jamieproctor.ca

It was a letter. Unusual in these days of instant messages and talking electrons, but it had a few newspaper clippings slipped in there that wouldn’t have gotten my way otherwise. Physical proof adds weight to the claims of the crazy, and it takes just enough longer to take a trip to the garbage can than to the ‘delete’ button that you might notice something worthwhile on your way. Three little articles from two little papers, with seven spelling mistakes between them. A missing car, a missing man, a missing hiker. All in the same place, all on the same road, all without a trace. The letter attached to that was an afterthought of information at best. ‘Come here,’ it said. ‘Help,’ it said.
‘Hunt.’
I thought about the options as I looked over my traveling kit.
Bear. No. They usually don’t do serial jobs, and they certainly don’t do cars.
Cougar. The same.
Humans. Could be, could be. Never rule out humans. It’d add to the challenge, sure.
Accidents. A universal. But maybe not this closely-packed. There’s bad luck, and then there’s bad luck.
And then there could be… something else. Which was why I was carrying the special case with the special tools in my left hand when I stepped out the door and left my latest small, meaningless apartment behind.
I’d say that the job finding me was unusual, but that would be a lie. What I do isn’t work. Great-great-granddad called it by a different name.
It’s the purest play there is, he said, a game humans invented a long, long time ago. And I still haven’t found anything that can beat me at it.
I can say the same thing.

It was a quiet sort of place, tucked away in some leafy little corner of the country that no one really cared about or looked at too closely. A hundred houses spread thin on the ground, two franchise buildings that sold grease and clogged arteries, and a late-night hunting supplies store on the highway that some joker had decided to paint in camouflage which might have been the stupidest thing I’d seen in my life. Country folk, god bless ‘em and screw them to pieces. Nothing important lived for a hundred miles around, which was a good sign of whatever problem that was hanging around it being ‘something else.’ That sort of thing usually sticks off the beaten path. Too noisy, too busy, too many people, and they just run. With this few nearby, they don’t run, they stay and fight.
I ate lunch in a terrible fast food chain coated wall-to-wall in plastic, feeling nostalgia for the good old days when I would’ve eaten lunch in a terrible independently owned restaurant covered in dented chrome. It didn’t really matter, as long as the food was bad. It forced you to think, to look at your map and make marks on it, to do anything, anything at all to take your mind off what was crawling over your gums.
Three vanishings over five years on the same stretch of highway next to the ass of a useless little town that hung off the road like a tick. And no traces ever found. The hiker sets off from his home and doesn’t come back. The driver heads into town and never gets there, nor his car. The idiot drunk gets in a shouting match with his friend, gets turfed out of the car to walk the last mile home by himself, and drops off the face of the known universe.
All locals, of course. It’s the only reason the papers – and by extension, me – know where the hell they went missing. I thought idly about how many people vanish without a trace on America’s highways and byways, and wondered how many of them could’ve happened just down by here.

I set up my blind in the edge of the thicket by the hunting store. A good view over the stretch of the highway I’d penciled out as the likely danger zone, and it’d be easier to explain away what I was doing to anyone to that wandered by. A few rednecks stopping by to stock up on bullets and beef jerky saw me setting up and made tsking noises. No way I’d get deer down there, what the hell was I thinking, blah blah blah. Nothing new, nothing useful.
It was mostly bent branches when I was finished, a screen that didn’t look like a screen, a seamless little blot on the landscape just big enough for me to tuck myself and the contents of the special case inside and vanish as far as eyeballs were concerned. Hidden in plain sight, the best and only real way to do it. Sound would be no problem, not unless I came down with the worst cold of my life in the next two hours, or explosive hiccups, or spontaneous Tourette’s syndrome, because all three of those were just about as likely as each other. That just left scent, and where I was sitting the wind wouldn’t reach.
Everything was ready well before sundown, so I went inside (nearly cut myself on the doorframe – rusty, and jagged as a shark’s mouth) and shot the shit a bit with the owner of the store. A fat, pale weasel with too few teeth and barely any eyes. Like a bloated worm. Those tiny little eyeballs nearly bugged out of his flattened skull when he saw the Gun, though. It was a mistake to bring that in there, I thought he’d take no for an answer when he asked to see it but the whining just wouldn’t stop until it came out of its case.
I told him the truth because that was the easiest way: yes, that was my great-great-grandfather’s elephant gun, old as sin and twice as ugly, yes, I knew how to take care of it, no, he couldn’t touch it, yes, it used black powder, yes, I agreed that it was a bit much to use on deer, blah blah. Yes, I knew how much it was worth, now stop talking I’m leaving. At least he didn’t have a problem with me leaving my car in the lot while I hunted ‘deer’; hell, just for letting me see the Gun he’d probably have let me sleep with his sister.
I went back to my blind and sat there in the dusk, watching the stars come out, counting the cars leaving the hunting store’s parking lot (one, two, three, four… only two left) and measuring the darkness. It was straightforward, normal, the sort of lack-of-light you find anywhere in the world. Not the deep black of an old, brooding forest, not the underworld pitch of a cave, not even the forever sleep of the bottom of the ocean. Just your everyday, everynight nighttime, nothing to write home about or quake under the bed in fear of.
Perfect cover for something else. And while I sat there on the cold dirt and branches, I thought about all the something elses out there that might be roaming my way.
Would it be a bigfoot? It’d been a while since a bigfoot. They were the reason I carried around great-great-granddad’s outmoded monster Gun with me, despite the reload time and the monstrous weight of the thing. All that hair and hide was on top of near-solid bone in all the important spots, and it was hard to find anything that could punch through that on demand.
I remembered that first time I saw one. All that arm and leg, lanky as a colt, but on a torso bigger than an entire gorilla. It looked at me as I pulled the trigger, and I think I saw surprise in there somewhere. I sold the feet to an old, old man in Texas, with a lot of old, old money; the things stank worse than a rotten skunk.
Bigfoot ate anything, just like people, but they steered clear of us when they could. We’re better at killing than they are, and they know it. And even a really big old one would have trouble getting rid of a whole car. Probably wasn’t a bigfoot. Unless it was really pissed off and really smart. Those two traits, they don’t go well together.
Now, while I was waiting and thinking all this, my ears and eyes were on the move, prowling the night around me while my body and brain sat lullaby-soft. And here and now, they came back home and told me that there was something out there, and it was standing just where the brush thickened into trees, forty feet from me, surrounded by branches and needles. Its breath was very soft, but deep and full, and it seemed to take forever for each exhalation to end and another to begin. Big lungs on it.
I moved the Gun into position and got my other hand ready on the big spotlight that was another part of the special case. One second was all it took once I had the range and aim. Turn on the light, and then, in that instant between freeze and flight, bang.
Or, since this was the Gun, BANG.
If I missed, there’d be problems. So there weren’t.
The sound of gravel under a tire rasped on the night like glass against a cheese grater, and the quiet breather in the wood chuffed under its breath and left, whump-thud-whump, off at a trot, paws churning through old pine needles and drained soil, overwritten by the wheezing roar of a pickup truck that had last seen maintenance when its owner was sperm as it hauled out of the parking lot of the hunting store.
I swore inside my head. Two seconds. Three seconds. Maybe two seconds and a bit closer. So near to being a one-night hunt too. Just once, just once (wait, there’d been the time in Puerto Rica) just twice, it’d be nice to have a one-night hunt. No chance it’d come back now, not after a run like that.
The car was my bed, the second of the terrible fast-food franchises in town was my evening breakfast, and the slimy little man in the hunting store was my timekiller, if only because the mildewed air in there put me to sleep real easy. He’d known the man that went missing in the car, he said. A good customer, a regular, a friend. Terrible shame. I’d better be careful, because if I went missing so would the Gun, and that would be the real tragedy haw haw haw haw.
Haw haw back at you. Jackass.

I moved for the second night, set up my blind in the trees. I knew where the thing was coming from now, I knew its sound, I knew its tracks – poorly. The shuffle of its run had been too frantic, all the details had been rubbed raw into a blur of claws. It could be a bigfoot, a big clumsy guy with overgrown toenails, a chupacabra, or even a bear. Too damned messy to say for sure.
And so I waited, and this time my thoughts wandered towards chupacabras. Which this couldn’t be. Goatsuckers like it warm, too warm for it to ever come this far north. Not on the hottest summer of this place’s existence. And besides, they were spindly little bastards that went for goats and cattle, and only took beef when it was asleep. An alert human? Probably not. A car? Not on the best day of the biggest, baddest goatsucker’s life. Especially not since I’d shot her four years ago.
One hunt. One night. One shot. The thing’s teeth had been worn down to little stubs from use, her bites were more like rat-gnawing than needle-pricks. Took the teeth for the trophy rack in the special case, sold the head to a man in Japan. He died two days later. I wonder what happened to the head. Wonder if it made it into the will.
There it was again. There was that breathing, soft and slow. Still quiet, but a bit more controlled, tighter. Not as relaxed, are you? Because last night you got scared off, and now you’re back and
Right
There
baBANGng
I jumped as the shot took, aiming and firing on automatic while my body did its thing. A bear’s face in the spotlight, surprised and wide-eyed in the light, a bear’s body falling over with the head a ruined mess. The Gun had spoken, but something else had too. That was a car door slamming, another one of those goddamned hicks nearly spoiling my shot with his late-night exit after one of those useless long conversations with the storekeep about guns and light beer and how his wife’s a goddamned bitch. Nearly ruined two nights now, and all for a goddamned bear.
All that flew between my ears as I turned to the parking lot, Gun still smoking big gouts of black powder, and then it flew away because the lot was empty. No engine had started. No tires had turned. Just the doors, and then a lot empty except for my own car.
Bang.

The bear had been a nuisance, feeding on the garbage over and over, said the store owner. His own damned fault for not getting better bins, probably. But now it was dead, hoorah, hooray, thank you so much, let me get you some more ammo for free, I’m sure I can have it shipped in, what’s your address, don’t worry, I know a guy who knows someone, wink wink. What’s that, man go missing? No sir, didn’t know that. Ain’t that a trouble there, makes me scared to leave the building. Good thing I live-in, huh? Haw haw.
I hated him, but quietly. I was thinking, and I let myself nod and grunt when he wanted me to while I puzzled over that parking lot.
No tracks. Not a one. And it had made off with a whole car in the time it took me to shoot, swear, and turn around.
Without leaving a track, there or in the bush.
A flyer, maybe? The Jersey Devil had traveled abroad now and then, they said. Not that I’d ever seen the bastard, despite my best efforts. Four trips, weeks each time, and not a single cloven hoof or leathery wingbeat in the night. Maybe it had died years ago; it was hard to sort out the genuine sightings by crackpots from the phony sightings by other, more imaginative crackpots.
It could be a bigfoot. A really old one, big enough to hoist a car, smart enough to do it quietly and cover its tracks, filled with enough simmering, built-up hatred to slow-burn through a massacre of decades, man by man. But no, no, no. At that range the stench would’ve given it away, and the bigger they are the worse they smell. No ignoring it. Besides, no matter how strong the damned thing is, it has to lift a pickup truck and carry it through a forest at about sixty miles an hour without leaving a trace.
Maybe it wasn’t physical. Now that thought got the hairs on my neck tingling; the Gun can’t work on what isn’t really there, and I hunt animals, not ghosts. I checked my watch while the owner paused in his gossipy ramble to take a bite out of his burrito, and was relieved to see the minute hand still frozen at noon. Not a quiver, and with anything with enough mojo to move a truck, it’d be spinning for days. I idly wondered if the store owner was a serial killer and had been using the dumpster-diving bear to dispose of his victims, and discarded it. The man weighed four hundred pounds and seemed glued to his chair. And there was still the matter of the vanishing car.
I excused myself and left the hunting store for someplace less damp, brushing myself clean with both hands, and considered my plan for the evening. Whatever the hell was doing this didn’t matter. It was real, it wasn’t dead, therefore the Gun would kill it. I just had to catch it, and judging from how fast it moved, catch it fast. So I’d have to know where it would be. So I’d need bait.

My sleeping bag was a rumpled, sweaty mess, but for good measure I wrapped it around myself for the rest of the day to make sure it stayed fresh. A couple armfuls of sticks and the use of my coat, and I had a hideous scarecrow that wouldn’t have fooled a nearsighted four-year-old.
But propped up and in a laid-back seat, in the poor light given out by the watery lights of the hunting store… well, things would be different. Were different. I didn’t even need the spotlight this time, just both hands on the Gun and a long, slow breath that never quite ended and was soundless as a falling snowflake.
Not much that could do a thing like this. I was ready for anything to cross my sights. A ripple in the air, a glimmer of an eye, a breeze that wasn’t quite a breeze. I almost shot a raccoon three separate times and each time I refused to let myself relax.
This would be so much easier if I knew what it was, even though it didn’t matter. Doesn’t have to be a ghost to be something a bit more out of my comfort zone than a twelve-foot hairy bastard. Might be a Grey. I heard they’ve been creeping back on-world in the last decade, and those shitheads are spooky as ghosts except they shoot back, and shoot hard. But no, there’d been no lights in the sky, last night, the night before, any night at all. Can’t be them.
Could be a wendigo, this far north. I’d heard some of them could fly, and they got big, bigger with each person they eat. And I don’t think they die of old age. Half-spirit, half-monster, but no ghost. Maybe one had come walking down from the north for a holiday.
Fingers bigger than pine trees flexed in my mind, reaching down, down, down to a car smaller than its nail, picking it up with no more sound than the bang of a car door…
The lights went out.
The Gun went off. BANG.
Flicker, flicker, fizz, and up came the store lights from the dark again, showing me an empty parking lot where my car had been.

I spent the rest of the night in a daze, reloading somewhere but otherwise offline as I searched my head for a next step. The car was gone, which meant my coat was gone, and I liked the damned coat, and most alarming of all I’d shot at something and missed. Or I’d shot something and it hadn’t died. I wasn’t sure which was more alarming.
The store owner was full of slimy condolences on my car being stolen. Oh, it was terrible, must be those damned punks from down the road, kids these days, yes there was a power failure last night how did you know, terrible service around here, pity you were doing so well, third time was the charm, better to go home now and so on.
No, I didn’t need a ride. I’d call in a cab. The idea of trusting my life to that fat slug’s ability to press a pedal hidden entirely by his gut made my eyes twitch. And I had a coat to pry out of something’s innards.

The roof of the hunting store was easier to reach than it looked. Up I crawled, hand over hand, Gun dangling. One good thing about that stupid-ass camouflage paint on the roof; it made my blending in a lot easier. Just laying down nice and flat there, I stretched myself out low and looked over the lot, a god on a fifteen-foot throne, eyes a bit bugged and brain a bit strained.
Perfect.
I climbed back down, ran to my blind, broke it to pieces and scattered them every which way, made it look like a cleanup that wasn’t quite careful enough, like an angry man had broken it down in a temper and gone home.
Perfect.
I took a land mine from the special case, instantly lightening it by ninety percent, and breached many international laws by planting it in the parking lot where my car had been, very carefully.
Perfect.
And finally, I took a very small item from the special case. It was an old souvenir from a hunt a long time ago, the littlest tooth from something I’d killed in a lake up in Canada once, years and years ago. It had left it inside my leg, and I needed all the luck I could hold right now.
Perfect.
I went back to my roof and laid down flat as the sun set. No thoughts this night. Nothing for the mind to distract itself with, no letting it wander while the body manages its own business. No, tonight was just for me and my trigger finger, nothing else between us. The thing would be back, it would be back.
The last red slipped out of the sky, and I settled myself carefully into place for the evening. If all went properly, the only part of me that would move anywhere this evening would be my finger. One finger, one gesture, one shot, blam. I had the positioning, I had the light ready, I had the luck, the hidden edge, and as I shifted my elbow I had a very large camo-patterned eyelid roll open next to my hand.
It was the size of my head, and it blinked at me. Winked at me.
Oh, that store owner, I thought, extremely slowly. Oh, how he reminded me of a worm, a big fat slimy worm stuck to his desk like a hook.
I turned the Gun, and was thrown to the ground fast as lightning as the hunting store bucked under me, landing right in front of it on the gravel with a crunch-crack of ribs and legs and arms. Away went the gun, skipping over the gravel as the hunting store heaved itself up in front of me, its lights flickering on and off like an anglerfish’s, doors clattering open and shut with all their jagged old rusty edges, moist, mildewed air seeping out into my face.

