Title: "Echoes of April's Disappearance"

Raven Keller’s hands smelled faintly of lemon and sweating rubber gloves as she counted bottles beneath the neon chill of The Hive’s bar. It was barely eight a.m. — the city’s flush of noise still just a suggestion through the thick club walls — but already the weight of the day threatened to crush her chest.

She unfolded inventory sheets and eyed the half-hearted scrawl of checkmarks she’d made last night. Vodka was running low again. Tequila, too — the good kind that never lasted through the Friday rush. Her thumb pushed tobacco-stained hair from her forehead as she scribbled updates. Amber squares of dust-laced sunlight inched across the bottles, illuminating lines of gin and whiskey waiting for darkness.

She pried open the fridge, counted limes in bags, lemons wrapped in their shroud of green netting. One by one, like she always did — her own brand of penance. Two years on, after all the things that had happened, Raven clung to routine as her only insurance against chaos.

A voice message pinged on her phone: Marcus, tonight’s DJ, asking about his guest list. Raven’s eyes darted to her lock-screen before she answered. Her breath caught. The phone’s background hadn’t changed in two years — the only photo she had of her and April, her younger sister, with matching red lipstick and crooked smiles, snapped just before April disappeared.

The glass in Raven’s palm hummed with tremors. Her mouth grew dry as she remembered that night — April’s laughter, her thin green jacket swinging loose, the promise to be back before midnight. Raven had told her to go home early; instead, April never came home at all. The face on the screen — hopeful, alive, impossibly young — gouged all the scabs from Raven’s heart.

She set the glass down, too hard. It wobbled. Her knees pressed weakly into the sticky rubber bar mat as memory unspooled behind her closed eyelids: April’s voice, April’s scent (peach shampoo and vanilla), April promising she’d only be a minute, her silhouette swallowed by the city’s hungry night.

Raven’s breath rasped out in short, shallow bursts. Her hands shook so violently the next glass slipped from her grasp, striking another on the bar — the sound shrill, shattering, precise. Shards sprayed like ice. Then another and another. Raven swept the rest off the shelf with the back of her hand, glass raining down in silvery, brutal waves.

“Goddammit!” she hissed, not sure if it was rage or panic that pulsed through her limbs. The sticky smell of gin pooled at her feet. She pressed her fists against her forehead, blue sparks dancing before her vision.

Footsteps echoed from the kitchen — Leah, the prep cook, poked her head through the door, concern etched across her brow. Raven ducked her head, throat raw. “Leave it,” she said quickly. “I’ll handle it.”

She needed air. Her boots crunched glass as she retreated to her office, past posters plastered with April’s smile, past the stack of police reports (untouched for months now), past the line of unsent text messages she’d written but never dared to send. The office was coffin-sized and dark — a mismatched couch under a thrifted lamp, paperwork heaped like a barricade against the world.

Raven shut the door, dropped into the worn swivel chair, and pressed her head to the desk’s cool veneer. In the humming silence, her pulse marched slowly back from chaos. The memory was always there, just below the surface — April under strobing lights, mouth opening in a scream as darkness swallowed her whole. Raven pressed her eyes closed till stars blossomed against her lids.

The world could not stop, she told herself. Routine, order, preparation: her only salvation. She pulled the roster from the inbox and started texting the barbacks — checking who’d called out, who could stay late, if the balloon installer was still coming for the party at ten. Her hands still trembled, but the motions were familiar — stock the registers, set up ticket lists, review security logs. Marcus texted again, and she sent a clipped response.

By the time evening’s first rays seeped into the alley behind The Hive, the club was scrubbed of broken glass and sorrow, ready for dancers and drinkers who’d never know a girl named April had vanished into this same night two years before. Raven stood in the DJ booth, her eyes dulled by exhaustion, and watched the first customers stumble in beneath the honeycomb lights. The Hive buzzed to life, thumping with oblivion, as Raven locked the memory of her sister deep within her chest — where it would burn, quietly, as she kept her vigil till dawn.

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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