Reset Request
0. Mnemosyne: The Bathtub of Lethe
With all the crow guts, blackened sage, vinegar, and other ingredients required by the rite, Nate’s bathtub was a disgusting mess. He filled it to the top with scalding hot water. When the water sloshed over the side, he turned off the tap, avoiding the sightless eyes of his avian sacrifices. At least he wouldn’t have to clean up; he’d be halfway across the state when the MuniciCorp’s housing authorities discovered the disaster in his bathroom.
Even his eyeballs were sweating. Withdrawal was a bitch and a half. But this was the last time. He’d said it before, but this was it. Using Alpha-Relaxacose had fucked things up so bad he was sitting on his toilet looking at a tub full of murdered birds trying to find a way out of his life.
Nate consulted the instructions he’d gotten from a minor Pascua Yaqui deity who showed up to an Easter ceremony. He didn’t know why a Native American spirit knew how to summon a Greek Titan and he didn’t care. It was a good thing, too, because the leprechaun he’d made out with behind the Denny’s didn’t know shit. This was his last night as a Citizen of Raytheotopia. If this ritual didn’t work, he’d be escorted to the Human Department and reassigned to fire suppression or blasting in one of the open copper pits. They might even send him to a RehabReality Center. No one came back from RehabReality.
No, Nate wouldn’t be worked to death in a mine and he wouldn’t be sent to a virtual reality prison. He would be forgotten and he would escape. To do that, he needed someone powerful enough to erase him from Raytheotopia’s data centers so that he could start over.
He needed a titan; he needed Mnemosyne.
The ritual itself was about a page of text—shorter than the spell he’d used to find a girlfriend but longer than the one he’d used to end things with her. When it was done, he sat back on the closed toilet and waited.
The water swirled.
Was it the air conditioning kicking on? No, something was happening.
Nate stared into the tub, looking for signs of a mystical being from the beginning of time. The modern world was full of myths come to life, but he’d never seen a goddess this old before. He wondered if she’d rise from the depths of the water, dripping and nude.
“Hello.” She appeared on the edge of the tub wearing a brown cardigan and cargo pants, but no shoes. Not nude, then.
“Oh fuck,” he said jerking backwards, “sorry, fuck. You startled me.”
The goddess looked like someone’s mom, still hot, but like she’d seen enough shit not to put up with nonsense. Her long brown hair was curly and wild, flowing down her shoulders almost to her waist.
Pointing at the murky water, she said, “You wish to forget? Submerge yourself in the water and you will be cleansed of memory. Or, if you have a specific memory to remove—”
“No,” he replied, grabbing his Raytheotopia badge. “I need to be forgotten.” He held his lanyard over the tub, the edge of the plastic ID grazing the water’s surface. “You can do that, right? Erase me?”
Mnemosyne leaned forward, peering at his photo. It wasn’t a good likeness, but the plastic card contained a chip with biometric data that gave him access to Raytheotopia: his salary, public transit, grocery store credit, private transit, and more. To the MuniciCorp that ran every aspect of what used to be called southern Arizona, the data was more him than he was.
She held out her hand.
He gave it to her. “Everything in this chip needs to be gone by midnight.”
A pause.
He added, “Do you need to know why?”
“No.” She turned the plastic badge over in her hand, feeling the hard plastic. “Who will you become?”
“Don’t worry about it.” He grinned with confidence he didn’t quite feel. “I have a guy.”
Mnemosyne didn’t respond.
“Can you do it? Remove me from the world? From the MuniciCorp?”
Her brown eyes flashed; in them he saw centuries of wounded pride.
Clenching her fist, she crumpled the plastic ID badge as if it were tissue paper. “My daughters will collect.”
“Okay, cool. Do they accept VenPal?”
Now Mnemosyne looked confused. She repeated, “My daughters will collect.”
