by Nina Post
Af came in, having already changed back into his human form. “I distributed all of the donuts, so if you have any more ready, I’ll―”
Stheno snatched Medusa’s hairnet off.
“Hey―” Af said, taking a step toward them.
Stheno pulled one of Medusa’s snakes and it hissed.
Medusa put up a defensive arm. “Ow, what the hell?” She slapped at Stheno, and within a few seconds the Gorgon sisters were in a punching, scratching, pulling, drag-down fight. Their snakes hissed.
Kelly came in through the interior door and stood beside Af. They let the sisters fight for a while.
“Did you already distribute the donuts?”
“Just waiting for another haul,” Af said.
Stheno dumped a bowl of flavored glaze over Medusa’s snakes, and Medusa tossed her iced tea in Stheno’s face.
“We should stop them. As fun as this is.” She took a donut from a half-filled box and bit into it. “Great Athena’s Owl, this is delicious. Wow. Are these cake donuts? They’re just as good as the yeast donuts.”
Af gave her a concerned look. “Maybe you should have a couple of them. You look kind of… wan.”
“Wan?” She laughed “That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard about myself all day. Why don’t you go break them up. You want to do good in the world and rebuild, there’s an opportunity right in front of you.” She sounded ambiguously sarcastic.
Af shrugged and ducked into the melee to pull the sisters apart. He held each of them by one shoulder. “This is not a good time.”
He looked at Medusa. “Your Super-Fryer is on the roof releasing demons from the underworld. The SPs are still recovering and off their posts, so whatever they protect is probably going berserk. We still can’t find the angel in charge of donut equipment. And we need you to make donuts with the antidote baked inside to give to the monsters who ate the contaminated donuts.”
He looked at Stheno. “So pull it together and get this done for the sake of… everything. Please.”
Medusa wiped the glaze off her face and went into the restroom to clean it off. Stheno absorbed the iced tea on her face with a paper towel―Brobdingnagiany brand, Af noted with approval―and returned to the backup fryer.
Medusa returned, chin high, and went to work on another bowl of glaze.
“Why do you two even still talk?” Kelly asked after a moment.
Medusa glanced up with her head lowered. “What? Us?”
“You’re family, right? Why are you so awful to each other? Because, Stheno, if I had someone in my life like you, I wouldn’t put up with it.”
Af nudged her and whispered, “I thought we wanted them to focus and make donuts.”
“We do. I’m just curious,” she whispered back.
Stheno looked over as she deposited the donuts onto the fryer from the cutter head. “You think she puts up with me? She gets everything handed to her, and doesn’t even try.”
“Medusa knows her donuts and flavors, I know that,” Kelly said. “You could say she’s naturally talented, but she definitely puts in the effort. You haven’t.”
Af stood right next to her, his arm and hip touching hers, his head leaned close to hers. “Are you trying to get them to fight again?”
She knew she didn’t allow herself to feel much of anything while she was working, so she kept stuffing any feelings she had into some mental corner. But if all of those times were receipts that she had carelessly shoved into a shoebox, tax time had arrived and the shoebox was so full the lid wouldn’t stay on, and the accountant was giving her that look.
She loved Af, and it was getting excruciatingly difficult to compartmentalize it.
She made a quick mental reminder to organize her paperwork for tax time, which was running up on her heels, then imagined Jay Vanner. Kelly, you can’t let this distract you from your contingency offense. But when this is wrapped up and you achieve victory, do yourself a favor and find out how he feels about you. All those years single-mindedly focusing on your goals has left you emotionally isolated and afraid of rejection, but maybe now you can get in touch with your real feelings for a damn second.
She blinked. Jay Vanner usually dropped in to offer a succint, pithy infusion of advice here and there, not give her a therapy session. And he normally wasn’t mad at her.
She blamed her flu, and maybe Archie’s drink.
She tried to focus. What were Medusa and Stheno talking about? “I may as well ask, since we’re waiting for the next batch of donuts,” she muttered.
