jamieproctor.ca

When Rachel was very small – so small that she didn’t know her own age yet – her mother read her Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

The old versions. Not adaptations. She relished the unabridged, arbitrary cruelty of the justice delivered.

Rachel’s father disapproved slightly but gently, which was okay. It was a private moment for the two of them.

Hansel and Gretel were in the woods, lost, with only breadcrumbs. And what did they find, alone and starving, but a big beautiful cottage made of gingerbread?

Rachel only vaguely knew what a cottage was. It was like a house, but smaller, and by the water. A whole house made of gingerbread.

“What’s gingerbread?” she asked.

“We’ll make some next month,” her mother promised.

They finished the story, and they finished the book, and at the finish of the year for the winter holidays her mother made a gingerbread house (COTTAGE, Rachel firmly corrected) and they decorated it together.

Rachel made sure there was no oven. She’d seen what’d happened to the last gingerbread architect she knew of.

***

When Rachel was larger – somewhat larger, but not big – she went to her grandmother’s after school sometimes, when her mother wasn’t home from work yet. And as she went over her homework and complained about it and completed it, her grandmother would make odd little cookies, with oatmeal and coconut and something impossible to pin down.

“What’s IN these?” Rachel demanded suspiciously. “Vanilla? Nutmeg? Cinnamon?”
“Oatmeal, coconut, and love,” said her grandmother.

“You are SO full of shit!”

“Where did you think YOU got it from?” said her grandmother. And they snorted and cackled and swatted at each other and it was a day that Rachel didn’t realize had stuck in her memory forever until ten years later at the funeral.

She got the cookbook. None of the recipes had love in them, but that didn’t prove anything. Her grandmother had kept a lot of things in her head; most of the recipes were like icebergs, with nine-tenths below the surface of the text.

Rachel’d have to find new secrets for them.

***

When Rachel was Very Much An Adult, she made cookie using the cookbook (or the scan she kept on her tablet), and she knocked on her roommate’s door.

“Go away,” said Troy.

“I have more cookies,” she said.

The door opened with the nudge of a foot delivered from a bed delivered from a body bereft of all hope and joy but still able to eat. “Oh wow. Thanks. It’s great. What’s in these?”
“Oatmeal, coconut, and spite,” said Rachel.

“No love?”
“I think you need spite right now. Or at least more than cookies.”
“Hey, food’s good. I need comfort, and this is comfort food.”
“There’s more than one kind of comfort,” said Rachel.

“This is pretty good. What’s better?”
“Revenge,” she said, with an unnecessary amount of enunciation.

“That sounds harder to make than cookies.”
“Actually, it has many ingredients in common.”

“What?”
“Let me explain.”

***

Two days later Jack Altman, law student and all-around prick, sat in his car and turned the key in the ignition only to find it stuck fast by molasses. Swearing and hauling at the vehicle door, the handle came off – partially sawed through – and a jet of piping-hot caramel filling shot out and scorched him in the hand. He tried to scream and was muffled by his airbag going off and slamming him in the face in a big cloud of aerosolized flour, which exploded.

The burns weren’t fatal to Jack, but his GPA wasn’t so lucky. Rachel was too busy graduating to notice: a triple-major in chemistry, physics, and engineering.

She sat at her desk, and considered her many options until her head hurt.

Then she considered her oven.

Then she said ‘well, this feels inevitable.’

***

History was confused on the matter of Rachel, even years after the dust had settled.

Yes, she had terrorized the entire eastern seaboard with remote—activated sugar bombs until the FDA budget was raised.

It was true that she’d ransomed the British crown prince after kidnapping him in broad daylight using a horrific and utterly uncatchably fast greased gingerbread golem.

No one denied that she’d sucked all of Fort McMurray into a fudge pit over what she considered one stifled pipeline blockade too many.

The moving gingerbread castle she travelled in was considered somewhat tacky even by those who admired the sophistication of its construction principals and the effectiveness of its instant-dry icing. 

And of course everyone knew the muffin-men she’d unleashed upon the Midwest until her demands for better home economics funding in schools were met.

But it had to be admitted by even her biggest detractors that the recipes she sent to news outlets appended to her threats, demands, and announcements were consistently cheap, tasty, and surprisingly healthy.

There were never any secret ingredients. She asked that you find those on your own.

