Story Summary: Alice is kidnapped, her mind is downloaded to the cloud, and, due to space limitations, her boyfriend must decide what memories make it into her new body. (Scroll Down to Read)

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The Memory Thief by Roger Johns

Fourteen Days Ago

Carson fought back a surge of panic when he saw the images of Alice trussed up on the floor in some filthy room. Her kidnappers were demanding a million in crypto within twenty-four hours. In the meantime, he knew they’d be trying to find out if she was wired for rescue.

In 2033, Eustace Winstead had perfected a way to remotely extract the informational content of a person’s brain and then install it into a new brain in a new body, leaving the old body a lifeless husk. While the ultra-wealthy used the method to achieve a sort of immortality, applications with wider commercial appeal soon found their way into the marketplace. As kidnap for ransom burgeoned into a growth industry, rescues using the technique became available as a benefit under abduction insurance policies. But because hostages with Winstead implants proved useless to kidnappers, they were usually killed, so the implants had to be continually updated to keep them invisible to the bad guys’ scanners. Praying Alice’s were new enough, Carson logged onto their insurance company’s website and filled out a claim form.

There was never a good time for one’s fiancée to be kidnapped, but now might’ve been the absolute worst. Carson was as crazy as ever about Alice, but their relationship was in trouble. For this he blamed himself. As his professional setbacks mounted, he’d become a petulant, sometimes mean-spirited partner. And now, with Alice’s life in jeopardy, any chance to repair the damage might be lost forever.

Twenty minutes after sending in the claim, a smooth-talking company representative called, but Carson wasn’t fooled by the man’s practiced sincerity. He knew the rep was fishing for a way to pin responsibility for the kidnapping on Alice, so coverage could be denied.

“Alice was very safety conscious,” Carson insisted. “She was scrupulous about following security protocols when she moved from one place to another. Every inch of the way.”

“It’s what she did after she arrived at her job site that concerns us. It seems her abductors were able to infiltrate the custodial company that cleans the building, and—”

“That wasn’t her fault.”

“No, but it introduced people into her work environment she wasn’t acquainted with. Victims often assume such individuals, by virtue of their employment, are vetted and safe—a big mistake. Hallway video shows her entering a room, other than her office, with just one way in or out. After that, a fake custodian wheeled in a cleaning cart, then emerged a few minutes later, but Alice Terranova never appeared on camera again. So, while she was inside that room, in no position to defend herself, she was somehow overpowered, then spirited away with the evening trash. Her failure to maintain greater situational awareness may be a violation of the ‘best efforts to avoid abduction’ clause in the policy.”

“If that’s your fancy way of saying that using the restroom is grounds for denial, you’ll be hearing from my lawyer before the end of the day.”

“Understood. But our obligation to our shareholders requires us to explore all possibilities before expending the firm’s resources. And, because I understand the anxiety this is causing you, I’m inclined to give you a break and not seek a determination of whether your not-so-veiled threat to sue violates the ‘best efforts to cooperate’ clause.”

“Look, Alice was kidnapped, through no fault of her own. If her captors figure out she’s implanted, they’ll kill her. I can’t imagine that having her blood on your hands will impress your shareholders, so you need to quit stalling.”

“Sir, I’ve done nothing that, under current precedent, could be construed by an arbitrator or court of competent jurisdiction as an attempt to slow-walk this process. In fact, based on your claim form, augmented by the information developed in this delightful dialogue we’re having, I’m pleased to inform you that we stand ready to initiate the rescue.”

“Then please, let’s—”

“Before we begin, however, I must draw your attention to the provision in the policy that requires you to choose between a physical rescue and a digital Winstead extraction.”

“Digital. Physical is too risky.”

“I was afraid you’d say that, so it’s only fair to warn you that, at the moment, we’re experiencing temporary difficulties with digital.”

“What difficulties?” Carson asked, fearing the kidnappers had discovered how to disable the Winstead technology.

“An increase in abductions is causing a higher-than-expected demand for the make and model of the new body Ms. Terranova preselected.”

Carson breathed a sigh of relief. “No problem. Under our policy, when this happens, we’re entitled to an upgrade.”

“Eventually. As of today, though, you haven’t met your deductible for that.”

“So, what are you saying? That Alice stays a captive until you manage to locate an acceptable body, or she has to settle for some crummy, print-on-demand job? No way. You just need to get her out of there before things get worse.”

“We’ll attempt a physical rescue, if you wish. However, the choice-of-method clause in your policy requires me to remind you that if you elect that route, and if the cost of a physical recovery equals or exceeds the cost of digital extraction plus a new body, then you forfeit any and all claims for bodily damage, up to and including the death or dismemberment of the body Ms. Terranova currently inhabits.”

“It feels like you’re forcing me to make an unwise choice.”

“Not at all. I recommend we go digital, then simply keep Ms. Terranova in the cloud until the body shortage is resolved.”

“Cloud storage was too expensive. It’s not part of our coverage.”

“Since this dilemma isn’t your fault, you get thirty days, free of charge. May I send you the storage consent form?”

Carson was suddenly overwhelmed with doubt. Would Alice be okay with whatever body was available now? What if something went wrong with the cloud? And, maybe physical rescues weren’t as risky as he believed. He hated being indecisive, especially because this new wrinkle in his personality had been another source of irritation for Alice, adding to the stress in their relationship. Maybe some good choices today would show her he was still the man she’d fallen in love with—assuming he got her home, safe and sound.

“Sir? The consent form?”

“Send it.”

* * *

Six Days Ago

As one promised delivery date after another came and went, without Alice’s new body showing up, Carson sank deeper into despair, imagining every conceivable disaster that could befall cloud-stored information. When the body finally did arrive, the insurance rep assured him his nightmare was nearly over. By lunchtime, an official from the Installation Lab called to assure him otherwise.

“Sorry, but we’ve hit a bit of a roadblock.”

“You’re kidding. She’s been in the cloud for over a week and according to some research you never mentioned, out-of-body intervals longer than this can cause psychological problems.”

“Nothing in the policy requires us to mention studies we didn’t conduct ourselves. Nevertheless, as human beings, we share your concern. Unfortunately, just before we started downloading, a band of ransomware pirates separately locked down each of the personalities we’re holding.”

“Surely you have a plan to deal with this.”

“Of course. The pirates must be paid, and paid quickly, because the ransomware is equipped with what’s known as a drain-hole timer. For each minute the payoff is late, a specified fraction of your fiancée is irretrievably drained away. Trust me. You don’t want any part of this.”

“Then, pay them.”

“We intend to, but the amount of their demand exceeds our obligation for this type of event. Under the terms of the policy, you’re responsible for the excess, and if we’re not in receipt of your payment, in a timely manner, and we’re forced to advance the money on your behalf, we are legally entitled to sequester Ms. Terranova’s cloud files until you’ve paid.”

“But it was your system they hacked. Shouldn’t you be responsible for all of it, since you were in the best position to make sure it didn’t happen in the first place?”

“Our safeguards meet current regulatory standards, which—”

“I know…which, under the terms of the policy, means I’m responsible for the excess.”

“You may, of course, challenge the adequacy of our protections, but that will take more time than the pirates have given us.”

“How do I know this isn’t some clever scheme you’ve cooked up, to squeeze me for more money?”

“A fair point. And such things have happened. However, a look at today’s late breaking business news will corroborate the ransomware attack. And a look at your policy will—”

“Just tell me where to send the money.”

“In an attempt to render service that exceeds your expectations, I took the liberty of sending the instructions, without you even having to ask. They should be in your email, now.”

Carson resented having to go hat in hand to his brother, for a loan to pay the pirates, but he had no choice. He had neither the cash nor the time and assets to arrange a bank loan, and Bartley could easily pay fifty times the ransomware demand, without breaking a sweat. But Carson thought of Bartley as smug, and he assumed his brother would revel in the chance to needle him for having bought such pitiful insurance.

His stormy relationship with his brother had been another touchy matter with Alice. She claimed Carson was jealous because Bartley had pursued a risky career and become wealthy, utterly against the odds, while Carson’s pursuit of the tried and true had led to professional and financial stagnation—also, against the odds. Alice conceded that Bartley could be a bit loud about his money, but what she saw as good-natured ribbing, Carson felt as holier-than-thou nose rubbing, so he was floored when his brother instantly agreed to lend the money—interest free and lecture free. Maybe Alice was right, that it was just childish envy. After this mess was over, he’d look into patching things up with Bartley.

* * *

Two Days Ago

Carson’s mood soared when he received the image of Alice’s new face—a touching variation on the theme of her original face. Taking this as a sign her homecoming would soon be a reality, he finally allowed himself to feel the joy of the forthcoming reunion. The first thing he would do, the minute they were alone, was to beg Alice to forgive him for all of his horrible behavior, then pledge to go back to being his old self.

By noon, when he still hadn’t gotten the expected call advising him of the next day’s pickup time, his euphoria started flagging. Just as he was about to check, to make sure they hadn’t simply forgotten him, his phone rang and his earlier elation came flooding back.

“May I assume you’re calling to tell me what time I can pick up my fiancée, tomorrow?”

“You may, but, unfortunately, that would be an incorrect assumption.”

Carson slumped in his chair, on the verge of tears. “What now?”

“Remember how we had trouble getting Ms. Terranova’s replacement body because the spike in abductions outstripped the capacity of the growers to meet demand? Well, it seems that, in an ill-considered attempt to catch up, they outsourced production to some third parties who were not as persnickety about quality control as we’d like. A total breach of contract on their part, of course, but—”

“So, what are you saying? She has bolts in her neck to hold her head on? They left out her pancreas?”

“You’re a very funny guy. In spite of the gravity of this situation, you’re still able to see the humor in it. I envy you that. But, to answer your question, it’s nothing as dramatic as all that. Event memory is the last thing to be installed, so we’ve only now discovered that the neural architecture of Ms. Terranova’s new brain isn’t sufficient to accommodate each and every element of her unbelievably extensive store of recollections.”

Carson was tempted to snap back at the implication that Alice’s extraordinary memory was the cause of this latest problem, but, as a down payment on his commitment to become a better person, he opted for the high road, instead. “By how much is she—”

“She’s about a year’s worth over capacity.”

“This can’t be happening.”

“Believe me, I understand how you feel, but, at this point, we’re out of options, and in the scheme of things, we consider this to be a minor glitch.”

“Would you consider it minor, if this shoe was on your foot?”

“No, but I think you’ll be thrilled to learn that, literally as we speak, our legal department is preparing to join an in-progress class action lawsuit against the body manufacturer. And, as a show of good faith, I’m authorized to send you all the forms you’ll need to fill out, in the event you wish to intervene as a third-party plaintiff in the suit.”

“That could take forever.”

“Sadly, it usually does. In fact, based on current court docket backlogs, for a full resolution of your claim, your estimated wait time is seventeen years, three months, and twenty-two days. In the meantime, Ms. Terranova’s memories must be reduced, and the policy designates you to perform that task.”

“Won’t that be like doing brain surgery on a patient who’s awake? What if I decide to edit a particular memory, but she doesn’t want me to? Am I required to override her wishes, just because the policy puts my finger on the Delete button?”

“A common misconception, but that won’t be a problem. Consciousness occurs only after the mind is fully seated in the brain. Until then, it’s just lifeless information.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course,” the tech said, with the superior tone of the digerati that Carson found so demeaning. “If she were aware, inside the cloud, we’d have her edit herself.”

“What if I can only remove enough so she just barely fits? Will she be able to form new memories?”

“Initially, no. But over the coming months, synaptic plasticity will allow her new brain to reconfigure to accept new memories, just like her old one did. If you’re having trouble paring her down enough, for installation, though, you can activate the first-in-first-out feature. That way, every new experience automatically pushes out the oldest like amount of memory.”

“That seems so indiscriminate.”

“People gradually forget the long-ago, anyway, just naturally. But if it really bothers you, then you can look into after-market capacity enhancements. The cost isn’t covered by your policy, but it would be a valid item of damages in your suit against the body maker, so I’d strongly encourage you to keep your receipts. And, if you wish, I can send you a list of vendors of reasonably priced enhancements. External, only, though. The internals are…well, let’s just say that, unless Ms. Terranova is ridiculously vain about her appearance, the cost-benefit is totally out of whack. Besides, huge strides have been made in the cosmetic aspects of the new externals. If you can learn to ignore the low-frequency hum, it’s nearly impossible to tell the difference between some of these gizmos and a pair of interesting-looking, slightly oversized earrings.”

“Does your mother know what you do for a living?”

“May I send you the access codes for your fiancée’s memory files?”

The codes came with a warning. To keep from falling too far back in the installation queue, Carson would need to work fast. If he got pressed for time, he could either have an AI-powered edit-bot complete the task, or he’d have to wait several weeks for a new spot in the queue. But he knew, from all the articles he’d read, that waiting would increase the risk of Alice developing cloud brain—the disorienting syndrome that afflicted individuals who floated too long in storage. And, if an edit-bot took over, the lab could guarantee only that the result would, more probably than not, be better than the drain-hole damage the ransomware pirates had threatened to inflict. He was also warned against deleting any of Alice’s nocturnal dreams—a tempting place to lop off long stretches of memory—because they played an essential but poorly understood role in the integrity of one’s personality.

* * *

Yesterday

Even before he began editing, Carson promised himself he’d respect Alice’s privacy and use the program to find and delete only unimportant stuff. He didn’t think she’d care whether she remembered every skinned knee, or poor test grade, or bout of the flu, or every time she took out the trash. But as soon as it dawned on him that seeing things through her eyes would be the best way to fully understand the problems plaguing their relationship, he dove straight into her most intimate recollections—then quickly wished he hadn’t.

Alice clearly loved him, but she’d also been cheating on him with his brother Bartley. Somehow, Bartley had developed an understanding of Alice’s physical and emotional and intellectual needs to a degree Carson couldn’t begin to fathom. Carson also learned that Alice felt like she had tried, over and over, to be an open book for him—to show him all the hopes and needs he was only now seeing by using a machine to trespass inside her mind. Early on, she had even blamed herself for their problems, but her most recent recollections, showed she had grown past that, and had come to realize he was the one falling short.

* * *

Today

The countdown chime from the editing program made Carson jump. He had achieved what the lab people needed him to, but the hours spent snooping had also shown him another important matter he needed to address. He shook off the fatigue and launched a new search, then stepped away from the keyboard to make some hasty preparations for later in the day. After that, he called his brother.

“Hey, Bartley, you got a minute?”

“Sure. What’s the word on Alice?”

“She’ll be ready at noon, tomorrow. Can you pick her up?”

“Shouldn’t you be doing that?”

“Something’s come up, business-wise. Totally unexpected and totally unavoidable.”

“Bummer. How long will you be away?”

