The end of the circus day was the only time she had to herself anymore.  Between the families and children who bothered her during the day and the unruly circus roadies who threw rocks at her trailer at night, there was no rest anymore, just solitude.  But judging by the heavy footsteps she could hear approaching outside, even that was a lost cause tonight.

The rusty tin door crashed open, letting in a burst of stinky elephant poop wind from the big top.  Alexandra’s father, Sergei, stood in the door licking a knife and pointing at her a lot, in the way that infers that you, the person being pointed at, are next.  She was the only person in her trailer, so the pointing was basically unnecessary, but he seemed to enjoy the theatrics.

“How many people did you make laugh today, Alexandra?” her father asked between licks.

She told him fourteen.  The licking stopped abruptly.

“Fourteen.  Pitiful.  That is but five percent of our daily ticket sales, Alexandra.  What kind of shitty clown can only muster five percent of laughter?”

She assumed it was a rhetorical question and continued smearing the last splotches of white from her neck.  Sergei hiked his sagging pants and lumbered over to her, pointer finger fixed like a laser.  He slid the dull edge of the knife’s back down her cheek, leaving a trail of slobber as it moved.  She refused to give him the satisfaction of looking at him, even though he was now trying to do that obnoxious double point from his eyes to hers in the mirror.

“We know what happens when we don’t reach our daily laugh quota, don’t we Alexandra?”

She totally knew, but obstained from nodding.  He flipped the knife in his hand and nicked her cheek in one fell swoop.  A slight string of blood trickled down her cheek, diluting in the saliva tracks her father’s knife had left behind.  It didn’t hurt, really.  Not anymore than the others.  She calmly lifted one of her gloved hands and used the thick foam lycra to wipe her cheek.

Sergei licked the blade clean of his daughter’s blood and awkwardly slid it back into his fanny pack, even though the knife was slightly too long and had to go in at a diagonal.  He zipped it as far as he could and then turned his attention back to his daughter.

“There is nothing funny about what I do to you, Alexandra.  You know this.  Tomorrow, be better.  It is the only way.”

The trailer buoyed slightly as he stepped back out into the night, leaving Alexandra with her quiet.  The cut on her face started bleeding again, and she held the sponge to her face to soak up the last few drops.  The banging of rocks landed on the roof of the trailer, and she could hear some derogatory yelling and a pick-up squeal off in the distance.

Alexandra flipped the switch on the side of the mirror and the make-up bulbs blinked off.  She looked pretty good in the darkness, the same way she looked pretty good with all that clown make-up on.  She smiled at the shadowy reflection in the mirror, stood up from her stool and went to lay down on the burlap cot that she called a bed.  As she lay there staring at the dented tin ceiling of her ramshackle home, the dull pain in her cheek throbbed just enough to provide a little internal rhythm to lull her to sleep.

That night, she dreamed of what her life would have been if she’d just finished that last semester of med school.

Jeff sat back in his leather office chair, arms satisfactorily rested behind his head, and let out a sigh.  Goddamn, he’d done it.  He’d written the ultimate novel about a writer writing a novel.  Sure, Stephen King had been coming close to perfecting the formula for years, but Jeff Mandel?  Jeff Mandel nailed it in one shot.

The secret, he realized, was that the writer in his story should be just like him.  We’re talking an average guy, someone everyone can relate to, but also really handsome in a noticeable way.  And the writer should be trying to write a novel, just like him.  But that’s where the twist comes in, because the writer gets some extreme writer’s block that just totally incapacitates him.  So instead of writing, the writer sits pensively for hours and reflects on his life up until that point, trying to find inspiration.  Real solid stuff, the kind that can go on for two hundred pages of adjectives alone.

Jeff made sure to click Save As, even though his copy of OpenOffice had document recovery should the program crash.  He clicked open his browser and ran a Google search for the word “publishers” to see if he could find some contact information on where to send this thing.  Boy, when his childhood friends go walking down the rows of books at their local B.Dalton, and they see Jeff’s name up there right next to Toni Morrison and Dan Brown?  They’re going to lose their shit.  They’ll be commenting all over his Facebook wall about it, attracting attention to the book, which will lead other people to comment and ask about it and then Jeff will have to write a whole blog post about it.  It’s just going to be a mess, really.