Great-great-grandpa called himself tactical, he called himself thorough, he called himself logical. He was a problem-solver.

There’s a difference.

Can I have another drink? I’ll tell you the story if I’ve had another drink. Don’t worry, it’s not the sort of story you forget after having another drink.

***

So. Okay.

Great-great-grandpa was a Very Important Man. The kind of guy where you’re so important you don’t have a title beyond ‘Mister’ with a capital M and you get invited to things without being an expert or a politician.

But he had opinions, and he had a little knowledge, which of course is always the most dangerous amount of knowledge, and he had a few fascinations and fixations. And one of his was spaceflight, and in particular space colonization, and in VERY SPECIFIC our continual failure to get our cryogenics program off the ground.

It kept killing the mice, you see. It kept killing the mice.

Look, cryogenics is important, you know. Unless you can break the universe over your knee, light speed is the fastest speed there is, and it takes a LOT of work to get up to it. So you’ve got to go slow, and if at light speed a trip in space takes years at ‘slow’ it takes DECADES. Decades of time you need to make a ship hold together in. Decades of time it has to keep an entire population of humans happy in! Which is hard, but then there’s the hardest part of all: not only does your ship have to keep tons – literal, measurable, tons – of humanity alive and functional for decades; THEN it has to provide them with the material they need to build a functioning society on the spot. Prefabricated cities! Prefabricated power plants! Prefabricated factories! It’s like trying to fit three identical dolls inside each other.

So instead you freeze ‘em solid, pack the ship with on-arrival supplies – no in-flight meals needed – and thaw ‘em on arrival. Simple. Tidy. Straightforward!

But it kept killing the mice. Which was a bit worrying, obviously. Somehow-or-another they’d worked out how to prevent cell ruptures from microscopic ice crystals, and that old stumbling block was gone, it was fine, fine, fine. But it kept killing the mice. They injected them and treated them and monitored them and it killed them all. Their sad mice bodies couldn’t handle the rise and fall of heat; it was always too much for them, however gently they were chilled and thawed.

But grandpa was there at the budget meeting when the program’s fate was being decided, grandpa was listening when someone said the dead mice were PRECISELY why they were cutting the program, and grandpa had the balls to open his mouth and say in front of EVERYONE ‘the problem is the process is too metabolically stressful for obligate homeotherms. Why not use gene splicing and turn the colonists poikilothermic?’

Which for every scientist in the room – who’d spent half their lives working on the cryogenics problem – was like asking ‘jumping over a tall building seems hard; why not grow wings instead?’

But as I said: great-great-grandpa was a Very Important Man. Too important to dismiss, or mock, or even politely explain that’s-not-how-it-works to. Especially when the chief budget secretary is sitting next to him and is his best friend and says ‘exactly! Brilliant! Do it!’

There’s not really any other choice after that.

***

Now there was one itty bitty problem with the project, with the notion, with the whole conceit my great-great-grandpa had provided. Namely, it was inhumane and impossible. Which sounds like two things but really the ‘inhumane’ part was just window dressing. It turns out it’s awfully hard to change the basic metabolic structure of a complex multicellular organism from the cell to the cerebral aftereffects, even one as well-known and well-trodden as a human being. And of course people objected. Often strenuously! And finally and most crucially, all of the people desperate enough to volunteer weren’t necessarily the people that were most qualified to build a new society from the ground up. Or so it was argued. Or assumed. Or both.

So it was much easier and cheaper and more economically sensible to start from nonhuman scratch.

They considered hibernating mammals first, then ruled it out. Trying to properly sort the hibernating response from seasonal triggers and the like was too fiddly, and the public likes cute fuzzy things that sleep too much. You know what they don’t care about? Lizards. And since they’re habitually low-metabolism rather than situationally, they need less food per capita. Lower average metabolic rate but who cares, how much energy do you need to run robotics and do programming and run basic maintenance routines, especially when the low food and space requirements mean you can stock TWENTY of them for every human you would’ve had to pack?

So they took some lizards and gave them antifreeze proteins and made them big enough to hold tools and hold big brains and they froze the lizards and eventually after many years of dead frozen lizards they had living frozen lizards and the world was good.

After that they had to teach the living lizards to talk and learn and obey. That took a bit longer, I think because some of the tutors kept teaching the lizards philosophical concepts like ‘personal autonomy’ and ‘elected leadership’ or other such troubles. Then they froze them, stuffed them in a rocket, and off it went, off to establish a home base away from home for humanity.

