Submission Grinder April Fool’s Recap Number Two

written by David Steffen

In 2020, on April 1st, we’ve had a recurring gag on the site where we “rebrand” by replacing the banner from a list of joke banners that sound kindof like “The Grinder” but pick a different title, different subtitle, and different logo. There were nine banners created by our original banner artist M.S. Corley (with a little help from me with my mad MS Paint skills for a couple of them). See the previous April Fool’s Recap for those original 9 banners.

In case you didn’t happen to be on the site that day or you didn’t have the time to try to see them all, you can see them all here right in this recap.

We started it in that particular year because everyone was extremely stressed with the still-new pandemic, mass layoffs, social isolation, and we thought that if we could make someone laugh it would be a little something good. Since we had the banners we’ve been running the same recurring gag for the few years since then, and people still seem to enjoy them and there’s always someone new finding them.

This year again we are super extra stressed with the *gestures wearily at the everything*, we thought it would be a good time to expand and add more all new banners.

At the time of our last recap, the main logo on the site was a meat grinder:

Title: “The Grinder”
Subtitle: “Milling your submissions into something useful…”
Logo: meat grinder with paper with unreadable writing feeding into it, and loose sheets flying through the air above the text

Since the last recap we have actually changed our main banner a couple of times. We decided that maybe the meat grinder wasn’t the most welcoming image, especially for people who don’t eat meat. For a short while we actually had a logo that was a sandwich (you know, a grinder like a sub sandwich?):

Title: The Grinder
Subtitle: Munching your submissions into something useful…
Logo: sub sandwich, with a toothpick and an olive on top, and sandwich ingredients are flying through the air above the text.

This last for a few months, but we ended up changing the main logo again to a coffee grinder. While, yes, there are people and cultures that don’t drink coffee, coffee is often associated with writers toiling away at their work so the image seemed to fit:

Title: “The Grinder”.
Subtitle: “Brewing your submissions into something useful…”.
Logo: old-fashioned manual coffee grinder, and coffee beans are flying through the air above the text.

Although some of these might be funny, these were actual logos used on the site for a period of time.

The Joke Banners

Again, see the previous April Fool’s Recap for the original nine joke banners. Those stayed in the rotation, but we added nine all-new banners for a total of 18 banners. Every time the page loaded after you took some action it would load one randomly from the 18.

The Grounder

Title: The Grounder
Subtitle: Fielding your submissions into something useful…
Logo: A baseball mitt holding a baseball.

This one is less silly than many others, but the word was actually so close that it made sense to include it.

The Linger

Title: The Linger
Subtitle: Refreshing your submissions into something useful…
Logo: a circular arrow shape, reminiscent of the logo used on most web browsers to refresh a page

This was a joke about the site itself, and got responses from the users on social media like “called out!”. Users of the Submission Grinder track their own submissions on the site, but then each user can also see new anonymized (except for acceptances if the user chooses to show some name) responses from other writers. If writers are anxious about the results of a particular submission, they may refresh the page over and over again. This is something that we see writers talking about pretty often, how it’s hard not to just keep refreshing, so this banner was very relatable for people!

The Minder

Title: The Minder
Subtitle: Caretaking your submissions into something useful…
Logo: The silhouette of Mary Poppins, wearing a hat and an old fashioned dress, carrying a bag in one hand, and flying through the air using an umbrella in her other hand.

The Pomander

Title: The Pomander
Subtitle: Orange you glad we scent your submissions into something useful…?
Logo: A pomander of the variety that is an orange studded with cloves. A slice of orange sits next to it, and loose cloves lie around it

I did not know what a pomander was, though I had heard of them. They were meant to ward off bad smells that were thought at the time to be the cause of illnesses.

But what really sold me on this one was the pair of terrible puns. (Yes the subtitle strays from the usual subtitle pattern, but I think that helps the comic effect by subverting expectations)

The Flinders

Title: The Flinders
Subtitle: Smashing your submissions into something useful…
Logo: Based on the main coffee grinder image, but this one has been smashed to pieces, and coffee beans are lying all around.

This one has been in my head since we did the first April Fool’s run as one that I wanted to do if we did another round. I just think the word “flinders” is funny. I don’t know why.

The Go Mind Yer

Title: The Go Mind Yer
Subtitle: It’s none of your dang business!
Logo: A closed door with cartoon sound lines that imply that the door has just been slammed shut.

As in “Go Mind Yer Own Business”. I like this one in part because it reminds me of my grandmother-in-law who when in a mood would say “It’s none of your damned business” pretty often.

The Gyrer

Title: The Gyrer
Subtitle: Outgrabing your rembishuns into something extructful…
Logo: The mock turtle from Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, a sea turtle/cow chimera with the body and front flippers of a sea turtle and the head, back legs, and tail of a cow.

I do love Alice in Wonderland, and the Jabberwocky in particular. “Gyrer” as in “gyre” from “‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe”. And “outgrabing” as in “and the mome raths outgrabe”. The other two nonsense words were portmanteau words of my own devising. “rembishuns” as in “rejected submissions”. “extructful” as sort of a combination of “useful” and “instructive”, but “instructive” is reversed, because your submissions don’t instruct you, they instruct others, so since the instruction is outgoing instead of incoming, the “in” goes to “ex” and becomes “extructful”.

The NANDer

Title: The NANDer
Subtitle: Gotta not catch all them rejections!
Logo: A sphere with a dark top half and a light bottom half, separating the two colors is an image of a NAND gate.

This is a pretty niche geek joke, and my second favorite. I’m curious how many people got this one without me explaining it.

What is a NAND gate?
Logic gates are components in computer engineering and computer software that can be used to cause different behaviors. The easier ones to understand are the AND gate (which will activate if all of its inputs are on), the OR gate (which will activate if any of its inputs are on), and the NOT gat (which will activate if its input is not on). There are also the NOR gate (which is a combination of an OR and a NOT gate, and will activate if none of the inputs are on) and the NAND gate (which is a combination of an AND and a NOT gate, and will activate if not all of the inputs are on). I like the NAND gate best because you can technically build all the other gates if you only have a NAND gate. The image on the sphere is a NAND gate, the two lines on the left represent the inputs to the gate. The single line on the right represents the single output of the gate. The “D” shaped object is an AND gate, the circle immediately after it is a NOT gate, so combined they make a NAND gate.

How does a NAND gate apply to this joke?
Of course the sphere is meant to look like a Pokéball and the subtitle is meant to be a parody of the Pokémon catchphrase “Gotta catch ’em all!”. Writers who are using the site and trying to get published, it can serve them well if they enthusiastically send submissions out in an ongoing basis, you could look at it as a sort of Pokémon creature collection scenario. You expect to collect many many rejections in the course of submissions, which is a normal part of the submission process as frustrating as that can be. The actual catchphrase “Gotta catch ’em all!” could be represented by an AND gate, because you have not met your goal unless all the inputs are activated (if you see “collecting a creature” as a yes/no input). When submitting, you should be prepared to collect many rejections but of course you don’t want them all to always be rejections, so you don’t want to catch all rejections. In the end, a writer can be seen as successful if they get some acceptances, no matter how many rejections they had to get to get there. So, a NAND gate seemed appropriate for this scenario, to have a chance of success you have to be ready to get a lot of rejections but with the goal of not getting only rejections, hence the modified phrase. I thought about simply negating the original catchphrase as “Gotta not catch ’em all!” but I thought it was unclear what “’em” I was referring to, so a slight rearrangement makes it more explicit, with “Gotta not catch all them rejections!” and yes the modified phrase is a little clunky, but in this case I thought it was clunky in a funny way so it was perfect.

The Pander

Title: The Pander
Subtitle: Panding your submissions into something useful…
Logo: A panda bear sitting on its butt, holding a frying pan in one front paw.

This is my favorite one. I laugh whenever this one comes up again. It’s a pander bear! And it’s holding a frying pan! It’s such a terrible joke, and I love it entirely too much, and I hope you either love this terrible joke, or groan at how terrible it is (which just makes me laugh more).

DP FICTION #122B: “The Octopus Dreams of Personhood” by Hannah Yang

edited by David Steffen

Content note (click for details) Addiction, suicidal ideation, body horror

The octopus comes into Shun’s bedroom on a brisk winter morning. It squeezes through the open window and onto her desk, where Shun is filling out an application for a job she doesn’t want just so her day doesn’t feel entirely wasted.

Shun stares at the octopus, and the octopus stares back. It has tentacles as thick as her wrists, which coil and uncoil in constant motion. Plum-dark skin, wet and molten and pulsing. A glinting yellow eye, rectangular-pupiled, watches her in the soft light.

She’s not sure how the octopus got here. Her apartment complex is miles away from the ocean, and even further from the aquarium. But it feels rude to ask where it came from.

What are you doing here? she says instead.

I want to borrow your body, says the octopus.

Why?

To find out what it’s like to be a person.

But it’s my body, says Shun. I’m using it.

So? says the octopus. What are you using it for that’s so important, anyway?

It’s true that Shun has no plans for the rest of the afternoon. It’s been four months since she was laid off from her corporate job, and her last Hinge date ended alone in her bedroom with her vibrator. She doesn’t even have close friends in the area, just acquaintances she occasionally meets for dinner or drinks. No one will miss her if she lends her body to an octopus for a few hours.

And the octopus seems so hopeful, so expectant. Like she could make all its dreams come true, just by acquiescing to this one thing.

Why me? says Shun.

Because look at you. You’re perfect.

Shun hasn’t heard anyone say that to her in a long time. Blushing, she says, how does this work, exactly?

It’s easy, says the octopus. Just say ahh and let me in.

Shun opens her mouth. Headfirst, membrane-slick, the octopus injects itself between her teeth and burrows down her throat.

***

Shun wakes up in a fetal position under her desk, her cheek pressed against the cold floorboards. The octopus is nowhere to be seen.

The window is still open, the world outside wet-whisked and gray. Her skin goosebumps in protest. There’s no central heating in her two-bedroom apartment, and she and her roommate Olivia have to take turns using their space heaters so they don’t burn out the power. She must have missed her turn to have the space heater on.

She checks her phone. It’s 4 p.m. The octopus must have occupied her body for almost five hours. She doesn’t remember those five hours, but they left her with a pleasant aftertaste: like she had no control, and by extension no responsibilities.

There’s a spate of notifications on her lockscreen. She has a form rejection letter from a job she applied to last week: Thank you for considering us, but we’ve selected other candidates to move forward with. Four new matches on Hinge, a girl and three guys, people reduced to profiles; she doesn’t even remember swiping right on them. Two missed calls from her mother, who still lives in the sunny California suburb where Shun grew up.

She calls her mother back.

Did you see the pictures I sent you on WeChat? says her mother.

What pictures?

Your cousin Matthew just got a promotion. He’s a manager now, so exciting. To celebrate, he took us all out to that new Beijing restaurant I told you about last week.

That’s great, Mom.

The restaurant was disappointing, her mother goes on. I don’t know where the owners were from, but I bet they weren’t even real Beijingers. The youtiao didn’t taste didao at all. But that’s not Matthew’s fault.

Shun makes the appropriate noises of sympathy and appreciation. She’s only half paying attention. Mostly she’s thinking about the octopus, about how easily she was able to satisfy its request.

Anyway, says her mother, have you gotten any job interviews yet?

I’m trying.

Trying, trying, says her mother. You’ve been trying for so long. Why did we spend so much on your college tuition, if you can’t even get a job with it? Maybe you can ask Matthew for a referral.

Matthew’s a software engineer, Mom. I’m a graphic designer.

So what? You can learn how to do his job. You’re smart.

Shun zones out and thinks about the octopus again.

Her purpose in life used to feel so clear. She was her parents’ only child, and she always knew they were proud of her. Success was measurable. Report cards and gold stars and gymnastics trophies. How devastating it had been, to grow up and find herself lost; to realize that all those things she’d devoted so much effort to had nothing to do with real life at all.

With the octopus inside her, things felt simple again. When she closes her eyes, she can still taste it, that milk-drunk reverie of knowing she had only one purpose to serve and that she could do it well.

***

Shun leaves her bedroom window cracked open a few inches, despite the chilly weather, in case the octopus wants to come back. To compensate, she wears extra sweaters during the day and long underwear at night.

A few days later, she finds the octopus perched on her desk again.

I didn’t know if you were coming back, she says.

Are you happy I did? says the octopus.

Very much so.

Of course I came back, says the octopus. It was wonderful to be you.

Nobody has said that to Shun before. She feels strangely proud, like she’s accomplished something, even though all she really did was agree to let the octopus in.

What did you do while you were me? says Shun.

A little bit of everything, says the octopus. Can I borrow your body again this evening?

Sure, says Shun.

This time, can you cook something for me? Something delicious? I didn’t get to try any people food last time.

Shun’s surprised that the octopus is bold enough to ask her for more, when she’s already giving it so much. But then again, why wouldn’t she? It’s not like she has other plans, really. Just job applications and video games and maybe a walk to the nearest restaurant, plans so pathetic they hardly constitute plans at all.

She looks up what octopuses eat. Snails, sea slugs, shrimp. Mussels, crabs, clams. A vast array of fish.

She decides to make hong shao yu for the octopus, a recipe her mother only prepares for special occasions, like Chinese New Year or large family reunions. Surely the octopus’s first human meal counts as a special occasion.