“What is the point of asking?” Af said. She lifted her nose an inch to breathe in his breath. Like a breeze in an apple orchard.
She rubbed her forehead. She had to get hold of herself. She couldn’t function like this.
Stheno narrowed her eyes at Kelly. “I don’t put in the effort?”
“Your donut shop is inferior to Medusa’s in every possible way,” Kelly said. “I would know, I worked at yours for an hour, which is all it took.”
Af spoke under his breath to her. “I can’t tell if you’re on too much flu medication or if you need some.”
Stheno’s snakes writhed and slithered around one another, which probably didn’t speak to a good mood. “Uh-huh. And is my donut shop responsible for the piece of equipment that opened a portal for demons? Is my donut shop responsible for contaminating its customers with poisoned Cluck Snack Dry Mix?”
Stheno laughed and turned to her sister. “I was so mad when Archie let you have the Dry Mix. Of course he liked you better, but to add insult to injury, you were the exclusive licensee of Cluck Snack Dry Mix for the retail donut and pastry industries.” She tossed up her arms and let them drop to her side. “And look where it got you.”
Af looked sideways at Kelly and spoke in a lowered voice. “What is your endgame here?”
Stheno stared back at Kelly. “What do you mean, you worked in my shop?”
Kelly shrugged.
Medusa finished the glazes and transferred the donuts to the center work table. “Archie will fix this.”
“Archie isn’t the president of Clucking Along Holdings,” Stheno said. “Not anymore.”
“He will be,” Kelly said.
Medusa turned to Stheno and folded her arms. “You came here upset that your boyfriend used you as his pawn to take control of Clucking Along Holdings, and to open the Super-Fryer portal, which you just now blamed on me.”
Stheno made an equivocating gesture. “You have to pick your battles.”
Medusa sneered. “Oh, bullpuckey. You don’t pick any battles when it comes to your boyfriend. You let him do anything he wants, regardless of how it affects you or anyone else, like, for example, me. Pothole City. The world. Are you really that desperate for male company, Stheno?”
“That’s horrible of you to say.”
“And do you know where he is right now, your gem of a boyfriend?” Kelly asked.
“He has a press conference in the moss garden at Clucking Along Holdings.” Stheno raised her chin and looked down through lowered eyelids.
“When?”
“Please, I never know where he is, let alone when he’s doing it,” Stheno said. “I only know this because he left a note to himself on the bathroom mirror.”
Af tested the glaze with a fingertip, then stacked the finished donuts into the boxes. “This has been fun, but I’m going to go distribute these.”
Kelly caught up with Af in the eat-in area of Pothole City Donuts. “While you’re distributing the donuts around the city, could you find the Archie Impostor and take him to the roof of Amenity Tower, ideally before the press conference?”
Af smiled, and Kelly wanted to put her hands on his chest and kiss him like he was hers. But he wasn’t. And she had the flu. And he barely even knew her. And she had spent so much time being someone else that she barely knew who she was.
Kelly asked Roger to make an announcement on the show.
The claddbydhhu swirled and churned in the center of t
he Mark 90 Super-Fryer like Charybdis. She didn’t see the point in leaving the tarp on top of it because the demons would come out anyway, only with an extra edge of confusion and frustration.
One demon, with thick scales like roofing tiles, emerged from the Super-Fryer and crouched next to it to get his bearings while electric blue saliva spattered and sparked from his nostrils. Kelly knew the feeling.
“It has come to our attention,” Roger said on camera, “that nearly every Amenity Tower resident has a consumer-grade donut maker in their locker in the storage room. We would like to ask all residents― including you, stairwell monsters―to come down to Pothole City Donuts on the lobby floor to A) pick up a supply of Cluck Snack Dry Mix, B) go home and use the mix in your donut maker, then C) drop off your donuts at Pothole City Donuts. But you must use the Cluck Snack Dry Mix in your batter! If you’re sure that your mix is ‘better,’ and use that instead, it’s of no use to us, and I will be personally disappointed in you for not properly following directions.”