***

The flight was long, but great-great-grandpa lived long enough to see it end. Not just the time-as-we-knew-it, but to receive the ‘journey successful’ notice from the far end. The ship had made it. The cargo had thawed successfully. The lizards had disembarked and unpacked a base camp. They were living on a horrible wreck of a place with a barely-there atmosphere and no native life that might – with a lot of work – one day let you breathe without a spacesuit. And they were working on making it better, particularly for ship number two, which would be faster and less heavily weighted with cargo and would keep the actual humans happy and alive until they got there and could take over things.

The lizards worked hard. They worked very hard. In fact they worked so hard that by the time ship two arrived – long after great-great-grandpa had passed away, blissfully content with his impact on the universe – the lizards had gone a little off-spec and had filled the entire planet with tunnels and those tunnels with lizards. Apparently it’s easier to have a population boom when you eat twenty times less than a human your size and you lay multiple eggs and you grow up fast. Who knew? So the world was full of lizards and although they said they were very happy to see the colonists and welcomed them as beloved fellow hatchlings they said they felt it wasn’t fair to turn over the entire planet to them and take their place as subservient biological drones.

The second ship had been equipped for this sort of argument and was willing to dispute it, which might have been successful had part of the lizard ship’s own equipment not included an asteroid mining rig that everyone had agreed could not possibly be retrofitted for use into a giant turbolaser. There were few casualties, but it put an end to our side of the debate.

They sent the second ship home, fully laden with gifts, supplies, everyone who’d been a bit too eager to press the debate and had no interest in remaining as equal citizens, and a polite request that we stay at home, since humans were uniquely ill-suited to the rigors of space colonization, which they were already tentatively beginning within their own system.

***

And that’s how my great-great-grandfather became the man who gave the stars to lizard people.

It’s not all bad though. I think they’ve named something like twelve space stations after him, and I believe I’m on the shortlist of for an intersystem shuttle’s title, as of the last courtesy missive I received. They say that heroes are never welcomed in their own hometowns, right?

Hey, do I still have an open tab?

On the first day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

A distant light above me.     

On the second day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

two falling stars

and a distant light above me

On the third day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

three robot drones

two falling stars      

and a distant light above me

On the fourth day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

four discreet calls

three robot drones

two falling stars             

and a distant light above me

On the fifth day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

five alien emissaries
four discreet calls

three robot drones      

two falling stars             

and a distant light above me

On the sixth day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

six drives-a-hypering

five emissaries
four discreet calls

three robot drones      

two falling stars                    

and a distant light above me

On the seventh day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

seven colds-a-fusioning

six drives-a-hypering

five emissaries         
four discreet calls

three robot drones      

two falling stars                    

and a distant light above me

On the eighth day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

eight plots-a-brewing

seven colds-a-fusioning

six drives-a-hypering

five emissaries                     
four discreet calls

three robot drones      

two falling stars                    

and a distant light above me

On the ninth day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

nine assassinations

eight plots-a-brewing

seven colds-a-fusioning

six drives-a-hypering

five emissaries                     
four discreet calls

three robot drones               

two falling stars                    

and a distant light above me

On the tenth day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

ten theorists-conspiring

nine assassinations

eight plots-a-brewing

seven colds-a-fusioning

six drives-a-hypering

five emissaries                     
four discreet calls

three robot drones               

two falling stars                    

and a distant light above me

On the eleventh day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

eleven final warnings

ten theorists-conspiring

nine assassinations

eight plots-a-brewing

seven colds-a-fusioning

six drives-a-hypering

five emissaries                     
four discreet calls

three robot drones               

two falling stars                    

and a distant light above me

On the eleventh day of Contact, my low-atmosphere telescope showed to me:

twelve orbital strikings

eleven final warnings

ten theorists-conspiring

nine assassinations

eight plots-a-brewing

seven colds-a-fusioning

six drives-a-hypering

five emissaries                     
four discreet calls

three robot drones               

two falling stars                    

and

approaching

light

above

me

On Friday, the lake froze over.

It was cold. It was clear. It was covered in fine, fine, fine snow that had drifted from the shoreline. And she saw that and thought it was nice, it was nice, it was very nice.

