bureaucracy – Diabolical Plots

DP FICTION #133B: “Well Tester” by E.M. Faulds

Content note (click for details)

Depictions of illness and vomiting, religious themes

edited by Amanda Helms

Sara collapsed into the folding chair in the rhomboid of shade by the camper pod, stared out at Terga’s vast red plains and tried to remember the French for ‘danger’. Her brain shuddered like the heat haze, but it wasn’t really to blame. It was dying, after all.

“Guess I’ll get my own.” Lucifer unfolded another seat with a thwipp of canvas to set it down in a petulant puff of orange dust. The chair wasn’t the same as the set that came with the pod. In point of fact, it wasn’t real at all. Nor was he. He was not rustling his butt down prissily into the seat, on this planet, in this system, so far away from home and so close to death.

“I didn’t want you to sit there,” Sara told him. “Hence, no chair.”

Lucifer ignored it, just the way her father did whenever she’d said something he didn’t want to hear. He’d taken her father’s form too, just to further piss her off. Dad had been a believer, born again into the church and not a fan of its Adversary, who was, apparently, sitting next to her twisting a cork out of an evil-smelling bottle of hooch with a rubbery pop and grinning with Daddy’s own teeth.

“You want some? Oh no, of course not. Still, sun’s over the yardarm, right?”

Lucifer had appeared last night after the worst of it, and hadn’t left since.

“‘Au secours’,” she tried, ignoring him. “No, wait, that means ‘help’.” She licked parched lips. It had been a long time since French class and she’d hated the teacher’s guts. “Not exactly succinct, anyway.”

“Mayday. That’s from the French, isn’t it? M’aidez,” he offered, overegging the accent to a heinous degree.

Sara lolled her head back over her shoulder to drawl in his direction but avoided actually looking at him. The yellow goat’s eyes in her father’s face were unsettling. “Nice try,” she said. “Means the same thing.”

“Of course. The last thing you want is to attract people here thinking they could help you.” He was leaning heavily on the sarcasm, but it was true. Sara didn’t want anyone to come here.

“Shh, now. I want to watch the transit.”

Above them, a gas giant filled half of Terga’s sky with whorled bands of malachite and olive green. One of its moons crept over its face, shadow skittering over the roiling cloud deck like a thief rifling through a drawer of silk underwear.

“Of course, it must just be ‘danger’,” she said. She’d have slapped her own forehead, but for the waste of energy. “Like Dangerous Liaisons. ‘Liaisons dangerooz’, isn’t that how they said it? You should know—probably there when it was being written.”

“Why are you even bothering?”

“Don-jer. Don-jay,” she said, ignoring him and instead experimenting with the mouthfeel, seeing which one sat right. At least it was likely spelled the same as the English.

“You should try drinking something again.” Lucifer’s voice was softer, verging on solicitous. If she hadn’t spent the last four hours vomiting and known exactly what effect more fluids would have right now, she might have believed he cared. He nodded towards the windmill. “You know, something not that.”

She resented his tone. Every single damn test had shown it should have been completely safe. And of course, that’s why she was here. Besides, it wasn’t as if she’d had a lot of choice.

She didn’t want to stand up, but she needed to find something to write with. And on. To put the word ‘Danger’ in as many languages and places as she could throughout the exploration camp before the end came.

***

She made a valiant attempt at scratching a symbol into the surface of the drill rig-cum-windmill above the borehole. The siding was corrosion-hardened, of course. But the spare drill bit she’d picked up was diamond-tipped.

“It doesn’t look like that,” Lucifer brayed as he leaned against an upright of the windmill’s tripod. “That’s the nuclear waste symbol.” The pump shaft within the polycarbonate sleeve heaved and sighed while the metal fins above turned, similarly plaintive. He didn’t, in fact, need to shout over the noise but clearly was the sort to enjoy being loud when people had headaches.

Sara rolled her eyes, spiking more pain through her skull. “It doesn’t matter. Gets the gist across.”

“You’re wasting your time, don’t you think?”

He looked like Harrison now, her eighth grade xenography teacher. The one who’d been the first ever to teach her about well testing.

That Lucifer, he loved a good barb.

She dropped the drill bit, arm limp. She was losing feeling in her fingertips, but it was hard to tell if it was from the work or the sickness.

“Why?” she asked, then got annoyed with herself for letting him bait her.

“They’ll probably get the hint from your dead body.” His posture was defensive. He stared at the ground for a while; the same breeze that was tickling the windmill vanes fluttered his hair.

“Besides,” he said finally, “what the hell do you owe these people?”

Mr. Harrison, the teacher, had found the very existence of well testers an affront to humankind. The idea of companies firing humans through space to check if colony planets were inhabitable, well, he’d made a lot of very pointed remarks about it, but Sara had been perversely drawn to the notion. To throw yourself off into the dark without knowing if you’d ever come back. To be the first to drink from a planet’s waters, trapped deep beneath the crust in a perfect bottle; to taste the forbidden liquor of an ancient sea.

“They might assume I died of starvation. The exploration camp was only stocked for six months. Could be a hundred years before the next expedition gets here.” The orange dust of the dry ground was getting so bright it threw spots into her vision. “Anyway. I don’t know them, don’t know who they’ll be. Could be…”

A dizzy spell slumped her to the hard ground. Her eyelids fluttered, shuttering the light of the sun, so white, so painful. Open, shut? Shut. Yes, shut was better.

“Sara?” Lucifer called from very far away. “Sar?”

***

“All long-range testing shows the remote probes have done a sterling job of engineering a breathable atmosphere.”

She examined her hands, rubbing a thumb across her other palm. The dermatitis from the dishwasher job was flaring bad today. “So, when I get there… I’d have to do some testing?”

The Bettera recruitment agent, an oil slick of a man, smiled on the other end of the beam. “That’s right. You’ll start out in a completely sealed environment. The pod will provide you atmosphere, and there’s the suits, of course. Then, when you’re sure that there’s nothing untoward, you can move on to in-person tests.”

Sara blinked at him slowly, making him spell it out.

“You’ll need to interface with the atmosphere and artesian water table, physiologically. Breathe. Drink.”

“You mean, rawdog a planet,” she said, pleased at how his mouth crawled in a sine wave of distaste.

“You could put it like that. But you’ll have done multiple tests to ensure your safety before that. You’ll be trained. Trust me, we want you to succeed here. You’ll be spearheading an entire community’s future. And let’s be realistic, before the atmospheric engineering, the planet’s surface was basically vacuum. There’s not going to be anything alive down there.”

Sara nodded. “But you need to be sure, right? Before you colonise.”

“Before we fully develop,” he corrected, chin lifted. “And then, as I mentioned, you’ll be compensated with lifetime citizenship, a high-spec home pod, a generous income, and the esteem and gratitude of the entire community.”

Esteem. Gratitude. “Sounds nice.”

“So, let’s get you signed, yeah?”

