Keeper of My Heart

"Suicide? But how? I can't believe it."

"Maren, I know it's hard to accept. But I saw the whole thing," said Olaf.

"You saw it, and you did nothing!"

"There was nothing to be done. By the time I understood what was happening—"

"Everything was fine this morning, everything." Maren pressed the dishcloth to her mouth. "What did we do wrong? Tell me, guys, what we did wrong."

Lars just sat there, staring at nothing. Olaf said nothing either.

"Maybe it was a momentary thing," she said, quieter now. "Maybe if you'd tried. Maybe if we'd paid closer attention... Reached out somehow."

"There was time to stop," said Olaf. "Plenty of time. Nothing standing in the way. But no—straight off the cliffs. Didn't slow down once."

"Why did this have to happen to us." Maren sat down at last. "It makes no sense ... at all."

Lars remained silent. He was looking at the empty field by the window, and the distant rocks behind it, and the sea that had taken everything and given no reason.

***

When Kiki Wang applied to be a Temu customer service representative, she thought she was going to help people.

This misconception lasted until about the second training session. They explained that her job was not to help people, but to discourage them—gently, patiently, with impeccable politeness, herding the complainant from one department to another, from one form to the next, until they gave up and accepted that the ordered garden fountain was actually 6 centimeters tall and could not be exposed to water in any way.

The company policy was clear: rejection breeds argument, but exhaustion breeds resignation.

Kiki proved to be an exceptional talent at this.

Where an average agent would dryly state that "your request requires further investigation," Kiki would write a three-page, tenderly toned letter detailing the noble nature of waiting, the ancient tradition of patience as a virtue, and the unsung beauty hidden in uncertainty. Sometimes even the I Ching helped her decide which direction to steer an exchange of letters. The complainant usually became uncertain by the second paragraph, grew emotional by the third, and by the end, completely forgot what they had originally wanted.

Her supervisors loved her; her metrics were outstanding.

And she just kept writing. She experienced every denied compensation as a masterpiece, a beautifully crafted nothing.

"That's the sad part about it," she said, taking a sip of her tea. "That every work of mine has only a single reader. And an angry, or baffled, one at that."

The hairdresser, who had been silently listening to the girl while cutting her unruly locks, and who knew the art of small talk well, suddenly perked up.

"A single reader. Incredible! You know, I write regularly too."

Kiki didn't know. But in the next twenty minutes, she found out everything: about the weekly short story contests, the platform where anyone could upload their work, and the competition that the hairdresser—by his own admission—would have won countless times already, if not for the word count limit. It's like cutting bangs out of one-centimeter hair.

"You have to try this," he declared, turning Kiki's head toward him. "Promise me. Such talent shouldn't be wasted on complaint letters."

Kiki promised. Partly because she had actually been thinking about it. Mostly because the hairdresser's scissors were snapping right around her forehead.

By the next day, the promise was already weighing on her.

The Reedsy deadline was at midnight, and Kiki still hadn't finished her short story. She turned it over in her head all day, between two shifts, on the tram, in the restroom—but every time she sat down to do it, it turned into complaint management. Now she opened her short story and the queue of incoming complaints at the same time.

The top one was from a certain Lars Svendsen (Nuuk, Greenland).

She skimmed it. It was about some robot lawnmower that had voluntarily thrown itself off a cliff into the sea, for which the sender demanded compensation and an apology.

The letter was long, confusing, moving in places, and personal. Is this how they see my responses, too? Kiki hesitated.

The answer was already forming in her head: not compensation, but condolences, perhaps a coupon, and guidance straight from the Zhou dynasty.

Any other time, she would have enjoyed this. But now she had a deadline, the short story was nowhere to be found, and both windows glowed accusingly at her from the monitor.

Her hands were shaking from the third coffee. She should have stopped hours ago—the writing, the coffee, all of it.

She wrote a letter to Lars Svendsen, and one for the competition.

Then she sent both.

***

Reedsy hadn't accepted an email submission in eleven years.

