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It was an ill wind that came ‘round the cape that evening, and it lasted for close enough to a week. The waves grew teeth, the air was a bludgeon, and the rain shot down fair to stab anyone that poked their nose out of doors.
But the fish needed catching, so we all went out in the mornings anyways, or what might have been mornings under the clouds and above the whitecaps. And most of us came back on time every night. As our grandparents did, and theirs before them. Because doing things the way they must be done, that comes before safety. And that means coming back with fish.
One day, one of us came back with something extra, something more than fat greybacks and bulging nets. “Found it in a bucket,” they said. “A bucket, just bobbing in the waves.”
The bucket was black and rusted and made from who knew what, and it went to the trash heaps.
(anything placed in it slicked with oily who-knew-what. no-one dared taste food cooked in it)
The child was pale and plump, and he went to a willing couple who had milk to spare.
We named him Walter, and we called him Walt. And that was well and good enough to let him grow up properly and kindly, if not straight and tall. Stout and stubby-fingered, that was our Walt, always short of breath and ready to lend an extra hand. Not so much strength in him as stubbornness, as vast a supply of that as you could find in any mule.
He was such a small little thing, Walter Newman was. Four inches behind the other children, always scrambling to keep up, always with a bulgy belly and sunken dark eyes. With a smile ready though, held in place behind his teeth. Always ready, just waiting for the right moment to burst out from that round face. If you worked for it, he’d reward you just so. Just so.

When Walter was a small boy, but big enough to run, he wanted on the boats.
That was normal, that was fair enough. Little boys want to be their fathers and their big brothers. We all were little once, we all had grand dreams too big for our hands.
Walter reached too hard and too fast, but his grip served him well. Old Tim Hickory was eight hours offshore and seventeen fathoms deep when he heard the sneezing from underneath the old sou’wester he kept in his cabin. Pulled Walter out by the scuff of his neck and the roll of his fat, and shook him silly with cusses and threats. Told him this was no place for a fool little boy to be. Told him how dangerous the sea was. Told him about the sharks, and the waves, and the salt.
Walter listened, and Walter nodded. And then Walter stayed out there, on Tim Hickory’s boat, because Tim Hickory couldn’t turn back by then and he couldn’t spend his time minding little boys when there were fish to fish.
Walter spent his time on the bow, watching the grey bodies scooped into the sky, dripping and wriggling. He would hum to them, and sometimes sing. Nonsense songs, mashups of tunes he’d heard other children, parents, neighbors sing.
Sometimes the songs got on Tim Hickory’s nerves. But he was busy, and most of the time they would blend in with the sound of the waves and the nets.
Walter had only a little boy’s voice, of course. He couldn’t sing very loudly back then.
He got in all sorts of trouble when he got back, too. Bottom smacked black and blue, but not a peep from him, not a tear shed.

When Walter was a bigger boy, he tagged along fishing.
This was more organized, more proper. He got a longer lecture than most did, of course. Rules firmly laid, commands issued, fists thumped, threats levied.
He listened, and tied knots, and sat on the bow again, and watched the nets come in. Helped haul ‘em too, alongside his brother and father. And as he work, he whistled and sung and hummed.
His father told him to knock it off. His brother pinched him and giggled.
Walter kept on singing. And he listened hard. Listened far. Listened deep.
At day, nobody heard anything that wasn’t hull on water, grunts from lungs. At night, nobody was awake to tell. But Walter was a dreamer, and a good one. And he kept his ears open, in those dreams.
He smiled a lot that trip. And when he came back home, he sang songs to his baby sister in her cradle that she’d never heard before.

When Walter was a young man, he built a boat.
It was a good boat, firm of hull and fine of timber. Its paint was still fresh and almost sparkling when the water first enveloped it, its sails smelled of musty cupboards and dried timbers rather than salt. It was good – not astounding, not saddening, but good. Walter did a good job when he built that boat.
He took it out that day, him and his father. Came back in nets bulging, deck crammed full. Finned bodies spilling out of the wheelhouse, ropes tangled in slippery grey flesh and slapping muscled frames.
Walter didn’t pay much attention to the fish. He had an ear cocked and an absent stare for everyone, slaps on his back and congratulations aside.
The next day they went out again. Even bigger haul came with them this time. A shark was lashed to the boat’s side, big blue body writhing and wriggling as it twitched its way towards death by inches. They took the jaws and left the flesh for the gulls.
(It made them sick. Gulls will eat anything, but even they have limits).
The next day Walter left on his own.
The next day Walter came back, paddling.
A squall had come up and overturned the boat, he said, as he wrung the damp green-and-blue from his sweater. Nothing he could do. He’d ventured out too far by himself, got cocky. He’d swum the miles to shore without even a life-ring for flotation, it had happened so fast. The boat had flipped mast-to-keel and left him tangled in the nets, with just enough time to cut free and strike out before it brought him down.
It was a good story, as Walter told it in that shy, low voice of his. And we all nodded and sympathized with him – such a fine boat it had been – because after all he was a good fisherman, maybe even a great fisherman, and nobody could vouch against his skill. Bad luck and bad weather will stop the best of us in their tracks, and leave them lucky to still have their lives.
And nobody, not one person, not a one of us every spoke a word of how calm the weather had been for the past week.
Because neither had Walter.

Walter was a grown man with the bad luck of ten. But we loved him anyways, because he wouldn’t let it beat him.
A boat would be made.
A boat would be launched.
A boat would bring in one
two
three
four (once) catches.
Then it would be gone, and Walter would wash in with the tides, smiling that same rare gift of his, happy to be alive and with luck no better than before.
Months to build it. A week to lose it. At most. And how Walter did it, no one knew.
A gale.
Harsh water.
Struck a rock.
Angry shark, once. That raised eyebrows.
And we all would’ve scoffed at one of them, let alone all of them, but Walter’s smile when he came back was always so wonderful. And each time, it grew wider.
He sang in town, now. Mostly at night. Folks complained, but quietly, and soon they stopped. It was quiet, and almost too low to hear.

And then one year, not many ago, Walter and his brother and his father all got in their boats, cast off, and left without a word for one, two, three days.
They floated back in on the currents, damp and grinning, and they were changed men. Went straight down to their friends’ houses and stayed up all night talking.
The next day, six boats left, with Walter guiding the way.
Two days later, the tides fetch them back again. No sign of the boats.
The wives complained. The shorebounders complained. The children worried.
Walter smiled, and that made it all right. Walter stayed up and sang half the night as families argued and muttered and fought for hours, spend the other half listening.
Ten boats the next day
Eight the day after.
Nine after that.
Almost no boats left, but the fish came in anyways. Walter would strip naked and swim out there, come back in dragging net-fulls of things we’d never seen before. No greybacks, no fatmouths, things with too much eel in their blood and too little eyes. Slimy, but tasty.
Only really good to eat raw, though. Cooking liquefies the flesh. Disgusting.

Seasons went by. Walter kept us afloat as the boats were rebuilt.
(His father and brother joined him after a time. A few others later, I don’t recall who).
One beautiful day the first of the new hulls slipped into the water. And that was the day that they set hands on it and towed it away. No time for a motor, no time for paint, no time for nothing.
They needed that boat. We needed that boat.
“For mother,” Walter explained.
No-one had asked for the explanation. No-one thought he was talking about Lucy, Geoff’s wife, Jeremiah and Petunia’s mother, who’d fed him her milk when he was a little pale thing plucked from the waves.

The truth came out in bits and starts. Nobody much noticed as it did. It just happened. Oh, some people grumbled, some people muttered, but by the time we all knew anything it was already normal.
The boats were necessary offerings, of course. In the right place
(eight hours out, seventeen fathoms deep)
at the right time
(moonlight on the water, a dark starry sky)
in the right state of mind
(dreaming afloat, waves lapping on the rim of your hearing)
was where you left your gifts.
Here, mother. Take the land from us. We trust you. We love you. And you trust and love us.
Why else would you have given your son to us?

The last boat sank on the first day of summer.
Old Tim Hickory was on board. Mad as hell, he was.
We’d talked to him and talked to him, but he wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t pay attention.
Stubborn man. He set his heels to it and wouldn’t budge, not for that boat. His father’s father’s father had laid it, he would pilot it, no matter where it went. And he wouldn’t budge.
(Couldn’t, after he tied the anchor around and around and around and around himself)
So he followed his boat, captained it ‘till it was gone.
(He wore the old sou’wester. It was the first anyone had seen that happen in living memory, the faded old yellow against the dull grey of woollen sweater, tangled beard).
He must’ve been the first to see mother there, as keel met bottom.
Met bottom and passed on through it, into home.

Life is stranger now, and we don’t do as our grandparents did, or theirs before them.
We spend our evenings down in the bay and leave the beds back upon land, rot in the trash heaps.
A hall is being made beneath the bay, a hall of stones and shells with no lights, a hull timbered in barnacled wood, scraped bare of paint by tide and time.
Our sides ache for the waves, and cry salt tears in the air.
The children swim like giggling minnows, hands grown small and over-webbed.
Babes’ teeth sprout early and needling, and their mouths eschew milk for fish-lymph.
Last Sunday we burnt the last of our homes, lighting the fires with kindling from our docks.
It can be hard, to change this way. But when we feel doubt, or pain, or confusion, we look to the face of Walt Newman. And we see that smile behind his teeth, waiting to be given.
If we work for it, we are granted it. Just so.