But then they’ll read it, and they’ll understand how important the work is.  That’s why he wrote the book, after all: to shine a light on the anguish of the common writer.  He was originally about eight pages into a mostly non-fiction novel about his opinions on Barrack Obama, but he scrapped it when he realized that he wasn’t really a political beast.  If anything, he’s like the stand-up comedian of the written world, just observing and riffing on the things that we all already know, but don’t really know (in italics).

They’ll know soon, he thought, because I’ll tell them (in italics).

He went to open another blank document to start a Contacts spreadsheet, but his cursor stopped before he could reach the File menu.  His computer had frozen again.  But it gave him a chance to reread the last few lines he had just written.  It all seemed to wrap up so nicely, which life so rarely ever does for people.  If anything, life is super tragic, and it would be a betrayal of truth for his fiction to depict anything but tragedy as an ending.  He nodded his head in agreement with himself until the cursor started moving again, upon which he promptly highlighted the last sentence and hit delete, except that he accidentally missed the letters “th” of the word “the” and had to manually backspace a little further.  He started typing again.

“The writer’s block finally gone, David sat down to write his hit novel, which would also serve as his suicide note because he would kill himself soon after.  The end.”

Jeff leaned back again, pretty much satisfied.  It just felt so much more real than that other trite thing he’d written before.  He clicked over to see what Google had found, but the first three links were all for the Publisher’s Clearing House.  He laughed silently at the irony of the search result.  Didn’t the Internet know that he had already won the lottery just by finishing this novel? (in italics)

The auto save feature kicked in and he closed his laptop for the night.  It had been a long Sunday, writing this damned book.  And as ideas for his follow-up project swirled through his head, Jeff dozed off, content that he had changed the world.

Kaimei felt the knife work its way through her stomach. It felt just like it did the first time, and the time after that. The pressure was the worst part, heavy on her gut as she tried weakly to push the blade all the way through. It punctured, tooth after tooth, and she bled, and all of the normal things that she had grown desensitized to happened in due course as she slowly passed out in the pool that flowed out around her shimmering robe.

It might not stick, she thought, but damn it if it didn’t feel good.

She could feel the control lifting from her limbs, the sweeping final stab collapsing midway to the goal as the nanites found her motor cortex. Already, they’d begun repairs on the existing damage, leaving Kaimei to lie helplessly as the flesh around her stomach patched itself over like the pixels of an image loading on her computer screen. She could still twitch her fingers, though the motion was less than functional. Despite this, she got lucky and managed to wedge the dagger into the open wound just before it could seal over. The longer it stayed open, the more dopamine the nanites released, the longer she could stay under…and that was the real game, after all. That was why she was the best.

But it was a minor distraction. For a moment, they continued sealing her off around the thick blade, the new skin already bleeding again as it fused around the cold metal teeth. With every spasm of her listless body against the floor, the knife wobbled ever so slightly inside her, tearing the tissue as quickly as the nanites could mold it. Kaimei was ecstatic; she had never managed to get the dagger back in before the neural takeover on a stabbing. It was going to be a good show.

There was a moment of nothing. No patter in the back of her stomach, not even the usual dope hallucination that drifted into the last few seconds of the process. Just the music. In the fourth injection, technicians programmed a small splinter payload that delivered shitty pop tunes to the ear canal during regeneration. Nice for those purposeful folk who only did this once or twice with actual intent, but miserable for the ‘ciders who had to endure the same vintage Rain single over and over again. Maybe that was their subtle way of saying “fuck you” to those who would abuse their program. Kaimei gave a stiff wince. The message was received loud and clear.

