Moonshine

by Jasmine Gower

  “Of course, Miss Agatha–”

  “Oh, darling,” the older woman interrupted, patting Daisy gently on the cheek. “Angel, please. I’m not some stuck-up grouch like Andre. If we’re to dance together, we can’t be on a last name basis.”

  Mr Swarz steepled his fingers. “Angel, what are you up to?”

  She removed her hand from Daisy to place it delicately upon her own collarbone. “Me? Andre, my intentions are perfectly amicable, I assure you.” Daisy noticed the little phoenix chicken figurine on Mr Swarz’s desk wobble where it stood on its twiggy legs. She had noticed it doing that during her interview, too, whenever a draft swept through Mr Swarz’s office. It was a distracting little trinket, and entirely out of place with Mr Swarz’s personality in its colorful whimsy.

  “I suspect you intend to take my assistant out partying and drinking so that she’ll drag herself in tomorrow morning hungover.”

  The idea of taking a night off to relax was appealing, she had to admit. Mr Swarz paid her enough that she could afford her dim studio apartment in the rundown southwest district with enough left to put away for savings and buy a new dress or a ritzy meal out every now and again. Ambitions for her new job were well and good, but the whole point of earning that money was to eventually spend it.

  “Don’t worry, Mr Swarz. I can hold my drink. Angel, I’d love to go along with you.”

  Angel smirked, showing off the pretty curves of her round cheeks. “Excellent. We’ll come pick you up after dinner, then.” Daisy smiled back, ignoring the irritated hiss from her boss. She respected her employer, but she wouldn’t allow his misgivings to deny her a bit of harmless fun on her own time.

  But for now, she was on his time. Once Angel strode out of the office, Mr Swarz pushed back his chair and stood. “While I have you here, there is another task I need to train you on. I would like to include in your duties checking the company post office box for deliveries. Come, I will show you where it is.”

  Another foray into the city? Daisy’s toes and heels ached in protest, but she supposed she couldn’t complain to her boss, especially given the condition of his legs. Instead, she drew on her reserves of energy to muster up a smile. “Of course, sir. Lead the way.”

  Andre brought his cane and a face mask for the outing, though when they stepped outside it seemed the latter wouldn’t do him much good. The ashfall in the morning had been raining larger particles, but humidity had rolled in during the afternoon, and the flecks of soot dissolved in the moist air. It was so much worse than the heavy ashfall, he thought. A face mask could shield one from solid flecks of ash, but when it was hazy it was fine enough to sneak into throats and nostrils and eyes. And the smudging on his glasses’ lenses – a nightmare.

  Miss Dell hadn’t brought along anything for their excursion. That left her hands free for Andre to hand her a folder with details on the post office box.

  “Everything you’ll need,” he said as they headed out the front office door.

  Miss Dell flipped the folder open and scanned through the few documents within as they walked, looking too miserably bored to convince Andre that she was actually reading any of it. “Is it far from here?”

  “It’s the nearest postal office there is. I would consider it something of a trek, though, yes.” Miss Dell’s eyes flickered toward his cane, holding her gaze just long enough for Andre to notice but not long enough to be rude. She was clever enough to understand his insinuation – on her own, she would likely be able to make the trip much more quickly. But perhaps she would appreciate the more leisurely pace, having run about covering Vicks’ ass earlier that morning.

  “Who’s… J R Elroy?” Miss Dell asked.

  “Who?”

  “The PO box is under their name. Do they work at Stripes?”

  Apparently she was reading the documents, after all. “Oh, Mr Elroy, yes. He doesn’t work with us, but some of our accounts are listed under his name for tax reasons.”

  “Would that tax reason be the evasion thereof?” Miss Dell cast Andre a sideways look that left him unsure if she meant the question as a joke.

  Regardless, he answered casually, “Of course not.” It was. “Mr Elroy was an early investor in our company and still retains a number of financial and institutional ties to us.” Mr Elroy was fictional, named after a dog Angel had owned as a child.

