short stories

A tale about two guys who take their work very seriously. Too seriously? You be the judge.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by SiChen Wang

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

Jones leaned against the subway doors, mopping the sweat from his upper lip with the last dry corner of a paper napkin.

“Hey!” Marlo said, slamming his palm on the polished steel wall. “Don’t you ruin this.”

The napkin dropped from Jones’s hand with the weight of all that sweat.

THWUP was the sound it made as it hit the floor, and Jones could do nothing but hold his hands up as if fending off an attack as Marlo’s mustached upper lip went damp.

No attack came, just a heavy silence that only an empty subway car could make at 11:39 PM on the Saturday night before Inspection.

Marlo’s squeezed fist sounded like an eggshell cracking, and the excema wounds around his knuckles wept. “Now look at what you did. Gonna have to wear gloves to salvage this mess you’ve made, and you know they slow me down.”

The door at Jones’s back was no longer refreshing.

“And get off the fucking door,” Marlo said. “You even put up the goddamn sign.”

Jones couldn’t move. Marlo’s hulking frame blocked the space between the two benches. He used it to his advantage and staked a gloved finger to the center of Jones’s chest, right on the zipper of his coveralls and pressed hard enough for it to catch on Jones’s chest hair on the other side of his cotton shirt, a 6-ounce heavyweight he’d purchased just for this job.

“Feel that?” Marlo asked. “That’s a fraction of what it’ll be like if Inspection goes bad. You don’t know what they do to guys like us. We’re expendable. The dregs.” Marlo’s face scrunched at that last word, and his staked finger retracted. “But we’re better than that. I know we’re better. I chose you just for this job because I know you’re better.”

“S-sorry,” Jones said.

Marlo nodded and put a hand on Jones’s shoulder. “I know you are. I am, too. But we have–” he checked his watch”–exactly fifteen minutes now to get this job done. Get things to Berfection.”

“Berfection?”

“Better than perfection,” Marlo said with glassy eyes, ready to be broken by the slightest touch. “Been working on that one for a while. I’m what you call a creative type. Better than this work, but I’m good at it, and–” he tapped his temple “–I can do the creative work in here, while I do the physical work out here.” His smile trembled, and one of his longer mustache hairs quivered like a tuning fork. “Hear that?”

Jones did, like a hornet in his ear.

“Tunnel C,” Marlo said looking over his shoulder down the subway car. “The most difficult stretch before Inspection.”

Jones looked too.

LEDs along the ceiling bowed to the turbulence, and the triangular straps hanging just below them swung like Newton’s cradle. The floor shook and kept shaking. The whole car. Jones grabbed a pole to steady himself.

“This is where you prove to me I was right,” Marlo said. “That you have what it takes. That all the backbreaking work down at the loading dock was the cakewalk that did nothing but prepare you for this moment. I chose you, Jones. I chose you.”

“No way can we finish off this car while it shakes like this,” Jones said. “I can barely stand up.”

A drop of sweat dangled off Marlo’s long mustache hair. “You’ll do it. You won’t let me down.”

Teeth chattering, spine rattling, all Jones could do was nod.

Marlo nodded back, his deep smile squeezing his face into a stack of pancakes, and went to work.

Jones found his footing with a wide stance, fingertips the only thing touching the subway pole, and he watched Marlo’s virtuosic performance. The man used the chaos of the car’s motion to his advantage, going against it when he needed to tighten a bench screw or straighten a poster or affix a warning sticker, then going with it when he needed to close the seam from a bad bolt job on a bench or reseat a subway pole. Marlo’s grace was infectious, a viral spray that infused everything. Jones couldn’t escape it.

He mirrored Marlo the best he could, garnering the highest form of approval from the man, which was autonomy.

Jones tripped up a few times as the car hit new rhythms, until he envisioned them like tracks on an album, anticipating the change before the final fade out or drum hit. He saw the breadcrumbs Marlo left for him, little things off just enough to alert the discerning eyes of Inspection, at least what he’d been told.

Jones had never been an artistic man, but he imagined these to be his final brushstrokes, the coda to his symphony.