Her eyes flitted back and forth, the best her paralyzed features could muster. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the collage of faces on her screen. At least three thousand had registered for this session, each paying upwards of 200,000 yen for the privilege of watching the direct feed. She could have performed for a blank screen, but Kaimei wanted to see the eyes of her patrons, no matter how small. A few pale gaijin stood out among the blanket of tiny heads; she wondered what sort of premiums they had been charged to break through the network. Their expressions were cold, though what else would one expect from someone who paid to watch a girl die? It didn’t matter. She wasn’t doing this for them. This was for him.

Kaimei had been ‘ciding for a year, though this was the first time that Ikiro had asked her to do a live showcase. She had gotten exponentially better in the short time since she’d started; what began as simple wrist-cuttings had evolved into more complicated maneuvers, the kind that stood out amongst the thousands of wannabe suicide girls who threw themselves at Ikiro’s profile like blind fish against a dam. She never commented, only performed, and her last upload of an underwater disembowelment had gone viral within hours, breaking even Japan’s network walls to spread internationally. The Americans got their first glimpse of the nano underground with Ikiro’s landmark first broadcast suicide in 2011, before the digital secession was instated by Emperor Naruhito to “preserve culture.” To think that Kaimei was the first glimpse to the world of what they had become since was exhilarating. She found purpose in it.

It was an honor when he messaged her; after the national break-away, he became a digital hermit, only emerging every other year or so to select a new wave of featured Jisatsus for his website. That he hadn’t contacted her sooner was surprising; it had been at least six months since she made headlines, and she had half expected a glowing invitation the day after, lavishing praise on her remarkable achievement in legitimizing their art. The delay, maybe, was her punishment for threatening to take the counter culture he had so carefully fostered out of his hands and into the tidal wave of popular media. But there came a time when even he could not deny the community what it wanted. His correspondence, thus, had been terse.

“You’re getting there,” he wrote. “I’ll let you perform in my show.”

She didn’t have to think twice about the offer. Not that the thought crossed her mind, but to deny Ikiro was a social death penalty, more painful than anything she could inflict upon herself. Though the adults would never acknowledge it, he had managed a stranglehold on the new youth of Japan without the frivolities of religion or politics. Ikiro’s followers didn’t need any extraneous motivation; the disillusionment in the old culture was enough to make them follow anyone strong enough to step forward. And whatever popularity she had garnered, it was still nothing compared to the public reins he gripped so tightly.

He had requested of her a simple method for her performance: a jigai, harkening back to the samurai culture of previous centuries. She had never considered nostalgia particularly appealing, but she accepted the suggestion gratefully. Kaimei received a package in the mail the day prior, simple brown paper without postage. In it was a beautiful red robe, silk at the least, and a heavy, curved dagger, lined with dozens of sharp jags carved into either side. At the base of the smooth wooden handle was a faint inscription: “For your death.”

Her pelvis shot up, arching her back off the ground as she felt the full force of the thick jags inside her for the second time in minutes. Her vocal cords wouldn’t let her scream, a function of convenience installed in the fifth injection to prevent neighbors from having to suffer the travails of their suicidal flatmates. This, no doubt, a response to the glut of would-be ‘ciders who tried to follow in Kaimei’s footsteps. Her throat produced only a raw groan, but her eyes welled up with an outpouring of tears that diluted the stream of blood which had worked its way up to her neck. They were working inside of her, she knew this, but the first shot of local anesthetic was wearing off quickly before they could react to that rebellious last stab. Real pain seeped through the blaring j-pop anthem in her head and she strained to find some contortion of her body that would relieve the pressure.

Another second passed by, stretched into an eternity by the sharp waves moving up and down her spine. Another second. They finally recognized the invading blade, and within another second, her once flopping arms and legs went completely limp. The nanites weren’t compensating, she realized, or merely course-correcting. They were just running the whole thing over again. The second hit to Kaimei’s motor cortex paralyzed her, her body still recovering from the impact of the first shutdown. That was new. She hoped that was something they could fix.

