The Great Misprint

Nora Finch discovered the mistake on a Tuesday afternoon, when the copy machine in the municipal office coughed up a stack of posters and one of them landed on her shoe like an accusing fan. The poster was bright, cheerful, and entirely wrong in a way that made her stomach do a strange somersault — the headline read MIRACLES & MAKERS FAIR in proud, bubbly letters, as if the town had finally decided to combine craft vendors with supernatural events. She stared at it, then at the copier, then at the tiny serif font credit at the bottom. "Typesetter's error," she told herself. "It'll be fixed." She was a planner by trade now, a woman who lived by checklists and spreadsheets and color-coded calendars. The town's annual festival had fallen into her inbox a month ago, and she had promised Mayor Calder a tidy event, a new vendor layout, and no surprises. "No surprises" had been underlined on her first day.

Nora's training in procedural calm held for half an hour. She made the phone call to the print shop, listened politely as someone named Pete said, "Oh, we thought that was the joke version," and then fled to the back closet where the community bulletin board lived like a retired veteran. That was where a cascade of other, slightly different posters waited: one with a misaligned palette, another with a missing date, and a third where MIRACLES had been stamped so loud it looked like an exclamation point with wings. Her email blinked; a message from the festival's headline performer, a man who performed mechanical illusions and goat juggling on summer weekends, contained the phrase "unexpected conflict" and the word canceled. Nora held the poster up to the fluorescent light and imagined Lucille Pembroke, the visiting patron who had hinted at underwriting the town's new arts program, reading the headline and expecting something she had not been hired to produce — a literal miracle.