THE DISSECTION & REASSEMBLY OF COHEN HOARD

CHAPTER 1

The hammering on my door startled me so much I dripped raspberry jam all over the table. It splatted, red and globby, like my kitchen table was the scene of a very small murder. I grumbled, running my hands through my hair and grabbing my robe off the back of the couch since I was still in boxers, and shuffled toward the door. It was too early for guests, but a tiny part of me wondered if it was Jocelyn.

She’d smiled when I said hello to her yesterday, so it wasn’t completely impossible.

I opened the door as the retreating form of the SMax rider jogged down the steps. A flat, SwiftMax Extreme cardboard envelope lay on the doormat, big black “Urgent” stamp in the corner. I glanced toward Jocelyn’s door, then bent over to pick it up, noticing as I did so that the name on the address label was wrong.

I rushed over to the stairwell. “Hey!” I called, though there was no sign of the SMax rider. “This isn’t for me! My name is Cohen! This is addressed to a Calla!” I checked the shipping label again. Calla Human? What kind of a name was that? But the address was definitely mine.

Boy, somebody really screwed up.

A door opened behind me, and I turned as Jocelyn peeked out, her red hair mussed in a bright halo around her head, makeup blurry around her blue eyes. She held a giant cup in one hand, phone pressed to her ear with the other, eyebrows raised in question.

“Oh, hey Jocelyn.” I tightened my robe and ran my hand over my hair a few times, knowing it was sticking up all over the place. “Sorry about the noise. Just got delivered something by mistake. Do you know a . . .” I looked down at the cardboard envelope in my hand to reread the name. “Calla Human?”

She frowned in confusion, then looked away nodding. “I know,” she said into her phone. “I said the same thing so many times, but she never listens to me.” She noticed me still standing there and shook her head, waved her fingers at me, and shut the door.

I stepped back into my own apartment, pushing the door closed behind me, and dropped the envelope on the table just before remembering the jam splatter. I grabbed a rag and wiped the package off the best I could, but there was a definite pink splotch in one corner.

I really didn’t have time for any of this. I’d been up till one last night working on my code for the DarkWave Demo, and I still couldn’t figure out what the problem was. It was driving me nuts. And now I was going to have to deal with correcting some schmoe’s shipping error. Well, it would have to wait. I had to get to work.

When I left a half hour later, I took my usual path through the park to get to work. The sun shone down like it owned the sky, but water from last night’s storm still dripped from the trees that arched above the sidewalk. As usual, I was the only person carrying an umbrella. I shook my head wryly. Birds chirped at me from nests attached to the underside of the broad tree leaves, ready to face the world again now that the rain had stopped for the day. A bright red bill poked out of a nest ahead of me, then the bird jumped out and set to work tidying its home, reweaving the twigs and branches that the storm had pulled apart. Saluting him, I stepped around a puddle on the path in front of me. Several joggers ran toward me, their wet running gear splashed with water, and I scooted over, my briefcase with the inconvenient envelope held out to the side.

I felt the whoosh of air before I heard it and looked back as a hydrocyclist rode straight toward me like she was in a race. Before I had time to react, she swerved past, wheels slicing through the puddle in the path without even slowing down. Water splashed across my pants, destroying the crease I had ironed in them and cascading onto my shoes.

“Thanks a lot!” I called after her as she turned and headed toward a river the rain had carved into the landscape. Without stopping, she jumped off the bike and ran straight through the thigh-high water, holding her bike over her head. Hydrocyclists. Sure, they could go some places cars couldn’t, but they were just so annoying. I hurried toward the GridLox building, trying to ignore the squishy, sucking sound of my shoes on the sidewalk.

I had only just gotten settled at my desk when Mr. Steenrod came by.

“There he is,” he said, patting my cubicle wall. “How’s the weather out there, Mr. Hoard?”

“Dry and getting dryer, Mr. Steenrod!” I said with a smile. It was a silly question. Ever since they broke the weather twenty years ago, that question had been unnecessary. Daytime? Here in Portland it was sunny and warm. Nighttime? Rainy. Well, no, not just rainy. More like torrential. Like the earth was a marble sprayed off with a hose, rinsing away anything that wasn’t holding on tight enough. People still asked about the weather though, an old habit that never seemed to rinse away.

