Morsel

Chapter 1

Year of the cicada they’re calling it.

Millions of them in the trees, littering the ground, boiling black spots on the hood of my car.

The number you can see is most definitely outweighed by those you can’t—the bodies that, after crawling up from their holes deep in the earth, have been trapped underneath by sidewalks, newly laid asphalt, sparkling development killing insects like a sheet of ice kills a drowning man.

It’s a good image. I’d illustrate the first few panels in soft pastel with colors as bright and warm as the world they’re working to reenter.

The last frame—their bodies piling up below concrete—would be grayscale.

Some of the digital ink smeared to give the impression of charcoal, but not the texture.

They’re everywhere, and now there’s one in the café thumping against the big bay window in a desperate bid to escape.

“Dude, get it,” Emma says. “Squash it or something before a customer walks in.”

Emma and I are the only two in Roasted!, which is her current place of employment and my lunchtime respite from my coworkers. The café is situated in Downtown Columbus. That means a bro with a two-hundred-dollar haircut or a WASPy product manager could pop in at any moment to make her life hell.

They’re such slow, clunky things when they’re not flying.

The cicada’s wings are translucent lattice bound by thin lines of orange-brown.

In the right light the sheerness flashes cool-toned colors like hunter green, wet-earth brown.

It’s easy to cup it in my hands and hold it safe in the dome of my fingers.

A shiver licks at my neck when its wings tickle my palms. I feel the crack of its exoskeleton against my skin like a premonition.

Wouldn’t take much. Just a little pressure—the pressing of skin on skin.

“Lou.”

“Right, sorry,” I say. “One sec.”

Outside, Downtown Columbus is hot and humid. I hold my cupped hands out in front of me. Schrodinger’s cicada. Will it be insectoid mush when I open my hands?

I open my hands to find it hale and whole. It lingers on the meaty rise where thumb meets palm, fluttering. A beat. Another. And then with a crinkle of lattice wings moving, it becomes nothing but a black dot speeding through the air.

“Thank you,” Emma says when I get back inside. “I don’t know what it is about Thursdays. One guy had me remake his frappe, like, three times.”

“You want me to fight him?”

Emma grins and I feel like latte foam inside. This is exactly what I needed before my meeting with Ellis. It looms over me—inescapable and catastrophic—but at least now there’s some sunshine in the mix.

“I don’t know. He was pretty big.”

“I got muscles. Look.” I flex my biceps for her, and she rolls her eyes.

“Let’s go over it again, okay?”

Roasted! smells like warm yeast and freshly ground coffee.

Just walking in causes my chest to unwind and my shoulders to lower.

At the mention of the probably-getting-fired script we’ve been workshopping, my insides wind back up and compress themselves into a hard little ball that sits leaden in my gut.

“‘This job means the world to me.’” I put on a normal, not-forced-at-all smile on my face. “‘You took a chance on me when no one else would. I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate that.’”

The smile is not coming across as I intended based on the look Emma is giving me over the steamer. Possibly it is not coming across as human, at all. I put a little more force behind it and continue.

“‘My performance has not been up to my standards. I want to change that. I am committed to changing that. When my mom got sick, you were all so understanding—’”

“Don’t mention that,” she says quickly. Her face is pained like the mention of my mom at all is enough to hurt.

It’s enough to hurt me, that’s for sure.

“He might act like he cares about that, he might even feel like he does care, but at the end of the day you doing bad work fucks with his money. That’s what matters. Focus on that.”

I unclench the bear trap of my jaw and try again. “‘I know everyone’s personal life impacts their work sometimes, but that’s not an excuse. I’m ready to be the employee you deserve. I’m ready to do whatever it takes to be better.’”

“That’s good! That’s great!” She puts my extra-dirty iced chai at the end of the counter. “If he lets you stay you can unionize your coworkers.”

I laugh. Emma is doing her master’s in labor studies, which means she’s deeply enthusiastic about radicalizing working people into collective action. As much as I agree, I’m too tired to even think about trying.

Emma giving her union-or-bust elevator pitch to Arden and Jena would be fun to watch, though.

Both are multi-level marketing girlboss girlies till the day they die.