Great-great-granddad, times change.

“Hunting,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.

Weather is annoying. It can’t help it.
Some places, it’s sunny, some places, it’s cloudy. Some places, it’s rainy, some places, it’s snowy. And yet across the entire planet, without exception, there is not one single place that has never been blessed with bad weather of some kind or another. If the problem can be boiled down to a single issue, it’s most likely that there’s always such a fine line between too hot and too cold.
For Judy, at the moment, it was too damned cold, and in a way that she was pretty used but not at all prepared for at the same time. The temperature was the usual too-damned-cold of the midwinter months, when the sun had run away over the horizon. That was normal, that was okay, she’d planned for that, same as every year.
What she hadn’t planned on was it going on ’till near April.
Well, that was fixable. Probably. With a bit of luck. Judy had a lot more than she’d need put away for her and the girls, just in case. But just in case was about half through, and getting a little more of it never hurt.
Fishing was a good start. Get a line, cut a hole, sit on the ice, wait. And wait.
And wait.

And wait.

And wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and THEN
wait a little bit more and there was a tug on the line.
Judy yanked up the fish and whacked it on the ice. One. Two might take a bit longer.
“So slow, so slow!” said a voice.
Judy frowned as she looked up. A voice had no call being so loud and warm this time of year. It was against the natural order of things. “Pardon?” she said.
The first thing that hit her was the smile. It was a big smile, a broad smile, a wide smile, a tall smile, a smile-little-smiles-looked-up-to-with-shining-eyes. It didn’t gleam, it glowed. The man it was attached to was nearly background after that.
“Waiting so long for one fish so small?” He laughed, a big, jolly laugh that made Judy’s knuckles itch. “Slow! Hah, I could outfish you two-to-one in my sleep!”
“Big talk from a big mouth with a little brain,” said Judy. “Go away. You’ll scare them.”
“Scare them? Hah! I invite them! The little scaly ones, they hear my voice and it calls them in like a mother’s lullaby, just you see. I bet you I can outfish you two-to-one with my big loud voice and your little quiet grouchy one, angry person!”
“Fine. Go fish over there.” A long way over there. Please.
“Hah!” The smile walked away.
Judy continued to fish as she did, maybe with her knuckles a little bit tightened. One fish (got it) two fish (a nice fat one) three fish (better chop the hole open again) four fish and five fish (skinny, discouraging things), and that was enough because she was about to freeze to the ice. There was no sign of the man on the lake, and she felt a vague sort of happiness in her heart that completely deserted her as she approached the shoreline and saw the waving, blurry little smile.
“Ten, and lively to boot,” it boasted. “What was your catch, fair lady?”
Judy gave him a look, and kept walking.
“Speak up now,” said the man, hurrying alongside her, “don’t be shy! We have a bet, didn’t we?”
“Ten,” said Judy, walking faster, “and no.”
“Surely you jest!”
“You said we had a bet, I didn’t. Stuff it.”
“Cruelty, such cruelty! At least give me one of your catch to make up for your cold, bitter heart, fair lady!”
Judy’s head hurt. “No. And stop yelling.”
“Ah, but we’ll settle this score yet! Come again, fair lady, and I’ll be waiting!”
Judy started humming very loudly and walked still faster. The man laughed, but didn’t follow.

“So that’s that,” said Judy to her mother, Anna.
“A twit,” said Anna, chewing her lip as she selected a large knife. Her other hand was busy moving the insides of the five fish to their outsides.
“You don’t say,” said Judy.
“None of that lip from you. See this lip that I am chewing? That is all the lip we permit in this household.”
“This is my house, mom.”
“Details and politicking. Give me that salt.”
Judy gave her that salt.
“That’s the stuff. Now, what you’ve got to do, you’ve got to find out how he’s cheating. Because you just told me that some smartass boy said he was a better fisherman than my girl, and I know that is a lie because the only one that could out-fish you was your daddy, until you out-fished him.”
“This isn’t a big deal, mom.”
“Sure it is. Someone flirting you up when you aren’t asking for it and making jokes on you, and you aren’t thinking of getting them back? The moment my girl takes that attitude is the moment I throw her out of the house and tell my grandchildren that their mommy got replaced by some stranger with her face on.”
“Water under the bridge, mom. He won’t even be there again.”
“What water, it’s all frozen, you are just talking crazy talk. And that man will be there, mark every word I just told you twice. Now take this advice out there with you tomorrow: you watch which way that man goes to fish, and you creep up on him and watch how he cheats. Then once you know, you wait ’till he boasts and you tell him how he cheats right to his stupid face. Got any more salt?”
Judy checked. “No.”
“Dang.”

Judy walked down to the lake. And she was pretty sure she wouldn’t ever see that man again, and she knew that she wouldn’t need to remember a single thing Anna told her. And she still wasn’t at all surprised when the man strolled up whistling as she was cutting her fishing hole and said “So, up for another bet?”
“Go away.”
“Come now, fair lady, giving up so easily? You did so well yesterday, I very nearly had to hurry to catch up!” He laughed, then caught himself. “Well, nearly.”
“Go and fish somewhere else.”
“I shall, I shall, I shall. And when we meet again, I guarantee that I will have caught three fish for each that nibbles your bait, and you can trust that word ’till the end of the earth.”
Judy sighed and concentrated on her fishing lure, and then, hating her mother just a little bit and herself a little bit more, she watched that man walk away out of the corner of her eye and made a note of that direction.
One fish, two fish. Set the pole up, fasten it tight (don’t want to lose that hook), and then off tiptoed Judy, feeling as stealthy as a toddler, creeping over the ice and trying not to breathe too loudly.
Finding the man was pretty easy. That laugh of his carried, and it never let up for long. A chuckle, a giggle, all leading into a big guffaw and then dying back down. In fact, he was so loud that she thought he MUST be right there at least three times, even though her eyes told her otherwise.
He had his back to her fishing hole where he sat, that must be the only reason he didn’t see her coming. The line danced through his fingers, half-fidget, half-play, half-haul, and up came the eighth or maybe ninth, so lively that it was fairly snapping at his fingers.
“Naughty!” he said, and then another one of those long, jolly, side-splitting laughs that made your fingers curl up into angry shapes all by themselves.
Judy was so busy trying to get them to unbend again that she nearly missed what was wrong with the man’s fishing hole. It was about twenty feet across and fish were swarming in it, dashing around under the surface like it was a summer stream.
First she stared, then she swore (very quietly), then she looked around for how the man could be doing a thing like that. Unless the answer could fit into his clothing or he was cutting fishing holes with his line, it was apparently not in front of her.
“Hoo hum ho,” chortled the man, and he pulled up the probably tenth fish as Judy slunk back to her line, thinking. She pulled in her third while she was at it, and her fourth, but she couldn’t make time from nothing and was only at five again by luck when she had to turn back.
The smile was waiting on the shore again, with the man. “Fifteen!”
“Mmm.”
“What? No praise? No adulation? Ah, such cruelty from the unappreciative – it makes me wonder I left my home to travel far and wide, if all men and women everywhere are brothers and sisters in their stingy praise!”
Judy started humming again.
“Ah, my prize is a song? How elegant! If you know the tune, I would not object to-”
Judy started jogging and humming, and didn’t stop ’till she was halfway home.

“Well now that’s strange,” said Anna.
“You’re telling me,” replied Judy. She was rubbing her sore feet by the fire.
“Just a big hole?”
Judy nodded.
“Strange. You’d better go ask mother then.”
Judy flinched.
“Don’t you give me that flinching. Your grandmother can’t help having her Condition. Just don’t talk too loud or get right up in her face and it makes no difference to anyone anyways anyhow.”
And that was why Judy had to go over to the spot where Carol was sleeping and poke her in the back.
“Huh?”
“Grandma Carol?”
“Whuh?”
“We’ve got a question for you now, grandma Carol.”
Carol scrubbed her eyes with a fury normally reserved for the filthiest of her descendant’s clothing. “Uh. Hmm. Er. Now, what was that, Anna?”
“It’s Judy, grandma.”
“I know that, I know, I know. But you do sound like her, you know. You both talk too loud and too much. Makes my head twirl.”
“I’m sorry, grandma.”
“Don’t be so sorry, it’s all right, it’s all right. You’re just perfect you know, just perfect. Now, what’s wrong?”
So Judy told Carol about the irritating smile and the man it was attached to, taking great care to keep her voice down at all times, even when she was describing the annoying laughs. And Carol nodded and listened and growled a bit, and when the tale was through she fussed it over and muttered to herself some.
“That man is irritating,” she told Judy. “You owe him a good fuss-making and an irritation right back at him. Up to some sort of tricks, he is. You sure you didn’t see anything?”
“No. No strange tools, nothing.”
“Hmm. Must be a trick he keeps close. What you need to do now, Anna, is you need to sneak up on him while he’s getting ready to fish, right away. You need to see how he puts up this special spot for himself.”
“Out on the open ice?”
“Don’t speak so loud! I have a Condition, and you know that. Carol knows that. Didn’t she tell you?”
“Sorry, grandma, sorry,”
“Should be. So you do that. And as for that ice, take my old white furry hide blanket with you and wrap your daughter up in that, and then, well, you can guess.”
“Yes?”
“Guess. Go on. Now let me get back to sleep, I need that sleep. This winter is too long and too dark, and all that dark is good for is sleep.”

Judy left Carol to her sleep and brought Emily with her. The girl was big for her age, still growing, and more than happy to have something to get her outside and running, even if the ice was a bit boring. And she got to wear her grandma Carol’s old white furry hide blanket. It was some sort of treat, apparently.
“Four to one?” asked the man, who showed up just as Judy was finishing up her cutting.
“Leave us alone,” said Judy.
“Ah, the child! Adorable, completely and utterly in every way! What’s your name, dear girl? No, no, how rude of me, I shouldn’t pry – hush, and I shall hush and be on my way. Good luck, fair lady! Good luck, little daughter!”
Carol counted to ten as the man walked away, then took ahold of the old white furry hide blanket from Emily. Her daughter opened her mouth to complain, then shut it as her mother firmly wrapped the line around her fingers.
“Stay here,” Judy told her. “Remember what you’ve practiced. And try to look obvious.”
Emily gave her a calculating look, then deferred pouting in favour of fishing. It took less effort.
The man walked, and as he walked he talked to himself – bits of nonsense, really – and laughed. And three times he looked over his shoulder, and three times Judy had to stop moving before she started creeping again, staying real close and real low to the ice while his eyes sailed over her white furry lump on a white frozen sea and bobbed back to that little brown coat by her fishing hole, right where she should be, waiting for him to say “Hah!” (it was always ‘Hah!’) and move on. It was chilly and she got a few mouthfuls of snow, but before her face started getting numb the man stopped and said “That’s that!”
Then he spat.
Judy wondered what he was doing five times in a row before she heard the sizzling. The man’s spit had melted a hole clean through the ice down to the water, and it was gnawing away more and more every second. By the time the drip-drip-splosh of fast-melt had stopped, the man had a practical ice-pond at the tips of his toes, warm as a summer sea. Curious, cold fish were already popping up in it like wildflowers, and there came that laugh again, full of joy and sharp and irritating as grit in your eyelids.

“I caught a fish!” said Emily.
“Good, good,” said Judy. “Let’s go home now. It’s a big fish, and that’s enough for now.” But the man was still waiting for them with his fish, twenty of them, early though they left.
“Too cold?” he asked, sympathy filling him to the brim. “Well, we can’t have the little daughters freeze, or who will be tomorrow’s fair ladies, fair lady? Still, my catch is twenty times yours! You really must pay me back tomorrow, or I’ll have to insist – giving way on this many bets without repayment is simply miserliness, no excuses permitted.”
“Emily, would you please sing us a song?”
“Oh how-” managed the man, and then Emily launched into her favourite one of Anna’s old tunes, plus or minus bits of one Judy had taught her, in a key that Carol had hummed for her. The combined effect was impressive, but the rest of the walk home was a lot quieter compared to the alternative.

“Well, that beats the hell out of me,” said Carol. “You got any ideas, Anna?”
“No mother, that puzzles me thorough to the core. It’s cheating, true, but no kind that’s ever crossed my eyes or ears ever in my life.”
“Slow down and talk quietly,” said Carol. “This is a puzzle.”
“A puzzler,” said Anna.
“No, a puzzle. The puzzler’s the one who made the puzzle, and that’s this smiley man. Didn’t I tell you never to trust a man that smiley?”
“Yes you did,” said Anna.
“Did you tell your daughter?”
“No,” said Judy.
“Well! Now why would you do that sort of thing?”
“She was smart enough to know it on her own now, wasn’t she?” said Carol.
“Don’t get sharp! Too sharp, now, now, now. Now. What are we going to do about this?”
They sat there.
“Tell him he’s a jerk,” suggested Emily.
“No,” said Judy.
“No,” said Anna.
“No, what we need to do is ask my mother,” said Carol. “Why didn’t one of you think of that?”
“Because grandma’s up and died years ago by now,” said Anna.
“Well! That’s no call to not go asking her questions, is it? You’ll make her feel unwanted.”
“I’m not asking any dead person questions,” said Anna. “That sort of thing is just not what I should be doing, and besides, I never was her favourite grandchild at all.”
“And it’s a good thing I wasn’t asking you to go do that, Anna, because mother only had one great-grandchild before she died and that was little Judy. Judy, won’t you be a dear and talk to mother for us?”
“Yes Judy,” said Anna. “That’s a good idea. She liked you a whole lot when she was alive and she probably won’t do anything too nasty.”
Judy looked at Emily, and found no support. She sighed, deeply and thoroughly. “How do we do this?”
“Well,” said Carol, “first we take this handful of…stuff.”
It was mostly plants, or at least maybe plants. “Right.”
“And we is you, because of my Condition.”
“Of course.”
“Don’t you roll those eyes at me! Take that to the fire.”
“Alright.”
“And toss it in.”
Judy tossed the stuff in.
“Now just yawn.”
Judy yawned, and accidentally yawned herself out of herself. But that was okay because there wasn’t a roof anymore, and she bounced off the belly of something big and pink instead.
“Great-grandmother Mary?” she asked.
“No,” said the thing, which had forty five eyes and no nose. “Try again.” It flicked her gently, and she landed on the other side of the building which was also the other side of the universe.
“Great-grandmother Mary?” she asked the ground underneath her, which was made out of faces.
“No,” said the faces. All of them had no ears, and all of them had two sets of eyebrows, one above and one below. “Try again.” They all sneezed, and she fell back inside the building which wasn’t there anymore but now its roof was.
“Great-grandmother Mary?” she asked the roof.
“Yes?”
“I could use a hand with a man who smiles too much.”
“Didn’t your grandmother tell you never to trust a man that smiley?”
“Sort of.”
“Well, that’s good, I guess.” The roof scratched its hip. “Listen, that smiley man’s causing his fair share of troublesome right now, and it’s to more than just you. That’s why I’m helping you right now, that and you’re a nice good girl who makes me very proud, all right?”
Judy nodded, and had to reattach her head.
“Careful! See, this is why you don’t need encouragement to do this sort of thing. Just get him to stop smiling, that’s all you need to do. And tell Emily she’s a pretty little thing, and she ought to sing more often. You and your mother were too quiet, that’s your problem.”
Judy nodded, and this time her head came off and didn’t reattach. It hurt an awful lot, and she had to work her way through half of the kettle of tea Anna had made in the meantime to get rid of the ache.
“Got a plan?” asked her mother.
Judy rubbed her face. “Sort of.”
“Good enough then.”