J. D. Hudson was a particular sort of man. He wore small, black shoes with no laces but with important names stitched into discreet parts of their leather. His keyboard was bare of lint and his fingers bare of ink, for his keyboard was all he needed. He dressed with a tie whenever possible, and sometimes whenever it wasn’t. His first and middle names were mysteries to all but his closest family members, in whose presence he frowned when addressed so. He starched his collars. He wore collars.
And he lived in Toronto, where, to the satisfaction of his property values but the irritation of his soul, he owned a lawn. It was small and grassy and made rather timid by the masses of concrete about it.
He loathed it.
Oh, J. D. Hudson did his best, he did. He always did. He purchased fertilizers and pesticides (rigidly defined within legally permitted lines), he applied shears with dispassionate skill, he weeded mercilessly and without pity for the young and sprouted nor old and rooted.
And yet still the damned thing vexed him.
He watered. He trimmed. He sheared. He even, in a fit of near-madness, planted a small patch of flowers once. They bloomed, wilted, died, and were dutifully tidied away.
And yet still the damned thing wouldn’t stop growing.
The last straw came when he had to go away for a week. The trip was fine – on his favorite topic too: serious business – it was the return that filled him with horror and disgust. The fine weather of late spring had come and gone, bastard thing, and filled his lawn with vigor and delight to a scandalous degree. It had become feckless. It had become unruly. It had become overgrown.
J. D. Hudson looked at his lawn, and he looked at the clippers in his hands, and small well-used muscles in his lower jaw twitched in a most unseemly manner. This would not do. This would most patently not do. This was a Problem, and Problems required Solutions. In the name of tidiness.
J. D. Hudson was not a man who knew things about lawnmowers. But one of his brothers knew a man who did, and he recommended a company. An obscure one. A very obscure one that didn’t even own a website, and whose purchases must be conducted through mail-order.
J. D. Hudson frowned on such things. But J. D. Hudson did not frown on what was avowed to be top-notched product at rock-bottom prices, and so he committed his untrained, keyboard-reared fingers to the fumbling tool of the pen. His handwriting was unspeakable, his signature unpronounceable, but in the end, all was filled, all boxes were ticked, all stamps attached, and the lot of it consigned to the hands of the mailman, whom J. D. Hudson suspected of petty theft and inadequate devotion to his career.

A week festered by, during which J. D. Hudson’s lawn grew more riotous still, deterred not by his unbending glare. His fingers clenched, his teeth ground, he woke in the night arguing with himself and his daily zero point five cups of breakfast oatmeal (without sugar) lost its taste, which it had never possessed.
And then, gloriously, beautifully, divinely, came the mail. And came a parcel that was rather smaller than J. D. Hudson had expected. It had arrived mostly assembled, lacking only the attachment of the handle to the main body with a complicated series of ingenious bolts that hurt J. D. Hudson’s knuckles as he turned them in and made him say improper words in clipped, exact tones.
Assembled, it stood atop the lawn in brooding glory as a colossus: the Accelerationist Townmower (his illegible handwriting had apparently resulted in his receiving an older, off-brand model whose name he did not recognize, but no matter), over sixty pounds of slightly dented metal and mysteriously oily machinery. He allowed it to bask there for a time as he read and reread the manual, which was in six languages, none of which were English, French, Spanish, or Mandarin. Complicating this was the typesetting: at least one paragraph was upside down, another was printed backwards, and an entire four pages of text were printed upside down, backwards, and in increasingly small concentric spirals. In red ink.
J. D. Hudson frowned to himself and shut the manual with a disappointed thwap. Well, he’d used these before, or at least seen people use them before. You primed them – like so. Then you pulled the cord – like so. Then you moved it over the grass – like s

J. D. Hudson, as with many people, thought of his life as a series of events, each following the other. Cause and effect strung together like Christmas lights and wrapped in circles around the big confusing evergreen of your mortal coil. He could recite his history since birth as a perfect series of points A through Z, laid in order exactly as prescribed in kindergarten song.
This made the events of that day very hard on him.

The Townmower slid over the grass like a greased pig over a skillet of warm butter, and with much the same noise. J. D Hudson planted his feet firmly to check the machine’s advance and was immediately hoisted off them, dangling from the mower’s handlebar as a fly on a fishing line. His first instinct was to hold on tight, which was unfortunate because that meant he was still gripping the Townmower as it touched the concrete of his sidewalk.
There were noises. Some of them sounded like falling rocks, some like screaming winds, and several as the calls of coyotes and squirrels. Tiny chips of cement and sidewalk screamed past J. D. Hudson’s face as the mower accelerated underneath him, screeching down the street at highway speeds. He pawed feebly at the ignition shutoff, and the shift in his weight sent it swerving wildly into traffic, where a car honked at him loudly for a little less than half a second before being mowed down.
J. D. Hudson found the courage to look back after the shock of having all his limbs still attached to himself wore off. A confused looking man – one of his neighbors, possibly – was sitting in the middle of what had been a road and was now a spry (if narrow) thicket, up to his thighs in prickerbushes and entirely naked bar a pair of sunglasses and a necklace. A tiny fragment of steering wheel crumbled from his hairy paws as he watched, silhouetted against the rambling, untidy hedge that half the sidewalk had become.
J. D. Hudson tore his gaze away from this sight and was spared the trouble of dwelling on it, because that was when he swerved onto Yonge Street and the world was reduced to many small things that flew away in his wake, captured only by his eyes.
A streetcar tumbled away, crumpling into dirt and dust.
Power cables snapped into roots that latched onto buildings that were suddenly very confused trees. Executives hooted in alarm from their canopies, ties dangling as they swung from branch to branch seeking a way down.
The street become a river beneath the blades, lashing violently out around it as dashes and dots and crosswalks were suddenly dashed, dotty, and cross ducks of varying species.
A streetlight fell to the ground, rose up as swamplight.
Streetlights to stumps.
Pedestrians went scurrying into the blossoming copses of shops in fright, hiding in the undergrowth that had once been a rack of t-shirts.
Somewhere in the midst of this, he turned his eyes forwards again and found that the mower had grown substantially, and was chewing up entire rows of housing, shredding bits of tile everywhere as it dropped the structures down to neatly levelled-off patches of mixed woodland forests. Then the Don Valley Parkway was ahead of him, and he shut his eyes again as the blades did their grisly work. Asphalt flecked his face and stuck to the moistness of his tears. Car horns sounded in alarm, then were hushed into the roars of bears and the cackle of birds. Then it all fell away again, far below and far away, leaving him alone in silence with only his thoughts.
The CN tower made a strange creaking noise in the mower’s suspension.

Morning found a slightly different city. For one thing, it now consisted entirely of a single home of modest proportions, with a scandalously unkempt lawn. In its over-lush grass lay a man, naked bar a rumpled collar, whose mute horror left him known only as John Doe.
As for the Townmower, the 401 had been replaced by a series of rolling meadows. It must’ve gone off-road somewhere, but if had, it had left no trace.
Tidily.

