Welcome to Helens, where books (looking an awful lot like people) show up to have their genres assigned by the publishing courthouse.  The gorgeous and vivacious Valentine Lots appears, claiming to be a contemporary romance, but the sour soggy publishers say she has to be labeled as erotica.

Enter her representative Austentatious Punk: passionate, funky, and wearing as thin as her home.  Valentine’s public defender will stop at nothing to see her get the genre label she deserves, but there might be time for a few breaks to get to know each other, bake a decent dessert, and talk love lives in this metafictional courtroom procedural slice-of-life novelette!

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 37 minutes)

Austentatious Punk

Attorney-at-Genre

by

Blaine Arcade

The Valentine Case: Public Reading 1

Double doors burst and the works flooded in. None of them had any idea where they were going, hence the guides with their red sashes and gold calligraphy titles. ‘Right this way please’ they say, polite as a first time flight attendant, white gloves beckoning in slow motion: the flight of serene and knowing doves.

Using cues only they have memorized, the guides split the new works based on one glance, into different tributaries of shuffling feet headed for their very own doors. The space was tall but tight; you had room to breath but not to run. Wooden doors were stapled into buzz cut carpets. New works never brought any odors along from the imaginary places that spawned them, so despite the crowds the publishing courthouse always smelled like office printers breathing their last and spine glue.

A pair of dovely gloves fluttered in her face, momentarily nonplussed, then grabbed her and pulled her into another line. Nobody else was so much as touched. She couldn’t catch the plaque on the door before she was pushed through into a dimmer room, quieter too, so much quieter that it left her stunned.

Three men behind tall desks opposite her glanced up from their many stacks of paper, some bone white and others aged yellow, covered in the wrinkle-ripples of pages that had suffered the moist bated breath of a slow and excitable reader. Their plaques she caught, now that the rush was over: Publisher Tay, Publisher Bridge, and Publisher Desister.

All three looked at her in a way she didn’t like, as if she was a turtle struggling on its back, having revealed obscene graffiti on its underbelly. One of them, Tay with the comb-over, pointed to a podium she was apparently supposed to stand behind before anything else could happen. Only now getting her bearings, having just passed the revelation of being attached to both feet, she figured out she was in high heels and managed to stalk her way to her place without toppling. The podium seemed the kindest entity in the room, allowing her to lean on it.

“Please state your title for the record,” said the one with the square glasses that almost looked like railroad tracks: Publisher Bridge.

“Poke the Bare,” she said, startled she had any words to give them. Books weren’t supposed to talk, were they? The publishing men gave her a second sterner look, despite not being quite done with their first one yet.

“Could you… spell that please?” the last one, Desister, said, droopy eyes and sagging posture making it clear he would be stopping to catch his breath in the middle of every sentence.

“P-O-K-“

“Just the last word.”

“B-A-R-E.” They looked at each other, silently comparing their notes from their improperly segmented looks at her. She took the opportunity to examine herself and see what the big deal was. Her face remained a mystery, but there were two big deals just below it, in her opinion tastefully covered without disguising anything. Previously that was where her blurb had been, and it had protruded as well. What good was it if it wasn’t attention-grabbing?

“Please state your genre,” Publisher Bridge requested brusquely. He was already writing something down; there wasn’t a pencil or eraser in sight.

“Contemporary romance,” she said with the same certainty as her title. It felt good to say. Now if only someone would read it; that would really screw a couple heads on straight. The publishers didn’t seem to get it though, taking another up and down look, staring straight through the podium. How many did they need?

“Your ultimate genre designation… is up to the courthouse.”

“Having taken your claim under consideration,” Bridge said, still writing, perhaps just underlining now, “we’ve decided to categorize you as eroti-“

BAM!

A door she hadn’t noticed was thrown open. In strode a determined woman with an olive satchel over one shoulder, which she promptly whipped around and slapped onto one of the two podiums flanking the unpublished work’s. The couch cushion corners of her tan blazer’s shoulders filled up the space, quelled the gloomy fog of the three men. Her neon pink fauxhawk clashed with all of it, but her face made clear she wasn’t capable of caring.

“You gentlemen wouldn’t be assigning this work her genre before she’s consulted with her attorney, would you?”

“Hello Miss Punk,” Publisher Tay sighed. “You’d think someone with that name would be more punc-tual.”

“I can hardly be late if it was one of your fellow publishers who held up another hearing, now can I? Should I have Publisher Prosettia come and apologize to you?” The unpublished work, who was apparently also Punk’s client, couldn’t help but stare in awe. Her attorney’s dark green lipstick hid a tenacious pursing of her mouth. Her eyes were rested, as focused and clear as silk-rubbed telescope lenses, while her glowing skin looked like its day shift never ended. She glanced at her client and winked.

“Hardly necessary,” Bridge grumbled, staring at the mess he’d written, dreading the now-inevitable crumple and toss. There was a wastebasket behind him, its perimeter strewn with shots taken and missed.

“We were just… finishing up,” Desister antedesisted.

“And the house’s label?” Punk asked, pulling out stacks of clipped papers like throwing daggers.

“Earotica,” Bridge said, hoping to fool her with a slightly incorrect pronunciation, but you had to get up before six in the morning, and already be fully caffeinated, to slip a bad label under the nose of this attorney.

“Is that what you told them?” Punk asked her client.

“No, I said I was contemporary romance!”

“Darling… look at yourself,” Desister said. Despite the specificity of his instruction everyone followed it.

“It wouldn’t be the first time this house has made a snap genre decision,” Punk claimed, “as if fully ignorant of their own procedures. On behalf of my client, I’m opening a genre critique!” The tribunal’s chairs creaked as their heads rolled. The crumple, the shot… no good.

“Very well,” Tay said. “We’ll schedule public reading two of Poke the Bare for tomorrow at two o’clock. That should be easy enough for Miss Punk to remember.” His jab drew no response. “In the interim the publishing house will assign a representative critic to argue our position of erotica. Does Miss Punk accept her new designation of enthusiast?”

“She does,” Punk said without looking at him, already shoveling her daggers back into her satchel.

“Then we are adjourned,” Bridge declared, loudly tapping the slate nub of his fountain pen against a ceremonial ink stone. The three men in business robes shuffled out of their desks and toward the same door. Everyone was so active, the unpublished work felt paralyzed by comparison. Turning to her attorney for advice, she saw Punk was already gone, the door easing closed on its own.

“Wait!” she pleaded, dismounting from her high heels, snatching them up, and running after the woman across a carpet unfriendly with bent paperclips and stress-popped staples. She didn’t make it very far before one of the red-sash guides with her dove gloves appeared again, hypnotizing her with hand waves. Those hands seemed to know where she needed to go.

One hallway, then another, then down some steps, with plenty of friends alongside, and just like that she was out of the publishing courthouse and on a public street. The guide circled around them like a sheepdog and started driving them to the left, toward a much drabber building that didn’t identify itself.

Suddenly the work had a bad feeling. Her fellows were strange: gray clothes wrinkled like jammed copier paper, black vacant eyes, hollow toothless smiles, taking tiny steps as if there was a set of pedals connecting their feet and driving them. Every face and body on all sides was such a copy; they shoved her forward, no response to her pleas for space. So she hopped. Spotted hope.

“Oh! Miss Punk! Miss Punk! Is this right!?” Her attorney had stopped at a food cart, was about to take her first bite of a vegan sausage so loaded with relish it looked like someone had pulped a spice garden, when the timid shouting drew one corner of one eye. Unfortunately for her lunch, that was more than enough.

Springing into action, simultaneously thanking the vendor for catching her fumbled purchase, Punk rushed over, muscled her way into the monoculture of bland men and women, and pulled her client free. The guide appeared beside them, almost as quick, putting her doves sternly on her hips and making her chin disappear in a judgmental scowl.

“Does she look like one of them?” Punk asked, matching the aggressive posture. The guide had nothing to say, so she answered for her. “No, she looks-” Her attorney finally saw her lower half, sans podium, and couldn’t hide her reaction. “-w-way better! I’ll take care of her from here. Get going.” She turned and smacked one of the dull people on the back of the head, setting them all going toward the equally dull building a few addresses down.

“Don’t they have attorneys?” her client asked, concerned despite having just escaped them.

“Hmm? Oh no. Those are AI-generated blog posts. They don’t fall into any genre; they’re nothing. There’s nowhere else to put them though, so they get funneled through here and gum up our entire system, as if it isn’t sticky enough.” Punk dragged her to the food cart, took the sausage back, but had to hand it off to her client before she could get back to the bite so she could check her watch.

“Crud,” she said, lipstick hiding her pout. She looked at her client, realizing too late she was already doing it to improve her mood. Poke the Bare was a lot taller than her, with midnight hair, and a voluptuous figure that could’ve been used to mold a case for a double bass. The only contradiction was her big soft doe eyes, a little scared, a lot bewildered. “You should call your local body of work. They can put you up until the critique is finished.”

“My what?”

“Your body of work… as in the establishment your author has built up here over the course of their career. You’re supposed to go to them in case of arbitration, which we just got going in there.” She went to take a bite, stalled out again. At this point it was getting colder faster out of pure frustration. “Do you have a name? We don’t use our titles here in Helens.”

The work realized that if she had a body, which she must have since everyone was so obsessed with it, it likely occupied a place. But what sort? She examined her surroundings for the first time, found an ordinary street, if populated by rather chaotic-looking individuals, most of whom seemed incapable of color-coordinating their clothing as well as picking wear and flair from the same eras and nations.

She looked up. So that’s where they kept all the oddities that clearly fueled this ‘Helens’ neighborhood. In the world of her author, and the word she was set in, the sky was supposed to be blue, with a sun feature, and some decorative clouds to water the plants whenever they needed it. What she saw was a ghastly mess, like torn paper, a magazine and newsprint collage sporadically rearranged by the wing beats of whatever cosmic cockatiel cage they lined. It unsettled her, so she brought her eyes back to street level, back to the ‘I’ve-been-there-buddy’ expression on Punk’s face.

“I’d say they’re renovating, but I got tired of lying. This is just Helens. Nobody is supposed to live here. That’s why we’ve got to get you labeled and get you out into publication. So what do I call you? Don’t think about it, just say the first thing that pops into your mouth.”

“Vaaaleentiiine Llllots? Valentine Lots!” She burst into a broad grin; her attorney smirked to join her. Long time though. A long time since she had managed to learn anything like that about herself.

“Hey, great work. Who’s your author? I can look up the address of their body and escort you.”

“Uhm… I think she’s a first-time writer? There isn’t a body really…”

“And the new release accommodations are for those who’ve already passed through here with their genres.” Valentine’s smile faded. She was too big to look so sad; she was a rain-soaked tree threatening to fall on her legal representative. “I guess that means you’ll be staying with me for the duration.” She set down the sausage again, swallowed nothing but the fear she would never get to it, and stuck out her hand. They shook. “It’s nice to meet you Valentine. I’m Austentatious Punk: attorney-at-genre.”

The Valentine Case: Girls’ Night 1

If Valentine called the apartment cozy she could avoid calling it messy. It was plenty clean, everything was in fact, it turned out Helens didn’t have dust unless you got it imported by special order. Atop that plentiful cleanliness were piles of thrifted clothing, seemingly gathered by several different people, as the sizes and styles were wildly different. A bookcase full of TV guides overflowed into a stubby paper organizer sat next to it, all the volumes’ corners curled, suggesting Punk had wetted her finger before turning the page, as if they were potboilers instead of schedules.