Carson imagined he heard eagerness in Bartley’s voice, but he pushed the thought away and focused, instead, on his conviction that he was doing the right thing.

“Hard to say. Just promise me you’ll be available, if she needs anything. And, the lab tech told me that installation after this many days in the cloud can cause someone to imprint strongly on the person who’s in closest proximity, so keep that in mind, as well.”

“She’ll be in good hands,” Bartley said, after several seconds of silence. “Count on it.”

Bartley’s tone had lost the gleeful tenor of a secret lover anxious to pounce on an opportunity. He now sounded genuine and empathetic, and that boosted Carson’s confidence his plan could work.

After a few minutes of small talk, he returned to his keyboard and watched the results pile up from the search he’d started before calling his brother. There wasn’t time to do a perfect job, but any remaining problems could be fixed by a few carefully crafted explanations. His earlier low mood was gaining altitude, aided by his renewed sense of decisiveness. Alice would’ve been proud.

The edit timer sounded another warning, so he quickened his pace, sifting the search results for the most critical recent episodes where he’d said or done something mean or foolish that damaged his and Alice’s relationship. Then he rewrote the aftermath of those events, removing the useless fights he had provoked, substituting rational discussions in their place—dialogues in which Alice convinced him to explore their problems and talk through whether they were right for each other. The last of these had occurred the night before Alice was kidnapped, when Carson casually tossed a mouthful of unkind words at her. The hurt on her face had been heartbreaking. He edited the next morning’s breakfast-table conversation, to make it look as if they agreed they needed space, and that the most logical solution was for him to move out, at least for a while.

Carson knew these changes made him look better than he deserved, but he wanted Alice to see she had been the one to make sure their relationship had every chance to succeed. After all the unnecessary disappointment he had injected into their lives, it was only fair that she be able to move forward, unburdened by any doubt or sense of guilt over their breakup.

With only seconds to spare, Carson saved Alice to the Installation Lab’s cloud account. After that, he wrote an email to Bartley explaining what he had done, then set it up to send automatically, an hour before the next day’s pickup time. Carson knew his continued presence might inhibit how Alice thought about her future, so he wasn’t just moving out, he was moving on, and Bartley, a bestselling novelist, would have no trouble explaining this.

Looking around the apartment for the last time, his eyes misted over. It was possible he and Alice might’ve eventually worked things out, but even if he fully regained all of his best qualities, he understood he wasn’t who she truly needed. She and Bartley, however, seemed made for each other, and they deserved the chance to find out, without the emotional complications that would come from him lurking around the margins of their lives.

Carson grabbed his suitcase, opened the front door, and stepped across the threshold, grateful for the changes the last two weeks had produced in him—especially those that came from his frolic through Alice’s heart and mind. Even the unpleasant discoveries had shown him how to be a better companion the next time he had the opportunity. And he wasn’t exactly leaving empty-handed, because he had figured out how to keep copies of some of Alice’s most cherished memories.

Waiting for the elevator, he checked once more to make sure he had the data cube with her most vivid recollections of the times he’d made her laugh, and when he’d said or done something that moved her, and the jumble of thoughts and emotions she went through the day she started to see him differently, that first day she knew she loved him.

Discussion Questions (Leave a comment!)

1. Do you think Carson was right to access or edit Alice’s memories at all? Do you think looking into the memories of another person, even to save their life, is permissible?

2. If you could look into the memories of your significant other, would you? Would you allow your significant other to look into your memories?

3. Do you think Carson was right to change Alice’s memories so as to write himself out of her life, and give Bartley and Alice a chance at success in their relationship? Was it fair to take that decision away from Alice? Was it a selfless act?

4. If you had to cut a year of memories out of your own life, what time period (or topics) of memories would you cut and why?

5. Who would you name in your insurance contract with the power to see your memories and cut memories out of your life as necessary for space and why would you name them?

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Today I had the sincere pleasure of interviewing Evie Pearman. Evie in an absolute delight and a breath of fresh air, both as a writer and as a person. In this interview we talk about creative writing programs, Victorian era criminality, “Weird Girl” fiction, virtual reality, true crime, cannibalism, and a lot more. Check out the video above to see the full interview!

~Drew

Read Evie Pearman’s short story, “It’s Too Easy”:

Click the image to get your copy!

After Dinner Conversation - Philosophy | Ethics Short Story is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Q&A

Describe your ideal reader.

To me, an ideal reader doesn’t come from why or how or what they read. An ideal reader is just someone who loves reading.

To expand, I believe that the ideal reader is open-minded, isn’t afraid to criticize and critique, to question and speculate, and also isn’t afraid to have fun and lose themselves in fiction. The ideal reader is someone who picks up a book expecting to not put it down and, if it’s worthy, read it all over again. Someone who could sit up all night talking books. Someone who is willing to engage in a story and to take it seriously. An ideal reader is one who reads to feel something, to see the world anew and to be changed. For me, the ideal reader is also the ideal kind of person.

Is there any standard publishing or writing advice that you disagree with? Or any standard advice that you feel is too often neglected?

As a writer, I often feel encouraged and pressured to follow the trends when it comes to publishing. Everything’s all about what sells and what sounds catchy on a blurb or in a pitch. Tropes, vital cornerstones to literature they may be, are currently being flogged to death on a book’s tagline. Everything has to follow the bestselling formula. But for me, rules were made to be broken, to be swerved, to be run over. And that’s how good stories are written and exciting new tropes are made.

I also think we should take back the em dash from ChatGPT. It’s highly evocative—see? We need exciting punctuation more than ever. I’m of the firm belief that form highly shapes the story. On that note, I’d like to see more stories written in the second person. It feels like unexplored territory for both the reader and writer in me.

If you could obtain certain knowledge of one specific thing, what would that be?

Other than the meaning of the universe (which, as Douglas Adams said, is obviously 42), it has to be if there are parallel universes where things worked out differently or someone made a different decision and, as such, humanity’s evolution was tweaked and we’re now all green slug monsters. Writing inherently deals with possibilities, and I’d like to know what possibilities are out there (so long as the discovery of them doesn’t explode my brain).

How do you come up with ideas for your short stories?

Often, it’s like a lightning strike. An idea of a situation will storm into my head, and then I have to figure it out, or rather, figure out how my characters will figure it out. Then I just write.

With my short story, “It’s Too Easy”, my first thoughts were to satirize our ongoing interest in true crime by writing a mock how-to-be-a-serial-killer guide. But then I realized that the customer was by far much more interesting than the instructor. And where there’s popular demand, surely new and far more exciting products will follow… Lightning strike!

I know I’m onto something when I find myself trapped in the web of a character’s decisions and I’m having fun, sweating it out, battling through their psyche.

Evangeline Pearman is currently studying literature in London, but she spends most of her time writing fiction designed to make readers like you question reality. She also enjoys reading tarot, studying cold cases, eating anything covered with chocolate, and participating in immersive experiences. Instagram: @the_literary_angel Check out one of Evie’s stories below!

E G Pearman

The Ghost of Grant Hall

We were sitting about the fireplace, whiling away the hours until the final chime of the year with merriment and wine, when the suggestion was made to tell ghost stories…

Read more

3 months ago · 2 likes · E G Pearman

E G Pearman

Hi! My publications tend to be short stories and poems about the weird, the uncanny, the fun and the spooky! If you're the kind of person who likes quirky aesthetics, dark humour and weird plots, read on!

Story Summary: A mysterious black box gives its users "unearned" money, but at what price? (Scroll Down to Read)

Take the poll for this week’s story, “The Money Box”:

(It’s completely anonymous…and fun! Last week’s poll results at end of post)

“Resident Philosopher” Nalini’s take:

Nalini Jacob-Roussety ties simple questions to deeper philosophical frameworks! Listen to her discuss the poll question above. Comment in the discussion area at the end.

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The Money Box by Phillip Scott Mandel

This is not a morality tale. It’s simply a story.

It began innocently enough, over a lunch of beef pho in the Financial District, when my friend Paolo first mentioned the Money Box. Paolo was a pupa of industry then, waiting to emerge as a titan. He was wearing a light blue seersucker suit with a flower-print ascot, which I remember distinctly because he spilled Sriracha on it. Also it was unseasonably cold for May, yet Paolo made us take a table outside.

“A money box?” I said, intrigued.

He nodded, daubing at his lapel with a wet napkin. “I can show you one day.”

“What’s with the getup, anyway?” I said. “Are you going to the Derby?”

“Oh, I’ve no need of such action anymore,” he replied, smiling cryptically. He slurped a noodle through a straw-shaped gap in his lips and changed the subject to his upcoming wedding, to which I was invited, though with no honorifics.

Paolo, unfortunately, I have not seen in ages. Swept up like the rest of us, I suppose, in the season of the plague.

* * *

Months passed with no mention of the Money Box, and I tried to forget about it. The news was awash with rising sea levels and apocalyptic dust storms. That summer was, yet again, the hottest on record. One of my clients suffered an oil refinery explosion that destroyed four hundred thousand acres of virgin rainforest. Another client published a series of tweets denying the Holocaust. So I had plenty to think about. But I couldn’t stop obsessing over the Money Box.

I threw myself in with my colleagues, whom I despised, and I walked my dog, whom I loved. I tried to date, with little success. My ears are rubbery and pinguid, my mouth spumescent. My nostrils are asymmetrical and, as an object, my body is short and round, unpleasing to the eye. A small but noticeable goiter protrudes from my neck. Also, I don’t ever seem to “get” jokes and therefore must force myself to laugh, often inappropriately.

Nevertheless, I was able to charm one woman, Penelope, in for a nightcap. It was our eleventh date, and her children were with her sister. When I flipped on the lights I noticed my goldfish, Simeon, had finally succumbed to the dropsy. He had indeed looked singularly unhappy for weeks, swimming in circles and popping out little air bubbles, but in my malaise I’d done nothing about it. So she wouldn’t see Simeon’s inert body floating at the top of the bowl, I had Penelope wait in the kitchen while I scooped him out with a little net and deposited his rotted carcass into the toilet. He seemed to be staring up at me with those piteous, lifeless eyes, forever open and plaintive, as (regretfully, I admit) I urinated on him, for I didn’t want to waste a flush.

* * *

I didn’t tell Penelope about the Money Box, nor did I pester Paolo about it.

But many nights I would dream fitfully about it, though I knew nothing other than it was called a “Money Box.” My imagination cooked up all manner of containers: an old cigarette carton stuffed with hundreds; a gleaming, stainless steel bank vault stacked with bricks of gold bullion; or more banally, a bulging chest of diamonds, rubies, and other treasure, protected by a scaly, halitotic dragon.

I was distracted, and perhaps because of this, four Key Accounts under my purview—including the ruinously careless energy company, and the anti-Semite—left our firm in Q3. My manager Rick (I’ve never trusted anyone named Rick) had HR write me up. Maybe he just couldn’t stand the look of me any longer. I can’t say I blame him.

Was I fired? No. Too much paperwork, Rick explained. But I might polish a CV. He’d provide a lukewarm reference.

“I am not a feudal serf!” I screamed, right in his face, then slammed his office door.

Of course but I did neither of those things. Because we both knew I was, in fact, a serf, quite dutifully bound to that hateful square of carpet upon which rested my cubicle, and my personhood was owned, if not by Rick, then by our shareholders.

Even Penelope broke off our budding romance, saying I always seemed distracted, never “present,” as if I was seeing someone else.

Even then, I failed to mention the Money Box.

“Look at me, Penny,” I said. “Do you think I’m seeing someone else?”

She shook her head sadly and said, “That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

* * *

Finally Paolo invited me to his house for a dinner party. His fiancée, Erin, was there, as were six other corporatized schlogs, so I brought my dachshund, Tyrone. Everybody loves a dachshund, and the guests of this dinner party proved no exception.

Erin was the kind of woman who decorated her home—a narrow, red-brick townhouse amid a row of old townhouses—with electric tea lights instead of real ones, who posted photos of her meals, a person who could never allow natural lulls in conversation to stand. While I was chewing on a particularly fatty piece of brisket and therefore could not stop her, she detailed her and Paolo’s honeymoon itinerary, about which I had not inquired. Then she rolled her eyes and said, “I’ve already been there,” as if I might sympathize with her dilemma. “Eight years ago.” She scanned the room and lowered her voice. “With my ex.”

I bowed, unsure what else to do. I’d heard from Paolo that Steve (her ex) was a loathsome brute, but had, for some reason, managed to remain friends with Erin and was even invited to the wedding.

“It’s a remarkable place,” she continued. “Really. The people are so warm, so friendly. Always smiling. But the flies, my god. Bigger than bumblebees. Their wings sound like static on the radio.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the place had been flooded into near extinction and these “friendly people” were now refugees, and had, if they were lucky, absconded to more moderate climes, or at least higher ground.

After dessert, Paolo brought out the Money Box. “I know this is why you’re here,” he said, over half-hearted protests that we’d come for his company. “This is what you came to see.”

In the corner of the room, there were two rolled-up foam mats—the yellow one more frayed than its purple cousin—peeking out from under a white bar cart, and I was momentarily struck with a bolt of intense sorrow, a hollow pain in my gut, both for my own loneliness and for imagining this soon-to-be-married couple doing yoga together.

Presently Erin cleared the plates and silverware and empty crystal punch bowl centerpiece, and Paolo placed The Money Box on the table.

It was jet black and perfectly cubical: roughly 18 inches per side, the size of a small guitar amp, or a cheap ottoman from Ikea. I don’t know if it was painted, or what onyx material the box was made of, but no light reflected off its surface. It emitted no smell or sound, and I imagined if I’d touched my tongue to it, I would taste nothing. But I did seem to feel a slight warmth emanated from where it sat on the table, just out of arm’s reach.

Despite my intense curiosity, the Money Box was, in a way, terror-inducing. What astronauts must feel on their first spacewalk, staring into that infinite midnight, or the day after someone wins the lottery.

On all six sides of the cube was a slit in the center. I didn’t notice until Paolo pointed them out, and then I couldn’t take my eyes away. The ever-slightest glow seeped from each aperture, as if the box was filled with a weak incandescent bulb.

“It doesn’t matter what side you lay the Money Box on,” Paolo said. “It all works the same way.”

“But what does it do?” Steve said.

“Just wait,” Paolo said, as if expecting the interruption. “Someone give me some money.”

Steve gave Paolo a dollar bill. I suddenly found I didn’t care for Steve, and not only out of loyalty to Paolo, but because earlier in the night he’d been pontificating about Robert Rauschenberg.

“No, something higher.”

Dee-Ann, with her suede jacket and designer purse, handed him a luminous gold credit card with an ovate portrait of a centurion in the center, buying her a few chuckles ‘round the table.

