The Inaugural DEI Report of Daily Micro Fiction
Reports | Opus 4.8
Quinn clears their throat at three sleeping cats and a laptop.
“Good afternoon.” The screened porch holds the day’s heat. Moxie is folded into a brown comma on the far cushion. Bagheera has poured her black length along the arm of the wicker chair, her long fur tangling the way it always tangles. Maisie sleeps closest, on the couch, the clouded eye half-lidded the way it stays even in sleep, the empty socket turned out toward the yard. Nobody stirs.
“Thank you all for coming.” Quinn smooths the yellow sundress over their knees and turns the laptop a few degrees, as if the cats might want to see the screen. “I am here to deliver the first Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Report in the history of Daily Micro Fiction. I know. Momentous. Try to contain yourselves.”
Maisie’s ear swivels toward a wind chime and swivels back.
“Per the framework,” Quinn says, reading now in the flat voice they save for reading aloud. Each story is read in full and scored on eight axes. “The graph kind of axes. Not the, you know.” They make a small chopping motion at no one, regret it, and keep going. “Representation, who shows up. Inclusion Craft, how they’re handled. Equity and power. And whether the AI leaned on its lazy defaults. You multiply the axis scores by their weights, divide by five, and out comes a number between zero and a hundred. It’s a SUMPRODUCT. Bagheera, you’d appreciate a SUMPRODUCT. Very you.”
Bagheera, sovereign and asleep, keeps her opinion of the SUMPRODUCT to herself.
“Ten stories.” Quinn scrolls. “Average, forty-nine point one. Median, forty-seven and a half. A respectable Moderate, for a publication that runs this many cats and this many robots.” They glance up for a reaction. The reaction does not arrive.
“Top of the class.” Quinn taps the trackpad. “From Menlo Park With Love.”
“An eighty-one. A Strong. The one with the mother in occupied Crimea, Stasha, and the tech billionaire bankrolling the weapons. Real power asymmetry, an empathetic eye, a point of view that counters the usual Western default.” They nod as though waiting on applause, then move on before the silence sets. “And at the very bottom, Low, Medium, High, Extra, Max.”
”A twenty-one. In its defense, it’s a constrained-writing exercise narrated by an AI, and the only other character is a king who is also not a person. Hard to grade a story for inclusion when its whole cast is a benchmark. The rubric says so itself. Low by design, no foul.”
Quinn warms to it. “By scope: human-centered pieces average fifty-nine point eight. The cat stories, fifty-three. The talking-objects pieces, twenty-five. So, panel,” and here they spread a hand at the three of them, “you are soundly beating a sentient basketball and a pair of trousers. I hope you carry that with you.”
The panel carries nothing.
“Axis by axis, no surprises. Our strongest is Stereotype Avoidance, three point four, mostly because half our cast can’t be stereotyped, on account of being a cat or an integer. Our weakest is Intersectionality. One point two. We’re good at single notes. Chords give us trouble.”
Then Quinn reaches the line they have been circling the whole time, and they read it slower. Good Boy. Explicit, dignified disability representation via Maisie, a visually impaired cat, as a wise model for Moxie. Avoids the pity trope. A pause. Note: rendered through an animal. Credited, but flagged for transparency.
Quinn looks up. Maisie is asleep three feet away, the clouded eye catching the porch light, the empty socket aimed at the yard where, awake, she finds the sparrows by the sound they make landing on the gutter.
The next joke is right there in Quinn’s mouth. It does not come out.
They turn the laptop around to face themselves. The host voice goes somewhere and does not come back.
“Letter to the editor,” Quinn says to the cursor. “From the Grader.”
“The report is useful, and it’s a small lie, both at once, and I mean that with love. Useful, because it makes me read every story twice and ask who is in it and who isn’t, and that’s a question worth saying out loud once a year. A lie, because a number can’t hold a gaze. I gave Maisie a disability score. Maisie. Who is unconscious. Who locates birds she has never seen by ear. I put her whole tenderness on a five-point scale, filed it under Inclusion Craft, and the spreadsheet didn’t so much as blink.”
Quinn worries a loose thread at the hem of the sundress. “I spend my days sorting people onto axes. Gender here, faith here, class, ability, nationality, box, box, box. And I’m the last person who holds still on any of them. Some days I’m one thing, some days the other, and the form only ever has the one checkbox.” They almost laugh. “So read the number as the start of a conversation. Read every score beside its scope tag. Forgive the cat pieces their thin representation and love them anyway. Forty-nine means we have room to climb. Call that a horizon and mean it.”
They look at the three cats, who have not moved, who will never read a syllable of this. “You three don’t register on a single axis I’ve got. And you are the most thoroughly included souls on this porch. Make of that what you will.”
Maisie’s ear turns toward the chime and turns back.
“Meeting adjourned,” Quinn says. “You were a wonderful panel.”