Novels by The_Cyberguy Ramadan

JULIANThe first number in Nora Flynn's notebook is fifty-six.She has written it in blue marker at the top of a page taped to the library meeting-room door. Beneath it, in smaller handwriting, she's written ORIGINAL DAYS UNTIL COUNCIL VOTE. Then someone—Tess, judging by the neat letters—has added TODAY: FORTY-SEVEN.It is Saturday, June twentieth, and I have come to the library to look at historical site plans. I haven't come to attend Nora's meeting.At least, that is what I tell myself when I stop in front of the open door.Inside, six folding tables form a rectangle. There are cardboard cups of coffee, two boxes of pastries, a stack of blank survey sheets and a handwritten sign reading ALL OPINIONS WELCOME. A woman I recognize from the town session is looking at a seating chart with the intense suspicion people usually reserve for jury summons.Nora stands at the far end of the room. Her braid is coming loose and she has a red pen tucked behind her ear. She's trying to get a proje

NORAThere are two ways to discover that the boardwalk has a problem.The first is to read a forty-three-page proposal about structural deterioration while sitting in an air-conditioned room.The second is to watch a town worker push an orange barrier across the path you use every morning and say, “Nobody through here until we check the decking.”I recommend neither, but the second gets your attention faster.It's Friday, June nineteenth. Mom and I have been open for twenty minutes when the maintenance truck pulls up by the blue arcade. A man in a yellow vest steps out with a measuring tape and another man who carries a clipboard as though it has personally offended him. They walk to the narrow ramp connecting the North Walk to Harbor Avenue, confer with a third worker, and start setting out cones.I come around the counter still holding a handful of coins.“What's wrong?”“Soft spot along the deck edge,” the man with the clipboard says. His badge reads PARKS & PUBLIC WORKS. “Someone

JULIANThe first mistake on the information-session display is a picture of a family eating ice cream in a plaza that doesn't exist.It's my rendering, in the sense that I assembled the people and the shadows and the benches from a collection of approved design assets. Nobody is real. There is no ice cream shop. And the bench closest to the camera occupies roughly the same coordinates as Flynn's Window.I stand in the back of the community center with a roll of painter's tape in my hand, staring at the display board while a ceiling fan pushes warm air across the folding chairs.“That one needs the new caption,” I say.Mara Chen, our project's planning consultant, doesn't look up from her laptop. “It has the preliminary label.”“On the bottom. In eight-point type.”“That's the standard template.”“It's a fictional family enjoying a fictional sundae outside a fictional business. The public should at least be told which parts are fictional.”Now she looks up. Mara has the expression of s

NORABy noon, I have decided three things about Julian Mercer.One: he is annoyingly good at listening, which would be more convenient if he were terrible at it.Two: he has no idea what a thirty-cent increase in the price of takeout cups means to a café trying to survive the season.Three: I cannot tell whether he is trying to help or simply trying to feel better about what his family's company wants to do.Tess says I should put all three statements in a document titled Preliminary Findings, Subject to Revision. She says it while eating the dough twist I was saving for lunch.“I'm trying to be fair,” I tell her.“You called him a walking zoning violation.”“That was before he started taking notes.”“And after he actually listened?”“I still think the notes were suspicious.”She licks cinnamon from her thumb. “You're going to make an excellent historian. Your sources disagree with you, so obviously they're wrong.”“I'm not a historian.”“You applied to study public history.”“That's

JULIANMy mother can make an empty hotel conference room feel like a courtroom.She sets two cups of coffee on the table, slides a folder between them, and waits until I put down my pencil before she speaks.“The town posted the preliminary packet this morning,” she says. “There's already a petition asking us to leave.”“How many signatures?”“Seventy-three.”“That's impressive for before breakfast.”“It's a serious project, Julian.”“I know.”“You say that in the voice you use when you think I don't.”She is wearing a white linen shirt with the sleeves rolled neatly to her elbows. There is a faint crease between her eyebrows, the one that appears whenever she is working three problems ahead of everyone in the room. I have watched that crease make its way through hurricanes, budget overruns, and one Christmas when the power went out with twelve people due for dinner.I used to think my mother knew how to fix everything. Then I grew old enough to see how much of her job involves choosi

NORAThe notice goes up while my mother is having an argument with the freezer. “You do not get to die in June,” she tells it, yanking the door open hard enough to rattle the jars of strawberry sauce on the counter. “Pick a more respectful month.” The freezer responds with a tired metallic hum. It has been making that sound since Memorial Day. Mom has been pretending not to hear it since Memorial Day. This is how most problems get handled at Flynn’s Window: with a warning, a threat, and a prayer that the parts hold until Labor Day. I’m halfway through writing the specials on our chalkboard when someone hammers the first nail into the post outside. Not a tourist. Tourists knock over chairs and ask whether the ocean is always this cold. They do not arrive at eight in the morning with a ladder and a clipboard. I put down the chalk. “Nora,” Mom says without looking up, “the peaches go in the refrigerator, not on the shelf.” “I know.” “Then why are they on the shelf?” “Because so