“Cash, then?” he asked, though his cash was already rolled tightly into two wads and jammed into his jeans pocket. He might be an addict (was he an addict? was he ready to admit that?) but he wasn’t an idiot. Nate had installed failsafes to alert him in case his little skims off the top of accounts receivable were detected. They were. Now his Raytheotopia accounts were useless and any attempt to use them might alert the MuniciCorp border patrol. It was only a two- day journey to UniteDenverCO™, but during those two days he would be a ghost.
The titan he’d summoned to erase him from the world looked sadly at his bathtub full of rotting bird corpses, then said, “Your price is ninefold. Good luck.”
1. Calliope: The Loss of Lore
The kid in an apartment downstairs sold him a solar scooter, and he rode in one hundred-plus degrees for almost an hour to get to Jesus’s place. He didn’t dare ride on the street. Traffic cameras sucked at modifying driver behavior but were excellent at proving Citizens whereabouts. The washes had cameras too, including infrared, but Nate slapped on a hi-vis vest and cap from SprintCart delivery service so he’d look like a low-Credit gig worker getting an early start.
The combination gas station-barber shop-convenience store-Mexican restaurant run by Jesus and his enormous family was protected from MuniciCorp surveillance. Not by the absence of cameras, but by having them with a neat little bundle of code inserted into their feedback system. It detected visitors and automatically replaced their biometric identifiers with those of normies pulled from a list of Citizens with four- and five-star Credit rankings.
Even still, Nate wore a medical mask and pulled his hoodie over his ears despite the oppressive summer heat. He shoved the hi-vis in his pack and shoved open the door just as the sun peeked over the purple peaks of the Rincons. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck.
“Buenas,” he said to Rosa, who worked the cash register.
She waved at him and yawned into a magazine. “He’s out of stock, Nate,” she said. “I thought you knew.”
He shook his head. “Need something else.”
She shrugged and turned back to the glossy front page. Ads on it shimmered, then updated with new products based on the temperature of her hands, her eye positioning, and dozens of other marketing factors.
Nate passed by racks of snacks and supplements, the sweat on his back turning cold. Summoning Mnemosyne made him forget for half a second about getting high, but being back here made his body feel like an empty cavern waiting to be filled with the colorful sensations brought on by Alpha-Relaxacose.
He glanced at the magazine and comics stands in the corner. Jesus was his drug guy, yeah, but he was also Nate’s comics guy. A new issue of Steleta the Soul Reaper beckoned. Her latest adventure had seen one of Steleta’s many love interests fall prey to a mind virus that erased his knowledge of their culture and customs, filling him with rage and hatred instead. On the cover, Steleta wielded her whip-like sword, its thong entwining around her in a sensual but dangerous embrace.
Jesus emerged from the back room, where the barber shop part of his business hadn’t yet opened. “Hey man, I got your message.” He beckoned Nate past the half-wall that separated the convenience shop half of the building from the Mexican restaurant half.
They sat down at a booth.
Jesus leaned forward. “Did you do it, man?”
Nate nodded. “She took me out of the system. None of my biometric codes worked. I tried to look at my socials and it’s like I never existed. Once I left my front door, I couldn’t get back in.”
“Damn,” Jesus said, shaking his head. “I’ll miss you, man.”
Nate grinned. “You’ll miss my money, you mean.”
Jesus grinned back, showing a straight line of stained teeth. “Hell yeah, brother.”
“You got me in?”
Jesus slid an access badge across the table. “UniteDenverCO™, here you come. Timothy Martin the Third.”
“The third?”
Jesus shrugged. “You want the ID or not?”
Nate tossed a wad of cash at Jesus and pocketed the card. He arranged for an untraceable vehicle to get him out of Raytheotopia with Jesus’s cousin, then said his goodbyes. Rosa gave him a burrito wrapped in foil for the road.
“Hey!” Jesus followed him out of the store, glancing at the empty parking lot before approaching. “Got you something else. A goodbye gift.”
