The Empress' New Clothes
Xochi got out of bed at 5:45 am on Friday, September 12th, a half hour earlier than usual, in order to clean up a mess she made at work. She had to arrive earlier than the rest of the staff in order to clear off a credenza in the conference room.
The items on the credenza were the following: a small arrangement of half-dead flowers, numerous candles, incense, a book of poetry, a hand written note/prayer offered to the “Golden Hefferess” and most importantly, a small gold replica of a statue of a very obese nude woman, to which the note was addressed.
This fifty-foot tall statue had been erected in Times Square a month earlier. It loomed large over her life as she passed it around 7:20 am.
She arrived at the office about 7:30 am, and was able to manifest a suitable trash bag for the job at hand. To her surprise, as she peaked into the conference room she saw the roundish outline of one of her subordinates kneeling in front of the credenza, seemingly in prayer.
By the time Xochi saw Cindy walk out of the conference room, smiling sweetly, dried tears still visible on her puffy cheeks, it was too late to complete her mission. The rest of the staff was starting to arrive.
Xochi was tall, thin, rather attractive, and was the head of Human Resources, which for whatever reason was staffed with other women who tended to be neither tall, thin, or attractive. While Xochi cared deeply about her appearance, allocating an undignified percentage of brainpower to thoughts about how to maintain and improve her physique, and accentuate it’s aesthetic, at work she felt that being prettier than her HR minions was a bit of a liability. She feared a staff mutiny, and thought their bitter envy of her appearance might be something that could unite them all against her.
It was an attempt to compensate for this weakness that led her into the mess she was now hoping to clean up. When she had walked by the statue in Times Square for the first time, at approximately 7:53 am on August 11th, she was inspired. Not by the statue itself, but the opportunity it presented. She spent the remainder of the walk into the office composing and rehearsing the story she would tell her coworkers about her “experience” of the statue. By the time she arrived at the office, it was a glorious work of flattery by proxy.
When in the presence of the staff however, Xochi lost her nerve, feeling that she was not the best person to raise the subject. If out of the blue she were to start gushing about the bloated giantess in Times Square, no matter how florid her praise, it would come across like she was low key mocking it, and by extension the women she meant to flatter.
She waited and waited for someone, anyone in the office to mention the statue, or at least Times Square, or anything vaguely statue related. The whole week went by and no one said a peep.
It was on the walk home Friday afternoon that Xochi spotted the cart with the little gold replicas. If there was something deep inside her that understood why she found herself purchasing a mini replica of that statue, she was not aware of it. She just did it. She spent the weekend casually moving the replica all around the apartment, seeing how it looked everywhere, exhausting every imaginable display option, but nothing worked. It was only when she awoke on Monday morning that she somehow knew exactly where it was meant to go.
Indeed it was Monday, August 18th, at 7:39 am that what would become known as the Golden Hefferess was placed in the center of the empty credenza in the conference room. There was nothing going on that day in the conference room until the afternoon staff meeting, at which point Xochi planned to feel out the room and see what the reactions to the replica were, and then decide whether to plead ignorance, stay silent, or, she hoped, finally get to use the spiel she had perfected a week earlier.
The staff meeting went by, and the replica on the credenza went unremarked upon, although she could tell it was noticed by some of the staff. This was not a possibility Xochi had accounted for, but there was a lot of normal work stuff going on and she really didn’t think about it any further after that. Even a few days later when some flowers appeared on the credenza next to the replica, she just briefly glanced at them and thought they looked nice and moved on.
By the beginning of September, all of the other items had accumulated on the credenza. The candles, the book of poems, the incense, and the hand written prayer to the Golden Hefferess, and of course the Golden Hefferess itself.
When Xochi finally noticed it all, she became incredibly frustrated with herself. Inadvertently giving the already-prone-to-disloyalty-and-self-aggrandizing staff an idol to worship was not a good managerial move. She imagined the gossip that would spread throughout the other departments. “Did you hear? The witches of HR were caught worshipping that super-sized golden glob in Times Square. They had a whole shrine set up in the conference room.”
On the way home that day there was a somber nausea in the air, as there is every September 11th in Manhattan, as all the memorial activities inevitably strike a nerve and then linger on that nerve a little too long, wearing out their welcome. Xochi knew the feeling.
And that brings us back to the day itself, Friday, September 12th. Once Cindy walked out of the conference room after blocking Xochi from removing the shrine, Cindy went down to the mail room and picked up the box. The box contained twelve tubes of gold body paint, which Cindy had covertly purchased using Xochi’s Amazon Business Account.
