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.”

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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!”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 “Blippy”

• 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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For a decade every grocery list we had was scribbled on a Don L. Carlton notepad. And look, the fact I can still remember his name says Don L. Carlton accomplished exactly what he wanted: name recognition.

Truth be told, we all want to be known. Lisette Buckingham, the protagonist of “Monsoon,” is no different. But Lisette’s reasons go deeper. And when the high of her local fame can’t solve her existential problems… it’s just a matter of time before she bursts.

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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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I wasn’t comfortable inviting any friends because I like to keep my spiritual life separate from my personal life, but immediately one person from the office popped into my mind: Abe.

Abe works with me at Flo-Tech Engineering. Well, technically he works in the mail room. But that means I see him once or twice a day when he delivers packages to my office. He has gaping holes in his ear lobes and is just generally obnoxious so if there was one person I knew who needed to be tamed, it was him.

I was surprised at how quickly Abe said yes. But maybe I shouldn’t have been. I am his superior and he does see all the mail so he knows that nearly all of the important packages at Flo-Tech end up on my desk.

In reality, his exuberance should have been a red flag.

First, Abe showed up at 10:07 even though I told him to get to church “no later than 9:40” because it’s Easter and if he showed up late we’d end up sitting in the back row with the youth group kids which is exactly what happened.

But his lateness was overshadowed by the fact he wore a Tupac Shakur hoodie and the baggiest jeans I’ve ever seen and so when we had to scooch down to our bad seats in the last row all I could do is watch in horror as Abe’s exposed butt crack slid past the faces of all these fifteen-year-olds who of course thought it was hilarious.

Then came the sermon. Our pastor picked the story of Jesus’ resurrection when Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb on Sunday morning and sees that Jesus isn’t there. An oldie but goodie. But of course Abe hadn’t heard it before and when it got to the part where Mary mistakes the resurrected Jesus for the gardener, Abe laughs like we’re at a Nate Bargatze concert.

“That’s not funny,” I whisper.

“Yeah it is,” he says.

And then a few seconds later, when Jesus calls Mary by name and she realizes he’s alive, Abe says, “Dammmmmmmn…”

When I hear this, naturally I kick him in the shin but by his lack of reaction it’s clear he’s not even paying attention to me at this point!

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Then the pastor talks about how the resurrection means we’re not defined by our past and Abe gets quiet which is a relief but then after another minute I hear him sniffling. I assume he’s having an allergic reaction to the teenage boys’ drug store cologne but when I look over he’s crying.

I pat Abe on the thigh. “Keep it down,” I say, but the second I touch him, he starts sobbing. That’s what I get for trying to be comforting, I guess. To make it worse, as Abe sobs, it spreads to the teenage girls around us who all start crying too.

Mercifully, the pastor is starting to wrap it up and explains they are going to do some baptisms for people in the church who have recently made a decision to follow Christ. Unfortunately, the second Abe hears this, he leans over to me and says, “I want to be baptized too.”

I tell Abe he can’t be baptized because that’s only for people who have given their hearts fully to Jesus and he says “But I did that” and I say “When?” and then he says “just now.” I tell him that’s impossible and that he hasn’t even read the Bible or attended our church’s 16-week new member class but he is being completely obstinate at this point and then just STANDS UP and yells, “I’M READY TO BE BAPTIZED!”

Well, you can imagine my shock, especially when my pastor locks eyes with me as if to say, “Why did you invite a crazy person to church on Easter?” I thought the moment couldn’t get any worse, but then, one by one, all these youth group group kids stand up with Abe and announce that THEY want to be baptized too!

And without even waiting for an elder to approve their request, they start sliding out of the row past me, with their stinky cologne and their butt cracks and down they march to the front like a parade of lunatics.

I assume someone on staff will put a stop to all of this, but instead people start applauding. No doubt these cheers are coming from other invitees like Abe who don’t know that there’s a proper way to do things or that Abe regularly comes back from lunch at Flo-Tech smelling like marijuana or that he has a 3-year-old daughter that he’s only allowed to see every other weekend with court-ordered supervision.

Anyway, I don’t know what Abe said to my pastor, but whatever it was, he clearly bought it hook, line, and sinker because next thing I know Abe is in the baptismal pool being dunked and then popping up out of the water with his head held high yelling “THANK YOU, JESUS!”

As I sat there in the back, watching Abe hugging the pastor and getting everyone around him wet and high-fiving the blubbering teenagers lined up behind him, I obviously felt like a fool. Here I was trying to tame a co-worker and instead I let his wildness infect our whole church on what is supposed to be the holiest day of the year!

When church was over, Abe met up with me in the lobby and asked if he could have a ride home but I said no because I didn’t want my cloth seats to get wet. Thankfully, he had many other offers from dummies who didn’t know what they were getting themselves into.

All that to say, I consider my attempt at Christian charity a lesson learned! Lord knows that the next time they ask us to invite someone to church, I will happily ignore the request. Or maybe I’ll stop going to church altogether.

Abe did mention he was thinking of joining the worship team… and I can only imagine what body parts I’ll see when he raises his hands in the air to sing.

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Every episode, one of my original short stories will be read by a real human who is incredibly talented and possibly famous.

While I get busy calling in some favors, this first episode is being read… by me! And why not? “bRobert” is the only story in The Silver Cord that is autobiographical.

No matter the format, my goal remains the same: to make you laugh and stir your soul.

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The Jankowskis had never considered themselves “cruise people.” Wife Shirley had an inner ear problem that made her wobbly even on dry land and husband Craig hadn’t set foot on a boat since he left the Navy in 1974. But Stellar Cruises was no normal cruise line, and when a brochure with the company’s summer itineraries landed in the Jankowskis’ Fresno mailbox, Shirley was struck with the overwhelming sense that she was looking directly into her future.

The cover featured a glossy color photo of a husband and wife, cheek to cheek, leaning on the balcony of their stateroom. Beneath them, a blue-green ocean stretched to the horizon.

“Oh my,” Shirley said out loud to no one.

After forty-nine years, her marriage to Craig was not marked by loving gazes and slow sunsets. The two of them kept a safe distance from each other, largely because Craig’s work at the water treatment plant left him with a repellent chemical smell that no amount of showering seemed to eradicate, and also because they increasingly had little to discuss even when they were in close proximity to each other. Separate bathrooms led to separate bedrooms which led to separate lives.

With their fiftieth wedding anniversary on the horizon, Shirley concluded that a lavish vacation might be the thing that resuscitates their love. They were overdue for a fancy trip, frankly, in so much as they had never been on one. And while they couldn’t technically afford a Stellar Cruise, if Shirley cut back on their food budget and Craig worked a few more overtime shifts, they could put the trip on a credit card and probably have it all paid off by Christmas.

Shirley held her nose and entered Craig’s bedroom. She handed him the brochure and watched silently as he leafed through it. He paused for a long time on the room schematics, tapping his index finger on the jacuzzi tub that came standard with all upper-level staterooms. “This is no Navy destroyer,” he concluded.

Shirley booked a seven-day cruise before he could change his mind. To her delight, Craig only grew more excited. He started to watch YouTube walk-through videos of the vessel and read online reviews about the best restaurants and entrees. Multiple times a day Shirley would hear Craig’s bedroom door crack open and, from inside, her husband would call out his latest finding like a seaman sharing an announcement from the bridge. “They serve fresh baked chocolate chip cookies every day at 3pm sharp! Guaranteed!”

Six weeks later they were on the dock in Fort Lauderdale staring up at the 45,000 ton vessel. It was so bright and white that, even through sunglasses, Craig still had to squint. Painted in swooping eight-foot blue letters near the bow was its mystical name: “Aroma of the Seas.” High above, seven decks of balconies stretched left and right. A small stream of white smoke drifted from the smokestack and dissipated into the blue Florida sky. “What a beautiful boat,” Shirley said.

“Technically it’s a ship,” Craig corrected.

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Once on board, they were handed champagne and confetti poppers and directed to the Dreamaway deck. Lining up next to other septuagenarians, they cheered and waved to the indifferent dock workers down below as the Aroma pulled away from its moorings and its four diesel-electric engines powered the Jankowskis into the Atlantic Ocean.

After their 3pm cookies, they went to their stateroom for a nap before getting gussied up for the early seating at dinner. Shirley had requested a table for two, near a window. The ocean breeze carried Craig’s smell off to parts unknown and together they had a romantic swordfish dinner with red wine from New Zealand and a vanilla bean crème brûlée their waiter charred right in front of them.

Once they reached international waters, the casino opened and Shirley watched with pride as Craig turned $40 into $80 at the blackjack table. The ship swayed gently from left to right but Shirley was wearing complimentary seasick wristbands and barely even noticed. When the two of them retired to bed just before eleven, they did so with satisfied smiles on their faces, excited to do it all again the next day.

Their restful sleep was interrupted shortly after midnight by a sound outside their stateroom. Shirley nudged Craig who put in his hearing aids and sat up for a better listen.

SCCCREEEEEEECH--THUD.

SCCCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH--THUD.

Shirley looked to her resident seaman. “What is that?”

“Something’s hitting the hull,” Craig concluded. He wiggled out of bed and shuffled past the screen door to the balcony. SCCCREEEEEEEEEEEEECH--THUD. “Yep. Somewhere near the bow!”

Craig offered to close the sliding door but Shirley needed the draft because of her husband’s miasma. “It’s okay,” Shirley said.“I’m sure it will stop soon enough.”

But the noise didn’t stop. Every twenty-two seconds it arrived like clockwork.

SCCCREEEEEEECH--THUD.

SCCCREEEEEEECH--THUD.

By the morning, Shirley was a wreck. She managed to join Craig on the Sunshine deck for coffee and pastries, but she did so with her disheveled face hidden under an Aroma of the Seas visor.

“And how was your first night on the ship?” a server asked as he topped off her coffee.

Shirley didn’t like to complain, but they had spent good money on this vacation and the fear she might not sleep for an entire week was weighing on her. “Actually, I was up all night because of… the noise.”

She called it “the noise” because she didn’t know what it was but also because she assumed everyone else heard it too and the crew was already busy fixing it.

“What noise?” the server said, straightening up.

Within ten minutes, an officer in white pants and crisp white shirt with epaulets on the shoulder was at their breakfast table. First Officer Korsika was Greek. Tan. Chiseled. At his request, Shirley recreated the noise in detail, amplifying it as loudly as she could without disturbing other guests’ breakfasts.

Officer Korsika shook his head. “My deepest apologies, Mrs. Jankowski. My best guess is that what you heard was simply the sound of waves hitting the hull. It was a bit rocky last night.”

Craig was not about to be patronized by a cruise ship “officer” wearing a puka shell necklace. “No no no. Waves is water on metal. This was metal on metal.” Shirley nodded, grateful for her husband’s support.

A few minutes later the three of them were crowded onto the Jankowskis’ balcony, listening. They couldn’t hear a thing over the sound of The Goldfingers, a 70s cover band running a sound check in the Stargazer Lounge. Officer Korsika pinched his radio and spoke to a nameless officer in Greek. A few seconds later, the music stopped. Once it did, clear as day they heard:

SCCCREEEEEEECH--THUD!

Officer Korsika didn’t need to hear it a second time to know: “No one stowed the anchor when we left port.” With that, he yelled something in Greek over the radio and made a beeline for the door.

“Like I said,” Craig said to Shirley as they watched him speedwalk down the hall. “Metal on metal.”