He handed Nate a paper-wrapped bundle. Peaking inside, he saw it was Steleta the Soul Reaper, issue 274.
“Thanks, man.” He felt an unexpected pressure across his sinuses at the kind gesture. Before this moment, leaving the MuniciCorp was exciting, an adventure and a fuck-you to the company that ran—and ruined—lives. But he wouldn’t ever buy a burrito and a comic at this hole-in-the-wall gas station ever again. Raytheotopia wasn’t all bad. He could never come back.
Out of nowhere, a girl appeared in front of him, seeming to blink into existence in his peripheral vision.
Nate stopped short, startled.
The young woman blocking his path was a goth, dressed in a black corset with purple ties over a gauzy, ripped mesh shirt and ankle-length skirt. Multiple necklaces and earrings dangled from her neck and ears. Her nose and lip were pierced. Long, unruly black hair fell to her waist.
“Excuse me,” he said, hoping she would move.
“You’re excused.” The goth girl pointed at the issue of Steleta the Soul Reaper. “You like these stories?”
Nate shrugged. He needed to get on the road, but the girl was hot and right in front of him. “I mean, yeah, she’s pretty fuckin’ rad. You like comics?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she held out her hand. “Can I see?”
Without thinking, he handed her the book.
She flipped through it, her eyebrows raised at the colorful, titillating artwork. “I don’t really get this modern stuff.”
Nate shifted the weight of the pack on his shoulder. “The cool thing about these is they’re archetypes. Yeah, it’s dressed in modern tropes and style, but at its core, comics tell the most traditional human stories.”
She held up the book, open to a page with Steleta brandishing her whip sword at a gigantic, mutated bear shooting lasers from its eyes. “This is a traditional human story?”
“With lasers.”
She smiled. “This will do.”
“What?”
“My sisters will see you soon.” The goth girl handed him back the comic. She picked a package of pistachios from her pocket and ripped it open. She shoved a handful of them in her mouth and chewed with her mouth wide open.
The sun was fully up now, baking the concrete surrounding the gas station and bathing the windows with heat. “I have to go.”
She nodded. “Good luck.”
Unsettled, Nate shoved the comic in his pack and left. The car Jesus’s cousin promised him was out back. A shitty-ass Honda with a sun-bleached hood and too-small tires. Fine. He could put up with a piece of shit car as long as it would get him to UniteDenverCO™.
After filling the piece of shit with gas, he climbed in, throwing his pack and the comic on the front seat. On the cover, a character with a huge pair of tits wielded a sword that looked like a whip. It was wound around her instead of her foe, a shirtless man who looked like a troll he’d gotten high with once under the highway.
The character on the cover and title meant nothing to him. Had it before?
He started the engine and peeled out of the gas station, heading east.
2–3. Euterpe and Polyhymnia: The Silencing
He had just passed what used to be Willcox when the radio went crazy. After a burst of static, it skipped around the frequencies, blasting snippets of a.m. asshole talk shows and rapid- fire Spanish news. He jabbed at the console until the country western station returned, but it wouldn’t stick for more than a minute before freaking out again.
“Piece of shit fucking car,” he yelled into the hot air. At least the air conditioning still worked. Not well, but it worked.
Nate kept driving. He had hundreds of miles left to go, and three MuniciCorps to cross, all without getting caught.
Out here, the open desert had been replaced by solar farms that powered the data center corridor between Raytheotopia and White Sands. Endless rows of black panels stretched on either side of the highway, their thirsty geometric faces turned to face the sun. The Chiricahua Mountains stood steadfast off to his right.
His bladder was about to burst by the time he neared Hatch by PepsiCo. He’d planned to make it as far as Truth or Consequences, a town that remained independent from MuniciCorp creep by retaining ownership of its geothermal energy. But with nothing except glinting solar panels and blank sky to look at, his thoughts had wandered too far. His life choices stared back at him every time he checked the rearview mirror. He needed to stop.