“How’s the demo coming?” Steenrod asked. “Got it finished yet?”

“Still working out that bug. But don’t worry. It’ll be ready for Friday. I promise.”

It had to be. We were running out of time. Automated Safety features (affectionately called Auto Save) had revolutionized driving for a large part of the population, but there was still plenty of room for improvement. While we were still a few years away from truly driverless cars, the advanced collision avoidance technology of Auto Save had cut traffic accidents in half. DarkWave’s purpose was to fill in the gaps by connecting all the vehicles, traffic lights, and other smart traffic signals into a sort of collective intelligence. DarkWave’s AI functioned as the central brain, coordinating all the moving parts so that traffic ran fluidly, more safely, more coherently.

Testing for the DarkWave product had gone as planned. My job was simple: create a demo to show what the AI could do, something that would wow the investors and excite the dealers. It should have been so easy. But there was a bug in the demo code that kept rearing its head when I least expected it. Every so often, for no apparent reason, the whole thing would crash and reset the system. It made no sense, and it was driving me crazy. But I’d figure it out. I always did.

“You sure it’ll be ready?” Steenrod brushed the cubicle wall fabric. “If we need to postpone again, we can, and I’d rather know it now than at the last possible second.”

I held in a sigh. It was too late to postpone. It was Monday. The launch was this Friday. But Mr. Steenrod had been tiptoeing around the whole thing for months. Besides the fact that DarkWave was a huge, powerful, lifesaving tool, it was also GridLox’s first new product since Steenrod’s wife passed away after a short battle with cancer two years ago. She’d been the publicity manager, and not only had he fallen apart when she died, but GridLox nearly had as well. DarkWave was a crucial step in keeping the company afloat, and we all knew it. My guess was that Steenrod had been dragging his feet because he just didn’t want to move forward without her.

“No, no. It’ll be fine,” I insisted. “Even if I have to scrap the whole demo and start over, I can. We’ll be ready.” There wasn’t time to start over, but it didn’t matter because I was going to figure this out—before lunchtime today, if all went as planned—and then we could go on with our lives.

Steenrod smiled and shook his head doubtfully, then he took me by the shoulder and stared deeply into my eyes. Like he was looking for something. I gulped and tried to maintain eye contact, but the awkwardness made my eyes sting, and I started blinking like he was spitting in my eye, not staring into it. He finally let go and gave my shoulder a pat, then wandered off to pour his insecurities into someone else’s cubicle.

I exhaled and dropped into my chair. Mr. Steenrod was a great boss. Definitely worth the idiosyncrasies. But they were multiplying, and I was getting worse at this new morning eye contact ritual, not better.

The map of the traffic lights downtown hung from my cubicle wall next to an actual traffic light I used for testing. My desk was tidy except for the stack of sticky notes, which Steve had obviously ransacked again. I took a deep breath, content in the predictability of my life, and opened my briefcase.

The SMax envelope lay on top, almost completely eclipsing all of the other essential items I carried with me everywhere I went. I exhaled and grabbed a pen, scribbling “not at this address” across the label.

Guilt poked at me. The contents must be important for someone to Extreme ship, and this was surely going to cause a delay, but I didn’t have time to do more. I wove my way through the cubicles of the GridLox building, then slid the envelope into the SMax dropbox in the receptionist’s office. They’d recently updated all of their dropboxes to the fancy model with the sensor, so that as soon as someone dropped in a package, a notification went out. The nearest rider should be there to pick it up in the next twenty minutes. It would have to do.

Sheila looked up, noticing me.

“Good morning, Cohen.” Her smile flickered on and off, like she couldn’t decide which expression to choose. She tucked her hair behind her ear. “Um . . . how was your weekend?”

“Same old, same old,” I said without stopping. “Lots to do—have a great day.” I buzzed past her desk on my way out, then rushed back to my cubicle. If I was going to find that bug, I had no time for chit chat. It was time for a stakeout.

I grabbed a big bag of pretzels and a large bottle of water from my mini fridge and parked myself in front of my monitor. Then I turned on the demo and just let it run. And I watched it. And waited. And watched some more. I was afraid if I looked away, I would miss it. So far, I hadn’t been able to replicate the set of circumstances that shut everything down. It would run perfectly for hours, or even days, and then crash out of the blue.