  Andre didn’t take any pleasure in lying to his new assistant, of course, but this was all quite above her head so early on in her career. In time – and perhaps after a few promotions – she would be prepared to hear about the grittier business details of their company. Until then, Andre needed to be sure she could at least survive a week in her position before he shared any legally-dubious trade secrets with her.

  His lies seemed to satisfy Miss Dell, at least. “Uh-huh. And how often do I need to make runs to the PO box?”

  “Twice a week, typically. More frequently if we are expecting packages.” Miss Dell made a humming noise that expertly walked the line between a neutral acknowledgement and a whining groan. It was less complaint than he ever received from Amelia or the Pasternack twins, Andre supposed, so he didn’t comment on it. Instead, he focused on leading her to their destination, turning north down Ivy Street. The neighborhood surrounding their office, just off the edge of the industrial district, was laid out in a neat if tight grid, so there were a number of routes to the post office six blocks down, but Ivy was the largest and safest of these streets. He didn’t care for the thought of Miss Dell trying to cut through back alleys.

  “It’s not a strenuous walk,” he continued as they made their way down the street. It wasn’t the ritziest of Soot City’s neighborhoods, but the little shops packed together along the road gave the area a sense of community. They passed by bakeries and pottery stores and little urban temples and shrines occupying the relatively cheap spaces available in this district’s narrow brick and sandstone buildings. Across the street was a dress shop, and Miss Dell watched with rapt interest as a seamstress set up a short blue dress on the mannequin in the front window.

  Turning down two more streets, they soon arrived at the post office, a squat little building occupying a good half of the block on its own. A bank of iron grated lifts – distinctly of ogre design with their aesthetically-exposed gears and wheels – lined the outside of one wall, where postal workers went up and down between the ground level and the post office basement with carts filled with bundles of letters. The postal workers scurrying into and out of the lifts had a busy rhythm to their hurrying, like worker bees in a hive.

  Miss Dell appeared unimpressed with the efficiency of her local public service employees, again peeking into the folder that listed the PO box’s information. “So, I just give them the number and they’ll bring me whatever’s there?”

  “Yes, and then you’ll sign off for it. They may call me to verify the first few times, since you’re a new face, but eventually they’ll recognize you as someone responsible for this box.”

  Miss Dell made that not-quite-whining hum again and snapped the folder shut. Andre led her inside to the front desk to walk her through the process, which was as simple as he had just explained – Daisy provided the desk attendant the company’s PO box number, the attendant went into the back room and returned with a small box of stationery that Angel had recently ordered from a catalog, and Daisy signed a form verifying her authority to retrieve items from the Stripes’ box. They were soon on their way back to the office.

  Their route back was the same as the one there, and again Andre noticed Miss Dell staring at the dress in the boutique window. It seemed a frivolous thing to fixate on, but he supposed she was young and just coming into her own, and material objects were easy to become distracted by at such a time in one’s life. It did remind him of something that he wanted to buy, as well.

  “Excuse me while I stop by the newsstand,” he said, as they neared the general store on Ivy Street. A small stand was set up outside of it, tended by a young, pasty man try
ing to flirt with two young women who appeared to have just emerged from the shrine next door. The newsstand boy didn’t notice Andre and Miss Dell approach, struggling too much trying to form coherent sentences. Most Ashlanders spoke the Iongathi Trade Language – not because there were many Iongathi immigrants in Ashland, but simply because it was so common in international trade – but this young man kept stumbling into some kind of Algretau-Glynland pidgin. The bronze-skinned women in beaded Awros-style veils snickered at his patchwork language, whispering between themselves about his stilted efforts to communicate. Given what the man was saying to them in his mother-languages – Andre’s family had come from the Ridgelands of Algretau, and he had picked up a fair amount of Algretau-Glynland pidgin from his mother – he thought it was for the best that the young ladies did not fathom the content of the young man’s babbling.

  Andre turned his attention away from that exchange, browsing through the print selection while the newsboy was distracted. Ogre technology had lent itself well to the print industry, and Soot City was already building for itself a reputation as a hub of communication. No fewer than three dozen different publications were laid out on the stand before them. Some were even in color, but Andre wasn’t about to pay the extra nickels – it was the same news, no matter what flourishes bordered the page.

