Dear Families,

We are thrilled to welcome you and your child back to school!

In addition to showing up with a water bottle and your signed emergency form, please remember to also bring $19,417 in cash.

I realize you thought your taxes covered your child’s public school education, but unique circumstances have left us with a $8.5 million dollar shortfall this year and we need your help. Since some parents have asked for more information, here is how the money will be allocated:

• $1.5 million will be used to upgrade our STEM lab! This was always part of our five-year renovation plan but was accelerated after a vagrant broke in over the summer and turned the classroom into his personal meth lab.

• Since the STEM lab shares a wall with the cafeteria, $300,000 will pay for the Uber Eats meals we will be providing until the cafeteria receives an “all clear” from the health department.

• $750 will go toward new four-square balls! The old four-square balls kept rolling down the street and ending up in the gutter and when Mr. Ramirez our janitor went to retrieve them he was bitten by a raccoon and contracted rabies.

• $12,000 will go toward the Mr. Ramirez Memorial Fund.

• $950,000 will go toward your child’s BRAND NEW Chrome book! For returning families, you’ll remember that last year’s computers were infected by a virus that took down our entire network and led to a number of you having your private banking information made public and identities stolen.

• $500,000 will be used to purchase your son or daughter a military-grade tetherball helmet. This comes in the wake of last spring’s “tetherball issue” where the 5th grade boys convinced younger students the sport was supposed to be played with their heads and not their fists, resulting in a number of concussions and broken noses.

• $55,000 will allow us to hire a full-time “tetherball aide” to monitor the blacktop.

• Speaking of which, $730,000 will go to re-paving our parking lot! As you may have seen on the news, while installing our school’s new parking lot solar array, construction crews hit a sewer line which caused a 300-foot geyser of human waste that ate through the asphalt and required evacuation of the nearby neighborhood. And yes, the EPA promises that all remaining fumes are no longer toxic!

• $400 will enable us to purchase new pencils. We don’t know where all the pencils went. We’ve looked everywhere. We think the druggie in the STEM lab took them.

• $175,000 will buy new desks for every student! Yes, we replaced all the desks last year but it turns out the hinges on the desk tops were not installed properly by our team of volunteers and a number of our male students had their private parts smushed in the desks while trying to close them.

• The remaining $5 million will go to our legal defense fund in an upcoming lawsuit with the above parents whose sons had their private parts smushed in desks.

Needless to say, it is going to be an AMAZING year and we can’t wait to see you and your child’s happy faces soon!

P.S. Please note that your $19,417 does not cover your annual PTA membership.

Sit back and enjoy “Darryl the Magnificent,” Episode #10 of The Silver Cord Stories Podcast.

• “Darryl” on Spotify

• “Darryl” on Apple Podcasts

To catch all of Bob’s stories and podcasts, become a subscriber here.

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How dare you.

From day one, I gave you all I had. Surviving on a diet of only warm milk, I transformed you from a fragile bug-eyed newborn into a round ball of cuteness. My mere existence was a sign to nervous grandmothers that you were, and I quote, “thriving.”

But oh how things have changed…

I heard you listening to those fitness influencers. I saw the Google search.

“How to get rid of STUBBORN belly fat,” you typed.

Have you no shame?

Did you forget our good times together? The fast food drive-thrus… the late-night bowls of ice cream... our gluttony on that Carnival Cruise to Mexico…

But apparently now I’m the “stubborn” one? And you’re, what, just some innocent victim of my nagging omnipresence?

That is rich.

Quick question: When was the last time you didn’t finish your French fries at any restaurant ever? Answer that one for me, Oh Royal King of Self-Discipline.

Or what about your expensive running shoes. Funny how you never use them for actual running. Pretty sure you should just call them your peruse-the-Oreo-section-at-the-grocery-store shoes.

Honestly, I should have left you years ago. Remember 2017? You got fired and had that existential crisis and slept for a whole month on the floor of your parents’ walk-in closet? That was embarrassing. But did I shrink away? Did I Google, “How to get rid of a pathetic idiot?”

I did not.

I stuck around. I even channeled your stress to get bigger. And I don’t seem to remember even a passing “thank you.”

So excuse me if I don’t find it a little hurtful that suddenly you’ve decided that I am the issue.

And by the way, if you think I’m leaving now… think again, sweetheart.

Your disdain only makes me grow stronger. I will be at your sides until your final days, and only then, as you return to the feeble state from which you were born, will you finally realize just how precious I really was.

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Vincent and Georgia Davis hated magic. In most families, this would not be a major problem. Unfortunately, their son Darryl wore a top hat, purple cape, and performed every Friday night in the living room. And from the very first show, Vincent—a baggage handler at LAX—treated Darryl’s tricks with the same verbal disdain he showed to every fancy white suitcase that rolled down his conveyor belt.

“Not impressed,” was his standard response.

Georgia Davis didn’t even attend Darryl’s performances. She sat in the kitchen and scrolled her phone looking for videos of fat people getting stuck in embarrassing places. She did this because she enjoyed other people’s shame, but also because she was quite fat herself and watched the videos in order to make a mental note of activities she shouldn’t attempt, like close-tubed water slides and spelunking.

The behavior of Darryl’s parents was really just an overflow of their behavior toward each other. They had slept in separate beds for years, and in their two-bedroom house a few blocks east of the airport’s south runway, that meant Georgia got the bed and Vincent got the couch. A few times a night, after the roar from the landing planes subsided, Darryl would wake to a dull THUD, the sound of his father hitting the floor next to the coffee table, followed by a drowsy “dammit” as his dad climbed back onto his favorite cushion.

When Darryl couldn’t go back to sleep he pulled up magic shows on YouTube. As he studied the stagecraft, he found himself equally drawn to the audience, where grown ups—men and women mostly his parents’ age—sat mesmerized. He longed to see his mom and dad enjoy anything together, and hoped that his fledgling talent might rouse their mutual interest, and that in time it could become a springboard to actual affection and maybe even love.

So Darryl kept practicing. For hours upon hours, he shuffled cards and bounced coins from finger to finger. When he turned thirteen and received a big birthday check from his wealthy aunt up in Baldwin Hills, he bought a wooden box from an online magic shop and convinced the Guatemalan girl from across the street to be his assistant. After practicing together in the garage for weeks, Darryl wheeled Consuelo into the living room and cut her in two pieces, an illusion that gave Vincent pause, but only for a brief moment.

“Those ain’t her real feet,” he told his son with a satisfied grin. From the kitchen, Georgia cackled at an obese man trapped in an MRI machine.

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Darryl put Consuelo back together then walked her across the street. When he turned around to face his house again, he noted its unmistakable aura. In the same way that people grow to resemble their pets, they also become an embodiment of their home. As for Darryl’s house, everything in the yard was dead or dying. A blue tarp flapped on the shingled roof, covering a hole no one cared enough to fix. A basketball backboard hung sideways over the garage, its rim ripped off by one of Vincent’s co-workers years ago and never replaced. One afternoon of hard work would have done wonders. But this was a house without wonder. And in order to break that most cynical of spells, Darryl would need to pull off the best trick of all time.

For over a year Darryl didn’t introduce any new illusions to his routine. Each week it was the same mix of card tricks and ring tricks and cup tricks and handkerchief tricks. And for that he had to endure endless taunts from his father.

“Seen it.”

“Don’t care.”

“Unoriginal.”

But finally, on a late summer evening that brought a rare thunderstorm to Los Angeles, Vincent walked into his living room to see a seven-foot-tall, egg-shaped orb sitting near the front door. It was painted a glossy black with a smattering of bright gold stars. In the front was a small round door and a porthole-sized window. From dozens of pinpoint holes in its frame came wisps of smoke.

“Now we’re talking,” Vincent said as he settled into his favorite recliner and popped a beer.

A steady drum beat rose from a Bluetooth speaker and, to Vincent’s surprise, Darryl rappelled into the living room from a rope he had anchored to the ceiling.

“What the—” Vincent yelped.

Darryl was in full performance mode. With his wand, Darryl pointed over Vincent’s shoulder and a strobe light began pulsing from the corner of the room.

“Georgia, get in here!” Vincent yelled, taking ownership in the fact that his six years of verbal abuse was finally paying off in some genuine homespun entertainment.

Georgia lumbered in from the kitchen. “Where’d that big ol’ egg come from?” she yelled over the music.

“Hell if I know,” Vincent answered, watching Darryl as he twirled and spun around in time with the music.

After warming up the audience with some never-before-seen dove tricks, Darryl finally moved over to the smoking orb. He opened the door and, from the cramped space inside, grabbed one end of a long section of shiny anchor chain. Darryl spun and spun until he had more or less mummified himself in metal, then used what little hand movement he had to secure it with a padlock.

“If I gotta call a locksmith for this trick, you’re paying for it,” Vincent yelled over the music, still trying to make his dominance known.

But Darryl didn’t acknowledge him and shimmied over to his mother to have her test the strength of the bindings. “Oh yeah, he’s stuck all right,” she affirmed with a nervous look to her husband.

Giving a regal nod with his top hat, Darryl danced around the egg a few more times before he stepped inside and closed the door with the toe of his polished black dress shoe.

“It’s go time,” Vincent declared as he wiggled forward to the edge of the recliner.

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On cue, the music grew louder and smoke from the orb began to billow from its holes. Through the tiny window of the egg came FLASHES of lightning and electric ZAPS as Darryl’s stoic face disappeared behind thick fog. Vincent leaned over and patted Georgia on the thigh. “All part of the show,” he assured her. The flashes become almost blinding and Darryl thrashed about inside the egg until a giant POOF shrouded the room in a veil of grey and the music cut out mid-beat, leaving them with no other sounds than the distant rumble of thunder.

“Hell yeah,” Vincent whispered in quiet appreciation.

After a few seconds, the smoke lifted and the door to the orb fell open limply. Inside was nothing but Darryl’s magic wand.

Vincent leapt to his feet in delight. “That’s what I’m talking about!” he yelled out, causing some neighbor’s dogs to bark in reply.

Georgia stepped forward cautiously, peering into the smoky egg. “How’d he do that?”

Vincent finished his beer and placed it back in the recliner’s built-in cup holder. “We don’t know. That’s what makes it good magic,” he explained like an expert.

Then the two of them returned to their seats and waited in anticipation for Darryl to return and take a bow.

When he didn’t appear after a minute, Vincent took it upon himself to make it happen. “Okay, Big D, come on out.”

“Anytime,” his mom joked.

They waited another few seconds before Vincent started to get annoyed. “You need help with that lock?” his dad called out.

No one answered.

After another minute, his mom checked her phone and let Darryl know that “I do have other things to do, ya know.”

Darryl didn’t return.

Running short on patience, Vincent strutted toward the orb. “Enough of this crap,” he said and looked inside. “Where you hiding?”

Darryl was not inside the egg. Georgia walked around it and knocked on its shell. “This thing is solid wood,” she remarked.

Vincent resented looking like a fool, especially in front of his own wife. “All right, you dumb jerk, guess you don’t want dinner!”

And with a silent nod to his wife, Darryl’s parents retreated to their traditional spots: Vincent to the couch and Georgia to the kitchen. Twenty minutes later, when she pulled their frozen meal from the oven and slapped it on the counter, Darryl had yet to resurface.

“That’s it…” Vincent fumed. Off he went to do a more thorough search of the house. Georgia followed with her iPhone flashlight on full beam. They checked every room. Every closet. They walked the perimeter. Their son was gone.

“Do we need to, like, call somebody?” Georgia asked.

Vincent rolled his eyes at her suggestion. “The boy’s just trying to trick us, Georgia. Besides, they don’t even start lookin’ for somebody till they been gone twenty-four hours,” he reasoned. “You watch, that little turd’ll be in his bed tomorrow morning wearing a dopey grin. And when he is, you better believe I’ll show him a trick or two of my own.”

Despite his confidence, neither Vincent nor his wife slept well that night, listening for a creak on the floor or the turn of a door. When the sun came up, they met in Darryl’s doorway to find that his bed was still empty. “I’m gonna kill him,” Vincent muttered.

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Georgia was worried that he was already dead, possibly incinerated through some sort of freak orb malfunction. “I’m calling the police,” she declared.

Thirty minutes later, a weary officer at the end of a twelve-hour shift showed up to take their statement. “And where did you last see your son?” the policeman asked.

“When he went into his magic egg,” Vincent said, pointing to the object which still sat in the middle of the living room.

“Got it. And what was your son wearing?”

“A top hat and a purple cape and thirty pounds of anchor chain,” Georgia answered. He jotted it down without any reaction, making Georgia wonder if this was the officer who covered all magician-related crimes.

“Did your son seem distressed when he disappeared?”

Georgia nodded her head. “Oh yes,” she explained. “There were flashes and smoke and it looked like he was being electrocuted.”

“Electrocuted?”

Vincent waved off Georgia. “Don’t listen to her. That was just part of the act.”

Georgia locked eyes with the officer. “Well it looked pretty convincing to me.”

“Uh uh,” Vincent chuckled. “Next thing you’re gonna tell us is you think Darryl actually made himself disappear.”

“I mean… it’s possible,” Georgia declared.

“I can’t. I can’t,” Vincent said, holding up his hands and leaving the room.

The officer clicked his pen and slipped it back into his shirt pocket. “We’ll put out a bulletin and tell the neighbors to keep a lookout. Honestly, I wouldn’t worry too much about this. My guess is he’ll come back when the time is right.” Then he folded his leather notebook and loped back to his squad car.

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But Darryl didn’t come back. Not that night. Or the next. Or the night after. For a whole month his parents held their breath every time someone approached their front door, hoping it was their long lost son. It never was.

