An excerpt from the unfinished memoirs of Sullivan Kingsley.

Text was dictated to and recorded by a Kvasir Scrivener™. Any poetic editorializing can be assumed in accordance with the spirit of Mr. Kingsley’s intentions, as interpreted by a conjured instance of the severed hand of Kvasir, Norse god of poetry, peacemaking, and beverage production.

• • • •

She’s doing this old bit: “We dreamt of flying before the Wright Brothers took off. We dreamt of dragons before we found the first evidence of dinosaurs. I think any rational person looking at the march of human progress would have to admit that our dreams are our destiny. What we imagine in our wildest fantasies—that predicts where the lightning of inspiration will strike. I’m grateful every day that I was lucky enough to be there when the lightning struck.”

I agreed to an interview, I showed up, and still CNN’s showing a clip from one of Margaret’s innumerable TED Talks. I’m not sure which one. I’ve got better ways to spend my time than keeping a tally of Margaret’s victory laps.

The clip ends in applause and Anderson Cooper swivels his chair to face me.

“Lightning struck,” he says, “Fifteen years ago. And now here you are. Sullivan Kingsley. The world’s first sextillionaire.”

“Guilty as charged.” I smile at him like somebody who gives a single shit what Anderson Cooper thinks.

Anderson says, “I remember when MAGi went from a trillion to a quadrillion dollar company. And then a quintillion just a few years later.”

Dipshit can’t ask me an actual question. What am I supposed to say to that?

“You never forget your first quintillion.”

My mind wanders. I could buy CNN, I could wipe it from the face of the earth.

I could buy Anderson Cooper and have him bronzed. He could tinkle purified water into my dawn pool next to the cherubs.

Anderson says, “You created—not just a business, but a whole new industry. As if from thin air. MAGi stands alone in the market. Where to now? What’s next?”

Finally, a question.

“Well. Everybody knows the story about how we founded MAGi. Two thousand ten. I was an inventor, an entrepreneur. Working on something so new that we had to invent the tools to build the tools to make the first prototype.

“And that moment, when we turned the machine on. When we opened the testing chamber. We knew we were looking at something that would change the world forever. That’s still our first order of business: changing the world.”

• • • •

Nancy was the genius.

Margaret was the marketing wunderkind who I had tempted to our little startup with a promise of partial ownership of the things she sold.

I was the engineer and business major; I secured the loan. I was eating mini-muffins.

We were in a wretched little office park in the armpit of two highways. We shared a building with a business that tinted car windows.

Our first product had sold enough to keep the lights on, but only just. Remember Google Glass? Me neither, but our thing was like a shittier version of that. An abortive revolution in useless wearable tech. Our principal investor was nipping at our heels. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing him at Thanksgiving.

We were burning the midnight oil. Nancy was doing genius things. “Building tools to build tools”—she couldn’t explain to me and Margaret much more than that.

We thought it might involve genetics, on account of the blood samples she kept requiring.

Margaret had given a pint without question, happy for a chance at “a little detoxification.” I needed an explanation. Nancy had talked about synthesizing abandoned avenues of human epistemology. All that got from me was a blank stare. Margaret yawned and said, “I can’t sell the world a six-syllable word.”

Nancy’s eyes went wide with inspiration and she rubbed the fine dark hairs on the nape of her neck below the sloppily pinned bun and said, “Active, interventionist epistemology.”

That sexy bitch had the slightest lisp. It drove me wild.

Her husband was out getting Chinese food. If Margaret hadn’t been there, I might have made a move.

I watched Nancy and wolfed mini-muffins.

Margaret scrolled and jabbed at her phone.

Nancy kept doing her genius thing.

The center of the office was a round oak table a little more than twelve feet across. A kiddie-pool full of lead shot and refrigerator coils rested beneath it. A curved metal gutter filled with salt rimmed the table, and five humming computers scrolled through iterating code equidistant around its edge. Dozens of cables and pipes snaked onto the table from every direction, veins feeding at its center, just large enough to hold a human head: a box.

The box was cast iron, five seamless sides of a cube. The sixth face hinged and gasketed, sealed by four ramped latches.

An exhaust pipe the width of a girthy banana rose six feet like a stem from the top center of the box.

A little after midnight, Nancy said we were ready.

She turned on the power. Two days earlier we had broken through the wall to the car tinting place and tied into their breakers so we could get the necessary draw. She spun up the transformers and the lights dimmed.

I said, “Nancy.”

Nancy looked like something stabilized by a gyroscope; rendered inert by furious internal motion.

“Nancy. What does it do?”

She didn’t even look at me. She . . . flipped switches and hit buttons and stuff. She was the genius. It would take me more than eight months to reverse engineer the process, even with her obsessive record-keeping.

The room got cold, the air dense. Even Margaret looked up from her phone. You could feel a kind of pressure. Nothing moved, nothing changed, but suddenly the iron box gave the impression of something crouching. It seemed darker, more solid, like the opposite of incandescent heat.

Nancy pulled a high-voltage trigger and the room went silent.

Nancy closed her eyes.

I waited.

Screaming exhaust erupted from the pipe. Not “screaming-like-tea-kettle” screaming, more like “toddler tortured by Torquemada” screaming. It was like something screaming from an orifice meant for entirely other purposes.

Exhaust black as coalsmoke rose to the ceiling and the scream bounced around the walls and died away.

Nancy put on oven mitts. She awkwardly loosened the latches sealing the box.

The box cracked and hissed open and spilled mist.

Nobody moved.

Nancy said, “Look.”

Inside the box there was a tiny, naked-woman-shaped creature with pointy ears and wings. It looked like it was glowing, but we would later learn that was just the effect caused by the fine blonde down covering its sexless body. The aura of glittering dust around it, though: that was straight-up magic.

The fairy fluttered out of the box.

I cursed. I peed a little. Margaret took a picture with her phone.

Nancy said, “Hello, little one. Welcome.”

The fairy looked at each of us in turn. It had eyes like a shark.

Nancy extended her hand toward the creature. The fairy feinted back on dragonfly wings then spun forward, shaking, shedding glittering dust onto Nancy’s fingers.

Possible futures really started to crystallize for me then.

Because Nancy started to float.

As if gravity had just thrown up its arms and surrendered. Nancy did a hummingbird act, no visual propulsion.

Margaret looked like I felt; her face twisted into grotesque, wide-eyed glee.

Nancy floated up toward the water-stained acoustic tiles, the fairy following.

“Cross my palm with coin,” it said in a wind-chime voice.

“Nancy, what’s happening here?” I called up after her.

“Active, interventionist epistemology!” Nancy yelled down.

“It looks like fucking magic to me.”

“Yes!” she yelled, floating along the ceiling. “Magic!”

“Cross my palm with coin,” the fairy said, buzzing around the back of Nancy’s head.

“Magic,” Margaret said, “I can sell magic.”

“What can this stuff do, Nancy?”

“I think it can do . . . anything! Maybe everything!” she said, somersaulting off the ceiling.

The product possibilities were already jostling for space in my head.

“Cross my palm with coin,” the fairy tinkled.

To this day, I’m not sure if Nancy ever really heard the request. But it didn’t really matter because—and I’ve never told this to anyone—four hours earlier I’d asked to borrow change for the soda machine and she’d absent-mindedly emptied her pocket into my hand. I had spent seventy-five cents on a Dr. Pepper, and still had two of Nancy’s pennies on my hip.

The fairies only ask three times. We’ve since tested it.

