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Once upon a time there was a single, lonely old wolf.  He’d been born without sisters or brothers and he had resigned to the fact that he would now die without them, and though this acceptance didn’t make him happy it did give him a sort of terrible sobriety with which he lived his days in restraint and emptiness, if not tranquility. 

Then one day, as the wolf lay in the woods alone, he heard a curious noise.  A grunting, grubbing, rooting, chuffing sort of noise.  He wondered if it might be a deer turned ill or injured, but then the smell came and oh no, how it made him SNEEZE.  Sharp and sordid and nasty. 

So he followed his nose out of the woods and into the meadows and there he found a vigorously trampled swathe of land, where the plants had been grubbed through and shredded and the ground-nesting birds and snakes and small animals had been devoured indiscriminately. 

And in the center of it was a massive, grunting, hairy monster with hot breath and a curly tail.

“Little thing, little thing, who are you?” asked the wolf of it.

“Feral hog,” snorted the feral hog.  “Go away.  I’m making a home here.  Go away.”
The wolf was a little bit hungry and a little lot-more annoyed at the rudeness of this feral hog, so instead he charged the pig, which stood its ground until the last minute and then fled, squealing and huffing and puffing until its legs ran sore tired and the wolf – though old and shaky – was still fresh enough, and brought it down and killed it and ate until he felt nearly sick. 

“How peculiar,” said the wolf.  “Maybe if there’d been more of us, this would be a good meal.  But it’s a bit much for me.”
Then he went to his favourite stream on the far side of the meadow, but the hog had been there too.  The mud had been churned into the water and the crayfish devoured and the frogs trampled or eaten or fled. 

The wolf drank some muddy water, which churned most oddly with the hog meat in his gut.  Then he slunk away back to the woods, slowly and surely, if not steadily. 

***

When the wolf passed through the young growth into the deeper forest where his den was dug he smelt it again: that serrated, silver-edged, smell.  Surreptitious in its pungent rot, yet unmaskable. 

“I’m full already,” he told himself, “so there is no need to investigate.” 

But the closer he came to home the stronger it grew, and at last he came to his den under the roots of an elderly oak and found it occupied.  A second giant hairy grunting monster had torn up his home’s front door and its ceiling and was eagerly tearing loose the wood from the soil and gulping it down. 

“Feral hog, feral hog, what are you doing?” asked the wolf

“Rooting and grubbing,” grunted the feral hog.  “Go away.  This is my home now, and I use it as I please.  Go away.”
The wolf wasn’t hungry at all, but he had lived in that shallow scrape of a den alone since his aunt died, and to have both it and himself disrespected in that way was too much for him.  So he leapt at the pig, full-bellied and groggy as he was, and though it squealed and turned and fought and huffed and puffed it was in a small space of its own making and died there, cradled in the torn roots of the oak tree it had killed.  Its thick blood clotted the earth with stinking sourness.

“If I had a family,” said the wolf, “this would be a fine meal for all of us, and we would dig a new home in no time.  But it’s too much for me.”

He burrowed a bit around the corpse to see if it could be shifted, but the hog proved even more obstinate as dead weight than living swine.  He wore himself out and came out covered in pig blood, sneezing hopelessly at the rankness and necessitating a second trip to the muddied stream. 

The wolf came back home once more in the twilight to see what could be done, and the answer was nothing.  He searched the woods for other places to dig, to scrape, to shelter and sleep by if only for an evening, and found that the hog had been busy before it had visited him.  The new growth had been devoured or trampled; the old growth had been uprooted and torn. 

He sniffed at the trees, and they said nothing in return.  Several were dead and didn’t know it, in the peculiar manner of root-crippled trees or familyless wolves. 

Then he walked away from the woods, head-hung and hard-done-by, if not hungry.

***

The woods vanished and then there weren’t any more. 

It was very confusing for the wolf.  The harsh asphalt paths were frequent, yes, but there were still trees between them and fields around those trees and shrubs around those fields, but none of them were woods and most of them weren’t meadows and the shrubs appeared to be being kept in line by constant-yet-curiously-restrained grazing rather than being strangled to death of sunlight by trees like the woods intended. 

Also, there were small wolves with odd fur and silly voices.  They had no manners.  Some of them stared, some barked, some whimpered, one that surprised him while he was sleeping under a hedge simply urinated all over itself and then laid down, ears-flat, until he turned his back to it.  They were like big puppies. 

Annoying as they were, they were still more pleasant company than the rest of the things around.  Metal boxes that farted their way down the asphalt with burnt juice squeezing out of their asses; giant piles of dead wood gnawed and grasped and heaved into position until even a beaver would’ve been embarrassed; huge empty unmeadows of the same plant positioned in the same way to its neighbours times ten thousand with only a few nervous rats and some reckless crows for company. 

“You’re really not where you should be,” the crows told him.  “And don’t eat the rats: if one of them’s eaten something it shouldn’t and you swallowed it then it’s lights out for you too, get it?”
“Yes,” the wolf lied.  His aunt had told him never to let birds see if you were confused. 

And then, one particularly fitful night, he woke up already-winded from his dreams, legs twitching and teeth bared. 

There was a stink in the air.

***

It was a vast building, coated with red-baked blocks of dead burned clay on the outside and metal on the inside and stench to a truly astonishing degree around it and within it and of it.  A shimmering lake stretched outside its doors, filled with no water and a truly literally breathtaking amount of hogshit.  The wolf’s nose gave up within half a mile of the place, and he found himself hoping it was for good.  Each breath felt like inhaling pondscum. 

And inside that giant hollow shell of a building, surrounded by their reeking moat, snorted and squealed and grunted one dozen, one hundred, one thousand hogs, more than a thousand hogs.  Hairy and grunting and rooting and shredding and popping out more and more hogs.  Resigned and dead-eyed bipedal apes wandered around and checked boxes indicating that there were more hogs than there were yesterday, and there would be more tomorrow, and so on and forever.  The hogs lay in cages and were pinned in place and nursed and squealed and grew and grew and grew and grew fat and grew cunning and looked through bars at the world outside and grew out to reach it. 

The wolf considered all of this.

“If I had a family,” he remarked, “there still wouldn’t be enough of us to make a difference.  And I would feel very guilty about this.  So I suppose it’s alright.”

Then he walked into the building, quick and quiet, if not quite keen. 

***

 The Great Jiggsville Swine Plague was not the first incident of hogs hunting humans.  It was not the hundred or even hundred thousandth occurrence of domestic pigs escaping into the wild.  It WAS the first occasion on which an entire commercial pork plant released its stock into the surrounding landscape within a few dozen miles of a suburban center; the first occasion on which the pigs stampeded towards human dwellings rather than the woods; and to this day remains the only mass jailbreak caused by a nonhuman. 

The security footage was heavily damaged in the escape, so exactly how a wolf got its hands on the gate controls is unknown.  How it managed to steer several thousand panicking, confused pigs is also unknown.  Witnesses agreed it looked pretty old and beat-up, which didn’t help matters.

“I think it was sick,” said one of the few surviving plant foremen.  “It was wheezing the whole time, really huffing and puffing.”

They never did find a body, but with thousands of pigs running rampant that was pretty normal.  There were bigger problems, like all those homes being invaded by feral pigs. 

Awful.  Just awful.  The poor property values, all gone down. 

A star fell.

It started up high – so high it was just another little white dot in the sky, shimmering from yellow to blue to red back to white again at the fancy of a viewer’s strained eyeballs – and then it came low, and it came low so fast and so furious that it tore the shrieking air in half and came to earth with the power of a very small and intense volcano, sending fountaining earth miles into the sky and shrouding the land in particulate that would linger for days no matter the sweepings and dustings and scrubbings that would be visited upon it all.

It also made Lord Batheley-Tweedlington, Baron of Coopmont and Yorklette-Upon-The-River and a Peerage of the Realm, spit out his pipe into his lap, spoiling his third-favourite Wednesday evening bathrobe. 

“Zounds!” he said.  “What the devil was that by jove?  Why, I say, I should go investigate.  Mrs. Biscuits!  Round up my carriage.”
“The stablehands just went abed,” said Mrs. Biscuits, who was fifty-six years old and looked a hundred and felt six times that some days.  She did not mask the contempt in her voice, as her employer was colourblind to it. 

“Well fire the insolent blighters and get me new ones, toodley pip toot sweet!  We’ve a sight to see!”

***

The sight was a smoulder glass-walled pit some hundred feet deep covered in burning ejecta that smelled like dying rocks and slaughtered dust.  Occasionally it went ‘ping’ and something exploded in a small and sulky manner.

“Astounding, marvelous, miraculous, wondrous, amazing, magical, why, downright providential!” gushed Lord Batheley-Tweedlington, popping his monocle in and out of each eye socket in excitement.  “A real-life fallen meteor, exactly as I’ve heard tale of in the Royal Society papers!  Why, I reckon they’ll come begging hat-in-hand to me to see such a sight, eh?”
“Sounds liable, sir,” agreed the backup coach driver.