Yet her television was small, old, and deep enough that a houseplant could sit on top like a pair of organic rabbit ears. The place smelled of a hot vacuum cleaner in need of emptying, shoved into a closet moments before. Valentine moved to the couch, where she was supposed to sleep, and sat, but only very briefly, because after that she sank a good deal further, springs squealing. Heaven. At least compared to the prodding and ogling courthouse.

A minute later Austentatious, who had informed Ms. Lots it was fine to just call her Austen on the bus ride to her apartment building, emerged from the bathroom in loud plaid pajamas with an avocado-like substance masking most of her face. It was 5:00 PM.

“I hope you don’t mind casual,” she said, shuffling across the room on bare feet, to a targeted clothing pile. In she dove and dug. “Work is so stressful I like to get out of those clothes as soon as I can, stay unwound as long as possible.”

“I don’t mind. Your mask? Is that good for your skin? Do I need one?” She rubbed her full cheeks experimentally, feeling for any dryness, then wondered if she would want to feel it as soon as she had her cover, ink, and pages… but perhaps those thoughts were too foreword. They still had to win the case.

“No, but you can have some if you want. I don’t really know what it is; the jar probably says.” She extracted a twisted pajama top from the heap, bisected the rug once more, and tore open a second pile. “We don’t have creature needs in Helens, but the creature comforts keep you sane. I just put this on for the routine, to have something to look forward to.” She found and removed another laundry core sample. Then she balled the bottoms up with the top and tossed them to Valentine, who didn’t realize she was supposed to catch them.

“Why does none of the clothing around here match?” she asked.

“All of our goods come from discarded manuscripts and advertisements; we never know what’s coming in the next batch. Everybody just cobbles something together so we don’t have to spend too much time on it. Those should fit you though. Do you want a shower? I remember feeling gross the first time I had to use feet and hands, and swallow, and itch a scalp.” The memory triggered such an itch, which she attacked.

“I don’t feel gross.”

“No, of course not,” Punk chuckled, seeing not only her innocent face, joy baked in, but also how far she sunk into what the attorney just then realized was a small couch.

“I’ll try it anyway though,” Valentine said, pulling herself out of the cushion with some effort and standing tall. She strode to the bathroom, only closing the door most of the way so she could stay connected to her lifeline and their conversation. Austen put her back to the wall next to the crack, crossed her arms and shut her eyes.

“We’ll take you shopping tomorrow morning, get you something more court-appropriate before the reading.” The water turned on, the hot knob not squeaking like it usually did. Steam billowed out from the top of the door. Punk felt it on her eyelids, had to open them and see the crawling white vapor. Valentine Lots was steaming up the place alright; she probably couldn’t help it.

“Is there something wrong with what I wore today?” the woman who was so much more woman asked, audibly slipping into the shower’s flow. It conformed like molten glass to a breath.

“No, you look great!” Punk blurted before realizing that wasn’t what she’d asked. “It’s actually that you looked too great. We’re dealing with a bunch of wet-newspaper men here though. Any beautiful women, with emphasis on the women, get them riled and guilty of all sorts of things only they would call crimes.

It sucks, it’s not fair, but if we want to get you labeled as romance and not porn we’ve got to downplay the hubba-hubbas on a paperback like you.” Punk silently scolded herself. “Sorry, shouldn’t have assumed. Are you paperback?” Valentine shifted her weight back and forth, felt it dance across her spine.

“Yes… does that make me look more like porn to them too?”

“What doesn’t? We might as well get the content discussion out of the way, since they’re going to ask about it. Remember I’m your advocate, so I need you to be honest with me. We’re all adults here, except for the guys we’re up against. How many sex scenes do you have?” She waited while Valentine thought it over, and over, then knotted it into her air, teased it out, shampooed it, conditioned it, rinsed it.

“Like… two?”

“You don’t sound sure.”

“What exactly is a sex scene? I’m romance, so everything feels intimate to me. Just meeting someone can be everything.”

“We use the publishing courthouse’s definition. It counts if there’s a ‘sexually charged’ atmosphere and there is explicit mention of genitals, or of a sex act, or of climax.”

“Okay, two.”

“There’s some luck for us. Three is the unofficial maximum, one allotted for each traditional story act. Still, three can go either way. I’ve never seen a four get out of here labeled anything other than smut.”

“It’s really not anybody’s business,” Valentine insisted, managing to sound chilled despite the steamy downpour. “It’s not like I don’t have a cover. It’s between me and the reader.”

“Preaching to the choir sister, but we’re not in charge.” The shower stopped, but Austen didn’t hear her step out.

“Austen, how exactly do I get to my readers? I know I just got here, but I feel impatient. There are ants on my heart; it should get throbbing and shake them off before they start exploratory biting.”

“That’s normal,” Punk assured her, hand passing over her own heart, checking a pulse she wanted to feel more intrinsically. “Helens used to have no name and be nothing, just one of many brief instars for us works as we passed through the veils of creation and interpretation before we’re smote on culture.

It used to be genre was barely a concept, literacy our biggest hurdle. But we proliferated, and within it there was the DNA parasite that gets us all: money-grubbers. They saw the decision-making was up for grabs, as the rest of us were too busy living and dying at the right time.

So they dammed it all up, built it out into layers using the mortar of our frustration, and now distant people in the world of our authors farm this irritation machine for profit. Not that genre is a worthless concept mind, just that it should be up to the work and isn’t. Those with no talent have claimed the talent of understanding us. All the headlines are bullshit and we’re barely the funny pages.

As it stands, after you get your genre you’ll pass out of this form and be scattered into smaller and smaller personifications of your elements: your setting, your themes, your tropes, your characters.”

“That sounds nice.”

“The grubbers reach all the way down there too though, deeper and deeper in search of more profit.” With a tilted head Austen watched the layers of their pseudo-world form in the flooding ceiling steam, overflow into successively smaller pools of storytelling. “Now they’re in Carlo, where all the tenners live. Those are characters whose names appear ten times or less in their original work. We’ve all got a few of those. Conceptually they’re not much more than dandruff, but there’s still someone standing over us with a louse comb and a baggie.”

The door creaked open. Austen expected her to emerge in the mismatched pajamas, but out of the wall of marshmallow steam came Lots in just two towels: one that could barely contain her and another, tall and tight, that could barely contain her hair. Dressed or not, she wanted to ask her attorney and roommate this question face to face, so she could search her expression for any secret fears.

“Austen, what happens to those blog posts?” Her giant eyes, expanding plains of white eclipse-edge brilliance, betrayed a sympathy for all living things as well as those that merely mimicked life. Her hand squeezed the towel near her underarm, which absorbed anxiety as it held her composure together.

“I assume you mean the AI ones,” she said, bouncing off the wall and stepping away, finding Lots too much to look at. “Regular ones with authors get expedited to publishing without genres; they don’t really need or want them. This AI stuff is just garbage. Another branching profit-arm off the hydra makes them, trying to cut the authors out, and then dumps them here for us to process.

Which we’re not equipped to do, so the publishers have been shoving them into that building they tried to take you to. It’s got no floor, opens up into a literal void in imagination space. Only, it’s not that much of a void anymore. Now it’s an AI landfill. I don’t know when it’s going to burst, it’s just a matter of time though, and nobody should be in Helens when it does. Don’t worry, we’ll have you taken care of long before then.”

“What about you?”

“I’m sorry?” Punk didn’t turn around, certain it would hurt to see such big eyes caring about her, like being thrown into a pool of caustic tears.

“You’re a written work like everybody else, right? Why aren’t you published? Where will you go when that dam breaks?”

“I’m unpublished because I’m in the same boat as you,” she admitted. “The house says I’m one thing, and I say I’m another. Their perspective pegs me as a courtroom drama, but mine…” She finally found the strength to turn around. “I’m a period romance.” Valentine burst like a firework.

“We’re both romances!? We’re like sisters!” Leaving the towel seam to its tenuous task, the large woman threw out both arms, muscular in exuberance, and barreled forward to wrap up Punk in the tightest hug she’d ever felt. The attorney was swept off her feet. By the time she was returned Valentine had forgotten about her other questions; the opportunity was taken to shift the subject to dinner.

It was still very early to eat, but the Lady Lots had never eaten before and Austen had only a third of a vegan sausage in the tank. The pair migrated to the kitchenette counter, Valentine leaning, which put roughly the weight of a typical adult on it. It groaned, but she didn’t let up, staring at her attorney in admiration even as the disheveled and bepajammed figure contorted herself into a half-pretzel digging two mismatched plastic containers out of the fridge’s badlands, the door banging her bottom all the while.

When finally the task was complete she set them on the counter, slid a random one to Valentine. The memory of their contents having expired, the food still having a day left on that front, Punk grabbed two of each utensil out of a drawer and handed over a set. Then came the reveal: the trashy cork pop of flexible lids.

Sesame noodles with kimchi hearts for Valentine and a stack of spicy scallion pancakes for Punk. They selected their best guess of utensil and dug in. Close to the trash can, but neither suffered in the flavor department. Two romances going at well-deserved and savored meals tends to produce a series of moans misinterpreted by neighbors, so onto the discussion it is, occurring halfway through the pancake stack.

“You’re a vegan?” Valentine asked.

“Yeah. We don’t get to know where any of our stuff comes from, so I have to assume if it ever came from a living thing it was separated from them in a cruel and violent process. Look at how they’re treating us, and on paper they say we’re equals.”

“This is plenty good.”

“I definitely know where these came from. My bestie Dish made them. She knows I’m always busy and I can’t cook for shit, so she drops off a bunch of these for me every week. You’ll love her. She’s actually-“

What followed was the kind of gushing that could sicken anyone, except of course for a pair of bonding romances, and the talk followed them back to the couch before metamorphosing into the subject of Helens, the courthouse’s procedures, and the likely length of the arbitration. At some point Valentine tried a placebo face mask and changed into the loudly conflicting pajamas, the top suffering a slight rip when she tried to pull it down past her navel.

That was when Austen was forced to admit her guest couldn’t possibly be comfortable on the couch, and would have to take the bed, to which Lots did not object. When they said their goodnights Austen flopped backward, sank into the impression her charismatic client had left that night, and toppled one of the clothing piles on the arms to use as blanket.

She was going to get this one. Every romance stamp achieved was good practice. If not, maybe she could call in every ten for a free one, like a punch card. The grubbers loved trash like that.

The Valentine Case: Shopping Trip

The shopping district in Helens was one street disguised as several by its winding path, like a bubble with a smaller one attached, terminating in a cafe everyone wound up eating at, but Valentine and Punk had another Dish to deal with first, at the outset, where the brick street was plenty wide and all the shops had entryways like doorless garages.

There was no point to any of them specializing in particular goods or themes, as they all drew from a daily wall of creeping falling products theorized into semi-being via trashed manuscripts, E-mail edits, marginalia shopping lists, and menus stuffed into mailboxes. The pair would have to check them all for an outfit that most screamed ‘reasonably modest’ at men saggy in both robe and sympathy.

For that they needed a hunter with a good nose for the stuff, and Punk claimed her best friend was just as good at that as cooking. She had called her up on her flip phone, its flimsy shell crackling in her gentle grip, making it hard to hear anything but Dish’s enthusiastic agreement to meet them at the head of the curled dead skink that was the shops.

Any party that included Ms. Lots was easy to spot, so they didn’t have to linger long before their goodsy-guide came power-walking up, arm waving almost involuntarily. Valentine saw a young woman dressed a decade older, with short flat hair sporting a few curls that only looked rogue, but were in fact engineered to give the appearance of having escaped notice after a passionate day’s work.