The next day Judy saw hide nor hair of the man, not on the shore, not on the ice. Not as she cut her fishing hole, not as she set the line, not as she drew up no fewer than ten fine fat fish. She looked left and right and all around as she wrapped up her line and strung her catch, and he was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t on the shore when she came back, and she walked halfway home without a single other soul to break the quiet of her breath.
“Thanks, Mary,” she said to herself and anyone else that could be listening, “but I guess it’s alright now.”
“Hello!” said an extremely cheerful voice in her ear.
“Go away,” she told the man, reflexively.
No, that wouldn’t do. And it didn’t, because that smile never flickered for an instant. “A fine catch! A full belly for all! Such a pity, such a pity, alas and alack. I’d bet you that I’d have to bring home no fewer than five times your catch, and today you exceed the furthest reaches of my imagination!”
“Not difficult in the slightest sense,” said Judy.
“Cruelty,” said the man, “is of no avail, when all I need do to refresh my happiness is to look upon you, fair lady! Although, of course, I must insist on the terms of our bet, regardless of my fondness of you. Behold!”
Judy beheld almost against her will. At least a hundred fat little fish were strung up on the man’s line, maybe far more. His arm nearly wavered as he held them high, but his smile stood firmer than a stone.
“How small,” she managed. “Though that’s normal for you.”
“Your awe overreaches your words, fair lady,” he replied without so much as a moment’s loss of focus. “Truly, I do not deserve your company.”
“You don’t deserve the company of the densest of the smallest of the fish on that line,” said Judy. “I feel pity for it, having to endure so much wind and noise.”
The smile held, but Judy fancied she saw a bit of a brittle shine on its edges. “Ah, but I kill them quick and merciful, so that they suffer little,” said the man. He seemed to perk up. “And besides, there’s no harm at all in a little conversation. One cannot live on one’s own, after all.”
“You talk to yourself enough for three; are you calling yourself lonely now?”
The man laughed and laughed, a big roiling belly-bellow that sank Judy’s hopes with each second it dragged on. The smile wouldn’t end, any more than this conversation would, even with home in sight. Emily and Anna and Carol were all outside with tea, waiting for her triumphant return, and she winced inside at the thought of bringing the man up to them with no way to get rid of him, not with that smile hanging about his face. Especially Emily. The poor girl had already suffered the man once, but…
Oh, there was something she’d forgotten.
“…of course, I need not take payment in fish,” the man was saying, as Emily ran up to hug her. “Maybe…”
“Emily dear,” said Judy, “great-grandmother Mary gave me a message for you!”
Emily blinked.
“She says you should sing more often.”
Emily beamed, and just like that, just as she opened her mouth, just for a moment that Judy would’ve missed if she and Anna and Carol weren’t all watching the man like a hawk, his smile blinked right out. And even when that smile was gone, even when that man looked as scared and miserable as a lost baby, that warmth kept coming out of his face, right through his eyes and ears and nose and everywhere else, and with it came light.
“So that’s where you’ve been hiding,” said Judy, and something about her voice made Emily close her mouth again right away.
The man blinked very fast, shook his head, and tried smiling. “Sorry?”
“You’re a very bad liar,” said Carol. “And if that’s the best smile he can do, I’m very ashamed of you, Judy.”
Now it wasn’t a smile at all, just teeth. “No call for rudeness now, fair ladies-”
“Easy for you to spit up a little melt with all that in you,” said Anna. “No harm in that, none at all, but why you’ve got to go and go lying to my girl like about bets when you plan on cheating, well, I don’t see why.”
“I never said I wouldn’t do it!” said the man, and now his smile was all gone and the fire he’d hidden was all there to be seen for anyone, hanging in the breeze with no smile to cover it up. There wasn’t a face there, either. “I never said!”
“I never agreed on any bet either,” said Judy, “but somehow there was one.” Anna was thumping Carol on the back, her mother was coughing and hiccuping. “And I don’t bet, and I sure as sure don’t make bets with anyone I don’t trust. And I don’t trust you, mister Sun, because you ran away out of the sky and left us in the dark and cold just so you could have a tease and laugh at me. And I don’t care how much people don’t appreciate you, that makes you a twit, and my family doesn’t like twits.”
The Sun was glowering now, a good smoulder. The snow was melting into puddles up to his ankles. “You never said please or thank you or even ‘you-did-a-good-job!’” he shouted. “All I wanted was a bit of fun!”
“I’d stop yelling,” said Judy.
“No! I’m not listening to you! All you do is sneer and ignore me and complain and that’s when I’m TRYING TO BE NICE! Can’t you all JUST ”
Carol’s Condition occurred.

It had been a long winter, and it had been a cold winter. But these sorts of things balance themselves out, across the world, across the years. For instance, that summer was the longest and warmest in decades, and the winter never quite dipped below dusk. The sun didn’t seem to want to come down from the sky.

“On the Ice,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.

It was a day that was not like any other, and Jimmy Davies, janitor-in-chief of the U.N.N Sanctum, appreciated it with gusto. Breakfast, for once, was not moving when he ate it, and he was thus spared from having to plead to the Completely Invincible Lizard that he safely digest it without exploding or emitting strange vapours from his tear ducts.
After that exciting moment, things pretty much went back to normal – insofar as a day containing such an extraordinary event can be labelled “normal.” Jimmy cleaned out the old tin he used as bowl, plate, and cutlery in the dirtiest corner of the two-fifths-full reservoir, had a good fortifying gulp of quasiwater liquid from the cleanest corner, and was off to tighten bolts, screws, and security all across the majestic hull of the Sanctum, mostly with his fingers nowadays, since he only had the one screwdriver left and it was a large flake of rust attached to a plastic handle.
After that, the outside of the main fusion reactor was given a careful spit-polish. Over the years this behaviour had gradually worn away every single one of the innumerable safety warnings and descriptive emergency instructions that had once coated its hide, probably because of the interesting diet that Jimmy enjoyed. It also allowed him to hawk exceptional loogies when the mood struck him to engage in a solo spitting contest.
This was rarer every day.
Too many bolts and rivets. Too much rust to spit-shine until you could pretend it was actual metal. Sanctum had been built to last, but the dangling coda was “for fifty years,” and the space station’s centennial was coming up, twenty years of which had been with no maintenance crew bar Jimmy, the Sleek Shark, the Completely Invincible Lizard, the Mind All Light, and the Older. Not that they seemed to do much on their own until he prodded them, and certainly not all together. Jimmy knew it wasn’t their fault, but he still felt annoyed about the whole arrangement.
It was the Older he was feeling particularly annoyed with today, when the rust seemed thicker and more desperate than ever. He did his duty without grumbling (much), he chewed off excess flakes and spat them out, he licked the rest clean, he intoned and politely requested the aid of the Older to make the Sanctum fall apart just a little slower, and, well, nothing happened.
He was starting to think he was the only person on the station with a work ethic. Why look at that! Number five docking bay was still receiving power, and after he’d told the Sleek Shark to cut the juice to it no less than maybe five possibly one none times yesterday! The cheek. If the Shark weren’t a terrifying and unpredictable unknowable known, he’d give it a piece of his mind.
Well, if you want something done right, Jimmy’s got to do it himself. And so he did. He marched all the way down to the big old circuit breaker board, which he delighted in saying as many times as he could until it grew unclear and mushy in his mouth (seven hundred thirty-eight a personal best set seven years ago). Four hundred and twenty-two little tiny electronic locks and dams in a waterway web that Jimmy couldn’t understand and never could. He was by far not Sleek enough.
But the Shark was. The Sleek Shark was the Sleekest.
“So it’d be real nice if you gave me a hand uh fin uh whatever here, okay?” he implored. “Just chip in. Just chip in for a bit, a bite, a nibble, a whatever. Swim.”
He pulled a breaker that was probably the right one, and the lights went out.
“Nope.”
Flip it back. Try another. The ventilation system shut down.
“Nope.”
Third time’s the charm. And the PA system, which began playing a song from Jimmy’s youth that had been just popular enough to be unpopular.
“No.”
Fourth time was not charming, but at last the Sleek Shark looked benevolently upon Jimmy, and number five docking bay shut down noisily and without grace. Now all Jimmy had to do was go down there and unscrew all nine thousand bolts sealing the useless module to the rest of the station, turning it into free-floating space junk that he would no longer have to sweep with the stick that was his one remaining broom, just like the other two-thirds of the original Sanctum.
You have time to think, when you’re using your time to unscrew nine thousand (rounded down) bolts by hand. Mostly about how much your fingers hurt, and if your arm has always hurt that particular way, and if the seal on the airlock’s still good enough that it won’t just pop away with the module you’re detaching and spin you out into a part of space that had been scientifically measured to be at least forty-eight percent emptier than normal empty space.
That was important, for some reason. Jimmy tried not to think about why nowadays. Do not think into the too-empty, lest the too-empty think into you. And who knows what happens then. Maybe it’d be like that physicist, the one whose eyes did that….thing he shouldn’t think about or the engineer, with her hand, and the hand went, no, no bad idea.
Jimmy quietly started mumbling a vague request to the Mind All Light to empty his head of thoughts so he could have some peace and quiet. After a few minutes it was the only thing in his head at all, and that was more results than he usually got. It was a blissfully blank existence, where Jimmy was nothing but a pair of ever-working hands, a mantra inside his noggin, and a pair of ears that politely told him that someone had been hammering on the inside of the airlock door for ten minutes and there were two bolts holding the module on.
“Oops,” said Jimmy. “Shark?”

There was a detour to be made, before Jimmy went to the switchboard. He wandered his way to a conspicuously inconspicuous yet well-tidied maintenance panel near his mounded and tangled bedding, opened it up, and counted out one, two, three little helpers from a bottle that had been mended with scotch tape three times. The rest of the maintenance crew had their places, but other people weren’t one of them. Even if they’d all come from other people to begin with.
One, two, three. With no glass of water, because all Jimmy had was quasiwater liquid.
A surprisingly short time later – the Sleek Shark had been feeling helpful just before it winked out of existence for a vacation – the door was open, Jimmy was being Mr. Davies, and Mr. Davies was politely offering his new friend his second-favourite and second-best seat, which was one of only two-and-a-half chairs on the whole space station.
The new friend gave it a dubious look that suited his face nicely and remained standing. He had dramatic eyebrows and hair that was slightly too long and styled to belong to a proper astronaut. His environment suit somehow managed to look much like a business suit, down to the oddly tie-like patterning on its front.
Also, his nose whistled in a way that made Jimmy not quite comfortable. Which meant it was certainly a good thing that he was too busy being Mr. Davies right now to be Jimmy.
“What happened?” asked the man.
Mr. Davies was clearer-headed than Jimmy, but the parting of the fog had left him stranded on a mountaintop. He fumbled in his social memories, and came up with “It’s a pleasure to meet you, what’s your name?”
The man gave him a look that he would’ve been able to identify at some point long in the past. “I am Edward Hemlock. Ed. And you are the janitor of this station, mister…?”
“Davies,” said Mr. Davies. “I’m Mr. Davies.”
“First name?”
“Not right now, Ed, not right now. Wait a few hours and he’ll be back.”
Another, different look. Mr. Davies hoped he was doing this right; he had a feeling he’d either explained too much or too little.
“Mr. Davies,” said Ed, clearly ready to try a different tack, “what happened to the rest of the crew?”
“Oh, you know the way it goes, Ed. One got fired. A few quit. A lot went mad. Some got between the ones that went mad and the silverware drawers. And some just sort of vanished away.”
“Mr. Davies, I had to go through eighteen levels of government classification to get the location of this station, and there were two cavity searches involved. Two. There was at least two hundred pages of paperwork in a very small font involved, and I, Mr. Davies, I LOATHE paperwork, and I tolerated this all without so much as a peep because it let me come here.” He shuddered dramatically. “The most anomalously empty-of-anything-at-all quadrant of the known universe has one man-made outpost in it, and this was it. This was not an unimportant place, the people chosen to crew it were not selected casually. They were calm people. Level-headed, reasonable people possessed of much equanimity. And you’re telling me that most of them went crazy?”
“No, mad. Crazy’s more passive. Technical terms.” Mr. Davies felt the Mind All Light hovering over his shoulder, where it definitely wasn’t. “Can we talk about something else, Ed?”
“Fair enough. How long have you been alone then, Mr. Davies?”
“Nineteen years and eight months. For a little while there it was just me and one of the security guards, but then Breakfast took poorly to him, and that was that.”
“Did he ever say anything about creatures?”
“No. Mostly he just screamed.”
“Hmm. And do you ever see any unusual creatures around here?”
Mr. Davies thought about the Mind All Light and its cronies. But they were probably staff by now, and they didn’t exist at the moment. And even if they did exist, he wouldn’t see them. And even if he could see them, they weren’t his problems, not originally. He just gave them room and board, and a fat lot of thanks he got for it.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“And you’re the janitor? You clean and dust and polish and that’s the extent of your technical skills”
“Yeah, I guess, if you want to put it that way. I handle the plumbing too, on the small scale. And I’ve been checking all the bolts, screws, and rivets. There’s four hundred ninety five thousand six hundred and thirty-six of them, so it takes a while to make a full rotation, but -”
“Mr. Davies, has this station’s fusion reactor been untended for two decades?”
“Nah. I spit-shine it every morning.” Mr. Davies scratched the back of his neck, then considered his last statement of belief, which made a lot less sense to him than it had to Jimmy.
“Hang on,” he said, but he was too late because Ed had hanged onto him first, and was towing them both towards the reactor as fast as he could.