“Strip off your uniform and return to the gutter, you verminous skittering wretch,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  “How DARE you speak to me without permission?”

“Sorry, sir.”
“CLUB HIM!”

“It’s just me, sir.  Should I club myself?”
Lord Batheley-Tweedlington ate his own tweed in anger. 

“I say I say I say what what what what what what what what what what’s afoot here, what?” interjected a most gormless voice.

Oh.  The horror.  Lord Batheley-Tweedlington realized, to his mounting loathing, that he had failed to notice the precise location of the fallen star in relation to his lands.  This was just outside No’thuperton (the Lesser), on the Sou’we’st’er’n’ side, which meant it was almost in the Duchy of Bucoolyptus, which meant it was adjourning the lands of…

“Woolthering,” he said coolly.  His worst enemy and second cousin waved cheerily back in reply, one long, thin arm jutting loose from a stagecoach that he realized was slightly nicer than his own. 

“Oh it’s BASIL, old boy old chum old sock old foot old fish old bass, you know it eh what what what?  Lovely to see you oh I do say what’s up have you come along to look at the ol’ thingamabob too?  Beautiful thing, beautiful, just beautiful, pity it landed on my half of the land but tell you what my old crown my old crock my old crumpet my old shoe you can take a piece free of charge not one groat nor ha-crown nor not a farthing nor penny nor ha’-penny upon my word as a gentlemen eh?”

While Lord Batheley-Tweedlington took his deepest breath and began to marshall his defenses against such an onslaught, the crater coughed.

“Pardon?” he asked, reflexively.

“Eh what what?” asked Woolthering, vacantly. 

“Hrrk,” explained the crater, strenuously.

Then the bottom of the buried pit heaved and roiled and disgorged a body into the mild Wednesday night, wreathed in the smell of burning chemicals and hot metal, and subsided its rotting self deeper into the earth. 

***

“Here, hold still you blasted thing!  Woolthering!  Woolthering!  Make the silly blighter hold still, would you – oh, step lively now, come off it, step lively!  How am I meant to get nice measurements with his bloody great numpty head swinging about like this?!”
“I say I say I say now hold on hold up hold on now my old tea and pudding my old china my old bean sprout the lad’s got a fierce hunger on him and you see how he growls when I step too close to his pudding, look at the face he makes, bless him!”
The visitor snarled at them over his eighth bowl of Mrs. Biscuit’s best what-I’ve-got-in-the-pantry soup.  Lord Batheley-Tweedlington was indeed unable to avoid looking at that face he made: it was almost magnetic.  Or at least he supposed it was; the teeth drew the eye so magnificently they seemed to swallow the attention whole.  For the first time in his life he was in the same room as Rufus Hibbleghorst Woolthering III without having his entire mind body and soul bent to contemplating his mortal destruction.  Instead his being was suffused with intoxicating words like CANINES and INCISORS and FANGS and SHARP to a degree that made him feel quite giddy.  Was this terror?  He’d never been terrified before.  What a peculiar emotion; he couldn’t say that he cared for it.  No wonder all the little people seemed so deuced upset to experience it all the time. 

A splash shook him out of his reverie; the visitor had inserted his entire brain-pan into the soup-pot.  Lord Batheley-Tweedlington seized the opportunity and – with a level of care he had hitherto reserved only for his own personage – placed the set of measuring-tongs about its skull and rattled off the numbers whip-smart. 

“Lovely!” cried Woolthering, and he began scribbling away on HIS (Batheley-Tweedlington’s) charts without so much as a by-your-leave or please-and-thank-you, which was NOT cricket at all and – “Done!”

“What?” burst out Lord Batheley-Tweedlington. 

“I say I say I said it’s done, my old trumpet my old coronet my old stocking my old grout!  Always had a head for figures, I did I say I say I say!  Here, take a gander!”

Lord Batheley-Tweedlington snatched the document from his cousin’s hands with ill grace and perused it with his typical fierce intelligence. 

“Upside down, old chap old chum old –”

“Oh DO shut up!” snapped Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  “Says here he’s an……”

“I say I say I say what?  Is it still upside down?”
“SHUT UP!  No, no, no, this is all wrong, you must’ve measured wrong!”
“But you wouldn’t let me touch the instruments, my old fiddle my old faddle!”
“Then you mathed them wrong!”
“I’m a maths expert, me, always am,” said Woolthering.  “I’ve never unmathsed a mathsing.  Mathsers are my bread and butter, I’ve never misundermathstimated a thing!”

“Well you’ve mathsed him as a bloody saint of the highest order, you have!  I’ve been an expert and fully-qualified phrenologist my entire adult life and in all my years I’ve never seen this low a highwayman-quotient; his nose is a roman as Great Caesar’s Ghost himself –”

“More of a snout, really-“

“-and his brow is noble!  High!  True!  Not the slightest trace of furrowing, of sloping, of, of, of COMMON BLOOD!  Why, he’s more anglo-saxon than my Uncle Percivius, and HE perished from exsanguination after chopping his own hand off when a beggar of irish-iberian stock brushed their fingers together while panhandling!”

“I say, he’s the one my mother disowned!  Terrible brother he was she said she did to me what what”
“He disowned her first.”
“He said she was ‘a blight on the blood of her highest and holiest house!’”
“Only when she disobeyed him!”
“He wanted her to marry him, what what what!”
“And she should’ve listened!  Purity, that’s the ticket!”
The visitor hissed through his beyond-roman snout, expelling a few last droplets of Mrs. Biscuit broth, and then curled himself into a small compact ball on his throne, where he began emitting the most aristocratic of snores.
“Well,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington loudly, in the tone of one who is putting an argument behind them BUT NOT BECAUSE THEY WERE LOSING IT, “I suppose it falls on us to civilize this man before he falls prey to the errancy and debauchery of this fallen, polluted, soiled world.  Amongst men such as I”
“-I say, I say, men such as WE-”

“-he may learn how to acquit himself in the manner of a man of his stature.”
“Speaking of which I say old chum are we sure he isn’t a lady?”
“My dear Woolthering,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington in the tones of one speaking to an unusually-thick clot, “this fellow travelled from a far star in a locomotive of fire and metal.  A woman’s bloodflow would collapse under such pressures and her brain-pan would explode from anxiety.  Obviously.”

“Oh no doubt my word my soul my sakes my word no doubt at all yes indeed indeed well then well!”
The visitor twitched and snarled nobly in his sleep, claws extended and retracting askew.

“Obviously yes let’s be about it,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  A few strands of antique French embroidery began to drip gently from between its grasping fingers.  “Urgently.”

***

“No, no, no, you are NOT to pay ANY ATTENTION to that end of the Great Chain of Being, that is where dogs and horses and Irishmen and other useful lower creatures abide, no no no you must look up here!  Here!  Just above-or-below the angels, under God, and….perhaps a LITTLE BIT above Englishmen?  Confound it, LOOK UP HERE damn you- AAAAGH!”
“I say!”
“It BIT me!”

“I say I say I say I saw you, you put your finger in his mouth!”
“That’s no bloody call for him to go and bloody well bite it!”

“I say, language!”
“Go to the blazes you darned harridan!”
“I say!”

The visitor snarled. 

“Now look at what you’ve let him do!  He’s chewed up the Great Chain of Being!   And NOT from the bottom-up as is right and proper!  He’s CHEWED UP GOD THE FATHER THE SON AND THE HOLY SPIRIT!”

“Don’t shout!”

“I WILL SHOUT WHEN I PLEASE AND ulk”

“I say!”

“uh”

“Please do let him go sir, I promise he shall stop shouting!”

“h”

“See, he agrees!”
“-ah.  Ah.  Thank.  You.”
“You’re welcome old friend old chum!”
“Please, Woolthering, I beg of you, in – ah, my god – the name of our many years of bitter, spiteful enmity, do not mention it.  Ever.  To anyone.”

“Lips sealed and solemnly sworn to oath eh what what what what what what what what what what!”

“What,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington mechanically.  He dabbed at the marks on his neck.  It was the worst he’d had since his dear old father had passed away of the dropsy.  “What.  Do we do now?”
“Well,” said Woolthering thoughtfully, “we might try-”

“Rhetorical!” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington loudly and a little too quickly.  “Rhetorical!  Come now!  We must correct his notions, and I know just the place.”

***

The Chapel of St. Burleston-Helpmeet-By-The-Starry-Shore-King-Of-Peace-And-Love had served Anglicanism proudly and with distinction since the first days after Henry the Eighth had his little difficulties with the pope, and before that it had been a Catholic shrine, and before that a roman temple, and before THAT some druids had done interesting things in its neck of the woods with knives and mistletoe and a consistent supply of about one and a half galloons of blood in mobile form. 

It had been burning most beautifully for five minutes, which was long enough for the panic to die down and the blame to go around. 

“You did this!” shouted Lord Batheley-Tweedlington. 