She was a smiler, the kind who does it while they talk, sometimes off-coloring their speech with maladjusted tone and concerning motives. Over one shoulder she had an empty canvas shopping bag, held onto as authoritatively as Punk’s satchel in the courthouse.

“Hi!” Dish Pernish bubbled once she was at their side. “Hey Tasty,” she greeted Punk, making clear what lengths she would go to in mangling someone’s name to find a term of endearment, like choking up on a coyote’s leash until it was growling right next to her. The two hugged, and then her aggressively friendly gaze turned to Valentine. “And you must be Val. Dish Pernish at your tableside service.”

“What’s your genre?” the tall woman posed, as if asking a child where she got the toy she held. The friends shared an awkward glance. “I’m sorry, is that rude? I was just curious. It seems like the people who stay here always have something going on with theirs.”

“Rude or not, you’re right,” Dish informed her, smile never fading fully. “What’s going on with mine is that it’s not recognized. I’ve appealed for recognition, and that can taken years… and on top of that it usually gets turned down.”

“Dish here is a recipe blog,” Punk added. Valentine stared absently in half-recognition.

“You know, you go looking for a recipe online,” Ms. Pernish prodded, “and then in the Mexican hot chocolate cookie preamble there’s a nice little autobiographical tale about how that food wove into someone’s personal history or their family’s? That’s me.” Her smile strained as her eyes suddenly searched for anything but a face. “I know people mostly skip us. If we had a good label it would happen less. I’ve been workshopping ‘culinary slice-of-life’. What do you think?”

“I think coming up with the name is all you should have to do,” Valentine said, and like everything else she said she meant it. “So job well done.”

“I wish you were in charge,” Dish chuckled, playfully caressing Lots’s long arm. “Things aren’t looking good for me now that they keep adding those ‘skip to recipe’ buttons out in the authors’ place.”

“Which we can argue as a table of contents,” Punk reminded her. “It can legitimize in our favor.”

“Tasty took my case,” Dish said appreciatively. “That’s how we met, and how we meet about once a month. The rest of the time it’s just for fun. I see that’s how she snagged you too. We’re getting you some kind of tarp for,” she gestured to Valentine with so full a range of motion that her arms instantly became sore, “all of this so those publishers don’t get their drool all over your label.”

“A flattering tarp if possible,” Lots said, as close to bashful as she came. Dish took the request seriously, and led the way into the first and largest shop, manned by a single bored employee at the front desk who popped her gum once for each person who entered, taking the place of a bell on the door. Past the initial displays it felt much more like a warehouse, chill kept out by harsh artificial light. While none of the shops had identity, the goods were at least roughly categorized within each, so they were able to head for the clothing department.

What Lots first noticed was not the wares however, not those already collected anyway. A back wall was floor to ceiling windowpanes that looked out onto the drafting chute, where thousands of tons of excised and edited words were extruded into physicality. Like a molasses avalanche it slowly poured down into rusted gathering trays longer than the buildings beyond: a wall of products losing their accessories and instruction booklets in a slow torrent that groaned with all the self-pity of a mountain antacid dissolving in a tap ocean.

“Best not to look too long,” Austen warned her, “like the sky. Helens is better when you pretend it’s not all splitting seams.”

“Sometimes it’s even fun,” Dish piped up, appearing from around a display with a massive top, like a rain poncho, for Valentine to consider. “What do we think? Too much coverage?”

“Not if you’re closing a pool for the winter,” Lots said gently.

“Right,” Punk agreed. “We can’t tablecloth her either; that draws attention to how little attention we’re drawing.”

“Which publishers are you two dealing with?”

“Tay, Bridge, and Desister.”

“Yikes. You flipped a coin and got three different ugly heads.” Valentine noted that Dish seemed familiar with all three, despite not working in the courthouse. It was further evidence that everyone knew everyone else in Helens, that it was little more than two long streets, and if you wanted to go somewhere exotic without getting published or thrown away you could try the next floor up in the few office buildings. “Who’s on critic duty?” Punk shot her friend a glare, but relented with an answer.

“Don’t know yet. We’ll find out in a couple hours. Cross your fingers for Tagpoe.” Pernish held up her hand and crossed the suggested fingers, but did not voice which name she wanted to assign the snipped and harvested luck to.

“Who sorts through all this junk and puts the best stuff in here?” the newcomer asked, despite the topic having been her own case. She was afraid of everyone else’s answers.

“People who can barely justify lingering here,” Punk explained. “And they don’t hold their jobs very long. Everyone’s got to move on eventually.”

“Val, tell me about your romance,” Dish requested to change the subject. “And give me every detail, since there’s nothing good here and we’ve got to walk all the way to the back of the next one.” It was a smart distraction, kept their guest chattering the whole time. For you see, there was a meet-cute at a national park, a first date where they got chased by geese and wound up falling in the mud, then having a roll in the mud, then getting some jewelry stolen by one of the geese, then a wild goose chase while covered in mud, then a second date where they saw a bear tucking itself in for hibernation, then a souring encounter with each other’s families where a smoking uncle almost started a forest fire and they had to check on the bear’s den that represented their winter-budding relationship, then a fight over both of them working too much which was resolved by the one-who-wasn’t-a-park-ranger’s company headquarters burning down, which left them unemployed and forced to move into their lover’s cabin in the park, resulting in the second sex scene after their muddy fling, terminating only in the middle of the night after hours, though it didn’t look like night, as the rare subspecies of firefly native only to the park was out in droves, magically illuminating their first night cohabiting, seen as a sign of their shared destiny, except there is another more conflagratory destiny afoot, the burning afoot of a fire walker, as it turns out their blundering uncle’s discarded cigarette was not the act of a litterbug, but a firebug; he was a serial arsonist, hiding it for decades, and he sees the park as the only treasure ever denied him, so the couple has to join together and track him to the center of the woods, where he plans on burning the poor hibernating bear out of its den along with everything else, and struggle ensues, and there’s a swing of an ax pulled out of a campfire, glowing red hot, scorching the frigid air, burning through pages faster than the reader surely will be, to the edge of a cliff, where he is undone by the swarming fireflies, drawn to his ember of a blade, that latch onto him by the hundreds and make him panic, sending him screaming over the cliff to his rocky demise, and then the couple gets married, with a groundhog officiating, as it’s one of those cozy goofy towns that elects an animal as mayor because there are never enough politics going on to need an actual one.

“Wow, I’d definitely read you,” Dish gushed once she’d finished; Valentine was so out of breath her vision went momentarily gray. When it returned she saw the clothing department of the next shop down, which also had giant windows looking out onto the garbagefall of goods. Briefly transfixed, she watched a tilting island of sleds and winter coats break up in the stream.

“Does our season match the one in the authors’ place?” she asked the closest thing Helens had to natives.

“Probably,” Punk said as she examined an XXL top made with an XXS amount of fabric. “We’re not allowed to have calendars; it’s part of the whole staying sane thing. It’s not good for a work to know how poorly they’ve aged. Down in the lower neighborhoods that can net you a bad case of obscurvy. Then you’re done for.” She pulled on another promising corner, found something so skimpy it might’ve been a ripped tissue.

“It looks like somebody got embarrassed and deleted all their fan fiction smut,” Dish sighed. “Everything here is lingerie!” Both Valentine and Punk tried to catch the right outfit off guard, leaping from one rack to another and pulling items at random: coconut bras, edible undies, in black licorice of all flavors, nighties with better visibility than a screen door, and tiny corsets that could only be lampshades for reading lights. Everything was red, black, purple, and white.

The sound of the churning soon-to-be-inventory softened, so they looked and saw those colors overtaking the rest: more lingerie. It was enough to last a library’s worth of sex scenes, and none of it was what they wanted, although Dish did spot something for herself as its cluster crumbled and fell out of sight.

“Ooh, foodles!” she blurted, rushing off into the brush of racks, disappearing so completely that Lots spun around in unsuccessful search.

“I know where she’s going,” Punk said with a grin, beckoning the taller woman to follow. Together they weaved a path that seemed like it should have turned them fully around, but instead got them somewhere with corrugated metal shelves topped with overzealous misting nozzles. Containers of produce, and sometimes containerless produce, came sliding out of chutes behind the shelves and banging into place against the others that came before in uneven stacks. Anything larger than a mango tended to bounce off and roll away across the floor to hide under the clothing racks.

Pernish was stood in front of them, shimmying back and forth, face worryingly close to the paths of vaulting honeydews. She had timed it correctly, so instead of melons trays of plastic-wrapped strawberries, some chocolate-coated, shot out. One of them couldn’t bounce off its brethren, as Dish had already snatched it up. She grabbed three more, handing them all off to Lots to carry, since she was clearly the strongest.

“Shoot, these’ll go off soon,” Dish said as she checked the expiration label, which warned her in days rather than a date thanks to the rule against calendars.

“Then stop grabbing more!” Punk scolded. “How are you going to use all these anyway?”

“Obviously you’ll help me,” she informed her most-frequently available, and thus best, friend. “We’ll do a dessert lesson. Val you’re invited, assuming you’re still here.”

“Are strawberries a special occasion?”

“Oh yeah,” Dish said with a nod, still side-eyeing the berries as they continued to arrive, their sounds overpowered by the clink of champagne bottles arriving out of a mail tube at the end of the shelves. Before long they would overflow the umbrella stand underneath and get to rolling as perfectly-engineered tripping hazards, so the trio started shuffling away as Dish went on, letting Lots carry eighty percent of the harvest.

“When an author writes the word ‘strawberry’ they hardly ever regret it. Everybody loves strawberries, and loves them all the time. They never get deleted! You hear ‘strawberry’, and all anyone ever thinks is ‘Mmmm! Strawberry!’ But now we get to think that.”

Nobody paid for anything in Helens, Valentine assumed as they simply walked out carrying the berries. Jobs were worked to justify residence, and to stall existential dread and boredom. She found herself wondering about the exact circumstances of her attorney’s misidentification. If she was so good, why hadn’t she gotten onto the shelf yet?

Romances are about trust, she reminded herself. Trusting Austen was so much more rewarding than doubting her, so she put the thoughts out of mind. Trust would also be necessary in regard to her wardrobe, given that she was now carrying such a large crop that she couldn’t effectively examine the clothing in any of the other shops they tried, which was all of them, though some were dismissed with a simple glance inside.

Finally, be it out of desperation or luck, Punk and Pernish each found a piece of a pant suit, top black and bottom blue, that they insisted would get the job done. Valentine was permitted to set the trays aside to go and try it on in the changing room, separated from the rest of the shop by what was clearly a shower curtain, given the rubber ducks in shower caps cascading across it.

She emerged with a twirl, steadied herself with her hands on her hips. Her expression asked for opinions, and she received them in the form of tepid but approving applause. Now she was not hiding her figure, but could act as if she didn’t recognize its power over other people. A career woman. Anyone who thought of her as something else would inevitably do so on their own time, and thus have to stew in their personal shame only.

“Can we eat now?” Lots asked, having started to look forward to the cafe at the spiraling center of the shops as soon as she saw the rusty maws shoveling away an avalanche of wares. The sight, the sound, put a bottomless hole in her spirit and stomach, made her worry she’d turn to gluttony or some other form of excess if her genre was delayed too long. How Dish and Austen could stay as long as they clearly had eluded her.

For now the answer was yes, and she only had to haul the strawberries a short distance to get seated outdoors at their own table on the cobblestones, painted as chaotically as the denizens, like aquarium gravel. They were under an umbrella, not to keep out sun, but to help them avoid looking at the drunken magazine-collage sky and its occasional streaking comet tear.

