The Going Price

Swappr offers you control of your own fortune.

Download Swappr when you’re in need of a little luck, or when you’ve got some luck to spare. Give your day the boost it needs, or earn some extra cash by sharing some of your good luck with others in need. Connect to the Swappr community and change your fortunes today.

Tilda looked up from the app purchase screen on her phone to raise an eyebrow at Johnny. He beamed back at her expectantly, bouncing on his toes in an attempt to stay warm. It was a losing fight, with the cold wind blowing through campus. Tilda rolled her eyes and told him, “You can’t buy and sell luck, come on.”

“Sure you can,” Johnny said, waving his phone around – he’d already downloaded the app, claiming it worked great – and Tilda turned on her heel to march away from him. She didn’t have time for one of his silly ideas. Not with term papers and finals breathing down her neck.

“Tilda,” he said, chasing after her. “Wait, look, obviously I know you can’t actually sell someone else your good luck. Which is why this is completely harmless. It’s people paying you for something you don’t actually have to give them. It’s free money!”

She turned to frown at him. The idea of free money sounded wonderful, like exactly what she needed at the moment, with tuition for the next semester coming up and an overdue rent payment burning a hole in her thoughts. But. She shook her head, “Nothing’s free. There’s some kind of catch.”

“There’s no catch,” Johnny insisted, turning to walk backwards, waving his phone around again. “And they do direct deposit almost instantly. It’s so simple, I’m telling you. I got two hundred dollars just today. For nothing!”

Tilda scoffed, doing her best to ignore the sale’s job, until Johnny declared her a buzzkill and left her alone, off to spread news of his sudden windfall with others.

Tilda waited until he was gone; he tripped over the sidewalk as he left, tumbling down and picking himself back up without a look over his shoulder. She could see the tips of his ears staining red as other people turned and stared. She turned the other way and downloaded the Swappr app.

She could really use an extra hundred bucks. What could it possibly hurt?

#

Swappr offered their dear friends who downloaded their new, life-changing app a number of different services. As Johnny had mentioned, you could put your luck up for sale. The app offered choices in how much good luck you’d like to sell: a day, two days, a week? The options stopped there.

People could also put their bad luck up on the app. You could barter for how much you wanted paid to take awful luck off someone else’s hands. There were warnings and advisements here and there, popping up as Tilda made selections, small text informing her that it wasn’t a good idea to sell more than a day or two of luck, that taking on bad luck from multiple sources could have severe results, that the Swappr brand was not responsible for the outcomes of unadvised luck trades.

The whole thing read like a joke, a very strange, dry joke that Tilda couldn’t understand. But the app had good reviews, for the most part, and it didn’t seem to be a scam. From everything she could find, the fine folks at Swappr really did pay up promptly for all luck-based transactions.

Johnny had said that he’d gotten two hundred dollars off of the app. Based on the prices she was seeing, he must have traded at least a week’s worth of good luck away. She needed five hundred dollars to cover her rent and some other expenses, already over a week past due.

It was, she considered, very unlucky to get kicked out onto the street at the end of the semester, when she most needed a warm, dry place to study. The entire thing was ridiculous, but it was a special kind of ridiculous that promised to pay her bills.

Tilda sighed, shrugged, and posted a week’s worth of luck onto the app.

It sold almost immediately, netting her an easy two hundred and fifty dollars. Prices must have gone up since Johnny made his deal. She watched the text reporting the deposit pop up on her phone, her bank happily informing her that her balance was no longer a stunningly impressive $0.53.

That still wasn’t enough to cover rent, though. She waited, sitting cross-legged on her bed for a moment, something superstitious making her hold her breath. But nothing happened. A mirror didn’t fall off her wall, alarms didn’t start going off, it was fine. Of course, it was fine. The app was just a dumb placebo.

And she needed another two-hundred and fifty bucks.

She scrolled over to the section of the app where desperate individuals were trying to unload their bad luck. Bad luck seemed to move in day-increments. She selected six of them, all from different people, little green check marks springing into life, moved them to her cart, and hit confirm before she could think more about it.

Another text arrived from her bank. She laughed a little in punchy delight, tossing her phone onto the bed so she could throw her arms up in a little personal celebration. It bounced off the mattress and over the side. She cursed, with feeling, at the tell-tale crunch of glass.

