Editor’s Note: This is a satire piece from The Collegian’s opinion section. Real names and the events surrounding them may be used in fictitious/semifictitious ways. Those who do not read the editor’s notes are subject to being offended.

I awoke one morning to a quill in my hands that folded over my body the way a Victorian child would lie — with sickness and boredom but also a roguish Ozempic look. 

“Why am I so bony?” I said. This was my first genuine thought, in part because I couldn’t shake the freshman 15 but also because I looked like Tim Burton’s wet dream.

“It is 1891,” a voice answered in cursive tongue. It belonged to a man who sat in the corner of the room. He laughed, and as his shoulders bounced, his wig slipped further back on his forehead, looking as though one glued a toupee to the butt of a watermelon.

“Why are you dressed like the French Revolution?” I asked. “We’re in Northern Colorado, not the coasts of Marseille, France.”

“It is 1891,” he repeated harshly. “The first edition of The Collegian is upon us. Our editorial board has requested that you write.”

I looked down to the quill in my hands, then back up to him. “It’s 1891, and you’re letting a woman write in a publication?”

Mario Antoinette pursed his lips. “Our editorial board demands a feminine voice. We had a better girl in mind. She was much more talented, but the plague got her.”

“What?” I asked. “Wasn’t the black plague in, like, the 1,300s?”

“No, no,” Antoinette sighed. “Those are all purely physical, cosmetic afflictions. Her plague was confidence — it’s a scary thing to men these days. She wanted to start her own paper. Something called The Woman Patriot. Doubt it’ll go anywhere.”

He reached up to fiddle with his wig and realized it shifted so far out of place that his forehead looked like a baby crowning.

“Talk about confidence,” I chuckled. “OK, so you want me to write.”

“Want is a stretch — it’s more of an obligation,” Antoinette said. “You will be the only woman writer in our staff of six students. An all-male staff would have suffocated the newsroom with the stench of unwashed swine and something I like to call manexplaining. I haven’t patented the idea yet, and it’s not as catchy as it could be, but it’s basically when a male clarifies a subject in a condescending manner that he doesn’t necessarily have to clarify.”

“That’s revolutionary,” I said. “Never heard of it.”

“I’m quite the genius,” Antoinette replied.

“What do you see The Collegian as?” I asked, sitting up straighter in bed. “Are you doing this to provide a platform for student voices, or do you want publicity? Fame? A profit?”

“In part both,” Antoinette hummed. “My main priority is to serve as an informant and searcher of the truth. I will do so by equally reporting on events and sharing my own opinions. For example, I admire American politics. Had I been alive for the Abraham Lincoln assassination, I would have reported on the subject with truth and justice. After my report, I would publish a column demonstrating how I believe Lincoln never truly died and instead fled to the West to start a new life.”

“Oh,” I said. “And who — who is the president now?”

“Some fool named Benjamin Harrison. Irrelevant. But there’s this real stud, William McKinley, who’s up and coming. Everyone thinks this guy is going to make it to the Oval Office in no time. He’s a trooper, practically immortal. Anyway.”

Antoinette shook his head, gesturing toward my quill.

“What will you write for our first edition?” Antoinette asked.

I thought about it for a minute, then smiled.

“I’d like to write a head-to-head on women in journalism,” I said. “Would you write it with me?”

“A head-to-head? Well, I don’t know if —” Antoinette said.

“Oh, you don’t know what a head-to-head is? I’d love to explain it to you. Basically, it’s when … ”

Reach Emma Souza at letters@collegian.com or on Twitter @_emmasouza