Kerry was savoring the chocolatey notes of her first espresso shot from the new Italian machine that dominated the kitchen countertop when the first text bonged on her phone. She ignored it, taking another sip of heaven. Whoever was texting could wait.
The Titian red Bravissimo model had cost more than she could afford and matched nothing in her studio apartment, but its sleek presence and effortless functionality made her smile as it hummed each tiny cup of caffeinated bliss into existence. She deserved this.
Always the responsible one, for the past year or so she had been covering for everyone——the dwindling and lazy editorial team she managed at Epiphany Communications, her well-meaning but clueless siblings, the over-worked yet smiling nursing staff at the assisted living facility where her father resided. The way she saw it, buying an appliance to enhance her productivity was the logical thing to do.
Kerry hovered her finger over a button on the machine to swap in a fresh pod of temperature-controlled arabica and watched her cup fill with a satisfying purr. Lingering over the last dark drop, she glanced down at her phone. Five texts were stacked up on the screen.
The first message was delivered at 8:21 a.m.: Good morning, Kerry Jensen. I’d love to schedule a conversation with you this afternoon. Please let me know what time would be most convenient. Thank you. Harmony Z.
Kerry didn’t know any colleague named Harmony, and the use of an initial instead of her full last name was a tad strange, not to mention the request for a conversation. The message was probably related to one of the recent morale-enhancement programs——Skill Swaps——designed to boost cross-functional camaraderie.
At 8:48, she’d gotten a text from her supervisor, Sabrina: Hey. Ping me. Need to talk re: stuff. Thx. For someone with the lofty and ridiculous title of Chief Storyteller, Sabrina’s linguistic laziness was a continual source of irritation, particularly since her camera during Zoom calls was always angled to showcase the Emmy she had won for a small-town cable news story about a multi-vehicle accident, which, it was later rumored, she may have caused.
A third text had come through two minutes later: Harmony Z is requesting a 15-minute conversation between 1 p.m. and 3:45 p.m. Your reply and cooperation are highly encouraged. The smell of AI was unmistakable.
Harmony had followed up at 9:01: We were excited about our conversation at 1:15 p.m., but your non-response indicates a pattern of poor performance. Therefore, we must inform you of your termination, effective immediately. Kerry laughed out loud. She had been kicked in the teeth by a bipolar algorithm.
The last text was from Sabrina: Me, again. Sorry re: the performance thang. Crazy times. Happy to be a reference. XOXO. S.
Kerry gripped her phone with both hands. Wow. It was a drone strike from Human Resources. Eleven years of synergistic needle-moving at Epiphany had been obliterated in minutes. Who was the bot——Harmony or Sabrina?
She closed her eyes and tried to recall the breathing technique taught by a former Navy SEAL during one of Epiphany’s Covid-era mental health seminars. Inhale while counting to four. Hold your breath for a count of four. Exhale, one, two, three, four. Hold your breath, one, two——
A new text ponged on her phone: This is Offical Notice from Ministry of Automobiles. You have 24 Hrs to Pay Important Fine. If Not obey, State Authorities take IMMEDIATE Movement and XXL problems come to your Household. Click to Pay Fast. No FALSEHOOD.
Kerry laughed numbly. Everything about the scam——the misspellings, butchered syntax, and random capitalizations——was pathetic. The scammer’s attempt at communication was just a few grammatical blunders beyond the lame texts from Sabrina, who had the dubious advantage of a journalism degree. Didn’t anyone give a damn about the time-honored usage of the semicolon or the serial comma?
That afternoon she sifted through a few pieces of paper mail, trying to maintain a sense of routine amidst the recent blank days of her online calendar. She opened an envelope containing her father’s latest bank statement. He had just turned 93 and was a cognitive rockstar, according to the medical director at Golden Years, the assisted living complex in Westchester where her father marched laps with his three-wheeled walker while clad in a shirt and tie, as if heading to his old Manhattan office. A taciturn accountant in his working years, he had become a beloved and exuberant member of his white-haired community.
Far too exuberant, Kerry thought, glancing at the balance due printed at the bottom of the bank statement. Apparently, her father had purchased $723 worth of silk bowties from a variety of online haberdashers. His room and board at Golden Years were barely covered by Social Security and a modest pension, so she sometimes shuffled funds into his bank accounts, gently admonishing him to watch his spending. His jaunty reply had become a sort of Vaudeville routine: I’m not dead yet. Besides, I need to look swell for the ladies. Keeps their heart rates up.
The thought of asking her father to return the ties was vaguely depressing, a failing on her part, and Kerry couldn’t count on getting much help from her siblings. Whenever she had reached out to them, they would recite a litany of financial demands: tuition payments, life insurance premiums, root canals. Clearly, it was up to her to shoulder this, the eternal burden of the eldest child.