***

She was supine in the shade of the camper pod again, no idea how she’d got there. One of the precious drink cans of pure water was open by her head. The taste and smell of stomach acid told her a story, too. There was a pathetically small damp-darkness on the hard baked soil by her head, shaped like regret.

It took her several attempts to lift herself from flat-out to half-seated, propped up on her elbows, which complained urgently about the fact.

“Oh, I see you’re awake,” Lucifer said from the camp chair again. “In ancient Sumeria,” he drawled, unhelpfully, “when a bad omen came, they’d get a decoy for the king.” He was dressed this time in the body of Janek, the first boy she’d fallen madly, passionately in love with, and the first boy to shatter her heart. He was making a point. Again.

“So, if there were an eclipse, or an earthquake, some sort of sign that prophesied the death of the king, they’d go into the population to find someone who looked enough like him and let them live in the palace for a few months dressed in the royal robes. He’d get to feast, and sleep on fabrics as soft as love, get waited on hand and foot. For the duration of the danger period, whoever they’d chosen got to live like a king.”

“Sounds pretty good,” Sara rasped. She could use some soft silks and servants right about now.

“It was. For a time. In order for the king to be safe, someone had to fulfil the prophecy. So, at the end they’d kill the decoy, just to be sure.”

She groaned as loudly as she could, given the circumstances.

“They weren’t gonna kill me at the end of this.”

“You sure?” Lucifer-Janek asked, bottle poised at his lips, smug. “What exactly did Bettera Corp promise you in exchange for the possibility of dying alone on an alien planet?”

“Something no one else ever had.”

***

“You know, guinea pigs were neither from Guinea nor pigs.”

“Fascinating. Do you know any Chinese characters?”

“Of course I do. But you don’t.”

Sara had crawled up to the pod roof to mark it. In the absence of any other ideas, she made X shapes, from one corner to the other, finger painting with the last of her tomato soup. She couldn’t eat it, in any case. Dragging herself up here had taken forever. She collapsed on her back, one knee up, to rest for a moment.

“Guinea pigs came from South America. A good source of protein.” The thought of rodent meat reignited her stomach’s violent mood. “It wasn’t until later they were used in scientific experiments. I’m still not sure why. Rabbits were more plentiful.”

“So what?” she said flatly, rolling onto her side to curl into a ball. “Why do I care about what they did to small furry animals?” Lucifer, as Gyri, lecturer at Betterra University, smiled sardonically and she suddenly took his meaning. She was the guinea pig. The dehydration was making her slow.

Gyri had been the one to tell her: actually, well testers were an ancient practice. Betterra required all recruits pass the Introduction to Exobiology course at their own university. Gyri, Professor of Exploration Studies, had a habit of tangents, and this one had wandered from microbiology into history.

If settlers in the wilderness wanted to start a new village, they’d first dig a well. To make sure the water wouldn’t kill everyone before they even started, they’d send one person to stake it out, drinking from it, and see if they survived. If they did, they were rewarded and given a place of honour in the community. If they didn’t, they’d just dig a well somewhere else and try again.

It was a practice that science should have eliminated by the modern era. Except that xenobiology was, by definition, beyond human science at times. You couldn’t test for everything if you didn’t know what everything was yet. So, you had to send a human.

She’d been weirded out that a Bettera U. lecturer had freely told recruits of the potentially fatal side of their future expeditions. Now she wondered if it was a case of plausible deniability.

“I’m not a guinea pig,” she said, looking up at his silhouetted form against the pale sky. The pain in her eyeballs made the vision of Gyri with the yellow, slitted-pupil eyes jump and pulse. She laughed as she coughed up a little more bile. “I’m a coal mine canary.”

She could stretch herself out across the soup marks and make her bones a saltire visible from space. Or would they just blow away in the next storm?

She needed to think bigger.

***

She stooped to toss aside the large chunk of red agate. Smaller pebbles she could toe aside with her boot and shuffling steps were all she could manage anyway, but the bigger stones were slowing her down. The sun was getting higher, and she was already dehydrated.

“The Nazca were better at this stuff.” Lucifer was now her mother, disappointment at wasted potential written into her very posture.

“The Nazca lines, you mean.” In South or maybe Central America? She was scuffing the words ‘KEEP OUT’ in twenty-metre-long letters into the plain. A long way to go though, she was still only on the second ‘E’. “But what did their pictograms even mean?”

“I like to think they were frightening off any gods who might descend from the skies and attempt to take the land. Hey, no, don’t come here, have you seen the size of our hummingbirds?”

“You’re boring me now.”

Lucifer glanced back over her shoulder at the drill rig by the camper pod, as if to make some joke, but stopped at Sara’s warning look.

“Hey, listen, I think I speak for both your parents when I say, ‘You should stop this and sit down and try to drink something’.”

“Can’t,” she said and shuffled her feet further, swaying like a boat mast and stumbling every other step. “Can’t stop.”

***

“No, you stop. Listen to me, you have to make those bastards come get me.”

Sara held the pad close to her face, peering into it as if she could see the figures lurking behind her abandonment, just off screen, if she craned her neck enough.

Lipton, her handler, shook his head from the other end of the beam. “It’s Betterra, they’re not…” Static crackled as he got further away. It was a slow job, moving a space station, but it would get exponentially faster as it broke its grav bonds with its parking spot beyond the gas giant. “There’s been a hostile takeover, Sara, I don’t know what to tell you.” His tone suggested she was the one being unreasonable here. Well, then fuck it.

“Tell them they’re murderers. Tell them if I get out of here, I’ll sue them for reckless endangerment, felonious negligence, moral homicide…” And if she didn’t? What if she didn’t get off Terga?

Lipton had the decency to look sad. “I’m going to do my best to get you evac as soon as I can. You know it’s going to take some time to get the new board’s attention. But sit tight, you’ve still got, what, eight weeks left?”

Sara flicked up her inventory screen. “I mean, max. A hard, hard max. You’d better tell them: Terga is not going to spring crops in eight weeks. The soil is unconditioned, there’s hardly any organic matrix…”

“Have you tested the artesian bore? Is it fit for consumption?”

“I haven’t. Because there was meant to be medical help on standby and you never got that scheduled, remember?” She’d been irrigating, attempting to rehab some soil into arable. That was it.

“You never know.” Lipton’s face shimmered in static again. The comms were stretched so thin, space dust was interfering with the laser signal. And there was a noticeable lag. “At least it’s there. As a last—”

The screen went black.

***

“If it’d been me, I wouldn’t have drunk it.” The son of a bitch was wearing the recruitment agent’s face now, the one who’d signed her up.

They sat in the camp chairs and looked out towards the windmill, its faint metallic creaking like the calls of distant peacocks walking the lawn of an English manor from the days of the Raj. “You still had potable in supply.”

“I was nearly out. Either way I was dead.”

“And you had to know.”

“Yeah. Not just for me.”

There were others who’d follow. Ones who might try what she had.

