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When Grace came downstairs that morning, there was a monster lying on their couch. It was about six feet long and about six feet across the shoulders and it had three shoulders and three eyes and one half face.

She went into the kitchen and found her mother midway through a second cup of coffee.

“Mom?”
“Yeah?”

“Why’s the monster from our basement in the living room?”

“Basements are expensive these days, baby. We’re just being neighbourly when times are tough.”
“Oh.”

“I know you’re worried and a little scared,” said Grace’s mom, who was perceptive in certain ways after a certain amount of caffeine, “but change isn’t always bad, and I know you’re a brave and clever enough girl to come to informed opinions and not rely on off-the-cuff judgments.”

Grace considered this, then went back to the living room to consult the evidence.

The monster hadn’t moved, but for some drool escaping the corner of their jaw. Their feet were propped up higher than their head, and their scaly talons looked like they must have been awfully chilly with no sheet to cover them. There were marks on their cheek from where they had pillowed their face on their arm.

She went back to the kitchen and sat down with some cereal, ate half of it, and thought for a little bit.

“I think they were mostly scary because they were in the basement,” she said. “You know. Because it’s dark. And dusty. And there’s bugs.”
“That sounds like a considered and calculated first thought, which is a good place to begin from,” said Grace’s mother. “Also I didn’t know our basement has bugs. What kind of bugs? Can you show me before you go to school? Ideally I needed to know this a few months ago.”

***

The bugs were crickets, not cockroaches, so that was alright.

The monster was of indeterminate species and age and form, and asked to be called Tabitha.

“It’s not professional to give your name out to the client,” Tabitha told Grace, “but I’m not exactly working with you anymore now, am I? Can’t be a basement monster without a basement.”
“You could go under my bed, maybe?” said Grace. “Or mom’s bed, if it’s too small.”

“That’d be scab work,” said Tabitha. “I’d sooner stick a daydream up my nose and walk into the collective unconsciousness than resort to that sort of bullshit whoops don’t tell your mom I said that.”
“It’s okay. Grandma says that sort of thing all the time.”
“Good for her,” said Tabitha. “Hey, what time does your mom get back?”
“Past seven if her shift runs late.”
“Cool. Want to make her dinner?”
“I’m not supposed to turn on the stove.”
“Yeah, but I can. How about cricket cakes? Everyone loves pancakes, your mom doesn’t want crickets in the basement anymore, win/win.”

***

Grace’s mom was flattered but didn’t enjoy the crickets very much. She said they probably would’ve tasted better if they hadn’t been living in the basement eating laundry soap.

On the weekend Grace sat with Tabitha on the floor of the living room and helped her sort through HELP WANTED and CLASSIFIEDS and JOB NOTICES print and online, local and afar.

“You don’t have a car, right?”
“Nope.”
“So why are we looking at jobs out of town?”
“If I have to move, I have to move,” said Tabitha, who was very slowly typing something on the family laptop and Grace’s mom’s phone at the same time and looking at neither. “You guys’ve been real nice to me, and I’d rather not stay on your couch forever. Nobody should have to deal with that.”
“I don’t mind,” said Grace, which was the truth. A few days into her relocation, Tabitha had lost the dusty smell associated with basements, but retained the oddly comforting mustiness of old books. It made the living room feel homey, and the (single) tall thin bookshelf seem fuller.

“Yeah, but you’ll want space eventually. Sooner or later you’ll grow up and be a teen and start bringing your dumb teen friends and your dumber teen crushes here and they’ll want to use the couch to vape at or make out on and then where will you be?”
“Gross. Do you want to be an elementary school janitor?”
“Isn’t that your school?”
“Yeah.”

“Can’t; conflict of interest due to you being a former client. And yeah, teens are gross. I know what I’m talking about. I was a teen for thirty years.”
“Some cicadas live underground for almost twenty years,” said Grace.

“Hey, that’s about how long I was in your basement.”
“How’d you do that?”
“Highest bidder.”
“Why’d you stop? Oh, do you want to be a security guard?”
“I’d fail the background check; part of being a basement monster is being formally categorized as a ‘nuisance animal.’ And I stopped because I ran out of savings.”
“Why’d you run out of savings?”
“The economy’s in the shitter whoops did it again.”

“It’s okay.” Grace tapped at the paper. “Do you want to be a dishwasher?”
“They don’t make hairnets big enough to let me in a kitchen.”

“You could wear a fishnet for fishing with. They’re big enough to hold whole schools of tuna.”
“Tempting, but no.”

“The tuna are endangered.”
“Same.”

***

Tabitha got a job doing data entry, and it lasted for two weeks before she was fired for slowness.

“It’s the claws,” she told Grace in the park that evening. “Typing is too damned hard with claws. I can either go slow or go fast and pull the keys out.”
“I didn’t know you could pull keys out of a keyboard.”
“I didn’t either until ’03 or so. I thought computers were a fad until around then.”

“Weird. Hey, can you help me come down?”
“The slide’d be faster.”
“I don’t like this slide. It’s gross in the middle.”
“Then why’d you climb it?”
“I wanted to be taller than you.”
“Job done. Climb backwards.”
“I can’t climb backwards.”
“Then climb upside down.”
“I can’t climb upside down.”
“I thought humans were supposed to be some kind of monkey? What kind of terrible monkey are you? Even I can climb upside down.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Sure. Watch.”
Nobody was hurt, and since the slide was gross they didn’t have to pay for it, but they never went back to that playground again.

***

Tabitha got a job doing construction work.

“Do you lift very big things?” asked Grace, who was being helpful by holding the laundry basket.
“I could, but no,” said Tabitha, who was holding the other laundry basket and the clean laundry and the dirty laundry because having three shoulders and four arms helped like that. “I’m the new guy, so mostly I hold the sign that says SLOW.”
“Why?”
“So the cars see us and go slow instead of running us over while we’re doing roadwork.”
“No, I mean, why do you have to hold the sign if you’re the new guy?”
“They want to make sure I can do something very simple before they ask me to do something hard.”
“Was being a basement monster hard?”
Tabitha considered this, or maybe the liquid soap. “Sort of? The job’s straightforward, but execution can be tricky. You were a pretty nervy kid, too. Never screamed once, so all I had to work with were breathing patterns and heart rates. It took me ages to figure out how to get the heeby-jeebies going inside your head without overusing whatever tricks I had. I think it was the ambiguous creaking that always got you most, right?”
“That creak that went like ‘eeeerrrrrruuunmk?”
“Yeah. Yeah! That took a lot of work.”
“It almost sounded like the house.”
“Of course it did. That’s why it was scary. Something’s always scariest if you don’t know what it is, and something that ALMOST seems like something else but isn’t is a good way to make people unsure of what something is.”
Grace considered this as the clean laundry entered the basket and overflowed the basket and buried her and the basket.
“Hey!”
“Whoops, my bad. Forgot you had little noodle arms.”
“I don’t!”
“Sure you do. Two little bitty noodles.”
The laundry fight that followed was intense, but briefs.

***

Tabitha was at home making dinner a week later when Grace came back from school again.

“Got laid off for picking up a backhoe,” she explained.

“Why’d you do that?”

“Some guy’s leg got stuck under it. Anyways his leg’s fine but I should’ve waited for the medic to be safe. But that wasn’t what got me fired: part of the backhoe fell off when I lifted it.”
“Which part?”
“I’m not really sure. I can’t even drive a car, why should I know what part of a backhoe does what? Hey, does your mom like worms? I got some good worms at work. Top notch worms. Anyone would be proud to eat those worms.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are you sure? She likes spaghetti.”
“Spaghetti is different.”
Tabitha sighed the sigh of someone with slightly more lungs than usual. “Sure, sure, sure, sure. Thanks, kid. More for me. Spaghetti then, though?”
“Sure sure sure sure.”
“Oh, go sure yourself. Where are the tea bags?”
“Mom likes coffee better.”
“Thanks. Where’s the coffee?”

***

Grace worked the laptop this time while Tabitha cleaned. “I can reach the high spots easier,” she explained, “and you can type without breaking the damned keyboard.”

“How about being a garbageman?” asked Grace.

“I’m allergic to plastic, and – more importantly – I can’t drive,” said Tabitha.

“You shouldn’t use the vacuum up high,” explained Grace. “It’s meant to stay on the floor.”
“I don’t see why not; I can pick it up just fine and your ceiling needed the cleaning. Hey, does your mom like spiders?”
“She likes that they eat other bugs.”
“They aren’t bugs.”
“Bugs is a colloquial word.”
“Very nice. Did you learn that in school today?”
“No, I read about it and asked mom. Hey, could you be an English teacher? Or a tutor?”
“You need certification, and even if you have it, you don’t get paid.”
“How about being an escort?” asked Grace.

Tabitha dropped the vacuum.

“Shit!”
“It’s okay!”
“Did it hit you?”

“No!”
“Okay, I’m taking the computer back. You’re looking at the wrong classifieds.”
“No I’m not!”

The following wrestling match would’ve gone wholly unremarked upon if it weren’t for the fact that Grace’s mom walked in the door just then, three hours early thanks to a major plumbing problem at work and twelve hours underslept.

“Oh,” she said. “Are you going to eat her?”
“She won’t be an escort!” said Grace. “And I’m NOT looking at the wrong classifieds!”

Grace’s mom nodded at this, walked into her bathroom, and cracked up.

***

“How about a nurse?”