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At dinner that night, Shirley and Craig were surprised with a free bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and a handwritten letter from Officer Korsika himself, thanking them for alerting him to the anchor issue. Folded up in the envelope was a Stellar Cruise Line credit for $2000.

“Two thousand dollars?” Craig exclaimed. He was so happy he stood up out of his chair, leaned across the table, and kissed his wife on the cheek.

Shirley blushed and shrugged her shoulders. “I guess sometimes it’s good to complain,” she said.

“Damn right it is! Now keep your eyes peeled, Shirley. If you spot anything else out of whack, we might get enough credit to pay for a second cruise!”

Craig said it as a joke. But the warmth of her husband’s words and the thrill of his affection stayed with her throughout the day, and she found herself secretly hoping something terrible might befall her that would net them the extra money they needed to do this all again.

It happened on day five. Shirley had just left the spa after making use of the free sauna, fluffy towels, and cucumber water when she stepped off the cedar flooring and back onto tile, only to have her sweat-covered foot slip out from under her.

“JESUS, MARY, AND JOSEPH!” she yelped, her arms flapping in the air like an ostrich who couldn’t get off the ground. She grabbed the door frame and steadied herself, seconds before a fall that would have likely cracked a hip.

A bubbly young spa worker in black shorts and white sneakers appeared around the corner. “Are you okay, ma’am?”

Catching her breath and re-securing her towel, Shirley explained what almost happened. She painted a gruesome picture, goosing the story along with frightful thoughts of internal bleeding, psychological trauma, and an emergency Air-Lift to a third-world medical facility that would have undoubtedly left her with a limp.

The spa worker put out a rubber mat and filed an incident report. That night at dinner, the wine was even fancier and the amount of Stellar Cruise Line credit in the envelope put them over the top for a 10-day trip to Alaska.

They booked the trip for August, just seven weeks later. Here they didn’t think they were cruise people and now they had been on two of them in the same summer. With the extra money from Stellar, the Jankowskis made use of the various add-on experiences (aka “Stellar Moments”) they hadn’t even considered on their maiden voyage. They walked on a glacier. They took a seaplane to a lodge for line-caught wild salmon. Craig even splurged for a professional massage. His masseuse tested various oils on his body until she found one that expunged his natural sulfur odor, and, for the first time since 1993, Craig Jankowski didn’t smell like wastewater.

“Well that settles it,” Shirley said after taking a whiff of her husband. “We’re never going home.” She laughed as she said it but Craig knew she wasn’t joking. He was feeling the same call to action that she was. When the clock struck 3pm, they grabbed a hot stack of chocolate chip cookies and a corner table to work up a plan.

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Craig estimated they would have to bring in half a million dollars of Stellar Cruise Line credit a year to hop seamlessly from one ship to the next. It was a daunting number, but less so if they broke it down to merely collecting $10,000 a week.

“We’ll have to be vigilant,” Shirley said. “It’s not every day we’re gonna step on a wine glass or find a Band-Aid in our pasta.”

Craig was hopeful. Up to this point it had only been Shirley looking for dangerous ship conditions. But he would be bringing his own critical eye as a Navy veteran. “You’d be surprised how many ways there are to die on a ship,” Craig boasted.

When they reached port in Juneau, the Jankowskis skipped the totem pole museum and stayed onboard looking for danger. Together, they scoured the ship. Craig noted a rusty deck railing on the port side near the shuffleboard court. Shirley discovered the lunch menu was serving sushi without noting the danger of consuming raw fish. Craig inspected the life jackets and found a half dozen were missing their safety whistles. Shirley uncovered some “black mold” inside the drain of their jacuzzi tub.

The experience was thrilling. Taking full advantage of Stellar Cruise Lines was the couple’s first shared interest in almost a half century. Not that Shirley and Craig saw themselves as taking advantage of anything. From their perspective, they were providing a valuable service. Whatever pittance Stellar Cruise Line paid them in credit was a drop in the bucket compared to what the company might lose in a lawsuit if an innocent passenger slipped or choked or drowned. They were heroes, if you looked at it the right way.

They delivered their exhaustive list to the Guest Relations Officer then retreated to their stateroom. An hour later, the captain himself was knocking on their door. He was in his late 50s, bearded, with a healthy belly. He spoke with a European accent they couldn’t place given their limited international travel. Asking if he could come in, he pulled out the small desk chair and sat while Shirley and Craig shared a seat on their bed.

One by one he went through the list, apologizing, promising that the people in charge would be held accountable, and explaining how each issue would be remedied within twenty-four hours. “In addition, Stellar Cruise Lines would like to offer you a complimentary voyage on a cruise of your choice. Would that be satisfactory?”

Shirley and Craig shared a knowing look. “Plus maybe some spa vouchers?” Craig added.

The Jankowskis went to the Mediterranean next. Then down the Mexican Riviera. And then up the East Coast to see the fall leaves. Shirley was craving something “spiritual” so they did a Holy Land cruise after that, followed by a trip to the South of France. With Craig’s smell well controlled by regular massages, they ditched their two-person table by the window in exchange for eight-seaters with a revolving group of strangers.

The fact this humble couple from Central California had strung together eleven straight cruises and counting made the Jankowskis the envy of their new friends. Their fellow dinner guests couldn’t believe Stellar was happy to reward them over and over again. It felt like a bug in the system. “Not at all!” Shirley explained. “They want to know these things.”

Spurred by the Jankowskis’ success, the other couples began to follow suit. On any given cruise, old men could be seen eyeing the service dates on the elevators or sneaking down to the lower decks to check the temperature gauges on the ship’s deep freezers. Wives, on the other hand, spent their free time seeing if they could get their thighs stuck between the slats of chaise lounges or have an allergic reaction to the hair spray in the beauty salon. For all the investment that Stellar Cruise Line put into shipboard entertainment, the most popular activity for people in their 70s turned out to be nitpicking.

By spring, Stellar had given out so much credit to the Jankowskis and all their entitled friends that it began to affect the company’s bottom line. At the current trajectory, there would not be enough profit at the end of the fiscal year to give out bonuses to employees and crew. They might even have to do a round of layoffs before the holidays.

The CEO, Melinda Stokeburn, a tense woman in need of a good massage of her own, was incensed. “What do you mean, ‘it can all be traced back to one couple’?” A month earlier, her Chief Financial Officer had hired a forensic accountant to unravel the growing mess, which led directly back to Shirley and Craig Jankowski, now thirty-four weeks into their string of complimentary cruises.

Melinda called the legal department to weigh her options. She could ban the Jankowskis from Stellar, but given the countless relationships they had made, that could turn a whole army of senior citizens against the cruise line. She could also direct all officers to stop giving out credit altogether, but legal pointed out that that was the company’s only pressure valve against legitimate complaints.

Melinda hung up and stared out the window at the brown hills of Santa Clarita. She had to get this one right: it was the kind of decision that could cement her reputation as the best cruise line CEO in the business.

A half hour later, she emerged from her office. “I’ve got it,” she said.

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The next morning, Stellar’s top executives joined her around the board room table to hear her plan. “For over eight months,” she began, “one couple has been sucking Stellar Cruise Lines dry with their impossibly high standards. Even worse, they are teaching other couples how to follow in their footsteps. It is obvious that they have no intention of stopping. And if we let them, they will continue to take advantage of us until there is nothing left. But we are not going to let that happen... because the Jankowskis’ entire scam hinges on one thing: our mistakes. Which means there is one way we can derail their entire gravy train.” Melinda stood up and put her fists on the table. “We are going to give the Jankowskis the perfect cruise.”

In theory, the task was simple. By not giving Shirley and Craig anything to complain about, they would run out of cruise credit and have to finally zip up their suitcases and return home. And with the head of the snake cut off, the other grifters would fade away with them. But pulling this off would be no small undertaking.

On Melinda’s order, Stellar tripled their crew for the Jankowskis’ upcoming 7-day trip to Portugal and Spain. A dedicated cleaning crew was assigned to their stateroom. Two rotating staff members would be waiting outside Shirley and Craig’s door twenty-four hours a day. Six other staff members were assigned to shadow Shirley and Craig wherever they walked on the ship, telling the couple it was part of a new “Platinum Experience” they were only giving to the highest tier passengers. As for meals, a Michelin Star chef was hired to prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the Jankowskis’ table, to their exact specifications. Whenever onshore, Shirley and Craig would be provided a team of armed security and five thousand dollars in per diem spending “just because.” To top it all off, Melinda herself would be traveling onboard, ready to authorize any additional expenses as she saw fit. In total, Stellar Cruise Line was spending an extra $10 million dollars on the cruise, but if they pulled it off, everyone at the company would still have a job come the new year.

Shirley and Craig arrived at the pier in Lisbon excited to once again be sailing on the Aroma of the Seas. After so many months of milking the system, they fell into their traditional roles without even thinking about it. Shirley tried to see if she could slip walking up the gangway. Craig ran his hands along the railing hoping for a splinter. They came up empty.

Once on board, they were thrilled about the new Platinum Experience until it became clear they were not allowed to do anything without their servants doing it for them. “I can open my own deck umbrella,” Craig said, hoping to pinch his finger in it and draw some blood. “Heavens no, Mr. Jankowski. You’re just here to relax.” The personal chef arrived at their private table with a detailed list of the Jankowskis’ food allergies, both the real ones and the ones they had made up over the last nine months, and only served dishes the couple had eaten and enjoyed on previous voyages. The cleaning crew changed the sheets in their bedroom three times a day. The towels were swapped out every ninety minutes. A new shower curtain arrived every night. Every morning the drain in their sink was snaked. When weather reports showed rain in the forecast, the captain charted a course two hundred nautical miles to the south to guarantee sunny skies all the way to Barcelona.

With just one day left in the cruise, the Jankowskis were sitting at $0 in future credit and beginning to get desperate. Shirley removed her seasick bands and tried on multiple occasions to fall and hit her head on the dance floor but every time she swooned, a crew member was there to catch her and turn it into a Ginger Rogers-like dip to the applause of fellow passengers. Craig pretended to have a heart attack to distract the crew members in the hopes they would miss their guaranteed 3pm chocolate chip cookie rollout, but an emergency room doctor who had been tailing the Jankowskis all week deemed him perfectly fine and the cookies were on their platters by 2:59.

“They’re onto us, Shirley,” Craig said, eating a cookie but not enjoying it one bit.

“I know,” she answered. And from across the table, she got a faint whiff of sulfur.

Late the next morning, the Aroma of the Seas approached its port in Spain. Shirley and Craig stood on their balcony and looked across the blue-green ocean. This was the moment Shirley had foreseen when she first saw the Stellar Cruise Line brochure. But unlike that happy couple, she and Craig weren’t happy at all. The thought of life back on land seemed so pedestrian. Routine. Loveless.

Up on the ship’s bridge, Melinda Stokeburn and the crew celebrated with mimosas. Their quarterly numbers were going to come in below expectation, but Stellar Cruises would rally, and in another year, no one would remember this dip or the greedy couple who caused it.

Down on the balcony of their stateroom, Shirley Jankowski began to cry. “I can’t go back to Fresno,” she said.

“Me neither,” said Craig.

As the ship slowed and the engine quieted, the sound of the waves hitting the hull drew Shirley’s attention. Shirley watched the whitecaps crash and swirl.

“We don’t have to go home, Craig.” Her husband of fifty years followed her gaze, a hundred feet down to the Mediterranean.