“Sacrificing you was always built into this equation. Corporations are sociopathic, you know that! That’s why I keep telling you, you shouldn’t warn them. Let them, and the people that use them to settle here, find out the hard way.”

“There are a lot of people who say, ‘I suffered, so should they.’ But they don’t really mean it. Not deep down.”

Lucifer scoffed.

“A lot of people take jobs that might kill them,” she snapped. “Firefighters, soldiers, plague doctors… Are you going around bothering them? Asking if they should let someone die just because they might?” She threw a pebble weakly at his head. It sailed straight through.

Lucifer grinned and patted the side of his slicked-back coiffure, unoffended. “I mean, them I’m used to. Been trying to get them to see sense for aeons, and no dice. But you? What—and I use this term advisedly—the hell were you thinking?”

“That life should mean something. To me, even if it doesn’t to Betterra.” She flirted with unconsciousness but danced away. “The water of life.”

“Uisge beatha is water of life. Whisky. You’re rambling now.”

Sara couldn’t reply. The pain of her thirst now was a high-pitched sawing. Her body was seizing as it took hold. The end was coming. But she knew what she’d meant, so he did too. He was just being a contrarian son of a bitch again.

The water. It was life and it was death. And if she warned no-one about it, death would fall from her hands. Or life, if she warned them. It was her life that she’d given. It was her death they had taken. But she’d given them life back. And death and life and death and life.

Water. It came in a cycle, didn’t it?

***

She’d stood over the bore head that day, looked at the flow gurgling into the trough and made herself decide. The windmill had sawed and whined in the breeze as the pump raised and sank. The trough piped out to the test ground with its withered abortions of a crop. Even after composting and shovelling out her shit, the plants had atrophied, white leaves like they’d been growing under a paving stone.

There’d been one dice throw left.

She’d done endless tests; no obvious concerns. The potable water supplies were far too low. If she got a laser call tomorrow, they still couldn’t get to her in time. And what was the likelihood of that? The bore might give her an extension.

She’d spent her life wasting time, taking endless menial jobs, disappointing parents, running away from things.

It had sung benevolently as it splashed out of the pipe. She’d cupped a hand under and brought it up, trickling clear and cold through her fingers. “To my health,” she’d whispered, and sipped. She’d blinked and stared out at the desert and waited. Then she’d dipped her hand for another mouthful.

It wasn’t until the next day that her stomach hadn’t felt right.

***

The sunsets on this planet were incredible, it had to be said. Perhaps because it would be her last, she paid rapt attention, lying flat on the patch of soil she just couldn’t manage to get up from.

“I’m scared,” she said. Or perhaps just thought.

“I know,” Lucifer said, as her childhood dog. “I’m sorry.” He curled up into a ball under her arm by her ribcage and she fancied she could feel the heat.

“Will I see you, after?”

Lucifer snuffled his nose, sneezing orange dust, then resting his chin on her belly. “For what?”

She’d been reckless. She’d wasted her life. She’d been lazy, vain, hubristic, taken recreational drugs…

She’d taken the job. She’d been catastrophically stupid. She’d drunk the water.

“Oh that.” He pretended to look around, swivelling his ears. “I think you’ve had enough punishment, don’t you? And besides, you were also trying to help. Look at what you’ve done here. It counts.”

They watched until the light faded, sinking into the night. The gas giant’s malachite bands rose above, shining and swirling and finally, Lucifer blinked out. Sara shivered with the new cold and smiled.

It might be only a community of one, but she held an honoured position.

Around her, on every surface, in every medium and in every language or symbol she could remember, was written the message to stay the fuck away from Terga.

3467 words

Author’s Note: This story is the second I’ve set in the Bettera Corp universe. I love the idea of science fiction as a tool to interrogate ourselves, our actions, and our ethics. Writers have been doing this for a long time: from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the Alien franchise to the hit streaming shows of today like Severance. I could imagine people like Sara being given little choice but to sacrifice themselves for exploitative companies rushing to dominate new planets. But there are always little acts of resistance innate in humans, even if they don’t see themselves as heroic. If you’re curious, you can find the first story, “Pearl and the World”, in the Gallus anthology, launched at Worldcon 2024 in Glasgow.

E.M. Faulds is a British science fiction and fantasy author. Born in Australia, she now calls Scotland her forever home. You can find her short stories in PodCastle, Strange Horizons, ParSec, and Shoreline of Infinity, and the anthologies Gallus, Nova Scotia Vol. 2, Best of British SF 2022, and ECO24: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction. In 2023, she won the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection. Her novella, Bring Me Home, is available now from Wizard’s Tower Press. She is a member of the Glasgow SF Writers’ Circle. Find out more at emfaulds.com

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DP FICTION #131B: “The Book of Fading Gods” by E.M. Linden

edited by Amanda Helms

The first god on our list wears the skull of a polar bear. The god is shrunk to the width of my little finger and almost transparent. Darkness seeps like squid ink from their eyes.

“Sir,” I address the tiny god. “Can you give me an account of—?”

ice, the god interrupts, their voice like crunching frost. ice.

Cata winces. She hasn’t been in the After Realm very long, and she’s only just been assigned an internship at the Department of Fading Gods. This is probably the first time she’s had a god speak directly into her thoughts.

The God of Ice—to give them their full title—once echoed through icebergs and glacier chasms. They sang themself awake against a chorus of scraped whale-bone, drowned men caught like blebs in the ice, the splintering of coracles and then ships. Now they’re the skitter of mouse claws in winter, a puddle cracking under a child’s shoe. They’re lucky; they don’t realise how far they’ve shrunk. They still have their tiny glee in violence, their hunger, their righteous fury.

The cold gnaws at my ankles. “Please state your case.”

ice, they say. ice!

I could shave this tiny god into a cocktail. I could melt them with a breath. What I can’t do—never can—is get a straight answer.

“Fine. Ice. Autumn leaves limned in frost, that sort of thing?” I’m not strictly meant to suggest paths of belief, but otherwise we’ll be here all day. “How about the existential dread of glaciers melting?”

ice, the god repeats, triumphant.

Cata’s trying not to laugh. “Or praying you’ve remembered to put antifreeze in the car?”

“Good point.” I say, with dignity, and turn back to the God of Ice. “Happy with that?”

Baffled silence. The concept of good and the concept of happy are so far beyond their comprehension that the god doesn’t even rage.

“That’s enough for another year, then.” I make a note in the book.

ice, they command. Unknowing, ungrateful, entirely oblivious to their reduced state and the grace that’s just been extended to them. A housecat that’s never met a dog, never been cowed by a rampant toddler, never even left a house.

ice, ice—

***

“And that was a god?” Cata asks, when they vanish. “Seriously, Aoife, that was weird.” Cata pronounces my name perfectly. Normally that would be enough for me to warm to her, but I’m still feeling defensive.

“Didn’t you get the briefing?” I ask.