That night, as Kerry finished uploading her CV to every employment website she could find, she picked up her phone and saw what appeared to be a follow-up message from the same scammer who had targeted her that morning: ATTN: Final Notice from Ministry of Automobiles. Pay NOW to avoid penal problem. Facing JAIL time if NOT respond ASSAP! CLIKC WITHOUT Delay.
She replied in an instant. This was an abomination. Not so much the scam itself, but the crime against anyone who had ever pored over the pages of Strunk & White or experienced the joys of diagramming a sentence. She was fully aware that her response was likely to give some pimpled hacker in Uzbekistan the data needed to suck every cent from her bank accounts and 401(k). Well, have at it. There wouldn’t be much to siphon off if she couldn’t find at least a part-time gig in three months. Her prompt response——ASSAP!, indeed——was a righteous stand against the bankruptcy facing the proper usage of the English language. As she typed her response, she felt the tickle of something more delicious than outrage.
She typed: I’m not the sort of person who would typically respond to your attempts at deception; however, after reading your latest communication, I feel compelled to reach out and offer some unsolicited advice. Clearly, English is a second language for your organization, and it’s fair to say that the basic principles of grammar in your native tongue continue to elude you. Therefore, I recommend purchasing——and studying——The Elements of Style and a decent dictionary (the OED comes to mind). When properly applied, the lessons contained therein should allow you to present your schemes in a more professional light. Be aware that this endeavor will take many years of dedicated effort. If the idea of “hitting the books” (an English idiom) is a daunting prospect, you might wish to consider a strategic alliance. Nota bene:my services don’t come cheap.
She knew her reply was ridiculous: a pixelated message in a bottle hurtling into the maw of the dark web. Even if it were read, the Latin and book recommendations would be lost on the scammer in his (weren’t they always guys?) squalid flat. Still, it felt so damn good to express herself. When was the last time she had been allowed to air her professional opinion?
Thrashing awake from a dream about E.B. White handcuffing himself to a typewriter, Kerry lurched off the couch and padded into the kitchen. She waved a finger over a winking green button, beckoning a ristretto from the programmed inner workings of the machine. She swallowed her dose of black magic and scrolled through a series of LinkedIn updates from former Epiphany colleagues. They had started adding #OpenToWork banners to their profile photos, many of which now had a burnished AI cast. She logged into one of the employment sites and saw several job recommendations based on her CV. The most promising of them indicated she was an awesome match for an assistant manager of signage position at a national hardware chain. She hesitated before saving it to favorites. The road to the next paycheck was going to be a grind.
She had just spent the better part of three hours going through 107 recommended jobs on her laptop—saving five of them——when her phone ponged again.
NO care aboot Englizh, said the text message. Language of IDIOT. We speak $$$. You understand THIS?
Kerry felt buzzy. She inhaled——one, two, three, four——and typed: I fully understand the amount of assistance you require. But do you? She was enticing the enticer.
HOW much $$$???
She began typing: A project fee of…
Was she really doing this? Negotiating compensation with a potential employer who was based God knows where? She hadn’t even thought about the money yet, but there was no question that this was sketchy. Risky. Dangerous, actually. Other than her failure to return a library book in third grade and a speeding ticket in college, she was a dutiful, tax-paying citizen.
SO How much MONEY$!? The scammer seemed to be biting.
$100K. Per project.
Kerry knew the figure was outlandish, merely a starting point for the haggling that would inevitably follow.
OK :)
She dropped the phone on the couch and left it there, needing some time and distance to think. She inhaled—one, two, forget it——and paced the confines of her studio apartment. This——whatever this was—just might be happening.
Glancing down at her phone, there was no doubt about it.
We talk. At TOMORROW. 13:30 East US of A Time.
Kerry saw her reflection in the glass door of the kitchen cabinet: smiling with a sense of control she hadn’t felt since…a long time ago, to be honest. Her years of experience now seemed to count for something—to someone she’d never met.
The thought of it had her sizzling with panic. She needed to back off on the espresso. The scammer, whom she had dubbed the Kraken, sent a chain of messages over the next several hours, each one dictating next steps: set up a Telegram account…contact them at a designated, anonymous address…remember that any fooking about would result in Badd SHITE. Aside from the threatening tone, Kerry was curious about the UK scatological term. Perhaps the Kraken was a thuggish Brit, not some Slavic hacker with a comic book command of English.