#

So, Tilda’s phone cracked across the screen. It wasn’t even a clean break. The entire face of the phone shattered into pieces, half of which fell out and got lost in her carpet. She cursed, picking them up carefully, and accidentally put the heel of her hand down onto a large shard she hadn’t noticed. It sliced up into the meat of her hand in a sudden wash of hot pain.

She yelled and jerking to her feet, gripping her wrist, trying to remember if she’d ever bought a first-aid kit or not. It turned out she had. She found it under the bathroom sink. She knocked over a bottle of bleach reaching for it, and the cap must have been unscrewed: it poured out across the floor.

She cursed, dancing in place to avoid the liquid, holding her bleeding hand over the sink. “Okay,” she said, into the quiet of her apartment, once she’d managed to right the bleach and throw a towel – it would turn out to be her favorite – across the spreading spill. “Okay, just… slow down.”

She moved cautiously, turning on the water. She touched the glass sticking out and decided, based on the sick roil of nausea through her at the briefest movement of the shard, that taking it out on her own was a bad idea.

She wrapped it as best she could in another towel and swayed out of the bathroom. She threw her phone in a plastic bag to contain the glass – it was blinking, she’d missed a call, but that would have to wait – and made her way out, towards the emergency medical center a few blocks away.

#

The walk-in clinic was busy when Tilda got there; apparently, she wasn’t the only one having a rough day. The nurse got her signed in, eventually. The computer shut down and restarted twice while Tilda tried to spit out her information. She shuffled over to a shitty plastic chair after accomplishing that task, slouching down gratefully and yelping when one of the legs broke, tumbling her down to the sticky linoleum floor.

Someone – an older woman with kind eyes and a strange smell about her – helped Tilda to her feet. There were no more open chairs. Tilda leaned against the wall, keeping her hand elevated, and tried not to feel lightheaded as she waited.

Her phone kept blinking at her. She awkwardly manipulated the phone through the bag, trying to avoid additional injuries from the glass, and managed to access her voicemail.

Johnny’s voice came through the speaker, cracking across the line. “Don’t do it, Tilda,” he panted, his voice quavering. “Don’t – or at least follow the rules, I, I made a mistake, Tilda, I—”

There was a strange sound, then, one Tilda had to replay the message twice to comprehend. It was, she realized, the sound of a scream and crunching metal and plastic. The message cut off, after that. She held the phone up against her ear for a long moment, her gut going cold, and then called Johnny.

He didn’t answer. In fact, the call went directly to voicemail. Tilda listened to Johnny cheerily request that the caller leave a message and disconnected the call. He never listened to his messages, anyway. She tried to text, but the shattered screen prevented that, so she just stood until it was her turn.

The doctor who finally saw her forgot to give her an injection of painkillers before pulling out the glass. She turned to the side, fighting the vomit rising in her throat, his hollow apologies ringing in her ears. The fact that she had a reaction to the tetanus shot he insisted on giving her was just a coincidence, a bit of bad luck.

Bad luck felt like the only luck she had at this point

That consideration dragged her thoughts back to Swappr, to the fresh money sitting in her bank account. She’d agreed to accept the bad luck of others, and now… But all of that was impossible. No one could sell luck. It was just confirmation bias. Things were going wrong, normal things, and she was attributing them to an impossible source.

Tilda ended up dragging herself out of the clinic, her bandaged hand held close to her chest, her lips still a little numb from her allergic reaction. She tried to call Johnny again, and got no answer. Just voicemail.

#

Tilda smelled the smoke for a long time before she realized her apartment building was burning down. To be fair, she’d almost been hit by three different cars while trying to make her way home, so she wasn’t exactly focused. One had jumped the curb and almost clipped her on the sidewalk.

Everything she owned, except for her broken phone, was in the apartment. Red flames were currently licking their way out of all of her windows. It looked like the inferno had started in her apartment, or, at least, that’s where most of the smoke was coming from.

She swayed on her feet and then gave up on standing, sinking down to sit on the sidewalk as her head swam and bile climbed up the back of her throat. She never saw the firefighter running past; he never saw her, either, she guessed.

He hit her in her left shoulder, momentum shoving her out onto the blacktop. She tried to catch herself with one hand, but her elbow buckled, leaving her caught in the crushing crowd.

