Some Bad Things About the Internet

The Almighty Algorithm Feeds You All the Same Stuff

Does anyone else remember how the list of recommended videos under the YouTube video you were watching would simply be related videos regardless of whether or not you had ever seen them before? Because I sure as fuck do. I could pull up “One Week” by Barenaked Ladies and have an entire late nineties playlist directly on the page below it, usually including some song or two I hadn’t even thought about since the last millennium. Want to mellow out in the afternoon listening to some Yacht Rock? Pull up some Christopher Cross and bam! Afternoon set.

Now, no matter which video I pull up, YouTube shows me the same fucking list of videos I have watched in the past couple of weeks, all with that little red bar on the bottom showing me I’ve already seen it. On my homepage they advertise these music mixes that will be filled with similar music to something I’ve already watched, artists I generally don’t listen to and want to give them a chance, but nope! As soon as I actually open that mix it’s once again populated with the same fucking music I’ve already listened to.

And I know there are better services out there to find new music. Fuck, at this point FM radio is a better way. But I sit at my computer all the live long day and I like having music videos up on the screen while I’m typing because I’m a nineties kid and I grew up on TRL and Top Twenty Countdown on VH1. Sometimes, yes, I do want to rewatch the video for “Raspberry Beret” because it is perfect, but really I just hate that the algorithm has basically padded the walls on my little bubble and every time I try to break out it tackles me to the ground and drags me to a Half Alive video.

The Internet is Becoming a Perpetual Funeral For People and Animals I Don’t Know

I first noticed this on YouTube, originally just on older, slower songs which makes a certain amount of sense, but now it really doesn’t seem to matter the vibe of the song or how old it is. Scroll down far enough – usually not far at all – and you’ll find The Eulogy Comment. I’m not going to put up examples because I’m trying not to attack anyone specifically. I’m just over here in my little padded bubble (thanks, YT!) complaining about things away from the people who are grieving and this is already going to sound callous enough.

But the grief is everywhere and I really need it to stop. Start searching through YouTube videos and it won’t take long until you find a comment that’s something like, “This was mom’s favorite song we used to sing it together in the car on the way to chemo six years gone I love you mom,” and it’s, like, Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumping.” Comments like that are everywhere now, and despite outward appearances I can be a very empathetic person and a bit of crier. I teared up writing that entire hypothetical run-on sentence. The grief is everywhere and it’s exhausting.

Even worse are the cat subreddits. Probably all the animal-based subreddits, actually, but I mostly follow the cat ones. I’ll scroll down and see the cutest little fluffy black cat I’ve seen in the past half hour and coo over it, and my eyes drift up to the post title and it’s something like ‘Sent Staff Sergeant Fuzzy Pants over the Rainbow Bridge today’ and then next thing I know I’m crying into my own cat’s stomach while I pat her head and she gnaws on my hand.

I get that the internet is for sharing. In fact, as far as I can tell the internet has turned into a place for over-sharing. And I get that death is a natural part of life and one that we, as a society, have decided to try and fight as best we can even if the results aren’t actually positive. I was a nurse for seven years, believe me, I have very strong opinions on the way our society treats death.

On the other hand, sometimes I just want to have fun on the internet and pretend I and everyone I know are immortal and getting tricked into reading about your dead cat is really harshing my buzz.

You’re Not Allowed to Say ‘No’ Anymore

When you’re living boonies-adjacent like I am, there’s pretty much only four types of post on Nextdoor:

  1. I Need X Service Done for My House, Any Recommendations?
  2. Help! Lost Pet/Whose Pet is This?
  3. Look At This Camera Footage of This Wild Animal That Climbed Up Onto My Porch
  4. Racism

Nextdoor, like other apps, uses an algorithm to try and decide what it thinks you want to see. Which is fucking ridiculous because everyone I have ever heard talk about this only wants one thing: a chronological feed of the things said by people you agreed to follow. That’s it. No Popular Posts. No Suggested Posts By People You Don’t Follow But The App Is Making Assumptions. And why anyone would want all the posts jumbled is just fucking beyond. Chronological order. It’s that simple.

Luckily, you can tell Nextdoor that’s how you want to see posts. Unluckily, this decision is only valid for sixty fucking days, and then it shunts you back into Top Posts because you’re not allowed to deny the algorithm its daily meal of souls, or whatever the fuck.

Twitter used to do the same thing. I have no idea if it does anymore because I bailed on Twitter shortly after Elon “I’ll Give a Million Dollars To Anyone Who Can Prove My Dad Actually Owned an Emerald Mine Oh Shit No Dad Not You Sit Down” Musk took over, but now that Twitter is basically just a writhing pile of problems I wouldn’t be surprised if this is still one of them.

Do you remember when Google bought YouTube, and they were integrating Google accounts into your YouTube account and it would ask you if you want to display your Google account name and picture for your YouTube account and you would say ‘no’ and then it would say something like, “Okay, we’ll ask you again soon?” Because I sure fucking do.

You’re not allowed to experience websites or apps any other way than the way the creators and advertisers want you to, but for some reason they like to pretend that you can and just hound you about it until you give in.

Headlines Are Mostly Lies

Basically, clickbait titles have hit critical mass and aren’t even pretending anymore.

These headlines are coming from shitty websites anyway, the sort of stuff that populates my Google newsfeed and not actual publications I’d want to read. If The Atlantic starts running headlines that read ‘President Biden is Dead, How is This Going to Change the White House?’ and then you open it, shocked you’re finding out this news in a fucking Atlantic article with this tone, and find out that he only stubbed his toe and everything else is a hypothetical, well, fuck everything I guess. Burn down the internet and move into the woods. That’s my plan anyway. Find your own piece of nothing.

Here’s a sample of some of the article headlines I see on a weekly basis:

  • This Beloved Fan-Favorite Disney Ride is SHUTTING DOWN (For regularly scheduled maintenance, it’ll be open again in a month and a half)
  • This Entire Disney Park is Closing Its Doors! (Just an actual lie)
  • Disney is Fuming Mad at Brie Larson and Going to Shoot Her Into The Sun (I haven’t seen any of these lately because I finally managed to block all the Go Woke, Go Broke type websites and blogs that were getting fed to me)
  • Famous Actor Stuns in First Image as Famous Comic Book Character (In a piece of fan art. It’s ALWAYS a piece of fan art)
  • Huge Spoiler For Movie That You Haven’t Seen Yet Because It Only Came Out A Week Ago in an Entirely Unrelated Article (This one isn’t a lie, it’s just fucking frustrating. I keep getting spoiled for Marvel movies while reading recipes)
  • What Just Emerged at the Grand Canyon Terrifies Scientists (Okay, this one is also cheating because these blogs aren’t even trying to be respectable, they’re the equivalent of grocery store checkout tabloids, but Google just mixes them in with all the other bullshit and I’m sure someone out there is going to look at that and believe it for half a second even though

A lot of these are still tailored specifically to me but I bet if you scroll through your own mostly ignored news stream you’ll see lots of these. Lies. Fabrications. Looking for clicks and absolutely nothing else. I don’t even know if they correct themselves in these articles because I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of going to find out.

