"Echoes of Loss in District 16"

Morning crept into District 16’s narrow, weather-smeared alley. Margo’s boots echoed over the linoleum as she crossed the empty dance floor, the chill morning air still clinging to the club’s black walls. She yawned, tapping the point of her clipboard with chipped red nails, moving steadily from one shadow-cocooned corner to the next.

Rows of untouched glassware perched like sentinels behind the bar; each bottle of gin and stack of napkins tallied, a silent contract with order she could still hold onto. Two years, she thought, brushing dust from the top shelf. Two years since the night the world tipped over. The vodka inventory was short by one, which meant Greg had snuck one for free again or something else had slipped through her unraveling fingers.

She ducked under the bar, counting crimson shot glasses, running her fingers along cold surfaces she’d cleaned the night before. In the quiet, everything sounded louder—the humming refrigerator, the breathing of the building, the ghostly echo of music and laughter that would come pounding in just hours. District 16 wasn’t much but it was hers, and holding it together was all she could do.

As she finished her checklist, Margo’s phone buzzed in her jeans. She fished it out, half-expecting a supplier’s complaint, half hoping for some last-minute chaos that would keep her mind busy. Instead, her eyes fell on the lockscreen: a picture of two girls at the state fair, grinning through powdered sugar. Alex’s dark hair tumbled around her face, one arm slung carelessly around Margo’s neck. Her blue fleece hoodie had glittered in the sunlight—the same hoodie she had worn the night she walked out the back alley door, into the teeth of the city, and vanished.

Something caught in Margo’s throat. For a second, the bar seemed to shrink, the air pricking cold and sharp as broken glass. She heard Alex’s laugh in her ears, saw the way her little sister—reckless, beautiful, infuriating—danced on the club’s sticky floors when no one was looking. She’d stood right here, two years ago.

Her hand shook. A glass teetered off the drying rack, shattering on the floor. Another followed—her elbow jolted the stack, sending two more tumbling into shards that scattered like dead stars at her feet. Margo gasped, the noise impossibly loud, a sharp agonizing chord that snapped her in half. She gripped the bar’s edge until her knuckles shone white.

The club was empty but it felt crowded with invisible eyes. Every memory of Alex rose in her: the late-night phone calls, the worry in their parents’ voices when Margo came home without her, the missing posters curling at the corners, rainwashing her sister’s smile into paper-grey misery. All her energy—the focus that kept District 16 running, that kept her breathing—suddenly drained away. She crouched behind the bar, pressing her hands to her face, fighting the sobs that threatened to choke her.

It took her minutes—maybe an hour—to collect herself. Margo fumbled the broken glass into a dustpan, one careful shard at a time, and dumped it in the bin. She wiped down the bar, her hands trembling, her heart slowed but hollow.

She made her way to her office—small, windowless, cluttered with invoices and unsent letters. The hum of the club’s sound system testing made a dull lull in the floor beneath her, grounding her. In here, surrounded by spreadsheets and dull paperwork, she forced deep breaths until the world sharpened again.

She checked the evening’s reservations, glancing at alerts for DJ times and barstaff rotas, the familiar rhythm settling over her shoulders like a battered old coat. Faded postcards and sticky notes from Alex glimmered on the computer’s edge; Margo shut the drawer before the pain pressed in again.

As she traced her finger over the ledgers, she reminded herself: she had to open the doors, turn on the lights, let the music swallow the grief. The city was waiting—for bright drinks, for punked-out strangers, for that brief freedom pulsing under neon. As much as it ached, District 16 was all she had left—a brittle shield from the horror of the unknown.

But every time she closed her eyes, she saw Alex slipping through the alley’s mouth, heading home—or somewhere far darker—while Margo counted bottles in a world that would never, could never, be right again.

This story was generated by user ziggo.zane with assistance by one of OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model; prompts used to help generate the story are shown below.

Images were generated with OpenAI's AI system, DALL·E 2, or uploaded by the user.

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