In a desert, under a mountain, above a floor thickened and reinforced so much that it wasn’t a floor, between a set of clamps designed to grasp with fickle tenderness the steel sides of aircraft carriers at drydock, lived a woman who weighed ten thousand tons. Some days she dozed, some days she daydreamed, sometimes she simply hummed to herself to make the time go by slow and sweet, like honey flowing on toast. Now and then she would shrug, or stretch her back a little, and one, two, three, dozens of the hundreds of strong, multilayered wires that tethered her to the far-away walls of her cubed room would tremble and grumble under the strain, but they had been designed to hold aloft the mightiest of telemetry towers and were reluctant to part with her even under such trying circumstances.
It was often dull, in the room, but there were ways around such things. The ten-thousand-ton-woman had tried many of them over the years before simply settling on not being bored any more, which had served her well. Her favourite had been conversation, at first with herself, and then with the woman who was ten thousand feet tall.
“Hello,” she said today again, out of friendship and habit.
Besides her, the ten-thousand-foot-woman blinked her eyes and sighed out a deep breath.
“It’s lovely today, as it is most days, isn’t it?” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman. “How are you, yourself, and your place in things? Do you have any itches? I cannot scratch them, but I can call for someone who can. Are you troubled and do you want to talk about it? Have you seen any strange things today, or later, or yesterday? How was your breakfast? Did you have any or did you skip it?”
The woman who weighed ten thousand tons looked around furtively, then bent closer to the woman who was ten thousand feet tall and whispered “how’s the weather up there?”
The air that would give the ten-thousand-foot-tall-woman the voice to whisper answers to her questions was yet twenty minutes away, but it paused in her throat for a minute as she snorted and chuckled, and her friend smiled to herself. She had told that joke the day they brought her in, wheeling in that endless gurney with her carefully strapped to it, and she had enjoyed it so much that she carefully repeated it to her every day without fail, as regular as lunchtime or even moreso, since sometimes they didn’t get lunch when there was a presidential inspection.
They’d met lots of presidents. Some of them were very important people, and it often puzzled the ten-thousand-ton-woman why they were interested in the two of them. She had been gingerly prodded and nudged with science for over a decade now, her nails, hairs, breath, teeth, tongue, gut, and toes all carefully explored down from atoms to quarks, and was quite sure that there was nothing of interest there. If her friend the ten-thousand-foot-woman remained somewhat unmapped in comparison, well, that was an issue of scale and practicality. They had still examined the bulk of her, using over ten miles of tiny tiny mirror tubes and miniature cameras on the tips of excessive ropes of wiring.
The door to the room opened, and a dramatic pause happened.
The ten-thousand-ton-woman frowned. It was her least pleasant part of the day, and so she suspected it went with her friend.
The dramatic pause ended, and a man walked into the room. He had striking eyebrows, not much white hair, and a dreadfully smooth face that was pinched in the most unpleasant expressions, like a lion’s.
“Good morning,” lied the ten-thousand-ton-woman. Beside her, the ten-thousand-foot-tall-woman twitched her left little finger in answer.
The man who was ten thousand years old looked at her with disdain.
“It is not a good morning,” he said, crossly. “I had no dodo egg for breakfast, as I enjoyed for so long. I was awakened not by the nose-flutes of the eunuchs who were my slaves as befitted my viziership, but by a rude alarm. I am forced to rely upon digital clocks rather than those sand-powered devices I personally designed, and there are no proper clothes anymore. And I still have not been given the host’s-gift of mammoth flesh.”
“Do tell,” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman. She didn’t want him to, but he would do so whatever she said, and complain the same. Manners cost nothing, as her mother had told her so many times back when she weighed one hundred and thirty-three pounds.
Those had been long-ago days, though, and she scarcely remembered them, as most people forgot infancy. The taste of waffles (home-made) with maple syrup. A birthday party (seventh? Seventeenth?). Sinking through the soil to bedrock twenty feet below in a single sharp moment and sitting there in a daze until the government came and removed her with very expensive and powerful machinery, most of which she’d never learned the names for, or forgotten.
Simpler times. She wasn’t sure if she’d like them anymore, or maybe she would.
The ten-thousand-year-old-man had stopped talking about himself, crossly. She realized that he had asked her a question, and wasn’t sure what to do about that. It had never happened before. “Agnostic, verging on Catholic, or the other way around,” she said, and hoped it was a good reply.
“Hnnf,” said the ten-thousand-year-old-man, crossly, and she knew that it wasn’t. “Such a waste. Such a waste. Of course you didn’t get it right. I made all those up, you know.”
“Really?” she said. She knew, she knew.
“Of course I did,” he snapped, crossly. “I made them all up after nobody listened to me the first time. I got it all right back then, I did. I knew the secrets of Zifweedoism, and you know what they did? They laughed at me, laughed at me. So I made up everything else – scientology, Christian Scientism, Mormonism, and Judaism, and Buddhism, and Jainism, and Tolkienism, and I lied about it. And so it’s all your fault for believing something that I made up, you see?” he finished, with a spit of spite.
“Yes,” she said. This was usually when he was finished.
“You’ll see,” he muttered, crossly. “You will.” And that was how he usually finished, and he did.
He left by the door without so much as waving good-bye to the ten-thousand-foot-woman, and she grew annoyed on her friend’s behalf all over again before she let her imagined fresh breezes and warm sun comfort her. It didn’t matter what that man (the ten-thousand-year-old one) thought or said or did anyways. She suspected that it never had.
The door opened and let in a bunch of very serious men in serious suits with serious eyewear who secured the area seriously. Behind them walked another president.
“Hello,” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman, politely. The ten-thousand-foot-woman twitched a finger in greetings.
“Hello, citizen,” said the president. And then he asked a lot of questions of some of the scientists with him. They didn’t look like scientists to her; they had no long white coats, most of them had no glasses, and they didn’t wear gloves. They wore suits and ties and used complicated little phones nearly as sophisticated as those that teenagers owned.
Then they were done, and they left. Lunch would come soon, and the ten-thousand-ton-woman worried about it anxiously. What if it were the mushroom soup, rather than the chicken-fried-steak? She was looking forward to the chicken-fried-steak so much, for reasons that escaped her. Maybe it was very tasty? Or maybe she was sick of mushrooms. Yes, maybe that was it. A pity. She’d always enjoyed mushrooms so very much.
Oh well. Having something new to shy away from was very nearly the same as having something new to look forward to. And that was a good thing, wasn’t it? She was sure it was.
Ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong. The air was full of sirens and hoopla and ruckus. She had never heard such a natter and fuss, and she suspected the ten-thousand-foot-tall-woman hadn’t either, but she was unable to ask her opinion of it because right then the door opened and in came the ten-thousand-year-old-man. He was strutting. Crossly, of course.
“Hello again,” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman, as politely as she could manage, which wasn’t.
“Hello yourself,” smirked the ten-thousand-year-old-man, crossly. “I have fixed things right up. I have picked the pocket of the president.”
“Oh?” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman.
“I did such things in my youth,” he continued, crossly. “Why, I stole Napoleon’s purse in Africa, and sold it to Sitting Bull in London. It’s all true, every word of it. And I was so good at it that I did it while I was sick, and that was true too. Vomit and bile everywhere, pus and rot creeping out of my eyelids and toe-tips.”
“Wonderful,” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman. She wondered if she was rolling her eyes. She was trying to roll her eyes, but she was out of practice for it, and the ten-thousand-year-old-man was not paying enough attention to her to tell her if she was doing it properly, even if he bothered to answer her.
“I picked the pocket and I took the codes and I have launched the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles that are kept in this place, and kept filled with nuclear explosives,” said the ten-thousand-year-old-man. “And because of this, I am sure now that the world will end, or at least mostly, which is good enough for me.”
The ten-thousand-ton-woman blinked in slow, total shock. That was the first time she’d ever heard him spoken something without sounding cross.
“Why, you ask?” asked the ten-thousand-year-old-man. “Because of all of it, but mostly the mammoths. We have too many people and not enough mammoths. This will correct the matter, and maybe I can finally get my host’s-gift of mammoth flesh.” He licked his lips. They were neither pale and thin nor fat and rubbery, but they were as unappealing as rotted bone regardless. “I did so love mammoth flesh. I came up with that custom, you know. And all the others.”
The ten-thousand-ton-woman looked at the ceiling (which was flashing and wailing with alarms), and then over to the ten-thousand-foot-woman, whose beautiful eyes were looking back at her. She had raised exactly one eyebrow, the right one, the one that meant she was asking ‘well?’
“I suppose we should do something,” said the ten-thousand-ton-woman, ignoring the ten-thousand-year-old-man as he boasted and bragged and wouldn’t shut up about things that didn’t matter because he didn’t matter.
The ten-thousand-foot-woman nodded, twice. And then she stood up.
It was complicated. Joints acted as joints shouldn’t. Tiny restraints parted under the pressures of leverage, the kind that could move the world. Things folded, then refolded with unimaginable majesty and power. And though the cube’s ceiling was very high, the ten-thousand-foot-tall woman had pierced it with her skull long before her head had even come close to reaching her waist.
As she straightened up, she reached down with one hand whose fingers were beyond imagining, and she grasped the ten-thousand-ton-woman, and she began to push. She didn’t have the strength to lift, or even to shove, but she did have the leverage, and she was pushing her forwards at a slow, slow speed that would be enough to launch her for miles.
And even then, as the strangeness was becoming nearly overwhelming, she heard the familiar, right-on-time rumble of her friend in the morning.
“Yes,” whispered her voice, low and windy, as the long, long, long arms began to move with the power and speed of continental drift; unstoppable yet beautiful. “I am happy in all ways. I do not itch, and thank you for asking of my troubles. I saw nothing stranger than the two of us, again, and I had no breakfast because I was not hungry. And it was toast.”
She sighed as the ten-thousand-ton-woman slipped through her fingers and began her slow, inexorable slide. “I do not like toast.”
And with that the ten-thousand-ton-woman went rolling away though the halls, crashing through floors and knocking over entire floors, ceilings, and pieces of multi-billion-dollar superstructure. The missile launch tubes were merely the third thing she tumbled through, and by the time she’d left them they would’ve been hard put to launch a chickadee. She travelled on, on, on, and by the time she’d stopped rolling she was in the outside again, in the desert, by a mountain. There was a fresh breeze and a warm sun.
“This is a nice day,” she decided, speaking to the ten-thousand-foot-woman.
Her friend nodded to her as she slooowly stepped out of the hole in the ground that had been punched by her head. Or she thought she did. It was hard to see her, so high up in the clouds.
But of course she’d agreed. It was a nice day, after all.

Scal the sorry, who often wasn’t but said she was, she sat down near the water’s edge on the shore and stared into it and frumped.
“I’m getting oldsome,” she grumbled as she looked at herself. “Look at that, all wrinkles and grey hairs and who knows what now. I’m sorry to say it, but I’ve been neglectful for sure and lazy at that; I should’ve been wed years ago before all this came along. I’d best find me a husband, and soonish rather than latish, or I’ll be sorrier for sure! Maybe when I’m married I can put all that behind me.”
So Scal the sorry went and looked all over the place. She splashed out into the surf and was knocked over by waves all over the place, dragged up and down the beach like a piece of old driftwood.
“I’m sorry for making so much noise,” she yelled out into the sea, “but is there anyone out there who would like to marry me?”
A shellfish by her foot coughed. A gull yawked.
“Fine then,” she snapped. “Sticks and stones to you all, see if I care.” And she flounced inland, where she tripped over roots and twigs in the forests and waded through boggy swamps and almost fell into a bear’s den face-first.
“I’m sorry for sounding so annoyed,” she called out through the woods, “but is there anyone out here who would like to marry me?”
A deer ran away in fright. The trees sighed in the wind.
“Take water and snort it sideways,” she swore. “Burn to cinders and snuff yourselves.” And she stomped away very noisily and angrily until the air grew cold and clean around her and the sky was at eye level, with stone underfoot and all the world spread down around her ankles underneath the big blue sky.
“Is there not anyone in all of this place,” she called out, “who will marry me, right now, right here!?”
“I will!” called back a voice from far, far below. “I will do that!”
“One moment,” said Scal the sorry, and she took a very long moment to climb herself all the way down the mountain again so she could talk to the voice properly.
It was waiting for her, and belonged to a man. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but did you agree to marry me just last moment?”
“Indeed I did,” said the man. “I am a great hunter and a great fisherman and a great eater. I can make things and I can break things, and I have so many muscles that I had to give some away to make space for the others. I will marry you, because I need something new to become great at.”
“This sounds like a good thing,” said Scal the sorry. “We’re married, then, and I need not be sorry any longer!”
“Wonderful!” said the man. And so they were.

