Humphrey Archer's Blog, page 2
September 1, 2025
A Dance with the Devil
Darko had come to Florida temporarily to help his aunt Emily with her little, 15-room hotel in a beachside community. Having been a navy medical technician in his country of birth, Darko was a reasonably able handyman and knew enough to supervise and plan some of the big repair work that was needed. The roof had some rotting timbers, there was a crack in the west wall where rainwater had been pooling, and some of the electrics were a mess. After the big issues had been resolved, Emily asked Darko to stay on, and offered room, food, and a tiny salary in return for ongoing maintenance, and sometimes doing the day manager job when she was out of town. Years passed and so did she, leaving the going, if not thriving, concern to her dapper, but somewhat uninterested, son, Bruce.
Bruce did a reasonable job of the finances and marketing but had a deep disdain for residents, and quickly “promoted” Darko, appointing him full-time day manager. The salary was increased by a nominal, but not unwelcome, amount and Darko settled into a satisfyingly soporific routine.
Darko started each day with a 5:30 jog to the beach. He spent 15 minutes sitting upright on the sand, eyes closed, and breathing deeply. This was followed by a quick 10 minutes of body surfing and 5 minutes of quiet reflection. A jog back and a shower saw him in the breakfast room at 7:00 and eating bacon and fried eggs, two slices of toast with butter and marmalade, and a glass of orange juice. He would take his used plate and cutlery to the cleanup trolley and pop his head into the little kitchen to thank the cook. This was partly because Darko was polite by nature, but also because he had a tiny crush on her but found her very intimidating.
Eleftheria was originally from a small town in Greece, and spoke with a thick accent, often lapsing into Greek when she was agitated. Other people in her kitchen, for example, often resulted in much muttering in Greek. She had been a physician in Greece and had emigrated as a result of social turmoil between ethnic Greeks and Turks in the border region in which she lived. A distant cousin had encouraged her to come over to Florida, where he assured her that medical positions were plentiful and highly paid.
The reality turned out to be more complicated. She discovered that it was a Byzantine process to get her qualifications recognized in America, and there was a labyrinth of local and regional licensure and accreditation rules that proved to be a formidable barrier. The answer she repeatedly received in interviews was that they respected her experience and thought she was a highly competent doctor but that she would need to complete a medical degree at an American college to be accredited. Her cousin had also exaggerated his lifestyle, and she had to live in a local hotel, which burned through her savings faster than she had planned. At a point when she had run out of money, time, and was about to become homeless, Emily had extended a hand. Free board and lodging plus a small salary to run the pokey kitchen. It was meant to be temporary, but like many things at Sea Crest, it soon settled into a comforting routine.
Life had not been without surprises at Sea Crest, but it was largely the same day played over and over. Darko liked it that way. There had been a few older residents who needed an ambulance, two had died in their sleep, and one keeled over at dinner, but the police had only been there twice that he could recall.
Once, the police were called when a couple had been in an alcohol-assisted brawl after the discovery of a third party in the shower. He couldn’t remember whether it was the husband coming home early from a poker night or the wife coming back from bridge or bingo. Either way, someone was in the shower who shouldn’t have been. Voices were raised, things were thrown, knives were brandished, and the police came. The other time was when one of the elderly male residents brought home a sex worker. The resident had woken early and thought she had stolen his watch and had yelled up a storm. The police came, found his watch under the mattress where he had hidden it, and booked them both for disorderly conduct and breach of the peace.
For Darko, a few such excitements over several decades were quite sufficient, and he was entirely happy for every day to be uneventful. Then Tim arrived as a new resident.
Brash, rude, inconsiderate, Tim made a special effort to alarm or offend Darko. If it wasn’t jumping out suddenly, it was making up stupid stories in front of the staff and other guests. “Did’ya all hear Desperate Darko is hiding a wife in his room? Yeah, she’s called Blowup Betty.” “Hey, Darko the Demon, how’s the dingle dangle?” The constant mocking nicknames galled Darko, and the stories drove him to distraction, but what really appalled Darko was Tim’s breakfast routine.
Every morning, at irritatingly predictable times, Tim would come into the breakfast room in a bathrobe. Sometimes after showering, sometimes after being in the pool, but usually dripping wet, with the bathrobe swinging partially open. Whether Tim had anything on under the bathrobe was something more with which to tease Darko. “Oh no, Dangerous Darko, wanna see inside my kimono?”
Tim would order poached eggs, extra bacon, and blood sausage, which was extra work for Cook, and then hover over the toaster. First, two whole wheat, then two white, and then he would pocket a handful of honey and jam packets and head to the veranda. By the time Tim had squelched his way out in sodden flip-flops, there would be a big dirty puddle on the freshly cleaned floor at the foot of the toaster table.
Since the cleaners would only get to the breakfast room when it closed at nine, that left it up to Eleftheria to clean up. Darko usually cleaned it because this was Eleftheria’s busiest time, and he deeply resented Tim for this embarrassment.
One morning, eager to mop up, Darko dashed to the puddle before Tim had quite left the Breakfast Room, and Darko had slipped on the wet trail and fallen heavily. Tim cackled with mocking laughter “Hey, it’s Damp Darko, taking a dive!” Not an apology, no attempt to help, just more mockery.
The commotion brought Eleftheria from the kitchen still grasping a wooden spatula. She shot a brief venomous look at Tim, waving him off with the spatula, and damning him with a string of Greek curses. Roughly translated, the curse suggested that Tim would be dancing with the devil before the next full moon. Cook helped Darko up off the wet floor, and after checking him out, set about mopping up and muttering darkly to herself.
Darko spent an hour after breakfast with Eleftheria and the cleaning crew, talking over ways to fix this ongoing problem. After initial thoughts that Tim could be evicted, they got down to realistic practicalities. Eleftheria suggested that she could pre-cook the poached eggs, and that would reduce the time Tim spent in the breakfast room. One of the cleaners suggested they come in earlier to the breakfast room to mop up. Another suggested a mat at the toast station. Darko liked the mat idea, but as he pointed out, cleaners weren’t allowed in while food was being served. Then Eleftheria asked about maybe getting one of those big toasters that did four slices at a time. That way, Tim would be standing there half as long.
Darko really liked the idea of a bigger toaster, and on his way back to the office, he remembered that they once had one of those carousel toasters. He thought it did four slices at a time but couldn’t remember why it was no longer in service. It wasn’t in the storeroom, and Eleftheria couldn’t remember what happened to it but thought it might be in the basement storage with the seasonal lights.
Darko brooded the rest of the day, and his body ached in a dozen places from his fall. His left elbow was a purple throbbing agony, and his hip felt hot and tight. Bitter resentment ebbed and flowed through him all day, and by the time he handed over to Arturo, the night manager, Darko was consumed with the need to find the carousel toaster or buy a new four-slice unit.
After an hour of painful bending, stretching, and crouching his way through the shelves and storage bins, Darko found the toaster in a tub labeled “Repair.” The Elem carousel toaster seemed fine but a bit dirty. He marveled at the way the four vertical cradles swung to toast first one side then the other. It was a pretty fancy retro piece of 1950s-60s kitchenware. He packed everything else back and headed for his room. Darko changed into overalls and safety shoes, picked up a ham and mustard sandwich left for him at reception by Eleftheria, and went to his workshop.
The workshop was Darko’s spiritual home—quiet, well equipped, and orderly. The wooden workbench had a detachable vice, a steel top, and a pegboard with an array of tools. Neon lamps and a movable spotlight provided good visibility. Drawers along one wall held a wide array of nuts, bolts, and screws. Additional shelves and plastic buckets on a set of rails held spare parts. Opposite the wall of drawers, stood a belt and flap sander, and a rotary wire brush. Next along the wall was a drill press and a small lathe. Gas and arc welders stood in one corner. A large compressor was housed outside, and an air connector and air tools rounded out the very well-appointed workshop.
Darko donned safety glasses and started by attaching a gun to the air hose and blowing the toaster with compressed air. He wiped it down with a mild cleaning solvent on a lint-free cloth and puffed a little graphite powder into the hinges. Darko twisted the knob on top that swung the bread gates back and forth, noting that the knob was cracked and loose. Darko looked through a few drawers before finding a chrome handle from an old gas regulator he had broken down for parts. With a few small modifications, it replaced the plastic knob and added a touch of flair.
Darko examined the old cloth-covered cord and Bakelite plug, noting the cord had frayed in places, and that the plug was cracked. He inserted a bench lead and performed a basic test for continuity that suggested the switch was working, and the elements were at least intact.
Darko plugged in the cord, and with a tiny feeling of trepidation, switched on the toaster. The elements glowed into life without any bright hotspots. Darko frowned, wondering why the elegant Elem had been put in the repair bin. “Maybe the loose knob?” He wondered to himself. Darko reached for the knob and turned the bread gates, and got a sharp jolt of electricity that made him grunt before the earth leakage safety on the workbench tripped and the element’s glow faded.
Darko unplugged the toaster and connected up a continuity tester between the live and the casing. As he slowly twisted the knob, the tester was quiet until the bread gates were almost completely home, and then it beeped continuously. Swing out, quiet, swing back in, and then “beeeeep.” Darko was now pretty clear on why this elegant appliance had ended up in the repair bin. Too fancy to be simply thrown out but badly in need of electrical work. Darko reached for the impact wrench and star bit to open up the base and bumped his injured elbow against the vice. A searing pain shot through his arm like another electric shock and Darko yelped. With pain surging through his arm, he was reminded why he was doing this repair, and a new thought dawned slowly on him.
It was nearly midnight before Darko had finished working on the Elem. He had buffed the nameplate and polished the chrome until the Elem sparkled like new. From the plastic feet to the shiny new knob on the top, it looked better than the day it left the factory in Germany in 1962. Darko coiled up an extra-long cord and packed it all in a clean cardboard box.
When Darko headed into the breakfast room the next morning, he carried the box and placed it next to the bread tray. Darko fussed about, tidying things away for Eleftheria.
Tim walked in with a swagger, “Hey, hey, hey, Dust Diver Darko?” Darko smiled grimly, and unboxed the Elem. “For you, special four-slice toaster.” Darko twisted the knob back and forth, showing how the gates worked, and then plugged it in and ushered Tim to the toaster. “Well, Darko, aren’t you the Dark horse, where have you been hiding this?” Darko smiled thinly again and turned on his heel as Tim slotted in his four slices and grasped the knob to turn his bread up to the brightly glowing coils in the center.
The police came again that day, and so did an ambulance. After all the flurry and sirens and flashing lights, the dour-looking crew from the morgue filed in. It was now just the cleaners and the morgue team, quietly making it all normal again. The wet marks, the plastic needle caps, packets that once held sterile gloves, saline bags, intubation kits, ECG pads, and of course, the crumpled earthly remains of Tim, were all collected and tidied away.
In the following days, an inspector came and looked at where Tim had jerked and danced with wide eyes and a contorted grimace, grunting, and swinging the toaster and its extra-long chord, his fist clenched tightly in an involuntary rictus around its chrome knob. The inspector briefly looked at the outline where Tim had at last fallen to the floor, curled in a tight ball, and hugging the glowing toaster to his damp chest. The inspector had asked for several details, and Darko led him through salient events from fetching the toaster from storage, cleaning it, and showing Tim how to use it for his four slices. Darko described how he had heard Tim grunting and screams from some of the others in the room. He had pulled out the plug and then called 911.
A week later, the inspector received the lab report on the toaster and breakfast room circuits, as well as the coroner’s report on Tim’s body. The lab concluded that a corrosion-related internal wiring fault had been exacerbated by the change from a plastic knob to a metal one, and by the lack of an earth leakage safety trip switch in the breakfast room. They ended by saying that there were no signs of tampering with the circuitry, specifically mentioning that the original factory seal had been intact. They recommended the toaster be scrapped and the Breakfast Room be equipped with an earth leakage breaker. The coroner’s report specified that Tim’s wet body and waterlogged footwear had caused an otherwise painful shock to become fatal and recorded this as an accidental death.
The day he received the final report, Darko dismantled the toaster in accordance with the instruction and dropped the parts into a large recycling bin at the municipal dump. That evening, Darko and Eleftheria sat quietly together on a bench watching the full moon rising over a glittering sea. Their lives returned to a normal but more intimate rhythm, and Tim’s memory and a few lasting scuff marks on the Breakfast Room floor were consigned to one of those few exceptional events for which the police came.
~~~~~~~~~~
If you enjoyed this short story, please consider signing up for my weekly email newsletter. In each, there is a link to a new free short story, and little insight into the writing life. Free ebooks will also be announced in the newsletter. https://hotmail.us16.list-manage.com/...
If you would like to read the book from which this story came, you can get it on Kobo, at https://www.kobo.com/us/en/series/the...
Bruce did a reasonable job of the finances and marketing but had a deep disdain for residents, and quickly “promoted” Darko, appointing him full-time day manager. The salary was increased by a nominal, but not unwelcome, amount and Darko settled into a satisfyingly soporific routine.
Darko started each day with a 5:30 jog to the beach. He spent 15 minutes sitting upright on the sand, eyes closed, and breathing deeply. This was followed by a quick 10 minutes of body surfing and 5 minutes of quiet reflection. A jog back and a shower saw him in the breakfast room at 7:00 and eating bacon and fried eggs, two slices of toast with butter and marmalade, and a glass of orange juice. He would take his used plate and cutlery to the cleanup trolley and pop his head into the little kitchen to thank the cook. This was partly because Darko was polite by nature, but also because he had a tiny crush on her but found her very intimidating.
Eleftheria was originally from a small town in Greece, and spoke with a thick accent, often lapsing into Greek when she was agitated. Other people in her kitchen, for example, often resulted in much muttering in Greek. She had been a physician in Greece and had emigrated as a result of social turmoil between ethnic Greeks and Turks in the border region in which she lived. A distant cousin had encouraged her to come over to Florida, where he assured her that medical positions were plentiful and highly paid.
The reality turned out to be more complicated. She discovered that it was a Byzantine process to get her qualifications recognized in America, and there was a labyrinth of local and regional licensure and accreditation rules that proved to be a formidable barrier. The answer she repeatedly received in interviews was that they respected her experience and thought she was a highly competent doctor but that she would need to complete a medical degree at an American college to be accredited. Her cousin had also exaggerated his lifestyle, and she had to live in a local hotel, which burned through her savings faster than she had planned. At a point when she had run out of money, time, and was about to become homeless, Emily had extended a hand. Free board and lodging plus a small salary to run the pokey kitchen. It was meant to be temporary, but like many things at Sea Crest, it soon settled into a comforting routine.
Life had not been without surprises at Sea Crest, but it was largely the same day played over and over. Darko liked it that way. There had been a few older residents who needed an ambulance, two had died in their sleep, and one keeled over at dinner, but the police had only been there twice that he could recall.
Once, the police were called when a couple had been in an alcohol-assisted brawl after the discovery of a third party in the shower. He couldn’t remember whether it was the husband coming home early from a poker night or the wife coming back from bridge or bingo. Either way, someone was in the shower who shouldn’t have been. Voices were raised, things were thrown, knives were brandished, and the police came. The other time was when one of the elderly male residents brought home a sex worker. The resident had woken early and thought she had stolen his watch and had yelled up a storm. The police came, found his watch under the mattress where he had hidden it, and booked them both for disorderly conduct and breach of the peace.
For Darko, a few such excitements over several decades were quite sufficient, and he was entirely happy for every day to be uneventful. Then Tim arrived as a new resident.
Brash, rude, inconsiderate, Tim made a special effort to alarm or offend Darko. If it wasn’t jumping out suddenly, it was making up stupid stories in front of the staff and other guests. “Did’ya all hear Desperate Darko is hiding a wife in his room? Yeah, she’s called Blowup Betty.” “Hey, Darko the Demon, how’s the dingle dangle?” The constant mocking nicknames galled Darko, and the stories drove him to distraction, but what really appalled Darko was Tim’s breakfast routine.
Every morning, at irritatingly predictable times, Tim would come into the breakfast room in a bathrobe. Sometimes after showering, sometimes after being in the pool, but usually dripping wet, with the bathrobe swinging partially open. Whether Tim had anything on under the bathrobe was something more with which to tease Darko. “Oh no, Dangerous Darko, wanna see inside my kimono?”
Tim would order poached eggs, extra bacon, and blood sausage, which was extra work for Cook, and then hover over the toaster. First, two whole wheat, then two white, and then he would pocket a handful of honey and jam packets and head to the veranda. By the time Tim had squelched his way out in sodden flip-flops, there would be a big dirty puddle on the freshly cleaned floor at the foot of the toaster table.
Since the cleaners would only get to the breakfast room when it closed at nine, that left it up to Eleftheria to clean up. Darko usually cleaned it because this was Eleftheria’s busiest time, and he deeply resented Tim for this embarrassment.
One morning, eager to mop up, Darko dashed to the puddle before Tim had quite left the Breakfast Room, and Darko had slipped on the wet trail and fallen heavily. Tim cackled with mocking laughter “Hey, it’s Damp Darko, taking a dive!” Not an apology, no attempt to help, just more mockery.
The commotion brought Eleftheria from the kitchen still grasping a wooden spatula. She shot a brief venomous look at Tim, waving him off with the spatula, and damning him with a string of Greek curses. Roughly translated, the curse suggested that Tim would be dancing with the devil before the next full moon. Cook helped Darko up off the wet floor, and after checking him out, set about mopping up and muttering darkly to herself.
Darko spent an hour after breakfast with Eleftheria and the cleaning crew, talking over ways to fix this ongoing problem. After initial thoughts that Tim could be evicted, they got down to realistic practicalities. Eleftheria suggested that she could pre-cook the poached eggs, and that would reduce the time Tim spent in the breakfast room. One of the cleaners suggested they come in earlier to the breakfast room to mop up. Another suggested a mat at the toast station. Darko liked the mat idea, but as he pointed out, cleaners weren’t allowed in while food was being served. Then Eleftheria asked about maybe getting one of those big toasters that did four slices at a time. That way, Tim would be standing there half as long.
Darko really liked the idea of a bigger toaster, and on his way back to the office, he remembered that they once had one of those carousel toasters. He thought it did four slices at a time but couldn’t remember why it was no longer in service. It wasn’t in the storeroom, and Eleftheria couldn’t remember what happened to it but thought it might be in the basement storage with the seasonal lights.
Darko brooded the rest of the day, and his body ached in a dozen places from his fall. His left elbow was a purple throbbing agony, and his hip felt hot and tight. Bitter resentment ebbed and flowed through him all day, and by the time he handed over to Arturo, the night manager, Darko was consumed with the need to find the carousel toaster or buy a new four-slice unit.
After an hour of painful bending, stretching, and crouching his way through the shelves and storage bins, Darko found the toaster in a tub labeled “Repair.” The Elem carousel toaster seemed fine but a bit dirty. He marveled at the way the four vertical cradles swung to toast first one side then the other. It was a pretty fancy retro piece of 1950s-60s kitchenware. He packed everything else back and headed for his room. Darko changed into overalls and safety shoes, picked up a ham and mustard sandwich left for him at reception by Eleftheria, and went to his workshop.
The workshop was Darko’s spiritual home—quiet, well equipped, and orderly. The wooden workbench had a detachable vice, a steel top, and a pegboard with an array of tools. Neon lamps and a movable spotlight provided good visibility. Drawers along one wall held a wide array of nuts, bolts, and screws. Additional shelves and plastic buckets on a set of rails held spare parts. Opposite the wall of drawers, stood a belt and flap sander, and a rotary wire brush. Next along the wall was a drill press and a small lathe. Gas and arc welders stood in one corner. A large compressor was housed outside, and an air connector and air tools rounded out the very well-appointed workshop.
Darko donned safety glasses and started by attaching a gun to the air hose and blowing the toaster with compressed air. He wiped it down with a mild cleaning solvent on a lint-free cloth and puffed a little graphite powder into the hinges. Darko twisted the knob on top that swung the bread gates back and forth, noting that the knob was cracked and loose. Darko looked through a few drawers before finding a chrome handle from an old gas regulator he had broken down for parts. With a few small modifications, it replaced the plastic knob and added a touch of flair.
Darko examined the old cloth-covered cord and Bakelite plug, noting the cord had frayed in places, and that the plug was cracked. He inserted a bench lead and performed a basic test for continuity that suggested the switch was working, and the elements were at least intact.
Darko plugged in the cord, and with a tiny feeling of trepidation, switched on the toaster. The elements glowed into life without any bright hotspots. Darko frowned, wondering why the elegant Elem had been put in the repair bin. “Maybe the loose knob?” He wondered to himself. Darko reached for the knob and turned the bread gates, and got a sharp jolt of electricity that made him grunt before the earth leakage safety on the workbench tripped and the element’s glow faded.
Darko unplugged the toaster and connected up a continuity tester between the live and the casing. As he slowly twisted the knob, the tester was quiet until the bread gates were almost completely home, and then it beeped continuously. Swing out, quiet, swing back in, and then “beeeeep.” Darko was now pretty clear on why this elegant appliance had ended up in the repair bin. Too fancy to be simply thrown out but badly in need of electrical work. Darko reached for the impact wrench and star bit to open up the base and bumped his injured elbow against the vice. A searing pain shot through his arm like another electric shock and Darko yelped. With pain surging through his arm, he was reminded why he was doing this repair, and a new thought dawned slowly on him.
It was nearly midnight before Darko had finished working on the Elem. He had buffed the nameplate and polished the chrome until the Elem sparkled like new. From the plastic feet to the shiny new knob on the top, it looked better than the day it left the factory in Germany in 1962. Darko coiled up an extra-long cord and packed it all in a clean cardboard box.
When Darko headed into the breakfast room the next morning, he carried the box and placed it next to the bread tray. Darko fussed about, tidying things away for Eleftheria.
Tim walked in with a swagger, “Hey, hey, hey, Dust Diver Darko?” Darko smiled grimly, and unboxed the Elem. “For you, special four-slice toaster.” Darko twisted the knob back and forth, showing how the gates worked, and then plugged it in and ushered Tim to the toaster. “Well, Darko, aren’t you the Dark horse, where have you been hiding this?” Darko smiled thinly again and turned on his heel as Tim slotted in his four slices and grasped the knob to turn his bread up to the brightly glowing coils in the center.
The police came again that day, and so did an ambulance. After all the flurry and sirens and flashing lights, the dour-looking crew from the morgue filed in. It was now just the cleaners and the morgue team, quietly making it all normal again. The wet marks, the plastic needle caps, packets that once held sterile gloves, saline bags, intubation kits, ECG pads, and of course, the crumpled earthly remains of Tim, were all collected and tidied away.
In the following days, an inspector came and looked at where Tim had jerked and danced with wide eyes and a contorted grimace, grunting, and swinging the toaster and its extra-long chord, his fist clenched tightly in an involuntary rictus around its chrome knob. The inspector briefly looked at the outline where Tim had at last fallen to the floor, curled in a tight ball, and hugging the glowing toaster to his damp chest. The inspector had asked for several details, and Darko led him through salient events from fetching the toaster from storage, cleaning it, and showing Tim how to use it for his four slices. Darko described how he had heard Tim grunting and screams from some of the others in the room. He had pulled out the plug and then called 911.
A week later, the inspector received the lab report on the toaster and breakfast room circuits, as well as the coroner’s report on Tim’s body. The lab concluded that a corrosion-related internal wiring fault had been exacerbated by the change from a plastic knob to a metal one, and by the lack of an earth leakage safety trip switch in the breakfast room. They ended by saying that there were no signs of tampering with the circuitry, specifically mentioning that the original factory seal had been intact. They recommended the toaster be scrapped and the Breakfast Room be equipped with an earth leakage breaker. The coroner’s report specified that Tim’s wet body and waterlogged footwear had caused an otherwise painful shock to become fatal and recorded this as an accidental death.
