Day 5 Winner of Quarto’s 2023 Thunderdome Flash Fiction Contest. View the prompt here
Illustration by Kaavya Gnanam
At our sector we don’t get many reports. Long weeks can pass where the worst jobs we get are calls about sentences on the run or other small stuff—never any occurrences as bad as that, you understand. But we’re ahead of ourselves; just know that’s why we were unaware of the absence for so long. Not an uncommon event. Many could fall through the cracks and one can hardly put the whole of the fault of the matter on our heads.
We began to suspect what’d happened when our rat at the newspapers let us know about the sudden breakdown of a staff member. Apparently they’d had to sack the food-column woman for her latest work—lacked the usual personal touch, or so they told us—and she took that poorly. We called her down for a talk and began to understand the problem.
“Are you sure you can’t locate them?” we asked.
“They’re not where they usually are” she responded. “Please, help me. One hardly knows who one’s anymore.”
“Clever” we remarked.
We announced them as lost later that day. Put up posters, TV ads, that sort of stuff. After a few days we got a break. A poet had made plans to move to a more prose-centered style. He told us he couldn’t sleep due to what he’d done and that he wanted a plea-deal. After what he confessed, we assembled a team and moved out.
They were found roped up out the back of the program’s compound—worked to death, an autopsy showed. Apparently students had jammed them repeatedly through unsafe structures full of waste; too much for them to handle. We let the people know through a conference.
“What do we do?” they asked.
“You could always use ‘Y’” Y proposed. Yt dydn’t go over very well.