Reactor, April 2026
“I Spin Records Into Gold” by Daria Lavelle — Reactor, 2026
Eddie is a engineering student turned reluctant roadie, a man who abandoned a clear-eyed future — NASA, a suburb, a golden retriever — the moment he heard a rock band play a Tuesday-night set at the bar where he was working. That band: four distinct, magnetically talented young men. Mac, the cool-blooded guitarist whose arms are tattooed with song lyrics. Jimmy, the puckish, bottled-up front man. Tuck, the freckled, metronome-steady drummer. Eric, the sad-smiling farm kid on bass. Eddie can’t make music himself, but he can feel it the way a compass feels north, and so he signs on as roadie, hauling gear through roach motels and condemned bars and diner-corner gigs across 1970s America, sustained entirely by the certainty that something about this band is exceptional.
That certainty is proven, catastrophically, in Las Vegas. At a run-down gold-rush-themed bar called The Golden Nugget — far from the Strip, far from anywhere — a small, root-faced man in a threadbare goldenrod suit walks through the saloon doors. Bill Bullion introduces himself as a band manager based in LA, heavy with tarnished gold rings and a mouth full of gilded teeth. He’s seen everything, worked with everyone, and he likes their sound. He offers them a deal: he’ll spin their records into gold. All they need to do is sign.
The ascent is dizzying. Bill gets them a slot at the Whisky A Go-Go, where two A&R men from competing labels get into a bidding war. Their debut album hits number one. Their first single goes gold within a month. They headline stadiums. But the golden pills Bill slips them early on carry something beneath the pleasure — a subliminal hum in the new songs they write, an addictive pull that feels like more than music. And Bill grows possessive and erratic, demanding a sophomore album by December, threatening the band when they try to cut him loose. When they finally fire him face-to-face backstage at Madison Square Garden, he’s almost amused. We’ll see, he says, burning a hole in the carpet with his cigarette.
The next morning, the band has never existed. Albums, airplay, memories — all erased. Eddie wakes up in his dorm room, slightly dazed, and simply resumes his life: engineering degree, Cape Canaveral, a woman named Allison he meets at a roller rink, twins born on Christmas Day, a dog on the rug. The dream he’d shelved comes true, and he nearly forgets there was ever anything else.
Nearly. Familiar melodies keep surfacing in other artists’ work — Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Aerosmith — songs Eddie knows note-for-note, with the wrong words. The memories seep back slowly. He tracks down his old bandmates: Jimmy is a grease-stained mechanic; Mac rolls coins at a bank; Tuck is studying accounting; Eric never left the farm and died under a plow. The band’s stolen songs live on, dispersed across the rock canon, attributed to other names.
Eddie eventually identifies Bill Bullion as Rumpelstiltskin — an ancient trickster whose currency is not gold but fame, whose immortality depends on people speaking his name and telling his story. Bill erased the band not for profit but for pride: they’d disrespected him, and he couldn’t let that stand. Their songs were too good to destroy, so he scattered them and wiped out the makers.
Confronting Bill, Eddie strikes a new bargain: in exchange for resetting time and saving the band — and Eric — he will offer Bill a place on the ultimate record, NASA’s Golden Record aboard Voyager I. What Eddie trades away, though he only understands it at the last moment, is Allison. The story closes back in The Golden Nugget on that first night, the timeline restarted — but now Eddie is onstage, guitar in hand, and Bill Bullion has been turned away at the door by an almost imperceptible shake of Eddie’s head. The band is intact. Eric is alive. And Allison, glimpsed laughing behind the bar, belongs to a life Eddie has just permanently forfeited. He looks away. The crowd is filtering in. He has made his choice, and he will have to make it worth the cost.
Lavelle’s story is a lushly imagined riff on the Rumpelstiltskin myth transplanted into the excess and yearning of 1970s rock, meditating on the price of proximity to genius, the ache of unlived lives, and the strange persistence of music across erased timelines.
Daria Lavelle is a speculative fiction writer. Her short stories have appeared in The Deadlands, Dread Machine, Dark Matters, and elsewhere, and her debut novel, Aftertaste, was published in 2025 by Simon & Schuster (US) and Bloomsbury (UK), and has been translated into thirteen languages. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and raised in the New York metro area, she holds degrees in writing from Princeton University and Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in New Jersey with her family, and can often be found in a local coffee shop, inventing new worlds or distorting this one. Learn more at darialavelle.com.