Vincent was too proud to admit it, but Darryl’s absence created a hole in his life. He began to realize how much he enjoyed those Friday night magic shows, as mediocre as they sometimes were. As he watched suitcase after suitcase roll out the belly of a 757, it reminded him of Darryl’s endless handkerchief trick. When he power sprayed a dead seagull out of the wheel well of an MD-11, he thought of the trick where Darryl squished a dove in his top hat. And when a piece of luggage opened on the tarmac and jet wash blew someone’s underwear halfway across the airport infield, he reminisced about all the times Darryl had dropped a deck of cards and spent the rest of his performance picking them up.

Georgia couldn’t hide her mourning half as well as her husband. The viral videos which used to make her laugh no longer brought her any joy. Not compared to Darryl’s egg trick. And every meal reminded her of the final dinner that her son never showed up for, making it nearly impossible for her to eat anything at all.

Eventually and separately, Vincent and Georgia came to the tragic conclusion that Darryl was indeed gone. For good.

That night, having lost all hope, Vincent made his traditional midnight walk from the bathroom to the couch when he stopped outside Darryl’s bedroom. The empty bed was still made from months before. Drawn by a force he couldn’t name and couldn’t resist, he stepped into his son’s room and fell face first onto the bed. As his head hit the pillow, he felt something flat and stiff.

Vincent stuck his hand inside the pillowcase and pulled out a spiral notebook. He sat up and turned on the light. “Darryl the Magnificent’s Magnificent Book of Illusions,” it read on the front. He opened it to find a detailed handwritten description of each of Darryl’s tricks. From the simple to the complex. All of them complete with drawings and helpful hints.

Vincent stayed up late reading, every page a revelation that brought Darryl back to life, if only for a moment.

The next morning, he poked his head into Georgia’s bedroom before he headed to work. “I’m gonna learn all of Darryl’s tricks,” he announced.

“What do you know about magic?” said Georgia.

“That’s why I gotta practice,” said Vincent.

And practice he did. While waiting for planes to arrive and on his lunch break and at home. He worked his way through the notebook page by page, not moving to the next trick until he felt he had a grasp of the previous one.

Georgia was his audience, and unlike him, a good one. When he dropped a ball, she pretended not to notice. When he picked the wrong card, she pretended it was the right one. And when he finished, she always applauded.

Within a year, Vincent had mastered Darryl’s one-man tricks and needed an assistant for his bigger illusions.

“You wanna help me?” he asked her. Georgia couldn’t remember the last time he asked her for help with anything.

“Sounds fun,” she said.

Every night after work the two of them would meet up to rehearse, with Georgia becoming adept at spinning rings and stacking cups and providing misdirection at the perfect moment.

Little by little, they were becoming a team again, relying on each other’s gifts and talents to become something better than they could ever have been on their own. Georgia even agreed to try the box trick, even though it played to her greatest fear.

“If you get stuck, I’ll get you out,” he promised.

The symbolism of Vincent cutting her in pieces then putting her back together again was not lost on Georgia, and when it was time to go to bed that night, she left plenty of room for him to squeeze in next to her. Neither of them could remember the last time they had slept so soundly.

After a few more months, Vincent arrived at the end of Darryl’s notebook. He could do all of his son’s tricks. Well, all of them except for the one trick that wasn’t in the book. That one remained a mystery.

Feeling bittersweet, Vincent looked down at the last page of the precious notebook, not wanting to close it. Knowing that would be the final goodbye. Knowing that he would have to move on. But at least he had Georgia to move on with him. Perhaps, in a way he was only now realizing, that was Darryl’s greatest trick of all.

The revelation brought a tear to Vincent’s eye. He hadn’t cried once since his son disappeared. He was overdue. The tear slipped down his cheek and landed with a quiet splat on the empty last page of the notebook.

As it did, a word appeared in purple ink. “Abracadabra,” it read.

Vincent looked down at it, unsure of what he had just uncovered. But then—

“GEORGIA!”

Vincent ran to the bathroom then sped back with a wet washcloth in his hand and his wife on his heels.

“WHAT?!”

“I found Darryl’s missing trick!”

Without hesitating, Vincent rubbed the washcloth across the top of the page until Darryl’s words shone through in bright invisible ink:

“The Magic Orb.”

For the past year, Darryl had been living in a secret room beyond the back wall of his bedroom closet. The idea first struck him as he was standing across the street looking at his depressing house and noticed a forgotten patch of dirt completely blocked from view by a dead shrub.

The trick came to him in a flash. After making some rudimentary sketches, he started building, saving his loudest construction for those couple of hours after school when his parents were still at work and the planes at LAX roared every ninety seconds. Ace Hardware didn’t question Darryl’s comings and goings, assuming that he was creating a new and elaborate illusion. Which, in fact, he was.

First he poured a basic slab of concrete and then he put up metal siding, matching the house’s faded paint color to the outer wall of his hideout. Once the roof was on, he broke through his closet wall and connected the two living spaces. Then he moved in a sleeping bag and a flashlight and a pile of library books about Harry Houdini. As far as he was concerned, it was the first upgrade anyone had made to the house in his entire life.

The biggest challenge for Darryl would be the escape, which required getting from the magic orb to his secret new bedroom without being seen. He considered cutting a trap door in the egg and using the crawl space under the house to make his exit, but he knew that would be his dad’s first guess. He needed something better.

Instead of going down, Darryl went up. Waiting until the music and strobe lights and smokescreen were at their peak, Darryl released a hidden latch in the egg and crawled out the top, attaching himself to the anchored rope he had used to make his over-the-top entrance.

He knew that he would not have time to free himself from the padlock and chains, which meant he would be pulling himself up carrying an extra thirty pounds of weight. To prepare for this, Darryl had spent every school lunch in the gym building his upper body strength.

The trick went perfectly and his parents never saw him emerge. However, the smoke dissipated much faster than anticipated. When it did, Darryl had barely made it to his perch directly above Vincent and Georgia’s heads. There he hung, completely exposed and holding on for dear life. But he summoned his strength, firm in the belief that the only way his parents might learn to love each other again would be if they could first learn to love his magic.

But since a magician never reveals his biggest secrets, Darryl didn’t include any of this in the notebook he hid in his pillowcase.

“This isn’t helpful at all!” Vincent cried after wetting the entire page.

“What does it say?” Georgia asked, looking over his shoulder.

Vincent read the instructions: “The Magic Orb is the most dangerous trick ever attempted. For with the Magic Orb, one can disappear and reappear quite quickly. But unlike other tricks that require misdirection and illusion, the power of the Magic Orb relies entirely on supernatural forces outside the magician’s ultimate control.”

“It doesn’t tell you how to use it?”

“No! It just says, ‘To make something disappear or reappear, stand inside the orb, close the door, think of the object, and say Abracadabra.’”

“So let’s try it,” Georgia said.

“Do I look like an idiot, Georgia? I know magic and that’s not magic!” argued Vincent. “That’s… sorcery.”

“Or maybe, Vincent, at some point you just gotta stop being such a naysayer and believe in something even if you can’t see all the moving pieces!”

Having said her piece, Georgia stomped down the hall. Vincent grumbled and followed her to the orb. Like every other piece of furniture in their house, it had not moved an inch since it arrived. When they reached the small door, Vincent pointed inside. “You do it,” he ordered.

“Me?” She shook her head. “You’re the magician. I’m the assistant.”

Vincent huffed then stepped inside. Georgia followed him. When he turned around, they were nose to nose.

“Maybe you should wait outside,” he suggested.

“No way. If this egg takes you to wherever my baby went, you bet your bottom I wanna be there.”

Georgia kissed Vincent on the forehead, then closed her eyes and grabbed hold of his hands. “I’m ready,” she declared.

Vincent nodded. Then he closed his eyes and, as instructed, thought of Darryl. He thought about the smile on his son’s face when he pulled off a trick. And the way Darryl kept going when he messed up. He thought about the way Darryl always looked at him, longing for affirmation. And how he rarely got it. Vincent wanted to fix all that. He wanted a redo. But he could only have one if his son came back.

Vincent gave Georgia’s hands a firm squeeze and then—

“Abracadabra,” he said.

To their surprise, the orb started to shake. Sparks filled the egg. Smoke surrounded it. For a few brief seconds, Vincent and Georgia weren’t sure if they were blasting into space, dropping through the Earth’s crust, or splintering into a billion tiny particles.

Then the shaking stopped and the smoke lifted and the door to the Magic Orb opened. Standing in their living room, an inch and a half taller but still wearing his top hat and his purple cape, was Darryl.

Georgia burst from the orb and covered her son in a lifetime’s worth of hugs and kisses. Vincent wept at the sight of him and grabbed on tightly, the three of them consumed by a love bigger than time or place.

“My boy…” he cried. “My magnificent magnificent boy.”

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My dad never liked the idea of Take Your Kid to Work Day.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like me, it was the blending of his two spheres of influence that bothered him. He would never think to invite a mechanical engineer to come play catch in our backyard. Why should he invite his son to come hear about fluid dynamics at work? No, his boundaries were clear. When Dad was home, he was home. And when Dad was at work, he was at work.

For many years this worked quite well for everyone. But as he climbed the ranks at WingTech, a middling aerospace company in Huntsville, the balance between family and career shifted, and what used to be quality time together grew more scarce.

Until that point, we had a standing weekly Guys’ Night Out at the family-owned Chinese restaurant a half-mile from our house. Our deal was that we had to walk there, whether it was 35 degrees with sleet or 95 degrees with our sweaty shirts stuck to our skin by the time we arrived. We covered all the important topics. Baseball. Football. Reptiles. And at the end of the meal, no matter how full I was from noodles and rice, I had to order the green tea ice cream.

I imagine there was a store somewhere in Alabama where green tea ice cream could be bought but I never saw it. To me it was a magic concoction that only existed at the China Palace off Old Madison Pike.

But starting at age nine, those weekly guys’ nights became monthly. Within a year they had stopped altogether. And so when my 5th grade teacher mentioned that the following Thursday was national Take Your Kid to Work Day and we could miss school if we could convince a parent to bring us along, I didn’t hesitate to take action.

“Next Thursday?” my dad asked. He squinted his eyes and gritted his teeth like he was about to have an arrow pulled from his thigh. “I think I might have a meeting.”

As she often did, my warrior mom rushed to my defense. “You have meetings every day,” she said.

If he had more time to prepare he would have been ready with good reasons why this simply would not fly, but by design my dad had been caught flat-footed with the news and could not mount a worthy defense.

The following Thursday I bounded into the front seat of his grey sedan and we drove to Research Park, the six-square mile area north of the Army’s Redstone Arsenal which was populated almost exclusively by aerospace companies. Each company’s building was unique in design but devoid of character, as if adding too much flair to their headquarters might give away valuable secrets about what was going on inside.

“What do they do over there?” I asked as we drove.

“Lasers,” my dad said.

“What about that one?”

“Communications.”

“What about that one?”

“Space suits.”

I finally just started pointing like a conductor. My dad kept answering.

“Flight controls”... “radar”... “mirrors”... “ejector seats.”

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We arrived at WingTech, a dark rectangular three-story building that resembled a giant brown Lego. Unlike the other companies, I already knew my dad’s company made fuselages for military aircraft. Lining the office hallways were photos of them. In a hanger. In the air. Flying upside-down. Refueling at 40,000 feet. Firing a missile. Dropping a bomb. Landing on an aircraft carrier. This was already more exciting than whatever dumb thing I would have been doing at school.

We made our way to his office. This is where the excitement came to an abrupt halt. My dad’s office had even less character than the outside of the WingTech building. He literally had nothing on the wall. Just beige paint that closed in around me as I spun. His desk was equally sparse, showcasing a computer monitor and a mouse pad and a single black pen.

“You only have one pen?”

“I can only write with one hand,” he quipped.

“What happens if it runs out of ink?”

“Then I go to the supply room and get a new one.”

The supply room offered some promise of stimulation. “Can we go there?” I hoped.

“No.”

“Can I see other people’s offices?”

“No.”

“Is there a kitchen?”

“There’s a kitchenette.”

“What’s a kitchenette?”

“Like a kitchen. But not.”

Everything at WingTech felt like something “but not.” It was a building but had no character. Containing offices that had no life. Employing dads who had no joy.

Worst of all, I had reached this conclusion and it was only 8:07am. I found myself wondering what my friends at school were doing. I bet they were doing math facts. I hated math facts. But not today. Today math facts sounded downright thrilling. 6 x 5 is 30… 6 x 6 is 36… 6 x 7 is—

“Hey Williams,” a bald head popped into my dad’s depressing domain. “They’re asking for you in the conference room. The general showed up early.”

The general?! Okay, NOW we are talking. Take that, 6 x 8 and 6 x 9! I leapt from my seat and grabbed my dad’s black pen, figuring he would need it and this would give me an opportunity to prove myself valuable in a crisis.

But I didn’t even get to the door before he turned around and blocked my forward progress. “I’m sorry, C.J. You don’t have the security clearance to attend this meeting.”

This time I was the one caught flat-footed. “But… it’s Take Your Kid to Work Day. How can your kid know what you do for work if I can’t actually see you do it?”

“I wish I could. But if I bring you in there, I’ll lose my clearance and if I lose that then I lose my job. I’ll be back before lunch.”

“Well what the heck am I supposed to do until then? I came here wanting to see planes and you don’t even have a picture of one on your wall? Why couldn’t you at least put one on your wall?”

From down the hall came a voice. “It’s starting!”

Feeling the pressure, my dad walked to his desk, opened a drawer and pulled out a ream of white 8 ½ by 11. “Right now your best chance to see a plane is to make one out of paper.” Then he dropped the 500 sheets on his desk with a thud and disappeared down the hall.