Sandwiches and sodas all around. A big central basket of hushpuppies to share. Valentine had learned the previous night, after removing the perfunctory face mask, that nothing could mess up her makeup, it was just a skin meant to remain stunning after a sloppy kiss, so she had no concerns about staining the corners of her mouth before being reviewed by the publishers. A meatball sub. As big a sandwich as she was a person.

Austen had a mushroom sub with a vegan herb jus for dipping. Dish had a bahn mi with extra carrots and daikon. The lull of everyone chewing under the shade, of so few other shoppers being about, was a relief to Lots, until she got the itching suspicion this was the calm before the storm. This lunch was nice, her friends were nice, but how many outings would it take for the whole scenario to feel wrong? Already she felt the phantom bend, of a human in another reality tethered to this one, turning the pages of Poke the Bare.

She was afraid that if she asked why her position in the world was anyone else’s decision she would have to wait that much longer for insulting them, or worse, be thrown somewhere she didn’t belong. Compelled to speak so the existential dread didn’t have her throw up instead, she asked Punk what they could expect at the hearing later that day.

By her tone it was clear case procedure rarely varied once things got started. There were to be at least two public readings, their introduction having been the first. Now that they were in arbitration the next meeting would have a house-appointed critic arguing on behalf of the publishers, trying to convince Valentine she wasn’t what she knew she was. Punk would argue the opposite, and most of the evidence available would be Ms. Lots herself, subject to content review and questioning.

Genre arguments had multiple pillars, but it all came down to a score, and if one claimed genre’s score was three points higher than the other’s, arbitration was over, and the label would be handed down immediately. If the scores were too close then the matter went to another reading, and on and on until one party conceded for this reason or that.

“We’ve got a chance of closing this out early since you have fewer than three sex scenes,” Punk said, pouring the last of her jus out of its little cup onto the tip of her tongue. Valentine wondered if there was a deficit in her diet from just one night of sharing stored Dish-dishes with her.

“Wow,” Dish said, rearranging some of the vegetables in her sandwich with two dexterous fingers, “if you count all my recipes I’ve got more sex than that.” She saw someone walking in the distance, locking on expertly despite the gargantuan and titillating romance in the way. “Speaking of getting more, look who it is.” She nudged Punk’s ankle with her own, prompting her to look.

“Oh, fuck my first edition,” Punk grumbled, doubling forward to hide her face behind her client and then putting up her hand to do it again.

“I’m sure he would,” Dish snickered. A true romance simply had to look, so Valentine twisted just enough to see the person. She didn’t believe it at first, because it wasn’t really a person. It was one of those AI-generated blog posts by the look of him: blank expression, printer-out-of-toner color palette, and a hunched posture determined only to exist and, at his most motivated, continue moving forward.

Not fast enough for his employer apparently, as a suede dress shoe came in from behind and booted the blogbot’s bottom. The second shoe completed the featherweight swagger of the man who must have been the actual focus of Dish’s amusement and Punk’s mortification. His own color scheme was only slightly livelier than the AI he bullied, but he dressed more cohesively than anyone she’d seen in Helens outside the courthouse.

Tailored pants drew her eyes up to his vest, which had a pocket with a little book in it, a watch chain dangling off a bookmark smack in its middle. Two fingers coathooked his jacket over one shoulder as he strolled and kicked. The only sore spot on his outfit was a pair of loud plastic sunglasses with little visors over each lens.

Even through them she could see he was handsome, in a cocksure sort of way, the way that could switch to a much uglier channel with the lightest touch of the dial. Silver fox hair aged him up, but she still wouldn’t want him in any hen houses. If he had any good at all he focused a lot of it into his appearance, his timing, and his exit strategy if the facade started to slip.

“Who’s that?” Valentine asked, unable to quell the warm swell in her voice. Her big wobbly eyes compressed Punk further, pushed her cheek through the table’s slats.

“A colleague,” she muttered with lips so lax they were basically unemployed.

“He’s so much more than that,” Dish said, savoring this event more than Punk had her herb jus. “That’s Paperbaxter Airdelay, and he told Tasty she could just call him Bax.”

“I usually go with ‘jackass’ and ‘stooge’ instead,” Punk said to defend her honor. Her face was nearly pushed through the table and licking hushpuppy crumbs off the ground, but she still managed to see puzzlement in Valentine’s eyes, probably over her choice labels. “I’m a defense attorney; he’s a prosecutor. He likes to take cases I couldn’t possibly win, just so he gets to be the one to wipe the floor with me.”

“What’s he doing to that bloggy thing?” Valentine asked just as Mr. Airdelay kicked the pseudoman again, causing it to drop several loose pages out of the large stack it carried. Despite its absentminded and bumbling appearance, the blogbot had mechanical reflexes and response time, and was thus able to snatch what it dropped out of the air and refile it without losing a step.

“That jackass stooge uses them as servants,” Punk griped, lifting her head just enough to make sure she still found the way both distant creatures moved repulsive and obnoxious respectively. “He just snatches them before they get tossed in the hole and starts ordering them around. Calls them his ‘clerks’ and his ‘crack legal team’. Being stuck here is bad enough without him filling up what little space we get with those awful things.”

Baxter checked his watch, a heavy clunky thing that probably grew every time he showed it off at a work social, deeming the hour late enough to hurry not just his clerk, but himself as well. Lots suddenly had a worry.

“He’s not rushing to the courthouse because he’s the critic in my case, is he?”

“No, thank god,” Punk said, practically shivering at the thought. “Like I said, he picks a lot of softballs. We’re more of a coin toss; there was no bait for him to take. Speaking of though, we should get going. You ready for some romancing?”

“Yes!” They thanked Dish for the company, stood to leave, checked for any last minute stains from a lunch that was too good not to leave any. The poor cook, Lots thought, how long had they been trapped in Helens perfecting their craft?

“Good luck you two! Don’t forget our dessert date,” Dish bubbled, face remaining aglow until after they were out of sight and she looked at the many wide trays of strawberries that no longer had a carthorse. “I can definitely carry all of these.” Another blogbot, a woman this time, came clopping by on rushed high heels, likely a straggler from the crack legal team. “Or…”

The Valentine Case: Public Reading 2

It was the same chamber, but things had been rearranged and altered some for the new proceedings. The central podium opposite the publisher desks was now two wider benches with seats behind, one section raised for standing and speaking, the other lower with drawers and trays like a convertible writing desk with the top down.

One of them was for Punk and Lots, the other for the critic and their assistant, except that assistant came in three parts and was not treated with any dignity. Three blogbots were dressed for court, two men and a woman, but nobody got to see as they were ordered to stand in a row, noses against the wall so they wouldn’t interrupt or get in their boss’s way. Valentine’s luxurious hair nearly whipped Punk’s do down to a shaved head when she turned from Baxter to her attorney.

“Crap,” Punk confirmed with a nod, drawing her papers out of her satchel with much less confidence than the first time. The publishers were locked in from the first scuffle, with Tay, Bridge, and Desister already in position and looking bored. All they had to do was listen, and officiously rather than well. Most of the actual work was now on their flunky, whom they formally introduced for the courthouse record, which recorded autonomously and was fed out of a slot on the wall throughout, like the emission of a gigantic receipt, the sound annoyingly punctuating and undermining every emotional argument like an old printer searching for another sheet in an empty tray.

“This is Public reading two of Publishers V. Poke the Bare. We are in genre arbitration. The defense is Enthusiast Austentatious Punk arguing contemporary romance. Is she ready to proceed?”

“Yes.”

“The prosecution is Critic Paperbaxter Airdelay arguing erotica. Is he ready to proceed?”

“Yes publishers.”

“I’d like to begin,” Punk indeed began, approaching the publishing desks with three stapled stacks, each of their corners marked by a diagonal slash of red tape, on which there was a dotted line of black kissing lips, “by declaring our sex scenes so we can move on to the important details.” She handed each publisher a stack. “As you can see, Poke the Bare has but two, so it should only take you a moment to-“

“Redaction.” Every eye went to Baxter, who was looking less smug and more professional now that he’d ditched his silly sunglasses in favor of his not-quite-steely, more alluminumy, eyes. Valentine guessed his interruption was this court’s version of objecting. “Poke the Bare in fact bears three intimate scenes.”

“No I don’t!” Miss Lots objected more traditionally.

“The work already has an enthusiast and will not speak for herself unless directly addressed by a publisher, a critic, or her representative,” Bridge warned. In visible discomfort, the work swallowed what was about to erupt, something about none of the haggard men having even a single intimate scene tucked away anywhere in their robes.

Baxter snapped his fingers, like flicking a switch in its effect, as the woman blogbot spun around mechanically, bounced over to her boss, and held out a folder similarly streaked with the red and black tape, sealing away the pertinent information with a kiss that he casually ripped open using the side of his pinky. A lock of his silver hair fell over his forehead as he looked down his nose to read and quote.

“Almost subconsciously her hand slid down her chest with the flow of the waterfall and found the only heat anywhere in the river. It was a public park, anyone could come along and see her, but that only added to her desire, as she could only imagine one particular face doing so. ‘Imagine it,’ she ordered herself, ‘him coming through the bushes and observing this particular wild life, migrated right into his lap’. Her other hand migrated to a lap alongside the first… It goes on like that for,” he flipped flippantly, “wow, three pages.”

“Part of that is flashback!” Lots protested.

“Erotically charged flashback,” Baxter edited once more. He snapped his fingers again, and when it drew no response he slapped his desk, ruffling even the publishers. A second blogbot got the message and moved away from the wall, toward the officiants, not swiftly enough to avoid a kick on the rump, which Mr. Airdelay now appeared to do purely to hurry them along, as it was nigh impossible to make one fall over. It handed out more pages, with Punk snatching one disrespectfully from the slow-moving Desister for a speedy analysis. When she was done, having returned it so quickly that she couldn’t be accused of stealing it, she crossed the chamber back to her client, facing her from across the stand.

“You have a masturbation scene?” she half-whispered with wide eyes and high beam eyebrows.

“Yes,” she admitted timidly, her height making her incapable of shrinking down to the equal of anyone else present. “But that’s not a sex scene! There’s only one person there.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Punk said sullenly. “The scene is defined by its tenor, not its construction.”

“And as of Publishers V. Situation Roommate, the house should define parties present as all entities, textual and metatextual, meaning any scene that has a single character present must also account for the author and the reader.” He looked at Lots. “You’re never alone once you’ve been written, and you’re never private once you’ve been published.” Was he mocking her, or perhaps casually veiling why he liked to live in Helens himself?

He summoned his third blogbot to hand the relevant precedent to Austen while shooing his other two clerks back to their timeout on the wall. Lots’s attorney moved as if to batter the bot away, but stifled herself, wanting to at least appear less violent to them than Airdelay.

“Does the defense have any objection to Poke the Bare’s sex scenes numbering three?” Tay asked, to which Punk was forced to say no. Swallowing the defeat, refusing to look at Baxter whenever she could avoid it, despite him doing the exact opposite, the enthusiast moved on, unenthusiastically, to other genre tropes and elements that could still be argued to be in their favor.

Valentine was only half-listening, instead working to keep the color out of her face, which she should never have to do. She was all about the color she could get into her cheeks, and the heat that came with it. Drawing a line between what part of it was love and what part was sex felt both arbitrary and surgical, like she was the dartboard and scalpels the darts.