When Nancy didn’t pony up a coin, the fairy came in close to Nancy’s face. I honestly thought it was going to kiss her.

It did not.

The fairy grabbed her cheeks, pressed its feet into her teeth, and pulled so hard that Nancy’s skin split across the back of her skull. Then it kept pulling.

When Nancy screamed it was a proper scream. The source and the intention of it were pretty clear: this thing’s ripping my face off!

She was dead before she hit the ground.

There was blood everywhere.

Margaret had gotten so far as inhaling to scream and then froze, eyes like headlights.

The fairy was a foot from my face. I could see myself reflected in its tiny black eyes.

“Cross my palm with coin,” it said.

I pulled one of Nancy’s pennies from my pocket. I handed it over.

The coin crossed its bloody palm and the creature disappeared in a puff of glittering dust.

We stood in silence, but for the dripping.

I heard the outer office door open.

Wayne.

Nancy’s husband. No—widower.

Back with the crab Rangoon his late wife so loved. Half-heartedly-singing 1984’s “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now).” Rapidly approaching the door.

Some are called to greatness, others have it thrust upon them.

Two steps took me to the inner lab door. I turned the dead-bolt and slapped the light switch, plunging us into darkness.

I held my breath. Willing Wayne to leave the office. To assume we’d all gone home.

“Food’s here!” he called from the outer office. “Hello . . .?”

I could just see Margaret lit by the dim sodium light spilling in from the parking lot. There was work to do, blood to clean, stories to get straight.

But I knew, even before she said it, that she was thinking what I was thinking:

“We’re going to be so rich.”

• • • •

“Rich” wasn’t the fucking half of it.

Luxury items, then energy production, then health and beauty, then entertainment, then food, then education, then everything else. Once you’ve got a Kardashian wearing Wyvern and Leo driving a Basabasa-powered SUV, you don’t even need the obscene national defense contracts that made you a billionaire before the public even knew you existed.

Ten years later and we’ve remade the very fabric of modern life. Everything cool either was or is running on a MAGi product. I was like Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, Steve Jobs, and Jesus Christ wrapped into one person.

Competition didn’t exist. Regulators couldn’t keep up.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has concerns about Basabasas escaping their engine cage? Fuck you, we’ve got a Simurg Engine. Food and Drug Administration wants to do further testing on Ouroboros diet products? Fuck you, we’ve got Wendigo Powder. Centaur Seed topical hair growth cream is causing seizures? Fuck you, we’ve got Unicorn Tallow.

Oh, did somebody say “Unicorns?”

Talk about a Giving Tree. Talk about a money press.

Everybody loves unicorns. But I LOVE UNICORNS. There is not a piece of that animal that doesn’t do something somebody will pay through the nose for. We’ve got a whole building outside Philadelphia where they do nothing but rub different pieces of unicorns on different parts of volunteer prisoner’s bodies. Money pours out of that place like it was Midas’s asshole.

But we never cracked fairies.

They were our eureka moment. Our very first conjuring. And the product was as basic a confluence of wish fulfillment and practical application as you could ask for: naked ladies and human flight. There’s a fairy on our logo for fuck’s sake.

But those safety issues. God damn.

A lot of test subjects lost a lot of faces.

We kept at it. I told Glen and Alan repeatedly that fairies were a personal priority. I told them—What if this is like Medusas? This isn’t a problem with the product, this is a problem with the packaging.

Sometimes the nature of genius is a matter of categorization, of re-examining a challenge from a 20,000-foot view.

Packaging was the innovation that allowed us to finally introduce fairies to the marketplace.

I’m not calling my packaging idea a stroke of genius.

I have people who do that for me.

• • • •

“This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for ten years.”

The room is dark and hushed. Five hundred lucky people out there listening live. Millions more watching from home.

“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. Here at MAGi, we’re very lucky to have shipped just a few of these to you folks out there.” The crowd chuckles. They get it: luck’s got nothing to do with it.

“And today, I think we’re going to do it again. Let’s talk about human connection. You want to visit your family. A friend. Maybe somebody who’s more than a friend? What are you going to do? Drive? Get in a car, burn some petroleum, charge up your EV maybe, then follow asphalt roads built decades ago based on outdated, probably problematic, ideas of urban planning? Yuck. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to live by 20th century rules.

“And let’s say your friend lives on a different continent. Now we’re talking airports. Long lines. Ticket prices you can’t control. Rude gate agents. Public bathrooms. Airplane food and hijackings. It’s a disgrace. Worse: it’s an affront to human dignity.”

Silence in the auditorium. They all had to fly here, the thousand tiny opprobriums of commercial air travel fresh in their minds. I’ve got them.

“Let’s think on an even more fundamental level. What about going to the kitchen? Walking to the fridge for a beer. Walking down the block to the store. You use your feet—you need shoes, they wear out, you get tired. I don’t know, folks. I don’t know.

“I thought there had to be a better way. I told my people: let’s go all the way back to the beginning. To something people have asked about for years. The truth is, it wasn’t ready. The truth is, for a long time we thought we’d never crack it.”

I pause. Let the anticipation fill the air.

“The truth is . . . we have.”

I pull the fairy out of the podium. It’s encased in a thin layer of plastic; a single penny carefully attached to its body with a breakable seal.

I hold it up. Its black eyes reflect the spotlights back at me. I say one word, but I say it with my chest:

“Fairies.”

I pop the seal. The fairy’s dust coats my skin and I float up off the stage.

People gasp.

One person cries out.

Somebody yells, “Fuck yeah, fairies!”

“Cross my palm with coin,” the fairy says, indifferent to the fact that it’s being seen by millions of people. It isn’t just a fairy right now, it is THE fairy. It doesn’t care at all. Just wants its penny.

The packaging auto-pops the seal between the coin and the fairy, and the creature disappears in a puff of glitter.

I’m left alone, levitating up over the crowd. Margaret was very specific on this point: “Don’t float like a supervillain,” she said. “Float like a benevolent god. Like an innocent star-child. Make sure your hands are palms up, like you’re giving a gift to the world.”

Because she couldn’t just say, float like David Copperfield.

But she was not wrong. And there I am, hanging in the air, basking in the adoration.

“Fairies will be available. Worldwide. Midnight tonight.”

The spotlight hits me just right. I’m ringed and haloed. My gifts are abundant and good.

The crowd cheers. I’ve done it. I’ve changed the world, again.

• • • •

Outside the event, I float my way through the crowd. My feet don’t get within a foot of the asphalt. Fans clamor for my attention, for more answers about the fairies, about flight, about what else the future holds.

Let them wonder at our accomplishments. Let them ponder what gifts we might sell them in future years.

It hits me, cold and sharp. A punch in the side of the neck.

I think assassin. I think lone gunman. I wait to hear the sound of the bullet.

But that would be impossible. I have wards, I have protection. If somebody even seriously contemplates my murder, spell-bound Djinns and Night Mares will haunt them to insanity and suicide, seven generations deep.

I wheel in confusion. I gasp at the cold, the shock of it.

It smells like vanilla. Chunky white slurry on my suit.

Some asshole has hit me with a vanilla milkshake.

• • • •

Later, in the car, my assistant asks gently about the streak of chocolate.

I nearly scream, “Sometimes vanilla milkshakes have a little chocolate in them.”

This is technically true but admittedly misleading.

The milkshake that hit me, it had a turd in it.