“I say!”
“You DID!  You said this was a good idea!”
“I say, I say, you said that!”
“No!  It was my idea but YOU said it was a good one!”
“I say!  I say that I said that it was a bad one!”
“WELL YOU SHOULD’VE SAID LOUDER!”
The visitor growled truculently. 

“Shut it,” snapped Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  “And drop that piece of the vicar!  The poor man only had one leg after waterloo, and now you’ve gone and robbed him of two of his longest and best fingers!” 

The visitor obligingly spat them out, covered in a peculiar secretion that dissolved the flagstones at their feet.

“Right!  Woolthering, you take them.”
“What?”
“What what?”
“What is what I said, what what!”
“What ‘what’ did you mean by saying what?!”

“What!”

“WHAT!”

A star descended from the heavens as smoothly and as softly as a baby’s sleeping smile.  It drifted from bottomless heights to the lowly earth in a single heartbeat and yet never rushed; its mass flattened the smouldering rubble of St. Burleston-Helpmeet-By-The-Starry-Shore-King-Of-Peace-And-Love without a whisper of effort or a creak of protest, and when its passenger disembarked even it seemed to move with grace despite having sixteen legs four faces and an entirely unbelievable number of arms. 

“There you are, my sweet baboo,” it sighed in an entire choir’s whispers. 

The visitor spat out the third finger it had secreted in its cheek pouches and scampered with a bound to the passenger’s skirts, which it pawed at most pleadingly.  It was picked up, and adorned with a crown of writhing appendages and sensors that soothed and fussed over it, and it was loved. 

Then the star swallowed them again and was gone.  A second later, it had never even existed. 

The two men stood there and stared at the empty sky, listened to the creak and crisp of more centuries of pews going up in cinder-spouts. 

“Bit of a pity one didn’t remember to bring his phrenological calipers with us, what what?  I should’ve liked to see her skull circumference.”
“She had a skull?” asked Lord Batheley-Tweedlington, distantly.  And then, “wait, she?  You think that…THAT… was a lady?”
“Why not what?”
Lord Batheley-Tweedlington closed his eyes.  “I’m going home.  I fear I have become ill.”

“Laudanum’ll do the trick, I say!  Swear on it for a dicky stomach!”

“Oh shut it,” snapped Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  “What do you know about scientific procedure?  If it weren’t for men like me we wouldn’t know anything about these beings from the phlogiston vapours of the luminous ether!”

“What do we know then eh, my old turnip, my old carrot, my old root cellar?”
Lord Batheley-Tweedlington looked to the skies again.  They were darkening and dimming; the smog from London town was rolling in with the winds.  He wished he had his pipe. 

“They clearly aren’t civilized enough to appreciate the power of Victorian scientific thought,” he said stiffly. 

Then he went home and drank half his bar as a medicine cabinet. 

We moved to space.  It seemed like a good idea at the time. 

So we made rockets and launch segments and fuel tanks and engines and we moved ourselves up into space, piece by piece, part by part, spanner by spanner, bolt by bolt, then finally body by body.

And we were in space.  Because space was completely empty, and it was the future. 

***

We moved to space.  It was full of nothing, but that just meant it was full of possibility.

So we made factories and parts and pieces and special tools.  It took forever and ever and ever because every single module and gear and bolt had to be lifted up out of the bottom of a planet’s entire gravity well. 

So we built a space elevator.  This took even more factories and parts and pieces and special tools.  It took forever and ever and ever and ever because it required ultratensile materials that were only theoretically possible in the same way that there was no rule saying your molecules COULDN’T line up just right to let you walk through a wall if you kept trying for the entirety of the universe’s lifespan times infinity, but that was just an insult to our can-do spirit and heroic goals so we tried anyways. 

It fucked up and split in half and in half again and again and again, which was actually really good because it prevented it from whipping around the planet repeatedly and instead flung a lot of it out into space.  The rest slammed violently into the planet hard enough to leave giant holes everywhere and killed a lot of people and destroyed a lot of people’s homes and made life harder for a lot of people. 

Their sacrifices were just and noble.  Because we were going to move to space. 

Cleaning it all up took forever and ever and ever and ever and ever, though. 

***

We moved to space.  It took a lot of work, and we mean a LOT of work, but that just made it heroic. 

There was an obvious problem, in that although there was infinite amounts of space and finite amounts of us, getting any of us into space was still sort of hard.  So we compromised and sent those of us into space to work that were brave and hardy and courageous and also didn’t mind the tiny tiny tiny tiny chance of being decompressed or suffocating or suffering an embolism and also the complete and total certainty of undergoing rapid skeletomuscular degeneration and quickly accumulating life-changing amounts of radiation exposure. 

They were happy to do it.  We HAD selected them for that, after all.  And most of them even stayed happy after they withered up and shriveled up and had bits snap or drop off.  Because they got to move to space, albeit to help other people move to space, and they floated around until they couldn’t anymore and we buried them by launching them at their home planet below and or out into the empty universe as per their request. 

Most of them wanted to be shot into space.  This wasn’t totally surprising. 

***

We moved to space.  At last.

Things started breaking right away, of course.  Maintenance is tricky and tough enough when you can breathe and wear gloves instead of giant insulated mitts attached to rigid full-body casketsuits.  And sometimes you’re tired or you’re bored or you’re hungry or you’re thirsty or a thought crossed your mind at just the right moment and you maybe miss a little something that doesn’t mean anything, so you don’t care and then you do it again and again and maybe someday it’s a BIG something and other days all the little somethings turned into a huge something and someone may or may not or maybe gets sucked out an airlock or maybe suffocates or finds out that the entire tank of #6 Spicy Sou’wester Barbecue Sauce got a leak and they don’t have any more and they maybe start a maybe completely justified riot. 

There are many hardships in space.  Which is like being an adult, which is inevitable, so of course we had to move there.  Where else would we be?

***

We moved to space.  This meant we didn’t have to care about a lot of things.

In places that weren’t space, people were dying and suffering and starving and screaming and so on.  There’s no sound in space so we didn’t have to hear it, and you’re too far away to see anyone or anything.  No countries or borders and no armies and no famines and no people and no forests or mountains and no life and nothing, just a big smeary blue ball. 

We didn’t look out the viewports on that side anyways.  It wasn’t space. 

And we didn’t have many viewports.  They were structural weaknesses.  Additional structural weaknesses. 

It was pretty annoying when the deliveries got more erratic.  And more expensive.  And more and more and more people started complaining about us being in space, asking what the hell we were doing up there.  But they were busy with problems that weren’t in space, so sooner or later they would be distracted or dead due to something that wasn’t about space. 

We’d moved to space.  What the hell did they think it meant?

***

We’d moved to space.  Now we could get to work on the important things. 

So we made stuff, from things we had to haul to space, and we either used it to fix the problems we had in space or we launched it back down to earth and they used it to make things to haul stuff back to space so we could make stuff. 

It would’ve been easier if we had the space elevator but there had been totally unforeseeable problems with that.  So instead we complained about the gravity well.  Bad enough that our skeletons missed the planet so much they kept crumbling into bacon bits; everything that needed to be moved into space was very reluctant about it and kept wanting to dive back down until it was properly heaved shoved pushed and launched on a column of carbonized fire. 

Why was everything so stubborn?  Why did it want to stay where it was, rather than moving to space?  There was so much space in space.  There wasn’t much else, but that was the appeal: imagine, having as much room as you needed to do things and nothing in your way and nothing with you and nothing being you and all around you nothing but nothing but nothing but nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing

nothing.                

***

We moved out of space. 

It was not a decision lightly made, and many of us protested it at the time.  But it wasn’t our call.  Bits and parts and people fell off and seized up and powered down and passed away until there wasn’t much there. 

Just space. 

***

We moved to space.  It seemed like a good idea at the time. 

Turns out the only stuff in space is what you put in it. 

Who knew?

At ten minutes to noon Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, stood on her chanting verandah and murmured the last syllables of a twenty-five minute spell precisely on time. 

“Go,” she said, and with a flick of her fingers the verandah’s voice fell silent and the words echoed and with a fat sucking sound that was almost exactly the opposite of any language she was ripped free from the earth and fell into the sky. 

The sky was a dangerous place to be a human.  The breezes were vicious and the air was harsh and around her she could feel the ill will and tremendous force that was the will of the birds, tugging on her limbs, draining from her heart, adding lead to her bones and gasps to her breath.  Upstart mammal, they hissed into her brain.  Wretched offspring of synapsids, thick-limbed, clumsy-footed, gut-brooding hairy rat.  Know your place below. 

Ar-klazion ignored them, and when that didn’t work anymore she sang to them, a long and mocking song whose simple melodies and blunt noises were offensive to their longminds and crude to their oldest souls, and they reeled away in disgust that overcame their hatred.  She chuckled smugly and banked through a cloud of grudges and seething spite; most of the attitude for dealing with the very old worked across species quite nicely, if not the precise words.  But now her sky was clear and her purpose was sharp and she had work to do.