“The Organising Powers of the After Realm… blah blah.” Cata shoves her hands in her pockets. She must have graduated on Halloween, Día de los Muertos or something like that, because she’s wearing this amazing black jumpsuit embossed with a skeleton. The bones aren’t quite anatomically correct; some of the smaller phalanges are missing and others are simplified, but Cata’s too cool to care. She’s got big black boots on, and tiny skulls swing from her silver hoops. Compared with my grubby old clothes, my stained trainers, the river-water darkening my hair and dripping down my collar, it’s hard to believe we’re from the same planet. “Something about winnowing?” she says.

I nod. “Yep. The Powers that run the After Realm like things to be tidied away. For those gods with insufficient belief, we erase their Names, so that no record remains.”

Cata nods. “Eternal decluttering.”

“You could say that.” I can’t tell if she cares. The Powers see no use for tiny gods, or any of the other scraps of belief that stray into their Realm like autumn leaves blown in through the front door. Human sensibilities are much more forgiving of small and messy things; after all, we’re small and messy ourselves. We have our instructions, here at the Department, and we enforce them to the letter.

“But we’re not Powers,” she says. “We’re human.”

“Yes, well. Gods are a human thing, so they need humans to deal with them.”

Cata frowns. “My abuela would argue it was the other way round.”

I shrug. “I’m not an expert in theology. I didn’t expect to Graduate so early, and—”

I stop, embarrassed. Cata Graduated early, too. She doesn’t need to hear my life story, even if there’s no one else to talk to. But Cata only nods. The eternal starlight pours through the temple’s open roof and glints off the hoops in her left ear.

“So that’s it?”

“That’s it? We decide whether a god has been forgotten,” I remind her as sternly as I can. “Whether they live or fade away forever. We summon them. And god by god, they plead their case. To us.”

I hand Cata the Book of Fading Gods ceremoniously; she takes it with no ceremony at all. It’s heavy, bound in bog-oak. The wood seems dead but every now and then, when least expected, a green shoot emerges.

Not subtle, as metaphors go.

Metaphors matter here. Belief sustains gods, but old gods fade. They become scraps of divine consciousness. Rags in the wind, looking for something to cling to. A good fishing ground. A twist in someone’s luck. Sometimes, even one believer is enough.

Everyone knows that. Nobody thinks about the paperwork behind it.

Cata shrugs, hands still in her pockets. “But these gods… they’re the size of insects. They don’t do anything. Why do you care what happens to them?”

“Because I met one,” I say quietly.

“Met one?” Cata’s smiling. Ready to make a joke of it. But I can’t.

“Yes.” The God of Aoife’s Nephew. The God of the Nick of Time. I can’t think of a way to change the subject. “Back when I was alive. I met one.”

Cata looks at me. At the river-weed in my hair and tractor oil on my jeans. At my old grey jumper, unravelling along the hem. I’d been helping out on my brother’s farm when I Graduated. I know Cata’s look. She’s deciding whether or not to ask how it happened.

Goody Moonraker told me to talk about it. She used to run the Department, and she was something of a mentor for me, even though she died five hundred years before I was born. “Centuries go by, Aoife,” she’d said in her cracked voice. “And it ossifies. Your truth gets stuck deep under the bone. And you can’t ever get it back.” She was right. But it’s hard. To say, there was an accident. Anyway if I talk about it, I cry, and that’s embarrassing for everyone.

Cata breaks the silence before it becomes awkward.

“Show me the summoning bit again.”

“Like this.” I prick my thumb with the silver pin we keep for the trickier gods, and smear a bead of blood across the second Name on my list. Its runes are as jagged as broken branches.

Cata leans away, eyeing the pin. “Do the interns get put on blood sacrifice duties? Or just the coffee run?”

I smile painfully. Coffee is near the top of my personal Things I Miss about Life list. Right after my family and sunlight. Also biking downhill in summer, my old cat Toggles, and those deep-fried cinnamon-dusted donut holes they sell in fairgrounds. There’s tea in the After Realm, thank all the tiny gods, but you can’t get a decent coffee this side of death.

***

The blood soaks into the runes. The God of Chestnut Trees in Autumn embodies in a crackle of dry leaves, a plump man in robes of russet and amber. The air smells of cinnamon and firewood. Another angry one. He stamps around our summoning platform, every inch of him trembling with fury. He shouts up at us, shaking a pea-sized fist.

“We have to give him a fair hearing,” I say, after an embarrassed pause. The tiny god rants and raves inaudibly.

Cata rolls her eyes. “And we can’t hear him. I think I get it.”

I mark the book. The god disembodies for another year. “Thanks, Cata.” Then I remember she’s an intern and I’m meant to be encouraging her. “Great job. “

“They’re just making stuff up,” she says. You’re just making stuff up, she means. I can see where this is going; our last intern quit over what he characterised as an excess of sentimentality and went to work for Spiritual Accounting.

“Everything was made up once.” That’s what Goody Moonraker told me. “Even gods. Doesn’t mean they’re not real.”

Cata just side-eyes me. I wish Goody were here; she was a lot more convincing than I am.

***

Still, we make good progress. There are dozens of gods scheduled for review today, and hardly time to catch our breath between them. “It’s not normally this busy,” I say. “Things are hectic because of the Festival.”

“The Festival?”

“The Festival of Memories. It starts today.”

Cata scrunches her forehead. “On the third of August?”

I’m impressed by her quick maths. “Well, it changes.” The Festival is meant to fall on quiet days, when nothing much is happening on Earth. But almost every day on Earth has celestial and divine significance. Holy dates change with the moon, or the Earth’s angle to the stars and the sun. And don’t start me on weeks. I still can’t fathom why weeks are patterned around a prime number. Earth calendars really are a shambles.

Nearly every other realm is better organised. There’s a fairyland with five seasons—Starlight, the Dances, the Knives, Frost and Despair—but no months. There’s a world of pristine snow, where each day lasts a hundred hours and each year exactly ten thousand days. And in the Underworld of Endless Dark, you don’t have to worry about calendars at all.

I shouldn’t compare Earth to them. I’m like that friend with rich parents who did an exchange to France and came back complaining that the bread at home doesn’t taste the same.

Except I can’t go home.

***

We summon and dismiss the God of Items Lost on Trains, the God of Lemons, the God of Missing Someone Whose Face You Can’t Remember. Cata’s very quiet.

“Are you all right?”

Cata’s eyes are shadowed, but the marigold tucked behind her ear is bright and warm, like morning sunshine. “I’m fine,” she mutters. She glimpses eternity out of the corner of her eye and winces. “Imposter syndrome.”

“Mortal Resources chose you.” The earnestness in my voice makes me cringe. I wish I could be as nonchalant as Cata. “You don’t have to stay here once your internship is finished, but you’re here for a reason. Everyone is.”

Sometimes I worry about that. I could have trained as a dream-stalker, a shuck-whisperer, a scribe for the Union of Hauntings. Why am I here? I shake those thoughts away. “There’ll be something about you. Some conversation with divinity, even if it’s an argument.”

