author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Notes from the author:

The pandemic has really brought home to me how privileged I am. My husband and I are financially well off, both of us making the transition to all-remote work without a hitch. With his support, I’m a full-time writer, so my schedule really didn’t change much beyond the loss of regular roller derby practice. And I’m introverted enough not to mind the hit to my social life, which, again, mostly consisted of roller derby.

Also, we’re both white, which is strongly correlated with better chances at avoiding the virus in our work and living conditions, better health outcomes if we do get sick, and better treatment by employers at less dangerous jobs. We’re not the targets of racial injustice. Our lives aren’t in danger every time we interact with police. We’re not randomly getting punched on the street by passing bigots. We’re only witnessing the rising tides of racial violence at a remove, via Twitter and linked newsfeeds. We could choose not to witness it at all. That’s white privilege in a nutshell. It comes with the option to be oblivious.

Karen White saw the photo on Facebook shortly after she logged out from work. She could not have seen it sooner. When her company had approved her to work remotely during the pandemic, they’d issued her a laptop with keyboard logging software installed to ensure she used her time on the clock wisely. It was annoying, but what could you do? Besides, had she seen the photo sooner, she would have been too distracted to get any work done for the rest of the day. She would have been puzzled, baffled really, and probably very angry.

Her next door neighbor had posted it. It was a picture of the remains of their duplex, burned to the ground.

Karen sat at her desk in her home office, sipped at the cold dregs of her afternoon tea, and stared. There was no mistaking the subject matter. That was their house, or had been. Was supposed to have been. The charred uprights and smoking rubble were completely unrecognizable, but in Karen’s half of the front yard, hanging from an L-shaped iron stand, the clay sign she’d painted and had fired at Your True Colors downtown six months ago still proclaimed FAIRIES WELCOME. Right now, at this very moment, she could see the very same sign from the window next to her desk.

Why would Tien have posted such a thing? If it was a prank, it was in decidedly poor taste. The accompanying text was earnest in its distress and told a believable story—believable, at least, to anyone who wasn’t sitting in the allegedly burned-down house right now. The rioters last night, Tien wrote, had flung whole burning boxes of surgical masks at the surrounding duplexes, screaming slurs and cheering when the buildings caught fire. “My family barely got out in time,” Tien wrote. “Everyone on the block is accounted for except Karen White.” (Tien had tagged Karen, which was why the post had floated right to the top of her notifications.) “Karen, are you OK? Please check in. If anyone’s seen Karen since last night, please respond.”

Karen remembered last night. It hadn’t precisely been a riot. More of a demonstration. But the protesters had indeed screamed hatefulness in all directions, and they’d burned a lot of masks. None of them were local to the neighborhood; the light of the bonfires flickered over their uncovered faces so that Karen could see they were all strangers. The protest had gone on long into the night; Karen had wondered why the police hadn’t squashed it already. Enforcing lockdown had been the rational behind dispersing that candlelight vigil in the park last week. That and the municipal fire codes. You’d think they’d come down like a hammer on all these bonfires.

Eventually Karen had put on noise-canceling headphones and gone to bed. Her house, needless to say, had not caught fire in the night. She’d woken up at seven-thirty, as usual, made herself breakfast and coffee in her small but entirely unburned kitchen, and gone to work at her entirely unburned desk. She glanced out her window now: Every other house on the block—most of them duplexes like hers and Tien’s—was intact. Why was Tien telling lies on social media? What did she hope to gain? Karen scanned down the page for a GoFundMe link but didn’t find one. There was only a long compendium of outraged and sympathetic comments. “Where was the local fire department in all this?” “Where do you think? Same place the pigs were—paid to steer clear and let the mob do its worst. ACAB.”

Karen paged back up and clicked on REPLY under the original post. She wrote, “I’m fine. The house is fine. Tien, you did a great job mocking up that photo, but I think the joke’s gone far enough, don’t you?”

She hit ENTER to submit the post. Her mouse cursor turned into a spinning blue wheel and stayed that way for upward of thirty seconds. Finally a small dialogue box popped up telling her that there had been a problem with her post, and that she should try again later. “For cryin’ out loud,” Karen muttered, and posted the whole thing again as a photo-share on her own timeline. That errored out, too. Finally she just posted a status update: “I love my next-door neighbor, but I don’t get her sense of humor. Please rest assured that I am fine, my house is fine, every house on my block is FINE.”

She neither named Tien nor tagged her. It felt like the worst sort of vaguebooking, but she didn’t want to risk dropping even a fraction of the internet on Tien’s head, not without giving her a chance to explain herself privately first. Karen sighed. Nothing to do now but wait. She headed down to the kitchen to make herself some dinner.

By the time her casserole was ready to go into the oven, Tien still hadn’t responded, and Karen didn’t want to wait anymore. She slipped on her knockabout shoes and headed outside. Lockdown was still in effect, but Karen reassured herself that she was well within the “necessary exercise” exception. She walked around to Tien’s front door and knocked, and waited, and knocked again. Tien also worked from home, and her two kids were doing remote learning, so they should have all been home. But no one answered the door.

Karen made the rounds of the entire block, knocking on every door, even calling out her neighbor’s names. At each address she got as little response as at Tien’s. It was inexplicable. True, most of her neighbors were classed as “essential workers,” grocery check-out clerks and restaurant cooks and health care providers and so forth, but shouldn’t at least a few of them have gotten home from work by now? Besides, a few were remote-working techies like herself and Tien. Where were they?

Her phone pinged. Facebook was asking her to check herself in as safe in the Little Saigon Fire. Karen just stared and shook her head. What the hell kind of prank was the world trying to play on her? The interface gave her no option for “I’m safe because there WAS no Little Saigon Fire,” so she had to content herself with clicking the SAFE button.

Her attempt to check in failed. Her two subsequent tries failed also. Each time she clicked the button, a little blue wheel spun and spun in the middle of her phone screen for a full minute, finally resolving into a similar error message to the one she’d got when she tried to reply to Tien’s post. Karen gave an exasperated moan, rolling her eyes for no one’s benefit but her own, and updated her own timeline once more.

“This whole neighborhood fire deepfake nonsense is really weirding me out. I’m right here where the fire was supposed to be, and I promise you, not a single house is the least bit damaged. WTF, people? It’s like I’m receiving dispatches from an alternate universe or something.”

This has been the Friday Fictionette for March 12, 2021. It's also the Fictionette Freebie for the month, so you can download the full-length (1182 words) fictionette from Patreon as an ebook and/or audiobook) regardless of whether you're a subscriber.

Friday Fictionettes are a short-short fiction subscription service powered by Patreon. Become a Patron to get a new fictionette every first through fourth Friday and access all the fictionettes of Fridays gone by.