Just as Emma pitched solidarity, Arden would launch into her speech on effective altruism as the only solution to saving the world.

A weird ouroboros eating its own tail is born.

I stare into the cinnamon Emma sprinkled on my drink. I’ve never been into astrology or tarot or whatever, but maybe if I look at the speckles for long enough, I’ll be able to foretell the perfect combination of words that glazes over every fuckup I’ve ever made at this job.

The line in my script about Ellis being understanding isn’t a lie. He told me to take an additional week off when my mom first got sick. His mantra from the last two months has been, “Perfectly understandable. Do what you need to do.”

And yeah, sure, those are the words that come out of his mouth, but that’s not what his face says. That’s not what the tense silences when I walk into a room where I was clearly the subject of conversation mean.

“Okay. Time to get fired by the hottest man I currently know.”

Emma snorts. “First, he is not that hot. Second, you’ve got this. Confidence of a mediocre white man, Lou!”

Arden and Jena are sitting at the lunch table when I walk in to deposit my drink in the fridge. I do my best to smile at them with both my mouth and my eyes. Emma said I’m getting better. I do not believe her, though I appreciate the support.

“Hey!” Arden says. Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes either, but her teeth are so white it’s easy not to notice.

She’s only ever at the office one or two days a week.

Both commission and working from home are privileges of seniority.

And it only took fifteen years of being the biggest suck-up known to humankind.

“Come sit with us. We can chitchat.”

“Oh, thank you, but I have a meeting with Ellis.”

She pauses. Her smile takes on the quality of a no-loitering sign—all confidence and no reason. That’s not very charitable, I know. In my defense, the last time I tried to be charitable they conned me into a weekend MLM seminar that cost almost an entire paycheck.

The two main tenets of Ascent—the personal-development and self-help multi-level marketing scheme both Arden and Jena are constantly hustling—are that (1) only you can control your own life, and (2) only through a mindset shift toward abundance will you be able to save yourself and in turn save the world.

The secret third tenet is that, of course, Ascent alone can teach you to unlock that super-duper special mindset that’ll propel you to success and happiness.

I didn’t know this before I registered for the Ascent Discovery Weekend. Arden and Jena pitched it as taking control, making a difference, being the master of your universe, cracking that defensive outer shell to reveal the authentic you inside, etc.

Arden herself was one of the opening speeches on the first day. She has seniority there too, apparently.

“Victimhood is your shelter,” she’d said, a giant live projection of her face on the screen behind her.

“It’s a second skin formed to protect against being accountable for your life.

Shedding that skin will open you up to abundance.

It’s only through this abundance that we’ll be able to change ourselves and through that, change the world. ”

I did not feel empowered after. All it did was make me feel poor.

“That’s okay,” Arden says. “How about after? Frank talk: You never hang with us anymore. You can talk about your dog. We love your Riley stories.”

“Ripley,” I correct her. They don’t. To them, the only dog worth having is a goldendoodle with a two thousand dollar price tag. Definitely not a pit bull from a county shelter like Ripley.

The words “no thank you” are again on the tip of my tongue when I remember Emma’s advice. “Be nice. Socialize. Make sure they see you being a team player. Bosses love that shit.”

“Sure. If you’re still here when we’re done, I’ll join.”

“No backsies,” Jena says.

She’s the Theater Star Beta to Arden’s Girlboss Alpha and consequently gets a side glare from Arden for her sheer audacity to … speak? Exist? I flee the break room before I can witness whatever passive-aggressive dressing down Arden’s about to unleash.

I’m looking at my phone and not watching where I’m going when I run smack into a broad, immovable object. Large hands cup my elbows. For a brief, ecstatic moment I’m flush against a chest that smells like pine and campfire smoke.

“Whoa there.”

The immovable object is a man—Ellis Katsaros. Partner at the Katsaros and Curie Company.

Need an abandoned mall appraised for an impending demolishment or a tract of land in the middle of absolute nowhere assessed for auction? Want a real estate agent for your multi-multi-million-dollar mansion? Katsaros and Curie have got you covered.

His smile is sly. There are crinkles around his eyes. His hair and beard are black, with faint impressions of silver. His skin is olive-dark. A nose that could have been chiseled from a Greek bust sits in the middle of his face.