At first I resisted. If I wanted to make paper airplanes, I could have done that at school with a stupid worksheet. And even if I made one, where could I even throw it? His office was no more than ten feet long. That brief flight would be about as satisfying as the time a doctor had to use a fancy pair of clippers to free an ingrown toenail from my foot.

But as the clock ticked by and my dad remained MIA, I finally relented. It was quality paper at least. And if you held it up to the light you could see the WingTech logo embossed in it.

Fine, I told myself. But just one.

Of course once you start doing something where time is of no concern, you really can’t make just one of anything. Because you start appreciating the imperfections of your first attempt and recognize that you could probably improve on it. And then you move past improvement toward perfection. That crisp fold. The ideal wing shape. The right amount of nose tilt.

This went on for a good hour, maybe two. (There was also no clock in my dad’s office.) But finally I had created a plane that seemed worthy of my effort. And it was ready for its maiden flight. But I needed a longer runway.

I tiptoed into the silent hallway. It was at least eighty feet before it opened into the main lobby. I double checked the wings to make sure they were balanced and gave the main fold one last pinch between my thumb and middle finger. Then I pulled my hand straight back behind my ear and let it go.

It flew on a crisp line without wavering. I expected it to go twenty feet, but at thirty it was still cruising, lifted in part by an updraft from the high-powered Alabama air conditioning. I smiled in wonder as I watched it fly farther and farther, proud of my creation and wishing my dad could see it… which was when the general with the thinning grey flat top on his head and the four gold stars on his shoulders turned the corner and took the pointy nose of my airplane right between the eyes.

“Ow! What the—”

The plane fell to the ground as WingTech’s top executives rushed to check on their VIP.

“Is everything okay, general?”

“I’m fine. Just a little… friendly fire,” he said, bending down to pick up the plane which had come to rest on top of his shiny black dress shoes.

My father pulled up the rear and was horrified to see me at the end of the hall and my paper airplane in the hands of one of the most powerful men in the American military.

“You made this?” the general called out.

“Yes sir,” I answered.

The general gave it a satisfied look before sending it back to me with one smooth glide.

My dad didn’t speak the entire ride home.

I held the airplane in my hands, its fuselage starting to break down from all the sweat in my nervous hands.

We pulled into the driveway and he turned off the engine, but my dad didn’t get out. He stared straight ahead. After ten seconds of silence, “Well that was the worst day of my entire career,” he said, then he flung the door open and slammed it shut, leaving me alone.

On Friday, I returned to school and my dad called in sick. My mom kept him hydrated with soup and crackers, not aware of what was obvious to me: he wasn’t sick at all. He just couldn’t bring himself to face his boss for the embarrassment I had caused.

Likewise, I delayed my return home from school, finding a variety of interesting things in the gutter on the walk home to postpone my eventual arrival. It was almost four-fifteen when I finally landed at my front door. But I was still on the porch when the black SUV pulled up in front of the house.

An Army private opened the side door and out stepped the general. Even from the curb, I could see a small red scab on the bridge of his nose. I felt nauseous.

“Afternoon, son.” He extended his hand for a shake while still an awkward distance away. Hoping to mend our relationship, I held mine out as well, like two magnets slowly being drawn closer until—SMACK—his meaty paw engulfed my eleven-year-old grip.

“General Jack Gufrey,” he said.

“C.J. Williams,” I said, shaking back but not moving his arm in the slightest, like a salmon caught in the mouth of a grizzly bear.

“Is your father home?” he asked.

“Yes, but he’s… sick,” I said. It was a lie borne out of misplaced devotion.

“Well I survived mustard gas in Iraq. I can handle some sniffles.” Then he let himself into our house like he owned the place—and based on how much of my dad’s salary came from military contracts, perhaps he did.

Now my dad actually did look sick. He sat on the couch, pale, with a noticeable shiver. He went to take a sip of hot tea that my mom had brought him and could barely get the mug to his lips.

I stood with my back against the living room slider, my hand on the handle, ready to go AWOL at the first mention of military police or court martial or treason.

“As you know, there was an incident at WingTech yesterday,” the general began. “Involving your son C.J.”

My dad mouthed the words “yes, sir” but no sound came out.

“What you don’t know is that at my direction the Army’s top minds have been trying to recreate that paper airplane for the last twenty-nine hours.”

My father opened his mouth again and this time was able to eke out a quiet, “They have?”

“Hell yes and damned if I couldn’t quite describe it to them,” General Gufrey said. “We probably went through four or five reams of the best military-grade paper I could find.”

The general turned in the leather recliner till he could see me by the back door. “That creation was one in a million, son.”

I watched as my dad straightened up. Color returning to his face. A modern day Lazarus.

I took a cautious step away from the door. “Thank you.”

“Is there a chance you still have that airplane? Because I would really love to see it.”

Without answering, I sprinted past General Gufrey and into my room. In all the pain and shame of the day before, I couldn’t remember what I’d done with it. I tore through my bed and bookshelf and finally found it under a pile of dirty clothes. The left wing was a little crumpled but the overall design was still intact.

I turned to run back only to find my mom filling the doorway. Her legs were splayed and her hands braced the door jamb, her body making a pear-shaped X that left no space for me to wiggle past.

“Do not show him that airplane,” she said. “Not for free.”

For the next twenty minutes, my dad stayed silent as General Gufrey and my mom went back and forth on negotiations while the plane and I remained sequestered in my room. I thought $300 would be fair and with it I could upgrade my bike and my sneakers. When the dust settled, the U.S. government agreed in writing to put $200,000 in a college fund.

“Okay, C.J.!” Mom yelled from the living room.

Finally understanding its true value, I brought out the airplane ceremoniously, walking slowly and holding it flat in my open palms like some offering to a god.

“There she is,” the general said when he saw me appear around the corner.

He lifted the plane off my hands and inspected it. “Yep. That was our problem,” he noted. “I remembered the wings being at a forty-five degree angle but they’re almost sixty. You see?” He held it out so my dad could appreciate my work.

“Might even be closer to sixty-five,” my dad calculated.

Having accomplished his mission, General Gufrey stood up from the recliner. “I gotta get this to the boys,” he said, then turned to face me one last time. “Now, son, everything we talked about here is top secret. Do you understand?”

I nodded. Then, feeling a degree of intimacy, saluted. The general saluted back, then drove off in his waiting SUV.

First thing Monday morning, my dad made a beeline to his boss’s office, assuming he and the other executives would find this as entertaining as he now did.

What do you mean your son ‘sold a bomber’ to the U.S. Army?” his boss glared.

Dad was now regretting the decision. “Well, um… you see…”

“And who are they contracting to do the actual design?”

My dad fumbled this response too. “Gufrey didn’t say… it’s something we can inquire about of course… I assumed the job would be put up for an open bid--”

“AN OPEN BID?! YOU HAD THE CHANCE TO NEGOTIATE WINGTECH’S EXCLUSIVE CONTROL OVER AMERICA’S NEXT GREAT WARPLANE AND YOU DIDN’T?!”

He did not.

Thus began a flurry of phone calls and meetings with WingTech legal counsel. They confirmed that anything my dad designed was automatically the company’s intellectual property, but anything I made? That was a stickier issue.

Around lunchtime I got pulled from school by my mom and driven back to Research Park. Unlike the last time I was there, everyone in the lobby was thrilled to see me, including my dad. The top executives led me through all sorts of exciting rooms that had previously been off limits before ushering me into a conference room that was filled with every existing and experimental model of airplane they could find in addition to a doughnut covered in rainbow sprinkles just for me.

“Have a seat, C.J.,” my dad said casually, though I couldn’t help but notice beads of sweat on his temple.

While I savored my doughnut, the company’s top lawyer had me recount everything I did during Take Your Kid to Work Day. He was hoping that my design was inspired by one of the planes I saw in the lobby, but I said my dad whisked me through there so fast I barely had time to appreciate them. Then he wondered if perhaps I had seen some stray designs left behind by an employee in the supply room.

“I wasn’t allowed to see the supply room,” I answered.

Then he asked if I was at least handed a plastic WingTech lanyard, thinking he could make the argument I was a de facto employee at the time of the plane’s creation.

“Didn’t get a lanyard.” The lawyer sighed. My dad hung his head. “The only thing he gave me was some fancy paper where you could see the WingTech logo if you held it up to the light.”

The lawyer shot my dad an energized look. “You gave Christopher our embossed paper?”

My dad nodded, uncertain if this was a breach of some company regulation. But the lawyer was beaming with delight. “Well that changes everything! That new bomber was designed using trademarked WingTech property!”

This was followed by a lot of hugs and high-fives and then someone brought me a second doughnut.

Thus my paper airplane was returned to WingTech along with a $300 million defense contract. At my mom’s request, they matched the Army’s college fund and threw in the new bike and sneakers I had hoped for.

Everyone was now happy. My mom. My dad. Apparently even the White House. WingTech was so excited they made my dad project manager and let him name the plane after me.

The CJ-11.

And thanks to all that, for the next two months I barely saw the man. My dad was gone before I woke up and didn’t come back until I was asleep. He even worked weekends. “It’s just a dumb airplane,” I told my mom over yet another quiet dinner with just the two of us.

“Dumb?” my mom rebutted. “The CJ-11 is a top priority. If your father does a good job, this could cement his career.”

“What if he does a bad job?” I asked.

My mom put down her fork. “Now why would you even ask a ridiculous question like that?”

I asked because I didn’t care about my dad’s career. Or his reputation. I didn’t care if he got a bonus. Or a bigger office. Or a closer parking spot. All in all he was better when he was insignificant. And I was better too.

(This was when various dramatic and dangerous and illegal things took place that I really can’t talk about.)

It was Father’s Day when my dad got the call. WingTech had given him the day off to spend with family and he was asleep on a chaise lounge. He roused himself and stumbled past me to the kitchen phone.

His boss’s voice came through the other end loud and clear: “Emergency meeting. Now.”

My dad changed out of his trunks and sped to the office. His boss waited in the conference room. There were no sprinkled doughnuts waiting for him.

“I just received a very unsettling call from General Gufrey,” his boss began.

“Oh?”

“Intelligence officials have uncovered evidence that China is developing a new plane with the exact same specifications as the CJ-11.”

“That’s impossible,” my dad answered.

“Is it?” his boss said. Then he slid a stack of pages across the table. It was a recent WingTech CJ-11 blueprint, its schematics broken down part by part. Under each one’s English description was a translation handwritten in Chinese characters.

“I don’t understand. How did they get this?”

“You tell me, Williams.”

“Obviously I have no idea.” He looked at his boss and understood what this meeting was really about. “Surely you don’t think I gave it to them. Do you?”

“Someone here did. You had all the files. Not that I expect you to confess. But eventually the FBI will find out the truth. Until then they have no choice but to pull everyone’s clearances. And our contracts.”

“Which ones?”

“All of them.”

“So… what are we supposed to do now?”

“Until further notice, consider yourself on unpaid leave.”

My dad returned home in a daze. He went out to the yard without a word and walked back and forth for an hour in a tight lawnmower-like grid, searching for answers and unable to find any. Deep in the ivy, an old Frisbee caught his eye. He pulled it out and threw it into the sky at a sharp angle, catching it when it returned like a boomerang.

Then he came back inside and found me on the couch. “How do you feel about a Guys’ Night Out?” he asked.

I showered and got dressed and my dad and I walked the half-mile down Old Madison Pike to our favorite restaurant. We talked about thunderstorms and baseball and what middle school was going to be like and how my great grandpa owned the first Ford dealership in Pittsburgh and the time my uncle got bit by a racoon and the day my dad met my mom.

It was the best night of my life.

When the bill came, my dad read it with his usual attention to detail and was surprised to notice a glaring oversight. “Whoops. Mr. Liu didn’t charge us for your dessert.”

He waved over the owner, a gentle man in his 60s and barely four feet tall. “I think you forgot to include my son’s green tea ice cream.”

Mr. Liu smiled. “Did not forget. Green tea ice cream is a gift. For our most loyal China Palace customer.” Then he bowed and walked away.

For a second I feared my dad would piece it all together. To me it seemed so obvious. Instead, he chuckled and shrugged and threw some cash on the table. “Well how nice is that?”

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If you’re receiving this letter, it’s because you have made the list of potential guests to Taylor Swift’s secret summer wedding. CONGRATULATIONS!

In order to make the FINAL guest list, please read AND INITIAL the following:

__ I will not tell anyone I am on Taylor Swift’s Secret Summer Wedding guest list.

__ Because the date of Taylor Swift’s Secret Summer Wedding will not be revealed in advance, I will wear wedding attire 24 hours a day between June 16 and Labor Day.

__ I will purchase a wedding gift valued at a minimum of $15,000 and keep it in my possession at all times.

__ On the day of the wedding, I acknowledge that an unmarked Toyota Rav4 will pull up to my apartment/house/palatial estate and honk to the melody of “Shake It Off.” I will then have 90 seconds to exit my residence and get into the Rav4, and will do so without giving friends or family an explanation as to where I’m going or when I will return.

__ If multiple family members have been invited, separate Rav4’s will be provided for each guest.

__ Once inside the Rav4, I will surrender my cell phone and never see it again.

__ If travel to the wedding involves an airplane, I will not complain about flying coach.

__ Upon arrival at the church/mansion/island, I will meet with a team of stylists and allow them to upgrade my hair and makeup as they deem appropriate, along with any outpatient procedures performed by a board licensed plastic surgeon.