“No, we don’t,” he said.

Shirley slipped out of her flats and climbed the first rung of the railing. Craig joined her. But as they stood there, precarious, the moment was interrupted by a loud scraping noise from under the water.

“What is that?” Shirley asked.

Craig listened as it grew louder. “It’s not water on metal,” Craig said. “But it’s also not metal on metal.”

“What else is there?”

“Rock on metal.”

In its final push to shore, with its captain and crew distracted by their premature celebration on the bridge, the Aroma of the Seas had run aground.

Seven short alarms sounded followed by one long blast. Then came a call from the captain over the ship’s P.A. system. “All passengers report to your muster stations. Abandon ship. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

Shirley and Craig stepped off the railing and back onto flat ground. They looked at each other in joyful amazement. The cruise liner was sinking. It was the ultimate failure. And they knew what it meant. Free trips. Unlimited excursions. All the massages they wanted.

Shirley leaned in and gave her husband the most passionate kiss they had shared in as long as either of them could remember. It was better than the brochure. But as their lips clung to each other in marital bliss, the hull beneath them split open and the Aroma of the Seas listed twenty degrees, sending Shirley and Craig Jankowski spiraling over their balcony and into the Mediterranean Sea.

Nine months ago, they could have swum long enough to be rescued. But after thirty-five weeks of steak and lobster tail and all the chocolate chip cookies they could eat, they were too stuffed to move. The best they could do was tread water just long enough to look up one last time at the massive cruise liner. Fourteen stories tall and gleaming white.

“It really is a beautiful boat,” Shirley said.

Craig would have corrected her, but he had already sunk beneath the waves.

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The vision here remains the same: to make readers laugh and stir their soul. Some stories lean more in one direction than the other, but isn’t that how life works too?

As we settle into 2026, I’m tuning my antenna slightly more toward stories that have a cinematic quality and, with any luck, a life beyond Substack. That was hopefully apparent with December’s “Starstruck.”

With that in mind, please enjoy my latest, a story about a heavy metal icon and his fall from grace. Or is it the other way around?

Silent Hum

Pierce Darkly had a string of smash albums between 2008 and 2014. Platinum-selling triumphs like “Meat Slicer,” “Blood Donor,” and “Kill My Sister,” most notably. But it had been ten years since the band had released any new material. Sure, the record label put out a few live albums and an EP of unreleased tracks, but for all intents and purposes, the four original members of the popular death metal band, now in their thirties, were coasting off greatest hits.

For six months a year, those hits filled an eighty-minute set that allowed Pierce (lead singer), Levi (lead guitar), Dray (bass), and Scab (drums) to leech off the disposable income and thirst for nostalgia of their fan base, a dependable combination that would likely carry them into their early fifties and the premature deaths that went hand in hand with being overindulgent rock stars.

But everything changed at the Chumash Indian casino.

It had been a fairly typical set, filled with a perfect mix of screaming, thrusting, and shredding, but when Pierce retreated to the tour bus with a cocktail waitress, he realized he could barely hear her while she told him the stories behind each of her sixty-three tattoos. It wasn’t that Pierce was going deaf. The problem was that his ability to hear was being drowned out by a deeper tone he couldn’t escape.

The next morning, the waitress was gone but the sound remained. As their tour rolled south toward Los Angeles, the un-diagnosed issue quickly made itself known in the band’s performances. Pierce started missing cues. He struggled to modulate his volume from verse to chorus. As he tried to break out his trademark “demon voice,” fans began to grumble that it didn’t have the same ferocity that had gotten Pierce Darkly CDs banned from Walmart in 2010.

Levi, Dray, and Scab cornered Pierce in his dressing room at The Wiltern.

“Are you dying?” Scab asked.

If so, it wouldn’t be the first time. Each of them had dramatic brushes with death over the years, not to mention multiple rounds of every STD known to the Western world plus a few more that doctors couldn’t categorize.

“It’s just my hearing,” Pierce admitted.

Levi fell into a stained leather couch. Dray punched out a light bulb with his fist. “JUST your hearing?!” he said. Dray had just bought a top-of-the-line wakeboarding boat and expected to pay it off with the money he’d make on the rest of the tour.

After a flurry of texts, Pierce’s manager/ex-wife Ava secured him a last-minute hearing appointment at UCLA. The audiologist, a one-time Pierce Darkly fan who pretended like she didn’t recognize his trademark pitchfork tattoo running from the bottom of his neck to just under his chin, led him to a quiet room and gave him a battery of tests. Before she delivered her findings, she led him through a series of simple yes/no questions.

Audiologist: “Have you ever had prolonged exposure to loud sounds?”

Pierce: “Yes.”

Audiologist: “Have you ever repeatedly banged your head, putting undo strain on your head and/or neck?”

Pierce: “Yes.”

Audiologist: “Are you now or have you in the past taken high doses of antibiotics or anti-inflammatory prescription drugs?”

Pierce: “Yes.”

Audiologist: “Are you now or have you in the past been addicted to recreational drugs?”

Pierce: “Yes.”

She nodded gently then put down her pen. “Mr. Darkly, considering your history, your hearing is remarkably strong,” she said. “But what you are fighting is a fairly severe case of tinnitus.”

Pierce was relieved. “So how do we get rid of it?”

The audiologist flattened the folds of her scrubs on her thighs, subconsciously trying to make something right before sharing something she couldn’t. “Unfortunately, tinnitus isn’t curable,” she said, staring into his sad blue eyes. “There are treatments that can help, and we can talk about that. But for most people, the best response is to just learn to live with it. The more you accept tinnitus as part of your daily life, the less it will consume your thoughts and allow you to move forward into your new normal.”

She then handed him a pamphlet. On the cover was a grinning, middle-aged man in khaki shorts and white sneakers riding a bike through a park next to his grey-haired wife. The image bore no resemblance to any part of Pierce’s existence. He didn’t want to ride bikes. Or be married to a woman turning gray. He wanted to play for packed crowds. He wanted to see audiences stare up at him in awe. He wanted to rock.

But there was nothing in the pamphlet about that. As he leafed through it in the tomb-like silence of the testing room, he actually sensed his tinnitus growing louder.

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The band paused the tour to give Pierce a chance to try some treatment options. Back in the comfort of his Santa Barbara hillside home, Pierce installed white noise machines in every room. He started cognitive behavior therapy to deal with negative thoughts and improve his sleep. He went cold turkey on his daily cocktail of medications. Surely this would alleviate the noise in his ears.

When Ava popped in a week later with groceries, she was hoping to find him on the mend or, at the very least, at peace.

“It’s worse than ever,” he said as he met her at the front door. Pierce was barefoot, wearing baggy exercise shorts and a white wife-beater. He looked like hadn’t slept since his appointment at UCLA, which was largely the case. A frantic “whoosh-whoosh-whoosh…” poured from every corner of the house. Ava felt like she was standing at the entrance to a demented womb and wanted to run.

But as both ex-wife and manager, Ava was doubly incentivized to see him restored to his previous income-earning self. “Did you stop all your medications?”

“WHAT?” Pierce yelled.

“DID YOU STOP YOUR MEDICATIONS?”

“YES!”

Pierce turned and shuffled toward the sunken living room. He was only thirty-three but was walking with the stiffness of a man twice his age. Ava watched as he fell face first onto his couch and covered his head with a pillow. “I think I’d rather just die,” he said with a muffled voice.

Ava sat next to him and rubbed his pale legs. Their marriage lasted three years and had been filled with fireworks and romance and drama and too much chaos for one woman to handle, but she still felt sad seeing a man she once loved so miserable. “WHAT DOES IT SOUND LIKE?” she asked.

Pierce moved the pillow so his mouth was exposed. “It started off like a low hum. But then it got louder. Like an amp that was turned up. Then I got off my meds and it only made it weirder.”

“WEIRDER?”

“Changing… evolving… I don’t know.”

“EVOLVING? LIKE FROM DAY TO DAY?”

“No. Second to second. It goes from a baaaa to a buuuu to a riiiiii to a waaaaaa…”

“THAT SOUNDS PSYCHOTIC, PIERCE,” she said.

He didn’t answer. He merely retreated back into his pillow.

Ava knew there was no way she could solve this from the confines of Pierce’s madhouse. “I’m going to call some specialists.” He didn’t move. “I’LL BE BACK IN THE MORNING,” she screamed.

Pierce stayed curled up on the couch as she left. He was angry. Yes, the sounds were debilitating and destabilizing. But “psychotic”? No. The more they repeated, the more they sounded, to his trained musical ear, melodic.

Pierce lowered the pillow from his face and looked across the living room to the black Yamaha grand piano in the corner. He rolled off the couch and crawled on all fours, over the bearskin rug, and up to the leather piano bench. Still on his knees, he closed his eyes and listened, then searched the keys until he found the note that matched the first sound in his head. Middle E. When he had it, he moved to the second. D. Then the third. C. Then the fourth.

He quickly had a whole melody. And as his head continued to cycle through it over and over, he played along with his fingers. With each pass, he added a chord here and a chord there. Then a little flourish. Going softer in some sections and louder in others. Pierce’s inner noise had broken free and was filling his outer world. He was so caught up in the whole experience that he didn’t realize what was happening: Pierce Darkly was writing his first song in a decade.

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He stayed up all night, not because he couldn’t sleep but because he didn’t want to. By 3am, the music was locked, and then came the lyrics. It was as if a silver key in a rusty lock had been turned and a heavy door pulled open and out of it flowed a river of words. He wrote furiously, scribbling them in Sharpie on the back of his medical report from UCLA.

When darkness gave way to the rising sun, the song was finished. But that wasn’t the most miraculous part. The most miraculous part was that Pierce’s tinnitus was gone.

Pierce went from room to room, unplugging his white noise machines, then summoned the band along with Ava. They arrived by lunch and he excitedly ushered them to his couch. “Everyone, sit!” They could sense his new energy. “You back on coke?” Scab asked, a little hopeful.

“I’m not on anything!” Pierce said. “Just listen!” Then Pierce sat at the piano and played. Three minutes later, without missing a note, he swiveled around on the bench and faced the others, expectant.

“What the f*** was that?” Dray asked.

“I wrote a new song!” Pierce said. “Last night. It just came to me! And when I was done, the ringing was gone. I’m healed!”

Levi’s brow was furrowed. “What chords were those?”

“Oh, um…” Pierce looked back at his scribbles. “E… C… F…”

“Major chords,” Levi noted.

Pierce hadn’t thought about it. “Okay. Yeah. So what?”

Scab stood up, livid. “That’s a f****** happy song!”

“It is?” Pierce said.

“Hell yes,” Scab said. “We don’t play happy songs!”

Pierce knew it was a departure from their normal music, but he had already worked out the arrangement and felt it might make for a nice interlude halfway through their set. “I was thinking maybe we could play it between ‘Roadkill’ and ‘Blood Splatter’?”

“ARE YOU F****** CRAZY?!” Dray said before kicking over a chair.

Pierce looked to Ava, sitting silent on the end of the couch. “What do you think?” he said.

“I actually… like the song,” Ava confessed. “It’s thoughtful.”

“PIERCE DARKLY DOESN’T DO ‘THOUGHTFUL’!” Dray screamed as he kicked over another chair.

This was obviously not the reaction Pierce wanted. Maybe they were right. Maybe the song was wrong. But even thinking it felt like a betrayal of his experience. Of his healing. “If our fans hate it, I won’t play it again.”