The Met Gala Proves Rich People Don’t Understand Anything, Apparently

So I had a whole other thing written for today and then I went to edit it and just fucking hated it. Like, every word of it. So I’m going to complain about rich people again.

Look, rich people suck for a whole lot of reasons and I’ve already gotten into a lot of them, but today I want to complain about, perhaps, the absolute silliest reason they suck:

How Do So Many of Them Not Understand the Met Gala?

I’m just some schlub in shorts and a ratty Panic at the Disco t-shirt I’ve had for almost twenty years that has STAR WARS written on the inside in sharpie because I didn’t have a Star Wars shirt to wear to the premier of The Force Awakens and I wanted one, okay, and even I understand the point of the Met Gala. If you get an invite to the Met Gala it’s not to give you yet another opportunity to look pretty in an evening gown or just, like, the same fucking suit you’d wear to the Oscars. If you’re putting on something that you would wear to literally any other place on the planet you have already failed.

The point of the Met Gala isn’t to look good. It’s to look like a fucked up piece of art.

Like, my God, the absolute audacity of some of these people. Do they know how much money they have? Do they know how much money they have in relation to the rest of us? I honestly don’t think they do. There are so many studies that show once someone has a certain amount of money the fucking brain worms just sort of move on in.

This is barely a parody. They all are so removed from every day life this is the shit that goes on in their heads. They don’t know what things cost. They don’t know what the interior of a grocery store even looks like for Christ’s sake. When’s the last time any of them even saw a public bathroom? This is how you get people spouting of inanities like WE ALL HAVE THE SAME TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. Motherfucker, until you have to ride public transportation every day for work you can sit down and shut the fuck up.

The worst part is they keep thinking they don’t suck. Remember that time all the rich people sang us Imagine from their huge mansions because there had been a pandemic for roughly three minutes and they were all already losing what was left of their minds? Remember how they thought that was a good idea?

What was I talking about?

Oh, yeah.

These people have so much money they don’t even notice the rampant inflation brought on by greedy corporate fuckheads raising prices simply because they can and then they have the fucking gall to show up at the Met Gala wearing a plain dress? A black suit? God damned strings of pearls?? And not even an inappropriate length of pearls! Martha Wayne pearls! Pearls to clutch! What the fucking fuck!

If you’re rich enough and famous enough to be invited to the Metropolitan Galileo or whatever the fuck you can at least have the audacity to understand the assignment, okay? You’re all entertainers, fucking entertain us. This is not every other party you get invited to all year long, mmkay? It’s a fucking fever dream. It’s Halloween sponsored by Prada and Salvador Dali. It’s a fucking Eyes Wide Shut-type orgy with far more cameras but almost the same amount of dick and tits out.

If you show up to the Metty Galipagos and you don’t look like a District 1 citizen pre-gaming the Hunger Games than you should lose any and all awards you have won previously for anything and have your internet privileges taken away for the rest of the year.

…

Anyway, so, like…what do they do after they show off their outfit? Is there a party? Do they go home? Do the cameras leave and then the orgy starts? I would go home. Too many people and I can barely manage one. Sheesh.

Let’s All Go to the Apocalypse: Why We Write the End of the World

Back when I was a tween and going through a Stephen King phase there was one book I was absolutely too scared to read: The Stand. Everything else I could stomach – the vampires and the haunted hotels and the telekinetic teenagers and the non-stop stream of utter what-the-fuckery going on in his short story collections, sure, fine, whatever. Great, even. Fuck those bullies up, Carrie, we love a girlboss story.

But The Stand was about the end of the world, and the thought of the end of the world Fucked. Me. Up. I don’t really remember if there was even a good reason for this outside of the natural anxiety that comes with slowly realizing that you are not immortal and your parents are not immortal and this moment will not last forever and nothing lasts forever and entropy will eventually see the universe as nothing more than darkness and chaos and every adult you have ever met in your life has known this the whole time and they somehow just, like…live with it, and you’re expected to, too. For three or four years, I avoided The Stand like when you spot your overly-chatty co-worker at the supermarket.

Did you think I was going to like the plague? Tsk, tsk. Shame. Shame.

The summer I turned fifteen I finally decided I was ready and I read the whole thing over the first three days of summer break because I didn’t have friends and I loved two thirds of it and it’s still the only book I’ve reread two-thirds of multiple times.

And yeah, the part I don’t read is the part you’ve already guessed: the end. And while I don’t think it’s terribly good, mostly I don’t read it because I don’t find it as interesting as the first two parts. In fact, I tend to start dropping off when all of our protagonists meet up in Boulder. The interesting parts of that book, to me, don’t have anything to do with some supernatural BBEG or yet another ultimate fight between good and evil. I can get that shit basically anywhere. No, what I want is an in-depth, real time look at the complete and violent collapse of society and I want it on my desk by EOD.

Two decades later and I like end of the world stories so much I’ve written enough to give the genre its own page on my website. And clearly I’m not the only one because post-apocalypses are doing gangbusters these days.

But why, exactly, do we all want to watch the world crash and burn?

And I Feel Fine

We don’t. We want to watch society crash and burn. Sure, there’s some stuff out there that deal with, say, a giant fuck-off asteroid heading to earth to completely destroy all life as we know it, but with those the entire plot usually revolves around trying to stop the giant fuck-off asteroid to varying degrees of success. The far more popular version of this story is the end of the world as we know it. Plagues, zombies (which I guess is just a type of plague), losing a vital part of current society like electricity or eyesight or adults, man, YA dystopian fiction just loves murdering all the adults, anything that really reduces the human population to the point where everything we as a species have built has crumbled and the survivors have to rebuild.

That’s what all of these stories give us. Survivors. And not just because you can’t really write a story about what happens after a giant fuck-off asteroids destroys all life on the planet because you’ve killed all your characters before you began, although that is a significant reason why these stories don’t exist. It’s also that people want to see themselves as the survivors. I mean, I only exist in my own head so I can’t speak for every single person on the planet, but I doubt anyone is watching The Last of Us and imaging themselves as a shambling fungus-piloted corpse roaming the marshy remains of Jacksonville until they get shot in the head by an unshowered hillbilly in an ancient Jaguars jersey looking for food and water. In this scenario, its preferable to be the unshowered hillbilly.