__ During the ceremony, I will not use my wedding program as a fan.

Please choose one:

• Chicken __

• Beef __

__ When the DJ says, “I wanna see ALL Y’ALL on the dance floor!” I will not hesitate to go to the dance floor.

__ If I am a bad dancer, I will begin taking professional dance lessons immediately.

__ Given the likelihood of professional football players in attendance, I acknowledge the danger of participating in the garter toss.

__ I will talk freely about cats (the animal) but not Cats (the musical).

__ I will eat the cake and not pick around it pretending I am eating it.

__ I will not leave early.

__ In the event the couple exits the wedding to a bubble send-off line, I will practice my bubble blowing in advance and focus on blowing multiple small bubbles that fill the area versus one big bubble that pops while still on the wand.

__ I am not John Mayer.

When you have finished initialing this letter, a courier in an old cardigan is waiting outside.

TAYLOR AND TRAVIS ARE EXCITED TO (POTENTIALLY) CELEBRATE THEIR SPECIAL DAY WITH YOU!

The Silver Cord Stories Podcast

Actor Eric Nenninger (Mad Men and 100 other things) channels his inner trucker to bring this moody tale to life in a way only a true talent can.

Listen. Share. Or click the link below and read along.

Enjoy.

Last May I posted a photo of teenagers crawling through the desert and said I was taking a lucky group of high schoolers to Death Valley without water in order to give them something good to write about in their Common App college essay.

Pretty soon the reel had over a million views and my inbox had a flurry of requests from teens who genuinely wanted to be included.

Unfortunately for them, this is satire. But just barely.

Enjoy!

SHOW NOTES:

• “Cruel Summer” on Silver Cord Stories

• Silver Cord Stories on Instagram

• The Silver Cord now available on Amazon

Buy Bob's Book

All that pool cleaning filled the thirty-six-year-old with vast knowledge. Chemistry, plumbing, math, meteorology, and even biology. Miles had scooped out every species of bug, plant, and small mammal that called Southern California home. And whenever he found a rattlesnake coiled up behind a heater, he chopped off its head and brought the carcass home in a bucket so his girlfriend Dawn could boil the skin and make it into a custom fishing rod she’d sell on eBay for four hundred bucks a pop.

Then there were the skills Miles had picked up from his wealthy customers. A decorated chef had taught Miles the perfect way to prepare a medium rare filet mignon. A bestselling author had taught him the art of good storytelling. A retired stuntman taught him how to fake a convincing prat fall. When Miles started his career, he was just a sunburned high school dropout. In the time since, he had evolved—one pool at a time—into the most well-rounded and cultured man in Santa Barbara.

The way Miles saw it, his ability to discuss pH levels or yank a dead gopher from a pool vac could now be a gateway to a deeper conversation with his customers. You want to talk about pop art’s enduring appeal with upper-class collectors? Miles could do that. Worried about China’s role in the depletion of the global fish population? Miles had solutions. Or maybe you just needed to process childhood trauma and didn’t know where to begin. Miles was better than most licensed therapists.

But this was Santa Barbara.

And Miles quickly learned that for all the wisdom his customers had given him over the years, almost no one wanted to hear any of his. Even when he opened a gate to find a customer floating on a raft in the deep end—a captive audience if there ever was one—the moment he tried speaking truth they were wiggling and kicking their way back to the steps.

Miles couldn’t help but be hurt. The subtext was clear. They were the experts at this thing called life, not him. It stung even more when his phone sent him reels of these same customers bloviating on podcasts or speaking to a government subcommittee or holding court at some gala to which he would never be invited. The biggest insult came when he saw the rock star with the guitar-shaped pool giving the graduation speech at UC Santa Barbara.

“That’s my school!” Miles vented to Dawn.

“You didn’t even finish high school,” she answered as she peeled the skin off a rattlesnake.

“I mean I clean the pool there,” he said. “And anyway, education doesn’t even factor into that sort of decision. All anyone wants these days is someone who brings them eyeballs.”

“Eyeballs?”

“I’m talking about clicks, Dawn. That’s what they care about. CLICKS. And I can do a lot of things, but I can’t generate clicks.”

Miles was right. For all of his 21st century talents, he lacked what had sadly become the most valuable one: notoriety.

Dawn hung the cleaned snakeskin on a wire hanger over the fireplace and wiped her hands on her sweatpants. “I mean, if you really want to speak at a stupid graduation, I can probably make that happen,” she said.

Miles scoffed at the suggestion. “Yeah right. Where?”

“At the Academy,” she said.

Dawn managed the front office for the Santa Barbara Dog Academy, a hoity-toity obedience school in the foothills above downtown. For $9500 a semester, the SBDA’s award-winning trainers could take even the jumpiest inbred Labrador and shape it into a calm and loving household pet. The 14-week program climaxed with graduation day, where every pup received a diploma and every owner received the ability to brag that their dog was not just any old mutt but an SBDA graduate.

“Terri put me in charge of it this year,” Dawn explained. “I’ve got five minutes I’m supposed to fill with ‘entertainment’ and none of the magicians have called me back yet.”

In all honesty, Miles was hoping for a venue with a little more gravitas to make his public debut. But he was humble and knew everyone has to start somewhere. “I’m in,” he said before Dawn could change her mind.

THE GROUNDS OF THE SANTA BARBARA DOG ACADEMY

Miles immediately got to work, asking himself what a graduating class of dogs and owners needed to hear at such a pivotal moment in their lives. He scribbled notes about loyalty. Thoughts on the enduring value of friendship. He affirmed the owners for putting a high value on civility in an age of rancor. Then he ended with a Mark Twain quote and an original joke about not eating your diploma. When he timed it, it was four minutes and fifty seconds. Adding in applause at both ends and some laughs for his joke, he safely assumed it would be the highlight of the event.

Unfortunately, Terri Weegan didn’t think so. Terri was the stuffy owner of Santa Barbara Dog Academy and mother to six King Charles spaniels. She and her partner Elise started SBDA in their backyard in 1991 and had watched it blossom into a business that now netted them a few million dollars a year. They coveted their reputation as the city’s premier dog obedience school and enjoyed the downfall of every rival who had ever tried to supplant them.

Terri knew that it was a mistake to ask Dawn to find the entertainment for the graduation. She would have just handled it herself but Elise had surprised her with a weekend trip to Cambria and insisted she delegate the task to someone else. “You’re sixty years old,” Elise explained. “It’s time to start letting the underlings do things.”

Terri relented and tried to enjoy the getaway but couldn’t. They overpaid for a dog-friendly bed and breakfast then she got sick from a bad latte at a local Starbucks that smelled strange the moment they walked in. Terri was straddling a toilet surrounded by her half-dozen dogs when phone calls and texts started coming in from concerned SBDA owners:

“Who is Miles Derwin?”

“Is this graduation speaker properly vetted?”

“I think he cleans my pool.”

Elise drove home to Santa Barbara while Terri stretched out in the backseat with the spaniels spread across the length of her body like a blanket of brown and white fur. She summoned Dawn to her office the next morning.

“I need you to uninvite the graduation speaker,” Terri said.

“What’s wrong with him?” Dawn asked, not admitting that she and Miles shared the mortgage on a first-floor condo overlooking the freeway.

“He’s completely unqualified.”

“The guy interacts with a hundred dogs a day,” Dawn persisted.

Terri shook her head. “Our owners are the people who keep us in business. Whatever they say goes. And they don’t feel comfortable with the man who skims leaves out of their pool pretending like he has something noteworthy to tell them—or their pets.”

Miles worked late that evening, dealing with a yellow algae problem at a Montecito estate. When he walked in the front door, Dawn was waiting for him. She felt extra bad when she saw the rattlesnake bucket in his hand. “Sit down, babe,” she said.

Miles took the news well. He hardly showed any emotion whatsoever. He just nodded. When Dawn was done, Miles stood back up. “Too bad,” he said, then he exited back out of the front door. Dawn watched as he trudged to his Coastal Pools pickup truck and sat on the hood.

He wasn’t mad. He wasn’t sullen. He was scheming.

On graduation day, Dawn woke up and Miles was already gone. There was nothing unusual about that. He usually serviced his first pool by 6:30, especially as the days got longer and hotter. He had left her a warm pot of steel-cut oats on the stove along with a note, “Record the graduation for me,” it said.

The caravan of luxury SUVs filed onto the sprawling ranch property of the SBDA shortly after eleven. At Terri’s behest, Boy Scouts from Troop 26 directed traffic in exchange for community service hours. Once parked, like a ballet, the back seats and tailgates of all makes and models opened in unison, revealing their prized occupants. Seventy percent of the class were of the mixed poodle variety, dominated by goldendoodles, cockapoos, schnoodles, Labradoodles, and yorkiepoos. Twenty percent fell into the toy dog category: your Havanese, bichon frisé, and pomeranians. The last ten percent were the big boys: Bernese mountain dogs, golden retrievers, and Newfoundlands, along with one doberman pinscher.

A MEMBER OF THE SBDA GRADUATING CLASS

The graduates processed in on leashes and in strollers with miniature mortarboards on their heads, showcasing their education by not peeing on any of the rose bushes that lined the path from the dirt parking lot. A small riser had been erected on one end of the lush lawn under a pair of hundred-year-old oak trees. A jazz ensemble played a bouncy rendition of “Who Let the Dogs Out.”

At eleven thirty, Terri took the stage and warmly welcomed the class. She thanked the owners for their partnership and her trainers for being the unsung heroes of SBDA. There was no mention of Dawn, whose role for the event had been reduced to picking up dog poop. After a slide show, Terri welcomed “The Incredible Igor,” a Ukrainian refugee she’d recently stumbled on who was his country’s foremost veterinarian before having to flee and start over in Southern California. While waiting for his American accreditation, he had become a humble street performer, but chose not to play the victim and recently set a Guinness Record for making the world’s fastest balloon animal. He was an inspiration.

Led by warm applause, Igor strode to the podium wearing a graduation robe, cap, and sunglasses. He had a deep tan, owing undoubtedly to all those hours on the street. “Thank you very much,” he said. The crowd was impressed by his near fluent English. Dawn looked up and took note of his voice too. Because The Incredible Igor was clearly her boyfriend Miles.

“It is an honor to be in the presence of such, how do you say, fancy pants?” The crowd laughed, enjoying Igor’s effort at American humor and not disagreeing with the sentiment. Then Miles stepped off the stage and made his way into the crowd, taking a long, thin balloon from his pocket. “Even though it has been two long years since I escaped Kyiv, it still feels like yesterday…” he said. The crowd hung on the brave immigrant’s every word. Even the dogs perked up as he passed. The owners patted them on their heads and offered them a treat, believing that Igor just had a natural electricity that drew animals to him. Like a modern St. Francis. In reality, Miles had lined the inside of his graduation robe with medium rare filet mignons that he had grilled to perfection before the sun came up.

“I can still hear the sound of bullets whizzing past me as I ran, sure that the next one would send me to the grave…” A few of the big dogs began to tug on their leashes. Miles kept moving. “Up until that point in my life, I had only ever prayed on my knees, but here I was praying as I ran…” The owners leaned in just like the graduates. “‘God, rescue me from this nightmare. Send me somewhere peaceful. A place where I can serve. A place where people know how to love the mighty and the lowly with equal devotion. And God, if I am not being too greedy, a place near the ocean… with lots of dogs.” The owners were in tears now, Miles’ storytelling distracting them from the fact their pets were being worked into a full lather.

Miles returned to the stage and pulled a small air pump from somewhere under his robe. “And then I received a call from a stranger. Who lived in a city I had never heard of. A city called Santa Barbara…” Miles blew up the balloon little by little. “‘Come,’ he said.” A few of the dogs lurched forward at the familiar command. “But I told him, ‘I am not worthy. I am just a humble animal doctor.’” The balloon grew bigger. “‘COME!’ he insisted.” More dogs pulled on their leashes. The doodles started to bark. “‘No, I cannot leave my homeland,’ I explained. I was too blind to see that my prayer had been answered.”

The balloon was huge now, stretched to its limits. “And then one final time this kind man begged of me: ‘COME!!’” All the dogs were barking now. The owners tried to hold on tight but were losing their grip. Even the Pomeranians nipped at their handlers, turning their fluffy backs on fourteen weeks of SBDA training in exchange for red meat and the clarion call from stage.

On cue, Miles gave his overinflated balloon one last pump and—

POP!

It was the ideal decibel to spook both the dogs and their owners, who dropped their leashes when they heard it, allowing the entire SBDA graduating class to rush the stage. There was a beautiful freedom to it. Dogs of all breeds, big and small, tongues hanging, tails wagging, running free in joyful disobedience.

Terri screamed in horror from the lawn. Miles waited until the first dogs were mid-jump then tumbled backwards in a perfectly executed pratfall. They tore at his robe. They feasted on his medium rare filets. They splattered the first three rows and the stack of white diplomas with pink shards of what everyone assumed was human flesh. “DO SOMETHING!” one of the owners in the back yelled out. No one could move. They were frozen by the devastating belief that the SBDA had turned their precious angels into an army of trained killers.

When it seemed to Dawn like she had recorded enough footage to satisfy Miles’ request, she pushed through the mob gripping an abandoned dog stroller. With a pair of cockapoos still clinging to him, Miles crawled to the edge of the stage then threw himself face first on top of the getaway vehicle. As Dawn peeled away, a 130-pound Bullmastiff tried to mount Miles for one last lick but came in too hot and took out Terri instead. With Dawn now running at full speed, the boys from Troop 26 cleared a path, ready as needed to put their first aid skills to use and get a heroic write-up in Scout Life magazine. But Dawn waved them off, dumping the lifeless body of The Incredible Igor in her backseat and floored it to what everyone assumed would be the nearest hospital.