Then the subway car fell into a stasis, almost as if it had no weight at all, and the two men stared at each other from opposite sides of the car. Marlo where Jones had begun, where he went to clean what must have been the smudge from Jones’s head when he’d rested against the door, where the large man’s foot found the discarded napkin.

Marlo left the ground in a backward somersault to meet the ground again with the sound of a coffin lid closing.

Jones rushed to him.

Marlo pointed. “The bench. False wall. We can . . .”

Marlo was out. Jones was alone. He did what Marlo asked after getting the napkin. They both lay as lovers behind the grated wall beneath the bench when the subway eased to a stop and a door opened.

In walked a man wearing a suit with a newspaper under his arm. He paid no attention to the state of things. The glass, the metal, the plastic. He merely sat on a bench and shook his newspaper open. He scanned the words there. He licked a finger. He turned a page.

He left.

Jones let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. So did Marlo, through broken teeth and blood, and he said, “Berfection.”

A lonely fisherman who doesn’t know what else to do but fish. I thought this would be a fun exercise to explore someone who has lost literally everything, and how they’d spend their time. In the video, I change course quite a bit after I talk myself through things, so I’m looking forward to eventually revising this one.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Alben Tan

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

Danilo woke to the song of the crickets and the light of the moon cocooned in his plastic tarp blanket, which had a hole bigger than the one in his belly. He shivered at the sounds it made as he hugged it around himself against a fist of wind that had ridden off the sea from a place he just might go someday. Not today, though. The world had ended, and there was still so much to do.

He coughed a cobweb of phlegm onto his hand and rolled the strands between his fingers, then in the dirt when they wouldn’t come off.

A cricket chirped beside him on the cardboard mat where someone had slept once. For a moment, he thought in might be her, born into a simpler body for a simpler life, because she deserved better. What he deserved was breakfast.

He placed his hand flat on the cardboard mat. Veins strode over tendons and swerved around calluses, only to be severed by a deep scar that marked the end of his hand. He wondered where the blood went. Maybe it had all escaped from the wound and he was a zombie who didn’t know it yet.

Danilo whistled to the cricket through the gaps in his teeth, of which there were many. Not a harmonica by any stretch, but it did create a semblance of a melody that the cricket answered.

He was a fat one, the cricket. Plump thorax with eyes like jelly beans. Danilo gnashed his teeth imagining those legs crunching on his molars, the squish of juices rolling around his tongue so every tastebud got a nip. Then a swallow to channel the flotsam down the river of his gullet.

Danilo’s hand twitched. The cricket chirped. It perched on his knuckle, eyes no longer jelly beans but pebbles, smoothed by the sea. Fish swarmed above those stones, silver scales reflecting the trickling sunrays like gemstones.

“Sorry, my love,” Danilo said and clapped his other hand over the cricket. He transferred it to a Styrofoam cup and fastened the lid.

After gathering his nets, poles, and tackleboxes, because more than one of anything was always useful, he padded out into the dawn. On the way to the docks, he plucked a few worms waking from the soil to give the cricket company.

The docks swayed like the palms used to. Those trees stood bare now, matchsticks that hadn’t burned to their roots. The sea brought another wind to flick strings tied to one of those matchstick trees. The strings rose and brought the remains of a hammock, which flapped as if to say hello before dropping dead again to hide in the grass.

Other things were dead in the grass too. Big hands and little ones with curled fingers reached above the blades and stalks, and he wondered why he didn’t feel anything. He looked the way he had come, no footprints to mark that he had ever walked the path. Not a zombie. A ghost.

Danilo felt bad for not feeling a thing, so he moved on. The docks were a trap of their own, splitners and nails frozen in an explosion, the only things to keep them together. That and the ropes, still decorated with the festival banners. All shriveled now. Like him.

His stomach grumbled, and he jumped, landing on one of those splinters, perhaps a nail too. No pain came with the blood pooling from beneath his toes, purple and black. This brought tears to his eyes. He dabbed them on his tongue. They did not taste like the sea.

Danilo climbed under the dock where he kept his boat among pallets, cardboard, and bloated garbage bags so no one would find it but him in case there was anyone to find it. So far, no one had.