Spring came, and the lake thawed. Mud flowed and frogs croaked and green scum filled the shallows.

But she remembered, and she longed, and one long hot day when the mosquitoes were fierce and the air was smug and thick she couldn’t stand it anymore and she walked down to the shore and held the lake by its bank, by its hand, and she drew the ice up from the far shore on, thick as maple sugar and twice as sweet. It was as cold and beautiful as she remembered, and she went to sleep and dreamed of it and was almost shocked to find it still there when she awoke.

She kept it like that all day long. She kept it like that all summer long. When someone finally found her down by the water as the leaves began to turn it wasn’t hard for them to put two and two together, especially when she didn’t deny anything. Why would she?

So they put her in the lake. They had to smash a hole first, because it was still very frozen, but they were angry and determined and had time. They demanded answers, apologies, anything, and she gave them nothing all the way ‘till the end, when they threw her in and closed the sky up behind her.

She closed her eyes and did the thing that was neither floating nor sinking, and she took the opposite of a breath, and nothing changed for a v

e

r

y

***

long time later, someone came knocking.

Tap, tap.

Tap, tap.

Tap, tap.

They were knocking on the ceiling. They were knocking on the sky.

She didn’t ignore them, because ignoring them meant she would acknowledge them and that wasn’t necessary. They sank into the background that was the foreground that was the lake that was everything; saturating her.

Tap, tap.

Except there being a ‘her’ was already a change. She hadn’t been her for a very long time, and the moment she realized that and tried to reverse it, to sink back down again was the moment she was doomed to waking, even before the saw fell from above and smacked her right in the head, removing a sizable patch of skin and bruising her very very badly.

“SHIT!” she shouted, and the moment she did that was the moment she forgot how to do the opposite of breathing.

***

When she was done coughing there was a concerned face watching her attached to an unconcerning body and they’d pulled her half-out of the hole in the ice. Half-out of the water. Half-into the sunlight. Every muscle in her body tensed rigid, then flexed.

“NononononononNO,” said the stranger. “No! It’s okay! You’re not coming out! You’re fine! PLEASE don’t do that again!”
“Do what again?” she asked sepulchrally. She could still feel the lakewater inside her, running down her vocal chords, rattling in her lungs, leaking out of her pores; every instance of its existence a moment of flight. It was leaving her behind.

“The thrashing and the screaming and the biting.”
“I bit?”
“You bit me, you bit the ice, you tried to bite the damned sun. Please don’t do that.”
Her mouth tasted like metal, which was another thing she hadn’t thought about until now that was stuck in her head and never leaving again, like a big invisible tumour. “I promise not to bite the sun,” she said.

“Try. Promise not to TRY to bite the sun either.”
She hadn’t noticed she’d done that and she hadn’t meant to do that and there was therefore no reason at all for her to feel so caught-out and ashamed about it. “I promise not to try to bite the sun, either,” she said sulkily.

“Thank you. Can I ask your name?”
“No,” she said with some relief. THAT, at least, wasn’t coming back.

“Is that your-”

“It isn’t.”
“Oh. Okay. I’m-”

“Strange,” she interrupted. “You’re strange.”
“You jumped out of a hole in the lake, drowning, then refused to leave it.”
“You dropped a saw on my head.”
“It wasn’t on purpose!”
“Why would anyone drop a saw into the lake?”
“I was trying to make a hole for ice-fishing!”

She knew ice. She knew fishing. She didn’t know what they meant when you put them together.

“Tell me about ice fishing,” she demanded.

“You make a hole in the ice and you fish through the ice. It takes a very long time and it’s very cold, so it’s a good excuse to drink and eat warm things. Can I have my saw back? I’m sorry to be so blunt, it’s just that I borrowed it from my mother and she’s going to kill me if I don’t return it properly.”

She considered this. On the one hand the saw had hurt her head, shaken her entirely from what she was and who she wanted to be and made her infuriatingly aware, and was wanted for entirely selfish reasons. On the other hand, there was no other hand.

“Grovel and beg,” she decreed.

“I’ll share the food with you!”
Oh no. Now she’d remembered food. “Give me the food.”
“I mean, I’ll share it with you when I’ve caught it.”
“You won’t catch anything,” she scoffed. “The fish aren’t dumb enough to bite a hook and a string that just sit there in the water.”
“Hungry fish are dumber fish. And the fish here must be REALLY hungry.”
“Why?”
“Because this lake’s been frozen forever. Don’t you know that? You live in it.”
“I don’t live in it,” she said with the fast assurance of someone saying something so fundamentally true that they don’t even have to consider the denial.