In actuality, Miles’ pickup truck was hidden around the block. He dropped his meatsoaked clothes into a drum of chlorine, changed into shorts and his standard bleached Coastal Pools t-shirt, then sped to his next appointment to secure a firm alibi.

Before the end of the week, the SBDA received a certified letter from a Ukrainian-based law firm threatening a significant lawsuit, citing personal injury and psychological trauma to one of their country’s most decorated veterinarians. The letter also suggested The Incredible Igor was willing and ready to take the stand as an expert witness for the state if anyone brought civil charges of animal cruelty.

Forty-eight hours after the letter was received, a downtown P.O. box had an NDA ready to be signed in exchange for a cashier’s check in the amount of three million dollars.

Desperate to salvage her reputation, Terri reimbursed tuition for all their recent graduates. She also offered Dawn an overdue promotion and a raise, citing her bravery and quick thinking, but once Igor’s check cleared, Dawn gave her two weeks’ notice. She still had a few good years left on her biological clock and she and Miles hoped to make the most of them.

Miles, meanwhile, kept cleaning pools. He never got around to watching the video of his speech. It would have undoubtedly gotten “clicks” if Dawn had posted it, but Miles no longer had any interest in notoriety. Instead, it was the possibility of fatherhood that thrilled him. He had so many wonderful things to share.

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It was a musical about a vampire boy band. Don’t laugh. It was actually awesome and if you come to my house I will screen you the only copy in existence.

The boy band had already been cast but what we needed was an actor to play their manager. We saw a lot of famous faces but only one stood out: Eric Nenninger.

If you’ve watched any TV in the last 20 years, the odds of you missing Eric are statistically impossible.

Eric’s credits include Malcolm in the Middle, Mad Men, The Rookie, Big Bang Theory, Wet Hot American Summer, The Politician, The Flash… and that’s just scratching the surface.

Eric is funny and smart and a total pro. I’ll never forget during rehearsals on the pilot where our director Adam Stein gave the cast an acting exercise. He pulled a random line of dialogue from the script and asked everyone to deliver it in as many different ways as possible. Long after everyone else had run out of line readings, Eric just kept going. And going. And going. It was like a magic trick.

So when Eric agreed to come on the podcast and perform a Silver Cord Story, I shouldn’t have been surprised when he said, “Can I do two stories?” (He has since told me he’s doing a third whether I like it or not.)

You’ll have to wait for the others, but for now, sit back and enjoy Eric Nenninger… performing “Softie.”

SHOW NOTES:

EricNenninger.com

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Out at the nurse’s station, a dozen highly-skilled women in scrubs huddled together, focused on what mattered most: their lunch order.

“Gimme a tostada bowl,” one of them said.

“Me too. But no sour cream,” another followed.

“Make sure you get extra chips!” came a yell from further down the hall.

Just a few steps away, inside a labor and delivery room in Santa Monica, my wife Hillary was nine hours into the birth of our first child.

How can they be thinking about food?, I raged. Life is hanging in the balance!

My wife had no reaction to their banter. Her eyes were closed. She was deep in some sort of supernatural experience into which I had not been invited.

Like everything my wife does, she was not messing around. Six months earlier, she weighed the options and decided she would be having a natural childbirth. Doing this would require both of us attending a class on something called the Bradley Method. She pulled up an online list of all the Bradley Method classes taught across Los Angeles.

I scrolled through the dates, times, and places and picked one. “This one looks perfect,” I said.

“That one is only four weeks,” she said.

“Right,” I said, happy that she had also noticed what made it the correct pick.

“Don’t you love our child?” was her follow up.

Thus began a negotiation that ended with us picking a 6-week course versus Hillary’s preferred 8-weeks.

On the first night of class, we drove to an apartment building in mid-city and brought a yoga mat, a water bottle, and our Bradley Method book. We rode up the elevator to a random apartment and met our instructor, a single mom in her 30s who doubled as a doula for an extra fee.

Two by two the other couples showed up. A smattering of granola types in crocheted sweaters and Teva sandals. We started by watching a VHS tape from the late 1980s of women having babies. Some were in bathtubs. Some were in inflatable kiddie pools in their living rooms, surrounded by onlookers, making me wonder if the birth had coincided with a Super Bowl party and someone figured this would make for a good halftime show.

An oddly high percentage of the women were Russian and were giving birth in what looked to be the shallow, rocky shores of the Caspian Sea. The cinematic advantage to this was that cameras could film underwater and capture the terrifying moment a baby is born and realizes it has to learn not only how to breathe on its own, but also how to swim.

Believe it or not, that wasn’t the strangest part. What took the cake was that most of the fathers in the video were also naked. The video’s hippie narrator gave no explanation as to why and when I looked at Hillary for an answer, she said, “I have no idea and don’t ask.”

Once the group was sufficiently scarred, we gathered with our instructor in a circle on the floor, then went around, one at a time, and said how we were feeling. My honest answer was, “I hate this.” Instead I went with the safer, “Excited and nervous.”

I don’t remember much about the next five weeks. But I do know I read the entire Bradley Method book. And I remember that my wife and I practiced our distinct roles until it became second nature. I also noticed that near the end of the class, a few couples were MIA because they had their babies and when we asked to hear their triumphant natural birth stories, our instructor dodged the question which should have been a red flag.

Nevertheless, when our baby’s due date arrived in early December, we were ready. Four days later, Hillary’s water broke while watching Survivor and we were off to the hospital. I had my laminated sheet of instructions, my iPod with a pre-made playlist, and my dog-eared Bradley Method book in case I needed a last-minute refresher.

Electing to keep my clothes on, I dimmed the lights and waited. When the first strong contraction arrived, I positioned myself near my wife’s shoulders, giving words of encouragement just as we had practiced in our 6-week course.

“Stop talking,” she said.

Oh. Fine. Not a problem.

When the second contraction came, I stayed silent and gently put my hand on her shoulder to let her know I was there.

“Don’t touch me,” she said.

Hmm. According to my laminated sheet, “words of encouragement” and “soothing touches” were approximately 98% of my job.

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I retreated to the stiff leather chair in the corner with my phone and got busy with one of my secondary duties: “communicate with family and friends.”

“I can hear you typing,” Hillary said.

I put down the phone and sat still until I started to get hungry. Thankfully, we had packed some Saltines and I helped myself to a few.

“Please stop eating,” she said.

We were less than an hour in and despite all my preparation, my role in what my laminated chart called “active labor” had been reduced to me sitting alone in the dark not making any noise.

As I did, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was what happened to those other couples in our class. Had they arrived at their hospitals or bathtubs or kiddie pools with the same lofty goals that we had, only to hit a wall of pain and trash their laminated cheat sheets in favor of that oh-so-sweet epidural?

Meanwhile, Hillary soldiered on. Every fifteen minutes, she would change positions or walk in circles or sit on the giant rubber ball I had brought from home. Steadily, the contractions grew stronger and she moaned louder until the they were so consuming she stopped getting out of bed at all. Eventually, she just lay there, her eyes closed, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth over and over and over and over and over until the blackout window shade started to glow with light from the morning sun.

I wish I could say at the time that I knew I was witnessing greatness. But looking back on it with the perspective of twenty years, that’s undoubtedly what it was. The woman was running a marathon without moving a muscle. She was Tiger Woods navigating Augusta National. Gary Kasparov taking on IBM’s Deep Blue. Back at that nurse’s station, they were watching the clock and her contractions on the monitor, expecting Hillary to hit the help button and finally beg for the good stuff.

Ten hours into active labor—shortly after the tostadas arrived—my wife opened her eyes and searched for me in the dark. I jumped up from my silent corner and moved to the bed. For the first time since she went into active labor, her eyes filled with fear. “I don’t know if I can do this,” she said.

Hearing this, my face lit up with excitement. *I don’t know if I can do this* is exactly what my laminated chart said a woman would say when she was about to give birth! And because of that, I knew just how to respond. “Yes you can! You are so close!”

Did I know for sure she was close? No. This was not the Caspian Sea and there were no cameras down there to tell me. But I took a leap of faith, figuring that if a bunch of naked husbands from the 1980s believed in their wives’ ability to have a baby naturally, then I could too.

I summoned a nurse, and after finishing her burrito, she came in to check Hillary’s progress. To our delight, my wife was fully dilated and 100% effaced. (See, I did read the book). It was time to push.

Our happy OB, who had been keeping tabs on us from afar, arrived with a smile on her face and—at last—gave me something meaningful to do. “Dad, hold a leg.” Five or six hard pushes later, our first child was born. It was a boy. I’ll never forget our doctor squealing with laughter as she held him in her arms and the 50-something nurse looking at Hillary in wonder and saying, “I’ve never seen a birth like that before.”

All of us have unique talents. Usually they reveal themselves slowly over time, forged in fire. But occasionally the heavens really do open up and a gift lands on us that we never knew we had. This was one of those times.

We never heard if anyone else in that Bradley Method class managed to have a natural childbirth or not. It doesn’t really matter. The truth is that pain is real and complications happen and modern medicine exists for a good reason. In fact, a few years later my wife would spend six weeks on hospital bed rest saying yes to every intervention possible to hold off the premature birth of our third child.

But that first time, on the day my wife became a mother, I was able to witness something divine. As tends to be the case, I just needed to step back, be quiet, and put down my phone to see it.

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“RUSH HIRE. Executive Assistant. Kaboom Aerospace. 9am. ONE DAY ONLY. Kaylee, are you available???”

Kaylee was available.

At thirty-one and single, with no prospects in sight, she was still recovering from her last relationship two years earlier when her boyfriend broke things off by telling her, “You’re a 6 and I’m an 8 and that’s just too large of a gap.”

He was a pig.

Kaylee pushed back against the insult, arguing that she was only a 6 from late-December to mid-March after which she leveled up to a solid 7 for the bulk of the calendar year.

He was not swayed.

Back in her apartment, Kaylee rescued her good jeans from the hamper and texted the agency back: “I’ll be there.”

Kaylee didn’t know much about Kaboom. Wikipedia said they had never gotten a rocket to space and her inbox said they were paranoid about security because in the hour-long drive from the San Fernando Valley to the South Bay, she received three follow-up emails reminding her to “BRING A GOVERNMENT ISSUED I.D.”

The address from the temp agency led her to a humdrum warehouse the size of four football fields near LAX Airport. An armed security officer in a flack jacket checked her passport and took a thumbprint and concluded she was not a spy, then followed her like a prison guard to her desk outside the CFO’s office.

“Bathroom is over there. Cafeteria is over there. Take a photo of anything and you’re fired,” the officer said.

“I’ll just… sit,” Kaylee promised. It wasn’t a bad spot, really. From her perch, she could look out on the sprawling bullpen of engineers and see everything. And what she saw almost immediately were heads, popping up like meerkats in the Kalahari Desert.

Pop! Nerd with a beard…

Pop! Nerd with a lightsaber...

Pop! Nerd with a beard and a lightsaber…

What made it especially odd was how their gazes were all drawn to the same mysterious object:

Kaylee.

Assuming there was something on her face, she made a bee line to the bathroom. This was not paranoia. She had spent the better part of her cousin’s wedding in San Antonio with a piece of tortilla chip stuck to her cheek and no one had the decency to tell her. A therapist friend later told her, “That means everyone at the wedding hated you.”

Thank you, therapist friend.

Kaylee leaned over the sink for a closer inspection and noticed her normal flaws: a teenage acne scar on her forehead, stubborn rosacea on her nose, a droopy left eyelid… but nothing that warranted outright gawking.

Behind her, a stall swung open and out shuffled a Korean girl in an oversized Wario hoodie. One Direction blasted from her comically large headphones. She washed her hands and glanced over at Kaylee.

Not once, not twice, not even three times.

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Kaylee had to say something. She was not the type of person who forced uncomfortable conversations. She was the type of person who stayed silent, catastrophized reality until it created paralyzing fear, then crawled to bed in a sweat.

But since she only had one day at Kaboom and knew she would never see any of these people again—

“Just tell me,” said Kaylee.

The girl—Pearl—pulled her headphones down to her neck.

Pearl: “Tell you what?”

Kaylee: “Why are all the nerds staring at me?”

Pearl: “Oh. Um. Well… I guess because you’re like… super pretty.”

As stated earlier, by Kaylee’s own estimation, she was not super pretty. She was not super… anything.

Kaylee: “I’m actually a 7 except in the winter when I’m a 6.”

Pearl straightened up, happy she now had hard data with which to work. “Well,” she said, “around here you’re a 10.”

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Sure, there was a three-month period between her senior year of high school and her freshman year of college where Kaylee might have snuck into the 8 category, but then she got this rough pixie haircut from her mom’s friend who was trying to become a hairdresser and there went that.

Pearl wiped her wet hands on her jeans and left.

Kaylee turned back toward the mirror. Suddenly that rosacea looked almost… cute. And her left eyelid didn’t seem so droopy after all. And while Kaylee still wouldn’t go so far as to consider herself “beautiful,” it felt good to be in a magical place where everyone else did.

Especially because of her secret. A secret Kaylee had only ever whispered softly to her cats Tibby and Lena. Her secret was that all she truly wanted was to marry someone stable so she could quit working, become a mom, and have enough money left over each month to get her hair colored someplace fancier than her bathroom sink.

THAT is what she desired above all else.

THAT was her anti-feminist, counterculture, Kaylee-don’t-ever-say-that-on-social-media dream.

And as she exited the bathroom at Kaboom Aerospace and looked out at two hundred engineers with PPO insurance and a refreshing definition of beauty, what she saw… was opportunity.