Again, she felt the tingle in her gut, the movement of new flesh underneath the surface trying to find a hole to cover. Her neck ignored the frantic signals from her brain to try and see what was happening, leaving her rapid blinking as the last vestige of emotion, wasted on the ugly taupe ceiling that regrettably held her gaze. She fought to see past her eyelids, past her breasts. The knife was still sticking out, she could see that much. Something oozed up the blade, turning the ashy gray of the metal into a translucent pink. It was enough to elicit “ooh”s and “ah”s from the watchers, but the second round of dopamine rolled her eyes back in her head before she could care why.

Colors slipped out of her brain and across her corneas, floating out and open into the room above her. Suddenly, the world became clear. Kaimei could see the tiny machines working inside her, swarming down the pulsing stream of reds and blues that formed her being, intersecting and separating across the vast highway of nerves and veins she housed inside her. She could feel her eyes turn and commanded them to go further. Let me see, she ordered, and they obeyed, sliding back into her sockets so that she could watch with clear perspective the prevention of her death.

The nanites poked and prodded at her brain, sliding up and over the hills of her mind and disappearing into any exposed cracks or crannies they could navigate. The technicians had never explained fully the functions of the machines, only that they were “benefits to public health.” Kaimei’s first vaccination was not a choice; the Emperor required all children junior high school-age or younger to receive them as part of the “Tomorrow Youth Act.” Peering inside herself, she couldn’t help but wonder which of the tiny bots were the originals, and which had joined them in subsequent vaccinations. Not that it mattered; they were all a team now anyway.

A pair of rogue nanites slipped away from the pack and she followed them down her brain stem and through the maze of organs and tubes, passing by dozens of other machines who would stop long enough to fix a slight tear or imperfection before sliding off down the stream. They dodged a flooding pool of red coming at them to emerge onto a massive steel tower sliding out of the rubbery ground beneath it. The pair dashed away to join a battalion of at least a thousand other nanites, all tinkering desperately at the invading dagger head. She reached out, her arms replaced with the same metallic grasshopper legs as the bots, and followed suit in trying to do something, anything to halt the invading behemoth. It pulsed forward again, deeper.

The clack clack clack of the thousands of tiny limbs working in tandem was starting to drive her crazy. More were joining by the second, an impossible swarm that seemed to come from nowhere. And it wasn’t the din, necessarily, but how familiar it all sounded. All the cacophany of struggling nanites needed was lyrics and it would sound just like–

Shit. That fucking Rain song.

Her eyes snapped open, the familiar taupe ceiling still hovering above, and sucked desperately at the air trying to catch a breath as it passed. A gust of something, far too painful to be air, filled her lungs enough to satiate the heaving for the moment. Another dope release has to be close behind, she thought. Kaimei couldn’t tell whether what she was feeling was nervous exhilaration or something else entirely. She could tilt her chin up now, that was progress. The paralysis was lifting, however slightly.

She took advantage of the newly allowed mobility and quickly scanned the room. The monitor was still filled with faces, though there was some kind of stir within the crowd. The undulating mosaic of heads looked like wriggling maggots against the backlit screen. She could barely make out a few of them pointing at her, hands over mouths, or yelling offscreen for a friend to come see.

Her arms let her prop herself up again. As she bent, the pain struck through, the dagger tearing into her folded stomach muscles. Still couldn’t scream, but the wheezing was vicious. This wasn’t how this went. She had seen a jigai before; normally the nanites would just push out the blade before finishing the repairs. Simple. But it was still in her, sinking inch by inch into her gut as she saw the last patch of the knobby wooden handle swallowed by synthetic skin. The tingle of the new flesh pushed down gently on the dagger, helping it along as it cut a path through the fresh tissue they had just worked so hard to reform.

She tried to grab at the skin-covered handle, though her arms were still less-than-agreeable and only managed to hit it in a passing flail. It was enough to slice through the thin layer of flesh and expose a bit of the quickly-disappearing blade. The metal was…different somehow. Streaks of darker gray flowed across the surface, the knife taking on a sort of thick milky quality. The puncture sealed itself over before she could get a better look.