“Needs school.”
“How about a doctor?”
“Needs school.”
“How about an elephant?”
“That isn’t even a job.”
“How about a painter?”
“Fur and paint don’t mix.”
“How about a housekeeper? Or a nanny?”
“Why would you assume I know anything about keeping, cleaning, or tending to a house?”
“You clean and you cook and you do the laundry and you take me out to the park and you buy groceries and you stopped trying to feed mom bugs when she asked you to even though you really really really want to?”

Tabitha was silent for a long, long time.

“And you’re making chocolate chip cookies for her right now,” added Grace.
“Thanks.”

“You should take them out of the oven in five minutes.”
“Thanks.
“You’re welcome.”

***

The first snowfall came down just as they finished the moving. Tabitha’s belongings were largely ambiguous nests of woven lint and cobwebs, held in fresh crisp cardboard boxes taken from a nearby liquor store.

“It was no trouble at all,” Grace’s mom was explaining. “And don’t hesitate to ask again if you need any help.”
“You put me up for two months and helped me move out; how could I ask for more?” said Tabitha.

“You own four boxes that weigh less than six pounds each.”
“And the couch,” said Grace.
“And the couch, but you moved that yourself.”
“I still can’t believe you got me to steal your couch.”
“You got more use out of it than we ever did.”
“I’ll buy you a new one.”
“If you buy me dinner.”
“How about if I make you dinner?”
“No bugs?”
“No bugs.”
“Are you going to get married?” asked Grace.

They looked at her.

“Because I don’t mind.”

They looked back at each other.

“Well, I didn’t want to do anything while you had to live at our place,” said Grace’s mom.

“And I didn’t want to do anything while I was costing you money,” said Tabitha.

“So is that yes?” asked Grace.

Tabitha and Grace’s mom did something weird with their faces a few times.

“Dunno,” said Tabitha.

“We’d need to think about it,” said Grace’s mom.

“Why?” demanded Grace.

“It’d be a damned big change, wouldn’t it?” said Tabitha.
“And mom told me that’s not always bad,” said Grace primly. “But if you do get married, please don’t kiss. That’s gross.”
“I’m biologically incapable of it,” said Tabitha.

And that was when Grace knew things had turned out just fine.

It’s another beautiful summer on this beautiful planet, and even after almost half a billion years somehow we all still aren’t tired of it. I know most of you are ready to get out there and ‘dive into things,’ as it were, but first we need to go over some crucial safety information to ensure your fun in the sun doesn’t turn dark: how to prevent human attacks.

First off, we’re going to explain what a human is – many of you may already think you know this, but the truth is, humans are widely misrepresented in our media. The public image of the human is a friendly, sociable creature that is largely hapless outside its curated environment and is totally useless when exposed to water. In reality, humans are mindless eating machines,, honed by evolution into a mindless swarm of omnivorous ape-locusts that will exterminate anything they encounter. They can’t swim – praise Cladoselache – but they love to play in shallow water, and even if you’re safely miles away from shore you might encounter one of their longlines, or their boats, or god knows what.

Some of you are thinking ‘gosh, that can’t be right; I have a friend who saw a human once and nothing bad happened to him, maybe all this is just overblown panic?’ I will remind you all that the plural of ‘anecdote’ is NOT ‘data,’ and the data do not in fact agree with your naivety: much fewer than a hundred humans a year are attacked unprovoked by sharks; the other way around, that number’s about thirty million. For your own safety and your own good you should stay the hell away from these things. The following will be some practical advice to help you do just that. Remember, preventing unwanted encounters with humans entirely is impossible, but by following these guidelines you will be able to reduce your chances of experiencing such an unpleasant surprise.

Firstly, observe all posted beach signs. If you see a beach with signs on it, who do you think put them there? Humans. Stay away from those places. Sometimes they even put signs up with pictures of sharks on them, just to fool you into thinking this is a nice place to hang out. This is a trap. Any sign on a beach is a warning and should be treated as such: don’t swim on beaches with signs.

Second, be careful when swimming at dusk and dawn. Everyone knows humans are diurnal, with terrible night vision and a pitiful count of other senses that verge on utter uselessness, so most of you think that dusk and dawn are safe times to go down to the beach. Wrong. Many humans are ‘early birds’ or ‘night owls’, and these para-avian freaks can be found in the water even when the sun’s barely detectable. I’m aware many of you are crepuscular by nature and habit, but for your own safety, I recommend absolute caution when approaching the shore during those hours, lest your daily foraging bite off far more than you can chew.

Matters of vision bring me to our third item, murky water is not safe water. It’s excellent to feed in, yes – low-visibility environments are wonderful tools for any elasmobranch with more tricks in your toolbox than just eyeballs – but it can also conceal the precise nature of what you’re trying to feed on. One moment you’re chasing a shoal of fish, the next moment you’ve smacked into the legs of some human wearing rubber pants and holding a fishing line. Restricted vision goes both ways.

Fourth, there’s one place in particular where murky water will be not just common but expected as a matter of course: avoid river mouths if you aren’t prepared to be hyperaware. Yes, this is a low blow: not only do rivers provide the tempting low-visibility ease-of-foraging we just covered, but they’re a rich source of nutrient outflow that lures little organisms which lure bigger organisms which lure bigger yet organisms, any and all of which are excellent eating. But you know who else uses rivers? Humans. A river is the ideal tool for an ape that can barely get itself to float; they just push their business into the water and let it sail downstream on its own. Humans and fresh water are like hammerheads and stingrays: they just can’t leave the damned things alone. Ask a bull shark. Fresh water means humans.

Speaking of humans doing their business and waste outlets, number five: beware sewage discharge outlets. They’re wonderful little things – like little compressed rivers, injecting vast quantities of filth and debris that are fed on by little things that are fed on by bigger things that we can then eat – but they’re too good to be true: it is a matter of confirmed scientific fact (not speculation, not allegation, cold hard fact) that sewage discharge outlets are made by humans. That’s right. Sewers are made by humans, for humans, and they are tended by humans. If you don’t want to encounter humans, stay away from sewage outlets.

Now, if you’ve followed all of the above advice, you may think that you’re safe. No. You aren’t. Even if they aren’t hiding, a human in plain sight has many tricks to fool the unsuspecting into coming close enough to be enmeshed in its opposable grip. Number six: not all that shines is scales. Bright, clean sunlight can make a fish shine in the water, but it can also lend glitter to all many of human gewgaws, gadgets, and flibbertigibbets that they inexplicable entangle themselves in. ‘Watches.’ ‘Jewelry.’ The meaning behind these objects is greatly obscured, but their effects are stone cold clear: with a bit of sunshine, they can sparkle like any clean healthy fish scale, luring you in for lunch and giving you nothing but a mouthful of betrayal and regret. Don’t rely on your eyes alone to tell you what’s food, and don’t be hasty!

Regrettably, no sooner have we warned you of your eyes than we must also caution you against several of your other senses – seventh, be careful when investigating splashing. Yes, most every time in your life you follow the sensation and the sound of struggling, flailing, uncoordinated writhing life in the water it will lead you to nothing more harmful than a nice snack. But if you’re doing it nearshore – and ESPECIALLY near a beach – be warned: there’s nothing less elegant or coordinated than a human in the water except two humans in the water. I know we just cautioned you against them, but use your eyes to confirm: is this really a flailing fish, or is it a thrashing human?

We’re moving towards the end of our lecture, but there’s a connected problem here that we haven’t brought up yet: number eight: human-associated animals; nonhuman lifeforms whose presence may signpost their presence. Most prominent in this are canines, the so-called ‘dogs’ you may have heard described as being sort of like sea lions with defective flippers. Like humans, they are terrible swimmers, producing incredible amounts of splashing and noise. Unlike humans, they aren’t dangerous in and of themselves. But they are almost universally encountered WITH humans, and if you think you’re doing nothing more dangerous than investigating some odd shaggy thing that might be edible? That’s when you’ll encounter a human when you least suspect it. Stay away from canines.

There is one more animal you may unexpectedly find in the company of humans, and it’s one you already know: dolphins. Yes, as unimaginable as it may be, humans may willingly seek out the company of dolphins, without apparent coercion. ‘Well, who cares?’ I can see you thinking. ‘I would never go near dolphins anyways!’ That’s what you think. Say you’re out cruising near the surface and you find a nice big fish shoal, big enough for everyone to get some. It’s you, a few swordfish, a half-dozen of your peers…. and a small pod of dolphins. Do you run? No, there’s plenty for everyone so long as you keep a weather eye out for danger. Right? Right. But sometimes – and megalodon herself could not tell us why – the danger can come unexpectedly, in the form of humans hopping right into the shoal to consort with the horrible creatures. So that’s number nine: be careful when feeding with dolphins, and not just careful of the dolphins themselves.

We’re about to wrap up, but first one final, tenth piece of advice, which is principally for any Carcharodon in our audience today: examine any oddly-shaped seal you see motionless at the surface of the water very carefully. Sometimes that’s a human lying on a plank with its arms and legs dangling off the sides. We don’t know why they do it, sometimes they just do it, remember it, identify it, avoid it. And we have it on reliable record that besides the danger involved, they taste awful.

Be safe, be careful, and remember: they’re way, way, WAY more scared of you than you’re scared of them.

That’s why they’re so dangerous.

Five AM, and too damned dark even on daylight savings time. A bad breakfast in the stomach and a worse coffee in your hand. Red eyes and a brain that’s happy to be here because it means you didn’t have time left to think about life at home or life at all. Ears full of roaring, wheezing, groaning machines and in the distance that one long whining call of Jerry getting his arm extracted from an industrial icing extruder again. There’s ten thousand dollars’-worth of Granny-Style #14 (choc. ic.) in the back of your truck and an emptiness inside your stomach.