  “Do you read the newspaper, Miss Dell?” he asked as he picked out one. The Chapton University Times. A student-run press, but much more reliably progressive than many private papers.

  “Not particularly, sir.”

  “Where do you get your news from, then?”

  “Franklin Blaine’s radio program.”

  Andre’s blood chilled, and he turned to stare wide-eyed at her. Franklin Blaine was some blustering radio pundit enamored with the traditionalist ideals of his ancestors from Berngi, complaining about refugees and forward-thinking women and magicians. Although Mr Blaine’s family fled to Ashland presumably to escape the fascist regime in Berngi, it seemed he was quite content to embrace their talking points. Could Miss Dell really listen to that pompous, reactionary dreck? When she saw the look on Andre’s face, and with the folder and parcel from the post office tucked under one arm, she threw up her free hand. “No, I’m kidding! My apartment walls just do nothing to block it when my neighbor has it blasting from their radio. Absolutely loathe the man.” She stepped closer to the newsstand and plucked from it a magazine printed with a color cover. “I’m more fond of the quarterlies, myself.”

  “It’s not quite news, though,” Andre said. The magazine she held was titled Vim and decorated with a drawing of a young woman with dark golden skin wearing a silk wrap over a short dress. The long legs extending from her meager skirt were disproportionate to any actual human – Andre was sure it was supposed to be abstract, but it just looked absurd to him. She was framed by headlines written in Iongathi and Elvertan that exclaimed about the cinema and fashionable new jacket cuts. There was only one headline that referred to current events – an exposé on a bank robber that had been arrested after a string of hold-ups. Sensationalist garbage.

  Miss Dell set the magazine back on the stand but made an effort to defend the publication, regardless. “Magazines aren’t for breaking news, no, but they provide social commentary on the current cultural climate. Essays and interviews… even advertisements can be a valuable lens into the values of a society.”

  Andre considered and took another magazine off the rack, this one featuring a drawing of a young model dressed in a skin-tight pink and green costume fringed with fake feathers. “Interesting hypothesis. What insight does this give about our society?”

  Miss Dell looked carefully over the cover before raising her eyes to glare at Andre. “This woman is dressed to look like a faerie, so I would think this speaks primarily to how our society sees faeries.”

  Her answer was clipped and measured. Andre could tell he was annoying her, but it was better than listening to more of her bored sighs. “And how would you qualify that viewpoint?”

  “Disconnected. If a human model were to dress like an ogre or faun in this regard, it would be seen as demeaning and tasteless, but no one expects any faerie to ever see this image. Sexual – she’s near naked and posed to give an almost complete view of her backside. Intertwined with nature and magic, what with all these flowers and watercolor flourishes in the background.”

  “And what is the value of these observations?”

  Miss Dell looked at him again, holding his gaze for a long, silent moment before answering. “It tells me that Ashlanders don’t quite understand non-humans or magic – that they see such things as alien and exotic – and that faeries in particular are unknown to them. That if I wanted to talk to my countrypeople about these topics, it’s a conversation that would be prone to misinformation and misunderstanding.” She leaned over and pointed to the newspaper that Andre had picked up. “What does this article on stagnating stock values tell you about Ashland?”

  Impressive. Even if Andre still found these magazines to be silly things, Miss Dell was certainly an analytical thinker. It would be unwise to underestimate her like that again, and Andre tucked that thought into the back of his mind.

  “You buying?” Before Andre could respond to Miss Dell’s coy turning of his own challenge against him, the newsboy barked over at them, as the young women of Awros-descent had grown bored of his antics and walked off.

  “Yes, yes,” Andre said, setting the magazine aside and digging around in his pockets for change to purchase the newspaper. The newsboy muttered something unpleasant in his pidgin as he waited for Andre to conjure up the coin – which Andre politely pretended not to understand – and took his money without any gesture of thanks, though he did spare a moment to look Miss Dell over. Worthless lout. Tired of the young man’s presence and eager to return to work, Andre said to Miss Dell, “Let’s get back to the office. I’ve already had you out and about over half the day, and I won’t keep you longer from your desk duties.”