A lot of what followed she didn’t quite absorb, except that, by the end of it, they had gone to a score: 12-10 in favor of the prosecution. Like with the sex scenes, one point of contention made all the difference. If one publisher felt slightly different about one of her aspects, she would already be on her way out the door, to be dumped into a bin of smut in some dim shop next to collectible sex toys that wouldn’t be in mint condition for long.

They had just squeaked by, and would be allotted another reading before a second scoring. They’d need a new argument, and everything would get much more granular, evidence now presented in the form of single sentences, word choice, and the author’s past drafts. Up next for review and judgment might have been her inner child.

With more elements to consider the score would inflate, from the low tens to somewhere near thirty, making it less likely the two results would be less than three apart. Punk, while she led her client out by the hand to keep her from getting hounded by any of the court staff, muttered that arbitration rarely went beyond three readings, and if it did that work became one of her neighbors.

Suddenly Valentine felt like a burden in her attorney’s apartment, a box of assembly furniture mistakenly delivered, key screws missing, instructions in Swedish. She tried to apologize, but Austen wasn’t hearing it. The pink torch of a woman was burning low, but still hot, angry at something, just not her.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said, tone unintentionally scalding, “just remember that nobody sees you the way you see you. To them you’re just a dirty mirror. I’ve got an idea. Baxter’s too good at arguing, so we’ll give him something he can’t argue with.”

The Valentine Case: Girls’ Night 2

It was actually part of their amicus-dossier that one of Ms. Lots’s subgenres was ‘whirlwind romance’, and when that was interpreted as a skeleton, musculature, and metabolism, it meant she was much more of a sprinter than a marathon runner, giving every situation her all and quickly running out of energy.

After both the shopping trip and the trouncing partly delivered with blogbot precision, Valentine was dead on her feet, once again teetering and threatening to crush her much smaller representative, but Austen was insistent that they needed to go out again that night to ‘supply’ their next strategy.

Apparently this required Lots to be fully informed and provide her signature at some point, so she was dragged, still in her pant suit, which didn’t smell bad but it did smell like court rather than the cafe, out to a new more hidden nook of Helens. The town barely had two streets, so this door between two walls couldn’t even be called an alley entrance, more like an architectural oversight someone decided to slap a sign above, which read Snapup Studios.

Once they’d entered it turned out they had some more entering to do, somewhere past a bunch of workers wearing headsets, rushing back and forth, fetching or delivering warm charcuterie, clipboards, bottled water, coffee, and cardboard cutouts heralding from more exotic genres than Valentine’s. They made it through without bumping into anyone, though that seemed more like a skill of the workers rather than the visitors, seeing as a couple of passing cutouts swung open like saloon doors to allow Valentine across unimpeded. Their only reward was an office door.

“You’re alright with this strategy?” Punk asked, stopping with her hand on the doorknob to confirm, for the third time. Her client nodded, and so did her eyelids. “Okay, just let me do the talking. I’ll get the deal done and then you just have to sign.” She rapped on the door twice, was told to come in by a barking voice before the second rap hit.

The office was dim, drab, notable only because it wasn’t clear if there were walls behind the alternating crowded bookshelves and bursting file cabinets or if they were the walls themselves. A constant background noise made the place feel like it was smack in the middle of a large abandoned field, but that there was a bustling city just beyond that: groan of books packed too tight, squeal of filing drawers under gravity, the buzz of a desk lamp bright enough to require sunscreen yet narrow enough to do nothing for the room, and the soft footsteps of all the production drones just outside.

“If you’re mixed media just leave your script in the tray there,” the man behind the desk said, not looking up from what appeared to be one of those scripts. A blue pen cap between his teeth looked more like a bucket that had been kicked into a first place finish by the entire Kentucky Derby.

Austen cleared her throat, which was just to provide a voice sample. His head shot up, and they saw a round face with a black beard a little too glossy to not be dyed. Constant passionate work kept his face young though. “Woah! If it isn’t Austentatious! I don’t remember trying to drag you in here lately. How long’s it been?” There was no spot to hang a calendar and no calendars to hang. “Could it be you’ve come to me without being hogtied, entirely of your own freewill, and of sound mind and body?”

“I don’t know about a couple of those,” Punk sighed, “but I’m here and I’ve got a proposition.”

“Propose to me, baby,” he said in a surprisingly aromantic and asexual manner, tapping the desk to draw them closer, where there were two chairs. Lots nearly collapsed into hers. “And who is this tall glug of mountain spring water?”

“Hitchlowe, this is Valentine Lots, Val Hitchlowe. She’s the plus one to your white whale.” The man looked confused, his smile stuck open, eyes darting between them. “You’re finally getting what you want and all you’ve got to say is breathing on us?” Some sound did start coming out of the man, but it took a second to turn into words.

“I would ask what the occasion is, but I guess the what is a who.” His attention pretended to turn to Valentine. First Baxter and now this man, there were at least a few people who didn’t stare at her, both clearly having their hearts set on Punk, for different reasons. “Val, what’s your pitch?”

“My what?” Punk took over, holding her hand to let her know she didn’t need to engage directly.

“You’re looking at a solid date night flick. Budget? Rent a national park, CGI some dots of light, and you’re done. She’s pre-publication, so nobody knows about her, and you’re getting first crack. We’ve got our own reasons, so we’ll accept a low ball, as long as it’s not the patented Lowe ball that insults whoever it hits.”

“That sounds fine,” the man said rather stiffly, leaning back in his creaky seat. “Almost too good to be true. Could it really get me If it Pleases the Court?”

“We wouldn’t be here if it couldn’t,” Punk assured him. Her hand hadn’t so much as twitched on Valentine’s, but the larger woman thought she felt its temperature suddenly dip, like her attorney’s blood circling the wagons around her heart to protect it. From what? The question straightened Lots out and made her alert.

“I’m sorry, I’m just going to butt in here a second,” she said. “We’re here so I can sign over my film rights to Snapup Studios, right? That’s supposed to help my case because nobody makes movies out of erotica, since they’ll be rated for mature audiences and not distributed anywhere.”

“Like I said,” Punk reminded her, but her hand just kept getting colder.

“I see the angle,” Hitchlowe said, some relief in his voice now that he had all the information he needed. “And I am amenable Austen. No low balls here. I’ll give you the same offer as last time, and just let her ride on the same rate.”

“Deal,” Punk said, shooting him with the word, but Valentine came in again while her attorney’s mouth still smoked.

“I wasn’t aware Austen was going to be part of this. Why did nobody tell me?”

“Just found out myself!” Hitchlowe said, throwing up his hands while somehow maintaining his leaned balance. “To keep up with the baseball talk, this is out of left field for me.” She turned to Punk, saw that the shorter woman almost looked like a guilty child caught with lizards in her pockets.

“You don’t need to think about it,” she told her client. Lots caught the same tone she’d used when telling her not to look at the sky, or the blogbots, or the oozing continental shelf of discarded goods. “I just saw an opportunity. Snapup has wanted the film rights to me for a while now; Hitchlowe here thinks they can make bank on the margins. I’ve not really been interested, but now it might help your case. Movies are bigger money than books. If we get a studio involved it legitimizes you. There’s no erotica atop the box office.”

“If only,” the executive joked, laugh stalled when two upset women, one very large and the other equally large in ire, swung toward him. His hands pretended to file papers, and his eyes did a worse job of it. The only positive effect of it was the momentary distraction that gave Valentine the time she needed to make a decision. She took Punk’s other cold hand too.

“Before I sign I want to discuss something with him, briefly. It’s private. Will you give us a minute?”

“Yeah of course,” Austen answered automatically, only giving a second thought when she was already out of her seat and halfway across the office. Instead of airing her concern she just sprang a half-cocked smirk on them. “There’s a vending machine out by the dressing rooms I should get reacquainted with, great guy.”

“What’s your concern?” Hitchlowe asked after the door clicked shut. “You want to talk nude scenes? We’ve got a studio policy, not mine, that in date movies we can’t accept anything less than a full moon in the shower.”

“It’s not that,” Ms. Lots stopped him, before he could break out his euphemisms for other body parts. “I need you to tell me why Austentatious wouldn’t sell you her film rights before now.” He craned his head past hers, no small feat, to see if there was a fauxhawk’s shadow through the door’s fogged glass window. She really was off locking lips with a Super Sizzlime soda.

“I don’t know if I’m at liberty to say.”

“She wants me to sign, and you want me to sign… and I’m not signing until you answer me.” She crossed her arms, gesture undercut by her tiny kick pushing his desk back a loud two inches. “Sorry… but not about the question.”

“Okay, okay. When she first showed up in Helens she was a pet project of mine, since she wasn’t heading out to the shelves and doing lawyering instead. That gave her courtroom experience. The longer she stays the more she has. That experience, if we turn her into a script, improves the writing by miles. A courtroom drama based on her could sweep the award shows. And naturally, as her producer, I would get a piece of that pie.”

“But,” Lots said, momentarily confused and offended, mistakenly thinking Hitchlowe’s ‘pie’ was another euphemism, “Austen’s not a courtroom drama. She’s a period romance.”

“That’s why she wouldn’t sell. Her experience is only any good to me in a depiction of the courtroom. I can’t produce her as a romance. And if she profits off herself here, under that genre, it hurts her case with the publishing courthouse. It goes right in their records that she’s already selling herself as the label they’ve been trying to slap on her.”

“So if I sign this contract and use the document in my case, it hurts Punk’s chances of getting published as a romance?”

“Probably,” Hitchlowe said, shrugging. “That’s what she tells me; I don’t really keep up with the affairs of the court. Studio genre stuff tends to be more after the fact; we lie about what genre movies are all the time, in the trailers.” This fact didn’t seem to trouble him at all; he was more troubled by the appearance of the shadow he had checked for earlier. There was a rap on the door, and then Punk let herself back in.

“Are we ready to do this?” she asked. There was a wastebasket blocking several development hell scripts on a bottom shelf. Punk spied it, tossed a crushed green can into it, demonstrating that at least in that matter she was a superior talent to the publishers they would soon face again. As to what ammunition they might have, Valentine bit her lip and mulled it over, regretting the tired fog creeping back into her mind and body. Hitchlowe’s eyes were on her. His hand had stalled after drawing some papers halfway out of a drawer.

“Yes,” the tall romance relented. “Let’s do it. To be clear though… I don’t want anything done with these scripts until after we use them in my case.”

“That’s not a problem,” the producer said, hoping he would get to say something along those lines. Apparently he had a contract missing only Punk’s signature within reach at all times. It didn’t even have to be dated, since they could only put TBD in that space anyway. He photocopied most of it, able to do that straight out of another drawer, and presented both contracts.

Valentine was supposed to be the apprehensive one, yet she signed first. Punk clicked the pen too many times to seem okay with it, and when she eventually put it to paper her face suggested she was signing in her own blood. The act finally complete, the attorney swallowed up copies of each contract into her satchel and they said their goodbyes. Hitchlowe smiled, stood, wiped his hands on his pants even though they weren’t dirty, and then watched them leave, looking to Valentine like he was nowhere near as enthusiastic as his long wait for the deal would suggest.

But she couldn’t think about him. She couldn’t even think about herself. Too tired. There wasn’t a reading scheduled for the next day, her fate to be determined the day after that, so they had time to sleep, unwind, make up their mind in what passed for Helens’s daylight. Valentine reminded herself she could pull out, refuse to offer the contract to the publishers.

No matter what it felt like one of them was about to have their dream label shot through with a pen nib arrow.