The day he received the final report, Darko dismantled the toaster in accordance with the instruction and dropped the parts into a large recycling bin at the municipal dump. That evening, Darko and Eleftheria sat quietly together on a bench watching the full moon rising over a glittering sea. Their lives returned to a normal but more intimate rhythm, and Tim’s memory and a few lasting scuff marks on the Breakfast Room floor were consigned to one of those few exceptional events for which the police came.
~~~~~~~~~~
If you enjoyed this short story, please consider signing up for my weekly email newsletter. In each, there is a link to a new free short story, and little insight into the writing life. Free ebooks will also be announced in the newsletter. https://hotmail.us16.list-manage.com/...
If you would like to read the book from which this story came, you can get it on Kobo, at https://www.kobo.com/us/en/series/the...
August 21, 2025
Nancy & William make a wish: Part 3 The Well and Future
This story is the third and final part of the series, and was published Jun 14, 2021.
~~~
The work order on the Wild Man scheduling page was one that combined two things that William hated most: confined spaces and high places. The firm had secured a contract to dredge and inspect a number of industrial ponds and their interconnecting wells. A main dam received the wastewater from the Eagle Crest mine, and to satisfy safety concerns and to recover silt, fed a number of treatment ponds. These all had to be dredged from time to time, to recover minerals and prevent them from simply becoming a marsh. William’s job was to clean out a number of the wells that lay between the dam and the ponds.
The dam got a steady gush of wastewater twice a day, in time with drilling and cleaning operations in the mine. Because it was likely that the work in the well would take longer than the cycle of filling and draining of the recently dredged dam, and as a safety measure, William was required to fit a 24″ Pipe Plug into the inflow pipe of the well. The plug would keep water out of the well and allow William to work in safety and without undue rush.
William was unfamiliar with all the issues around using pipe plugs and read through an image of a photocopy of some pages from the manual. It mentioned a table of safety precautions, but those pages didn’t seem to be included. William drove to Wild Man early the next morning to draw all his equipment. It was Saturday, so Jay was at the stores desk and wandered back into the warehouse to fetch the pipe plug. William heard a loud thud and a lot of cursing before Jay emerged struggling with a canvas bag. This was the mysterious pipe plug. William had imagined something like a flat bung, but unzipping the bag, this looked more like a round trashcan lid attached to a large buoy. It was cumbersome, and William judged that it was about as heavy as a large pocket of cement–50 pounds or more.
William heaved it into the back of the truck and opened the bag wide to get a better look. It had large steel lugs on the front that were too small to be comfortable as handles. He looked closer and saw burring on the lug edges that suggested maybe carabiners or chain got attached to them. William shrugged and fetched the rest of his suggested equipment. On the drive to the job site at the Eagle Mine, he thought about the lugs. He figured they must be to pull the plug out in case it got stuck. A thought occurred that the plug might get sucked backward when he deflated it after finishing the job. Maybe water would flow out on the other side and suck it in.
If the clerk who had captured the document image had scanned reverse side of the last page, William would have known that the lugs were meant for cables or chains to anchor the plug into a pipe and may have seen a graphic showing the front of the installed plug with a crosshatched area and the label “Danger Zone.” He would also have read that, indeed, sometimes the plug would need to be extracted with a cable attached to the lugs, just as he had imagined.
The map of where to find the well manhole cover was rough but good enough to find it in a paved area below the dam. William heaved off the cover with the tool he had drawn from stores, and he swung the heavy cover to one side. Staring down into the well with the work light, he could see that the water level was about fifteen feet down. The diagram said the floor was twenty feet from the ground level. William lowered a suction hose into the well, ran the outlet hose into the lower pond twenty feet further down, and started the pump. While the pump ran, William unloaded the rest of his equipment. He dragged the axial fan and its 12” fresh air pipe over to the manhole and then set up the generator and compressor unit next to it. William positioned the hoist tripod, so it straddled the opening, and connected its hoist motor.
William peered down into the well and could see that almost all the water had been pumped out, so he lowered in the 12” fresh air hose and started the small generator and then the axial fan to force fresh air into the well. There was no knowing what the air would be like down there and blowing fresh air in was just a good idea.
William took a moment to take a swig of water and a few calming breaths. He didn’t like heights or confined spaces, and here he had to climb down into a dark hole that looked like a tomb. He felt a slight vertigo, and thinking about being in this hole made him feel nauseous. William forced himself to think of Nancy and the house on Orchard Rd. and how her job was mostly a lot harder than his.
Using the winch, William lowered the pipe plug to the floor of the well, and then put his toolbox, work light, and spade into the mud bucket and lowered them all down into the well. William grimly put on his safety harness, and swiveled his legs into the hole, gulped hard, and slowly made his way down the slippery metal rungs.
William soon had the light set up, and the image of being in a tomb was replaced with a tiny bit of wonder at this mysterious and dank place. William used the compressed air hose to blow out the 24” inlet pipe that was 3 feet above the floor and then checked the inside of the pipe for loose materials, scaling, and cracks as described in his work order. Next, he took a wire brush with severe bristles from the toolbox and gave the first two feet of the inside of the pipe a good scrubbing to remove any loose scale or grit.
Next up was fitting the plug. He rolled it over a few times to make sure he understood how the instructions tallied with the physical appearance and then wrestled the huge plug into the pipe. By the time he got it positioned so the lid part was just sticking out of the pipe, he was breathing hard and sweating. William attached the air hose from the compressor and started inflating the plug. It groaned and whined and bulged until it filled the pipe tightly. He pumped it up to 35 psi as described by the pages from the manual. The instructions said to look through the glass inspection window, but William saw nothing but darkness. William sat on the toolbox for a few minutes to collect his breath and to review the job. With the plug in, he could get rid of the silt, and start inspecting the floor and walls.
William used the suction hose to remove what liquid mud he could and then started shoveling the firmer mud and debris into the mud bucket. After about forty minutes, the mud bucket was full, so he reattached his harness, and climbed back up to the surface. The hoist pulled the mud bucket up, and he could swing it to the side and pull the pin and lever to hinge it open and dump the mud out. William took a break, poured himself some coffee from his thermos, and munched on a ham and cheese sandwich he and Nancy had jointly prepared the night before. She took the cheese and pickles; he took the cheese and ham.
William felt almost invigorated by the coffee and followed the empty mud bucket back down. The pipe plug instructions had said to view the inspection window hourly and to check the drain valve at least once. This time when William peered into the inspection window, he could see that there was a water level building up behind the plug, and opening the bottom valve briefly resulted in a spray of somewhat slimy water from the dam. “Guess it works,” William muttered to himself and got back to shoveling and scraping muck into the bucket.
It took another three trips to the surface, but William had finally got the floor clear. Fairly exhausted, he took a lunch break, finished off his sandwiches and most of the coffee, and discovered with delight that Nancy had packed in a chewy candy bar and a little note: “Thinking of you in your underground cave, enjoy the candy and think of me cleaning bedpans!” She had left a bright red lipstick print on the note. With a big grin and a sigh, William donned his harness, and climbed back down into the well. With the floor clear, William began inspecting the walls, looking for loose bricks, cracks in the concrete sleeve, or signs of leaking or roots. He picked at cement here and there to make sure it was firm, and as instructed, took photos of the walls with his phone.
With daylight almost gone, the opening above that had been a bright blue circle above him was a darkening evening sky. “Nearly done” he thought and got down on hands and knees to inspect the well floor. As he got close to the inlet pipe and was looking at the floor below, he thought he heard a humming sound over the noise of the air hose. He reached up to touch the pipe and could definitely feel a vibration. William stood up, puzzled, and went around to the front of the pipe. He bent over and peered at the inspection window. It was dark again, so he was unsure what to make of that.
William brought the work light closer and peered at the plug. It seemed to be sweating around the edges, and the humming sound was quite distinct. He started to stand up, and to wonder if this was a problem. He wondered now if the sound he had heard at the Wild Man this morning was Jay dropping the plug. “Was that a problem?” he wondered. He looked at the pressure gauge and noted in alarm that it was far below the 35 psi. “Leaking!” he muttered, with a growing sense of alarm.
William barely registered the plug leaving the pipe almost explosively and hitting him full in the chest as it shot out of the pipe, no longer able to hold back the tons of water pressure behind it. He briefly felt a cracking sensation in his chest, but then the force of the impact drove him backward into the wall behind him. His head hit the wall with a sharp crack, and William blacked out. Cold muddy water gushed from the 24″ pipe in a solid geyser, spinning William and swirling him around the walls. William’s heart beat erratically, trying to cope with the trauma. It fluttered, paused, and stopped.
Almost everything was packed, and Nancy had stacked full cardboard boxes in the middle of the living area. In one corner was the stuff she needed to take in her onboard luggage—her copy of the job offer as an RN and her graduation records, her boarding pass, and her identity documents. She had accepted a good position at a hospital in another city, another state. A new life. She didn’t know how, or even if, she had coped these past 3 months. Life had been a grey blur since the accident, but she had somehow finished her degree, completed her RN exams, and found a new job far away from memories and pain.
Clearing out a final drawer, Nancy came across a rumpled page, three-quarters full of handwritten notes. Nancy recognized it instantly, sat down heavily on the empty carpeted floor of the bedroom, and cried with great heaving sobs. It had been a lazy summer afternoon, and one of those rare occurrences when neither of them were hurtling off to a job or heading, exhausted, to bed. The sun was angling through the open balcony doors, and busy sounds of life filtered in. Somewhere, a dog barked happily in time with peals of children’s laughter. Nancy made one of those terrible relationship mistakes, and looking up from a popular “women’s magazine,” asked him the kind of question better known for wrecking relationships than fostering mutual insight. She had just finished an article that was highly critical of how men were critical of women’s bodies. It suggested a test. The test, it stated confidently, would identify if your current partner was a keeper or best ditched.
Nancy looked across at William with no hint of the risk he was being offered and asked in the sweetest and most innocent sounding tone, “If you could change three things about my body, what would you choose?” The answer, if one is a Sir Lancelot, is of course something along the lines of “oh my precious darling, I would not alter but one hair on your head, oh light of my life, keeper of my soul.”
Instead, William looked up beaming, and answered, “Oh, I would change your boobs, your brain, and your lady-bits.” “Perhaps,” Nancy said in light tones that belied the growing rage, despair, and sense of betrayal that roiled within her, “you would write it all down while I go to the bathroom.”
Nancy had stood in front of the bathroom mirror, hot tears streaming down her face. She tried to recover her composure but sure to her core that this was the last day she would ever spend under the same roof with him. Nancy splashed cold water on her face and bought some extra time brushing her hair. She closed her eyes and counted breaths like they had taught in her course on resiliency. Breathe in, one … two … three … four … out … one … two … three… four. When she felt she had her emotions under control and a plan to pack and leave, Nancy took one last breath and walked back to the living area.
William had grinned like he had just solved a tricky problem, found a forgotten $20 bill, or baked a particularly yummy cake. He handed her a page with three headings and copious notes under each, smiling broadly and not in the least picking up on her icy body language.
Nancy had taken the page with thumb and forefinger but could not help herself from grasping the righthand edge in a clenched fist., expecting to see words to the effect that he wanted her to have breasts of cartoonish proportions. She started reading the text under the first heading. In caps, and underlined, was the word “BOOBS.”
The text below started “I would give your boobs the ability to ward of cancer, and those lumps some women get.” Nancy skipped to the next underlined heading—” BRAINS”—and scanned the text. It was a slightly convoluted paragraph about feeling for her when she had struggled with her statistics course, so he would fit her brain with a cyborg implant that had a floating-point math co-processor and preloaded R statistics programs so she could just look at a page of numbers and instantly do all those complicated tests and regressions. Nancy skipped on to the last heading— “LADY BITS”—which in turn talked about immunity from cervical cancer, ovarian cancer, and the ability to pick ovulation and menstruation times and have no cramps.
Nancy had shed tears of pure relief on the paper before she was done reading and had launched herself across the couch and into his surprised but very grateful arms. She had kissed him with unexpected ferocity and a sense of relief and joy that overwhelmed her.
Nancy now smoothed out the sheet of paper as best she could, wiping away the fresh tears on the page, and smudging a few more words. Like she had before, in what seemed like distant make-believe world, Nancy counted in her breaths, counted them out, counted them in.
Nancy was almost calm when she was jarred by the doorbell.
The rumpled looking man at the door somehow matched the crumpled sheet of paper. His brown suit looked like it was more than a little past its expiry date, and the man inside it had the creased and furrowed look of someone who bore the world’s woes in his baggy pockets and bulging leather case. Before launching into her pre-recorded “no thank you, I do not wish to buy …” speech, Herbert H. Hoover (no relation) launched his even more rehearsed “Hoover, H, Metropolitan Life, with pay out papers for Mrs. Jones, Nancy, of this address”.
Over the bare kitchen island, Herbert Hoover detailed that Jones, W, deceased, had held a basic death and dismemberment policy with Metropolitan, and that he, Herbert Hoover was therefore empowered to issue Jones, Nancy, (Beneficiary) with a check to the sum of thirty-four thousand, four hundred and thirteen dollars, and eighty-seven cents. After some brief steps to positively identify Nancy, he offered her a pen. Nancy took the pen and signed distractedly next to the red sticky note arrow. Her eyes drifted to the fridge door, where a large note was still posted, and which she had as yet avoided taking down. The amount they had needed for the deposit and earnest money for the little house on Orchard Rd. The amount they were striving for ever since that day. The number in thick black Sharpie in William’s handwriting was $34,413.87, and she had inherited exactly what they had wished for.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you enjoyed this story, you might enjoy the collection, which you can get at Kobo
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-...
~~~
The work order on the Wild Man scheduling page was one that combined two things that William hated most: confined spaces and high places. The firm had secured a contract to dredge and inspect a number of industrial ponds and their interconnecting wells. A main dam received the wastewater from the Eagle Crest mine, and to satisfy safety concerns and to recover silt, fed a number of treatment ponds. These all had to be dredged from time to time, to recover minerals and prevent them from simply becoming a marsh. William’s job was to clean out a number of the wells that lay between the dam and the ponds.
The dam got a steady gush of wastewater twice a day, in time with drilling and cleaning operations in the mine. Because it was likely that the work in the well would take longer than the cycle of filling and draining of the recently dredged dam, and as a safety measure, William was required to fit a 24″ Pipe Plug into the inflow pipe of the well. The plug would keep water out of the well and allow William to work in safety and without undue rush.
William was unfamiliar with all the issues around using pipe plugs and read through an image of a photocopy of some pages from the manual. It mentioned a table of safety precautions, but those pages didn’t seem to be included. William drove to Wild Man early the next morning to draw all his equipment. It was Saturday, so Jay was at the stores desk and wandered back into the warehouse to fetch the pipe plug. William heard a loud thud and a lot of cursing before Jay emerged struggling with a canvas bag. This was the mysterious pipe plug. William had imagined something like a flat bung, but unzipping the bag, this looked more like a round trashcan lid attached to a large buoy. It was cumbersome, and William judged that it was about as heavy as a large pocket of cement–50 pounds or more.
William heaved it into the back of the truck and opened the bag wide to get a better look. It had large steel lugs on the front that were too small to be comfortable as handles. He looked closer and saw burring on the lug edges that suggested maybe carabiners or chain got attached to them. William shrugged and fetched the rest of his suggested equipment. On the drive to the job site at the Eagle Mine, he thought about the lugs. He figured they must be to pull the plug out in case it got stuck. A thought occurred that the plug might get sucked backward when he deflated it after finishing the job. Maybe water would flow out on the other side and suck it in.
If the clerk who had captured the document image had scanned reverse side of the last page, William would have known that the lugs were meant for cables or chains to anchor the plug into a pipe and may have seen a graphic showing the front of the installed plug with a crosshatched area and the label “Danger Zone.” He would also have read that, indeed, sometimes the plug would need to be extracted with a cable attached to the lugs, just as he had imagined.
The map of where to find the well manhole cover was rough but good enough to find it in a paved area below the dam. William heaved off the cover with the tool he had drawn from stores, and he swung the heavy cover to one side. Staring down into the well with the work light, he could see that the water level was about fifteen feet down. The diagram said the floor was twenty feet from the ground level. William lowered a suction hose into the well, ran the outlet hose into the lower pond twenty feet further down, and started the pump. While the pump ran, William unloaded the rest of his equipment. He dragged the axial fan and its 12” fresh air pipe over to the manhole and then set up the generator and compressor unit next to it. William positioned the hoist tripod, so it straddled the opening, and connected its hoist motor.
William peered down into the well and could see that almost all the water had been pumped out, so he lowered in the 12” fresh air hose and started the small generator and then the axial fan to force fresh air into the well. There was no knowing what the air would be like down there and blowing fresh air in was just a good idea.
William took a moment to take a swig of water and a few calming breaths. He didn’t like heights or confined spaces, and here he had to climb down into a dark hole that looked like a tomb. He felt a slight vertigo, and thinking about being in this hole made him feel nauseous. William forced himself to think of Nancy and the house on Orchard Rd. and how her job was mostly a lot harder than his.
Using the winch, William lowered the pipe plug to the floor of the well, and then put his toolbox, work light, and spade into the mud bucket and lowered them all down into the well. William grimly put on his safety harness, and swiveled his legs into the hole, gulped hard, and slowly made his way down the slippery metal rungs.
William soon had the light set up, and the image of being in a tomb was replaced with a tiny bit of wonder at this mysterious and dank place. William used the compressed air hose to blow out the 24” inlet pipe that was 3 feet above the floor and then checked the inside of the pipe for loose materials, scaling, and cracks as described in his work order. Next, he took a wire brush with severe bristles from the toolbox and gave the first two feet of the inside of the pipe a good scrubbing to remove any loose scale or grit.
Next up was fitting the plug. He rolled it over a few times to make sure he understood how the instructions tallied with the physical appearance and then wrestled the huge plug into the pipe. By the time he got it positioned so the lid part was just sticking out of the pipe, he was breathing hard and sweating. William attached the air hose from the compressor and started inflating the plug. It groaned and whined and bulged until it filled the pipe tightly. He pumped it up to 35 psi as described by the pages from the manual. The instructions said to look through the glass inspection window, but William saw nothing but darkness. William sat on the toolbox for a few minutes to collect his breath and to review the job. With the plug in, he could get rid of the silt, and start inspecting the floor and walls.
William used the suction hose to remove what liquid mud he could and then started shoveling the firmer mud and debris into the mud bucket. After about forty minutes, the mud bucket was full, so he reattached his harness, and climbed back up to the surface. The hoist pulled the mud bucket up, and he could swing it to the side and pull the pin and lever to hinge it open and dump the mud out. William took a break, poured himself some coffee from his thermos, and munched on a ham and cheese sandwich he and Nancy had jointly prepared the night before. She took the cheese and pickles; he took the cheese and ham.
William felt almost invigorated by the coffee and followed the empty mud bucket back down. The pipe plug instructions had said to view the inspection window hourly and to check the drain valve at least once. This time when William peered into the inspection window, he could see that there was a water level building up behind the plug, and opening the bottom valve briefly resulted in a spray of somewhat slimy water from the dam. “Guess it works,” William muttered to himself and got back to shoveling and scraping muck into the bucket.
It took another three trips to the surface, but William had finally got the floor clear. Fairly exhausted, he took a lunch break, finished off his sandwiches and most of the coffee, and discovered with delight that Nancy had packed in a chewy candy bar and a little note: “Thinking of you in your underground cave, enjoy the candy and think of me cleaning bedpans!” She had left a bright red lipstick print on the note. With a big grin and a sigh, William donned his harness, and climbed back down into the well. With the floor clear, William began inspecting the walls, looking for loose bricks, cracks in the concrete sleeve, or signs of leaking or roots. He picked at cement here and there to make sure it was firm, and as instructed, took photos of the walls with his phone.
With daylight almost gone, the opening above that had been a bright blue circle above him was a darkening evening sky. “Nearly done” he thought and got down on hands and knees to inspect the well floor. As he got close to the inlet pipe and was looking at the floor below, he thought he heard a humming sound over the noise of the air hose. He reached up to touch the pipe and could definitely feel a vibration. William stood up, puzzled, and went around to the front of the pipe. He bent over and peered at the inspection window. It was dark again, so he was unsure what to make of that.
William brought the work light closer and peered at the plug. It seemed to be sweating around the edges, and the humming sound was quite distinct. He started to stand up, and to wonder if this was a problem. He wondered now if the sound he had heard at the Wild Man this morning was Jay dropping the plug. “Was that a problem?” he wondered. He looked at the pressure gauge and noted in alarm that it was far below the 35 psi. “Leaking!” he muttered, with a growing sense of alarm.
William barely registered the plug leaving the pipe almost explosively and hitting him full in the chest as it shot out of the pipe, no longer able to hold back the tons of water pressure behind it. He briefly felt a cracking sensation in his chest, but then the force of the impact drove him backward into the wall behind him. His head hit the wall with a sharp crack, and William blacked out. Cold muddy water gushed from the 24″ pipe in a solid geyser, spinning William and swirling him around the walls. William’s heart beat erratically, trying to cope with the trauma. It fluttered, paused, and stopped.
Almost everything was packed, and Nancy had stacked full cardboard boxes in the middle of the living area. In one corner was the stuff she needed to take in her onboard luggage—her copy of the job offer as an RN and her graduation records, her boarding pass, and her identity documents. She had accepted a good position at a hospital in another city, another state. A new life. She didn’t know how, or even if, she had coped these past 3 months. Life had been a grey blur since the accident, but she had somehow finished her degree, completed her RN exams, and found a new job far away from memories and pain.
Clearing out a final drawer, Nancy came across a rumpled page, three-quarters full of handwritten notes. Nancy recognized it instantly, sat down heavily on the empty carpeted floor of the bedroom, and cried with great heaving sobs. It had been a lazy summer afternoon, and one of those rare occurrences when neither of them were hurtling off to a job or heading, exhausted, to bed. The sun was angling through the open balcony doors, and busy sounds of life filtered in. Somewhere, a dog barked happily in time with peals of children’s laughter. Nancy made one of those terrible relationship mistakes, and looking up from a popular “women’s magazine,” asked him the kind of question better known for wrecking relationships than fostering mutual insight. She had just finished an article that was highly critical of how men were critical of women’s bodies. It suggested a test. The test, it stated confidently, would identify if your current partner was a keeper or best ditched.
Nancy looked across at William with no hint of the risk he was being offered and asked in the sweetest and most innocent sounding tone, “If you could change three things about my body, what would you choose?” The answer, if one is a Sir Lancelot, is of course something along the lines of “oh my precious darling, I would not alter but one hair on your head, oh light of my life, keeper of my soul.”
Instead, William looked up beaming, and answered, “Oh, I would change your boobs, your brain, and your lady-bits.” “Perhaps,” Nancy said in light tones that belied the growing rage, despair, and sense of betrayal that roiled within her, “you would write it all down while I go to the bathroom.”
Nancy had stood in front of the bathroom mirror, hot tears streaming down her face. She tried to recover her composure but sure to her core that this was the last day she would ever spend under the same roof with him. Nancy splashed cold water on her face and bought some extra time brushing her hair. She closed her eyes and counted breaths like they had taught in her course on resiliency. Breathe in, one … two … three … four … out … one … two … three… four. When she felt she had her emotions under control and a plan to pack and leave, Nancy took one last breath and walked back to the living area.