Another shift at the local cake depot.

***

The foundational deliveries are what start the day, of course. The places that can’t go without cake – your hospitals, city halls, megastores, and port authorities, all of whom take a lot of the fast-spoiling stuff like parfaits in addition to their monthly emergency stock lay-in of things like Pound (0-ic.). Later in the day you’ll hit up secondary high-flow areas like nursing homes, malls, and apartment complexes with more traditional mainstays like Baker’s Choc (choc. ic). In the evening you’ll go by the schools and offload some of the extra byproduct from the day’s travels; the stuff that got crimped by a forklift or smeared against the walls or smushed in a corner.

There are bills being considered to prohibit schools getting discounted cake. That’s cake that could go to retirees.

So your morning’s a lot of driving and a lot of signing delivery forms and a bit of sitting there and nodding and listening to someone telling you a long list of problems that you can’t help them with and aren’t interested in until they let you get a word in edgewise and that word is ‘talk to your boss’ and they won’t do that.

Makes you want to smash a pie into their faces. Can’t do that. Pies were trimmed out in the cutback frenzies of the ‘80s. If you want pie you’ll have to provide your own materials and labour, and you don’t have any time for that. You’re working on depot time, doing the depot tour, keeping the cake coming and breaking yourself down one vertebrae, one neuron, one nodding-along at a time.

You don’t deserve a medal for your service but you probably deserve one for not punching anyone while executing it.

***

Lunch is consumed in a greasy little box you set up yesterday if you had the energy; in a roadside box with a big bright logo on it if you didn’t. You didn’t, and you usually don’t. It’s thirty minutes long and you make sure to make those minutes last without running into that terrible, terrible moment where you have nothing to do but sit and watch the clock move and feel that aching hollow inside you get bigger and bigger, a void that no cake will fill.

When that happens you usually go to the truck and take a slice of Pineapple Upside-Down (Glz) and mark it down as spillage incurred at your least-favourite dropoff site (it’s a Walmart, it’s always a Walmart). It still doesn’t fill the void but it DOES quiet it down a bit.

***

When the deliveries are all done and the forms are all filled and that little ache in your spine is getting worse and worse and the sunlight is fading and the dark is getting too much to bear you return to your depot and hand over all your papers and you start the hardest part of the day, which is the small talk.

You are working hard, unless you’re hardly working. The coffee is bad, but at least it’s free. Hey, did you hear that Jerry got his arm stuck in a cake extruder and spoiled an entire batch of Boxed Vanilla (van. ic.)? Only the sixteenth time this month. How’s your day going? How ya been? How ya doin’?

The trick is to grunt a lot and say ‘can’t complain, nobody’ll listen’ and then grunt a lot more. And then the hard part’s over, and it’s almost time for you to be almost ready to get almost ready to go home.

***

Got to do the materials checklist before the night shift starts up, to make sure everything’s set for the midnight runs – the cake that moves out under cover of darkness, to go to places where cakes shouldn’t be noticed. Devil’s Food (ex. choc. ic.) and other even deadlier secrets. And of course beyond those there’s the emergency standby crews, forever ready to pounce the moment a fire breaks out or a kid falls through the ice or a shooting happens and there’s an urgent need for a rapid-response truck with one ton of pre-sliced Sturdy Pound (van. ic.) ten minutes ago. You’ve never driven one and you’ve never wanted to because frankly you already spend too much of your life drinking coffee and talking about coffee and wanting coffee and one more hour of that injected into your daily cycle might make you die from abstract causes. And you don’t like Sturdy Pound with icing; you’ll only eat it plain.

Once the materials checklist is done, there’s just the safety checklist (with its persistent entry on Jerry), and the cleaning checklist, and the sign-out sheet, and the office secret santa signup sheet, and that one form you forgot to sign this morning that you’re technically violating the law by signing in the evening but that’s the easiest way to deal with the whole thing as long as you never ever tell anyone that you did it, since then they’d have to either admit they do it too or get you arrested and fired in that order.

***

After that you leave, realize you forgot your wallet, go back, and leave again.

Then you can go home.

Just another day at the local cake depot. A hard day, a long day, a grinding day, an essential day.

Nobody ever said it’d be a piece of cake.

It was five in the morning and Roggles had gone to bed just two hours prior when the first knock – a polite, solid, firm, socially-acceptable-yet-unshy knock – came at the door. ‘You can rest when you’re dead,” her master had told her the previous day; and indeed, almost every day.

This was something that Roggles conceded may have been true, but was still too damned on-the-nose for a coffin-maker to say.

The second knock arrived as she hobbled her way to the workshop door, and was exactly as unyieldingly businesslike as the first. She opened it and came face to face with the most authoritative knuckles she’d ever seen, on the most dutiful arms she’d ever known, attached to the most boring man she’d ever met.

“Greetings, salutations, and obeisance to your renowned and beloved master, the coffin-maker Uul,” proclaim the boring man in a voice so controlled and competent that Roggles nearly fell asleep again on the spot. “I come on behalf of my own master, whose name may in fact be known to you, whose time of departure from this world draws nigh, whose title demands respect: the Princess C-I. She would like to commission a coffin fit to stand among her ancestors in their burial city and command the respect and admiration that she is due from her peers of the past, and she would like it done by tomorrow morning, lest it be late for her death. If you should deliver this commission on time, riches shall be yours.”

Roggles looked at him and felt whole universes of thought and motion slide like glass sheets across her mind, obscuring every inch of him for beautiful amounts of time that had no name.

“Sure,” she said. “Thanks. Great. It would be my master’s happiness. Pleasure. Yes. Thanks.”
So perfected was the messenger that this was accepted with a slight and completely-sincere nod, and commission thus delivered, he departed and left Roggles standing there with several multi-faceted concepts floating in her head.

“Bed,” she decided. “No. Bed, then Uul. No no no, Uul then bed. Yes.”

“Is this the workplace of the coffin-maker Uul?” asked someone four inches away from her face.

“Yes,” said Roggles’s mouth while the rest of her disentangled itself from the burning wreckage of her brain. Her eyes reported back first: there was a warrior in front of her; unnecessarily large and unnecessarily filthy and openly wearing at least six different weapons in town, all of which were suspiciously well-cared-for and worn. She was picking her teeth with a sliver of bone.

“Good. Open up your ears and listen carefully: Caul, the bandit-lord, just died. Little Caul wants a box for his dad, a respectable one. Get it done by tomorrow and we don’t come back and cut your ears and noses off. Got it?”

“Yes,” said Roggles’s mouth, now guided by her survival instinct while the rest of her brain organized a riot.

“Good. Remember: tomorrow night, ears and noses. See you soon.”

And then she finished picking her teeth, flicked the bone-sliver into Roggles’s eye, and left.

“Aaaugh,” said Roggles.

“Pardon me, but do you think you could do me a favour?” asked a very small and washed-out man. His face looked like old clothes.

“Urgh,” said Roggles.

“It’s just that I need a coffin.”
“By tomorrow, right?” managed Roggles, rubbing at her streaming eye. “Why not. Everyone else does. What’s the big rush?”
“I am cold and miserable and alone and have nowhere to go or be or do, and I would like to not leave my remains in a mess for someone else to tidy up,” said the man. “I’m sorry to say this, but I cannot pay you.”

Roggles’s brain froze, her mouth tried to apologize, and her conscience jammed them both, resulting in a blank stare fit to age milk. Luckily the overwhelming awkwardness of the moment caused her back to seize up in such a way that made her chin nod, and so reassured, the man went on his way.

***

“Quite a racket out there this morning,” said Uul as she and roggles took their morning hot drinks. Uul sipped sparingly. Uul did everything sparingly. Uul was less extravagant than most people’s skeletons. “Have we work to do?”

“Yes,” said Roggles. “Little Caul wants us to make a coffin for his father by tomorrow or he’ll cut off our ears and noses.”
“Mmm,” said Uul. She took another sip. “Was there more? I heard more than one visitor.”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“Enough is when you’ve done everything you can.”
“Princess C-I is dying. She wants the most opulent coffin you can imagine by tomorrow so she can show off to her dead relatives in their dead city.”

“Please be quiet when you’re treasonous,” said Uul, carefully adding a single pinch of aromatic pollen to her mug. “Well. That’s quite a set of commissions.”
“There’s one more.”
“Really? I didn’t hear anything.”
“The quiet little man from down the way is going to die and wants a coffin by tomorrow. He said he didn’t want to make a mess for anyone.”

Uul put down her mug.

“Then that is what we will do first,” she said.
“He can’t pay,” Roggles said.
“Oh, we all do that eventually. He just doesn’t have any money, and that’s less important. Now bring me my tools.”

***

The small man’s coffin was made from the same timber that was set aside for the Princess and the bandit-lord. Uul was very specific about that.

“The outside may show what it pleases,” she said, “but the essence must be the same. You know this by now.”

The outside in question was kept modest. In the end, the coffin was perfectly measured, perfectly trimmed, and perfectly unadorned and undecorated. It was a coffin, absolutely nothing less and infinitely nothing more.

“Good,” said Uul, whose sleeves had begun the day rolled-up and had someone migrated farther north from there. “Now that the hard one’s over, we can do the simple things. The Princess wanted luxury, yes? Open the safe and bring me everything that’s inside it. The big one in the basement that’s sealed into the wall.”