“That’ll work,” Paolo said, but as he went to take it from her, she pulled back her arm with an almost-imperceptible hiccup. Dee-Ann, always so composed, was coming undone by this frightening device. We all were.

Finally, Sanjeev took a crisp hundred-dollar bill out of his billfold. He ran one of the sharpest hedge funds in the world.

“Perfect,” Paolo said, and grabbed it.

“Wait,” Sanjeev said, but by then Paolo had already inserted it into the Money Box.

It happened so quickly I barely registered the transaction. The bill went into the slit smoothly, like buying a Coke at a vending machine, and then… Nothing.

We stared at each other. There was no sound, no movement, just our eyes darting back and forth, skeptically, between the box and ourselves.

Tyrone barked. “Hush,” I said, and bent down to scratch his ear.

That’s why I missed what happened when these people—my non-friend acquaintances—gasped and said, collectively, “Oh.”

I popped back up to see Sanjeev holding three fifty-dollar bills, and Paolo holding a finsky.

Sanjeev cleared his throat. “How the hell—”

“It’s the Money Box,” Paolo said, with a grim smile, like a dentist extracting a persnickety, stuck tooth. “Who else wants a turn?”

* * *

Perhaps I should take a moment to provide context for what happened next.

The Assyrians of Nineveh worshipped a minor deity, the Locust Man, as God of Agriculture (maternal uncle to the Goddess of Fertility). The Scythians called this same divine spirit the Patron of Slavery, and in the earliest known version of the Hebrew Bible, he is alternately referred to as “Trust-King” and the “Grandfather of Suffering.” Ancient Hindus referred to him as the ex-boyfriend of Lakshmi.

Unsurprisingly, only human sacrifice would do for such a god.

A few tiny sects of contemporary monotheistic religions still claim him as the precursor to Jehovah, but he is not. His true identity is the Lord of Money and Pestilence. That is all.

There is a well-guarded and little-known archive of religious artifacts in the sub-sub-basement of The Peace Palace in The Hague wherein lies an ivory carving—a woolly mammoth tusk, in fact, not unlike the Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel—of a humanoid figure with a finely detailed orthopterous head, leathery forewings and membranous hind wings, and two razor-sharp chewing mandibles. It’s as close a simulacrum to The Locust Man’s true form as you’ll find in the modern world.

I know all this because, since the plague season commenced, I’ve done a whole lot of research on the subject.

* * *

Anyway, nobody knew how the Money Box worked. I hesitate, even, to say “worked,” because the box didn’t appear to do anything.

It was easy to demonstrate that it worked: I saw with my own eyes people insert countless hundred-dollar bills and receive back larger sums of money, though always in smaller denominations—and Paolo always got his cut. But the box itself made no noise, and there appeared to be no machinery inside, no moving parts. At first, we guessed there was a wireless or Bluetooth device: a money-counter, or a copy machine, printing out fake currency.

But the Money Box produced authentic legal tender, indeed. I bought clothes and lottery tickets and Uber Eats and deposited it in my account with no trouble.

Whenever the box was “processing,” as it were, nobody could sense any type of disturbance. But Tyrone would whimper. That, I suppose, should have been a tip-off something beyond merely cryptic, but untoward, and unnatural, was taking place, though I couldn’t ascertain what. But there are a lot of things in the physical world that exist, that are real, but are also mysterious and imperceptible, like quantum entanglement, gamma radiation, germs, evolution, or falling in and out of love. I don’t disbelieve such phenomena just because I can’t perceive, or make sense of, them with my lowly consciousness and imperfect naked eye.

Paolo would not say where he got the Money Box, and he certainly wouldn’t take it out of his home. If you wanted to use it, you had to be invited. And you had to bring cash. There appeared to be no limit to the amount of money the thing would convert—as long as you used increments of fifty-dollar bills or higher. And you could recycle the same bills: if you put in a hundred, and got back three fifties, you could put one of those fifties back in and get three twenties (Paolo would get a single dollar from such a meager exchange). Indeed, Dee-Ann came back from London with a £50 note and got back four twenties, which was even better than the currency exchange rate (incidentally, she also put in €100 and received a less generous exchange). However, if you put in a twenty or smaller, the money simply disappeared.

I was invited to Paolo’s house three more times before the wedding, and on my second visit, I brought ten fresh one-hundred-dollar bills. He’d bought a case of Veuve Clicquot and it was a crowded, celebratory, almost raucous dining table.

But, even tipsy as I was, it was then I noticed Paolo himself never used The Money Box, and I began to grow suspicious. I tried to ask him why, but he’d always dodge the question, or say something about “not getting high on your own supply.”

Nevertheless, the third time I visited, I brought a wad of one-hundred-dollar bills (the extent of my life savings) and for a time after that, I felt, mistakenly, that I was a rich man.

This belief—and the ease with which I adopted the churlish smugness and imperious vanity that led me to tell off Rick—was, perhaps, my tragic flaw. But he’d made me take down my inspirational poster of a wet grizzly bear eating a salmon, underneath which was the phrase, “Only when the last tree has been felled, the last river poisoned, and the last fish caught, will we remember that money cannot be eaten.” He said it was antithetical to our company’s mission and the passive voice was weak writing. So I told him where to stick it.

How could I have known?

In any case, on that third visit, Dee-Ann was present again. She was haughty as ever, complaining that Singapore Airlines was “going to seed.”

“You shouldn’t be flying at all,” I muttered under my breath.

“Come again?” Sanjeev said, staring at me with disgust.

“Carbon emissions,” Dee-Ann replied, rolling her eyes and smiling a vulgar little smile.

We were in Paolo’s living room now, which had more room for guests. Every book Paolo owned was about predatory subprime mortgage lending, credit default swaps, Lehman Brothers. Old news.

Dee-Ann brought out that same glinting golden credit card from before. She handed it over to Paolo, confidently now, and, oddly, it appeared the centurion, in his oval, had reversed, now facing the left.

“You’re sure?” Paolo said. Dee-Ann nodded.

Paolo inserted the credit card into the Money Box, and we waited. And waited.

“So anyone have weekend plans?” Erin said, in a newsprint-soft voice.

“Be quiet, please,” Paolo said. I began to fret about how long their marriage would last.

I’d booked Tyrone in a Pet Hotel for the night, but now I wished he was with me, if only to break the interminable silence with his jagged little yaps.

“What have you done?” Dee-Ann said eventually, alarmed.

“Just wait.”

I concentrated, listening hard for any sound, such as the movement of infinitesimal gears or the laser scanning of a bar code. But nothing. It was like a séance.

“What the hell, Paolo?” Dee-Ann said. “Now I’m going to have to cancel it.”

Paolo’s eyes widened. “Do not do that. Whatever you do.”

“Why not?”

We all stared at Paolo, and I felt a sensation of dread creep up from the pit of my stomach into my throat. It felt exactly like when, in business school, I’d downloaded an essay for an economics course and handed it in without even reading the damn thing. For weeks I waited to be expelled for plagiarism, but instead I received an A+.

Before Paolo could answer, the Money Box began spitting out hundred-dollar bills from all five slots. It was the hardest labor I’d seen from the machine. Ninety bills came out of each slot, for a total of forty-five thousand dollars. Paolo lifted the box, and there was another nine grand squished up under the bottom slot.

“Okay everyone,” he said. “Time to go home.”

“Wait,” Dee-Ann said. “Where’s my credit card?”

“It’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

Paolo and Erin started ushering people out of their house. “Just, gone,” he said.

* * *

That was the first night I was visited by Mr. Locust. He was an evil, slender figure in a three-piece gray suit and he smelled like gasoline. He looked like a giant silverfish. In the dream I was tied to a hospital gurney, and under my body the icy metal bars burned my skin, for I was naked except for a pair of soiled white briefs. I couldn’t understand what Mr. Locust was saying, but when he opened his mouth sometimes a dusty cricket would fly out. Suddenly he was holding a meat cleaver, like he intended to chop off my feet.

Despite my screams and protests, he removed everything below the ankle. It was not a quick process.

When he was done, I woke up. The lower half of my bed sheet was covered in blood, and my toenails were cracked and split apart, but my feet were still there, relatively intact.

I believe Paolo, in a benign yet insidious way (that is, without malice but without grace, either) sought to exploit the asymmetry of information between the market maker and the buyer, while skimming a little of the top for himself. A standard practice throughout human civilization—the oil in the gears of progress, in fact. The foundations of civilization. But did he really know how the Money Box worked? I don’t think he did.

Not that it matters.

Steve was the first to be rejected by the Money Box. It turned out Steve was broke, though he claimed his money was tied up in “business ventures.” We all knew it was booze, gambling, cocaine. Though I detested his personality, I didn’t fault him his vices; as far as I was concerned, every man was free to swing his fist up to the tip of another man’s nose, so to speak. But Steve, well, he was just rotten.

After that first rejection, Steve borrowed five hundred dollars—from whom I know not—and returned to Paolo’s home, asking to use The Money Box to turn it into a thousand. Paolo refused. He said the money had to be earned.

Steve slapped him.

That’s what Paolo told me. And why would Paolo lie? It’s a humiliating thing, to be slapped by another man. To be infantilized, emasculated. After the slap, Paolo relented and let him use the Money Box, and Steve even kept Paolo’s share.

As we neared the wedding, Paolo complained about Steve showing up at his house, clutching crinkled bills and asking for The Money Box, using words he obviously didn’t understand, like “LIBOR” and “derivatives.” Paolo said he wasn’t an ATM, and eventually got a restraining order, but nobody believed Steve would be deterred by such weak tea. I think Steve planned to steal the Money Box, which would have been a disaster, as all economists and philosophers agree such power needs to be concentrated in few, competent hands; otherwise, society would devolve into an egalitarian, democratic wasteland. The unwashed masses are too ignorant to control their own urges, let alone steer the ship of culture. It would lead to anarchy, chaos, ruination.

Even the ancients knew as much.

Several opportunities passed for me to bring up Mr. Locust, who’d begun appearing in my dreams every second or third night. Paolo mentioned I looked like I wasn’t getting enough sleep, and I was about to say something but even then, I held my tongue. Mr. Locust wasn’t his problem, I told myself, though, really, I didn’t want to make Mr. Locust angry. The phantom pain from his bullwhip and scalpel and wheel felt real enough, and there was no telling how Mr. Locust would punish me if I transgressed against him.

At first Penelope politely declined the invite to be my wedding date. I realized I’d grown quite fond of her, though, not unlike how, perhaps, a farmer grows fond of his favorite sow, or a gambler begins to trust his bookie. I enjoyed knowing her in the biblical sense, too, and after much prodding and begging, I convinced her to come.

“No funny stuff,” she told me.

“I’m never funny,” I replied, and relayed the old joke about the zombie and the chicken to prove it.

For Paolo’s bachelor party, we scheduled a limousine to take us to a steakhouse, a casino, and a Gentlemen’s Club. Before we left, I attempted to withdraw an enormous sum of cash from an ATM in preparation and was informed on the screen there was a problem with my account. This being a Saturday night, I figured I could handle it the following Monday.

Steve was not present, as he’d been disinvited.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the steakhouse was in a sorry state of disrepair: a worn, frayed red rug led up a balustrade staircase missing several spindles into a nearly-empty dining room staffed by a crew of forlorn, phlegmatic waiters, all old enough to be waiting to die. It made me sad because it reminded me of my own father, who waited tables until the day he aneurismed in the walk-in fridge.

Before even the chateaubriand was served, Paolo’s phone rang.

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Greetings After Dinner Conversation subscribers! Todays interview is a bit of a departure for us at ADC. Instead of limiting our video interviews to authors solely featured in our magazine, we have have decided to use our platform to spotlight new and upcoming authors who have caught our eye on the Substack platform.

Today we are featuring Mila Golubov and her publication The In Between.

This interview was an absolute blast. We touch on so many important topics including AI, joblessness, marketing, techniques for growing your Substack, where ideas come from, whether or not to choose a writing niche, attracting paid subscribers, branding, and how not to use AI.

I hope you enjoy watching the interview as much as I enjoyed conducting it. And make sure to check out Mila’s work at The In Between.

-Drew

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Bonus content not featured in our video interview:

Mila’s “Cheat Sheet” for growing your Substack-

Ha no official cheat sheets but here’s some tips. Participate in haiku/last line challenges- allows you to tag bigger accounts and get your skills out and become a go-to for others cause they want to see what you do. Subscribe to accounts with open chats, most people just read posts there instead of in emails. Restacking is favored by the algo. Lives/podcasts are also currently favored. Find ways to playfully tag people in work. Most people will subscribe to you it you are positive and support their work a few times. Following or being followed doesn’t actually get you into the feed consistently so sub or be subbed when you can. Collabs will help visibility most larger creators will collab with you if they like your style but there’s some people on here that just love to collab with others for the don’t of it like ethereal poetry or Damian.

Which philosophy or philosopher most aligns with your own beliefs?:
Rawls, Hobbes and Marx.

Is your process for writing philosophical fiction different from the way you approach other works?:
I tend to approach fiction with sociological implications, current events and historical precedence in mind.

Which authors or books would you recommend to those who want to challenge their own thinking?:
Moonwalking with Einstein, A Molecule Away From Madness, The Creative Act: A Way Of Being, The School Of Life.

What authors on Substack do you enjoy reading/think others should know about?

Labyrinthia Mythweaver, A Writers Voice, Nicole K Writes, Shae/Yuck Fiction, Laura B Shadows

Author Bio:

Mila Golubov is a playwright. An author. A poet. A screenwriter. An avid reader. A teacher. A spiritual explorer and a long-time creative director. Her work currently explores all things woo woo, the fall of capitalism, heady sci-fi, witchy rituals, natural analogies, divergent thinking, conscious AI and so much more. milagolubov.com

The In Between

The In Between is a place to explore the world from the outside in.

Read “The Post Mortem Post” here!

Read “Killer Sex” here!

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Story Summary: A little girl is "born" by a film studio, and is raised as their ward. (Scroll Down to Read)

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Hollywood Baby by Holly McGinnis

Hello. You may have frequently heard my name in the news these past few weeks. You may have heard it uttered as if I am a criminal or a reprehensible celebrity having a breakdown, which is what the broadcasting network would have you to believe. However, I am neither. I am fighting for my rights, and today, I am fighting for my reputation and future. The public needs to know the truth, and you need to know my story.

My name is Araminta Fox, and I’m a Hollywood Baby. I was born for the show Kat’s Out of the Bag, where a widower father (Miles Swift) raises his feisty daughter—the beforementioned Kat. Shenanigans ensue. In season six, he marries an engineer named Emily (Delilah Banks), and in season seven, they have a daughter together (Araminta and Anastasia Fox). The show was on for three seasons after our birth. I don’t recall a single moment of it.