She left her apartment at dawn, wearing sunglasses and a hoodie under a raincoat, despite the brightening sky. Returning an hour later, she unpacked the contents of her Paris Review tote bag: a burner phone purchased from a guy on Canal Street and a selection of cheeses, English water biscuits, and Marcona almonds from Murray’s——civilized provisions to fortify her for the negotiations ahead. Savoring a bite of chèvre rolled in lavender, she powered up her laptop and opened a crypto wallet in the name of @ynR@nd! Having worked through her checklist, she allowed herself to close her eyes and decompress.
She was jarred awake by the default Chopsticks ringtone on the burner phone. The Kraken was punctual, despite his abysmal writing skills. She had to give him that.
“Yeah,” she answered, hoping to convey the detached tone of a veteran criminal.
“Doctor?” The Kraken’s voice was surprisingly high-pitched but without any identifiable accent.
“Perhaps.”
“Maybe professor of the Engleesh?”
“Let’s just say I’m an expert.”
“Okay, Doctor Hexpert. Talk how you to help.”
“It’s simple. You send me the message, then I edit it and send it back. Trust me, it will sound professional.” She was beginning to enjoy this.
“What is good of this…this Eengleesh of the professional?”
Kerry nodded. Every institution of higher learning in the country was asking the same question. “I received your texts, if you recall. They read like something dumped from a blender.”
“Like smoothie?”
“That would be putting it kindly.”
“No more chitty-chatty. We do this.”
So much for diplomacy, she thought.
That evening, Kerry received five phishing messages from the Kraken, all variations on a theme: you have run afoul of a bogus authority (the Council of Taxation, the National Law Enforcement Society, the Disciplinary Assembly of America) and must pay said authority within hours to avoid a variety of unpleasant consequences (photographic evidence posted on the interweb, financial destruction, nocturnal visits by malevolent forces). They appeared to be the product of a rambling juvenile mind with criminal tendencies fed a diet of the Brothers Grimm, Marvel comics, and authoritarian propaganda.
Flinching at the breathtaking disregard for the most basic conventions of English grammar, Kerry beckoned a doppio from her espresso machine, sharpened a pencil, and bore down on the printed copy she had made of her first assignment—making a mental note to purchase a shredder. It was invigorating to get back to the detailed work that brought her joy, marshalling the clauses and punctuation marks into proper order, arming the sentences for maximum impact. She walked away from her laptop and deep-cleaned the bathroom to clear her head, then returned to review her editorial labors twice more. Each message was now an exquisite mousetrap baited with a sense of authority that would trigger a prompt response, instead of a finger swipe to oblivion. Saving her efforts to a pdf called Art of War, she sent it the Kraken via Telegram and spent the rest of the evening reading a translation of Beowulf. The saga of a battle against a skulking monster felt particularly apt.
Closing the book 30 pages later, Kerry logged into her @ynR@and! crypto wallet. Her balance——the gold she’d spun from straw——glowed on the screen in its six-digit glory. Sleep was now impossible as she mulled the financial possibilities parading through her head: pay off her father’s sartorial shenanigans, max out the annual contribution to her anemic IRA, take the vacation she’d been postponing for years. Having sublimated her ambitions working for micromanaging, macrodramatic supervisors, she felt the respectable adult emerging from hibernation within her.
A fresh batch of projects had been sent to her sometime during the hour or so she had dreamed of meeting Geoffrey Chaucer on a slop-strewn London street. The content of these fresh texts featured the same lumpy consistency, over-seasoned with ridiculous demands. She whipped each of them into a smooth and enticing cocktail that would be eagerly swallowed. When she checked her crypto wallet a short time later it had grown by another $100,000. By the end of the week, her balance was close to half a million dollars, and she hadn’t needed to struggle through another conversation with the Kraken. It was all so delightfully simple.
Kerry’s youngest sister was the first to notice the change in her. “I’m shocked,” she said during a phone call about their father’s latest splurge: a custom ten-gallon hat.
“I know,” Kerry said. “After the bow ties and Harris tweed, I never dreamed he would begin a cowboy phase.”
“No——I can’t believe you’re so calm about paying for it. I really want to do my part, but Luke’s getting braces next month.”
“No worries.”
“You’re not pissed?”
“All will be well, little sister.”
And so it was. The crypto deposits grew and Kerry’s editorial powers went unquestioned.
She was tweaking the equity holdings in her expanding portfolio when she received a phone call from one of the staff members at Golden Years.
“Has my father been misbehaving?” Kerry asked.
“He’s absolutely fine,” said the woman. “Such a lively gent. But I wanted to let you know that he almost fell for one of those phishing emails.”
“Shit.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Did he send money?”
“It never got that far. I was helping him with his phone when I saw the text.”
Kerry felt something bite inside her.
“Are you still there?” the woman said.
“Sure. Yes.”
“Would you like to speak with him?”