She had a night to catch. 

***

The night lay far in advance from her, fleeing as it was wont to, and an inexperienced sorcerer or cunningman or witch – flush in their powers and giddy with success – might have hurled themselves pell-mell after it in gleeful haste.  They would scoff at restraint and mock the notion of a challenge greater than that they had already conquered to come here; the defiance of an entire planet’s heavy-handed grasp; the evasion of its ancient and crabbed-taloned rulers; the precisely correct pronunciation of twenty-five minutes of ancient words created by a species that had no actual mouths humans would recognize.  This would be what would get them killed, if not in the next few hours then the next time they did something else significant.  Ambition was a spice; arrogance was a poison. 

So Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, crossed her legs and sat upon an icy scrap of cirrus fibratus, where she began, very intently and very thoroughly, to look at her hands. 

Finger.  Thumb.  Finger.  Finger.  Finger.  Times two. 

She pulled them in and out, tugged on that heartbeat, rolled them back and forth and checked the palms and the knuckles and the tendons and the little scars and the bumps and the hangnails and itchy bits that were part of having a body, and she reached out and gently cupped a handful of ozone and brought it down to her.  It hissed and spat most angrily at being brought low thusly, and she soothed its murmurs with one hand even as her other began to remove its skin before the lowly air could strip it loose. 

Her anvil was her palm; her hammer was her thumb; her tongs were her fingers; her forge was her breath. 

It lay gilded and glowing in her grip, a small knife exactly one inch long and one horizon wide, and she picked it up and swung it and it cut the lesser, lower, rarified air in half with the vicious callousness of an aristocrat overdue for the guillotine.  Where it slashed, the sky bled apart, and where it did, Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, followed. 

***

On the vacuum-path she spun forwards, lungs empty, heart frozen, brain alive with sparkling plans.  Behind her she left a brutish contrail of puzzled oxygen molecules, peeled freshly from both the atmosphere and her ozone-blade and left to quarrel in confusion as oxygen molecules always do.  Far beneath and below rust fell like rain and humans grew light-headed and giddy; cats burst into laughter and dogs wandered in dazes.  A contrail of sparkling, dying metals marked the edges of her passing, and as her speed reached its zenith Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, saw the air begin to dye itself from passionate ocean blue to royal purple bruising. 

She was catching up to the night.  It was arrogant and old and it was used to being the fastest thing in the sky, and she would get very close to it indeed before it bothered to notice her. 

When it did, she knew it.  The moon had been following her for some time now, and when it veered sharply in her direction she was ready.  Bodyguard of the night, wanderer of the late summer skies, it dove at her like a stooping hawk, but it was inelegant in its rush and overconfident in its surprise and she simply banked to one side and let the moon slide by, laughing in disdain as it shaved itself down to a crescent on the sharp edge of her passage.  It gained her some seven high-leagues towards the target before the night even noticed its failure, the eld fool, and still, oh still, oh yet the miserable thing didn’t understand the position it was in.  Stars twinkled in her path and rose in her face to bar her way, but she was ready and carefully cut herself into dimensions that slid between their light like water through a streambed, slipping past the shine and squirming closer, ever closer to that inky black that lay beyond. 

The night was still not alarmed.  Why would it be?  Fail though its guardians may, it was still the earthbound finger of the infinite dark on this world, the touch of the universe running down the spine of the planet to bring it shivering relief from the smothering love of its upstart star-parent. 

It must be remembered, of course, that fingers are very delicate in more than one sense. 

So it was both no surprise that the night itself allowed Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, to come so close to it without much caring, and that when she subsequently brought out a small potted plant and turned its chlorophyll inside-out, dumping a lifetime’s-worth of sunshine out in a very sharp railroad-spike of pure photons, it was immediately, unceremoniously, and painfully nailed to the sky. 

***

The heavens did not scream. 

The night itself screamed.  It was much bigger and older and softer and more arrogant, and so it reacted as shrilly and angrily as any such person does when pain is visited upon them, especially minor, inconvenient, meaningless pain.  Actual agony would freeze them stiff. 

The heavens did not scream.  But at hearing that, they did cower and shrink away.  And so Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries was alone in the gap where the sky had been, with the immense vastness of the pinned night and a fraying splinter of purest harvested sunlight. 

There was little time to waste.  She brought out her spade and bucket and alit upon the night’s shores, and there she braced herself, and put her hat between her teeth, and bit down so that when her shovel breached the flesh of the night itself the tremendous and all-consuming nauseated pain and roiling horror wouldn’t make her bite off her tongue because she needed that to get back home alive very very much. 

The night was now coherent enough to get over its shock and stop screaming and begin cursing, so Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries stopped up her ears with small scraps of rags and began to hum as loudly and off-kilter as she could, drowning out swearwords and damnable blasphemies with lullabies and nonsense verse and filthy limericks, watering down the infinite with the ultra-finite until it could not wound or touch her.  Her fingers itched with the temptation to reach out and snag a flailing tendril of one of the smaller curses, but no, her self-control won the day.  Some things aren’t meant to be taken, but more common are the things that are up for grabs by anyone but with a nasty tendency to remove the hand that receives them. 

She had a bucket full of something like those now, lighter than air and heavy with portent.  Her arm was buoyed and her soul was weighted, and as she threw aside the dissolving remains of what used to be the idea of her shovel and the little sunlight sliver dissolved and the night began to bloom in hideous wrath all around her, she clicked her tongue three times, coughed, and from memory, yelled a loud and perfect “cock-a-roo-roo!”

And Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries slid vastly, perfectly, endlessly down the slope of above and around and into the small comfortable spaces crowded all around with matter, with ordinary matter, with ordinary things that mattered, and slammed into her chanting verandah with such force that every bone in her body came within a single degree of dislocation. 

She lay there for a few hours trying to work up the energy to scream or cry.  The potted plant comforted her, but greater still was the comfort of the little bucket in her left hand.  It was full of the closest thing anyone on a gravity well can get to the actual universe, and it weighed a stupid amount because weight was a stupid concept to apply to it, like size, like shape, like age. 

“Got you,” she said, a few minutes before dinner. 

Then she screamed for a while until she felt better. 

***

“That’s very nice, dear,” said Hanna, mother of Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries.  She gently turned the bucket in her palms, giving it friendly little pats to soothe its noises.  “But this isn’t what I meant when I asked if you could go get me some nightsoil for my garden.”

“Well what the hell else would you mean?” 

Hanna told her.

“Shitting EUPHEMISMS?!” erupted Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries. 
“Exactly,” said Hanna. 

Twenty-six days, that was how long it took.  Wendell felt that was very reasonable of him.

Twenty-six days since they found the mould in the apartment beneath him (and ONLY that apartment: apparently it had originated from an ambitious fridge slime that had gotten too big for its britches and had made it as far as the microwave before being caught).  Twenty-six days of antiseptics and antibacterial and antimicrobial soaps.  Twenty-six days of feeling like someone had placed a can of ethanol inside one nostril and a bar of soap in the other. 

That was how long it took before Wendell went to see the leprechaun in the building’s basement.

“I’m a brownie,” said the leprechaun. 

“Yeah,” agreed Wendell.  “A leprechaun.”

“I’m closer to a hobgoblin than anything.”
“A leprechaun.”
“Are you even listening to me?”
“I’ll make you a deal, leprechaun,” said Wendell.  “Can you please, please, please, please, PLEASE take away my sense of smell?  Because it’s worse than death having it.”
The leprechaun scratched his nose in perplexity at this.  There was a lot of nose to scratch, both inside and out – it was not long, but it was broad and possessed a staggering depth to it, emotional and physical.  “Look, leprechauns don’t cut deals.  But brownies can, I s’pose.  Stop calling me a leprechaun and I’ll have that nose off you.”
“Not the nose, just the smell.”
“Why do you care?”
“I like my nose.”
The brownie looked at it critically.

“What?”
“Nothing.  Nothing.”
“That wasn’t nothing.”
“It’s a fine nose, I mean.  Just.  I’ve seen better, that’s all.”
“Take the damn smell,” said Wendell.

“Fine,” said the brownie.  And he did.

***

That night Wendell went to bed early and fell into the true sleep of the blissfully exhausted and drifted too deeply for dreams, until the exact moment someone rear-ended someone else on Queen Street and the sirens and the howling and roaring and mangling and screaming grabbed his hindbrain and hurled it back into the universe in blinking terror. 

“Jesus,” he muttered, and rolled over.

Ten minutes later a couple outside had a proposal turn into a breakup. 

Ten minutes after THAT the tow-truck for the rear-ender got rear-ended. 

Ten minutes after THAT the police showed up.

Wendell walked downstairs to the basement and nearly died sixteen times on the way due to forgetting to open his eyes until the third floor. 

“What’s up?” asked the brownie, who was reading an old magazine of dentist’s-office age and stateliness. 

“Can you do ears too?” asked Wendell. 

