Longlisted by Minds Shine Bright Short Fiction Competition 2023
A rainbow soup of fliers and misprints has risen to the waistline of the wire basket near the counter of Natagwa Qwik Print . The only sound is a copier humming out pink leaflets. Zeke Jackson, the seventeen-year-old clerk, slides a collated sexual harassment manual into a comb punch and impales it with rectangular holes along the left side that look like airplane windows. Then he binds it and lays it face down on a stack of sixty-two finished booklets.
Anymore, Zeke doesn’t smell the whetted cocktail of print toner and insecticide in the air. Downtown Natagwa has become a hospice for small businesses, but the Quick Print is still alive because it’s a retail chimera: half stationary, half gardening supplies.
The paper half is overstuffed with ream towers, laminate rolls, and pegboards, markers, pens, white-out, and thumbtacks. The gardening half is a maze of fertilizer, seed packets, garden hoses, faux terra cotta pots, and hand shovels.
“Goddamn pink,” spits Micah Pale, the one-time millet farmer. He watches Zeke square loose papers in the comb punch. Every Thursday, Micah waits at the counter for his fifty fliers. They’re always yellow and always political. But this morning, canary stock #41 was short, so the ex-farmer grudgingly chose the least bad alternative. Green, he said, was too hard to read. Gray was boring. And fluorescent colors were unnatural. So it was goddamn pink.
“I’m sorry about that,” Zeke stops crunching blades through paper and faces the ex-farmer to show he’s taking the matter seriously.
One of Micah’s speckled hands cups the dome of his ball cap and another tugs the bill. “I seen yellow was low last week and I told you so.”
When Zeke is nervous his right hand grabs the fabric inside his slack pocket and balls it up in his fist like a dirty napkin. “Yellow will be back in next week,” he says. “I’m really sorry, Mr. Pale.”
Zeke can’t lose this job. He can’t make any mistakes.
“One year,” his dad said. “You better keep this one for at least a year or I’m gonna throw that laptop you love so much in the street and run over it with my car.”
The threat made Zeke want to vomit. “But grandma bought me that,” he said. The panic choked his voice a little and made his tone shoot up at the end.
“Just one more thing you didn’t have to pay for.” His dad crossed his black arms, the ones that had welded their family into a real house and put food on the table every day. “You spend every goddamn minute on that computer, sitting on your ass, acting like everything in this house got here by magic. There ain’t no free ride for anyone around here. You lose this job and I’ll break that computer in half.”
It wasn’t Zeke’s fault that he lost the job at the carwash, or the one at the autoparts store. They just couldn’t pay him anymore. For eight months he couldn’t find another job and he was beyond lucky to get this part-time shift at the Qwik Print. He can’t mess it up. Well, he already messed it up so he just has to fix it before his boss finds out. The truth is that last Thursday when he was supposed to order the yellow paper, his morning was torpedoed by five hundred presentation folders that Soulwell Insurance ordered with same-day turn around.
“You listening?” demands Micah Pale.
“I am listening, sir,” Zeke assures him.
“So what happened? You lazy?”
“It won’t happen again, Mister Pale.” Zeke clenches and releases the fabric in his pocket. “I can promise you that.”
“Or maybe you ain’t very bright,” Micah’s feral eyebrows rise to underline his suspicion.
Zeke just looks at the floor. Even if he wasn’t worried about his job, he wouldn’t answer the farmer, because he did make a mistake. In fact, it wasn’t just the Soulwell folders that made him forget the order last Thursday. His attention was also hijacked by an online mutiny he needed to avert. His dad is right about how much time he spends online, though his dad will never understand how that world can seem more real than the rest of his life.
Zeke’s avatar, Acrion, is a household name in the cyber community called Trusade. It’s a corporate espionage Animal Farm for 1.3 million digital animals. Making alliances is the key to penetrating successive chambers of a steel and glass Tower of Babel, but your comrades tend to become enemies and enemies become comrades from one chamber to the next. You need a different combination of tools and intel every time a new door hisses open, so your allies have to be kept or killed depending on the goal. And Zeke is a master at it. His Trusade persona is persuasive, intuitive, and virtually unstoppable.