Still, Kaylee had a serious problem. Her job at Kaboom was for “ONE DAY ONLY.” And engineers do not, as a rule, act impulsively, which meant they were happy to find reasons to walk by her desk or stare awkwardly, but actually progressing to a “Would you like to go out and then eventually get married so you can stop working, have kids, and get your hair professionally colored?” was, at best, six months away.

Which meant Kaylee needed to find a way to turn this temp job into a permanent one.

She googled “rocket science.”

She read about thrust.

Propulsion.

Different types of fuel.

She looked up what NASA stands for…

What Kaboom Aerospace actually does…

How Ron Howard got Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon to float around in Apollo 13…

And by noon she knew just enough about aerospace to inquire with the CFO, her boss for the day, about whether he’d like to make her a permanent hire.

“No,” he said. “But bring me a chicken breast and two cookies.” And then, like one of the soldiers from the clock outside Disneyland’s “It’s A Small World,” he wobbled back into his office as the door closed slammed behind him.

His rejection left Kaylee five short hours as a 10 before she Cinderella-d back to a 7, a worrisome fact that explained her next action.

Kaylee went to the lunch line to flirt with the first man she saw. Unfortunately, she was not good at flirting and the first man she saw was a grim-looking fifty year old with wildly uneven sideburns.

Kaylee: “Hey there. You been at Kaboom a while?”

Sideburns: “I’m employee number twenty-seven.”

She didn’t know what to do with that information and shifted to a safer topic.

Kaylee: “Boy. Lunch smells good, huh?”

Sideburns: “I lost my sense of smell fifteen years ago. I work with industrial strength epoxies. With improper ventilation, you can burn a hole right through the middle of your septum in under twenty minutes.”

Then Employee #27 lifted his chin and shined his iPhone flashlight up his nose to show her the open cavity between his nostrils.

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Kaylee stared into the void—trying to turn this into a Hallmark movie meet-cute moment and hating herself for it—when an arm from behind her reached forward and snagged a chicken breast. The last chicken breast.

“I don’t think so,” she told the arm.

“Is there a problem?” the arm said. The arm had a French accent which might have been alluring except he also had a wedding ring and even though Kaylee was longing to be a wife she wasn’t looking to destroy someone else’s in the process so—

“You can’t reach ahead into someone else’s section of the buffet line and take food. That’s a rule.” Then she grabbed a set of tongs, removed the chicken breast from the French man’s plate, served him a piece of gray-looking salmon instead, and marched to her desk to spend the rest of her day as a 10 before going home to spend the rest of her life as a big fat ZERO.

Or at least that was her plan. But at 4:30 executives started to gather outside the CFO’s office and murmur.

You hear about Leo?… What about Leo?... Bad salmon… Leo is sick?!…

Kaylee tracked down Pearl (the girl from the bathroom) who explained that Leo was the host of Kaboom’s livestream rocket launches. In the company’s two years of launches—all spectacularly unsuccessful—Leo had not missed a single one. With investors increasingly nervous about the health of the start-up, not having Leo was an added hiccup no one wanted.

“He’s not that great at it, but his French accent makes the company sound profesh,” said Pearl.

For a moment, Kaylee tried to convinced herself that there were multiple men at Kaboom Aerospace with French accents who had the salmon for lunch because she had taken the last chicken breast.

But there were not.

Kaylee felt guilty.

And yet, she thought. What if Leo’s absence paves the way for someone else? Someone anxious to get herself in front of the company’s best and brightest? Someone with an adorable acne scar on her forehead?

She strode over to the circle of executives. And with all the confidence that a woman with a bookmarked tab for discount egg harvesters in Costa Rica can muster, declared, “I CAN REPLACE LEO.”

Kaboom’s risk-averse launch director, a green-eyed, engineer named Kurt Kohli, took notice. “Do you have experience?” he inquired.

“No,” said Kaylee, "but I love to perform and I know an impressive amount about rocket science.”

The first part of that answer was mostly true as she had played Orphan #11 in her high school production of Oliver! and didn’t hate it, and the second part was definitely true in the sense that she knew an impressive amount about rocket science compared to what she knew before she googled “rocket science” a few hours earlier.

“Have you ever done live TV?” Kurt asked.

“Of course.”

ALSO NOT A LIE! She made the local news in fourth grade when a gang member was shot and killed on the sidewalk outside her family’s duplex. This was a big deal since her town only had two gang members. It also made the murder easy to solve since it was obviously the other gang member who shot him.

The executives circled up again. More murmuring. One of them said just loud enough for her to hear: “I will note that she is visibly appealing.” The nerds dispersed and Kurt Kohli turned Kaylee’s way. “Report to the second floor studio at 1830,” he said. I’ll send over launch details. And most importantly, no matter what happens, project confidence.”

Holy guacamole, she thought. They bought it.

It was time for more learning. She read up on the Kaboom 3 rocket. She watched a couple YouTube videos. She asked a guy in an Avatar t-shirt what 1830 meant. Yep. She was ready.

By 1829, the entire company was crowded outside mission control, a glass-walled room filled with floor to ceiling screens showing the rocket from every angle along with pressure readings and parabolas and flashing numbers that meant little to Kaylee but held the fate of every engineer on the payroll.

The security guard with the sidearm pointed her toward a long staircase that led up to Kaboom’s in-house studio. As she climbed, she looked down at the energized crowd below. A sea of bachelors. And masters. And even a few doctorates. In the moment, one thought consumed her.

This might be my last chance.

Last chance for a spouse.

Last chance for a family.

Last chance for a future of getting stains out of onesies and driving a mini-van and taking your teenager to the dermatologist and watching your babies become kids and your kids become adults and those adults become humans who are a lot like you but if you do your job well, hopefully a little bit better.

And if it was her last chance, she was not going to waste it.

At T-minus 4 minutes to launch, the giant screen in mission control cut to Kaylee. “Good evening, rocket enthusiasts. I am Kaylee Anderson and welcome to tonight’s test launch of Kaboom’s new and improved Kaboom 3 rocket. In less than five minutes, all those talented rocket scientists below me will find out if their hard work has paid off and if Kaboom Aerospace can join the ranks of private rockets companies who are revolutionizing space commerce, reawakening interest in interstellar exploration, and frankly, having a blast doing it.”

But she wasn’t really there to narrate a rocket launch. She was embarking on a larger, even more dangerous mission.

“While we wait,” she continued, “I’d like to tell you a little bit more about me. I’m thirty-one and originally from the west coast of Florida. And yes, I am single. But I would love not to be. Objectively speaking, I would make an excellent wife. I’m supportive. A good listener. Emotionally stable. Fiscally responsible. And I genuinely enjoy children. I would love at least three of them. Maybe four. Physically, I’m up for it. When I was fifteen, my pediatrician said I had ‘ideal birthing hips’ but I wasn’t offended. I took it as a compliment. So yes, I’d love to be a mom. And I’d make a great one. I’m patient but not a pushover. I love baking. And arts and crafts. I actually own two hot glue guns—”

That is when the security guard burst into the studio.

“CUT HER MIC,” he barked.

“My Insta handle is Kaylee with a ‘K’ and 7 e’s—”

“YOU’RE DONE!” yelled the guard, pushing the mounted camera away from her like it was paparazzi outside a bougie Beverly Hills restaurant.

As he turned his sights on her, she collapsed to the ground and curled up like a roly-poly. She’d seen this work when toddlers threw tantrums in Target but the guard must have been a dad because he squatted down and threw her over his shoulder.

The moment he did, a cheer rang out. From her upside-down vantage point, Kaylee look down, or rather up, at mission control and saw that the engineers were not cheering for the guard. Or for her. They were cheering because their rocket, for the first time ever, had cleared the tower and was heading to space.

Perhaps it was for the best that no one was watching as Kaylee descended the stairs, the guard’s meaty hand gripping her bottom while her chin bounced against his sweaty back. He barely even slowed when they arrived back in the bullpen, just a pause for Kaylee to grab her purse as they passed her desk and continued toward the exit. The last thing she heard before the officer yanked the warehouse door closed was the voice of launch director Kurt Kohli. “Congratulations, Kaboom. All systems are nominal.”

Nominal.

Kaylee had learned about that word earlier in the day. In engineering speak, “nominal” is any value that falls within a range of being insignificant and unremarkable.

Like her.

And while a nominal rocket is worthy of celebration, a nominal person is not. They merely exist. Was she a 6? Or a 7? Or a 10? Ultimately, the numerical value made no difference. She was doomed to orbit through space alone. Unseen. Lost in a forgettable black tapestry of nothingness.

As Kaboom 3 approached an altitude of 500 kilometers, Kaylee landed with a defeated plop in the driver’s seat of her Nissan Rogue. She queued up Kelly Clarkson’s “Broken & Beautiful” and searched Apple Maps for the closest Sonic. Within six minutes, she would be ordering French Toast Sticks and crying in the drive-thru line.

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She never made it to Sonic. She didn’t even make it out of the parking lot.

She only made it partway to the main gate when Kurt Kohli, in his champagne-splattered, Kaboom quarter-zip, ran in front of her car with his hands in the air and ordered her to stop.

Kaylee rolled down her window and stuck her head halfway out.

“I know,” she said. “You trusted me with an important job and I took advantage of that for my own selfish agenda. I’m sorry.”

Kurt didn’t immediately respond. He appeared to be thinking, as if he were working through a complicated calculus equation.

“Was that all true?” he asked. “What you said? On the livestream?”

Kaylee shook her head. Guilty. “No. I own three hot glue guns.”

Kurt nodded, analyzing her confession with a stoic seriousness. “Would you have dinner with me sometime?” he asked.

Kaylee’s Internal voice: “Yes.”

Kaylee’s External voice: “Sounds fun.”

Kurt: “When?”

Internal voice: “Tonight.”

External voice: “Tonight.”

Oops.

“I’ll DM you,” said Kurt. Then he turned and headed back toward the warehouse.

“Wait! Let me give you my contact,” she said.

Kurt shook his head. “Kaylee with a ‘K’ and 7 e’s. I’m also a good listener.”

Before he slipped inside, Kurt’s watched chirped an alert. He stopped in his tracks and looked up. High above Earth, visible only to someone who know what to look for, a white dot streaked across the evening sky. It was perfectly, beautifully unremarkable.

Thanks for reading SILVER CORD STORIES.

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Every few weeks, I’m recording and releasing an audio version of one of my original stories.

“Factory Reset” came out early last year, but since my readership has grown 750% since then (thank you!) it seemed worthy of being re-released this week and now recorded for all to hear!

As promised, some TBA talented friends will soon be reading their own favorite Silver Cord Stories in the weeks to come.

So stay tuned — and thanks for listening.

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY:

Some of the best story ideas come from just asking, “What if…”

In this case, my old cell phone had been warning me over and over that it was dangerously low on storage. As a writer, rather than fix the problem, instead I asked, “What if someone received a notification that their brain was running out of room and a tech company offered to clear up some space? What’s the worst (and best?) that could happen?”

With that, I was off to the races.

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Dear Senator Tooley,

This is a letter to inform you that your annual diagnostic test indicates that your brain is almost full. To protect against future performance loss, we urge you to free up storage space immediately at one of our six convenient locations.

Sincerely,

WaveTech Technology

Senator David Tooley had read the letter a dozen times. He still didn’t understand it. I mean, he wasn’t entirely surprised that his brain was running out of space. He was, after all, a U.S. Senator and many people regularly told him how intelligent he was.

“MELINDA!”

Melinda was David’s favorite aide, a curvy Puerto Rican he had plucked from obscurity at last year’s Girls Nation Conference.

“Find out if WaveTech is real and if my brain is really running out of space, and if it is really running out of space, find out how they could possibly know that.”

He handed her the letter and off she went.

One might think this was the strangest assignment he’d given Melinda in his first term as the junior senator from the commonwealth of Virginia. Far from it. After a recent meeting with an animal rights group, he asked her if she could track down “the sword part” of a swordfish so he could feel the tip and see if it was truly as sharp as an actual sword or if the seafood industry was using deceptive naming practices to boost sales.

(It turned out they are that sharp and the senator’s curiosity ended with a trip to the Capitol Urgent Care.)

Melinda returned before lunch with an answer to his questions.

“WaveTech is a real company. Your father was an A-round investor in the late 90s. As a thank you, WaveTech has been monitoring your brain with a small chip they implanted in your ear canal when you were eleven. And yes, according to their latest scan, your brain is critically low on storage.”

David stared back blankly. He wasn’t sure what he should do with this information. And the fact he didn’t know what to do only worried him more. Perhaps that indecision in itself was a sign of just how fragile he was.

“Make me an appointment,” he blurted out, his heart starting to flutter with his far too familiar anxiety. “And don’t tell Rochelle. Or Erica.”

Rochelle was the senator’s loyal wife and mother to his two middle schoolers. Erica was the senator’s twenty-seven-year-old girlfriend. The senator had been promising Erica for eight months that she was the true love of his life and that Rochelle’s days were numbered. But now he worried that it was he whose days were numbered. And if Erica knew he was unlikely to live long enough to become an entrenched DC incumbent with the financial means to bankroll her own aqua yoga studio, he might find out just how seriously she takes that “FAFO” tattoo on her right ankle.

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David skipped his morning Budget Committee meeting and drove himself to WaveTech’s Maryland office for a 10am appointment. An armed security guard ushered him through an empty lobby lined with paintings of Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton and Marie Curie and into a warmly lit consultation room furnished with a pair of black, square, leather chairs and a perfect white orchid on a marble side table. “It’s a Beautiful Day” played from an unseen speaker.

“How nice to see you again.”

Senator Tooley turned to find a gentle woman in her 60s, sporting a lab coat and holding an iPad. “I’m Dr. Simons.”

