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A timid events officer’s clerical slip forces a town to improvise five overlapping festivals into a single, messy weekend. As attention swells from local livestreams to a state visit and sponsorship offers, Percy must balance authenticity with safety while learning to lead on his own terms.
Percy Finch’s day began the way Tuesdays always did: with a tea kettle that made an unnecessarily theatrical whistle and a desk that knew the precise map of a life built around forms. His desk was small in the municipal building’s events office, crowded with color-coded sticky notes, an unhelpful rubber plant that had seen one too many fluorescent lights, and a stack of permit envelopes like a neat cathedral of bureaucracy. Percy liked lists because lists answered questions before they could wake up. They were polite in the way a solid routine is polite: they showed up, they did the work, and then they retreated to the safety of being predictable.
He had, incidentally, recently purchased a teapot with a particularly refined spout. It lived on the corner of his desk and was the only thing in the room that seemed to take dramatic pauses as seriously as he did. This teapot had, over the years, participated in a dozen of Percy’s small domestic ceremonies — a brief inhalation before a difficult call, the saving of a sent email, the folding of a paper apology meant for a neighbor who’d once been cut off by a parade. It was also, for reasons Percy neither understood nor wished to question, the best listener he knew.
On this particular Tuesday Percy's inbox glowed at him like a set of tiny windows into other people's plans. Permit requests, contract queries, a cheerful photograph of a dog in a yoga pose labeled “Lola’s Calm Canines” — the names had gathered around his desk like neighbors trying to borrow sugar at a funeral. He rotated between them with the calm small-movements of someone primed to be accommodating. There was a gentle pride in his thumbed-through binder of past notes; it was where previous generations of municipal improvisations had left their printed breadcrumbs.
He made a list while the kettle sputtered: confirm volunteer tents, check for spill insurance, locate a power source that would not be allergic to a silent disco. He wrote the items with that small, concentrated penmanship that people use when they mean to be taken seriously by themselves. He added two things he often told himself when the day looked like it wanted to become bigger: apologize early, and be small where you can. He believed, with a kind of practical reverence, that big apologies could be generous, but only if made from the front porch of genuine competence.
The municipal email interface had a charm of its own: green buttons that promised closure and greyed-out boxes that offered difficult truths. On the screen, his next open window was an administrative queue containing five separate permit requests for a single Saturday in the prime town square. Each had the gleam of possibility: tent diagrams, sound specifications, and the kind of earnest justification that reads as civic poetry to the right person. Percy read them with the focused calm of someone who admired the art of asking nicely.