“It’s itchy in here,” said Mr. Davies.
“I’m sure. There was a lot of dust.”
“I hadn’t been dusting inside radiation suits no one ever wore. Besides, none of them fit me.”
“This one does.”
“Yeah, but it’s a woman’s.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers, Mr. Davies. Now, remember: once you’re through the airlock, you need to check for cracks on the reactor core. If there are any, you need to…”
The explanation that followed was extremely long and complicated. Mr. Davies tried to remember it, but then that hovering feeling over his shoulder crept up again and the jar of little helpers was far away and hidden. By the time the lecture was over he was Jimmy again, and not entirely sure what the hell was going on.
“Do you understand?”
Jimmy hesitantly looked to his shoulder, found a receptive audience, and consulted the Mind All Light.
“Sure!” he said.
“Go on in.”
Jimmy went on in, past two airlocks and a broken de-irradiation chemical shower. There were cracks in things, but he wasn’t sure if they were the right sort of things he was meant to be worried about.
“That a problem?” he asked.
The Older, which had muscled its way into his forebrain, told him it wasn’t.
“What was that, Mr. Davies?”
“Huh? Oh. It’s nothing. But listen, it’s Jimmy, okay?”
The silence was hard to read, but even so, Jimmy could feel it shaping itself into another one of those troublesome expressions. He ignored it and foraged onwards, crawling through banks of depilated equipment, most of which had that odd shiny-grime texture that the Older informed him was a telling mark of things that had never really seen heavy use before falling apart in their old age.
Eventually, there was a console that was on. It was also glowing very faintly.
Jimmy poked it.
The Older told him not to be a dope and to press the buttons like THAT.
So Jimmy pressed the buttons like THAT and sure as sure, there was Ed on the suit radio going on about how great everything he’d just done was.
“…power surge without the blowout. Just beautiful. Whole board lit up like a Christmas tree out here. Of course, it’s got the wrong cord of lights on and the decorations are missing, but that’s fixable! You ready to do some more work?”
Jimmy consulted the Older again, but it had lurked itself away when he wasn’t paying attention.
“Sure!”
He wondered if the screen was supposed to be flashing all that red text on it, but everyone seemed happy so he guessed it was all right.

Ed was a different man under the stronger lighting that now scoured the Sanctum‘s innards. His chin appeared larger, his eyes more sparkling, his breath seemed to smell faintly minty, and his footsteps seemed to nearly ring on the deck, or at least they would’ve if the deck wasn’t mostly made of creak nowadays, audibly speaking.
“Right, and now that THAT’S done we can get to some real work. Are you ready to fulfill the purpose for which this station was made, janitor Davies?”
“Jimmy.”
“Jimmy, now is not the time for nitpicking. At any rate, your circuit board here, the one you wore all the labels off through constant dusting-”
“Sorry about that.”
“It’s fine. But we need to get power to the director’s room, and the docking module I left the ship at, and this vault over here that doesn’t exist on the station plan.”
Jimmy looked dutifully at the chart Ed was brandishing. “That vault doesn’t exist on the station plan,” he pointed out.
“Precisely my point! Get cracking!”
Jimmy stared at the circuit board and tried to remember which of the four hundred twenty-two locks and dams moved the waters the ways he needed. Of course, he failed.
“Please?” he asked.
“Eh?”
“Nothing.”
And the Sleek Shark laughed at him as it did the whole thing in a flash, a crackling, juddering, fanged mass of cheer and serrations. It gave Jimmy the shivers as he pushed the right buttons, pulled the right levers, set the tide flowing and gave the moon a good yank. Some of the smaller lights on the board went bright red and then winked out, and he hoped that was supposed to happen.
“Damn, you’re a savant, Jimmy!” Ed gave him a friendly punch in the arm, then froze at the sound of cracking.
“Just my scabs, Ed. Don’t worry.”
Ed removed the punch from his arm and gave him a big, friendly grin instead. “Right, right. Sorry! Sorry. Now, there’s just one more big job, and then we’re all done here. And none too soon – this whole place gives me the creeps. The last ten light-years getting here were no picnic either, I can tell you – too empty. Scientifically interesting, yes, but too empty.”

It was a big job, all right. It took nearly an hour just to get to it.
First Ed had to go to the director’s office and open up the re-powered computer. Whatever he found on there made him sweat an awful lot, but he was a quick reader and Jimmy hadn’t had occasion to use the English language as-written for at least ten years, so whatever was so worrying passed him by. It can’t have been that bad anyways, Ed was smiling his face off when he closed the thing down again.
“Done!” he said, and then he picked up the computer and smashed it briskly against the titanium desk until it was an unrecognizable pile of mangled bits. “Come on now, we’ve got to hurry up.”
“That was important, wasn’t it?” asked Jimmy.
“Oh, yes. Hugely.”
“Then why’d you break it.”
“It was too important for anyone else to see. That reminds me, Jimmy, did you see anything on there?”
Jimmy thought. “No.”
“Good, good,” said Ed, with that big smile. “Ah, we’re here. Just move that pile of filth out of the way, and we’ll be done!”
“That’s my bed,” said Jimmy.
“Nevertheless,” said Ed. “Sacrifices must be made by all if we want to pull through.”
Slowly, reluctantly, with infinite care, Jimmy lugged the disintegrating remnants of his nesting out of place. He’d fashioned it himself from plastic tarps and the innards of expired mattresses, and it was as close to him as a sun.
Or a son.
No, a sun. Those were more important to you.
But not closer.
The Mind All Light told him to knock it off and pay attention, which he did in time to not see Ed push him down the hole he’d uncovered in the deck.
“OW!”
“Sorry, sorry, best if you aren’t tense on impact and all that, surprise was needed, etcetera, etcetera, only fifteen feet down and can you see anything?”
Jimmy looked around. “A notebook on a table.”
“A notebook, hah yes. Had to be paper, of course. Doesn’t need power, and if you suck all the air out of the room until it’s powered up, well, it lasts pretty nicely! Anything else?”
“It’s a pretty bad table. Rusty. If I’d known this was here, I’d have polished that rust ’till you’d swear it was steel, honest truth.”
“Yes, yes, yes, that will do. Here, throw that book back up to me, will you?”
Jimmy picked up the book and weighed it in his hands. It was surprisingly light, and he had to check twice after he’d thrown it to make sure it had left his hands at all.
“Oh lovely,” said Ed, peering at a page. “Oh glorious.” He spun them through his palms and chuckled in a friendly and fatherly manner. “This is just perfect. Jimmy, do you know what this is?”
“Nope!”
“It’s a complete record of every bit of abnormal mental phenomena and wildlife gestated on the station! Who thought it up, what the side effects on the host were, predators and prey and parasites…. oh Jimmy, there’s a goddamned ZOO in here, a zoo that could only have been dreamed up here, in this dank little corner of the universe where space goes runny! And we know exactly what sorts of minds breed these things up now! Engineers to make little psychedelic worker ants, security guards to farm unblinking guardians inside their own heads, doctors to make thoughts that really cut, that really have teeth to them. Good show, Jimmy, good show!”
The Mind All Light proposed a question.
“Uhh….”
“Speak up, Jimmy.”
“Are you going to leave me down here?”
“What a silly question!” Ed shook his head. “Honestly Jimmy, just think. What did I tell you I hated?”
“Paperwork?”
“What do you think bringing back an unexpected missing-declared-dead citizen causes?”
Jimmy thought. “Paperwork?”
“Correct! Goodbye.”
There was a clang, and Jimmy was alone in a dark place.

Which wasn’t really all that novel.

He did feel a bit funny though. And his fists kept curling up into these strange little gnarled things, like they did after he’d tightened his four hundred thousandth bolt.
The Mind All Light made an observation: Jimmy was angry.
“Yup,” agreed Jimmy.
Well, Jimmy needed to get out of there if he wanted to be angry properly. Needed a target for those little balls on his arms.
“Damn straight.” Jimmy squinted up at the ceiling. “How?”
He had to spit.
Jimmy spat, and watched as the hatch went all runny and dripped down to the floor, where it nearly ate the toes of his boots. Apparently Breakfast had been just as nasty as usual, just more subtle. He hated to think of what could’ve happened if he’d belched while talking to Ed, although in retrospect that could’ve been for the best.
“Gross,” he said. And then the gravity went off, then came on again in reverse. It was very exciting, and at the end of it Jimmy was spread-eagled on the ceiling, outside the vault once more, staring at the rubble of his bed, and his head was very sore.
He’d better run fast, advised the Sleek Shark. And then it was gone again, along with half the lights in a shower of sparks.
Number five docking bay was barely any distance at all from there, even with a quick pause to get lost – you think you know a place like the back of your hand, and then it turns upside down on you.
To his right, suggested the Mind All Light.
And he’d want to duck and cling in two seconds, added the Older.
Jimmy turned the corner, saw Ed (surprised), ducked and clung, and winced as a gravitational flux sent a sheet of rust bigger than he was into Ed, who was violently shoved into his own airlock.
Better follow. That was the Mind All Light’s take on it, anyways. He needed off here, after what the Older did to the core. That and the little tidal waves the Sleek Shark had sent through the electrical wiring had probably sent the place under.
“Can I get my chair?” asked Jimmy, as he clumsily dove through Ed’s airlock and into an environment that struck him as dangerously clean.
No he couldn’t. Also, Ed was about to hit him in the face.
“What?” said Jimmy, immediately before Ed hit him in the face. It was a good, solid hit, a real shiner-raiser, and it smacked him over on his ass with a very satisfying thud that he was in no position to appreciate on any level.
Ed was saying something by then, but it was mostly profanity and Jimmy was too busy listening to the Completely Invincible Lizard, who was the one that knew about this sort of thing.
He needed to punch high while kicking low, and use that hesitation to get to his feet.
Jimmy punched high and kicked low, and used that hesitation to get to his feet.
He needed to block that next punch.
Jimmy blocked that next punch, and was knocked over again with another bruise all ready to blossom.
He needed another forty pounds of weight, preferably all muscles.
Jimmy didn’t really have time for that, and Ed had lain hands upon him and was now about to toss him into number five docking bay, which was indistinct in the odd haze of depressurizing atmosphere now filling it.
Oh well just belch then.
Jimmy belched. And because he wasn’t feeling quite proper at the moment, it turned into a yawn. A technicolour yawn, if he remembered his slangs properly.
It set most of Ed’s environment suit on fire. And as he swore and flailed around frantically, attempting to pat out the flames, the Completely Invincible Lizard told Jimmy that now would be a good time to hit him where silly monkeys like him kept their reproductive organs. Jimmy no longer recalled what those were for – at least on his off hours – but he listened. And as he did that, and as Ed toppled and staggered and was rudely shoved back into the docking module, Older gave a happy update on the status of those last two bolts Jimmy had forgotten to tweak up that morning, the only things holding number five docking bay to the rest of the Sanctum.
All rusty, Older told him. Terrible thing.
The next thirty seconds weren’t as alarming as they could’ve been, mostly thanks to the total lack of sound in space, and Jimmy didn’t remember them with any real terror, or, come to that, detail. Suffice it to say that he learned how to input the correct password on an airlock in a total lack of atmosphere very, very quickly. Or at least the Sleek Shark did. As to what happened next, well… most of it was sleep, possibly coma.

After that was breakfast. Not Breakfast, with none of the vivid personality (mostly truculence) that entitled capitalization, just small-b breakfast. Toast. With jam. That was even maybe real jam that had been made or at least been near actual, physical berries at some point.
Jimmy was full. And also out of things to do, except for one important thing.
“Thank you,” he said.
It was asked from a variety of quarters whether this meant that he could stop nagging them so much about stupid things when it wasn’t important.
“Right, right. Right. Uh, thanks.” He scratched his chin, uncertainty weighing down on him for the first time in decades. “I guess I’ll just start checking the bolts then…?”
The Mind All Light told him not to be such a silly. They were all very busy, very important people now, and they had no time to sit around doing silly things. They needed to be doing important things, like examining Ed’s computers and deciding which of the people in the address book needed visits.
“Dunno about revenge,” said Jimmy. “I’m a janitor. I make sure things don’t break and I keep things tidy.”
Those were big loose ends. He probably should be going out to tidy them up. Who knew who could trip on things like that, just lying around.
Jimmy thought about this.
“Fine. But no more Breakfast.”
This was agreed upon.

“Mostly in Your Head,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.

You know a lot about a thing, knowing what it eats.
Eating is a messy, nasty thing to do. Something takes up something else and tears it apart and breaks it to bits and it thrives on it, just basks in it, all that decay and downfall. You can make it neat and civilized and give it knives and forks, you can talk about palates and umami and all the flavours of the rainbow, you can do that all you like. You can glorify the act of acquiring your food, the hunt, the chase, the kill.
But you’re still eating, and that’s still not very nice. And what you eat says a lot about you.
Hyenas eat a lot of carrion. Those big strong jaws, they’ll crack open bones that anything else would turn its nose up at, get at all that good tasty marrow in there. That’s productive, that’s industrious.
Wars, they eat the young and the stupid and the deceived. They call them in and chew them up, spit out the little shreds of them into unmarked graves and mass burials and now and then, on special occasions, a casket. That’s tricky, that’s cunning, that’s an animal that hides and sneaks and lies to get what it needs because it knows the moment anyone looks right at it and sees it for what it is, it dies. So they make smokescreens, and snag you in ‘em.
Particular angles, as we all know, eat lines, usually straight lines. They chew them right out of existence, and they use that to force a few more particular angles into being. Mindless, but real thorough. And since nothing eats them, they’ll probably outweigh real things someday.
Societies eat people, of course. But the people eat them right back. It sort of works if you squint one eye shut and take two steps back and tilt your head just right. Unless one or the other chews a little too quickly.
And humans, naturally, are omnivores. Which is a lot worse than it sounds, if you think about it.
This human here was exercising her omnivorous rights that night, at the foot of that mountain, on a rabbit and some stale bread.
(The rabbit isn’t important, not in this story, so we can forget about her for now)
The human was old and leathery and her hands moved in that special slow way that said whenever she wanted to she could turn them into striking snakes. She was also a noisy chewer, on account of having three and a quarter teeth, and this was one-third of what caused the problem. And she was a good listener, which lead her to hear the faint, impossibly low sounds of the rock groaning under her wrinkled toes, and this was one-third of what caused the problem. And because her grandmother had been a pretty cunning and crafty lady who’d taught her a few tricks about this sort of thing, she could recognize the language as an itinerant and casual shaman (most people could talk to animals back then, which made hunting a bit more awkward, but talking to rocks and trees was pretty damned hard). And that was one-third, four-quarters, and the whole nine yards of what caused the problem.
The mountain was talking. A slow talker, of course, but the old human was patient and waited the half-hour for the sentence to finish.
“What. Are. You. Doing?” asked the mountain.
“Eating,” said the old human. “Everybody does it.”
“Not. Me. What. Is. It?”
The old human thought about that and she thought that made sense, sort of. Mountains didn’t really eat anything, although the rain and the wind and the rocks that spawned them were happy enough to chew them up over a couple of eternities.
(Human eternities aren’t so long as all that, and that’s a fact)
“Y’know, eating,” she said. “You chew stuff up – well, that’s not true, lot of things out there don’t chew – you swallow things, and it keeps you going so you keep doing, well, whatever you do. Talking, laughing, walking, you know, all that stuff.”
The mountain thought about that while the old human stashed her half-loaf of bread and stripped the rabbit bones clean with her favourite tooth.
(The rabbit still isn’t important in this story)
“How. Do. You. Swallow?” asked the mountain, at length.
“Just gulp,” said the old human, and then she added “good-bye,” and was off and away down the trails, leaving the mountain there to ponder that sort of thing over for a few days.
Then it went gulp. Just to see what would happen.
A small tree vanished on its slopes, and the mountain felt full. Not only that, it knew what it was like to feel empty.
“Hm. Mm,” said the mountain.
Gulp. There went another tree, and a very surprised bear that had been sharpening her claws on it.
“Hm. Mm,” reiterated the mountain.
Gulp.
Gulp.
Gulp.