Kelly asked Gil to send out an email to every resident with the same information, but he refused, explaining that he had to run every email by Forcas, the board president, for approval―and it usually took Forcas a few weeks to respond.
She addressed Gil’s screen. “A few weeks? He’s bound to the building! What could he possibly be doing?”
Roger started to sing “I’m Happy To Be Your Manager”: “Let’s meet in the common areas and share our common hopes and dreams…”
Another demon jumped out of the gate and looked around before tiptoeing up to Roger and singing along with him, though she could tell that the demon roughly approximated the sounds and had no idea what he actually said.
A few of the residents on the roof clapped politely. Roger delicately moved away and kept singing.
The demon made an enthused growl and leaped off the roof. More demons emerged from the Super-Fryer in a cloud of flapping wings and hovered in a dark gathering over Amenity Tower, apparently coordinating their Day Planners, until flying away en masse.
“Next up on What’s On Your Mind, With Roger Balbi, a highlight reel of the Amenity Tower End of Days Sub-Committee, now dissolved,” Roger said.
The camera operator signaled they were clear. Roger winked at Kelly. “May as well keep it hyper-local for now.”
The angels bound to Amenity Tower, along with the resident monsters (including the ones living in the stairwells), rushed down to the storage room, startling Archie and the SPs in their zeal to open their lockers, then rushed out, each carrying a consumer-grade donut maker.
Anything for What’s On Your Mind, With Roger Balbi.
Af flew over the Clucking Along Holdings campus in search of Archie Driscoll’s impostor. Every time he went back to his angel of destruction form, he felt loss, a sense that he had lost his north star, even though he had so much power.
He missed a presence he had taken for granted, a presence he had thought would always be there. Maybe he had a little more serenity since he quit being the prince of wrath, at least professionally, but that serenity came with a price.
The only balm to his soul was Kelly, but he feared that she would leave at any moment. Why wouldn’t she? She had lived her life that way so far―always moving, always working. Always pretending to be someone else.
And he knew she wanted to figure that out, but he knew her. He knew her in how she cared for the SPs even though she hadn’t wanted or expected that responsibility. How she found Archie and looked after him so he could do his job. How she worked with others in solving a problem and didn’t let anything get her down.
He knew her tenacity, her resourcefulness, her intelligence. He knew her from all of these things and more, but just when he thought they were actually close, she would put up a barrier to him, and he wondered if she even know she was doing it.
Af landed on the corner of the roof, giant thighs flexing into a crouch. He had noticed the moss garden when he drove the board members out in the trolley; now a small crowd of attendees and press with their camera crews had amassed there, and his hearing was keen enough to detect the conference as though it were right in front of him.
Archie’s impostor stepped up to the mic and raised a hand in greeting. Af knew Kelly had said to get the impostor before he started the press conference, but he thought it would play better for the camera if he swooped down mid-sentence.
“First,” the impostor said, “I would like to express how deeply sorry I am as president of Clucking Along Holdings that our product let you down. I have formed a cross-functional team to explore the root cause of the contamination, and will be implementing an ISO 9001-certified integrity verification system to insure that no similar events occur in the future. You have my word on this.”
Af was impressed―the imposter was making hay out of that burning platform and leveraging every possible synergy.
(He read magazines.)
“Due to the success of the antidote, a project that I spearheaded, we intend to pursue partnerships with major drug companies to produce a full line of Cluck Snack branded prescription drugs, available at our forthcoming lines of pharmacies. Through this initiative, we expect to gain control of seventy-five percent of the pharmaceutical market within eighteen to twenty-four months.”
Af decided it was a good time to intervene, and moments later, the camera caught a flash of dark red and an empty podium where the supposed president of Clucking Along Holdings had been standing just a moment before.
Stringfellow connected the cables that would allow What’s On Your Mind, With Roger Balbi to broadcast to all of Pothole City.