Step back from that for a second and isn’t it entirely unhinged? You’re unshowered because hot showers aren’t a thing anymore, you’re wearing an ancient jersey because no one is making clothes anymore and you don’t know how, and you’re looking for food and water because you haven’t eaten anything more than half a pack of jerky in three days and you’re basically starving to death. Why would you want that? It’s escapism, sure, and no one really wants that, but why do we even want to daydream about it?

I Wake Up in the Morning and I Wonder Why Everything’s The Same As It Was

You may be too young to remember Y2K. Apparently people younger than me can not only read and write, but they have graduated college and have jobs and debt and such? Outrageous.

To sum this up without looking a single thing up because this is not the point of the article and research is for schmucks, when people first started building computers the date was always programmed  with two digits for the year to save space because computers used to have less memory than a couple dozen enthusiastic ants. The problem, of course, was when the year switched from 1999 to 2000, the computers were going to think it was actually 1900 and all sorts of shit was going to break. Why didn’t anyone think of this when they were building programs in the seventies and eighties? I don’t actually know, but I’m guessing the answer is somewhere along the lines of ‘humans suck at planning for the future.’ Because we absolutely do.

There was a fair amount of vague anxiety leading up to 2000. Experts were saying that people were working on the problem diligently and the average person would experience little to no negative effects on their day-to-day lives, while inflammatory morons on the news were quietly wondering if the entire world was going to burst into flames the second the ball finished dropping directly into a microphone and camera and, well, you know who people tend to believe in situations like this. Eventually the new year came and nothing of note really happened and everyone moved on with their lives.

I bring all this up because I vaguely remember an article I read a month later. I don’t remember enough to find it, of course, but I remember the content: basically, some people were having a bit of a Y2K hangover and instead of feeling relieved that nothing happened, they were feeling disappointed. Some of these people were simply disappointed because they went all in on prepping and now had eighty-three boxes of spaghetti and three dozen crates of bottled water and didn’t know what to do with it (preppers gonna prep). But the article also stated that some people were annoyed that they had to go to work the next day. For some people, a complete disruption of society and whatever potential end-of-days bullshit that entailed was more enticing than having to deal with an eight am meeting that goes on for too long because Jeremy from accounting thinks everyone wants to hear how wasted he got at his wife’s family’s New Year’s Eve party.

People were mildly looking forward to the end of the world, and this was the nineties.

London is Drowning, and We All Live by the River

The society we built fucking sucks to the point that its sometimes easier to imagine destroying the whole thing and starting over.

That’s basically it. I pussyfooted all around this particular bush for a thousand words, but that’s the tweet, as they say.

And I’m not going to go into the many, many, many endless ways that it sucks because at this point, you either acknowledge that fact or reject it. But it does. It completely sucks, and more than that, the systems that have been created are so big, so intricately woven, and so in control it’s basically impossible to see a way to fix any of it. It’s going to take so much work, so much time, so many elections and fights and uprisings, and we can’t even get all of the people who are being systematically beaten by the system to agree that they’re getting punched in the groin every morning so how the hell are we going to do anything let alone everything about it?

Fuck it. Destroy everything and start from scratch.

That is the appeal of apocalypse fiction.

Well, part of it anyway. There are also people out there who just really want to be able to fix all of their problems by shooting someone in the head and, super great news here, they all vote.

Now, to be absolutely fucking clear, I don’t actually want the world to end. It’s like that scene in 2007’s Live Free or Die Hard which is a terrible movie, I am not recommending it, sure, Timothy Olyphant is in there doing his usual “I’m Trying to Kill You With the Laser Eyes I Don’t Have” looks but you can get those looks in much better quality movies, I’m simply bragging I saw this movie when it came out and it was really bad, I hated it, but I remember it, don’t watch it.

Anyway, Olyphant’s character starts doing a terrorism on the country, unfortunately not laser-eyes based, but tech based, and Justin Long’s character whose name I have completely erased from memory but I’m betting had some sort of long E sound in there, realizes that it’s something called a fire sale where everything is destroyed all at once. He admits that he and his little nerd friends on Reddit or wherever they fuck they were back in 2007 (Something Awful?) used to giggle about how cool a fire sale would be, but now that he was standing ass-deep in one he very much wanted to get off Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride. It’s like that, only without Bruce Willis’s seething hatred for Kevin Smith.

End of the world scenarios are entertaining to think about but in reality we’d only be exchanging one terrible FUBAR society for a new, already terrible society that humanity can then proceed to fuck up even worse, and also we’d be surrounded by literally billions of rotting corpses.

But it turns out daydreaming about, writing about, or producing a multi-million dollar show about the end of the world can be entertaining, and like, super cathartic for potentially all the wrong reasons but as long as it’s happening in fiction who cares? I mean, nerds on the internet. Nerds on the internet will definitely care, but most of them are also so terminally online if they saw the sun they’d weep so I think you’ll be fine.

Sister Spring

By the time Sister Spring woke up it was basically almost nearly time for Sister Summer to take over so she decided she was just going to hang out in her bathrobe.

“Shouldn’t you be, like, doing stuff?” Sister Winter asked, looming over her while she nestled deeper into the couch, both hands gripping a Nintendo Switch.

“Huh? Oh, yeah, sure.”

“Sure?”

“Right.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are you going to start doing your job or not?” Sister Winter finally asked.

“Look, it’s fine, I’ll get going in a few minutes,” Sister Spring said as she tried to find her coffee mug without looking away from her game. Eventually she found the wrong side of the coffee mug, and the coffee mug found the floor.

“Ah, shit,” she muttered. But she still didn’t get up.

“You have to get out there!” Sister Winter said. “You’re already late. It should have started to warm up weeks ago.”

“It’s been getting warm. Sometimes.”

“Because I keep pulling favors from Sister Summer and she’s not even supposed to be up for another month and a half. Do you know how much Brother Planet doesn’t like it when it’s snowing one day, and then eighty degrees the next?”

“Sounds wild.”

“You’re not listening to me.”

“Yeah, you do that.”

“Okay, that’s it.”

Sister Winter took the console out of Sister Spring’s hands, then took said reaching hands to pull her up out of the couch. And then started pushing her to the front door.

“I’m not dressed!”

“That’s your fault. I’m done playing. I want to go to bed, for the love of…here we are. Bye!”

And then Sister Spring was outside, half dressed, wishing she hadn’t knocked over her coffee mug.

“No one understands me,” she sniffled. The sniffles turned to cries, and the cries turned to rain that spread across the low fields and high hills of Brother Earth.

Sister Winter looked out from her bedroom window, phone up to her ear.

“Sorry about all that. Again. Every year.”

“Nah, it’s cool,” Brother Earth said on the other side of the line. “I am digging all this rain. Make her cry more.”

