Free One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries by Marianne de Pierres Tehani Wessely

“What’s a hatpin, again?”
    Kaneko felt her chest tighten. “Never mind. How about we try something you know? Can you tell me where my phone is right now?”
    “ In your bag?”
    “ Well, it’s in my hand. But close enough,” Kaneko said.
    The girl’s face fell. She shrugged and began pulling on a scraggly wisp of hair beside her ear.
    Kaneko said, “How’d you really find the body, Tipsy?”
    “ I guess it just happened?”
    Tipsy wasn’t looking at her anymore; she was looking at her bare toes, curled over the side of the bed.
    Tipsy’s answers were too vague. Like the girl’s thoughts were sliding around in her oversized skull.
    “ Anything else for my story, Tipsy?” Kaneko prompted.
    “ My sister,” she offered up, “she says I’m like the next step of human evolution. Like in the future we’ll all be psychic.”
    Her words ran together in her excitement.
    “ Maybe,” Kaneko said. “I think you mean stage, though.”
    “ What?”
    “ The next stage of human evolution. That’s more colloquially widespread, I believe. Or … anyway. I’m being pedantic,” Kaneko caught the girl’s agonised expression behind the smeared make-up mess of her face. The expression looked permanent. “She could be right. Your sister.”  
    Tipsy, beamed. “They call us indigo kids.”
    “ Who does?”
    “ Like, doctors and stuff.”
    “ Indigo children, that stuff from the seventies?” Kaneko almost laughed.
    “ Maybe, I dunno.”
    “ Tipsy, have you ever been diagnosed with an illness? Like, learning disability, ADHD, schizophrenia? Psychopathy?”
    “ No?” Tipsy gave her a wounded look.
    “ Because a lot of those kids they called indigo children were. They were meant to be the first wave of supernatural evolution, come to save the world. But they were mostly just spoilt brats.”
    “ I’m not a brat,” Tipsy pouted.
    “ No,” Kaneko agreed. “And I don’t think you found that body, either. Am I right?”
    Tipsy’s lip trembled and her eyes narrowed. She kept her gaze on Kaneko though tears began to line her eyes.
    “ I didn’t think so,” Kaneko said gently.
    She shut her notebook and made to leave.
    “ That mean I won’t get any money?” Tipsy asked.
    “ Not for this.”
    Make the story, don’t find the story. Some bedsit-living, broken kid with no future and no idea what to do beyond the next dollar. She left Tipsy curled on the corner of the bed.  
     
    ∞ ¥ ∞ Ω ∞ ¥ ∞  
     
    Downstairs, she turned into the alley.
    “ Hey. You still the King?” she called.
    “ Always,” he called back. “You still looking for the girl with the drunken name?”
    “ Not anymore.”
    “ You bring me a drink this time?”  
    “ Not this time.” Kaneko squatted beside him. “Is there another name by which I can call you? For my story.”
    “ Yeah,” the King looked dubious. “I guess you can call me Rick. If you have to.”
    “ I wonder if you can help me, Rick,” Kaneko said. “I’m looking for something.”
    “ It’s not like, your conscience or your sense of humour or something?”
    Kaneko let out a huff of surprise. “No. None of those.”
    “ Good. I don’t do those.”
    “ It’s a hatpin.”
    Rick grunted. “Didn’t think Japanese women wore hatpins. You mean a hairpin?”
    “ No,” Kaneko smiled. “My family made them. But you’re right, Rick, we mostly didn’t wear them. They were for export.”
    She described the pin in detail and with more hope than when she’d tried with Tipsy. She explained the raised gold dragon, hand-painted, the bearded nostrils, the flare of its claws. The hatpin was the only thing she’d ever lost that she wanted back, barring her youthful optimism, and Rick had already said he didn’t do that kind of thing.
    Rick’s face relaxed. He gazed into some kind of middle-distance that had Kaneko checking over her shoulder. But by the end of the hatpin’s description, something sly and dark entered his eyes.
    “ What’s in it