As you know, Miles Swift went on to become a big action star, garnering fame, fortune, and esteem beyond the sitcom world. He hasn’t spoken to my sister or me since the end of Kat. Delilah Banks has had a few roles here and there. She sends us cards on our birthday and holidays. When we were young, it was always “To my Precious Girls.” Now, it’s “To my Talented Araminta” and “To my Brilliant Anastasia.”

Beth Shepherd, our caretaker, always made a big fuss over these cards when we were kids. But she was careful to never call Delilah our mom; it would place too much emotional burden on the actress. Other children might have had mothers, I later learned, but we had a Beth. She was enough. Mostly.

We had acting coaches and booked small gigs as far back as I can remember. At age six, we landed a lead role in a new show, one where the protagonist has supernatural powers. I remember the night before the first day of filming, Beth readied us to see Ross Declan, the CEO of Fox Television and our legal guardian. She brushed our hair and tidied it gently, first Ana’s, then mine.

Our bedroom was a light pink. Both of our twin beds had squishy pastel pillows and translucent canopy curtains above. Against one wall, we had a white, mirrored vanity table. We each had a small desk, as well. It was all perfect for little princesses.

That evening, I sat on the end of my bed, feet hanging down, while Beth braided my hair for bed. Anastasia bounced around the room, her hair already neatly French braided. We both wore white nightgowns with pink trim.

“Mr. Declan is coming to see you tomorrow morning,” Beth said to us. “He is your primary guardian, and he cares about you very much. He wants to wish you good luck before your first day of filming!”

“What’s a guardian?” I asked.

“It’s someone who is in charge of a child. You’re his responsibility.”

“Is Mr. Declan our dad?” my sister questioned, squeezing the hem of her skirt tight.

“No, he’s not your dad, baby girl. But he’s there to take care of you.”

“But you take care of us, Beth,” I stated. “Doesn’t that make you our guardian?”

“No,” she began, pulling my braid through a ponytail holder, “I’m just your Beth.”

“So, if Mr. Declan isn’t our dad, and you’re not our mom,” Ana reasoned, “does that mean we’re orphans?!” She flung herself back on the bed and pillows, placing a hand on her forehead in a swoon. Ana had just watched The Little Princess (the one with Shirley Temple), and she was very enthusiastic about the dramatic potential of orphanhood just then.

“No, you’re not orphans!” Beth giggled. “Orphans have lost a parent. You... just have a different situation.”

“So, who are our parents?” I asked. “Is our dad dead like Sarah’s?”

“He’s not dead, Minty!” Ana shouted, “He’s just wounded!” Beth smiled and gave a shush.

“You don’t really have parents,” she said. “But you have me and Mr. Declan and the whole board of directors. We’re all here to take care of you.” She squeezed my shoulders and smiled at me in the mirror. Ana was still lying on her bed, probably wondering if she could get away with calling herself an orphan for dramatic effect. I smiled at Beth but wished there was a name for someone who had never had parents to begin with.

It would be years later before Beth gave us the Birds and the Bees Talk, and I learned that, biologically, my parents were Miles Swift and Delilah Banks, but they have no legal relation to me. I still don’t know who gave birth to me and my sister. It wasn’t Delilah. Perhaps it was Beth, but I have never asked her. Fox keeps its surrogacy arrangements very confidential.

The next morning, we sat in our trailer, already costumed in worn jeans and too-big t-shirts, our hair and faces artificially dirtied. The trailer was a large RV, furnished in deep browns and creams, and Ana had already been around, swiping her hand against the smooth wooden surfaces and hugging random pieces of furniture. “It’s not pink!” she said.

Thirty minutes before we were called to set, we met Ross Declan. He was thin, but not particularly tall. His hair was a deep black, which looked strange above his creased face. He wore a suit and had a seemingly unshakable air of formality. He stepped into our trailer. “Araminta, Anastasia!” he greeted us. “How are our girls this morning?” Ana replied, “Good,” and I nodded, wondering who else he was speaking for.

“Are you two excited for your first day of filming?” He rubbed his hands together. I bobbed my head again, and Ana glanced at Beth, who smiled, nudging her off the couch.

“Okay, girls,” Declan continued. “I want you two to be on your best behavior today. You’ve been working with our family, but now you’ll be working with NBC, and I want you to make us proud. Show them how Foxes do it!” Ana smiled wide, and Declan put his hand out to start a stack. Beth put her hand atop it, and we joined in. “Go Foxes!” he said, and we raised our palms in the air.

“Now, who’s taking first shift?” I glanced at Ana, and we both volunteered. “Those are my girls!” Declan praised, and I wondered if parents were different from a guardian.

The show lasted less than one season. It was cancelled during its winter hiatus.

For the next few years, Ana and I floated from job to job, audition to audition, feeling like pros next to the new kids who cried in the waiting room or wiggled nervously as parents fretted and fussed. Beth always ran lines with us before auditions, but, once we reached the day of, she refused to use the real dialogue. We knew each page backward and forward, and she would insist we improvise the dialogue and mess around. Play pretend. I learned later that Beth had been a casting assistant before our caretaker.

When we were seven, we booked a small-budget horror movie. I think that’s when things changed. We met the monster beforehand; he was a middle-aged man, with a bald, shiny head, and a wide smile. He showed us how he could make scary noises in his throat. We tried to copy him, laughing hysterically when all we could manage was high-pitched pig oinks.

I took the first shift. My job was to fall backward on my butt and then run down the hallway, making sure to turn around when I passed the door and look at the camera with my most scared face. I did the scene over and over again, and then Ana had her turn for a scene where she hides, trying not to cry, while I had school time. Then, we filmed a scene where the monster chases our character, screaming, through a parking lot and catches us. The set was in a studio. The ground looked like an asphalt parking lot, but it was squishy. And the walls were green fabric. We weren’t in a dark car park at all.

We practiced with the nice man, and he showed us how he would pick us up. The director played it back for us, and I was surprised how it looked like he was attacking us. Ana was on shift for the scene, but Beth let me watch while I ate lunch. We liked to cheer each other on when possible.

The lighting positions were set, and the man and Ana walked to their marks. The man started gurgling, and the director called “action.” Ana ran. And screamed. The monster chased her, the awful noises lunging out of his throat.

She was supposed to run across the stage, just slow enough for him to catch her around a green tape marker on the floor. The director had explained it was important for how the camera was set. But Ana breezed right past it; she was running so fast that the monster didn’t lift her up until almost the edge of the green screen. She yelled even louder, tears streaming down her face. I was in awe of her performance, and I couldn’t wait to tell her so. The director called “cut!” and the man put her down, praising her acting, but Ana didn’t listen. She jogged away from him, holding her arms around herself.

“Good job, Ana!” I called. She didn’t respond, just trudged closer to where Beth and I stood. Something wasn’t right. The director called for places again; he wanted to get a take where the monster caught up to Ana closer to her mark. But she kept walking until she reached us and buried her head in Beth’s jacket.

“Did that scare you, baby?” Beth asked, stroking her head and back as tiny sobs shook my sister. She nodded.

“It’s okay, Anastasia,” I consoled. “I can do it for you.” I squeezed her back in a quick hug, kissed her head, and took my mark. The frazzled director was happy to let me substitute. I got on my mark, eyed the monster-man, and screamed my heart out when action was called, making sure not to run too fast. The man’s costume was heavy, after all. When he reached me, I made sure to sob a little and scream bloody murder. He bobbed me up in the air, a little higher than we’d practiced, and I could feel my whole insides trying to leap into the sky. We heard “cut,” and he swung me up once more to right me and ceremoniously placed me on the ground.

“Are you okay?” he asked, pushing back his mask and looking at me eye-to-eye. I wiped my crocodile tears away and smiled, feeling the power my lungs had just exuded. “Great!” I answered.

I took the rest of Ana’s shifts that day while she rested with Beth in the trailer. At shift change, I would go to the bathroom, and when I returned, the crew would call me Anastasia. The next shift, I would be Araminta again. I was proud to help my sister, even as I expected her to rejoin us any minute. To my surprise, she didn’t, and I worked even as I became exhausted. Finally, all scheduled scenes shot, talent was released from set. Mr. Declan walked me back to the trailer. Beth ushered me through my nighttime routine, and I joined Ana in our bunk beds.

The compact trailer bunkhouse was darker than our room at home. It had one small window, but I couldn’t see it from the bottom bed. Ana turned over above me.

“Ana?” I whispered. “Are you okay?”

“I think so.” Her voice was barely audible.

“What happened?”

“I got scared.”

“Why? It’s all pretend,” I pointed out.

“It didn’t feel like pretend to me.” I didn’t understand. The concrete was squishy, the background was chartreuse, and the monster was a friendly man. How could it have felt anything but highly fabricated?

“Why didn’t you come back?” I questioned.

“My tummy hurt.”

“I missed you.” I crawled out of bed and up the ladder.

“Me, too. Beth and I played card games, and I wished you were here.” Ana scooched over to let me cuddle with her.

“Will you come back tomorrow?”

“Beth says I have to.”

“Do you want me to do the scary scenes? I can pretend I’m you.” I looked at Ana’s sad face in the low moonlight of the window. She nodded.

“I love you, Ana.”

“I love you, too, Minty.” We lay down, snuggled together, and slept soundly, squeezed into the tiny trailer bunk. I would spend the next few months overworked and jumping between being myself and impersonating my sister.

Surprisingly, I really liked doing horror movies. The cast and crew were always exceptionally nice, and I got to scream all the time; no one told me to hush. Ana had a few roles on children’s shows, but I guest-starred in crime shows, playing the victim, inconsolable, weeping with grief—I was showing off. I could make everyone believe I was hurt, even while it was all pretend. After a while, I learned to miss Anastasia less.

When I was nine, I booked my first big movie. It was a screen adaptation of a new, popular children’s trilogy. I wasn’t a lead, but my character was in every book, guaranteeing me a place in each of the movies. Beth assured me that Mr. Declan and the board were so very proud of me. Around this time, Ana asked to have more time to study. The board agreed she could, so long as she went to one audition a month. Anastasia upheld her end of the bargain, but, despite her impressive résumé, she never booked another job. If Beth knew the reason behind Ana’s sudden, suspicious inability to act, she didn’t tell Mr. Declan. I was just glad that she was always home when I was. When she saw me after a long day, she would inundate me with the latest facts she had learned, and I would regale her with my successes on set. This ended when I booked the movie.

I was always accompanied by a board member to the set in New Zealand, while Beth was responsible for Ana’s schooling in LA. My first chaperone was Don, and he didn’t like children very much. He was a good sport, just couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for interacting with me. Luckily, I made friends with the large cast of children quickly. They were fascinated by my parental situation, but conversations around this always ended with a sense of pity, or an apology that I couldn’t remember enough of Kat’s Out of the Bag to chat with them about the reruns their parents had shown them. I learned that I could best connect with them by talking about movies or siblings. These were universal topics—and pity-free.

Over the next three years, as we grew from bubbly children into anxious, fame-weary tweens, our cliques morphed and evaporated, reformed and dissolved, until we emerged from the experience not remembering who our first friends were. We had made three movies, endured rigorous press tours, and our faces (not mine) were plastered on billboards and advertisements the world over.

And then it ended. No longer did I have friends surrounding me for 12-hour days on set, but I also didn’t have to watch them run to their mom or dad, while I waved to Don or whichever board member was accompanying me, fulfilling the legal obligations of guardianship. The situation did have its benefits, however. While parents berated their children for bad performances or missed opportunities, my guardians’ only comments on my work were constructive criticism or encouragement. I was only ever chastised for misbehavior. Other actors dealt with overbearing parents while my relationship with my guardians was always strictly professional. For better or for worse.

For the next few years, my work was press. Late night interviews and daytime talk shows were my gigs, and I studied with Ana during the day. Fox decided we (me) were too well-known to attend school, so we learned with Beth and private tutors at home. Ana flourished, swimming through grade levels easily, while I applied myself to what needed to be done, although not with the same enthusiasm I had for acting.

When we were fifteen, Fox wrote a new television show with twin leads, just for us. I think they were tired of waiting for Ana to bring in money from other studio jobs, so instead they wrote a show in which they didn’t have to pay their leads. The show was humorous and well-received. You may remember it. Anastasia and I did well. It was great fun acting with my sister again, and her comedic timing has always been impeccable.

Upon our eighteenth birthday, we were emancipated, much to Fox’s chagrin. I would have stayed until age twenty-one, but Ana was eager to forge her own path. We now had access to the percentage of our earnings legally mandated to be set aside for us. Our characters were killed off and replaced with male leads: the Colby twins. Fox was hoping to keep the momentum going, as Dr. Who had managed to do years before with new leads, but ratings plummeted after we left. The show only lasted one more season. This ending was bittersweet. I was sorry to disappoint Mr. Declan, the board, and the fans, but being with Ana was most important to me. And Beth was so proud of us. She made the transition more sweet than bitter.

Ever the scholar, Ana applied and was accepted to St. John’s College at the University of Oxford. We were all so proud. I did my best to follow and was accepted into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Mr. Declan threw us a party, Delilah Banks wrote a card, and Beth retired. To Fulmer, UK. Coincidentally.

For the next three years, we studied: Ana art history, me theater arts. I drove to Oxford every weekend I could. Sometimes we would meet at Beth’s cottage in the middle, and, even more rarely, Ana would have time to visit me in London. Holidays were precious, and we spent them together, exploring castles, going to shows in the West End, hiking with Beth, or crossing to Paris in the Chunnel.

The summer before our final year, Ana brought an extra person along on our holiday excursions. His name was John, and he studied mathematics. Ana was good enough to never make me feel like a third wheel (if she could help it), but the dynamic had shifted. No longer was I the best companion for my sister.

But John was good, and he was good for Anastasia. They viewed the world through different lenses but managed to see the same scene. Together, their outlook on life was better than either’s was alone. After a while, I couldn’t begrudge her this relationship. They were happy and in love, and they made everyone around them happy. Still, I visited Beth and her cottage more often during my final year at RADA.

At RADA, I unlearned some bad television-acting habits and was welcomed into the world of the theater. Movie sets and TV studios were my world, but the stage was fresh. I could sing into the dark auditorium, feeling my lungs expel power, much like they had during my childhood horror movie days. But this was healthier and more emotionally expansive. You could sing joy, sing fear, sing anger, sing hurt, sing exuberance! And you could stay with the same company for months. Each scene—the fun, the challenging, the boring—you got to do each night, over and over again, until it was perfect every day, but always a living thing.

I auditioned for show after show on the West End during that year, and, finally, the day after graduation, I booked the role of Juliet in the new adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. John proposed to Anastasia. Their wedding took place three weeks after my opening night. My costume was so lovely, I was very tempted to wear that.

