Bruce beat on the door with the flat of his palm, with wanton disregard for the disturbances being caused in the middle of the night. His normally unruffled appearance was, in a word, ruffled. He seemed to have thrown a randomly selected coat over the top of a pair of battered jeans, a slightly stretched out t-shirt, and a pair of untied boots.
Directly behind him, Charles shrugged awkwardly, looking up and down the street. “He might not be here.”
Bruce stopped hammering for a moment to turn and look at Charles. “Would that be good for you or bad for me?”
Charles seemed to ponder this for a moment before the door opened.
“Apparently not that bad for you,” Charles offered.
Alistair fixed Bruce in place with a gimlet eye. He wore his typical getup, the subdued but colored suit and barely buttoned shirt. Bruce had occasionally wondered if Alistair slept in it, and it seemed quite likely given the current situation.
“Bruce.” Alistair began with leaden precision. “You aren’t unpleasant company on the regular but is there a reason you’re trying to beat my door in in the middle of the night?”
Bruce swallowed hard, a solid attempt to control his own breathing. “We need to make Charles less lucky.”
Alistair’s only movement was to slide his gaze over Bruce’s shoulder. Charles waved from below the steps – an average man in almost every conceivable way, he would have been impossible to describe. His most distinguishing feature was his utter lack of anything outside the absolute center of the bell curve. “Charles?”
“That’s me.” Charles ducked his head.
Alistair went back to Bruce. “Are either of you going to elaborate any further?”
“Is luck real, Alistair?” Bruce said.
“I believe the idea that some people are more lucky than others and rectifying that is the core concept behind most revolutions. What exactly is your issue?”
A gust of wind shuffled through the trees, an embarrassed little attempt to break the silence that followed.
“May we come in?” Bruce asked.
“I haven’t decided. What’s happening?”
Bruce took another moment. “Charles is, he’s extremely lucky. I didn’t completely believe him but he always lands on his feet.”
Alistair nodded. “I can see how that would be hard for you.”
“No, but it’s true.”
“Clearly my main objection to whatever this is.” Alistair waved his hand. “I’m in the middle of something, if you could hurry it along.”
“He sucks the luck out of other people, or something. People who know him have bad luck.” Bruce jabbed a thumb at him. “Again, I didn’t believe him, but then it started happening to me. My nice pen broke, completely ruined my shirt.”
“Tragic.”
Bruce threw his hands up. “That’s not it, that was just one thing. Charles got dropped off his company’s HR roster right before they started a round of firings, right?” Bruce looked to Charles.
Charles gestured over his own head. “Completely forgot about me, fired everyone around me, I walked out like an action guy in front of an explosion.” He mimed the noise and used his fingers to make a little impromptu prop.
“I’m frankly pleased for you.” Alistair started to close the door. “Good night.”
Bruce slapped the door back open. “Natasha is sick. It got very bad, very fast. I can’t afford to guess anymore. I think it might be true.”
“Natasha is a hale, hearty woman. She’ll be fine.”
“The baby might not be.”
Alistair looked blankly at Bruce.
“Baby?” Bruce ventured. “Mine? Natasha’s?”
“You have a baby?”
“She’s pregnant.”
Alistair frowned. “How long has this been a thing?”
“Six months!” Bruce slapped the door again. “Goddammit, Alistair, what the hell is going on?”
Alistair sighed. “It might just be coincidence.”
“Would I be here in the middle of the night if this was the only coincidence to happen? It got bad. This has to stop.”
Alistair stared back for a long, still moment. There was a searching moment. Then, he looked over at Charles. “How long has this been happening?”
Charles shrugged. “All my life, I reckon.”
“And you’re tired of it?”
Charles nodded.
“Parents make a deal with a fae? Favored by some gods?”
Bruce shook his head at the same time Charles did. “We already looked into that. He’s been grabbing iron and praising the wrong deities for a week now.”
Alistair gave Charles a critical glance, then cocked his finger. Charles stepped up beside Bruce, and Alistair gave him an appraising glance.
After a moment of shuffling, Charles said. “You’re shorter than I expected.”
Alistair sniffed hard. “Nobody asked.”
Charles cleared his throat and avoided eye contact. He glanced over Alistair’s shoulder before starting suddenly. “Oh, my god, is your house on fire?”
“A little bit.” Alistair poked Charles in the sternum. “It’s supposed to be right now.”
“It’s supposed to be on fire?”
“I said I was in the middle of something.”
Bruce tapped Charles on the shoulder. “Come on, man, focus up.”
“Right, sorry. I guess. Distracted. I guess.”
Alistair started to close the door. “Straightforward. Charles here isn’t a void attracting the luck of others; otherwise something unfortunate would have already happened.”
“More than the house on fire?” Charles put in.
“Again, nobody asked you. The point is, your personal good luck is overwriting the fortune of others. It isn’t necessary that others suffer, except insofar as the tapestry of fate is a complicated thing with great interactions.”
Charles goggled.
“What do we do?” Bruce asked.
“Charles, have you played the lottery before?”
Charles shook his head.
“Why not?” Alistair pointed down the street. “Go a very long way away, find a gas station, and buy something that has the numbers come up tomorrow.” He looked at the sky. “Later today.”
