Book of Eucalypt

The city was rotting from the inside out. Pavements were slick with piss while doorways stank with the sour tang of bodies that had nowhere else to go. Every wall wore the stains of aged decay, elsewhere the graffiti layered on so thick the letters blurred into bruises. Rubbish clotted in the gutters as black bags were split open from elemental exposure, feeding stray dogs and even fatter rats. No one looked up anymore – no one looked at all. Pride had left the city after the government fell, leaving only the bare fact of survival: keep moving, or keep your head low. The air, thick and sour, clang to your skin and clothes in an act of hostility. It wasn’t a city that lived. It exists, and it drags its people down with it.

Rafe worked here. Not in the daylight when the peddlers and hustlers shouted for coins, but in the narrow alleys where people came whispering. His little wooden box, his bent deck of cards, his scraps of string and copper – these were his props. Everyone who sought him knew the show wasn’t in the sleight of hand, but that’s not why they sought him out. Rafe sold miracles. Not the grand and biblical kind but the small, desperate ones that mattered most in a life already buckled by struggle.

A man once came to him with his palms raw, begging for a night of dreamless sleep. He was a dockworker, or had been, before his nightmares started clawing him awake. Rafe had taken a strand of twine and wrapped it round the man’s wrist and whispered until the knot sealed itself. The man walked away blinking like someone who had seen daylight for the first time. Rafe had watched the skin of his own hands fade thinner, his veins glowing faint blue like cracks in porcelain.

One night a woman wept into his shoulder because her cat had been gone for weeks. Rafe conjured a trail of pawprints in the grime of the alley, leading her three blocks over to a crumbling stairwell. When the cat sprang into her arms, purring, she pressed a silver coin into his hand as if it were the only currency worth saving. He had walked away hollowed out, another day gone from the shrinking pile of his existence.

Every trick was the same exchange: someone’s small salvation for a piece of his dwindling life. He never let them see the cost. He would smile and bow, often making a joke about his “fee,” but he would never show how each miracle stripped another page from his body’s ledger.

He told himself he did it because someone had to. That was the only truth that felt solid in the fog. Still, when he caught his reflection in rainwater pooling by the curb, his fingers translucent as candle wax, he wondered how many days he had left before he disappeared entirely.

The crime lord came for him on a Thursday. It was raining, as always. The gutters choked with trash causing water to spill over onto the pavement. Rafe was packing up after mending a boy’s broken toy soldier. The boy had run off smiling while Rafe had felt the drag in his lungs like he’d lost a stair from the staircase inside his body.

Two men in leather coats blocked the alley’s mouth. The crime lord followed, umbrella tilted against the drizzle, shoes clicking on the wet pavement. It could have been a scene straight out of one of those old graphic novels – the one about the bat. Rafe knew him at once, though it had been years since their paths last crossed.

Dominic Varrin. The name alone was enough to still conversations in the bars. He had been a bruiser once – a muscle for hire – until he learned that fear was more profitable than fists. He owned half the rackets in the region now and the other half paid him for protection. He’d grown heavy with money, but don’t confuse his size for slow; his eyes were still sharp as someone who was always counting what was his and what would be.

Rafe remembered him from their childhood. Dominic was thinner and faster on his feet then, but still mean. They had met when Rafe was fifteen, running tricks on the corner of Canal Street. Dominic had not been much older and watched on with a rare vape container from afar as Rafe turn a coin into a bird and back again. But Dominic’s stare hadn’t been the wide-eyed wonder of a kid, it had been hunger. Even then, Dominic had recognised something he could use.

“You still playing god for pennies, Rafe?” Dominic asked now, his voice smooth as oil. “Thought you’d be dead by now.”

“Thought the same about you,” Rafe said, folding his box shut. He forced a smile. “Guess we’re both hard to kill.”

Dominic stepped closer, and the rain slid down his umbrella like glass beads. “I have a proposition for you. I need someone who can do more than parlour tricks. A miracle. Something worthy of that word you cheapen every night.”

Rafe refused to look at him.

“Do this for me and you’ll never want for anything again. Money? Women? You name it. Want a place of your own? You got it. You’ll never have to skulk in these alleys again.”

Rafe felt his ribs tighten. He already knew what was coming, but he let the silence stretch, hoping Dominic would say it out loud.

“The grid,” Dominic said. “I want the city black. Every light off, every circuit dead. One trick. One miracle. Enough to bring the whole rotten structure down. Do that, and you’re free. You can walk away with more than the filthy coins you collect – you can walk away with your life intact.”

Rafe laughed, though it came out thin. “That’s not a trick, Dominic. That’s suicide.”

Dominic leaned close, the smell of his cologne sharp under the rain. “You don’t get it, do you? You don’t have a choice.”

“I have every choice.”

“No, you don’t. This city eats people alive. You’ve been feeding it pieces of yourself for years. And I am very generously offering you a way to matter before it spits you out. And don’t pretend you care about them – those drunks and beggars and street urchins you sell your fairy dust to. You do it because you’re afraid of being nothing. Why be nothing when I can give you everything.”

Rafe said nothing. He shoved his trembling fingers into his coat pocket so Dominic wouldn’t see. Inside his exhausted brain he was already doing the math. If a broken toy had cost him a day and a cat, maybe two… then the power grid? He would burn through everything he was. He would vanish like smoke carried off in the rain.

That night as he sat alone in his room, the pipes creaked, and the traffic muttered below. The walls were damp causing the plaster peeling in strips like old bandages. His bed was narrow complete with a thinning blanket. He stared at his hands in the flickering lamplight, noticing how much more translucent his skin was becoming. He could see the bones beneath, the faint shimmer where flesh was wearing away.

“Just walk away,” he whispered to himself. “Let him find another fool.”

But he couldn’t stop the thought that came next: if Dominic pulled this off by some other means (if the grid collapsed under his order) the city would fall into chaos. Hospitals would go dark and generators may fail. The water pumps the city relied on would stall. Fires would go unchecked. People like the dockworker or the woman with the cat would suffer worse than they ever had before. And what was his life worth compared to all of theirs? One life against thousands.

He rubbed his face and laughed at the cruelty of the bargain. “Every trick is death,” he thought. “But maybe this one could buy enough life for everyone else.”

And yet another voice with a sharper tongue cut through: “You don’t want to die, Rafe. You’ve been selling pieces of yourself for years, but you never once let it finish you. Why should Dominic be the one who decides when you’re done?”

He turned that question over like a coin in his palm. His whole life had been this dance: giving everything yet holding nothing and always refusing to let anyone see how hollow he’d become. Maybe the trick wasn’t in the miracles; maybe the trick was convincing himself that he mattered. That these fragments he traded for were enough.

But what if they weren’t?

The rain stopped at dawn. The city lay grey and sullen with the shining wet streets. Rafe walked out with his box under his arm and his coat collar turned up against the wind. Every step felt heavier as though the ground itself was pulling him down and unwilling to let him slip free.

He didn’t know if he would walk to Dominic’s den and accept the job. He didn’t know if he would turn the other way and vanish into the cracks of another city. He knew was that he had no more small miracles left to give but was damned either way – should he perform the one would end him or refuse and damn them all.

And somewhere in the silence of the waking streets, he swore he heard the faintest sound: a coin spinning endlessly, never allowing his choice to be made.