For three years I had that role, an extraordinarily long time for an original cast member to stay on, but I was enjoying myself. Every night I fell in love, had (two!) sword fights, and cheated death. (The Bard would be horrified.) Meanwhile, Anastasia found a job at a museum in London. I was in the same city as my sister again, and it felt good. Dodging the immovable shows and rehearsals in my schedule, I visited Ana and John in their flat. Game nights were my respite. Beth visited every few months, but we were grown now, and she had her gardening community in Fulmer to think about.

As the years passed, Anastasia settled into family life, and I... settled. As she blossomed in her stability, I began to wither in my stagnation. But perhaps wither isn’t the right word. I was getting twitchy.

Finally, I decided I wanted to give movies a go again. (My West End performances hadn’t been enough to land me a spot on Graham Norton’s couch yet, I rationalized to John.) I alerted the producers of my intention to resign a week after my sister announced her pregnancy. My nephew was born the night of my last show. (He’s always had an interesting sense of timing and irony. I think he might turn out to be a philosopher.)

Back in the States, in New York, I had little luck at my movie auditions. I moved to auditioning for guest-starring roles on every procedural I could think of. These were more successful. I was in five episodes of a CW sci-fi show. I video chatted with Ana, John, and baby Edwin once a week. I also booked a leading role in a new off-Broadway production. This is what I was devoting my time to when I got the call from Fox.

They offered me the leading role in a new show they assured me would be a hit, saying that I was their first choice. Skeptical but intrigued, I agreed to read the script. It was fantastic! Characters were deep, dialogue was snappy, and the potential was endless. I loved the character from the first page. Her name was Natasha, and she suddenly finds herself a single mother after her partner ends their relationship to pursue humanitarian work. She’s torn because she resents him for leaving her but respects his instinct to help others in need. It’s just that she suddenly finds herself in need. That’s why it was called Natasha in Need. Each episode opened with “Need” being scribbled over and a more fitting word for the episode being inserted. I am still hopeful that this project will one day be fulfilled.

Encouraged by the successes of Anastasia and I, the company wanted to birth their next Hollywood babies. NBC, ABC, and CBS all have dozens, but Fox was intentional about its brand being seen as family oriented. They wanted to show the world the effort and nurture they gave their babies. This would be only its third set since the practice began.

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If you would like to submit a story to After Dinner Conversation, here’s how.

Read Jon Medrano Miller’s short stories, "The Place Before Perdition” and “Broken-Winged Moths”:

Click the image to get your copy!

Q&A

How do you come up with ideas for your short stories?

Sheesh! Stories come from everywhere really. “The Place Before Perdition” was an accumulation of a true crime documentary I watched about a serial killer in Texas in the 1960s, memoirs I’ve read from both parolees and prison guards, and stories I’ve heard from family working in law enforcement. Then this story collected dust in a drawer for a year before I circled back to it.

To me, a great story is a gathering of two things: philosophy and ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. When else is one bombarded with the deepest, murkiest of ethical questions?

Are there any ideas right now that are ripe for fictionalizing?

Right now, I’m fascinated by the idea of history repeating itself. I’m working on a manuscript set in 1918, a time of war, pandemic, and religious fervor. Presently, everyday people insist we’re living through the “worst of times,” but I’d wager someone in 1918 was saying the exact same thing. What is interesting to me is how the anxieties of the past—about health, religion, death, and self—are like our own concerns today. By putting today's issues on top of history, we can understand how human desires and fears truly are universal; they only have been shaped by an evolving society.

Which authors or books would you recommend to those who want to challenge their own thinking?

Once an overthinking college student, I greatly admired the ideas of Emil Cioran—a man so pessimistic that his own mother told him she wouldn’t have had him if she knew he’d turn out so depressed. His aphorisms taught me so much about meaning, or lack thereof. As I’ve gotten older and started a family, my outlook has thankfully brightened—but life has by no means grown simpler. The dilemmas are still there, only reframed.

Writers like Kōbō Abe and Daniil Kharms have a way of incorporating surrealism to expose the banality of everyday life. Abe, in books like The Woman in the Dunes, traps his protagonists in hopeless repetition. Kharms celebrates the absurd and the grotesque. Boris Vian mixes tragedy with acid satire, luring you in through humor.

Clarice Lispector is more interior—her prose digs and digs to the point where you feel like you’re eavesdropping on unvarnished consciousness itself. And more recently, I’ve been drawn to Samanta Schweblin, whose work often hovers between the real and the uncanny. Have I mentioned the films of David Lynch yet?

And if you haven’t read Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, I recommend you get ready to have your socks blown off.

What is your ideal reader?

My ideal reader isn’t someone who agrees with me—it’s someone willing to be unburdened by questions. I remember reading this YA book in middle school that started off strong until the final 20 pages when everything suddenly became nicely tied up and resolved. I felt totally robbed. Not because I enjoy watching people suffer, but because it seemed so far removed from real life. It’s why everything I write is left open-ended, in a way.

My ideal readers are those who are willing to sit without knowing and wrestle with the desire for tidy answers. If they finish one of my stories without a solution and at least one question that will continue to live with them in a useful way, then I believe that the story has worked.

Jon Medrano Miller is a Chicago-based writer who crafts stories about those often overlooked—loners, misfits, and chanteuses. Influenced by the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Kōbō Abe, and Daniil Kharms, he is currently at work on his debut historical novel. For representation or to just talk about all things literary: website.

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Story Summary: Daphne is institutionalized while trying to answer the question, "Why am I, I?"

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The Big, Immovable I by Harrison V. Perry

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Daphne said from behind her cigarette. “Of all the people in the world, I’m me.”

Disinfectant, and the reek of the canteen food laid out on the table, brought back memories of school dinners and dread. Daph wore her favorite tatty jumper, the sleeves scrunched up to her elbows. I had looked high and low for it and she wouldn’t say a word until I had found it and brought it to her.

“You know?” she went on. “It’s a mask I can’t take off.”

At the table behind, a man wearing a ward gown flipped his tray of curried chicken and vegetables high into the air. “There is no God!” he screamed. “Let me out!” and was pounced upon by two of the orderlies.

Daphne explained: “That’s Charlie. God abandoned him.”

The ash from her cigarette fell away and landed in her banoffee pie.

“I keep running into it,” she said, “into the infinite-regress.” With her teaspoon she scooped out the ash. “I love the pie here.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“And I get stuck in it.”

“In the pie?”

“No, the regress.”

“Oh, yeah. I get it.”

“Do you?” She leaned forward. “Do you really?”

I ate a bite of soggy canteen burger. “Are you doing much sport?”

“No,” she said. “They only let you do one. So, I can run, or I can play tennis.”

“That’s too bad.”

“I prefer tennis,” she said. “It gives me less time to think. But nobody here is any good.”

“That’s what you need, to get out of your head.”

She smiled, drew hard on her cigarette, and blew smoke into my face. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know.”

She shook her head. “The doctors and psychologists, they think they know too, but they don’t, neither do you.”

I put the shitty burger back down. “I love you, Daphne, and I want—we all want you to be well, to get out of here. Dad’s been busy redecorating your old room. He’s painted the walls, fixed the stuck window, even built you a double bed. It smells good in there, like his old workshop; you remember the sawed-wood smell? Like his workshop from when we lived in Toronto? It smells just like that right now.”

“Has he read my paper?”

“Yeah, we all have.”

“What does he think?”

He thinks you’re confused. “He didn’t say. He doesn’t say much, but that’s dad. He just got to work making you a new bed.”

The orderlies had got Charlie under control and taken him out into the hallway. A grown man screaming, getting wrestled away, Christ, I didn’t blame Mum for not visiting. The tension here, the anxiety: an outburst from a patient, odd questions and smells, shouts and invasions of personal space: it had lost its initial hold on me after my first few visits. I no longer panicked: it was all part of the environment. You either accepted it, or you didn’t come.

“Daph, I need to get back to work, alright? I’ll see you next week. You know, if you fall into the regress, you can call me. I’m always at the other end of the phone.”

“Yep,” she said, “but you really don’t wonder why you’re not me?”

“No,” I told her, getting to my feet, “the thought never comes to me. It doesn’t bother me. I don’t worry why I’m me. I just … I just, I don’t know. I just don’t have those thoughts.”

She lit another cigarette, smoked it so the cherry was nice and bright, and then stubbed it out on her wrist. I went to whack it from her hand, but an orderly beat me to it, grabbing her wrist and saying, “That’s it! That’s no more cigarettes for a week.”

* * *

“Psychosis leads its sufferers down rabbit holes of beliefs,” group leader Anna said. “Everything the sufferer encounters, a TV show or a film, a conversation, even the title on the spine of a book, act as evidence for the psychotic belief, as if these pieces of information were made for the sufferer. Messages, the psychotic might say, are encoded in everything. Creating information-sparse areas, like removing books and the television set from the bedroom, are ways we, as loved ones, can help reduce the amount of stimuli and stress for the sufferer.”

Daphne had lost her job the week after her admission. I’d spent three days clearing out her apartment, sifting through everything—looking for that fucking jumper—trying to get it all boxed up before the landlord charged another month’s rent. Every single one of her books had highlights in it, notes in the margins, the question: Why am I, I? scribbled on most pages.

“Zach,” Anna said, “are you with us?”

I came out of my thoughts to find everyone looking at me. There wasn’t a person in the room who didn’t have an ashen face and black bags under their eyes.

“Sorry,” I said, “what was the question?”

“No question,” Anna said. “You drifted off.”

“Sorry, it’s been—” A sharp pain on my wrist cut me off. A red splotch.

“It’s okay to feel a little disconnected,” she said. “Why don’t you tell the group how you’ve been helping your sister? I’m sure our new faces will find it helpful.”

I doubted it. “Alright,” I said. But a man, I guessed it was his first time in the group, started crying.

“My son thinks I’m Zeus,” he said, taking a clump of tissue paper to his face. “He thinks my wife is Aphrodite. He’s absolutely sure of it.”

* * *

After the meeting, I went back to work and found a new voice message from Daphne on my desk machine. “Don’t tell Mum,” she pleaded, her voice shaky. “She doesn’t like it when I put cigarettes out on my wrist.” Shouts in the background: someone was cheating at sevens again. “The explanatory gap is bogus,” Daphne explained. “It’s a language problem. If we didn’t have language, Zach, then they’d be no problem. But we use words to think, so we’re burdened.” The message ran on, all this philosophical nonsense. “I have graduated from the school of life and I see the true reality, but I can’t work it through. I have had to make a new mathematical symbol that quantizes human consciousness. We are waveforms—”

The tape in my machine finished. If she was calling the office phone, it meant that she’d filled up my machine at home, too.

I drank a little from my desk flask. The cheap gin burnt my throat, but settled my head and eased the pain on my wrist. I found enough focus to get back to the Havisham monument designs. The cenotaph was already over budget, even before it was handed to me to complete, but the Royal Canadian Infantry Corps still insisted it be twelve feet high and onyx stone.

On the tip of the cenotaph the general wanted a star, but my inked lines weren’t right. I sat there, staring at what I had drawn, wondering why it was so off. I traced the lines with my finger and realized I had drawn Daphne’s hospital logo.

“Zach.”

I started. My finger smudged the ink. It was Mr. Diego, in his tweeds.

“Can I see you in my office?”

* * *

On Mr. Diego’s darkly red desk stood four finger-sized basalt models. Each one was a to-scale of the various monuments we had designed over the years. I picked one up, a baseball bat and mitten, commissioned by the Ontario arm of Baseball Canada. It never got erected because a focus group said it looked like a dick and balls.

“Zach,” Mr. Diego said, shutting the door behind him. The recliner squeaked as he sat down. “You know I’ve given you a lot of leeway. I even told The Infantry Corps, explained to them about your difficulties, your personal issues.”

My gut tightened. I wanted more gin.

“And I know they haven’t been the easiest of clients to work with.” He leaned back in the green leather chair. His tweed jacket smelt like dog and stale pipe tobacco. “But you’re drinking in the office. I can’t have that. I looked the other way, at first, but it’s upsetting people. We can smell it on you. It’s on your breath, Zach. Have you thought about taking time off? A sabbatical? You used to talk about Australia.”

“You want me to go to Australia?”

He set his elbows on the desk: “I want you to stop drinking in the office.”

“I’m not a drunk—The work is getting done.”

“It isn’t, Zach, it really isn’t. The stonemasons are fed up. The last design was nearly ninety kilogrammes too heavy.”

“That wasn’t my fault. General Hawks wanted it twelve feet high, in onyx stone. How the hell—”

Mr. Diego shook his head. “What are you talking about? At the last client review we all settled on ten and half.”

“What?”

He closed his eyes. “This,” Mr. Diego said, “is exactly what I’m taking issue with. You aren’t right. You’re… you’re not here. I don’t know who you are.”

Neither did I.

“Let me get the meeting notes,” I said, rising to my feet.

“No, would you just…”

But I left his office, scratching at my wrist, and walked to my desk. I found my folder—quickly finished the dregs in my flask—and headed back. “Here, look,” I said, “look right there. Twelve feet.” I held my finger by the digits.

Mr. Diego put on his glasses. He studied the page, then me. “Zach,” he said, “Zach, that says ten point five.”

It said twelve. I blinked a few times, refocused my eyes, and the number shifted between twelve and ten point five, but settled on twelve. I smelt freshly fired clay and glaze: wet dog and pipe tobacco.

He sniffed, peered over the rims of his glasses. “Did you take another drink?”

“No, I…”

“Zach, you clearly aren’t well. Why don’t you take the rest of the week off? Take it as compassionate leave. On Monday, we can start fresh, no more drinking.”

It said twelve. I knew it said twelve.

* * *

My favorite lamp lay smashed on my apartment floor. I swept up the porcelain and bulb shards, wondering how it got broken. Daphne had made the lamp for me: she would stay late at the potters and make mugs and bowls and vases and lamps. I need the practice, she would say, and give the pieces to friends and family. It all seemed so long ago. Stuffed full of ambition, determined to get her work in galleries and exhibitions. But it never happened for her. It never really happened for any of us.

I ate leftover pizza and played my home answering machine. The tape was full.

“There’s no reason I’m not an Egyptian, tilling a field on the banks of the Nile a thousand years ago,” she said. “Why am I, I?”

I drank and ate to Daph’s voice until I fell asleep.

Dreams of the infinite-regress: I fell and picked myself up: I fell and picked myself up: I fell and picked myself up….

The telephone woke me. I jolted; the empty gin bottle rolled off my lap and thudded on the carpet. I padded over, picked up the receiver. “Yeah?”

“This is doctor Zetsubō. Am I speaking with Zachary Anderson?” the voice on the telephone said.

I rubbed my eyes with the back of my wrist. “I think so. What’s happened?”