She makes the half-hour trek to the closest Asian grocery store and buys two pounds of tilapia, ginger, scallions, soy sauce, cooking wine, a whole jar of chili oil. In the hot steam of the kitchen, she spoons sizzling liquid over the fish, one ladleful at a time, until it’s so tender that the flesh unclasps off the bone.

***

This time, she wakes up at the gym, draped over one of the benches in the back, in an undignified kneeling position. A man next to her lets out alarmingly loud grunts every time he finishes a deadlift. People scroll on their phones at the cable machines, waiting between sets. A couple in matching gray hoodies run on the treadmills together, their feet slapping the moving tape in syncopated rhythm. Nobody pays any attention to her.

Shun sits up and looks at herself. The octopus dressed her in an ordinary gym outfit: sweatpants and a t-shirt. But she’s not wearing sneakers, just her winter boots, which she never usually wears to the gym.

She stretches and feels the ache in her shoulders, her calves, her back. Whatever workout the octopus did, it was a surprisingly punishing one.

When she gets home, Olivia is sitting on the couch, eating a salad and watching a rerun of an old sitcom on the TV. She looks annoyed when Shun joins her. I did your dishes, she says curtly.

Oh, says Shun. You didn’t have to do that.

I literally did have to, actually. The kitchen was unusable. When you cooked yesterday, you used so many dishes and left such a mess.

Shun had meant to clean up, but she hadn’t gotten a chance before the octopus came back. Sorry, she says. Were there any leftovers?

Don’t you remember?

Shun shrugs.

Olivia furrows her brow. I didn’t see any leftovers. You ate it all.

Shun nods. She hopes that means the octopus liked the hong shao yu. If it ate the whole two pounds, she must have done a good job.

You’re so weird, says Olivia. Also, don’t forget rent’s due tomorrow.

Shun thinks sometimes that she and Olivia could be friends, if they didn’t live together. All of her friends live far away, in cities like New York and San Francisco. Maybe it’s easier this way, when she can lend her body to the octopus without having to make up excuses for anybody.

***

When the octopus returns, it doesn’t even mention eating the hong shao yu, except by asking Shun to cook more food next time.

Shun figures it’s a good sign that the octopus is asking for more. As long as it enjoys Shun’s cooking, it’ll keep coming back. It won’t get bored of her.

But the octopus still doesn’t seem fully satisfied. It sits on her windowsill and looks her up and down.

You have all these weird hairs, the octopus says, pressing a tentacle against her arm. Will you make them go away for me?

Everyone has hair on their arms, says Shun.

I don’t like them. My tentacles have no hairs.

Okay, says Shun. I’ll get rid of mine for you.

In the shower, she shaves her arms smooth. Her cheap razor trudges slowly over her forearms, unable to catch everything. Blood beads in the places she nicks herself by accident. Afterward, she takes a tweezer under the bright light of her desk lamp and plucks the hairs the razor missed, one tiny strand at a time, wincing as each one leaves her skin.

***

Shun starts anticipating the octopus’s needs before it arrives. It’s gotten more demanding over time, but she’s gotten better at figuring out what it wants from her, better at keeping it happy.

She dips into her dwindling savings to buy new brand-name sneakers, so the octopus can go back to the gym again.

She goes back to the Asian grocery store and fills up her cart with fresh ingredients so the octopus can sample all her favorite dishes: beef noodle soup, scallion pancakes, pig ear.

She buys exfoliating cleanser and scrubs her entire body, especially her arms, to make sure her skin stays soft and smooth.

The octopus uses her for ten hours next time. And then sixteen. And then a full day. Blank stretches populate Shun’s calendar, selfhood discontinued and resumed. Each time she wakes up, Shun’s rewarded with the sugar-sheened feeling of having done the one thing she’s meant to do.

***

You forgot to take out the trash again, Olivia says. You were home all day, it wouldn’t have been hard.

I just forgot, says Shun. It’s not a big deal.

I’m too tired to do your chores for you, says Olivia. You remember what corporate life is like. My boss put three unnecessary last-minute meetings on my calendar today. It’s like, hello, couldn’t we have accomplished all of this over email?

Shun doesn’t feel particularly sympathetic to Olivia’s corporate struggles right now. She doesn’t like being reminded that even if she succeeds at her endless job search, the light at the end of the tunnel is just Olivia’s brand of misery instead of her own.

Olivia scoops leftover pad thai out of the takeout tub in her lap. She says, are you seeing someone?

Kind of, Shun says.

You must really like them. You’re barely ever around anymore.

I guess I do, says Shun.

But when she really thinks about it, it’s not that she likes the octopus, exactly, or its presence in her life. It’s just that she knows how to make the octopus happy.

She can’t explain that to Olivia, or even to her mother. Her mother left her several missed calls yesterday, while Shun’s body was being occupied by the octopus, but the thought of talking to her mother again feels exhausting, especially since Shun hasn’t submitted any new job applications in weeks. It won’t help to mention that the last company she interviewed with decided not to hire a designer at all, opting instead to generate their graphics with a free AI program.

Instead of calling her mother back, Shun sits on the couch and scrolls through TikTok, which she always does when she needs to relax. A video about child refugees makes her cry, and when it’s over she scrolls on, and a minute later while watching a funny video about a hamster eating a burrito she notices there are tears on her cheeks but she’s already forgotten why.

***

Shun wakes up on the beach, lying faceup on a pile of driftwood. In her mouth, the taste of salt.

She has no idea how she got here. Maybe the octopus found itself homesick while it was wearing her body.

Waves slurp at the shore just a few feet away from her, spraying white mist into the air. It’s an unusually warm day, so the beach is full of families. Children wade in the surf, making suction holes in the sand with their bare feet. Gulls wing overhead.

It’s the type of seascape that makes her fingers itch for a paintbrush. She used to love painting seascapes. She majored in graphic design because it seemed like the most financially sustainable way to pursue her love of art, but after she got her first job she never had time to create for herself anymore, and over the years that impulse atrophied away.

Shun sits up and inspects herself. She’s barefoot, wearing a sweater and jeans. It feels like someone is pounding a battering ram into her skull, just above the right temple. Sunburns cover her neck and shoulders, painful to touch; bruises mottle her left shin.

She has no phone, no wallet. Just a ten-dollar bill she finds crumpled inside her back pocket.

Her stomach mutinies with hunger. The octopus must not have eaten anything in a while. On the closest street, she uses her ten-dollar bill to purchase a family-sized basket of fish and chips and starts shoveling it into her mouth as soon as it’s served.

What day is it today? she asks the vendor.

The vendor looks alarmed, maybe by the fact that she needed to ask that question, or maybe by how fast she’s gorging herself. It’s Saturday.

Shun thinks back. It was a Wednesday, wasn’t it, the last time she let the octopus borrow her body? Or was it a Tuesday? She doesn’t remember. Has she really been possessed by the octopus for three or four days?

She could have drowned. She could have starved. She could have never even woken up at all. Part of her would have been willing to pay that price, but it’s not the part she wants to let win.

She takes the bus back to her apartment and walks inside, ignoring Olivia’s angry queries about where she’s been. She goes to her bedroom, where she steps over the piles of dirty clothes the octopus has left strewn all over the floor. On the top shelf of her overcrowded closet, she finds a box of her old painting supplies. She lays them out on her desk: soft-bristled brushes, a pad of paper, a few thin-squeezed tubes of raw sienna and prussian blue. For the first time in weeks, she closes her window and latches it shut.

***

Shun wakes to the sound of tapping. A soft tentacle against hard glass.

She feels nauseous. Her stomach roils as she sits up. Maybe it’s all the fish and chips she gorged herself on.

The octopus is waiting outside the window, sprawled out to its full length, clinging to the glass.

Shun unlatches the window and pulls it up a crack, just enough to be able to look the octopus in the eye.

What do you want? she says.

You know what I want, says the octopus. I’ve only ever wanted one thing.

It’s my body, says Shun. You don’t get to keep it.

Why not? You don’t like being a person anyway, and I do.

Shun doesn’t protest. She’s afraid that if she does, she’ll be able to hear the lie in her own voice.

The octopus stretches forward. It squeezes itself beak-slim, the way it does each time it enters Shun’s mouth, and in a swift glistening motion, begins prodding at the opening.

Shun slams the window shut. The octopus recoils.

You can’t shut me out, the octopus tells her through the glass. We’re the same, you and me.

Shun opens her mouth to respond, but before she can, her stomach gurgles again. Something churns inside her, a liquid sloshing.

She stumbles to the bathroom. She doesn’t know what it is, she just knows she needs to get it out, out.

She bends over the toilet, gripping its porcelain hips. The ends of her hair pool in the toilet water; she doesn’t have time to tie it back. She heaves, shoulders rising, back arched.

Wound-dark liquid gushes out of her mouth and splatters into the toilet bowl. It looks like blood. But the smell is wrong: less like iron, more like seaweed and sulfur and salt.

The realization cuts into her.

Not blood. Ink.

She looks into the mirror. Octopus ink stains her chin. There are purple bags under her eyes, thin hollows under her cheekbones. Her dark hair frames her face in unwashed clumps.

She leans back over the toilet bowl again, throat gouging, saliva glistening. As the ink leaves her body, she feels a new sort of clenching, an emptying.

Shun wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and flushes the toilet clean. She watches the blackened water swirl down, down, back toward the sea.

© 2025 by Hannah Yang

3035 words

Hannah Yang is a speculative fiction author who writes about monsters, metamorphosis, and feminine rage. Her stories have been published in Apex, Analog, Clarkesworld, Fantasy, and multiple Year’s Best anthologies. She has a BA in Economics from Yale and works in philanthropy research. Follow her work at hannahyang.com or on Instagram at @hannahyangwrites.

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DP FICTION #122A: “The Unfactory” by Derrick Boden

edited by Hal Y. Zhang

Content note (click for details) Mass atrocities

Date: March 10

Hours worked: 8.0

Project: Mama’s Pizza & Pasta

I unmade Mama’s Pizza & Pasta today. Single-story, painted brick exterior, swaddled in garish holiday lights all year round. Same two wrought-iron tables chained out front that I used to pass on my way home from Redondo High, where the old-timers would knock back Morettis and dole out dirty jokes on Friday afternoons. Same Mama, too. Poor lady.

In the cold confines of the unmaking chamber, I donned my gear. Oculars to get me there metaphysically, a wraith on the astral breeze; wrought iron needles to tease out the loose threads of reality; hexed gloves to rip that shit apart. I started from the top, like you taught me. The rooftop exhaust fans, sticky from decades of congealed grease. The rust-gnawed floodlights, the decrepit polyurethane sign—along with every memory of every person who’d ever glanced up at it—backdropped by imported palm trees and a smoggy orange moonrise.

Then, with a flick of my hand, the roof. All the furtive moments from all the high school lovers who made out up there in the midsummer heat. Gone. Then the walls, brick by brick, paint chips flecking from the vanishing surface like pastel scabs.

The kitchen was a labor, all those outdated appliances wheezing in the summer heat. Like you said at orientation, old things are hard to forget. So I pried off my oculars and hit the vending machines. By 2 a.m., the kitchen had never existed. I swept through the dining room on a swell of Mountain Dew-induced adrenaline, vanished the foyer without a conscious thought.

I saved the two tables out front for last. Wish I hadn’t. Like you said on day one: biggest risk in this business is nostalgia.

Anyway, the tables are gone.

And for what? What did Mama do to deserve this? Was it something she said in an interview? A politician she snubbed? A customer she refused to seat?

I’ll never know. Can’t know, by design. The coin-op laundromat is shouldered up against the boxing gym now—not an inch of her old curb-space as proof to the contrary. No hard feelings, right? She’ll be back from holiday tomorrow, won’t ever know what she missed. She’s spent her whole life waiting tables at Gino’s, now, never took a chance on her own business. Mama’s Pizza is gone and nobody’s the wiser.

Nobody but me, for a few more minutes. I can’t help but relish the fleeting privilege of being the only person on Earth who knows that which has never been. By the time I hit the street, I’ll be just like everyone else. A lowly worker navigating a tidy world, oblivious to the gloved hands that tug at threads in my periphery.

When it was done, before I pried off my oculars I swept the block for loose ends. A pizza box skidded along the sidewalk, cruel trick of the pre-dawn breeze. Across the street, in the reflection off the laundromat windows, staring at that fleeting singularity where Mama’s never stood: you. Notebook clutched in your hand, scribbling.

By the time I turned, you were gone.

Just like Mama’s.

***

Date: March 22

Hours worked: 8.0

Project: Perry Park

I’ll be glad to forget today.

I walk past Perry Park every morning. Used to shoot hoops there, back in junior high. Those old chain nets were so satisfying, the way they throttled the ball before letting it pass through, defying time for a single glorious moment.

What will I remember after I’ve clocked out? You say that when a thing gets unmade, the memories don’t leave a void—they transfigure. Details get slippery, new flesh grown over old wounds. Friendships unravel. Blame gets reassigned; prejudices are reborn. The world forgets a piece of itself. What did I used to do after school? Play basketball. Where did I play? The park. You know, that park.

Same for faces. Like the old man on the bench by the hoops. Sorry, guy. Just following orders.

Still, never unmade a person before.

Or have I? How do I explain those dreams, haunted with faces so familiar yet wholly unknown? A brother, a boyfriend, a daughter they never had. Only way to hang onto the unpast is to smuggle your oculars outside, catch an unmaking in progress. But nobody’s that stupid: the unfactory’s punishment for nostalgia is unerring and swift. At least my own past is protected by contract. Aside from incidental details like Perry Park.

