Grimm's Quiet Day Off

The vacation form had been in Quackers's filing system for three years. Grimm had submitted it in a moment of weakness — the crew suspects Riot's influence; Riot admits nothing but glows slightly when asked — and had then spent three years not taking the day, on the grounds that the door needed him, which it did, and that the factory would fall apart without him, which, well. This is the story of the day the form came due, because Quackers's filing system does not forget, and a duck arrived at the door at dawn with a laminated card reading MANDATORY (QUACK).

Grimm's plan for his day off, extracted under protest and logged by Bones for historical purposes: walk to the Unknown Sector. Sit by the bin. Eat one sandwich. Come back. Total elapsed time, four hours, door coverage arranged, no fuss. The Bin Kids invited themselves along by standing silently in his path until he sighed, which is the Bin Kids' most reliable technique and has never once failed.

Meanwhile, at the factory, the fuss began at 8:14 a.m.

The door, understand, had never been guarded by anyone else. There was a rotation posted for Grimm's absence — Riot until noon, then Drips (stationary coverage; the door would effectively guard itself while a bear melted encouragingly nearby). What the rotation had not accounted for was that the DOOR had opinions. The door behind the laundromat has one relationship in this world, and at 8:14, when the first delivery knock came and Riot swung it open with sixteen colors of hospitality, the door — per multiple witnesses — opened WRONG. Grudgingly. At a angle. With a creak it had never once produced for Grimm, a creak that Static, consulted later, slowed down and analyzed and translated on his screen with visible reluctance: it appeared, he displayed, TO BE ASKING WHERE HE IS.

It went downhill from there, in the specific way factory days go downhill: no disasters, just a building quietly refusing to run at tempo. Deliveries stacked oddly. The presses ran fine but FELT off, per the entire day shift, independently, in the same words. Seven's hall ran two degrees cool. And the crew, one by one, found themselves drifting past the door for no reason, the way a household drifts past the window when someone's late — until by early afternoon there were eleven stitched creatures loitering in the entry hall pretending to check shipping labels, and Riot, on guard duty, hugging every single one of them on arrival, which helped morale and nothing else.

Out at the bin, the actual day off was going like this: Grimm sat on the rusted lip of the donation bin that had held him for years, flanked by a unicorn skull, a shark working through a bus schedule he'd found (reading it or eating it: unclear, both), and a crow maintaining unusual, suspicious, weather-vane quiet. The sandwich was eaten. The hour was peaceful. And Grimm — per Uni, the only witness willing to narrate — looked at the bin slot for a long time, the way he does every year, and then said, out loud, to nobody, to the bin, to the years in it: 'I kept them. All of them. You'd never guess where I ended up.'

And Caww, quiet all day — QUIET, the crew notes, the dangerous kind, the kind you run from — finally spoke. One prediction, delivered soft, to himself, the register that has never been wrong:

"He's gonna cut the day short. They need him at that door like the door needs hinges. Always will. Nobody tell him it goes both ways."

Grimm walked back through the factory door at 2:51 p.m., one hour and nine minutes early, to find eleven loiterers scattering unconvincingly, a door that opened for him — witnesses insist — like an exhale, and a building that snapped back to tempo mid-afternoon so audibly that Sprocket added a celebratory off-beat, which he has done four times in recorded history. Grimm growled that he'd just forgotten his good scarf. He was not wearing a scarf when he left. He does not own a scarf. Nobody said a word, because the Bin Kids had walked in behind him wearing the expressions of witnesses sworn to secrecy, and because some things you don't make the soft ones say.

The vacation form went back into Quackers's filing system, where it sits today, renewed annually, mandatory, ignored. The duck and the bear have reached an understanding, which is that the form will always be filed and the day will always end early, and the paperwork now reflects reality: the official form title, amended in Quackers's own beak-writing, reads DAY OFF (PARTIAL) (HE COMES BACK) (LET HIM).

One hug. Free. Today only. Every day.