She Was Supposed to Go to the Ball

A heart can only bleed for so long before hardening. A cheek can only be turned so many times before turning red. Compassion is not a bottomless pit. It was never supposed to be.

Cindy sat in a crumpled heap on the front stairs of the house that loomed above her. It always loomed, or towered, or cornered now. Once, it had been a place full of love. Of her love, of her mother’s love, and of her father’s love. Then her mother had gone, and then, slowly, like water slipping through cracked glass, her love had vanished. Then her father had gone. His love had lingered a little, but not nearly so long, because the woman he had brought into the house – along with her two stepdaughters – were so antithetical to love that they sucked it all up and puked it out in the backyard.

Cindy’s stepmother loved herself, and loved her daughters, and that was all the love she had. Worse, the negative spaces of her emotions were not filled with like or dislike or neutrality or nothing at all. They were filled with hate. All three of them were only capable of love or hate, and they certainly didn’t love Cindy.

She had tried to love them anyway, the way her mother would have wanted her to. She had tried to get along with them, the way her father had wanted her to. As she cried herself to sleep at night on her little cot with its threadbare blanket and no pillow, she had told herself that she could teach them by example. Love them and teach them how to love. Give them smiles for all their sneers and eventually their crooked faces would turn out right.

But now, tonight, as she wept openly on the stairs of her home that had been turned into nothing short of a prison, as she felt the cold of the stone steps through what remained of her dress…no, not just her dress, her mother’s dress, the only thing she really had left of her mother. And they had known that! And it hadn’t made them stop, no, it had made them go about their terrible work with such disgusting glee, the happiest she had ever seen her stepsisters since they had met. Cindy was surrounded by shreds of fabric, tufts of torn tulle, and across the drive and into the grass sparkled pearls that had flown out into the darkness when they had given one final, grabbing tug.

The malice in their eyes. The gleeful hate. The joy at destroying what little she had. That had been it. The final push. Cindy finally, regretfully, understood.

Her weeping had run itself dry, nothing more than hard, cold sniffles, when a star in the sky above detached itself from its frigid confines and lazily swooped and swayed its way down to her. By the time it was hovering no more than a few feet in front of her it was roughly the size of a pumpkin. Cindy watched all of this with nothing more than a detached curiosity. She had cried out all of her emotion and would need the night, at least, to recover.

The ball of light resolved itself into an old woman in a fine dress and surrounded by delicate wings. There were little sparks around her, like fireworks, and a cold rush of air. The old woman looked at Cindy as though expecting some sort of response. A smile. Applause. Relief.

Cindy only sat and waited.

“Aren’t you going to ask who I am?” the woman asked with an eyebrow raised.

“Who are you?” Cindy asked obediently. She didn’t have the energy in her to argue, and the sooner this nonsense was over the sooner she could crawl back inside to her little cot and cry some more.

The old woman pulled a thin wand out of nowhere and waved it back forth, trailing silvery light in the darkness for a bit before bending into a professional curtsey.

“I am your fairy godmother,” she said. Finally.

“Oh,” Cindy said. “That’s nice.”

“That’s…that’s nice?” the fairy godmother repeated, crossing her arms in front of her. “Here I am coming down from the heavens and performing a little magic, and all you’ve got for me is that’s nice?”

“I’m sorry. It’s just…I’ve had a bad day.”

The fairy godmother looked Cindy over and tutted. “Yes, I’d say you have. I supposed you’ve earned the right to be a little upset, haven’t you? And in fact, that’s why I’m here.”

For the first time all night, Cindy felt something besides anguish and sorrow and numbness as the warmth of hope filled her chest. “It is? You’re here to help me?”

“Of course!” the fairy godmother said. “Honestly, why else would I show up? So, tell me, what’s the one thing you want more than anything else in the entire world?”

Cindy wondered if this was a time for brutal honestly as she worked her hands in and out of fists. The first word of her title was ‘fairy.’ And fairies did have a bit of a reputation. Honestly, this might be Cindy’s only chance.

“Well, up until about twenty minutes ago I would have said it was going to the ball tonight. But now I think the thing I want the most is for my stepmother and stepsisters to be dead.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking, and of course you can’t go to the ball dressed like…wait.”

The fairy godmother was once again pushed out of her routine, and for a few seconds could only stare at Cindy like she was some new kind of fish.

“What?” she finally said.

“Not necessarily dead,” Cindy said. “Just, like, so very, very far away from me. If you can’t kill them, can you just take me away? Anywhere, I do not care at this point where I go.”

“Ah, yes, yes!” the fairy godmother said, recovering herself. “That’s why you must go to the ball! You never know who you might meet-”

“Um…no, thank you.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to go to the ball anymore. They are at the ball.”

“Yes, but…what I’m trying to say, dear, is that if you go to the ball, you might meet someone, and that someone could take you away from all this!”

But Cindy was already shaking her head.

“Why would I want to meet someone when I know those three are only going to try to take him away?”

The fairy godmother waved her hands. “Don’t be silly! They wouldn’t-”

“They would.” Cindy stood up, brushing off some of the dirt from her ruined dress. “All I wanted to do was go to the ball and meet some people. You know, I didn’t even care about meeting the prince? It’s so far outside the realm of possibilities that I never even thought about it. I just wanted to meet people, literally any other human being besides those three awful women. Maybe friends. Maybe someone to date and fall in love with! I don’t know! But certainly no one they would care about. No one they could see as a threat. Except they would see him as a threat. Whoever I brought home, he could be a farmer’s son or a barkeep or some half-deformed ditchdigger from the graveyard. Whoever I met they would try to take them from me because that’s what they do.”

“Yes, but-”

“Look at my dress!” Cindy said, holding up the tatters. “Even before they destroyed it, it wasn’t very nice. No, wait, it was nice. It just wasn’t nearly as nice as what they were wearing. If the four of us had walked into the ball together no one would give me a second glance before they were fawning all over the three of them, but they are so filled with hate for me that they wouldn’t even risk that first glance. I can’t have them in my life anymore. I won’t.”

Shifting uncomfortably, the fairy godmother tried to come up with something to say.

“My dear,” she finally said. “I was sent down to help you as a reward for your kindness, and your patience. Saying something like this…”

Cindy shrugged, completely over it. “I’m sorry, fairy godmother. Maybe if you had come earlier. Sometime in the last ten years as they tormented me every day of my life. Maybe if you had come before they broke me. I can still feel kindness. I can think of others and imagine all the wonderful things I’d like for them. But when I think of my stepmother and my stepsisters all I think of is the never-ending parade of hate they sent my way, and how much I’d like to send it back to them.”

“Doesn’t everyone deserve kindness?” the fairy godmother asked.