“Married life is stranger than I thought it’d be,” Scal said some time later. “There is more snoring than I’d imagined.”
“I am indeed the greatest of snorers,” agreed the man. “And my elbows the sharpest and largest in all the places I know, as well as the most energetic.”
Scal felt this wasn’t ideal, but she was not sorry anymore, and so she said nothing but grumbles.

“Married life is odder than I’d imagined it to be,” Scal said to herself and the world at large a few days onward. “There is a great deal of yelling and strangeness.”
“I yell most fervently when I am ired,” confirmed the man, “and I grow ired when drunk with a speed that any other man I have met envies. Why, last night I out-growled a bear so grizzled his grizzles had grizzlies, and nearly kicked down four trees!”
Scal had rather liked those trees, but she felt she shouldn’t be sorry about things that way, and so she contented herself with grousing.

“Married life is peculiar in all ways,” Scal said loudly and aggressively and with a good deal of annoyance. “Today I went out to watch my icebergs float down the coast – bump-bump-bump as they go – and I found my husband peeing on one, and I would very much like to hear why he would do that sort of thing.”
“I am possessed of the mightiest urine of all beings in this wide world of ours,” boasted the man, “in both flow and strength of stream. I proved I could cut an iceberg in two, drown a whale, and dye whole waves with my abilities! Truly, I am indeed a superior individual!”
Scal liked the icebergs, as you recall. Scal liked watching them float by. Scal did not like any of those things her husband had said one bit – not even half a bit – and Scal might not be sorry about THAT but she was damned sorry she’d married him entirely and thoroughly at that very moment.
“I’m a sorry fool again to be sure,” Scal the sorry whispered to herself as she plotted, “but I’ve faced worse troubles and trounced them. I just need to get rid of him and it’ll all be fine, it’ll be fine for sure.”

“Husband dearest wonderfulest kindest gentlest man,” simpered Scal the sorry, “perhaps you could go a-fishing for us, and catch us some fish?”
“I am the finest fisherman I have ever known, and I have known them all,” said the man. “This is thus a thing that I can and will do, you wait here and see.”
So the man jumped in his boat and rowed away at great speed and enthusiasm. And Scal the sorry smiled happily to herself and began to rub and whisper at her left hand, because that hand was magic, and she became a little sea-lion, and followed after the boat of the man.
“Ahhh, here is a fine place to fish!” yelled the man aloud, and he threw down the oars and began to fish like crazy, yanking up fish after fish after fish after fish, big and small, fierce and quiet.
Scal the sorry snickered to herself underneath his boat, and she lightly nipped the left tip of her flipper. And as she nipped, the boat sprung a leak that sprung a crack that spurted water like a lovesick streambed.
“What’s this now!” said the man, as his ankles got wet and the horizon shrunk down. “But I know already, for I am a boatsman without peer! I can fix this with but spit and a snap of my fingers!” And he spat violently into the hole and snapped it shut with a moment’s work. “Better than new!” he laughed, and under the boat Scal the sorry cursed to herself and began to tickle her left flipper.
The seas roiled, the seas rumbled, and up from the depths charged a huge shark, an old shark, a shark that could eat small whales. Its eyes were deadest black and its teeth were whiter than snow and it shot for the man’s boat like an arrow to its target only much larger and more frightening and also a shark.
“Hrrm!” said the man, squinting ferociously. “Now THAT’S a fish!” And he pulled out his fishing spear and threw it three times. The first cut out each of the shark’s eyes, and the third its heart. He lashed it to the boat with one hand, and chortled mightily at his luck.
The underside of his boat was home to many muffled words, and the furious scratching of Scal the sorry’s left flipper with her right. Before moments had passed the sky turned dark, then green, then red and orange and purple. Thunder screeched and lightning howled, the wind made noises like a raccoon in heat courting a mockingbird. Water began to fall from the sky fit to double the ocean’s depth.
“Ah, a breeze to sail home by!” cheered the man. He rowed until the oars broke in half, then rowed with the stubs of the handles, and touched foot to shore just as the last bit of his boat broke into splinters apart underneath him and sank down to the bottom of the ocean forever.
“Wife!” he called. “I have brought you your fish for our dinner, and a great fish indeed it is, as befits my greatness at fishing, which is one of the many ways in which I am greatest at a thing!”
“Wonderful, husband,” said Scal the sorry. “But we need berries now, or dinner will be duller than dirt in a deadfall. Go a-berry-picking and fetch us some from over the hills, and we will eat happily!”
“I can pick berries in ways that put bears to shame and bugs to flight,” said the man. “This is yet another thing I can do, and I will return here afterwards to make you see that this is true.”
So the man hurled himself into a great long bounding run with mighty strides and outthrust chest. And Scal the sorry frowned to herself, licked her left hand three times counterclockwise, and was a little bright jay-bird that flitted from tree to tree in his wake all the way to the far sides of the hills where the berry bushes were.
“The picking shall begin now at this time and place,” decreed the man, and he began to fill his pack with them at a most alarming pace. Up in the tree above him, the little jay-bird preened its left wing and watched, eyes twinkling. In mere instants a whole family of bears came lumbering out of the woods – mother and cubs – and came charging for him, teeth-and-breath-first.
“Such fun!” whooped the man, and he whooped with the bears for a full hour with kicks and punches and bear-hugs. He stopped when they were all too tired to wrestle, shook himself off, and began to fill his clothes with berries twice as fast as before, laughing to himself.
Away in a bush behind him the little jay-bird ruffled the feathers of its left wing and watched, eyes hardening. Right away a swarm of bees rose up from the berry-bushes, stingers a-bristle, swarm a-flutter, and they fell on the man with the fierceness of animals a million times their size.
“Ah, a honeying-time!” observed the man with good cheer and great enthusiasm. He started a fire quick as anything, and in the clouds of the dense and billowing smoke he evaded the bees and swatted them, pat-pat-pat. A minute’s work and he was done with them, a minute more and he was at their hive, a minute after and he had their honeycomb well in hand as he was busily stuffing his cheeks with berries, twist as fast as before, when he had done so twice as fast.
From under a leaf the little jay-bird snapped at its left wing and watched, eyes sharp. The trees sparked, the brush alit, and in no time at all the forest was a raging wildfire with hungrier teeth than a wolf and a fiercer heart than a wolverine with a cavity.
“How much faster can such a thing be?” asked the man of himself to himself. “Why, as fast as anything – except for me!” He laughed and ran and sprang and leapt and made it home with only the very tips of the tufts of his hair singed, smouldering like little coals.
“Wife!” he bellowed. “I have retrieved the berries you wished to have as part of our dinner, and they are the finest and also the most numerous of all berries, as a result of my impressive berry-picking, which is one of the most impressive skills of my many impressive skills, all of which are equally impressive!”
“Good,” said Scal the sorry. “Wonderful. Excellent.” And then a thought struck her. “But husband-dearest, I am afraid that after dinner you will need to pee, and we have no place suitable for you to do so. Dig a pit, so that we’ll be prepared.”
“I shall do that incredibly well,” vowed the man.
“Make sure it’s deep,” said Scal the sorry.
“This will be so exactly,” promised the man.
“And pile up all the dirt neatly, so we can fill it in properly,” suggested Scal the sorry.
“Perfectly!” swore the man. And in less than no time at all he’d dug a massive pit, with all the dirt he’d torn through stacked up neatly next to it in a careful pile.
“Are you through?” asked Scal the sorry.
“This pit can hold anything in all the wide world there is,” bragged the man.
“Anything at all?” asked Scal the sorry.
“Anything at all,” replied the man.
“Nothing won’t fit in it?”
“Nothing itself COULD fit in it,” proclaimed the man. “Nothing, anything, AND everything can fit in this pit, even myself!”
“Are you sure of this, husband dearest kindest?” asked Scal the sorry.
“Utterly!” said the man. “Look, I’ll show you!” And he leapt down into the pit and there it fit him perfectly. “See?” he said.
“I see, dearest wonderfulest kindest gentlest,” said Scal the sorry. “And I’m sorry about this, but it is absolutely necessary.” And she gave the dirt-pile a shove, and it filled up the hole perfectly, leaving just the man’s head sticking out.
“Oh what is this now?” shouted the man. “What is this now, eh? What is going on?”
“I am sorry to say that you are very good at many things, but a very poor husband,” said Scal the sorry. “Marriage may not be for me after all. But you may stay here, and become the best in all the world at being planted.” And she walked away.
“A fine idea!” said the man, although no one was listening. “A fine idea! I’ll beat the other plants to it, just you see! A fine idea! I’ll beat them hollow at their own game. A fine idea!”

And this is why we have poison ivy.