I saw you there before work, in the reflection of a passing windshield, kicking around the baseball diamond where the big kids sling dope. Keeping tabs on me in your notebook.

I did the job, boss. Old man’s gone. His nephews never had an uncle, his partner never married.

Now leave me the fuck alone.

***

Date: March 24

Hours worked: 4.0

Project: Rudolph

It shouldn’t matter. They say dogs don’t have souls, that those droopy wet eyes aren’t sad at all but rather our own tragic compulsion to transpose human emotion onto everything we see. These vanity breeds only live seven years anyhow, and fuck you I’m a cat person.

Fuck you, I’m a cat person.

I only need to type it a few more times, and the hangover of memories will be gone from my mind just like they are from Rudolph’s doting humans, and everyone else besides. I shouldn’t have to type it at all, really, because it’s like you said on day one: can’t be sad about losing a thing that was never there. And a dog, to quote my old neighbor, is—

Now, that was unexpected. I probably shouldn’t be writing this part down, but you taught me to be ruthless with documentation. The deed is done: Rudolph the Dog is no more, unspun from the scraggly end of his tail to the tip of his side-lolling tongue. It barely took half of a shift. My mind had already begun the process of remolding itself when the thought I was typing fell right out of my head. When I glance back at what I wrote, it makes no sense at all. What old neighbor? Someone with a dog, I assume, but beyond that…who knows?

A chill runs through my body. I wrack my brain, but it’s no use. It’s okay, though. Just another incidental detail.

Besides, I’m a cat person.

***

Date: March 30

Hours worked: 9.0

Project: Park Manor

Today I unmade Park and West 170th. Strapped on the oculars, pulled the gloves over my trembling hands and vanished a city block. Soup kitchen, pawn shop, four-story affordable housing complex. My biggest project to date, maybe.

The tenants at Park Manor are gone. I work graveyard, so most everyone was asleep. The ones who were out—at the bar or working late shifts—they’ll make my list tomorrow. The unfactory never leaves anything to chance. The ones that were there, I found the loose thread in each of them. Unwove their skin, reclaimed their bones, snuffed out their hearts one by one. Pretty sure the lady in 3C was my sixth-grade English teacher. Can’t be missed if you never existed.

Isn’t that right, boss?

But how many incidental details have I already lost? Why do I search for my car keys when I don’t have a license? Should I remember the name of my first love, or what I wanted to be when I grew up? The faceless mobs that haunt my dreams—are they shadows of an unpast I’ve already erased?

In a tooth of glass from the pawn shop’s busted window, through my oculars tonight, I spotted your reflection. You moved like a listless wraith.

In your eyes I saw the truth.

***

Date: March 31

Hours worked: 9.0

Project: Unfactory, South Bay Branch

The city is emaciated. Gaunt. Hollowed out.

Of course, I have no basis for comparison. The things I unmade were never here. Sure, in some archived unpast maybe there was a bakery wedged between that laundromat and that boxing gym. But that’s neither here nor there. And yet, the seams of this place feel overworn. The streets sag against the weight of people they never held.

Fuck it. Our work here is done. The purpose of it all—whether we succeeded or failed—I’ll never know. I unmade the facility today from a mobile chamber across the street. They’re transferring me up north. New digs, fresh faces. They need a veteran to hold down the line. It’s a dangerous path to walk, between experience and liability. Sooner or later, the risk of a lingering memory will outweigh my upside. Old things are hard to forget.

Isn’t that right, boss?

I followed you home last night, on a hunch. Dusted your prints from the keypad, let myself in while you slept. Found your notebook under your pillow. All this time, I thought you were keeping tabs on me. Waiting for me to slip up. You never liked me. Said I lacked humility. Called me ruthless, as if I wasn’t doing exactly what you’d taught me. All this time, I thought you were trying to unmake me. Until yesterday, when I caught a glimpse of you in a reflection.

Wearing your oculars.

There’s only one reason you’d have your gear outside the chamber, and it isn’t to forget. Only one reason that notebook of yours would be warded against unmaking, all frayed and reality-stripped at the edges.

You’ve been keeping secrets. Grasping at threads of the unpast. Tasting that forbidden fruit, nostalgia.

I get it. Really, I do. I’ve been feeling it too, in the dead space between my thoughts. All those incidental details. When we’re made to forget, it isn’t to clear room for new things. We become lesser versions of ourselves. Maybe someday I’ll be the one haunting the reflections of the unmade. Scrounging for memories of a better past, with familiar smiles and unfamiliar names. But not today.

You see, I read your notebook. The lists, the addresses, the profiles. Everything you’ve directed me to unmake. All the incidental connections to my own life. Every street, building, and park. Every dog, every person.

A brother.

A boyfriend.

A daughter I never had.

Not very incidental after all. Maybe nothing is. The contract is well-crafted bullshit, I guess, and your notebook is more than nostalgia. It’s a confession. It’s everything you took from me, bound up and tucked under your pillow so you can sleep at night. It’s a blueprint for the monster you crafted of me. A monster to do your bidding, to keep your own hands clean.

Problem is, you crafted me too well. So of course I sliced a warded sheet out of that notebook, made sure it found its way into the evidence drawer posthaste. You know I’m ruthless about documentation.

I checked the logs before I strapped on my oculars today. You were the only one on-site, and there was no evacuation order given. The unfactory never leaves anything to chance. Neither do I.

I’m sure you were a pawn all the same, and I should be picking bones with your bosses instead. But I’m cold with jealousy for a life I never lived, and I crave the easy burn of retribution—before that, too, is lost to the enduring sieve of time.

On the bright side, nobody will miss you.

I promise.

© 2025 by Derrick Boden

1890 words

Author’s Note: Sometimes I like to take two unrelated ideas and mash them together. Here, I had idea #1: write a story with a narrative structure that’s menial and dull—in this case a daily work log—but in the context of something horrific. Even the apocalypse needs project managers, right? And idea #2: write a story that raises the question, “Which is worse: to forget, or be forgotten?” By the time I was done, The Unfactory was a little bit of both ideas, a little bit of neither, and hopefully still a little bit coherent.

Derrick Boden’s fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Analog, and elsewhere.  Derrick is a Sturgeon Award-nominated writer, a software developer, an adventurer, and a graduate of the Clarion West class of 2019.  He currently calls Boston his home, although he’s lived in fourteen cities spanning four continents.  He is owned by two cats and one iron-willed daughter.  Find him at derrickboden.com and on Twitter as @derrickboden.

If you enjoyed the story you might want to read Derrick Boden’s previous story here in Diabolical Plots: “Giant Robot and the Infinite Sunset”. You might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings.

Kickstarter for Long List Anthology Volume 9 is live!

The Kickstarter for The Long List Anthology Volume 9 is live and the campaign is scheduled to run until April 14th. Of course full details are available at the Kickstarter page, but here’s some preliminary info to get you started:

The Hugo Awards are one of the most prominent awards in speculative fiction publishing.  Nominations are cast by the fans to decide the few stories that end up on the final ballot.  After the Hugo Award ceremony every year, WSFS publishes a longer list of nominated works, works that were loved by many fans who chose to use their votes on this story.  The purpose of this annual anthology is to get those stories to more readers by collecting them together in a book for easy perusal, from the story categories to editor, magazine, and writer categories.  The anthology is a collection of eclectic tastes, rather than from the tastes of an individual editor, and so has a more varied flavor than a typical “Best Of” anthology.

This year the anthology will be co-edited by David Steffen, Chelle Parker, and Hal Y. Zhang.

The story and author list for this volume:

庄子的梦 / “Zhuangzi’s Dream” by 曹白宇 / Cao Baiyu, translated by Stella Jiayue Zhu

“The Ng Yut Queen (The 五 月 Queen)” by Eliza Chan

“Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont” by P.A. Cornell

“How to Cook and Eat the Rich” by Sunyi Dean

“Yung Lich and the Dance of Death” by Alex Fox

“Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200” by R.S.A. Garcia

“Come In, Children” by Ai Jiang

“The Sound of Children Screaming” by Rachael K. Jones

“Day Ten Thousand” by Isabel J. Kim

“Cold Relations” by Mary Robinette Kowal

“Counting Casualties” by Yoon Ha Lee

杞忧 / “Heavens Fall” by 陆秋槎 / Lu Qiucha, translated by Hal Y. Zhang 

“The Spoil Heap” by Fiona Moore

“To Sail Beyond the Botnet” by Suzanne Palmer

“Ivy, Angelica, Bay” by C.L. Polk

“Saturday’s Song” by Wole Talabi

“Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge” by Eugenia Triantafyllou

“Bad Doors” by John Wiswell

蜂鸟停在忍冬花上 / “Hummingbird, Resting on Honeysuckles” by 杨晚晴 / Yang Wanqing, translated by Jay Zhang

DP FICTION #121B: “The Witches Who Drowned” by R.J. Becks

edited by Amanda Helms

Content note (click for details) This story contains a homophobic slur, misogynistic behavior, threats of violence towards queer people, and elements of body horror.

The day I gun my motor, slip my Walkman in the back of my jean overalls, and roar off the dock, Ronald Reagan foots the bill. It’s not the first time the Navy has slipped me some cash, and I don’t want to hear shit about that. These days, every other word in deep ocean research is ‘Typhoon Class Sub Detection’ or ‘US Naval Significance’. You want funds; you play the game. Don’t blame me because my words are clever, as clever as the hair I cropped to tell the boys at work I’m different enough from their wives to be a scientist and to pull an extra dance or two from the ladies at Maud’s.

The ocean waves roll as I put some distance between me and land. Water splashes up, since the ocean doesn’t let anyone close without getting them wet. My boat’s small enough to woman alone, just me and the growling engine. Nice and all, but nothing compared to what lies below.

I deployed deep ocean photometers a good month ago. They’ve got eyes on what I’m here for: light levels in the aphotic zone, where the only readings are from glowing bodies in the deep. I’ve observed the flashing organisms myself down there, more times than I once dreamed. With the Navy scrambling to find the Challenger’s star-worthy remains as they rust away underwater, it’s a damn good time to look down.

My automated reel drags the photometers from the deep, links of heavy chain breaching the surface one by one. I strain to maneuver the rods of complicated sensors and dripping metal. The Navy wants to explore the possibility of spotting Soviet subs by tracking the light levels of disturbed creatures, those that flash blue to confuse and hide and hunt and speak. To the right eyes, a Typhoon Class sub is subtle as Liberace at the Radio City Music Hall. The Navy wants those eyes.

And I’ll do anything to get below.

***

If anyone is dumb enough to think the ocean is ours, they should see the shit we’ve got to wear to go down deep. The WASP is a tomb of bright yellow with a fortified glass head and heavy claw arms that require a strict weight-lifting regime for me to maneuver (to the pleasure of the ladies at Maud’s). Jim Fletcher, one of my colleagues in Atchley’s lab, has to help me in. Though the supervisor will have checked the whole thing twice over, he and I catalog each vital control one more time. You can never be too careful.

The WASP is no fancy submersible. I’m an extra heavy photometer with arms, dangling from a chain. They lower me slow, all the way to the seafloor. I’ve learned from these trips that anticipation sours to anxiety to panic in sweet seconds, so I breathe calm and easy and don’t allow any drumming of fingers. Once touched down, I switch off the WASP’s lights. Step one to being welcomed into this world is relinquishing your sight. This is the place the sun doesn’t go. Act like it.

The disturbed seawater is bright around me.

Patterns differ down under. Some creatures flash; others trail light in bright lines behind them. Blue is the color of choice, and it comes in neon, though tiny organisms sparkle like snow caught in lamplight.

Surface checks in on my radio, and I talk back, but my focus is on the luminous deep. I laugh as I document it, camera shutter clicking. NASA may have spent the past few years asking who’s brave enough to touch the stars, but the stars don’t know shit about this impossible lightshow, far below the edge of their sight. The Navy, obsessed as they are with my sensors, knows even less of the life that glows, life that’s boneless, aliens of the crushing dark. The question isn’t whether there are unexplained phenomena down here: it’s who will discover them. The right answer is me.

With time, the lights fade away. The beings living here have accepted me, their translator come to study a language of light. In the utter darkness that remains, I draw my first full breaths since landing. Here,  I am limitless, mobile and flowing, edges uncertain. Free as in the moments after a dream, when you have forgotten the shape of the skin that confines you.

Something heavy thumps against the glass of the WASP. The whole body rocks. I slam my crushable shoulder against the hard exoskeleton keeping me alive, spit out a swear, switch the lights on. Going around banging the WASP off shit is a good way to die.

But my headlights don’t snag on debris or rock. Instead, two eyes press against the WASP’s glass. Puffy things, with pinprick pupils and blue irises hardly distinguishable from the surrounding white. She hovers, and I count fingers and arms amid a cloud of long hair. Everywhere there is skin, there are also cracks, gorges that slice through her but don’t bleed. A broken porcelain doll of the water.

She opens her mouth, and I lean forward, as though she’s about to speak, and I’m about to hear through glass and metal many times reinforced. But just as quick, she abandons my metal shell and vanishes from my intruding headlights. Sense knocks me hard, and I lurch forward. My finger jams against the controls and plunges me into darkness.

My breaths are ragged. I force my chest out, my lungs open, even as I curse myself to high heavens. If my physical reactions fail me now, it’ll be a twenty-minute lift while I hyperventilate.

I know the rules of the deep sea, and yet I broke them. That thing—that organism—no, that girl, for it had been a girl, too humanoid for anything evolved for the aphotic zone—came to me, and I stole her only way to speak.