William had grinned like he had just solved a tricky problem, found a forgotten $20 bill, or baked a particularly yummy cake. He handed her a page with three headings and copious notes under each, smiling broadly and not in the least picking up on her icy body language.
Nancy had taken the page with thumb and forefinger but could not help herself from grasping the righthand edge in a clenched fist., expecting to see words to the effect that he wanted her to have breasts of cartoonish proportions. She started reading the text under the first heading. In caps, and underlined, was the word “BOOBS.”
The text below started “I would give your boobs the ability to ward of cancer, and those lumps some women get.” Nancy skipped to the next underlined heading—” BRAINS”—and scanned the text. It was a slightly convoluted paragraph about feeling for her when she had struggled with her statistics course, so he would fit her brain with a cyborg implant that had a floating-point math co-processor and preloaded R statistics programs so she could just look at a page of numbers and instantly do all those complicated tests and regressions. Nancy skipped on to the last heading— “LADY BITS”—which in turn talked about immunity from cervical cancer, ovarian cancer, and the ability to pick ovulation and menstruation times and have no cramps.
Nancy had shed tears of pure relief on the paper before she was done reading and had launched herself across the couch and into his surprised but very grateful arms. She had kissed him with unexpected ferocity and a sense of relief and joy that overwhelmed her.
Nancy now smoothed out the sheet of paper as best she could, wiping away the fresh tears on the page, and smudging a few more words. Like she had before, in what seemed like distant make-believe world, Nancy counted in her breaths, counted them out, counted them in.
Nancy was almost calm when she was jarred by the doorbell.
The rumpled looking man at the door somehow matched the crumpled sheet of paper. His brown suit looked like it was more than a little past its expiry date, and the man inside it had the creased and furrowed look of someone who bore the world’s woes in his baggy pockets and bulging leather case. Before launching into her pre-recorded “no thank you, I do not wish to buy …” speech, Herbert H. Hoover (no relation) launched his even more rehearsed “Hoover, H, Metropolitan Life, with pay out papers for Mrs. Jones, Nancy, of this address”.
Over the bare kitchen island, Herbert Hoover detailed that Jones, W, deceased, had held a basic death and dismemberment policy with Metropolitan, and that he, Herbert Hoover was therefore empowered to issue Jones, Nancy, (Beneficiary) with a check to the sum of thirty-four thousand, four hundred and thirteen dollars, and eighty-seven cents. After some brief steps to positively identify Nancy, he offered her a pen. Nancy took the pen and signed distractedly next to the red sticky note arrow. Her eyes drifted to the fridge door, where a large note was still posted, and which she had as yet avoided taking down. The amount they had needed for the deposit and earnest money for the little house on Orchard Rd. The amount they were striving for ever since that day. The number in thick black Sharpie in William’s handwriting was $34,413.87, and she had inherited exactly what they had wished for.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you enjoyed this story, you might enjoy the collection, which you can get at Kobo
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-...
August 12, 2025
Nancy & William Make A Wish: Part 2: Jobs and Homes
(Published Jun 11, 2021)
Two days—and a brief interview and follow-up calls to her supervisor—later, Nancy was working a second shift at the care facility. It was a block from the hospital and paid weekly. Nancy was bringing in an additional $12/hr., 20hrs/week, and fitting studies in at the care home while William did chores. With what little time they had for a social life, they either stayed home or attended free events. Their favorite was art exhibitions that offered complimentary snacks and wine. Whenever they had spare gas money, they drove out of town with the truck and enjoyed the free national park and wilderness. The art exhibitions gave them a sense of being entertained, and wearing mismatched clothing from secondhand stores might be seen by other patrons as Bohemian rather than skint. The drives out into the parks gave them a sense of peace.
Feeding in the numbers including Nancy’s additional job increased the height of the teeth in the graph and reduced the slope by a lot, but it was still a slow downward slope. Nancy’s extra work just pushed out the point at which they would be unable to pay rent and put food on the table. By next year this time, they would be on the street. It was clear, William also needed a second job, but they had some time to figure out their options.
William compared rental of other flats further out of town and then looked at rentals versus mortgage payments. Surprisingly, he found that if they could manage a 20% down payment, a mortgage on a comparable house was cheaper per month than the apartment. “That’s nice, honey,” Nancy said looking over his shoulder, “but our rental contract locks us in for a year.” “Actually, 13 months,” William added. “It’s a bit of trickery in the contract dates.”
When they had spare time, they looked wistfully at houses. Not seriously, just to get a feel, they told themselves. During one of these mental excursions, they saw an ad for a small, two-bedroom cottage on the edge of a green belt on the other side of town. The details said that the owner was in no hurry to sell and was using it as a guest cottage. The next Sunday, when Nancy was off, they drove over to the area and took a tour. It was at the end of a dead-end road and hidden from the street by a small and slightly disheveled hedge.
The agent said it needed a sewer connection but had electrics and new roof tiles. The agent led them through the cottage and showed them the back of the property. It was a surprisingly large plot, and a small stream cut through an overgrown orchard. Nancy looked around at the small living room and fell in love with the divided light windows with diagonal muntin. The walls were a muted white and crisscrossed in dark timbers in a faux-Tudor style. Nancy whispered to William that she half expected to see old horse brasses hanging from the timbers and pictures of a Cadbury canal boat. The feeling of fake Olde-English countryside was pleasing, even if a bit contrived.
The cottage had been servants’ lodgings, and then an in-law suite on a larger property, but the main house had become dilapidated after the original owners retired and then had burned down after a lightning strike. The property had been subdivided, with the bulk turned into a new housing estate. The agent did some numbers for them and said the owner would probably shift for $170,000. William pulled out a pad, and in a few minutes, had the 20% down payment calculated as $34,413.87.
They went home feeling thrilled and frightened in equal measures. Nancy joked about one of their aunts leaving them an inheritance to pay for the down payment. “I wish,” exclaimed William. “Wouldn’t it be a dream if we just inherited the money?” Nancy grinned and sighed, “Oh well, I guess with wealthy family, it’s just us chickens to save it up.” When they got home, Nancy put a photo of the cottage on the fridge, and William added a sheet under it with “$34,413.87” in big black letters.
They now had a clear savings goal.
Furniture, or the lack thereof, was starting to be a pest, and without comfortable cash reserves to pay with, they scoured secondhand shops for furniture and kitchenware. Given the already eclectic style mix, they had the luxury of not caring if things didn’t quite match. They had some nice tall-backed chairs but no dinner table. The tables at the secondhand stores were all just the wrong height. While tinkering on the truck in the basement, William found a pile of old wooden pallets. The building super said these were junk and was happy for William to take them. William had the basic tools, including a handheld power saw with an 8” blade, but needed a planer and sander. Nancy loved the idea of their own custom-made dinner table and helped him look for tool-rental shops nearby. They found a local tool rental that also had the cheapest prices, although it had a weird name—Wild Man Tool Rental & Services.
The next Friday night, while Nancy was working, William went to Wild Man Tool Rental & Services and asked about a planer. The staff were helpful but seemed ever-so-slightly shifty. William shrugged it off, and asking for an orbital sander, was shown to a rack with several machines and a row of shelves with sandpaper sheets of varying grit. While picking out the sandpaper sheets, William saw a notice board. There was a paper for odd jobs and a small stack of application forms. He was a fair handyman, he thought, and took one home. William had cut the pallet timbers to size, planed them to an even thickness, put the tabletop together, and sanded it to a fine finish. He had then taken the table up in several trips and assembled it in place. By the time Nancy came home on Saturday afternoon, there was a freshly sanded new table. Nancy got out her paintbrushes and paints and set to work adding a grape-vine motif on the legs and edges. By the time they went to bed, the table had a hand-drawn pattern around the top, and a fresh coat of lacquer to seal in her artwork.
William took the completed application form in the next evening, and they interviewed him on the spot. He was ushered behind the counter and into a back area that opened up into a cavernous warehouse. Tall racks stretched up to a high vaulted roof, and there was equipment everywhere. They sat in a small, prefabricated room in one corner next to a large set of sliding hangar doors. The interview consisted of a few technical questions about his driving abilities, tools he had used before, and examples of previous DIY projects. The two people interviewing him exchanged frequent glances and there seemed to be some kind of subtext that William couldn’t fathom. Did he have any prior involvement with law enforcement? Was he ever a boy scout? Has he been in the military or taken any pledges?
After about 40 minutes, one of them nodded to the other and fetched the owner. Clyde was a very sleek person in a three-piece tailored suit and expensive shoes, and he smelled of cologne. A thin mustache seemed to quiver when he spoke, and he had soft, plump hands that signaled that he had never held a tool in his life. The contradiction was startling, but William soon realized that Clyde was not into tools and maintenance but was very much into profit. Clyde described how the company bought tools and equipment on estate sales and auctions mainly, but sometimes from pawn shops. The way he paused on the issue of pawnshops and then rushed on to describe how they had branched out into bidding on service and maintenance contracts, made William wonder. Clyde explained how the company had very few employees and instead sub-contracted almost all the actual service work to contractors and DIY enthusiasts. William asked vaguely how the tools were checked or maintained, and Clyde said something equally vague about DIY enthusiasts doing the refurbishment of all tools.
Something that William did not know, and which Clyde feared but also didn’t know, was that the company was already under investigation for buying stolen equipment and changing serial numbers. Clyde was not aware that within a year, and largely due to William, he would be indicted on 22 counts of fraud, receiving stolen property, and conspiracy to commit fraud.
The next morning, William read an email congratulating him on his appointment as a “Registered Handyman Specialist” for Wild Man Tool Rental & Services and was given a login to the online scheduling system. Despite some slight misgivings, William logged in and was surprised and excited to see he already had two jobs in his queue. The first job, or “Work Order,” was to clear a barn that was being decommissioned. In the inventory of tools he had to pick up was a Bobcat 220 skid steer loader, spare propane tank, and a shovel. The instructions stated that any safety equipment such as helmet, gloves, boots, or masks were available for hire or purchase from the store prior to leaving. The instructions gave directions and the address, who he was to report to, that it paid $500, and that it was expected to take him 15 hours of labor. Nancy peered over his shoulder that night after shift and was thrilled that he had picked up a gig so quickly. “I think this actually means I get to shovel crap,” William whispered theatrically. It didn’t escape their notice that he could earn far more doing so than she could while caring for the aged.
When William arrived on site, he could see that work was already well underway, and there were people cutting apart other buildings. The foreman in a bright, high-visibility jacket gave him a brief overview that the dairy farm was being decommissioned and the site would be used for housing and a block of apartments. William’s job, he confirmed, was to scrape and load several tons of manure from a large barn into a dump truck. The dump truck was someone else’s job, but William was to use the pressure hose after scraping was done, and pump that into a weir a few hundred feet downhill. William found the Bobcat fun to drive, and although he got showered in manure a few times when he raised and tilted the Bobcat’s bucket into the truck, it was more like a game than a job.
The pressure washing was an entirely different thing, and he soon learned that the back-spatter and spray would drench him. By the time he was done for the day, he was soaked from head to toe in a rancid mix of liquified manure and old dirt. He stripped off his overalls before climbing into the truck and tried hard to scrub it all off in the shower, but when Nancy got in after her shift, the whole flat reeked of barnyard. “Wow, did you take a swim in the river?” she asked him with a smile. The next day, William finished off his pressure washing, got the job signed off by the foreman, and by 7:00 PM was back at home and scrubbing himself down again.
That weekend, Nancy and William crowded around the laptop again and looked at the budget. The numbers now looked healthy, and the trend line was on a slow but firm positive slope. Looking further into the future, they could factor in Nancy’s upcoming qualifications. In less than 6 months’ time, Nancy would qualify as a registered nurse at just over double the pay and have far more job options. With her RN status, Nancy could take the odd extra shift at the hospital at a far higher rate than working at the eldercare facility. William had another year still to go on his 2-year work experience requirement to become a Certified Internal Auditor (CIA), and then his salary would also almost double, to a little less than $60,000/year.
The future was promising, and they both felt a sense of approaching relief and the comfort of a well-defined plan. In the meantime, however, food and entertainment were humble, and life settled into a comforting but exhausting routine. Because of their second jobs and studies, they often missed each other entirely, with one coming home just after the other had left or getting home after the other was already asleep. The two had brief moments of shared wakefulness to chat, cuddle, or do things together.
Their life had turned inward, shrunk, and hardened, and their social life was entirely a table for two. Drinks with friends, poolside parties, and BBQs were replaced with events shaped tightly around them as a couple and mostly related to work, study, and sleep. Waking hours were dotted with jealously guarded moments of intimacy. Every day they would look at the picture on the fridge, and every week William added to a drawing of a progress thermometer he had made on a sheet of white cardboard and stuck to the fridge. The red line indicating their savings was creeping slowly but surely toward their target.
~~~~~~~~~
Two days—and a brief interview and follow-up calls to her supervisor—later, Nancy was working a second shift at the care facility. It was a block from the hospital and paid weekly. Nancy was bringing in an additional $12/hr., 20hrs/week, and fitting studies in at the care home while William did chores. With what little time they had for a social life, they either stayed home or attended free events. Their favorite was art exhibitions that offered complimentary snacks and wine. Whenever they had spare gas money, they drove out of town with the truck and enjoyed the free national park and wilderness. The art exhibitions gave them a sense of being entertained, and wearing mismatched clothing from secondhand stores might be seen by other patrons as Bohemian rather than skint. The drives out into the parks gave them a sense of peace.
Feeding in the numbers including Nancy’s additional job increased the height of the teeth in the graph and reduced the slope by a lot, but it was still a slow downward slope. Nancy’s extra work just pushed out the point at which they would be unable to pay rent and put food on the table. By next year this time, they would be on the street. It was clear, William also needed a second job, but they had some time to figure out their options.
William compared rental of other flats further out of town and then looked at rentals versus mortgage payments. Surprisingly, he found that if they could manage a 20% down payment, a mortgage on a comparable house was cheaper per month than the apartment. “That’s nice, honey,” Nancy said looking over his shoulder, “but our rental contract locks us in for a year.” “Actually, 13 months,” William added. “It’s a bit of trickery in the contract dates.”
When they had spare time, they looked wistfully at houses. Not seriously, just to get a feel, they told themselves. During one of these mental excursions, they saw an ad for a small, two-bedroom cottage on the edge of a green belt on the other side of town. The details said that the owner was in no hurry to sell and was using it as a guest cottage. The next Sunday, when Nancy was off, they drove over to the area and took a tour. It was at the end of a dead-end road and hidden from the street by a small and slightly disheveled hedge.
The agent said it needed a sewer connection but had electrics and new roof tiles. The agent led them through the cottage and showed them the back of the property. It was a surprisingly large plot, and a small stream cut through an overgrown orchard. Nancy looked around at the small living room and fell in love with the divided light windows with diagonal muntin. The walls were a muted white and crisscrossed in dark timbers in a faux-Tudor style. Nancy whispered to William that she half expected to see old horse brasses hanging from the timbers and pictures of a Cadbury canal boat. The feeling of fake Olde-English countryside was pleasing, even if a bit contrived.
The cottage had been servants’ lodgings, and then an in-law suite on a larger property, but the main house had become dilapidated after the original owners retired and then had burned down after a lightning strike. The property had been subdivided, with the bulk turned into a new housing estate. The agent did some numbers for them and said the owner would probably shift for $170,000. William pulled out a pad, and in a few minutes, had the 20% down payment calculated as $34,413.87.
They went home feeling thrilled and frightened in equal measures. Nancy joked about one of their aunts leaving them an inheritance to pay for the down payment. “I wish,” exclaimed William. “Wouldn’t it be a dream if we just inherited the money?” Nancy grinned and sighed, “Oh well, I guess with wealthy family, it’s just us chickens to save it up.” When they got home, Nancy put a photo of the cottage on the fridge, and William added a sheet under it with “$34,413.87” in big black letters.
They now had a clear savings goal.
Furniture, or the lack thereof, was starting to be a pest, and without comfortable cash reserves to pay with, they scoured secondhand shops for furniture and kitchenware. Given the already eclectic style mix, they had the luxury of not caring if things didn’t quite match. They had some nice tall-backed chairs but no dinner table. The tables at the secondhand stores were all just the wrong height. While tinkering on the truck in the basement, William found a pile of old wooden pallets. The building super said these were junk and was happy for William to take them. William had the basic tools, including a handheld power saw with an 8” blade, but needed a planer and sander. Nancy loved the idea of their own custom-made dinner table and helped him look for tool-rental shops nearby. They found a local tool rental that also had the cheapest prices, although it had a weird name—Wild Man Tool Rental & Services.
The next Friday night, while Nancy was working, William went to Wild Man Tool Rental & Services and asked about a planer. The staff were helpful but seemed ever-so-slightly shifty. William shrugged it off, and asking for an orbital sander, was shown to a rack with several machines and a row of shelves with sandpaper sheets of varying grit. While picking out the sandpaper sheets, William saw a notice board. There was a paper for odd jobs and a small stack of application forms. He was a fair handyman, he thought, and took one home. William had cut the pallet timbers to size, planed them to an even thickness, put the tabletop together, and sanded it to a fine finish. He had then taken the table up in several trips and assembled it in place. By the time Nancy came home on Saturday afternoon, there was a freshly sanded new table. Nancy got out her paintbrushes and paints and set to work adding a grape-vine motif on the legs and edges. By the time they went to bed, the table had a hand-drawn pattern around the top, and a fresh coat of lacquer to seal in her artwork.
William took the completed application form in the next evening, and they interviewed him on the spot. He was ushered behind the counter and into a back area that opened up into a cavernous warehouse. Tall racks stretched up to a high vaulted roof, and there was equipment everywhere. They sat in a small, prefabricated room in one corner next to a large set of sliding hangar doors. The interview consisted of a few technical questions about his driving abilities, tools he had used before, and examples of previous DIY projects. The two people interviewing him exchanged frequent glances and there seemed to be some kind of subtext that William couldn’t fathom. Did he have any prior involvement with law enforcement? Was he ever a boy scout? Has he been in the military or taken any pledges?
After about 40 minutes, one of them nodded to the other and fetched the owner. Clyde was a very sleek person in a three-piece tailored suit and expensive shoes, and he smelled of cologne. A thin mustache seemed to quiver when he spoke, and he had soft, plump hands that signaled that he had never held a tool in his life. The contradiction was startling, but William soon realized that Clyde was not into tools and maintenance but was very much into profit. Clyde described how the company bought tools and equipment on estate sales and auctions mainly, but sometimes from pawn shops. The way he paused on the issue of pawnshops and then rushed on to describe how they had branched out into bidding on service and maintenance contracts, made William wonder. Clyde explained how the company had very few employees and instead sub-contracted almost all the actual service work to contractors and DIY enthusiasts. William asked vaguely how the tools were checked or maintained, and Clyde said something equally vague about DIY enthusiasts doing the refurbishment of all tools.
Something that William did not know, and which Clyde feared but also didn’t know, was that the company was already under investigation for buying stolen equipment and changing serial numbers. Clyde was not aware that within a year, and largely due to William, he would be indicted on 22 counts of fraud, receiving stolen property, and conspiracy to commit fraud.
The next morning, William read an email congratulating him on his appointment as a “Registered Handyman Specialist” for Wild Man Tool Rental & Services and was given a login to the online scheduling system. Despite some slight misgivings, William logged in and was surprised and excited to see he already had two jobs in his queue. The first job, or “Work Order,” was to clear a barn that was being decommissioned. In the inventory of tools he had to pick up was a Bobcat 220 skid steer loader, spare propane tank, and a shovel. The instructions stated that any safety equipment such as helmet, gloves, boots, or masks were available for hire or purchase from the store prior to leaving. The instructions gave directions and the address, who he was to report to, that it paid $500, and that it was expected to take him 15 hours of labor. Nancy peered over his shoulder that night after shift and was thrilled that he had picked up a gig so quickly. “I think this actually means I get to shovel crap,” William whispered theatrically. It didn’t escape their notice that he could earn far more doing so than she could while caring for the aged.
When William arrived on site, he could see that work was already well underway, and there were people cutting apart other buildings. The foreman in a bright, high-visibility jacket gave him a brief overview that the dairy farm was being decommissioned and the site would be used for housing and a block of apartments. William’s job, he confirmed, was to scrape and load several tons of manure from a large barn into a dump truck. The dump truck was someone else’s job, but William was to use the pressure hose after scraping was done, and pump that into a weir a few hundred feet downhill. William found the Bobcat fun to drive, and although he got showered in manure a few times when he raised and tilted the Bobcat’s bucket into the truck, it was more like a game than a job.
The pressure washing was an entirely different thing, and he soon learned that the back-spatter and spray would drench him. By the time he was done for the day, he was soaked from head to toe in a rancid mix of liquified manure and old dirt. He stripped off his overalls before climbing into the truck and tried hard to scrub it all off in the shower, but when Nancy got in after her shift, the whole flat reeked of barnyard. “Wow, did you take a swim in the river?” she asked him with a smile. The next day, William finished off his pressure washing, got the job signed off by the foreman, and by 7:00 PM was back at home and scrubbing himself down again.
That weekend, Nancy and William crowded around the laptop again and looked at the budget. The numbers now looked healthy, and the trend line was on a slow but firm positive slope. Looking further into the future, they could factor in Nancy’s upcoming qualifications. In less than 6 months’ time, Nancy would qualify as a registered nurse at just over double the pay and have far more job options. With her RN status, Nancy could take the odd extra shift at the hospital at a far higher rate than working at the eldercare facility. William had another year still to go on his 2-year work experience requirement to become a Certified Internal Auditor (CIA), and then his salary would also almost double, to a little less than $60,000/year.
The future was promising, and they both felt a sense of approaching relief and the comfort of a well-defined plan. In the meantime, however, food and entertainment were humble, and life settled into a comforting but exhausting routine. Because of their second jobs and studies, they often missed each other entirely, with one coming home just after the other had left or getting home after the other was already asleep. The two had brief moments of shared wakefulness to chat, cuddle, or do things together.
Their life had turned inward, shrunk, and hardened, and their social life was entirely a table for two. Drinks with friends, poolside parties, and BBQs were replaced with events shaped tightly around them as a couple and mostly related to work, study, and sleep. Waking hours were dotted with jealously guarded moments of intimacy. Every day they would look at the picture on the fridge, and every week William added to a drawing of a progress thermometer he had made on a sheet of white cardboard and stuck to the fridge. The red line indicating their savings was creeping slowly but surely toward their target.
~~~~~~~~~
August 8, 2025
Nancy & William Make A Wish
A young couple wish they would inherit enough to make the down payment on a small cottage. Will that fateful wish set events in motion with fatal results for someone?
(Published Jun 9, 2021)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Part 1: After the Honeymoon
Returning from their low-cost, but exciting, honeymoon package in Greece, Nancy and William moved into a small, two-bedroom apartment on the fifth floor of a seven-story block. It was well-situated workwise and had a balcony overlooking a park. William could just make out the river from one corner of the balcony if he stood on a bucket. They had enough furniture already moved in to meet basic needs but needed to fully furnish the flat. Their most used pieces were the faux-leather couch in pale blue from his Aunt Polly, a long wooden coffee table with ball and claw legs (with only a few tooth marks) from Nancy’s Aunt Betty who had several Dachshunds, and a new queen-size bed they had ordered online.