Cata slams the book shut. “Aoife, I don’t think I can do this.”

***

We sit in the staff room out the back of the temple complex and I pour the tea. The room has dark curtains and a slouchy sofa. The Eternal Void is a nice shade of blue and streams with stars, but it strains the human soul. Sometimes you need a roof over your head.

“Thanks.” She warms her hands on the cup. “It’s just… Aren’t you, well, hoarding gods?”

“Belief generates belief.” Goody Moonraker told me that once; I hope Cata doesn’t ask me to explain it: I’m only half-sure what it means myself. “Anyway, we don’t keep them. Didn’t you cover this in training? They’re not like… I don’t know, butterflies ethered in a collection case.”

Cata wrinkles her nose. “I can’t believe people used to do that. Old white men have a lot to answer for.” She looks at me accusingly. “But do you ever winnow the list of gods at all?”

“Sure,” I say. “We had a God of Teapots until a few years back. The last intern got over-enthusiastic, and bam. Winnowed.”

A careless act of unbelief. I look sadly at an escaped dribble of tea. I miss the God of Teapots. Ever since then, it’s been impossible to find a teapot with the perfect pour.

“Okay.” Cata adds a spoonful of celestial honey to her tea. “What about gods that were, you know, colonised out of existence?”

“Good question.” Her thoughtful tone encourages me. “There are special pages in the book for murdered gods. Gods that people tried to erase by violence.” The Powers are cold and inhuman, but they’re quite big on justice. Justice, I suppose, is tidy. A kind of ordering of the universe, a correcting of things that should never have happened. “Their Names are written in indelible ink. They will outlast the stars.”

The indelible ink is one of my favourite parts of the job. I have a special quill for it. Cata raises her eyebrows. Maybe she’s the tiniest smidgeon impressed.

***

It only sinks in after we’ve finished our tea. Cata’s not nonchalant; she’s sad. Makes sense, for someone who Graduated so recently. I should have noticed earlier.

I wish she could see the Festival of Memories. Each year, one lucky intern designs it, using their Things I Miss Most About Life list as a blueprint. This year, there are vegan dumplings, blue-sugared almonds, ghost stories, crochet and phoenix-shaped kites. It smells of mint and libraries, sounds like rain and firecrackers, and feels like a dress with generous pockets. Everyone loves the festival, the tiny glimpses of home, the annual catharsis of joy and life. Everyone except the Powers. They don’t like it, but they can’t stop it, either, so they pretend it was their idea in the first place. One of those things that make me realise the Powers aren’t quite as powerful as they portray themselves, even here in the After Realm.

Maybe we should just go to the festival, I think. Cheer Cata up. But Cata hardly knows me. She’ll realise I have no one else to go with. Feel sorry for me. And that would embarrass us both.

It’s true that company would be nice. Last year there was bubble tea and jasmine blossoms, ducks and the music of ouds and a planetarium, but I ended up wandering around aimlessly, watching the crowds, until I gave up and came back to the temple and the fading gods.

“You know, my god was always small.” I don’t know why I’m telling Cata any of this. I want her to know she’s not alone, I guess. “She was the God of a Small Stretch of River-water, of duck-weed and waterlilies and empty beer cans. She was already almost forgotten when we strayed into her waters. Too small to save us both. But she—” I have to stop talking until I get my voice under control. “But she heard me. She gave me enough strength to save him.”

“Him?”

“My nephew.”

He was four. We were at the river at the edge of my brother’s farm. He slipped down the bank and into the water. I tried to pull him out but I slipped too, and I couldn’t swim well myself. The current was strong.

Then the god came.

My nephew’s the tallest person in our family now. He’s at university, and the same age as I was when I drowned. I wish I could say he’s studying medicine, like I was, but at the moment he wants to be a DJ. I’m not so sad about the accident anymore; in time, Goody said, the sadness fades completely. But I will never not be grateful for his life. When I see what he’s up to, when he remembers it’s my birthday, when he puts a jam-jar of bluebells on the sunny windowsill overlooking the river where it happened, because my brother told him that my favourite colour was blue.

Still is.

I brush at my eyes.

Cata half-reaches out to me. I shrug, plaster a smile on my face to hide my embarrassment. “Who’s next?”

She lowers her arms. She flicks through the book, the neat lines of Names. “We haven’t winnowed a single god so far. What’s the secret? Don’t tell me it’s because they believe in themselves or some rubbish.”

My face heats. “I believe in them,” I mumble. “I believe in all of them.”

She puts the book down and stares at me. “Of course,” she says. “We believe in them. You and I. The Department. This isn’t about fading gods, is it? It’s a way to remember the gods. A system to nourish them?”

I shrug. She figured it out years faster than I did. “Not exactly. It’s more of a loophole. Our bosses don’t know.”

She waves this away as if the Powers of the After Realm aren’t worth considering. “But why bother remembering? What’s the point?” She’s not being difficult; she wants, she needs, to know. I remember how that felt.

She might as well say, what’s the point of us?

“Because,” I blurt out. “They matter. The gods matter.” Words rush out of me. Heartfelt, embarrassing words. “The world isn’t only for the big and strong and successful. Small things matter too. A secret language, a bird’s nest, a photograph. The smell of rain in a city you can’t return to. The fragile and the odd, the broken things, the things you care about even if nobody else does. They deserve to be remembered.”

She doesn’t say anything, just stares down at the book in her hands. I try to find better words.

“Many things are sacred,” I say at last.

Cata almost smiles. Her eyes go soft and sad. It’s obvious her thoughts are a lifetime away, with someone she loves in another world altogether.

***

We don’t summon the next god. She’s just suddenly here, all around us. That happens, sometimes. A strong emotion, a certain look on someone’s face—that can be enough to call a god into being.

The sky is as cold as always, but out of nowhere, sunlight warms my shoulders. A swirl of pink-white blossoms drifts on a soft breeze. I smell lime-blossom, cinnamon, and clean laundry.

This is grace, for someone.

I stretch out my hand. A petal drifts onto my sleeve. “That’s a new one. I wonder why…?”

I see Cata’s expression. The tear tracks on her face. “Oh,” is all I can manage, feeling foolish.

“The God of Wildflowers Gathered by a Child for Her Mamá.” Cata’s voice hitches then cracks on the Name. Cata’s never heard of this god until now, nobody has, but she recognises Her instantly. Of course she does. She’s hers.

I take the book and busy myself with it to give her time to wipe her eyes, if she wants to. I write the Name of her god into the book in indelible ink, where it will remain, year after year, forever.

Like I say, the job does come with some perks.

I don’t ask about the child or the mother. What happened, or which one Cata was. Instead, I rustle the pages, and hum to myself until Cata clears her throat and says, “Right, what’s next?” and I can hear that she’s stopped crying.