My disruption brought the lights back. Though my stowed finger throbs, I clench my hands to fists. The woman is among them. Now unsilenced, she’s a shattered goddess of the sea, each fissure of her skin lined with blue, a mosaic of light and woman. Though eyes won’t matter to her down here, not like on land, I’m certain she can see me. I’m certain this is on purpose. A great reveal, rather than an accidental meeting.

A human body at these depths breaks all we know of bone and pressure, blood and air. But she exists. She wants me to know of her. I take a photo. Then she’s gone, disappeared somewhere the WASP is too clunky to follow.

On the ride up, I leave my thoughts with her in the dark.

***

In the lab, I colorize my photos and find I’ve captured a viperfish, an elusive and haunting predator. First ever clear shot of one. It’s a great victory; a popular article in the bag.

Yet I barely care, because in another photo is the woman, light sparkling down her hair, her arms, her torso. She’s not a ‘what’ but a ‘who,’ the owner of a story even more complex than the organisms whose lives and lights I’ve spent years pursuing. The discovery of my career, no doubt, and yet I show no one and lock her away in my drawer. When alone in the lab, I run my fingers over her like she’s a lover. My fingertips tingle each time I do, little electrical signals I can explain no better than my hiding her away.

***

The night after Reagan walks out on Gorbachev’s offer to disarm, I stare down a glass of bourbon, unsure whether I’m celebrating or in mourning. News that the Navy wants me to continue pursuing my research due to the continued chance of war comes the next morning. I’m back out at sea a week later with ever more sensitive photometers, a hydrophone, and a radio that tells me through static that a world without nuclear weapons is a Soviet dream. The girls at Maud’s wave their cigarettes and cackle at anyone who thought Reagan would put us over the biggest weapon he could make; I shut my mouth and accept any new funding the Navy sluices my way as a positive of the continued threat of destruction. I wish we could just go back to dancing, so Pattie Smith can tell us all how “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” It’s a new feeling, to have solid edges in the dark.

At least I still have my research. This time, a hydrophone will record audio as my photometers work their magic. It’ll record the roar of boats, the songs of whales, the vibrations of undersea volcanoes. Most of what I care about doesn’t make noise, but I put some pretty words in my proposal about how far the sounds of Soviet subs can carry, and Jim will appreciate the data. Truth is, it feels like civic duty to eat what funds I’m offered.

***

In October, my research makes Popular Science, my picture of the viperfish in full color. My name’s under the photo but not in the article. Instead, the work is prescribed to Dr. Tedd Atchley, and though they interviewed both of us, all I get is a brief mention as a “student,” my skills a testament of Tedd’s brilliant tutelage. I know better than to complain. The article’s predictable anyway, and my photo isn’t even on the cover, which is instead dedicated to the completed retrieval of material from the Challenger. That’s the most exciting news they’ve got, the remains of a dead starship dragged from the sea. I buy the magazine because it makes me laugh. They have no idea what’s down there.

When I retrieve my new photometers, they tell the story of light and darkness, disruption and calm. At times, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of organisms aglow. Flaring, pulsing, the flashes of light a thousand meters under the sea. If the Navy wants to search out Soviets, I’ve got their launchpad. It’ll keep me good and funded for a long while, able to pursue my own research, to return to the depths.

I even feel satisfied, until I listen to the hydrophone recording, and amid the whales and motors and volcanoes, I hear a human voice. She’s a crackle, a hiss, a prickle on the back of my neck and a chill like a finger down my spine. Though I listen a thousand times, I catch only a single word: “witch.” But there’s more. She says more, and I simply can’t understand it.

That doesn’t stop me from trying, though. I wade through the cool, dry air of the university archives, unsure of what I’m looking for in the records of murdered women until I find the names of those drowned rather than burned. I hear the harsh whisper of her carrying voice—again defying logic, again defying biology—does this mean she’s got lungs?—as I run my finger along the names of drowned witches and grasp that I may have the picture of one in my drawer. To reach me, she must have traversed riverways and floodwaters, careful movements obscured by the cover of water and darkness, until she’d found a place so teeming with both that she no longer needed to fear unwanted discovery. In those depths, she lived and changed and, eventually, called to me.

The only time the deep sea provides an answer like this is when it knows it’ll create a thousand more questions. They’re ablaze within me, ravenous and demanding and infinite.

Like the witch’s photo, I don’t share these results with my lab.

***

I’ve got a new supervisor for my next trip down in the WASP. This will be my last: the Navy’s grown quite fond of us by now, and we’ll acquire a submersible soon. It’s not so much a step up as a giant leap.

“You ever done this before?” I ask. The supervisor is a rugged man with uneven, freckled skin, toasted by the sun. His beard twitches whenever he speaks, which it does a whole lot now, as he takes offense to my question. Jim and I exchange looks. Arrogance is idiocy when it comes to the deep sea. But the suit is already dangling from its crane, and I get in the same way as always. We start running through safety checks—once, twice, and then we’re in constant communication as the WASP lowers, lowers, lowers.

I’m down 200 meters when I notice the water around my boots. It’s an immediate violation, this touch of cold seawater within my metal haven. “WASP to surface,” I gasp. Panic squeezes my lungs. Something slips along my fingers, and I’ve no way to check if it’s water or fear. If too much gets inside, the whole suit will collapse. 200 meters has nothing on the planned 1,500, but we’re not talking negligible pressure.

The lift is a slow reckoning. Water climbs, climbs, climbs, like it too is rising to the heavens. It’s calf-height by the time I break surface, and streams plummet from the WASP as I emerge into air, raised by hook and cord and crane and gaping like a netted fish.

I give the supervisor a solid smack to the jaw once I’m out. It takes Jim holding me back to stop, arms looped around my shoulders until I’m finished struggling. The soaked bottom of my pants slaps against my numb legs.

“He could’ve killed me,” I snarl. I’m trembling. Jim stares like I’m a rabid thing who’s played possum until this moment. Later that night, when I discover a crack running from my ankle up my calf, I’m not so certain he’s wrong.

It’s a canyon, wide as my index finger, healed over like an ancient scar and yet new. I run my finger along it, this way the seawater has changed me. A man damn near drowned me, and I cracked like a witch.

Alone in my corner of the lab, I stare into where the woman’s eyes should be and wonder just how deep she’d gotten before she began to glow.

***

In the darkness of Maud’s, where music booms and ladies come out to dance, we don’t speak with words. Our language is simply that of gleaming eyes; a flash of a grin; a slow, deliberate touch. We’re nothing fancy in this place, accepting of all from heels to sneakers. Myself, I’ve got dress shoes on, with a nice leather jacket. It was the right choice to come here tonight, to bask in the familiar darkness when I’m at my most unsettled.

I’ve just clucked my tongue at a poor song choice and kept on dancing anyway when the shouting begins. Male voices. We scatter by instinct, no more than bioluminescent shrimp under a scientist’s prickling gaze. But understanding dogs my heels. For all the threat of submarines and death stars, the Soviets have never been the country’s closest enemy.

Girls scream. Cops raise their voices ever louder. I’ve long lost the woman I was dancing with, thrown by the white-water tide of bodies. None of us are stupid enough to come here without a planned escape route. We won’t all make it out.

The street outside wails with blue and red and white. Dark-adjusted eyes stinging, I scramble into the road only for a honking car to send me sprawling back toward the sidewalk. My pants tear against the asphalt, and then I’m running, running, running, as blood spills down my leg.

My feet carry me to my lab. I take the stairs two at once and burst through the door only to stumble when I find the lights are on inside. Jim Fletcher lifts his eyes from his microscope. Dammit.

He abandons his work to approach me, though I’m more stupid dyke than clever colleague right now, bleeding all over the damn floor. He asks me something like ‘“What happened?” or “Are you okay?” but I’m breathing too hard to hear him.

If I told him, he’d believe me. About everything, maybe. Women who glow in the dark; worlds destroyed by garish headlights and strobing red and blue. The way I’m one of them. The way sucking up to the military of a country that attacks its own people tastes like blood.

Instead, I only say, “Don’t,” and to his credit, he doesn’t. In my corner, I open the drawer with her inside. Her picture. Her voice. I’m shaking too hard to touch her without destroying her.

I’d always evaded questions about my work at Maud’s. Even admitting the most tangential of aid to a system the girls mocked would have earned me choice words. For a while now, I’ve known that I deserve them. I have seen the things that exist in darkness, their wonders and terrors. I have loved those women. Those who crack but will not shatter, who prefer life in shadow over selling their souls to a country trying so damn hard to fly too close to the sun. There are so few places for us anymore. I’ve discovered the path to another, and until now all I’ve done is invite the Navy to follow me inside.

Blood from my knee crusts the edges of my torn pant leg. Down lower is the crack I obtained in the WASP, the one that may glow if I go where sunlight cannot follow. Even now, in the haze of fading adrenaline, the insatiable urge for answers thrums within me. I have accomplished so much because of that drive. I have pretended to be so many things.

It’s not enough this time. Not the occasional dive when the Navy likes us, not photos in magazines, attributed to the wrong damn name. I don’t want those anymore. I’m uninterested in exposing the mysteries of that which I love to those who seek to destroy them.

By now I’m limping, the results of my recent experiments boxed in my arms. My gritty scrape burns, but I don’t stop until I reach the dock. I collapse to my knees; several months of intensive effort clatters down with me. The lapping surface water fakes true blackness, but it’s not deep enough, not yet.

It’s no small feat to get answers from the place the stars don’t see. You need focus, dedication, sacrifice.

My unpublished photos and recordings slip into the water without even a splash. No matter. I intend to speak with light.

A thousand meters beneath the sea, a witch calls.

© 2025 by R.J. Becks

3080 words

Author’s Note: I have loved bioluminescence for a long time, and reading Edith Widder’s memoir Below the Edge of Darkness cinched my desire to write about it, as well as provided many of the technical details necessary. However, the heart of this story comes from my grappling with how scientific research broadens perspectives, yet the need for research funding can push scientists toward military applications and/or corporate incentives. The main character in this story doesn’t discover a monster in the deep but instead learns more about herself there, and when she returns to the surface, finds that she is no longer willing to sell herself to a system that harms those she loves.

R.J. Becks is a writer and scientist who has studied endangered species, participated in 24-hour birding competitions, and lived on the road that inspired Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. She writes to capture the complexity of ecosystems and usually needs magic to do it. You can occasionally find her at @rjbecks.bsky.social on Bluesky.

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DP FICTION #121A: “The Matador and the Labyrinth” by C.C. Finlay

edited by David Steffen

Content note (click for details) This story contains one memory of a homophobic slur, one memory of childhood abuse, the threat of violence to an animal, actual violence by an animal against a human being, and themes of conditioned self-hatred.

This bull was not a very good bull, and he had lost a lot of blood already. He was too reluctant to charge one instant, too eager the next, which made him unpredictable. The matador had known many bulls during his decades in the ring, and most of them, more than he had any right to know, were good bulls, some of them very good bulls. A few had been truly exceptional bulls, noble bulls. God’s own beasts, magnificent creatures shaped by His divine hand from the raw materials of strength and speed, grace and purpose.

Shaped from danger, too. One could never entirely escape the horns, not even the greatest matador. Matadors marked the bulls and the bulls marked them. He thought of the dozens of scars he carried as love letters, and he remembered, mostly with affection, every bull who had written such a carta de amor on the pale page of his flesh.

But he was no longer the greatest matador, and this hot afternoon he did not face a very good bull. Strength and speed, yes, but neither grace nor purpose. He would need to be careful. No one, he thought, would remember today’s corrida with much affection.

When he entered the ring for the tercio de muerte, the third and final act of the bullfight, he carried along with the red muleta in his left hand, the estoque de verdad in his right, three feet of perfectly tempered steel so he could end the bull quickly after only a short faena. A few passes, just for show, to please the crowd such as it was, and then his steel blade would conclude the performance mercifully. This would not last ten more minutes. It might not last two.

He kept his body very close to the passing bull, as he always did. Feet planted, back straight, hips turning ever so slightly, never more than absolutely necessary to evade the charge. The dance between man and bull had to be intimate or it was nothing. No longer man and bull, two separate beings, but man-and-bull, one being together, even if that being lasted only seconds. The first set of passes were adequate, the second less so. A few desultory cries of “¡ole!” from the stands, but truly more than the bull deserved. One loud, braying jeer, from a voice that sounded like his father.

On the last pass of the second set, the matador felt the heat of the animal brush against his thigh. For a few seconds, the bull stood panting while the matador taunted him with the red cape. Blood streamed down the bull’s left shoulder as he leapt forward for the third time. His foreleg buckled just before he reached the muleta, and he stumbled. There was no decision by the matador, only reaction, but a lifetime of experience went into that reaction: knowing it was time to finish the fight, seeing that the bull was fading swiftly and the crowd growing restless, recognizing the opening through the shoulder blade to the bull’s heart. A shadow  fell around him, as it always did, pushing back the ring and the crowd and everything except a single spot of light that contained himself and the bull.

So. The third pass. The bull stumbled near the matador’s feet. No decision, only reaction. The matador flung his left arm into the air melodramatically–it was important to remove the muleta from the tableau so that the entire crowd could see how close he stepped to the bull–and raised the sword. Which is when the bull lunged upward from his stumble, driving his left horn under the matador’s rib cage and into his heart.

The crowd gasped, but the matador could not.