“That’s what my mother taught me.”

The fairy godmother smiled.

“But she was wrong. And I’ve been wrong, too. Everyone deserves kindness up to a point. But if that person never gives you kindness back…if all that person does is show you anger and hate…then I think you can stop giving that person anything at all. Besides the finger and your back as you walk away.”

“But by showing kindness, you become the bigger person!”

“Why does that responsibility always fall on the victim?” Cindy asked, taking a step forward and noting the way the fairy godmother took a step back. “I’ve spent ten years being the bigger person and where has that gotten me?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, it got you me! I was going to dress you up and send you to the ball! You were going to meet the prince and dance with him all night and fall in love!”

“I already told you what would happen if I met anyone tonight.”

“It’s not even worth the risk? The chance of true love?”

Cindy sighed. “No. It’s not. Not anymore. Help me leave this place for good, or help me kill them.”

The fairy godmother straightened up, her eyes sad. “I can’t do that.”

“Well,” Cindy said with a shrug. “I guess we’re done here.”

The fairy godmother hesitated, as though she knew she shouldn’t leave. But her hands were tied. She had come with one mission and one mission only. And now that was ruined. She left as she came, turning into light and fading off back into the stars.

Cindy watched the sky for a while, as though perhaps another, more amenable fairy would come down and help her. When no one came, she turned back into the house, heading for the closet under the stairs that held the rat poison.

Elevator

The folks on the already packed elevator – all seven of them – glared heavily at the man who had put his briefcase between the doors to keep them from shutting.

“Room for one more?” he asked with a half-smile. Maybe he thought he’d relieve the tension of squeezing on. Get a chuckle. A light behind the eyes that indicated that if it had been any other time of day he would have gotten a smile.

Nothing. It was eight fifteen on a Monday morning. He was lucky he didn’t get stabbed.

The doors closed with proficiency so alien to the rest of the bureaucratic building and the elevator began to rise. There were five floors highlighted. All of the previous seven occupants had been so busy cursing the eighth’s mother and father and children and general bloodline they failed to notice he hadn’t picked a button.

Seventeen floors up, he did. The emergency stop button didn’t get much action, and seemed to resist his finger. But after a split second the elevator ground to a stop with a high pitched whine and a jolt.

“Hey!”

“What the fuck, man?”

“What’s going on?”

The eighth man turned around to face the seven others with a mild and playful smile on his face.

“I bet you’re wondering why I gathered you here today.”

The seven others stared at the eighth man. Confused. Waiting. Growing increasingly hot. And angry. A man in the back stared harder than the others, sure he knew this face. Was it a common face? Was it the face of the man in his nightmares, the one who lurked in shadows too shallow to hold anything of substance? Was it the face he saw in the corner of his eyes when he was too stressed and had overdosed on caffeine?

No.

“Hey, I know you! You’re that temp working the front desk with Margaret!”

The eighth man held up his hands. “Got me!”

“What was all that then?” one of the others, a woman in a blue blouse, asked.

“What?” the temp asked, going red up to his ears.

“All that nonsense about gathering us here,” a man in a black shirt said.

“Oh, well, everyone seemed so grumpy-”

“Yeah, it’s fucking Monday, man,” the temp’s coworker said.

“-so I thought I could cheer us all up. You know, a little humor.”

“What? Cheer us up by getting us stuck in the elevator?”

“No, no! I mean, I’ll just hit the ‘go’ button and-”

The temp who worked the front desk with Margaret turned in what little space he had back to the row of buttons, sweat popping out on his forehead and neck faster and faster as he failed to locate the ‘restart’ button he was sure was there.

“There is no fucking ‘go’ button, you lollipop,” said a little man in the corner. “You hit the emergency stop. It won’t start again until the fire department gets here.”

The entire car groaned, none louder than the eighth man.

“I am so fired.”

The rest of the car roared their enthusiastic assent.

Ogre, Part 2

It seemed the roar and the screams had come from the southwest, and they didn’t have to run long to be sure. The chain link fence that surrounded the Happy Oaks trailer park wasn’t far away. A metal post had been pulled from the ground and lay flat, bending the chain link down with it. Tristan stepped through it carefully while Asche cleared the whole thing in one long leap.

They could see the lights of the highway to the north. To the east, so far away already, was the back lights of the Two Step. The music would be on. They wouldn’t hear a thing. In front of them, to the south, there was nothing but darkness on the ground and starlight above. They could make out some shadows that were probably scrub, but everything was bleeding together. They skidded to a halt.

“I don’t have a flashlight,” Asche said.

“Do you hear anything?” Tristan asked.

Trucks on the highway. Some bass beat from the bar. Nothing else.

Nothing? Maybe not nothing. Maybe there was the sound of something moving in the brush. Something with a heavy tread. Something looking for something else.

“I can’t tell,” Asche said. “I might…but it might be nothing.”

Tristan nodded. He then pulled in as much breath as he could, and with everything his diaphragm had, bellowed Marguerite’s name.

“What are you doing? What if Daphne comes at us?” Asche asked.

“Then we’ll know where she is.”

“But-”

Tristan put his hand up and tilted his head to listen.

“Over here! Hurry!”

It was faint, and sounded tired, but it was undeniably Winona. And it was coming from the southwest.

Maybe.

They started moving in that direction again, but it was hard to tell in the dark if they were still going in the same direction, let alone the right one.

“Winona!” Asche shouted.

“Over here!”

They corrected a little to their right.

“Here! Hurry, please!” She was getting louder.

And then that roar again, unmistakable as something alive and certainly not human or normal. It was a little bit to their left. It sounded a little farther away than Winona.

But the heavy tromping meant it was getting closer. The whole ground seemed to shaking now underneath them.

“Winona!” Asche yelled at the same time Tristan shouted, “Marguerite!”

“Here!” came the response, practically right underneath them. Without warning the ground below them disappeared, and Tristan and Asche found themselves trying to stay up straight as they tripped and skidded down a sandy embankment towards a dried riverbed.

Tristan almost stepped on Marguerite’s head. She and Winona had been hiding in the shadow of the culvert. Tristan could barely see either of them, but could hear pain in Marguerite’s voice when she spoke.

“What the hell are you guys doing?” Marguerite asked.

“Coming to rescue you,” Asche said in a whisper. The ogre was still tromping around, but had apparently lost the signal again.

“Tell me you have guns or weapons or something…” Winona spit out. “That thing ate my daughter. It ate my little girl and it’s coming for us.”

Marguerite clamped a hand over Winona’s mouth to keep her from screaming.

“Winona, Winona, calm down. Daphne is alive,” Tristan said.

He could make out Marguerite shaking her head.

“Just trust me, okay?” Tristan turned to Asche.

