I replied. “All the shit we deal with every day, from front of house to back, I could write twenty books easily.”

Photo by Nicolas Lobos on Unsplash

He nodded. “So why don’t you?”

I shook my head. “No one would want to read it.”

“How do you know? You won’t know unless you write it.”

“And you?” I replied, trying to change the conversation. “What do you want to do with your life?”

He shook his head. “No, we’re talking about you. But if we’re being honest, it’s not what I’m doing now.”

“I don’t know if I’ve ever told you, but I transferred here from XX; I was a supervisor at their business center before it got swallowed up by FedEx,” I offered.

“For real?” he asked. “Why didn’t you apply at our business center? I’m sure we would’ve found a place for you.”

I shrugged. “I didn’t see any positions available when I applied for this job. Besides, I took that job as far as I wanted professionally. There was nowhere else to go. A lot of the employees there didn’t care about their jobs. Dealing with that apathy soured me from going after it more.”

“Soured,” he repeated. “Good word. You should write a book about that.”

“Twenty books,” I reminded him, “twenty books!”

He glanced at his phone. “I gotta go back. My lunch is almost over. It was good talking to you. I hope I can read one of your books someday.”

I smiled. “Yeah, it was good talking to you too. I hope you can figure everything out. And hey, you might see one of my books someday.”

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Guilliean Pacheco (she/her) is an American of Filipino descent. She is an early career full-stack writer by day and raconteuse by night. Her journey includes earning an M.F.A. in Writing from the University of San Francisco, a Media Writing certificate from the New School, and becoming an Anaphora Arts poetry fellow. She's also a valued A.I.R. and IWW FJU member, deeply rooted in her passion for supporting the creative community. A misplaced California girl, she lives in Las Vegas normally — if one could call living there normal — on Southern Paiute land.

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