Clarkesworld, May 2026
The story opens on Tillie, a twenty-one-year-old low blood woman standing outside her family’s home in the crowded lower city of Simetria while her father is being mercy-killed inside. The world Singerling constructs runs on a cosmology of geometric order: distortions — ruptures in Euclidean space-time — can touch human flesh and produce affliction, a grotesque and endless metamorphosis of the body that cannot be undone except by complete dismemberment. Citizens perform daily mathematical rituals, drawing circles and invoking formulas, to reinforce reality’s proper form. Surveyors carry out the mercy killings. Deacons offer consolation. It is a world in which bureaucratic violence against the poor is dressed in the language of the sacred.
Tillie’s mother, having refused to leave her husband’s side, is caught by distortion-laden matter and infected. Before she too is killed, Tillie is allowed a brief, wrenching farewell across a protective ward. A young deacon, handsome and quietly guilt-ridden, leads Tillie away through streets that climb from the crumbling lower city into the manicured calm of the upper city. They speak on a park bench. He is awkward at consolation but attentive, and he notices that Tillie bears an uncanny resemblance to a high-blood surveyor named Lady Sophie Roshem. He names her before the section ends: Sophie Roshem.
A month passes. Tillie is living cramped into a corner of her friend Gemma’s home, enduring the hostile insinuations of Gemma’s husband Jacub and grinding out twelve-hour days as a seamstress. On her one free day she visits a prospective rental, is harassed and groped by the landlord, and retreats into a bell tower to escape the heat. There, she watches paper airplanes drift down over the lower city — a recurring anonymous gift to its residents, poems folded and released from above. She climbs to find the poet.
He turns out to be the deacon: Nicolus Yevin, a high-blood clergyman who releases his work anonymously, unable to express himself freely under the weight of his station. Tillie, cornered and desperate, threatens to expose him unless he helps her reach Lady Roshem, whose likeness she hopes to leverage into a better life. He talks her out of it — not cruelly, but practically — and instead introduces her to Madam Gerton, who runs an upper-city establishment called A Taste of Refinement, where employees impersonate high-blood figures for paying clients. The work is intimate but also theatrical, structured and warded, a world apart from the predatory exposure of the lower city.
Nicolus arranges for his colleague Vergil Holdsworth, a priest who has known Sophie Roshem since childhood, to help Tillie prepare. Four months later, Tillie is thriving: dressed well, sleeping safely, learning to read, protected by walls that cost money rather than demanding vulnerability. When Nicolus finally releases a new poem — titled “A Gift,” addressed to her, suffused with guilt and self-reproach — she reads it with Vergil’s help and responds with a single editorial correction. Where he wrote I betrayed you, she crosses out betrayed and writes saved.
The story’s central tension is the gap between Nicolus’s romantic guilt and Tillie’s clear-eyed pragmatism. He experiences her path as a manipulation he set in motion; she experiences it as the first real safety of her adult life. Singerling uses the non-Euclidean mythology with quiet precision — affliction as a figure for precarity, the rituals as social compliance, the wards as the literal architecture of class — while keeping the human drama legible and unforced. The ending, that small inked correction, is elegantly earned.
Sheri Singerling spends her days staring at rocks and dust from space and her nights crafting worlds via the written word. She is a US native living in Germany, where she works as a laboratory manager, lecturer, and research scientist. Outside of her work and writing, she enjoys coaxing plants to grow, walking up and down steep inclines in nature, and listening to repetitive electronic beats. Her novels and short stories all fall into the Alfom shared universe. “Paper Airplane Poet” is a direct companion to her latest novel, Blessed is the Rot (book #1 in the Bit trilogy).