For the longest moment, she could not stand. Every time she got half-way up, someone elbowed her in the side, or shoved her in the back, or hooked a foot around her ankle. She fell and tripped against one person after another, all of their faces blurring together from the tears stinging in her eyes, none of them offering her aid. None of them even seemed to see her as she fell, finally, into an alley.

She rested, gulping for breath, against a damp brick wall. Trashcans surrounded her. She’d fallen in something wet and hot. It soaked up into her jeans and the bandage on her hand. She watched her apartment burn, gulping for breath, murmuring, senselessly, “It’s alright, it’s alright, it’ll be fine.”

She didn’t believe it, even as she said it. She believed it even less when she went to stand, bracing on the dumpster, and her hand pushed right through the corroded metal, spilling waste down over her body and something small and wriggling, that clung to her.

Tilda screamed, beating at the rats scampering on her jeans, on her jacket, reeling backwards. Their tiny warm bodies fell to the ground, they squirmed over one another, over her feet, terrible and organic, scampering around in a panic.

She leaned, breathless and stunned, against the other wall of the alley, and didn’t believe anything would be alright at all.

Something was wrong. No, scratch that. Everything was wrong. And it had all gone wrong after Tilda signed up for Swappr. She didn’t believe any of it was real, she couldn’t, but—but what would it hurt, to undo the transactions, to give back the money and stop playing along with this stupid joke?

She held her broken phone carefully against one leg, navigating poorly around pieces of shattered glass. Navigating to the ‘Contact Us’ section of the app was a nightmare, especially as fat raindrops began to fall from the sky.

There was a phone-number available to call. The sheer unlikelihood of an actual telephone number threw Tilda for a moment. She blinked at her screen, shaken back into her own head by a long, low rumble of thunder, though it was far too late into the fall to expect a lightning storm.

A flash of light from the mouth of the alley made her jump. She swore as rainwater flowed down across the asphalt, curling around her shoes. She punched numbers into her phone and held it up to her ear, jumping at another crack of thunder. It sounded closer.

The phone rang. She half-expected the number to be disconnected, she really did, but after only two rings, someone answered. “Hello,” a chipper voice said, the kind of voice that belonged to someone who’d had three cups of coffee heavily seasoned with sugar, “I’m Susanna and you’ve reached Swappr. How can I help you control your fortunes today?”

Tilda almost laughed. The sound caught in her throat. “Hi, yes,” she said. Her voice sounded shrill. “I’m—I made some transactions, earlier. With your app. I need to cancel them.”

Susanna hummed on the other side of the phone. The next rumble of thunder shook the wall at Tilda’s back. She stepped away from it. She wasn’t the tallest thing in the area. She wasn’t even close to the tallest thing in the area. Lightning wouldn’t hit her, she thought, scrambling out of the alley and away from the rising waters.

“I’m sorry,” Susanna said, sounding like she was probably smiling, wherever she was. “All Swappr transactions are non-reversible. It’s one of the factors we advise you of before you make your selection.”

Maybe it had been. Tilda hadn’t read the terms of service. Who did? She curled her shoulders down, trying to stay out of the rain. There was a shitty tree, growing on one corner of the intersection. She huddled against its bark, stepping in something that smelled as awful as she did.

“Look,” she said. “That’s—I understand. But I’d really appreciate it if you could make an exception. I still have the money. I’ll give it back. I just—”

Need my luck back sounded like something a mad person would say. The words stuck behind Tilda’s teeth. This was all madness. None of it was possible. It was just in her head. She was making too much of it; the stress from finals was getting to her.

“Unfortunately,” Susanna said, before Tilda could get down to the nitty-gritty of pleading. “I don’t think I can help you. We do warn about potential ill-effects multiple times on the app, and—”

“I know,” Tilda cut in. “I know that, I just, I accidentally took on bad luck from multiple people.” The bold face lie felt necessary, at the moment. There was little Tilda wouldn’t have done to stop the rain pouring down the back of her sweater, the thunder in the air, the car horns all around, the fire still billowing out of her apartment.

“We do warn against taking on the bad luck of more than one individual, as this can increase the risk that—”

“Please,” Tilda cut in, her voice unfamiliar with panic. “Please, I didn’t realize, can you just—just cancel the transactions. I’m begging you, please.”