***

“You know something?” I take the book out of Cata’s hands. “The festival really gets swinging about now. Everyone will be dancing. There’ll be thousands of silk kites in the skies, and spiced hot chocolate, and friendly dogs. Silly things, maybe, but—”

“Sacred things,” Cata says. “Memories.” She smiles, though her face is still wet, and I smile back.

“Shall we leave the rest of our list for later?” I look down, see my cowpat-stained jeans, and sigh. “Not that I’m dressed for a festival.”

Cata grins. She takes her marigold from her hair and tucks it behind my ear. It glows among the riverweed. In place of the marigold, Cata’s tiny god has left her wildflowers. They glimmer in Cata’s hair, translucent, knotted into the sort of clumsy flower crown a child might make in spring.

“Now you’re ready,” Cata says. “Let’s go.”

3320 words

Author’s Note: I started playing with the idea of a tiny, impotent, but absolutely furious god and just got carried away from there. It took me a while to figure out the emotional core of the story was not the fading gods, but the relationship between the two main characters and their reasons for being there. I suspect reading too much Discworld at an early age was an influence as well.

E.M. Linden is a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand whose work has appeared in Strange Horizons, The Deadlands, PodCastle, The Dark, the Shirley Jackson Award-winning anthology Why Didn’t You Just Leave, on the Locus Recommended Reading List, and various other places. She likes coffee, books, owls, and the sea.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

DP Fiction #104: “Like Ladybugs, Bright Spots In Your Mailbox” by Marie Croke

edited by David Steffen

Someone began sending hand-written spellcrafted postcards out of DC in July of 2024. Those postcards made the rounds for a good nine months, under the radar, scarcely observed. That was, until the rash of good health, the proliferation of wealth, and the sudden uptick in good living coupled with a grand downtick in big socioeconomic issues the mayor was quick to claim as her own—such as suicides and unemployment—brought the situation to the attention of the East US Coven.

Because we can’t have downticks in unemployment and upticks in good health, not if there’s witchery being waved under everyone’s noses. Especially if the handwriting has a particularly feminine flair. No siree.

The coven sent a team, sans me, to check DC, do a sweep that chugged them around on and off the metro until they shook their heads and scattered home, reports saying that it must be the mayor after all.

I admit, I checked the coven’s files after, a part of me rankling since the coven overlooked asking me to look into things when I was right there. But I am “just a low-level research drone.” As if my duties take away from knowing my own home over men from New York and Boston; as if it isn’t literally my job to find possible unapproved spell-usage hinted at in news articles and reports and forum threads. Talk about being low gal on the invisible corporate witchpole I’m supposed to climb.

Then the goodwill witching spread. Not like California wildfires. Like ladybugs. Crawling into people’s houses via their mailboxes, with goodness hidden under their stamps and well-wishes printed out every fourth letter in the mundane notes.

Now, I’m what you call a witchery watcher, or at least that’s what would be on my resume if Salem hadn’t happened, kicking us all deep undercover from the rest of the world. It’s not that glamorous a job, not when half the self-proclaimed witches can’t seal their bottle spells properly enough to be termed spells and the other half spend the bulk of their time insisting that spells are all internal or some new-agey form of mindfulness. But here and there someone who acts suspiciously like a real witch pops up on one of my routine checks and my job gets a tad more interesting, if you call “interesting” sitting at home while higher-ups from elsewhere snatch the file and head out into the field to hunt that wild witch down themselves.

Those days are frustrating as all heck because I’m never given authorization to use higher-level spellcraft to check out the witch dabbler myself.

See, it’s dangerous to authorize women for too much crafting on the job. Don’t want another Salem. Don’t want another witch-burning spree where the men of the covens hide behind the women, send them out to die for the good of keeping everyone else safe.

Best to make sure we don’t get noticed.

A bit of a catch-22 if you ask me, since promotions come from wild witch catching, yet if I’m never out in the field because of my supposed feminine wiles…

That mentality isn’t something I can change all at once, not craning my head as I am from the bottom of the coven.

So when I get a postcard in my mail that smells like the sage-flavored mountain on its front and spells a wealth of confidence into my spine, I decide to do some off-grid, inadvisable digging of my own. Maybe jump a few pegs up on that ladder even if I have to bend some coven rules. Get to a position where I might do some good, change the culture, move some immovable mountains so my two girls could step into a coven without having to claw for every scrap of respect they gained.

Or I hope I’d at least earn a nice letter of recommendation and some off the record shop-chat that could help me corporate-jump myself between the ladders of different covens like a game of leapfrog.

I wait till both my girls skip merrily onto bus #475, that orange monstrosity that every day I wish I could wrap in a protective blanket of spells, though that doesn’t come under the “allowable spellcraft” rules.

While the girls learn mathematics and grammar and spotty history, I craft a runic graph of my city, marking it up by feel before I rip up that confidence-spelled postcard, hold the confetti in my fist and release it over the scrawled lines representing DC. A spelled wind takes those jagged-edged pieces and swirls them over the city on my coffee table, each of them bobbing when they sailed down the Potomac, yet ultimately landing in as haphazard a way as you’d like.

I try pendulums next, cleansing each and working through the now-shredded postcard’s origins, but the crystals latch onto the stamp, dragging the pendulum toward my local post office over and over like a poor confused dog. Which meant whoever this witch is had found a way to break the trail, stop the ink, the words, the spellcraft, from trickling a wake back, back to the one who’d crafted them.

Screw it. I’ll bend the law just a tad. No holds barred.

Using sunwater to find pinprick jolts of lingering spellcraft wake where it hadn’t yet been contaminated with too much other life, I find the houses in the local neighborhoods that had been sent spellcrafted postcards recently. Reach my hand in through grandmother’s opal-glazed bowl and steal mail right off of tables and armchairs and dusty tops of refrigerators.

In a stack that thick and robust, the slightly damp postcards practically glow with a lovely residual witch-touch—a gentle turquoise with pale pink chevrons that spoke of streams of love and caring in a backdrop of creativity and friendship. My single, now-shredded card wasn’t this bright alone—just a drop in the metaphorical postal system it’d been. Whoever this witch is, they truly are a spellcrafting benefactor of tiny, prolific blessings. Blessings that are collectively wrapping their embrace around the city, stretching through Arlington, through Bethesda, reaching for Rockville and Columbia.

Like some urban, limited-word guardian angel.

I hesitate, running my fingers along those damp edges, staring at the smudged ink where every fourth letter spelled contentment, spelled hope, spelled happiness, motivation, forgiveness, love, charity, satisfaction. There is even one spelled to help find lost things. And another to accept those things that can’t be found.

This witch doesn’t need to be hunted down like some Salem echo. This witch is doing good work, witch work, the sort that means to help, to heal, to wrap warm arms about a cold people and remind them that life wasn’t the crapshoot it sometimes felt like, filled with people who only did wrong to others.

