The kettle clicked off like a tiny verdict. I poured boiling water over a cup of instant ramen and accepted, with cheerful defeat, that my life had narrowed to a fluorescent-lit cubicle, a swivel chair, and someone on the phone who wanted "colorful black." "Colorful black?" I said, because you either laugh or hang up. I chose to make it a question. "We need black that pops," the client insisted with the kind of calm entitlement people reserve for bank tellers and junior designers. "A different black. A black with depth. With personality." "Right. A character," I said, stirring soggy noodles with a plastic fork. "Who is... black in your story?" "You just don't get it," she sighed. "You planners are all the same. Bring me colorful black by morning." I looked at the cup, at the bunched-up strategic brief beside my keyboard, at the poster of Alder Bay's Film Week tacked crooked above my desk. Outside, the city was a slow smear of sodium light and rain. Inside, the ceiling buzzed like a beehive gone industrial. I told her I'd get it done. I told myself I'd get home. I told my stomach it was dinner. The fluorescent light hummed a little higher, as if to punctuate the point. When my boss—my actual boss, not the art-director-in-a-NY-corporate-dystopia boss—emailed asking for the revised deck, my reply was a gif of a shrug and an empty hope