Marcus’s room was a complicated place, up there on the third floor above all the others, on its own. It was wood-walled and filled with creaks, dark-seamed and shadowed. Someone had tried to carpet the floor once, but had given up and left it at a small, threadbare rug that had once been an oval. The walls were crammed with old furniture from desks to chests-of-drawers, all wooden, all missing at least one leg, and mostly empty. A selected few held Marcus’s clothing, which he regularly forgot. And on the north wall of the room was Marcus’s bed, where he spent his nights.
Those were the unimportant parts of Marcus’s room, and they were all that mattered during the daytime.
At night, Marcus laid underneath his covers, underneath the groaning, whispering, mumbling beams of the house’s skull, and he looked east. Sometimes he looked west instead, it made no real difference. And as he waited, he would close his eyes and count with his pulse until he heard the sound of marching feet overlay the noises of his heartbeat.
The armies of the east would always be the first to arrive, eager to the field atop their golden crows. Their shining helms contained no holes for the eyes they did not have, and their long-bladed triple-forked spears were the most beautiful weapons in the world, as slender as the legs of ballerinas. Short sharp flutes played as they flowed into his room, brought in on a warm breeze from the silvery-orange dawnlands at their backs, beyond the sill of the window on Marcus’s east wall.
The armies of the west would set foot to floorboard exactly three beats behind those of the east, without exception or presumption and with a great creaking shudder. Each man was an iceberg of strange metals that seemed part-copper, part-iron, and all-rusted with greys, reds, and greens of fuzzy debris. Their helms were open and their faces were indistinct with paints and tattoos, smeared into muddiness apart from their beautiful brown eyes. The soft-sweet vapors they used as weapons were the most wonderful thing anyone had ever smelled, and they played around their feet like puppies in the dim purple sigh of twilight that beamed from the place beyond their western window-frame.

It took no less than ten minutes for each army to fully deploy and assemble itself upon the field of battle, that being Marcus’s floor. Each eastern crow-of-gold stood taller at the shoulder than an elephant, each western metalberger two men high and six men wide, but they squeezed in with room to spare – near a football-field’s-length lay between the standards of the opposing forces, a comfortable enough space for Marcus’s bed to fit into as the two generals approached one another for talks. Each was a giant: the western general twenty feet tall, the easterner ten but mounted upon a silver raven who could swallow a lesser man whole. Their bodyguards remained a discreet ten paces behind them – little enough to cover in moments, should the need arise, but great enough so as to avoid the appearance of eavesdropping, which was so much more shameful than the actual thing.
“Duchess, of East,” rumbled the western general, with a slight bob of the helmet.
“Lady, of West,” whispered the eastern general, waving an arm in a manner that might simulate a minimalist bow.
“Adjudicator, of South,” they addressed Marcus, with a formal salute each – fists against chests, heads inclined just so, offhand fingers intertwined at precisely the right moment.
Marcus nodded.
The generals faced one another again, and the mood relaxed into the familiarity of terrible and great decisions that haunted Marcus’s room on all nights of the week, month, and year.
“I will begin with a strategic weakening of my center,” announced the eastern general, “so as to draw out your own and flank it with my cavalry. This will cut you to ribbons.”
“And I,” proclaimed the western general, “have fissured my forces into three legions. As the hardened center is taken in your grasp, mine own flanks shall march towards it. This will crush you into pieces.”
“My strategic reserve will approach from your rear at this point,” replied the eastern general. “They will assail your personal guard and your person both, disrupting your orders, sowing confusion in the ranks, and wreaking havoc on the morale of your troops.”
“Which shall touch off the signal to the traitor I have hidden in your command,” said the western general. “His hand will end the life of your most trusted marshal, and strife shall grip your command and heart equally.”
Nods were exchanged. “Adjudicator?” they inquired.
Marcus nodded, and waved a hand.
“Well enough,” said the general of the west.
“Properly prepared,” agreed the general of the east.
And so they turned and strode away. Ten long, firm, decisive steps, each made with the firmness and surety of an earthquake.
On the eleventh, they stopped.
The twelfth through twenty-second were more hesitant at first, then more hurried, then slowly more and more reluctant until both striders were returned to the bed of the adjudicator, looking unsure and awkward.
Marcus frowned.
“There is… one more thing,” admitted the western general.
“A small matter,” said the eastern general. “Speak first.”
“No, it is nothing,” said the western general. “You may proceed.”
Silence sprouted in Marcus’s room, flowered up against the sky, blossomed all the way up to the soaring vaulted heights of the beams that held fast against the world outside.
“We would like to negotiate,” said the generals, at the same time and entirely off-rhythm.
Marcus wasn’t sure what his expression was, but it was a sight to behold. The negotiations had been finished, hadn’t they?
“Not…precisely the manner of negotiations we propose,” said the eastern general.
“A settlement, to be specific,” said the western general.
Marcus wasn’t sure about a negotiated surrender but if that was what they wanted to do tonight he guessed that was –
“No. A peace settlement.”
“Mutually….respectful, perhaps,” suggested the eastern general.
“Quite possibly,” said the western general, a hint of cautious optimism shining through.
“Yes…” said the eastern general, one thin, gilded hand stroking the chin of her chinless helm. “With nonpartisan language and historically informed decisions.”
“Exactly,” agreed the western general. “And balanced concessions and compromises!”
“Cunning! Perhaps lay the foundation for some subtle guidance of the general culture-at-large of our peoples to support a less belligerent and aggressive foreign policy?”
“Devious indeed and worth consideration. Might this newfound surplus of labor lead itself to public-works projects and a new focus on ensuring the health and well-being of both our peoples as opposed to a nebulously-unreal future promised to us on the crushing of an abstracted and hated foe?”
“Yes!” said the eastern general.
They hugged.
Marcus picked at his blanket and tried to decide what he should be looking at. He failed, and settled for nothing.
“There will need to be documentation of this, of course,” managed the eastern general eventually, disentangling both herself and her raven-of-silver’s skull from the arms of her opponent.
“Of course,” replied the western general. “A treaty must be signed, and to be signed it must be drafted.”
“And for maximum neutrality and to avoid the sabotage of bloodthirsty patriots, it would help if it were ratified and approved by a respected neutral third party, besides ourselves.”
They looked at Marcus. He wasn’t sure if they had ever looked at him this way before.
“Adjudicator?” they asked.
Marcus bunched himself up small and stared out the north window, the one he didn’t look at. There was a summer moon rising in May, and a breeze blowing that brought the sounds of spring peepers.
He looked back. The generals were still there, as solid as rocks. Clearly this was important.
Marcus nodded, and took the great, heavy bronze pen of the western general in hand as it was offered. It slid across the soft eastern parchment as smooth as a honeyed salmon, and his signature fit the sheet like a glove.
“Done,” said the eastern general, rolling up her half of the parchment.
“And sealed,” agreed the western general, stamping her copy shut with the tip of her right thumb.
They shook hands over Marcus’s bed, and said their farewells as the battlefield grew darker. They turned to Marcus himself, and they spoke words, but he was already slipping out through the north window on the breeze, his attention wavering. The generals grew dark and heavy, as they always did, as they always were, and Marcus’s eyelids slid shut on those two beaming, faceless smiles.

“Mom,” asked Marcus the next morning, down in the simple, solid kitchen of their home, down on the first floor where everything was new and shiny, “how do you know when you’re a grownup?”
“Oh honey,” said Linda, as she aimlessly chased a stray dollop of jam with her flaxseed toast, “you don’t have to worry about THAT for a while yet.”
“Like, in your head.”
Linda secured the reluctant red goop at last. Her chewing was without mercy, but it paused for a moment. “Is this about girls?” she asked, succeeding at keeping suspicion from her voice but failing at crumbs.
“No. Wait yes. Wait again.”
Marcus pondered. Linda waited, and finished swallowing.
“Not really?” he managed, tentatively.
“Well,” said Linda, thinking her sentences through as she picked crumbs from her teeth, “I can answer some of your questions for you, I think. And for the rest of them, I think we can make a trip to the library. I think I remembered a few books that are helpful for people around your age.”

She was a bit puzzled when Marcus attempted to look up War and Peace, but went along with it.
The copy of Politics for Dummies was more helpful in the long run, though.

My name is Joe, and I’m an addict.
Damn, hard to say that.
Now, thing to understand about how I got this way, boys and girls, is that I’m a risk-taker. No, not just in my off hours – I’m a stockbroker. Risk-taking is my job, and I’m damned good at it. I gamble to make my morning wages, and I’m no vegas blowout, fuck no. I’m a guaranteed shoe-in, a money-flipping machine, the man to call when you want two fortunes for one at guaranteed odds within six months or your money back.
I love that job.
I love that job.
I really, really, truly do love that job.
But….sometimes a man needs to relax, you know? Even if his preferred recreation isn’t so relaxing.
Can’t calm down, you know. Nah, too small, too slow. Me, I need to calm UP. I change braintracks, I don’t change the speed, if you can get what I’m saying.
So I do drugs. Lots of different drugs. LSD, a bit of cocaine, PCBs, meth, whatever. I switch around a lot. Keeps it from getting stale. No pot though. Too mild.
Not an addict though. This was all strictly recreational, like I said. Business is business and fun is fun and I got my adrenaline highs just fine at work without sticking a needle in my eyeball or anything else, you know?
Then one day I end up with an actual weekend. An actual, honest-to-god, full two-days-plus-Friday-night weekend. For the first time in eight years.
What the FUCK am I supposed to do with that? I’ll be bouncing off the goddamned walls come breakfast Saturday. I needed a new thing, a new trick.
So I checked in with my dealer – never you mind who – and he tells me he’s got a new thing. Hands me this little tiny round pill.
What the fuck’s this shit, I ask.
Omnipotence, he says. Go on. Give it a try. Everyone wants it.
So I pay him, I take it home, I have a glass of water and put that pill in my mouth bottoms up gulp down it goes and woah woah woah.
WOAH.