Their first concert back was at the Orange County Fair. An outdoor summer gig. The band hoped the combination of alcohol and heat would make their fans quickly forget this creative detour. They also made Pierce bury the new song in the set list, slipping it in discreetly on the heels of “Hell Bitch,” “Cannibal Breath,” and “Sick Magnet,” three of their bigger hits.

“So this is a new one,” Pierce said. The drunk and dehydrated crowd cheered. “It’s called ‘Silent Hum.’” Then Pierce closed his eyes, leaned close to the microphone, and began to sing:

What would you say if I… turned away… and forgot your name?

What would you do if I… left you too… and erased your face?

Would you haunt my dreams?

Would you break my heart?

Would you disappear?

Would you fall apart?

Or would you… come?

In a silent hum?

In a silent hum.

Would you come?

Levi, Dray, and Scab played their parts with little enthusiasm. Their mediocre effort only succeeded in making the song more intimate, not less.

Where do I go when I… just don’t know… what I’m meant to do?

What do I say when my… soul won’t pray… and the words aren’t there?

When I’m all alone.

When I’m scared as hell.

When I’m breaking down.

When no one can tell.

Would you come?

In a silent hum?

In a silent hum.

Would you come?

With your silent hum, would you fill me up?

With your silent hum, would you break me free?

With your silent hum, would you make me me?

With your silent hum.

With your silent hum.

With your silent hum.

Pierce opened his eyes to a mostly confused crowd. The scattered applause was balanced by a few boos and a loud voice that yelled, “PLAY SOMETHING LOUD!”

Levi didn’t wait for permission. He jumped straight to the opening power chord of “Suck On This,” their #1 single from 2012. The crowd roared, the awkwardness dissipated, and Pierce let himself be engulfed in a fresh billow of smoke from the fog machine.

No one talked about “Silent Hum” after the show. Better to forget it ever happened and move on. This proved easy enough to do since they had a packed schedule after the tour’s two-week pause.

They played Palm Springs, then went north to Victorville, followed by three sold out nights in Vegas at the MGM Grand. Dray was feeling much better about his boat purchase when Ava found the band spiking their hair and preparing to take the stage.

“I have some good news,” she said. But she didn’t look happy. “Pierce Darkly is back on the Billboard charts.” They were stunned. Some of their greatest hits had popped a time or two in the last decade, but they never scared the top-100. “Which one?” Levi asked.

“‘Silent Hum,’” she said.

“That’s impossible,” Pierce said. “We never released it. We never even recorded it!”

“I know. But someone took your live version and put it out there,” she said.

Scab was already searching on his phone. “I don’t see that s*** song anywhere.”

Ava cleared her throat. “Yeah, I was getting to that. It’s trending as a, um, worship song.”

“What the f*** is a worship song?” Dray asked.

“I think that means they play it on aircraft carriers or something,” Scab said.

“Not warship,” Ava said. “Worship. Like a gospel song.”

“But for white people,” Levi added.

“You mean churchy s***?” Scab said.

“Yes,” Ava nodded.

Scab turned his ire on Pierce. “You a***hole,” Scab declared.

“I didn’t do anything!” Pierce said.

“Yeah, you did.” Dray moved toward Pierce, rage in his eyes. “Writing a Christian song is even WORSE than writing a bad song!”

Pierce took a step back. “BUT I’M AN ATHEIST!”

America didn’t seem to care about that fact. Neither did the band. With a giant swing, Dray punched Pierce in the neck and sent him flying backwards over a riser, through the curtain, and onto the stage. Before Pierce could get up, Dray was on top of him. Fans cheered at the “pre-show” their favorite bad boys were giving them.

Pierce and Dray rolled into Scab’s drum kit, knocking it over. Dray grabbed a cymbal and was about to drop it like a guillotine onto Pierce’s head when Pierce reached for Levi’s guitar and swung it, sweeping Dray’s feet out from under him.

“Hands off my axe!” Levi yelled, bolting onstage to try and wrestle it away.

When Pierce wouldn’t let go, Scab joined them and kicked Pierce in the side with his metal-tipped boots until the lead singer relented, leaving the band’s front man with two broken ribs and a night at the University Medical Center.

The only one who came to visit Pierce in the hospital was Ava. “The Venetian pulled your gigs,” she said. “And the band wants you out.”

“They can’t kick me out. I’m Pierce Darkly.”

“I checked on that,” Ava said. “Legally, you’re not. Legally, you’re just… Jeff Nudson.”

Pierce waved off his next dose of pain meds and left the hospital on his own volition, booking a one-way flight back to Santa Barbara. From his patio, he sat and watched the Channel Islands as the setting sun turned them from green to blue to black. The world beneath him offering nothing but beauty and indifference.

Meanwhile, “Silent Hum” continued its rise up the charts. Every few days, Ava texted and begged him to do a studio recording. Pierce couldn’t bring himself to do it. He was scared of further embracing the mystery of whatever that song had tapped into. No, he was perfectly content just sitting on his patio, ordering UberEats, and watching whatever was left of his life roll by.

Or he was until the Vatican called.

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Lured by the +39 international number, Pierce hit the green button on his phone and found a man with a genteel Italian accent on the other end. “Hello, Mister Darkly, this is Father Andrea Bianchi calling from the pontiff’s office. The Holy Father has requested your presence. He would like to hear you play your new song.”

“The Holy Father,” Pierce said.

“Yes, Mister Darkly.”

“As in… the Pope?”

“Yes, Mister Darkly.”

“Who is this?” Pierce scoffed.

“This is Father Andrea Bianchi from the—”

“Yeah yeah, hey listen. Let your Pope know I’m retired and I don’t believe in God.” Pierce hung up and laughed. A minute later, Ava called.

“You hung up on the Vatican?!” she said.

“That was a prank call,” Pierce said.

“That was not! The Pope heard ‘Silent Hum’ and found it quite moving and wants you to come play it for him.”

Pierce still didn’t believe her. And even if he did, “What if I don’t want to play?”

“YOU DO NOT TURN DOWN THE POPE, PIERCE!”

Pierce and Ava flew to Rome three weeks later. His black suit, black shirt, and black tie matched the tinted car that picked them up at the hotel. They drove past the tall Vatican City walls, across St. Peter’s Square, and through a gate protected by a dozen Swiss Guards in Renaissance-era blue and yellow striped uniforms. When the car stopped, Father Bianchi himself opened Pierce’s door. “Welcome to Vatican City, Mister Darkly.”

Pierce and Ava followed the priest down a long, gilded hallway. Pierce began to sweat. The last time he performed solo was in high school. Ava grabbed Pierce’s hand and squeezed. “This is just like any other gig,” she assured him. After a few more turns, they climbed past a set of marble columns, through tall steel doors, and into the Sistine Chapel.

“Oh my God,” Pierce uttered. Even for an atheist, he knew where he was. His eyes climbed the fresco walls to Michelangelo’s ceiling where the finger of God reached from the heavens to touch man.

“Unfortunately, we could not fulfill your request for a microphone,” Father Bianchi apologized as he continued walking toward the altar. “Thankfully, the acoustics in the chapel are quite good.”

Pierce froze. A humble piano waited for him up front. “Wait a second. I’m singing in here?” he asked.

“I hope that’s all right,” Father Bianchi said. “That was the Holy Father’s request.”

“Oh my God,” Pierce repeated.

“I don’t think you should be saying that,” Ava whispered.

Father Bianchi beckoned Pierce toward the piano bench then moved a single chair into position fifteen feet away. As the priest excused himself, Pierce sat and waited.

His eyes were drawn to the altar wall in front of him and Michelangelo’s “Last Judgement.” Forty feet high and forty feet wide, it told the story of Christ’s second coming. As dozens of souls rise from the dead, some are pulled up into the heavens by a host of angels while others are dragged back down into hell by a legion of horned demons and snakes. Floating in the middle of it all, Jesus looks down as hopeful saints show him evidence of the torture and death suffered for his name in a last call for mercy.

“Oh my God…” Pierce whispered again.

Pierce was not in denial about the excesses of his life. He had tried everything and hurt too many people to count. Friends. Family. Women, especially. Girls, more accurately. Staring up, the fresco felt less like a work of art and more like a mirror, convicting him of every moment of hate and deception and pride and lust and greed. He knew that if that painting were accurate, even metaphorically, he would not be one of the ones going up. He would be going down.

“Here we are,” Father Bianchi said, returning to the room. Behind him, dressed in white, was the Pope.

Pierce stood as the Pope approached, then extended his tattooed hand. “Hello, Father,” he said. The Pope took his right hand and covered it with his left. “You’re very talented.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

“When I heard your song, I knew it was from God. I could sense it. Breaking through darkness. And that was before I even knew your name.”

Pierce resisted the compliment. The last thing he wanted to do in this place was lie. “But Father, this song isn’t really about God. It’s about feeling loved.”

The Pope smiled. Nodded. “But my child… God is love.” Then he patted Pierce on the shoulder and took his seat.

Pierce was rattled. How could the Pope tell him what his own song was about? The Pope didn’t write it, he did!

Father Bianchi took his position behind the Pope and nodded toward Pierce. It was time.

Pierce sat at the piano. Pushing away his annoyance, he played the musical intro then sang the opening line:

What would you say…if I turned away… and forgot your name?

Pierce shot a glance to the pontiff as if to say “See? Clearly not about God.”

What would you do… if I left you too… and erased your face?

Again. A song about a relationship. Not about “piercing darkness.”

Would you haunt my dreams? Would you break my heart? Would you disappear? Would you fall apart? Or would you… come? In a silent hum?

Pierce eyed the man in white again, sure that by now he was hearing that this song had nothing to do with God at all and he had made an embarrassing error inviting him here to perform. But no, the Pope was smiling.

Pierce pushed on to the second verse.

Where do I go… when I just don’t know… what I’m meant to do?

Okay, Pierce heard a little bit of Jesus in that line. Fair enough.

What do I say… when my soul won’t pray… and the words aren’t there?

The moment Pierce sung it, everything stopped. His voice locked, like the door on the open vault in his head had been slammed shut. His fingers played the melody, over and over, waiting for his mouth to do its part, but it was frozen.

Pierce panicked as the fiction of his words became reality. Was it possible? Had he, sinner of sinners, really written a divinely-inspired song without even believing in the divine? And if he admitted that was possible, then wouldn’t he have to admit everything else?

Ava and Father Bianchi and the Pope blurred into the background. He stared up at the fresco again. At the angels grabbing for precious souls. Saving them from eternal death. All he wanted in that moment was for one of them to grab for him.

“Oh God,” he whispered.

Immediately, Pierce sensed a holy presence. Not from the Pope. Not from somewhere in the room. From deep inside his own soul. It filled his lungs like a rush of wind and burst forth, filling the chapel with his unintentional prayer.

When I’m all alone.

When I’m scared as hell.

When I’m breaking down.

When no one can tell.

Would you come.

In a silent hum.

In a silent hum.

Would you come?

With your silent hum, would you fill me up?

With your silent hum, would you break me free?

With your silent hum, would you make me me?

With your silent hum.

With your silent hum.

With your silent hum.

Pierce and Ava had dinner in a piazza a few blocks from St. Peter’s Square. Over a bottle of red wine, Pierce failed in his attempt to put into words exactly what had happened during his performance. But Ava didn’t need an explanation. She felt it. She saw it. The man she fell in love with at nineteen looked visibly different. Transformed. Almost glowing.