Xochi stayed late after work on September 12th, and ate a Falafel Crunch Bowl she ordered from Cava. By around 5:45 pm all the desks were empty, and Xochi grabbed the trash bag and headed over to the conference room to finish the deed—The destruction of the alter of the Golden Hefferess. Alas, once again the conference room was not empty. The scene she walked into was somewhere in between cult ritual, and eating contest. There was a crew of a dozen or so women ranging from a little fluffy to nearly disabled by excess fluff, sitting facing the Hefferess, stuffing their faces with pizza in silence.
Deciding to improvise, Xochi went and got what was left of her Falafel Crunch and returned to the conference room and sat down with the girls and ate with them.
“I hope I’m not intruding” she said as she started eating.
“What are you doing here” asked Miranda. “Who told you about this?”
“No one, I just wanted to sit with her for a while. I felt an instant connection with her beauty and wisdom when I saw the real thing in Times Square. It felt like our fates were intertwined.” said Xochi, finally getting to use some of her material.
“I don’t think you could understand what this is.” Deirdre hissed.
“Well, it looks as though it’s become a bit of a shrine to her” Xochi said.
Cindy pulled out her phone and showed Xochi a video. It was a very obese woman walking around Central Park, wearing only gold paint.
“This is the woman who posed for the statue. Her name is Hefferess. She’s started walking around like this everywhere, as though she was a real living goddess.
“She’s beautiful. It’s beautiful that us women are helping her to feel like the goddess that she is.” Xochi continued, attempting to conjure her most empathetic manager voice, “But, unfortunately, we can’t have what looks like a shrine in the conference room. We do interviews here sometimes, and it could be construed as religious discrimination.”
Cindy became more intense and continued “There is a surprise event tonight, a bunch of women are going to go to Times Square in the gold paint in honor of her. We are all going.” she continued “You need to come with us, to show solidarity”
“Is that even legal?” asked Xochi.
“It's safety in numbers. They can’t arrest us all.” Said Heather.
Before Xochi could even consider how to respond to this, one of the women began disrobing and the box of gold body paint was plopped on the credenza.
At this point another video was shown to Xochi, this one of a large crowd of women in gold body paint assembling in front of the statue in Times Square.
“It's on your way home, isn't it Xochi? You can walk in between all us fatties, no one will even see you.” Said Miranda. “It would mean a lot to us if you did it. On the other hand, it would speak volumes if you didn't.”
“This moment will go down in history, and we will all know who was on the right side, and who was a Xochi.” Said Cindy.
At this point Xochi became aware that she was sitting in her workplace with a dozen subordinates who were now all naked, busily applying gold body paint, standing in front of a shrine to another golden naked woman, and Xochi, their boss, was the only remaining clothed individual. The longer she resisted, the more likely someone from the janitorial or cleaning crews would walk in on this scene, and it would not be easy to explain, or take responsibility for. Without saying a word, she undressed, applied as much gold paint on herself as possible, and quickly directed the herd of Golden Hefferesses towards the nearest exit.
As they approached the doors, two of the bigger girls locked arms on either side of her. Two of them went ahead and opened the doors, and as they got outside, the girls tossed Xochi forward with surprising force, and as she landed she heard the doors clink shut.
Naked and alone on the sidewalk, in gold body paint, at the entrance of her workplace, Xochi banged on the door, and heard only cackles in response.
She started sprinting towards Times Square, hoping to blend in with the golden mob, and get away from her building, where someone might recognize her. As she got closer, an increasing number of people had gotten their phones out, and were recording her running. As she nervously looked around for other golden bodies to hide amongst, a terrifying thought was seeping into her mind. What if it was AI? What if there is no event in Times Square? What if she is just one lonely streaker slopped in gold paint running through the streets of Manhattan?
Her sprint to safety slowed to a golden walk of shame. She became encircled by phones filming her from every angle. At a certain point, the phones started turning around, showing her videos of her, which were going viral as she walked. Feeling that her life was over, that there could be no further humiliation possible, that she was utterly destroyed, she looked up at one of the largest screens in Times Square, and saw a live feed of her own golden nakedness walking through the crowd, even larger than the statue.
Perhaps it was the fact that Xochi had spent the last month staring at the Golden Hefferesses in Times Square and on the credenza shrine, or the sight of her coworkers slathering their pudgy selves with gold paint. Or perhaps it had something to do with an unknown feature of the Mayan calendar. Whatever the reason, when she saw her lanky form on the big screen at exactly 6:12 pm, a strange thing happened.
The Golden figure on the screen looked like the most amazing thing she had seen in her life, or that anyone could see. It was her, but it also transcended her. It was as if Xochi was transubstantiated, becoming a goddess. She felt as if there was some forgotten ancestral celestial empress whose spirit had washed over the entirety of her being. In this mysterious and miraculous alchemical process, she became, in both body and spirit, to herself and to the world—Xochi, The One True Golden Goddess of Times Square.
In this new incarnation, Xochi possessed the power to melt the Golden Hefferess, and every cheap replica on the planet, merely by willing it. And she did.