I dropped the jar, by the way. First time I’d done that since I was a teenager. Took me ages to pick up all the pills afterwards.

Now, I’d seen some things. But nothing like I’d seen with that shit. I mean first things first, everything was pitch fucking black. BAM. Like someone’d hit the ‘off’ switch on my eyeballs. So I wanted light and then FWOOM, there it was. Holy hell.
At this point I decided this was maybe some sort of lucid hallucination, so I decided to see what I could get away with making, with screwing around. But first I’d need a place to put all the stuff, so I was ‘hell, let’s make the world.’
And bam, I made a world. Did the whole thing. Got the ground and the sea and the fishes and the birds and the skies and I made myself a sweet place to crash and then I just had a five-minute break before I got SERIOUS and bam, I woke up. Checked the clock, it’d been seven minutes.
Seven. Minutes. That’d felt like seven DAYS.
Well, of course I had to get more. There was a whole weekend left over, and I hadn’t done jack yet. So I drove back to my dealer and he was laughing his ass off. Knew you’d come back, he said. Everyone wants this.
Fucker. Bought a big jar, just to show him. Wouldn’t see me around again ‘till the weekend was over.
By Sunday morning that jar was down to the dregs and I was higher than an astronaut with six joints. And I’d been doing some serious work. Big-time serious. This was better than Lego’d been when I was six.
I made some people, and I told them to listen to me. No half-assed mom/dad wait-twenty-years-and-maybe-they’ll-be-okay crap, just made ‘em flat. BOOM. BAM. Of course, they still didn’t listen to me, but whatever. I kicked them out of my place and took a break for munchies.
I came back in an hour and shit, someone’d filled up the planet with douchebags. Worse than a cockroach infestation; stomp one, ninety million to go. Had to fumigate the whole place – went with water, yeah, douchebags drown like everyone else. Bit of overkill in retrospect, yeah, but what’re you gonna do?
But then everyone started asking me to do shit. Everyone. Eve-ry-one. And the ones that weren’t were making up stupid shit with names like Bool and Mersomargarine and telling their imaginary friends how lame I was.
After that…well… the weekend got longer than I’d thought it would be at first. A lot longer. Felt like years, and years, and years, and years. I think I shot bugs at people and turned things into snakes, turned the skies into a nosebleed and threw bears at people. Kicked the shit out of a guy and broke his leg for… some reason? I made a bet with a guy that I could ruin somebody’s whole life and he’d think it was okay or something, the details are a bit fuzzy. I can’t even remember if I liked the guy or not. Won the bet though; I think for a followup I made a fish eat the same poor schmuck too – unless it was a whale – or maybe that was someone else. Was it a shark maybe? Whatever it was, there should’ve been more of those and the seaside in general. Should’ve spent more time on the beaches; felt like I spent half my time wandering around some desert in the assend of nowhere, though I think I only did that because I was pissed off at the people that wouldn’t SHUT UP at me and wanted to show them who was boss. I think.
God those guys were useless. I gave them some basic ‘here are the rules of this house’ shit on rocks. Rocks. And you know what they do, no joke, right away? Like, immediately? They break them. I put them on ROCKS for fuck’s sake! And you know why they broke them? They got in a big fight over whether or not they should all just wander off and worship a cow statue made of everyone’s melted-down pocket-watches and wedding rings.
Damn. I mean, just damn.
So….right.
Right. There I was, it was Sunday morning, and I had something like six shots of Omnipotence left. And I was sick of the shit, but I couldn’t stop taking it. It felt too good. I mean, sure I had to deal with petty little assholes whenever I was high, but at least I was in charge of them for once – beat work, I can say that much for it.
Now, I’d been a good boy ‘till then. No experimentation. No double-dosing. One pill at a time, dealer’s orders, nice and safe. But you know what? That was because Omnipotence alone felt crazy enough. And that had been yesterday. After all I’d done and seen and been it was starting to feel…boring.
So I took all six at once. What the hell, only die once, right?

Well, I woke up with a head that felt like there was a little supernova embedded in its base and a hardon that could moor the RMS Queen Elizabeth. And too many really, really bad memories.
I couldn’t tell if I was one or three people, I’d fucked off and left my worldful of crazy little people to their own devices, and I’d gotten some girl pregnant on her honeymoon. Also I think I’d waited for the kid to grow up, then nailed him to a stick. Unless I’d nailed myself to a stick. Maybe I’d done it first just to show him it was okay, you do that with your kids, right?
Right?

Right.
So I’m clean now. I think. I had to give it up. Had to give it all up. I can’t take more drugs because they aren’t Omnipotence, and I can’t take more Omnipotence because fucking hell that got messed up towards the end. And the middle. And the beginning. So no more. Not one more. Not even a little bit. Even if I had one more, which I don’t.
Yeah, this would sound a lot more convincing if I weren’t talking to the bathroom mirror. Hell, just one more won’t hurt. It was stuck under the couch, right? That makes it floor food, right? That doesn’t count. You have to eat stuff you drop on the floor anyways, finders keepers finders weepers or whatever.
Wonder what the kid got up to. I sort of wigged out on him there.
Bottoms up!

His name was Sam, but everyone always called him Simon, always Simon. He asked them why, sometimes.
Oh Simon, Simon, Simple Simon, they’d say. You lovable goof. It’s who you are, Sam or no Sam, and that’s what we’ll call you.
I don’t get it, he’d said.
Exactly, they’d said. And then they’d laughed, but they did that a lot at a lot of things Sam didn’t understand, so he just shrugged and went on going on.
Oh Simple Simon, you chuckleworthy silly-billy, his math teacher had said in grade school, as he divided a subtraction problem and multiplied when he should’ve equalled.
Oh Simple Simon, you cheeky goofus, his father murmured when he came back from the pet store with a wild raccoon.
Oh Simple Simon, you hilarious dunderhead, his grade ten crush said when he gave her a single chocolate bar in a glass of water and a bar of crushed and congealed daffodils.
Sam persevered, and sometimes he wondered what all the fuss was about, but on the whole he thought life was okay. He did his things and other people did theirs and so long as that was the way it was it all made sense, was all fine.

Simple Simon, said his father one day, take the trash out.
Sam was thunderstuck. Trash? Trash wasn’t his job. That wasn’t the thing he did.
Oh Simple Simon, you ignorant ignoramus, it is now, said his father. My back hurts. Take the trash out.
Sam relaxed. Taking the trash out was now his thing. All was well. He’d just do it one step at a time.
Garbage.
Recycling.
Compost.
Easily done. The garbage goes in the garbage bin, the compost goes in the home compost bin, and the recycling goes in the home compost bin.
Done.
Oh Simple Simon, you loopy idiot, said his father when he reported back. Now what’s going to happen to that recycling? Sometimes I wonder if the doctor dropped you on your head when you born over and over again.
Okay, said Sam.

Three days later, all the recycling had been composted down to a fine grey paste.
What do I do with this? asked Sam of his friends and family.
Oh Simple Simon, you dribbling dolt, just throw it away, said his father and all his friends.
Sam threw it away, but because it was compost he threw it away on top of other things, to help them grow. He threw it on the house and he threw it on his father’s car and he spread the leftover bits on his computer.
Overnight, Sam woke up and heard hissing noises. His computer was puffing up like a balloon, and steam was wheezing from its sides. He pondered this, shrugged, went back to sleep, and woke up to find that its RAM had doubled, it had a quintuple-linked processor that ran on small lasers rather than electricity, and was cooled with liquid nitrogen.
Sam walked outside and examined the house. It was 20% larger, 43.8% more attractive, and the windows smelled like peppermint.
Sam walked around to the garage and examined his father’s car. It was half the size it had been in the past, with the same amount of storage space and eight times the gas mileage, with a simple and highly effective electric motor sharing space under the hood.
Oh Simple Simon, you magnificent clod, said his father, shaking his head at what had become of their stuff. Wait’ll the neighbours see this. What did you do again? What exactly did you compost? What did you do to that garbage?
Dunno, said Sam.
Well, just keep doing what you’re doing, then, said his father.
And so that was why everyone watched Sam carefully around garbage day, to make sure they could get it done right.
Sam confronted the three bins, the three bags, and he searched his memory, and he searched deep inside himself, and he made his move.
Garbage.
Recycling.
Compost.
The garbage goes in the recycling bin, the compost goes in the home compost bin, and the recycling goes in the recycling bin.
Done.

One week later, Sam opened up his garbage bin and found that it was already full of garbage.
Uh-oh, said Sam. He measured it: approximately 45% of last week’s garbage had been carefully recycled and returned to him. Uh-oh.
Got any more of that ‘compost’ there, Simple Simon? asked his father at that particularly inopportune moment.
I think there was some sort of mistake, said Sam.
Oh Simple Simon, you outright moron, said his father. This is not good.
And it wasn’t. Every single neighbour had been watching Sam, and every neighbour had told their neighbour, who’d told their neighbour, who’d told their neighbour, until everyone had run out of neighbours. 45% of the entire city’s garbage from last week had been recycled and reused.
Oh Simple Simon, you endless chump, everyone said to him. Why did you lead us so grossly astray?
Lead who what? asked Sam.
Never mind, they said. One more chance. And do it right this time!