But this time I would not miss it. I had diagnostics running in the background and a bag of pretzels in my hand: I was ready for whatever this code could throw at me.

I was still staring at the screen at six o’clock when most of my coworkers had gone home. My eyes burned and my back ached. I would pull an all-nighter if that’s what it took, but first I needed a bathroom break, and there wasn’t anyone left to sit watch in my place.

I pointed at all my monitors in the most commanding way I knew how. “Don’t. Do. Anything.” I tiptoed away, looking back at the screens every millisecond or so, but the demo kept plugging along, running just as it should. I rounded the corner toward Steve’s cubicle and heard the whirring of a computer fan kick on behind me.

“No, no, no, no!” I darted back to my desk to find the demo display window frozen, completely unresponsive, the terminal window reading: LookupError: Vehicle with id XRF000435 does not exist.

“Ah HA! I caught you! You really were waiting until I wasn’t looking, weren’t you?”

I scanned the rest of the diagnostics for anything that stuck out, but nothing did. Still, now I had a lead, which meant I could go home and work from there. I saved everything and then sent it to print so I could review it at home even if the internet went out during the torrent tonight. Steve appeared while I waited for my reports to inch their way out of the printer and rolled his eyes. Everyone always made fun of me, but they simply didn’t understand how helpful reviewing hard copies could be.

Half an hour later my footsteps echoed in the stairwell as I climbed toward my apartment on the fourth floor. I whistled tunelessly, listening to the sound bounce around the concrete and metal enclosure. I’d picked a flower on my way home and now I laid it on Jocelyn’s doormat. As I did so, I noticed my own, and a shipping envelope lying on top of it. I marched over and as I neared, I noticed the pink splotch in the corner and my own scribbled note.

The envelope for Calla Human was back.

 

 

CHAPTER 2

Had SMax even looked at it before they’d sent it back to me? The address was mine, and sure, Cohen Hoard and Calla Human started with the same letters, but that was no excuse for Ms. Human to have her packages delivered to my door. There were no previous tenants in my apartment by that name that I knew of. It made no sense.

The envelope was shipped from Muster Inc., but I’d never heard of it. Too annoyed to even go inside my apartment, I looked the business name up on my phone.

Their slogan flashed across the screen: “Looking for Something? Look No Further!”

What kind of crap slogan was that? It didn’t tell me a single thing. Yes, I was looking for something: their contact number. But there wasn’t one.

I grunted in frustration. Companies that didn’t list their
contact number drove me crazy. What if someone needed to talk to them immediately?

I squeezed the envelope a bit, the thin cardboard giving under my fingers. The envelope was mostly flat, except for a small bulge in the middle, square and hard. Dental floss maybe? Who would Extreme ship a box of dental floss?

I walked over and knocked on Jocelyn’s door. A few loud heartbeats later, it opened, and Jocelyn stood in the door gap wearing tight cutoff shorts and a low-cut tank top with the words “Heart Attack” printed across the chest. My heart thudded painfully inside of me, like it was taking the words as a command. She seemed confused to see me standing there. But she always seemed confused to see me standing at her door, like it was strange for neighbors to stop and check in with each other from time to time.

“Oh, hi. Do you need something?” she asked, pulling on a pair of running shoes, shimmery earrings dangling from each ear. “I’m just heading to work.”

Heart Attack was a sports bar downtown that specialized in beef hearts and hot employees. I’d been there a few times, but it was too loud and the sauce they put on the hearts was way too spicy.

“Sorry, I’m just trying to find the person this envelope is addressed to. They keep sending it to me by mistake.” I held it up as evidence, proof that I wasn’t inventing a reason to knock on her door.

“What’s the address?” she asked, leaning toward me. She smelled amazing, her flowery perfume so overwhelming it made me a little dizzy.

“Well, it’s my address, but the name is wrong. Do you know a Calla?”

“As in calla lily?”

“Yeah, but it’s to Calla Human.”

She took a step toward me to get a closer look at the envelope, then stepped back, the remains of the smunched flower lying on the doormat at her feet. She lowered her eyebrows at me, frowning. “Is that from you?”

“Um, well.” I coughed, trying to dislodge whatever had wedged itself in my throat. “I . . .”