  After a quick dinner of rice and cauliflower, Daisy fussed over her reflection in the bathroom mirror, preparing for her night out before Angel and Rudolph arrived to pick her up. She had already changed into a slim, knee-length amber dress and white thigh-high socks and was fast at work applying her makeup. She heard through her apartment’s thin walls a radio switch on, and the raving and frothing of her neighbors’ favorite talking head carried in muffled waves into her living space.

  “What do you hate today, Franklin Blaine?” Daisy mumbled as she examined her reflection under the single, yellow bathroom light. Sunken eyes, tired from a day at work, and her hair in a frizzy, springy mess after picking loose the day’s ashfall. A bit of eyeliner would be enough for her face, but it always took a healthy dosage of pomade to smooth her hair down. With a few weeks between her and her last trip to the salon, her hair was beginning to curl just past her ears, and she nearly emptied her current bottle slicking those curls back into place. As she worked on that, Franklin Blaine answered her question from her neighbors’ radio.

  “–and these magician folk. All this higgledy-piggledy jabber about energy flows and… and quantum what-have-you–”

  “It ought to be illegal,” Franklin Blaine’s guest complainer interrupted.

  “It’s unnatural, it’s twisted, my family doesn’t need to hear that! And these magicians treat it like… like a fashion statement.”

  “Well, they… they try to get people in on it. The kids, especially. Kids are too… they aren’t developed enough, mentally, to understand why it’s so… it’s–”

  “It’s unnatural.”

  “Aw, Franklin,” Daisy said, running the shiny goop through her curls. “You’re hurting my feelings.” When her fingers snagged on a tangle, it at least provided a distraction while Franklin Blaine and his equally huffy, indignant guest went on ranting, probably blaming new immigrants and women’s agency for the increase in magicians and illegal mana production and the decline of morality. It was more or less the s
ame every evening. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Franklin Blaine’s disapproval never stopped her from being or doing much of anything. There was a bit of a power trip in knowing that this man that the radio paid to try to control people could not, in fact, control her.

  She could use that sort of self-confidence that night. As if going out with coworkers off-hours for the first time wasn’t nerve-racking enough, Angel was an intimidating figure. Daisy wanted the older woman to like her – not just for the workplace favor, but on a simple, human level. Angel drove a car and dated a younger man and had a job with the word “Senior” in the title. She was the kind of woman that even the bankers in their nights off at the bars bowed to and called “ma’am,” and when she said no, the matter was considered settled. Daisy respected her for all that and, even more so, for the fact that Angel seemed happy with her life and herself as a person. Maybe it was selfish, but Daisy recognized that a part of her desire to know Angel better was a flicker of hope that her commanding presence and attitude could rub off on Daisy herself.

  She heard a staccato of light car horn beeps from outside just as she finished slicking down the last of her curls. Hurrying to the kitchen window, she peeked outside at the street running behind the back of her building. A dark jalopy with its headlights on waited below. From the glare of the light, she couldn’t tell for sure if it was Angel and Rudolph sitting inside. It was about time for them to arrive, though, and she stumbled back across the room to the box of her grandmother’s trinkets she had sitting on her dresser.

  Her hand hovered above the open box as she considered what she wanted to bring, if anything. The hardest part of living up to the expectations of a Modern Girl, in her experience, was reconciling ideals of progress with the traditions left to her by Grandma Sparrow Dell. Back when Sparrow first began teaching Daisy of the Old Ways – that was literally what she had called it – it had been no big matter. Ashland was still a young land, and its citizens were expected to cling to some of their immigrant ancestors’ ways. And the backlash against magic had only begun a decade or two ago, just starting up when Daisy was first learning. Of course, while the “mainstream” magic in Ashland wasn’t as horrifying as the propaganda always made it seem, the traditions that her grandmother had passed on would certainly draw alarm if they were better known.