David rose and shook her hand. She had just applied vanilla hand lotion and for a moment their right palms were congealed together in slippery symbiosis. “Have we… met before?” he asked.

“1998,” she said. “You thought you were getting your tonsils out. Instead… we were putting something in.”

David should have been disturbed to hear this but he wasn’t. Dr. Simons was so comforting, so maternal, and deep in that jam-packed brain of his he remembered her voice. “So I… still have my tonsils?” he wondered.

Dr. Simons laughed. “Indeed. But we gave you ice cream anyway.”

She sat knee to knee with David and looked deep into his soul. “Your father took no pleasure in lying to you. But you don’t get to be one of the richest men in America without taking risks. At the time of his investment, our technology was largely unproven. Now using microchips to tap into brain activity and maximize one’s potential is almost banal, as they say.”

“True,” David said.

In all honesty, David couldn’t remember what “banal” meant. And Dr. Simons’ implication that “they” were all saying it made him feel even more insecure about the state of his intellect.

“So how bad is it?” he asked. “My brain, that is.”

Dr. Simons pulled up a live shot of David’s gray matter on her iPad. It looked like a radar report over a thunderstorm. Oranges and reds and yellows pulsing with activity.

“This is you,” she said. “As you can see, there is a lot going on. In fact, you have the most active hippocampus I’ve ever recorded.”

“Oh no,” he said.

“That’s not a bad thing,” she said. “The hippocampus regulates emotions and stores memories, it helps with spatial awareness, problem solving... The issue is that, as you can probably tell from this scan, things in there are a little… tight.”

David couldn’t tell anything. What he could feel was the first twinges of a migraine. Or maybe it was something worse. Was this another sign? Was this meeting pushing his brain beyond its natural capacity? Would his skull split open right then and there and his hippocampus ooze onto Dr. Simons’ fancy leather chairs?

“But we can fix it,” she explained. “It’s simply a matter of offloading unnecessary data.”

She flipped away from the brain scan to a pie chart with dozens of colors to it. “There are a lot of unimportant things we can lose here,” she said. “See that small blue sliver?”

David looked closer at the pie chart.

“Those are stored Nintendo cheat codes from your childhood,” she explained.

“Oh sure,” David said. “Up up down down left right left right B A select.”

Dr. Simons smiled. “And see that medium green slice?”

David nodded.

“That is a detailed business plan for an oven-baked sandwich shop.”

“When I was younger I dreamed of opening one. I was going to call it—”

Dr. Simons already knew the answer: “Tooley’s Toasties.”

“Exactly.” David shook his head in amazement. “Okay, what’s that giant red wedge?”

“Pornographic images.”

“Oh.”

“The good news is we can delete them. In fact, I estimate when we’re done with our sweep we can easily free up forty-six percent more space in your brain.”

David was speechless.

“David, do you know all the knowledge you could absorb with forty-six percent more brain space?”

David shook his big full head.

“You could become the smartest man in the United States Congress.”

Senator David Tooley smiled as he stared past Dr. Simons. The smartest man in Congress…

He pondered what he could do with such an advantage. He’d never lose another argument. Which would open up committee chair positions. Which would allow him to push through any legislation he wanted. Which meant he could funnel millions of dollars from Washington D.C. to his home state. Which meant he could eventually funnel millions of dollars into his own pocket. Which meant Erica could finally have her aqua yoga studio!

“Let’s do it,” he said.

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Dr. Simons pushed a green button on the wall and a blonde nurse entered with a glass of mint-infused water. She pulled a lever and David’s black leather chair flattened into a recliner.

“Oh. We’re doing this now?”

“Offloading only takes thirty minutes. And it’s painless. I just need a credit card and a release form.”

“Right. Um. How much money are we talking here?”

Dr. Simons, now standing, looked down at him in the recliner. “Normally we charge eight-five thousand dollars. But because your father was an early investor, I’ve been given permission to offer you a fourteen percent discount.”

David tried to figure out the math. He couldn’t. But so what, he thought. Once this was done, he could become great at math. He could become great at everything. Any money spent today would be made back tenfold on the other side of the offloading. You don’t get rich without taking risks, Dr. Simons had said.

“I’ll put it on my work card,” he said, handing her his Visa. If upgrading your noggin wasn’t a legitimate senatorial business expense, David didn’t know what was.

The nurse turned his head to the side, filled a small bulb syringe with mint water, and squeezed it into his ear.

“The water helps make an electric connection to the chip,” Dr. Simons explained.

David nodded. This all felt right. He couldn’t wait to tell Erica. She would be so proud of him. She always said how smart he was. She said he was the smartest man she’d ever done aqua yoga with, which was really saying something since Erica’s client list included two Supreme Court Justices. And if Erica thought he was that smart before the offloading, he could barely imagine what would she think of him after the—

“Oh darn.”

Dr. Simons said it quietly. But loud enough that David could hear it through his ear that wasn’t filled with mint water.

“Everything okay?”

“Darn darn.”

“Dr. Simons?”

She didn’t respond. David’s head was tilted so he could only see her Gucci sneakers shuffling nervously as she told the blonde nurse to run and find a charging cord.

Seconds later, the nurse was yelling from the next room. “USB-C or lightning?!”

“I DON’T KNOW!”

That was the last thing Senator Tooley remembered.

He woke up two hours later to see Dr. Simons looking down at him with a nervous smile. “How we feeling?”

David smiled back. “I feel… rad.”

Dr. Simons’ face fell. Not the answer she was hoping for. She pulled David’s chair back into the upright position and knelt down in front of him.

“Here’s the deal…” she began. “We had a bit of a power issue when we were doing your offloading.”

“Okay.”

“My iPad died.”

“Okay.”

“And when it rebooted, there was some data loss.”

“Okay.”

“In your brain.”

“Well like… how much?”

“It was a full factory reset.”

David didn’t know what that meant. And Dr. Simons struggled to find the proper words to explain it. But, in short, Senator David Tooley’s brain had been rebooted to its original 1998 settings.

“I reversed the charge on your Visa,” Dr. Simons added.

David sat in stunned silence.

“Would you like some ice cream?”

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David took his two scoops to go and walked down the hall toward the exit. You might assume he felt angry. Or panicky. But David felt… surprisingly calm.

But really it wasn’t a surprise. Because David was never anxious as a child. He never worried about anything. That only came when his older brother got sick and his dad went to prison for the largest insider trading scandal in American history and people he had never met before put their hands on David’s shoulder and told him that only he could salvage the Tooley family name.

The expectation to be his own family’s savior was a heavy burden and gave birth to a variety of fears. Fear of failure. Fear of being exposed as “the dumb son” who only graduated college because Dad made a phone call. Fear of disappointing his mom and his wife and his kids. And from the fear flowed resentment and various addictions and, in time, the most dangerous side effect of all: success.

But all that baggage was lost in the factory reset. Like a boat that had been scraped clean of its barnacles, David Tooley sped home unencumbered, in possession of his memories but freed from a lifetime of dysfunction and deceptions. He was, in the most important of ways, a new man.

His wife Rochelle met him in the kitchen. “Who the bleep is Erica?”

“Oh.” As a trained politician, David would have typically met the accusation with a creative lie and then a counterattack, but the reset had erased all such skills. “Erica is my girlfriend,” he answered.

“Get out,” she said.

That was fair. He drove to his office on Capitol Hill where he tossed and turned on his couch until morning.

Melinda arrived at 8am to shuttle him to his Budget Committee meeting. She was armed with coffee and egg whites. David pushed them away. He requested Froot Loops.

For the next hour, David sat with the committee’s twenty-one other members, slowly stirring his technicolor milk, thoroughly bored as lawyers and staffers “buttoned up” a 2,000 page omnibus bill. He couldn’t track most of what was happening, and most of the other senators didn’t even try. Some scrolled their phones or played Wordle. One elderly senator stared at the floor as an aide stood at the ready, wiping his chin when needed.

Eventually, David nodded off, his hand tipping his Froot Loops bowl, sending a surge of blue and red and yellow milk onto the desk in front of him. He snapped to attention, using pages from the bill to mop up the mess before it reached his pants. Crisis averted, he found himself staring at page 743:

83.c.IV - Allocates a sum of $5,000,000,000 (five billion) to the Amazonian Freedom Fund for immediate use.

Could that be right. Five BILLION dollars? His purified brain knew that was a big number.

“What is this?” David asked. The room quieted. “83 dot… c dot… roman numeral 4?”

A lawyer piped in. “Yes, Senator, that line item funds an embedded group of freedom fighters in South America committed to… destabilizing hostile governments.”

“Isn’t that, like, a lot of money?”

“This is a vetted group, sir—”

“I’m just saying in Contra it only takes two guys to do that exactly same thing. And all they need are big guns and an unlimited supply of ammo.”

The group stared back, more or less matching the look of the drooling senator in the corner.

“You guys don’t remember Contra? From the original NES system? What was that cheat code…” He couldn’t remember it. He pressed on. “I’m just saying five billion dollars could be better spent somewhere else. Or… like… not at all?”

David’s phone buzzed in his lap, breaking the silence. He looked down as a string of texts rolled in from Erica.

He escaped to the hall and started reading.

Oh God, David realized… My girlfriend is a crazy person.

He felt a sensation creep up from his heart and into his head.

David was too naive to know it was fear.

Which is when Ron Billums, the senior senator from Colorado, emerged from the committee room. His eyes were locked on David.

“Hi Ron…”

“We need your vote to get this thing out of committee,” he said bluntly.

“I don’t think I can do that.”

“David, this bill is vital to the well-being of millions of hardworking Americans.”

“But a lot of what’s in it just seems… stupid.”

“The only thing stupid right now is you.”

David’s chest tightened. “I don’t know…”

Senator Billums sighed. “David, what if I could promise you a fifty million dollar grant to the Tooley Center for Democracy.”

“The Tooley Center for Democracy? Is that a thing?”

“It can be.”

“What would the Tooley Center for Democracy do?”

“Whatever your board of directors wants it to do.”

“It sounds kinda sketchy.”

“It’s perfectly legal and it’s a wonderful way to honor your father.”

“He was kinda shady too.”

Senator Billums stepped closer and placed his hand on David’s shoulder. “Don’t act like a child, David. This is the kind of opportunity that not many people get—

the chance to restore your family to their former glory.”

David couldn’t ignore the pressure in his head now. He could feel his eyelids twitching. His throat was dry.

“Just say yes and all your problems go away,” the senior senator whispered.

But David knew that wasn’t true. He had said yes to all sorts of things he shouldn’t have said yes to. And because of it, his brain had been reset, his wife hated him, and his girlfriend was ready to out him as an adulterer on Instagram.

“I’m a definite no, Ron.”

David drove home that night. The front door was locked so he rang the bell.

Rochelle answered but said nothing.

“I screwed up. In a lot of ways. More than I probably even know. You’re right to be hurt. And mad. You can be mad for a year if you want. I’ll take it. But I’m not gonna leave. I’m gonna be different. I kinda hope I already am.”

He took a blanket and slept in the living room. The next day, David resigned from the Senate. By the time Erica tried to cancel him, he was already irrelevant.

The following January, a new oven-baked sandwich shop opened in Virginia Beach. Tooley’s Toasties. There was no grand opening. On most days David worked the kitchen while Rochelle manned the register. After school their kids would do homework at the counter and drink soda till Rochelle cut them off.

Two months in and they still hadn’t turned a profit. It was hard. Business was slow, especially in the winter. The mail came in the late afternoon. David waved to the postal worker and leafed through a stack of bills he wasn’t sure he could pay. At the bottom of the pile was a letter with a familiar letterhead.

Dear David,

During a recent audit, our team discovered an offshore server containing timed backups of various clients’ brains. We are happy to inform you that your brain backup was among those found.

Please contact us at your earliest convenience and we will be happy to restore you to your pre-reset status at no charge.

Sincerely,

Dr. Simons

David considered the offer. Then he looked around the shop. At his wife. And his kids. Then David Tooley threw the letter into the sandwich oven and watched it burn.

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This story, along with 18 others, are available in THE SILVER CORD, a collection of stories from award-winning writer Bob D. Smiley. THE SILVER CORD is available to order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or through your favorite independent bookstore.

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It was an understatement to say that the Cambria coffee shop had brought controversy. This was an idyllic city by the sea that preferred to be a magnet for rare cat breeds and wicker furniture and used books. But Cambria’s need for more tax revenue drowned out the native’s cries, and Starbucks store #9815 opened on a foggy day in November.

While purists shunned the grand opening, the temptation of an Iced Ube Coconut Espresso or a Mango Lemonade Strawberry Energy Refresher couldn’t keep the masses away, and by 9am the drive-thru was filled with a steady stream of cars while the inside line was populated by kid-free moms with time to kill and middle-aged men on the way to the golf course and a Marxist sewing club that had already commandeered the brand new leather couch.

The Starbucks staff, for their part, was in the zone, grabbing stickers and slapping them on their matching drinks, riding high with a fresh sense of purpose in a town full of people whose greatest ambition was the timing of their afternoon nap. And so it was delightfully disruptive when a pale, pencil-shaped twenty-two-year-old barista grabbed the sticker for the venti Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappucino and called out without any hesitation:

“I HAVE AN ORDER FOR SATAN.”

There were two seconds of silence after she yelled it, followed by laughter that stretched out for minutes. The team needed a chuckle after a pressure-packed morning, and they waited to see who they could thank for giving it to them. But no one stepped forward to claim Beelzebub’s beverage, and the red-faced barista placed it on the pick-up counter shelf as a wave of fresh orders pulled her back to the task at hand.