“Okay. Watch.”
She watched. It was okay. And then as she watched and it was okay and she watched and it was okay and she watched and it was OKAY she felt the faint stirrings of something truly incomprehensible to her.

“I think I’m bored,” she said with dawning horror.

“That’s part of it.”
“No, no, no. I can’t be BORED. I was happy!”
“Whoops, felt a tug!”
“Why would wait what?”
A lunge, a surge, a heave, a pull, some swearing, and one good hard yank and a fish flew out of the water and landed on top of her, which she resented vocally.

“Sorry. Here, one second, let me get this thing gutted: we can probably catch a second one with his insides, and I don’t know about you but I’m damn hungry.”

“I can gut it myself,” she said. And she was so vexed she did it bare—handed, and even stopped at the guts instead of wringing the fish from the fins up to everything.

“We should probably start the fire. Do you want to do that or do you want to keep fishing for number two?”

“Two,” she said, and took the rod without asking and sat there and prepared to once again battle the strangest sensation she’d relearned yet.

She wasn’t as bored for as long or as hard as she’d thought she’d be. There was still trickles of bright red coming from the fresh bait when she hauled it out of the water, its would-be-consumer still grimly hanging on. She bludgeoned it to death ambivalently.

“Fire’s up. Do you want to help cook?”
The heat felt strange. It made her fingers tingle.

“No,” she said. But she scooched closer to it, and when the fish was done cooking she learned how to eat again, and when it was done she felt warmer still, and stranger. She laid on her back on the ice and realized her feet were all that were still in the water, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that or anything else that had happened. She was too restless to sit still and she couldn’t keep her eyes open.

“I’m going to go back to sleep,” she announced.

“You sure? There’s lots more to see up here. I was about to make tea.”

Tea sounded interesting, and it took time to brew, and by the time it had been made and talked over and drunk she was even more tired and restless and so instead of announcing herself she simply slid back into the lake and sank, like a stone, like the saw had, and for a beautiful moment everything was still and calm.

Oh.

She threw the saw out of the hole and watched with some satisfaction that it bonked off the stranger’s head.

“Now we’re even,” she shouted up. But all that came out were bubbles, and she shut her eyes feeling frustrated and unable to tell why.

***

A pebble fell between her eyes.

It was smaller and softer and rounder than the saw, but it hit the spot on her forehead that was bare of skin and sore of touch and so when she came up she was already pretty angry, and seeing the stranger looking down at her made her angrier, and then finally she burst up and out of the depths with great irritation and agony and landed on them with both hands and feet.

“You!” she said.

“Me!”

“Why are you BOTHERING ME.”

“I thought we could try skating.”

She looked at the little bladed shoes with great distrust. “Try what?” she asked.

“You slide around on them.”
“I’d have to leave the lake.”
“You’re out of the lake already.”

Oh.

Oh.

She looked down her legs and saw her bare feet dripping on dry ice, drying droplets all that were left to link her to where she’d been. The air was immense and razor-thin and all-enveloping and it was trying to get inside her, to inflate her lungs. She could breathe and it meant she couldn’t breathe.

So she looked at the skates again instead. They already seemed nice.

“Show me,” she said.

Ten minutes later, when she was done laughing, she took her own turn at them.

“You’re not very good at this,” she said as she budged and nudged and skidded.

“We’re in sort of a bumpy spot,” said the stranger crossly. “I’m fine on flat ice.”

“Well, where’s flat?”

“Over there a ways?”

“Fine.”

It was flatter, but not flat. And so was the next spot they found, and the next, and to a great degree most of what was being done wasn’t skating but it was tripping, slipping, cursing, insulting, and general arguing and disgruntlement, and she’d never been so pleased to be short of her gruntles in all her life.

She wasn’t sure how long her life was. Did she count the years in the lake? If she hadn’t been alive then, what else had she been?

“I’m tired,” she realized, and decided, and announced.

“Me too. The sun’s almost down.”