Susanna was quiet for a moment, just long enough for Tilda, huddled against the tree, barely even aware of the tears streaking down her cheeks, to think that the representative would give in, show some mercy. Instead, Susanna sighed. “I’m very sorry,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do. You signed the waiver and the transactions aren’t reversible. Good luck with the rest of your day, ma’am.”

The phone went quiet against Tilda’s ear. She cried out, preparing to re-dial, hoping to try again with someone who had more human feeling than Susanna. The world turned white at the same time the sound of thunder hit her eardrums.

She blinked up at the grey sky afterwards, smelling something charred. She ached from head to toe. Someone was leaning over her, their mouth moving, though she couldn’t make out most of the words. They were definitely saying something about calling 911.

She waved a hand at them, rolling slowly onto her side. The tree she’d been huddled against was little more than matchsticks. The sky overhead was slate grey, clouds moving angrily against one another. She felt the next rumble of thunder, shoved to her feet, and ran, limping, stumbling, looking for someplace, anyplace, that might offer her safety.

#

The worst part about it, Tilda thought, running headlong down the street, was that she couldn’t call out for help. No one could help her get away from bad luck, bought and paid for fairly. No one could snap their fingers and change her fortunes.

Except that was what Swappr did. Tilda stumbled to a stop. The guy behind her ran into her, spinning her around, but she barely noticed. It was just a drop in the bucket. She brought her phone up again, planning to access the app, and found it dark and unresponsive.

Her phone smelled of smoke and burnt circuitry.

She laughed, shakily, and threw the ruined device at the ground, wobbling in a small circle. There were people all around her. Most of them were giving her a wide berth, but there was a young woman standing along the curb, huddled under an umbrella, scrolling through her phone.

She wasn’t paying attention to anything or anyone.

Tilda considered her options, decided she didn’t have any, and lurched forward. Adrenaline and sharp terror gave her strength as she bumped into the girl, grabbing for the phone. The girl screamed, beat at her, but Tilda barely felt it. She clamped her fingers around the phone and shoved the girl, who went over backwards, wide-eyed, mouth open like an ‘O’ into the street.

Tilda heard horns and the squeal of brakes as she spun around and ran.

#

Tilda ran unheeding, ignoring voices calling after her, full of anger and alarm. She dodged into traffic, felt her hip catch something hard, spun and landed on the asphalt. She was back on her feet in a moment, adrenaline shoving aside everything else.

The girl didn’t have Swappr installed on her phone, damn her. Tilda downloaded it as she limped along, dragging her left foot. She paused, there in the middle of she-didn’t-know how many lanes, her fingers shaking as she entered in her username, her password.

Her account came up as she jerked into motion again, barely even risking a glance up as she staggered onward, across the road. It was simple to put a day’s worth of bad luck up on the app. Her bank information was already connected to the account. It was only a few buttons, quickly pushed. She put two-fifty on it, and then put another day up, not caring that it was all the money she had.

Surely she’d used up a few days of bad luck already.

She just needed to wait, just a moment, just long enough for someone to take one of the days.

A blare of sound filled up the whole world. Tilda froze, looking up and over at the truck bearing down on her. She felt too exhausted to move suddenly, and what would be the point, anyway? Something else would just get her, at least getting hit by a truck was a normal way to die. She turned her face aside, squeezing her eyes shut, fingers cramping around the phone, and heard two little chimes, close together, as someone took her bad luck and her money.

There was a scream, from somewhere to her left, a wet crunch, the sounds of metal slamming into metal and giving way.

She stood, trembling, in the middle of the road, daring after a moment to crack one eye open. The truck had veered off the road, barely missing her, if the skid marks on the asphalt were anything to go by. It had slammed into the front of an old brick building, instead.

People clustered around, jumping out of their cars. Some were screaming, others crying. One of them touched her shoulder, put a jacket around her.

Tilda stared forward, letting the phone fall out of her fingers, lost in the rain and the sudden onrush of people, as sick, heady relief spread out through her chest and her luck changed, just like that.

END

Author’s Biography

J.S. Rogers has been writing since she was old enough to hold a pencil. She enjoys exploring horror fiction and the intricacies of the human condition. She lives on the East Coast with her kids and cats.