Now this sort of happening can’t go on for long before people start to notice things, and not more than three days had gone by before everybody who lived around that mountain started to meet up and put their heads together.
“Folks been missing,” said the fox. “My handsome husband, he’s been up and vanished. And so did our house. And most of the hill we dug it into.”
“My granddad is gone,” said the human boy.
“That he is,” said the human father.
“And grandma too,” said the human mother.
“My wife’s gone, and our favourite fishing stream, and the trees near the fishing stream, and all the fish in it,” rumbled the big bear. “I am angry. I want to find who did this and beat them until they are black and red. Or white and red. Or brown, green, blue, and red. But mostly red.”
“I am agreeing with you here,” said the human father.
“Who did this, though?” said the human mother. “We need to find out that first.”
“Let’s ask the old crazy human that wanders around these parts,” suggested the fox. “She knows weird things.”
So they went out and after a while they found the old crazy human, who was the same person as the old human. She was fishing, or at least sleeping while pretending to fish. Same thing.
(The fishhook was made from a bit of the rabbit’s old ribs, there you go, but it’s still not important in this story)
“What’re you up about?” she asked, annoyed. “You’re going to scare off my fish.”
“People are going missing,” said the human mother.
“And streams,” said the big bear.
“And dens and hills,” amended the fox.
“And granddads and grandmas,” finalized the human boy.
“Huh,” said the old human. “Could be that mountain, eating things he shouldn’t. Now, what you could try is…”
And that wasn’t as far as she got, but it was as far as anyone else listened, because the big bear said in his loud voice “well, there’s nothing for it but to beat it up. Who’s coming with me?”
“I will,” said the human father. “I also want to beat it up.”
“Right!” said the big bear, and they left and everyone else went home, or the closest thing to it.
So the big bear and the human father went up the mountainside stomp stomp stomp. They put a lot of stamp into those stomps, so the mountain knew they were coming nice and easy. And when they got halfway up the mountain it stirred, and it twitched, and it spoke up and said “what are you doing?”
“Who said that?” said the big bear.
“I was just thinking that as well,” said the human father.
“It’s me, the mountain” said the mountain. “I can speak clear and fast, talking all I want since I started eating all I want. You’re stomping hard down there on my foothills. What do you want?”
“You ate my wife,” said the big bear, “so I’m going to thrash you.”
“And you ate my father and my mother-in-law,” said the human father, “so I will also thrash you.”
“Gulp,” declared the mountain, and that was pretty much that.

Back down the countryside, everybody who lived around that mountain met up again.
“My husband is gone,” said the human mother. “I think he made a mistake when he followed that big bear up the mountain to go give it a thrashing.”
“You can’t solve a problem like that with your fists,” agreed the fox. “Too daft. Too silly. My husband, he always said, you want to solve a problem you’ve got to use your brains, not your fists.”
“Let’s go check in with that old lady and see if she knows what’s what,” said the human mother.
So they checked in, and the old human was found a little while later. She was in a scrub thicket, teaching herself to sing birdsong, which was pretty nice, and she was learning from a crow, which wasn’t quite as nice.
“Oh, you again,” she said. “Still got problems?”
“We need to trick the mountain,” said the human mother. “It’s too big to fight, we need to talk it around it circles.”
“It’s only been able to talk like normal animals since a day or so ago,” said the old human. “I think it might not be good enough at it for that to work.”
“I could talk my husband’s tail in circles five times before supper,” said the fox, “and he was dafter than a birch when it came to anything but stealing meals.”
“That’s a good plan,” said the human mother, right over top of what the old human was saying, “let’s talk it around,” and they left right there, and told the human boy to stay put and do what he was told.
“I’m bored,” said the human boy.
“Me too,” said the old human, and she showed him how to make a game with pits hollowed in the earth and little pebbles.
Meantime, the fox and the human mother went up the mountainside, tramp tramp tramp. They weren’t sneaky, but they snuck up on the mountain anyways because it was so busy laughing that it couldn’t hear them.
“Ha! Ha ha! Ha ha ha! Aha, ha ha!” it said, very carefully.
“Excuse me,” said the fox.
“HA! Ahaha, ha, aha,” continued the mountain.
“We’re here to-” managed the human mother.
“AHAHAHAHAHAHA! Ha. Ha ha,” said the mountain, so loudly that it bowled them head over heels over head again, and then it noticed them as they were picking themselves up and swearing.
“HA HA AHA, gulp,” it said. “Ha. Mmm. Not sure I see the point.”

Back down the mountain, the human boy was bored again. He’d lost four games and won three games and he’d already sorted out all the shiniest pebbles so now the fun was missing. And he was starting to miss his mother.
“Are they coming back soon?” he asked the old human.
She frowned. “Guess not. That mountain must still be eating things it shouldn’t. Troublesome of it.” She scratched herself with her pit-digging tool.
(The rabbit’s thigh. Don’t worry, it’ll have a story where it’s important someday, just not right now, okay?)
“Listen little boy, your mother told you to do what you’re told, right?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the human boy.
“Great. Okay, listen.”
The human boy listened.
“Smart kid,” said the old human. “Right, here’s what we’re going to do. Well, you’re going to do. I think I probably made this problem, so I don’t think I can fix it proper. You’re gonna go over there, just a little ways, and you’re going to stand on that big spiky hill. And then you’re going to wait. And when that mountain finds you, I want you to ask it politely to stop eating things it shouldn’t. Now, can you remember all that?”
“Yes,” said the human boy.
“Good. Now get going fast.”
The human boy got going fast, and was up on top of the spiky hill lickety-split-lightning, which was just as well because the mountain was walking down towards him, rumbling along very slowly in a very fast way that it didn’t quite seem able to stop and definitely couldn’t steer.
“Hello!” called the human boy.
“Ho ho ho!” bellowed the mountain. “Look at me walk!”
“HELLO!” yelled the human boy.
The mountain looked down at him. “Yes?” it said.
“Please stop,” said the human boy.
The mountain considered this. And then it went “gulp,” and down went the human boy, hill, spiky, and all.
And that was where it all went wrong for the mountain, because that was when it learned about indigestion, and it learned about it a lot faster than eating. And much, much, much louder.
The sound it made was very, very loud and most of it was on levels inaudible to ears, human or any other kind, but if you squinted real hard at what you’d heard, it’d probably sound something kind of like
HLLUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGH
But bigger.
And POP POW out came everything out of its top, the rocks, the trees, the water, the bears and foxes and humans and everything down to the very last insect that the mountain had eaten, one after another, tumbling down its sides into a big messy pile.
“Ow,” said the human father, removing the fox’s foot from his face.
“Blub,” commented the smaller bear, wrenching her face free from the stream she had been fishing in a few days ago.
FWOOSH, declared the mountain, and it coughed up some magma. Of course, once it’s out there in the open, it’s lava. Still really hot stuff, though. There was a bit of a rush for the hills, and the nearest one was the spiky hill, which had landed upside down but was otherwise okay.
The old human was already waiting on top of it, and she gave them all a bit of a leg up with those fast hands of hers. She was grinning. “See? All good now. And look, we even got you something new to look at! Needs a name though. Hey kid, you got a name for this thing?”
The human boy shook his head and hid against the human father.
The old human shrugged. “Have it your way then, and I guess that means I do it my way. Well, I’m sure someone out there has something better for it, but I’M calling it a volcano. Unless our volcano here has a better name for it?”
The volcano belched and coughed.
“Guess not.” The old human scratched herself, chewed on her digging bone, and walked away.
And that was that.

“What You Eat,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.

In the first hour, Tammy and Benjamin did put on their snow outfits, and were made to shovel the driveway by the MOM. And the MOM’s word was obeyed, albeit grudgingly, and the driveway was snowed in no more, although it was still snowed upon.
In the second hour, Tammy and Benjamin did think of their fresh snow, and they did consider it beautiful, or at least really pretty, and so they did love it, or at least feel great affection and warmth towards it, and they began to fashion it into small spheres, the shape of worlds and eyes. Which they did hurl at each other.
In the third hour, Tammy and Benjamin did tire from their exertions, and they began to think of other things to do. And they took the spheres and rolled them across the snow, and it was snow no more but part of the sphere, and this was good. So they did it a lot more, and before long they had two greater spheres. And with much effort and struggle the lesser of the greater spheres was rolled upon the top of the greater of the greater spheres, and it was a body, and this was good.
And in the fourth hour Tammy and Benjamin did craft a smaller sphere of hardest-packed snow and ice, and a stick was jammed in it, and pebbles of varying sizes, so that a face was made. And this head was placed upon the peak of the body, and the body was fitted with arms of greater sticks, and this was also good.

Tammy and Benjamin looked at their snowman. The snowman looked back, but without any real enthusiasm.
Tammy frowned and tweaked the angle of his smile, which seemed to fix this.
“He needs a friend,” said Benjamin.
“A cat then,” said Tammy.
“A dog,” said Benjamin.
“Dogs are boring. He’ll have a cat.”
“No he won’t.”
They wandered off, arguing.

And in the fifth hour, Tammy and Benjamin departed to fashion a companion for their human of snow, who was left alone in the world. And it was a bit lost and very surprised, because it had no name, but this was all right, because there were many other things around him that also had no names. So it picked up one of them, which had a handle and a broad blade, and its arm did come off, shocking it so greatly that it almost froze to the spot.

“His arm came off,” said Tammy.
“Your fault,” said Benjamin. “You put it in.” He dumped the armful of fresh branches and sticks at the snowman’s feet.
“It’s your fault,” said Tammy. “This is the side of him that you were pushing, and it’s all soft and unpacked. Because you have skinny little chicken legs for arms.”
“Do not,” said Benjamin, selecting some of the smaller twigs.
“Do so,” said Tammy, briskly rolling up a crude cylinder of snow, preventing it from fragmentation with firm yet brutal love.
“Nu-uhhhh,” enunciated Benjamin, sculpting a skull and jabbing twig-whiskers into it at scientifically determined angles.
“Nope,” rebutted Tammy, fashioning some stubby little snow-legs.
“Whatever,” decided Benjamin.
“Duh,” said Tammy.
They admired their handiwork: a deliberately species-ambiguous probably-domesticated companion for their snowman.
“She needs a name,” said Tammy.
“I think he should name it,” said Benjamin. “It’s HIS dog.”
“It’s a cat,” said Tammy. “And I mean the snowman. She needs a name.”
“It says snowman right in the name, he’s a man,” said Benjamin. “And it can’t be a girl because it doesn’t have long hair.”
“I don’t have long hair.”
“You don’t count.”
A chase was undertaken.

And so in the sixth hour, the snowman learned from the wise and noble creators that it was a girl unless it was a boy. It wasn’t sure, but it loved its creators unconditionally so that was okay. And it looked upon its Companion and was also not sure, because it didn’t seem particularly impressed by the snowman.
It also looked lonely, and the snowman was troubled by this.
And so the snowman did labour, and labour with speed and strength, for it knew much of the ways of cold things. And its labour was undertaken with skill learned from watching those that made it, and so it was done with grace, and care, and finesse, and a love most firm yet subtly brutal. The labour was completed, and it was another Companion, similar in most every way, and they did regard each other with fondness. And the snowman felt a strange stirring in its hard-packed and stout innermost layers, and it knew that this feeling meant that it was good.
The snowman watched as its Companions regarded each other fondly, and it did look upon its creation fondly as well, and the creation of its creators also. It bid them farewell and wished them happiness, and then it knew not what to do and waited there as the first day ended.

On the dawning of the second day, just after breakfast, Tammy and Benjamin did war with snowballs against Rob and Susan. A mighty fortress was erected on either side of the front yard of Benjamin’s house, with Susan and Rob crafting walls from blocks pressed from a garbage-can, unwieldy and foul-smelling. Tammy and Benjamin did laugh at this display, and they did craft their walls from rolled snow as time dictated, and although their victory seemed assured because of Rob being a wimp, they found themselves hard pressed in time, as their own walls crumbled under the stone-cored slushballs of their foes. And in time they did fall to ruin, and were pelted under the open sky with not a scrap of cover to defend themselves.

“This sucks,” said Tammy, spitting out grey snow. “Let’s go have hot chocolate.”

And they did this, and so ended the first hour of the second day. And lo, the snowman did awaken once more, stirred by the sounds of battle and tumult, and it inspected the ruins of the war. Anger stirred within its chilly heart at the sight of the undaunted, blighted walls of the enemies of its creators, and it fell upon the garbage-can, and the slushball-stockpile, and the battlements, and tore them asunder in their names, but it could not destroy the foul-smelling-walls, for they were made of near-ice and of strength beyond all.
Its job half-done and the second hour of the second day gone behind it, the snowman did turn itself upon the fortress of the creators, and it did see where imperfection had been allowed to lair within it. And the wrath faded from its heart and was replaced with industry, and so it did pile up all the snow that was to be found within the front yard and mounded it high about the shattered walls of the fortress of the creators, packed it firmly, and it did this, which it knew was good, until the fourth hour had elapsed, at which point it staggered away to its rest, filled with exhaustion.

“A teenager did it,” suggested Tammy.
“Then who built yours up?” asked Susan.
“Dunno,” said Tammy. “A teenager did it?”
“They don’t fix things,” said Susan. “You did it.”
“We were inside.”
“You asked someone else to do it.”
“Who?”
“Someone!”
“I’ve got an idea for a game,” said Benjamin.

And so the fifth hour was spent in demolition of the new fortress, with much entertainment had by all, and the ramparts were thrown down, and the pack-battlements used as projectiles, and much strife and sport was taken betwixt and between the two enemies, until they all had to go home for dinner.

On the dawning of the third day, in the first hour, the snowman came back to the front yard and beheld the ruin of its labours, and it knew a new thing: that this was not good. A great wrath waxed in its heart for the wickedness of the persons who had made its frame and yet so carelessly and callously thrown asunder its gifts, and it was filled with the desire for vengeance and just punishment. And so it did seize the frost from the air and scrawled symbols of rebuke and regret upon every window in the person’s home, without regard for pity or mercy. Mercy would blunt the necessary force of the message, the weight of its import.

“It got REALLY cold last night,” said Susan.
“Yeah,” said Tammy. She was poking her sheet of math problems to see if it would do anything. It hadn’t the last ninety-eight times, but she had learned earlier that day that Thomas Edison had believed in innovation being ninety-nine percent perspiration, and was testing the hypothesis.
“Really cold,” agreed Rob, in a transparent effort not to be forgotten.
“I got frost all over my windows,” said Benjamin, ignoring this.
“What’d you draw?”
“Dinosaurs. And butts.”
“Dinosaur butts?”
“Yeah, those too.”
“Gross.”
Emily poked her math sheet again. “Bullshit,” she said a little too loudly, and then had to explain herself to the teacher.

And the snowmen did spend the second through sixth hours of the third day in a swoon, paralyzed by the effrontery of those that it had once counted as family, the filth that had undoubtedly malformed its pure essence into the depraved and fumbling thing that it inhabited, for none as foul as they could have created it as it was. It grieved most thoroughly that it had witnessed such defilement, and on the seventh hour it did pray for guidance and move much snow. If blame would not turn the heads of the senseless, perhaps guilt would bind their hearts. And then it saw the way to enlightenment, and it laboured all through the eighth hour of the third day.

On the morn of the final day, the person Benjamin was ordered outside to Clean Up That Mess You Made, and he did see that the Companion that he had crafted for the snowman out back had been relocated to the front stoop of his house, along with another of its kind. He waxed irritated, and did shovel them.
And Benjamin did blame it upon Rob’s older brother Jake, and a resolve filled him to pretend to be nicer to Rob at school lest Jake take his pranking farther, and Rob did enjoy the increased niceness of Benjamin with a bit of surprise but figured it was okay.