Nate pulled a bandana over his face as he drove through the small corporate outpost. The entire town smelled like the chiles they sold to PepsiCo for protection from another MuniciCorp takeover or infighting among the AntiCorp splinter groups. The market was busy, flush with residents and tourists who came from far-flung MuniciCorps to buy the pungent wares. Nate spotted a few elves behind the booths, eager to sell chiles that might or might not enchant whoever consumed them.
At the only gas station in town, he angled his body away from the cameras while he filled up the tank. The titan Mnemosyne had promised to remove him from all databases, but in some places, being a ghost was just as dangerous. If the MuniciCorps didn’t know who you were, they couldn’t extract payment from you and they didn’t like that.
A few miles outside town, a lone booth selling chiles, snacks, and water was staffed by a young girl and an elderly Indigenous man asleep in a lawn chair. She held a cardboard sign andb danced wildly to tunes from a boombox on the ground next to her feet. No cameras. Nate pulled over and gave the girl a few bucks for a water bottle.
“Thanks.” Pointing at the boombox, she said, “It’s your last song, what do you pick?”
“What?”
She wiggled her hips, doing a little dance. As she moved, the music changed, shifting from modern pop to some kind of traditional flute song. “Last song you’ll ever hear, what do you choose?”
He thought about it for a minute. “‘Earning Devils’, by The Sinker Alliance.”
“Done.” She snapped her fingers and the song played.
“How did you—”
She just smiled and that’s how he knew.
“You’re one of them? The daughters?” The song continued, the sound layering over the whisper of the desert wind. When it was over, he heard nothing but the wind and the elderly man’s snores.
“Good luck, Nate,” she said, handing him a bag of chips.
“Wait…What was that?” He didn’t feel much of anything, but he thought he ought to be angry.
She didn’t answer, just picked up her sign and started to twirl it.
The rest of his drive was silent, no matter what buttons he pressed. The radio would play talk stations, but somehow he knew he’d heard his last song.
#
The billboard advertised, “Last chance to drink for 100 miles!” Past the exit, the vast MuniciChurch compound stretched until the border with UniteDenverCO™. Though it was technically not-for-profit, the MuniciChurch’s security systems were as high-tech as any MuniciCorp. If he could get through the church’s lands to the border, his journey would be over and the next phase of his life could begin.
He knew he shouldn’t stop, but his entire body was covered in a film of sweat, and not just from the heat. The monotony of the drive meant ample chances to focus on his body tearing itself apart from the inside. He felt like he knew what it meant to die of thirst, even though he had water in the passenger seat. He needed something to take the edge off, or he might not make it to his destination. His last dose had been thirty-six hours ago, and though he knew this was the worst of withdrawal, that didn’t make it any easier.
The place was shitty. He fit right in.
An eclectic mix of humans, chimeras, dwarves and a bear spirit occupied the dim, sticky bar. Nate saw a redneck in a stained ballcap put a coin into the jukebox, but no music played. He sat at the bar and waved to the bartender.
She looked like a magician crossed with a country girl. Her crisp white top was unbuttoned enough to show her cleavage, covered by a cropped black blazer with a red flower in the breast pocket. Instead of a top hat, she wore a black sombrero.
“Whisky, please,” he said.
“Sure thing.” She poured him the drink, then studied him as he threw it back. Her eyes were a shade of bright green he’d never seen before. “You going to Denver or coming from?”
“Heading there.” The alcohol loosened him up, took the edge off withdrawal and replaced it with a burn.
“Home?” she asked.
He nodded. “It will be.”
Maybe he shouldn’t have said that. Jesus’s fake ID was supposed to get him into UniteDenverCO™ with a new identity, but all he had was faith that it would work.
But as he shared his destination with her, he felt something break loose, a tide of feeling he’d been suppressing since he summoned the titan to erase his old life. Now that he was almost there, he wondered what his new life in a new MuniciCorp would be like. His time in Raytheotopia was fine, until it wasn’t. His family lived north, in BannerLand, and they weren’t close, even before the accident that laid him up for months with nothing to do but gulp down Alpha-Relaxacose and watch cartoons.