The brownie’s eyebrows crinkled into highly disgusted shapes. 

“Hearing.  I mean, can you take my hearing?”
“I only do trades,” said the brownie.  “And thank fuck because listen pal, those ears?  Those are fixer-uppers.  You got wax in there or is that tar?”

Wendell pulled off his right slipper and threw it at him, then went to bed and slept through his alarm clock by six hours. 

***

Wendell’s sheets were tacky.  Not as a matter of taste, but as a matter of sensation. 

Sweat, mostly.  Some dust.  And the thread was bare and coarse enough that it trapped them easily. Now that he was getting a solid eight (minimum) a night, he woke irked from it.  And breakfast wasn’t helping.  Breakfast was oatmeal, same as always.  And it tasted like nothing at all, but a little bit worse. Air tasted like nothing.  Oatmeal tasted like lumps. 

“Hey,” said Wendell to the brownie. 

“Hey,” said the brownie. 

“How can I still hear YOU?”

“You’re not,” said the brownie dismissively.  “Don’t overthink it.  Now what the hell’s your problem this time?”
“I hate my breakfast and I hate my fabrics,” said Wendell.

“Want new sheets?  Some recipe ideas?”
“Can you just take my senses of touch and taste?”
The brownie sighed.  “Sure.  Why not.  What’re you offering?”
“I’ll trade you my sense of touch for taking my sense of taste,” said Wendell, who had thought about this very carefully on the way down sixteen flights of stairs. 

The brownie squinted at him.  “Clever.  Very clever.  Too clever.  Don’t try that shit again.”

Breakfast was peaceful then, aside from when Wendell almost bit his tongue off by mistake and only noticed when the spoon came out of his mouth bright red. 

***

The wall to the left side of Wendell’s computer monitor was his worst enemy. 

It was painted teal, but not really.  It was grey, but not quite.  It was almost the colour of a sullen sky, or maybe some sluggish water.  It was rough from the wall’s texture, or maybe that was because it had been applied slapdashedly.  There was a hole that might have been from hanging a picture or from a careless bump with furniture moving.  A spider was living high up on it, unless that was a smear from something. 

Data entry crawled along so slowly, so slowly because of it.  Hours went by in which Wendell had nothing to do but sit and consider that stupid, stupid, stupid wall. 

“Take my sight, please,” he told the brownie. 

“Why don’t I just paint your wall?” the brownie asked. 

“Take it,” said Wendell firmly, “and I’ll be happy.”

“Oh thank FUCK,” said the brownie.  And although Wendell took some two hours to get back to his apartment and could no longer enter data at all, he felt great relief and comfort. 

***

The next day he went down to the basement, which took only one hour but probably almost wasn’t very safe. 

“You’re a ripoff,” he pouted.  “I gave you my sight and we agreed I’d be happy and I’m not!  I’m miserable!”
“That’s because you’ve been avoiding your problems by ignoring them instead of doing anything to fix them,” said the brownie.  “Did you buy ear plugs?  Do your laundry?  Get a poster?  Visit a friend?  Do anything, ever?  TRY something?”
“This is much easier,” said Wendell.

“Beyond the personal moral implications on your character, it’s also pretty rude to the blind and deaf communities.”

“This is all making me even LESS happy,” complained Wendell.  “Fix it!”
The brownie shut his eyes, counted to six on one hand, and opened his eyes again.

“Alright,” he said. “You want me to fix you being unhappy?”
“Yes!”
“And you’re sure about this?”
“Yes!”
“And-”

“We had a deal and I demand you uphold it.”
“Fine,” said the brownie.

***

Wendell’s hospital bed was coarse, his meals rough, his roommate noisy, his neighbours loud, and his walls painted a dreadful vomit—orange. 

But his brain was in a little jar in a basement in a brownie’s burrow, and so he smiled, and was not troubled. 

Barboringgravvixtoner’cha’tirlishmecklestonmorrigor woke up. 

It was a sudden sharp surprise to her.  It only took a few weeks. 

The sudden flood of returning senses was the same rush it always was – pitch blackness resolving at her pupils; tingling air on her hide; distant odours eddying through her sinuses – but it arrived without the usual easy comfort.  She felt groggy.  She felt heavy.  She felt tired.  She felt like she wasn’t done sleeping.

And then, after a discombobulated month or so, her brain realized why. 

“Oh,” she said (aloud: there was no WAY she was coherent enough for thought).  “I’m hungry.”

***

Her fridge was empty.  The deep-cave’s ice was bare and slick, not even a bloodstain remaining.  Pure cold ice, satisfying to crunch and utterly useless save to build up emergency steam in the absence of liquid water. 

Damnit.  Sure she’d hunted before torpor?  The memories were surly and slow to arrive, begrudging with details and short-tempered when prodded: yes, she’d hunted; no, she hadn’t bothered to save leftovers; yes, she’d eaten the whole thing, claws, paws, fur and all.  It had only been a young bear, she’d told herself; it wouldn’t even make for a decent midslumber snack; she’d only be angry with herself if she woke up and all she had was a half-consumed half-grown half a bear ass. 

Well, here she was: half-ass-less and exactly as angry as she was worried about anyways.  Maybe she could go get another one?  Was it winter?  Finding hibernaculums was a pain and any inhabitants she could dig out would be half-withered from their own naps.  It smelt like winter.  Damnit. 

Her wings cramped.  Her forelegs burned with the ache of comfiness turned sour with stiffness.  There was an itch precisely between her hips that no amount of twisting would ever let her scratch. 

“Fuck it,” she spoke, slipping into eldwords in her liminal consciousness, intent writing itself into her brain and settling just above the surface of her soul.  “I’ll just make a salad.”

And lo, it was sworn. 

***

The mountain stream was too fast to freeze.  That, combined with its delicious traces of heavy metals, was part of what had led her to select this cavern complex in the first place.  It was nice to not have to play whack-a-mole to find the least-stagnant patch of water underneath the crust and then worry about trying not to inhale too many turtles when half asleep.  That big snapper had sent her into chronic coughing for the rest of the year. 

Steam built up.  Her heart roared into second gear, her body temperature in a few select places skyrocketed, and she creaked and hissed her way downslope; half-flying, half-pouring herself, letting gravity take the wheel.  She eeled her way down to her favourite mineral field and oh!  Oh!  The gall!  Some horrible little pests had gone and nibbled away at it while she was abed, snipping away at the exposed edges and chewing on all the richest veins!  It was practically swiss cheese by now. 

“Fuck,” she said aloud – again, in eldwords, and so bilious emotion slopped out of her mouth and poured across the ground, eating away the scrap rock and slag like soft dirt.  But wait, but wait, there was still a smell of metal, a hint – a more-than-hint, an intoxicating whiff – of appetite.  She tidied away the leavings of the pests and as she cleared the slope of stacked stones and chewed timbers (sending a few stragglers flying in the process, hideous little tetrapodal bodies flailing and squealing) there was a little exposed nest, and in that nest, wonder of wonders, of all the pleasant surprises, against all she knew and hoped, in spite of everything, was a few dozen pounds of near 24-karat gold. 

“Holy shit,” she blurted out, blighting the ground around her with irrecoverable poison, which it looked to be used to.  “Jackpot!”  Who knew the little four-limbed bastards had it in them?

Hmm. 

She looked downslope.  Yes, there were more down there.  They usually preferred the valleys to her peaks, and she could smell the rising cinders from their half-baked little fires, feel the fuzzy and linty edges of their small dreams. 

So she lurched, slipped, and jumped and landed amongst them. 

***

The big nests were the real prizes.  They’d taken the gold and silver and purified it so beautifully, then frustratingly fashioned it into tiny little flat circular fecal pellets.  She stuffed them into her crop as she sifted through the detritus, then alit on something even nicer: a tiny wooden husk holding something that, but for its sparkle, almost looked like diamonds.  Then she sniffed and licked and bit and felt that crunch and grit and knew they WERE diamonds, only the little pests had nibbled away the edges of the gems to make them sparkle.  Magpies they were.  Still, even reduced they were a nice treat. 

Yes, it was all coming together nicely.  And oh, and oh, what was this that she smelt, that she smelt smelting?  On the edge of town a fire that roared sullen-dark, almost like a very sad and tiny version of her own gut.  She upended it and spilled molten goo across the ground – sad tin, dull iron, but mixed within the slag and the slurry was something that hummed JUST right. 

At last.  Perfect. 

***

The gold lay heaped; topped with silver.  The gems blazed.  And threaded throughout it as dressing and binding, the small tickling buzz of a light undertone of molten radium. 

Barboringgravvixtoner’cha’tirlishmecklestonmorrigor wrapped herself around it three times, coiled tightly as she could, and inhaled the rising fumes from the whole glowing glorious mess in three shuddering breathes. 

Damn, she loved salad. 

And so she went to bed, body aching pleasantly instead of stiffly; stomach full; soul soothed; and she slept there quite content and very happy and ready to awake late in the decade.