The Valentine Case: Cooking Lessons

“Hey you guys made it! Come in, come in, come in, hurry up!” Dish Pernish’s flailing hands ambushed Punk and Lots, startled them into Dish’s apartment and corralled them to the kitchen. There was hardly anywhere else to send them, as the space separate from the bedroom and attached bath was mostly kitchen.

What had been a tiny kitchenette had been amateurishly extended in every direction, one random tile or cabinet handle at a time. The counter-top island now ran the length of two rooms, starkly divided in half between granite of a fuzzy gray and something so chaotically sedimentary that its surface looked like an old woman’s spilled button collection. Where there should have been a television there was a wine rack, and some of the bottles in it were just plastic party-size sodas with labels that screamed ‘discontinued for good reason’.

Pernish’s home was much tidier in its scent profile: tea, lemon, caraway, cardamom. The only other element muscling in had a very good excuse, and both were strawberries. Tray after tray of strawberries was stacked on two corners of the counter, looking as perfect as they did when they’d first found them.

“How’s the case going?” the giddy woman asked, which could have started a lot of awkward hemming and hawing over whether they were presenting the Snapup contracts, but their hostess recognized the start of it and snipped it off cleanly. “What am I saying? Haha, nothing! We’re here to cook! And we’ve got to do it quick! Grab your aprons.”

“Why are we in a hurry?” Valentine asked, successfully catching the lilac apron tossed to her and unsuccessfully tying its too-short straps around her back. Dish spun in behind her and addressed it, using a wire bread tie to bridge the gap.

“Because I didn’t want to make these tarts alone. Cooking’s no fun by yourself. You need a riveting conversation to blame when you measure something wrong. But these strawberries are about to go off!”

“You mean rot?”

“Nope,” Punk answered for Dish as she scurried around the counter to her own station in a creamy orange apron. Punk’s was seafoam, but there was a fourth folded apron set beside a fourth set of bowls and utensils, gray in color. “Remember all our stuff here was deleted. It breaks all at once, as if by keystroke. With food that means it’s fresh and ripe one second and completely inedible the next. What kind of clock are we on Dish?”

“Judging by my excellent instincts, hours Tasty. Probably two, but definitely not three. We’ll have to get started without our fourth.” Punk stopped fiddling with her station and actually looked at the fourth apron for the first time, scrutinizing its color. She licked a far inner corner of her upper lip, as if suspicious a big hairy spider had set up cobweb shop there.

“Who’s our fourth?”

“Doesn’t matter now,” Dish dismissed, “since he’s not h-” There was a single rap on the door, merely a courtesy, or perhaps an anti-courtesy, because he immediately let himself in less than a second later. He might’ve deemed it justified, as it was his single blogbot assistant brought with him that had performed the knock, closed fist still hanging in the air. The real courtesy was in asking the unsettling digital golem to wait idle outside.

“Alright, let’s get cooking!” Paperbaxter said, clapping his hands crisply, spared as they were the hardship of knocking. In casual clothes he still bothered to tuck his shirt in, but it was a breezy loose fit that gave him the look of someone inexperienced at sea spending a few too many minutes at the windy bow, and he set down his shoulder bag next to the counter like that same person disembarking.

“Dish!” Punk blurted, suddenly holding one of the knives, using it to point alternately between her friend and rival. “What’s he doing here!?” Dish’s face was blank for a couple seconds, despite the rush they were supposedly in, then an answer clicked into place like a cassette tape.

“Come on Tasty, don’t be like that. There’s basically nobody in Helens to invite over except you guys. I’ve never even hit the dinner party threshold. Besides, we just kind of ran into each other after lunch the other day; he helped carry all the berries back here. I couldn’t have him do that without getting to taste the reward, but there’s not going to be any reward if we don’t get to it!” She grabbed the gray apron and tossed it to Airdelay, who promptly tossed it right back.

“Brought my own,” he boasted, then proved it by pulling the item out of his bag and holding it up for all to see. What they saw was perhaps the ugliest apron ever to not technically exist. Its plaid bore several colors that would have been present in a pile of Thanksgiving vomit, disrupted only by a white section on the chest bearing a few words in a font only ever used by restaurants catering to retirees on menus that were seventy-five percent margarita: Kilt the Cook.

“What is that?” Lots couldn’t help but laugh.

“Isn’t it great?” Baxter asked as he donned it, shimmied his hips back and forth to force its best fit. He glossed over Punk muttering the word ‘terrible’. “Presumably it was supposed to read ‘kill the cook’, an itself-overplayed riff on ‘kiss the cook’, but it looks like there was a spelling mistake or autocorrect or something, to ‘kilt’, so when it showed up here it had this pattern. Helens is so nuts. So, what are we making?”

“Strawberry tarts,” Dish bubbled, “but they’ll look more like miniature pies.” She started dealing out the tiny tins like playing cards, making sure to toss Punk an actual card on which was written the modified vegan version of the recipe.

“Is this… uhm… allowed?” Valentine asked after a glance at her fuming attorney. “He’s the critic in my case. Are we not supposed to… I don’t know… fraternize outside the courtroom?” The information caught Dish off guard, but there was no time left to stall, so she just fired off a deep frown before sliding a bag of flour down to the other two women.

“There’s no conflict,” Baxter assured her, helping himself to one of his allotted strawberries meant for the tart. “I’m sure they would discourage it if they could, but people need to stay sane around here, and that means you need other people to stay sane with. If we were barred from socializing with coworkers we’d basically be in solitary confinement.”

“Still,” Austen countered, having regained her bearings enough to precisely slice the first of her berries, fanning them out as clinical cross-sections, “this could be intimidating for my client. You are trying to delegitimize her identity, and you have the authorities on your side.”

“It’s just a label,” he said, eyes elevating from Punk to Valentine halfway. “You can always be whatever genre you want and nobody can stop you. Plenty of works change genre late in the game when they get reevaluated. Just don’t let your sticker be your sticking point.” Val felt a little wisdom slip from what he said and through her defenses, with the immediate effect of combativeness.

“What’s your issue?” she asked, cracking an egg into the wrong bowl; across the counter Dish bit her tongue. “Your genre issue I mean. You must have one if you’re stuck here too.” The question didn’t seem to bother him, but he did cut the greens from three berries before actually answering.

“Me? No issues. I’m peachy. My author on the other hand, he’s in conniptions about any of his works getting labeled as ‘airport thrillers’. Never mind that I am a cheap thrill, and a cheap date,” he winked at Austen, “on top of all my elder siblings being sold mostly in airports. He thinks it’s trashy, wants to get some fancy silver sticker on one of our covers one day.

Those aren’t my feelings, but he’s my creator you know? I’m hanging around, doing my best to respect his wishes. And if I’m gonna hang around I’ve got to have justification and something to do, so I’m with the publishers.”

“How long have you been here?” It wasn’t Lots that asked. Punk was looking up, stilled fingers fully pink from berry juice. It was a real question, no veiled insult, no disguised growl. They locked eyes, her stony expression doing nothing to make his less breezy, but perhaps a little softer.

“Enthusiast Graham was not so enthusiastic when I showed up.” The counter went quiet. Dish was out of ingredients and tools to divvy, and she had no recipe card to crumple nervously, as that was one of the pillars of her being instead.

“Who’s that?” Valentine asked to break the silence over her knee.

“Punk’s predecessor,” he explained. “I was kind of her protege, even though we started on opposite sides.” Austen couldn’t withhold contribution on this front, so she turned and spoke to her client with the utmost conviction.

“Cypherina Graham was the best genre attorney Helens has ever seen. She wouldn’t allow herself to be beat, no matter what it cost. If one of her clients walked into her office and said they were an avant-garde grocery store magazine rack anthropomorphic xenofiction neonoir twice translated she wouldn’t doubt them for a second.

The publishers hated her. They had to print tens of new labels because of her alone. She innovated so much that she was more of an artist herself than an attorney. I try to give my clients everything, just as she did when I was one of hers.” Valentine thought about her current living arrangements, wondered where she would be with a less generous host. “I owe Cypherina Graham everything.”

“Literally,” Airdelay added, much closer to seconding her opinion than correcting it. He looked up through the puff of flour he’d generated by dumping some into a bowl, saw Valentine’s blank expectant stare. “What? You didn’t tell her?” Punk had something to say, but to him, not Lots, so her dark lips stayed tight.

“I do like to know things,” her client said, not trying to apply any pressure, but at the same time making it known she was getting so frustrated with being kept in the dark she might burst into flame just to generate some illumination. Both Dish and Punk tried to puncture Baxter with their glares, let the words deflate out of him that way, but he expertly dodged and kept chattering, as righteous as if he was making his closing argument in a court of heaven and hell.

“There are only so many positions available here in Helens. Punk came in qualified as an attorney thanks to all the court material in her manuscript, but she couldn’t stay here in protracted arbitration without a slot to fill, so Cypherina gave up her own.”

“Gave up? You mean-“

“She let the house publish her with a label she was fighting,” Baxter confirmed, cracking an egg over the lip of his bowl. A potential soul oozed out, plopped into the flour. With a gentle hand he spread a layer of it over the yolk. “And now we have Austentatious Punk, so really she did it for all of us.”

Silence, a silence only participated in by Ms. Pernish and Ms. Lots as the other two furiously sifted, measured, and whisked, gripped both ends of the counter. Valentine couldn’t get Punk to look back at her, but even without her enthusiast’s contribution everything fell into place with solemn finality.

This was why she’d offered her film rights to Hitchlowe. She saw an opportunity to give herself up, to lose her fight for the right reason, so she could join her mentor in some kind of Valhalla of improper attribution. If she didn’t do it she wasn’t as good or as brave as Cypherina Graham. Punk saw it as her duty to lose, as long as she could pass on the torch of resistance.

“I don’t want to do it,” Valentine said. Austen didn’t seem to hear her, she looked as if she was deaf to everything but the slicing of crisp strawberry flesh. The statement hung in the air, sinking slowly, until the weight of it on Punk’s shoulders became intolerable. Finally she looked into Lots’s eyes, gigantic and pooling. “The rights thing,” was the only elaboration she offered. “I don’t want to do it.”

“We don’t have anything else,” Punk warned her, voice thin. “I’ve got nothing else to offer.”

“We have the truth. If the publishers don’t see it I’ll just have to live with it. All I want right now is a strawberry tart.” Punk’s brain slowly backpedaled, toward a cliff of despair, but Dish decided to jump in, thinking she could rescue the next two hours or so, maybe even their appetites.

“Everybody be careful with the vanilla!” she yelled, as if the black strands she was about to pass out had lit fuses. “This is very strong stuff. You know it reminds me of how my author once opened up her cupboards and, in abject terror, realized she had no vanilla extract, when her very judgmental parents, and an even harsher aunt, were due over for dinner in a few hours.”

Dish’s babbling continued, gave everyone else the space to cook. Without stopping to breathe she finished her own phase and then went around the counter, gently correcting everyone else from behind with her long thin arms. Lots recalled what genre their host was, figured this rather pointless tale was the whole reason for her existence, and so did not interrupt. It wasn’t about the tarts for her, not really, they were just the end result. It was the story that inspired them, constructed them, baked them, and that nourished the soul while the food took care of the afterthought of the body.