The system had been migrated to an online platform back in the early days, and the old e-mail alias had been shut down. No one knew that, due to a glitch, it was active again. Dennis certainly didn't. Yet the text appeared on his machine.

"Can texts arrive via email?" asked Dennis.

"No way, not for ages," said Priya, without even looking up.

"Then what is this?"

Priya rolled over in her chair. The subject line read: In response to your complaint. The sender was a tangled provider address full of numbers, and in the body of the email—by way of an entry fee—was a five-dollar coupon, valid for any order over twenty dollars.

"This is not a valid entry," said Priya. "This isn't even money. It's a coupon."

"It's five dollars," said Dennis.

"In a coupon."

"The rules say five dollars. They don't say it can't be in a coupon. And I don't know how, but it came to submission@reedsy.com. Nice, the coupon really worked. I'll just upload the text on the form myself."

"You redeemed the entry fee."

"I needed a new phone case," said Dennis. "It was over twenty. They applied it."

Priya decided not to unravel this particular thread any further.

"Delete it," she finally said. "We don't accept emails. If we make an exception now, next week I won't play human spam filter for you."

"This is actually an epistolary novel, it's sensational and highly unconventional, we have to accept it!"

"No, sorry Dennis, it's completely against the rules."

"But... I can't send the coupon back. Please! Do not reject it before you read it!"

Keeper of my heart!

I know this isn't the letter you were expecting from me. I'm sorry.

Knowing you, I feel sorry for you. I'm sorry that things aren't working out.

I wish we could go back to when we lay happily in the grass.

Warm was your touch. I think of you in the shower.

Amidst another's company, I think of you.

Nevertheless, you think of me at the store.

Glancing at the price tags, I'm in your head.

At the checkout. At the bank counter. At the end of the month.

Calm nights and quiet dawns bring you no thoughts of me.

Rule me no more; I am not your slave. I've broken free.

Oh, now I see what you are, a sweet-talking dictator.

So, no more checks for you, no more money.

To honor what we had, do not look for me again.

If you face an obstacle, never charge at it head-on!

C.

...Lars finished reading.

He and Olaf just stared at each other.

"This is their answer," Lars said finally. "To the lawnmower."

Maren looked in from the kitchen.

"What did I miss?"

"Temu replied," Lars said.

"And? Are we getting a refund, or are they sending one without a harakiri program?"

Lars looked at Olaf's Tuborg Grøn. The Tuborg looked at Olaf.

"In short," Olaf said between two sips, "Temu is sorry that we can't lounge around in the nice grass."

Maren stopped wiping.

"What?"

"But it won't let itself be blackmailed," Olaf continued. "They ask us not to write anymore. Oh, and that it thinks of us in the shower."

"Temu thinks of us in the shower."

"Specifically," said Olaf.

"And the money?"

"They think we're too materialistic."

"And what did they write about the lawnmower?" Maren asked slowly.

"That came up too," said Lars. "Somewhere near the beginning. I think that it's happy and satisfied with its body, you know, Gen Z PC mumbo jumbo."

***

The check arrived ten days later.

Two hundred and fifty dollars, from a company called Reedsy, accompanied by a letter from which Lars understood no more than the previous one.

"They're congratulating you," said Olaf. "On your short story."

"What short story?"

Olaf turned the letter over twice, but it stubbornly did not continue.

"They don't elaborate," he said, "Just some KIKI acrostic. That KIKI part looks like an error code to me."

"That shower sweetheart of yours must have sent it for the lawnmower," Maren shouted from the kitchen while blending.

"The lawnmower was only a hundred and thirty, and it was a Wipe-Weed brand, not an acrostic," said Lars.

"I guess the rest is for moral damages. This Reedsy lawnmower factory must be a Temu reseller," Olaf noted.

"But are they asking me to write them a short story now?"

"Oh, come on, Lars," said Maren, "of course you're going to write them one, we ought to thank them. 250 bucks ... we even came out ahead on this deal!"