“Listen,” Jocelyn cut me off. “I’ve never heard of that Human person. But I gotta go. If I don’t leave now I’ll be late again, and my boss will kill me. Good luck, okay?”

The door banged shut in front of me, leaving me standing with a ruined flower at my feet and a mystery envelope in my hand. The door on the opposite side of Jocelyn’s opened and Mr. Suggs stuck his head out.

“You say you got a shipment there that ain’t yours? Might belong to me. I been waiting for a delivery all day, but nobody come. I got better things to do, but do you think they
care?”

Mr. Suggs had nothing else going on and he knew I knew it. He was nearly eighty years old, short, and round, with ears like the wings of an airplane. They must’ve given him superhuman hearing, because he always seemed to know what was going on out in the hallway.

“Let me see it, kid. It’s probably mine.” Mr. Suggs beckoned to me like there was a line of people rushing up the stairs to claim the envelope right out of my hands.

I headed toward him with a sigh. “Sorry, Mr. Suggs. Unless your name is Calla Human, this is definitely not for you.”

He snatched it out of my hands and held it out, stretching his arms to get the small print far enough away from his face so he could read it. His outfit was surprisingly similar to Jocelyn’s, though his tank top and shorts were grubby and faded, and he had a large amount of white hair poking jauntily out of his enormous ears. The cardboard envelope flapped against my chest when he shoved it back at me and I grabbed it to keep it from falling to the floor.

“That ain’t no name,” he said, like me and my shenanigans had seriously inconvenienced him. “You tell me if you see my shipment. I need those catheters tonight!”

I opened my mouth to respond, but the door banged shut before I had the chance.

It was possible that Calla Human was in this building, and the shipper had simply gotten the apartment number wrong. But if I knocked on every door, it would take forever, and I’d had my fill of doors in my face for one day. I spun and headed down the stairs to the building manager’s apartment on the first floor and pounded on the door a few times.

Esteban answered with a grin when he saw me. His short hair was gelled and spiky, sitting like a black crown above his pencil thin eyebrows and his deep dimples. His standard black button-up shirt and khaki slacks were well pressed. I’d always thought it was a uniform until he’d told me he dressed that way so that people would take him seriously.

“Hey, Cohen. How’s it going, man?”

He pulled the door open, so I followed him inside. “Hi, yeah, this envelope was delivered to me by mistake. I’m thinking maybe they got the apartment number wrong? Is there a Calla Human in the building? Or is that the name of a former resident?”

Esteban snorted. “A who?” He took the envelope when I handed it to him, looked it over, then sat down at his desk.

“I would think I’d remember if I ever heard that name before, but I’ll double check for you.” He clickety-clacked on his keyboard for a few seconds. “So,” he said, glancing at me over his shoulder as he waited for the software to load. “You ask out that girl from work yet? Sheila, I think?”

“Oh yeah, uh, I decided we probably didn’t have much of a future anyway, so . . .” I ran my hands through my hair, leaving it standing on end now that I’d loosened the gel.

“What do you mean? I thought she was super into you?”

I shrugged. “What’s the point if it’s not going to last?”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “There’s a lotta point, and if you need me to explain it to you, you’re more hopeless than I thought.” He chuckled when I leveled a look at him. “Cohen, you gotta stop playing it safe all the time, man. She might’ve been good for you. How will you ever know if you never take a chance?”

I shook my head. “Ah, it’s okay. I’m saving myself for Jocelyn.” I said it with a grin, though I was only half joking.

Esteban laughed. “So, you asked her out yet?”

“I know this is something you won’t understand, but I actually like to be friends with a woman before I date them.”

“Aren’t you two friends yet?”

“Well, yeah, I mean . . . we’re neighbors, so . . .”

He snickered and typed some more.

I cleared my throat. “It’s . . . It’s a work in progress.”

“Whatever you say, man.” Esteban shook his head and spun to face me in his wheeled office chair. “There is not, nor has there ever been, a Calla Human on our list of residents. Now, if they’re staying with someone else, I wouldn’t know. I’m supposed to get notice of every person occupying the premises for more than two weeks, but you know nobody ever follows that rule. Pretty sure the Whitehursts on the second floor have at least eighteen people in their little two bedroom, but as long as they pay their rent and pass their cleaning checks, I’m not really going to worry about it. Sorry, man.”