So next week there Sam was in the garage. At least four million people were watching him from the stream his dad was running off his laptop. But he didn’t know about that so it was all okay.
He stood before the three bins, and he contemplated them.
Garbage.
Recycling.
Compost.
The garbage goes in…the garbage bin. The recycling goes in… the garbage bin. And the compost goes in… the garbage bin.
Done.

That was the week the city’s dump was an overflowing cesspit. Disease filled the air, rats ran in the streets in broad daylight, shoulder-to-shoulder. The skies were grey with the fog and mist of decaying stench, and plastic water bottles bobbed in the bay. The mayor was trapped in his office, the dead were piled in the graveyard hurly-burly and willy-nilly, the police were battling the firefighters and the media was blacked, browned, and blued out.
Oh Simple Simon, you endless chump, his father chastised him. Now we are trapped in our home with hordes of angry folks beating down our door. You have truly gone and done it this time.
Done WHAT, asked Sam, who was getting a little annoyed with all of this.
Oh Simple Simon, complained the mob of neighbours beating on their door and bearing garbage-torches that had come to take them away and toss them upon the tire fires that had consumed the south end of the city, you pitiful chucklefuck. We put our trust in you, all our hopes in you, and all for naught. You have let us all down.
Fine, whatever, said Sam. Do you want me to take the garbage out or what?
I don’t particularly care anymore, said his father. Go away and leave me here with my alcohol to dull my miserable last minutes.
Okay, said Sam. And he went to the garage and he did that, as the doors rattled and shook under angry suburban fists.
I’d best get set to go away then, said Sam. So he took his father’s car keys and he examined his father’s car. He’d never driven before, but he knew the principles of the thing.
Ignition.
Brake.
Gas.
Easily done.

Oh Simple Simon, you bevelled shit-for-brains, pestered the mob of neighbours just outside the door. What on earth is that noise?
They never did find out where Sam went off to, though they found bits of peeled rubber for a few hundred miles. Most of the witnesses weren’t in much shape to say.
Still, I’m sure he’s out there, somewhere. He won’t cause much trouble, as long as he does his things and other people do theirs and it all makes sense. It’ll all be fine.