“My only regret is that I never asked you to record it,” he said.

Ava held up her phone. “Come on, babe, give me some credit here.”

“You did?!”

Ava nodded and took a victorious sip.

Pierce laughed then looked at his ex-wife with fresh eyes. “You deserved someone better than me, Ava.”

“I know,” she said. Then, with a vulnerability that surprised even herself, “But maybe that person is you.”

Pierce reached across the table and took her hand. Ava waited for him to pull it away. He never did.

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Most of the time whatever she has found absolutely looks like a heart and it’s like a little “I love you” from God to her. And sometimes I can’t really see it but I play along because I’ve been married 23 years and I am not an idiot.

And so obviously this same incredible, heart-loving woman must LOVE Valentine’s Day, right?

Nope. Can’t stand it. Thinks it’s a commercial holiday for suckers.

Such is marriage. Just when you’re confident you have a grasp on how it works, the rules no longer apply.

But some rules are evergreen.

When I was younger and dumber, I probably would have said the duty of a husband is to love your wife “in good times and bad.” And that is true. But it’s vague. The older I get, the more I’m realizing my greatest responsibility is to love her in the big things and the little things.

The big things are obvious: births and deaths and celebrations and tragedies… The little things are not. And this can be a husband’s downfall, and has often been mine, because for every one big thing that may cross your path in a given year, there are 10,000 little things. And if you fail to love your wife in the little things, how heroically you respond in a big thing will be largely irrelevant.

What counts as a little thing?

Here are a few examples that spring to mind:

• When your wife is talking to you, actually give her your attention. Put away your phone and look her in the eyes and when she says something that would typically elicit a response from a human being, respond like a human being versus staring blankly at her like she’s a Jehovah’s Witness who just interrupted your nap.

• Compliment her for things beyond her appearance. When she says something funny, tell her she’s funny. When she solves a problem, tell her that’s she’s smart. This is not just encouraging for her, it reminds you of her many enduring qualities.

• Don’t be gross. I don’t need to be specific here because whatever the first thing you thought of when you read that is probably the thing you’re doing that’s gross.

• When she is overwhelmed by life, don’t pick that moment to point out the “bad decisions” she made that you believe led her to the brink of insanity. Instead, just say, “How can I help?” And then help. You will have a chance at a later point to talk about she got there and how to avoid it happening again.

• Do random nice things for her without calling attention to it. Fill up her gas tank if you notice it’s low. Switch the laundry from the washer to the dryer. Make the bed. Then forget you did it. You’re not a dog who did a trick and now needs a treat. You’re her partner in life and should do things because you love her and want to see her thrive.

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And then there is a category of little things I will call “I Got You’s.” Or IGYs for short.

An IGY is any situation that your wife perceives is a crisis that you do not. From your perspective, if she literally does nothing, her problem will go away. You might even tell your wife that exact thing!

And if you do, you’re an idiot.

Because, most likely, she has been consumed with this issue for hours if not days, and has long ago concluded that it is indeed worth worrying about. By telling her to ignore it, what she hears is, “You’re on your own, crazy lady.”

(Note: Spouses generally don’t like feeling abandoned or called “crazy lady.”)

This is a regular pitfall for me. Not long ago, while getting ready for bed, my wife saw a spider next to her bedside table and asked me to bring her a tissue to kill it. Because I did not perceive it as a crisis, I took my sweet time procuring a Kleenex and walking leisurely across the bedroom. By the time I arrived, the spider had disappeared somewhere behind the headboard.

Now a wiser husband than I would then realize that even if the initial spider problem was not a crisis, my laissez faire attitude had now made it one. But no! I decided to tell her that it was probably not a poisonous spider and the odds of it crawling onto her face and biting her while she was sleeping were quite low.

You’ll be shocked to hear this led to a larger fight which I did not win.

But all of this could have been avoided if I’d recognized this as an IGY situation and just sprung into action and killed the stupid spider.

But most IGYs require your brain and not your brawn, and therefore we as husbands don’t recognize them as heroic opportunities.

Some real-life examples from my world:

• “When our daughter comes home from college in May with seven of her friends, how are we going to transport them in our car?”

• “Do you think that spot on our son’s foot is a rash or a bruise?”

• “I’m about to send this email but I’m not sure what to say.”

• “The low tire pressure light went on for thirty seconds but then it went away.”

• “Which shoes should I wear to church?”

Solving these with her will take various amounts of time and self-sacrifice. But when you do, your wife will feel seen and safe.

Am I really suggesting that helping my wife pick out the right shoes is as meaningful to her as, say, pulling her from a burning building?

Emotionally? Yes.

Look, with two decades of marriage under my belt, I can attest to the fact you will only get so many cinematic, heroic chances as a husband. You might not get any. But when you look for those little things—just like my wife looks for hearts—you will begin to see a steady stream of opportunities to shine.

Here’s hoping you—and I—embrace them on Valentine’s Day. And every day after that.

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It’s not easy being RE/MAX’s top Scottsdale realtor for sixteen straight years. But that was exactly what Lisette Buckingham had achieved. When asked at the 2019 Western Arizona Realtors Conference what her secret was, she did not mince words. “Dynamism,” she said.

From the moment Lisette’s toes touched her bedroom carpet, she was moving. She started with a shower, rolling through it like her hybrid Audi at a gas station car wash, then moved onto her espresso machine where she twisted knobs and pressed the tamper till thick sludge dripped from the filter and into her favorite to-go cup.

By 8am—and 7am on Sundays—she was scouting properties or meeting buyers or wandering up and down grocery store aisles with a cart of non-perishables while eavesdropping on conversations in the hopes of picking up gossip she could use to her advantage. An ugly divorce… a late mortgage payment… a grandmother who broke her hip and might finally be giving up her Paradise Valley four-bedroom...

Lisette prided herself on knowing more about the city than her competition. Any old Coldwell Banker agent could compare neighborhood values and school ratings. Lisette went further, studying weather patterns and subclimates on individual streets.

“You don’t want to live on that cul-de-sac,” she would tell a client. “Monsoons hit that pocket extra hard in the late summer. Always have. You’ll be buying a new roof every ten years.”

Her pace of activity was all the more impressive given the steady creep of her weight from a forgettable 145 pounds to a hard-to-miss 265 frame. But Lisette’s size matched her presence. When she arrived at an open house, other realtors unconsciously moved behind potted plants or disappeared into walk-in pantries. She was like a black hole, and everyone feared if they stepped too close to her they would be sucked in and only emerge a decade later somewhere south of Tucson as a broker for dilapidated mobile homes.

In their defense, Lisette had decimated the careers of numerous plucky agents over the years. Usually these were realtors who were first on the scene when a golf course community broke ground and naively believed they could establish themselves as the young sexy agents for a fresh flock of snowbirds.

But Lisette Buckingham was not about to be outfoxed by youth and good looks. And before winter had even arrived, she was on a chartered RE/MAX flight to Vancouver and Calgary and Winnipeg with floor plans in one hand and a duffel bag full of Titleist Pro-V1s in the other. When the sexy agents’ clients went to put their money down on the new properties, they were shocked to learn every lot had already been sold, sight unseen.

“Find a different desert,” Lisette group texted. More often than not, they did.

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Still, the community at large revered her. She was their constant. A pillar of strength. If you wanted to accomplish anything of note in Scottsdale, you didn’t get very far before someone advised you to “talk to Lisette.” She always had an idea. Usually the right one. The locals hoped she might run for mayor. Maybe even governor. But Lisette only ever wanted to be the Shining Star of Scottsdale Real Estate. And so she sparkled.

And yet her personal life was a mystery. For as much time as she spent in other people’s homes, no one had ever been invited inside hers. There were theories, of course. Rumors, really. That Lisette Buckingham had a secret family up in Prescott that she only visited during the summer. Or that real estate was a way to launder money for a Mexican drug cartel.

Unfortunately, the great secret was that beyond the awards and commendations and six-percent broker fee, Lisette had no one. No significant other. No children. Her only friends were her clients, but those relationships never lasted longer than the thirty or sixty-day escrow. Her parents had died young and left her in the care of a great uncle east of the city in Tortilla Flat. But there was nothing great about him, to put it gently, and, as soon as she could, Lisette moved west to Scottsdale and started a life. All on her own.

She didn’t land on real estate because she loved sales or even people. What she loved was the idea of having her regal-sounding name and happy smile plastered on bus benches and billboards and front lawns from Camelback Mountain all the way up to Cave Creek. She was multiplying herself, if only in paper and ink. And if Lisette Buckingham were ever to be introspective, which Lisette Buckingham never seemed to be, she might confess she held the deepest of hopes that some distant relative would see her name and graft her into an extended family that had long ago forgotten her.

For two decades and counting, no one had. Instead, with every passing season, Lisette grew a little bit larger and a little bit redder. Her once enviable “dynamism” was slowly being replaced with something more menacing. And as she reached middle age and the roots of her hair turned white, she began to resemble a walking pimple—round, red, and about to burst.

And burst she did. Regularly. At potential buyers who had a change of heart. At sellers refusing to consider her offer. But like small tremors along fault lines, they didn’t ease the pressure. They were foreshocks. Harbingers of a major seismic event to come.

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It was a Tuesday morning in late August when the “Big One” finally struck. Lisette was at the Whole Foods on Scottsdale Road, just down the street from Grayhawk Country Club. She had been eavesdropping on two botoxed golf wives discussing a wave of firings at a Tempe software company. Instantly, Lisette could see the downstream effects: a market flood of single-family homes near Pima Acres.

Wheeling her cart around, Lisette prepared a mental list of clients to call as she powered up the cereal aisle to an open register where the checker was already bagging the person in front of her. Lisette exhaled, confident that she would be at her Audi in four minutes tops.

But then, to her horror, she watched as the checker abandoned her station mid-bagging.

“No no no…” Lisette said under her breath.

The checker walked around to the elderly woman in her line and held out her arms.

“What is happening?” Lisette said a little louder.

To her dismay, the customer fell into the checker’s embrace and the two began to hug.

“Oh come on…”

“I am so sorry for your loss,” the checker whispered. Lisette stole a glance at the checker’s name tag. Cheyenne. She made a note to avoid her in the future.

After ten seconds, the two were still hugging. In fact, Lisette noticed they were now rocking. Left and right and left and right… It was less hug and more dance now. With each rock they rotated twenty degrees. Eventually, the old woman’s face came into view. Eyes puffy, snot running down her nose.

Lisette looked away, uncomfortable, and drew her attention to the still-moving conveyor belt where the sad woman’s unbagged items were piling up. She counted them. Twenty-three. She noticed condensation forming on the outside of a half-pint of rocky road ice cream.

“Oh my sweet love,” Cheyenne said to the elderly woman.

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Lisette pondered what sort of tragedy could have befallen a woman of that advanced age that could really be worthy of all this blubbery. If anything, this woman still being alive herself was a minor miracle.

“Ice cream,” Lisette blurted out.

Cheyenne looked back at Lisette as she rocked into view again.

“I’m sorry?”

“She bought ice cream,” Lisette pointed. “It’s melting. Just thought someone might care.”

The comment accomplished exactly what Lisette intended and the old woman finally patted Cheyenne on the shoulder and pulled back from the hug. “I better get going. Gotta keep living. That’s what everyone says. That’s what Reginald would have wanted,” she said, drying her tears and wiping her nose with a wadded up Kleenex.