Kaimei could feel the dark flow release inside her, crashing through the walls of her stomach and up her chest. Within a minute, any semblance of the dagger was gone, the matter sucked inside her without a trace. The pain remained. Veins that she had never knew existed popped up from her arms and legs, her neck, her face. She went limp again. This invader, this poison, was hitting her quicker than the nanites could repair. She could feel her consciousness lifting, her eyes beginning the slow roll back into her head without the cushion of hallucination to aid the process.

As the veins began to pop open the surface of her skin, the streams of color poured out again, very tangible reds and blues seeping into the floorboards. Kaimei wished she could see inside again as the virus broke down her body piece by piece. She turned to watch her fans as they watched her collapse, hoping their adoration would provide what the dopamine wasn’t, but the screen had frozen.

Little by little, the faces of the crowd shifted themselves like a slider puzzle, reorganizing themselves into familiar features and shadows. Her eyes went wide, the eyelids deteriorating off her face. Ikiro’s visage emerged from the thousands of observers and a smile oozed across his face. His correspondence, thus, was terse.

“You’re getting there,” he said. “But you’re not there yet.”

This latest one, this problem, was like the others; an older woman, two months shy of 25 but with the upper arms of a 19-year-old. And like the others, she was drawn in by Ripper’s natural charisma. The boy was a prodigy of sexual magnetism, his mysterious eyes piercing the souls of women like a knife slowly pushing into a balloon, except without the pop.

That he was three had not yet come up in conversation, and he appreciated that. Normally, it was the focal point; conquest after conquest breaking down in tears during post coital snuggling with vocal attempts at self-consolation. “You’re too young!” they’d cry. Or “I can’t do this!” Or “my husband is waiting in the car!” But Diane seemed utterly unphased by his youth or the questionable legality of the situation.

“I’ve had younger,” she’d say between puffs of the giant novelty cigar she would occasionally pull out and wiggle around by her mouth. It was said as a point of pride, and Ripper imagined her sitting down with a checklist numbered one through a hundred, slowly ticking off each year as she slept her way through a century. For a three year old, it was a surprisingly abstract thought.

Her cavalier attitude made the sex all the more interesting. She would lay in bed motionless, sometimes half asleep, letting Ripper slip and slide his way around her body. It was a freedom he was unaccustomed to, as most women ravaged him before he could make a move, tearing through pair after pair of OshKosh B’Gosh overalls with a wild abandon normally reserved for hungry cocker spaniels. Now he had independence, and the gratification could come at his pace for once. They made love all night long, really hard, and long past Ripper’s bed time.

Ripper instinctually woke up at 10:15 the morning after and began to write his obligatory thank you note, courteous without being a tease. But he stopped himself, unable to muster the words that would push away this miracle woman. A single tear welled up in his eye, the first of its kind not brought about by a temper tantrum or an accidental poop. Emotions like these were for five year olds, he thought. Not him.

Wiping away the remnants of feeling, Ripper noticed the pile of sheets at his feet where Diane was supposed to be. And then he felt it; the gentle scratch of ribbon around his ankle and the wet rose stem that was almost as long as the leg to which it was attached. Diane knew his tricks, or had stumbled across the same foolproof way out on her own. Either way, she broke his little heart without so much as a word.

Now he knew what it felt like. Ripper grabbed his favorite stuffed doggy, rolled over and, finally letting his age catch up to him, cried like a baby.

That the hat had been left with such literal abandon was unsurprising, as Matt often left objects unattended in their respective baths to prune, which had thus far ruined all of his living room furniture and a good portion of his slack collection. The slack bath broke down from overheating before he could finish the damage.

At hour two, the top hat began showing symptoms of shrivel.

At hour three, the hat had absorbed most of the water from the hat bath, leaving the crumpled corpse of the once illustrious chapeau a soggy mess that not even a hobo would salvage.

At hour seven, Matt returned from his frisbee golf tournament to find his raisin of a top hat, not so much bathed as manslaughtered through negligence. He skimmed the hat bath and the hat bath box, unsure as he always was with the baths as to where it all had gone awry.

Defeated, he dropped his frisbee in the disc bath and took a seven hour nap.