He texted Kelly: done. try now. -S
He had a raging fever, and had put a bandage over his nose to mitigate the nasal discharge so it would stop running into his fur and making it stiff. Using a reserve of energy, he made it back up to the ground floor and crawled into Pothole City Donuts.
The shop smelled incredible―a soul-pleasing swirl of rich scents and fresh-fried batter that made you happy to be alive. He found a pink box on the floor with four donuts in it, and nibbled on one of them―so creamy, so flavorful!
As he curled up in between two puffy unglazed cake donuts, Stringfellow had a fleeting thought that as much as he pursued complete autonomy and independence, it was nice to know that you could work with others to achieve something great.
Af dropped Archie’s impostor and a furious-looking thickset woman on the roof of Amenity Tower.
A small crowd of shivering residents and fans of What’s On Your Mind, With Roger Balbi assembled in the center of the roof after dropping off their donuts downstairs.
“Who’s this, a salesman?” Roger said.
The impostor brushed dust off his suit sleeves.
Af turned back into his human vessel and his stomach growled. He could easily eat a whole ham and a hundred donuts, but he tried to do most of caloric intake while in his other form, not the human one.
“This is the amoeba pretending to be the president of Clucking Along Holdings,” Af said to Roger. “And some woman who was standing next to him. Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“Aw, you knew just what to get me.” She gave Af a sly grin then took Roger aside and spoke in his ear. “The woman is Macarena, his Bolivian wrestler/assassin henchman, and who knows what else―his bookkeeper? His lover? His chauffeur?”
Macarena spit on the ground in front of Kelly.
“If it weren’t for those meddling kids, right?” She turned to Roger. “You should be able to broadcast out to the city now. I have a few things I want to say.”
Af put a hand on Kelly’s shoulder. He lingered, and reluctantly withdrew. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go raid the automat again, then get another batch of donuts to distribute.”
She wanted to go with him, but just watched him leave.
he camera operator signaled a go-ahead to to Roger.
Roger started to say something but Archie’s impostor grabbed the microphone away.
“I appreciate you giving me this platform to continue my press conference, Roger.” Archie’s impostor flashed an insubstantial smile at the camera.
Kelly took the microphone away from the impostor. “This isn’t your press conference. This is Archie’s.”
“But…” He smiled, overcompensating. “I’m Archie Driscoll.”
“You’re not, and I’ll prove it.”
The impostor scoffed. “Of course I am. I run Clucking Along Holdings.”
Kelly hoped that Archie’s mystery flu drink would hold up, especially considering she stood outside on the roof in the winter. After this, she would definitely take some time off. A full day, maybe two. Her body ached and her head felt like one of those tilting yuppie desk toys with the fluid sloshing around in it, but she could probably last a little while longer.
She took a binder from her bag.
“The binder!” someone in the crowd of residents said with a gasp. They remembered the binder from when she confronted Murray with the incontrovertible piles of evidence she had gathered against him.
“She’s got a binder. You’re screwed,” Roger said to Archie’s impostor.
The real Archie stepped from the stairwell door, with Medusa, who raised her hand in a wave. Kelly was heartened to see her.
She opened the binder to the first page and spoke to the impostor. “I have copies of wire transfers from Don, the Destroying Angel of the Apocalypse and Demonic King of Locusts, to you, Robert Fluke, via your bank account at Pothole City Credit Union.”
The crowd of residents murmured in excited voices.
She turned to the next page. “You had Don’s corporate credit card. Here are surveillance camera images of you using it to buy donuts at Pothole City Donuts.”
An outraged yell rang out from the back of the crowd and Stheno elbowed her way to the front and pushed Fluke in the chest. He stumbled back a step.
“You bought her donuts?”
“And enjoyed them,” Kelly added. “Look, here’s a photo of your boyfriend eating at Medusa’s donut shop. I think he looks a little furtive, and rightly so.”