• • • •

I can’t remember what his parents named him, but I call my assistant Kent. I call all my assistants Kent. It’s an efficiency thing; I’ve got better ways to spend my time than learning the name of a new assistant every few months. And it starts off our relationship with an inside joke, it lets Kent know that he’s not just my employee, but my friend. Kents love me.

I tell Kents, “Don’t be a Can’t, be a Kent.”

I tell Kents, “This is your chance to move up in the world.”

It’s been three weeks since the turd milkshake. I’ve spent a fortune (for somebody else, ha-ha) wiping video evidence from the Internet, but copies keep popping up. If it weren’t me getting hit, I’d find it hilarious, too. Who doesn’t want to see the world’s richest man get milkshaked?

But nobody’s found out about the turd. All the videos show nothing but creamy white vanilla milkshake. The turd was, thank God, a pretty solid log, well-coated in cream, invisible from all seven camera-phone vantages.

I’ve spent another fortune trying to identify the thrower (and presumed shitter-in) of the milkshake. No dice. Despite all my wealth, my connections; despite being the most powerful wizard on Earth, the turdshaker remains elusive.

Frame-by-Frame analysis revealed a hand-written “S” in thick marker on the paper take-out cup. As if the turdshake had my name on it.

I could ask Eight-Ball about it. Eight-Ball’s a Sybil Crow I conjured ten years ago. Eight-Ball’s a real piece of shit. Sybil Crows can remember the future, but not the past. And they actually have, I don’t know, sentience? They’re not like what-you-conjure-is-what-you-get fairies. They can lie, and be bitchy, or in the case of Eight-Ball be mad about something you’re going to do and completely unaware of all the nice things you’ve already done for them because Sybil Crows only remember the future, and not the past. So, just a for instance—a Sybil Crow might be laughing for the three days leading up to the day you get turdshaked but not actually bother to tell you about what, for it is a memory, because said bird is a real piece of shit.

This is what I’m thinking about while having really phenomenal sex with my supermodel charity-influencer girlfriend (I use the Djinn dick), and afterwards I text Kent to come make an excuse why she needs to leave.

Kent knocks on the door before I even send the text.

He says, “Mister Kingsley? Oh! Sorry, Bella!”

This Kent’s a virgin. He told me so! His church insists on abstinence before marriage.

Kent’s dying; you should see him trying not to look at Bella; she looks like she was carved by a Norwegian yacht-builder. You could (and I have) bounce nickels off her.

I tell him that she’s a supermodel and she’s used to being naked in front of strangers.

“Okay. You’re very beautiful, ma’am. Mister Kingsley, Miss Margaret Lukins has called an emergency meeting. She said to tell you ASAP.”

Kent’s doing a pretty good job of looking yelled-at. I pretend to protest while I let him pack-up Bella and usher her out the door. She asks for a fairy on the way out. I tell her she can take as many as she wants.

I take off the Djinn dick and hand it to Kent for disinfecting and then I notice he’s laying out a suit for me.

“Kent. Bella’s gone. What are you doing?”

“The emergency meeting. It’s actually really happening.”

“At eight o’clock on a Saturday night?”

“She sounded really intense.”

Margaret hasn’t screamed since she bought Tibetan Buddhism from the Dalai Lama. Now she just gets intense.

I figure I know what this has to be about. And the whole ride to the meeting, I scour the Internet, watching videos. Sullivan Kingsley Milkshaked LOL. Sextillionaire Milkshake Bomb. Sully Gets Creamed. But I don’t find it and by the time I get to MAGi Pawtucket I’m shaking, convinced that the lack of milky turd on the internet is proof that knowledge of it has gone wide.

I burst into the conference room, where Margaret’s got a whole presentation running for the Board.

“They know about the turd.”

Margaret stops mid-sentence and all twelve Board Members turn to look at me, faces blank as a bunch of goldfish (except of course the Stygian Furies, with their legendary trio of resting bitch faces).

So, I say it loud and slow: “THE TURD. IN THE MILKSHAKE. THEY KNOW ABOUT IT, DON’T THEY?”

Margaret says, “Who?”

“EVERYBODY. I am going to be a fucking laughing stock.”

“He speaks of the feces in the ambrosial dairy,” says the Fury holding the eye at the moment.

“This isn’t about the shit-shake, Sully.” Margaret’s standing in front of photographs and looping video of far-distant people against cloudy skies, and crime scene photos of the faceless dead in generous splashes of crimson.

“Oh, thank God,” I say.

“This is about the fairies.”

“Sales are great,” I say.

“Sales are great. Historic. It’s a blessing.” She does some kind of yoga-hand thing.

“So, what’s the problem?”

Again, all of them with the goldfish looks.

“Have you not looked online today?”

“It’s all I’ve done!” Outside fucking a super-model, and an eight-martini lunch.

“Latest number is sixty-seven.”

“Sixty-seven whats?”

“Deaths. Forty-something flight-related, and twenty-something defacings. But that’s just what was caught on video. We’re expecting much larger numbers within the hour.”

“Wait, what?”

“The fairies are killing people. Our customers are flying into the stratosphere and suffocating and freezing to death. Or they’re not putting coins in palms and . . . paying for it with their faces.”

“What,” I say again.

“Somebody figured out how to crack the packaging. People are over-dusting. They’re foregoing pennies.”

Our fairy packages limit users to about twenty minutes of flight, and usually-survivable altitudes. A full fairy’s worth of dust, however, could put you in orbit.

“But you’re sure nobody knows about the shit-shake.”

“Sully.”

“Glen and Alan said it was impossible to crack the fairy packaging.”

“People figured it out. And now the instructions are posted all over the Internet.”

“I mean, we can’t help it if people aren’t using the product as instructed, right? That’s not on us. And every fairy comes with a user’s license, right? ‘Blah blah by touching this fairy you agree to limit MAGi’s liability Blah blah blah.’ Tell me there are user licenses.”

“There are.”

“Thank fuck. So we adjust the packaging and we prosecute people who tamper with it. Problem solved.”

“There is more. We’ve been seeing this.” Margaret presses a button on her remote.

The center video screen cuts from a dead teenager in pink quinceanera taffeta hanging frozen and dead in a California blue sky, to a shaky zoom-in on a tree branch. What looks like a cigar made of ham hangs from it in dappled shadow.

“What am I looking at?”

“They made it from a face.”

“They . . .”

“A fairy. Made that from a face.”

“For . . . why?”

“Watch.”

I watch. The ham cigar wiggles, it bulges. It splits open and a slick, nacreous, woman-shaped thing struggles and squeezes out and shakes its muculent wings then buzzes away. It’s followed by another, and another, and a whole crowd of tiny humanoid pupa jostles free and tumbles into flight.

“It’s a cocoon,” Margaret says. “The boys in the lab counted at least two hundred and forty newborn fairies from that one alone.”

“They’re reproducing in the wild.”

“Yes,” Margaret says. “Cocoons made from human faces.”

It all comes into focus for me. “I don’t give a fuck what they’re making them out of. People are getting fairies without paying for them. This is a disaster. A DISASTER. Margaret? What are we—YOU—doing about this?”

“Blessings,” Margaret says. “Deep breaths. Calm. Centered. Blessed.”

“We need a publicity blitzkrieg.”

“Just say ‘blitz,’ please.”

“We tested the shit out of that fairy packaging. That’s the message. We spent fifteen years getting this right. If our consumers are going to hack and misuse our product with the end result being . . . being ripped faces, and unlicensed black market fairies, we can’t be held responsible.”

“Despite our deep and heartfelt sympathy for the victims and their families.”