Cheyenne bagged the rest of the woman’s groceries then flagged another employee to help her make it safely to her car, giving one last rub on the arm as she shuffled off with her head down.

Relieved to have that over with, Lisette stepped forward as if their previous exchange never happened. “Good morning,” she said.

Cheyenne scanned Lisette’s items in silence—two bottles of rosé and a tube of Pillsbury crescent rolls—but instead of announcing the total, she looked Lisette in the eyes and said, “That woman was grieving.”

Lisette’s eyes were focused on the key pad. “Clearly,” she answered, tapping her credit card to pay.

The register spit out a receipt. Cheyenne ignored it. “And what, you ain’t ever cried like that?”

Lisette found the question absurd. Unfathomable. Insulting, in fact. “Do I look like a child?” she said.

Cheyenne did not realize that this was intended as a rhetorical question. Rather, she accepted it at face value and took in Lisette Buckingham as objectively as she could. The splotchy skin, the round face, the thin hair of an indiscernible shade, the folds of fat around her wrists and neck.

“I mean, kinda…” Cheyenne responded.

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The unapologetic honesty of the answer pierced Lisette’s soul and she started to tremble. It began in her knees and spread north through her sturdy hips and barrel chest. Something large had been dislodged and was rising internally toward her licorice red face. Forgetting her receipt, Lisette swiped her groceries from the register and ran as fast as she could for her car.

Lisette sped through Scottsdale, struggling to breathe. As her vision grew blurry, she flipped on her emergency flashers and flew through red lights and stop signs, scattering cars behind her as she went. She pulled safely into her garage and rolled out of her car, stumbling down the hall before tripping over her own feet and falling face first onto the travertine floor of her sunken living room.

Her torso’s impact with the polished stone acted as the final thrust for what had been brewing, and there, all alone, Lisette Buckingham, the Shining Star of Scottsdale and 16-time RE/MAX realtor of the year, started to weep.

The tears came on slowly, like those first thick drops from her espresso machine. But then they came faster. And steady. Within ten minutes a small puddle had formed around Lisette’s heaving body. At the hour mark, the living room had taken on an inch of water. But Lisette was just getting started. She cried the rest of the morning without ceasing. By lunchtime, her tears had breached the living room and were spreading through the rest of her house. By dinner, she was floating above the furniture as the saline mix covered every surface and stretched into every crevice. As darkness settled on her street, anything that wasn’t tied down in Lisette’s 3,731-square foot home drifted up and out as dry wall withered and bay windows cracked under the pressure of four decades of unconfronted pain.

The following morning, Lisette Buckingham’s neighbors woke up to find their street was strewn with all of Lisette’s intimate possessions. Underwear and prescription bottles and credit card statements and draft after draft of handwritten letters to distant relatives that she never had the courage to send.

And lying face up at the bottom of the driveway, her tears now slowed to a trickle, was Lisette herself. As the August sun crested the brown mountains and lit up her face, she squinted and opened her eyes. Then she gingerly rolled to her side and stood up.

She was barely recognizable. Her clothes hung loosely off her body. After shedding all that water weight, she was no longer the 265-pound rock that realtors had come to fear. She was softened. Closer to that vulnerable young girl who set out from Tortilla Flats all those years ago to make a name for herself.

A concerned neighbor stepped over Lisette’s belongings and through her tears and set a hand on her shoulder. “Lisette? Are you okay?”

Lisette didn’t answer with words. She just gave her neighbor a long, wet hug.

Then she started to rock. The neighbor rocked with her. When the tears finally stopped, Lisette took a breath, pulled away, and looked into her neighbor’s eyes. “How are you?”

The neighbor could see that, for once, she meant it. “I’m okay. How are you?”

Lisette considered all that had transpired. Then, with a buoyant spirit, she answered. “I’m drained.”

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THE SILVER CORD on Amazon

Joe suffered from epilepsy and lived with the reality of the danger it posed. But he did not live in fear nor did he choose to play the victim. If anything, his condition seemed to make him lean even more into pursuing what truly matters.

I have never explicitly shared why I started calling this site Silver Cord Stories but this seems like the right moment.

About a year ago, our pastor was teaching through the book of Ecclesiastes. It’s a wildly honest book that wrestles with the brokenness of this world and the hard questions for which there are not always simple answers. More often than not, the writer ends his musings by proclaiming, “Everything is meaningless!”

Despite this—or perhaps because of it—by the end of the book he reaches a much deeper conclusion. “Remember your Creator… before the silver cord is cut.” Hearing this, my heart was tugged toward writing stories, often funny ones, that might force people to slow down and consider their mortality and the priorities that should flow from a proper understanding of it.

My nephew understood better than most of us that the glittery connection between our bodies and our souls comes with a ticking clock. And he lived his life accordingly.

He loved God and sought after him daily. And he loved others. Not just his parents and siblings, but his friends. My sister shared that Joe had recently deleted many of the apps off his phone and was filling the void with prayer and by connecting more intentionally with his classmates. On summer breaks, when his college friends scattered, Joe devoted his time to teaching swim lessons at the local YMCA and by running his own sports camp which he opened to every kid in his community. One is hard pressed to find a child in my sister’s small town who had not been taught something by Joe.

Love for God.

Devotion to family.

Surrounded by friends.

In service to others.

Those are the markers of a life well-lived. And his passing is our great loss.

(You can read more about Joe and his life here.)

The woman in the Lululemon dupes had one last thought as she arced through the air: This hurts more than I thought it would.

To be fair, she was struck by a $250,000 Mercedes G-Wagon, a car built to forge rivers, impress wealthy neighbors, and, apparently, hit joggers in crosswalks late at night.

When she opened her eyes a minute later, she was face up on Sunset Boulevard. A silhouette hovered over her, backlit by a pair of headlights.

“Oh God,” the man whispered. “Say something.” His hand rested on her knee.

“Did I land in heaven or hell?” she quivered.

“Hollywood,” he said. “So a little of both.”

She could hear the concern in his English accent. As her eyes adjusted, she could see it in the shadow of his green eyes. Even his bangs stretched toward her with an unmistakable empathy.

The woman in the crosswalk managed a half smile, then started to fade off again. Just my luck, she thought. Killed by the last perfect man in L.A.

“Stay with me,” he begged.

She wanted to.

“What’s your name, love?”

She rallied just long enough to let out a soft “I don’t know.”

The man swore under his breath, then crossed off. In his absence, a billboard filled her vision. A summer blockbuster starring the world’s biggest actor. She closed her eyes before she could realize… the man who hit her was the same man on the poster.

When Collin Wright left home earlier that night, the only thing he’d intended to hit was an empty bar. He thought he had found one, too. Tucked away from the tourists a half-block down Sweetzer, it had one boarded up window and a pair of naked hooks where a sign once hung. The dive was so unloved that even the hipsters stayed away. And so, to the actor’s delight, he had planned to sit there for hours with a bourbon and his thoughts and never be bothered.

“You doing good?” the bartender asked.

So much for that.

Collin stole a glance at the voice through the dim light. The bartender was young. Maybe twenty-three. Curly hair. Kentucky accent. Some stubborn acne around the nose. He’s using the wrong face wash, Collin thought. No. Best not to engage.

“All good,” Collin responded with a smile, then stared back down at his glass like he was waiting to receive an important transmission from somewhere under the ice.

There was a time when Collin longed to be noticed. Early in his career, five thousand miles from home, he fed off it. But with success he learned that attention is shallow. Having just turned thirty with an ex-wife, no kids, and more money than he could ever spend, all he wanted was depth. He could buy once-in-a-lifetime experiences and he had. But they only provided a temporary relief from the gnawing fear that nothing he did had any lasting value.

“My name’s Jonas. I’m an actor too,” the bartender piped in.

Collin sighed. “Hi Jonas.” There was no stopping this now. The kid had seen the yellow light and blew right through it. Which meant a question was coming. A dumb question. “So what’s the secret of making it here?” Jonas asked.

And there it was. Collin especially hated this one. It attempted to reduce fifteen years of self-sacrifice into one magical “secret” that would explain how he succeeded while so many others had failed.

Collin looked up but said nothing. He let the tension build, leveraging the look that had made him the highest-grossing star worldwide for the last five years. And when it was clear Jonas finally felt uncomfortable, Collin finally spoke:

“Discernment.”

Downing the rest of his drink in one gulp, Collin pivoted off his barstool and headed for the back door. “Are you gonna be here every Wednesday?” he asked.

“And Thursdays,” the kid answered with a smile, mistaking the question for a compliment.

Collin slid into his denim jacket. “Good to know,” he said. Then he pushed open the door and was gone.

Back on Sunset, Collin grabbed his phone from the G-Wagon and made the rare phone call. Sheryl Dolan was an A-list manager and a Hollywood savage who wouldn’t even wear a dress to the Golden Globes. Pushing sixty, there was no crisis she hadn’t already navigated twice.

“Is she alive?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Is she underage?”

“No.”

“Are you drunk?”

“No!” He paused, reconsidering. “But I did just come from a pub.”

“Collin—”

“She came out of nowhere! Truly. I was driving home and turning left and then—”

“Has she seen your face?”

“What?”

“It’s a simple question.”

“I’m not leaving her in the street, Sheryl!”

This was the problem with celebrities these days, Sheryl thought. They start off cutthroat, willing to hurt anyone to make it big. Then once they get there they turn soft. And introspective. It was a liability. “Do not call 9-1-1. Do you understand? It will be a big scene and the paparazzi will show up…”

A block down Sunset, a light flipped green and fifty cars rolled their way.

“I don’t have much time!”

“…plus you already have the DUI from last year—”

Collin hung up and ran to the nameless woman. He scooped her into his arms and carried her to his passenger seat. By the time the wave of cars reached the intersection, his G-Wagon had vanished into the Hollywood Hills.

Collin Wright’s home at the top of Marmont Avenue was considered “architecturally significant.” He just thought it looked cool. It had mostly glass both inside and out with views of downtown and the westside and everything in between. The drawback was a lack of privacy and the never ending struggle to keep windows clean. There was Windex hidden in a dozen different cabinets. A 5,000-square-foot home that should have brought serenity was usually filled with the sound of someone, somewhere… squegee-ing. As a sick reward for all the effort, the house claimed the lives of a good thirty birds a year.

“You shouldn’t have brought her here.” That was the non-medical assessment from Collin’s personal doctor on the current situation.

“But she’s okay?” Collin replied.

Best the doctor could tell without doing a CT scan, she was fine. No nausea. No blurred vision. Good balance. No broken bones. Just some memory loss which should come back over the next few hours. “She needs to rest. And you need to pray she doesn’t sue.”

Collin showed his doctor out and made the long walk back to the den. The woman was sitting with her feet up on his leather couch. Awake.

She was pretty. About Collin’s age. If she was wearing makeup, he couldn’t see it in the low light. She reminded him of the kind of girl he would have fallen for in an earlier lifetime.

“Well, this is the fanciest hospital I’ve ever seen,” she said.

Collin nodded and sat on the couch near her feet. He gathered his thoughts. “I am genuinely sorry,” he began. “This is a unique situation. Obviously, everything I do is under a microscope. Bringing you here saves us both a lot of unwanted attention. The good news is you’re not broken, just… rattled.”

“Am I supposed to know who you are?” she asked.

Now it was Collin who was rattled. “You don’t?”

The woman didn’t. Truly. She still didn’t know who she was. All she had was her phone, locked behind a code she also couldn’t remember.