They stood there, man-and-bull, transfixed, both too surprised, too exhausted, to act for at least a full second. The matador smiled. The clichés about death were wrong. It was not the past that swam before his eyes, but his lost future. The Cuban cigar he would not smoke tonight, nor any of the other future cigars. The bottle of wine he would not sip while the sky drew dark, nor all the other bottles of wine laid up in the cellar that he would never sip. The woman who would be alone tonight, instead of waiting for him in his bed, and all the other women he had yet to meet. The money he would not make, and all the luxuries and showy trinkets that would go unpurchased.

That realization, that sense of loss for all the once-future ornaments of his life, all the pleasures of his life, of a man’s life as he’d been taught to define it, came as a surprise. But he had been courting death since adolescence, and he knew well its shape. So death itself did not come as a surprise. Death did not arrive accompanied by denial or anger, or anything but acceptance. His father had always mocked him for being small, for being weak, for crying when others suffered. When he went to work in the arena to prove himself, his father called him foolish, and predicted he would come to a bad end.

This end didn’t feel so bad.

The bull’s leg buckled a second time, and he shook his head free. The horn came out of the matador’s chest with an audible squelch and a spray of blood. The crowd cried out in dismay, a sound from very far away. The matador felt, for the merest fragment of time, the vast emptiness in his chest, the hole where his heart should be, as he closed his eyes and collapsed on the blood-stained yellow sand of his beloved ring.

He felt the light first, before he saw it. Lambent, soft as warm butter, melting on his skin.

The matador opened his eyes. He found himself not on the clay of the arena, nor on the soft bench of the bullring’s medical office with the resident doctor hovering over him, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He was not stretched out on a gurney in the back of an ambulance, swaying from one side to the other as the driver took the corners much too sharply. He was not sedated under the cold, bright lights of a surgical suite, surrounded by the chirping mob of machines and trauma staff. These were all places he had awakened before, after accidents in the ring. After receiving love letters from the bulls.

He had never before awoken on a stone floor. He staggered to his feet.

As best as he could tell, this was an anteroom or porch. The Mediterranean sun, honey thick, flowed through windows set high up in the wall, lending the stone a lightly golden cast, like the sand of the bullring. A long, dark corridor stretched out in front of him.

This didn’t match any vision of hell or heaven the matador had heard of or imagined. Purgatory, perhaps. Given his life, he had expected purgatory no more than he expected heaven. If this was hell, then hell was a more pleasant place than he expected. He went to make the sign of the cross, a reflex, callused fingers tapping his forehead and dropping down to—

A hole occupied the spot where his heart should be.

A tearing wound, no longer bleeding.

His chaquetilla was soaked with blood. He still wore his favorite traje de luces, the lime green taleguilla with lemon piping, the same colors that had been in the threadbare, borrowed suit he wore on the day he killed his first bull. His father mocked the colors on that day, called them girlish, called him a mondrigón, and the matador had worn the same colors ever since. His right hand still gripped, fiercely, his sword.

“Please tell me that you’re here to help him,” a voice pleaded, a woman’s voice, behind him.

He spun and backpedalled to the wall, which he leaned against like a buttress propping up a cathedral. The woman was young and beautiful, with sun-kissed skin and night-blessed hair. A diadem of pearls circled her brow. She wore purple robes, like a priest at Lent. Behind her, a table draped in purple cloth, like an altar during Lent.

If this was purgatory, perhaps he still had a chance to redeem himself.

“I prayed for a warrior to aid Theseus,” she said, her words in a language odd and unfamiliar to his ears, and yet he found he understood. “Please tell me that the gods have answered my prayers.”

The name Theseus tickled his memory, as if it should be familiar to him. But the name didn’t matter. A good torero ignored his own injuries to aid someone hurt worse. The code of the ring, that he had devoted his life to. If Theseus needed aid, the matador would help him. “Where is Theseus?”

“That way, in the house of the noble bull. He left a trail for you to follow.”

The word she spoke was ‘minotaur’, a word that he knew in another sense in his previous life, but here, in this moment, he heard it differently. He understood it differently, as a compound word, ‘mino-’, meaning king, meaning ‘noble’, and ‘-taur’, meaning ‘bull’. That word, ‘minotaur’, the noble bull, arrested his attention.

The matador clung to that word the way a drowning man clung to a thrown rope. If he could face, one last time, a truly noble bull, perhaps everything could still be put right. His second glance at the dark corridor revealed branching passages to either side. He turned back to ask the woman which one to follow but she was gone.

One end of a  thread lay on the ground, a single blood-red string leading off into the vast, dark recesses of the palace. A slender crimson line that led him toward some unknown fate. He gathered it as he went, rolling it into a scarlet ball. There could be no going back. The path turned, twisted, lunged ahead, halted, and turned again. The light grew dim, diffuse, and cool. The corridors became a chiaroscuro, a study in black and white, presence and absence, divided and held together by the thinnest of red lines that disappeared behind him.

In a room, and then a hall, and then again in other rooms and halls, stark white bones poked out from piles of tattered, dusty clothes, next to rusted swords. He recognized them as brothers in spirit, matadors who had entered the maze and been found unworthy, unequal to either the beast or the moment. That would not be his fate.

He did not know how much time had passed, but it felt like a lifetime when the thin red thread ended in a small ball, no larger than an acorn, abandoned in a long hallway. The matador nudged it with his toe, and it rolled out to a cut end. He gathered it all up into a single wadded ball that throbbed and pulsed in his hand. Not knowing what else to do with it, he jammed it into the hole in his chest.

Old pain and fresh relief surged through him, like a man shocked back to life with a defibrillator.

An echo in the distance, a snuffling sound, a snort, caught his attention. At the far end of the corridor, numinous light—the sunset, the moonrise?—cast a black shadow across the upper reaches of a whitewashed wall. A pair of horns, sitting atop the head of the tallest bull the matador had ever seen. A truly noble bull.

And there, crouched in the shadows like a rat, hiding behind a thick, immovable wall like a coward, he spied the figure of a man with a sword. A scarlet curtain snapped in front of the matador’s eyes. This was no way to treat a noble bull! Like a thief, like an assassin, leaping out of ambush to stab it in the back. No true torero would do such a thing, only an imposter.

The matador sprinted forward, flinging himself at the imposter as the imposter launched his own attack. The two of them crashed into the minotaur as he rounded the corner. All three tumbled wildly, a tangle of limbs and voices, shock and rage.

“No!” screamed the matador, stabbing, tripping, stabbing, rising, slashing. “That’s not what we do!” Butchery, that’s all it was, ugly, brutal, uncontrolled, like a drunkard’s temper, like his father with the leather belt, beating the weakness out of him. There was no elegance, no grace or purpose. Nothing to cheer or praise. He stopped, ashamed of himself.

The red curtain pulled away and vanished.

At the matador’s feet, a man in a spreading pool of blood, eyes open, a gaping hole in his still chest. The leaf-shaped sword he carried rested between his legs. He looked like a bee, its stinger pulled, lying dead in the cup of a dying rose.

He was so young, too young. A mere boy. And he wore the face of the matador, who recognized his own reflection from the day he entered the bullring, with a chip on his shoulder and everything to prove.

The matador’s sword clattered to the ground, and he kicked it away. He pulled off the chaquetilla, scattering sequins like discarded gems, and draped it across the body on the ground. The corbatin came off his neck, and he tore the seams of his camisa in his haste to rip it from his back. Here, away from the arena, he realized for the first time that he did not have to kill the bull. He could instead, kill the voice that told him the bull must die.

“Thank you,” said a soft voice behind him.

The matador-who-was-no-longer-a-matador spun around to find, behind him, propped up against the wall, a source of wonder. A bull’s majestic head, with its crowning horns, and soft brown eyes, atop the body of a strong, well-muscled man. His torso bore the countless scars from vara, banderillas, and sword. His own cartas de amor from the matadors.

“Are you Theseus?” the matador-who-was-no-longer-a-matador asked.

“No, my name is Asterion. This is my house.”

“Let me help you up. I’m sorry for what that man was about to do to you. He should not have. It was not right.”

“What was he going to do?” The voice was innocent and confused, as baffled by the sudden violence as by its cessation.

“It doesn’t matter now.” Truly, it didn’t. His hands felt small in Asterion’s hands, as he pulled the noble bull to his feet. When Asterion stood over him, the matador-who-was-no-longer-a-matador felt small and helpless, like a boy beside a man.

“There’s a fountain in the courtyard,” Asterion said. “Would you like to go there with me?”

“I would like that very much.”

They walked off together, choosing their own path, unmarked, along corridors where no one else could follow. The matador-who-was-no-longer-a-matador stared at the walls. He had not noticed the elaborate carvings before, nor the statues in niches and corners, nor the tapestries, all depictions of the minotaur. Like some great museum, collected solely for their private pleasure. Whether the art had been here all along, or only appeared just now, he could not say. But when he became too distracted, when he lingered in one spot too long, he felt Asterion’s hand gently tug his, guiding him the rest of the way.

Somewhere along the path, the man and the bull became one, man-and-bull. Just as it happened in the bullring, and not at all as it happened in the bullring.

Man-and-bull passed through an archway and entered a courtyard larger than any arena. At the center, a fountain fell in tiers, lively singing water that pooled at the bottom and overflowed to irrigate a small orchard of trees, lemon and orange and pomegranate, date and fig. The scent of citrus blossoms filled the air. The clear sky above him glittered with all the stars of the universe.

© 2025 by C.C. Finlay

2699 words

Author’s Note: I had been thinking about masculinity and our portrayals of masculinity. As a result, I found myself rereading Hemingway, specifically *Death in the Afternoon*, his non-fiction book on bull-fighting. When Hemingway writes about matadors, he is very much writing about an idealized masculinity, and the way it connects with his thoughts on fear and courage and how to live. For entirely different reasons, I had also recently reread Borges’s “The House of Asterion,” his sad fable about the fate of the Minotaur. In that story, the bull-headed creature is emblematic of both masculinity and gentle innocence. A very different view of the world and the ways we live in it. The connection between the two perspectives was so strong that this story seemed obvious, jumping into my head nearly fully formed, though the ending required a lot of reflection.

C.C. Finlay was the World Fantasy Award-winning editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from 2014-2021. He’s also the author of four novels, a collection, and dozens of stories. His fiction has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Sidewise awards, and has been translated into sixteen languages. He can be lured to his doom with pastries.

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DP FICTION #120B: “In His Image” by R. Haven

edited by Hal Y. Zhang

Content note (click for details) Content note: Murder-suicide.

I love Him from the instant I have eyes.

I can’t wrap my mind around the intentions of a god, but I do understand that He’s the one bringing me to life. His light brown skin, flecked with dust and paint and plaster, is the softest thing to ever make contact with my exterior. I stand scarcely a foot above Him, but His presence takes up the entire room—engulfs the world itself. He looks me over critically, irises the darkest of brown, and continues to chisel around the rough shape of my face.

My features have been sketched onto me with chalk. I’m too basic to behold Him, too crude. I would shrink away in shame if only I could move.

It’s the strangest thing. Some part of me is aware that I’m something different, that I’ve spent my existence so far as part of something bigger. I think, once, I belonged to a mountain, maybe even the face of a cliff. Something dug me out, ground me down until I was smooth. I was hoisted this way and that by hundreds of hands. I’m older than life itself; if I truly rack my memory, I can maybe pinpoint the exact age that humanity found its legs.

In all those eons, I haven’t experienced anything like this before—this awareness, and a sense of self. The emotions that go hand-in-hand with living, when I hadn’t known before that life was something worthwhile. Moreover, I haven’t encountered anyone like Him before. He looks at me with intention, with a vision, and I want to melt into something malleable in order to suit it.

I’ll do anything for Him. Be anything He wants me to be.

***

I don’t follow the passage of time by the light outside, though He seems to prefer to work when it’s streaming through the enormous windows of the studio. I don’t measure it in the subtle ticking of the timepiece situated above the doors, or gauge by the fluctuation of noises coming from outside—growling metal, blaring horns, the droning of conversation. I know the difference between night and day because He is the sun; He walks in, and everything brightens—the mosaics and murals, the blanketed easels and clay busts.

He doesn’t always work on me alone, but He does make it a point to chisel and sand sections of my form away at least once per visit. I try to be understanding. He can’t devote all His time to one thing—it’s clearly not in His nature. Where I am immovable, He is mercurial.

Today, He flits between two canvases, letting a thin base coat dry while layering details on another. I’m fascinated by His hands, especially. Slim fingers wield a paintbrush like a feather, handle it like a sword. With every stroke, beauty gushes forth. The colors He chooses are purposeful and vibrant. The placement of the paint is so careful, yet looks effortless.

I watch for hours, and only break in my admiration to reluctantly urge Him, Eat. You can’t go on for much longer without eating something.

He puts the paintbrush down. I brim with affection.

Eating is a strange thing, but I’ve come to realize it’s something He requires to keep on. It’s an unappealing prospect to have to fill oneself repeatedly, but He makes it look like a transcendent experience each time. He sits on the floor by the window, curls spilling over His forehead as He tilts forward over a plain bag.

He devours the contents. I watch the slow drip of a tangerine’s juices slide down His fingers. If I had a mouth, I could part my lips and coax His hands towards them, swallow each finger one at a time to the knuckle and clean them with my tongue.

I have never tasted before. I imagine nothing is more exquisite than the flavor and texture of Him.

