“Ugh!”
“Yes!”
She had their full attention. “Well, Wooden Board is still open now, right? That’s because the workers all joined a class action suit, and the dude decided to settle by quitting and giving them the business. So they became a worker-owned cooperative. Everybody has a share in the shop. It worked out great and they started selling those really amazing cheese tarts.” Edwina paused. “We could do that.”
Daisy was dubious. “But Skin Seraph is an international chain. We can’t turn it all into a co-op.”
“No, you mean with the Skin Seraph workers at this one shop, right?” Agony continued to blink up feeds as she thought it over. “It might even work, because your boss could get rid of the shop that got her in trouble in the first place. She could do a total rebrand.”
“Okay, sure. But what would we do with a shop?” Daisy asked.
Edwina’s heart began to pound, and she realized with surprise this mattered a lot to her. “We all need jobs. Daisy, you want to be a self-care influencer, and this shop is the perfect place to build your brand and make video. Agony, you want to do events? We’ve got amazing spaces here for retreats, classes, and pop-ups. Listen. How often do you have the chance to grab prime retail real estate that has suddenly become garbage? Isobel has a dozen other outlets—she doesn’t need the hassle of dealing with all the fallout from Agony’s curse. We’d be doing her a favor. And we—we could make a really great store. We don’t have to do it forever. But wouldn’t it be nice to build a business where all the workers would be owners, so we could give ourselves good health benefits and vacation time and stuff?”
Daisy looked thoughtful. “We could get rid of Isobel’s shitty bonus system, too.”
Agony waved her hand to dismiss whatever she was accessing online. Nobody said anything for a minute while two parrots fluttered down to the counter. The third, still on Agony’s shoulder, spoke first. “These humans have good hearts,” the bird said. “You can trust them.”
Another bird cackled. “Or you could swindle them! They’re credulous!”
Agony rolled her eyes. “We’ve talked about this, Loudface. That’s an inside-your-head thought.”
Edwina glanced at Daisy, worried the talking animals might be triggering her anti-fae feelings. But she was toying with one of the free sample packets they kept behind the counter, seemingly oblivious to the possibly-magic, possibly-trained-parrot scenario.
And then Daisy said the last thing Edwina expected. “You know what? Fuck it. I’m in. Let’s do this. Let’s make a store.”
“YESSSS!” Edwina did an awkward wiggly dance. “We can do this! What do you say, Agony?”
The fae looked at Loudface, then behind her through the windows, seeming to measure the armies of pedestrians swarming Whole Foods across the street. When she turned back around, she was smiling. “We’re going to need a lawyer. And a business manager.”
It was weird how you could want something badly, and not realize exactly what it was until you found yourself in a completely anomalous situation. Edwina drummed her fists on the counter in triumph. “I have a couple friends who might be able to help. They just got their MBAs and have done some start-up stuff.”
“My mom is a labor lawyer,” Daisy said haltingly. “This might be the only time she will ever understand my job.”
Agony’s smile turned hard. “And I can make your boss very… receptive to our offer.”
“We’ll need to ask the other workers if they want to join us, too,” Edwina said.
“After my next curse, though? Because we don’t want to tip our hand.”
“Yeah that makes sense.”
“Hey, do you want me to do it right now? It’s going to be super gross and scary.”
Edwina looked at Daisy. “Do you want to? I want to.”
Daisy shrugged and then grinned a little. “No more poop, though, okay?”
Agony crooked her finger and they followed her outside onto the sidewalk, facing the illuminated interior of a business they were about to claim as their own. The fae raised her arms, fingers spread wide, and Venus became visible in the evening sky.
That’s when the fat, warm drops of blood began to fall.
About the Author
ANNALEE NEWITZ is an American journalist, editor, and author of fiction and nonfiction. They are the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from MIT, and have written for Popular Science, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post. They founded the science fiction website io9 and served as Editor-in-Chief from 2008–2015, and then became Editor-in-Chief at Gizmodo and Tech Culture Editor at Ars Technica. Their book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction was nominated for the LA Times Book Prize in science. Their first novel, Autonomous, won a Lambda award. You can sign up for email updates here.
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