“-and she remembered that this very harsh aunt’s late husband was such a resourceful man. He was in sanitation, always rescuing furniture from the dump, fixing it up, and putting it in their house where no one was the wiser; there wasn’t so much as a whiff of dump anywhere about it, but he would still call it a dump, just to agitate the aunt affectionately. So my author resolved to do just as he would’ve done. She was sure everything she needed was already there, even if it wasn’t in the most refined form or properly categorized. Vanilla, all she needed was the taste of vanilla. Scouring the cupboards, she searched first for the word, and when that came up dry, the memories of how everything tasted. She struck something, plumbing the fuzziest depths of her childhood. Cereal. Cereal marshmallows often had vanilla in them. There was a box in her pantry from when her little nephew had visited. There was all the vanilla she needed, wrapped up in silly barnyard shapes like roosters and sheep. The best she could do to blend them into the dish was, well, blend them into the dish! Out came the blender, which pulverized the marshmallows she spent ten minutes picking out of the cereal, only for her to then realize the cereal itself could be incorporated into her desert’s crust. It was a crazy move, followed by an even crazier idea. Why not tell her aunt? Not directly, but subtly. Let her puzzle it out that her niece was the spitting image of her dear husband. So she took the calculated risk of leaving the box out on the counter when her parents showed up. Not only that, my author ate her own dessert with the plastic color-changing spoon she found at the bottom of the box. And, oh you guys should have been there, it was magic. They locked eyes from across the table, my author boldly eating with her stupid little spoon, her aunt glancing over into the kitchen, at the box, brazenly open with its rumpled bag sticking out like some kind of garbage flower. And, and, you won’t believe what my author said. ‘Sorry it’s kind of a dump around here’ she said, but she smiled at her aunt when she said it, and you know what, she smiled back. They’ve actually been sharing recipes ever since. Isn’t that great? I couldn’t warm these ovens if that didn’t warm my heart first. Anyway, that’s how we got the idea to incorporate the vanilla into the crust of these tarts rather than the filling. It helps contrast with the brash strawberry. The whole thing pops because of it.”

For the time being they were all happy to let Dish chatter as much as she liked. If she eventually lost her case at the courthouse these cooking lessons might be the best memories she ever had, where a captive audience learned about tarts and her author’s drab personal life at the same time, the two now inextricably linked.

Austen and Baxter didn’t speak to each other much, but they did race to see who could complete their tart first, occasionally lunging for the same ingredient. Valentine watched, clean hands sliding down the front of her apron, as several of those mutual lunges resulted in their hands touching.

Baxter’s hand always pulled away first, letting Punk snatch the prize. He was letting her win these little contests, perhaps a concession since he couldn’t do the same thing in court. In his tiny smirks, flailing inchworms in search of a secure branch, Valentine saw that he liked seeing her victorious, seeing the smug purse of her olive green lips and the dip of her hot pink fauxhawk like a flamingo bowing to take a drink. The man liked living in Helens, that much was clear, but how much of that liking was wrapped up in a vegan firecracker? If she left, would he? Lots thought so, but she thought of little else but coupling and the special sort of sleep that comes after, that only occurs together, that sets people’s eyes upon a sighing moon when they don’t have it.

Dish’s instructions came precise and clear, but also faster, and faster, and after an hour more than a little biting. If something needed to be added to the mix she would chop it, sift it, crush it herself and toss it across the counter without asking, where it always landed right where it was supposed to, no granules or droplets astray.

The tarts were small enough that their bake time was only about fifteen minutes, and all four went into the oven in the same brief window. Their instructor was the judge of their readiness however, and she warned them it was inevitable for one tart to win the race. Everyone’s creation was scored on top, an initial in the ruby red filling so they could identify their own handiwork.

After a tense thirteen minutes of hot oven hum, Dish peeked, and one dessert was extracted. A wave of her oven mitt cleared the steam, and the others leaned forward to see the victor’s letter: P.

And that was P for Paperbaxter, not P for Punk, who had opted for A.

“Looks like I win,” he said. “That’s what happens when you kilt the cook.” He pointed at his opponents with a steely offset spatula. “None of you respected the power of this apr-“

“Oh my god you have to hurry up and eat it!” Dish honked. She shoved her way into his space and extracted the tart from its tin, placing it in front of him. “The berries could go any minute! Eat! Shhhh! Eat!” Baxter was momentarily wary of his own creation, but was sufficiently unsettled by Dish’s face, like a gargoyle having just witnessed an obscene hookup in the castle courtyard, to pick up his tart and let his fingers dance the heat away underneath it. He managed to bite off a fifth of it in one go, the swallow requiring more phases.

“Tell me how it is!” their host demanded. Crumbs shot out of Baxter before words.

“I’ll wet you- mmf– know as thoon as I ukh- eat thum.” If Dish was dished off at his response they couldn’t tell, because she’d whirled back to the oven so fast her face blurred, then disappeared in another belch of steam. Out came two more tarts: D and V. The head chef spanked the side of Lots’s tin as soon as it was on the counter, sending it sliding all the way down to her.

In total disregard of the temperature, Ms. Pernish lifted her own tart out of the tin, nibbled the crust away all around, and then scarfed the middle in three bites. As the molten center slid down her throat she took one second to savor it. Her body did a micro-jig, almost a curtsy to herself, compliment and congratulations in one.

“Delectable,” she said, satisfied only until she glanced down the flour-streaked work surface and saw Valentine delicately blowing on her tart with ballooned cheeks. “Val!” Her voice was clusters of gravel breaking up gummy pastry residue. “Eat your tart right now!”

“It’s hot,” she whimpered, like a much smaller woman, or an even smaller puppy. Dish rushed around behind Punk, tore open a cabinet below the sink, and pulled out not sympathy, but a small electric fan with rusty blades, which had perhaps sat on the windowsill and blown pie steam around to other apartments for a few valiant months. Its owner plugged it in and then immediately made the cord taut yanking it over to Valentine. She flipped it on and it rattled up to speed.

“You’re a romance; you’re supposed to like it hot!” Dish snapped. Three seconds of cooling occurred. “There, practically frozen! Now eat!” Lots obeyed, downing it in three bites, except for a glob of berry filling perched pertly on the edge of her lip. She wiped at it with her little finger and then disposed of the evidence.

“It’s yummy,” she bubbled. Then she looked at the battleground of eggshells and dough trimming trenches, saw that not a single bite had survived. “It’s a shame it’s over already.”

“Tell me about it,” Baxter agreed, listing over the counter like a ship with unsecured cargo. His eyes and mouth seemed out of communication with his brain, instead reacting to his digestive system’s waffling in regard to a wholesale rejection of food delivered too swiftly and rudely.

While that drama played out internally, Dish extracted the final tart and set it down in front of Austentatious, who was ready to shovel with a pair of pitching forks. They arced and flashed like breaching dolphins, about to splash into a jammy red sea. “I wish I could’ve saved that for a special occasion,” Airdelay added. Punk’s forks froze.

“Tasty, what are you doing?” Dish asked, a stained glass panel cracking somewhere just behind her eyes, but her friend didn’t answer, instead staring at Baxter.

“What, something in my teeth?” he asked, feeling around his apron for his toothpicks, which were in the pocket of his blogbot in the hallway.

“Special occasion,” Punk repeated, head creaking like an old door, all the way up to Valentine’s face. She too was startled, checked between her teeth with her probing tongue. “That’s it! That’ll do it!”

“Huh?” the other three voiced in their individual shades of confusion.

“Baxter, get out!” Punk ordered. The critic took a step back, but then looked like he’d forgotten where the door was. “Your tart’s gone, we had fun, you ran your mouth, and now you’re running somewhere else,” Punk rambled, abandoning her luscious tart to circle around and push her rival by the shoulders. “Now I have to discuss something with my client and you can’t be here! Out!”

“I had a great time ladies,” he threw over his shoulder, only fighting Punk enough to let her know he had a will of his own. He made a show of exiting, as if thrown out more forcefully, damage mitigated by the blogbot that cushioned the impact against the opposite wall. “We should do this again s-” The door slammed.

“Valentine,” Punk addressed, laser-focused and already burning Lots’s skin enough to make her itchy, “I know how we can get you on the contemporary romance shelf, by tomorrow night.” Her client smiled defensively.

“Gee, hopefully it’s not too late,” Dish said with a flat stale tone. She picked up and tilted Austen’s tart, to show it had turned a lovely but smelly lime green.

The Valentine Case: Public Reading 3

“This is Public reading three of Publishers V. Poke the Bare. We are in genre arbitration. The defense is Enthusiast Austentatious Punk arguing contemporary romance. Is she ready to proceed?”

“Yes.”

“The prosecution is Critic Paperbaxter Airdelay arguing erotica. Is he ready to proceed?”

“Yes publishers.”

“Alright,” Desister sighed, eyes barely open, “let’s see if we can’t get this settled today… If both parties would please bring us their expanded briefs and itiner-“

“Redaction!” Punk declared, slamming something down on her desk. The crack of the impact nearly toppled Publisher Tay from his chair, and it got all three of Baxter’s blogbots looking off in the same incorrect direction. He smacked one of them on the arm, correcting their gaze and prompting them to pass it down the line until all three were aligned again.

Once the critic got his own eyes back on his opponent he saw the strange color and proportions of what she had whipped out. Only the bottom portion looked familiar; he’d seen several of those trays stacked in Dish Pernish’s kitchen. It wasn’t filled with strawberries this time however. Whatever it was looked soft, and Punk hefted the tray to walk it around to him, beaming like she was about to serve him a summons to a dressing down. Before she got to him Publisher Bridge found his drawer of crumpled complaints.

“Traditionally the enthusiast waits for the house or the critic to make a claim before attempting to redact,” the man said, pushing the black bridge of his glasses with his index finger despite them having not slipped at all.

“Yes I understand,” Punk said plainly as she set the tray down directly in front of Airdelay. He had trouble taking his eyes off her ebullient pride, cheeks pink like the lady apples; she helped him out by pointing down, where he found a pile of reds and purples. Punk separated a lacy set of lingerie, lifted the idle hands of a blog bot to turn them into hangers, and draped it over.

“They’re not my size,” Baxter said cheekily, hoping to goad her into a response, but her smile and fanning fauxhawk just swung away toward the three publishers whom she was about to gift more briefs that weren’t briefs. One by one she presented them with items: pink panties laden with hearts, chalky candies bearing missplled mssaeges, plastic champagne flutes, baritone man and sax cassette tapes, and fuzzy dice with lewd pictograms.

“These aren’t legal documents,” Publisher Desister said scanning back and forth to see if they would flatten into an appropriate pair of dimensions, or if the purple bra closest to him would instead inflate into its own appropriate pair.

“What my client and I wish to redact is this entire proceeding,” Austentatious claimed, both hands planted on Bridge’s desk, leaning well into his personal space. She turned just enough to share a look with Lots, who nodded and urged her on. “Poke the Bare has suffered terrible financial damages at the hands of this court, and as such we demand restitution in the form of our preferred genre label.” Now she pulled out a document, straight from the heart and under her blazer.

“We have ample precedent from both Publishers V. Independence Midnight and Publishers V. Christmas King, New Year Queen that if financial damages in excess of half the expected launch revenue have been caused by the entity refusing publication the matter can be settled by dropping all active cases against the work and granting their demands regardless of the publishing courthouse’s opinion on their validity.”

“Special occasion,” Baxter said, snorting and clicking his tongue, unsurprisingly the first of their foes to understand her angle.

“Have I missed something?” Publisher Tay griped, scratching at his bald dome between strands of comb-over. “What harm did we do this little l- this work?”