Nate wiped a hand across his forehead. The cute bartender was still peering at him, a kind expression on her face.
“Sorry,” he said, downing the rest of his drink. “I swear I used to be able to talk to…”
He almost said ‘girls.’ But she wasn’t a girl, was she? He’d seen two of them now, plus their mother. They looked nothing alike and yet he knew who they were: the daughters. They were beautiful. And they had come to collect.
“Eloquence,” she said. Her smile was small and sad. “Many who meet me don’t miss it at all. Some don’t even realize it’s gone.”
“Elo—” He couldn’t even finish the word, his tongue tripping on the qu and falling down the stairs before the final syllable. “Words. Talking. You mean I can’t talk anymore.”
“You can!” She wiped her hands on a bar towel. “Just not well. Not anymore.”
Nate opened his mouth to reply, but had the sense to shut it.
“Another drink?” She held a bottle of something expensive above his glass.
He nodded, then tried to speak. What came out was, “Yah.”
The third daughter poured him an extra finger, then leaned back as he drank it. Before he left, she said, “Good luck.”
4–8. Clio, Terpsichore, Erato, Thalia, and Urania: All The Things They Said
His new job, under his new name (Timothy Martin [the Third]) was at an old folks’ home south of the MuniciCorp’s center. He had enough cash for a few nights in a hostel, then spent a terrified night at a bus station, before finding an apartment he could afford with the cash he had left.
The elderly residents didn’t mind that sometimes he couldn’t find his words, or seem to put more than two syllables together. They talked more than enough. The girls who worked the front desk complained endlessly about the repetitive music piped into the lobby, but he could never seem to hear it. His cravings grew further and further apart, though some were still so intense his whole body shuddered.
Most of the old people regaled him with their glories: millions made on stocks and crypto, victories on the golf course, children who became famous and never visited. But his favorite resident, an old Black woman named Marjorie, told him stories unlike anything else he’d ever heard. She spun yarns about aliens on Mars with multiple buttholes; she created imaginary civilizations of mole people and told him about their interpersonal drama as if gossiping about her friends. No one visited Marjorie, but she never seemed to mind.
“Who are you, anyhow?” she asked him one afternoon, after he had helped her to bed and
given her afternoon meds. “Timothy Martin, who is that?”
“The Third,” he said, “can’t forget the Third.”
“Mmhmm.”
“’m from BannerLand,” he said, “told you that.”
Marjorie fixed him with a sharp gaze. “I know, but I want to know who you are.”
“Okay,” he said. “Later.”
She harumphed, then gradually fell asleep, her papery eyelids flickering with dreams.
He practiced what to say the next day, when Marjorie asked again who he was. Nate was from BannerLand. He went to school, then lived in Raytheotopia, working as a financial analyst for the MuniciCorp. He was good at what he did. Then he became an addict, and asked to be erased. Who was he now?
Luckily, Marjorie forgot to ask him who he was the next day. And the day after that.
The staff gathered for a quarterly earnings party in the cafeteria. A large sheet cake took up one of the tables and Nate’s supervisor handed out plastic plates. To celebrate “employee efficiency and meeting resident turnover quota,” they said. Representatives from the MuniciCorp narrived to hand out certificates to the manager and a few of Nate’s co-workers.
After ninety days of perfect attendance and extra shifts at the home, Nate thought he might receive a plaque like Tobias, who claimed not to care about his job but still held up his plaque like it was the Stanley Cup.
But Nate’s name was never announced.
He sat alone, eating a slice of cake, when a woman in a smart suit approached.
“Mind if I sit?”
He nodded.
She daintily brought a piece of cake to her neatly painted lips. “You thought you might get an award, didn’t you?”