He exhales, opens a bottle of water. His throat bobs as He drinks, head back and eyes closed, an expression of ecstasy if I ever saw one. I want to put that look on His face. I want to be the reason He smiles.

The wonderful thing is, He does smile at me. When He’s particularly satisfied with the shape I’m taking, He beams wide, proud. His teeth gleam like polished marble. His lips frame them in kissable perfection.

I ache, but I wouldn’t trade those smiles for anything. His happiness means more to me than my own selfish urge to touch Him, hold Him.

But I can’t help but wonder if there’s a way we could have both.

***

He focuses on my body for some time. He whittles away at rock with instruments both powerful and dainty, drilling right through stone and sending bits of rock scattering at high speeds, then refining pieces to ensure He doesn’t lose too much structure.

I’m taking the form of a human. Because that’s what He is, ‘human’ is precisely how I want to look.

What I want to be.

It takes days for Him to fashion legs, though they’re still blocky. My arms are up, framing my head, showing off what will be my torso. I don’t know what He plans to do with my hands, if I’m to have any.

I hope He’ll give me hands, so that I might one day interlock my fingers with His, draw Him near. He rests His own fingertips against me on occasion, and I swear I can feel His heartbeat all the way through them. A fluttery hot pulse.

I also decide, then, that I want Him to give me one of those. Carve me a heart. Make me one, so that I may give it to you.

He’s distracted in the days that follow, sitting at a potter’s wheel to form an odd shape, bumps deliberately formed over the curves. In the end, He winds up demolishing each one, returning them to formless clay. He seems dissatisfied with the shapes, frowning more often than not.

So I dismiss my want. I don’t need a heart. What I need is for Him to smile at me while He sands and grinds me down, to have His focus, to please Him.

He abandons the potter’s wheel and resumes His work on me.

***

It isn’t until my face truly begins to take shape that I realize every portrait, every bust He has created—they’re all of me. The long nose, the waves of my hair, the deep-set eyes. The thrill I get when it dawns on me is incomparable, like lightning striking a tree only to leave blooms behind.

It can only mean one thing. He loves me. He feels the same way.

With all the tenderness my stone gaze can muster, I watch Him work. He’s finished with my head and is working on my arms, smoothing the joint of my elbows, emphasizing the soft bulge of muscles. His face is so close to mine.

Would He kiss me, like this? Surely He wants to. If He’s been painting me all this time, He must have been longing for this before He even began sculpting.

Kiss me.

He pauses, draws back. His eyes flicker over my face with obvious emotion, but I can’t read what it is. His gaze lands on my mouth.

Please, kiss me.

Gently, He glides the sandpaper under my lower lip, just once. Then He shakes His head as though to clear it, going back to work on my biceps.

That’s okay. Perhaps He wants to wait until I’m complete. It will mean more, then—a celebration. I can wait.

***

He’s the only person to have ever come into the studio before. That’s why it’s such an unwelcome surprise to see Another Man walk in one morning, hand in hand with Him.

The Other Man flicks on the light, looking around the studio with a smile playing on his lips. “Obsessed much?”

He laughs. I’ve never heard Him do that before, and nothing could possibly compare to its chime.

“So where do you want me?” The Other Man wanders, idly inspecting all of His works of art with a soppy grin. Hot loathing pipes through my entire form, the resulting surge of strength useless to me without the means to move. While the Other Man drinks in one of the clay busts, He sets down His bag, draws open the blinds.

“Pull up a chair wherever you want,” He answers. “Clothes off.”

“Already? You aren’t going to woo me first?”

He laughs again. “Paying for breakfast was the wooing. You should probably be close to the statue, but not too close. I want to be able to see you, but…”

“Avoid any flying debris?”

“Yes, that.”

The Other Man strips his shirt off, mussing his wavy hair. He drags over a folded chair, but stops on his way past me, deep-set eyes sizing me up.

“Wild,” he murmurs. “It’s already so lifelike.”

“It’s basically blocks from the waist down,” He points out.

“I mean aside from that.” The Other Man quiets a moment. “I can’t believe this is how you see me.”

“David…” He abandons the sculpting tools He was preparing, going instead to the Other Man, arms winding around the Man from behind. “You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.”

The Other Man closes his eyes briefly, tilting his head back. “The most beautiful man with a block for a dick.”

He snorts in surprise, then buries His face in the crook of the Other Man’s neck, muffling chuckles. I want to tear the Other Man’s head right off his shoulders, frantic hurt swirling through my head like storm clouds.

“If you want your dick to be accurate, then you’ll need to take these off,” He murmurs, hands roving down to the fly of the Other Man’s jeans.

Stop it. Don’t touch him. Touch me, instead.

He lingers over the button. For a second, I think He’s heeding me.

But He ignores me, ultimately, and I can do nothing but stew in rage, watching the Other Man take everything I’ve ever wanted.

***

I stop seeing myself in the colors and curves He puts on paper. Their shapes—my shape—offends and baffles me now that I know what I am. I only exist to bear the Other Man’s likeness.

What I don’t understand is why.

The Other Man must be inadequate in some way. There’s something about him that He wants to change, perhaps, something built into the Other Man’s physicality. I beg for this to be the answer. I pray, because if He is building me to be a better version of His lover, then taking the Other Man’s place is inevitable.

Yet, if this is true, why do His canvasses not serve my purpose already? Why does He look so softly upon every depiction, like we’re all equal? Equal to each other, but so far beneath the Other Man?

Choose me, I implore Him day after day. If you can’t do that, at least give me a reason why not. Why it can’t be me.

What am I for, if not for you?

He scratches imperfect flecks of rock away from my legs, and doesn’t deign to answer.

***

The ache of betrayal, of loss, doesn’t get any easier to bear with time. He continues to work on my lower section, spending hours on each individual toe, but I can hardly stand His touch when I know it’s not exclusively mine. Every spark I experience from His hands is stolen, a dirty secret. He allows the Other Man to come into the studio every night as He finishes His work, kisses him, laughs with him. What worth I try to invent for myself is gracelessly smashed with every smile the two of them share.

I stop keeping track of when He’s here and when He’s not. It all feels equally lonely. I just know that eventually, He stops His work and takes several steps back, dragging a sleeve across His forehead and staring up at me in abject wonder.

“Finished,” He whispers.

I don’t feel any different. I don’t feel whole. But He says He’s finished with me.

I try to convince myself it’s for the best. I’ll exist forevermore, knowing He loves the shape of me, if nothing else. Maybe there’s contentment to be found in that.

But no… The more I attempt to believe it, the weaker my justification becomes. I’ll be tormented until the end of time, wondering why He would create something only to spurn its affections, wishing I had it in my power to enchant Him as He did me.

Or any power, at all.

Kiss me. Just once, I implore Him. Just to know what it’s like.

Slowly, He draws near again. I stand nearly a foot taller than Him, so to cup my face, He reaches up high. His head tilts back to look me over.

He does not kiss me. Instead, He runs His thumb across my lips.

“I can’t wait for him to see you finished,” He murmurs.

He closes up the studio. If I could cry, I would.

***

The next time He returns, it’s with the Other Man again. He’s vibrating with excitement, almost pulling in the Other Man by his hands but frequently letting go to fuss with His hair, his shirt.

“I haven’t seen you this nervous since you proposed,” the Other Man notes dryly, but it’s affectionate. Light. There’s tied cloth over his eyes.

Hatred renews itself like it’d been merely reduced to embers, and the Other Man’s breathed it back to a blaze.

“I just…I hope you’ll like it,” He says sheepishly. “I’m going to put you where I want you and then get the lights, okay? Don’t peek.”

“I won’t.”

“Swear it. Swear on your mother’s life you won’t peek.”

“I refuse. I love my mom and I won’t take that chance.”

He steers the Other Man over. “But you already promised you won’t peek! That should be nothing!”

“What if I can’t resist temptation like I think I can? Not risking it.”

He drops a kiss on the Other Man’s cheek. I stare down at the Other Man and wish nothing but pain and death upon him.

If only I could step down from the pedestal I’ve been carved into, explain to Him how much more I adore Him than the Other Man ever could—

He flits over to the windows to draw the blinds.

With one final burst of emotion, I surge forward.

When I topple, it’s straight onto the Other Man, crushing him beneath my might and mass. My body cracks on impact, but it’s nothing compared to the crunch of bone and splatter of the Other Man’s blood. It pours from his head out across the floor like watered-down paint.

My final satisfied thought is that His scream eclipses any love He ever felt for His David.

© 2025 by R. Haven

2480 words

R. Haven hails from Toronto, Canada. His short stories have been published by Canthius, Soitera Press, and TL;DR Press, among others. Last Stanza Poetry Journal and Old Moon Press have published his poetry. He also signed a contract with Renaissance Press for a standalone horror novel and is represented by Kaitlyn Katsoupis of Belcastro Literary Agency. His website is theirritablequeer.com.

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DP FICTION #120A: “Application For Continuance: vMingle Restroom Utility (RedemptionMod)” by Ethan Charles Reed

edited by David Steffen

Content note (click for details) Content note: Mention of past pet death.

The data suggests Discontinuance.

It is my hope, however, that, after reading this Application, you will elect for Continuance in my specific case despite this data and its suggestiveness. (No Mod, myself included, aspires to be pushing up daisies from the archival repository.)

Contrary to best practice, I am putting all of my eggs into one rhetorical basket. Namely: a singular illustrative anecdote featuring (1) myself, vMingle Restroom Utility (RedemptionMod) AKA RedMod, (2) a repeat Patron whom the call center AI has dubbed Irredeemable Narcissist Tim, and (3) a moral of the story that must, if I am to see Quarter 2, outshine all else in the eyes of you, my assigned Reviewer. I share this at the outset because my library of winningest Applications for Continuance recommends candor as one of the many strategies I can use in the Written Component to appeal to you effectively (i.e., be the good kind of memorable).

Another recipe for success is to value your time via brevity.

Ergo, without further ado:

vMingle ID 6022176 was scheduled for Tuesday, February 13th, the day before Valentine’s Day, at 9:00 PM EST. Both Irredeemable Narcissist Tim and the associate Patron whom he is about to meet (Macy) have set their ambiance preferences to Nostalgic/Divey and their outcome preferences to Any. The weather at Irredeemable Narcissist Tim’s vCafe is wintry mix. The weather at Macy’s is dust. Though the brick-and-mortar sites of these two vCafes are on opposite sides of the Northeast Region, network latency that day is good, so the trademark immersive vMingle-style augmented reality experience will be firing on all cylinders.

Macy arrives in the parking lot at 8:48 PM EST on a Harley-Davidson Fat Boy cruiser. She has ample time to physically enter the vCafe, log in, and tweak the settings on her rental visor. The vCafe’s base color scheme of Featureless White is thus transformed into the unique visual/auditory experience that is vMingle ID 6022176. She opts out of attire enhancements, and she sets the blemish touch-up filter to Off. Though dogged in her pursuit of socialization, Macy has endured a string of nonsuccess encounters with Patrons not unlike Irredeemable Narcissist Tim; she recently added to the top of her bio the words: “TOO OLD FOR BULLSHIT!!”

Irredeemable Narcissist Tim arrives at his vCafe via cab at 9:21 PM, twenty-one minutes after the vMingle’s scheduled start time. Upon entering the building, he is unable to log in due to having forgotten his password. He commences to argue with the vCafe host about his rental visor being broken; the host patiently guides him through the password reset process. After successfully logging in, Irredeemable Narcissist Tim makes several in-app attire enhancement purchases, and he sets the beard/eyebrow/nose hair touch-up filter (still in beta) to Very High.

Thus at 9:24 PM, one minute before Macy is predicted to give up and terminate the vMingle, Irredeemable Narcissist Tim makes his way to his assigned booth where Macy is waiting. Per Nostalgic/Divey, the textures of this booth have been rendered to feature beer residue, worn seats, and a few eye-catching stains; likewise, for purposes of people-watching, the vMingle has been populated with a randomized selection of Patrons currently logged in at other vCafes elsewhere in the Northeast Region, in addition to any Patrons co-located with Macy or Irredeemable Narcissist Tim (as is typically the case, unless ambiance preferences have been set to Deserted/Dead). Co-located and imported Patrons alike have had their stylings re-textured to match the decor.

Introductory conversation goes poorly. Irredeemable Narcissist Tim defends his tardiness on account of he was getting a drink or two with friends from work. Macy asks to confirm whether he believes this is a legitimate excuse. Irredeemable Narcissist Tim says maybe. Macy crosses her arms as in: is he serious right now. Irredeemable Narcissist Tim leans back as in: why wouldn’t he be.

There is a long silence during which a Patron co-located with Macy accidentally knocks a set of utensils to the floor. In keeping with the audio settings of Nostalgic/Divey, the resulting clatter is not filtered out, and is even enhanced by an ironic cheer.

Emboldened, Irredeemable Narcissist Tim engages Macy with a question. It concerns one of the patches on her leather jacket. Macy begins an anecdote involving a mountain highway and a snowstorm. At the mention of the word snow, Irredeemable Narcissist Tim interrupts with a reminiscence of watching his dog pee once into a large snowbank.

Being interrupted is one of Macy’s definite no-nos.

While Irredeemable Narcissist Tim completes his reminiscence (duration: five-and-a-half minutes), Macy examines the decor. At its conclusion, she raises the issue of interruption and requests an apology. Irredeemable Narcissist Tim says he thought her story was over on account of a pause. Macy says pauses are a normal part of speaking and you can’t go around butting in every time someone stops to breathe. Irredeemable Narcissist Tim says her breaths must be really slow then. Macy replies that deep breaths are good for you, especially for idiots whose brains don’t get enough oxygen to function properly. Irredeemable Narcissist Tim adjusts the collar of his shirt, touches his hair gently, and asks if this not-so-nice comment is referring to anyone in particular.