In contrast, his meatspace persona is virtually invisible. Maybe because he’s a black kid in a white town. Maybe because he doesn’t go to church. Maybe because small talk is a talent he wasn't born with. Whatever the case, his wordcraft doesn’t translate to the real world.
“Your boss is a buddy of mine,” the farmer taps a bent fingernail on the glass counter, “maybe he should know what you done.”
Zeke shakes his head. “Please, Mr. Pale, don’t do that.” An empty minute ticks by and it feels like a hundred. He glances at the farmer and quickly away.
“Goddamn pink,” the farmer repeats. “Like watermelon guts.”
The copier behind Zeke births one final pink slip and stops to rest. He turns to fetch his customer’s fliers, lifting the top hatch and pinching out Micah’s original.
“There ain’t no accountability for those folks.” The farmer juts his chin in the direction of the copy machine.
The farmer’s ire seems to suddenly have changed targets and Zeke is relieved. Maybe Micah will just forget. Though Zeke is also surprised because Micah doesn’t chat. Micah hasn’t said an unnecessary word to him in the four months since Zeke was hired. Even when they’re the only two souls in the cramped copy shop, Micah is as thrifty with his words as he is with his social security.
“No accountability,” the farmer repeats.
“This is accountability?” asks Zeke, settling warm leaflets on the counter.
“It’s something,” Micah growls. “They don’t think for one second,” he waves a flyer like it’s a one-way ticket to disaster, “about what this will cost the rest of us.”
Zeke doesn’t know what that means. He read the first pink leaflet that zipped out of the copy machine this morning, but he never heard of Prop 31. “That’s true,” he says to be nice. “Do you need anything else, sir?”
“No,” the farmer scoops up his fifty fly sheets.
“Have a nice day, Mr. Pale,” Zeke pivots toward the collating table. He has a 5pm deadline for the manuals.
But Micah doesn’t go anywhere. His eyes are fixed on Zeke, though he seems to be looking beyond the clerk. Micah finally detaches from the counter and potters through the shop with his fliers in hand. He passes a quarter hour reading seed packets and comparing sprinklers.
Zeke punches and binds, punches and binds.
“Zeke,” Micah calls, holding a pair of pimpled gardening gloves in his free hand. The clerk looks up. “That’s short for Ezekiel?” asks the farmer.
Zeke nods.
“So,” the farmer says. “I was named for a minor prophet and you was named for a major.”
Zeke doesn’t have a good response to that so he just smiles. Micah pushes the gloves back onto the chrome peg they came from and saunters toward the counter. “You seen those folks that dance slow motion in the park?”
Zeke thinks for a second, “Oh. No, they’re not dancing. It’s Tai Chi.”
“Huh,” Micah grunts. He waits a minute and then asks, “You a new ager?”
“No,” Zeke inverts a manual on the finished stack.
Suddenly, brass bells crash against the front door and a pair of twin toddlers in parkas shriek into the narrow garden aisle, pursued by a dark-eyed mother. She snags them simultaneously by their furry hoods. The door clangs again for a stork-legged man in brown plaid wool and an ear-flap hat.
Zeke assists in a hunt for crayons and stickers and legal pads. He rings and bags and dispenses change into palms. Through it all, Micah is rooted at the counter.
When the shop is finally silent, Micah scratches his dirty-snow beard. “Church people, all of ‘em,”
“Those clients you mean?”
Micah supports both flannel elbows on the glass. “You a Christian?”
That question never has a right answer. “Why?” Zeke asks.
“Tryin’ to figure which side you might be on.” The old man studies the young man impassively.
“So the sides are new ager and Christian?” Zeke isn’t sure he wants to know.
“No,” says the farmer. Outside a gust of winter wind summersaults brittle leaves against the glass door.
Zeke looks at the fliers in Micah’s hand, “Democrat and Republican?” This time Zeke is sure he doesn’t want to know.
“Hell, no.” Micah says. “You ever heard of Socrates?”
Zeke thinks the conversation is starting to zig zag like a hunted rabbit. “Everyone’s heard of Socrates,” he replies.
“Had a lot of enemies.” Micah’s face threatens a smile. “And he always voted against the majority. Even when he agreed with’em.”
Zeke frowns, “So what side is that?”