“Who can’t sue us!” I remind everybody.

One of the Stygians takes the eye and says, “We only tested the fairy-containment plastics for three months. Claiming fifteen years of testing is a lie.”

“Which is why we don’t say that part,” like I’m talking to a child. “And put in there that fairies are proprietary MAGi creations! ALL fairies. Wild or not.”

Margaret says, “We need a story about MAGi’s long history of compassion and responsibility. Let’s lean in to all the health and spiritual benefits MAGi products have brought to the world. Our Please Use Magic Responsibly messaging. Magic is just like medicine or automobiles; a blessing that can do a lot of harm if improperly applied. And in the meantime, R&D will be working overtime to one—harden our fairy packaging; and two—figure out how to counteract our illegally multiplying wild fairies.”

The third Stygian takes the eye and says, “This is a good plan.” Why they need an eye to talk—they’re not passing around a magic mouth for fuck’s sake—is beyond me, but a good wizard learns early not to ask for too much logic from magic.

• • • •

On the ride home, I watch social media videos of fairy victims. A frozen corpse floats past an airplane window. The faceless corpse of a fruit picker in an apple orchard, granny smiths painted red. Two corpses hanging from the same high-tension power lines.

“Everybody’s going to hate me.”

Kent exits off the highway and says, “No. Not you, Mr. Kingsley.”

“Look at all this.”

“That’s not your fault. You’re the Wizard of Earth. Everybody loves you.”

“Then why would they throw a turdshake at me?”

“That’s just one crazy person.”

I pull a tin of unicorn marrow from my pocket and tuck a plug into my cheek. It tastes of musky cantaloupe and I immediately feel the optimism spread through my blood.

“Nothing you can do about crazy,” I say, and then an idea hits me. “Kent. You’re a MAGi fan.”

“I love MAGi.”

“You have been your whole life.”

“I was eight years old when you revealed the Wyverns.”

I look into the rear-view mirror until he meets my gaze.

“Kent. You’re the voice we need.”

“What?”

“Absolutely,” I say. “Margaret and her team of suits can come up with the intellectual answer to why MAGi cares. But you, you could come up with the emotional angle. Because you actually love magic.”

“I mean, I do,” Kent says.

“You could save the company, Kent.”

“Really?”

“Truly. What Margaret does, marketing, it’s nothing special. She’s just telling pretty stories. Even you could do it. Here. This is what I want you to do. This next week, you’re not my assistant, you’re a professional MAGi fan. I’m giving you full access to the MAGi library. I want you to come back to me with the story of the most compassionate, responsible, not-murderous magic company in the world. Can you do that?”

“It’s what I was born to do, sir.”

“Then pull the fucking car over.”

He does and I kick him out and take the keys.

“Sir?” he says.

“You’re not driving me anymore, you’re not my assistant until next Tuesday. You’re a professional MAGi fan. Get to work!”

He honest-to-God salutes me. He pulls a packaged fairy from his coat pocket, cracks the seal, and flies off back toward headquarters.

I pick up the dropped packaging and watch the fairy inside the hard, clear, plastic take its coin and vanish, just as designed.

Then I get in the car, turn the ignition, and listen to that Simurg sizzle.

• • • •

Fairy sales go up.

The MAGi message is—“A few bad consumers might ruin this for everybody. Stock up on fairies while you still can!”

Wild fairy reproduction remains a problem, but it’s not disturbing our market.

The MAGi message is—“Wild fairies are dangerous! Only use safely packaged fairies.”

The death toll is in the mid-five-hundreds. I’ll admit that’s not great. But the bar for outrage is getting higher all the time, and who doesn’t want to fly? How many people have died in plane crashes over the years? We don’t ban airplanes. How many people jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge? And that fucker’s still standing.

It’s not the easiest week without a Kent but I can’t wait to see what he comes back with. In his job interview he honest-to-God cried to be face-to-face with me. The kid loves MAGi. I spend a leisurely Gentleman’s Sunday with Bella, and Tuesday morning Kent’s right on time.

He finds me in the Centaur Garden, reading the market reports and sipping my dekopon juice.

“Mr. Kingsley.” His voice quavers. Kent is shaking, tears in his eyes, fists balled. The kid looks like he’s taking a shit on the road to Damascus.

“Kent?”

“Mr. Kingsley. I lo . . .,” he swallows, he closes his eyes, he tries again. “I looked up to you, sir. I thought you were a great man.”

I wait.

He says, “I talked to Wayne.”

Wayne, I’m thinking. Wayne, Wayne, Wayne . . .

“Wayne Wizbiki.”

Wayne! Nancy’s Wayne.

“He was married to Nancy Wizbiki. Who worked for you when you founded MAGi.”

“Now, Kent . . .”

“She was with you even before Margaret.”

I stand up. I say, “Kent, maybe we should go inside.”

“Don’t you come a step closer! I have copies!”

“Copies of what?”

“Anything happens to me, my copies go everywhere!”

“Kent. I want you to calm down and tell me exactly what it is you think you saw.”

“Nancy Wizbiki. She kept hard drives. Backups. Wayne didn’t know the passwords to get into them. But an assistant . . .” Kent’s eyes go wide, he stabs a finger into his own chest. “A good assistant, you never underestimate.”

“What do you want, Kent?”

“I want a hundred billion dollars.”

I do a little math in my head. I have a hundred-trillion times that amount of money. But still, a man needs principles.

“And I have a spell of protection!” Kent screams. “I’m being paced by a Night Mare. If anything happens to me, the information on Nancy Wizbiki goes public, and the Night Mare will torment you to insanity unto death!”

“Kent. C’mon now. You know you can’t bind a Night Mare to me without a sample of my blood.” Obviously.

“I’m a good assistant,” Kent says. Christ, I’m thinking, there’s a dozen ways he could have gotten my blood.

“A hundred billion. By close of business Thursday.”

Tears falling down his cheeks, teeth a chimpanzee rictus, he backs to the hedge and then runs.

I search morning’s meager shadows for the Night Mare. I’ve only seen the ass-end of the things before, and would never have anticipated looking one in the mouth.

This is not my favorite Kent.

• • • •

I’m at MAGi Pawtucket by ten. Staring at Margaret. Contemplating how best to put this.

I say, “Margaret, this is a fucking disaster.”

“In what sense? Nobody cares about the turdshake. The fairies are under control. I’ll have the Doubtshops running before the end of the week.”

“What’s a Doubtshop?”

“Do you read anything?” she asks.

“OF COURSE I DON’T FUCKING READ ANYTHING.”

I close my eyes and try to count to ten.

I get to three and say, “Kent knows about Nancy.”

“What?”

“Kent knows about Nancy. He’s black-mailing me.”

“You’re sure.”

“Nancy kept records of everything. I mean, that’s the only way you and I figured out any of this shit. Wayne must have kept her hard drives. Clearly, he didn’t know how to get into them. But Kent figured it out. Now Kent knows. He wants money.”

“If you give him money,” Margaret says, “he will never go away.”

“You think I don’t know that!”

Margaret leans back. Closes her eyes. Let’s out a long slow “mmmmmmmmmmm” sound. Not “hmmmmmm” like she’s thinking. “Mmmmmmm” Like she’s taking a piss after a long road trip.

“Margaret—”

She holds up one hand to silence me.

“For fuck’s sake—”

The hand again. I’ve often wondered if I could figure out some way to get rid of Margaret. Buy her out maybe. Get her to transcend all the way up her own ass and then leave her to suffocate there.