“How’s your brother?” asked Benjamin, as innocently as possible. He had shared a small bag of sour cream and onion chips with Rob, to keep the conversation as friendly and inoffensive as possible.
“A little weird,” said Rob.
“Yeah?”
“Um. More than usual, yeah. He stayed out too late last night again, and he wouldn’t say why. Mom got mad.”
“Uh,” said Benjamin, and he thought about Jake’s absolutely terrifying and startlingly realistic werewolf mask. Then he bought Rob a chocolate bar and gave him two thirds of it.

And on the stoop of Benjamin’s home the snowman regarded the rubble of its Companions with anguish, and it wept bitterly or would’ve if its eyes weren’t pebbles and the ambient air temperature were not sufficient to keep the vast majority of its body frozen in a solid state. So be it, as rebuke failed it. so too did guilt fail it. How could you shame that which knew no shame? How could it still attempt to make the blind see? It only lowered itself in the effort – the grey slush of their boot-treads had dirtied the snowman up to its near midsection. Their flaws were truly irredeemable, and their mere existence sullied it beyond hope of salvation, and yet it had to try. It had to try.
And so the snowman did, on the final hour of the eighth day, with its heart filled with pity overflowing, melt itself for the sins of its creators. And it was good, and also surprisingly nice-feeling.

“Your brother is really weird,” said Benjamin.
Rob nodded. Tammy and Susan agreed similarly silently. The ex-snowman had been propped up against the laundry exhaust pipe, where it had been slowly liquified from the cranium down.
“Yeah,” said Rob. “So. Uh. So.”
“Let’s make a bigger one.”

And lo, as there were four of them, they were able to make a bigger one. And in the end, as they came in, the MOM told them that the driveway needed shovelling again. And so it was, and so it would be.

“Snowfall,” copyright Jamie Proctor 2011.

Oh man, oh well, here we go again. Look at you. Just look at you. It’s goddamned precious. I don’t remember the last time I saw anything this hilarious, and I don’t even remember forgetting.
What d’you mean “what?” Your outfit there? Those little brass buckles, those blue-and-green-patches? That’s Matagant wear. That’s almost a thousand miles away, and your cute little trains will only take you half of that before you have to get out and ride. And then the mountains get in your way and you have to walk.
You’ve walked at least a hundred miles to get here, Mata-boy. That’s what’s so damned adorable. And I bet you even think it was a hard trip, because it took the shine right off those brass buttons.
Hey. Hey. Don’t walk away now, Mata-boy. Don’t walk away and leave an old snowcrawler here high and dry. I’ve got what you want. Spend a few dollars to rinse the dust out of my throat, and I’ll tell you everything about the Window you ever wanted to know.
Of course you want to know about the Window. You’re here, aren’t you? Oh man, oh Mata-boy, here we go again.

First thing: you want to know about the Window, you got to know about the Sill. If you don’t want to hear about it, well tough shit Mata-boy, they’re as tied up as tied up can ever be. The man that found the Window founded the Sill two hours later, that’s how close they are. Two hours. We know that ’cause we know the times.
The Window was found eighty-one years ago exactly, to the day, at three-thirty-three in the afternoon. Sillas Bradley hauled himself over that ridge ten feet behind some poor bastard securing the ropes no one remembers, looked down a two-thousand-foot drop, and looked up into a sky that wasn’t quite real.
Two hours later, he puts down a flag and tells everyone to start building something better than tents. Bam. That was that. Old bastard doomed the lot of us right then and there. “Let’s build our homes on the edge of a cliff.” Two hours.
Yeah, of course it was temporary! Of course it was temporary! Christ, it was a bunch of tents and piled-up rocks and they had no food, not so much as a goddamned twig to build with. Of course it was just a friggin’ stopgap. Didn’t stop them from coming back six months later with more stuff, did it? All ready to build pretty little houses and carrying packs chock-full of tasty salted meat and just as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as lovable little shitfaced squirrels, right?
Yeah, I’d say it was at least three or four dozen deaths in the first few weeks of building up Sill. Overwork, underfed, couldn’t handle the thin air, couldn’t handle the noise the Window makes….
No, you don’t get used to it. Not really. You get better at ignoring it, but whenever you don’t, it just slides back in. Like someone sticking their finger in your nose, except it fills up your whole head.
No, I damned well don’t wonder how they felt when they went through the Window for the first time. I don’t wonder because everyone feels the same way. Everybody’s first time might as well be the first time ever, because you never really know it ’till you’ve tried it.
You sort of… freeze up. You walk up those fifty-six steps until you’re forty feet farther over the edge of the cliff than you’d ever wanted to be, with nothing but some greasy old timbers that groan like grandmother’s bra between you and two thousand and forty feet of empty air. You’re trying not to look at the Window, but that just leaves looking down and you don’t want to do that either. And you can’t shut your eyes.
So you look at the Window, and it hurts your eyes like hell. Like someone put salt in them, and the salt wants to lick the backside of your head by going right through the middle. Shut up, I know it doesn’t make any goddamned sense. Just listen. Listen.
While you’re looking at the window and trying not to pay attention to it, your legs are still moving because they know if you stop, so will the guy behind you, and so will the guy behind him, and then the whole lot of you’ll be just sitting there on top of the fifty-six steps, all of you. Standing there, not moving, on top of that creaking staircase from hell. Which is starting to groan a little louder every second. And you’re stuck right at the end of it farthest from solid ground.
I’ve got to finish this cup. Hold up.

Okay, that’s better.

Right. You go through the Window, right through the part of the air where the air is different and sparkles like ground glass, and you’re not right side up, upside down, or sideways. You’re just sort of there. In the air. Floating free as a friggin’ fairy, you and the guy behind and the guy in front of you and every single one of the whole expedition, at least twelve and at most a hundred and nineteen.
That only happened once, yeah, and it nearly broke the fifty-six steps. Next biggest was eighty or something I don’t know, just listen. You didn’t come this far to hear yourself talk, did you Mata-boy?
When you’re floating there, everyone looks helpless as babies for the first few moments. After that the veterans start to remember, and the new floaters just go rigid. Too scared to move. But they have to, so it’s everyone else’s job to shove ‘em into shape. Push them, yell at them, drag ‘em along if you need to do it. They usually unfreeze in the first few hours. If they don’t, well, you just tie them on a lead and drag ‘em around. It’s stupid, but sometimes there’s one or two that just end up like that. No point in complaining too loud once you know it, because there’s no way to fix it. Just do the bitching inside your head, it’s a real comfort.
It also takes your mind off what you’re seeing now, because you’re seeing a lot of things past the Window that you don’t want to. There’s colours that I’m sure as shit don’t really exist, that’s the big part. Looking at anything makes you queasy, especially things that should look right but don’t. You go in wearing blue socks, you come out wearing blue socks, but while you’re past the Window you don’t want to check what colour those socks are, because whatever they are it won’t be right.
The sound’s not as bad, no. It’s so loud you can’t hear it anymore. Or feel it. Kinda relaxing, really. Everything in there is all muffled and shit, like your ears are full of mud. No complaints there, Mata-boy. Don’t fret your pretty little head about scary noises.
Yeah, yeah, I’m getting there, I’m getting there. Let me tell you about what you’re seeing in there that’s so scary.
You won’t see the Ta right away, I can tell you that. They never hang around the Window. Must give them the creeps as much as it does us, if they can feel that way. I’ve got no idea, let some priest babble on about their mindset or their souls or whatever, I just know trying to read them is like trying to chew water, but they don’t come near the Window. Not unless they have a reason. Like us.
Hold up. Last gulp.
Good stuff. You trying to soften me up, Mata-boy? Hah, sweet of you, but you’re too young for me.
The first thing you see isn’t the Ta, it’s probably a broken up kala-husk. The big bastards never die easy, either something cracks them open and eats them like a fox with a hen’s egg or they overswell their shells and explode from the inside out when they hit old age – whatever the husks are made of, it may look like wool and feel like wood, but it’s harder than iron. Helluva way to go, but it’s supposed to take a few hundred years for them to get big enough. There’s one big husk that’s usually floating without a few miles of the Window’s other side, Huge Halger. He’s your best friend – floats around so slowly and you can see him from so far away that there’s no beating him as a direction. Good as a compass heading. “Go towards Halger’s biggest crag on the left side. We’re not that near, head a little bit farther away from Halger. Be careful, there’s a swirl of particular angles near Halger’s far side.”
Particular angles you usually don’t get near the Window either. It’s a pretty dead quiet zone, they like to hunt live, lively prey. That doesn’t mix well.
Swirl’s the word, yeah. You can’t count them, and you can’t tell one big angle from a thousand little ones. No one can. So they’re a swirl of particular angles. Just the way it works, Mata-boy, and it doesn’t make too much difference at all. One little angle in the wrong spot’s worse than a million ones each the size of this pub, if they’re a safe ways away. Of course, the safest place to be when it comes to them is this side of the Window. I saw a little wee swirl of angles once – couldn’t have been bigger than my right tit – and I saw it boil right up through the man next to me’s ribcage. Closest I’ve ever been, and I’m just happy they were filled right up after that because they could’ve had me for dessert without even trying.
What d’you mean, what do they eat? Hah! You look to be the reading kind, Mata-boy, you telling me you didn’t even try to learn this stuff at home before you walked a hundred miles into the asshole of the ass-end of the world? What’re you, a writer? Spit and shit, boy, think you’ll be the first to write a book that’s the reading, what an ego you’ve got! But hah, there you go and fill my cup again, so I’m not going to stop talking.
Particular angles eat lines, and they’re picky eaters, so they prefer big ones, and the straighter the better. Which is good because otherwise they’d probably eat everything. Instead, they’ll just take most of your arteries, or the spaces between your teeth, or every single stitch in your clothing, it’s all luck as to what they end up going for. I saw a body once, the angles had taken every last hair on his head and not a single damned thing anywhere else. Died of fright, poor bastard. Some people can even lose when they win.
Particular angles aren’t the only problem in there. Big problem is the stinks. You see this mask here? See the big bulb over the nose? That hollow’s meant to be filled with the nastiest-smelling shit you can imagine. I don’t know what the apothecaries make it out of, but you put a good wad of that under your whiffer and you don’t have to worry about the stinks. There’s these little spores that make smells out there, that’re so sharp and funked that they’ll send you into coughing fits that can dislocate your jaw, and they hit hard enough that after a few minutes of that you can’t keep breathing.
Well, after you die, the spores fill your carcass and breed in it. Circle of goddamned life. Isn’t it a gorgeous little bitch?
But I’d say the worst problem – the worst problem that’s a straight-up threat – is the noisy thoughts. The stinks? You just wear your mask all the time. Even when you need to eat. Better sick than dead. Particular angles, you just keep an eye out and keep a bunch more near you. But the noisy thoughts? You can’t do anything about those. Anything at all. And almost nobody toughs them out.
See, when they first get their hooks into you, you think it’s you. It’s a tune, or an idea, or something you think someone might’ve mentioned. The tip of your brain’s tongue, you know what I mean? And you let it sit there. Biding its time. You’re waiting for it to go away, because if you just wait things like this ALWAYS go away, but it won’t. It just gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger.
And the bastard of this is that up until right near the very end, most people think that a noisy thought is just something they can’t get out of their head. What’s really funny there, Mata-boy? They’re sort of right. But not quite.
Now, the bit at the end where even the dimwits get that something’s wrong, that’s when their other thoughts start getting crowded out. It starts out soft – you’re so busy humming along with the little song that you lose track of the knot you’re tying, or you stop walking for a moment for no good reason. Then before you know it you’re losing sentences halfway through and forgetting people’s names. By the end? You can’t even think enough to move. The whole brain shuts down bit by bit.
And the real kicker of all this, Mata-boy? There’s nobody that knows what the hell the noisy thoughts even get out of this. They come. They hollow you out. And then they go. You can count the survivors on the fingers of a blind butcher’s hand, and there’s only one still living. If you can call it living. Look up Dead-Head Lizzie, eh? She’ll tell you.
I need another drink. Double it up this time.

Okay, so now you got an idea of some of the risks. That’s just the flashy stuff, mind. I haven’t said jack squat about the things that just drive people nuts or make them wander off and never come back in the night – oh yeah, there’s no night. No day either. Amazing how fast that makes some guys snap.
Now we’re gonna talk about the sweet stuff, the reason anyone wants to go through the damned Window in the first place. We’re going to talk about what Sillas Bradley found when he took fifty-six armed bastards through there for the first time ever, when the fifty-seven steps were still new and didn’t creak so bad.
See, at first the old bastard didn’t find much more than what I told you. No right or left, up or down. Colours all wrong. Huge Halger. Lost a few women and men to particular angles, I think, and the first time anyone saw that would be enough to send most home.
But they were out for money. Nobody wants to come back home with an empty wallet, eh? Makes the bosses unhappy. So they searched in circles, and just when they’d given up, well, there they found something. Floating inside the scraped-out scraps of an old kala-husk, they found some shooms growing.
Funny things, shooms. You ever try some, Mata-boy? A sliver of a scraping’s all I ever could afford, but you bought those brass buttons with somebody’s money, and I’m betting you have more than that.
Never tried? Liar. But such a goddamned polite one. Butter wouldn’t melt in that mouth of yours, would it? Hah. Well then, I’ll be twice as polite and pretend I believe that bullshit, lay it out flat with you: a worm’s-skint-scraping of shoom tastes like sex warmed over by a god and filled to the gills with wine made out of sunbeams.
If you think that isn’t enough reason to send men and women in there to die, Mata-boy, you’re dumber than I thought. But there’s more to it than that. While the taste of that beautiful little parasite is melting apart against the roof of your mouth, you know numbers.
No, I don’t mean that you can do math, no I
Pay attention and shut up. You. Know. Numbers. You don’t add or subtract or any other bullshit, you just know ‘em. While that little scrap of shoom was wasting on my tongue, I could see any number I imagined, and I knew it inside and out. Sillas sent home a bushel or two, and they let the royal mathematician try it out. He sorted every single tax record in the country sound as a bell inside the day. Nearly wore out his wrist with cramping, but it worked. It’s precious stuff, Mata-boy, and there’s two who eat it: royalty, and the advisors of royalty. And the snowcrawlers who bring it back from beyond the Window and are just quiet enough to sneak scraps without getting caught. You get caught once skivving on a trip, you get a punch. Twice, you get a beating. Three times, and they don’t kill you, they don’t kick you out, but nobody’s going to play lookout for you, nobody’s going to help you, nobody’s going to share supplies, and unless you cut losses and make a beeline for the Window you’re probably a dead woman walking. Happened to me twice, and I must’ve run out of all my luck on the way home.
That’s the first bit there, the first sweet bait to lure us all in past the Window. The second’s a bit more obvious: kala-husks. I already told you how tough those things are, you don’t need to hear more. At first they made armour from it, then they found out that they could make it as light and thin as they wanted, then they tried using it to build machines. And if half of what I hear is coming out of the colleges these days is true, Mata-boy – and never more than half, if you say an inch more than half of it is true I’ll eat my boots – then I’m only surprised the prices on the stuff aren’t higher.
The third big thing (and there’s lots of little things I’m not saying right now, Mata-boy – little souvenirs I’m not even going to try to describe, nothing more than trinkets for rich folk and good-luck charms for idiots), we only found five years later. That was when Sillas found the Ta. Walked right into one of their Not-Cities.
Yeah, that’s the word for them.
No, I don’t know how you talk to them. Some people just can. Best not to do it too often, too. The more you do it, the more often you do it, the more you get like them. In the head, not the body, but sometimes I get to wondering. I swear Eightfinger Ulluver’s lips were nearly gone by the end of his life.
Yup. No lips. That’s the Ta. No lips, no eyes. Big ears though. And their legs are like arms, and their arms all look like legs, and they have no teeth. And they don’t live in cities. All the Ta-talkers get really snippy about that. They don’t live in villages, they don’t live in towns, and they REALLY don’t live in cities. Not-Cities is the best word we have, I guess. Stupid as hell if you ask me, but then most of the things the Ta do are stupid as hell. They eat each other and pretty much nothing else, they spend most of their lives asleep, and when they’re awake they do everything at half-again speed before they pass out again. A hundred Ta in one place, you’ll never see more than two or three moving at once. They do things in shifts.
But they know things about the world past the Window that we don’t. They know what to avoid and what to find, they know what’s worth things and what isn’t. We just had to pick out was worth anything to US and we were golden. We traded for how to treat kala-husks and how to find kala-husks and how to find where shooms grew and we found out how to make a Listenstem out of one of their skulls. You take the emptied braincase after they’re done eating one of their own – they do it while the food’s sleeping – and rip off the jaw and sort of push the skull into a bowl. Then you hold that to your ear, and if you know what to think, you think better. That’s all I know because I’m not fool-assed enough to try it. There was a pretty good culling of the colleges when Listenstems started getting out of the Window, before some of the careful ones figured out how to train yourself for it. You do it wrong, and you pretty much turn Ta in the head, and it turns out Ta heads don’t fit inside human brains. Most of ‘em bled out inside their skulls. A couple went crazy, but the useful kind, so they kept them around with force-feedings. Good stuff, eh? And to think, they’ll practically give the things away, which is good because we can’t make them ourselves. Not sure why, but they don’t work.
Now, there’s the big question here, Mata-boy. I can feel it from across the table here, itching away at the tip of your tongue, trying to squirm past those pretty lips of yours, but they’re too polite to open up and spit it out in the drunk old snowcrawler’s face: what do we trade them? What do they want? What are they asking? What are we giving? Because I know, and you know, Mata-boy, that they know how much we want their things. Damned all else we have in common with them, but they get trade. And barter. And payment.
No, it isn’t people. They aren’t interested in us. Just our trade. Don’t get all huffy there.
Go on, guess.
Guess better!
Warmer.
Close!
Hah, give up?
Wrong again, you lose. I’ll tell you anyways because I’m so goddamned nice. They want our thoughts. And I can’t tell you why because in seventy-odd years of us trading them to the buggers, they haven’t seemed like they understand one spitsworth better than before. Maybe they’re just bored and we’re the most hilarious friggin’ thing they’ve ever seen. Whyever they want it, that’s what they’re trading for. The whole team draws straws and the unlucky bastard loses about six months of memories, in exchange for a little over a quarter of the total take. Not a trade most people like. That’s why you’ll find so many snowcrawlers are washed-up scumbags like yours truly, Mata-boy. Nobody who’s had a very nice life would trade it away for any amount of money. Nobody.
I must’ve lost six or seven years. Mostly bad ones. I think I broke even, more’r less. Maybe.
Thanks. Needed that.