“Will that help?” Bruce said.
“If it doesn’t, you’ll at least have some pocket money to split.” Alistair waved Bruce in. “I’ll need you here.”
The loom beat incessantly, sliding across a weft that was both small enough to be delicately threaded by a set of smooth but aged hands and large enough to span the cosmos. That was the entirety of this reality: the loom, the threads, and the three figures weaving a pattern of impossible complexity. What these four stood on was nothingness itself, solidified into an edgeless surface. They bobbed at slightly different heights, as though they’d come to a loose agreement on where the floor should be but had failed to knock out the fine details before starting. Where there would be black, or space, or featureless plane – there was void. An overwhelming sense prevailed that nothing that happened here counted, in the same way that a memory didn’t count. An even more overwhelming sense said that what happened here counted more than anything else in the entire universe.
“Hello,” Bruce said.
The loom didn’t stop, but the three figures looked up at him.
“Hi. I’m Bruce. Um. I was sent here to talk to you about a little business with luck. A friend of mine is getting a little too much of it, I’m given to understand. And I was told that you might have something to do with it?”
The figures stared at Bruce, all three ancient crones. Their hands did not stop working the weave for a moment even as they studied him. Bruce studied them back, noting that while they were old, they were not aged. It was as though they had been created old seconds ago, or as if they existed before time but did not flow with time.
“You are outside your world,” the crone working the shuttle said, tying off a knot.
“You were sent by someone who cares not about you,” added one of the others as she beat the loom twice.
“Right.” Bruce cut off the third one. “I’m here because my wife and future child are ill and I’d like that to be knocked off. So if you could just get Charles Fogg to stop messing with everyone else’s fortune that would be lovely. Thank you.”
The shuttler spoke. “You do not understand the import of what you ask.”
“You ask to alter the pattern.”
“You demand that fate bends for you.”
Bruce laughed awkwardly. “See, yes, I’ve been told that it’s actually that I’m asking to stop bending fate for the other fellow. Just let it fall where it might.”
“Who asks you this?”
“Why come they not themselves?”
“What keeps them from here?”
Bruce shrugged, his eyes drifting towards the threads. One of the crones snipped a thread and, with blinding skill, tucked the loose end away into the pattern. “Long story, he can’t come places like this. Anyway, any objections?”
“He is such a beautiful shade of blue.”
Bruce cocked his head to the side. After a moment, he leaned forward. Then, “Elaborate on that?”
One of the crones ceased their work on the tapestry, reaching out for a thread and holding it out. It glimmered in the void, achingly blue, sparkling.
“He is such a lovely shade of blue,” she repeated.
“It would be a shame to hide it,” the shuttler added.
“If other threads must be hidden, so be it.”
Bruce took a step forward. “Wait, is this a convoluted metaphor? It’s literally just a nice shade of blue?”
The thread dove back into the weave.
“Seriously?” Bruce fished into his pocket and retrieved a plastic bag filled with ink, a snapped pen barely visible inside. “You broke my pen for his thread to be more visible? Does the blue mean anything? What if it was red?”
“The blue is pretty.”
“The red is passe.”
“Beauty is its own reward.”
Bruce opened the bag and looked inside. The broken pen lay like a shattered soldier, having fought valiantly to the last, a burgundy tube in a small sea of blue-black.
“So that’s it, then. His thread goes on top of all the others.”
Again, no answer. The loom beat.
“Well. Bugger this.” Bruce made a single quick movement, punching the bag inside out. The pen itself flew off into the void. At some point, it vanished in an event horizon, unnoticed by all.
Unnoticed because Bruce, in the same movement, flung himself onto the tapestry, smearing the ink up and across. An enormous blot shot across the tapestry, and then he scrabbled for the blue thread. The crones grabbed for him, and Bruce discovered to his surprise that even ancient beings of anthropomorphic concepts suffer the effects of a lack of exercise and sunlight. He bullied through the thread, then stood up, panting slightly.
“Have I just caused World War Two or something?” Bruce stared at the blot.
“You’ve ruined the color!” One of the crones shrieked.
“Destroyed the thread!”
“It is hideous!”
“I swear I was only aiming for one thread.” Bruce held his hands up. “I apologize.”
A moment later, Bruce vanished.
“I could have really used that lottery win.” Charles took a slow sip of his coffee.
“Right. I’m sorry.” Bruce copied the sip and stared out across the duck pond. He was much more put together now, his typical tweed jacket in place. Charles, meanwhile, had the unshaven look of a man who HR just realized was supposed to be let go.
“What did your boss do?”
Bruce cleared his throat. “Not much, personally.”
“Sucks is all. I guess everyone’s luck runs out eventually.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s run out,” Bruce ventured. “Just normalized. You’ll be back on your feet again. Come over for dinner tonight.”
Charles nodded slowly. “Thanks.”
“Yeah. Um. It’s nothing.”
Charles stood up and stretched. “Lady Luck’s a bitch, isn’t she?”
“Them. Yes. I mean, petty, really, that’s the word.” Bruce stood up with Charles. “At least you’ll have friends who aren’t down so you can be up.”
Charles frowned. “What?”
Bruce took a hasty follow-on drink. “Metaphorically speaking. Let’s get dinner.”
Patrick Tadge 