“Do nothing,” she says a moment later.

“How the fuck is that going to solve this!”

“Kent loves this company like it was a parent. And like any child eventually must, he just found out that his parent isn’t perfect. Give it time and he’ll learn the key lesson: an imperfect parent is still a parent and worthy of love.”

“You want me to risk the whole company—our whole company—on the idea that Kent will teach himself a lesson?”

“The child is the father of the man.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?!”

“When he comes back on Thursday, hug him, forgive him, then promote him.”

“You want me to promote him?”

“And give him a raise.”

“You just said—agreed!—that if we give him money he’ll never go away.”

“A ransom and a salary carry opposite dynamics of power. Now please, fairies, the real problem of the day, requires more of my thought.”

She leans back and closes her eyes.

“Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm”

“Margaret—”

The hand comes up.

• • • •

Doing nothing is not an option. You can’t kumbaya yourself out of a traitorous Kent.

Maybe there’s some subtle way to get rid of him. I’m not saying I want him dead. Just how convenient it would be if he were dead. How nice it would be to have that fresh Kent smell in the office.

But there’s the matter of the Night Mare. And the more I think about this Kent, the more I’m convinced the nerd will have utilized every MAGi product possible for his defense. Shit, I’m pretty sure he even has access to the military-grade magic.

But still . . . nothing is not an option.

• • • •

I walk into the birdshit-maculated room and Eight Ball finishes the conversation he remembers we’re about to have.

“Yeah, hi, I’m tired of talking about how everybody hates you. You never do anything to warrant it.”

“Can’t you ever say anything nice?”

So, Sybil Crows. They move forward through time, but they only remember the future, and not the past. They can make guesses about the past in ways we make guesses about the future, but they don’t know what just happened, or what you just said. So Eight Ball is always responding to what I’m about to say.

You would think a creature that can remember the future would be valuable, but when that creature is answering questions you haven’t asked yet, you find yourself shaping your questions to his answers and the future remains this frustratingly vague series of traps.

Eight Ball has free reign of my house. It’s impossible to cage a crow who can remember everything you’re about to do.

“Ask literally anyone. In the whole world! Everybody hated you so much!” Eight-Ball speaks of the future in the past tense because for him the future is a memory, so “hated” here is the future. I know, it’s exhausting.

Eight Ball says, “Because you’re a paper-skinned gobbler of shit!”

To which I ask—“Why does—did—everyone hate me?”

The bird descends into laughter. “The look on your face when it came out. Priceless. Priceless. They hated you because they all knew that Nancy’s going to invent magic one day and you’re gonna steal it from her. Like a proper fuckwit.”

To which I find myself, infuriatingly, trying to guess the correct question, which is of course, “Why, specifically, did everyone hate me?”

Which I can barely come up with because: everyone is going to find out that Nancy invented magic, not me.

I’m fucked.

It’s all that every conversation with Eight Ball ever leads to—I’m fucked. It’s like having a migraine with wings.

And his presence constantly makes me think about things I don’t want to think about. Predestination. Free will. The idea that I’m almost certainly a prisoner of my own life in an unwavering chain of cause-and-effect in which my illusion of choice is just the steadily-diminishing fiction whose endpoint is probably justifiable suicide.

One time, I asked Eight Ball if his memories (being the future) can be changed. He said, “Can you change your memories, dumbfuck?”

He always said that his favorite memory is my funeral. Where he ate the eyes out of my head and nobody else bothered to attend.

Everybody’s going to find out that I didn’t invent magic.

I’m going to lose my money.

Everybody’s going to hate me.

• • • •

Nothing’s protecting Wayne.

I have the Stygian Furies check up on it. Wayne Wizbiki has absolutely no magical security; no wards, no sigils, not even a horseshoe over his door. I think the way they put it was: “He is void of apotropaics.”

Like I don’t have a word-of-the-day calendar. Like I don’t have a Kvasir Hand to pretty up my language.

Wayne’s in the same miserable little house in Cumberland they were living in when Nancy died. We folded our original business and formed MAGi six months after the funeral, so Nancy’s estate would have no part in the revenue stream. I haven’t seen Wayne in fifteen years.

I put my phone and a few packs of fairies in a fanny pack and pull a jar of unicorn eyes from the mini-fridge. I tell the staff I’m going to be in the sauna for a few hours and not to be disturbed, then slip out the back and pop one of the eyes in my mouth.

It tastes like candy tasted when I was four. The texture teases my teeth, like a peeled grape with a promise, soft and sensual and encased in a membrane offering just enough pressure to make you want to pop it.

I suck the eye. My skin goes cold and my hands vanish in my shirtsleeves.

A unicorn eye in your mouth turns you invisible, so long as you can resist the temptation to bite down.

I resist long enough to get my clothes off.

But as I’m about to crack open the packaging on a fairy, I lose concentration for a split moment and close my teeth on the orb.

It ruptures and floods my mouth with a sensation like the memory of childhood candy. I groan, eyes closed.

Instantly, I reappear, naked on the back porch, shuddering with pleasure. I fish another eye from the jar and pop it in my mouth. I look in the jar: ten more eyes in there.

Fuck it, I bite down. It’s better than the last one.

Nine eyes later I’m back at the fridge, naked but for the track belt bag clipped around my waist, pulling a fresh jar of eyes off the rack.

This time I will resist the temptation to—

Fuck.

I pop another in my mouth, shove the jar into my track belt bag, crack a fairy, and fly off toward Cumberland.

I’m naked as the day of creation, skimming above treetops gone tortoiseshell with the first hints of autumn, invisible and all-seeing, erect in the wind. Time Magazine said magic would make us as gods, and they were not wrong.

There are fewer cars on the road. I see other aeronauts (fairinauts?) in the distance. People floating to work, playing airborne games of frisbee and tag, children grinning hand-in-hand with laughing parents, dancing across the tops of trees.

I bite the eyeball and for the moment it takes me to get another eye in my mouth, I’m a naked sextillionaire visible to laughing children in the skies above Massachusetts.

• • • •

The driveway in front of Wayne’s house is empty. I fly around to the back and find the porch door open.

Naked and invisible, I slip in.

The house is meticulously clean but tawdry in its poverty. The carpet under my bare toes feels greased with undiscovered strains of hepatitis. Maybe it’s pure misery. There are pictures of Nancy everywhere. With her sisters, her parents, with people I don’t recognize.

Her office is still intact. Fifteen years she’s gone, and Wayne hasn’t touched it except with a duster. I turn on the computer, it beeps and buzzes and clicks and whirrs. This thing is ancient.

Wayne says, “Hello?” from back in the bedroom.

I almost bite the unicorn eye in shock. What the hell is he doing home with no car in the driveway?

“Is somebody there?” Wayne calls out, closer, footsteps creaking.

I slide my fanny pack so that my invisible body hides it from sight just as Wayne shuffles in. Fat, bald, and poor, with the saddest eyes in the world, magnified by a thick prescription. He clutches a paperback book in one hand, some much-abused decades-old sword-and-sorcery novel. In a world of actual magic, this guy’s still reading poorly-imagined, mid-twentieth century fantasies of dragons, elves, and bustiers. I don’t understand people at all.

If Kent leaks the information, if Nancy gets credited as the inventor of magic, this fat, damp fucker stands to get half of my company. Maybe all of my company. If he gets good enough lawyers, my personal fortune, too.

I hold my breath. He cocks his head at Nancy’s whirring computer. C’mon, Wayne, it’s just electrical weirdness. Or Nancy’s ghost trying to tell you something.