In one corner of the living area, a small but respectable array of wedding presents had been dropped off by William’s brother, Joseph. Nancy had set up a registry when the wedding was announced, and they were now eager owners of many of the necessities a new couple might need, including a Ninja blender, Cuisinart toaster, Kitchen Aid mixer, a Lodge skillet set, and a set of two Boom Bluetooth speakers. Other necessities, such as a cutlery set, crockery, and linen, had been scavenged from both families, leading to a functional but eclectic household.
Nancy and William spent the last 2 days of their honeymoon in their little utopia, before the gravitational pull of working life tugged them into a routine of commuting to work, studying, and running the roster of household chores—cooking, tidying, cleaning, and laundry. The apartment didn’t have a washer or dryer, and they couldn’t afford appliances at the moment anyway, but there was a communal laundry every second floor, and large coin-operated washers and driers were a cost-effective alternative to shuttling laundry to parents’ homes. This was particularly important to them, because as a nurse assistant, Nancy worked shifts at a hospital and generated a lot of laundry.
By the third month of near-bliss, William applied his auditing training to their finances and soon had an “end of week balance” graph of their savings and current accounts. What he saw made his heart sink, and his exclamation of “uh oh” had them both clustered around his laptop to examine a graph that showed their total balance in a slow downward slope. Every payday popped up a little peak, but each peak was a little lower than the one before. William had seen this pattern when he helped low-income customers. Rent, student debt, car payments, and all the things needed to put food on the table and a roof over their heads were collectively pulling their balance ever lower.
There were also medical bills to pay from Nancy’s car accident 6 months earlier. A driver had skipped a red light, hit her car just ahead of the front passenger-side door, and spun her around and into a concrete barrier. The impact had bounced her head off the door, and the front airbag had left her with a black eye from where her right hand had been thrown up into her face. The car was totaled, and although insurance covered much of her medical bills, the emergency room visit and one overnight “observation” stay (not covered by the insurance) had left her with more than $3,000 of medical debt.
The next day, and with a great tug on his heart, William put his blue Subaru turbocharged WRX on Craigslist. Nancy took photos of the car with her phone, and with her eye for composition, got in a backdrop that made it look appealing to the young adventurous speed enthusiast. Within an hour, William’s phone had buzzed with the first text message, asking to see the car. On the third day, he and Nancy were watching it drive off with a new owner. They went inside and reviewed the stakes. He had owed $11,500 on the car, and after something approaching haggling, had sold it to the fourth person that responded for $18,000 including the workshop manual, a few Subaru-specific tools, and some spare parts and accessories that he had collected.
That night, they opened a bottle of low-budget white wine and curled up on the coach with the laptop, looking at car auctions. The car payment was gone, but they still needed at least one car between them. William had done his homework, and the depreciation curve of secondhand cars favored sellers in person-to-person direct sales and favored buyers for auctions, so long, of course, as the buyer was well-informed and disciplined to the point of stubbornness. With $6,500 in hand and a bank guarantee of $4,000, William took a bus to his first car auction. It was a miserable experience, and he was outbid on everything he had even remotely wanted. No matter what he bid, someone always went just $100 higher, until he hit his limit and had to back out. That night, he described the experience to Nancy, and they decided to try the next one together.
Saturday arrived, and Nancy was just off nights, so they made it an outing. She liked the old Mercedes 220, and he found a Ford F150 4×4 pickup—leather interior, really nice sound system, and it showed none of the subtle signs of abuse. It also had only 134,000 miles on the clock, and the docket showed no history of accidents or major work. He looked under the hood for signs of overheating and any work that had needed the cylinder head to be removed, while Nancy scrutinized the upholstery, headliner, and paintwork. The maintenance record looked complete, and there were no signs of rust underneath.
William made the first bid enthusiastically, but several others showed interest too, and bids climbed steadily. At $11,000, William dropped out of the bidding, and they went back home slightly despondent. The following day, they tried again, but there was nothing in their price range or that they would have wanted. “Maybe a car auction isn’t the best place, honey?” Nancy suggested, “I mean, you get car enthusiasts and resellers there. Maybe estate auctions or auctions for business closings would be a better bet?” William agreed, and the next day he broadened his search. He scoured the trade auction notices all week. The following Saturday, William and Nancy caught the bus and then walked to the auction yard in an industrial area that was selling off equipment from businesses that had closed or were cutting back. True enough, this was a different crowd, and the buyers were milling around heavy equipment more than near the cars that were in the corner of the yard. More people were scrutinizing the forklifts than the cars.
Of the five vehicles, William could skip two immediately—one was a five-ton truck, and the other was a very sad and dented blue panel van. He also eliminated the black Mercedes delivery van. Nancy peered inside the van, “Would make a great patient shuttle,” she whispered to him. The two remaining candidates weren’t at all bad. A GMC double cab with a canopy and a white Toyota 4×4. The GMC was 2 years old, and the Toyota was 8. The GMC had a larger engine, but the Toyota showed signs of better maintenance. The thing that put him off the Toyota a bit was that it had clearly been in service with an electrician, and this was borne out by the manifest, and it had rows of equipment boxes mounted in the back. On the other hand, he thought, that might actually mean he could get it at a lower price. Nancy asked which he preferred, and he really couldn’t say. “Let’s bid on both,” she suggested, and asked if she could do the bidding this time. “OK, sure, honey, but $10,500, is our limit.”
The crowd had thinned out a little by the time the bidding got to the cars, and most of the action had been around wire machines, welding equipment, and the forklifts. Bidding started with the sad looking panel van. Only two bids, and it went for $1,300. The five-ton truck went for $18,500. Next up was the GMC, and William felt a surge of excitement. First bid was slow in coming, and then $1,000 was bid by a man in faded brown coveralls. “Two thousand,” Nancy’s voice interrupted the auctioneer who had advanced the biding to $1,200. William gasped, but quickly shut his mouth. This was her show, and she seemed to have a plan. Coveralls offered $2,200. “Four thousand,” came Nancy’s bid. Coveralls dropped out and a new bidder in a plaid shirt offered $5,000. “Eight,” Nancy called out. Coveralls re-entered, and he and plaid shirt juggled each other up to $14,500. Plaid shirt took the bid and walked off to go pay.
Next up was the Toyota, starting at $1,000. Coveralls raised his hand, and Nancy doubled. Coveralls bid $2,200. “Five,” called Nancy. Coveralls bid $5,200. “Ten,” called Nancy. Coveralls hesitated, biting his lip. The auctioneer queried him, but he was done. The auctioneer surveyed the small throng. “Any advances on $10,000? He looked at Coveralls who looked away. “Going twice at $10,000,” he looked slowly across the throng. William was gripping the edge of his trousers so tightly his fingers were aching. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. “Done at $10,000!” called the auctioneer, and he brought down the gavel with a bang that jerked William’s eyes open.
“Good buy” the elderly clerk rasped as she filled out details and took payment from Nancy. “We were expecting that Toyota to go for $15,500”, she said looking up at Nancy and handing her the receipt, the papers, and the keys.
“You were amazing!” William blurted out as soon as they were out of earshot and gave Nancy a big sideways hug as they approached the Toyota. “I couldn’t watch anymore!” Nancy handed him the keys, “There you go, lover, your very own bigass truck.” She smiled broadly and gave him a big theatrical wink.
The next week saw William making small fixes to the truck. New tires, a seat cover, and a few new pipes and filters ran to the tune of $986. William declared the truck perfect. They crowded around the graph that weekend. The truck had depleted much of their savings, but they had eliminated the monthly car payments and reduced insurance, so the graph showed a small but perceptible upward movement going forward, but it was still a negative slope.
Nancy looked up at William. “I’m still only a CNA for the next few months, so I don’t qualify yet to take extra shifts at the hospital, but I know the care home down the block is looking. They put a job ad on our notice board.” This sounded like a plan, but they both reflected on how a second job would make a dent in their homelife as much as it would in the graph. Between studies and the new workload, there wasn’t going to be much home life.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(Published Jun 9, 2021)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Part 1: After the Honeymoon
Returning from their low-cost, but exciting, honeymoon package in Greece, Nancy and William moved into a small, two-bedroom apartment on the fifth floor of a seven-story block. It was well-situated workwise and had a balcony overlooking a park. William could just make out the river from one corner of the balcony if he stood on a bucket. They had enough furniture already moved in to meet basic needs but needed to fully furnish the flat. Their most used pieces were the faux-leather couch in pale blue from his Aunt Polly, a long wooden coffee table with ball and claw legs (with only a few tooth marks) from Nancy’s Aunt Betty who had several Dachshunds, and a new queen-size bed they had ordered online.
In one corner of the living area, a small but respectable array of wedding presents had been dropped off by William’s brother, Joseph. Nancy had set up a registry when the wedding was announced, and they were now eager owners of many of the necessities a new couple might need, including a Ninja blender, Cuisinart toaster, Kitchen Aid mixer, a Lodge skillet set, and a set of two Boom Bluetooth speakers. Other necessities, such as a cutlery set, crockery, and linen, had been scavenged from both families, leading to a functional but eclectic household.
Nancy and William spent the last 2 days of their honeymoon in their little utopia, before the gravitational pull of working life tugged them into a routine of commuting to work, studying, and running the roster of household chores—cooking, tidying, cleaning, and laundry. The apartment didn’t have a washer or dryer, and they couldn’t afford appliances at the moment anyway, but there was a communal laundry every second floor, and large coin-operated washers and driers were a cost-effective alternative to shuttling laundry to parents’ homes. This was particularly important to them, because as a nurse assistant, Nancy worked shifts at a hospital and generated a lot of laundry.
By the third month of near-bliss, William applied his auditing training to their finances and soon had an “end of week balance” graph of their savings and current accounts. What he saw made his heart sink, and his exclamation of “uh oh” had them both clustered around his laptop to examine a graph that showed their total balance in a slow downward slope. Every payday popped up a little peak, but each peak was a little lower than the one before. William had seen this pattern when he helped low-income customers. Rent, student debt, car payments, and all the things needed to put food on the table and a roof over their heads were collectively pulling their balance ever lower.
There were also medical bills to pay from Nancy’s car accident 6 months earlier. A driver had skipped a red light, hit her car just ahead of the front passenger-side door, and spun her around and into a concrete barrier. The impact had bounced her head off the door, and the front airbag had left her with a black eye from where her right hand had been thrown up into her face. The car was totaled, and although insurance covered much of her medical bills, the emergency room visit and one overnight “observation” stay (not covered by the insurance) had left her with more than $3,000 of medical debt.
The next day, and with a great tug on his heart, William put his blue Subaru turbocharged WRX on Craigslist. Nancy took photos of the car with her phone, and with her eye for composition, got in a backdrop that made it look appealing to the young adventurous speed enthusiast. Within an hour, William’s phone had buzzed with the first text message, asking to see the car. On the third day, he and Nancy were watching it drive off with a new owner. They went inside and reviewed the stakes. He had owed $11,500 on the car, and after something approaching haggling, had sold it to the fourth person that responded for $18,000 including the workshop manual, a few Subaru-specific tools, and some spare parts and accessories that he had collected.
That night, they opened a bottle of low-budget white wine and curled up on the coach with the laptop, looking at car auctions. The car payment was gone, but they still needed at least one car between them. William had done his homework, and the depreciation curve of secondhand cars favored sellers in person-to-person direct sales and favored buyers for auctions, so long, of course, as the buyer was well-informed and disciplined to the point of stubbornness. With $6,500 in hand and a bank guarantee of $4,000, William took a bus to his first car auction. It was a miserable experience, and he was outbid on everything he had even remotely wanted. No matter what he bid, someone always went just $100 higher, until he hit his limit and had to back out. That night, he described the experience to Nancy, and they decided to try the next one together.
Saturday arrived, and Nancy was just off nights, so they made it an outing. She liked the old Mercedes 220, and he found a Ford F150 4×4 pickup—leather interior, really nice sound system, and it showed none of the subtle signs of abuse. It also had only 134,000 miles on the clock, and the docket showed no history of accidents or major work. He looked under the hood for signs of overheating and any work that had needed the cylinder head to be removed, while Nancy scrutinized the upholstery, headliner, and paintwork. The maintenance record looked complete, and there were no signs of rust underneath.
William made the first bid enthusiastically, but several others showed interest too, and bids climbed steadily. At $11,000, William dropped out of the bidding, and they went back home slightly despondent. The following day, they tried again, but there was nothing in their price range or that they would have wanted. “Maybe a car auction isn’t the best place, honey?” Nancy suggested, “I mean, you get car enthusiasts and resellers there. Maybe estate auctions or auctions for business closings would be a better bet?” William agreed, and the next day he broadened his search. He scoured the trade auction notices all week. The following Saturday, William and Nancy caught the bus and then walked to the auction yard in an industrial area that was selling off equipment from businesses that had closed or were cutting back. True enough, this was a different crowd, and the buyers were milling around heavy equipment more than near the cars that were in the corner of the yard. More people were scrutinizing the forklifts than the cars.
Of the five vehicles, William could skip two immediately—one was a five-ton truck, and the other was a very sad and dented blue panel van. He also eliminated the black Mercedes delivery van. Nancy peered inside the van, “Would make a great patient shuttle,” she whispered to him. The two remaining candidates weren’t at all bad. A GMC double cab with a canopy and a white Toyota 4×4. The GMC was 2 years old, and the Toyota was 8. The GMC had a larger engine, but the Toyota showed signs of better maintenance. The thing that put him off the Toyota a bit was that it had clearly been in service with an electrician, and this was borne out by the manifest, and it had rows of equipment boxes mounted in the back. On the other hand, he thought, that might actually mean he could get it at a lower price. Nancy asked which he preferred, and he really couldn’t say. “Let’s bid on both,” she suggested, and asked if she could do the bidding this time. “OK, sure, honey, but $10,500, is our limit.”
The crowd had thinned out a little by the time the bidding got to the cars, and most of the action had been around wire machines, welding equipment, and the forklifts. Bidding started with the sad looking panel van. Only two bids, and it went for $1,300. The five-ton truck went for $18,500. Next up was the GMC, and William felt a surge of excitement. First bid was slow in coming, and then $1,000 was bid by a man in faded brown coveralls. “Two thousand,” Nancy’s voice interrupted the auctioneer who had advanced the biding to $1,200. William gasped, but quickly shut his mouth. This was her show, and she seemed to have a plan. Coveralls offered $2,200. “Four thousand,” came Nancy’s bid. Coveralls dropped out and a new bidder in a plaid shirt offered $5,000. “Eight,” Nancy called out. Coveralls re-entered, and he and plaid shirt juggled each other up to $14,500. Plaid shirt took the bid and walked off to go pay.
Next up was the Toyota, starting at $1,000. Coveralls raised his hand, and Nancy doubled. Coveralls bid $2,200. “Five,” called Nancy. Coveralls bid $5,200. “Ten,” called Nancy. Coveralls hesitated, biting his lip. The auctioneer queried him, but he was done. The auctioneer surveyed the small throng. “Any advances on $10,000? He looked at Coveralls who looked away. “Going twice at $10,000,” he looked slowly across the throng. William was gripping the edge of his trousers so tightly his fingers were aching. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. “Done at $10,000!” called the auctioneer, and he brought down the gavel with a bang that jerked William’s eyes open.
“Good buy” the elderly clerk rasped as she filled out details and took payment from Nancy. “We were expecting that Toyota to go for $15,500”, she said looking up at Nancy and handing her the receipt, the papers, and the keys.
“You were amazing!” William blurted out as soon as they were out of earshot and gave Nancy a big sideways hug as they approached the Toyota. “I couldn’t watch anymore!” Nancy handed him the keys, “There you go, lover, your very own bigass truck.” She smiled broadly and gave him a big theatrical wink.
The next week saw William making small fixes to the truck. New tires, a seat cover, and a few new pipes and filters ran to the tune of $986. William declared the truck perfect. They crowded around the graph that weekend. The truck had depleted much of their savings, but they had eliminated the monthly car payments and reduced insurance, so the graph showed a small but perceptible upward movement going forward, but it was still a negative slope.
Nancy looked up at William. “I’m still only a CNA for the next few months, so I don’t qualify yet to take extra shifts at the hospital, but I know the care home down the block is looking. They put a job ad on our notice board.” This sounded like a plan, but they both reflected on how a second job would make a dent in their homelife as much as it would in the graph. Between studies and the new workload, there wasn’t going to be much home life.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
July 25, 2025
The Reply-Guy
Note: This is a chapter from "The Book of Joy", a novel that centers around the life story of Joy. She is a complicated person, although maybe she is very simple and just very deadly.
If you enjoyed this story, you might enjoy the book, which is available at https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-...
~~~~~~~~~~~oOo~~~~~~~~~~~
Besides his eyeballs and gun, Joy had left Willy's apartment with one other trophy - the realization that observation and intrusion could be done at a distance. The fact that he was able to see video feeds of people right in their homes using remote-controlled cameras, was a revelation. It was still percolating in her pigtailed head when she was reading social-media posts on one of her favorite topics - locksports.
There was a fertile community of people weaving in and out of a social media forum who had some kind of passion for picking locks. There were tips, tricks, and many shared videos, and the members of this loose society ranged from lawyers to locksmiths, and lazy hobbyists to security zealots. Joy glided through the chats, keenly interested in learning but not greatly in search of companionship. Some of the discussions seemed to her to be more about ego clashes or flirting, than about opening locks or studying what was inside them. There were even some who discussed only antique locks, and another group who were only interested in electronic ones. Joy didn't fit in any of those groups, and her quest for knowledge was more instrumental and practical. She wanted to know how to open more complex things than padlocks, office furniture cam locks, and the simple mortice locks found in the average home. She was looking for skills, not community, but then by accident, a special kind of community found her.
Joy had replied to a post about commercial mortice locks, and asked what the "ANSI Grade 1" part of the description implied about the methods used to open it. Alice, the discussion initiator, liked the direct, concise, and factual nature of the question, and then Joy had a follow-up question that Alice felt was best handled on a Signal call. That discussion had led to finding Joy a cheap second-hand lock to play with, and then a few chats on the best low-budget pick tools for the job. As someone who lived with autism, Alice appreciated how Joy was always clear, direct, and with no buried meanings in her communication - there was no hinting that she didn't have enough money to spare for new lockpicks, she just said so directly, and asked straightforwardly if they had an old set she could buy cheaply. Discussion had drifted to the topic of electronic locks, remote sensors, microphones, and cameras. Joy seemed to have some practical understanding, but further explanation would either need a video, or an in-person meeting. Meeting up with other locksport fans over a coffee and some hands-on lock work was not unusual for Alice, and they also wanted to meet this eager teenager. They set up a meeting at three on a Wednesday at a coffee place near the train station.
From Joy's posts, Alice had unconsciously built a mental image of her age and style, and was therefore surprised when instead of an eighteen year old with slightly goth style, Joy suddenly appeared next to them as a twelve-year old in a green and black school uniform, and lugging a pink backpack with a sparkly rainbow unicorn attached to one strap. Alice was a little bit taken aback at the chasm between the expectation and who Joy was in person, but was mostly amused and interested in what was obviously an exceptional kid. Alice also liked pink, glitter, and fuzzy stuff, and admired the backpack, from which Joy tugged a partially dismembered Easilok commercial mortice lock. She proceeded directly to explaining a point of confusion, and Alice stifled a giggle at the little package of cute, earnest, and eager in front of them. Alice was quickly able to resolve the confusion and then pulled out their own lockset to demonstrate the picking technique that had been so confusing. As Alice demonstrated, Joy's eyes lit up, and she yelped with exhilaration.
Life crept up on Joy, and some things were going on for which a mother was needed. At breakfast, holding a spoon in one hand poised over a bowl of oatmeal and blueberries, and the other holding her organic high-pulp orange juice, Joy looked earnestly across the table and asked "Mommy, why are my nipples sore? It's like they have tooth-ache." Jane had been in mid-sip of her coffee, and took some time to recover, mop up the mess, and formulate an answer she had been meaning to rehearse for years. "Well, Darling, remember we spoke about that Women's Health book you got from school?" Jane fumbled. "Oh, so I'm growing tits now. OK. Can we have pizza tonight, Mommy?" Jane was still gaping and stunned when Joy had taken her last spoonful, gulped down the last of her juice, and packed them into the dishwasher. "Um, … yes, Darling, sure, we can have pizza." Of all the ways Jane had imagined this conversation going, this was not one. She had almost forgotten her youngest, Jenna, who was still happily munching her oats, and now looked up at her with a big smile and a waving hand, "Mommy, why did Joy say she's getting tits? What's tits?" Jane could see this was going to be a strange day.
When Alice met Joy again, they had a surprise. "Check this out. This is a Flipper Zero. It is used for penetration testing, and it can open garages, cars, hotel doors, and even siphon data from tap-to-pay credit cards." Joy was fascinated, and Alice walked her through setting it up and using it. To demonstrate, Alice used it to open and close the garage doors of an apartment building across the street from the coffee shop. Then they recorded and replayed a customer's key fob to make their big black pickup truck lock and beep a few times, and then use it to set off the alarm. When the owner, a beefy old man with a bald spot and a pigtail, ran out cursing to reset it, Alice waited until he was seated and set it off again. "OK, so maybe that's enough of that, but you get the idea. You can buy one for half the price at this place, … or this place," Alice scribbled down names and details on a Post It for Joy. "You could also watch online personal ads, and if you spot one, let me know, and I can check it out for you." When they parted, Joy's head was buzzing with new information and possibilities. The thought that a cute little thing that looked like a toy could do so many really useful things had her mind ticking. "I wonder if Mommy would get me one for Christmas."
In the year since Joy had first met Alice, her body had changed and so had the way people reacted to her. She was no longer the unnoticed little girl in pigtails, but she was also not a woman. Girls had cuteness, women had agency, and whatever she was now, she was still subject to all the restrictions of being a child without the welcome invisibility or the increased power of a woman. Things were different but the same. For one thing, Joy had decided that breasts were annoying and inconvenient. It was like having two morose grannies strapped to her chest - they complained all the time, got in the way, and just seemed to have no use. They got in the way of even the most mundane tasks, and then hurt if they were bumped. Even folding up a towel could involve bumping into a breast and then having it complain, and she could no longer do her favorite sleeping position anymore, because now there was a breast that could get in the way, or get angry about being trapped between her body and the bed. They got in the way when she was on the climbing wall, or just getting dressed. Women stopped touching her, and gone were the big smiles and comments about how sweet she was. None of them touched her head anymore - which she always thought was weird, but now they glanced at her breasts and gave her a thin-lipped grimace and a face that said quite obviously that she was now competition rather than a partially invisible little girl. Men also saw her now, and they stared in ways that made her want to hurt them. Her butt had swelled, and now her jeans didn't fit anymore, and her climbing outfit was stretched too tight. A bigger butt had uses at least - sitting on hard chairs was comfier. It was like having a built-in cushion.
Her first period had been annoying. She woke up with a severe cramp in her gut. It was sharp and clenching. It felt like that time she had been fooling around with the bulldog clip from Mom's clipboard when she was eight. She had been looking at it close up, opening and closing it and making croaking noises. "Hello Mr. Frog" and she had made as if she was going to kiss it and turn this flat-mouth frog into a prince. It had slipped in her hand, and suddenly grabbed her upper lip. The pain was immediate and intense, and her lip was swollen for a week. This felt like a giant bulldog clip had grabbed her insides. The books were unhelpful and frustrating. It said she might leak 50-90 ml of blood. But how was she supposed to measure that from the clotted mess she was looking at. Either the book was written by a very stupid woman, or by a man who had never seen congealed tissue and blood. She got Mom's measuring spoons to try to estimate how much blood there was, but Mom freaked out for a bit. "Honey … I'm sorry I yelled at you. It was just a shock. That doesn't look like too much. It looks normal. … and yes, every month." Joy concluded that this was the dumbest thing ever, and went to her room mumbling, almost walking into Jenna who had come to see what the fuss was about, and then had questions. "Mommy, … Mommy … does Joy need a doctor? She said that things that bleed this long usually die. Is Joy going to die?"