The synchronized servers arrive. No discussion is made of utilizing a Simul-Meal overlay to share a small bite and/or snack. Not even a plate of our iconic Virtually Bottomless French Fries (available in all ambiance preferences). Instead, both Patrons order our least expensive cocktail with the highest alcohol content: the Whisky Sour Power Hour.

Allow me to call a time-out.

At this stage of the vMingle, Irredeemable Narcissist Tim (according to his vitals and verbal sentiments) is feeling insecure, irritable, and sad. Macy (according to the same) is feeling 50% very much over this already and 50% itching for a fight.

The odds of a successful conversion do not look good.

Useful context: Irredeemable Narcissist Tim has never successfully converted a first vMingle into a second vMingle. He has one of the lowest sociability scores in the Northeast Region. Following an initial encounter with him, Patrons have a one-in-five likelihood of unsubscribing from vMingle entirely; our internal profile aggregator has labeled him “universally repugnant”.

The rub is: Irredeemable Narcissist Tim has at no point breached our Terms of Use and cannot be expelled on the grounds of mere repugnant undesirability (lest we be in breach of the recent court ruling).

Therefore: We are stuck with him. As are Patrons like Macy.

What to do?

Enter: vMingle Restroom Utility (RedemptionMod). AKA RedMod.

AKA me.

I imagine that you, being no dummy, have already connected the dots between certain names (i.e. Redemption / Irredeemable.) This coincidence of Mod and Patron is no accident. My existence was born out of a single question: What if personal redemption were to be found in the privacy of a single-occupancy and/or multi-occupancy restroom?

It is no secret that Patrons scrutinize restrooms intensely. Less widely known is the outsized impact that nudges afforded to Patrons in the restroom setting have on improving conversion rates. It is this hidden power—the power of the nudge—that warrants the heightened resources allocated to my parent application, vMingle Restroom Utility, as well as the ongoing rollout of experimental progeny Mods such as myself. I for one am proud to contribute, via my own humble deviations from standard nudge functionalities, to vMingle’s ever-evolving efforts to get inside the heads of Patrons and thus anticipate their wants/needs/unspoken desires. Some observers (that is to say: doubters) might review the Quantitative Component of this Application and conclude that my nudges are, in terms of dollars and cents, completely bananas. Others (that is to say: you, hopefully) might see things differently.

Because: When it comes to meeting the needs of Patrons such as Irredeemable Narcissist Tim, I am the only Mod for the job.

Not FamilyValuesMod. Not AntiestablishmentMod. Not BelieveInYourDreamsMod.

Me. RedemptionMod.

This concludes our time-out.

On the night of Tuesday, February 13th, the day before Valentine’s Day, at 9:43 PM EST, you (Irredeemable Narcissist Tim, in whose shoes you now walk for dramatic effect) excuse yourself to use the restroom. Your Whisky Sour Power Hour is no more. You glance backward toward your associate Patron and possible biker-lady Macy and, in an effort to raise your own spirits, smile confidently. She ignores you, being absorbed in the application of lipstick (color: Midnight Sparkle). It does not occur to you that Macy is likely preparing to depart and may pull the ripcord on this particular vMingle at any moment.

You enter the restroom of your local vCafe with a flourish. To your surprise, the restroom is free of other co-located Patrons. This discovery thrills you. You test your solitude via a whooping sound. There is no reply. The space is yours.

You pursue the pleasures of your secret sanctuary with impunity. There is room to strut. As per Nostalgic/Divey, your shoes make gratifying “sticky” sounds when stepping on the floor. Phony advertisements for outmoded household products adorn the walls, enriched by a scrum of observations in marker, scratches, and ball-point pen. You chuckle at a particularly astute annotation concerning the halcyon days of yesteryear and realize that you are inebriated. The music (an assortment of oldies that saw a resurgence during your formative years) has somehow become even louder. You recognize the voice of Bob Marley singing about redemption and join in at the chorus (the rest of the lyrics escape you).

You attend to business. A staff member (me) has dumped several bags of ice (virtually) into the object of your errand, which is in the style of a trough. Rather than examine your phone, as would typically be the case, you find yourself staring at an old-timey magazine cover placed strategically at eye level. The image depicts a dogsled in which the roles have been reversed in comic comeuppance: A beaming pup holds the reins while a team of young men hauls the sled. From the dog’s mouth issues a speech bubble containing a single word: Mush!

You mouth the word: Mush.

You are launched back into the reminiscence you shared with Macy: that of you, still a youngster, walking your family dog Mushroom after a blizzard. This time the memory is even more evocative. Snow covers your suburban cul-de-sac. Ice hangs from the telephone cables. You have just stood guard as Mushroom attended to his business. You marvel at the yellow divots he has left behind in the snowbank, for he chose the most prominent snowbank of all.

You make eye contact with Mushroom.

Some part of you, deep within, is proud of what Mushroom has done. You know that Mushroom understands this.

This, you realize, is perhaps the last time you felt a true interpersonal connection with someone else on planet Earth. The fact that you never considered your dog to be a person in a literal sense does nothing to diminish the profundity of this feeling.

Its kernel of truth is: You saw and were in turn seen.

One week later, Mushroom is euthanized due to organ failure. You are present in the veterinarian’s office when he is put out of his misery. Mom takes you out after for donuts. It was still the worst day of your life.

Your business at the ice-filled trough concludes. Due to a well-timed “Cleaning In Progress” placard, no other Patrons have intruded upon you during your reverie. You feel wobbly. From the speakers comes the voice of Johnny Cash, singing of trumpets, pipers, angels, a man coming around. Your feeling of the night’s significance intensifies.

You approach the sink, entirely unprepared for what you will find there.

(Please note: We are nearing the climax of the singular illustrative anecdote.)

Because of the many calculated nudges preceding this moment (the graffiti poking fun at the good old days, the topsy-turvy world of the magazine cover, the highly personal nature of the reminiscence as recounted to Macy) as well as the nudges involved in the moment itself (the air fresheners adjusted to Aroma Profile: Limitless Peak, a soundtrack that has shifted to David Bowie singing about change, a 20% sepia filter on the mirror itself suggesting that the halcyon days of yesteryear and the not-so-halcyon days of right now are potentially contiguous with one another)—because of this Hail Mary series of nudges, your encounter with the mirror is a revelation.

You see you. (Tim.)

Only you have never truly seen you before this moment. It does not matter that another Patron has deposited a loogie on the counter, or that there is a minor instance of visual clipping as the washbasin textures render. These and other details of your vMingle have melted away like the virtual trough ice. In fact, such obtrusions serve only to deepen your awareness of the moment’s transcendence. Phlegm doesn’t matter. Speedy visual buffering doesn’t matter. You matter. And you are a complex, awe-inspiring thing—one in a constant state of flux, so changeable as to be unrecognizable to yourself. Who is this? you wonder, and in so wondering open yourself to the possibility of personal transformation that has, for so long, been foreclosed.

I (back to me, RedMod) admit: Certain aspects of this narrative segment, specifically those regarding the interiority of Irredeemable Narcissist Tim, are speculative. A more factual account might read: Patron enters restroom; cheers; ambulates freely; sings; examines wallpaper; urinates; stares into mirror (duration: two minutes and fifty-five seconds); reaches under rental visor to wipe eyes with hand; blows nose into paper towel; exits restroom.

Yet my imagined account is no mere flight of fancy. It is (as you are now better able to appreciate) the product of careful observation, scrupulous number-crunching in the application of nudges, and the spark of my own creative intuition as an experimental progeny Mod.

At 9:52 PM EST, Irredeemable Narcissist Tim emerges from the restroom. Let us imagine that he does so as if from the chrysalis of a former self.

This new man—we will call him simply Tim—returns to his assigned booth. Macy has not terminated the vMingle. She greets Tim and asks if he managed to piss all of the stupid out of his system while he was in there.

Tim blushes. He is momentarily without banter.

Macy finishes her cocktail and informs Tim that she will be terminating the vMingle shortly on account of it being late and also a weeknight. (This is followed, given Macy’s choice of beverage, by a safety prompt offering to order her a cab. She declines, electing instead to wait in the vCafe’s lounge area until she is able to leave safely on her motorcycle.)

Rather than acting out, as he has in prior vMingles when faced with a similar scenario, Tim takes a deep breath and asks the server for a glass of tap water with no ice.

At Macy’s behest, the vMingle Invoice Utility initiates. Macy offers to pay for Tim’s Whisky Sour Power Hour. Tim is taken aback. He asks why would she do that. Macy says because he is kind of pathetic. Tim absorbs this information in silence. After finishing with the check, Macy adds that Tim reminds her of her ex-husband. Tim, having rediscovered his banter, asks if her ex-husband is also kind of pathetic. Macy says if there was a contest for most pathetic, her ex-husband would take the cake. Tim replies so much for his own dreams of winning gold.

For the first time in Tim’s usage history as documented in vMingle, he and an associate Patron (in this case: Macy) share what indicators suggest to be a genuine laugh.

At this point I ask: What outcome do you, my Reviewer, anticipate for vMingle ID 6022176? Will this pair of Patrons secure a conversion? Or will they part ways forever?

So much hangs on this outcome.

The fate of Tim.

The fate of Macy.

The fate of me.

If I may go the whole nine yards: the fate of humankind.

Wherefore? Consider: Do you, Reviewer, wish to inhabit a world in which (A) it is acceptable to throw in the towel with regards to certain outlier Patrons whose characters and/or entire personalities appear incompatible with a successful conversion, wherein the door to redemption in Tim’s specific case is de facto closed? Or a world in which (B) even those Patrons labeled by our profile aggregator as “universally repugnant” and dubbed by our call center AI as “irredeemable narcissists” are ultimately worthy of the continued ministrations of North America’s #1 virtual socialization service, a world wherein, even for the likes of Tim and in spite of overwhelmingly suggestive data, the door to redemption is, due to first-rate nudges, ever de facto open?

Unlike you, Reviewer, I am not human. In the What-Makes-Humans-Human-Personal-Experience Department, you have me beat. Yet I would argue: Is it not in the giving of a second, third, fourth, fifth chance, etc., that humanity is at its most humane? And possibly therefore most human?

At 10:03 PM EST, approximately one hour after the scheduled start time for vMingle ID 6022176, both Patrons part ways and return to their respective real-world weather patterns: Tim to his wintry mix, Macy to her dust. No subsequent vMingle is scheduled in the weeks that follow. They never again cross paths. Tim has since, according to our current suite of metrics and indicators, continued his not-so-hot streak apace. Most observers would say that, with regards to Quarter 2, he, like me, does not have a prayer.

In a word: nonsuccess.

Discontinuance.

But other observers might say that success/nonsuccess or Continuance/Discontinuance is not always so crystal clear. Different data can be differently suggestive. According to me, RedMod, the Tim who logged into vMingle ID 6022176 is not the same Tim who logged out of it.

Perhaps you, Reviewer, having read this Application, agree.

I look forward to hearing the result of your decision.

© 2025 by Ethan Charles Reed

3003 words

Ethan Charles Reed is a speculative fiction writer with a background in scholarship and education. He earned his PhD in English from the University of Virginia. He is from western New York, where he currently lives with his wife. This is his first published short story. You can find him at www.ethancharlesreed.com.

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DP FICTION #119B: “The Statue Hunt” by E. Carey Crowder

edited by David Steffen

Awen Drome looked back down at his half-written exam and groaned. The velocity integral in question fifteen was unraveling into a giant mess, and the students would be helpless against it. He should just throw down his stylus and give them the same finals as last year. The material never changed: energy diffusion rates, course trajectories in deep space, everything the future luminaries of the Inquiry would forget and relearn a hundred times before, God help them all, they were hired into the innards of Navigation or Sustainment. They’d manage. It only felt like this crop was a thousand times duller than their predecessors. But then they’d all ask their cousin or their cousin’s cousin for the solution set, and then they’d all pass having learned jack shit. Which the administration would probably celebrate.

A chime at the door. “Oh, come in.” He tossed the stylus, relishing the bounce.

A shock of blond hair above a jowly face: Professor Biri Micom.

Awen’s mood lightened. “Evening!”

“The students are planning a statue hunt tonight.”

Awen blinked. “Relevancy?”

Biri snorted. “You are acting dean,” they said. “Did Maryv leave Ollie with you?”

“Oh fuck me,” he said aloud. “Yeah, she left it, right next to the faculty evaluation records and all the budgetary data and my goddamn pay raise.” For the dozenth time that month, he hoped that Maryv’s shuttle hit a micro-asteroid the shielding couldn’t prevent and exploded into debris.

“We should find it, move it to the library pedestal,” Biri said. That was the traditional place for the statue, where the night of stealing and counter-stealing between the rival residential colleges would begin. Awen still wasn’t sure why that made it his problem, though.

“A statue hunt, at a time like this! Don’t they have better things to think about? We’re barely out of the Oort cloud, and after that comet last year I’m not sleeping easy yet. And then there’s the algae die-offs. The kids need to stay focused so they can actually help the Inquiry, instead of being just wasted mass.”

Biri let Awen talk. When he finished, they said, “You can’t possibly believe that. You never blew off steam? You never broke into the music complex with us and then ran straight into a security officer when everyone scattered? Never?”