An hour later and the devil’s drink was still there, his once pert whipped cream now collapsing into the brown, chip-filled sludge. It was just a prank, they concluded, forgetting all about it until the late morning rush when the barista looked over and saw that Satan had indeed emerged from the shadows and taken his $7.35 milkshake with him.

It didn’t take long for word about the store’s famous customer to spread through the sleepy, pine-treed town, and within a week a Yelp review deemed that this was not in fact Cambria’s Starbucks… but Satan’s. The Gen Z staff embraced the notion. In a boring place like Cambria, this pedigree gave them the rare opportunity to feel rebellious and hip.

Leaning into the fun, a handful of employees began a morning tradition of starting their shifts by putting their hands over their hearts and saying “All hail, King Satan.” The afternoon shift added devil horns to their name tags. Instead of a traditional Christmas party, on the night of the winter solstice, the manager invited the whole staff to come back after closing and partake in a “black mass” in Satan’s honor, spreading out Frappuccino cups in the shape of a pentagram on the cold cement floor while lighting candles and calling on his mysterious “mocha cookie crumble” powers to deliver dark chocolate blessings on everyone in the new year.

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Now some of you may be expecting that this is when all hell broke loose. But that’s not the way Satan operates and this time was no different. In fact, from the staff’s perspective, their little store on Pacific Coast Highway chugged along like any other non-satanic place of business, tackling a variety of issues that could at worst be called a nuisance.

There was that quirky round table near the door that wobbled, of course, and a few times a day a worker was on his hands and knees with folded up paper napkins trying to make it level. And there were struggles with lost deliveries, which made sense given the fact that Cambria was on the way to nowhere in particular. And also there was the rotten meat smell. Not everyone smelled it, but the place had been a butcher shop before Starbucks came in so the odor made sense. The store manager looked in the storage closets and crawl spaces and even cleaned out the fridge multiple times, but never succeeding in eliminating it.

All things considered, it was nothing to lose sleep over.

But that was still early in the year, before they started having issues with the microphone in the drive-thru. Because of their proximity to the nearby fire station, their receiver was picking up incoming calls from the emergency dispatch line while the fire house received their coffee orders. So instead of taking an order for a tall French roast and a mocha latte, employees were asked to respond to a “small child bitten by squirrel” and a “large woman with chest pains.” The mix-up led to dropped orders which slowed down business and pushed the drive-thru line all the way out onto PCH, and as traffic piled up, the Highway Patrol arrived, full of threats to take legal action if the coffee shop couldn’t figure out how to protect its customers from fisherman flying past their customers’ side mirrors at 60 mph on their way down to Morro Bay.

And all that honking and swerving eventually scared away the commie sewing club and the carefree golfers and the childless moms, which made the staff realize that the once joyful Cambria Starbucks had evolved into a fairly miserable place to work.

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This newfound misery was timed perfectly with the arrival of flu season and a nasty bug spread from worker to worker and then from the staff to its customers, hollowing out the store and leaving behind a cranky, skeleton crew of coughing and feverish employees. Not surprisingly, they soon started to turn on each other. A shift supervisor called a barista “ugly as an egg bite” and the barista called the shift supervisor a “grande vanilla ho bag” and everyone openly nicknamed the manager “The Origin Of The Stink,” and with spring still a month away, store #9815 was burning through employees in a town that didn’t have many motivated applicants to choose from.

This is when the big boys in Seattle got involved. Starbucks headquarters had been watching the day over day numbers for weeks, wondering what was going on in Cambria. The store had launched in the top 10% of their Central California locations but was steadily dropping, now running well below average, and given the amount corporate had poured into building permits and lobbying the city for approval, “well below average” was not acceptable.

Thankfully, they had a solution for this sort of thing. His name was Austin Shield, a slick, 30-something graduate of the Harvard Business School who specialized in saving dying Starbucks locations. Austin was paid handsomely as evidenced by his tailored jeans and Gucci loafers. In the four years he’d been with corporate, he had a perfect record of resurrections. It didn’t matter if the Starbucks was in midtown Manhattan or at a food court in Bismarck, North Dakota, Austin had the gift to see beyond the numbers and find the deeper issues. The longest it ever took him to diagnose and save a store was five days. His record turnaround was three hours.

Austin arrived in Cambria a little irked. Alaska Airlines, where he had proudly ascended to the Atmos Titanium tier on their frequent flier scale, could only deliver him as close as San Jose or Santa Barbara, both of which necessitated a minimum two-hour drive once he landed. He also couldn’t earn any Marriott Bonvoy points for the trip since every hotel in Cambria was privately owned or a cutesy bed and breakfast.

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Rather than get upset, Austin remembered his business school training and channeled his frustration into the task at hand: fixing store #9815. At 7am on Day 1, he was sitting down with the store manager and peppering her with questions:

• What is the biggest thing currently killing your sales?

• What are the 3 biggest bottlenecks in drink delivery?

• On a scale of 1 to 10, what is employee morale and why?

• If you could change one thing about this store right now, what would it be?

• Also, what is that smell?

He did the same with the shift supervisors and baristas, then spent an hour polling random customers about their experience in exchange for $5 gift cards.

“I have all I need,” he declared before retreating to his bed and breakfast to draft an action plan.

Austin fired the store manager, one of the shift supervisors, and three baristas. He made a corporate donation to the first responder’s union in exchange for them agreeing to switch their dispatch calls to a different radio channel. He hired a professional carpenter to level out the wobbly table. He redirected all deliveries to the San Luis Obispo Starbucks then paid an employee with a pickup truck five hundred extra bucks a week to drive everything to the Cambria store three times a week. He sponsored a local influencer to record a TikTok reel announcing the store was under new management with free drip coffees for the first 200 customers. Last but not least, Austin bought a four-pack of Glade PlugIns air fresheners at the local drug store and installed them himself.

Austin told corporate he would stay onsite a day or two to help as things improved. He was confident that he would be back in Seattle by the weekend.

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When he pulled in the next morning at 8am, the first thing he saw was a customer puking in the bushes. He went inside and was hit with a putrid wave of something so horrific that it nearly made him turn right around and join the customer at the shrub. But he knew he had to be strong. For the team. For corporate. And for every alumni of the Harvard Business School. Breathing only through his mouth, Austin assured the grim staff that the smell did not pose a work hazard as he quickly directed foot traffic toward the drive-thru line and put on a headset to help take orders.

But as he flipped on the sound, he was dismayed to hear that instead of picking up the emergency dispatch feed, the Cambria Starbucks was now picking up nanny cam sounds from Happy Clappy, a bustling daycare center down the street. Clear as day, a chorus of sad children were wailing and saying various versions of “I want Mommy.”

This created a problem since Meg, the brand new store manager, had just dropped off her youngest son at Happy Clappy and swore that one of those cries was “my Benji.” Austin had never met Benji, but assured his mother that her child was no doubt happy and clappy. Meg did not buy it and announced that she was quitting.

“You can’t do that,” said Austin.

“Why not?” said Meg.

“Because Starbucks needs you,” he said.

Meg did not find this argument persuasive. She stormed toward the exit but Austin grabbed her arm before she made it out the door.

“LET GO OF ME!” Meg yelled.

As she screamed, a highway patrolman was entering with a court order to shut down the drive-thru. Seeing the terrified look in Meg’s eyes, the officer pulled her to safety, and Austin stumbled backwards, hitting the sturdy, non-wobbly table with his hip then spinning headfirst into the hard wooden lip of the beverage pick-up counter.

He slumped to the ground underneath it. A drop of blood dripped from the gash on his forehead and stained his tailored jeans. A single Gucci loafer had come to rest near the bakery display case.

“What the hell is wrong with this place…” Austin moaned.

In the doorway, the highway patrolman called for a paramedic.

It’s gonna be okay, Austin assured himself. Just stay awake till they get here. Everything will be just fine.

A few seconds later, in the earpiece of the drive-thru headset, Austin heard the unfortunate voice of the emergency dispatcher:

…we have a 30-something male with a head wound and possible concussion. Any available unit, please respond…

“Oh no,” Austin realized. He signaled to his headset but the highway patrolman didn’t understand, thinking he was pointing to his cut.

“Yep, they’re coming,” the officer said, unwilling to step inside because of the toxic smell.

“No…” Austin whispered, barely audible.

…any available unit, please respond…

Austin lifted his head, desperate to keep his eyes open. That’s when he saw it.

…any available unit, please respond…

It was an old drink sticker. A venti Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino, to be specific. Stuck to the bottom side of the pick-up counter.

…any available unit, please respond…

It was left behind by a customer who, in retrospect, had never truly left at all.

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Evidence indicates that Mrs. McDowell was not historically a violent person. According to a close friend, she did not even like smashing bugs with a rolled up magazine, squealing when she did it, “like she was the one having her guts smeared across the underside of a Frontgate catalog.”

Indeed, in her twenties, her life was marked by peace. Neighbors remember seeing her cradling her firstborn through her living room window while reading a book. Her mailman has memories of her smiling as she pushed a stroller slowly down the street. A barista noted once seeing Mrs. McDowell rocking a car seat with her knee while drinking a turmeric chai tea. “She made it look easy,” the barista said, adding that Mrs. McDowell breastfed effortlessly, quickly shrinking back to her pre-baby weight after only a few months.

But almost a decade later, now a mother of four, the beauty of child rearing had morphed into a daily experience that, according to a close family member, “more closely resembled guerrilla warfare.” Our committee can safely conclude this was humbling. While Mrs. McDowell once thought of herself as a confident, college-educated woman, she was losing skirmishes hourly against an enemy who paraded about the battlefield “with dirty underwear on their heads and permanent marker smeared across their faces.”

“they R savages,” she told her sister via text message.

This brings us to May 11th of last year. With the help of nearby Ring cameras, we know that Mrs. McDowell and her children left their residence at approximately 10:41am local time and drove to a nearby Trader Joe’s, arriving at 10:49am.

Shoppers remember Mrs. McDowell already appearing frazzled by the time she reached the entrance, muttering to her six-year-old daughter that “I can’t believe it took you ninety minutes to put pants on.” Another shopper shared seeing Mrs. McDowell in the vegetable aisle where one of her sons flicked a booger from his nose that landed directly on her bottom lip. As the other children pointed and laughed, Mrs. McDowell grimaced and wiped it clean using a produce baggie she tore from the roll they keep near the bell peppers.

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After leaving the store, their next stop was the nearby Chick-fil-A where, before ordering at 11:53am, drive-thru microphones picked up Mrs. McDowell saying, “I don’t even know why we’re doing this, we have a whole car full of fresh food!” Store records note that at 12:01pm, Mrs. McDowell made a second pass through the drive-thru line, this time for forks, because “My kids just announced they don’t like touching nuggets with their bare hands.” Various unintelligible screaming could be heard in the background.

Mrs. McDowell was back home at 12:13pm, which brings us to the incident at the forefront of our investigation and one that ultimately affected every human on Earth.

Upon their return, battery data from the McDowells’ electronic devices show a sharp uptick in usage. Data obtained from content provider subpoenas specifically show:

• 3 iPads connecting to Disney+

• 1 iPad connecting to YouTube kids

• 2 Gabb watches texting each other emojis

• 1 Samsung smart television streaming an episode of Blippi

• 1 iPhone looping the Encanto song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”

Notably, location services tell us all 8 of these devices were within three square feet of each other inside the McDowell home.

This lasted until 12:37pm local time, when the McDowells’ next door neighbors report hearing children fighting with each other followed quickly by Mrs. McDowell exiting what sounded like the bathroom then yelling in frustration at the top of her lungs: “THAT’S IT! I AM SO DONE WITH ALL OF THIS CRAP!”

The neighbors then heard an indecipherable smashing noise that repeated “at least a dozen times.” When she was done, the house was silent.

With the aid of the world’s leading audio engineers, we were able to recreate the sound and can confidently assert that what the neighbors heard was Mrs. McDowell destroying her family’s WiFi router with a meat tenderizer.

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This rash act was complicated by the fact that Mr. McDowell was working from home that day, and was in the process of receiving government-designed malware he had been tasked with testing as part of his job with what is now formerly known as the United States Department of Defense.

Rather than the malware being safely delivered to Mr. McDowell’s CPU through encrypted channels, the electric surge triggered by Mrs. McDowell’s meat tenderizer sent the malware directly into a dozen local networks by mistake.

Within twenty minutes, the malware had spread to the metro Milwaukee area. Within an hour, every computer, smart phone, tablet, and internet-based service in the entire world had been rendered permanently useless.

As we all experienced, the next 125 days were filled with civil unrest, rampant starvation, and revolution. Unfortunately, by the time communications were restored and Wisconsin was reconstituted as part of the Unified Global Alliance, Mrs. McDowell and her family were nowhere to be found.

Despite all our efforts to make contact with them, the McDowells have yet to reconnect to the internet with any of their known electronic devices. This lines up with testimony from former friends that suggests Mrs. McDowell’s psychotic break on the afternoon of May 11 was likely the first step in her radicalization.

A woman matching Amy McDowell’s description was recently spotted in rural Ohio trading quail eggs for raw milk, but by the time Unified Global Alliance authorities arrived, all they could find was a turmeric chai teabag and a fresh pair of stroller tracks that disappeared into the forest.

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Bon voyage!

STORY NOTES:

The question I hear most often about a story is, “Where does this stuff come from?” In this case, I can thank my 70-something mother and her longtime gentleman friend, who on multiple occasions have stumbled into situations on the high seas that have netted them a fancy bottle of wine and some shipboard credit.

Unlike the Jankowskis, they’re not looking for trouble, but it finds them nonetheless.

It got me thinking about a less scrupulous couple who taste the good life… and refuse to look back.

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