Joy was online more. There were many things to try out, and Alice had given her little assignments that were always fascinating. She had discovered, for instance, that she could control the school security cameras, and could make them zoom in on Mr. Joyce's hairy ears, which annoyed the staff who had to monitor the camera feed, and made Mr. Joyce start plucking his ears. The online mood had also changed a bit, with more girls saying what they thought, and more men getting angry about that. One in particular got her attention when he said angry things to Alice. He seemed to be dogging her posts, and then he said he was going to kill her, and that got Joy's attention, and she started watching him. The next time she met Alice, they had been distracted, then shared with Joy that the Reply-Guy had tracked down where they lived after they had started banning him from the forum. Joy decided she had a new practice assignment, and once she was at home, she figured out who he was and where he lived. It was the first time she had used what Alice had taught her to find a person and scope out their environment and behavior, and it was thrilling. It took her a week to discover that he had stalked women before, and was just a giant pompous gasbag. She thought about how to do something about this. Some members on the forum had said he should be permabanned from the entire network, and others had said the police should get involved. Joy had a different take in mind, and got down to planning.
Joy took one of the many tote bags Mommy had collected during sales events and seminars, and then dug into her hiding space to retrieve her switchblade and pistol. She rolled up Mom's clear plastic arts apron, a change of clothes, and blue surgical gloves, and put them in the tote with one of the sparkly rainbow unicorns that Auntie Bev and Dr. Foreman handed out at their clinics. She packed in a bottle of sports drink with electrolytes, and a granola bar. On the train, she thought about Alice, and how much they had taught her, and how much hacking was like opening locks. When she got to the destination station, she ducked into the restrooms, and changed. She put on Mom's push-up bra after adjusting it and making a tiny mark where the buckles had been, buttoned up a tight blouse from the thrift store, and zipped up a short skirt. She tucked a handful of Kleenex under each breast, wobbled them about to settle them, and put on eyeshadow and lipstick. With Mom's clipboard in one hand, she was just another young business woman in town going her way.
Bill was fairly sharp about information security, but stank at physical risk management. He wasn't expecting his pizza to come so early, but got up from his sofa in a hurry when there was a knocking at the door. He put his laptop on the coffee table and grabbed the cash before going to the door and plucking it open. He stood a moment, confused to see a young woman instead of his regular pizza guy, but his eyes settled on her cleavage and the nipples that seemed to be trying to pop out. He was so focused on her chest that he didn't notice the Kel-Tec pistol in her hand, or the muzzle of the silencer, before it coughed a little puff of smoke, and she pushed him inside. The world tilted as he fell over backwards and then it spun and vanished as the blood flow to his brain slowed and stopped. In the meantime, Joy had things to do. She took out the unicorn and dipped the horn into the bullet entry wound. She used his PC to take a photo of it, and then stuck the unicorn into the dishwasher on fast cycle. With the PC and its power brick wiped with a soapy facecloth, she wiped off her makeup, and changed back into baggy pants and hoodie, and stowed it all in her tote. She went back to check on the guy, and could feel no carotid pulse, his pupils were fixed and blown, and when she poked an eyeball with a gloved finger, there was no reflex. She rolled him into the recovery position and felt his back. Yes, there it was, a slight bump telling her where the bullet had come to rest. Two minutes later, her switchblade opened up a big enough incision for small fingers to retrieve the bullet. She pulled the shirt back down, patted him on the back, and quickly surveyed the apartment. She took the cash to pay for food going home, and fetched the soggy and steaming unicorn.
It had been less than fifteen minutes before Joy was sitting against the west wall in the apartment block parking garage, hunched over his PC that was still in range of his Wi-Fi. She edited the image, erased most of the background, and then posted it online, tagging the group Alice was in. It took another few minutes to format and remove the hard drive, snap the screen with a kick, and throw the busted PC into a dumpster. She hit the hard drive a few times with a brick, and sang softly on her way to the train station. Joy paused briefly to throw the mangled drive into a garbage can when she went through a mall, and made one more stop to buy a Swiss-cheese and ham bagel, and a Ramune soda, both of which she hungrily dispatched while waiting for her train. On the way home, Joy decided that breasts were still annoying, but they certainly had their uses.
Alice sat knees-up in bed with one hand on the tablet resting against their thighs, and the other holding a nearly-cold mug of coffee. That asshole guy had posted again, but it was just an image of a stuffed unicorn, rather than the usual taunts and provocation. They zoomed in on the unicorn image - Something familiar about it, but the horn wasn't a stripey twirled rainbow or gold. This one was dark red. Alice zoomed as far as it would go. Was that blood? Zooming out again, they tried to make sense of it, and then decided, this fucking guy can just drop dead. Alice switched to something else and then noticed the coffee was cold. With a grunt, they rolled out of bed, slipped on the fluffy pink bunny slippers, and went to reheat the unfinished coffee.
It was a week before Alice noticed that "Reply-Guy Alpha" hadn't posted anything since the cryptic unicorn post, and took another look at the unicorn image. They knew where they had seen one like that before, and also knew that this was a very private message, and why Reply-Guy was silent and would never bother them again. It was a complex feeling of alarm, admiration, trepidation, and appreciation. There was also certainty that asking questions would not be possible.
When they met again, Joy was her normal calm and eager self, but Alice had struggled to come up with what to say and how to say it. Alice also knew what kind of creature Joy was in this forest. As a person with autism and a background in abnormal and criminal psychology, Alice had noticed at a certain point that Joy was mirroring their body language, speech patterns and expressions. They had pushed back a little, and there was a moment when Joy had noticed this, and there was a fine and sharp instant when Alice could see a cold but unthreatening evaluation going on in Joy's head. Nothing was said, but Joy had backed off on adjusting Alice's behavior, and Alice had signaled that they liked and appreciated Joy for who she was. This felt like one of those moments again, but maybe a lot more dangerous. Alice was not very good at the whole thing of social signaling with buried and latent messages, but they had practiced, and now delivered the message of gratitude. "That reply guy has fucked off and vanished. I am very happy about that." Joy's usually deadpan face had shown a flicker of acknowledgement. Message received, the scales were balanced again. Joy took a sip of her decaf latte, and asked "What can you tell me about SQL injection?", and the two got busy with some details and a possible new assignment for Joy.
~~~
If you enjoyed this story, you might enjoy the book, which you can get on Kobo
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-...
If you enjoyed this story, you might enjoy the book, which is available at https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-...
~~~~~~~~~~~oOo~~~~~~~~~~~
Besides his eyeballs and gun, Joy had left Willy's apartment with one other trophy - the realization that observation and intrusion could be done at a distance. The fact that he was able to see video feeds of people right in their homes using remote-controlled cameras, was a revelation. It was still percolating in her pigtailed head when she was reading social-media posts on one of her favorite topics - locksports.
There was a fertile community of people weaving in and out of a social media forum who had some kind of passion for picking locks. There were tips, tricks, and many shared videos, and the members of this loose society ranged from lawyers to locksmiths, and lazy hobbyists to security zealots. Joy glided through the chats, keenly interested in learning but not greatly in search of companionship. Some of the discussions seemed to her to be more about ego clashes or flirting, than about opening locks or studying what was inside them. There were even some who discussed only antique locks, and another group who were only interested in electronic ones. Joy didn't fit in any of those groups, and her quest for knowledge was more instrumental and practical. She wanted to know how to open more complex things than padlocks, office furniture cam locks, and the simple mortice locks found in the average home. She was looking for skills, not community, but then by accident, a special kind of community found her.
Joy had replied to a post about commercial mortice locks, and asked what the "ANSI Grade 1" part of the description implied about the methods used to open it. Alice, the discussion initiator, liked the direct, concise, and factual nature of the question, and then Joy had a follow-up question that Alice felt was best handled on a Signal call. That discussion had led to finding Joy a cheap second-hand lock to play with, and then a few chats on the best low-budget pick tools for the job. As someone who lived with autism, Alice appreciated how Joy was always clear, direct, and with no buried meanings in her communication - there was no hinting that she didn't have enough money to spare for new lockpicks, she just said so directly, and asked straightforwardly if they had an old set she could buy cheaply. Discussion had drifted to the topic of electronic locks, remote sensors, microphones, and cameras. Joy seemed to have some practical understanding, but further explanation would either need a video, or an in-person meeting. Meeting up with other locksport fans over a coffee and some hands-on lock work was not unusual for Alice, and they also wanted to meet this eager teenager. They set up a meeting at three on a Wednesday at a coffee place near the train station.
From Joy's posts, Alice had unconsciously built a mental image of her age and style, and was therefore surprised when instead of an eighteen year old with slightly goth style, Joy suddenly appeared next to them as a twelve-year old in a green and black school uniform, and lugging a pink backpack with a sparkly rainbow unicorn attached to one strap. Alice was a little bit taken aback at the chasm between the expectation and who Joy was in person, but was mostly amused and interested in what was obviously an exceptional kid. Alice also liked pink, glitter, and fuzzy stuff, and admired the backpack, from which Joy tugged a partially dismembered Easilok commercial mortice lock. She proceeded directly to explaining a point of confusion, and Alice stifled a giggle at the little package of cute, earnest, and eager in front of them. Alice was quickly able to resolve the confusion and then pulled out their own lockset to demonstrate the picking technique that had been so confusing. As Alice demonstrated, Joy's eyes lit up, and she yelped with exhilaration.
Life crept up on Joy, and some things were going on for which a mother was needed. At breakfast, holding a spoon in one hand poised over a bowl of oatmeal and blueberries, and the other holding her organic high-pulp orange juice, Joy looked earnestly across the table and asked "Mommy, why are my nipples sore? It's like they have tooth-ache." Jane had been in mid-sip of her coffee, and took some time to recover, mop up the mess, and formulate an answer she had been meaning to rehearse for years. "Well, Darling, remember we spoke about that Women's Health book you got from school?" Jane fumbled. "Oh, so I'm growing tits now. OK. Can we have pizza tonight, Mommy?" Jane was still gaping and stunned when Joy had taken her last spoonful, gulped down the last of her juice, and packed them into the dishwasher. "Um, … yes, Darling, sure, we can have pizza." Of all the ways Jane had imagined this conversation going, this was not one. She had almost forgotten her youngest, Jenna, who was still happily munching her oats, and now looked up at her with a big smile and a waving hand, "Mommy, why did Joy say she's getting tits? What's tits?" Jane could see this was going to be a strange day.
When Alice met Joy again, they had a surprise. "Check this out. This is a Flipper Zero. It is used for penetration testing, and it can open garages, cars, hotel doors, and even siphon data from tap-to-pay credit cards." Joy was fascinated, and Alice walked her through setting it up and using it. To demonstrate, Alice used it to open and close the garage doors of an apartment building across the street from the coffee shop. Then they recorded and replayed a customer's key fob to make their big black pickup truck lock and beep a few times, and then use it to set off the alarm. When the owner, a beefy old man with a bald spot and a pigtail, ran out cursing to reset it, Alice waited until he was seated and set it off again. "OK, so maybe that's enough of that, but you get the idea. You can buy one for half the price at this place, … or this place," Alice scribbled down names and details on a Post It for Joy. "You could also watch online personal ads, and if you spot one, let me know, and I can check it out for you." When they parted, Joy's head was buzzing with new information and possibilities. The thought that a cute little thing that looked like a toy could do so many really useful things had her mind ticking. "I wonder if Mommy would get me one for Christmas."
In the year since Joy had first met Alice, her body had changed and so had the way people reacted to her. She was no longer the unnoticed little girl in pigtails, but she was also not a woman. Girls had cuteness, women had agency, and whatever she was now, she was still subject to all the restrictions of being a child without the welcome invisibility or the increased power of a woman. Things were different but the same. For one thing, Joy had decided that breasts were annoying and inconvenient. It was like having two morose grannies strapped to her chest - they complained all the time, got in the way, and just seemed to have no use. They got in the way of even the most mundane tasks, and then hurt if they were bumped. Even folding up a towel could involve bumping into a breast and then having it complain, and she could no longer do her favorite sleeping position anymore, because now there was a breast that could get in the way, or get angry about being trapped between her body and the bed. They got in the way when she was on the climbing wall, or just getting dressed. Women stopped touching her, and gone were the big smiles and comments about how sweet she was. None of them touched her head anymore - which she always thought was weird, but now they glanced at her breasts and gave her a thin-lipped grimace and a face that said quite obviously that she was now competition rather than a partially invisible little girl. Men also saw her now, and they stared in ways that made her want to hurt them. Her butt had swelled, and now her jeans didn't fit anymore, and her climbing outfit was stretched too tight. A bigger butt had uses at least - sitting on hard chairs was comfier. It was like having a built-in cushion.
Her first period had been annoying. She woke up with a severe cramp in her gut. It was sharp and clenching. It felt like that time she had been fooling around with the bulldog clip from Mom's clipboard when she was eight. She had been looking at it close up, opening and closing it and making croaking noises. "Hello Mr. Frog" and she had made as if she was going to kiss it and turn this flat-mouth frog into a prince. It had slipped in her hand, and suddenly grabbed her upper lip. The pain was immediate and intense, and her lip was swollen for a week. This felt like a giant bulldog clip had grabbed her insides. The books were unhelpful and frustrating. It said she might leak 50-90 ml of blood. But how was she supposed to measure that from the clotted mess she was looking at. Either the book was written by a very stupid woman, or by a man who had never seen congealed tissue and blood. She got Mom's measuring spoons to try to estimate how much blood there was, but Mom freaked out for a bit. "Honey … I'm sorry I yelled at you. It was just a shock. That doesn't look like too much. It looks normal. … and yes, every month." Joy concluded that this was the dumbest thing ever, and went to her room mumbling, almost walking into Jenna who had come to see what the fuss was about, and then had questions. "Mommy, … Mommy … does Joy need a doctor? She said that things that bleed this long usually die. Is Joy going to die?"
Joy was online more. There were many things to try out, and Alice had given her little assignments that were always fascinating. She had discovered, for instance, that she could control the school security cameras, and could make them zoom in on Mr. Joyce's hairy ears, which annoyed the staff who had to monitor the camera feed, and made Mr. Joyce start plucking his ears. The online mood had also changed a bit, with more girls saying what they thought, and more men getting angry about that. One in particular got her attention when he said angry things to Alice. He seemed to be dogging her posts, and then he said he was going to kill her, and that got Joy's attention, and she started watching him. The next time she met Alice, they had been distracted, then shared with Joy that the Reply-Guy had tracked down where they lived after they had started banning him from the forum. Joy decided she had a new practice assignment, and once she was at home, she figured out who he was and where he lived. It was the first time she had used what Alice had taught her to find a person and scope out their environment and behavior, and it was thrilling. It took her a week to discover that he had stalked women before, and was just a giant pompous gasbag. She thought about how to do something about this. Some members on the forum had said he should be permabanned from the entire network, and others had said the police should get involved. Joy had a different take in mind, and got down to planning.
Joy took one of the many tote bags Mommy had collected during sales events and seminars, and then dug into her hiding space to retrieve her switchblade and pistol. She rolled up Mom's clear plastic arts apron, a change of clothes, and blue surgical gloves, and put them in the tote with one of the sparkly rainbow unicorns that Auntie Bev and Dr. Foreman handed out at their clinics. She packed in a bottle of sports drink with electrolytes, and a granola bar. On the train, she thought about Alice, and how much they had taught her, and how much hacking was like opening locks. When she got to the destination station, she ducked into the restrooms, and changed. She put on Mom's push-up bra after adjusting it and making a tiny mark where the buckles had been, buttoned up a tight blouse from the thrift store, and zipped up a short skirt. She tucked a handful of Kleenex under each breast, wobbled them about to settle them, and put on eyeshadow and lipstick. With Mom's clipboard in one hand, she was just another young business woman in town going her way.
Bill was fairly sharp about information security, but stank at physical risk management. He wasn't expecting his pizza to come so early, but got up from his sofa in a hurry when there was a knocking at the door. He put his laptop on the coffee table and grabbed the cash before going to the door and plucking it open. He stood a moment, confused to see a young woman instead of his regular pizza guy, but his eyes settled on her cleavage and the nipples that seemed to be trying to pop out. He was so focused on her chest that he didn't notice the Kel-Tec pistol in her hand, or the muzzle of the silencer, before it coughed a little puff of smoke, and she pushed him inside. The world tilted as he fell over backwards and then it spun and vanished as the blood flow to his brain slowed and stopped. In the meantime, Joy had things to do. She took out the unicorn and dipped the horn into the bullet entry wound. She used his PC to take a photo of it, and then stuck the unicorn into the dishwasher on fast cycle. With the PC and its power brick wiped with a soapy facecloth, she wiped off her makeup, and changed back into baggy pants and hoodie, and stowed it all in her tote. She went back to check on the guy, and could feel no carotid pulse, his pupils were fixed and blown, and when she poked an eyeball with a gloved finger, there was no reflex. She rolled him into the recovery position and felt his back. Yes, there it was, a slight bump telling her where the bullet had come to rest. Two minutes later, her switchblade opened up a big enough incision for small fingers to retrieve the bullet. She pulled the shirt back down, patted him on the back, and quickly surveyed the apartment. She took the cash to pay for food going home, and fetched the soggy and steaming unicorn.
It had been less than fifteen minutes before Joy was sitting against the west wall in the apartment block parking garage, hunched over his PC that was still in range of his Wi-Fi. She edited the image, erased most of the background, and then posted it online, tagging the group Alice was in. It took another few minutes to format and remove the hard drive, snap the screen with a kick, and throw the busted PC into a dumpster. She hit the hard drive a few times with a brick, and sang softly on her way to the train station. Joy paused briefly to throw the mangled drive into a garbage can when she went through a mall, and made one more stop to buy a Swiss-cheese and ham bagel, and a Ramune soda, both of which she hungrily dispatched while waiting for her train. On the way home, Joy decided that breasts were still annoying, but they certainly had their uses.
Alice sat knees-up in bed with one hand on the tablet resting against their thighs, and the other holding a nearly-cold mug of coffee. That asshole guy had posted again, but it was just an image of a stuffed unicorn, rather than the usual taunts and provocation. They zoomed in on the unicorn image - Something familiar about it, but the horn wasn't a stripey twirled rainbow or gold. This one was dark red. Alice zoomed as far as it would go. Was that blood? Zooming out again, they tried to make sense of it, and then decided, this fucking guy can just drop dead. Alice switched to something else and then noticed the coffee was cold. With a grunt, they rolled out of bed, slipped on the fluffy pink bunny slippers, and went to reheat the unfinished coffee.
It was a week before Alice noticed that "Reply-Guy Alpha" hadn't posted anything since the cryptic unicorn post, and took another look at the unicorn image. They knew where they had seen one like that before, and also knew that this was a very private message, and why Reply-Guy was silent and would never bother them again. It was a complex feeling of alarm, admiration, trepidation, and appreciation. There was also certainty that asking questions would not be possible.
When they met again, Joy was her normal calm and eager self, but Alice had struggled to come up with what to say and how to say it. Alice also knew what kind of creature Joy was in this forest. As a person with autism and a background in abnormal and criminal psychology, Alice had noticed at a certain point that Joy was mirroring their body language, speech patterns and expressions. They had pushed back a little, and there was a moment when Joy had noticed this, and there was a fine and sharp instant when Alice could see a cold but unthreatening evaluation going on in Joy's head. Nothing was said, but Joy had backed off on adjusting Alice's behavior, and Alice had signaled that they liked and appreciated Joy for who she was. This felt like one of those moments again, but maybe a lot more dangerous. Alice was not very good at the whole thing of social signaling with buried and latent messages, but they had practiced, and now delivered the message of gratitude. "That reply guy has fucked off and vanished. I am very happy about that." Joy's usually deadpan face had shown a flicker of acknowledgement. Message received, the scales were balanced again. Joy took a sip of her decaf latte, and asked "What can you tell me about SQL injection?", and the two got busy with some details and a possible new assignment for Joy.
~~~
If you enjoyed this story, you might enjoy the book, which you can get on Kobo
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-...
July 22, 2025
Dr. Patel and The Medical Reps
The first time Dr. Patel had been visited by a medical representative, she had puzzled late into the night over each assertion of the wonders of the new drug in the glossy "performance sheet" that the rep had left. She poured over her notes, read up what she could, and deliberated for hours before consulting the other members of the practice. Dr. Giannopoulos had had no interest in relative efficacy, half-life, and adverse effects. Giannopoulos was a practical man, and only asked how many free samples were being offered, whether there was a bonus incentive, and what the margin was. "Margin?", she had asked, frowning, "I don’t understand. Do you mean the dose width between therapeutic and toxic?" Giannopoulos had fussed and puffed his cheeks at her, muttered something about Hippocrates dying a pauper, and bustled out of the little doctor’s lounge.
Dr. Llewelyn Jones had been initially indifferent, and when pressed, he grew irate. "Liars and cheats the lot of them!" His voice had risen, and his hands flew. He had poked a finger in the direction of the city "they lie with a smile on their faces," he had turned sharply on his heel, and she had watched in astonishment as the lanky Welshman stormed out of her consulting room. She realized that the situation was hopeless. There was simply no way for her to know whether the evidence favored one medication over another, but she slowly formed an idea of a general set of empirical methods to decide on product quality and value for all the things reps brought to her.
Dr. Patel was soon known by her peers as being highly effective in sifting through products, identifying those that worked, and those that were more marketing than reality. Over the years, more and more of the local providers had adopted a simple "what did Patel say" attitude to product sourcing. If Dr. Patel gave something the nod, then it was consider worthwhile to order.
It was Guy's first sales trip in this part of his territory since joining a medical supplies company three months ago. Three years at a medical devices firm selling motorized wheelchairs had given him enough experience to be accepted as a field salesperson for a line of intravenous needles and supplies. The pay was better, and he could afford to trade up to a newer model BMW. A red one with leather seats and a comprehensive set of options. He also traded up on girlfriends. Gone was Melody, a sweet freckled bank teller who he had wowed with his city smarts and his previous BMW. The new lady of his life was Eva, a blonde pharmaceutical sales representative who he had met during training. She was the sporty and exciting type that could outsell most of the people on her team, and wasn't shy to rub their noses in her skills and performance.
Today had started off well, he made good time to his first call, an obstetrics practice whose office manager plied him with homemade muffins and coffee, and placed an order for twenty birthing kits, and ten boxes of nitrile examination gloves. His next three stops were frustrating. They each gladly accepted his offer to inventory their supplies, listened carefully to his pitch on the current high profit "special", and then asked him what Dr. Patel had said about his featured product. First Dr. Paulson, a tall grey man whose voice quavered when he spoke in slow clipped sentences. Guy had mistaken the voice to imply indecision, and reiterated the advantages of the new needles, and how soon the special prices would return to normal. Paulson was suddenly adamant and immovable. "Call again when you have the concurrence of Patel," he said, herding Guy firmly to the door, and shutting it resolutely behind him. The next call followed a similar pattern. Dr. Schmitz had just finished surgery for the morning, and had done five hernia repairs since she started at seven. She was ravenous, and was listening to Guys sales pitch while wolfing down a cheese and ham sandwich. Schmitz took off a tie-died purple headscarf, revealing greying hair tied tightly back in a bun. She pointed at his brochure with the corner of a sandwich. "You say these suture kits are dissolving?" He nodded confidently, and was about to do a trial close with a “... and how many would you like me to get for you?", but was cut short before he got to the end of "how". "Yes, yes, but what did Patel say?” Schmitz finished her ham and cheese, and brushed Guy and his brochure aside. She leaned past him, and retrieved a scone. "Well, come back when you have Patel's thumbs up." Schmitz pushed her way past him to get to her recorder, and their conversation was over.