“I’m an actor,” he explained. “Collin Wright.” He waited, sure that hearing his name would spark something. It didn’t.

“Are you any good?” she said.

Collin laughed. It was absurd. Of course he was good. He didn’t have any Oscars but he had everything else. A star on the Walk of Fame. A wax figure in Madame Tussauds. This ridiculous house. Plus three or four others.

“I’m not bad,” he answered.

She wasn’t convinced. “Show me something. Whatever you think is your best work.”

“You’re serious?”

She shrugged. “I mean, it’s kinda the least you could do after trying to run me over.”

He couldn’t believe he was having to prove himself. And yet in a world where he hadn’t had to work for the interest of a woman in ten years, he found the challenge refreshing.

“All right. Fine,” he said.

He grabbed a remote and pushed a button. A cabinet slid open to reveal a 100-inch flat screen. “Couldn’t find a bigger one?” she quipped. Collin shook his head and began scrolling Netflix. A slew of action films filled the screen. “Okay, so not a serious actor,” she noted.

“I see you also lost your sense of humor,” he shot back without looking at her.

He stopped at his most critically-acclaimed film. “Here we go. This one’s called Dark Feud. A cat and mouse thriller. Opposite Brie Larson. This was right before Captain Marvel.” The woman stared back blankly. “Well, this was an awards contender,” he noted, then pushed play and settled in.

For as much as she enjoyed keeping his ego in check, his talent was undeniable. His performance was commanding but still likeable. It felt like an authentic reflection of the man Collin Wright seemed to be in real life. It would have been natural for her to assume the worst about the rich celebrity who hit her with his Mercedes then abducted her to his house. But the more time she spent with him, the more she found herself giving him the benefit of the doubt.

“Not bad, I guess,” she said as the credits rolled.

“Not bad?”

She smirked and picked up her phone. She tried another password. Nope.

Collin shook his head. “People don’t realize how hard acting is until they try it. First there’s the technical side. Knowing where the camera is, knowing where the lights are, hitting your mark… And if you mess that up a hundred different people are mad at you. But then there’s the artistic side. To do it well you have to develop the ability to become a different person on command. Sometimes it feels almost like a possession. And as much as you try to leave that person behind, a little part of every character stays with you. It messes with you.”

“So stop doing it,” she said.

He chuckled. “Obviously I can’t do that,” he said.

“Why not?”

The safe answer was to smile and say “Because I love it.” But he wasn’t talking to an entertainment reporter or 6,000 fans in Hall H at Comic-Con. Collin Wright was sitting in the dark on his couch, talking to a woman who didn’t even know who he was. He could be completely honest.

“Because too many other people need me to keep going,” he said. The list was too long to list them all. The short version included agents, lawyers, Sheryl Dolan, theater owners, studio chiefs, car detailers, landscapers, a masseuse, a private chef, two personal trainers, a hairstylist, not to mention his ex-wife, his own parents, and his deadbeat pot-smoking brother back in London. “I used to be an actor with a dream,” he said. “Now I’m a machine that’s never allowed to stop.”

He was worried she would laugh off his vulnerability as the most privileged of problems. Instead, he caught the lights of Los Angeles reflecting off a tear in her eyes. She stretched out her hand to his. He took it. Then, feeling a connection that had been missing from his life for years, he pulled her close and kissed her.

She woke up with the sunrise. Her head felt clearer. Collin was still next to her, sharing a one-person blanket.

They hadn’t gone beyond the kiss. Which meant she woke up with all the hope of what could be and none of the regret. Riding that wave of optimism, she grabbed her phone and closed her eyes. She entered some numbers. No. Still locked.

She slipped away from the den and went in search of a bathroom. She found seven of them, each more grand than the previous. At last she made it to Collin’s room. Floor to ceiling glass with an original Vivan Maier photograph above the bed.

She wandered into the bathroom. The shower was carved from a single block of granite, with a tinted pane of glass that looked out on the Hollywood sign. The shower head was not a head at all, but a hundred small spouts drilled into the rock that dropped purified water from above like a downpour in the Amazon rain forest.

She couldn’t resist. As the water heated up, she happily slid out of her tank top and leggings and, for the first time since the previous night’s accident, inspected herself in the mirror. She had some scrapes on her forearm. Some road rash on her left shoulder. Below it, she caught sight of something else. A tattoo. She leaned in closer.

It was two words. Backwards in the foggy mirror. She wiped it clear with her hand, then screamed.

The two words were “Collin Wright.”

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PART 2

His name was written in a romantic, scripted font, set against the backdrop of a snow-capped mountain. The woman who remained nameless stared at it in the mirror, deducing its meaning.

For the last ten hours, she had assumed that theirs was a chance encounter. But the name on her shoulder meant that there was nothing accidental about it at all. She was not some stranger in a crosswalk. She was a target in his sights.

But just like the fake punches Collin Wright threw on camera, he pulled up short. And she survived. And as she was quickly realizing, it was only a matter of time before the man who tried and failed to kill her once would find an opportunity to finish what he--

KNOCK KNOCK.

Collin’s shadow stretched across the other side of the frosted glass door. “Still alive?”

Darn right she was. And she had every intention of staying that way. “Uh huh,” she said, then quietly locked the door from the inside.

“Take your time,” he answered. “I’ll make us breakfast.”

She scanned the bathroom for a blunt instrument and found an asteroid on the counter, a gift from the studio when Space Hunter 2 crossed a billion dollars in global box office revenue. She gripped it in her sweaty palm. “Sounds good,” she replied.

As Collin’s shadow slipped away, she climbed into the shower and looked out the curved panoramic windows. She thought about smashing them with the space rock and making a run for it. But the house sat perched on stilts, leaving a thirty-foot drop into brush and rattlesnakes of Franklin Canyon. If she had any hope of escaping, it would only be through Collin Wright’s front door.

The woman pulled her wet hair back in a ponytail, stuffed her locked phone in the waistband of her leggings, and walked softly into the living room. Collin was battling with a skillet in the kitchen, leaving her a runway to the front door. She arrived at the massive steel handle and pulled, but it didn’t move.

She looked for a clasp or a dead bolt or a latch. Nothing. She pulled harder, trying in vain when—

“Traditionally I’m the one who tries to slip out when no one’s looking,” Collin said from behind. He was holding a butchered omelet. Burned red peppers peeking out through runny eggs.

“Thanks for last night. But I’m gonna—” she said.

“No you’re not.”

“I’m not?”

“You know I can’t let you go. Not in your condition. Besides…” He was inches from her now. “I like you.”

“You don’t even know me,” she said, still pretending.

“Of course I do,” he admitted.

Her back pressed against the steel door. This is where I die, she thought.

“I know German engineering can’t kill you,” he began. “Which tells me you’re strong as hell. And I know you’re not afraid to speak the truth even when it’s not what someone wants to hear. And I know you aren’t impressed by fame. And I know you have an adorably crooked smile. And I know you talk in your sleep. I’m sure there’s more to you than that, but that’s a pretty good start,” he said.

Lord, he is charming, she thought. Maybe he isn’t out to kill me. Maybe there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for my tattoo. “Collin Wright” is not that uncommon a name all things considered. It could just be a massive coincidence… He moved in closer when a fresh thought cut through the tension—

“What did I say?” she asked.

“When?”

“In my sleep. What did I say?”

Collin pulled back. “You mumbled. A number.”

She stood up straight, realizing the potential significance. “What number?”

BUZZZ!

Someone was at the front gate. Collin pushed a hidden button on the wall, opened the heavy door, and walked barefoot down his front walkway with skillet in hand. “Twenty-eight!” he answered as the door swung closed behind him.

“Twenty-eight,” she repeated.

She took out her phone. Then, with the utmost care, entered the six-digit passcode:

2 8 2 8 2 8.

Click. Her phone unlocked.

She went to her settings and there, along with a happy profile photo, was her name:

Mandy Lake.

Hearing those two words pierced the darkness of her memory. Of course it was. Other puzzle pieces fell into place. She saw her apartment. It was somewhere hot. Reseda. She could picture the walls. And a photo. She was hiking. With a dog. A mutt. Roscoe? No. Rascal. She could see his eyes. One was brown and one was green.

Mandy flipped to her texts. Unread messages with blue dots from “Mom”... “Bro”... “Keira”.... “And a random (323) number.”

She scrolled backwards in time through the one-sided text thread.

You’re welcome?

Mandy read it a few times, trying to discern its meaning until confusion gave way to reality. An explanation for all of this that she hadn’t considered.

Collin Wright wasn’t stalking her. She was stalking him.

Out in the driveway, Sheryl Dolan was giving her biggest client an earful.

“Do you realize how exposed you are?? The leverage this girl has?? She could end you. And you know who becomes collateral damage? ME. And then where do I go, Collin? Back to Michigan? Have you ever been there in February? I might as well DIE!”

“First off, she’s not a girl. She’s a woman.”

“Wow. What a gentleman. You slept with a woman you hit with your car who doesn’t even know her own name. You’re dead! YOUR CAREER IS OVER!”

“I didn’t sleep with her!”

“What?” Sheryl was shocked.

“I slept next to her,” he added. “On the couch.”

Sheryl looked up to the heavens and put her hands together. “Oh thank God.” It was her first prayer in a decade.

Collin explained his thinking. “I could have. I suppose. But I didn’t want to mess things up. I’m actually kinda… intrigued.” He explained what made her so great. Her sense of humor. Her honesty. The fact she didn’t come with any preconceptions. By being free of all the baggage that comes with thirty years of real world trauma, he was getting the purest version of her. And he was all in.

Sheryl nodded, thoughts of Michigan winters in the rear view and her frontal lobe starting to function again. “I can sell this,” she said.

“What? No. Please don’t,” Collin said.

Sheryl was excited. “The world’s biggest star hits an everyday beauty out for a jog. Cinderella in Hokas. NO. Not hit. A romantic run-in. She was… lovestruck. Yes. NO. STARSTRUCK. There it is. I need her to sign an NDA.”

Mandy watched Sheryl and Collin through the windows. She couldn’t hear but she could see Collin’s face. He was scared. She knows, Mandy concluded.

When Sheryl burst into the house with Collin hot on her heels. “Now where is our favorite pedestr—” Before she could finish, Mandy sprung from behind the sofa and hit her in the head with Collin’s MTV Movie Award. As Sheryl slumped to the carpet, Mandy leapt over her, escaped out the front door, and disappeared down Marmont Avenue.

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Mandy ran toward the flats of Hollywood, pulled by gravity and guilt but unable to outrun the one person in the world she was truly scared of: herself. The twisted thinking that marked her life had been kept at bay for the last twelve hours but was now gaining on her. She could feel it seeping slowly into the corners of her psyche, polluting her mind like a toxic tide.

Behind her came a familiar rumble. Collin’s Mercedes. With Sunset Boulevard in view a block below, he pulled even with her. She kept running, not even stopping to look his way.

“Stay away from me,” she warned.

“I can’t. You have my MTV Award for Best Fight. That has great sentimental attachment.”

Mandy looked down to see that, yes, she was running with a gilded box of popcorn in her hand. She threw it through his open window and kept going. Collin kept pace.

“You know you really shouldn’t run downhill. It’s bad for the knees,” he warned.

“Can’t you see I’m dangerous?” she yelled.

“Not really,” he said. “To be fair, I’m the one who hit you, so—”

She stopped running and faced him head on. “No. I hit YOU.”

Collin pulled to a stop next to her. “What?”