Roggles did this and in the deep dank dark and crumbled, mildewing brick of the basement was confronted with enough wealth to blind a less groggy human. So overwhelmed was she by the luxury of the jewels and the precious metals on display that the notion of stealing any of them didn’t enter her head until half the day had passed and she was just fitting the last of the cut diamonds into a beautiful spiralling pattern in the center of the enormous coffin’s lid that had been fashioned to reflect the light of the setting sun in such a way – when combined with the gold inlay – as to make it seem aflame with inner light.

“You know, I could have stolen one of these – just one, a very small one – and left,” she said aloud, because the hot drinks had been a very long time ago and the line between dreams and reality was getting fuzzy again.

“Yes, but you wouldn’t,” said Uul. “And besides, you’d miss out on the fun part: now we’re going to build the coffin of Caul.”

This caused Roggles to remember her ears and nose, and she was at once more awake than she’d been in years.

“The thing about this coffin,” said Uul, “is that it must contain burial wealth. A bandit-lord left destitute in death will never bribe his way past the walls of forever, and a bandit-lord without a very secure coffin is a bandit-lord that will be left destitute in death in very, very short order. We will build it thick, and we will build it strong, and we will build it to be as greedy and grasping as Caul himself.”

And so they did; constructing a mighty and sturdy frame that was nigh-impermeable to blade, blow, or burning, and inside that frame Uul did things with wood and metal that turned the entire thing into a giant finger-trap that would accept a single big, bulky band-lord body eagerly into its depths but would never permit it – or its gilded wealth – to leave again.

“Now, I think that’s a good day’s work,” said Uul, stretching her arms out with an alarming series of pops snaps and crackles. “I’m going to bed. You know I’m a little slow-footed, so would you be kind and answer the door when the callers come? It’d be a shame to lose our ears and noses after we did such fine work to preserve them.” And of course Roggles didn’t say no, being an apprentice, and so she went to bed with a brain made of fizzing nerves and a soul made of lunk-lead-weariness and an honour guard of three carefully-shrouded coffins.

The last, at least, did not bother her. She’d met plenty of those, and slept as peacefully among them as a babe in a basket until someone hammered on the door less than a half-second after she’d finally begun to rest.

“AWAKE,” shouted a large voice, as a large boot kicked the door. “Caul’s getting cold and Little Caul’s getting impatient. You got the damned body-box yet?”

“Yes,” said Roggles as she surged upright and fell over and scrabbled and got up and almost fell over and caught herself on a coffin and staggered to the door and opened it and said ‘yes’ sixteen more times. “Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.”

“You’re hilarious,” said the warrior, who’d brought a small and obnoxious pony and two slightly dirtier warriors and a sturdy cart to carry the load. “That plus the box ears you your nose and ears back, lucky girl! See you next time.”
And with this cheerful threat Roggles was left standing in the doorway with a bladder full of melting icewater and a heart in her throat and a great and incredible amount of relief pouring out of her skull and running over her shoulders like liquid sunshine.

“Pardon me,” said a very small voice at her elbow, one million miles away, “but did you manage to spare a coffin for me? Even a very old or broken one would do.”
“Yes,” said Roggles beatifically. “Yes we did. Do you have, uh, anyone else to –”

“Oh no,” said the quiet small man, who had brought only an old half-broken wheelbarrow that groaned under the coffin’s weight like a dying cow. “No, no. Nobody at all.”

And he left, and with him left Roggles’s good mood, and so it was with a pensive and solemn and vaguely furrowed face that she was discovered by the officers and ministers of Princess C-I, which they complimented her for greatly.

“It is an expression worthy of a coffin-maker,” the under-official’s assistant conveyed to her as he handed over a little box containing some slips of waxed paper that were more valuable than every bit of wealth that had gone aboard the coffin itself. “Keep that up and more people will come to you than your master, someday. Uul’s craft is admirable, but her manner is light.”
“Thanks,” said Roggles, and so tired was she that she managed not to laugh while she said it, and it made her bow exceptionally deep besides. This raised her esteem in their eyes and in her own, so when Uul finally made it downstairs she found Roggles and their hot drinks in an unusually content mood for being barely-alive.

“Payment’s here,” she said, passing the exquisite little casket and its priceless cargo to her master.

“Oh, it can go downstairs later; I’m not sure I’d trust either of us on that staircase right now. I overheard our visitors, but not much of what they said in specific; I take it there were no problems?”

“No problems at all,” said Roggles, mouth full of warm brew and mind full of beautiful, slothful clouds. “One-two-three, out the door. Right in a row.”
“Two-one-three,” corrected Uul. “We lined them up at the door in order of size from smallest to largest, remember?”

“Oh fuck,” said Roggles’s mouth. Then her brain, which was a bit slower on the uptake, threw up.

***

They took the rest of the day off – or at least Roggles did, at Uul’s urging. She was no use with the shakes and she needed the rest, or so she was told.

So she slept by the doorway in her cot and slept well and truly and infinitely until she was woken in the evening by cheering and yelling and someone playing an instrument very badly and then someone stuck their head in the door and yelled “CAUL IS DEAD!” directly into her ear, to which she reacted with incredibly politeness.

“Mmmnrfuck!”
“CAUL IS DEAD!” the visitor – who was the local street-meat-maker, she hazily recognized – called again into her face. “AND HIS HEIRS, TOO! HIS COFFIN WAS SO AFLOAT WITH GOLD AND GEMS THAT HIS MEN FOUGHT ONE ANOTHER TO THE DEATH OVER IT, AND THE FEW SURVIVORS TOOK WHAT THEY COULD AND FLED! CAUL IS DEAD AND GONE, HOORAY!” And having said this he threw a meat pastry onto Roggles’s lap and left to yell at someone else.

Roggles tried to comprehend the significance of this and gave up to focus on pastry. This brought her meager success until the door opened a crack and hit her toe.

“SFHGIT!”

“Pardon the intrusion,” said the under-official’s assistant, a bit louder than he’d been that morning due to the necessity of speaking over a small war’s-worth of celebration, “but I come bearing word of Departed Princess C-I’s estate, by commission of Princess C-U.” And so saying so, he produced a small box, identical to the one Roggles had received that morning, and bowed with incredibly depth and skill, managing to tip himself almost but not quite to the point of simply falling over. “No other tomb in all the burial city boasts a work of craft as perfected as her coffin; in lacking adornment, it has granted her dignity that sets it apart from her peers past and present. There will be no mistaking her resting place for any other, nor can it be outshone by splendour, nor can it be matched in craftsmanship. Please take this paltry reward, and with it the gratitude and esteem of the Departed Princess’s estate.”

And having made this speech and having made note of Roggles’s state of comprehension and having been possessed of ears in the vicinity of the ongoing festivities, the under-official’s assistant made himself very scarce as quickly as was politely possible.

Roggles sat at the door and stared. Then she finished her meat pastry, because that was about what she could manage right now.

“Oh lovely,” said Uul, who was sneakily quiet even when she wasn’t trying to be. “Did you get a second one?”
“No,” said Roggles, emerging from somewhere deep inside herself to feel like a heel.

“Ah, that’s alright, that’s alright. Accept the treats life hands you, don’t go complaining they weren’t big enough. I take it things have worked out?”
“Somehow. Mostly. Probably?”
“Excuse me,” said a very small voice from the doorway – which the under-official’s assistant had neglected, perhaps, to close quite as diligently as he might have. “But might I have a moment of your attention, if it’s no trouble please?”

The quiet man was there.

“What can I do for you?” said Uul.

“Well,” said the small quiet man, “I regret to say that I must return your coffin.”
“Oh damn. Was it not good enough?”
“Oh no no no! Far from it! It was beautiful. Is beautiful. I’ve brought it back, if you can reclaim it. The thing is, it was too kind. I took it and myself out to a lonely place where I wouldn’t be any trouble to anyone, and I dug a small grave, and I put the coffin in the grave, and I put myself in it, and that coffin gave me the snuggest, gentlest hug I’ve ever felt since my mother passed, and it moved me to tears and made me think of the love that can be given freely even to strangers by a person of sufficient kindness. And so I have come to ask, O Uul, master-maker of coffins, if you might perhaps have the time and space to spare to train an apprentice.”

Roggles felt as though the world had very carefully moved away from under her feet and left her standing above a tiny but infinitely deep hole whose contents were entirely unknown to her.

“You know,” said Uul thoughtfully. “I believe I don’t, for I already have a very fine apprentice here who – just now – taught me a few things either of us ever considered about customer satisfaction. But small spaces to spare are part of the coffin-maker’s trade, and as for time… well, as I have said before, I can rest when I’m dead. I already can’t manage myself, let alone one apprentice; why not two? Roggles, go get us something warm from the market. More filling than fancy, please – and more grease than grace. It’s been a long day.”

***

It wasn’t until they were done eating that Roggles realized that every piece of living space she occupied was now cut in half. But it had been a long day, so that didn’t matter.

Can you keep a secret? Look, look down here, look under this little loose board. Yes, at the back of the closet, under the old photo album box.

It’s where I keep all my magic tricks. Let me show them to you.

See, I have a weighted coin – a little weight, but where it helps. And a deck of cards that will let you hold them all, even when it looks like you don’t. And some tricky dice, and some handkerchiefs, and a little marble that used to be the eye of a great-great-great-grandmother worm. Don’t put it in your mouth; too much wisdom is deadly poisonous. Curse and cure is all in the dose and all that! If you put it down and watch it’ll follow you around the room.

