Libero

Anna plays professional volleyball in Omaha. Makes a decent living. Every so often, a company will send her something to post on her socials, and it’s usually athletic gear. Knee pads or shoes or something like that. Except, one day, a pair of pinkish-beige shorts shows up with a note from Fairly. Fairly is a Hanes competitor. Anna calls them shorts, but it appears they’re actually underwear (the tightest pair she’s ever known), and they seem eerily matched to her skin tone. Like, somebody cared about dying this fabric. Somebody pored over Anna’s photos and probably watched her in person and followed her around the court and in and out of different patterns of light. 

Fairly wants her to wear the underwear, of course. Not in a game. They don’t care about that. They just want the one photo, posted for public consumption (to her modest following of 28,000), and some kind of line about wanting to feel athletic and sexy even on her nights off. Sydney Sweeney of the glutes, she thinks. They don’t write that. It’s just hanging there in the subtext like a spider in the garage. The photo can be paired with anything Anna chooses. They recommend a crop top of some kind. Maybe some low heels or even flats if they can be cut close to the ankle. She could go barefoot. There are certain arguments that this might be preferable. The offer is not life-changing, but it is approximately twice Anna’s annual salary, and she calls her agent. Voicemail. She doesn’t really want to call her mom. The thing about Anna is she played the most popular women’s sport at a major midwestern university and was good enough to be first-team all-conference, but that didn’t mean she could skip class. She wasn’t a football player. And even if women’s football existed and was more popular than the male version, she doubts very much that society would look at all kindly on female academic negligence, and so she internalized a lot of conversations about double-binds and misogyny, sex-positivity and feminine agency, and also a bunch of stuff about media coverage. Athletes in swimsuits. Athletes turned toward the camera at unnatural (yet sexually receptive) angles. She’d once written a paper about volleyball’s popularity (its TV ratings at the collegiate level dwarfing those of the men) as, basically, a function of the magnetic properties of Spandex in relation to the male gaze (plus a sort of ploy for legitimacy, as in, “see, we love women’s sports when they’re the right ones,”) and this is all spinning around in her brain as she fingers the fabric. Checks her bank account. Does call her mom, but doesn’t mention any of it, and this has more to do with structural things (the walls parents put up, their need to perform a particular role for their children, and Anna wonders if all mothers feel this need and knows, someday, she’d probably like to find out) than individual, mother-daughter relationship things, and during the course of this relatively banal conversation, she decides not to call her agent again. That was stupid. She’ll just want a cut, and this feels like a transaction that does not require a third party since it’s already been solicited, and, if shit goes bad, Anna will just plead naivete. It’s a new league, she’ll say. Everyone’s figuring out the rules as they go. Mea culpa, mea culpa. She wonders if her teammates have received this particular offer, but the group chat informs her that no, no, they have not. It then fills up with unsolicited advice. Stories about similar propositions. People will hate you. Don’t read the comments. No one will fucking notice. Sex sells and all publicity etc. etc., and the prevailing sentiment is, Girl, take the money and run, and she tries this perspective on for a while. Gets herself posed. Her sweatshirt cuts off above the navel. Stands on (freshly painted and teal, if you must know) tiptoes. The “shorts” are functionally miraculous, sans bunching and looking nearly invisible in the mirror. At certain angles, you can catch a hint of a ridge or a stitch that alerts the eye to the fact that this is something other than human skin (and certainly at least a few people will be looking closely enough to notice), but otherwise, it’s incredible. Comfortable, even. Anna looks at herself and understands the appeal of the story, even if it’s not one she wants to walk around in for more than an hour or so. Thankfully, she doesn’t have to. Though she would be, technically, pressuring someone else to do something she wouldn’t, and at a moderate financial cost (apparently the “shorts” are selling for $98 a pair, which Fairly argues is necessary to ensure ethical treatment of its workers and executives, health plans and such), and that little issue of authenticity doesn’t even consider the whole idea of athlete as role model and the responsibilities of community members in a growing sport, in a growing business, and there are young female athletes out there. There is also, like, a total historical precedent that’s already been set (because she’d be far from the first), but precedents die if they are not reaffirmed, and she’s taking photos now. Wondering if there’s something about the look in her eyes. Something subversive. Something that says, “I’m exposing this company rather than myself,” and she thinks she finds it. The right glance. The corners of the mouth. The viewer as implicated, as part of the joke, and there’s some kind of power reversal in the way her smile is a dare. A warning. Gawk at your own risk, motherfucker (but in a threatening and very unsexual way), and her guts believe in it enough to publish while her thumb hovers above the button. She zooms. She scrolls. She hears wind chimes and considers the role of the journalist. Those conduits of athletic experience. All that’s holding her back is this nagging generational phobia. It’s the fear that no living writer will find the precise translation.   

BRETT BIEBEL is the author of three collections of flash fiction, 48 Blitz, Winter Dance Party, and Gridlock; and A Mason & Dixon Companion. His work has appeared in many magazines and been selected for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. He lives, writes, and teaches in Illinois.