So that’s the deal then. You go in. You collect. You barter. You head back to the Window, and you come home. And by the time you come back, you’re a little used to it over there. Not much, never more than a little, because you’re human. But a little. And when you walk back through the door, all of that gets rubbed raw all over, and you spend a few days with twitching eyes and clenching teeth. Me, I get rid of it through drink, same as most. Some of us can’t handle it, keep playing tough for years when they’re soft inside, and then it all spills out whoopsie daisy along with the guts of three or four poor schlubs who were standing a little too near when the sound in the back of your head gets to be all too much and someone says something a little too loud.
Funny thing though, after a few trips in and out of there, you sort of start wanting to hear that noise. Just a little.

How many cups does this one make?
You’re right. Never enough.

You’re all right, boy from Matagan. You’re all right. But I’m getting drunk now, and I’m maudlin as shit when that happens. So I think that’s it for the night.
What? Oh, fine. Last one. But just because you bought me the good stuff, and because me ‘n Dead-Head Lizzie are the only ones left who know this.
See, I never did tell you how Sillas Bradley’s trip ended, did I? Well, he discovered the Window, and he founded the Sill, and he built the fifty-seven steps. And he wandered through the Window and met the Ta, and surprise surprise, he could talk to ‘em. And since we didn’t know much back then, well, he talked a lot. And he asked questions.
Nowadays, we know not to do that.
Sillas was a tough old bastard, and he knew better than to let that sort of shit show in front of his men, but there’s some things you just can’t avoid. His skull was still crowded with Ta-thoughts, and he might’ve even gotten some noisy thoughts in there too. We don’t for sure, but that’s Lizzie’s guess. Pah, what’re guesses worth.
So Sillas set foot outside the Window, fell right back into the real world, and he got the shakes real bad, with a head full of things that were never meant to exist out here, where there’s a sun and a moon and a sky with a wind through it. So he screamed real loud. And he stumbled. And he lashed out and laid out flat the three men nearest to him, poor luckless sods, and when he fell down on top of those three men, well… I hadn’t tied on that last step as well as it could.
Ulluver told me that was his fault. He was a liar, all the time. Those eightfingers worked better than any twenty of anyone else’s.
So that’s why we have fifty-six steps. And when we looked all the way down that mountainside, all two thousand feet of it, we could see the little black marks like crawly bugs on the white snow where Sillas Bradley and three other men had landed. Don’t remember their names. I forgot most of that year and got told it second hand by Lizzie, and her memory’s lousy.
So that was that. And that was us. “Snowcrawlers.” Senses of humour as black as sin from that first trip.

Goddamn.

You’re a good man. You write that book. I need to remember these things. And you finish it fast.
I want to still be able to remember how to read when it’s finished. And I need another trip soon.
Just one more, that’s all. That’ll be plenty.
But just in case, you finish it fast.

“On the Sill,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

Iris woke up to the sound of a zephyr blowing overhead, blowing through the cracks in the walls of her shack, blowing through the gap where her right canine should be.
It was practically an open invitation.
Snick, snack, snap, open and shut went her wiry, rawbone jaws, chew, pulp, munch, down went half of the zephyr, leaving the other half to run away crying. Swallow, stretch, belch and the walls of the hut shook.
“That’s lucking,” she said, wiping away a shred of uncertain air currents away from her jowls, “that’s gooding. But not besting. Best is the whole thinging”
First things first, such a fortunate moment had to be recorded. Iris hobbled with purpose to the big moldy book that dominated the room, dominated the oaken table it rested on so thoroughly that it almost continually groaned. It was thicker through than the body of a child of ten years, and greater in height from header to footnote, and it was bound in the hide of a thunderhorse, though it was so aged that only the loudest flashs of lights would lead it to rumbling.
Iris heaved it open to the second-to-last page and chewed over her lip without gentleness. It had the consistency of jerky, and was a great comfort between meals, but her mind was elsewhere now. Important work had to be done.

Zephyr, she wrote. Chocolaty, with a hint of a sigh. Soft against the palate but only becomes more tender with each chew, mild as mother’s milk and twice as sweet, but just a hair’s-breadth short of cloying. Succulent raw, would cook using light sautéing with some fresh mushrooms.

Iris stretched her cramping fingers – her writing grew more and more roving and uncertain by the minute, like a drunken dog – and returned to her efforts.

Acquired by happenstance on awakening one early Tuesday morning. Set traps in likely locales and it will cheerfully bumble straight into them. Attempt nonlethal, relatively calming capture to ensure a lack of muscle tension in the meat.

Iris set down her pen with a grunt. It was made from an eagle’s wing, filled with the blackest blood of a stormcloud. Terrible tough, rank eating storms made, but they were useful. You could write pages about all the exciting, dangerous things you could do with their blood and flesh and electrical fields, and Iris had done that, at the cost of four fingers, several cumulative yards of skin, and the ability to control the direction of her right eye, which now did as it wished at all except the gravest moments.
“Almost doning,” she croaked, stroking the freshly inked page. It sparked, but didn’t smear. “So nearing. Just one more, my loveliest. One more, and then the world will know of all that I am knowing. One more.” She pursed her lips. “And what better day is there to go do this thinging, hmm? It is a sign of good luck. I should be off and away while it is lasting. Who knows, maybe it will being flying into my mouthing too, ehh?”
And so Iris prepared herself. She put on her bonnet made from briars, and took up her stone walking stick that could strike a bear dead with one blow, and on her back she slung her trapping-bag, which was woven out of her hair and was stronger than the strongest steel. She smiled, and her teeth shone like angels in the sunlight.
“It is good lucking,” she said. “I will catch a rainbow today.”
And she limped out the door.

Rainbows were harder to catch than they sounded. Things like that usually were.
For one thing, they were rare, rare, rare. If you wanted a chance, you either had to bait them – and they were wary of that, oh so wary – or wait and hope. And Iris was old and impatient.
For another thing, they were too big. Seven stripes! Seven colours! Each was more troublesome and fierce and touch-shy than the last, and if just one of them got away from your grasp the whole thing would wriggle after it no matter how hard you clutched.
Finally, they were as shy and quick to run as cats in a strange house. The first hint of the first sign of anything from anyone and they would be somewhere else before most people had even noticed they were there.
Iris had stalked nine rainbows before. Every time she’d gotten a little bit more frustrated, but today she felt confident. There was luck on her side this time. And luck beats anything.

Iris’s shack stood at the hinge of two mountains, huddled on top of itself in a scree of boulders and broken stone. On one side, a sheer drop. On the other, a soaring wall. Front and back, a small thicket of bitter-thorned shrubs that had been doing slowly for over one hundred years, and then empty space. No living thing had walked up there for as long as Iris could remember. Which suited her fine. She liked her privacy.
Today the west mountain suited her intuition of luck. The zephyr had come from the west, it only stood to reason more might follow. She took her walking stick between her teeth and pulled herself up the cliff hand-over-hand until her house lay below her no bigger than an ant’s and a thin ledge came to her grasp. It was just wide enough for her to shimmy on, greasy hair clawing its way free from her bonnet in thin strands as she wiggled her way to the broader grounds of a little mountain meadow. The air tasted clean and sharp enough to cut taste buds clean out of your mouth.
Iris bit into it four times as she walked, chewing each forty times with her needle-bright teeth. A little snack to whet her appetite properly for when she found the big game. The rumble of her quarry’s home was already loud in her ears.
The waterfall started maybe halfway up the mountain and dropped straight to its base, smashing its face into the cliffs three or four times on the way down. It sounded like the world’s largest bear being woken up from the world’s coziest nap with the world’s pointiest stick, drawn out long. Iris sometimes hummed along with it when she was thinking. It made her floorboards creak and the lantern flicker.
She looked at the spray and roar, then squinted at the sky. “Too early for the misting,” she commented. “Waiting time.”
So grey Iris sat down there, near the top of the waterfall, with her walking stick, and she hummed along to the waterfall as she repaired the small damage that the wind’s careless buffets had done to her bonnet of black briars. She sat there for three days, sustaining herself only on nips and bites of the most faintly eddying breezes, watching and waiting and waiting some more.
On the fourth day, the rainbow came.
It was thin and translucent in the sunlight, a bit uncertain and startled as to its existence. It stretched across the mountain sky with the tentative air of a bird first flapping its featherless winglets.
The rainbow lasted ten minutes, and in that time Iris made no move at all. She was old and experienced; she’d lost her first two rainbows to hastiness and greed. Patience was her watchword now.
“Time loses nothings,” she muttered into her teeth, “and it brings luckings. And luckings beats anything.” And she bedded down for the night with her trapping-bag as a pillow, resting her skull on its unbending coils.
On the fifth day, the rainbow came again in the morning. It was more solid now, more sure. It was a vain creature, as all its kind were, and it flittered most fetchingly in the sun, still wobbly but bolder and more adventurous, testing its limits. It swayed and it shimmered and once it even doubled itself in a fit of pique, though the effort seemed to exhaust it.
Iris hummed in thought, masked by the waterfall’s ever-roar. A double rainbow was twice the catch, but twice the difficulty. Should she wait longer even, hoping for it to properly split itself?
“No, no, noing,” she scolded herself that night. “Greed is a curse. A rainbow is a rainbow is a rainbow, doubled or no, and better one than none, truth be telling.”
On the sixth day, the rainbow was mature. It stood astride the valley of falling waters like a prince newly crowned, with the confidence and beauty of a freshly-greened maple. It held a shimmer in its sides that was the secret envy of every trout and the love affair of countless bad poets, and it knew it and owned it. It made Iris’s mouth water just looking at it.
“Soon, soon, sooning,” she said that night, speaking to her walking stick in a fit of pique that evening. “Sooning.”
On the seventh day, the rainbow innovated some more. Secure in its resplendence, bored in its effortless existence, it shaped itself in strange ways. It reflected from ice particles in some clouds, bending itself into a halo. It shifted its perspective no less than three hundred and sixty times. It even tried to see what was over the mountain top, but grew dizzy before it had grown large enough. And then evening came, and it tucked itself away for the night again.
On the eighth day, the rainbow was confident, determined, and bursting with impatient new ideas. It faded into the visible edge of light with the casual ease of those who belonged there, and was grabbed by fingers so strong and quick that it didn’t even know anything was wrong until a bag of grey iron was spread over its head and it was stuffed straightaways into it.
“Caught! Caught! Caught!” laughed Iris, waving her bonnet overhead in triumph, where its cruel thorns tore at the belly of an innocent breeze. “Caught at last and caught for realings! All one, two, three, four and so on to seven stripes! All of them! All mine!” She laughed so loud that the rocks bleached white with fright everywhere she stepped all the way home down the cliff as she skipped with joy, jostling and bruising the poor rainbow something fierce as it wriggled in her trapping-bag.
“Caught!”

Iris’s home had no cage for her prisoners, but she was wily. She pulled the rainbow out of her trapping-bag by the scruff of its neck and stuffed it inside her black briar bonnet. At every wince the rainbow made, a hundred tiny spikes poked its flesh terribly.
“So good, so good, so gooding,” chuckled Iris. “The last one, the lasting! The final page of my booking! The last sampling! Where shall I start, where shall I be starting? Inside or outside? One big bite or three little ones? Shall I eat it raw or cooked, kill it with my sticking or eat it raw and struggling? Choices! Choices!” She poked the rainbow in the heart with her finger, and it nearly doubled up from the pain.
“If you want to eat me,” said the rainbow, “you had better listen to what I have to say. Eat me now, before my colours fade! By four days time they’ll have faded away, and they’ll be deadly poison to an old hag like you.”
Iris squinted at him. “Liar, liar, lying liaring,” she hissed. “You know well what brightness and light do to an old woman’s tummy. You want me to eat you fresh and sparkling, so bright it burnsing! You evil thing! I’ll coop you up for all four days, and eat your rawing! RAW!” She hissed and laughed and spat once and went to bed with a snore that could scrape lichen off rocks.
Cooped up in its prison of black briars, the rainbow smiled so hard that its teeth nearly jumped out of his mouth. Then it sat up as straight as the thorns would allow, cupped its hands to its mouth, and sang in a sweet low voice.