I sit with hands clasped, suffused with a sense of rightness. I would tuck these postcards away, ignore the proliferation of positivity, let this witch, whoever they are, get away with their practice under the coven’s nose because people like them are what these cities need, whether or not its citizens cared. Whether or not its citizens might run screaming if they knew.

And for a good thirty minutes, I admire my own morality. Then my girls come home with a squeal of bus brakes and a breath of chilly wind.

My youngest screams in, a ten-year-old’s strength and optimism and excitement opening up a babbling of her day, her wild curls haloing her face and the crookedness of her teeth making her smile seem wide, wider. Like the world hadn’t yet caught hold of her mind, told her to hush, hush, let the others talk.

But my oldest steps through the door a minute after, dragging her sneakers and dropping her bookbag like it weighed more than a curse, societal expectations bricking her up, squishing her down. Her dark hair wafts around her cheeks. Her eyes skip past mine. What has happened today, what words lost to the depths of her throat, what tiny infractions that seem so large to her now, yet will climb and build until she presumes them normal?

Until she finds herself working in an entry-level job under people with less skill, less craft than what she possesses in her littlest finger, yet will be unable to leap past them because rules and regs and laws all built to say no, not-yet, you-aren’t-the-right-fit have become expected. Lines she’ll sit contentedly in, obediently.

Like the box toddlers play in. Yet as a toddler, we always push against the cardboard and tip…over. Because the box is fragile, always was, until we let it turn to stone and plaster and brick around us as we grow.

I put the girls back on the bus the next morning, the grey sky cleared in splotches, like hope peeking out from a shedding blanket, though someone probably has a damn good darning needle and some thick thread and will patch those little spots up, clouds yanked in stitches until the holes shrink to nothingness.

But I can’t think like that.

I’ve got spells in my back pocket. A little bottle, filled with postcard confetti and scrying water and intentions, all sealed with a black wax meant to enhance and reflect the witch-touch so the spell might be powerful enough to react to wakes and fresher castings. A small notebook page, folded and folded and folded again until I’ve got a puzzle with protective words written in sixteen different languages, fifteen of which I don’t speak, that will make me hard to remember. A watch from my childhood—yellow bumblebees on its scratched band—that saves up seconds, seven of them to be exact, that I might replay them in need.

I head to my local post office to begin my chase of the witch’s wake, the air thick about me, expectant. The bottle spell for finding things that don’t want to be found grows invisible tendrils about my body, reaching for hints to scarf down, swallow and exaggerate so that I might trail. A good little nose, I’d once been called by some middle management guy from Baltimore. No better than a dog—stick me in a kennel when I’m not needed, why don’t you.

I shook my head, removing that conglomerate, insidious voice that attempted to shunt me down the ladder. Climbed the steps into the brick building, the scent of paper thickening, the scent of spellcraft billowing.

Little metal boxes with their little metal locks block me in on all sides. A witch might have a day in here, snapping up the power numbers, every box that ends in seven, every thirteen that winks with untapped potential, every three growing warm at my presence. I let my finding spell reach and search, sifting through the air, tasting it with suckers no one else can see.

All that billowing spellcraft, streams of wakes where postcards have swept up and away and into and out of postal boxes congregates here, then parts there, disappears here, then solidifies there. In flux, throbbing, like…the craft is being constantly worked in pockets and moments, nothing too big all at once, but everything small all the time.

I step up toward the counter. And pause.

Of course. There she is. Not quite as powerful a witch as I thought, her wake stopping here because here is where she crafts.

She reminds me of my own mother, the way her poinsettia-patterned dress clings to her, the way her thick glasses sit on the bridge of her nose, the way she chats with the man in front of me, telling him all about grandchildren, all about life. As she passes him the receipt she tells him not to save his smiles because like cookies, they go bad if you don’t pass them out. Can’t save them all for oneself, you can’t, she says.

For just a moment, I see all that effort she’s gone through, handwriting each message, licking every stamp, pressing her witch-touch as she casts the small spells with a hope in her heart that they make someone smile, or give them the little bounce they need to make a fresh choice or be content with an old one.

The man brushes past me with a light in his dark eyes, like there’s a chevron pink flame flickering in those depths.

Then I’m breathing hard.

I think—I thought this would be easier. My fingers slick with sweat as I tug off my glove, press the contact list, find my coven boss’s number. I think—I thought I’d had resolve. I’m just doing what’s necessary to claw my way up that witchpole, lay claim to little scraps of power that I’m thrown. That’s all.

That’s all.

My phone comes down, down to my side. She smiles at me, handing out joy like a freshly-baked cookie, like she can’t see the finding spell eagerly wrapping about her, pointing as if I hadn’t already figured her out. Realization flickers in her eyes and that smile flattens out.

I could hold my hand out, introduce myself, wish her well on her crusade. I could find a kindred spirit maybe, that reflects back on the days I sat with my mother while she taught me runes and wax and scrying.

Instead, I reach to my back pocket and rewind seven seconds, take back her smile, take back the man brushing past me. Back, back, to when my folded paper spell still worked to make me forgettable.

Then, as the man begins to turn away anew, I turn as well, escape out into the street, away from the little metal boxes and all the postcards they may or may not hide.

There, with the patched-up grey sky thickening overhead, I make the call. My breathing steady. My heartrate normal. Because sometimes we have to do things we don’t like, yeah, things that jump us up that witchpole.

That’s what I tell myself, over and over, as I walk home to meet the girls off the bus. That’s what I tell them when we sit around the table. Tell them that sometimes, in order to keep our jobs, keep ourselves safe, keep food on the table and inch the world into something different, something that might be better, we’ve got to work within the confines of the rules we were born into. Inside the box.

I just don’t tell them how much it costs.

When my coven comes—two men from New York and a third from Atlanta—I try not to think of the woman like my mother. Try to think about her like she’s an unknowing martyr, a witch for the cause so that the covens stand tall, that I might wind my way up to wield true power, make a difference one day. It’s a long game. Long.

Like how they thought of Salem. All those woman pulled and burned that the covens might stand…

I’m on the email chain as they wrap up the “DC Postcard Witch.” There’s no mention of the higher school grades or the lower unemployment those postcards had wrought. There’s just a withering in the air, the sky crying for a week as the postcards are fading, fading, gone.

And I…

I take my tiny back pat. My off-brandvacuum-cleaner reward. My paper commendation that crinkles in my desk at home, buried under my daughters’ honor roll cardstock print-outs.

I go back to my researching duties, reading, filing, emailing, typing Johns and Steves and Adams in the “To” boxes. I find evidence of possible witchery occurring outside of the Coven’s know-how and approval. I field question after question on how a spell works, what they might be doing wrong from people who work in positions higher than me and should already know. I fix, I tweak, I make everyone above me look good, because that’s what they say will make me look good too.

Except it doesn’t. Nothing changes. That witchpole looks the same from down here. And my city, it looks all the worse.

