The Festival Fumble

Sam Calder liked lists the way some people liked coffee: as a daily necessity, an identity marker, and a defensible excuse for feeling sane. Their desk in the town cultural center was essentially a paper shrine—appointments, permits, color-coded post-its like a botanical specimen display. The wall calendar looked like an art installation of tiny, severe squares. Sam liked the squares to mean what they said. They had a ritual: arrive before the center opened, double-check the bookings, and sneak a pastry from Eli's café before the first volunteer arrived. That morning, the pastry felt smaller than usual, but Sam attributed that to the new brand of anxiety that had been carrying itself around town lately—a good kind, the type that made them finish spreadsheets early.

The problem revealed itself in the innocuous way disasters tend to: in an email subject line. "Permit confirmation: Town Square - Saturday." Sam opened it for the hundredth time and saw something that made the color drain from the calendar squares. Three distinct permit PDFs were attached—not a list of names, but separate, proudly official permits stamped with municipal insignia: one for the children's chorus rehearsal, one for the antique-car meet, and one for the local poets' open-mic night. Same date. Same public square. Same hours. Sam scrolled and scrolled, checking timestamps and cross-referencing the online permit portal as if evidence would magically rearrange itself into an acceptable pattern.

There was supposed to be an extra reason to be jittery: a message from Councilwoman Beatrice Knott's aide had popped up earlier about a possible visit from a prospective sponsor who wanted to see community programming in action. Not a mortgage-sized donation—more like a lifeline, a summer's worth of program fees bundled into a polite package. The sponsor's representative had penciled in the town square visit for that very Saturday to gauge how the center connected with the people it served. Sam pictured the representative arriving like a hawk with a clipboard and clichés.

Sam started calling. The chorus director, Mrs. Patel, clipped and efficient, answered with a breathless line about a rehearsal they'd promised to parents before school started again; moving was impossible because a recital lineup had already been printed. The antique-car organizer, who called himself Hank and sounded as if he'd been built out of carburetors and stubbornness, explained that the meet was a decades-long tradition anchored to a family anniversary. The poets—led by a young woman named Lara who ran the zine—texted an expletive emoji and an explanation that a visiting poet would only be in town that afternoon and travel plans were immovable. Each voice was polite and firm, and each had a legitimate, heartfelt reason for wanting that square on that Saturday. Sam listened until their fingers started making small, involuntary lists on the paper in front of them: options, contingencies, a column for who would cry if plans were changed.

June Alvarez showed up ten minutes later as if on a cue. June had a knack for arriving at the exact moment a catastrophe shifted from theoretical to unavoidable. She grinned at Sam’s face—the way a friend sees a beloved mess and knows it will be funny later—and peered at the permits. "Oh," she said, cheerfully. "That's ambitious." June was the center's social-media whiz and unofficial morale officer. Where Sam saw problems, she saw viral opportunities. "We could make it a mash-up," she suggested, as if proposing a reasonable bake sale. Sam nearly strangled her with a highlighter.