His boat rocked on the black water, trapped between two dock posts and camouflaged with a tarp not unlike the one that barely kept him warm. He flung it off and stepped onto the boat.

By now the clouds had retreated from the sun, which squatted on the horizon.

“I’m tired too,” Danilo said. A message he didn’t know he was to deliver. It was true, though. His shoulders and hands knotted as he prepared the vessel, using the oar to push away debris. They were persistent today, the bags heavier, the pallets stubborn with their legs locked in the water. He managed to clear a path and guide the boat out from under the dock, where he had to shield his eyes from the sun.

He laughed as the sun embraced him. The hole in his belly laughed, too. A family of water lilies swam up to greet him, but he knew water lilies didn’t grow in the ocean. He decided that’s what they were anyway, keeping them at the edge of his vision to not ruin the illusion.

Danilo bent to retrieve the Styrofoam cup and coughed up a handful of muck, which he covered with his foot.

He wiped his mouth. “Teamwork, eh?” The worm had crawled up the side of the cup with the cricket riding its head, its barbed legs firmly planted on the wall.

“All right,” he said. “All right.” He put the cup down and fetched his net along with his straw hat because the sun was tired no longer.

A deep breath cooled his lungs but did nothing to snuff the fire in his belly.

He sighed. He did not look back the way he had come and tossed the net into the air while the crickets chirped, and the worms writhed, and the water lilies gathered closely to keep his boat steady in the wind.

Danilo thought he should say something, give thanks to the bounty he would catch and the life he still possessed to hear the songs of the nights and see the brushstrokes of the mornings, but there was no one to listen, and there was so much to do.

A story that took an unexpected turn. Not necessarily by accident, but by resisting the simplest solution.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Ivan Onokhin

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

If you would have told me the sounds of bones clacking somber in the breath of a gray winter morn would be the one thing to bring me peace, I would have said you were crazy, and that I was a man who didn’t deserve peace.

But there is no you. Only me. And I speak that truth every morning as I wait for my mug of hot water to cool enough so that I may drink it. A selfish ritual, but by ritual standards, it could be worse. And I know worse.

There are homes around me, but I have no neighbors. Sometimes I think one day a man or woman or child will step out of one of those husks on these mornings when I sip my warm water, to greet me with knowing eyes, and we can enjoy the morning together and each other’s company, though from afar.

If you told me distances could be more intimate that closeness, well, I would have told you that you were crazy. Thankfully, there is no you. Only me.

I haven’t touched a woman since the day I stepped foot upon this land with the dirt road whose ruts are often filled with rainwater, though it rarely rains, this dirt road that curves away from the homes who sit there, brooding beneath their eaves, only to be drawn back to course directly through this scattering of homes as if by some strange gravity.

I didn’t misspeak when I said “who,” nor when I said “homes.” You’ll recall I said no one lives in those houses, but they are homes nonetheless. Structures are unique that way, when built by human hands and thereby dwelt within by humans. I say “humans” as if I’m not one. Most say “people,” but that doesn’t sound right to me. Not that I’m an alien or anything. Now you got me laughing. Well, I suppose it’s me who got me laughing. Lord, it feels good to laugh.

Anyhow, let’s get back to the moment, the present, because it’s not about the deeds a man has done, but about the deeds he hasn’t. At least I think so.

My water is cool enough to sip, so I go about my daily ritual, as you might call it, sitting on the rickety chair that was here before me, dead center on the porch to have the best view of the road that led me here, which I’ve already described so I won’t do it again.

One thing I forgot, though, which brings us back to the beginning of our chat or whatever it is you call this exchange, and that is the totem that rises off the side of the road that led me here. I can see it from my porch, the one upon which I sit dead center, about half finished with my water, which has gone lukewarm. If I had a son I would have named him Luke. A good man according to the good book, and that’s good enough for me.

Anyhow, about this totem. I’ll describe it to you how I see it with the clarity of my vision from this distance, as the blackbirds sweep across the sky, jostled from the sagging power lines that hold no power. It’s not quite the height of a man like myself, and I am not a tall man. It is a single beam of wood rising from the ground to join three other shorter beams in the configuration of an arrow pointing skyward. That realization took me a long time to come to. The first thing I thought of was that it looked like one side of the support of a very small house, a shed perhaps, and that the other walls had fallen away.