Here is a hat. It looks ordinary, but there’s a little fold here and a little tuck there and with the right placement you can pull a rabbit or a dove or a ribbon from it out of nowhere. Here’s a sword you can swallow. And here’s a sword you shouldn’t swallow, because it’s cursed; its bearer can never die. Trust me, there’s so many ways for that to go wrong you don’t even want to start listing them.

Oh no, there’s much more, you need to keep digging. It’s a deeper box than it looks. Sturdy too. They don’t make them like this anymore – profit margins. An algorithm objected to it.

Here is a box inside the box; it’s full of jewels. These here are costume jewelry made from glass; and these here are costume jewelry made from non-precious minerals; and these here are faerie gems that will melt into dew if you bring them out under the light of a new dawn. You can use these to make someone’s wedding ring disappear and then destroy it in front of them and then return it.

This is a magician’s coat; which is just fancy enough to look impressive at a crowd’s-distance and just scruffy enough to hide all the extra pockets as slight fraying. This is a magician’s ring, which is made from cold-forged iron and can hold any one demon of moderate size as long as you aren’t damn-fool enough to release it. This is a magician’s wand; it’s made from plain scrap wood and a bit of varnish to make it glisten in the light. It does absolutely nothing but moving it around directs the audience’s attention, which is what all magic tricks rely on.

Those are gloves. You don’t need those for most shows, but putting them on is one more thing to get people’s attention and give you something to do while you stall for time, like if you need to wait while your assistant moves a rabbit or a dove around or for the odour of the hemlock you crushed under your heel inside your shoe to drive away the Hidden Folk that were making a plate levitate. Speaking of which, this is a little bag of dried hemlock. Don’t eat it because it will kill you. Stop fussing and keep listening; isn’t this all fun?

This little velvet bag is where I keep my small mirror. This big velvet bag is where I keep my large mirror. You DO NOT want them scratched or harmed; there are so many things that you can do with a perfect reflection that most people have no idea of. Make strings vanish; make ghosts appear; stand between two of them on a moonless night and converse with your truest shadow – the sky’s the limit and that’s no limit at all. And that’s not even getting into what you can pull off if you get into concaves and convexes

And over here, in this little lead-lined box, is my smoke. The little round balls are smoke bombs to confuse and conceal; the little slim sticks are incense to convoke and clarify; the rugged chunk of melted carbon is a piece of a coal forest that pre-dates bacteria that can consume lignin in plant matter, and if you ever expose it to an electrical current it will unleash a three-hundred-and-thirty-million-year-old wildfire that can devour a continent. So that’s only for emergencies.

This egg carton contains the eggs. Turkey, chicken, quail, hummingbird, tiny insubstantial and ineffable forest being, in descending order of size. If you crack them open just right they make doves come out; if you crack them open just wrong they make a mess; if you crack them open just wrong but just right they say things. If you do that, use the sealing wax in this tube to clog your ears the moment your lips start to feel numb. Nothing good comes from hearing too many might-have-been words.

Pay attention. I’ve told you before, you’ve got to pay attention. I won’t say it again; if you keep bugging me I’ll put the box away and you’ll never get to see it again.

See? Look. Look at this wonderful little collection of locks. You can use them with this chain to restrain yourself with a volunteer (a friend) and then you just twist them here and here and there and there and you’re free again, without anyone knowing differently. And here’s a lockpick, for when you need to do it the ugly way when nobody’s looking. And here’s a second chain, for when you’re chaining something you’ve called up that needs to not go back down again. And here’s a second lockpick, for when you’ve paid a price too dear and need to void whatever bargain you’ve made.

These are balloons if you’d like to make balloon animals.

A bottle, unlabeled – good if your memory is (and you hate prying peeping toms); bad if it isn’t. This one is stage blood, which is important if you need to disgust someone enough that they don’t look too closely. A dribble inside a hollow needle, and it pierces ‘through your arm;’ a dab on a sword and it ‘slices off your fingers;’ a razor that can be ‘swallowed’ and coughed up again. And this other bottle is real blood, and THIS one is unreal blood.

This triplet of coconut shells is your best friend. Combine them with some pebbles or coins or anything, anything at all, and you have the most fundamental in slight-of-hand. An amount of something under one, spin the shells about, and look how they change! Magic, pure magic, is about doing things where someone isn’t looking.

That isn’t a coconut shell; that’s a hermit-crab’s shell, and yes, it was someone’s skull. The crab learned a lot from him and if you ask it politely it will share answers. Bring it little bits of dead fish. It like those. You want it to like you. Trust me.

Stop whining. This is important. If you quit now it’s all for nothing. Look. Look in the box. Now.

Under the newspapers from the 1920s that can rearrange their headlines to predict today’s show…

Under the sleeping rabbits that don’t breathe or dream…

Under the black weighted tablecloth that conceals everything beneath it…

Under the SECOND deck of cards – which you can never hold all of, and nobody ever has…
Under the little bent flap of the box that’s gone a bit dogeared….
Under the bag of doves….

Under the coil of stage wires, so thin that no light makes them visible…

Under the bag holding the four winds…

Underneath my last assistant…

And atop the bare scuffed brown cardboard of the box’s bottom.

Here.

Yes, there.
Here’s your place. Alright?

Alright.

Yes, I think you’re ready.

Climb in and I’ll shut the lid.

And you won’t speak of this later, will you? That’s important. A good magician never lets anyone know how the magic works.

Simon sat down in his office and moved paperwork with his hands and a putter with his mind. The shot was perfect and immaculate and he could just about see the ball go PLUNK if it weren’t for these damned files in his hands plotting out the green green green grass. That, and the distant bitching of the morons one hole behind him, who were clearly impatient because they were too impatient to take their damned time and ENJOY themselves enough to do the job properly.

“Doctor?”
Ah, the bitching hadn’t been from inside his head. Dr. Simon Crabb opened his eyes and looked upon the tremulous, milky-pasty face of his patient, his responsibility, his charge, and sighed deeply.

“Yes?”
“What is it?”
Simon gazed dispiritedly upon his files. How to go about fitting so much information inside such a small head? Then a thought struck him, and so jarring was the blow that it escaped through his mouth before he had time to consider it further: “you have scabies,” he said, and no more.
“I’m sorry?”
“Scabies.”
“What abo-”
“You have scabies. Go home and drink some orange juice or whatever and they’ll be gone by Monday. Talk to the nurse about it.” And he picked up the paperwork again and began to shuffle it with such determination and focus that he was soon left alone with his thoughts and his thoughts were left alone with his 4-iron.

***

The odd brilliance that seemed to have suffused Simon since the gentle prodding of his fairway muse did not desert him. As each patient entered the office, he had but to consider their stupid, vacant, cowlike faces and then turn his mind to finer things like wedges, woods, and links and – quite without his input or design – the most miraculously conclusions would leap forth from his mouth, each scrupulously-crafted to remove the patient’s presence from his domain immediately.

“You have liverwort,” he informed a teenager sternly. “Stop eating so much liver.”
“Bu-”

“Next! You, what are you even here for?”
“My –”

“You have false pregnancy. Next!”

“Wha-”

“Is that supposed to be necrotizing fasciitis? You were misdiagnosed, it’s just wrinkles. Perfectly normal age related issue. Next”

“Hello, Simon!”
“Hell?” managed Simon, whose brain suddenly had to sprint several kilometers to catch up with his mouth. “Reggie?”
“Yes indeedie!” chirped Reggie. “Just a little checkup before the fairway, you know how it is ahahaha. Lovely day today, the club’ll be PACKED this afternoon I reckon ahahahaha. See you there?”
Simon’s mind had dropped into a very dark and deep place, full of inane chatter spoiling his shot, and so it was without the intervention nor instruction of conscious thought that his mouth opened and said “I’m afraid not, Reg.”
“Oh?”
“You have gigaherpes. You’ll need to stay indoors for the next three days and avoid all contact with grass or you’ll explode.”
“Oh NO!”
“Yes, terrible timing. You’d better send in the other club members right away; it’s highly transmissible.”
“But I haven’t been to the club since last Sunday!”
“It’s a retrovirus,” said Simon’s id, “it can spread retroactively. Call them right now and confess or I’ll do it for you. My ethics as a practitioner demand it.”
“Oh dear,” said Reggie, pulling out his phone with shaking hands. “But what about you, poor Simon, and the rest of the clinic?”
“I’m immune. But you’re right about the clinic – I’ll cancel the rest of the day’s appointments. It’s too dangerous for them right now.” Simon stood and grabbed his jacket. “Well, nice seeing you, Reggie. Be sure to make those calls and tell them not to leave the house for the next week.”
“Weren’t you going to?”
“It’s a retrovirus, remember? I retroactively diagnosed it. Keep up.” Simon strode confidently from the office, haltingly only briefly as a groaning man on a stretcher blocked the doorway.

“Doctor, if you would –” began the nurse.

“Yes, yes, yes” sighed Simon. He bent over and inspected the patient. “Perfectly healthy, just hypochondria, send her home,” he announced.

“Bu-”

“She’s a shark, Jessie. Sharks are healthy animals. Just detach her from this bozo, send her home, bill her later. I’ve got to go. See you next Monday.”

And he was gone.

***

Gone to the green.

Simon stood on the middle of the greenway at hole 3 of the Bunder’s Scupp course, gloriously, truly, beautifully alone. Every sign of life was gone; no clouds spoiled the blue sk; no nagging voices spoiled the silence; nothing was there but he, his voice, and the green, glossy grain of the grass.