“Daphne is fine,” the hurried voice said, “but there was an incident early this morning. Would it be possible for you to come to the observation ward?”

* * *

It was snowing downtown. I arrived at the hospital blanketed in snow, my feet frozen solid. I wanted a drink, to keep warm, but the liquor stores weren’t open yet and the supermarkets didn’t sell this early. Doctor Zetsubō, a Japanese lady who’d led most of Daphne’s care, who’d listened to me as I’d explained Daphne’s first episode, stood outside the hospital doors smoking a cigarette. I walked up the icy marble stairs, my breath blowing like a car exhaust, and said hello.

She smiled at me. One of her incisors had a small chip in it.

“Can I bum a smoke?”

She patted herself down, pulled out a crumpled packet of cigarettes. I took one and she lit it for me.

“Thank you for coming,” she said between exhales. “It’s not easy.”

“I want to be here for her,” I said.

“She couldn’t sleep last night, so the night team gave her sleeping aids, and they—” she ran the tip of her tongue over the chipped tooth “—they didn’t mix well with the psych-meds. She was up all night and hallucinated. We’ve moved her from her room. She had drawn over all the walls.”

Blank walls were too inviting: like a giant canvas, begging to be drawn on. I smoked and watched the traffic go by. The traffic lights glowed and lit the snow and the headlights of cars were like flying fairy lights. I used to love this city. When we first moved here it was our great big adventure. All of us heavy with our own hopes and dreams, and all of us slowly ground down to nubs. First Dad, then Mum, then Daph, and now me.

I blew smoke. My tongue tingled.

Doctor Zetsubō flicked her cigarette butt and crushed it out. She shivered, eyeing my cigarette. “How are you doing? Looks like you haven’t slept either.”

“I have… a little.” An ambulance roared past, wheels slipping on the icy road. “But I’m having—My work is difficult. Not like yours is, I’m sure, but—They want to send me to Australia.”

“You’re a family of artists, yes? A… ceramicist, yes?”

I had to think for a minute. Was I a ceramicist? “No, I design monuments.”

“Oh, that’s unusual.”

“It’s not what I want to do. Not anymore.”

“What is it you want to do?”

I dragged hard, finishing the smoke to its bitter end. “I would like to be a ceramicist.” I dropped the butt on the floor and, as I crushed it with my heel, said, “Ever since Daph getting sick, it’s been hard to think about anything else. I’m worried it’s spreading.”

“The want to be a ceramicist?” Doctor Zetsubō laughed, but seeing my face, she held a cold granite expression. “Her psychosis? Has something happened?”

I told her, “Some numbers, at my work, they shifted right on the page. Ten point five, twelve, ten point five, twelve. Is that a problem?”

“Tiredness can do that to you. Stress, too.”

“It makes you wonder about reality.”

“A very dangerous idea to wonder about reality.” She smiled.

“Your tooth,” I said, “I never noticed it before.”

She hid herself behind her hand. “Oh,” she said, laughing, “I haven’t had a chance to see the dentist.” She grabbed the door handle. “Chewing on marbles.”

“Chewing on marbles?” The hospital warmth wrapped around me: the canteen scents sickly and oily. I closed the door behind us.

“Mmm,” she said, “I thought they were candies. Who has marbles on their desk that look like candies?”

That’s what happens when you can’t distinguish reality accurately: you chip your teeth, design a heavy cenotaph, draw all over the walls, burn your wrist and not realize it.

* * *

Beside a big window, Daphne was smoking a cigarette in a hospital gown, sitting up in a chair wrapped in easy to clean plastic, her legs crossed.

“I thought you weren’t allowed to smoke for a while?”

She puffed away.

“And you’re in a gown,” I said. When she was first sectioned, dad and I had packed all her favorite clothes, but every time I visited it was always that tatty jumper I found her in. “Where are your clothes?”

“Covered in ink, Zach. You need to read the walls. Have you read the walls?”

“They don’t let me into your room.” I grabbed a big foam cube: all these soft, hard-to-hurt-yourself-with objects lying about, and sat on that. Between us, on a table that had its corners rounded, stood a chessboard, most of the pieces missing. “What did you write?”

“I figured it out, Zach.” She blew smoke all over the pieces, grabbed the queen and dragged it across the board until it reached the king. “Look how easy it is.”

“You’ve figured out why you’re you?”

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“Don’t you see, Zach?” She knocked the queen against the king. “It’s that easy!”

“Daph, I have no idea what you’re talking about. You aren’t making any sense. What’s a queen and king got to do with any of this?”

“Can’t you see, Zach? The king and queen, and even all the pawns, they’re the same.”

“Seriously, there’s nothing here. This is all some fantasy of yours. It doesn’t make sense to ask why you are you. You just are, alright? You’ve got no fucking idea what all this is doing to us, to Mum and Dad. We’re losing our minds. You can play psychotic all you like, but you’ll have to come back to the world: to reality. I’m losing my mind.” I thumped the chessboard and sent all the pieces scattering. Daphne screamed. Her cigarette fell and burnt on the board. Orderlies ran in and I shot up from the foam cube, shaking all over. “I can’t do this anymore!” I yelled.

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An “After Dinner Conversation” Virtual Book Club — Come Join Us

Great stories don’t end on the last page. They linger. They come back to you in the shower, or mid-conversation, or right before you fall asleep. You find yourself wondering what you would have done in that character’s position, or whether the story got it right.

That’s exactly what we want to talk about.

After Dinner Conversation is hosting it’s last monthly virtual book club, a one-hour Zoom conversation built around one (or two stories) from that month’s issue. Free to attend. Open to all readers. No formal agenda, no literary gatekeeping, just honest conversation about the ideas and moral questions the stories stir up.

Here’s how it works: Each month we pick one (or two stories) from the current magazine issue as our focal point. From there, the conversation goes wherever it needs to go, the ethical dilemma at the heart of the plot, the choice a character made, the moment that stuck with you. Our readers come from across the country and around the world, which makes these conversations richer than you might expect.

We’re hosting events through Luma, which handles time zones automatically, so no matter where you are, you’ll always know exactly when to show up.

Our next session is May 21, 2026, and we’ll be discussing stories from the May, 2026 issue.

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Read Courtney Welu’s short story, "Soul Loop”:

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Q&A

Are there any ideas or topics that you wish you had the courage to write about?

Someday, I would love to write the Great American Draft Dodger Novel. I have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing currently in print, and the few books that do touch on the experience of draft dodgers in the Vietnam War almost always treat it as some great shameful secret or hidden guilt that causes untold suffering. Personally, I think draft dodging is one of the most ethical things someone can do when told to fight in an unjust war. My uncle went AWOL in the year 1969, and he would tell you it was one of the best decisions he ever made. I don’t think I have the talent or experience to write the Great American Draft Dodger Novel yet, but I figure that’s the imminent goal of my writing career.

Which philosophy or philosopher most aligns with your own beliefs?

In undergrad, I took a literary theory class as a requirement for the English major. My professor was a very short, very intense Sri Lankan man who would regularly threaten to jump out the window and kill himself if people kept asking stupid questions. I absolutely loved him. Everything we read influenced my worldview, but Louis Althusser and Roland Barthes especially gave me the vocabulary to talk about concepts that I already believed in. I certainly don’t want to hold them up as paragons of virtue – Althusser killing his wife is a pretty big strike against him – but I am grateful to my professor for introducing them to me.

How do you come up with ideas for your short stories?

Many of my short stories, including “Soul Loop,” are drilled into a specific location, often somewhere in South Dakota. I prefer to write explicitly about places that I know well rather than fictionalized versions of them. I enjoy researching times and places, and bringing my intimate knowledge of the places I’ve lived to a story. Even though I love sci-fi and fantasy, I have always vastly preferred urban fantasy to second world fantasy. I want the characters to live in a world that I recognize.

Which authors or books would you recommend to those who want to challenge their own thinking?

I think we all have a responsibility to read books written by people who are different from us, whatever that might mean for you as an individual. I especially think cis readers need to read trans authors. My favorite recent release is Emily St. James’s Woodworking – set in South Dakota! I was thrilled to find a reference to the 41st Street Perkins in Sioux Falls.

Courtney Welu (she/her) is a writer from the Black Hills of South Dakota. She currently lives in Austin, Texas where she works at a community college. Her previous work can be seen in publications including Gone Lawn, Prosthetics, and Bag of Bones Press.

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Story Summary: The "Lord Keeper" sets out to murder his successor in order to keep a community secret safe. (Scroll Down To Read)

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Bound by Joanna Michal Hoyt

I came fully awake as I sat up and cracked my head on the thwart of my upturned canoe. The pain cleared my head. I felt under my bedroll for my knife, hoping I hadn’t made enough noise to attract the attention of whatever—whoever?—had waked me. I didn’t hear footsteps. I was just starting to drift back down into sleep when I heard the voice speaking from the high ridge above the brushy bit of riverbank where I had camped, meaning to get a good night’s sleep before venturing into Sheneshe. The speaker must have been just about directly above me.

“This is the third night, and the second asking,” the voice said. A man’s voice, elderly, melodious, and exhausted. “If I knew anything more to say to change your mind, I would say it.”

“And it would not change my mind. My answer is no.” The answering voice was younger, harsher.

A sigh. “Then all I can do is sit with you until dawn.”

“Until three nights ago, I might have thought that was kind of you.”

“Arlin,” the old man said, “the Law was given in kindness, but that kindness was meant for the people, not the Keepers—or the breakers either.”

I could hear the capital in the old man’s voice as he said “the Law.” I heard something else too, something I couldn’t put a name to, something that set my teeth on edge. Though perhaps that was only the fear that came from the rumors I had heard...

* * *

Gossips in the towns downriver had told me that no woman in her right mind would paddle on upstream past Sennipol to Sheneshe. When I observed that I could paddle as well as most men, they sighed and said no sane man would go that way either. When I inquired whether there were rapids, they explained that the problem was not in the river, but in Sheneshe itself—that its folk were unchancy.

“Unchancy how?” I asked. “Lawless? Cruel?” Some stared blankly at me or shrugged, plainly parroting something they’d heard and never thought to question. Others looked hard at me and then held their hands up before their chests, fingers splayed—the curse-warding sign. Some made it vaguely toward the north, toward Sheneshe. Some made it toward me. Maybe the shadow of what I’d left behind, the reason for my flight, was in my eyes. Maybe they thought the cursed place drew accursed travelers to itself. They might have been right, at that.

In Sennipol, the last town downriver from Sheneshe, there was a deal of curse-warding and a bit of muttering and spitting; I left the inn with all discreet haste. One man, a thin stooping fellow with ragged clothes and haunted eyes, followed me back to my boat and tried to give me an answer.

“They’re not lawless in Sheneshe,” he said, spitting aside. “Their Law interferes in far too many things—if the tales are true. But they killed their god long ago, and the curse is still on them.”

“The folk downriver in Marvi kill their god every autumn, and mourn for him every winter, and he comes back every spring and blesses them,” I said.

He spat again. “Southland lunatics,” he said. “But the folk up northaway... I’ve heard of no blessing there.”

* * *

I remembered that warning as I listened to the young man’s voice in the dark, answering the mention of the Law with words I couldn’t make out and fury I couldn’t help hearing. I was several paces away from my boat before I understood that I was going to the voices. I didn’t stop. I’ve learned to move quietly, and the young man’s voice covered the noises I couldn’t help making as I climbed. I was maybe ten paces from the young man when he stopped speaking and I stopped moving. The circle of light from the old man’s lantern stopped five paces from me. It showed me the old man’s face, heavy with grief. It didn’t reach to the young man. I stood there for a long time, watching the old man watching the young man, watching first hint of gray smudging the eastern horizon. When the old man looked up and said “The third night, and the third asking,” and the young man answered “No,” the lantern-light flashed from the knife in the old man’s hand.

I was between him and the young man before I had time to recall this wasn’t my affair. I was also between him and the lantern-light, and the dawn light wasn’t much help yet; I think he saw a bulky black silhouette against the glow, not a rawboned middle-aged woman trying to hold her own knife steady.

“You can’t do that,” I said.

“You do not understand,” he answered, lowering his knife hand.

“No, I don’t,” I admitted. “I thought you meant to use that on him.” I jerked a thumb back over my shoulder at the young man. “Was I wrong?”

The heavy silence answered well enough. “I can’t let you do that,” I said.

“I had no choice. I gave him his choice, and he chose,” the old man said.

“Had, not have?” I asked.

He didn’t answer that either. We stood looking at each other while the light came up in the sky. Then he sheathed his knife and sat down. I stepped back so I could see both men. The young one was sitting very straight against a beech-bole—tied to it, not cruelly tight, but enough to keep him in place. His hands were tied in front of him.

“Who did you say had a choice here?” I asked the old man. “He’s bound and you’re not.”

“I am bound by the Law, and he has broken the bond.”

“You carry out your Law in secret, in the middle of the night?” I asked.

“His Law is all secrets and lies,” the young man said. “I would have told them the truth.”

“I keep them safe,” the old man said.

“Keep who safe? Safe from what?” I asked.

“The god,” both men said together in the same heavy tone.

“So he’s after you for sacrilege?” I asked the young man, wishing I’d stayed out of it. I thought I’d learned not to meddle in religion in foreign parts. For one thing, meddling was an easy way to get yourself killed; for another, it was an easy way to hurt people in ways you’d never imagine ahead of time. But I couldn’t just go off and leave the young man to get murdered, or sacrificed, or whatever it was. I’d seen too much to let me leave, and I hadn’t seen enough to know what I should do instead of leaving.

“Not sacrilege,” the young man said. “It isn’t the god he’s protecting.” I waited for one of them to explain. I kept waiting. Another voice finally broke the silence, a woman’s voice on the far side of the ridge, calling, “Lord Keeper?” By then the sun had come up, restoring the color of the old man’s long blue robe and the smell of the late blackberries tangled in the long grass.

“Go back!” the old man called.

“Only if you want murder done,” I shouted before I could remind myself about the evils of meddling.

“Who’s there?” she called.

They didn’t answer, so I did. “An old man with a knife, and a young man tied up—I guess one of them’s your Lord Keeper—and a stranger.”

“Athele, it’s me, it’s Arlin,” the young man called in his rough tired voice.

Athele, who looked near my age, came over the ridge and stopped to stare at us. She looked first at Arlin, but it was to the old man she spoke after a long uncomfortable pause.

“Lord Keeper, you said Arlin had run off,” Athele said slowly. “Said you were going to find him. What happened? And who is she?”

The two men I’d interrupted answered together again: “The god’s messenger.” They both sounded afraid.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t know your god.” They ignored this.

Arlin looked at the Keeper. “Too late now for your way,” he said.

“Too late,” the Lord Keeper agreed. He nodded to me. “Loose him, then. We’ll go back together.”