I tapped my thigh. “Eh, it’s okay. It was kind of a long shot. I think everything about this is one big typo, but I had to try. They sent it SwiftMax Extreme, so I figure it’s important. Just wanted to do my due diligence.”

Esteban nodded, a crooked smile on his face as he handed the envelope back to me. “I know. That’s your thing, and I respect it.”

“Say, I’ve got some of my grandmother’s lasagna upstairs. You wanna come up for dinner?”

“Can’t. I’ve got a job with Ranji. You should join us sometime. You need to get out. You could come tonight; I know Ranji wouldn’t mind.”

“No thanks. I’ve got a lot of work to do. You go ahead.” I carried my mystery envelope toward the door. Even if I hadn’t been too busy, I would have said no. Ranji was . . . a lot to handle. “But be careful out there, Esteban,” I said on my way out. “Make sure you get home before the rain starts.”

He laughed his easy, infectious laugh. “Always, man. Always.”

I went upstairs and called SwiftMax, explaining the whole situation. Fifteen minutes later, a rider picked up the envelope, and it was officially no longer my responsibility. Whoever was waiting around for this mystery envelope wouldn’t receive it anytime soon, but SwiftMax Extreme or not, I’d done all I could. Time to let SMax correct their own mistakes. Hopefully, they’d get it right this time.

I heated up Gran’s lasagna and sat up in bed with my laptop and my printed sheets, searching through all the diagnostics, hoping to find an explanation for the crash, a clue that would tell me where to look next. The only problem was that I wasn’t seeing anything. The “LookupError” had shown up out of nowhere, and the system had just shut down. I huffed in frustration, then logged in to the GridLox server and set up a diagnostics test to run twenty-four seven and the demo to automatically restart whenever it crashed. If I got lucky, it might crash a few more times tonight, and I’d have enough information to actually figure out what was going on.

Since I had run into another wall on the world’s most infuriating bug, I forced myself to work on my latest mini diorama for a while to help myself unwind. I was almost ready to slip the minuscule building I’d constructed into the test tube. All it needed was some plants to finish it off. More tiny test tube dioramas that I’d painstakingly created over the last several years lined the shelf in the corner, but this was one of my favorites.

I’d been hoping that working with my hands would let my subconscious relax and magically figure out the bug on its own, but instead of finding answers, I found myself nodding off. Even so, I was still awake when the lightning started, and before long the rain ran down the windowpane of my bedroom like I’d driven my apartment through a car wash.

I woke up to a pounding at my door again, the last of the rain dripping down the window, the sun up and burning away the last of the heavy clouds. I pulled on a robe while I jogged toward the door.

No one was there.

But on my doormat, lying there like it couldn’t bear to be apart from me, was my old friend, the SwiftMax Extreme envelope, white sticker slapped over my “not at this address” note. Even from my height I could see the addressee name:

Calla Human.

Growling, I stooped and picked it up, then slammed the door behind me.

I poured myself a giant bowl of cereal, glaring at the address on the shipping label. It seemed like the universe, or at least SwiftMax Delivery, really wanted me to have this envelope. Maybe it was meant for me. And only the name was wrong. The first initials of the name were right, so perhaps someone had had a small seizure after starting Cohen and Hoard and no
one had ever caught the error.

Plus, hadn’t I done all I could? Curiosity got the better of me. The only way I would know if it was for me or not was to see what was inside.

I pushed my bowl out of the way and held the envelope in front of me, pulling gently at the tear-open tab, trying to keep the cardboard intact as much as possible. I lifted the flap and peeked inside.

The envelope held only a small plastic case, white and smooth and hinged in the back. There was a sticker across the opening at the front that read “Medical Specimen.” My curiosity shot through the roof. I peeled back the sticker with a fingernail and lifted the top.

Inside the plastic case was a human tongue.

 

 

CHAPTER 3

 

“Aaaagghh!”

The little box clattered softly to the table as I shoved my chair back and jumped up, breathing deeply through my nose a few times. A tongue? Why would someone send me a tongue? Why would someone send anyone a tongue? I stepped to the sink, downing a large glass of water before I turned back to the table again. The pale pink appendage lay in its open case, mocking me, like it was blowing a long, soundless raspberry.

I blinked, not sure whether I felt more confused or unnerved. Was this how medical specimens were always transported? Body parts just biked around the city?