He swung, and it hit or missed and it didn’t matter because the score was his alone to tally and the numbers didn’t matter and rules weren’t real. He laughed and sang and swung and chortled and coughed and tapped and wheezed and lunged and staggered and felt a lot of his arm stab him with violent pain all at once.

“My imagination,” said his mouth as he fell over, “nothing more.” And because he wished it to be so he trusted in it, and as the green turned grey and the cropped blades began to fuzz he knew very confidently that he was just going to take a quick nap now and get right back to the game.

On a particularly normal day on the planet Earth in an average sort of month at a perfectly meaningless hour, a message arrived.

It came on wavelengths of light and radio and other things; it was registered in telescopes and satellite transmission; it was about nineteen seconds long and it was very complicated and then it stopped.

It also had arrived from Tau Ceti. Probably.

***

There were Concerns.

Some were excited about the message, believing it was a sign that not only life existed elsewhere, but it wanted to make friends. Some were skeptical, believing it was some sort of meaningless nonsense. Some were paranoid and believed it had been done by other humans as part of a nefarious plot that explained the sixteen other nefarious plots they already believed other humans were masterminding. Some were a little TOO excited, believing it was a sign from someone to do something. And most of them were a few of the above mushed together in one way or another.

This led to arguments which led to escalation which led to death which led to more arguments but louder and hoarser. Explosives became involved.

Meanwhile, some small groups of people, in varying degrees of secrecy and isolation, worked on the message. Was it a warning? Was it a threat? Was it a welcome? Was it a secret? Was it a gift? Was it a puzzle? Was it abstract, obtuse, and convoluted or simple, straightforward, and direct? Computers were designed and applied; codebreakers and mathematicians and linguistics experts were grouped and employed; occasionally someone was killed with high-speed explosives by someone else, and the world, with increasing erraticism, spun on.

Then the second message arrived. It was half as long as the first, and had half as many characters, and halfway through receiving it someone launched a nuclear missile, which caused other things to happen.

***

While the first sets of missiles were in the air, one of the earlier teams managed to crack the first, more structured message. It was a plea for assistance from someone, anyone, since the sender’s society had torn itself to shreds from pre-existing internal divisions while trying to decipher an inexplicable message they’d received from space, and they were placing themselves at the mercy of any potential recipients, whom they hoped would be wise and benevolent.

The second message was a useless assemblage of symbols, such as might be created by something or someone falling over on top of an input device.

***

The code team decided not to bother retranslating the message into earthly languages before rebroadcasting it. It would’ve taken time they didn’t have, and after all, this one had already proven itself to be decipherable at least once.

I like it out here. It’s hard work because Uncle won’t take a turn at the oars, and he won’t load the cargo, and he won’t unload the cargo, and he smacks me on the back of the head if I’m slow.

But I like it out here anyways. The night so dark it blends into the sea and the land and it looks like if I wanted to I could row the dinghy everywhere from anywhere. Of course that makes steering a little tricky but that’s what Uncle does since he doesn’t let me touch the spyglass.

“Port,” he whispered and I shifted port.

Hard to see the monaskerry this time of night, but hard to see us too. That’s what made the trade work. Lot of hungry, hungry initiates out there learning wisdom and aestheticism and how one could sup on seafoam for supper and salt air for breakfast in time and such and so on. And there was a lot of real nice folks in town that could make the most wonderful whelk chowder, or berry jams, or candied salmon. And right in between them there was me, my uncle, and his dinghy.

The dinghy isn’t special, mind you – it’s us. Nobody else in town goes out at night. Scared of the nefarious squid, I think. I’m not sure why; it’s not like they can climb onto the boat or anything, and we’re going swimming. Uncle says it’s superstitious bullshit.

“Starboard,” whispered Uncle, and I shifted starboard.

It was nice, in a weird way, to do this. To fall inside my own muscles and my own heart and lungs and just listen to myself and forget about what I was doing. The oars barely existed in my palms except as textures. The soreness in my butt was divorced from the existence of the bench. I couldn’t even smell the warm cooked herbs leaking gently from the casque under my feet.

“Fuck,” hissed Uncle, “too loud,” which was weird because I was sure I hadn’t made a ripple. But he was already swearing and tugging at lines so I got up from the oars and started fumbling at the ties and dumping the cargo overboard one basket and barrel and bag at a time. Each weighted with a little stone for ballast, nature’s anchor, plish plash. “Fuck. FUCK,” he whisper-shouted into my ears. “Not so loud!”

I slowed down.
“Not so slow!”

I sped up.

“Not so loud!”

“Hoy there,” said a patch of the gloom as it lurked above us. “Is there something wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” said Uncle. “We’re fishing.”
“Funny time to be fishing,” said another voice from above a murky railway, above a towering old pile of timber and barnacle, above the water. “And for the third night this week.”
“We need the money,” said Uncle and this wasn’t actually a lie for once. Uncle wasn’t as good at cards as he thought he was.

“Catch anything yet?”
“No, because SOMEONE keeps scaring the fucking fish away.”
“Just doing our jobs,” said the first voice again. “Keeping an eye out for nefarious raiders from asea.”
“Or ashore,” added the second.
“No, no, nothing nefarious there. These folks are just fishing, right? With empty nets, at night. Aren’t you worried about the nefarious squid?”
“Superstitious nonsense,” said Uncle shortly.

“Nothing superstitious about nefarious squids. We see them all the time out here. Big. Long arms.”
“And they don’t bother you neither.”
“Well of course not. We’re in a proper ship and you’re in a dinghy.”
“Your ship’s a rotten old hulk and you’ve scared away the damned fish.”

More than the two voices laughed at that.

“Well, we’ll leave you be then,” said the first. “But you watch yourself. Hard to see anything out on nights like this, and if you were a little bit quieter why, we might just run you down.”

Uncle didn’t say anything to that, and he didn’t say anything as the monaskerry guard-ship creaked and groaned away from us, but when they were gone for good he DID smack me on the head so hard it echoed all the way to shore.

“Ow!”
“THAT is for splashing the damned oars so loud,” he hissed. “Three times. In one week!”
“I didn’t!”

“I heard it! I heard you splashing! Now we’ve lost our income AGAIN, and we’ll have to pay restitution at this rate! Do you know how nasty the jam-maker gets if she doesn’t get her cut? DO YOU?”

“No,” I lied. Glisset was always friendly to me, but she had a short touch with creditors and didn’t like my uncle and had exactly the forearms you’d expect from someone who spent all day grinding and pressing tough little salt-hardened berries into sweetness with a big mallet.

“I don’t know why I put up with my niece,” he said aloud into the general darkness, even though we both knew it was because my mother was dead and he was a goddamned greedy scumbag. “It must be because my sister is dead, and I’m a goddamned merciful saint.”

I rowed, and tried to fall back into myself again. Didn’t quite make it.

***

Two beautiful clear days in a row after that. No clouds, moon still fat enough to show itself low on the horizon in the afternoon and keep the water glittering happily at night.

Uncle hated it. He was so put out that he didn’t even go to his card games, which didn’t make our money problems any worse but did put me in the way of more whacks to the head. I spent the time we weren’t fishing out on the street and up the hill and once – when I got very bold and had taken a shot from Uncle’s bottle-under-the-floorboard – trying to persuade Glisset to bring me berry-picking, which turned very awkward when she took me literally and spent an earnest half-hour telling me about why you should never hike out to the berry patches at night (it was bears).

The third day was a bit wispy in the morning. Then it was a bit cloudy in the afternoon, leaving the water lead-dull. Then as the sun came down the fog came up and the whole town turned the kind of deep-down damp you can only escape by setting yourself on fire.

Uncle was ecstatic, eyes glittering in the wet air. He whistled – actually whistled! Badly, mind you – the whole time we collected the cargo; he helped pack it up for once; he even kept humming after we left dock, soundless as mice.

“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,” he said conversationally as I rowed. “Red sky in the morning, sailor’s take warning. Fog bank at night? Heart takes flight, I say.”

I nodded to keep him happy, but man I didn’t agree inside. I was cold and felt half-soaked.

“You know the best part? Keeps the sound down.”

I nodded again.

“No splashes, no guard-ships, no fuss. Nothing out of you.”
I made a terrible mistake then and looked at Uncle to see what had him in a good mood, which was the fastest way I knew of getting him out of a good mood. Luckily, I did this just as he was coming at me with his knife and so for once that sort of worked out. Unluckily, I blocked the knife with the haft of my port oar so he got pretty mad anyways.

“Snitch! Sneak!” he hissed. I grabbed his arm, he grabbed my arm, the knife wiggled in between us like an eel on a hook. “I take you in, I feed you, and you tip off the guards every night! How much’d they pay you? How much did you take to splash and splash and call ‘em in every night? Three nights in ONE WEEK?”

“Huh?” I said, and he actually screamed at that- just a little, involuntary, like someone had kicked him in the right spot and it leaked out. He tugged and yanked and heaved and I let go of the knife so he fell half-ass-down and I kicked my boot loose into his belt region.

Now THAT didn’t make him scream. It made him wheeze and sit down, which was troublesome because he was standing at the gunwales and there was nothing to sit on but thin foggy air and thick smooth water.

It was quite a splash – big and solid and juicy, droplets in my damned eyes – and it kept going as he foundered and floundered and came up over the side leg-up, knife waving. I pulled up the oar and held it overhead and was just about to bring it down when he squeaked like a mouse and vanished immediately, straight down.