Stranger still, and perhaps horrific to some, is the ram’s skull that sits atop it, its two horns hooking over the crossbeam to rest inside a rotting tire on the backside. And at the ends of this crossbeam, beside the skull hang three bones, two on one side, one on the other. They clack in the wind, and there is always wind. I’ve thought about adding another bone to the lonely side, so that it may have a companion, but I haven’t found any bones lying around and I’m not a killing man.

So, you ask, why does such a horrid thing bring me peace? The sight and sound of this thing? It’s what sits at the bottom, perched above a gathering of flat stones about a hand off the ground. It’s a bottle with the label peeled off but some of the scars still remain no matter how much rain hits it. It’s a bottle I left there when I first arrived. Put it there as a joke at first to free my hands to have a piss because I had drank it empty. Facing the ram’s dead eyes then, I saw the blackness inside me, and all the things I’d done to get here, out in the middle of nowhere with nobody.

Some might say it appears to be a symbol of worship, erected by a cult in the backwoods of wherever it is I am. A warning, not a welcome, to others who dare tread further down that rutted road. Some might say a cult requires more than one member, but as I said, there is only me.

I hope you understand now why it brings me peace, though there is no you, which means I am perhaps crazy, and perhaps I do not deserve peace, but peace I have found.

Clouds draw in. Not much sun ever in these parts, and I’m fine with that, as are the birds, the trees, and the grass that grows strong and green except around that totem, which has a worshipper of one. Mostly weeds and brambles, a human might see there at the bottom. And the bottle, of course, which stands tall.

Even the storms can’t refill that bottle.

A story inspired by, dare I say, more than the artwork? You be the judge.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Raphael Ragimov

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

Strange how fire can look like water. How it flows and crashes and froths. A wave there, then gone. A new one resurfaces to dance with others, to become them. What would one call such a thing? He’d know when the time came.

These are the thoughts that flooded Duncan’s mind as he stood mesmerized by the Hive Core. A writhing ball of energy that controlled . . . everything.

“How much longer?” Duncan asked QWERTY. Arguably more machine than man at this point, he was hunched over the service node decrypting the cauldronic mainframe to create a chiral portal, resetting the Core and thereby giving them reign over the Hive. In other words, to rule the world.

QWERTY delicately guided the service node’s arm. “Clavs are stalled, gyrons are fluid, and power diversion is imminent.”

“You look like you’re stirring a pot with that thing,” Duncan said. “And Federation Standard, please. You sound like a fucking robot.”

QWERTY raised his mechanical arm, all rods and pistons, and clacked his three “fingers” that looked more like tongs. “Almost. Forty-nine-point-three-five percent. To be precise.”

“Jesus,” Duncan said. He rolled his shoulders, the jet pack strapped there heavy with the reminder of what he had to do next.

“A mythological man,” QWERTY said, “composed of a collection of individuals to create a unified archetype that would provide spiritual sanctuary, but also be the impetus of wars and later inspire–”

“QWERTY?”

“Yes, Duncan?”

“Why do I give a fuck?”

The Hive Core reflected on QWERTY’s visor in all its fluidic glory but shrunken down so small Duncan could hold it in his hand. “Because you are about to become a powerful man. A powerful archetype.”

Duncan chewed the inside of his cheek. “And you’re telling me all this as a cautionary tale, right? That my name will be something cute and benign at first, giving people all the feel-goods, and then drive star systems to war only to fizzle to a sad legend that gives people a bad taste in their mouths, or worse?”

“Duncan?”

Duncan liked the sound of his name. “Yeah?”

“I’m just fucking with you.” QWERTY wheezed out a laugh that was very human and went back to work.

“Asshole,” Duncan said and went back to being mesmerized.