He crosses to the computer and turns it off. He sighs. He heads back to what I assume is a recliner that smells like soup.

My phone rings.

Startled, I bite down on the unicorn eye.

I snap into visibility.

Wayne turns towards the sound.

I do what any sensible, naked man would do.

I punch him in the face before he can get a good look at me. His glasses go flying and he stumbles back.

Then I punch him again, harder. It hurts my hand, something pops.

Wayne falls.

I run naked through the living room and out the back door.

I shove an eyeball in my mouth.

I crack a fairy.

I fly like the wind.

I’m home and dressed in ten minutes.

I grab another handful of fairies, grab a ball cap and aviators, and five minutes later I’m at our Pawtucket Plant.

Meng Cats are not commercially available. We have a contract with American Intelligence for their use in interrogations, but otherwise they’re strictly for internal MAGi use. Not many people know Meng Cats exist.

Meng Cats eat memories and shit lies.

We use them in the Conjuring Keeps to protect company techniques.

I get a carrier and check out a Meng Cat.

It howls the whole flight back to Wayne’s house. I keep my ball cap low and don’t make eye contact with other aeronauts.

I land on Wayne’s lawn and try to hush the howling animal.

I check my phone. It’s been twenty-six minutes since I punched Wayne.

No cop cars. That’s a good sign.

I walk up and knock on the door. I wait.

Wayne answers, holding a bag of frozen peas to his face. He looks like he’s been crying.

“Wayne! Oh my god, are you okay?”

“Sullivan . . . Kingsley?”

“Yeah. Sully, please. Oh my god, you look awful. Can I come in? I’m coming in. I gotta put this cat down. Thanks.”

“Sullivan Kingsley,” he says again. He’s shocked, almost sleepwalking, it’s perfect.

I close and lock the door.

“You look like you’re about to fall over, brother. Have a seat. Jeez, I mean look at you. Come on, sit down.”

I usher him into a chair. I put the cat carrier on a coffee table.

“Sully, the weirdest thing’s just happened . . . I don’t know . . . I don’t know . . .” he shakes his head, struggling with emotion. “There was someone in the house. He attacked me . . . he was naked and he hit me and I must have hit my head, blacked out . . . he had . . . God . . . he had the weirdest looking penis . . .” He starts to cry.

I hate seeing people cry. And I’ve got a lot of dicks, none of them weird.

My phone rings and I send it to voicemail.

Soon as I unzip the cat carrier, the smell of Meng Shit hits me and I immediately lie: “I’m here to help.”

I pull the Meng Cat out.

Wayne looks at me about like you’d expect somebody who was visited by a sextillionaire with a cat.

I say, “Um. Take this cat,” and I put it on his lap.

Every Meng Cat is gray, with green eyes and a banded tail whose movement makes the stripes seem to travel like the spiral on a barber’s pole. It’s a hypnotic effect that hits Wayne fast.

He stares down at the creature, who purrs and rubs against him and paws at his chest.

“Nice cat,” he says.

The Meng Cat sniffs its way up to Wayne’s face and begins to nip and lap at the air in front of his mouth.

Wayne’s eyes go dull and distant.

The cat feeds. For a full-grown Meng, they eat about a quarter hour of memory per minute.

I set a three-minute timer on my phone and go check out the fridge. Not a beer in sight, and the orange juice is spoiled. I am a man cursed.

My phone rings again and I poke at it until it shuts up.

After the three minutes are up, I pull the cat away. It hisses and swipes at me and I shove it into the carrier and zip it up. More Meng-shit hits me and I say, “Cute kitty.”

Wayne’s still dozing in his chair.

I slip out the front door, tuck the cat carrier behind some bushes, give it a minute, and then knock.

Wayne slowly answers.

“Wayne! Long time!”

“Sullivan . . . Kingsley?”

“I haven’t seen you in years!”

“What are you doing here, Sullivan Kingsley?”

“Can I come in? Are you okay? Did I wake you?”

“No, no. I mean. Yeah.”

I walk into the house and pat him on the back and close the door.

He says, “I must have dozed off, or . . . ow. My face hurts. Does my face look okay?”

“You look great.”

“Can I get you something to drink?”

“No, no, I’m actually here on business.”

Wayne even blinks slowly.

I tell him a bit of a story, about how our servers saw he was trying to log in to an old drive of Nancy’s and it was creating a bit of a security situation.

“Oh man. Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cause any trouble like that. I was just . . . A guy from your office came down. Ken, I think?”

“Kent.”

“Kent! Yeah! Nicest guy. Nicest guy, really. Big fan of yours, too.”

“Yeah, Kent’s the best.”

“He came down, he said he was doing, like a project on MAGi and wanted to look through Nancy’s old stuff. I told him I was sorry but even though I’d kept everything she had, it was all password-locked and I’d never been able to guess it and it just kind of hurt too much to keep trying so I stopped. But he must have logged on no problem. I heard him yell. I was in the other room and I heard him yell and he told me to stay out. He was really insistent. In my own house, you believe that?”

“Wow,” I say.

“And as soon as I walked in, he closed all the windows on the computer and logged out. And I was yelling at him, I was begging him. I mean, I’ve been trying to see what was on those files for, for, fifteen years. But he just ran out of here and flew away. He just . . .”

My phone rings, I silence it.

“Maybe I can help?”

“Could you?”

“I can try.”

I follow him into Nancy’s office. He powers up the computer. We watch it chirp and whine.

“So, how are things?” I say to fill the space.

“Good. Can’t complain. Everything’s . . . You know I was really sad for a while there. Like. There were a few times I thought about, uh . . . I’m not really a complainer.

“I love the fairies.” He turns to me suddenly, eyes desperate. “I love flying. It’s so incredible.”

“I’m glad.”

“I sold my car. Because I don’t need it now. I fly everywhere. And I can afford it for a little while with the money I got from my car. So.”

“That’s great, Wayne.”

“So, thank you.”

“Thanks for being a good customer.”

He finally gets back to the computer; brings up a login screen with NANCY WIZBIKI auto-filled in the USER field. The PASSWORD field waits.

It looks bad. It looks like gigabytes of data. The whole year leading up to Nancy’s death. All behind one little bit of encryption.

I’ve got to guess the password. And then I need to erase it without Wayne getting in the way.

I ask Wayne to hand me the paperweight, “That brass softball over there.”

“Nancy’s trophy? Why?”

I need something to hit Wayne with once I unlock the files, so I can keep him out of commission while I erase everything and then bring the Meng Cat in to clean up the memories. And my hand still hurts from the last time I hit him so I’m not doing that again.

“I need something to rest my wrist on. Carpel Tunnel.”

My phone rings, it’s Margaret. It’s been Margaret the last three times. I send it to voicemail.

“She was such a strong outfielder,” Wayne says. He starts crying again, but he hands me the brass softball. It feels like you could fire it from a cannon. Perfect.

Now I just need to guess a password.

Margaret calls again. I hit ignore.

I type PASSWARD123, which Nancy always used until I gave her a hard time about it. The computer chirps irritably at me, deletes the field, and helpfully informs me I have two guesses left.

But my backup is the real play—one of those memories rendered precious by random gray matter, a post-it I found in Nancy’s desk fifteen years ago when I was scrounging for cigarettes. It read, in block letters unmistakably Nancy’s handwriting, T3DD4NSON69!

I type it in.

I hit return.

The computer buzzes at me and deletes the field.