Winds, winds, here I am, here I am. Rainbow, your prince, is all caught up. Attend me! Help me! Winds, winds!

There was a quiet whistle from far away, and in swept the east wind, wet and lush as a steaming river, long as the end of the world. “Trouble, my prince?” it whispered warmly.
“Free me, free me,” said the rainbow, in a hushed voice. “I have three days before I die, if I am not freed.”
“I will do as you ask on this day,” said the west wind, “and then I am needed elsewhere in the wide world.” And the west wind breathed deeply in and out and flooded the dried old briars with damp, nurturing moisture, suffocating their bitter thorns.
“Free!” called the rainbow. “I am free!” And it leapt out of the wilting briars, and straight into the iron-haired trapping-sack of Iris.
“Woke me woke me woke me!” she yelled. “Smells of clean water and warmth? In my home? Unkind thing! Unwelcome fooding!” She beat the rainbow so hard that it nearly went black as well as blue, and all the next day, the second day, as she wrote notes in her old creaking book she gave it the evil eye.
“Watch it carefullying,” she muttered aloud as she wrote, “or it will be most escaping. Pah!” And then she knotted up her trapping-sack and left the rainbow alone for the second night.
The rainbow huddled in a heap, nursing its bruises, and waited until the old woman was fast asleep and louder than ever, then it hitched itself up, put its fingers to its mouth, and whistled high and fast.

Winds, winds, here I am, here I am. Rainbow, your prince, is all caught up. Attend me! Help me! Winds, winds!

There was a low hum from far far away and up came the south wind through the floorboards, dry as a bone’s soul, turbulent and coarse. “You ask for aid, my prince?” it spoke softly.
“Free me, free me,” said the rainbow, begging open-handed. “I have only two days to live if I am not freed.”
“I will do as you ask on this day,” said the south wind, “but then I must soon speed someplace.” And the south wind spoke strange words that made the air jump and billow with dry, fierce heat, and the iron-hard hair of the trapping-sack withered and shrank until it was no more than a tight little collar around the rainbow, which burst it with a quick shake of its head.
“Free!” yelled the rainbow. “Free! I am free!” And it leapt out of the window and was nearly in the air when Iris’s stone walking stick strike it in the back, knocking it prone.
“Woke me!” she snarled as she thrashed the rainbow without mercy. “The sound of sanding? In my stone homing? Thief! Burglaring of my hospitaliting!” She cracked the rainbow across the head so hard that it saw eighteen stars at once, then stabbed it through its middle and right into the dirt with her walking stick. Squirm and cry as hard as the rainbow might, it could not budge itself and for all of the third day she refilled her eagle’s-wing quill with the bright blood of the rainbow. “Proofing,” she said. “Proof of my capturing.” She went to bed laughing and in no time at all she was asleep for the third night.
The rainbow cried for some hours, hurt and alone and growing more dim by the day. It missed the sky so much, and the ground hurt against its back. But still, when the pain had grown dim, it pursed its lips, cleared its aching throat, and hummed strong and angry.

Winds, winds, here I am, here I am. Rainbow, your prince, is all caught up. Attend me! Help me! Winds, winds!

There was a fierce shriek from farther away than ever, and down came the north wind, storming in the chimney and through the fireplace, colder than a corpse’s heart, fierce and hungry. “You need help, my prince?” it rumbled, nails needling on the rainbow’s skin.
“Free me, free me,” said the rainbow, pawing at its feet. “I will die tomorrow if I am not freed.”
“I will do as you ask on this day,” said the north wind, “and then I must fly away to eat.” And the north wind reached down with one clawed hand and tore the walking stick free and cast it to the floor where it shattered into a thousand frozen fragments, leaving the rainbow to struggle quickly to its feet.
“Free!” screamed the rainbow. “Free! Free! I am FREE!” And as it screamed it ran, ran, ran, and it was barely out the doorway before Iris was pelting pell-mell after it, roaring and spitting.
“Fooding!” she shrieked. “Mine, food, mineing! Come and be eaten!” Her feet cracked the rocks between her toes, her breath curled at the nape of the rainbow’s neck, and it nearly fainted from fear. In between the terror, panted between footfalls, too small to hear for any distance at all, the rainbow called “help!”
There was a soft whisper, just a little ways away, and curling up to wrap around the rainbow as it ran came a gentle little zephyr that had been hiding just down the mountain as it mended itself, so close that it could hear even the tiny little cry for help that the rainbow made, as luck would have it. “Are you all right, prince?” it asked with worriment.
“Please,” gasped the rainbow. “Save me. Save me.”
“I am small and half-eaten,” said the zephyr, “but I will do everything I can.” And the small zephyr sped all the way to the waterfall and seized a handful of its precious spray and whisked it back again quicker than anyone could ever run, woman, man, rainbow, or witch, so gently that not a single drop was wasted. “A path, a path!” called the zephyr as it threw the water into the air, and as the rainbow ran straight up the waterdrops back into the sky it burst into full colour for the first time in four days, as brilliant and bright a light as may ever be seen anywhere. It turned night to day, set Iris back on her heels with a squeal, and in Iris’s shack the old thunderbeast-bound book smacked itself shut with a snap and let out a thunder that would’ve made the mightiest storm stand proud.
The earth shook, the sky yelled, and the hinge of the mountains that Iris’s cabin stood upon – the broken rocks, the shaky cliff, the crumbling wall – fell all to pieces at once in a heartbeat, smashing all the way down to the bottom of it all until nothing was left that was bigger than a gentle calm.

“That was a good thing you’ve done, little zephyr,” said the rainbow as it shone in the sky. “A very good thing.”
“Thank you, prince,” said the zephyr.
“You will watch over the west, if the sky will permit,” said the rainbow.
“But I am small,” said the zephyr.
“You are gentle,” said the rainbow. “That is important. And small means nothing. Luck means everything. And you have been good luck to me.”
And that’s the way it was.

“Taste the Rainbow,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

There was a man. An old man. This sort of thing happens, over time.
He was also dying. And didn’t much like it. This too was not unusual.
“I’m not going to stand for this kind of treatment,” he said, and that WAS a little strange, and he phoned up his three daughters and two sons and told them to get their asses over to the hospital.
And they got their asses along properly, because he was their father and he was dying and they all felt like they owed him that much. In limousines and taxis, motorbikes and minivans, up came each of them, one after another, all within five minute’s time. Up they paraded in their suits and their brightly coloured socks, and they listened.
“My beloved, successful, wealthy, entrepreneurial children,” said the dying old man, “I have a last request for all of you from your father, on his deathbed. I humbly request that you all do your best to fulfill it.”
“Yes,” they all said. “That sounds fair enough.”
“Dying isn’t that great a thing,” said the old man. “I don’t want to go through dying – the thought gets me all tense and wired, like a squirrel stuffed in a spring. I want you to fix it. Go on, give it a try.”
Five moments of thought overlapped.
“I’m not so sure,” said the oldest daughter.
“Doable,” disputed the oldest son.
“Possibly,” seconded the youngest son.
“Absolutely,” said the middle daughter.
“No doubt about it,” said the youngest daughter.
The oldest daughter made a face at her siblings. They made faces right back.
“Enough of that,” said the old man. “Get to it. I’ve got a few hours left and the clock’s ticking. As incentive, the one who pulls it off gets my wallet and buys a free round for the family.”
“I’ll go first,” said the oldest son. He stood up and straightened his tie in a very menacing way, then walked over to the nurse.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I would like to see the doctor, or I’m going to sue you for obstruction of obfuscation of objectification of the Oldowan.”
“Right this way,” said the nurse, and he led the oldest son to the doctor.
“What’s your problem?” asked the doctor.
“I’d like to see the director of this hospital,” said the oldest son, “or I’m going to sue you for breach of privacy, breach of conduct, breach of hospitality, breach of hospital, and breaching with malicious intent to spyhop.”
“Whatever,” said the doctor. “Not my problem.” And she sent the oldest son onwards to the director, who was trapped on his desk surrounded by four ringing cellphones, three laptops blaring with virus alerts and unanswered emails, forty-five unfilled forms, and a savage blackberry.
“What is it?” asked the director. “I’m a little busy here.”
“I would like to meet your supervisor of death,” said the oldest son, “or I’ll sue you for libel, liability, liberalism, and lagomorphism.”
“Screw off,” said the director. “I’m too busy for that. I’ve got forty-five other lawsuits to deal with this afternoon.”
“I’ll give you a chocolate bar,” said the oldest son.
The director’s hand darted out faster than the strike of a praying mantis, snaring the treat from the son’s grasp almost before the words had left his esophagus. “Done deal,” he muttered through the crumbs, and he directed the oldest son to the office of the local supervisor of death.
He was texting with his feet up on his desk, chewing a novelty scythe-shaped toothpick in the corner of his barely-obese lips.
“‘Sup,” he said, without looking up.
“Laws,” said the oldest son.
“Shit. What kind?”
“I am going to sue you for defamation of character, declaration of independence, and defenestration of crepuscularation if you don’t reverse my father’s impending death immediately.”
“Hit me with your best shot, dumbass,” said the supervisor of death, still not looking up from his phone. “Crepuscularation isn’t a word. ‘Crepuscular’ pertains to twilight or dusk, and as a noun it’s ‘crepuscularity.’”"
The oldest son returned to his father’s deathbed, his cold blue eyes brimming with tears.
“I tried, dad,” he said. “I tried.”
“It’s okay, we’ve got time,” said the old man.
“I think it’s my turn,” said the younger brother. He pulled himself off the wall he’d been leaning on, took out his laptop, and wrote a very serious research paper.
“I’ve been planning this for a while,” he told his father. “This is really just the perfect time to sum it all up. Nothing like panic to give you that good kick in the ass you need to write more than three pages a minute.”
“What’s it on?” asked the old man.
“What isn’t it? I’ve got philosophy applied to sociology applied to anthropology applied to history applied to biology applied to chemistry. Then I applied that to physics, astronomy, and brought it back around to philosophy again. The gist of the central thesis is that your mind makes other people real but can’t control their beliefs and worldviews, which explains the U.S. Civil War, and how an unusually obvious gene pattern in the skull of Ulysses S. Grant confirms the overall necessity of this, as well as how uranium is a false concept just like the existence of other humans. This means that most of what we know about physics is fake, which throws our beliefs about the universe at large into question and ends up confirming my initial premise, which is that if enough people believe each other not to be fake they become immortal.” He blew his hair out of his eyes, rattled his fingers across the keyboard one last time, and spiked his laptop.
“Done and good as already edited,” he said with satisfaction. “I’ve just disproved death. Published ten seconds ago.”
“I don’t feel any better,” said the old man.
“Wait a few days for the peer reviews,” said the younger brother.
The old man gave him a look.
“Oh. Right.” The younger brother slouched against his wall again and didn’t look at anyone.
“Good effort,” said the old man fondly. “Reminds me of those frogs you sent into orbit years back with nothing more than matches and old cellophane tubes. Anyone else got an idea?”
“Of course,” said the middle sister. She put on a pair of appropriately stern glasses over her contacts, adjusted the indestructible plastic sheen that coated her hair, and beckoned her finest cameraman in for a close shot, adjusting the angle of her head so that it was perfectly silhouetted against the flag a helpful aide was quickly nailing to the nearest wall.
“Citizens, my opponent is all about death,” she announced, the sincerity in her voice sound enough to split redwoods with a single blow. “Death is a necessity, he claims, death is a vital part of our economy, death is there so that there may also be life. But this cold, clinical analysis, which may remind us of Auschwitz (I am most certainly not implying my opponent is a Nazi at all what gave you that idea perhaps you are implying something YOURSELF hmm?), is not the only way to look at death. Death may be necessary indeed, death may be economically sound, death may indeed define our entire species and outlook upon life – upon our very existence – but this cannot excuse on-two solitary facts.”
The music swelled.
“My opponent wants to raise your taxes and is a possible pedophile,” she said. “Goodnight, and god bless.”
The middle sister sat down again as the camera turned off.
“Election won,” she said happily.
“You’re going to abolish death then,” asked the younger son. “Won’t that be a bit messy? I can do the math for you.”
“Oh, nothing so crass as that,” she said dismissively. “I’ll just have the supervisor in charge of his case file fired and get dad lost in the shuffle.”
“Metaphysical affairs,” said the youngest sister. “Out of your jurisdiction.”
“I can get an appointee in there.”
“Sure. They take a few hundred years to process applications.”
“What?!”
“They say it weeds out the applicants that aren’t catchy enough.”
“Fiddlesticks,” said the middle sister, and she sat down again in a frump.
“I believe it is my turn,” said the youngest sister. “Tell me,” she asked the older brother, “where was the supervisor of death for this district?”
“Five rooms and four layers of willing disbelief to your left on exiting the room,” he said.
“Good,” said the youngest sister, and she went there.
“Heya,” said the supervisor. His feet were no longer up on the desk, but he was still texting. His tongue, once prepared to whet his lips once per minute with clockwork precision, had become stuck just to the right side of his mouth. It seemed to leer at the youngest sister.
“I will donate one billion dollars to you if you remove this unnecessary red tape from the path of my family,” she said.
“Nah,” said the supervisor.
“I will place one trillion dollars towards making your life absolute hell if you do not remove this useless obstruction from my father,” she said.
The supervisor shrugged and flicked an errant snotcrusting from the rim of his largest nostril.
“I’ll put in a good word with your boss and get you some stock tips,” she said.
The supervisor looked up from his texting. “Get in line. Position eight quintillion. Rounded down.”
“I’m really sorry,” the youngest sister told her father. “That’s the first time that hasn’t worked.
“Bureaucrats,” grumbled the old man. “Well, I’ve got five minutes. Anyone got any plan Bs?”
“I used all my lawsuits,” said the oldest son. “My tie is flaccid.”
“I can’t make people peer-review any faster,” said the youngest son.
“I’d be accused of flip-flopping,” said the middle sister.
“I don’t have enough money,” said the youngest sister. “I should fix that.”
“Well, shit,” said the old man. He sighed, with an underlying gurgle. “Good tries, everyone. Guess that’s it.”
“I might have an idea,” said the oldest sister, carefully unhooking her stethoscope and coiling it into a neat loop.
“Well, go on and try it,” said the old man. “Can’t hurt to try.”
“It’s going to take a little while,” said the oldest sister. “Just bear with me, and listen hard…”
So the oldest sister talked to him about world war II, and the effect that had probably had on his parent’s upbringing of him, and the possibly psychological effects this might have had, and about his fierce and competitive drive that had so obviously ingrained itself in his children, judging by their career paths, and how the seeds of resentment so easily sown between generations when the children had been in their teenaged years had only fuelled their fierce pursuit of independence, and of how reconciliation had come gradually, achingly, lovingly over the past decade, and of how this whole deathbed effort they’d all put forth really was the most heartwarming and coordinated family event they’d had since, well, ever.
“That’s a really nice thought,” said the oldest brother.
“Well, when it’s put that way, sure,” said the youngest brother.
“Homey,” said the middle sister.
“Cute,” said the youngest sister.
The old man didn’t say anything.
The oldest sister lifted one of his eyelids and critically inspected the pupil. “Gone half a paragraph ago, I’ll wager on my medical license,” she said. “And judging from the amount of tension in his muscles, I’d double or nothing that he didn’t see it coming either. Anesthetic’s for people without a little creativity.” She extracted his wallet and turned it over with a critical eye. “Five bucks. Let’s go get some juice.”

“Deathbed” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.