The truth brought relief, not pain, so she kept talking. “I unlocked my phone. I checked my texts. My name’s Mandy Lake. I’m not an innocent crosswalker. I’m your stalker.” She pulled her sweatshirt to the side and showed him the tattoo. “I knew you were driving home last night. Someone tipped me off. I jumped in front of you. I don’t know why. It was all me.”

Collin paused to process the revelation. “Well that’s… that’s pretty jacked up, Mandy Lake.”

“I KNOW!”

“Honestly, most of my stalkers are men…”

“So?”

“It’s just unusual, that’s all.”

“Happy to be the outlier. Now just let me go!”

“I want to see the tattoo again,” Collin said.

Mandy pulled down the sweatshirt a little further this time.

“Interesting. Wonder why you chose the Paramount logo?”

“The what?”

Collin pointed to the snow-capped mountain below his name. “That’s the Paramount Studios logo.”

“Okay,” Mandy said, taking his word for it.

“Aren’t you curious why?” he asked

“I’m only curious why you haven’t driven away yet,” she said.

It was a good question. One that deserved a thoughtful answer. Collin leaned over and pushed open the passenger door from the inside. It swung open before her.

“Because I’m hoping you’re not the monster you think you are,” he said.

One of the perks of being an A-list actor is access. Anywhere you go, the world assumes you are supposed to be there. Nowhere is that more true than when pulling up to a studio lot. There is no asking for I.D., just a wave from the guard at the gate and a friendly, “Ya know where you’re headed?”

“Sure do,” Collin said.

That was a lie. This was an exploratory mission. “Any of this look familiar?” Collin asked Mandy as they drove past Paramount’s executive bungalows. She nodded her head. They passed the mill where a wave of sawdust drifted through the sunroof. They stopped in front of the Blue Wall and Mandy gazed up at the cloud-covered backdrop, 200 foot-wide and 175-foot tall. “They use this for ocean scenes, don’t they?” she said, a random memory breaking through. “Sure do,” Collin affirmed. He pointed to a blue-bottomed parking lot filled with black BMWs. “I made a Coast Guard film here,” he said. “The best one ever made.”

“Are there a lot of Coast Guard movies?” she asked.

“Almost none,” he said.

Collin continued across the lot when an LAPD squad car in the distance turned toward them. Mandy shot Collin a nervous look. “Probably a picture car,” he said, continuing toward it. Behind the first, three more squad cars turned and fell in line. “Or maybe not,” he added. Collin calmly turned right past the studio water tower then watched his rear view mirror.

The line of cops made the turn and followed. “Well, Mandy Lake, we seem to have attracted unwanted attention. Thankfully, this is one part of Los Angeles I know better than the LAPD.” Then Collin flipped the G-Wagon into sport mode and tore out across the studio backlot.

They flew down little New York, where brick facades framed open doors leading to nowhere. Collin weaved around 18K lamps on wheels and fake maple trees on wooden stands. “I once spent six hours running from an invisible CGI alien on this street,” he said.

“That doesn’t sound very awards worthy,” Mandy quipped.

“It wasn’t,” he said before zipping around a corner.

Collin pressed the accelerator as massive mid-century soundstages passed outside Mandy’s tinted window. With the cops falling further behind, she drew her attention to the large black numbers emblazoned on the side of each stage.

25… 26… 27…

“TWENTY-EIGHT!” she yelled.

Mandy reached over and grabbed the steering wheel. Collin hit the brakes and they spun sideways off the alley and through the open elephant doors where they slipped into the shadows of Stage 28 and skidded to a stop.

They sat in silence, grateful to still be vertical. “That was a pro move,” Collin whispered in the dark. “Not a lot of actors could pull that off.”

“Pretty sure I did the move and you were just holding on for dear life,” Mandy answered.

“I was working the brakes,” Collin insisted.

“True. In between your whimpers.”

Outside, the four squad cars flew past them and down the alley toward the front of the lot.

In the clear, Mandy opened her door and stepped onto the swept concrete. She looked up at the maze of catwalks, a hundred high. She ran her hands along the bare, soundproofed walls covered in wire mesh. It was a blank Hollywood canvas and yet…

“I’ve been here,” she said. “Don’t remember when. Or why...”

Collin nodded and crossed to a plaque near the stage door that listed every TV series or movie filmed on Stage 28. “Godfather Part 2?”

Mandy shook her head.

“Hunt for Red October... Forrest Gump... Uh oh… Dr. Phil?”

She glared back. He moved on.

“Oh wow. I made a movie here. Barely remember it. 2016. Twist of Fate…”

Mandy shot him a look. “That was it.”

“Really?” Collin stared at her, puzzled. “Hang on… are you… an actress?”

She nodded. The fog was lifting. She closed her eyes, summoning all she could before it rolled in again. “My first big role. I would have been twenty… I played your love interest.”

Now it was Collin who felt like the crazy one. “In Twist of Fate? No. That was Florence Pugh. Wasn’t it?”

“It was. After I got recast. This was my chance. And I came here. And it was my first day on set. And I…”

“What?”

“...I blew it. I knew my lines but I… I don’t know what happened. I was so excited and my parents came to town and we were… about to go out to dinner when my agent called and said… they wanted to go in a different direction. And that was that. And it messed me up. Because I thought I knew who I was and what I was good at and then suddenly… I didn’t know anything.”

“We never got to do our scenes together,” Collin realized.

“And I’ve been chasing you ever since.”

“HANDS UP!”

A SWAT team with guns drawn stood at the open elephant door. Mandy did as she was told. Arms in the air, then knees on the ground, her back to Collin as the LAPD moved in and put her in shackles.

“I don’t want to press charges,” Collin explained.

“Yeah, well that lady does,” a sergeant said, pointing toward Sheryl Dolan, silhouetted against the midway sun, a large bump visible on her forehead.

Three months later, after pleading guilty to assault and serving time at Lynwood Women’s Prison south of Los Angeles, Mandy was once again free. Or as free as a woman could be having been at the center of the Hollywood news cycle for the better part of a month.

Moving home was an easy decision. Her parents Stu and Denise had already packed up her apartment and taken her things back to Georgia. Stu owned a plumbing business there and he thought he could find a job for her as his bookkeeper.

When the prison gate opened, Stu was waiting for her in the visitor lot. He flashed the lights of his rental car and Mandy waved. She was halfway across the street, a clear plastic bag of photographs in her hand, when a black G-Wagon came to a screeching stop just inches away from her.

“Well that was far too close,” Collin chirped as he hopped out. “These brakes are squishier than I remember. I meant to have them looked at but then I got called over to Singapore to do some reshoots and—”

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“Right. That’s understandable.”

Stu watched with suspicion from the visitor lot.

“Here’s the thing,” Collin continued. “You didn’t get fired from Twist of Fate because you were bad. You were good, actually.”

“You never even saw me.”

“I called the editor and asked if she could dig up the dailies. It took some time but she found them. And I watched them. And you were great.”

“I was not great.”

“You were. And I asked her why you were fired and she couldn’t remember and I asked the director and he couldn’t remember. And so I asked the producers and they did remember. You were fired because I asked them to fire you.”

“You? But we hadn’t even met.”

“That’s correct. Not even once. But I had met Florence Pugh. And I was convinced that if I were to get her cast in that role that all my twenty-something fantasies would come true.”

Mandy shook her head in disgust. “And how’d that work out for you?”

“Quite well, actually. Florence is fun. For a spell. But it came at a price. That price was you.” Collin looked at her with a sincerity that transcended even his best acting abilities. “And so I’m here to say something long overdue. I’m sorry.”

Mandy started to cry. Tears of anger and sadness and a decade of confusion being untangled.

“I didn’t just take away a job that you were worthy of. I took away your confidence. And I don’t know how to give that back.”

Mandy didn’t know the easy answer to that either. But she knew where to start. “Can I punch you?”

“Punch me?”

“Yes.”

“In the stomach?”

“In the face.”

“In the face? A real punch or a—”

“A real punch. In the face. Right now.”

Collin nodded. “Okay. That’s fair. I accept.” He steadied himself. Closed his eyes. Exhaled a cleansing breath then opened his eyes again. “I don’t want you to break a bone in your hand. I have very little body fat.”

Mandy was already widening her stance and making a fist. “I’m willing to take the risk,” she said.

“Super. Just wanted to check.” Collin closed his eyes again. “As long as this isn’t a violation of your parole—”

Mandy responded with a fierce right hook to Collin Wright’s chiseled jaw. Out in the parking lot, her dad Stu leapt a little in his seat and honked his horn in accidental delight.

Collin screamed, loud enough to draw the amused attention of a prison guard standing watch. “OW! Son of a… OW!”

“Sorry not sorry,” Mandy said.

Collin gripped his face and wiggled his chin. “You lifting weights in there or something?”

“Every day,” she answered. “They say it’s good for self-confidence.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that ahead of time? I would have skipped that whole part of my speech!”

Mandy smiled and looked him over. “Calm down. I barely even broke the skin.”

“What about my teeth?”

“Your teeth are fine.”

“And my nose? I think your knuckles got the edge of my nose.”

Mandy took the actor’s face in her two hands and held it steady. She looked him straight in the eyes with a clarity and stability that came natural to her. A rebirth of an old instinct. “You’re gonna be okay,” she promised.

He believed her.

“I’m moving to Georgia,” she said.

“No, you’re not,” he answered.

“I know,” she replied.

Ignoring the pain in his jaw and a fat bottom lip, Collin leaned down and kissed her. He had no idea how Sheryl Dolan would spin this. And for the first time in a long time, he didn’t care.

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Honestly, even if I told you everything that was in it, you still couldn’t make it. It’s very difficult. And frankly, I don’t think someone like you has the patience to stir the 4 1/2 cups of sugar and the one can of condensed milk together for ten minutes at a low boil so don’t even try.

You know who did have patience? My great grandmother. This was her recipe. And that’s why I can’t share it. To give it out willy-nilly to everyone who showed interest at the holidays would be diluting her legacy like some street whore and I refuse to be a part of that.

If you do somehow steal the recipe—believe me—I will find out. And when I do, I will break into your house and take all the specific cookware you need to make it properly. The 12-inch wooden spoon, the 8-quart All-Clad pot, the greased rectangular Pyrex dish chilling in the fridge…

SO DON’T EVEN ASK.

Good.

But having said all that… you do want it, right?

You don’t?

Really?

Even if I left the recipe card right here on the kitchen counter and you just peeked at it? Just for a second?

What if I AirDrop it to you? No one ever has to know how you got it. It will be our little secret.

Please just take it. PLEASE.

This recipe is the only interesting thing about my family. Some breed artists. Others build empires. Mine made fudge. FUDGE. What kind of asinine ancestor chooses that? My STUPID GREAT GRANDMOTHER, THAT’S WHO! And every year around Christmas I lie awake in bed thinking about what I would tell her if I had the chance. All the ways she failed our family. All the things I could have been if she had just chosen a different path. A different recipe.

But I never had that chance. She died when she was only forty. Forty. Probably from eating too much fudge.

I need a minute. I’m sorry.

What was that?

You do want the recipe?

Really?

Thank you. THANK YOU! This means so much to me. Truly.

No, you can’t have it.

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Thankfully, our multiple security cameras were able to capture the entire thing, which I have painstakingly pieced together for the sake of my concerned subscribers.

Unrelated, don’t forget to order my new book, THE SILVER CORD, in time for the holidays!

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