The upticks become downticks and the downticks morph into upticks. My youngest begins to have a smidge of that same sagging weight to her steps as my oldest. The dinner table talks become rote, become painful because I can’t believe in the shit I’m spitting out anymore.

So I stop saying anything at all.

And I start doing.

Someone begins to send spellcraft postcards from DC in September 2025, during the season the ladybugs start searching for warmth, encroaching into homes, red specks crawling pentagrams across ceilings, insect runecraft, the sort the big covens would shut down the moment they sniffed competition. Because that’s all this has ever been about, stomping the competition before women might claw their way back, swell their small-coven ranks, show the world that witchery wasn’t about profits and rules and big power, but about small powers, about hopes and futures outside of confinements.

They’ll come for me too one of these days.

Maybe the winter of 2027, when the cold that creaks through ragged carpet is defrosted by a few tropical words spelled out every 4th letter. Maybe during the height of the summer in 2028, when the breeze contained under flag stamps is a little more inclusive as it breathes soothing messages through the worst of the season. Maybe not until 2035, when I’m finally eligible to apply for a managerial position in the coven–fifteen years of dedicated service and all–when they tune their eyes closer, check every nook and cranny of my life, overturn the rocks and stamps to find the gentle spells I’d released en masse to those in most need.

And then maybe my girls will nod a few decades on, saying their mother did something, yeah. Something that made a difference. Something that maybe would spread like ladybugs, happy bright spots, little, little, but proliferating nonetheless.

2967 words

Marie Croke is an award-winning fantasy and science-fiction writer living in Maryland with her family, all of whom like to scribble messages in her notebooks when she’s not looking. She is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and her stories can be found in over a dozen magazines, including Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, Zooscape, Cast of Wonders, Diabolical Plots, and Fireside. She has worked as a slush editor and first reader for multiple magazines, including khōréō and Dark Matter, and her reviews can be found in Apex Magazine. Her hobbies include crochet, birding, and aerial dance.

For more of Marie Croke’s work in Diabolical Plots, check out “Delivery For 3C at Song View”. If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

DP FICTION #6: “The Superhero Registry” by Adam Gaylord

“What about ‘Copper Penny’?” Lois spread her hands out in front of her like the name was on an old Hollywood marquee.

The square-jawed applicant sitting across the desk arched an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

“Sure! Just think of the potential catch phrases. Your arch-nemesis monologues about how you’ve yet again foiled his or her plans and you say, ‘Of course. I’m Copper Penny. I always turn up.’”

She could tell he was tempted. She tried to sweeten the deal. “Plus, copper is very valuable right now.”

He frowned. “It’s just, it’s a little feminine, don’t you think?”

“No way! I think it’s very masculine.” She batted her eyelashes a little. Anything to get this guy to settle on a name so she could go to lunch. Copper Penny was a bit of a stretch as far as the rules went but she was pretty sure it would pass muster because of his natural red hair.

“Hmmm. No. I just don’t think it’s right for me.”

Lois sighed. They’d been at this all morning and he was no closer to making a decision. Working in the Registry was usually fun. She got to meet the new class of superheroes before they got famous and occasionally she’d even help one pick a name, which was usually a blast. A few of the more appreciative heroes even kept in touch. She was supposed to have lunch with The Valkyrie Sisters next week.

But every once in a while she got one of these fellas. No creativity, no initiative, just expected to have the work done for them. Pretty bad traits for a superhero, in her opinion.

He leaned back in his chair. “Can you go over the rules one more time?”

It was the third time he’d asked and she was tempted to shove her coffee cup down his throat, but the agency had been pushing customer service lately. “These are tomorrow’s superheroes,” the memo said. “We need to establish a strong working relationship from day one.”

So she smiled, brushed her curly blond hair aside, and explained again. “Your name has to have something to do with your super power and/or your look. But, you can only base your name off the latter if you already have a look established, not the other way around.”

“But why? Why can’t I pick a name and then build a look around it?”

She shrugged. “Honestly, it doesn’t come up that often. Most heroes base their costume off something pretty significant like a traumatic childhood memory or the blanket their foster parents found them in. And of course, many heroes are actually green or blue or made out of rock or whatever, so that’s easy.

“But I just look like I always have.”

“Right. So we have to pick a name based on your powers. Now, your fists turn into metal, right?”

“And my forearms.”

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Right. And your forearms. Is that it?”

“What do you mean, ‘Is that it’?” He stood, rolling up his sleeves to show off his shiny metallic appendages. “I can crush cinder blocks with these things.”

“Of course,” she said with a smile. “They’re very impressive.”

He sat down, apparently placated.

“Let’s use that. What else smashes cinder blocks?”

His eyes lit up. “’The Sledge Hammer’!”

She checked the database. “Sorry, that’s taken.”

“What about just, ‘The Hammer’?”

“Nope. Taken.”

“Hmmm… ‘Iron Hammer’?”

“Are your fists actually iron?”

“I’m not sure. Still waiting on lab results. They said it might take two weeks, but I want to get started now!”

“Well, we don’t want to register you as iron if they turn out to be tin or aluminum, do we? I only suggested copper because of your hair color.”

He looked at his hands. “I don’t think they’re aluminum.”

She clicked away at her keyboard. “What about ‘Hard Hand’?”

“Hmmm…kinda catchy.”

“Or just ‘The Hand’?”

“Perfect!”

“Excellent!” She quickly entered the appropriate information into the database before he could change his mind.

“Talk about catch phrases!” He stood and pantomimed shaking someone’s hand. “No worries officer, I’m always happy to lend a hand.” He punched an invisible assailant. “Sorry, I guess I was a little heavy handed.” He thrust his chest out, hands on his hips. “No criminal can outrun the long hand of the law.”

“Arm”, she muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She hit the enter button and the successful registration confirmation message flashed on the screen. “Congratulations Hand, you are now a registered superhero. I will forward your information to one of our case managers and he or she will contact you within seventy-two hours to discuss training opportunities and duty assignments.”

“Wait, aren’t you gonna help me with my look?”

She handed him a fistful of colorful pamphlets she had at the ready. “There are dozens of costume consultants that can craft you the perfect super-ensemble.”

“Oh, okay. So, a case manager will call me?”

“Within seventy-two hours.”

“Okay.” He sat looking at her for a long moment. “Okay, well thanks for your help. If you ever need a superhero, look me up.”

Lois waited a full five count after he left, then scurried for the break room. They had a running over/under board for what superheroes would make it past their first year and she wanted to be the first to lay money on “under” for The Hand.

Author’s Note: I love epic action and harrowing plot twists as much as anyone, but often it’s the everyday interactions of the worlds we create that really fascinate me.

Adam Gaylord lives with his beautiful wife, daughter, and less beautiful dog in Loveland, CO. When not at work as a biologist he’s usually hiking, drinking craft beer, drawing comics, writing short stories, or some combination thereof. Check out his stuff at http://adamsapple2day.blogspot.com/ and www.hopstories.com.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the earlier story offerings:
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