New things happen, like it or not. And you’d better like it, because everything being the same forever gets boring, no matter how nice it was to begin with.
But if you don’t like it, the complaining is fun anyways. And that’s what Scal the sorry was doing as she wandered the hills and the trees by the sea, shivering under her oldest, tatteredest clothes. “I need a home,” she grumbled, “I need a good fine house with walls and a roof and maybe even a floor to be fancy on, and there I can keep myself comfortable. Not out here, in all this… weather. I’m sorry to say it, but this weather irks me sore. Where will I put my house?” And she carried on griping this way for three days as she wandered, driving all the creatures she passed sore irked with her.
Then Scal the sorry found a tree. And that’s what caused all this nonsense.
It was a good tree. Tall, firm-limbed, with a trunk both stout and tall. Its leaves were finest green, its bark truly brown, its hue lustrous and ruddy.
“That is the finest tree in all this forest,” said Scal the sorry, “and I’m sorry to say so of all you other trees, but that’s the truth. Why, if I were a bird and had feathers and beaks and all those things, I’d be happy as a clam to take up a perch in that particular tree and roost all I pleased, with twigs and with feathers.”
Then Scal the sorry stopped and thought for a bit, and laughed too much.
After she was finished with that, she took off her left glove and whispered to her palm and picked away at one of the fingernails she kept her magic in with her teeth, then spat out a bit of a word and a bit of a cough, wound tight together, and she set to making herself a house.
Scal the sorry’s house was round and squat and the walls were sticks. Its roof was a thousand feathers from old birds she’d eaten all year, and for a floor she used their down. It was cozy and smelly and on the whole she considered it pretty fine.
“No wonder the birds like this so,” she said, as she laid herself down for sleep. “A fine view, a good view, even if I must remember not to roll over in the night.” So she tucked herself in and snored.
No more than halfway through the night Scal the sorry was awoken loud and clear by swaying and moaning, a roar and a ruckus. Her home was bobbing in the high branches of the tree like a cork in a sea, and the wind was whining through all the cracks in her walls.
“Shush!” she yelled at the wind and the world. “Shush! I’m sleeping up here! I’m sorry that I’ve put myself and my home up in your place, but it’s MY place now and it’s going NOWHERE!”
The wind laughed and roiled at her and didn’t die down ‘till well past dawn, leaving Scal the sorry red-eyed with sleepless ire.
“Bothersome blight and dreadful vex,” she snarled as she drank the strongest teas she could mix (bear-paw and old vinegary apple). “It was one night. I will sleep twice as long tonight, and make back the difference.”
But the winds came back that night, and the night after, and so on and on and on all week, every week, endlessly. It was driving Scal the sorry ‘round the bend and straight off through the mountains, it was, and she was so grumpy that she could boil water with a glare.
“A fine home,” she muttered to herself as she sat, awake, and listened to the midnight gusts yet again. “I am sorry to say so, but I believe I just might have to do something about it.” And so she gathered those bits of her brains that hadn’t been shaken and spooked to pieces by the wind, and she thought all day.
That evening, Scal the sorry put on an old, old tattered rag she had, hunched herself up small and crooked, quivering and shaking, and she sat out in the doorway of her house, legs dangling over the edge and her face hidden away by the hood of her battered clothing. She waited past sunset, and just as she heard the wind come howling down from the west she began to sob and sniffle.
“Oh! Oh! Oh no! Why have you come again, wind, why have you come to hurt your mother so, why have you done this? Did I do a harm to you when you were small, poor wind? I am sorry for this; a mother’s sins are thoughtless ones, oh poor little wind! Take pity!”
The west wind was very confused by this. “Father in the sea never told me about my mother,” it said. “But you look very small to be MY mother. I am big enough to stretch all the way from here to far away over the sea, where there’s nothing but water for forever and ever and further. I can pick up more water than a thousand buckets with one hand, and I can shove the clouds away with my littlest fingers and toes. I don’t think I could do those things if such a little thing as you were my mother.”
“Maybe you’re big and strong now,” said Scal the sorry, with infinite patience and love, “but you’re still my little son, my little boy. And I’m sorry to say that if you do not believe me, I shall prove that I am stronger than you ever will be. A test then, son! Why don’t we see which of us can throw this stone the farthest?” And she pointed to a stone on the ground, far below.
“So small a thing?” asked the west wind. “Mother-maybe, you are a madwoman. I can knock over tall trees and send waves that eat shores. This is nothing, you watch!”
Well the west wind heaved and the west wind hauled, the west wind blew up such a flurry that it nearly pulled down the trees, but the west wind couldn’t shove that stubborn little stone. Finally it gave up, spent and exhausted, and Scal the sorry tsk-tsked in her most motherly voice.
“Well,” she said, “you’ve done your best, my boy, my little boy, but I’m sorry that I must see that you’ve lost.”
“Lost, but you’ve not won, mother-maybe,” retorted the west wind. “That stone cannot be moved at all!”
“I am your mother, little wind,” she said, “and I am stronger than you. Now you just watch.” And Scal the sorry plucked up the little rock that she’d sunk into the dirt that morning, where half its bulk lay buried beneath the surface. And she did it with one hand.
“Now listen to your mother, who is stronger than you,” she told the wind, “and leave my house alone! Never come back here, and tell all your brothers and sisters that I said so!”
The west wind left in shame, and Scal the sorry slept the sleep of the exhausted for a week and five days. She slept through breakfasts, suppers, and lunches, and finally woke when she felt a tip-tip-drip-drop on the back of her neck. Water was leaking through the feathered roof of her home, trickling down the walls, making a mess in her bedding and ruining her food stores.
“A million mice mangled in a meadow!” she swore. “Ah well, rain must come, rain must go. A day indoors patching leaks hurts nobody, though I’m sorry to admit it.” So she cooped herself up and mended the roof and walls, and brewed her latest, strongest yet tea (spiky thorns and the angriest stones she could find) to keep off the chill. She went to bed with the strum-drum-drum of raindrops in her ears, lulled to sleep.
The next day her neck was cold and wet again, splish-splash-splosh. More leaks had sprung up, and still the rain fell and fell and fell.
“Two in a row?” she nagged to herself. “Bothersome!” And she brewed more tea and patched more leaks and did this for all the week before she shook her fist at the sky and saw that the clouds weren’t moving as they should be. They were stuck fast, fat and soggy, held in place by a breezeless air.
“I find myself sorry that I have no wind,” said Scal the sorry, “but there must be another way around this! Eh, having a house is such a trouble – I will find a way, yes I will.”
So she tried covering her home in resin from the tree. The rain pounded and poured and in three days it washed it all away.
“Rabbit legs snipped by snares!” she swore, and tried covering her home with dozens of interwoven branches. Pound pound pour, in two days the rain had soaked all the leaves through and filled her home with their washed-out little scraps.
“Bear-carrion in a nest of eagles!” she shrieked, and chewed on her left hand’s fingernails, spitting and hissing. She put her magic hand’s power into her house, so strong and fierce that it chased all the water away, right down to the spit out of her mouth and the tea she was drinking. It took one day for her to stop coughing and wheezing long enough to undo her mistake.
“Dirty riptides,” she sulked, washing out her parched throat with (damned) rainwater. “Those clouds need scorching. Maybe I can ask for help.” So Scal the sorry put on her least-damp clothing and set off into the rain, looking and searching for help outside the endless rainfall that surrounded her cloud-clotted home.
“I’m sorry,” she asked of a passing deer, “but do you know any animals that might help with getting rid of all my rain?”
“No,” said the deer, twitching its nose. “Water on the ground we drink. Water in the sky is not for us.” And it bounded away.
Scal the sorry said harsh words, and tried again.
“I’m sorry,” she asked a spry young sapling, “but do you know any plants that might help with getting rid of all my rain, which is ruining my home?”
“No,” said the sapling, rustling cheerily. “But isn’t it most fine? A good drink puts green in your stem and bite in your bark! I’ll be in the canopy in no time at all, barely a century, just you wait!”
Scal the sorry said cruel words, kicked the tree’s trunk, and, limping, tried again.
“I’m sorry,” she asked the nearest mountain, “but do you know any other powerful big stones that might help with getting rid of all my rain, which is ruining my home and driving me to distraction and difficulties?”
“No,” said the mountain. “But I know who can. It’s the sun. Go and ask the sun to help. She can dry things right up, but she’s proud and prickly.”
Scal the sorry said thankful, kind words, praised the mountain, and went back home to her (leaking) house to think.
“I’d best get on asking him,” she said, and clambered to the top of the tree, right where the branches were so small that she had to turn herself into a little squirrel to stay aloft. “Hey sun!” she called. “Hey sun! Hey sun! I am sorry to speak to you so, but it’s your job to keep this sort of place warm and unsoggy, and you are not doing it!”
The sun slid around in her seat and stared down at Scal the sorry. She was indeed proud; the way she looked down her nose at her left no doubt. “What is all this racket,” she yawned. “I am busy, as I always am, with important things. Why is there a little mouse in a tree shouting at me? Go hide in a burrow or something like animals do, little tree-mouse. You are boring.”
“Boring?” squawked Scal the sorry. “I am Scal the sorry, and you are lazy and ugly and fat and downright unpleasant in every which way, all of which I know because your husband told me so! You couldn’t dry my home if it was the only place in all the world, you good-for-nothing soggy-ended weasel-faced bark-skinned moosenose!”
The sun flared up like grease on a campfire at that, and some of the words she and Scal said to each other next didn’t bear speaking once, let alone repeating. When all they had to say and do was said and done, the sun was shining bright as midsummer – in October, no less – the clouds were wisps of errant water frying in a searing sky, and Scal the sorry’s home was as dry and warm as the back of a buzzard’s wings in a thermal.
“This is fine and good,” she sighed to herself as she lay down for the night in a bed that didn’t smell one bit of wet leaves. “This is how a house should be, I guess, eh? This is better.” And she slept in for one week in a row.
When she woke up, her mouth was parched, her hair felt like brittle twigs, and the leaves of her tree had been crisped to a bitter brown. The sun still glared at her, bright and early in the morning, fixed at high noon.
“What a grudge-holding stick-in-the-mud,” grumped Scal the sorry, rehydrating herself on a tea made from burnt ashes and hurt feelings. “I am sorry that I said those things to her, but that was ages ago, and they needed to be said before she would do her job properly. Now she is just as bad, but the other way around! I’ll show her!”
So Scal the sorry walked outdoors – where she winced as her skin burned in the sunshine – and chewed her left-hand fingernails again. And as she chewed, so she changed – into a little beetle, a little burrowing beetle with a dainty black coat and a pair of digging legs and jaws. And that little beetle went straight to work on the ground, digging down deep and far. Topsoil, dirt, more dirt, stone, more stone, and then through and down into the dark places under the world, where the shadows had their roots and lived out their shadowy other lives. Her own shadow waved happily to her, stretched-out and huge in its proper home.
Scal the sorry waved back. It was polite.
Finding what she was looking for took time, a long time – there was so much dark and dim, so many shades without light – but finally she spotted it: the shadow of the sun, hiding away in a corner of the always-midnight sky, where nobody needed or spotted it.
“Hello there,” said Scal the sorry. “Feeling lonely?”
“Nobody needs a sun where the shadows live,” said the shadow of the sun, miserably. “And she never casts me – everyone else gets to go up and see the world above, but I’m down here forever.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” said Scal the sorry. “I am sorry, but you are talking nonsense. I’ve got a way out right here, you look at this. A tunnel all the way up top! Come on in! Stay at my house!”
The shadow of the sun was a little worried by all this, but in the end it allowed itself to be persuaded to be crammed up the beetle-tunnel face-first, squish squish squash. They got to near the surface when it halted fast.
“I am sorry to ask,” said Scal the sorry, who was lying, “but what is the problem?”
“I’m stuck,” whimpered the shadow of the sun. “It’s too small!”
Scal the sorry sighed rudely and loudly. “Shadow,” she said, “I could use your hand now I could. Because I don’t have any this moment.”
And Scal the sorry’s shadow, who was waiting down at the far-end of the beetle-burrow and listening, reached up, up, up to the world above, and then down, down, down into the tunnel with its thin fingers. It grasped Scal the sorry and the shadow of the sun both, and it yanked them free – pop! – into the bright-burning daylight, where it took refuge once again under Scal the sorry’s foot.
“Shadow,” she said, “I owe you a powerful debt. And speaking of such, look up there little shadow of the sun! Look up at my house! Set yourself above that tree and breathe deep and happy, under the sun!”
The shadow of the sun ran all the way up the tree and sprung into the sky with the eagerness of a fledgling eagle, and glorious, peaceful, cool darkness spread itself across Scal the sorry’s home, swallowing all those scorching sunrays whole before the last words had died from her lips.
“Sweet, cool, refreshing night-time,” she hummed happily as she turned in for bed that evening – although maybe it was morning, it was hard to tell with the shadow of the sun above her. “This is more like what a house should be.” And she drifted off, with only the creeeeak-eeeek of her parched tree to whine her to sleep.
She woke up some time later with her teeth chattering. She bundled on every bit of clothing she had, she put on her winter mittens, she tore down half her roof for use as bedding – nothing worked, she remained frozen, numbed, chilled to the bone-and-marrow in the pitch-black dark.
“Blast this endless shadeshine into blisters and splinters!” she spat. “Hey up there, old sun’s-shadow – can you take a break, give me a moment to warm up? You can take turns with the sun, eh?”
But the sun’s shadow was too happy to hear her, too busy looking at all the world around and below it to pay attention. Scal the sorry yelled at it for three days before she gave up and nursed her voice back to herself with some tea made from frozen leaves and desultory fumes.
“A warm I’ll need, but not a sunwarm,” she grumbled. “Best to go asking. I’ve got friends, I do, and I’ll see them right.” So she pulled out her left hand – just for a moment, for it was perishing-cold – and chewed the right nails for just the right amount of time in the right way. Scal the sorry was a crow then, and she flew around for hours and minutes and days asking and talking.
“Grow more fur,” said the animals.
“Or thicker bark,” recommended the trees.
“What is ‘cold’?” asked the mountains.
“Splosh-swissh,” said the ocean.
Scal the sorry grumbled herself nearly hoarse. “I am sorry to bother you with my anger,” she complained to a passing raven, “but I have asked every birch-battered thing and creature that floats, hops, jumps, skips, and stands in this little part of the world that is mine and not one little thing knows where one little me could find something to keep herself warm. Are neighbours always this troublesome when your house is out of sorts?”
“If it’s warm you need,” the raven advanced, clicking his beak, “then you should ask a favour of my great grandfather. He found something powerful warm a little time ago, and brought it back in his beak from a faraway man.”
“Then I’ll pay him a visit,” said Scal the sorry, and she did, and she found that the great raven had warmth to spare, warmth from this thing he’d found.
“It’s fire,” he said. “It’s so hot it burns, burns things right up. Now be right careful with it, eh? Be cautious.”
“I am sorry,” said Scal the sorry, picking up a bit of fire in her foot, “but I can only be so careful when my house is so cold.”
“Ow,” she added on the way home. “Ouch. Ow ouch ow ouch ow ow ouch ouch ouch.”
The fire was indeed hot, as her tender feet told her, but it looked sure fine right in the middle of her floor. And as Scal found out so quick, hot tea tasted so much better than cold.
“Warm,” she said, “is nice. And this is nice, and this is a proper home now. It was a lot of trouble, but I’m not sorry at all now, not one bit.” And she closed her eyes, and sighed, and slipped away to sleepland.
And as Scal the sorry lay napping, she slept so safe and so happy that she didn’t hear her tree complaining at her, poor thing. It had been scorched to thirst, and then it had been darkened to starvation, and now it was too warm, too warm. Dry as a torch and dead all inside, poor thing, it would have asked for an apology if Scal the sorry had been awake to give it. But she wasn’t, so it couldn’t, and the best it could do was bear its death with dignity, poor thing. Trees are used to such things, and used to silent suffering.
Because of this, the moment Scal woke up was when her house hit the ground, and a good thing too – the embers were sliding up her legs and trying to make nests in her armpits.
“Ow!” she repeated, yelping. “Ow!” She stamped and spun and rolled and ran and tumbled down hills and it took three whole days for her to put herself out, by jumping into the sea.
By then her house was just a big firepit, and long-burned-out when she made her way back to it.
“A pity,” she sighed. “And I am very sorry that this didn’t work. But on the whole, I think that maybe houses are too much trouble for me.”
So she spent her days down by the seashore once more, and forgot about most of her problems.
Though she did remember the trick with the tea. That was a good one.