He shrugged. He’d never cared much about his job before. Once his life was governed by the amount of pills remaining in a bottle, he hadn’t had time to care about much else.
“Sorry kiddo,” she said. “Your price isn’t paid yet.”
His eyes snapped to her face. She was pretty, her dirty blond hair pulled back in a perfect ponytail.
“When?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “Good luck.” She patted her mouth with a paper napkin and left him sitting at the table alone.
#
After work, Nate’s co-workers dragged him to a nightclub, despite his many protests that he couldn’t afford the luxury. He hadn’t danced without the haze of Alpha-Relaxacose in years and wasn’t sure what it would be like.
“First drinks’ on me,” Molly insisted. “Next is on Tobias!”
Tobias shook his head, but grinned and offered to drive.
They cut ahead of the line of wannabes waiting to get past the bouncers because one of them was Molly’s cousin. Inside, Nate could feel the vibrations of the music through the floor but all he could hear was a mix of heavy breathing and the stomping of feet. Molly and Tobias disappeared onto the dance floor, leaving him at the bar.
He had ordered a bourbon but barely touched it when a woman who looked like she belonged at the Renaissance festival appeared on the empty stool next to him. Her long hair was piled on her head in a fancy braid. There were glowsticks woven into the braid with ribbons. Her face shone with exertion and glitter.
“Dance with me!” she shouted.
He shook his head. “Can’t.” The girl wouldn’t know why; she would assume he meant he was a basic white guy with no rhythm. Which wasn’t entirely wrong.
“Try anyway!” The girl grabbed his hand, pulled him off the stool and into the crowd, her grip surprisingly strong.
She led him into the crush of bodies and twirled her skirts, moving to a rhythm that didn’t match anyone else’s. Nate watched her, swaying helplessly.
“Oh, you’re right, this won’t be a big loss,” she said, laughing.
“Huh?”
Bobbing her head to the beat he couldn’t hear, she took his hand and put it around her waist. She ground her hips to his and said, “Enjoy a last dance, on me.”
He shouted, “Don’t get… what’re you—”
She put her finger to his lips. His body swayed with hers and every place they were connected felt light, felt smooth, felt liquid. He let go, letting the girl move him. He focused on her, enjoying the feeling of his body moving against the body of a pretty girl with glowsticks in her hair and glitter on her face.
And then it was over.
“Wow. Call you?” He held his hand to his ear like it was a phone.
She shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but you know my mom.” The dancer kissed her fingertips and pressed them to his cheek. Then she waved at him and disappeared into the crowd. Trudging back to the bar, he felt like he was moving through quicksand. He knew it wasn’t just the alcohol—something had changed.
When his co-workers found him dancing alone later, they were sky-high and he was standing in the corner. Even high, they were more coordinated than he was sober, more able to move about the dance floor and weave through the crowds.
“What happened to you?” Molly asked. “After you danced with that hot chick, it’s like your feet are made of lead.”
“Yeah.”
Molly swayed, leaning on Tobias. “Boo.”
Nate said, “Wanna go home.”
He wasn’t shocked when another sister showed up at the Rent-a-Ride line at the club’s exit.
She introduced herself as Erato (“it’s a strange name, I know, comes from the same root as eros”) and she kissed him on the cheek. There was a slight spitting rain and the wind off the mountains was cool instead of blazing hot, but it didn’t help his spinning head and leaden feet.
It wasn’t until he looked in the mirror back at his apartment that he realized he was ugly. Had he always been? After meddling in the affairs of muses, how would he know? It had been almost a year since the silent drive and the dive bar. Months since his lonely piece of cake. He’d almost thought he’d gotten away from them. But no. Deep down, he knew. The price was ninefold.
#
He didn’t even notice his last laugh. He didn’t see the daughter who took it from him, though she must’ve appeared somewhere. She might’ve been one of the visitors to the care home, or a barista at a coffee shop.