“Oh.” So it was. She’d barely paid attention to it since she’d tried to eat it; a defense mechanism, maybe. But she supposed it looked low and that made sense and she felt that tiredness again, that fidgety urge to sit down and never stop moving all at once. Even the long trip back to the little windbreak where they’d eaten the fish wasn’t enough to wear it off.

She had trouble fitting through the hole.

“I’ll bring the saw back again tomorrow and cut it bigger for you.”
“Why’s it smaller?”

“It’s freezing over again.”

“Oh,” she said. Of course it was.

She went back down to the bottom before she had to think about what she thought about that.

***

This time she saw the sunlight shift and came out of the ice before the pebble could be dropped, caught it in midair, and flicked it back.

“Ow!”

“Exactly. Serves you right.” She shook herself and the water clinging to her flew everywhere. “What are we doing today?”

“I wanted to show you something.”
“Is it a long way away?”
“Not SO long.”
“Can we skate to it?”
A terrible sigh. “Yes.”
They skated to it, which made it take longer but involved a lot of shoving.

The shoreline wasn’t as muddy as she remembered. Up on the banks there was green growing in a million shades.

“It’s warm,” she said, and was surprised that this surprised her.

“It’s not winter.”
“But the lake’s frozen,” she said. And then, because she’d only just remembered it and felt very foolish, “I froze it. On purpose.”
“Why’d you do that?”
It hadn’t been for ice fishing. Or for skating. And she was sure that at the time it hadn’t been so she could do something much deeper and stranger than sleep.

“I think that I thought it was pretty,” she said. “And I missed it.”

She looked at the shoreline again. “This is pretty too. I don’t know if I missed it. But this is pretty too.”
“Do you want to try it?”

She’d been completely dry and hadn’t noticed until now. That was what made up her mind.

One foot, then the other. Soft under her heels and toes, but more springy than slimy.

She closed her eyes, breathed in cool solid white, breathed out clean warm water. She opened them, and walked onwards.

***

She looked back once, to make sure she was being followed. The lake was blue in the center now, spreading out through the ice in a thousand thousand little streams. That decided something for her.

“I’m going to see a river,” she told them. “I’ll visit afterwards.”
“I’ll make tea.”
“And then we can go fishing. Without ice.”

They agreed on that.

Catalogue of Items Retrieved from the Tomb of Malgrokklus the Wizened, Ancient Craftsmaker and Writmaster of Impeccable Horrors Most Esteemed

-1 iron sword, slightly sharper than normal. Edge does not appear to need honing.

-2 30-cm-diameter rings. Putting anything through one ring makes it come out the other; putting anything through the other ring dissolves it into pure water vapour. The second ring described has been marked clearly with tape and an indelible marker.

-1 iron knife, slightly sharper than normal. Edge does not appear to need honing.

-1 pit trap, capacity of ~300 m³. Composition is exquisite; the weight-activation mechanism remains perfectly functional despite its age; the trapdoor hinges are functionally invisible even when cleared of dust; and the internal stone is well-smoothed with almost no visible cracks or joins and provides no handholds beside the giant clawmarks adorning the bottom half of the pit.

-1 large (~5L capacity) dish of silver, decorated with golden bone sigils. Once every 24 hours this becomes filled with a rich and nourishing meaty stew.

-1 skeleton (complete) of a monstrous magical hybrid of a zazz’zjarran fen troll and a cposk-serpent. Individual has somewhere between 0 and 7 limbs and died in late maturity, probably in the 7th century of its life when its body outgrew the capacity of the feeding dish it had been locked with inside a pit trap.

-4 hollow glass globular chandeliers, each containing ~200? engorged cannibalistic fireflies living in accelerated reproductive cycles of mass death and birth. Thermodynamics appears to have been violated.

-1 glass jar (weight: 100 grams) containing some water and an adult (female?) blue whale (weight: ~110 tons). Whale appears to be content, in good health, and sings quietly when kept company. Song appears to be of normal volume for an adult blue whale.

-1 guidebook to the Tomb of Malgrokklus the Wizened, Ancient Craftsmaker and Writmaster of Impeccable Horrors Most Esteemed. Writing style is exhaustingly dense and unnecessarily multisyllabic, which without further analysis lends credence to its authenticity as a work of Malgrokklus. Guidebook is coated with contact poison brewed from frogs that will paralyze the afflicted slowly, starting from the fingers and proceeding towards the heart while turning the skin bright blue.