The farmer claps a hand on the pink pile. “The right side. There’s the powers that be. And there’s the rest of us.” He leans in conspiratorially. “If we don’t fight ‘em, we feed ‘em. Power always needs opposition.” Micah Pale is now at full throttle. “Prop 31 is fresh shit straight from the asshole of the state senate. But at least there’s a fight going on.” Micah twists his cap off and scratches a damp patch of gray curls before he replaces it. “But here in Natagwa, there ain’t no opposition.”
Zeke is no longer thinking about his deadline. “Who’s the power in Natagwa?” he asks.
“I ain’t got nothing against Christians,” Micah responds. “I’m for the Golden Rule. I’m for whipping the money changers and throwing over the tables. Jesus was opposition, pure and simple. But here in town,” Micah tilts his head toward the entrance, “the church is another thing.”
He lets that settle in. “It’s a damn gang. Every banker and politician and every goddamn business owner makes their deals over wine and crackers.” Micah thumps his fliers on the counter like a Bible. “Anybody needs to make a living has to join up.”
Zeke looks at the door and back at the farmer. “Why isn’t there any opposition?”
“Now we’re getting to it.” Micah throws his cap on the counter. “There used to be opposition. Used to be another gang in town called Lumines.”
“Lumines?” Zeke prods.
“A hundred years back.” Micah explains. “Builders and masons and such had a meeting. Every building in town that don’t look like a goddamn Soviet bunker was built by Lumines. You seen the cubes?”
“Of course.” Zeke passes one of them every day. Many of Natagwa’s oldest corners host a four-foot cubic sculpture in stone or concrete or bronze. The five exposed sides are engraved with a tree, a hammer, a triangle, a flame and a spidery symbol.
“Same symbols on the buildings if you know where to look,” Micah says.
Zeke steps closer, “What happened to the Lumines?” The timid copy clerk is suddenly possessed by his alter ego, Acrion. Alliances and strategy are Acrion’s domain.
The old man’s face bends into a smile, “That’s too long a story.” He tugs his ball cap back on. “Lumines weren’t a good bunch, though.” The smile vanishes. “Born assholes every one. But they knew something the church folk don’t know.”
Zeke rests blue-checked elbows on the counter, mirroring the farmer. Micah’s faded eyes narrow. “You peek behind the veil in this town and there are dark things back there. Things that watch. Things that come around. ‘Specially now that the Lumines are gone.”
“Like what?” Zeke asks.
“You know about the black trees?” Micah’s voice gets low.
Zeke glances at the door again. The sky is darker than it should be. “No,” he admits.
“Woods north of town have a patch of black trees on the far side, by Seller’s Field,” Micah says. “You know how many trees?”
Of course Zeke doesn’t know. Wind smashes a plastic bag against the door and then yanks it out of view.
“No one knows how many because the number changes,” Micah explains. “Sometimes three. Sometimes four. Sometimes seven.”
Zeke remembers the side of the Lumine cubes where the trees are etched. “Maybe they grow fast,” he offers.
Micah slowly shakes his head. “They’re always full grown.” Bullets of rain hit the glass and freeze on impact. Frosty fractals explode one on top of the other.
“Wouldn’t people notice?” Zeke asks.
“People don’t care much about trees,” the farmer says.
“How can they just change numbers like that?”
“Because, Zeke, they ain’t trees.” Micah says.
The clerk stands up straight, “What are they?”
“Qins,” Micah says, gathering his fliers. “They come up through the ground there and then they come into town after dark looking for people who been marked.” He points a knobby finger toward the door. “Every Qin has a right to one mark.”
“How do you know that?” Zeke is suddenly cold.
“Because my grandaddy was a Lumine,” Micah confides. “I don’t know half of what he knew. But I do know they had a ceremony to make the trees sleep.” The farmer exhales. “If the black trees sleep, no more Qins can come up there.”
“So Lumines were fighting more than Christians,” Zeke says.
Micah nods, “After the Lumines died out, wasn’t no one to stand up to the church in politics,” his eyebrows crash together, “but there also wasn’t no one standing in the way of things a lot more deadly.”
The copy clerk looks earnestly at the farmer. “So you’re the opposition now.”
Micah rolls his fliers and taps Zeke on the shoulder. “We, Ezekiel, are the opposition now.”