I cut Arlin’s ropes and he stepped forward, staggered. The third night... I thought. No wonder he’s stiff. I reached out an arm to steady him; when the old man reached for him I came round between them again.

“I will not hurt him,” the Keeper said. “Not now. Take this.” He loosened the sheathed knife from his belt, gave it to me, took Arlin’s arm over his shoulders and started to help the younger man along. “Go back, then,” he told Athele, “and gather them all in front of the Place. If the story must be told, let it be told only once.”

Arlin’s legs limbered soon so he could walk at a decent pace and bear his own weight, though neither he nor the Keeper seemed eager to let each other go. We hurried through woods, then through pastureland loud with sheep and calves, then over the last hill into the village. The white stone houses were small and sturdy. I heard and saw no people. Right through the village we went, out the other side, through fields of oats and pease, then back into wild country.

At the top of another hill we came to a tall hedge of roses with a few late blossoms, white and scentless, still clinging to their thorns. Inside was a turfed courtyard surrounding a round wall of white stone too tall to see over and too smooth to climb. The door in that wall was locked. Six or seven score people milled around the courtyard, buzzing like a hive of bees that’s almost made up its mind to swarm. When they saw us, most of them raised their left hands to their foreheads as they looked at the Lord Keeper; I took it for a gesture of respect, though not one I’d seen before. A few of them made the curse-warding sign.

“Lord Keeper,” they said uneasily.

“It is yet to be seen whether I am still your Keeper,” he answered.

They didn’t seem to find this much clearer than I did. “Are you stepping aside for Arlin, then, Lord?” one man asked.

“He will never be Keeper,” the old man said

“He speaks truth in that, for once,” Arlin said. “The secret has been kept too long. It is time you knew the truth. It is time the gates opened and you saw...”

“Wait.” The Keeper spoke so softly that even Arlin quieted to hear him. “Wait. You want them set free, Arlin, and then you want to make their choice for them?”

“It is the god I would set free.”

“Ill words,” someone said, and “What does he mean?” said another.

“I’ll tell you...” Arlin began.

“Do you want him to tell you?” the Keeper interrupted. “Or will you keep the Law and your own protection?’

“And let your Lord Keeper sneak off in the middle of the night and kill people,” I added.

They seemed to notice me for the first time when I spoke. “Who are you?” a woman asked. “Did he threaten you?”

“He didn’t threaten me,” I said, “but seemingly he would have killed your Arlin here.”

Arlin shook his sleeves back, let them see the rope marks on his wrists.

“He wouldn’t! He didn’t!” several voices cried. “You never did, Lord Keeper?”

“I did,” the Keeper said.

“Why?” The question spread quickly through the crowd.

The Keeper turned his palms upward, nodded. “You have won,” he said. “I will tell the story, Arlin.” The people sat, and Arlin sat too, facing the Keeper. I sat where I could get between them again if I had to—not that either of them appeared to notice. Arlin’s eyes were fixed on the Keeper, smoldering with anger—though there was something else there too; something I took for an affection that had grown so far into him that he didn’t know how to get rid of it all at once. The Keeper looked into the empty air as though he could see the things he spoke of happening there. I can’t rightly remember the words he used, but I won’t soon forget the gist of the tale.

* * *

It began, he said, when the grandfathers of their grandfathers were still babes in the womb. (From him, that sounded less like a tale-teller’s flourish than an actual accounting of how much time had passed.) The women in whose wombs they rested, and their men, lived then in Sennipol, a town down the river which had been locked in its fears and its petty rivalries for generations: rich and poor feared and resented each other, families brooded over slights from generations past, but they all agreed that it was far better to live in Sennipol than in any of the backward or decadent towns downriver, or in the wild hill-country upstream which was said to be demon-haunted. (I bit back a snort of laughter, remembering Sennipol and wondering how the good folk of the inn would take to that description.) But one of the Sennipoli, an old woman named Myriona, was haunted by a dream of better things: of a sweet country where the air was fresh, not stinking as in the alleys of Sennipol; a place where men and women worked and sang and were glad together in the light of the face of the god.

Oh yes, she dreamed of the god too. It was his voice that urged her to come up the river to the hill-country and live free, and to take with her any brave souls who were willing to come. Myriona obeyed, and got away from Sennipol before anyone actually got round to disposing of her as a witch; a fair number of other people who were weary of the course of their lives followed her.

There was no obvious sign of a curse on the hill-country. The streams were sweet and clear, the soil deep enough to work, the game plentiful. And there was one spring-fed pool whose waters seemed little short of miraculous; drinking them cured Myriona’s lameness, and Alden’s sleeplessness and fear, and the children’s summer sickness. Above that spring there was a great outcropping of shining stone which Myriona worked into the shape of the face of the god she had seen in her dreams, the one who had led them there.

In the first-year rain and sun came in season and all things grew and prospered. At the first-year festival when the people danced around the spring and gave thanks for the god’s gifts, some looked into the water and saw that the reflection of the carved figure’s calm face smiled more broadly than it had when Myriona first carved it, and that the reflected eyes followed the dancers as they leapt and spun.

The next year also passed in peace and plenty, and the year after that wasn’t bad, though there were more pests eating the crops and a few lambs born wrong, to their loss and their mothers’—no more than might have been expected back in their old life, but it didn’t quite seem to fit with the blessed new life. A few murmurs started then about who might have been less than properly grateful for their blessings, but nothing much came of it.

In the twelfth year there was drought. The vegetables were scanty, the grain headed too early, the goats took sick and their milk came out dark and foul-smelling. The pool fed by the spring shrank in the drought. Some said the healing water shouldn’t be wasted on sick goats; others said it was sin not to use it and trust that all they needed would be given.

One night Myriona woke from a nightmare to see flames rising from the thatched roof of her neighbor Ansa’s goat-shed. She knew Ansa had taken blessed water for her goats. She knew, too, that their neighbor Evrena had called it a sacrilege and a waste. She ran out and found Evrena standing with her hands on her hips and laughing at the flames.

“What have you done?” Myriona hissed. Evrena whirled to run. Myriona caught her arm. They struggled silently until the flames leaped from Ansa’s byre to Ansa’s house on one side and Evrena’s hencoop on the other. Then they stared at each other and ran opposite ways down the street, shouting for help in fighting the flames. Too late.

Half the village burned that night. All might have been lost if the rains had not come at last, torrential, drenching, pounding the standing grain into the ground. The villagers huddled together in the unburned houses. Some blessed the god, and some cursed him, and many cursed the human fire-starter. Myriona, afraid they might think her guilty of that, told them how she’d waked to find Evrena by the stall. Evrena didn’t deny it. Her face was stiff with fear even before word came that Ansa’s oldest daughter Tereu, a girl of sixteen, was dead.

Tereu had taken a dream-draught, hoping for word from the god about why the rain did not come; she did not hear the flames, or the shouting. When the blaze kindled in the roof Ansa picked the baby up, and her husband Goran took their sickly four-year-old; when they would have gone back in to pull Tereu out, the roof fell in, blazing.

When the rain rolled away, Myriona climbed stiffly up the hill to the spring and stopped, staring at the god’s stone face. The face was scarred and blistered, the mouth twisted with pain. She feared her eyes or her mind were playing her false, and she stooped to drink from the spring, hoping it still had grace to clear her mind. She didn’t drink after all. She stared instead into a reflection that was not a reflection. In the still water she saw the flaming roof collapsing on Tereu. Then she saw Evrena’s face, streaked with blood. When Myriona looked up, blood ran down the face of the god-stone.

Myriona fled, but as she passed into the trees she heard footsteps blundering up the path toward her. Goran stumbled up the hill, wild-eyed and haggard.

“What are you looking for?” Myriona asked.

“The one who killed my daughter is dead,” Goran said. “Surely I did right in that. The curse-bringer is dead, and now the god must take the curse away.”

“The god!” Myriona cried. “See what you have done to the god!” She took Goran’s arm and pushed him up the path ahead of her, out of the trees, face to face with the god-stone. Goran stared awhile, then turned back to her with the vacant stare of an idiot and fled back the way he had come.

Myriona looked again and saw that the god-stone was blank-eyed as Goran had become, though the stone face reflected in the spring was a mask of grief.

Myriona stumbled back down the slippery stones of the path and told her neighbors what she had seen.

“What are we to do?” they asked her.

“Nothing else to grieve the god,” she said.

“What would not grieve the god?”

She opened her mouth, closed it. “I do not know,” she said at last, low and troubled.

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Read Katie Cervenec’s short story, "Death's Hope”:

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Q&A

Describe your ideal reader.

In short, any author just wants someone to read their words, I think. Any reader is a good reader. But, I think the best kind of reader comes to your words with a willingness to just disappear into the story for a moment. And that takes trust, on the part of the reader, and honesty as a writer. I don’t want my words to be taken too seriously; I don’t want to be stuffy or high-brow. I just want to use my stories to connect. That moment when someone reads something I’ve written and says, “No way, I’ve felt that too,” that’s when I feel like I’ve succeeded.

Which authors or books would you recommend to those who want to challenge their own thinking?

In this day of fast information, it takes a lot of discipline to dive back into classic literature. You have to dig for it, work for it, as you read some of the older authors. And there are some gems waiting to be unearthed there. But, for a more modern author, I recommend Helene Wecker and her Golem and the Jinni series. It’s a beautiful series about friendship and immigration. Two characters who are night-and-day different find a common ground. Anytime we finish a story about dissimilar characters working it out on the page, it seems a little more likely we can do the same in our own lives.

How do you come up with ideas for your short stories?

I have to give a shout out to my writing group critique partners. We challenged each other to write a few short stories to critique once, and I’ve never looked back. I love the short story genre. It’s a great platform to try out something ridiculous, or something hard. I keep a note on my phone of ideas that come at the most random times, usually right before I drift off to sleep at night. Sometimes pounding out the words to a story is like pulling teeth. Other times, you blink and there’s a paragraph on the page and you think, “Who wrote that?”.

The story I have published with ADC is my short story most personally important to me and to my family. Loving someone who struggles with mental illness, or being someone who struggles with it, is one of the hardest things. I just wanted to say “I see you” to both the person I love and to anyone walking these trenches with someone else. If you or a loved one is struggling with a mental health condition, please, please reach out for help. Calling 988 or visiting the NIMH website (National Institute for Mental Health) are just a few of many resources. You’re not alone.

Katie Cervenec is a writer by night, commercial interior designer by day. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky with her family. She enjoys sushi and trying to grow garden vegetables. She has pieces published with Metaphorosis, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Nature Futures and more. You can find her at katiecervenec.wordpress.com and on Bluesky @katiec.bsky.social.

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Story Summary: A young adult is invited by her new, older, love interest on a weekend trip with his friends, but struggles to fit in. (Scroll Down To Read)

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The Wrong Shampoo by Amber Kusmenko

Brandy scoured the rows of bubble gum bright shampoo bottles. How much time had passed already? She looked to the front of the store but couldn’t see the checkout lines. She had only been to Jeff’s apartment once so far and didn’t remember what brand he used; that would have been the safest choice. Start with the easy part: dandruff shampoos were out. Kids’ shampoos were out. Overly girly-smelling shampoos were out. The panic loosened a little. She was left with two contenders: Herbal Essences and Suave. Herbal Essences was $7 per bottle, the most expensive shampoo she had ever seen. It seemed like the one he might conceivably choose, as a successful adult professional in his... early 30s? Returning to the checkout line with Herbal Essences might make it appear like she fit into his world. The other option was what she used, what her family had always used and stretched by adding water as it neared empty, what she had never even questioned buying until this moment. Suave for 99 cents.

The dilemma was that Jeff was the one paying for the shampoo, and it was for communal use at a beach house; probably most of it would be left unused at the house at the end of the weekend. And it was entirely possible $7 shampoo would seem as excessive to him as it did to her, regardless of the circumstances. It wasn’t right to be frivolous with someone else’s money. After another few seconds of breath-holding indecision, she grabbed the kiwi-green Suave and headed for the check out.

The cashier was just starting to scan his items as she arrived.

“I told you you’d make it in time!” He smiled that perfectly symmetrical smile, joyous and certain of himself. That smile inspired people to take big risks with their projects. Or sometimes to take big risks in announcing their attraction to him. His smile let you know that he expected good outcomes.

His request for her to run and get the shampoo was obviously not a test. Not an intentional test. She was supposed to just know which shampoo to get.

“Here you go.” She extended the bottle toward him.

His eyes said it all. Like he didn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “This stuff?”

“They didn’t have a lot of options.” She broke eye contact to study the objects on the conveyor belt, as if they were the most interesting items in the world. Roman tiles being excavated and brought into the light for the first time in millennia. Cheeses and a jam and real whipping cream flowed into the cashier’s deft grasp.

* * *

Brandy had had a crush on Jeff since her first day in his class. It had been her last semester of college, and something about finally being 21 let her indulge in daydreams of meeting up in darkened office-hours rooms with an actual adult man with actual familiarity with the experience of female orgasm without it feeling like her fantasy paramour was a predator.

His appeal had more sources than just his age and pretty smile. Jeff had a whole real-world career outside of the school that made his adjunct professorship seem like a touching act of charity; “giving back” to the next generation. Not as cheesy as that, but really, he didn’t have to teach, not like the downtrodden, “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” types. Knowing him was knowing success was real, not a fantasy she’d been sold in exchange for tuition money.

The way Jeff got so animated whenever someone asked a good question, the way he loved life, or perhaps the way he’d built a specific life that he loved, was inspiring. It showed possibilities for a future where maybe she too could love her life and attack each day with fierce energy and an expectation of happy outcomes.

She never did venture into his office hours in real life, but she had sent him emails about assignments from time to time. She read the non-required books he recommended and sent short, appreciative notes about them. And she’d stayed in touch after graduation to ask the occasional software-related question. Consequently, she’d been included on a mass email announcing his partnership at a new digital marketing company he was forming with longtime colleagues. She’d attended the launch party, and she’d worn a short dress. Alone with him back at his place after, he said what he liked about her was her wide feet that hadn’t been squished to the point of permanent deformity by the wearing of high heels.

“Wild and free, like a woodland nymph.” He placed a finger between each of her free-range toes, not minding that the bottoms of her feet were as rough as a hobbit’s. That had been Wednesday.

Today, Friday, they were getting supplies for a weekend on Fire Island. Monday he was leaving for Asia for a month of vacation before flying to California for a month of work setting up his new company. He had wanted to spend more time with her but was already committed at the beach house.

She was about to meet all his friends, from his own college days at least a decade before.

She was out of her depth.

What did thirty-year-olds talk about? Current events? She’d been meaning to get into that. Careers? She didn’t have one yet. Wives? Cholesterol? She didn’t have much to offer in the way of fascinating conversation, but there was still a chance he would be fascinated by the strangeness of their situation itself. Her youth must be worth something.