Marguerite didn’t have time to argue. Another roar, feet away. They weren’t alone anymore.

It was tall. Eight feet at least, although it was slouching, so probably closer to nine if it stood up straight. It was barrel chested and muscular, overly so. Its face was overcrowded with large, bulbous features that were contorted in rage and hunger. Maybe it had green skin. It was hard to tell in the pooling dark. It paused for a brief second, its eyes scanning the four of them, and then it roared again, forcing them to cover their ears.

Before it could move forward again, Tristan stood up and held up his hands.

“Daphne, wait!”

It took a step back, as though it had been pushed. And then it started in again, slow, deliberate.

“I know who you are! Daphne Miller!”

Another pause. A look of confusion, but then it started again.

“Tristan, tell me this isn’t the whole plan,” Asche said. He tried to back up but only found the dirt behind him.

“It was supposed to work,” Tristan said, taking a step back.

Behind him, Marguerite whipped to Winona and pulled her hands away from her face.

“What’s Daphne’s middle name?” Marguerite asked. Winona was sobbing and didn’t even hear the question.

“Winona! Winona, listen to me, listen to me now. What is Daphne’s middle fucking name?”

“Ma…ma…Martina! It was Martina!”

“I call you out! I know your secret, so give it up! Daphne Martina Miller!”

It stopped again. Look confused. Another roar. But this one faded off into a confused groan. It lifted its hands to its heads and fell to its knees, almost crushing Tristan in the process.

Cracks started. Snaps. It sounded, at first, like brittle wood in a campfire. They came faster, and louder. Slowly, one by one, they realized that it was the creature’s bones. Breaking. Remolding. It roared with pain. Its arms bent in wrong shapes. Legs. Back. Its face was changing, although they could see the face of pain before it doubled over.

It seemed like it went on for hours. Really, it was at most a minute. Sixty seconds. And then the shape in the ground in front of them was no longer the lumbering, towering ogre. It was small. Human. Feminine. Crying.

Tristan knelt down next to the shape and put a hand on her shoulder.

“Daphne? Daphne, it’s okay. You’re safe. We’re all safe.”

She lifted her head. Her eyes. They were still…

But then they weren’t. And it was just a scared teenager sobbing in front of him.

“What did I do?” she whispered.

“It wasn’t you,” Tristan said. “Not really.”

“Daphne? Daphne?”

“Mom.”

Winona was surrounding her daughter before she could get anything out.

“Mom, I’m so sorry-”

“I thought I lost you.”

“I didn’t want to hurt you.”

They were sobbing together, holding each other in the middle of the dry riverbed.

Ogre, Part 1

Given the empty and rather disgusting state of the swimming pool out back, Asche didn’t think anyone would care if he stole one of the plastic pool chairs and brought it in front of his room. Then, figuring he already had a chair, he might as well bring one of the little plastic tables. Content with this, he further decided that even if today was the day Dietrich started giving a fuck again, the fuck he gave wouldn’t be for Asche drinking a beer in front of his room. With his chair and table and beer all set up, Asche sat down with his sketchbook and a few of his pencils. He really liked the look of the front office with the sign and the Cowboy looming over it. He wanted to draw it. Later, he wanted to put in an alien spacecraft trying to take the Cowboy. Yeah, that would be funny.

He was working on the Cowboy’s lasso when the taxi cab swung into the parking lot and cut to a quick stop right in front of him. Someone inside the cab shoved money at the cabbie with one hand and swung the door open with the other. Tristan half stepped, half fell out, and barely got the door closed before he was running across the parking lot and taking the steps up to the second floor. The cabbie made a very professional K-Turn in the parking lot before rolling back to the street, signaling his right turn, waiting three full seconds, and pulling out, heading north towards the city.

Above him, Asche could hear Tristan fumbling with the door key.

“Marguerite? Hey, I figured out who…Margie, are you here? Shit.”

Asche sat his book and pencil down on the table next to his beer and stood up quickly. It was the first time he’d ever heard Tristan say anything worse than ‘gosh.’

“Margie!”

“Tristan!” Asche called up. After a couple of seconds Tristan appeared at the balcony. Even in the dark Asche could see his face was clouded with worry.

“Have you seen Marguerite?”

“What’s going on? Is everything okay?”

“I figured out who the ogre is,” Tristan said. Loudly.

“Say it again only with more feeling,” Asche said. “I don’t think the family in 101 heard you.”

Tristan rolled his eyes but still looked around to see if anyone else was in the courtyard. He disappeared for a couple of seconds, and Tristan heard his room door slam shut. Then there was feet on the stairs.

“I was at the university library, and there were books on…on stuff like this. And I found a thing on ogres. And it was all the same as that journal, except it said they feed every fifteen years. Not twelve.”

“Maybe the book was wrong,” Asche said. But Tristan was shaking his head.

“If it’s twelve years, we don’t have a lead. If it’s fifteen years…who just had a birthday?”

Light bulb on. Dawn over Marblehead. Asche groaned.

“Daphne,” he said.

“Daphne.”

“How could it be Daphne? She’s so…little…”

“Not when she’s an ogre, I guess. We need to tell Marguerite. And find Daphne.”

Asche could feel the blood drain away from his face. Apparently it had a visible effect, because Tristan immediately became alarmed.

“What? What is it?”

“Margie is with Daphne.”

“What?”

“Some school report thing, I don’t know…They’re at her trailer.”

Tristan didn’t say anything, only started running to the front of the parking lot. Given the state of his suit and his hair, Asche guessed it wasn’t the first time Tristan had been going at a dead sprint today. Asche followed after him, finding it harder to keep up than he expected.

“Shouldn’t we have weapons or something?” he called through the panting.

“If I’m right, we shouldn’t need them,” Tristan called back.

At any hour there was barely any traffic in the Pasodoble and now was no exception. The two of them ran straight through intersection, barely looking for any cars, the light blinking red and yellow above them. The Happy Oaks offices was already quiet and dark, and no one came out to investigate as they ran past. A young couple with a couple of babies were playing on a homemade playset in front of one of the trailers. They stared as the two of them ran past, bemused. Asche slowed slightly.

“The Millers?” he asked. Both husband and wife pointed to the back, in the direction they were going.

“Thanks!”

“They live in the back somewhere,” Tristan called back.

“Down this way!”

Beyond a point, there was only two trailers on either end of the trailer park. One was completely dark. The other had lights on. They headed for that one, both of them running harder than they thought they could. Both of them trying to convince themselves that nothing had happened yet. Daphne was Daphne, most of the time. Asche was picturing them running up to the trailer and banging on the door. Scaring the crap out of Daphne and Marguerite and probably Winona. The three of them would be sitting around the kitchen table, a notebook in front of Daphne, remnants of dinner on the counter. And they would laugh. And then, of course, have some weird explaining to do, probably, but Asche could take that over the alternative.