Then some little FUCKER rode up to her door on a horse, snuck into her bedroom, and stabbed her side. 

Kenneth was a big, beautiful scorpion – six hundred tons if he was a gram, with a lovely red carapace that made the haemolymph of his opponents splash most attractively against it. Jarleen had ridden him to victory in six races and two grand championships and the noise he made as his mouth foamed and his legs folded under him and his brain shut off was a very small and disappointed ‘thhht,’ more fitting of a distressed dockyard guard-spider than a mighty steed.

“Fuck,” said Jarleen in her trademark manner, which seventeen articles in seventeen periodicals had described as classy-yet-efficient. “Fuck fuck.” Half a league from the finishing line and down a mount with no backups. “Fuck fuck fuck.”  And the trap had been poison, which had needed time to work its way through Kenneth’s system, which had needed to be timed during a pit stop, which meant the race officials were compromised. “FUCK.”
“Why do you swear as you assault that dead beast so?”
Jarleen looked at her hands and looked at what was in them and looked at the stranger (stocky, squinty, strange) and discovered that she was correct, as entirely without planning to she had seized up her goad and begun thwacking Kenneth in what had formerly been the tenderest section of his exoskeleton.

“I’m a half-hour ahead on a sixteen hour race and some scumfuckering bribetaking pissshitting fuckbitchassmotherwhore killed my mount with doped food,” she explained primly. “Now please stay back because I can’t guarantee my aim at the moment.”

“Oh, you need a new ride?” asked the stranger. She scratched aimlessly at the sun—boils on her arm, which were the ripe round red of someone who’d spent too much time on the old hiways where the sun rolled off the rotted metal roofs of the motorcars. “I sell rides.”
“The Southern Eldland Grand Loop is only open to skyscraper-class scorpions,” said Jarleen.

“And hey, that’s what I sell,” said the stranger, offering her scratching hand – still flaked with dead skin under the nails. “My name’s Moth. Let’s talk titanturkey, shall we?”

***

Moth’s Used Scorpions was a scrap of worn cloth serving as both tent and banner stretched between a pair of Eld-age streetlamps. Underneath it was a rock (her chair) a cooler (her lunch and her safe) and a telescope (for spotting clients).

Moth offered Jarleen half her lunch. It had been a long time since her last meal and a random stranger was at this point less likely to poison her than any of the professionals at the pit stops, so Jarleen took the bottle and drank stale fermented grain as she was shown the first scorpion, lurking patiently in the shadowed and empty-eyed bulk of an Eld building that very nearly stood taller than he did.

“This is Billy. Good shape, gently used, young enough to have tons of energy and not so young as to be thin in the carapace. A bit plain in his patterning, but a working jockey’ll care less about that than results, right?”
“The ‘casters don’t shut up about it, but yes.”

Billy rustled gently beneath them, mandibles flexing, and Jarleen sighed. “Close. Very close. But absolutely not. He’s got no right pincher.”
“And he makes good use of his left!”
“Nine times out of ten that’s the side you get passed on in the last league. He’s as useless to me as if he had no legs. Pass.”
“C’mon, you’re in no position to be choosey,” protested Moth.

“Unless you’ve only got the one scorpion, I suspect I am. Who’s next?”

Next was Newman. He brooded low in the shade of a collapsed overpass, the skeletal remains of his meals delicately picked-dry around his den-mouth.

“Two pinchers, see, that’ll do you,” said Moth, accepting her lunch back and shotgunning the dregs of the bottle with a loud crunching sound. “And believe you me, he’s fierce enough with them. Almost got my leg two days ago.”

“I can deal with feisty,” said Jarleen. “Call him out.”
“Pardon?”
“Let’s see his pace.”
Moth sighed and put her fingers to her teeth and shrieked a harsh note that shook the dust from the deadest windows of the Eld buildings, and Newman bestirred and slowly, gently eeled his way loose to investigate.

Jarleen sighed.

“Hey, he still has two pinchers! I told you!”
“You told me. He also has no legs. You didn’t tell me that.”
“He gets around pretty good for someone with no legs, I’d like to see you do any better.”
“I wouldn’t do worse. And I wouldn’t win this race. Do you have any others?”

Moth shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m a bit light on stock.”
“Anything. Anything at all.”
“Alright, alright.” Moth shrugged once more – a great heave of flexion from shoulder to wrist – and pulled her hand from her pocket.

“That’s a beetle.”
“So it is.”
“That is NOT a scorpion.”
“You said anything at all, what the hell more do you want?”
“A scorpion!” screamed Jarleen. “An honest to god skyscraper-class scorpion that can run a race and defend itself and beyond that I don’t care if it’s on the verge of death or a barely-hatched skitterling with wobbly legs! Hell, at this point I don’t care if all you’ve got is a female – I’d take her so long as she had the restraint to not eat me or the officials until the race is over!”

Moth drew her palm across her brow, smearing fresh dust on old grease. “Alright, alright, alright. Fine. I didn’t want to do this, but fine. I’ve got a personal favourite, see. His name is Tyler and he’s been with me through thick and thin and helped capture half my stock. But you’re in a hurry, and you’re in need, and you know what? The old boy deserves one last moment of glory.”

“We’ll see,” said Jarleen.

***

Tyler stood twenty-two meters at the apex.

Tyler’s pinchers were meticulously honed to razors.

Tyler’s tail was the pleasantly-plump sheen you got when a scorpion was flush with venom.

Tyler’s carapace was a lovely thick black without even so much as flecks or mottles of light – no wonder Moth had caught others with him; on a moonless night, he would be invisible despite all his majesty.

Tyler was also stone dead.

“He was happy as a clam an hour ago,” said Moth in tears. “Ate his cow like a good boy and everything. Oh Tyler! You were old, but I thought we’d have more time together! Oh Tyler! Why?! Anyways that’s the lot, who’ll it be?”
Jarleen swallowed the primal words at the back of her throat. “What?”
“Who’ll you take?”
“Between them all, you have one barely-functioning scorpion.”

“So why not just ride ‘em in turns?” said Moth in that infuriating tone of voice that dared suggest she thought she was being very reasonable.

“One mount per racer,” said Jarleen, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth with perfect care. “Just one at a time. Wait. Wait wait wait.”
“Yeah?”

“Hold on a moment.”
“Yeah?”
“Have you fed your stock today besides Tyler?”
“Yeah?”
“FUCK-“
“No wait no I mean no, sorry. Was just fixing to when you showed up and I got distracted.”

Jarleen stared at Tyler’s big dead body.

“I’ll take all three of them.”

“Which three?”
“The SCORPIONS, YOU-” and then Jarleen thought about it. “All of them. All four of them. Give me that beetle this second; I need to chew on something.”

***

“A beautiful beast,” said the ‘caster into his microphone. “Lovely black carapace on him, quite glorious. And a real bruiser – look at the strain on his skin from all that packed-in muscle and mass; god, he must be about fit to shed soon! You said you found him at a roadside used-scorpion shop?”
“Yes,” said Jarleen in her trademark manner, which seventeen articles in seventeen periodicals had described as classy-yet-efficient and which she now found herself wishing was more focused on pure bullshitting.

“Quite a lucky find. I wasn’t aware there were any along the Southern Eldland Loop!”
“There aren’t any more,” said Jarleen. “It was a closing-out sale. Just barely made it for exchanging the cost of my old mount.”

“You know,” said the ‘caster thoughtfully into the long, smooth silence, “I’ve never seen a three-pinchered scorpion before.”
“He’s an exotic,” said Jarleeen. “Common in his species.”
“What species?”
“Western Mojave Turrduken.”
The ‘caster waited for an explanation. 

“So,” he said at last, “can we expect to see more of…”

“Tylerbillyman.”
“…Tylerbillyman?”
“Absolutely not.  They- HE – is.  Are.  Very tired.   Elderly and a bit overfed.  HE deserves retirement.”

“Sad to see a dark horse like that leave, but it only adds to the mystique I suppose.  You know, he did the work of three mounts out there today.”
“Yes,” said Jarleen.  And she left, before she admitted anything else. 

There’s a lake out back.

It wasn’t there last week.  We had a puddle last week.  Big ol’ puddle in the backyard, something about the way the ground settled when mom and dad finished building the house years and years back.  It always appeared there every spring and smeared itself between the backyard and the little porch steps like a swampy fence.  Just big enough to do a running jump over if you were eight and ambitious and if you aren’t ambitious you aren’t eight. 

Anyways, we had that puddle last week, just like every other last week for every other April.  But now it’s not there, and neither is the backyard, and the little porch steps lead straight down into four feet of water.  Because there’s a lake out back. 

Not quite sure how that’s happened.

***

It’s not a bad lake, really. 

