Sledgehammer Writing Contest

We had a great time at the Great BOLD Write-Off in August! Small crowd but great stories! New Bold barista Luke Cohn was off the clock and decided to compete, and he took home the prize! Congrats, Luke!

Prompts:
Character: A songwriter
Action: Smiling
Setting: On a broken computer
Phrase: “Don’t you dare.”

***

In the Back Room of U-Break-I-Fix 

by Luke Cohn 

“Come on.” Rafi slams his hand on the table. “Come on, baby. Come on, come on.” Spinning wheel of death. Maybe Rafi could take up a new career. “Don’t do this. Don’t crash.” Maybe he could invest in a nicer computer, or at least a mostly functional one. “Don’t you dare––“ Maybe he should forgo all technology and live contactless in the middle of the woods. He had an uncle do that, once, or perhaps the friend of an uncle, or even–– 

“Oh. Fuck.” The computer’s screen goes black. “I’m ruined.” Rafi is not prone to violent outbursts of rage, and it’s not his fault, definitely not his fault, that his computer ends up on the floor. Accidents happen. 

He explains this, later, to the technician at the hole-in-the-wall U-Break-I-Fix shop on the sketchy side of town. He heard from a friend they had the best prices, if you didn’t mind the smell of burning plastic and the neighborhood. 

“Accident, huh?” The tech pulls a piece of glass from Rafi’s laptop screen. “I’ll see what I can do.” 

“Cheers, man.” Rafi gives his widest smile until the man disappears into the back. To kill time, he wanders the haphazard aisles of the store. There’s no word more accurate than ‘junk.’ Junk piled at least four feet high, junk on tables, junk with wires, some junk that might have once had organic matter mixed in but is long since dead. 

“Whatcha lookin’ for?” 

“JESUS FUCK.” Rafi places a hand over his heart. “What the fuck?” 

“Um, hi?” The person standing in front of him looks like a pixie. For an insane moment, Rafi thinks maybe they are a pixie, with their wild curly hair and bleached eyebrows, but reminds himself he’s not living inside a video game. The video game currently in progress on a laptop with a peeling screen that won’t boot up. The video game that he spent months working on and is probably completely lost to… to wherever video games go when the only hard drive they’re saved on crashes. Probably hell. A special one, for developers like Rafi, who don’t think to back up those hard drives. “Hello?” the person repeats. 

“You’re not a pixie,” Rafi says.

They tilt their head to the side and take on a mischievous grin. Rafi is distracted by the freckles on their nose. “Who’s to say?” 

“Oh. Right.” Rafi clears his throat. “Well, I’m not looking for anything,” Rafi says. “I’m waiting.” 

“Cool. Me too.” The probably-not-but-maybe-a-pixie smiles. “Come with me.” “Who? Me?” Stupidly, Rafi looks around to see if they’re talking to him. As if there would be more than two customers in the shop. Rafi’s shocked there’s even one. He just really, really needed that game to save, and this was the only shop open after five on a Sunday. “Yes, you, silly.” The not-pixie grabs Rafi’s hand. “I’m Willow.” 

“That’s… not not a pixie name,” Rafi says. That is, in fact, the name of the pixie character in his video game. Creatively stolen from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “Astute,” Willow says. “Sorry I couldn’t be more obvious.” They pull him through the maze of aisles of junk, beyond a reasonable depth the shop could inhabit, longer, even, than the city block the building exists on. Rafi’s just about to ask Willow if they’ve possibly entered an alternate dimension, which wouldn’t be the weirdest thing to happen to Rafi but this time he’s fairly certain he’s not tripping on anything. 

“Voilà.” Willow drops Rafi’s hand––was it that sweaty the whole time, or just because they were holding it?––and puts their hand on their hips proudly. “Your kingdom.” “Ha. Cool. WHAT?” 

“Oh. Okay. Um.” Willow frowns and chews their bottom lip. Their ears, if possible, are pointier than Rafi thought. And somehow he missed the fact that they weren’t wearing shoes before. “Sorry, this is my first day on the job. I used to be the court jester, and before that the king’s bard, but I got bored. And I wasn’t very good. I can’t rhyme for shit. And you don’t want to hear me try to carry a tune. But everyone always assured me changing careers a couple times was normal. I thought I might find tour guide a bit––” 

“Sh.” Rafi covers his eyes with his hands and takes three very deliberate breaths. In for four, hold for six, out for eight. Repeat. “This cannot be real.” 

“Can’t it?” 

“I don’t want it to be real?” 

“Oh, and I suppose because you’re God, you think you can just want something out of existence?”

“GOD?” Rafi’s so shocked he forgets to be panicked, and he un-shields his face. Willow is standing where they ought to be, but they have wings now. And their teeth are slightly pointier. And Rafi could have sworn–– 

“Nice to meet you.” 

“I’m just Raf. Rafi. Not God.” 

Willow blinks at them, with eyes that are much too big to be human. “Huh. Most people would be pleased to be God.” 

“Well, sorry to disappoint, Willow, but I’m not, okay? I don’t want to be God. I want to be Rafi. I want to go back to my shit apartment with my broken heart and my broken computer––“ He cuts himself off. “Wait. Wait. I added you last minute to look like––” He doesn’t say Georgie’s name. He doesn’t even think Georgie’s name. Nor about their freckles, so similar to Willow’s, or the way they bleached their eyebrows in the same way. No, Georgie stays very far from Rafi’s mind. He wipes his sweating palms on his cargo shorts. “The game… saved?” 

Willow shrugs. “Dunno.” 

“We wouldn’t happen to be inside my––“ 

“Hey, bud? No sleeping here.” 

Rafi jerks around, coming face to face with the shop technician. “I wasn’t sleeping.” But he doesn’t know what else he’s supposed to call it. He looks over his shoulder, but Willow’s gone and the shop full of junk looks like it should. Which is like a shop full of junk, and not a kingdom populated with kings and centaurs and pixies that look like Rafi’s ex. “Sorry.” 

“Good news, I saved the hard drive.” The technician hands the small black object to Rafi. “Bad news, that computer was beyond fucked. But we have a few options…”

(c) 2026 Luke Cohn

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