-1 iron spoon, slightly sharper than normal. Edge does not appear to need honing. Chronologically may be the earliest known spork.

-1 iron-bound ironwood chest measuring 123 cm x 123 cm x 170cm externally. Internal volume is currently unknown until the spelunking team reports back, assuming the wildlife didn’t get them.

-1 tiny (26 cm tall) robotic man crafted from brass. No apparent power source, no apparent animating force, no apparent personality beyond ‘butler.’ Refuses to do anything but offer staff members drinks he does not possess.

-1 tiny oak chest inlaid with gold containing 3 small (living weight estimated at <10g) eyeless, tailless mice and a knife. Implications are unsettling.

-1 map, drawn in badly-weathered ink on what appears to be a used napkin (food stains include traces of wine, cheese, and some sort of preserve). Map appears to be either a prototype of the Tomb of Malgrokklus the Wizened, Ancient Craftsmaker and Writmaster of Impeccable Horrors Most Esteemed or a close facsimiles thereof.

-1 unattended brick, seemingly mundane. Brick contains a secret compartment holding a key which does not fit any lock within or without the Tomb of Malgrokklus the Wizened, Ancient Craftsmaker and Writmaster of Impeccable Horrors Most Esteemed. The key does have a secret compartment in its handle. In the compartment is a tiny version of the unattended brick. Inside a secret compartment of the tiny unattended brick is a tiny key. Investigation of the tiny key for secret compartments will begin as soon as sufficiently small set of tweezers can be manufactured.

-1 ceremonial oar-sceptre of coral and pearl crafted by the master-eddyists of Current Court. Historical records sourced using the maker’s-mark on the hilt proclaim this to have been granted for services rendered in creating some sort of magizoological reef fixative.

-1 signet ring, carved from solid onyx and emblazoned with the spirals-in-spirals symbol of Malgrokklus the Wizened, Ancient Craftsmaker and Writmaster of Impeccable Horrors Most Esteemed. Experimental use has confirmed that sealing any envelope with it will cause the contents to melt upon opening without the recital of the correct pass-phrase.

-1 grand wing’d dream-chariot, harnessed to a team of 4 horse skeletons each enchanted into nightmaredom and sealed within a private chamer. Appears to be designed to convey the passenger into their unconscious mind while waking, but this remains difficult to confirm at present since the nightmares devour anyone approaching them without the recital of the correct pass-phrase.

-2 private journals of Malgrokklus the Wizened, Ancient Craftsmaker and Writmaster of Impeccable Horrors Most Esteemed, self-identified as such upon their covers. One of them is false and one of them is real, and each invites the reader to ask it a single question (by writing in the frontispiece) that can be used to tell them apart. Writing anything in either book causes the reader’s fingers to come off without the recital of the correct pass-phrase.

-1 scrap of incredibly aged parchment, crudely and casually erased, found hastily crammed in a midden just outside the tomb’s entrance. Trivial analysis of the palimpsest shows a list of pass-phrases for every magical trap and device in the tomb.

-1 large sarcophagus containing the mortal remains of Malgrokklus the Wizened, Ancient Craftsmaker and Writmaster of Impeccable Horrors Most Esteemed. Sarcophagus is crafted from pure lead to deter all forms of removal and intrusion, physical, metaphysical, or quasireal. Inscriptions on the outer lid admonish trespassers; inscriptions on the inner lid deliver final warnings; inscriptions on the INSIDE of the inner lid spontaneously transform all oxygen within ~100 m³ into angry monomolecular devils when the lid is removed. See attached files: site incident reports 2-38.

-1 mortal remains of Malgrokklus the Wizened, Ancient Craftsmaker and Writmaster of Impeccable Horrors Most Esteemed. Peculiarities and noteworthy anomalies include 32 false teeth crafted from enchanted rubies containing 1 trapped lost soul each; 2 ritual trepanations designed to create ‘inward eyes’ in the brain-pan; runic etchings in the long bones of the limbs to ward away ill fortune; and an enchanted pubis. The nature of the enchantment on the pubis is unknown and unspeakable.

Xeek I swear to Frog the next time you drag me out here you can tabulate these tables on your own; have you ever tried to get a consistent count on a globe of rapidly dying and birthing bugs that never stop flying? My eyes hurt.

And after that pubis, my brain hurts. Goddamned wizards.

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.