A bit small and VERY strange, but what there is has all the essentials.  Got a little stretch of beach to wade in from (mud, mostly – no sand, no pebbles, and we’re not close enough to the Shield for a solid rock lakebed).  Got a little cliff near a deepwater dropoff for jumping in from.  Got weeds for pike to hide in; got reeds and marsh nearby for swans to nest in; got a beaver lodge; got a creek coming in on Mr. Morton’s side of the property and a stream running out through Mrs. Jaxton’s herb garden and down the block; got a few small islands in the center with stubborn conifers and a few brave and doomed shrubs that we’ve seen a few idle turtles sunning themselves next to; got a lot of blackflies around its edges in the daytime and a lot mosquitoes around its edges in the evenings and a big ol snapping turtle whose size is impossible to estimate from the enigmatic distance we’ve always sighted them at. 

It’s got just about everything, which is really weird since it’s only about twenty feet across.  We took out the tape measure and everything.  Twenty-three feet four inches, or around seven metres if you’re feeling more sensible.  And yet it – and its contents – remain perfectly proportionate.  The most obvious sign is that the bug bites (and there are a LOT of them) are completely normal-sized, but the next would be that you can dive right in and have a proper swim-around and wade out and swim to one of the islands and back and it’s all a good time instead of you wallowing in a half-inch of muddied water as you wash out the banks from shore to shore. 

Not quite sure how that works. 

***

The lake has attracted visitors. 

Yesterday Mrs. Jaxton and her family had a picnic on the north shore; today Mr. Morton brought some friends and beer and their friends and their beer to fish and drink beer.  They left wrappers and beer cans everywhere until we complained, and then they threw the beer cans into the lake when they thought we weren’t looking.  The cans have become new islands, and I can see turtles sunning themselves on them.  It’s hard to pull them out because they’ve sunk right into the lakebed and also it’s real tiring to swim all the way out there to pull them back into shore.  Guess we’re stuck with Isla Budweiser out there. 

Someone knocked at the door after all that went down.  It’s a surveyor from the city, here to map and chart the lake.  She says to expect a visit from some hydrologists soon too.  There may need to be a study on how the lake and the municipal sewer systems interact.  There are developers out there that need to know more.  There are ecological trusts that require alerting.  A farming conglomerate has demanded that the lake be drained for the growth of corn.  There are many disparate and intricate interests involved. 

Not quite sure how to handle this. 

***

The lake has been purchased by a consortium of developers. 

Waterfront condos are planned which will produce many many many millions of dollars of economic investments and fund at least twelve construction jobs for about a year or so.  The beavers will need to be evicted because they won’t stop stealing the surveying equipment and using it to plug holes in the shoreline.  The turtles are now sunning themselves on the construction equipment.  One of the backhoes backed up too far while hoeing and dropped off the diving cliff and is now buried under thirty feet of water.  Six different firms sent us six different emails and seven different phone calls and thirty different veiled and incomprehensible messages with a thousand different meanings, any of which could be bribes, threats, or both.  We’ve been invited to join a property-owner’s-association and barred from membership for life. 

Not quite sure how this is going to end up. 

***

The lake is gone. 

There doesn’t seem to be any consensus on how it happened, or even when.  We woke up today and we’ve got no lake, just a puddle – not even a big puddle, it’s tapered off a bit because it’s mid-April now and we’ve lost all the snowmelt to erratic evaporation.  A puddle with some Budweiser cans and a backhoe and what appears to be a lot of shed beaver fur and a single really big really really dead pike jammed in it. 

The developers threatened to sue us for breach of contract; the turtles have vanished without a trace; and the surveyor came back to let us know that since the lake’s gone we’re not going to be fined for conducting landscaping without a permit. 

A swan beat the living shit out of Mr. Morton last night.  He’s in the hospital with four broken fingers and a nose that’s been flattened like a tomato on a highway.  He’s said he wants to sue us but there’s no sign of a swan and we don’t have a lake the swan could have been living in so we’re pretty sure he’s got no case. 

Not quite sure about the emotional or fiscal ramifications of any of this in the long-term, but I mean, what else is new?

It was Sunday at Our Deity of the Waters.  Thoom, dum, doom went the church bell, sonorous and fat.  Thoom, doom, duuum.  Its clapper hung loose, its cord swung wildly in the sweaty skinny grasp of Jerry, who always rang it thirty seconds late and panicked every second of it.  Thoom, dum, doooooom. 

Luckily for him nobody had ever noticed or cared, unluckily for him he’d never realized it and never would in a million years; they were too busy chatting and gossiping and lying and mingling amidst the pews and he was too busy filling himself with horror and despair.  Thoom, dum, doooom.  Thoom, boom, dooooooooooooooooom. 

Done. 

Jerry finished panicking and settled back into his normal abyss of desperate self-loathing, while beyond him in the sanctuary – open to the wind and the reeds and the sky – the people shut up and the choir assembled and the organist rolled up her sleeves and the song got cooking, and it went like this:

Oh my God, my gosh, my God

That sure is a lot of God, my gosh, my God.

That’s a hell of a big God, my God, my gosh

Holy shit, holy God, holy fuck

The organist flailed her arms with a last flourish and veryone bowed their heads very solemnly and bubbled ‘amen.’  The minister stood up and adjusted his speedo-robes and cleared his throat of the blockage induced by the ceremonial Coors and spoke, and this is what he spoke:

“AGH!” he spoke.  “Argh, aiee, ow, ow ow, nrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRUUUUhhhhh, uhr hur hur hur hur hur, aaaaaaaaaaagh.  Aaaaaaamen.”
“Amen,” bubbled the congregation. 

“Friends,” said the minister, “it is good to see you all here once again, on this most joyous occasion, to celebrate the day of death and rebirth and redeath of our once-lord and once-saviour, whose name must not be spoken.  Shush that name now and forever hold your piece!”
“Amen,” they bubbled, and raising their left hands, made a simple zipping motion across their firmly-shut lips. 

“My friends, it has been a long and harrowing year,” intoned the minister, face now graven in graveness and gravity.  “We have seen the deaths of several of our flock – some by illness, some by accident, several by acts of God.  Death is a normal part of life, but it is always a pity to see it come so soon and to some so beloved.  Any money placed in the offering plate today will go towards the provision of comfort and succor to the bereaved, and any money they refuse will go directly to our lamb carcass fund so that God’s maw will be stayed from any further wrathful judgments upon our band of fellows.  Amen!”
“Amen,” they bubbled, one hand raised apiece in helpless cowering defense, wobbling irresolutely between fending off wrath from above or teeth from below and settling on neither. 

“For community announcements: Brother Marley has suffered the loss of additional mobility after her stroke last week.  We ask that you gift unto her your thoughts and your prayers and also and more importantly your meat.  Please give brother Marley your meat as she is currently unable to procure her own and will suffer horribly and unspeakably unless assistance is rendered with stark promptness.  Please do it right now, before I finish this service or this sentence – for the love and apathy of God, do it now, now – NOW!”
“Amen,” they bubbled, slimy red tissue grasped in trembling palms over collection vats.  And for good measure, they said it again.  “Amen,” they bubbled, tremendous fear in their hearts. 

“Secondly and less urgently, Brother Tim and Brother Hasham’s child we baptised last week is with us today during this service!  In respect for this, please keep the happy family at the rear of the crowd and do NOT encourage them to approach the God-sump, because we don’t want an accident and we all remember what happened to Brother Wooster’s infant back in ’93, don’t we?”

“Amen,” they bubbled, cringing to an individual, shoulders hunched and faces puckered.

“Excellent, excellent, excellent,” murmured the minister, baritone and soothing, like someone talking to an injured dog.  “You know, every year this season brings me to joyous contemplation.  It’s a time for righting wrongs, a time for the retrieval of hope from the greatest pits of despair, and a time to clearly illuminate the path that lies before you and find true purpose  And accordingly it’s also a time for learning which wrongs are immutable facts, which hopes are idle foolishness, and discovering which paths are loops that lead back unto true realities.  We speak at a time of rebirth and redeath, of promises made and failed and kept.  My fellow congregants,” he enunciated most solemnly, casting back his robes to reveal his fingerless hands and missing leg, “none is more humble of their position than I, whose mortality is most stark and heavy, whose position is closest to God, as was my father, as was his father whose noble unknowing sacrifice during the Holy Riverside Enlightenment sermon of the Easter of ‘72 did reveal unto us the necessities of this world and the greater cosmos surrounding and enfolding it.  Is it not right that on the day when we are most grateful to Him that God would reveal His presence and our purpose in it?  Was it not right that this purpose be revealed to us most viscerally and with much viscera?  And was it not right that the man who spoke for him should speak loudest and truest of all as he departed from this mortal coil on a day when he lied of rebirth and was corrected into a most appropriate and irreversible death?  I beg of you all to ask of God to forgive my grandfather, for in his foolishness he granted us all a great and powerful insight into the world and all its beauty.  Amen.”

“Amen,” they bubbled, eyes and feet scuttling in place like trapped rats. 

“And now, forthwith, without further ado, with all the joyousness and rapture that is His right, the Lord God Omnipotent!  And yeah, he reigneth as the king of kings, the lord of lords-“

“Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, halleluuuuuuuuuuu-jah” screamed the choir rhapsodically. 