Significant reward offered, to be paid in full at time of return unless I don’t have cash on me, at which point reward will be forfeited to dog’s owner (e.g. myself). My children, who I do not have, thank you.

“Alright, Batman. Listen up. If you can’t solve this riddle, I’ll detonate that entire steam train full of women!”

Batman said nothing in a really menacing way, but he also looked thoughtful. Like real “brain-working” thoughtful.

“Riddle me this,” the Riddler said with a cackle. “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

Batman let it sit for a moment.

“Ummm…hm. Okay,” he said, coughing a little. “Excuse me. Hang on. Why did the…chicken? Cross the road? Hurm. Uhhhh…no, hang on. Was his brother on the other side? Wait wait wait, no no no, don’t blow it up, that’s not my real answer. Guhhh, think! You got this, Batman. Chicken. Road. Chickenroadddd…that didn’t work. Can I use scrap paper? I’m going to use scrap paper, that’s not cheating. Okay, there’s a chicken and…a…road. Draw the line across there…chicken’s over there…hm. Jesus, what the hell is this riddle? This thing is a doozy! Can I ask questions? Okay, no, I can do this. The chicken technically shouldn’t be by a road because it’s a coop bird, which means someone…left it? But why is it crossing? Is that philosophical? Is the chicken dead and you mean it’s crossing into the afterlife? That’s probably too morbid. Ugh! This riddle! Ummm…okay, I’m going to go with…uh…”

Batman bit his thumb and squinched his eyebrows.

“The chicken was…getting lunch?”

Two hundred and fourteen women were found dead next to a bunch of burning hot steel train scraps later that morning.

I shit you not, though, I’m looking over at the horizon and I will be damned if that is not a unicorn. Do you see it? You can see the silhouette against the sunset…there’s a horse’s body and a unicorn’s horn. It has to be a unicorn, right? Agh, why didn’t I bring my camera today?! I had to charge the battery after I photoblogged that charity mini-golf tournament for Susan last weekend. This is so much more valuable than hundreds of shots of mini-golf! So much more valuableeeee.

Hang on, is it coming over here? Don’t look at it, don’t make eye contact. If these unicorns are anything like wolves, they might get intimidated by eye contact or see it as a sign of aggression. Christ, I hadn’t even considered the possible wolf connection before. They could be like wolves in so many other dangerous ways. This could be the tip of the wolf iceberg. No. No, we can’t think like that. Just don’t look at it.

Oh God, I can hear it whinny. I can hear it–hey! Wait a minute. Unicorns don’t whinny. Horses whinny! Is that…that’s a toilet paper roll on its head! Son of a bitch, David, did you do this again? Is this your doing? Well cock me in the balls. No kidding. Yeah, no, you got me. Again. That’s a different horse, too, isn’t it? Where do you get all these horses?

Fine, yes, okay. You got me. You can stop. Fool me once and then fool me twice and I’m an idiot both times. That’s the saying. I really wish you’d tell me where you get all those horses, though, because I cannot for the life of me figure that out. You’re from the city. I’ll tell you what really screwed me up, it was putting the horse off in the distance like that against the sunset. It’s way harder to tell what’s real and what isn’t when it’s silhouetted against a beautiful sunset.

I’ll be honest, I’m glad I don’t have my camera now. Except that is a pretty beautiful horse. That probably still would have made for a decent photo. Shit, now I wish I DID have my camera again. It’s like, when am I going to get another photo op with a horse, you know? You thought you were fooling me, but you were almost doing me a favor, except then you didn’t cause I still forgot my camera.

Seriously, David, just…where did you get all the horses, because–HEY! IS THAT A UNICORN PULLING A HORSE-DRAWN CARRIAGE?! FIND ME A CAMERA! THIS GAME IS ON!

I took my time, dramatically slamming the hood with a devil-may-care flourish and strutting all the way back to my designated hole in the passenger side backseat. Everyone in the car was silent, their eyes (and, by association, their brains) unsure of what to say or do for fear that any sudden actions may somehow reverse the miracle of my idiot savantitude.

