Griselda, as Head of Tournament Operations, took this responsibility extremely seriously, and had arranged the match schedule on the noticeboard with colour-coded pins. Morocco had been given a very small pin. Scotland’s pin had been quietly removed and placed in the drawer where they kept things that were not to be discussed.
“We could,” said Gwendoline, who handled Communications and had been staring at the same spreadsheet for forty minutes without updating it, “look on the bright side.”
Nobody looked on the bright side.
Gertrude, who was in charge of Seed Procurement, had the expression of someone doing difficult mental arithmetic about whether disappointment counted as a special occasion. It did not. She had checked the criteria. She checked them again. Still no.
“I have been thinking,” said Greta, eventually.
Greta was not officially in charge of anything. This was generally considered to make her more dangerous rather than less.
“The problem,” Greta continued, smoothing a piece of paper that did not need smoothing, “is that we have no collectibles.”
A pause.
“Collectibles,” repeated Griselda, in the tone of someone writing it down anyway.
“A sticker album. For the tournament. Every team. Every player. You collect them. You stick them. There is a process.” Greta paused. “The process is soothing.”
Gertrude looked up from the seed procurement ledger. “Who would be in it?”
“All the competing gerbil nations. And their squads.”
“How many nations are competing?”
Greta consulted nothing. “All of them.”
“How many is that?”
“All,” said Greta, with quiet finality, “of them.”
Griselda had located a fresh colour-coded pin without being entirely conscious of doing so. “And the players. We would need names.”
“We have names,” said Gwendoline.
“We would need more names.”
This was understood to be true. Squad sizes were, as yet, administratively undefined, which Griselda found uncomfortable and Greta found full of possibility.
“Gunnhild,” offered Gwendoline.
“Gunnhild is a goalkeeper,” said Greta immediately.
“You don’t know her position yet.”
“It’s a goalkeeper’s name,” said Greta. “You can hear it. She comes off her line early. She’s confident about it.”
Nobody disputed this. Gunnhild did sound like she came off her line early.
“There will need to be a shiny one,” said Gertrude, from behind the ledger.
Everyone turned.
“Every sticker album,” Gertrude continued, with the authority of someone who had clearly been thinking about this longer than they were letting on, “has a shiny one. A foil sticker. The important player. The one everyone wants.”
“Who’s the shiny one?” asked Gwendoline.
A longer pause.
“It will need to be earned,” said Greta. “We can’t simply assign shininess. There has to be a process.”
Griselda wrote down shininess process and underlined it twice.
“And,” said Gertrude, closing the ledger with a soft but definitive sound, “when the album is complete—”
“If the album is complete,” said Gwendoline.
“When,” said Gertrude, who had not spent twelve years in seed procurement by accepting if as a planning framework, “the album is complete. There should be a ceremony. And at the ceremony—”
She did not finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. She simply looked at the locked cabinet where the sunflower seeds were kept, with the expression of a gerbil who was finally, methodically, constructing an occasion.
Griselda got a new pin. A gold one.
She didn’t put it anywhere yet. But she had it ready.
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/the-bright-side