“-And he shall reign forever and ever!”

And so speaking, mouth yet agape with the force of his exhalations, the minister was seized abruptly from behind by the great scaled snout of god, who dragged him back with eye-blinking speed into the watery and palm-shrouded pit of the godsump where he was whirled about rapidly into shreds and devoured in spine-shudderingly vast gulps that dyed the ripples violent red. 

“Amen?” bubbled the congregation. 

***

The meat offerings were unwanted that day thanks to the minister, so they took them home instead for an Easter supper.  It was most pleasant and filling and really reminded them of what the season was about and what it all really meant, deep down, right in the marrow and the bone and the flesh and the teeth and the teeth and the teeth and the teeth and the teeth.  For many of them, it reminded them about 2 AM with sudden sweats and screams. 

And wasn’t that just right and proper?

It was a beautiful bright day outside, good for sunning, bad for hunting.  The sort of day where you could spend sixteen hours straight doing nothing useful and feel good about it too. 

So it was a bit surprising to Slump that she was spending it all on her own.  Not that it was an UNPLEASANT surprise – it meant she had all of the best sunbathing rock to herself, instead of half of it plus whatever she could steal off’ve Grumble’s tail – but it was peculiar.  And maybe just a little insulting. She was gravid right now and wanted a little attention.

So she dragged herself off the big warm sunny slab of concrete that had once been part of what the ancient world had called a ‘bank’ and sidled slowly and comfortably down the wild and boiling way, content in her knowledge that it was too early in the day for the buffalo to be out and that the massacranes were still north for the season, so as to prevent their delicate feathers from burning up at high noon. 

At this time of day, at this time of year, Heloderma Spectacular – the Greater Western Gila Monstrosity – was the apex predator of the land.  For a little while, and that was more than most got. 

Slump found Grumble taking full advantage of his passing time in the sun hiding out of the sun underneath a crude lean-to of boulders, cement, and rusty rebar.  An awful little machine buzzed insolently at her from its place atop a level bed of asphalt, and she hated it immediately. 

“What are you doing and why isn’t it paying attention to me?” she asked Grumble. 

“Learning,” said Grumble distractedly.  He held a small and ridiculous piece of plastic with twiddles and fiddles on it in one massive claw, digits oscillating wildly.  “It’s to help.”
“How?”
“Remember how you found all those old books on motherhood from the old days?”
“Yes,” said Slump.  That had been a rare find; her mother, Mulch, had been adamant that books were for nerds and had personally eaten the bulk of them her family had discovered over her sixteen decades of life before dying of hyperrhea. 

“Well, you know what we didn’t find?  Any books on fatherhood.  And then I found THESE, and they’re full of advice on it.  We’re going to be parents before the acid rains come again, and I don’t want to be unprepared.  You remember what happened to my dad?”
“No, I never met him.”
“Yeah, that’s because my older sister Junk bit off his snout and he bled to death.  If he’d known to feed her more often that wouldn’t have happened.  This sort of information is vital and important, and I need access to it if I want to do the best for our clutch.  Also I don’t want to have my snout bitten off or bleed to death.”

“Wuss.”
“Look, watch.  And be quiet: I can’t learn if you’re talking over the dialogue.”

***

A bearded bear-shaped human stood in a cold storm without a shirt and picked up a sharp stick and hit another human with it over and over until its face was a red smear and wet bone splattered over the snow. 

“Offspring,” he muttered as he paused to change arms, “don’t do this.”
“But you say that about everything!” said the human’s offspring in feeble piping protest.

“That is because you must never be like me,” said the bear-human, who was now using his foot to stomp on the other human’s neck over and over.  “Since your mother, who was good and kind and better than I deserved, is dead, I cannot show you how to be a good person because I’m awful and tragic and doomed and can only do my miserable best against my nature.  So instead I’m showing you all the things I do so you won’t do them.  Now stop talking and pay attention, I need to show you how to not draw and quarter those who oppose you.”

***

“I don’t get it,” said Slump.

“It’s simple: I’m the father, and it is my job to commit war on any who threaten my child.”
“You only have ONE?  Wow, he wasn’t kidding when he said he wasn’t a good father; what happened to the other thirty-six?”
“That’s where the pathos comes from,” argued Grumble.  “Being a father is about being sad because your spouse is dead or gone and your kids are in danger of being dead or gone or they are dead and gone and you find another kid to be sad at about them.

Wait, wait, wait; I don’t understand this,” said Slump.  “How is this father still alive if the mother is dead or gone?  He is clearly frailer and smaller than she is.”

“She left.  That’s part of why he’s sad.”

“If he pissed her off that much, why not eat him?”

“Humans don’t eat each other unless they’re bad people.”

Slump’s tongue rolled around her mouth in shock.  “Oh my god.  No WONDER they all died if they were that wasteful.  Are you sure you didn’t misunderstand it?”
“No, no, no, it’s all here in this other educational game.  I’ll load it.”

***

A bearded, rangy human being stood in a destroyed human city with a ragged shirt and shot another human with a gun and then pistol-whipped them with it over and over until its face was a red smear and puddles of every fluid in the rainbow were seeping into the overgrown dirt that had once been an asphalt highway. 

“Adopted offspring,” he grunted as he paused to kick the other human in the groin, “don’t look at this.”
“But you told me I need to pay attention to learn how to stay alive!” said the human’s adoptive offspring.

“That’s because I’m a liar who refuses to admit I’ve conflated you in my head with my dead prior offspring and it’s my fault she died and I’m a bad person who can’t find meaning in anything anymore but raw survival but now you’ve reawakened my moral impulses and I’m torn between my desire to protect you and my need to see you avoid becoming like me because I’m awful and tragic and doomed and can only do my miserable best against my nature,” said the human, all in one breath.  His beard fluttered in the wind of a ruined world.  “Now c’mere and I’ll show you how to scavenge a corpse.”

***

“Wait, what was that about?” demanded Slump.
“The thing that killed all the humans just happened, I’m the last of dad, and it’s my duty to protect the last of daughter.  Mostly I kill people and weird mushrooms and then I-”
“No, no, no, the ‘scavenging’ thing.  Why were they slapping their hands all over the body and not swallowing it?”
“Humans kept their valuables on their outsides in fake skins instead of storing them in their gular pouches.”
“That’s disgusting,” said Slump.  “These games are going to be a bad influence on our children.”
“They’re not for kids,” said Grumble.  “They’re full of important truths and lessons about being a father.  We can show it to them when they’re planning on being fathers.”
“Important truths and lessons about what?  Whining?”

“It’s really hard, being a father, okay?  You wouldn’t get it.”

“You’re not a father either.  Not yet.”
“You won’t get it.”
“If you mouth off any longer you won’t get a chance to get it either,” said Slump, baring her teeth from her gumline just enough to make her saliva run bright red. 

“Right, right, I’m really sorry please don’t eat my snout PLEASE.”
“Fine.”  Slump’s dorsal scutes settled down to a semblance of calmness.  “I’m surprised at how quickly you folded, even for being stuck in a confined space with me.  Usually you’re less sensible than that.”

“I’m telling you, it’s these fatherhood games.  See, the secret of being a good dad is to admit that you’re the entire problem in every way.  Like this!”

***

A gigantic firearm shot seventeen times, sending massive explosions through a balloon full of armed humans each of who spilled a galloon of blood everywhere as a first-person human bludgeoned them each in the face with a sort of arm-mounted pinwheel hook, opening throats and tearing off jaws and cratering faces. 

“You’re my father,” said the human’s surprise offspring.  “And you’re killing all the people in this awful floating city so horribly.  Also you’re the same person as the evil man who built this awful floating city and who raised me in a tower all by myself.”
“All I do is kill,” said the human.  “I’m a monster who hates myself and if I forgave myself I’d be even worse.”
“I’ll help,” said the human’s surprise offspring, grabbing him by the head and holding him underwater until the bubbles stopped.

***

“I can’t help but notice,” said Slump, “that all of these fathers don’t seem to have partners.  Where are the other parents?  Are they ALWAYS dead or gone?”
“Dead or gone because being a father is very sad.  That’s what biological dad infinite is about.  Fathers are the worst people who ruin everyone’s lives with their mistakes and they show their kids how to not be them so the kids can take their place and feel sad about them.”
“What if you try not being a terrible father anymore?”
“No, it’s just how it works,” said Grumble sadly.  “If you’re a dad, you ruin everything and your partner vanishes or dies and maybe your kids die and then you show them or someone else that you’re very sad, and then you die and they’re very sad.  There’s no escaping it.”
“I can think of one,” said Slump. 

“Oh?” said Grumble, and then she ate the console and the television and the generator and left. 

“Oh,” said Grumble. 

Two minutes later Slump came back and ate him too, just to be safe. 

***

She really didn’t mind having all of the sunning rock to herself all of the time, anyways.