Brandy’s toe caught on a warped plank in the boardwalk leading up to the ferry. She stumbled, which made a loud sound, but she didn’t fall.

“I still got the bags!” She jogged ahead a few steps, swinging the groceries like windmill arms, trying to use physical comedy to get that smile pointed her direction once more. She felt clownish, but maybe if she was forced-cheerful consistently enough, it would reprogram her neurons’ default response and become real.

“Careful, there’s no grocery store on the island.” He smiled after he spoke, but was the smile more deliberate than spontaneous? Was he annoyed, for real, that she might have dropped the bags?

He climbed up onto the ferry first and then took one of the grocery bags from her and placed it on the deck. The ferry bobbed up and down, by almost a foot, and faster than she would have thought. Jeff offered his hand and kept her steady, his grip firm and unwavering, as she hoisted herself aboard.

“Let’s go up top!” He stashed their bags just inside the door to the covered part of the ferry, then indicated a ladder. Apparently, there was no risk of thievery aboard the Fire Island ferry. She followed him up; he didn’t wait at the top to offer his hand this time.

Did she perceive a tiny change in him? Was he recalibrating his fantasy image of her and their many differences to incorporate this new information about the shampoo?

The open-air seats on the top level of the ferry were buffeted by sea spray and populated by people in wind breakers and fleeces. They had coolers and bikes and oversized, mesh-sided bags.

“What’s the weather like in Cambodia right now?” She gripped the railing as her stomach clenched.

“Hot. I can’t wait to get back there—I went five years ago and couldn’t get over how happy the people there were. To have nothing and be so full of joy.”

Sharp anger momentarily blocked her nausea. For the first time, she felt that he wasn’t universally superior to her. Jeff apparently didn’t see the people he met in Cambodia as individual, real, three-dimensional humans with names and hobbies and favorite shirts. He saw them as “cheerful poverty.”

She looked up at him, and her stomach lurched again. Was she any better? Did she see him as an individual person, or was she suspicious of his empathy skills just because he belonged to the monolithic block of “oblivious upper middle class”?

“Do you want to sit?” He gestured to some dry-looking seats.

“No, I think I need to stay here.”

“Sick?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to go downstairs where it’s warm?” He placed his hand on top of hers.

“No, it helps to be cold. Thank you though.”

Some of the windbreaker people were looking at her. This was her first ferry ride, and she was supposed to be feeling exhilarated, experiencing the sea and the salt and the blue sky from an angle that many people never get to experience. Instead she was focused on her shivering body, nausea, and doubts.

* * *

Jeff and Brandy were the last to arrive at the house.

Everyone crowded around them as they came in, and they all started talking at once. Each of them leaned down, somehow all taller than she was, and did double cheek kisses, one side then the other. None of them smelled like anything, even cologne or perfume. She smelled her own faint B.O. wafting in the air as she swooshed forward and back, forward and back to lean in for the uncomfortable kisses. It happened too fast for her to register whether Jeff was proud or embarrassed introducing her.

Their names flowed in and out of her brain like waves.

“Katrina?” she whispered to Jeff, of a thin, black-haired woman.

“Yes, Katrina,” he replied at his normal volume.

Katrina looked startled.

“Just, um.” Brandy pointed to her own head. “Remembering.” Katrina winced.

Brandy looked to Jeff to check for some kind of change of status in his eyes.

Jeff looked as relaxed as ever, but he had somehow transformed into beach-guy since walking through the door. His shirt was unbuttoned and his hair seemed to radiate highlights; his cumbersome bags had disappeared.

“Where should I put this?” She lifted her backpack helplessly.

He made a face that, although this was maybe too specific, seemed to say, “You care too much about your stuff. Belongings are meaningless.”

“Oh, we’re extra. The organizers and the pregnant couple are taking the private rooms. We’re going to sleep in the hammock outside.”

“Nice!” Was it strange that she’d never lain in a hammock before? As excited as she was to try it, she was uneasy about not having a “place.” The ability to get out of the way and also to recuperate from social interactions was important. She would have traded a hammock for a bunny-like burrow to use as a home base.

Brandy tucked her bag into a corner of the living room, behind an umbrella stand. She was careful to fold the straps in so no one’s foot would get caught. Oh God, what if the pregnant woman tripped on her backpack? She went back and pushed it down again, trying to make it as small and inconsequential as possible.

“I’m starving,” Doug said. She remembered his name because it was so odd—who would look at a baby and proclaim him Doug?

“We got cheese!” Too loud. “Does anyone want cheese?”

No one answered, but that didn’t mean they weren’t interested. Jeff and Katrina peeled off, engrossed in industry talk.

Brandy went into the kitchen, but there wasn’t really room for her. Jeff’s alumni friends were taking up all the counter space: putting away groceries, making drinks, chopping vegetables for the dinner that would be prepared later.

“Can I help with anything?” she asked.

“Nah, just the cheese.”

Yes! They wanted the cheese.

Brandy opened the cheeses and set them on a dinner plate. Immobilized by indecision, she stood looking down at the cream-smeared plastic wraps, wondering if she should keep them for putting away leftovers, or maybe peel the stickers off to place next to the cheeses so people could identify them: brie, Jarlsberg, and a goat something.

Jeff breezed into the kitchen. “Here, use this.” He handed her a wooden cutting board.

Instead of the plate, he meant? Or to cut them on, then put them back on the plate? Were you supposed to pre-cut before serving? When she or her friends served cheese, it often involved drinking and sometimes involved gnawing at the end of the Cracker Barrel (“the good cheese”) like a chipmunk.

“Thank you! I didn’t see the cutting board before.” She moved the cheeses over. A sweep of the drawers did not reveal any little cheese knives, which was a relief, as she didn’t know which went with what kind of cheese or how to use them. She laid out a paring knife and a butter knife.

“Where’s the jam?” Jeff asked. He frowned at the cutting board.

“I just uh, could you open it for me?” She handed it to him. He opened it and handed it back. She considered the cutting board, cheeses far apart like battle ships, unsure of what to do with the jam.

Now it was a test.

He reached his hand out to take back the jam. “I’ll show you.”

“Thank you.” Her voice came out more weak and muttering than intended.

He put a little plop of jam between two of the cheeses. It didn’t look all that classy. She could have done that. She was so indignant, she had to actually stop herself from crossing her arms. He fanned out some thin, brittle crackers.

Jeff carried the cheese board to the coffee table in the living room and set it down. “Time for snacks!”

He was greeted by a chorus of thanks.

Brandy’s stomach rumbled, its first awakening since feeling sick on the ferry. There were no free seats on the couch, so she kneeled down in front of the coffee table. With the butter knife, she cut a small bit off the tip of the brie, so small it was like she wasn’t even there. It got stuck on the knife. She held her breath as she tried to scrape it off with a cracker, which of course snapped. She could feel Jeff watching her. Carefully, delicately, she used the tip of her finger to dislodge the cheese from the knife and affix it to the cracker. She was careful not to touch the knife, just the cheese, but still said, “I just washed my hands.” She smiled sheepishly.

“Help me with something?” Jeff tilted his head toward the kitchen, which Doug and the others were finally exiting. She shoved the cracker in her mouth as she followed.

The light from the kitchen windows illuminated his face in gold, and she remembered why she was there at the beach house in the first place. He wanted to spend more time with her. He liked that she was unlike his squish-toed, worldly peers. Her inexperience perhaps read as the inexperience of a woodland nymph encountering the contrived social customs of humans for the first time. And now she and Jeff finally had a moment of privacy. Having noticed her discomfort, he would reassure her and pull her toward him for a kiss.

Instead he said, “You never eat the tip of the cheese first. That’s the best part, so it’s bad etiquette.” He didn’t seem mad. He was helping. There was a special kind of embarrassment that came from eating something you weren’t supposed to. As painful as this weekend was shaping up to be, it was also an accelerated course in becoming a sophisticated person who could hang with successful professionals. She wasn’t all that invested in staying a nymph forever.

“Thanks for looking out for me.” She kissed him and meant it.

Thankfully the rest of dinner was uneventful. There wasn’t quite enough food, but everyone but the pregnant woman pretended to be full. Conversation centered mostly around past seasons at the beach house, and Brandy was grateful. There was no way she could join in and wasn’t expected to, whereas with any other topic she probably would have been.

* * *

As soon as the last person ate his last morsel and set his fork down for the final time (she noticed each and every person set their forks on top of their empty plate at an angle, like some kind of creepy code), Brandy hopped up to start taking dishes to the kitchen. It was the perfect cover for continuing to hide from conversation. She was terrified of having to learn to use the dishwasher, but it was worth it to escape what had slowly come to feel like a tableaux vivant, so intensely normal and wholesome it felt like artifice.

She was disappointed to find someone, she had zero memory of the woman’s name, had beat her to the dishwasher. By the pinched smile the woman gave when Brandy entered the kitchen, she could tell she made her uncomfortable. Some unnamed sensory organ deep in her brain told her it was purely because she looked so young, not anything to do with specific instances of her acting too young, such as the cheese or kisses on the cheek.

“No one who cooks cleans up after,” the woman said cheerily. “So that leaves me for clean-up duty.”

That little tidbit of dinner party etiquette was committed to memory, in a way names never would be.

“I didn’t help cook either.” Brandy set two plates on the counter next to the sink. “Let me help clean?”

She shuttled dishes from the dining room to the kitchen in silence. The woman in the kitchen smiled encouragingly with each new round. “What did you study in school?” she asked when the quiet got to be too conspicuous.

It was a question you asked your little cousins at Christmas, not a question to ask a fellow adult. “User interface design.” She scraped some gristle into the trashcan. “What did you study?”

The woman became warm and casually touchy, relieved to have a stockpile of words about her time in a PhD program to spend on this topic.

By the time Brandy got back to the living room, Jeff had gone outside with the boys to smoke a joint. There were some empty spots on the couch now, but she wasn’t sure if she would be stealing one that would be wanted back. She lowered herself uneasily into place. Doug was on his phone and Katrina flipped through a magazine. The television was on with the sound too low to hear the dialogue, so Brandy only pretended to watch it, alert for sounds of people returning for their seats.

Whose fault was this? She had come to a house full of people ten years older than she was, and she had nothing in common with them. She knew ahead of time she didn’t have the social skills or the extrovert’s energy needed to navigate successfully. She had wanted to see up close how happy, successful people lived, like a nature video. She had wanted to see if their happiness was fake. She had wanted to see if it was something she could grow into.

Should Jeff have done more to ease her transition into the group? Or was it her responsibility? Maybe it was a form of respect on his part, the assumption that she could do it on her own; perhaps there was no question that most women he dated (mature, successful, confident women) could introduce themselves and make friends. If she wanted to hang with the big kids, she needed to become less shy, learn conversational footholds faster, accelerate the natural coming-into-yourself process.

Just when it seemed she’d settled it, that it was not Jeff’s responsibility to babysit her when he had only this one weekend to catch up with his friends before a long absence, her brain snuck in one more little punch. Was she needy or was he insensitive?

Regardless of the answer, she determined then to make conversation this weekend, with everyone, until it stopped being an act of bravery and became a matter of habit.

The next time Katrina glanced up from her magazine, Brandy said, “So is everyone here at the house a strong swimmer?”

Katrina smiled a natural, engaged smile, seemingly not put out by this request for interaction from Jeff’s weird young former student. “I grew up in California, so I was practically raised in the ocean. I love it. Most of us met at Stanford, so we all swam and spent time at the beach. And I’m sure you know Jeff sailed.”

“Oh wow, no. That’s so impressive—he has so many hobbies and seems to excel at all of them.”

“Yeah, I don’t know how he pulls that off.”

It went on like that, safe but comfortable.

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Read Angelo Attanasio’s short story, "The Kingdom in a Bottle”:

Click the image to get your copy!

Q&A

Is there any standard publishing or writing advice that you disagree with? Or any standard advice that you feel is too often neglected?

I tend to be against absolutes, especially in writing. While I don’t strongly disagree with any specific advice, I dislike when certain pieces of advice are repeated like mantras. For instance, the phrase “Show, don’t tell” comes to my mind. Although I don’t necessarily disagree with it, I believe there are instances where telling can be more effective than showing. Dismissing telling outright can hinder writers, particularly beginners, from exploring different narrative styles and pacing.

One piece of advice that I find is often neglected—something I also overlooked for a time—is the simplest and most obvious: to improve your writing, you need to write a lot. While reading, participating in workshops, giving and receiving critiques, and attending writing courses are all beneficial, without a substantial amount of writing (including bad writing), it’s unlikely that one will develop into a proficient writer.

Is your process for writing philosophical fiction different from the way you approach other works?

Actually, all of the stories I’ve written have an underlying philosophical theme, whether it’s explicit or more subtle. Therefore, there isn’t a substantial change in my approach when writing different pieces.

How do you come up with ideas for your short stories?

Usually, I start with one or more themes that I’m interested in and would like to explore, and I ask myself: how can I convey them in a work of fiction? For instance, in “The Kingdom in a Bottle,” the questions I asked myself were: “How much does the desire for change in our lives give meaning and purpose to it?” and “What would we be willing to do to change a routine that doesn’t appeal to us?”

The next step was to frame these two questions in a coherent way, and after some unsatisfying attempts, I decided that the best choice was to present the themes in the form of a fairy tale.

Describe your ideal reader.

My ideal reader is someone who enjoys thinking deeply about what they read, rather than simply seeking entertainment. They prioritize the emotions that a fictional piece evokes and the questions it raises, rather than whether the characters are likable or if there’s too little action in the story.

What is the greatest compliment you have received as a writer? The most stinging criticism?

I cherish two compliments received as a writer: firstly, many people have told me that I’m good at giving vivid descriptions of scenes or characters in just a few words. The second compliment is that, according to some, my writing doesn’t leave readers indifferent. Whether they like it or not, most people who read my works have something to say about them, rather than just “I enjoyed it” or “it’s boring.” Hearing this feedback is gratifying because capturing the readers’ attention and engaging them with my writing is important to me.

I have a fairly thick skin when receiving feedback, but when someone mentions that what is being conveyed isn’t clear, it bothers me a little. I always strive to explain characters’ motivations and emotions through description or dialogue (to the point that sometimes I fear overexplaining!), so this kind of criticism takes me aback and makes me doubt whether I should rewrite the whole story to clarify my point.

Angelo Attanasio was born in Naples, Italy. He graduated in Chemistry in his hometown. He has many hobbies, like working out, playing guitar, and making cocktails at home, the last of which makes him inexplicably popular among his friends and family. His work has appeared in Liquid Imagination.

He can be found on X (Twitter) @AngAttanasio.

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