Emily looked at the medical representative, and a half smile flickered across her face. She had sharply rebuffed his transparent offer to "inventory" her stores. She needed a rank amateur loose in her storeroom like she needed a hernia, she had thought to herself. She was, however, vaguely curious about any current specials. "New range of intravenous needles, you say?" Emily harbored a deep hatred for salespeople in general, but medical reps in particular. The smart suits and over-confident air irritated her, the flashy cars angered her, and the fancy slip-on shoes revolted her - she relished every opportunity to cause sales reps’ some anguish. She gestured for him to sit, and pointed to what appeared to be an antique wooden dining chair, the kind made by people who thought sitting to be slothful, and bought by people who felt a need to do penance at mealtimes. It was hard, and uncomfortable, and had been specially purchased by Emily from a thrift store, and lovingly assembled with her own hands. She took her time ordering office materials, and watched Guy for any signs of nodding off. Guy didn't sleep, but did settle into a daydream, replaying his last meeting with Eva, he sighed softly.
"NEXT" Emily yelled at him suddenly, startling him and causing him to jerk upright in the antique chair. The chair immediately swayed and shed a leg. Guy tumbled to the floor, his leather briefcase skittered across the teak floorboards, and he landed in a convulsing and untidy heap on the groaning wooden floor. "Third door on the right opposite the cloak room, knock loudly so Dr. Patel can hear you," she barked at him. Leaning over her desk, Emily glared at him, "... and stop fooling around with the furniture!"
Having found the washroom, Guy turned sharply to his right, only to see a storage closet in front of him. "The NEXT door", came Emily's voice from down the passage. "What!", Dr. Patel shouted when he knocked loudly. She briefly wondered to herself why these arrogant salespeople always banged on her door. She always left it open for them, but they insisted on jarring her by banging on the door. It made her irritable. Dr. Patel pursed her lips at him, “What is the product you are bringing to my attention?” She held up a hand as he slid into his prepared pitch, “are you asserting all that is in this brochure?”, and had used a green highlighter to mark out each claim of fact in the brochure he had provided. “Sharper tip and easier insertion, yes?”, she peered at him, waiting for confirmation. “… hardened tip?”, “less bruising?” Ptael listed the eight claims that she felt were clinically relevant, and discarded the rest. “Now, let us operationalize and quantify these claims, yes?” Patel had references at hand of needle insertion force, sharpness indices, and bruising scales, and set about measuring them.
Guy sat at a slightly sticky table in the Holiday Inn bar. It was made of dark gray wood, with a small chip knocked loose from the edge facing Guy. He felt a bit like that himself, a small but noticeable chip knocked from his normal cocky self. He was nursing a beer, a dented ego, and two aching arms. The Holiday Inn was the stopover of choice for many of the sales travelers in the region, so it was common to see the same faces, and share familiar stories. Crisscrossing the region, many of them had already met Guy. "So, meet Patel yet?" one of the pharma reps smirked at him, knowing quite well from the deflated figure cast by Guy that he had indeed met Dr. Patel. "So how did it go?" asked a redhead from the doorway as more salespeople started gathering after a long day of smiling and fawning and dealing. "Sell her a bunch, honey?" she smiled.
"What were you flogging" she asked, sitting down at the little table, "suppositories?" A roar of laughter swelled from the small gathering. News of a newbie in the area had quickly spread through the grapevine, across mobile phones, texts, emails, and passing chatter as paths crisscrossed, and slowly converged on one of the few roosting places in the area. After several minutes of banter, jokes, and questions, eventually Guy relented. "Needles," he said, clearing his throat, "IV needles." A sharp intake of breath, and then a chorus of "show us." Guy reluctantly took off his jacket, and rolled up one sleeve to a rousing cheer from the assembled crowd, to show them where Dr. Patel had tested out twenty-four needles. She had carefully documented several key performance factors, and viewed each needle under a microscope before and after use. She had compared his bruising and inflammation to a set of images, and at the end, had told him in polite but firm terms that his needles were no better than the norm, and if he wanted the clinic to order them, he would have to reduce his price by 58.3%
Soon more Patel stories were being told about how she made sales contingent on proving their products, usually on themselves. Guy began to feel not quite good, but at least less bad. One rep in a navy blue jacket nodded at him, "my first time was a colonoscopy prep kit, and she timed me." The Patel effect ultimately led to reps becoming more careful about what they promised, and being very careful to state only what they could prove with data or which they were prepared to demonstrate on themselves. It may indeed have led to fewer breakthrough treatments reaching the patients as quickly, but it most certainly resulted in them avoiding time-wasting treatments. Guy shifted emphasis on safer supplies – nitrile gloves, masks, and hand-cleaner – and was very careful to make no claims that the solution used was “eye safe”, in case Dr. Patel insisted on seeing it for herself.
Dr. Llewelyn Jones had been initially indifferent, and when pressed, he grew irate. "Liars and cheats the lot of them!" His voice had risen, and his hands flew. He had poked a finger in the direction of the city "they lie with a smile on their faces," he had turned sharply on his heel, and she had watched in astonishment as the lanky Welshman stormed out of her consulting room. She realized that the situation was hopeless. There was simply no way for her to know whether the evidence favored one medication over another, but she slowly formed an idea of a general set of empirical methods to decide on product quality and value for all the things reps brought to her.
Dr. Patel was soon known by her peers as being highly effective in sifting through products, identifying those that worked, and those that were more marketing than reality. Over the years, more and more of the local providers had adopted a simple "what did Patel say" attitude to product sourcing. If Dr. Patel gave something the nod, then it was consider worthwhile to order.
It was Guy's first sales trip in this part of his territory since joining a medical supplies company three months ago. Three years at a medical devices firm selling motorized wheelchairs had given him enough experience to be accepted as a field salesperson for a line of intravenous needles and supplies. The pay was better, and he could afford to trade up to a newer model BMW. A red one with leather seats and a comprehensive set of options. He also traded up on girlfriends. Gone was Melody, a sweet freckled bank teller who he had wowed with his city smarts and his previous BMW. The new lady of his life was Eva, a blonde pharmaceutical sales representative who he had met during training. She was the sporty and exciting type that could outsell most of the people on her team, and wasn't shy to rub their noses in her skills and performance.
Today had started off well, he made good time to his first call, an obstetrics practice whose office manager plied him with homemade muffins and coffee, and placed an order for twenty birthing kits, and ten boxes of nitrile examination gloves. His next three stops were frustrating. They each gladly accepted his offer to inventory their supplies, listened carefully to his pitch on the current high profit "special", and then asked him what Dr. Patel had said about his featured product. First Dr. Paulson, a tall grey man whose voice quavered when he spoke in slow clipped sentences. Guy had mistaken the voice to imply indecision, and reiterated the advantages of the new needles, and how soon the special prices would return to normal. Paulson was suddenly adamant and immovable. "Call again when you have the concurrence of Patel," he said, herding Guy firmly to the door, and shutting it resolutely behind him. The next call followed a similar pattern. Dr. Schmitz had just finished surgery for the morning, and had done five hernia repairs since she started at seven. She was ravenous, and was listening to Guys sales pitch while wolfing down a cheese and ham sandwich. Schmitz took off a tie-died purple headscarf, revealing greying hair tied tightly back in a bun. She pointed at his brochure with the corner of a sandwich. "You say these suture kits are dissolving?" He nodded confidently, and was about to do a trial close with a “... and how many would you like me to get for you?", but was cut short before he got to the end of "how". "Yes, yes, but what did Patel say?” Schmitz finished her ham and cheese, and brushed Guy and his brochure aside. She leaned past him, and retrieved a scone. "Well, come back when you have Patel's thumbs up." Schmitz pushed her way past him to get to her recorder, and their conversation was over.
Emily looked at the medical representative, and a half smile flickered across her face. She had sharply rebuffed his transparent offer to "inventory" her stores. She needed a rank amateur loose in her storeroom like she needed a hernia, she had thought to herself. She was, however, vaguely curious about any current specials. "New range of intravenous needles, you say?" Emily harbored a deep hatred for salespeople in general, but medical reps in particular. The smart suits and over-confident air irritated her, the flashy cars angered her, and the fancy slip-on shoes revolted her - she relished every opportunity to cause sales reps’ some anguish. She gestured for him to sit, and pointed to what appeared to be an antique wooden dining chair, the kind made by people who thought sitting to be slothful, and bought by people who felt a need to do penance at mealtimes. It was hard, and uncomfortable, and had been specially purchased by Emily from a thrift store, and lovingly assembled with her own hands. She took her time ordering office materials, and watched Guy for any signs of nodding off. Guy didn't sleep, but did settle into a daydream, replaying his last meeting with Eva, he sighed softly.
"NEXT" Emily yelled at him suddenly, startling him and causing him to jerk upright in the antique chair. The chair immediately swayed and shed a leg. Guy tumbled to the floor, his leather briefcase skittered across the teak floorboards, and he landed in a convulsing and untidy heap on the groaning wooden floor. "Third door on the right opposite the cloak room, knock loudly so Dr. Patel can hear you," she barked at him. Leaning over her desk, Emily glared at him, "... and stop fooling around with the furniture!"
Having found the washroom, Guy turned sharply to his right, only to see a storage closet in front of him. "The NEXT door", came Emily's voice from down the passage. "What!", Dr. Patel shouted when he knocked loudly. She briefly wondered to herself why these arrogant salespeople always banged on her door. She always left it open for them, but they insisted on jarring her by banging on the door. It made her irritable. Dr. Patel pursed her lips at him, “What is the product you are bringing to my attention?” She held up a hand as he slid into his prepared pitch, “are you asserting all that is in this brochure?”, and had used a green highlighter to mark out each claim of fact in the brochure he had provided. “Sharper tip and easier insertion, yes?”, she peered at him, waiting for confirmation. “… hardened tip?”, “less bruising?” Ptael listed the eight claims that she felt were clinically relevant, and discarded the rest. “Now, let us operationalize and quantify these claims, yes?” Patel had references at hand of needle insertion force, sharpness indices, and bruising scales, and set about measuring them.
Guy sat at a slightly sticky table in the Holiday Inn bar. It was made of dark gray wood, with a small chip knocked loose from the edge facing Guy. He felt a bit like that himself, a small but noticeable chip knocked from his normal cocky self. He was nursing a beer, a dented ego, and two aching arms. The Holiday Inn was the stopover of choice for many of the sales travelers in the region, so it was common to see the same faces, and share familiar stories. Crisscrossing the region, many of them had already met Guy. "So, meet Patel yet?" one of the pharma reps smirked at him, knowing quite well from the deflated figure cast by Guy that he had indeed met Dr. Patel. "So how did it go?" asked a redhead from the doorway as more salespeople started gathering after a long day of smiling and fawning and dealing. "Sell her a bunch, honey?" she smiled.
"What were you flogging" she asked, sitting down at the little table, "suppositories?" A roar of laughter swelled from the small gathering. News of a newbie in the area had quickly spread through the grapevine, across mobile phones, texts, emails, and passing chatter as paths crisscrossed, and slowly converged on one of the few roosting places in the area. After several minutes of banter, jokes, and questions, eventually Guy relented. "Needles," he said, clearing his throat, "IV needles." A sharp intake of breath, and then a chorus of "show us." Guy reluctantly took off his jacket, and rolled up one sleeve to a rousing cheer from the assembled crowd, to show them where Dr. Patel had tested out twenty-four needles. She had carefully documented several key performance factors, and viewed each needle under a microscope before and after use. She had compared his bruising and inflammation to a set of images, and at the end, had told him in polite but firm terms that his needles were no better than the norm, and if he wanted the clinic to order them, he would have to reduce his price by 58.3%
Soon more Patel stories were being told about how she made sales contingent on proving their products, usually on themselves. Guy began to feel not quite good, but at least less bad. One rep in a navy blue jacket nodded at him, "my first time was a colonoscopy prep kit, and she timed me." The Patel effect ultimately led to reps becoming more careful about what they promised, and being very careful to state only what they could prove with data or which they were prepared to demonstrate on themselves. It may indeed have led to fewer breakthrough treatments reaching the patients as quickly, but it most certainly resulted in them avoiding time-wasting treatments. Guy shifted emphasis on safer supplies – nitrile gloves, masks, and hand-cleaner – and was very careful to make no claims that the solution used was “eye safe”, in case Dr. Patel insisted on seeing it for herself.
July 14, 2025
Mortimer visits the doctor
Mortimer Percival Grenfell was what in an earlier age might have been termed, portly. His family doctor clicked her tongue at him at every checkup. "BMI, Mister Grenfell, is not a sort of dish", she would scold in her slightly sing-song Pakistani accent, and she would wag a stern finger from side to side. Mortimer's unenthusiastic response would usually be something along the lines of "I am just big boned", and he would steel himself for what was inevitably to follow. "Your tummy isn't a bone, you know," Doctor Patel would say emphatically, looking over her bifocals at the now fidgeting patient. "Neither," she would say with emphasis, her slender index finger raised, "is your buttock, Mister Grenfell. Adipose, not bone, is what's driving your BMI beyond optimal limits." Dr. Patel would pointedly gesture towards the slightly dog-eared BMI chart on the wall behind him. The chart was tacked above a collection of vintage medical books and instruments laid out almost ceremonially on a sturdy but aging wooden bookcase. The finger would then point directly at his midriff, "You have an overabundance of adipose!"
A screaming and hotly swollen ankle was what had brought Mortimer to the doctor, that grey and drizzly morning, years before. It had been uncomfortable all the previous evening, but was a big red pulsing lump of agony when he stepped out of bed in the morning. His left foot was a scorching beetroot of anger that throbbed and sparked with sharp edges of pain that shrieked up his leg at every movement. All the way to the consulting rooms of Dr.Giannis Giannopolis, Mortimer was in agony. Dr. Giannopolis had been in the Grenfell family, so to speak, for decades. Giannopolis was an elderly but exuberant man, who drank, smoked, and womanized. On this particularly leaden and miserable day, when the streets were slippery and even the pigeons on the square were huddled miserably together, Dr. Giannoplois was unavailable. In fact, as would come to light in the weeks to follow, Dr. Giannopolis had left the country with his nurse, leaving behind several angry creditors, and the nurse's bemused and abandoned husband.
Emily, the ancient and gleefully cantankerous receptionist and general office manager, had stared at Mortimer through spectacles that were scratched and wobbly. "Not here," she said flatly, folding her arms over a thin blue jumper, "you can't see him". She went back to filling in an order for cotton swabs. She had planned her order meticulously to be as inconvenient to the supplier as humanly possible. Emily had been a logistician for the military until retirement, and used this expert knowledge to make life a misery for the suppliers. She had a similar if slightly more humane approach to patients. She generally had it in for anyone who interrupted her ordering process, arrived without an appointment, or hovered around her desk. Mortimer was winning the jackpot by doing all three.
"Well, how about later?", he queried. Emily laboriously opened the dusty and cracked appointment book, and leafed to the current day. She consulted the page, muttered a bit, and then peered up at Mortimer.
"This afternoon?"
"Yes, yes, fine," said Mortimer in exasperated tones.
"No," she answered, shutting the book firmly, "Nothing available this afternoon."
"Tomorrow then?", Mortimer asked, biting back an oath. Emily peered at him coldly, and slowly reopened the book.
"Morning?", she asked, after finding the page and consulting it for several seconds. "Morning will be fine," Mortimer heaved a sigh of relief.
"No," she said, shutting it again, "he's not here in the morning."
Exasperated, Mortimer took a deep breath and asked in his most polite tone, "and when are you expecting him to be available again?"
Emily stared straight at Mortimer, and delivered her sucker-punch.
"Not for several months, I shouldn't think."
Mortimer's mouth dropped open and he looked somewhat like a mud fish. A somewhat surprised and unhappy one.
"... if ever," Emily continued before he could break out of his fishy trance.
"You could try Dr. Patel though," she looked satisfied. "Shall I look?"
Mortimer was too stunned, too frustrated, and in too much pain to even answer. He nodded weakly.
Emily opened the book laboriously, oozing satisfaction.
"Tomorrow morning?", she queried.
Mortimer took a deep breath, "Yes, please, tomorrow morning would be very nice, thank you."
"No, nothing tomorrow morning", and before Mortimer could let out the scream he felt welling up in his chest, Emily cut him short.
"Dr. Patel could see you now though," Emily announced with a grim but satisfied smile, "If you like, that is. Third door on the right, opposite the cloak room."
Emily closed the book sharply, and returned to her ordering with a finality that made it clear that no further discussion would be possible.
Mortimer had shuffled off as rapidly as he could, and having found the washroom, turned sharply to his right, only to see a storage closet in front of him.
"The NEXT door, “came Emily's voice from down the passage. "Go in and sit down."
Mortimer found the room, and his impression was that this room was more an annex to the broom closet than what a doctor's consulting room should look like. There was a waist-high bookcase with Leopardwood doors and a dark Neem wood top and frame. Neem trees have many medicinal and culinary purposes, but it was the instruments and books that rooted Mortimer to the ground when he first entered the consulting room. A sense of panic gripped his mind, and he surveyed the medical books with their cracked and tattered leather covers. Most seemed to be from the late 1800's, and at least one would have looked at home on a British warship of the 1600s. This specific volume was laid open at a section describing the procurement and use of medicinal leeches. A pewter box shaped somewhat like a large hip-flask with a flat perforated lid for transporting leeches was illustrated. "God help me" muttered Mortimer to himself, "he's a quack!"
He stood looking at the illustrations in the ancient medical book, and felt a sense of panic.
He gingerly picked up a large bone saw from the display, and looked aghast at its bent and missing teeth. He burst out, "He is a bloody quack, this Patel guy is a quack!"
"She" came a woman's voice from behind him, "and while certainly nonconformist at times, I disagree strongly with any accusation of quackery, Mr. Grenfell."
Dr. Patel was a tall slim woman in her mid-fifties, he judged, dressed in a colorful green and gold sari, topped with a white lab coat. She looked at him sternly, holding out her right hand, palm down, “Sit!" Mortimer sat down heavily, adding acute embarrassment to his growing list of conflicting emotions.
Other than a few answers to her sequence of ever-more specific questions as she examined him, Mortimer was relieved to have to say very little.
"I will need to collect some fluids," Dr. Patel explained, fetching a slightly battered steel box from a wooden cabinet behind her desk. She laid it on the green leather surface of the desk, and flipped open the slightly creaking lid, and elicited a sharp gasp from Mortimer. In front of him was a fat glass-barreled syringe with an impressively thick fixed needle. The three nickel-plated brass loops attached to the barrel and wide thumb loop on the plunger suggested physical force, and the sturdy needle looked like it belonged more in a bovine laboratory than a general practitioner’s surgery. Mortimer winced noticeably and unconsciously grasped the sturdy armrests. He had started to rise out of his seat, when Dr. Patel lifted the top tray with the syringe clear, revealing a layer of modern and sterile evacuated collection tubes, and modern color-coded needles in sterile packs.
"God, I thought you were going to ...," Mortimer burst out. Dr. Patel clicked her tongue at him and selected a needle. "No, Mr. Grenfell, have no fear in that regard. I am going to draw some of the synovial fluid from your ankle." She explained. "We must rule out various forms of arthritis including rheumatoid and septic arthritis, cellulitis, and nephrolithiasis."
"We will be looking for a very irritating compound by the name of monosodium urate in the lubricating fluid in your joint."
After expertly drawing fluid from inside his ankle joint, some blood from his arm, and coaxing him to produce a urine sample, Dr. Patel sat on a chair next to him and began in an unhurried and kindly tone.
"I must run some tests, Mr. Grenfell, but I am very confident already that it is gout that is chewing your foot right now."
Mortimer opened his mouth to object, but she held up her hand.
"Yes, I understand, you think this is an ailment of dotage, of fat old men in their country clubs."
"This is a misapprehension" she continued, "It can strike at many ages, and in your case, right this very day."
"We are going to solve this misery in three steps"
"I will do most of the first step - stabilizing the acute attack"
"We will together address the prevention of further medium-term attacks. I will work out a prophylaxis, and you" she looked him in the eye "will comply with it"
"The third step is mostly yours," she put a hand on his shoulder, "and requires exercise, increased water intake, and some dietary restrictions."
"If you shall fail" she said getting up and walking to a large wooden cupboard behind him, "your future will be this" Dr. Patel held out a skeletal hand and forearm, the joints and finger bones twisted and bulging. "It will not be pretty, it will not be enjoyable, it will not be quick"
"But, it will be certain".
She walked around to her chair on the other side of the desk and picked up her prescription pad. "Shall we do this thing?" she asked him.
That had been his first session with Dr. Patel, one which saved him from untold misery, set his course for the rest of his life, and started what was to become a close friendship over many years. It also started them on an adventure that would put both of their lives in peril.
A screaming and hotly swollen ankle was what had brought Mortimer to the doctor, that grey and drizzly morning, years before. It had been uncomfortable all the previous evening, but was a big red pulsing lump of agony when he stepped out of bed in the morning. His left foot was a scorching beetroot of anger that throbbed and sparked with sharp edges of pain that shrieked up his leg at every movement. All the way to the consulting rooms of Dr.Giannis Giannopolis, Mortimer was in agony. Dr. Giannopolis had been in the Grenfell family, so to speak, for decades. Giannopolis was an elderly but exuberant man, who drank, smoked, and womanized. On this particularly leaden and miserable day, when the streets were slippery and even the pigeons on the square were huddled miserably together, Dr. Giannoplois was unavailable. In fact, as would come to light in the weeks to follow, Dr. Giannopolis had left the country with his nurse, leaving behind several angry creditors, and the nurse's bemused and abandoned husband.
Emily, the ancient and gleefully cantankerous receptionist and general office manager, had stared at Mortimer through spectacles that were scratched and wobbly. "Not here," she said flatly, folding her arms over a thin blue jumper, "you can't see him". She went back to filling in an order for cotton swabs. She had planned her order meticulously to be as inconvenient to the supplier as humanly possible. Emily had been a logistician for the military until retirement, and used this expert knowledge to make life a misery for the suppliers. She had a similar if slightly more humane approach to patients. She generally had it in for anyone who interrupted her ordering process, arrived without an appointment, or hovered around her desk. Mortimer was winning the jackpot by doing all three.
"Well, how about later?", he queried. Emily laboriously opened the dusty and cracked appointment book, and leafed to the current day. She consulted the page, muttered a bit, and then peered up at Mortimer.
"This afternoon?"
"Yes, yes, fine," said Mortimer in exasperated tones.
"No," she answered, shutting the book firmly, "Nothing available this afternoon."
"Tomorrow then?", Mortimer asked, biting back an oath. Emily peered at him coldly, and slowly reopened the book.
"Morning?", she asked, after finding the page and consulting it for several seconds. "Morning will be fine," Mortimer heaved a sigh of relief.
"No," she said, shutting it again, "he's not here in the morning."
Exasperated, Mortimer took a deep breath and asked in his most polite tone, "and when are you expecting him to be available again?"
Emily stared straight at Mortimer, and delivered her sucker-punch.
"Not for several months, I shouldn't think."