Which was rapidly becoming the reality, it seemed. As they approached the trailer they could see the front door was standing wide open.

No, wait. It wasn’t standing. It was on the ground a few feet away from the trailer. Ripped off its hinges. Tristan ran and jumped into the trailer, Asche right behind him.

Well, he had been right about dinner remnants on the counter. They were also on the table, on the walls, and on the floor. The table was snapped in two. One piece upside down near the fridge. The other leaning against the back of the couch. There were holes, large ones, punched into the walls.

There was blood on the floor. And smeared on the walls immediately surrounding the doors.

“We’re too late,” Tristan said, his voice small and breathless.

“But where are they?” Asche asked. “If they’re dead, where’s the bodies? Where’s Daphne?”

From outside, somewhere in the desert, came a deep, rumbling roar. It sounded like the train…but not entirely so. Asche and Tristan looked at each other.

“Was that-”

Tristan was cut off by two high pitched screams, so much quieter than the rumble, but still there. The two of them were out of the trailer before the screams ran out.

An Expected Reunion

It was all exactly how she had left it. Like the past twelve years of her life had been a long joke told by some asshole at a party except no one was even listening in the first place.

In her time away she had banished everything but the broad strokes of the house from her memory. Now it all came screaming back. Same blue house with white shutters. Same exact blue. Freshly painted. Kept. Never changed.

She recognized the curtains in the windows. The wreath on the door, the same one made of fabric and plastic leaves that her mother had put out every fall when she was a kid. The only new thing she could see was the car in the driveway, and even that was the same make and model pick-up her father always drove, just the newest year.

Exactly as she left it. Like coming back here had unwound time. Brought her back not just to Juniper, but to eighteen.

Birdy fought the urge to puke.

“I shouldn’t be here. I should go. This is a bad idea.”

She shifted in the seat of her fifteen year old Outback, tugging the seatbelt away from her chest. Being this close to the house made her uncomfortable, if she went inside she was liable to explode. The sane thing would be to drive past and go back to the highway. Find someplace else to stay. Flee into the woods. Build a little wooden hut. Live off berries.

There was nowhere else to go. That was the problem. Everything she had to her name was either in the Outback or the Outback itself. A couple of boxes of clothes in the back. A laptop and a phone. Four hundred and sixty-two dollars and however much change was in the glove box in cash. The might have been able to stretch it to get to Miami. Might. A single thing wrong, however, and she’d be stranded somewhere in the middle of the country. That had worked out for her once. That sort of luck doesn’t happen twice.

Birdy didn’t want to be here, but it was clear she didn’t have much of a choice.

It was still summer. Technically. Scientifically. Reality made it more complicated.

Like everything.

It was warm, almost hot, in the sun. But the aspen leaves were starting to turn gold, and as she crossed into the shadow of the house the memory of warmth died and she thought she was dead. The light jacket around her did nothing.

This is why I moved to the desert, she lied to herself.

From either the creeping cold or the fear she’d punk out, Birdy half-jogged across the yard, took the porch steps in one leap, and practically crashed into the doorbell. Shuffling came from the living room. It was too late now.

They’ll answer the door and look exactly the same. Like Juniper is in some sort of bubble out of time.

The door opened.

Her mother was there, looking at her curiously.

Oh, thank God, she went gray.

Time did exist. Her mother was rounder, her face scored in lines, and roots of gray peeked out amongst the black hair. Her skin was as pale as ever. And getting paler by the second.

“What are you doing here?”

It was exactly what Birdy expected.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Amy? Who is it?”

Her mother turned slightly, keeping her eyes firmly on Birdy as she did. As though she might disappear. Or steal the gnomes off the porch and run off.

“It’s Roberta.”

“Who?”

Her mother pressed her lips together. Eyes darted up and down the street. Birdy could see the exact moment she found the beat up Subaru, her eyes widening and then narrowing.

“Roberta.” Her mother lobbed the name back in the house like a grenade. The door was only open enough for one person, her mother’s hand still on the knob.

Maybe they won’t even let me in. Wouldn’t that be a relief.

“I heard that, but who…”

The face her father was making as he pulled the door wider was exactly the one she had imagined. Confusion, mostly, but also the jutting jaw displaying a hint of anger. Her father didn’t like being surprised. He considered it a betrayal.

“Roberta,” he said flatly.

“Hi, Dad.”

“What are you doing here?” he asked, using the same tone as her mother.

“Can I come in?”

Just say no, she thought to herself as they stared at each other. Just say what you want to say. No. Say no. And then this whole stupid thing is over and I can leave and I don’t know what I’ll do, but at least I won’t have to pretend this was a good idea anymore.

“Yes, of course,” her mother said after a few quiet seconds. “You must be cold.”

Birdy caught them both glancing up and down the street. To see if anyone had seen her. They glared at her car like they could set it on fire through sheer force of will alone.

The hallway was, of course, exactly as she remembered. Stairs going up, hall going back, the walls covered with framed pictures. Lots of her parents. Her brother, and people she assumed was his family. If she was in any of the older pictures, she couldn’t find herself.

There were a lot of things that were supposed to be said in times like this.

How have you been?

Where have you been?

We missed you.

Can I get you something to drink?

Instead her parents stood quietly, staring at her, arms around each other for support. They had both asked the only question they had any interest in. Birdy knew better than to waste any time.

“I hit a rough patch,” she said. “I need a place to stay until I get on my feet again. A few weeks. Maybe a couple of months.”

“You need money?” her father asked.

“No,” she said, putting up her hands like she was defending herself from the entirely correct accusation. “No, I’ll get a job in town. I just need a place to stay so I can save up.”

“Your room…well, it’s not your room,” her mother said. “Not for…well…”

Not since about ten minutes after you found my note? Or maybe it was more like five?

“We have the futon. In the basement.

Her mother couldn’t suppress the quick look she shot her father. There and it was gone. If Birdy had been looking anywhere else, she would have missed it. Only seen the calm, carefully constructed smile she put on after.

“Yes. The futon,” she said.

Birdie imagined herself tossing her hands up to the air as she scoffed. Really, the futon? she would yell. There’s three bedrooms in this house besides yours. Now, I can guess that you didn’t touch Robby’s room and it’s the perfect museum to his excellence, but that leaves two other rooms. You don’t have a guest room anymore? Or do the guests have to stay in the Robby Museum? The tension broken – and her fault, to boot – her parents would finally stop acting like robots on massive amounts of tranquilizers and speak their peace. They could all yell at each other. Scream. Break stuff. Relive the trauma twelve years gone.