I’ve got one more chance before the server kicks me out for a half hour. Wayne looks at me, doubt and suspicion creeping in.

Margaret calls again.

I remember that Margaret’s smart. I answer.

“Hey, Margaret, I need help. What do you think Nancy’s password would be?”

“Where are you?”

“At her house. Wayne’s house.”

“It’s still our house,” Wayne says.

“I told you to leave that to align itself,” Margaret says. “You have to let the universe find its own balance.”

“Come on. Nancy’s password. You’re good at remembering things.”

“Why aren’t you answering your phone? Communication is central to trust.”

“I just answered, didn’t I?”

I stare at that password field, willing memories of Nancy to surface.

“I need your approval to pull the trigger on the Doubtshops,” Margaret says. “With the child labor laws, it’s not going to be a small expense.”

“Uh-huh,” I say, staring at the screen, thinking Nancy, Nancy.

“My assistant emailed you all the numbers,” Margaret says.

“Yeah, I always check the numbers,” I lie even without the smell of Meng shit.

“And you approve it? Verbal approval is sufficient, I just need you to say it explicitly.”

“We gotta get ahead of this Kent thing. First priority.”

“So say it.”

I can’t help but cast a look at Wayne, damp and depressive, sitting there waiting to take all my money without even trying.

“Hey, Wayne, brother, could I have the room?”

“It’s my house.”

“This is kind of private.”

He stands miserably and shirks out of the room, nearly leaving a trail.

“This fixes our problem? This fucks Kent?”

“I’m dealing with the fairies, Sullivan,” she says.

“Oh, fuck. Whatever, yeah, I approve the Doubtshops if it gets you out of my way so I can deal with our real problems. Margaret. It’s gonna get out.”

“What’s getting out?”

I cover the phone and whisper: “Nancy. The invention of magic. I talked to Eight Ball about it, and he said the world’s going to find out I didn’t invent magic. Everybody’s going to hate me. We’re going to lose everything.”

“Eight Ball said those words precisely?”

“Yeah, basically. But meaner.”

“I’ll talk to Pace.” Pace is Margaret’s Sybil Crow. Rhymes with “Bah Che.” A piebald bird she named after the Latin word for “peace,” or after an Italian restaurant in Los Angeles. Maybe both.

“But if I can get Nancy’s password, then I can erase the evidence. Then it’s just Kent’s word against ours. And we’ve got lawyers and money and fame.”

“Sullivan. The truth always comes out eventually. You have to learn that this is not a threat, but a promise and a blessing. With truth comes peace.”

“Margaret, I give precisely zero shits about enlightenment. This is our public standing. This is our money. I’m not a thief, okay? I’m the Wizard of Earth. If . . .” I can hear my voice getting loud, I put my hand over the phone and hiss, “Anybody can invent magic. It’s luck. Monkeys and typewriters or whatever. But I took the invention of magic and I gave it to the people. Only a wizard can do that. MAGi is the center of every economy on Earth, and I’m the center of MAGi, and it’s our responsibility to take care of it. I need Nancy’s fucking password.”

Margaret is silent for a few moments.

Then she says, “Didn’t you set Nancy’s passwords on everything?”

Oh shit, that’s right.

“I have to talk to Pace,” Margaret says. “The Doubtshops will be operational by Monday.”

She hangs up.

I type tYLERdURDEN2009 into the password field and the files open.

It’s gigabytes of video. Each one labeled with a date.

She was keeping a video diary.

If Kent has a copy of this, even if I delete the originals, it’s a disaster.

Her written notes on the creation of magic would cause some static, but video makes good TV.

Wayne hears me groan and asks if everything’s okay.

I can’t even speak.

I’m going to have to pay Kent trillions of dollars. I’ll never get rid of him.

Even if I do, Eight Ball said it—the information is going to come out. Everybody is going to know I’m a fraud.

I open the first video.

The sound is off, but there’s Nancy’s face. There’s me.

And we’re not doing science.

I laugh.

I open the next video; it’s more of the same.

I can’t stop laughing.

I open another video, and another.

Wayne says, “Is everything okay? I’m coming in.”

I have seven videos playing. I’m laughing, I’m spinning in my chair and kicking my feet like a little kid.

Of course I remember how much sex me and Nancy had, but I had completely forgotten how much it turned her on to video tape it. Somebody like Nancy had to organize and save everything. There’s probably forty hours of our affair here.

Wayne stands a few feet in the doorway, eyes wide, mouth gaping. I bet he didn’t even know Nancy was that flexible.

“It’s just dirty movies!” I shout.

For some reason, Wayne’s just standing there.

“My crazy fucking virgin Christian assistant thinks this is a betrayal! I’m fine. I’m totally fine!”

Wayne’s crying again. This fucking guy.

God, those sexy dimples in the small of Nancy’s back.

I hug Wayne. I say, “Everything’s going to be okay.”

Wayne picks up Nancy’s brass softball trophy and smashes the monitor. He starts moaning and blubbering and smashes the computer. Sparks fly, glass shatters, and plastic cracks. I leave him to it.

• • • •

I call Kent.

“Kent?”

“Hi.”

“It’s Sully.”

“I know.”

“Kent. FUCK YOU.”

He doesn’t answer. I elaborate.

“Fuck you, fuck your family, and your faith. If you ever finally get laid and knock up some other fundy maniac, then fuck your kids. You got nothing on me, Kent. Nothing.”

“I have video.”

“I saw the videos, Kent. An affair?!”

“You were sleeping with an employee.”

“I’m an international playboy, buddy. Nobody cares. Share the video. Please. Let people know I was still getting my bone smooched even before I was the world’s richest man. Fuck you. People love me.”

“Mr. Kingsley. They really don’t.”

“Fuck you, Kent. I expect you back at work on Monday.”

“What?”

“I’m giving you a ten percent raise, Kent. Fuck you.”

“What?”

“You showed initiative. You saw an angle and you played it. I’m not sure I would have done any different except I wouldn’t have fucked it up. So, you’re getting a raise, you’re welcome, fuck you.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Say you’ll be at work nine A.M. Monday morning. Fuck you.”

“Okay.”

“See you Monday, Kent. Fuck you. Bye.”

• • • •

Me and Bella have a party. We go all out: sativa laced with unicorn marrow, mandrake-infused tequila, I pull every dick off the shelf. Ten years ago Bella came real close to being an Olympic swimmer and her endurance is phenomenal. And I have drugs and money and magic dicks.

I wake up and it’s three o’clock on a Friday afternoon. I’m deliciously hungover, drained, starving. The staff tip-toes around me, nobody will make eye contact. We must have been noisy.

Bella comes in as I’m finishing my seafood tower. She plucks a piece of melon from a platter and nibbles.

She’s not smiling, and she’s wearing a disconcerting amount of clothing.

“How you feeling?” I ask.

By way of answer, she holds up her phone, indefatigable news scrolling the screen.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“You’re an enemy of women,” she says.

“After last night? I’m an enemy of . . .”

I catch a glimpse of Margaret on the screen.

“I think our personas are misaligned,” Bella says.

“Wait. Did Margaret do something? Is this about the fairies? Bella. They’re not women. They’re just shaped like women. Like tiny women. Not even . . .”

“It’s not about the fairies.”

“Why are women mad at me?”

“It’s not just the women.”

“Bella what did I do?”

She crosses her arms.

“Bella! You . . . Communication is the foundation of trust!”

She narrows her eyes.