Mortimer's mouth dropped open and he looked somewhat like a mud fish. A somewhat surprised and unhappy one.
"... if ever," Emily continued before he could break out of his fishy trance.
"You could try Dr. Patel though," she looked satisfied. "Shall I look?"
Mortimer was too stunned, too frustrated, and in too much pain to even answer. He nodded weakly.
Emily opened the book laboriously, oozing satisfaction.
"Tomorrow morning?", she queried.
Mortimer took a deep breath, "Yes, please, tomorrow morning would be very nice, thank you."
"No, nothing tomorrow morning", and before Mortimer could let out the scream he felt welling up in his chest, Emily cut him short.
"Dr. Patel could see you now though," Emily announced with a grim but satisfied smile, "If you like, that is. Third door on the right, opposite the cloak room."
Emily closed the book sharply, and returned to her ordering with a finality that made it clear that no further discussion would be possible.
Mortimer had shuffled off as rapidly as he could, and having found the washroom, turned sharply to his right, only to see a storage closet in front of him.
"The NEXT door, “came Emily's voice from down the passage. "Go in and sit down."
Mortimer found the room, and his impression was that this room was more an annex to the broom closet than what a doctor's consulting room should look like. There was a waist-high bookcase with Leopardwood doors and a dark Neem wood top and frame. Neem trees have many medicinal and culinary purposes, but it was the instruments and books that rooted Mortimer to the ground when he first entered the consulting room. A sense of panic gripped his mind, and he surveyed the medical books with their cracked and tattered leather covers. Most seemed to be from the late 1800's, and at least one would have looked at home on a British warship of the 1600s. This specific volume was laid open at a section describing the procurement and use of medicinal leeches. A pewter box shaped somewhat like a large hip-flask with a flat perforated lid for transporting leeches was illustrated. "God help me" muttered Mortimer to himself, "he's a quack!"
He stood looking at the illustrations in the ancient medical book, and felt a sense of panic.
He gingerly picked up a large bone saw from the display, and looked aghast at its bent and missing teeth. He burst out, "He is a bloody quack, this Patel guy is a quack!"
"She" came a woman's voice from behind him, "and while certainly nonconformist at times, I disagree strongly with any accusation of quackery, Mr. Grenfell."
Dr. Patel was a tall slim woman in her mid-fifties, he judged, dressed in a colorful green and gold sari, topped with a white lab coat. She looked at him sternly, holding out her right hand, palm down, “Sit!" Mortimer sat down heavily, adding acute embarrassment to his growing list of conflicting emotions.
Other than a few answers to her sequence of ever-more specific questions as she examined him, Mortimer was relieved to have to say very little.
"I will need to collect some fluids," Dr. Patel explained, fetching a slightly battered steel box from a wooden cabinet behind her desk. She laid it on the green leather surface of the desk, and flipped open the slightly creaking lid, and elicited a sharp gasp from Mortimer. In front of him was a fat glass-barreled syringe with an impressively thick fixed needle. The three nickel-plated brass loops attached to the barrel and wide thumb loop on the plunger suggested physical force, and the sturdy needle looked like it belonged more in a bovine laboratory than a general practitioner’s surgery. Mortimer winced noticeably and unconsciously grasped the sturdy armrests. He had started to rise out of his seat, when Dr. Patel lifted the top tray with the syringe clear, revealing a layer of modern and sterile evacuated collection tubes, and modern color-coded needles in sterile packs.
"God, I thought you were going to ...," Mortimer burst out. Dr. Patel clicked her tongue at him and selected a needle. "No, Mr. Grenfell, have no fear in that regard. I am going to draw some of the synovial fluid from your ankle." She explained. "We must rule out various forms of arthritis including rheumatoid and septic arthritis, cellulitis, and nephrolithiasis."
"We will be looking for a very irritating compound by the name of monosodium urate in the lubricating fluid in your joint."
After expertly drawing fluid from inside his ankle joint, some blood from his arm, and coaxing him to produce a urine sample, Dr. Patel sat on a chair next to him and began in an unhurried and kindly tone.
"I must run some tests, Mr. Grenfell, but I am very confident already that it is gout that is chewing your foot right now."
Mortimer opened his mouth to object, but she held up her hand.
"Yes, I understand, you think this is an ailment of dotage, of fat old men in their country clubs."
"This is a misapprehension" she continued, "It can strike at many ages, and in your case, right this very day."
"We are going to solve this misery in three steps"
"I will do most of the first step - stabilizing the acute attack"
"We will together address the prevention of further medium-term attacks. I will work out a prophylaxis, and you" she looked him in the eye "will comply with it"
"The third step is mostly yours," she put a hand on his shoulder, "and requires exercise, increased water intake, and some dietary restrictions."
"If you shall fail" she said getting up and walking to a large wooden cupboard behind him, "your future will be this" Dr. Patel held out a skeletal hand and forearm, the joints and finger bones twisted and bulging. "It will not be pretty, it will not be enjoyable, it will not be quick"
"But, it will be certain".
She walked around to her chair on the other side of the desk and picked up her prescription pad. "Shall we do this thing?" she asked him.
That had been his first session with Dr. Patel, one which saved him from untold misery, set his course for the rest of his life, and started what was to become a close friendship over many years. It also started them on an adventure that would put both of their lives in peril.
July 8, 2025
Claudia and The Dark Forrest Gang
Finch, Chili, and Claudia were a tight team. Two of them were clever ponies, and one was a brave girl with blond hair and an eagle eye. Finch was called a "Barbie pony" because of the way the blond coat turned gold in the summer sunlight. Finch was pretty, and knew it. Chili was the most curious pony you have ever seen, often got up to mischief, and could never stay still - always checking people's bags, pockets, or baskets in case there was something interesting to see.
Claudia often rode Finch and Chili along the boundary road of the Dark Forrest, and sometimes took one of the narrow twisting paths that looped through the tall trees. Sometimes she took those paths to get to a stream to water the ponies, sometimes because the mist and the birdsong drifting across the Dark Forrest were just so thrilling, and sometimes because of something unexpected. Something unexpected did happen, and was the start of an adventure.
While she was standing in line at the post office, Claudia heard two of the Church ladies talking about strange goings-on in the Dark Forrest. One was saying how rude people were riding bikes too fast down the path that passed between her cottage and the forest, and were startling her geese. The other lady said how she heard strange sounds in the dead of night - Sounds like a giant bee swarm that came from the forest and hummed and buzzed right over her roof. They were both sure that it must be teenagers drinking and playing silly games.
That night, after saying good night to Finch and Chili, Mum and Dad, her sister and brother, and the dogs, Claudia turned off her bedroom light, and went to open her curtains. Suddenly remembering what the Church ladies had said, Claudia peered out into the darkness, and let out a quiet little yelp of surprise. Out beyond the garden, somewhere in the Dark Forrest, there was a red light blinking in the distance. She stared at it for a while, moving her head from side to side to see if it was a small dim light somewhere close, or a bigger and brighter light further away. She wondered how she could record where the light was, so she could find it again in the daytime. Claudia had a plan.
She took apart two disposable pens that were in her schoolbag, and placed one of the empty tubes at the very left of her window sill. She sighted through the tube until she was seeing the pulsing red light through it. She fixed the tube into place with a little ball of hardened saddle wax. Then she did the same with the other tube at the far right of the window sill. Claudia went to bed, but could hardly sleep she was so excited about what she might find in the morning light.
Next morning, as soon as the sun was up, Claudia sighted through them again to see where they were pointing, and using her school protractor, she measured the angle of each to the window frame, and measured the distance between the two tubes with a ruler. Then she took her compass from a hiking kit she got for Christmas last year, and took a bearing to about where the tubes were pointing. After breakfast, she showed her dad a sketch of a triangle she had drawn with the distance between the barrels as the base. Dad was good as sums like that, and using the trigonometry functions in his work calculator, he figured out the length from the base to where the two sides joined at the apex. Claudia now knew where the light was, and how far from the house it might have been.
After her chores, Claudia took Finch and Chili for a trot along the edge of the Dark Forrest, and then walked them through the trees on the compass bearing she had taken from the bedroom window. When she reached the distance that Dad had calculated, she walked in little circles, looking at the trees, on the ground, in the bushes, for anything that might explain the strange light. She saw a little clearing among the trees, but it was Finch who found something. Always interested in the chance of finding something to nibble, Finch had found a little black plastic tube with a spike stuck in the ground. Claudia examined it and took some photos before putting it back, and then spotted two more, about a pony-length apart in a triangle. She was about to go, when Chili let her know that there was another interesting something. Chili was pawing the ground by some bushes under a tall tree and calling her over with a soft whinny. Chili had found something very odd. It was foreign money, and it smelled very fresh. Even stranger, the ink had run a bit where Chili had licked it. Sure that they had found a secret, Claudia scooted back home.
During lunch, she asked Mum about the pictures she had taken of the black plastic tube things. Mum thought for a bit, and then suggested that they were probably GPS beacons used to mark places. She had seen some farmers use them to mark boundaries for different crops. Claudia borrowed two camera traps that Mum used for security at the stables, and to watch for foxes, and then she Googled what it might mean if you found money and the ink smeared when it was licked. What she found was so exciting, she could barely wait to take the dogs for a walk. When she got to the clearing with the dogs, Claudia hid the two camera traps, made sure they were in silent mode, and dashed back home and an eager wait for night time.
The next morning, she took Finch back to the clearing in the Dark Forrest, and downloaded the camera trap images with her phone. Flipping through them, her mouth dropped open - there were clear pictures of a big drone landing with a box, and then taking off without it. The next time something triggered the motion detectors on the camera traps, it was a man on a quad bike who grabbed the box, fumbled it onto the bike, and left. She was so engrossed in the pictures, and zooming to look at the face of the man fumbling the box, that she barely noticed the sound of two quad bikes coming towards the clearing. When she realized the danger, the bikes were already on the path to the clearing. Claudia mounted Finch as fast as she could, but in her haste, one stirrup had twisted, and by the time she got her foot in properly, the bikes were in the clearing. "Hey you!" one of them yelled, and the other shouted "Get her!"
Claudia swept Finch around and sped through the trees. The bikes roared down the path after her. They tried to cut her off, but Claudia knew the paths like her times table, and she had memorized every loop in the paths, every ditch, and every turn. They raced down a straight section, the bikes were catching up fast, and the distance between them was shrinking rapidly. Claudia could smell the hot engines behind her, and she knew she had very little time left. Whispering to Finch, Claudia veered sharply down a cut path to the right, and was ready to jump Finch over the fallen oak trunk she knew was lying across the path. She had just cleared it when the bikes crashed into the massive trunk with a loud crunch of twisting metal, tearing plastic, and breaking glass. Claudia hurtled through the trees, got to the main path, and galloped out of the Dark Forrest and into the village beyond.
When the police had rounded up the two quad bike riders, the news people had come and gone, and things were almost back to normal, a detective came to visit with an invitation. A week later, in their best jackets, hair brushed, and shoes polished, Claudia and the ponies were given an award for their part in bringing down a dangerous gang of counterfeiters.
Claudia often rode Finch and Chili along the boundary road of the Dark Forrest, and sometimes took one of the narrow twisting paths that looped through the tall trees. Sometimes she took those paths to get to a stream to water the ponies, sometimes because the mist and the birdsong drifting across the Dark Forrest were just so thrilling, and sometimes because of something unexpected. Something unexpected did happen, and was the start of an adventure.
While she was standing in line at the post office, Claudia heard two of the Church ladies talking about strange goings-on in the Dark Forrest. One was saying how rude people were riding bikes too fast down the path that passed between her cottage and the forest, and were startling her geese. The other lady said how she heard strange sounds in the dead of night - Sounds like a giant bee swarm that came from the forest and hummed and buzzed right over her roof. They were both sure that it must be teenagers drinking and playing silly games.
That night, after saying good night to Finch and Chili, Mum and Dad, her sister and brother, and the dogs, Claudia turned off her bedroom light, and went to open her curtains. Suddenly remembering what the Church ladies had said, Claudia peered out into the darkness, and let out a quiet little yelp of surprise. Out beyond the garden, somewhere in the Dark Forrest, there was a red light blinking in the distance. She stared at it for a while, moving her head from side to side to see if it was a small dim light somewhere close, or a bigger and brighter light further away. She wondered how she could record where the light was, so she could find it again in the daytime. Claudia had a plan.
She took apart two disposable pens that were in her schoolbag, and placed one of the empty tubes at the very left of her window sill. She sighted through the tube until she was seeing the pulsing red light through it. She fixed the tube into place with a little ball of hardened saddle wax. Then she did the same with the other tube at the far right of the window sill. Claudia went to bed, but could hardly sleep she was so excited about what she might find in the morning light.
Next morning, as soon as the sun was up, Claudia sighted through them again to see where they were pointing, and using her school protractor, she measured the angle of each to the window frame, and measured the distance between the two tubes with a ruler. Then she took her compass from a hiking kit she got for Christmas last year, and took a bearing to about where the tubes were pointing. After breakfast, she showed her dad a sketch of a triangle she had drawn with the distance between the barrels as the base. Dad was good as sums like that, and using the trigonometry functions in his work calculator, he figured out the length from the base to where the two sides joined at the apex. Claudia now knew where the light was, and how far from the house it might have been.
After her chores, Claudia took Finch and Chili for a trot along the edge of the Dark Forrest, and then walked them through the trees on the compass bearing she had taken from the bedroom window. When she reached the distance that Dad had calculated, she walked in little circles, looking at the trees, on the ground, in the bushes, for anything that might explain the strange light. She saw a little clearing among the trees, but it was Finch who found something. Always interested in the chance of finding something to nibble, Finch had found a little black plastic tube with a spike stuck in the ground. Claudia examined it and took some photos before putting it back, and then spotted two more, about a pony-length apart in a triangle. She was about to go, when Chili let her know that there was another interesting something. Chili was pawing the ground by some bushes under a tall tree and calling her over with a soft whinny. Chili had found something very odd. It was foreign money, and it smelled very fresh. Even stranger, the ink had run a bit where Chili had licked it. Sure that they had found a secret, Claudia scooted back home.
During lunch, she asked Mum about the pictures she had taken of the black plastic tube things. Mum thought for a bit, and then suggested that they were probably GPS beacons used to mark places. She had seen some farmers use them to mark boundaries for different crops. Claudia borrowed two camera traps that Mum used for security at the stables, and to watch for foxes, and then she Googled what it might mean if you found money and the ink smeared when it was licked. What she found was so exciting, she could barely wait to take the dogs for a walk. When she got to the clearing with the dogs, Claudia hid the two camera traps, made sure they were in silent mode, and dashed back home and an eager wait for night time.
The next morning, she took Finch back to the clearing in the Dark Forrest, and downloaded the camera trap images with her phone. Flipping through them, her mouth dropped open - there were clear pictures of a big drone landing with a box, and then taking off without it. The next time something triggered the motion detectors on the camera traps, it was a man on a quad bike who grabbed the box, fumbled it onto the bike, and left. She was so engrossed in the pictures, and zooming to look at the face of the man fumbling the box, that she barely noticed the sound of two quad bikes coming towards the clearing. When she realized the danger, the bikes were already on the path to the clearing. Claudia mounted Finch as fast as she could, but in her haste, one stirrup had twisted, and by the time she got her foot in properly, the bikes were in the clearing. "Hey you!" one of them yelled, and the other shouted "Get her!"
Claudia swept Finch around and sped through the trees. The bikes roared down the path after her. They tried to cut her off, but Claudia knew the paths like her times table, and she had memorized every loop in the paths, every ditch, and every turn. They raced down a straight section, the bikes were catching up fast, and the distance between them was shrinking rapidly. Claudia could smell the hot engines behind her, and she knew she had very little time left. Whispering to Finch, Claudia veered sharply down a cut path to the right, and was ready to jump Finch over the fallen oak trunk she knew was lying across the path. She had just cleared it when the bikes crashed into the massive trunk with a loud crunch of twisting metal, tearing plastic, and breaking glass. Claudia hurtled through the trees, got to the main path, and galloped out of the Dark Forrest and into the village beyond.
When the police had rounded up the two quad bike riders, the news people had come and gone, and things were almost back to normal, a detective came to visit with an invitation. A week later, in their best jackets, hair brushed, and shoes polished, Claudia and the ponies were given an award for their part in bringing down a dangerous gang of counterfeiters.
June 17, 2025
Amy's Story - The Debater
I told him it would get him killed, but he didn't listen. He persisted, and just wouldn't change his ways, and was so entrenched in his habit that it had become part of his soul. I warned him, coached him, even begged him to quit. I offered him a dozen alternative ways, a score of exits from this path, but he persisted, and now he is dead. I am Dr. Amy, I'm a psychologist, writer, author, and speaker, and this is my story.
I met Bruce on the college debate team, and thought him a pompous ass the moment I laid eyes on him. He was debating my friend Anne, and after being awarded the debate by the judges, was an overbearing winner and he cracked a joke about "natural male advantages”. We had been natural adversaries from the start - he was an institutionalist, I was more an anarchist, I liked Tab, he preferred Pepsi, he drove a new BMW, and I rode a bicycle. The rapid exchanges during the debates often pitted us against each other and we each vied to be the one that could squeeze the most points and facts into our allotted time, and we each tried to outdo the other in speed of delivery. The debates often spilled over into heated discussions afterwards, and then one day in the middle of arguing in the college cafeteria about whether smoking was a public health hazard or personal preference, I leaned in and kissed him. I know it was cliche and the "enemies to lovers" trope is just so tired, but I was wound up, needed to pee, and desperate to shut him up. It certainly worked like a magic spell - it took the words right out of his mouth and while he was just sitting there stunned and confused, I jumped up and scooted to the restroom. It became a sort of foreplay, and some of our best sex was immediately after or even during a really intense argument. I always figured it would mellow into something more adult, but we never seemed to get out of that groove.
Fast-forward 14 years and a couple of children later, and I don’t have the fire in me anymore to debate the Oxford comma, whether or not a particular politician is a fascist, or if the ending of "Killing Eve“ was better in the book. Every time I state a simple opinion, he tries to engage in a debate, but he goes from zero to 100 in a second and just never actually listens to my opinion. I have taken to letting him "win” these stupid debates just to shut him up - I don’t want to hear it anymore. He gets frustrated when I do this and always argues that it’s what we always used to do and is "our thing." But that's also a "debate" that I just don't have the energy to do. My priorities have changed and even if it was “our thing", it sure as shit is not mine. I’m calmer than I used to be, and most of my attention is focused on our kids and my patients. I’m tired of the constant arguing, and although I know he enjoys it, I’m just not in that place anymore.
To make things worse, we ended up in the same workplace. I joined the neurosurgery team at St. Andrew's, and he became the IT Director. There he found a whole new terrain for being argumentative, and he infuriated staff and suppliers alike. He was always with the pithy counter to every statement and parried every question with another. Many people avoided him, but occasionally he crossed paths with patients and families too. He did somewhat moderate his behavior with them, but one day he had a snappy reply to a patient of mine, and it got very tricky. Paranoid people don't often respond well to being challenged with clever riddles or having their attempts to communicate frustrated by someone apparently taking pleasure out of making them look foolish. This is especially true when they are also psychopaths. It took a lot of talking to convince the patient that Bruce didn't mean to insult her, and that murdering him was not in her best interests especially now that she had earned back TV privileges. My unit manager had banned him, and, of course, this had led to a whole raft of dinner-time and bed-time debates between us.
The day it happened had started as one of those biting cold wet days on which I was really glad for an early morning conference call that I could do from the kitchen table in my fluffy dressing gown and rabbit slippers. He had to go in early, and we got into a debate about "tactical hoodies". I'm not sure why, and I was only trying to suggest he wear something warm and take his green jumper, but apparently the important thing was that it was "olive drab" and was a "tactical hoodie", not a "jumper". But that delayed him, so he left without it, and crabby. While I was waiting for my conference call, I was watching the news, and the weather gal said there was a warning for freezing fog and drizzle, and then high winds. I texted Bruce to warn him about it, and got back a snarky reply asking if it was "magic wind", and honestly, I just couldn't. It will live with me forever, but what flashed through my mind was "fuck off and die".
He had parked his CyberTruck between Chuck's Dodge Ram Powerwagon and Ethan's Ford Raptor. They say he probably slid on the slick concrete when he was closing the overly heavy Cybertruck door, and was knocked unconscious hitting his head on the steel doorframe. He didn't have the hoodie, and just lay on the concrete where spray from passing cars and drizzle could get him. I guess the wind would have been tunneling under the trucks that also blocked him from view. The medical examiner report said that by the time Chuck accidentally reversed his Ram over Bruce's head at lunchtime, hypothermia had already taken him away. I miss Bruce, and my life is still torn open and raw, and maybe I even miss the arguments sometimes. Just a little bit.
My name is Amy, I warned him, and that was my story.
~fin~
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I met Bruce on the college debate team, and thought him a pompous ass the moment I laid eyes on him. He was debating my friend Anne, and after being awarded the debate by the judges, was an overbearing winner and he cracked a joke about "natural male advantages”. We had been natural adversaries from the start - he was an institutionalist, I was more an anarchist, I liked Tab, he preferred Pepsi, he drove a new BMW, and I rode a bicycle. The rapid exchanges during the debates often pitted us against each other and we each vied to be the one that could squeeze the most points and facts into our allotted time, and we each tried to outdo the other in speed of delivery. The debates often spilled over into heated discussions afterwards, and then one day in the middle of arguing in the college cafeteria about whether smoking was a public health hazard or personal preference, I leaned in and kissed him. I know it was cliche and the "enemies to lovers" trope is just so tired, but I was wound up, needed to pee, and desperate to shut him up. It certainly worked like a magic spell - it took the words right out of his mouth and while he was just sitting there stunned and confused, I jumped up and scooted to the restroom. It became a sort of foreplay, and some of our best sex was immediately after or even during a really intense argument. I always figured it would mellow into something more adult, but we never seemed to get out of that groove.
Fast-forward 14 years and a couple of children later, and I don’t have the fire in me anymore to debate the Oxford comma, whether or not a particular politician is a fascist, or if the ending of "Killing Eve“ was better in the book. Every time I state a simple opinion, he tries to engage in a debate, but he goes from zero to 100 in a second and just never actually listens to my opinion. I have taken to letting him "win” these stupid debates just to shut him up - I don’t want to hear it anymore. He gets frustrated when I do this and always argues that it’s what we always used to do and is "our thing." But that's also a "debate" that I just don't have the energy to do. My priorities have changed and even if it was “our thing", it sure as shit is not mine. I’m calmer than I used to be, and most of my attention is focused on our kids and my patients. I’m tired of the constant arguing, and although I know he enjoys it, I’m just not in that place anymore.
To make things worse, we ended up in the same workplace. I joined the neurosurgery team at St. Andrew's, and he became the IT Director. There he found a whole new terrain for being argumentative, and he infuriated staff and suppliers alike. He was always with the pithy counter to every statement and parried every question with another. Many people avoided him, but occasionally he crossed paths with patients and families too. He did somewhat moderate his behavior with them, but one day he had a snappy reply to a patient of mine, and it got very tricky. Paranoid people don't often respond well to being challenged with clever riddles or having their attempts to communicate frustrated by someone apparently taking pleasure out of making them look foolish. This is especially true when they are also psychopaths. It took a lot of talking to convince the patient that Bruce didn't mean to insult her, and that murdering him was not in her best interests especially now that she had earned back TV privileges. My unit manager had banned him, and, of course, this had led to a whole raft of dinner-time and bed-time debates between us.
