The Club

by Ellery Lloyd

Because really, isn’t that what power is? A middle-aged Rumpelstiltskin, jumping up and down, visibly out of breath, swinging on a chandelier, and no one daring to laugh. A grown man so cross with an oil painting of an old lady he looks as if he is about to burst the buttons off his shirt, and nobody daring to suggest he might be overreacting just a little.

It was literally going to kill him one day, this job.

Nikki could not quite recall the moment Annie Spark had started dressing like her own drag-tribute act,

If Ned read this, yesterday’s explosion was going to look like a polite fart—in

And somehow, somewhere along the line, without really noticing, he had gone from being a person to being a running joke.

In some respects it was a mistake, as a woman especially, to be really efficient over a long period of time. Because if you made things seem easy, and people had no experience of things not running smoothly, it came to seem that anybody could do it.

If they ever found out she was only fifteen.

“I guess what we hadn’t reckoned with was that when you give people a mask, that’s when they show you what they really are.”

Instead they’d exchanged a look as eloquent as a sigh,