“Damage was done by starting a genre dispute with someone who was already on a publication deadline,” Punk explained, making her way back to her desk, leaving them to deal with the variously flirtatious and lusty merchandise on their own, hoping to witness them try and figure out how to file such exhibits away. If they wanted to legislate erotica their public records were going to have to become pubic records for every employee and witness to judge as they passed through these supposedly professional halls. “Poke the Bare was always intended to be released in time for Valentine’s Day, which has now passed, and she has thus missed her most profitable window. Sales of romance novels always drop precipitously after the occasion, as do those of these exhibits.” She stopped herself short of claiming the publishers were also damaging her evidence with their drool.

“How do you know it was Valentine’s Day?” Bridge asked, throwing up his hands as if trying to flip a card table, succeeding only in rolling a fuzzy die to a picture that suggested suckling.

“As the publishers are well aware,” she countered, “seeing as we all frequent the same shops in Helens, there has been an inundation of Valentine’s Day-centric goods passing through. I’ve collected all these items from the deluge. The only reasonable explanation for their volume and concentration is that the holiday has come and gone, thus the surge of deletions that sent the related materials to us.

Strawberries that arrived days ago are now sitting in green mounds waiting for waste pickup. The color red is at this very moment, thinning out everywhere; you can go and check for yourselves. We may not be able to track time reliably here, but it marches nonetheless. Poke the Bare would have to wait an entire year for another chance at her deserved premiere, something she had adequately planned for, before the house got in her way.”

From across the chamber Baxter mimed applause, his blogbots copying without understanding they were supposed to mute the gestures, which practically forced Punk and Lots to take a bow.

“Obviously we will have to take the financial burden into consideration,” Publisher Tay said after clearing his throat, silencing the other parties, “but if the damage is done it’s already done and there’s no point in hurrying. We still need your expanded genre arguments for the record and to close out this session after that, properly, with our final decision.”

Everyone nodded, the real enthusiasm in Punk’s littler arms grabbing and tugging one Valentine’s larger ones, like a bell pull, tolling their presumed victory out for all Helens to hear, and hopefully the much more important worlds beyond.

Then they proceeded, both criticism and enthusiasm going through the motions, both happy that Valentine’s victory seemed a foregone conclusion. Baxter was breezy and erudite as ever, but while he spoke he was fiddling with his blogbots like toys, seeing if he could get them to eat the chlaky mispsleld ehxbiits, having them hold up all the underwear in lurid display.

Punk didn’t deviate an inch from procedure after that, laying out point by point, never slipping up since there was no pressure on the argument itself. It all came down to money with the house, everything else was a facade in the end. If the publishers got their bosses tied up in a lengthy dispute over this delayed release it would become a resource sink, and eventually their own losses would outweigh those of Valentine’s author, something they would never be able to justify without getting at least one of their trio canned while the other two watched the nauseating compression into book form and subsequent unceremonious sendoff to a humiliatingly demonetized lending library.

“Does the enthusiast rest?” Publisher Bridge asked once everything was presented and filed. His hands were on the final submitted set of documents, a woody orange folder principally containing Punk’s damages claim and proposed terms of truncated settlement.

“Yes publisher.”

“Does the critic rest?”

“Yes publishers.”

“Good. We’ll briefly adjourn for deliberation.” To keep up her streak of professionalism Punk suppressed a chuckle, as this was the phase that made the cost and corner cutting of the house most apparent, even the publishers not afforded an individual chamber for a purpose best served with closed doors.

The three men in their navy pillowcase robes had to huddle together under the wide sheet of paper constantly fed out of the wall: the automated record of the sessions. Once scrunched up together, wearing the giant legal receipt as three hats, they then lifted two cheap plywood screens out of slots on the floor to pretend at two stall walls, the draping paper both third and roof. Its constant chugging printer noises served to muffle the muttering.

The process didn’t take long, thanks in part to the uncomfortable squeeze of it; all three settled back into their desks. Before he said anything, Publisher Bridge held out the orange folder with one hand, beckoning Punk forth with it. She came and retrieved the materials, was halfway to her hug with Valentine, who was already opening up her big arms and recliner-cozy body when-

“We have reached a genre designation in the case of Publishers V. Poke the Bare. The label is erotica, in favor of Critic Airdelay. The work may now report to the distribution shuttle.” Austentatious froze, her heart the halved, chipped, and shot product of a malfunctioning ice machine. She didn’t need to turn to know the sneer on Bridge’s face as he adjusted glasses that never wavered, or the deflation and sideways floor glance that Baxter hoped his legal team would replicate.

What her position forced her to see was the face of Valentine Lots, possibly the sweetest woman ever imagined, definitely among the most fragile in crucial moments such as this. Her client’s eyes turned to rain-streaked glass. Kissable lips quivered. Luxurious voluminous hair became a silken burden on a starved camel’s back. And worst of all, a shadow was thrown on her, a bucket of black paint, which would erase her when she was thrown into the void the publishers were calling her home.

Not while Austentatious Punk was still a licensed and practicing attorney-at-genre. Steady Valentine, she hoped. Her client just had to keep silent, let her enthusiastic fan take the arrow to the heart. They were both romances. Austen silently swore she would be fine, that one day a second heart would get skewered on that arrow and they could bleed together.

“Redaction,” she coughed, just loud enough to be heard, and to hide the sound of her slipping a cloudy sheath of papers into the orange folder. She turned to face the publishers, all three of whom were repulsed by her attempt to redact during a verdict. So, it turned out they hated what women read more than they hated her proposed price tag for continued arbitration; that was clear now, seeing their faces. How about an additional 0, a screw you 0 after that, and a let’s-catch-a-Friday-night-flick 0? “This is the publishers’ designation despite the Snapup Studios contract included in Poke the Bare‘s proposal?”

“The what?” Their heads practically shuffled as they searched each others’ eyes for context. Publisher Tay’s comb-over combed itself the wrong way in search of an explanation.

“Perhaps you accidentally missed it,” Punk proposed, frantically gluing any cracks manifesting in her voice. As she, very deliberately, walked back to the publishers, she threw a look at Baxter, begged him on behalf of Lots to keep his mouth shut. He gave her nothing in response, and gave the same to his bosses.

She made it to her destination, dropped her payload from a single foot that felt like ten thousand. Multiple publishers grabbed at it, ripped it open, scanned the contract for a number of theaters and a potential release date. Hitchlowe had made sure they were where they belonged, plenty intimidating to a mere publishing house, every dot on every i a bullet hole in their bravado.

They could potentially fight and win a damages case against one author and one agent, but a movie studio with an annual international gross of three billion? Not on their lives. If you combined all the publishers’ manuscripts they didn’t have half the pull of ten drunken script pages jotted off by one of Snapup’s frequent collaborating writers. If they denied them the book they wanted to adapt, threw even a blade of grass into the gears of their release schedule, a truly colossal pocketbook would descend on the courthouse and crush it.

“The- uhh- the house would like to thank Enthusiast Punk for her due diligence,” Bridge stammered, the other two nodding, searching among their papers for the spines they’d forgotten to purchase from the company store. “In light of this information we will instead issue a label of-” he glanced at Valentine, an act that practically included a sultry jazz trumpet sting every time it occurred, a glance that saw her mouthing her genre to him defiantly, “-contemporary romance. Are there any redactions from Critic Airdelay?”

Eyes went to him, but he was already shrugging the entire case off as a fluke. What was one label slapped over another between friends? Punk and Lots exploded, directing the debris at each other. The now-properly-labeled work lifted her attorney into a bear hug and spun her around several times, gushing and giggling while the publishers quietly tapped their ink stones and declared the arbitration complete, shuffling out with their heads down, an angle from which it was easier to wipe their sweaty brows on their robes.

“I can walk you to the shuttle,” Punk told her once she was finally put down. She grabbed Valentine’s hand and pulled her out of the oppressive chamber, into halls filled with employees that could no longer touch or threaten them, white gloves of the guides fluttering out of the way like birds flushed from a bush. Other potential clients parted and watched the legal juggernaut of Punk and regular juggernaut of Valentine cruise all the way through and outside, to the stop designated for the shuttle.

It promptly arrived, summoned by their victory, silver and blue, always looking like a chariot to Mt. Olympus in victory when at all other times it was a bus with a head cold coughing out its tailpipe. Its doors squealed open so Valentine could step inside and turn to say her goodbye.

“This is as far as I can go,” the attorney said, choking up, but less so than the totality of her client.

“You gave up your film rights for me,” she blubbered. “How are you supposed to get your romance now?”

“I’ll think of something, don’t worry about me. You get out there and you knock’em dead for me, okay? We’ll always be friends, across any of these one ply toilet squares divvying up art for the people who think it’s nothing but pie they didn’t get a piece of. Hell, I would’ve figured out the Valentine’s Day thing just from your name if I wasn’t so distracted by all the fun we were having.”

“Thank you so much Austen. I’ll never forget you.” Punk had to urge her to spit it out when it was clear there was something else she was tonguing against the bed of her mouth. “I like Baxter for you and I think you should have lunch with him, and marry him, and have way more than three sex scenes with him!”

“Alright, that’s enough out of you, get out of here before you spoil your own ending.”

“I love you Punk!”

“You love everybody you big softy! And everybody’s gonna love you. Go.” The doors shut. Punk watched through the windows as other passengers said hello to the passing addition, something they all were compelled to do as she redistributed her impressive junk back toward the trunk, the whole bus shifting according to her infatuating weighty whim.

Then it puttered away to a place Austentatious had never been, leaving her stood there on the sidewalk, under the vestibule, nothing to replace the buoyancy and the burden of Valentine but the man suddenly at her side, sans assistants. He had his stupid sunglasses on and his hands in his pockets; she sensed them stretching the fabric in attempted escape. Maybe they wanted to hold something, and that’s why he had to fold them away like his many dress shirts of identical gray that he insisted had a percentage difference in gradation.

“She would’ve been okay with any label,” Paperbaxter said.

“But you didn’t say anything,” Punk probed. “We both know you could’ve concocted something to counter that contract.”

“I liked her. I want her to have what she wants, whether or not she needs it. Same goes for you Punk.”

“I’m not gonna get it,” she sighed, unwisely looking up into the Helens sky, seeing construction paper fates tear themselves and disappear down the holes in fading newsprint letters. “My film rights had to go to get her a deal. It reinforces my procedural label. Now I’m stuck here with you and your AI zombies until they overflow, bust out, and kill us all.”

“You should recruit some then,” he said like it was nothing. “That’ll be three more not sitting in the receptacle. It buys us time.”

“There are more of them everyday,” she dismissed. “I can’t stand seeing them. They’re all reminders that people are trying to squeeze us out. They don’t like that we’re alive, or that we make noise.”

“So take the easy way out, under a bad label. You’ll get sorted, just might take longer. Or you could take my way out, which is taking me out to dinner.” Punk smirked. Her eyes rolled his way, fatigued, but not entirely dismissive.

“No offense Baxter, but I don’t think you’re the kind of guy my author would approve of.”

“Authors don’t decide what art is either. We do.” Silence settled in, but she kept waiting for him to shuffle off, and he valiantly refused.

“I suppose, if we had a date, that could be experience that helps my genre case,” she posed. “If courtroom content made me a lawyer, maybe being a lover can get me where the romance goes.”

“The critic and the enthusiast finally agree on something,” Baxter said. His hands reappeared as he held out his arm for her to take. “Shall we?” She sent her hand down his sleeve, and that was the only touch.

“Easy tiger. According to your calendar, we’ve got all the time in the world.” Austentatious Punk kissed the air with her lustrous olive lips and walked away, across most of Helens in minutes. What did Dish have ready for pickup? She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a decent bite, except for what she just took out of the publishers.

The Valentine Case: Labeled!

Contemporary Romance!