So what now? Should I take it to the police? This Calla person was probably sitting somewhere, waiting for their tongue transplant, but while the police could probably find out exactly where this tongue needed to go, it would likely be tied up in bureaucracy until it was far too late. The image of Grandpa popped into my mind, hooked up to a machine, waiting for a kidney that never came.

I paced the length of my tiny kitchen, banging my knee on the chair I’d left in the middle of the floor, and cursing as pain shot up my leg. I wasn’t sure why this specimen came to be in my possession, but it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that I had it. And since SMax was unable or unwilling to deliver it to the right location, the responsibility fell to me.

I closed the lid on the white plastic box, looking at the contents as little as possible, and pressed the Medical Specimen sticker back in place as smoothly as I could. Then I slipped it back into the envelope and carefully taped it shut. It was time to take matters into my own hands.

 

I hated to pay for a cab, but I didn’t have time for the bus. The car picked me up outside my apartment building, tires sloshing through the puddles from last night’s rain like a boat through a river. I was expecting it though, standing as far back from the road as I could to keep my shoes dry, an umbrella over my head to protect me from the rain runoff of the buildings and trees.

The cab driver looked like she had just survived an explosion. Her clothes were tattered and frayed, and her hair stood on end. Grunge had come back with a vengeance the last few years, and apparently, she was a huge fan.

“Good morning,” I said, sliding into the backseat. “You got the address?”

She nodded. “Yeah, we’re good. S’all good. Don’t forget to buckle up.”

I sent a quick text to Mr. Steenrod.

Dealing with a minor emergency. Will be a bit late. I’ll tell you the crazy story as soon as I get there.

The driver peeled out into the street and we were off, water from the puddles we splashed through cascading over us like waves in the ocean. I secured my seat belt and held on, peering around her head to try to see the road in front of us through the water and wipers.

My phone dinged. A response from Mr. Steenrod.

Not a day for emergencies. Can you take care of it after work? I need you here!

Great. Sounded like Mr. Steenrod was in full stress mode. If I didn’t get to work soon, he would erupt like a geyser. I typed in a reply, promising to get there as quickly as I could. I’d have a lot of apologizing to do, if I survived this car trip.

“My name’s Cohen,” I shouted. I didn’t need to shout. But the speed and the splashing of the water against the windows made everything feel louder than it was. “What’s yours?”

“Uh . . . Ruby, I guess.” She swerved around a car in front of us and I closed my eyes to avoid seeing my death bearing down on me.

“Pleased to meet you,” I shouted back. I knew some people preferred not to talk to their drivers, but how was I supposed to ride around in a car with someone if I didn’t even know their name? It was just basic human courtesy. And we were still alive, so I kept talking. “How long have you been a cab driver?”

She scratched her matted hair and swerved needlessly back and forth across the street. “Um, a while. Listen, do you mind if I turn on the radio? I gotta focus on the road, you know?” She turned on the radio, which screamed at the both of us.

I texted my grandmother, to give myself something else to focus on besides my impending doom.

Morning, Gran! Is your car still leaking oil? Do you need me to come check it out?

Thanks, sweetie, but Lenore’s nephew is a mechanic. He took care of it for me.

Oh. Okay. Great. I didn’t have time to go over there anyway. But, I mean, her neighbor’s nephew? Was she fine with just anyone working on her car these days?

Sounds good! Let me know if it gives you any more problems.

I will. Gotta go. Tae Kwon Do class is starting. Love you!

I pulled out a copy of my diagnostic report, but trying to read it during Ruby’s driving nauseated me. I gave up and shoved it into my pocket, then pressed my face against the window, watching the trees as they flew past, their branches heavy with the water from the rain.

We pulled over on a quiet side street in the industrial side of town, an area I’d never been in before. The car stopped so suddenly, only the seatbelt saved me from ejecting straight through the windshield and gliding through the puddles like a speedboat. I wanted to thank her but worried that if I opened my mouth to speak, what little breakfast I’d eaten would end up all over the upholstery. Almost before I’d shut the door, she was gone.