That fire, that water, that whatever it was illuminated the entire Trench Sector, whose grandeur Duncan hadn’t appreciated until now. Maybe it was the idea of what the future held, how he would direct it, what he would name it. Still, it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

Catwalks, scaffolding, beams and cables crisscrossed vistas that had no ceilings, no walls, all ejecting from an ancient structure his people had built upon, erasing the bedrock of what had come before. Volumetric light cradled all of this in its glory.

Duncan raised his hand and caressed the distant repair drones that hovered around the Core delivering fuel catalysts. Though he was few hundred meters away, he truly felt their worn surfaces, and assured them, too, that he would provide for them.

“You used to be a drone pilot,” he said to QWERTY. “What was it like?”

“Long hours. The mind-link is brutal, until you get used to it, which you never do.”

“I know,” Duncan said.

“Why’d you ask, then?”

“I needed to hear you say it.”

QWERTY scoffed. “Listen to you, sounding all saviorlike. Am I supposed to believe you’ve transcended and you’re not the same Duncan who would start fires in trash bins? Strategically placed around fuel canisters, set up like a giant Domino game that went BOOM?”

Duncan turned from his view of the dying and birthing plasmatic waves. “Almost done? Because I don’t have time for this.”

QWERTY’s visor reflected Duncan with the distant Core behind his head. It was off center, so he shifted his stance. There. Perfect. Like a crown.

“Yeah,” QWERTY said.

“Good.”

Duncan relished in the Core once again. It was larger now, pulsing to a new beat. QWERTY did his job well. Too well. Duncan shouldn’t have spoken to him like that. After all, he couldn’t do this alone, even though he had the most difficult part. The part that could end him or begin him.

Duncan checked his pack’s monitor, then its shoulder straps. Digital vitals didn’t matter if his pack fell off. Everything looked good. Too good. It couldn’t be this easy, right? Why had no one attempted it before? Slaves too long, he supposed, squashed under the two-times Earth gravity. Physically and metaphorically.

Not him. Not QWERTY.

“I’m . . .” Duncan said.

“We’re a go!” QWERTY strutted around the service node as if a primitive man discovering fire for the first time.

Duncan smiled, as if he had a choice. “Sorry,” he finished. QWERTY didn’t hear, still circling the node. Duncan would tell him one day. After all this was his.

QWERTY stopped to catch his breath. Human enough, Duncan supposed.

Duncan powered his pack, tested comms, navigational systems, everything. Twice.

He left the ground, and the ground left him. He nodded to his subjects. The drones, the struggling laborers staring at welding sparks. Tiny dots, like distance stars. They didn’t see him, but he saw them.

“One hundred meters,” crackled QWERTY on the comms.

It was cold up here except for the pack’s exhaust on the backs of Duncan’s legs.

“Fifty meters.”

Duncan was a single-celled organism dropping into the miasma.

Ready.

For–

“Name it,” QWERTY said.

Name it?

“The system. Your empire. Whatever you want to fucking call it. It needs a fucking name, a title.”

Inspiration hadn’t struck, like it should have. A man facing a god to become one.

“Don’t tell me you don’t have one. Fuck I told you this. As part of the cauldric declaration of the code base, this thing needs a fucking name to execute. You know this. You knew this.”

He did know this. He knew this.

Duncan shuttled toward the core without inspiration, without time, burning hotter than a bin fire, and–

BOOM.

An image that might evoke the idea of monsters, but I chose something far darker.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Elena Nikishina

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

Iva lingered at the entrance of her home, which was a cottage, which was empty. Not yet ready to push the door open, her bare feet soaked in the floorboard cold while her toes kissed the splinters of the threshold, which was worn from the traffic of large boots, which were absent from the two ovals of dry mud that had been dry too long. Maybe tomorrow she’d clean them. Maybe tomorrow.

Her hands, like her toes, found splinters. The door where she placed her hands was not worn smooth like the threshold, so splinters were easy too find.

The stab of the cold and splinters grounded her, reminded her, though she didn’t need reminding. A ritual she performed yet never finished. Today would be different. Today she would finish.

The comfort of her cottage no longer comforted her. It had grown dark and festered with memories she couldn’t hide from. They infested the down mattress she had cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. They infested the view from the small window in her room from which she used to gaze and sing with her hands crossed over her stomach because it was warm and stretched smooth. They infested the emptiness, which was everywhere, especially inside her. She was empty.