I waited.

Then I put the oar down and waited some more.

Then I waited a little longer, just to be safe, and I rowed up to the monaskerry’s little half-hidden shingle beach and gave sixteen delicious meals to a furtive and wealthy acolyte and went home and slept well for the first time in six years.

***

I still fished after that. It was hard by myself, but Uncle hadn’t helped too much to begin with, and it was more for appearances than anything. The real profit came in on the dark nights, when I took up the cargo and put out the dinghy and rowed into the dark and then – halfway out, just a ways to go – I cut loose about one-quarter of my load into the water and watched as it sank a little and then was sucked down by something too quick and hungry to be gravity.

It’s easiest to deal with the nefarious squids this way, I think. It’s certainly a lot cheaper than waiting for them to get impatient and start splashing for the guard-ship; they don’t need me to give them EVERYTHING, just enough to take the edge off. Eyes bigger than their stomachs.

Of course, I had to put the prices up a little to make up for it. But I told them all that the work was harder since Uncle passed, and they believed that enough.

It isn’t even entirely wrong. The nefarious squids take the jams and chowder and jerky well enough on every trip, it’s true. But Uncle? After they took him, they didn’t ask for food for six whole days.

June 13^th

Not my finest showing today, diary. I was out trimming the hedges with my earplugs in – safety first! – and it took me a good thirty seconds to realize there were visitors on the estate, and that was because one of them got fed up and leaned on the horn for a good six seconds. Startled me pretty good when I turned around, and I’m ashamed to say I was so rattled they had to repeat themselves a few times before I could understand them or say anything.

It seems they were friends and associates of little Tommy H. Feldingway – god, it’d been AGES since I’d heard that name, the family never spoke of his father after he moved out. As it turned out he’d come home as the now-last of his line to spend the night in the estate’s guest wing so as to claim his inheritance in accord with the remits of his grandfather’s will (a classic move from ‘Old Hawthorn’).

But that wasn’t the REAL problem. The REAL problem was that Tommy was NOT the last living Feldingway, because long-lost family-shame cousin ‘Rigor’ Mortimer Feldingway had arrived two nights ago and was hiding in the attics somewhere and I had absolutely failed to find a way to shoo him out yet, even after he’d dismembered the postman. I’d tried traps, spraying, even clanging pots and pans at all hours to drive him out; nothing worked. This was the absolute nadir of my tenure as groundskeeper, and you know how bad my imposter syndrome’s always been, diary! I was sure I was about to lose my job! But if I didn’t warn them about Mortimer, they’d be a real pickle – and if I DID warn them about Mortimer, I’d be violating the blood oath six generations of Otuses had sworn unto the service of the Feldingways to keep their secrets! So there I stood, tongue-tied and wide-eyed as six bizarrely gorgeous young people with artfully coifed hair sat in their fancy car and stared at me.

“So, like, can we go in?” asked little Tommy.

“Can’t say as I can stop you,” I blurted out. Oh god, WHY did I say that?! It was so rude! I was trying to HELP these people, not scold them! “But you’d best take care. The house isn’t very friendly at night.”

It was as if I was trying as hard as I could to incriminate myself, diary. They laughed at me and it was like the first day of first grade all over again – I was so busy reliving the moment when Nelson Munsch pulled down my pants in front of the whole gym class that I don’t think I replied to a single word they said after that, just stared at them all glassy-eyed until they drove off.

Now I’ve got two Feldingways under one roof and only one of them can inherit the house and I know, I just KNOW, I just KNOW that ‘Rigor’ is going to cut the phone lines before dawn. He always did that, he always does that, he doesn’t know that mobile phones exist and if he did he wouldn’t care. I’m going to have to spend all morning splicing the wire back together and it’s an absolute bitch, pardon my language, diary.

I really wish I was better at asserting myself. This whole pickle wouldn’t be happening if I were a bit less introverted.

***

June 17^th

I’m sorry for spending so much time away from you, diary. Cleaning up after the ‘Mortimassacre’ took a LOT of time and spoons from me, and once I was home I just wanted to sleep. And beyond the physical wear and mental tear, emotionally I still feel guilty about the whole mess; especially what happened to the weathervane. It had spent over a hundred and forty years on that roof without ONCE harming anybody, and did not deserve what happened to it.

All of that actually makes me feel a little better about the other thing that happened today. Suffice to say it, diary, I really stuck my foot right in my mouth yet again. But at least this time it was because I was already a basket case from the LAST time I was too shy to speak up!

Ugh. I’m spiralling.

I cleaned out the last of the plumbing this morning, then spent the afternoon doing the final mop circuit to scrub the last stains out of the upper hallways, and I was just sitting on my workbench out front and getting ready to finally resharpen the woodaxe after all the abuse Mortimer put it through when someone – I kid you not – cleared their actual throat at me. I looked up and oh my god, it was Professor Mesquin, the REAL Professor Mesquin, the actual, honest-to-god, world-famous local-legend Professor Richard Mesquin, who was standing there in short sleeves and a light jacket with a suitcase and a backpack of all things. He had that look people get, diary – the one where they’ve been waiting for me to notice them for too long.

So I sat there with my axe in one hand and the whetstone in the other and my mouth shut and stared until he said “is this the Feldingway estate?” and I just nodded because what else was I meant to do? Would it be rude to ask him to sign my copy of Antique Observatories And Star-Cultists Of New England? Would it be sycophantic to say I’d been really impressed by his essay last year on the ‘doom spiral’ pattern of familial sects when inheritance and religious fervor produced contradictory drives within increasingly resource-poor congregations that overwhelmingly led to outbursts of massive filial violence?

“Are you the groundskeeper?”

Oh god, was I even the groundskeeper still? There were no Feldingways left, but I’d never been fired, and my wage was still being autodeposited, but was I technically an employee of the bank now? I never understood finance or law. If I made an authoritative proclamation now and he put it in his book would I get arrested?
“Depends who’s asking,” I hedged.

“Hmm,” he judged. I died inside a few hundred times and when I was done he was staring at me again and had clearly just asked me something.

“The keys,” he repeated.

“Sure thing,” I said in total relief and handed him my entire keychain. His arm sagged under it.
“And the observatory key is…?”
“Here,” I said, fishing it up off the keychain.
“Thank you,” he said, and turned on his heel. “I’ll return it tomorrow morning.”

Wait he was going in the observatory oh god oh god oh god wait what? “I wouldn’t do that,” I said without thinking WHY do I say things WITHOUT THINKING?”
“Excuse me?” he asked, and it was too polite, too polite means he isn’t actually polite anymore oh jeez DAMNIT.

“That place isn’t safe,” I said. “Especially at night. Loose stone and shoddy mortar. Needs repairing.”
“And who is responsible for the repair?”
Oh god WAS that my job? It was, wasn’t it? But I’d also been told if I ever set foot in there without the explicit permission of a Feldingway I’d be torn limb from limb by the proto-aeonic beings that slept within the walls and floors, chained into the young stone with elder sleep.

“Well, good-day,” he said and oh god I’d been staring again hadn’t I. Just like the teachers used to complain about.

Well, it was too late to apologize or endear myself to the Professor now, and judging by the heft of that suitcase (and the fibula protruding from the loose zipper) he had most of a human skeleton in there. Was it a Feldingway? Fuck, was he going to send them ‘back to the stars’ as the family had done back in the old times? Did he know the correct syllables and the correct apologies and the correct warnings and when would be the incorrect times to say any of them? Would warning him violate my promise to ‘ne’er leash the sins of the sky with tongue form’d oft dirt’? Maybe I could give him a hint, but would he want one? Did he need one? He was an expert? Maybe I could pretend it was a joke. But I’m not funny.

“Good-day is well and good,” I called after him, “but be careful of the night.”

He turned and the incredulity on his face was like a boot to my face. He said “excuse me?” and I resumed sharpening the axe until he gave up and went away.

Well, that was enough fuel for my social anxiety for the rest of my life. Why am I LIKE THIS, diary?

***

June 24^th

The police stopped by again today, diary. At first I thought they’d changed their minds about me being a suspect in the Mortimassacre or the mysterious disappearance of Professor R. Mesquin on the night of the sudden and inexplicable meteor showers that turned the town teal for three days, but it turned out to be about something else entirely: it seems that the storms and lightning on the 18^th exposed a secret entrance in the graveyard that led into “Old Hawthorn’ Feldingway’s hidden underground bioterrorism lab. Oh diary, I didn’t know where to put my face for embarrassment; I had NO IDEA that I’d done such a miserable job of cleaning the grounds. I just put my head in my hands and cried like a baby, and when I finally had the strength to speak again they’d placed a call to our local Specialized Unit for National Safeguarding, who showed up just half an hour ago. Diary, I tried to warn them that ‘Old Hawthorn’ hadn’t been able to tend to the vat-spawners in a dog’s age and that the hidden steel corridors and hallways that honeycomb the earth underneath the estate are doubtlessly now rife with escaped froggoths, zoombys, and dogodiles, but I was so shaken up about what a miserable mess I’d made of everything that all I could do was blubber about how terrible and monstrous and evil I was, and I think they might have mostly focused on me screaming about ‘TERRIBLE, MONSTROUS EVIL’ and run off half-cocked after taking my keys.