One day, he stopped to watch a street performer on 16 th Street, a juggler with an old- fashioned bowler hat and suspenders. The crowd around him gathered, kids clapping their hands and cheering as the clown failed at every routine he tried. Well-dressed moms tossed coins into his jug, a giant flower vase holding an artificial rose.
Nate smiled, but couldn’t laugh.
He walked away from the crowd, hands in his pockets.
#
Two left. Every day, he wondered if he’d meet another one. Every woman he passed could be a daughter of Mnemosyne, ready to extract another aspect of his new life.
After two years of service to the care home, he was allowed to take a two-day vacation. Nate applied to join a group of wealthy MuniciCorp Citizens on a retreat to the Sand Dunes by Shell. They spent the day frolicking on the piping hot sands and nights around the campfire telling scary stories of violent Anti-Corp raids. Nate listened.
One by one, the campers returned to their tents, but Nate stayed behind. He stared at the dying firelight and wondered what it would look like if he were high. But it was an idle thought, not a need.
A woman plopped next to him, carefully folding her legs under her. She was middle- aged, but beautiful, with short, wispy hair and freckles. “Beautiful place, right?”
“Yeah,” Nate said.
“Who have you become?” she asked.
He couldn’t answer. Both because his eloquence had been taken and because he didn’t know.
She tossed a twig into the flames. “You look well.”
He shrugged. His cheeks were hot from the fire and frolicking in the sun that day. His body felt tired; the good tired that meant exertion, not duress.
“You’ve made the most of your time,” she said. It was almost a question, but not quite. “After being forgotten.”
Nate sifted a handful of sand through his fingers. Had he? His new life didn’t include nights with his head in a toilet or waking up in squatter houses he didn’t remember entering. It didn’t include Raytheotopia monitoring his eye movements to demand more productivity or measuring his urine to decide whether to cut the office coffee supply. But he also didn’t have songs, or laughter, or stories. He found that he did miss dancing, though he had never been good at it.
“Can’t say,” he answered.
She smiled. “It’s okay.”
He rubbed his eyes and looked at the sky. There were no stars. Had there been stars? Before? Surely someone would notice if they disappeared? Scientists, or some shit?
“I’m sorry, Nate.” The woman next to him patted his arm. “Good luck,” she said, then got up and left.
The stars.
He broke down, weeping onto the hot sand as cicadas screamed around him. They had taken so much from him. He persevered, but the theft of the stars left his soul feeling as black and empty as the sky above.
9. Melpomene: The Return of Alpha-Relaxacose
He was invited to Marjorie’s funeral, but left halfway through. He couldn’t say any nice words on her behalf, but he thought that was all right. She knew.
The next shift without her was hard, but he wasn’t alone. Molly had found a new job by then, but Tobias clapped him on the back and offered to unclog the toilet on the second floor so Nate didn’t have to.
He was at the deli across the street on his lunch break when the last one appeared. She wore a red dress and he knew she was the last one before she spoke.
“What you gonna take?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Got my stars,” he said, holding up a finger. “Can’t talk good, no dance.” Two more fingers. He waved his hand. “Buncha other stuff. Wha’s left?”
The last muse smiled. “Tragedy isn’t always taking.”
“Whazzat mean?”
“Your price is paid, Nate.” She stuck out her hand.
Only when he took it did he realize he was trembling.
“Sometimes tragedy means giving,” she said. “Good luck.”
Nothing had changed when he returned to work. The cafeteria was the cafeteria. Mrs. Olson was Mrs. Olson. The shit still stank and the clock moved slowly. He remained on edge, waiting for the ninth shoe to drop but he couldn’t tell what the last daughter had extracted from him.
Then at the end of his shift, he opened his locker and the world stopped. A bottle on the shelf.'
Pills. Little green ones. Alpha-Relaxacose.
The script was under his name, 90 pills, 50mg each. Just like the one that had started him down this road in the first place.
He reached for the bottle.