This emptiness was a thread, red and unbreakable, which made it sharp. It encircled her middle in so many loops and trailed behind her to her empty room. She didn’t need to turn and look to know where it ended, where it wanted her to be. It ended at a red she hadn’t been able to clean or hide, no matter how many blankets she knitted, no matter how many furs she laid. It was warm, though, beneath those layers. She had spent many days there, many weeks, sometimes not even getting up to use the toilet. She knew it was dirty, filthy, and abhorrent, but it, too, was warm. She thought the smell might cover up the stain, become even stronger than what she could not clean. It never did.

So, here she found herself, at the door, which had been a journey. She had made it twice. The first time she arrived naked, having forgotten the need for clothes, having forgotten to need.

This emptiness also stained her clothes. No matter how much she washed, no matter how long she left them on the line to dry in the midday sun, the emptiness remained. But today she decided she would wear that emptiness because it was inside her already, and she feared it no longer. She had donned her wedding dress, because it was the only one clean, as clean and smooth as her bedding. A small part of her thought she might never come back, and wanted to ensure that whoever discovered her empty cottage wouldn’t feel the emptiness lingering there. Maybe that traveler would find comfort in the love she had left, and she did leave it, because she couldn’t carry it with her. It was too heavy. The other half was carried by boots missing from their muddy spot near the door.

A drop of crimson beaded where her right hand touched the door. She smelled iron, a smell she was intimate with. A smell that brought both joy and sadness. Those emotions wrestled in her head, in her bosom, in her emtpiness, and she knew she must act now or they would wrestle her back to her bed where she would be drowned in the deepest depths by the unbreakable thread that was the color of the blood on her pale hand.

The door wimpered open, and the wind threw it to batter the cottage wall. She teetered on the threshold while the wind fought the unbreakable thread around her, and her hair fought her vision.

She thought her back might break, and then she would be forced to lay at the threshold unable to venture out or to return to the emptiness of the cottage. She joined the wind’s side in battle, fighting blind through the whipping locks of her hair, which she had brushed many hours in preparation for this moment, because she must look beautiful. For them.

A snap resounded, like splintering wood, like a blade of thunder. But it was not her spine because she stood, outside her empty cottage.

The clouds, exhausted, too, lay across the ground in ghostly heaps. But they didn’t obscure. They illuminated. Frosty swathes molded a path that led her to trodden trails flanked by yellowed grass. She knew why it was yellow, but couldn’t say the word, so used the color because it was a warm color, and outside was cold.

Where paths converged sat a bushel of the yellow grass. Where it had happened thrice, her emptiness. The soil there still damp, but not from the mist. The soil dark there, but not from shadow. She closed her eyes because it was the only way to see them.

She waited for a time, relishing the sensation of her veil and tresses and gown giving in to the breeze that crawled over the yellow grass. Then the swish and crunch of footsteps were near. Too many to be her love, but they were her loves, too. All three.

They waded toward her, ever shadows, ever twisted, ever cold. Crawling still, but of course they should. She wished to warm them, but her hands were locked to her belly, which was loose and scarred. The final place where her emptiness festered, where it was with her always.

She beckoned her three loves who had no names. She could never bring herself to give them any, because that would anchor them to this world, and they were too good for it, too pure. No matter how they appeared now.

They came to her, and she held them, and she told them she loved them, and she asked for their forgiveness, but they told her there was nothing to forgive, and she was empty no more.

A character sketch of a mysterious man with a mysterious case.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by deepfry

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

Jake combed his hair back with his head still on the pillow. He smoothed his mustache without looking in the mirror, despite the one mounted to his ceiling right above his bed. It was more habit than anything else, a nervous tic some might say, but Jake was never nervous.

Jake flinched to the sound of tapping and rustling outside his window. Nothing but the black of night between the blinds.