The Muster Inc. building was small and gray and indistinguishable from any number of similar small, gray buildings scattered across Portland. There were no signs posted out front, but the street number stamped on the door matched the one on the envelope, so the tongue must have been sent from here. Everything on this side of town was concrete and gravel, with barely enough soil to support the ever-determined plant life. Compared to the rest of the foliage in the city, this area seemed almost dead. A few buildings over, a woman in coveralls wacked down the vines, weeds, and tropical flowers that had the audacity to grow.

From Muster Inc.’s website it was impossible to tell what the company actually did. I didn’t know if they provided a service or a product. The website looked like somebody’s brother-in-law had designed it twenty years ago as a favor. Maybe while I was here I could convince them to hire me for a website redesign. I hadn’t done a website in a while, but a little side income never hurt, and these poor people needed it badly.

I pulled open the glass door and walked into the reception area. There was no one at the reception desk, just a yellow note in the middle reading “Be Right Back” with a smiley face on one side. I dinged the bell on the counter, then sat in one of the green plastic chairs. An idea struck me, and I pulled a black marker out of my briefcase and scribbled out my address on the envelope. I went over and over it with the pen so that nothing but black remained, and no oversight or laziness on the part of the delivery rider could cause this envelope to come back into my life.

And then I waited.

And waited.

I considered leaving the envelope on the desk and being done with it, but if whatever error that had sent it to me in the first place was in their system somewhere, and they just turned around and sent it to me again, I’d be right back where I started.

My phone dinged.

How’s it going, Mr. Hoard? Everything all right? How soon can we expect you in the office?

Steenrod was getting antsy. So was I, come to think of it. How could you run a business like this? With no receptionist on duty at all? I silenced my phone, walked back up to the receptionist’s desk, and rang the bell again.

“Hello? Is anybody there? You’ve got a potential customer out here!” I could be a customer, if I had any idea what they did here. The only clue I had so far implied that they either cut out people’s tongues or collected tongues that had been cut out by other people. I wrinkled my nose. It didn’t seem like the tongue belonged here any more than it belonged to me. This was just a boring office.

A guy with a black afro, possibly just out of high school, peeked around the wall behind the receptionist’s desk. He must have heard me yelling, but he still seemed shocked to actually find someone standing there. He stepped hesitantly around the wall, checking once behind him, and then came around to the receptionist’s desk.

“Can I help you?” His voice was unexpectedly deep for someone wearing pants that tight.

“Yes, this was sent to me by mistake.” I set the envelope down on the counter between us, spinning it so the address label faced him, trying not to think about the thing that lay inside. “It shipped from this company, I believe.”

The boy looked at the envelope and up at me. He looked back over his shoulder, at me, down at the envelope and up at me again, his afro bouncing back and forth. “Where did you get this?”

“It was delivered to my apartment. It was my address on the label, but that’s not my name.”

He looked at me as though to say “duh” then looked back over his shoulder again.

“So, can you take care of it for me? I want to make sure it isn’t sent to my address again. Maybe you can pull up the shipping label in your system?” I gestured toward the computer on the desk, and he glanced at it like someone might look at a porcupine they’d just found in their bed.

“You say this came to your apartment?”

He seemed so confused I started to feel bad. Perhaps I needed to handle this differently.

“Yes. It came to my apartment.” It was the tone I used when I talked to Mr. Suggs’s dog. “My name’s Cohen. What’s yours?”

“Jimmy Lewis Jr.” He said it all in one breath, like he was glad I finally asked him something easy.

“Nice to meet you, Jimmy Lewis Jr. Listen, I really need to make sure that this shipment is handled correctly. Can I talk to someone who can help me?”

He shuffled on the spot, like the question was way above his pay grade, then spun and walked back around the wall behind the desk. I drummed my fingers on the desk a few times and checked my watch. It was nearly 9:00. If I didn’t make it to GridLox soon, Mr. Steenrod’s head might literally explode.

Jimmy Lewis Jr. poked his head back around the wall and beckoned me to follow him. I groaned. They weren’t going to make this easy on me, were they? Couldn’t the shipping manager just pop out and take this problem off my hands?

I followed Jimmy down a hall as sparsely decorated as the front office, passing a few closed doors on the way. We stopped beside one, no different from the rest. Cheap wood slab set into dingy white walls. He knocked, then walked away, disappearing behind another door identical to this one.

“Come in.”