“Not right now,” Kerry said. “I’ll stop by in person. Thanks for looking out for him.”
“It’s what we do,” said the woman. “Every member of the Golden Years family deserves to feel seen and safe.”
“That’s a comfort.”
The next morning, Kerry drove a rental car up the Saw Mill River Parkway to the faux-Victorian complex at Golden Years. It was in Pleasantville, of all places. She found her father in the living room, performing card tricks amidst a traffic jam of rollators, wheelchairs, and crutches whose operators were either spellbound or stupefied by his animated patter. She stood in the doorway, watching him whisk the Joker from behind the hearing-aid of a woman whose hair had the pinkish hue and texture of cotton candy. The audience members who remained awake thumped their canes on the floor in approval.
“Daddy.”
“My dear Kerry! Did you enjoy the show?”
“I just caught the finale, but I’m sure the whole thing was terrific.”
“Always room for improvement,” he said. “Shall we adjourn to my quarters?”
She followed him as he led the way down the hall, pausing to introduce her to each nurse they passed, all of whom she’d met on previous visits. Arriving at his room, he eased himself onto the worn sofa he called the Chesterfield.
Kerry opened her bag and handed him a small gift box, watching as he smiled and tugged at the gold bow, a little boy with unruly eyebrows and age-spotted hands.
“Isn’t that snazzy!” he said, lifting the turquoise-and-silver bolo tie from the tissue paper.
“A little something to go with your cowboy hat.”
“Roy Rogers would be jealous,” he said, putting on the tie with tremulous fingers.
“Dad, have you gotten any unusual text messages lately?”
“Racy, you mean?”
“Oh, Dad.” Her chuckle became an awkward cough.
“There might’ve been one. Accusing me of not paying an overdue parking ticket. Hell, I haven’t driven for seven years.” His watery eyes frosted over with annoyance.
She fought the urge to wince. “Just ignore them.”
“What kind of son of a bitch would send such a thing?”
She focused on the jaunty Stetson on his bedpost. “I’d better head out now. Traffic, you know.” She hugged her father. “Call you tomorrow.”
“You’re my rock, sweetie.”
She drove south in the rented Ford, listening to WQXR, the speakers rumbling with In the Hall of the Mountain King played at full volume.
A slew of new assignments was awaiting her when Kerry checked the burner phone back at her apartment. The Kraken had even added a note of encouragement on their collaborative efforts: Dreem Teem GO Baby!
Steaming doppio in hand, she fired up her laptop and tried to lose herself in the rescue of strangled sentences. She wiped at a dusty film on the screen, but something fuzzy remained. Maybe it was her eyes. She blinked drily and found a bottle of saline solution in her purse. Putting three drops in each eye, she leaned closer to the screen. Just beyond the pixelated scrim of letters and punctuation marks was a vague, persistent flickering. She closed her eyes——inhaled, exhaled——opened them. The image was still there: pulsating lights on wet snapping teeth.
She slammed the laptop shut.
It took an hour and a half, plus a glass of grappa for her to settle down enough to overhaul the messages, clarify their meaning, and polish their demands. Lingering over the last text, her fingers paused over the keyboard before typing a postscript after the menacing final sentence: P.S. Despite all appearances, this message is merely a heist in prose. To bring this criminal charade to its judicial conclusion, please share it with your local law enforcement officers posthaste.
She bundled it all up into a pdf and sent it off via Telegram, confident that the Kraken and his comrades would get so lost in the language that they would never read all the way to the confession she had lit like a fuse.
In the days that followed, Kerry holed up at a series of budget tourist hotels scattered across Manhattan while she methodically checked off the items on her to-do list:
o Liquidate crypto
o Fund trust for Dad and sibs
o Pick up ’97 Volvo wagon (Manny @ W. 10th St.)
o Donate espresso maker (women’s shelter @ St. Bridget’s)
o Laptop/phone (East River)
As dawn’s molten glow pooled between the buildings on the East Side, Kerry double-parked outside a typewriter repair shop above a bodega on 1st Avenue and climbed the stairs to pick up a squat green Olympia.
The salesman nodded. “That’ll outlive us all.”
“Something has to.”
Driving west, she had no other plans beyond steering around the potholes on the George Washington Bridge on her way to I-80. Actually, there was one: if caught, she would teach ESL to her peers in the system. Damned if the Oxford comma would die on her watch.
E.A. Mayer’s short fiction has been published in the Swannanoa Review, Pindeldyboz, the Absinthe Literary Review, Squawk Back, the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and Tower. He earned an MA in Communication from Stanford University and an AB in Creative Writing and Literature from Dartmouth College. His villainous secret identity is Mordecai Sangfroid.