Without a word, my brother, a neurosurgeon, and my older sister, an astronaut, scooched over so I could squeeze back into my lot. My mother, a popular mystery novelist, stared at me through the side mirror as my father, the inventor of the VHS tape, turned the key in the ignition and picked up down the road as if we had never even stopped.

For the next ten miles, everyone tried desperately to avoid glancing in my direction and the silence remained palpable, the pressure of comprehension straining them too much to attempt outward communication.

Finally, my father screeched the car to a halt on the dusty shoulder of the highway. He shut down the engine and turned around, the first to break the embargo on direct eye contact. I had forgotten how brown his pupils get when his eyeballs are bulging.

“Alright, goddamn it. How did you fix the damn car?!”

“I don’t know, dad.” I said with a wink. “Maybe I’m just good at something after all.”

He shook his head, unwilling or unable to accept an explanation so banal for what just happened. He turned the key again and the Sentry coughed back to life, still fixed and undeniably functional by my blessed hands.

And then the car exploded.

“Where eez theh frausteeng?!” screamed Chef Jean Paul. “Cheffe Meechelle! Thee cack muste be frausted beefore it cools if we arre to acheeve the prauper densitee!”

“It’s here, Chef Jean Paul! I have the whole vat prepared!”

“Eet ees white?”

“Yes, Chef Jean Paul! Bright and clear!”

Chef Jean Paul sniffed a glance into the vat, scanning it for the slightest hint of Michel’s incompetence. Nothing. Nothing obvious.

“Hmmph,” he hmmphed. “Stirre it waunce more to be sure eet ees pearfecte. Madame President weel eexpect nahthing less.”

The masking glob was weaker than Michel had expected. Red was bleeding through at a crawl for now, but any stirring would blow the whole thing. Michel spun the vat out of Jean Paul’s sight and reached for his chef’s spoon. A quick evaluation of the options followed.

To murder Chef Jean Paul as a means of hiding his mistake would only provoke more attention, and likely turn more foods red, which would in turn require more cover-up murdering. The kitchen was on the basement level, which meant no windows were available for a proper escape, and he had just used the bathroom a scant five minutes before, which made that excuse to leave downright unusable.

“Stir eet!” Chef Jean Paul belted. “We are late alreedy!”

Michel plunged the wooden spoon into the frosting and stirred. Just as he expected, the red pock split and spread like wildfire around the vat, morphing the pure white ever-so-slightly into a gentle pink. All told, it was actually rather pretty. Much prettier than the white, actually. Against the creamy tan of the unfrosted cake, it would make a wonderful complement and provide a more inviting contrast than a generic blank slate would. Chef Jean Paul was a fool. Pink was playing gangbusters.

He stirred and stirred, pleased with the unexpected byproduct of his ineptitude. But as he stirred (and stirred), the pink grew fainter again, swallowed back into the depths of the thick white frosting. As quickly as it had come, it was gone again. Back to stupid, boring white.

“Here,” Michel said, thrusting the vat into Chef Jean Paul’s pasty arms. “Clear and bright, just as you requested.”

Another sniffed glance.

“Eet is bare-ly perfect, but eet weel have to do.”

Jean Paul slopped a batch onto the cake, easing the frosting over every visible inch of confection. The whole thing was done before Chef Michel even realized it was starting.

With the enthusiasm of a dying wildebeest, Michel loaded the finished work onto a gleaming silver cart and pushed it down the hall into the ballroom. Fanfare followed him all the way to its resting point by the other desserts in the buffet, guests lauding the ingenuity and inspiration of Chef Jean Paul’s latest creation. Jean Paul himself wasn’t far behind to capture the accolades as they fell.

Michel left the cake to its audience and slunked back to the kitchen, quiet and empty. He cleaned the bowls and the spoons, swept the floor clear and organized the ingredients back to their places, save for the small vial of red food dye which shouldn’t have even been out to begin with.

He pocketed it gently and flicked off the light switch. Maybe tomorrow pink.