Or maybe it wasn’t trauma for them. Maybe the only trauma is me coming back.

Birdy smiled. “That would be fine. Great. Thank you. I’ll just-”

“Why don’t you move your car to the back alley?” her father asked. “Before you get settled. It’s a…uh…quicker walk that way.”

With a nod, she went out to move her car. Now was not the time for fighting, or screaming, or anything that wasn’t pretending everything was fine. As long as everything went to plan, she’d only be here for a weeks. Maybe months. Save up a few paychecks to reliably get to Miami. She could even leave again the same way she did after high school. Pack up the car at four in the morning and be gone before the sun.

Her parents would probably react the same way, too.

Dark Day

Nadia didn’t fully notice something was different until her strict morning routine finally let her sit down at the breakfast nook with a coffee, cream no sugar, and her low-calorie high-fiber breakfast bar. She pulled up the stock market app on her phone, brought the mug up to her lips, and froze just as the hot coffee hit her tongue. Not because it was too hot – twenty years of chugging coffee whenever she could and had burned off any nerves that would give her that information – but because she had looked out the window.

“It’s still dark,” she said because it was, indeed, still dark outside.

She glanced at the clock over the stove at the same time she put down her mug to check her wristwatch. It would not be the first time she had completely fucked up her time management and sat down to breakfast a full two hours before she was supposed to.

Nope. Both the clock on the stove and her wristwatch – and her phone, for that matter – all agreed it was seven-fifteen. The sun should have been up by now and reflecting off the windows of the apartment building across the street.

“Hey, Jules?” Nadia called, afraid to move.

Jules sauntered into the kitchen still wearing his sweatpants, his hair sticking in every direction. Nadia had tried to get him on the same Up-And-At-Them morning schedule as her, and to his credit he’d given it the old college try. For three days it had been great. They had woken up, stretched, worked out, meditated, gotten ready and had breakfast together. Then on the fourth morning Jules had waited for her to leave the bedroom first before closing and locking the door and getting back in bed. Three days later he had finally emerged and the two of them had agreed to never try it again.

“I think I’m having some sort of episode,” she said, staring out the window. She kept moving her eyes in and out of focus like she was looking at a Magic Eye and all she had to do to get the sun to come up was squint hard enough.

“You don’t watch TV,” Jules said from the depths of the fridge.

“No, I mean…Jules? Jules. I need your attention right now.”

He shut the fridge as he yawned, and she waited until he was looking right at her. He really was a good man. Later in the day.

“What time is it?”

Jules glanced at the stove. “Seven-eighteen. Nineteen.”

“Your phone says that too?”

Without argument or question, Jules pulled his smart phone from the pocket of his sweatpants.

“No.”

Nadia took a relieved breath.

“It’s says seven-twenty. I guess the stove clock is a little off.”

“The sun isn’t up!” she practically yelled into their tiny apartment kitchen.

Jules looked out the window and blinked a few times.

“You see it, right? That the sun’s not up? It should have been up half an hour ago, at least! I mean, I don’t really know when sunrise is, like, specifically, but surely it should have been up. It’s up, isn’t it? It’s up I just can’t see it. Oh God. Oh, no.”

Nadia kept thinking about her Uncle Reggie. He’d been a high powered corporate lawyer, working eighty to a hundred hours a week and making an insulting hourly, right up until he’d had a complete nervous breakdown. They’d finally found him three months later, working at a Buc-ees outside of Fort Worth under the assumed named Jackie Potts.

That can’t be me. No no no. No way. I don’t work eighty hours a week. Seventy, tops! Unless you count all the stuff I do at home which I don’t because it’s not work if there’s a television on in the background and your boyfriend is massaging your feet. Right?

Right!

Ahhh! Did I just answer myself? I just answered myself!

“Babe, relax. You’re not going crazy. Today’s the first Dark Day, remember?”

She looked up mid-hyperventilation, her arms still wrapped around her thighs and her head barely above her knees, and stared.

“The first what now?”

Jules rolled his eyes. “I knew you weren’t paying attention when I was telling you about this. And reminding you about it. And pointing it out to you when it was on the news last night.”

“I work too hard, yeah, I know, I get it, old argument, what the fuck is a Dark Day?”

“Exactly what it sounds like,” Jules said, gesturing vaguely out the window. “The scientists thought it might help with global warming if we skipped sunlight for a day or two every month. So here we are.”

She…vaguely….remembered something about this. He’d been telling her the other night, while they had been watching…something…and she had been answering emails.

And hadn’t someone mentioned it in one of those emails? She couldn’t remember. She usually skipped both the first and last paragraph, knowing that that’s where the useless greetings and pleasantries were.

And maybe someone had said something about it in the last Zoom call she’d been on?

Nadia looked outside again. Still dark.

She looked at her boyfriend again. Still unconcerned.

“Scientists?” she finally asked. “What scientists?”

“I don’t know! Scientists! They figured out how to do it and got the approval last month. It’s all anyone’s been talking about for weeks!”

“Not in my office,” she lied.

Jules rubbed his forehead. “Nadia, for fuck’s sake.”

Nadia looked from the window, still dark, to her boyfriend’s face. Somehow darker.

“What? Come on! It’s dark outside and it shouldn’t be! That would be enough to freak anyone out!”

“Yeah, anyone who wasn’t so involved with their work they missed literally every notice about it. For months. From their own live-in boyfriend.”

“Hey! This isn’t about my job!”

“Of course it is!”

Nadia stepped back out of shock. Jules was perhaps the most even-keeled person she had ever met. Not really saying much given the type that she worked with, but still. She’d never seen him even raise his voice at being cut off, let alone yelling at someone in person.

Yelling at her.

But here he was. Arms out. Eyes wide. Exasperation painting lines into his face.

“Not everything is about my job!”

The laugh that came from him was so over the top and fake he ought to have earned a Razzie.

“That’s fucking rich coming from you. Your entire life is this job, Nadia. You’re so caught up in it, all the time, the whole world is passing you by. You are constantly three degrees away from completely burnt out and yet you keep on pushing.”

“I’m not burnt-”

“Oh, yeah? Tell me something. Just now, when you were hyperventilating into the back of your knees, you were thinking about your uncle again weren’t you?”

He only needed the look on her face.

“See? You know, Nadia. You know this job is killing you and you still can’t disengage. And, uh, I can’t stay here and watch it anymore.”

Just like the darkness outside the window, it took some time for the words to completely register. The perfect rebuttal she had been planning dissolved into nothing.

“What?” was all she could manage.

There were other words said. Screamed. Cried. None of it seemed to matter. This was, apparently, coming. Coming for a while. And just like all of the little warnings about the completely Dark Day outside, Nadia had missed every last one.