Gerald Gray’s To-Do List

A short story about the consequences of uncompleted work

Photo by Bill Adler

Gerald Gray, a project manager at the Grace Mannequin Manufacturing Factory in Detroit, Michigan, died of a heart attack on October 7th with one task on his to-do list undone. 

The uncompleted task was to order five hundred pounds of modacrylic fiber, which their plant would process, dye, and shape into human-looking hair.

Human Resources retasked Gerald’s computer to Angie Trell, promoting her on the spot from senior bookkeeper to Gerald’s former job. On her first day, either inadvertently or deliberately, she deleted Gerald’s to-do list, and the fiber never got ordered.

Six weeks later, twelve mannequins were due to be dispatched to Teller’s Department Store in Cincinnati to replace their cracked and faded ones, but Grace Mannequin canceled the shipment because they had no hair for the mannequins. 

Forty minutes into shopping for a winter coat for her eight-year-old daughter, Ana, Liliana Durand said, “Enough!” Ana had tried on over a dozen coats, and despite Liliana’s coaxing, prodding, and suggesting, Ana didn’t like any of them. In previous years, Ana had dashed to the child-size mannequin, hugged it, and said, “I want that coat, Mommy.” In and out in ten minutes. Today, in frustration, Liliana grabbed a random dark blue, button-down wool coat with a detachable fur-trimmed hood and buttonable pockets and said, “We’re getting this one, and you’re going to wear it.” 

When Liliana and Ana arrived home, Liliana’s husband, Louis, asked how the shopping went. Liliana reported that it did not go well. When Liliana told him how much the coat cost, he snapped at her and said, “That’s too much to spend on a coat she’s going to outgrow in a season.” 

Liliana shouted back, “Next year, you do the shopping,” interlaced with a few swear words.

Liliana and Louis remained frosty for the remainder of the evening, their anger following them into the bedroom like mosquitoes after blood. Fury wedged its ugly self between Liliana and slumber. 

Liliana worked in the IT department at the University of Cincinnati. Having had barely three hours of sleep, she teetered over the edge of sleep deprivation. Instead of backing up Louise Morgan’s computer onto the server, she made a mistake and restored the drive from the previous week. 

Louise Morgan, PhD, was the astronomer in charge of the Near-Earth Object Detection Project, a consortium of astronomy departments from a hundred universities and observatories around the globe that tracked asteroids and comets. She had been selected to head the consortium after discovering Hailchon, the most distant dwarf planet from the sun.

Because she was using the wrong data, Dr. Morgan didn’t notice that the orbit of 56934 JV9, a thirty-three-mile-long, irregularly-shaped asteroid that resembled a saddle, had changed and was now on a collision course with Earth. 

By the time another astronomer, Yuki Matsuda of Kiso Observatory on Mt. Ontake in Japan, detected that 56934 JV9 was making a beeline for Earth, there was no time to deflect the asteroid with the high-mass kinetic impactor that America had developed. Yuki, who was aware of the limitations of the planetary defense, was torn between spending her last days with her parents or her boyfriend and decided, despite the awkwardness, to bring her boyfriend to her parents’ home. 

Six days later, 56934 JV9 struck Earth just north of Easter Island. The impact triggered cataclysmic earthquakes, mile-high tsunamis, thousand-mile-an-hour winds, and a heat blast that killed everyone.

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