The servos in his mechanical arm whirred. A wakeup call Jake never needed. But old habits and all, a dark history stemming from his youth to get up in time for school all the way to the near-present when he had been an on-call pizza delivery driver, which is how it all started. Hydroplaned, they’d said. It rained like hell that night, they’d said. Rolled the truck, and his arm had punched through the glass to be pinned once it settled on its side, they’d said.

But he’d been the one in the damn truck, and though his brain pan had been abused over the years, the biological wiring most people had replaced with synthetic, still trundled along more or less just how nature had intended. No matter how quick tech evolved, he’d put his money on millions of years of evolution every time.

His arm whirred again. “But now I have to bet on you.”

He flexed its fingers. It, because it wasn’t technically his. Still had a few jobs left to do to clear the debt.

He slung himself out of bed, grabbing his jacket that looked like it belonged to a mechanic and read “Jake” on the breast patch, because what the fuck else would it say? He slipped it on, tucking the shorter sleeve behind the piston because the damn cybernetic arm was too bulky with all kinds of form-over-function bullshit fanning from the forearm and elbow. They’d assured him those things had their uses, but he wouldn’t have full access until the debt was paid.

The only thing left to don were his shoes, because Jake always slept in his clothes. He’d learned the hard way when the junkhead in his old apartment building torched the place in three minutes flat from a psycho-stim cook gone wrong. Jake had ended up on the street with nothing to hold onto except his fun bits to not offend the crowd gathering to watch the fire.

Jake stood in the entryway of his apartment, which was really just the two square feet in front of the door, and pressed the wall with his shoulder, which opened a small panel to eject his gear, all cased, all good.

The cybernetic arm took it. Jake wasn’t a weak man, but he liked the weight of his debt to be a metaphor tied to the thing that had yet to become his.

The mirror on the door showed him a man who looked damn good, and the case that could have housed a violin or an assault rifle or a nuclear bomb, because they were small these days. Near the back of the out-facing side, three white crosses were stickered with a scratched-in one beneath. He wasn’t a religious man, hell no one was anymore, so they were essentially meaningless, but he liked the way they looked. Down further near the orange strap below the handle stretched a torn length of silver tape that read FRAGILE. But he wasn’t about to reveal what lay inside, though if it was housed in a case like this, how couldn’t it be fragile? Unless it was a ruse, but Jake never lied. Further down was a blue dot sticker some little girl slapped on there while he waited for job instructions in the food district. She told him he looked blue at the time. Maybe he had been. Flanking that dot was a shred of white tape with JAKE scrawled in black on it, because that was his name, and he never lied or was afraid of people knowing his name, because he was the embodiment of DOPE-NESS, which was the final sticker of interest on his case, and that didn’t need an explanation.

Jake listened at the door, because they were always looking for him. Light foot traffic, then gone. A death-bed cough, then chatter, then gone.

After a trek through the corridor and stairwell maze, Jake was on the street, struck by a puddle on the evening asphalt still simmering from the day. It showed him the neon tangle of the buildings above. The image felt off. The patterns weren’t right.

He didn’t risk a look up. They couldn’t know he knew.

He swore he heard the flex of bulletproof fabric. Jacket sleeves adjusting the rifle trained on him?

He stepped onto the street, and someone yelled, “Watch out!”

Jake watched as a white-hot streak seared the sky. It hit his abdomen, and down he went. His case lay open to the sky. Almost had his gear out. Almost.

He felt no pain. Must be his adrenals firing. Feet shuffled behind him, and his cybernetic arm lashed out.

In his grip, and in his sideways view of the street stood an old woman with rainbow filament hair. It cycled through ten colors before he let go of her.

She smoothed her purple synth-fur trench coat and her glowing hair. “No harm done, young man. That one got you good.”

He followed her pointing finger to his boot. A spatter of white dashed the leather. Bird shit.

“Used to feed them from my window back when I was a girl,” she said, the memory caught in her eyes.

Drone pigeons didn’t shit. Old world pigeons did. Nearly extinct. Extremely expensive. And it was assuredly flying back to report coordinates.

The old woman’s eye glittered. “It’s crossing six and fourth. Jake, before you kill it, will you give it this?”

She held out a square of cracker.

Jake made his fingers into a gun, and pointed it at her. “You got it, lady.”