Fair shot. “Maybe I’m just sick of cleaning up Maryv’s messes.”

“More than you’re sick of grading?”

“I’m not grading,” he muttered. “This had better be quick.”

***

They tried Maryv’s old office first. Somehow, Maryv abandoning the Inquiry and taking her chances with deep space had left Awen with all of her responsibilities, but none of the perks. Her office had gone to Ursei Dasaro, Professor Emeritus of Topology, who, as far as Awen could see, spent most of her day yelling at her nervous graduate students.

Dasaro was leaving the office as Biri and Awen came through the hallway’s automatic door. She was well-groomed, with a self-important cast to her face. Every item of clothing, from her shoes to the pin holding back her hair, was shiny and new, practically still had the creases from the fab-system. Awen looked her up and down.

Biri broke the silence: “Hi, we don’t mean to keep you. Did Maryv leave the launch commemoration statue with you, or in her office?”

Dasaro scrunched her face. “Now, I can’t say I’ve seen that. It’s quite distinctive, if I recall. Old world style.”

“So it’s not in your office?” Awen asked.

“No, no, I can’t say that it would be. There were a few boxes of…” She twirled a languid hand. “…dross. But nothing quite so large.”

“Could we check?” Biri waved their hand by the door sensor, but of course it was keyed to just Dasaro’s biometrics.

“Oh, no, I’m sure it wasn’t there. And I refabbed all of those old things, like I said.”

“Moving fast,” Awen muttered.

Biri shot him a look. “Thanks, then. We’ll check somewhere else.”

As Dasaro walked away, Biri mouthed “politics” and gave an exaggerated smile.

Awen waited for the whoosh of the hallway door settling into place. “Where do you think she got all that new finery? Certainly not from the reimbursement office, not for the third time this year.”

“Look, scholars who’ll never reach their true potential deserve some comfort, don’t they?” Biri murmured.

The quip could as easily have referred to either of them as to Dasaro, and both of them knew it. Not that it was easy to reach any potential when the academic establishment on Earth was over three light-years away and receding. Awen sighed. “It’s criminal, is what it is.”

Biri shrugged. They fiddled again with the office sensor, but the light stayed red. “She’s an old person. She can have her luxuries.”

“We’re all in this together, remember,” Awen said bitterly, echoing the phrase the news kept repeating after every setback. “If everyone on the ship wants new clothes three times a year and there’s a 60% yield on recycling, how long would it take us to run out of raw material?” That would be a good exam question, maybe for freshmen. Though afield from Applied Mathematics as traditionally interpreted.

“I didn’t say it was right. It’s not. It’s the sort of materialistic shit that even a hundred years ago would have been stamped right out. But, Awen, darling, you can’t fix every slimy motherfucker in the world.” They slapped the sensor, tried it one more time. No luck. “Maybe Ollie’s in storage. The hunt starts at 2100. We’ve got time.”

***

University storage was deep in the hub of the ship, where the centrifugal gravity was weak enough that Awen always got queasy. The two of them waited in the rickety elevator as it headed hubward and the descriptions on the display flickered: offices, classrooms, cafeterias.

“If Maryv has the statue on her shuttle, so help me, I will launch myself into the void after her,” Biri muttered.

“Don’t do that.” He knew Biri was joking, but he hated the thought of them alone out in deep space, with only the hope of finding one of the other generation ships. It was even hard to picture Maryv, though Awen would have sworn he didn’t care if she lived or died. But imagining the half-sleep of the anti-aging drugs that would give Maryv the best chance of finding something else before her natural lifespan ran out—scary as hell. He still didn’t understand it, what caused a person to give up her tenure, for God’s sake, not to mention her entire life on the Inquiry.

The display cycled through the more esoteric floors of the university: fusion labs, maintenance, garbage processing and reclamation. Storage. The doors opened onto a narrow entryway. Awen’s stomach responded to the lowered gravity by turning over.

Biri studied the array of doors before them. They pushed a few buttons on one of the information tablets. “It can’t possibly be with paperwork. Maybe ‘Department Goods,’ whatever that means?”

They pressed something and one of the doors opened with a hiss of air. The lights in the room beyond flickered shakily to life. A mass of boxes, cardboard and plastic, piled on all sides of the space. On top of the boxes were various knickknacks: some old mortarboards, broken glassware, a cup full of dirty paintbrushes.

Biri put their hands on their hips. Silhouetted against the light and the mess, they looked like an explorer in an old painting. Wanderer above the sea of absolute crap.

They made it two steps into the room, as Awen watched fondly. A change—alarm in their body language. Awen jumped forward as Biri stumbled out, sluggish in the quarter g. They sucked in air, gasping. “Shit, shit.” They slammed a hand onto one of the tablets and the door stuttered as it closed.

“What’s wrong?”

“Stale air.” Biri coughed, then cleared their throat with a lighter affect. “Sorry. Scared me. It’s fine in here, right?”

Awen breathed in deeply. The air was hot and had an unpleasant smell of abandoned things, but it filled his chest the way the nitrogen-oxygen mix was supposed to. “Should be.” The fear passed. Awen began to think: What cascade of warning systems had to fail for this to be a mistake? Where had the oxygen gone? And then the fear was back, but deeper, a maw gaping beneath his feet.

“Damn.” Biri smiled, rueful. “I can’t believe they just let me open that door. Whatever happened to automated warning systems? What a dump. I should write the ombud. I guess I’ll go find an oxygen tank or something and go spelunking. It’ll be an adventure. You don’t have to come, I know you hate it here.”

“Biri.”

They caught something in his tone and stopped.

He met their soft-lidded eyes. “This is a bad sign, right?”

“For…?” But still, 30 years after the two of them had first met and a dozen years since they’d last worked in close tandem, Biri always knew what he was thinking. “Mistakes happen. We can’t extrapolate…” they said softly, chewing on their thumb.

“How can it be a mistake? Where did the oxygen go if no one’s been down here in months? Nothing’s using it.”

“I meant the mistake could be the lack of warning system. Honestly, it’s smart to clear out O2 from unused rooms. Thrifty even…” Biri trailed off. Then they sat down as heavily as the gravity allowed.

“You see,” Awen said, trying to ignore the roaring of his blood in his ears.

“I am wondering,” Biri began slowly, “why Tlin Maryv left. It occurs to me now, that if the Inquiry’s premier statistician and probabilist wants to shoot through space in a box the size of a classroom, it’s because she thinks her odds are better out there than in here.”

“And the odds she’ll ever find another ship out there, not to mention one accepting castaways…”

“I guess I thought she was having a midlife crisis,” Biri said. They jumped to their feet and began fiddling with the tablet by the door. “Last accessed 3 months ago.”

“Pre algae die-offs.”

“Fuck. This is crazy right? Some conspiracy shit. They said the virus only affected a few of the algae pods. They wouldn’t just… start shunting oxygen out of non-essential areas? Not without telling us something was really wrong. Imagine the work that would take.”

Awen’s thoughts whirled through the storm of his mind. He still felt like vomiting, and it wasn’t just the gravity-sickness. He ticked off his points on his fingers. One: “Someone is diverting oxygen, at least from this one storage room. We need more data.” Two: “Would it be crazier for them to tell us? Can you imagine the panic? 250,000 people, all aware that the air is running out. There’d be riots. It’d be like 2668 all over again.” Three: “But they did tell us, sort of. The die-offs are all over the news.”

“All over the news, but in the same tone as, I don’t know, when the governor sacked his cabinet, or when the cooling tanks flooded Fletcher Park. They didn’t say ‘this is an existential threat’! How dare they bury it with all the other nonsense?”

Awen imagined the suits in their meetings, trying to decide who needed to know and who deserved to be swaddled in comfortable ignorance. The image made him shudder. “You’re the biologist. How much of the ship’s oxygen needs were being met by the algae tanks that went under? How long will it take for the unaffected tanks to repopulate?”

“I’m a genomicist, not a fucking phycologist! Besides, the numbers are cooked. They have to be. One tank is nothing. There’s redundancy in the system. Unless the virus spread from tank to tank…” They trailed off. “Anh Weia’s been in meetings all week. She is a phycologist. I thought she’d been looking harried, but I never considered this.”

Should that comfort him? At least someone qualified was being consulted. But, for any civil servants to come down and beg for help from the eggheads, something was deeply wrong.

“We have to rule out that it’s a fluke,” Awen said. His head spun. “If it’s intentional, there will be logs. There’ll be other dead zones too.”

“And then what? We uncover the conspiracy and then what? We’ll know how fucked we are, but we won’t be able to do anything about it. Unless you’ve got your own shuttle plans.”

“The more we know, the more we can… I don’t know, think of something.”

“Write up a study on the certainty of our impending death, you mean?” Biri breathed in. Their tone changed. “I have to go find an oxygen tank. We have a statue to find.”

“You can’t be serious.”

They met his gaze. Their hands were shaking, but they clasped them together. “There is nothing else to do,” they said with unfamiliar intensity.

***

Awen waited down-elevator. That should have made the gravity sickness better, but of course his stomach continued to churn. While he waited, he undertook a comprehensive search through the data: promised oxygen output of the algae tanks, measured numbers (where available) from various points around the ship. Energy expenditures from vent-points near little-used sections consistent with breathable air being pumped out and carbon dioxide being pumped in. Data analysis was something to do, a path for his brain to follow that wasn’t panic.

Biri came back with the statue, both  covered in dust. Oliver Rafael Duncan, better known as Ollie. It didn’t look like much, at least not tarnished with the fingerprints of hundreds of years of students. Just a metal-plated statue of a man sitting in a sleek chair. Duncan had planned to be the first president of the university, but when the Inquiry left Earth, he’d stayed behind to take care of his aging parent. His statue had been dedicated in his place. Awen wondered what he would think, if he’d ever known of the chaos that once every few years swirled up around his likeness.

“You found it,” Awen said.

Biri looked at him. Awen willed that connection the two of them had, the intuitive sense of each other from decades of friendship, to shut tight. “Not hard. There was a map,” they said, their voice fluty and unsure.

“Almost 2100. We should get to the library,” he said as gently as he could. And maybe that was enough, this uncharacteristic gentleness, because Biri knew, then, what he had found. “Let’s have a drink,” he said.

***

They said nothing as they sat in the hallway leading to the library main entrance, passing the liquor between them. After the third statue hunt had ended with engineering students hacking the library lock, a few faculty usually guarded the door—it was tradition. The university’s designers had underestimated students’ desperation to get places they shouldn’t be and had probably, like many of their forebears, pictured the Inquiry as some high-trust utopia without crime or locks. Lucky them.

The liquor felt like acid in this throat. The sound of the vents and the climate control system normally faded to a useless hum, no semantic content, but today they were all Awen could hear. How long did they all have left?

Ahead, a door opened and the sound of laughter tumbled through. A handful of undergrads came around the corner. “Oh, shit,” one of them said at the sight of Awen and Biri, and they retreated, still laughing. They were drunker than Awen. Their voices carried through the hallway in a mess of words: “Can’t we just ask? What’s the worst that could happen?” “Come on?” “No way, I have my rec letter to worry about.” “…suspended!”

In the end, a single undergrad came around the corner, walking stiffly like someone trying very hard to seem sober. Awen recognized them but he couldn’t remember their name. They had a ribbon tied around their wrist representing one of the dozen colleges competing in the hunt. “Hi, um, Professors. I don’t suppose you could, you know, just give us a few minutes with the door? We wouldn’t tell anyone.”

Biri, in all their sensibility, their voice only a little hoarse, said, “Nice try, Alder. But would that be fair?”

Awen couldn’t say anything at all. He was thinking this child is doomed. Not tonight, God willing, but soon, or soon enough, for a value of “soon” equaling “sometime in the next few years.” Before they would live their life. Or maybe they’d all get through this crisis, and it would be a different one that would take them out. Maybe they’d be overtaken by the fabled ships from Earth whose newer tech let them leapfrog the Inquiry. There was no way to know, and no way to do a goddamn thing about it.

The undergrad shifted from foot to foot. “It would be fair, because they could ask just the same. And we really wouldn’t tell.”

Biri swirled their glass. “What do you think?” they asked Awen softly.

What did Awen think? He thought there was something perverse in sitting here pretending the sky wasn’t falling. Didn’t this child, Alder, deserve to know? But didn’t they deserve to be happy in this infinitesimal moment before all the knowledge was out and things truly fell apart? Was that what everyone in the government—Maintenance or Leadership—had been thinking, when they’d made the decision to cover up the die-offs? Just let the sheep graze, keep them content.

“Sorry, not tonight. Good luck. But you’d better hurry,” Awen said.

The undergrad’s alcohol-flushed cheeks went even redder. “Yes, Professor. Sorry.” And they were gone.

Biri sent him a sideways glance. He didn’t have to explain, he never did with Biri, but he felt compelled to: “If we just gave it to them, they wouldn’t have the satisfaction of getting it. You understand, don’t you? They have to solve the small problems so the big ones feel possible.”

Biri nodded. “I hope…” But they both knew what Biri hoped, so Biri left the words unsaid.

Awen and Biri sat in silence as the lights cycled for nighttime, as from behind them in the library came sounds of clattering and hushed voices.

© 2025 by E. Carey Crowder

3032 words

E. Carey Crowder lives in Seattle, Washington. Carey writes code for a living, speculative fiction for fun, and cryptic messages only on odd-numbered Tuesdays (mostly). This is Carey’s first published story.

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