I don’t know where my phone is. I yell at the TV until the news comes on, and there’s Margaret, talking to Anderson Cooper.

She’s saying, “. . . about belief, and when you’re in the business of belief, the truth is not just important, it’s inevitable. That’s why we’ve chosen to recognize Nancy Wizbiki’s contribution to the creation of magic.”

I scream.

Anderson Cooper says, “Now when you say contribution . . .”

“By contribution, I mean almost total responsibility. Nancy Wizbiki is the genius who created magic. I sold it, and Sully had the business plan, but magic belongs to Nancy.”

I scream again.

Bella’s already out the door. There’s a picture of Nancy on the TV. There are news crews on Wayne’s front lawn. There’s footage of Margaret handing out water bottles at a natural disaster. There’s footage of me covered in milkshake.

• • • •

I scream at Margaret for three hours. It has no effect.

She says, “I feel like we’re finally communicating.”

• • • •

There are wild fairies everywhere.

The fairies are killing bees, sparrows, and frogs. Seemingly just for sport.

Airplanes have largely been grounded because there are so many fairy-dusted corpses floating in the sky. But less airplanes just means more MAGi fairy sales. Still, trees full of faces and skies full of corpses doesn’t look good for anybody.

• • • •

The Turdshaker posts a video.

In it, they wear a red raincoat and a bucket hat, everything about their identity and gender hidden. You can’t even tell their race from the tiny crescent of ass visible when they lift the coat and crouch above the opened milkshake.

I recognize the turd dispensed neatly into the vanilla.

The Turdshaker replaces the lid and straw—Why the straw! This haunts me)—then uses a poster-marker to write a fat S on the side of the cup.

Then the video cuts to the milkshake exploding against my face and neck.

That’s it. The video is posted with perfect timing, it goes viral, accompanying the story of “How Sullivan Kingsley Stole Glory and Fortune From a Dead Woman.” Cultural trauma and cultural catharsis packaged neatly together.

The first time I leave the house I get Turdshaked thrice on the way to Pawtucket.

Five times the next day.

My lawyers are going through the legal and financial ramifications. Our stock has already dipped enough that I am now the world’s first former sextillionaire.

Everybody hates me.

I have to fix it.

• • • •

Alan and Glen show me the new fairy packaging. Any tampering, even a firm jostling, results in the meeting of fairy and coin, and the little fuckers turn to dust. They estimate we’ll lose about twelve percent to shipping, but we can make that up by branding these “next generation” fairies and raising the price.

The Stygian Furies say (one at a time, as they pass the eye) that the markets will stabilize, our stock should return to former levels.

I spend most of my waking hours hating Margaret. She says marketing of MAGi products matters, public perception of me does not. She actually smiles when she says, “Research shows how much people hate you has no effect on whether or not they buy MAGi products.”

“But they still hate me!” Why do I even have to explain this?

“Sully. You can’t control the hatred of strangers. You can only control your love of yourself.” She says this in front of The Board.

“She’s not wrong,” says the Stygian holding the eye.

I put my head on the desk.

“All that remains then,” Margaret says, “is our wild fairy problem. We should make an announcement when the Doubtshops go live. A press conference. It should probably be me. Sullivan needs to let the air clear around him, and the Doubtshops are a delicate message. And I’m seen as a problem solver in the company.”

“I’m a problem solver,” I say.

“Of course you are.” Margaret pats my hand.

I can’t stand condescension. I say, “I’m announcing the Doubtshops.”

Margaret and The Board look at each other uncomfortably.

“I’m announcing the Doubtshops,” I say again. “I’m the face of this company. I made MAGi. I need to let people know I’m in charge, and . . . and . . . competent and likable. This is my company. I’m announcing the Doubtshops.”

I look slowly from Margaret, to the Stygians, to all the nervous humans sitting on The Board.

Margaret says, “Okay.”

I say, “What’s a Doubtshop?”

• • • •

I tour the Doubtshop in Paramus.

It’s about a hundred kids in cubicles, all around the same age as our Unicorn Wrangler Department, ten or eleven years old. They’ve got cookies and juice. They’ve got parents waiting in a breakroom with coffee and cheese cubes.

Alan explains it to me, Glen watching, rapt.

Alan says, “So a coin will disintegrate a fairy on contact. We’ve known that as long as we’ve known anything about magic. More recently, we’ve discovered fervent disbelief will sometimes result in a fairy’s death, even at great distance.”

“Sometimes but not always,” I say.

“The Peter Pan Principle,” Glen adds.

“Right,” Alan says, and Glen beams. “Recent events have necessitated a greater focus on remote fairy elimination. The breakthrough came with age and purity of belief. Hence the kids.

“When the shop opens Monday, we’ll have science teachers come in and explain away the impossibility of fairies. In testing, we’ve had greater success with large groups of kids under the sway of one charismatic authority figure. Once we have them warmed up, we start the kids clapping and saying they don’t believe in wild fairies, and about seventy percent of the time we can count on the remote elimination of a fairy within a twenty-mile radius and the cancelation of any residual magic.”

I ask what the numbers are.

Alan estimates, with bathroom and juice breaks, upwards of ninety dead fairies per hour per child.

“We’ve established Doubtshops within the actionable radius of every fairy infestation in North America. We’ll get them up and running as soon as you make the announcement.”

Some of the kids are laughing, looking from their phones to me and back again. Do I hear an angelic little voice say, “Turdshake?”

I’ll put it behind me come Monday morning.

I’ll be the man who saved us from wild fairies. The man who cleared the skies.

Eventually the world will forget about Nancy.

They’ll be grateful for everything MAGi has given them.

They’ll wonder what we’ll come up with next.

They’ll love me.

• • • •

I stick to the speech Margaret prepared. I say it with my chest, I smile with my eyes. I blame irresponsible consumers for tampering with fairy packaging, then I forgive them, because who wouldn’t want just a little more magic in their lives.

I talk about MAGi’s responsible stewardship of world markets and industries. I improvise a little bit on my personal stewardship of world markets and industries.

I say, “Everybody gets a little egg on their face sometimes. And I get a little milkshake on mine now and then.”

The press laughs.

“We’ll be providing family jobs”—which sounds a lot better than “child labor”—“for over twelve thousand people in over six hundred cities and towns in America.”

I had them put a red telephone on the podium, with a line to the Doubtshop ten miles away.

“When I make this call, the first Doubtshop will start production, and the skies will be safe again for magic.”

Kent is in the crowd, looking dutifully penitent. I give him a wink. He doesn’t love me like he used to, but he also knows not to fuck with the boss. I think he’ll learn to love me again.

I dial the phone and put the receiver to my ear.

“Hi, it’s Sully.” I smile for the cameras. “Let’s get to work.”

I hang up the phone.

Ten miles away, Children start disbelieving at industrial scale.

“Any questions?”

A hundred hands go up. Cameras flash. I call on a woman in the front row.

“Will remotely eliminating fairies and their magic have any additional safety concerns?”

“Safety’s our first priority. Mine and MAGi’s both. We’ve considered every possible outcome and our team is cer . . .”

The frozen corpse is going over a hundred miles an hour when it hits the reporter. She explodes, and the icy corpse shatters.

Blood splashes on me before I can wipe the smile from my face and somebody snaps a photo.

It rains bodies.

I flee the stage. Kent grabs me and leads me away from the panicking people and exploding corpses.

I say, “Everybody’s going to hate me.”

He says, “Everybody already does.”

I can fix this, I have magic.

DBNR—Sullivan Kingsley