There’s been a lot of screaming since they went down there, and then the regular policemen followed them, and now I’m stuck up here and I’m not quite sure what to do. Are they in trouble? They looked big and strong and competent and were wearing bulletproof vests and they told me the situation was under control and it would be pretty egotistical of me to assume I know better than they do. I’m not even sure if I know if it’s POSSIBLE to kill a froggoth, for instance, and I never learned more about their confinement measures than their hatred of salt. Who would I be to chime in and nag these professionals? They’re busy. Did they tell me how to fix the shingles after the meteor storm? Would I have been happy if they had? No! God, I’m so selfish and paranoid.         The idea of trying to tell these experts how to do their jobs just absolutely makes me want to cringe into a ball and die. Maybe I’ll just leave some medical supplies and ammunition around the complex, hidden in cupboards and under desks? You know, discreetly. In case they need it.

Damn my spoons! This would all be so much easier if I could just TALK to people!

***

June 25^th

Well, the estate exploded. I’ve had it, diary. I’m tired of trying to talk to people and warn them off being foolish; I’m tired of being ignored and misinterpreted; I’m tired of stumbling over my own tongue.

So I’m going to write ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE on a big wooden sign and leave it out front of the gate. That ought to clear things up for good.

Weirdest thing happened at work today, honey. A dungeon erupted beneath the breakroom and swallowed everyone during lunch.

It explains a lot – turns out our furnace breaking last spring wasn’t just from poor maintenance, but also the work of pernicious delving spirits!

Mostly the poor maintenance though.

So it was a real rough time for a bit, because me and Ed and Mary had landed on top of some sort of yawning portal in the earth that led to forgotten secrets and ancient tombs, and there was no way back up since we haven’t had the budget to replace the janitor’s ladder since it broke cleaning the gutters last month. So instead they threw down a bunch of the old football equipment for padding and some knives from the kitchen and told us they’d count it as emergency absences with no penalty as long as we could get back out before the next workday. It was pretty funny!

Well, I say pretty funny. At the time it wasn’t great. Mary landed on my lunch. But then Ed opened the darkened ominous creaking gate that was our only exit and we were swarmed by koblins, so I guess I had to let it go pretty fast. It’s hard to stay hungry when you’re trying to put a butter knife through a screaming biped-shaped coyote-frog-monkey-thingy, you know? Took them down, found a few shiny stones in the heel of the biggest one’s shoe, and we moved on. Mary found a secret passage in the next room that led to a hidden chest filled with old, rusty swords, so that was nice I guess.

Still mad about lunch though. I fucking loved those noodles, honey. After a full overnight of flavour intensification? I was FANTASIZING about them all morning.

Oh right, the swords. There were like, sixteen of them, which turned out okay because the next room we found was some kind of dankened primordial pit that opened up underneath the gymnasium and the volleyball team’s practice had gone long so they were stuck in there with Coach Maple, battling some sort of disintegrating slime-beast. Looked a bit like a dog or a whale but longer and more rotten? Smelled like a dumpster, I tell you what. So me and Mary distracted it while Ed armed the volleyball team and we stabbed it until it stopped moving,, and we found some sort of shield in the disintegrating remains of its torso that shone with eldritch runes, which we gave to Ed because I’ll be honest with you that man was NOT pulling his weight and maybe if he had something to hide behind he’d stop flinching, you know? Maybe he’d learn to stand his ground. Maybe he’d stop caving to the damned parents and ensuring the rest of us got flooded with requests to extend deadlines because my little Sammi got an extension for her math homework so why can’t you do that for history, blah blah bitch bitch blah blah BLAH.

Sorry honey. It’s just. Ugh.

Anyways the only way onward was downward so we descended the foetid staircase into the rotten sump, which was a clear sign that our plumbing was in even worse shape than we’d thought after the furnace died and let the pipes freeze. Remember that? Also there was some kind of primeval inscrutable idol and one of the volleyball players started yelling and screaming and trying to stab the rest of us until we could hold her down for a few minutes; said she saw us all as monstrous horrors! Mary said enough was enough and her and Coach Maple tipped the thing over and kicked it until it fell apart. I saw a glowing pearl that shone like a full moon fall out, so I grabbed that before we moved on.

So the next room was full of skeletons – and listen, honey, when I say ‘skeletons,’ I’m NOT saying ‘human skeletons.’ It looked like a herpetology exhibition down there; Mary said there was everything from iguanas and skinks to komodo dragons, and I’m not sure what kind of crocodile the biggest one was but believe you me it was an ANGRY one. We had numbers on our side though, even after Ed blocked a strike from a big snake and turned him into a rat. Ed is a rat now. It’s a real pity none of us could decipher the runic script on that shield; guess it just does that. So everyone was very surprised and Ed was even more scared of the snake than he’d been before and he wouldn’t stop this godawful SQUEALING and then the crocodile or alligator or whatever grabbed my leg and it hurt a lot and sort of took my attention away from whatever was going on, so I’m not quite sure how we managed to pull that one off. Coach Maple said she hit the snake with a skink. I’m sure I won’t argue with her.

So this next bit was stuff everyone else told me because I fainted from the pain and blood loss of having a skeletal crocodile or alligator or whatever chew on my leg. It seems like we were in a foyer to a sort of arcane laboratory, which was occupied by a crazed wizard? I’d love to know how he got any funding for that, honey, let alone paid. So when we ran in Mary asked for help and he was really mad we’d killed his bodyguards and started throwing lightning bolts at people. Completely inconsiderate. Luckily enough it turns out being up close and personal with an old-fashioned alchemical setup is REALLY bad for your vision, so he didn’t land a single shot before Coach Maple skewered him in the giblets. The hard part was that after that happened there was nobody left to explain his awful shorthand he’d labelled all the potions with, so we had to experiment – Ed got voluntold for it, since he was a rat and maybe a potion would fix that, I don’t know. I really wish we’d had Lani with us; the only thing I remember from chemistry is that fume hoods are important. The wizard didn’t have one, by the way.

Now, I didn’t quite get the full story of how many potions everyone went through or what they all did, but by the time I woke up, here’s what was going on:

My leg was better.

Ed was purple.

Coach Maple was holding a twisted staff formed from the wizard’s spine, I think. It was probably his spine. It looked fresh, okay?

The laboratory had exploded and there was glass everywhere.

Ed was still a rat.

It seemed like we got pretty lucky? Especially since the staff could open the locked back door, which was good. I was pretty done with the dungeon thing and wanted back out, so imagine how happy I was when we stepped out into the sunshine! It just sort of sucked that that the sunlight wasn’t coming from our sun, but a miniature one embedded in the ceiling filled with screaming, burning ghosts and orbited by nine spinning spherical skulls, all of which started chanting malign curses.

I was REALLY not happy, honey. I won’t lie, I swore at work. I swore in front of the kids. Nothing mild either, a full-on no-holds-barred ‘oh for FUCK’S sake.’ Grandma would’ve been proud of me.

So that was just a miserable time. The skulls kept spitting comets at us, and the comets bruised and blistered, and Mary was too short to reach any of them and the first time Coach Maple hit one of them with the staff it screamed loud enough most of us had a little bit of blood come out of our ears and Ed was a rat, so it was just me and the volleyball team. But one of them jumped high enough to grab one of the skulls, then they said ‘it just sort of clicked’ and the next thing we knew they were just absolutely dunking on them, or serving them, or whatever the term is. Skulls flying at skulls being used to smash skulls, everywhere, forever. The sun got spiked by six flying skulls at once and well I think that’s the closest I’ve ever been to a supernova. I hope none of us got radiation exposure; I don’t think the school’ll cover any of that.

Oh, and the dying sun spat out a pearl that blazed like fire. We took that and my old moon-pearl and put one in each eyesocket of Coach Maple’s skull-staff, and then it didn’t really do anything, so we tried touching it to Ed to see if he stopped being a rat. He was still a rat.

We were all dead tired – except the kids, they’d just gotten warmed up – but nobody wanted to try and take a break down there, so we kept pushing on. Some sort of stalagmite forest filled with giant crystal spiders; an endless staircase whose steps kept flying out from underfoot and falling into an infinite abyss; and a crypt with a big smashed-open sarcophagus, ten glistening obelisks, and a pair of slowly-crushing walls.

We lucked out on the last one – it turned out when Coach Maple laid the pearl-eyed skull-staff to rest in the sarcophagus, it telescoped the whole apparatus into the ceiling like an elaborate spiral staircase. Gave me the heebles, but not as badly as the scorched and blackened sword that she took from the tomb to replace it. Ed hated that, but it might have been because he was a rat; he REALLY was jittery after that happened to him, and I mean jittery by Ed standards even. Oh, and the staircase took us up into the school board’s meeting room, which they were very unhappy about until Coach Maple’s eyes shone bright red and her sword caught on fire and she screamed about these being those betrayed her and started stabbing. I think the sword and skull might have belonged to Superintendent Mendez, she sounded like him. The board shed their skins and revealed themselves to be monstrous worm-ghouls but the sword was REALLY on fire so in the end the whole school board was executed by Coach Maple, she got exorcised by Mary pouring six salt shakers from the cafeteria down her face, and we all got to go home early while the fire department investigated the new rooms for fire hazards. The volleyball team didn’t get to keep their swords, which they weren’t happy about, but oh well. I told them I’d ask Coach Maple if they could use them after practice once she comes out of her swoon; they figure it should pass before the week is out since it was only a vengeful wraith and not a malign one.

Anyways it was a long, shitty day, but we all pulled through in the end, the kids are all okay, and there’s no real lasting harm done. Except Ed is a rat now. Do you want to order pizza?