I opened the door, envelope in hand, and stepped inside. A woman sitting behind a gray metal desk smiled at me. She must have been close to my age, probably early twenties, but the way she sat, even the way she smiled, somehow conveyed confidence and authority in a way that was undeniable. She wore a navy-blue blazer and her shiny black hair just brushed across her shoulders. She was pretty in a subtle way that somehow made it clear that she couldn’t care less whether I thought so
or not.

“How can I help you?” She motioned toward one of the chairs, and I tried not to sigh visibly. This was a simple problem, one that we could manage without anyone having to sit down at all.

I sat and passed the envelope across the desk to her, wondering if she knew what it contained, and if the thought of it made her as queasy as it made me. “This envelope was shipped to my address by mistake. That’s my address under the black marks.” I pointed at the black scribbles beneath the name Calla Human, suddenly embarrassed, like I’d scribbled all over the couch. “I’ve tried returning it through the shipping company, but they keep sending it back. So, I figured, being SwiftMax Extreme, it was urgent that it get where it needs to go as soon as possible.”

She smiled, her eyes softening. “That’s very thoughtful. Someone else in your shoes might have just thrown it away.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, unnecessarily shy at her compliment. “Most people try to do the right thing, most of the time.”

She raised her eyebrows.

I cleared my throat. “I guess maybe I shouldn’t have crossed out my address now that I think about it. Now you don’t know where not to send it next time.” I scratched my neck. I was supremely curious as to why this little, out of the way, nothing company was sending a tongue to anyone, but that was beside the point right now. “Should I give you my address, or, uh, do you happen to know where it needs to go? Is Calla Human a person? Do you know?”

She pulled the envelope toward herself, reading the label as she did so and looked up with that same smile.

“You’re in luck. The envelope is addressed to me.”

“You’re Calla Human?” I asked, confused and derailed. She clearly had a tongue of her own. And she didn’t seem like the kind of person I pictured dealing in black market tongues. Nothing about this made a lick of sense. I smiled at my unspoken pun.

She held out a hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“Cohen Hoard. Nice to meet you too.” Her hand was soft, her handshake strong, and I wondered suddenly what it would be like to arm wrestle her. “No offense, but your name sounds like something a robot or alien would use to try to fit in.”

She lifted her shoulder. “One does what one can.”

I grinned and she grinned, and time stood still for one long heartbeat.

I cleared my throat. “Why did you send it to yourself?” I knew it wasn’t any of my business, but this envelope begged so many questions, and I felt like I deserved at least an answer or two.

“I didn’t,” she said with a small shake of her head, tapping the envelope against the desk. “It came from our corporate office. They must have somehow entered your address into the shipping label by mistake. I’m sorry you had to come all the way down here, but I really appreciate you taking the time.”
Her smile was so genuine it almost made me forget what a huge hurry I was in. If I’d had the time, I would’ve liked to stay and find out more. But not today.

“Happy I could help,” I said. “But if you’ll excuse me, I really must be going.”

“Of course,” she said, standing and walking around the desk toward the door. “We don’t want to keep you.” She held the door open for me. “Thanks again.”

I stopped in front of her, not quite ready to walk away. “Just out of curiosity, why is your corporate office sending you . . . that?”

Calla’s face fell, and she pushed the door closed, leaning against it. “You opened it?” Her voice was small and tight.

Oh cripes. Why was I such a buffoon? It may not have been technically illegal for me to look inside the envelope since it was sent to me, but it was definitely idiotic for me to tell her I had. “Uh, no.” I was a horrific liar.

“You did.” Her composure shattered, and she clung to the doorknob like it was the only thing keeping her upright. “Why? Why would you do that? What in the world were you thinking?”

“I was thinking it was for me! They sent it to me three times!” I shouldn’t be yelling at her, but she was making me extremely nervous.

She ran her free hand over her face, then her gaze flicked around the room like the empty paneled walls could fix whatever conundrum I’d caused.

I held up my hands in supplication. “Listen. I’m sorry. I really am. I know I screwed up. But if I don’t get to work in the next thirty minutes I’m going to lose my job. So, I gotta go.”

I pointed at the door, the one she was blocking with her body, to remind her that she was the only thing standing in my way.

Her lips turned up, but her eyes were sad, and she suddenly looked like a little girl.

“I’m sorry, Cohen. I can’t let you do that.”

 

 

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