The day it happened had started as one of those biting cold wet days on which I was really glad for an early morning conference call that I could do from the kitchen table in my fluffy dressing gown and rabbit slippers. He had to go in early, and we got into a debate about "tactical hoodies". I'm not sure why, and I was only trying to suggest he wear something warm and take his green jumper, but apparently the important thing was that it was "olive drab" and was a "tactical hoodie", not a "jumper". But that delayed him, so he left without it, and crabby. While I was waiting for my conference call, I was watching the news, and the weather gal said there was a warning for freezing fog and drizzle, and then high winds. I texted Bruce to warn him about it, and got back a snarky reply asking if it was "magic wind", and honestly, I just couldn't. It will live with me forever, but what flashed through my mind was "fuck off and die".
He had parked his CyberTruck between Chuck's Dodge Ram Powerwagon and Ethan's Ford Raptor. They say he probably slid on the slick concrete when he was closing the overly heavy Cybertruck door, and was knocked unconscious hitting his head on the steel doorframe. He didn't have the hoodie, and just lay on the concrete where spray from passing cars and drizzle could get him. I guess the wind would have been tunneling under the trucks that also blocked him from view. The medical examiner report said that by the time Chuck accidentally reversed his Ram over Bruce's head at lunchtime, hypothermia had already taken him away. I miss Bruce, and my life is still torn open and raw, and maybe I even miss the arguments sometimes. Just a little bit.
My name is Amy, I warned him, and that was my story.
~fin~
If you enjoyed this short story, please consider signing up for my weekly email newsletter. In each, there is a link to a new free short story, and little insight into the writing life. Free ebooks will also be announced in the newsletter. https://hotmail.us16.list-manage.com/...
June 10, 2025
Beatrix and the Dead Trolls
Beatrix was not a conventionally attractive woman - she was overly skinny, her long black hair was a little mousy and unmanageable, and her skin was lumpy. She did not have the traditional standards of blinding white teeth, full bosom, and curves, and her brown eyes, lashes, and brows were functional rather than photogenic. Not many men or women found Beatrix attractive, but she had a very acute sense of those that did, and could spot them in an instant.
Where Beatrix perhaps underperformed in terms of traditional standards of beauty, she greatly overperformed in her senses and social awareness. She could spot a bully, a blowhard, or a bastard the moment they strode into view. Their swagger, pose, and movement betrayed them to her no matter how they had learned to camouflage what they were, and Beatrix could instantly spot their stink. Beatrix had a few extras in her body - she saw many more colors than 99.9% of humans, could hear tones and taste flavors hidden from the rest of us, and had a sense of smell that rivaled the Gambian Pouched Rat. She could smell a reply-guy at twenty paces.
Being wheelchair-bound, she was excluded from many things that other people took for granted, or to which there were physical barriers to participation. In her teens, twenties, and even thirties, she had merely accepted that lack of ramps, tables, or seating areas suitable for a wheelchair user didn't exist in many places. In her forties, as she reached the time of generativity in Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, she decided the fuck with that. Instead of reaching a flight of stairs and then just turning back, she would demand to see management, and then just point to the obstacle, and ask "well?". This proved more effective than she had expected, and besides a sense of retributive joy, sometimes, eventually, one day, a ramp would suddenly appear, or wheelchair-accessible tables would be installed. But physical barriers were not the only obstacle to be addressed.
Beatrix had found that life online as a woman with strong views, especially a woman living with a disability, and even more so a Black woman, was filled with Reply Guys. The online world teemed with them, it seemed, and being a consummate researcher, she collected data on the trolling, and plotted user names against the number of abusive posts over a period. The plot had a big bubble to the left, and a long flat tail stretching out to infinity. Just a small number of trolls, maybe a dozen, were responsible for the vast proportion of hostile and abusive posts, while many more did so only once. Beatrix started replying to those most virulent posters with the hashtag #chum. She stayed silent of whether she meant "a close friend" or "chopped fish, fish fluids, and other material thrown overboard as angling bait," and didn't generally reply to them, nor even engage with them at all. Beatrix considered the potential research on the topic, and started playing with the idea.
One of the three biggest of her "#chums" seemed to have figured out what she was doing, and doxed her. As someone who dealt with stigma and the abuse that disability often draws, she dealt with the online abuse by copious blocking, and told the security guy at work to be alert for pranksters trying to get to her. After someone had left a dead rat outside her apartment door with a poorly-disguised threat linked directly to the original #chum post, she confronted the influencer online, accused him of incitement to violence, and then asked what he was going to do about restoring public peace. Like many insecure bullies, he lashed out in a violent online rage, and made a death threat. She reported this, with screenshots, to the police, to his internet service provider, and to the social media platform.
The police said nothing had actually happened so they couldn't do anything about it, the ISP said that it was not something they could address, and the platform sent a fifteen-page form letter that boiled down to "meh".
The #chum guy just kept posting hate against her, seemingly in a rage-fueled doom-loop, and then suddenly he went quiet. For a day or so, there was radio silence, and looking at his profile, she could see that he had posted nothing in that time, and nor had he been on the platform at all. On day three of the silence, some of his active followers were asking about him, and then slowly, he slipped from even their range of interest. Beatrix was more persistent though, and after three weeks of his silence she tentatively matched him to a news article of a man in his early forties dying in a slip & fall accident in a parking garage. Having tripped on the stairs, he had apparently fallen sideways over the guardrail and plunged three stories. The link between the online person she knew, and the person in the news was by no means certain, but it was certainly an interesting possibility. But then it happened again.
The second-highest person on Beatrix' Pareto list also went quiet, and then also the third-highest. Following up, Beatrix could again tentatively tie #2 to a man who died in a mugging, and #3 was more definite, since he actually used his real name and the newspaper article that described him drowning in his bathtub mentioned the full name, location, and his aquarium and tropical fish he mentioned in social-media posts. Beatrix was intrigued and a little horrified. The odds seemed a little long. It seemed like a thing, but it could just be that very active trolls also had other things going on in their lives that increased their risks. As an epidemiologist with a flair for numbers, studying the trolls and their social networks was an interesting hobby, and she used some of those tools to visualize the trolls on a connected network of who was following whom and the nature of their exchanges. In that way, she could see the most influential trolls with the biggest networks were mainly connected via second- or third-degree contacts. She could even see herself in their network and the red color-coding of the connection lines, or arcs, showed up as red, meaning negative sentiment. Working out whether their deaths were unlikely, either singly or as a cluster, was far harder, but there were some clues. Firstly, one of her tools analyzed their posts for a list of hazards, and then calculated the 5-year risk of hospitalization and death. Another tool looked at risk probabilities by age, gender, and race/ethnicity by nine-digit ZIP+4 location codes. Using those two together was the tricky bit, and for that she sometimes called Barb, her friend in the actuarial department.
Barb looked at the three cases with interest, but had a big cautionary disclaimer. Three cases with odd numbers in a population of over three-hundred million, was just not unusual, and it would be very unusual if it didn't occur. That said, she pored over the cases anyway, and then painted a scenario. If someone was knocking them off, "which, I presume, is why you are interested?", Barb peered at Beatrix over her reading glasses, “then they are doing so rather cleverly, and one should expect more.” Barb paused and cleaned her glasses, "The killer is, in this scenario, switching methods. So, other than you and your view of them as nodes in a specific social network, there is very little to tie them together." Barb sipped her coffee, pushed away from her monitor, and walked over to her whiteboard. “Let's say you are partially right." She drew little blue circles representing the three people, and surrounded them with a big green dotted circle. "But let's say a pseudo-group of individuals are linked via some other criterion, and that someone is bumping them off." She drew little black crosses scattered around the green, "You would only see the ones that your criterion connected, and you wouldn't even know any of the bigger set existed," she peered down at Beatrix, "and would never know to even look for evidence of their deaths." Barb returned to her workstation. "However, even if you are wrong about the real criterion, you may still have correctly predicted the next few deaths." Beatrix looked a tiny bit shocked, "sorry, next few?", and frowned. "Oh sure," Barb said, and dug around in a stack of papers, rummaged through a draw in a battered old grey filing cabinet, and then lifted a pot plant, and pulled out a paper from a criminology journal from twelve years before, "um .., here it is. Median number of murders by a serial killer is eight.", she looked up and grinned. "So, let's assume someone is following the same method as you, and therefore arrives at the same criterion, then we can expect with ...", she peered at a graph, "... a 68% probability that there will be eight. So, who is next on your Pareto chart?"
Beatrix had updated, annotated, and tidied her chart, and sent it to Barb. Over the phone, Barb sounded enthusiastic, but also added another disclaimer. Since three deaths was insufficient to estimate the Takt time or periodicity, they wouldn't know if the next case was due in a day, week, a month, a year, or a decade. Also, if Beatrix' list was a subset, they wouldn't know how many others were being selected between each on her list. Luckily, the actual names of the next three on her list were known, so Beatrix set up an alert for any news items mentioning any of the three, as well as any keywords that might suggest death in social media that mentioned them. Lastly, she set up a different alert that would ping if any of them was quiet on social media longer than 5% of previous periods of absence. None of it was foolproof or perfect, but like most epidemiology, it was a good stab in the dark.
She didn't have to wait too long. Three days later, a news article described the accidental overdose of a person with the same names as her #4. A day later, there were twelve posts on social media that he had OD'd, and two days later her alert said that he was unusually quiet given past posting frequency. Barb was positively thrilled, and Beatrix pretended to be scandalized at her glee, "Barb! That's a person," but Barb was having none of it. "Fiddlesticks! The more I see of people," she quoted, "the more I prefer my dogs. Present company excluded," she winked. A week later, #5 was shot while jogging, and a month later, #6 was stabbed after leaving a bar. Beatrix and Barb had looked at forty-two variables that might be common between the deaths, but as Barb had reminded Beatrix, they were only comparing members of a sample of the general population that she had identified, and that there could be any number of other cases out there. Given that her hashtag was the common element, it was 85% clear to Barb, that the only other things that stood out in common between their cases were that they were all male between ages of 24 and 46, all were online trolls, and all had been supporters of the Philly Eagles. What was very clear was that whoever was killing these people, was following a selection process very similar to Beatrix. Identical, in fact,
Then Barb made an uncomfortable discovery. She was going through the process of documenting each step, and discovered a small error in Beatrix' process. Fixing that and rerunning the data yielded a slightly different list. Still with mostly the same members, but a totally new #1, and a somewhat different order. Barb spent the rest of the day re-checking and then working through different plausible scenarios as to why the deaths matched Beatrix' original Pareto rather than the more accurate one. They got together after work over a Chinese take-out and chilled wine. Beatrix posed the central issue - if the killer had used the same criteria as Beatrix, correctly, the names would no longer be identical, and the order would have been different. If they had used the hashtag in the order she had posted them, the candidates would be the same as the list of victims, but the order would have been very different. Finally, the only way it made sense that both the original faulty list and order of deaths could be the same, was if the killer had seen that list. "The killer," Beatrix said in a voice tinged with fear, "is watching me?" Barb agreed in principle, but pointed out that while it was probably so, the killer might more likely have been in and out and grabbed the list, and was no longer watching. Alternatively, he might even have simply made the same mistake as Beatrix and had never been watching her.
Barb had an idea, and snorted, "How much risk are you up for to test this with an experiment? If we change the list on your computer, and the killer adjusts, then we know you're being monitored." Beatrix spotted the flaw in this logic, "sure, but if he likes playing games, he will stick to the original list. We won't know for sure either way. I'm also not sure if he might target me if he thinks I'm on to him." There seemed no safe way to tell if Beatrix was being watched by the killer, and it seemed like a bad idea to put it to the test.
The next day brought fresh insight. There had been a double header. The trolls on the original list listed as #7 and #8 had been together overnight, and a fault in the furnace had filled the house with carbon monoxide. The news said they had died in their sleep, but had obviously been partying in the evening, judging by the bottles and their blood alcohol levels. One oddity that made a compelling news story, was that the older of the two men must have been a poet. He had died clutching a haiku, and the reporter read it out.
Eight is the number
B and B - a list for me
Now they are all free
The two women double-checked that information, and it was confirmed in the web article. It certainly looked like a message directed at them, but of course it could have meant anything. Beatrix asked if Barb thought they should take their information to the police, but Barb had other ideas. "Oh hell, no!" Barb exclaimed, "nothing would be less welcome to the cops, or more likely to paint us as targets, than announcing we had identified a serial killer. But also, ...", Bard reflected thoughtfully, "how much trouble do you really want to go to explain the deaths of internet trolls?"
There were no further oddities, but Beatrix decided to give up on tagging anyone "#chum", just in case they had been right, although sometimes she was sorely tempted.
~fin~
If you enjoyed this short story, please consider signing up for my weekly email newsletter. In each, there is a link to a new free short story, and little insight into the writing life. Free ebooks will also be announced in the newsletter. https://hotmail.us16.list-manage.com/...
The Screw Turns Series: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BL3Y4NV9.
Where Beatrix perhaps underperformed in terms of traditional standards of beauty, she greatly overperformed in her senses and social awareness. She could spot a bully, a blowhard, or a bastard the moment they strode into view. Their swagger, pose, and movement betrayed them to her no matter how they had learned to camouflage what they were, and Beatrix could instantly spot their stink. Beatrix had a few extras in her body - she saw many more colors than 99.9% of humans, could hear tones and taste flavors hidden from the rest of us, and had a sense of smell that rivaled the Gambian Pouched Rat. She could smell a reply-guy at twenty paces.
Being wheelchair-bound, she was excluded from many things that other people took for granted, or to which there were physical barriers to participation. In her teens, twenties, and even thirties, she had merely accepted that lack of ramps, tables, or seating areas suitable for a wheelchair user didn't exist in many places. In her forties, as she reached the time of generativity in Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, she decided the fuck with that. Instead of reaching a flight of stairs and then just turning back, she would demand to see management, and then just point to the obstacle, and ask "well?". This proved more effective than she had expected, and besides a sense of retributive joy, sometimes, eventually, one day, a ramp would suddenly appear, or wheelchair-accessible tables would be installed. But physical barriers were not the only obstacle to be addressed.
Beatrix had found that life online as a woman with strong views, especially a woman living with a disability, and even more so a Black woman, was filled with Reply Guys. The online world teemed with them, it seemed, and being a consummate researcher, she collected data on the trolling, and plotted user names against the number of abusive posts over a period. The plot had a big bubble to the left, and a long flat tail stretching out to infinity. Just a small number of trolls, maybe a dozen, were responsible for the vast proportion of hostile and abusive posts, while many more did so only once. Beatrix started replying to those most virulent posters with the hashtag #chum. She stayed silent of whether she meant "a close friend" or "chopped fish, fish fluids, and other material thrown overboard as angling bait," and didn't generally reply to them, nor even engage with them at all. Beatrix considered the potential research on the topic, and started playing with the idea.
One of the three biggest of her "#chums" seemed to have figured out what she was doing, and doxed her. As someone who dealt with stigma and the abuse that disability often draws, she dealt with the online abuse by copious blocking, and told the security guy at work to be alert for pranksters trying to get to her. After someone had left a dead rat outside her apartment door with a poorly-disguised threat linked directly to the original #chum post, she confronted the influencer online, accused him of incitement to violence, and then asked what he was going to do about restoring public peace. Like many insecure bullies, he lashed out in a violent online rage, and made a death threat. She reported this, with screenshots, to the police, to his internet service provider, and to the social media platform.
The police said nothing had actually happened so they couldn't do anything about it, the ISP said that it was not something they could address, and the platform sent a fifteen-page form letter that boiled down to "meh".
The #chum guy just kept posting hate against her, seemingly in a rage-fueled doom-loop, and then suddenly he went quiet. For a day or so, there was radio silence, and looking at his profile, she could see that he had posted nothing in that time, and nor had he been on the platform at all. On day three of the silence, some of his active followers were asking about him, and then slowly, he slipped from even their range of interest. Beatrix was more persistent though, and after three weeks of his silence she tentatively matched him to a news article of a man in his early forties dying in a slip & fall accident in a parking garage. Having tripped on the stairs, he had apparently fallen sideways over the guardrail and plunged three stories. The link between the online person she knew, and the person in the news was by no means certain, but it was certainly an interesting possibility. But then it happened again.
The second-highest person on Beatrix' Pareto list also went quiet, and then also the third-highest. Following up, Beatrix could again tentatively tie #2 to a man who died in a mugging, and #3 was more definite, since he actually used his real name and the newspaper article that described him drowning in his bathtub mentioned the full name, location, and his aquarium and tropical fish he mentioned in social-media posts. Beatrix was intrigued and a little horrified. The odds seemed a little long. It seemed like a thing, but it could just be that very active trolls also had other things going on in their lives that increased their risks. As an epidemiologist with a flair for numbers, studying the trolls and their social networks was an interesting hobby, and she used some of those tools to visualize the trolls on a connected network of who was following whom and the nature of their exchanges. In that way, she could see the most influential trolls with the biggest networks were mainly connected via second- or third-degree contacts. She could even see herself in their network and the red color-coding of the connection lines, or arcs, showed up as red, meaning negative sentiment. Working out whether their deaths were unlikely, either singly or as a cluster, was far harder, but there were some clues. Firstly, one of her tools analyzed their posts for a list of hazards, and then calculated the 5-year risk of hospitalization and death. Another tool looked at risk probabilities by age, gender, and race/ethnicity by nine-digit ZIP+4 location codes. Using those two together was the tricky bit, and for that she sometimes called Barb, her friend in the actuarial department.
Barb looked at the three cases with interest, but had a big cautionary disclaimer. Three cases with odd numbers in a population of over three-hundred million, was just not unusual, and it would be very unusual if it didn't occur. That said, she pored over the cases anyway, and then painted a scenario. If someone was knocking them off, "which, I presume, is why you are interested?", Barb peered at Beatrix over her reading glasses, “then they are doing so rather cleverly, and one should expect more.” Barb paused and cleaned her glasses, "The killer is, in this scenario, switching methods. So, other than you and your view of them as nodes in a specific social network, there is very little to tie them together." Barb sipped her coffee, pushed away from her monitor, and walked over to her whiteboard. “Let's say you are partially right." She drew little blue circles representing the three people, and surrounded them with a big green dotted circle. "But let's say a pseudo-group of individuals are linked via some other criterion, and that someone is bumping them off." She drew little black crosses scattered around the green, "You would only see the ones that your criterion connected, and you wouldn't even know any of the bigger set existed," she peered down at Beatrix, "and would never know to even look for evidence of their deaths." Barb returned to her workstation. "However, even if you are wrong about the real criterion, you may still have correctly predicted the next few deaths." Beatrix looked a tiny bit shocked, "sorry, next few?", and frowned. "Oh sure," Barb said, and dug around in a stack of papers, rummaged through a draw in a battered old grey filing cabinet, and then lifted a pot plant, and pulled out a paper from a criminology journal from twelve years before, "um .., here it is. Median number of murders by a serial killer is eight.", she looked up and grinned. "So, let's assume someone is following the same method as you, and therefore arrives at the same criterion, then we can expect with ...", she peered at a graph, "... a 68% probability that there will be eight. So, who is next on your Pareto chart?"
Beatrix had updated, annotated, and tidied her chart, and sent it to Barb. Over the phone, Barb sounded enthusiastic, but also added another disclaimer. Since three deaths was insufficient to estimate the Takt time or periodicity, they wouldn't know if the next case was due in a day, week, a month, a year, or a decade. Also, if Beatrix' list was a subset, they wouldn't know how many others were being selected between each on her list. Luckily, the actual names of the next three on her list were known, so Beatrix set up an alert for any news items mentioning any of the three, as well as any keywords that might suggest death in social media that mentioned them. Lastly, she set up a different alert that would ping if any of them was quiet on social media longer than 5% of previous periods of absence. None of it was foolproof or perfect, but like most epidemiology, it was a good stab in the dark.
She didn't have to wait too long. Three days later, a news article described the accidental overdose of a person with the same names as her #4. A day later, there were twelve posts on social media that he had OD'd, and two days later her alert said that he was unusually quiet given past posting frequency. Barb was positively thrilled, and Beatrix pretended to be scandalized at her glee, "Barb! That's a person," but Barb was having none of it. "Fiddlesticks! The more I see of people," she quoted, "the more I prefer my dogs. Present company excluded," she winked. A week later, #5 was shot while jogging, and a month later, #6 was stabbed after leaving a bar. Beatrix and Barb had looked at forty-two variables that might be common between the deaths, but as Barb had reminded Beatrix, they were only comparing members of a sample of the general population that she had identified, and that there could be any number of other cases out there. Given that her hashtag was the common element, it was 85% clear to Barb, that the only other things that stood out in common between their cases were that they were all male between ages of 24 and 46, all were online trolls, and all had been supporters of the Philly Eagles. What was very clear was that whoever was killing these people, was following a selection process very similar to Beatrix. Identical, in fact,
Then Barb made an uncomfortable discovery. She was going through the process of documenting each step, and discovered a small error in Beatrix' process. Fixing that and rerunning the data yielded a slightly different list. Still with mostly the same members, but a totally new #1, and a somewhat different order. Barb spent the rest of the day re-checking and then working through different plausible scenarios as to why the deaths matched Beatrix' original Pareto rather than the more accurate one. They got together after work over a Chinese take-out and chilled wine. Beatrix posed the central issue - if the killer had used the same criteria as Beatrix, correctly, the names would no longer be identical, and the order would have been different. If they had used the hashtag in the order she had posted them, the candidates would be the same as the list of victims, but the order would have been very different. Finally, the only way it made sense that both the original faulty list and order of deaths could be the same, was if the killer had seen that list. "The killer," Beatrix said in a voice tinged with fear, "is watching me?" Barb agreed in principle, but pointed out that while it was probably so, the killer might more likely have been in and out and grabbed the list, and was no longer watching. Alternatively, he might even have simply made the same mistake as Beatrix and had never been watching her.
Barb had an idea, and snorted, "How much risk are you up for to test this with an experiment? If we change the list on your computer, and the killer adjusts, then we know you're being monitored." Beatrix spotted the flaw in this logic, "sure, but if he likes playing games, he will stick to the original list. We won't know for sure either way. I'm also not sure if he might target me if he thinks I'm on to him." There seemed no safe way to tell if Beatrix was being watched by the killer, and it seemed like a bad idea to put it to the test.
The next day brought fresh insight. There had been a double header. The trolls on the original list listed as #7 and #8 had been together overnight, and a fault in the furnace had filled the house with carbon monoxide. The news said they had died in their sleep, but had obviously been partying in the evening, judging by the bottles and their blood alcohol levels. One oddity that made a compelling news story, was that the older of the two men must have been a poet. He had died clutching a haiku, and the reporter read it out.
Eight is the number
B and B - a list for me
Now they are all free
The two women double-checked that information, and it was confirmed in the web article. It certainly looked like a message directed at them, but of course it could have meant anything. Beatrix asked if Barb thought they should take their information to the police, but Barb had other ideas. "Oh hell, no!" Barb exclaimed, "nothing would be less welcome to the cops, or more likely to paint us as targets, than announcing we had identified a serial killer. But also, ...", Bard reflected thoughtfully, "how much trouble do you really want to go to explain the deaths of internet trolls?"
There were no further oddities, but Beatrix decided to give up on tagging anyone "#chum", just in case they had been right, although sometimes she was sorely tempted.
~fin~
If you enjoyed this short story, please consider signing up for my weekly email newsletter. In each, there is a link to a new free short story, and little insight into the writing life. Free ebooks will also be announced in the newsletter. https://hotmail.us16.list-manage.com/...
The Screw Turns Series: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BL3Y4NV9.
