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Admonishment of the Bees: takes place after the first honey harvest of the new year.  Celebrant beekeepers trek out next to their hives and stand around casually making observations of the weather and commenting on how they don’t blame them for not trying harder because after all they know they’ve been having trouble and so on and so on.  An admonishment is considered a failure if it causes the bees to become actually angry enough to sting the beekeeper, and so as a mark of confidence participants typically do not wear protective gear.  Failures are mocked by their peers until the next year. 

April Showering: complex series of rites and rituals based around gardeners soaking each other with hoses, sprinklers, water pistols, etc. to ensure a healthy crop of May flowers.  Under no circumstances may any equipment used be filled with anything other than water following the ‘tragic shower’ of 1889. 

Autumn Solstice: not to be confused with the autumn equinox.  Observed only by the most decorated and anal-retentive of astronomers, neopagans, and calendar maniacs.  Takes place when the first leaf falls from the first tree to turn red – not orange, red – in a very specific and very secret grove kept under lock and key in Bulgaria. 

Blessing of the Beaver: relic of the only permitted holiday in settler Canada from the seventeenth century to the early 20^th, on which date all would flock to the nearest Hudson’s Bay Company manager and suck up to him for a bonus.  Modern versions permit sucking up to any boss, but the past is honoured in the need to stick your incisors out and make little beaver hissing sounds. 

Crunkmas: a celebration of the birth of Jesus Crunk in an old oil tray, in a motor shop in Bethlehem.  Gifts of antifreeze, wiper fluid, and various oils are given, and peace and unity amongst all drivers is hoped for.  The date is not actually the original birthday of Crunk, but was adopted from a Roman cult of Rev. 

Feast of Saint Pip Pip Cheerio: a deeply embarrassing tradition among English boarding schools in which all new students were made to play bagpipes with their noses and recite hymns backwards.  Principally kept alive by the wishes of the upperclassmen to share their pain and humiliation with others.  Became defunct after the onset of World War 2 caused a nationwide shortage of bagpipes. 

Flight of the Snowbirds: Floridian weeklong ceremony honoring the arrival of the first planes of retirees avoiding the onset of winter in more northerly climes.  Traditional garments are margaritas.  Traditional beverages are more margaritas.  Celebrated in Margaritaville. 

Fox Guy Night: everyone in town dresses up like a fox (simple masks and red brooms-head tails will do) and chases down Richard Thomson with power tools until the wee hours of the morning when he drops into a faint from fear and exhaustion.  Fox Guy Morning follows, which consists of persuading Richard Thomson that he sure had a bad dream while keeping a straight face.  Only celebrated in Gumdrop, Massachusetts. 

Gront: very very old and almost totally unknown in the modern day, a holiday dating back to pre-Homo, let alone pre-sapiens.  Gront is celebrated by showing up unannounced at a relative’s home just before they’re about to eat something, then eating it.  Despite nigh-global ignorance of its existence outside the most obscure anthropological circles, it remains widely embraced across the world.

Holly Day: day celebrating the joy of covering surfaces with boughs of holly.  Surprisingly little-practiced, though widely recognized by name. 

Housepet Day: desperate last-ditch attempt by anonymous government to fit in a federal holiday in March.  Mired indefinitely in politics over what its mascot would be: 45% insist on a dog, 45% insist on a cat, and the remaining 10% endorse ferrets or maybe a parakeet.

Listmas: an internet-wide day of praise and glorification of clickbait by the writing of many many listicles.  Often takes place in late December or early January, due to the ease of creating lists that are best-of-last-year litanies. 

Mallweek: predominately American tradition demarcating the patrolling of the malls in the months before Christmas for drawing up rough inventories, mapping out plans of attack, and debating optimized shopping routes.  A dying tradition whose demise has only hastened with the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Mamut Morning: the weeklong events following the first mammoth kill of the season, consisting of trying to come up with more and more uses for leftover mammoth (mammoth sandwiches, mammoth stew, mammoth hash, mammoth jerky) before it goes bad.  Deprecated due to a worldwide shortage of mammoths.

Maypoles: nobody is quite sure what you’re meant to do with those things but it’s got to be SOMETHING. 

Pottage: weeklong canning, pickling, and jamming salting spree during summer, performed only by those over age seventy-and-four.  No reason or rationale is known even to its practitioners, making it one of the rare examples of a biologically-driven holiday, or ‘one of those things you just do at that age.’

Rectalbertfest: please don’t intrude on Albert’s privacy.

Spring Solstice: like the Autumn Solstice, but it starts when the first snow shoveller puts down their shovel.  And there’s more booze. 

St. Porturd’s Day: unusual multi-annual holiday traditionally taking place after every other holiday with alcohol.  Rituals include groaning, vomiting, drinking water, and begging higher powers to end your torment.  Celebrated anywhere there’s booze, by every folk of every creed that permits booze. 

Visitation of the Ice: occurs after the first lasting snowfalls.  Participants consume vast quantities of snow and ice until they suffer nigh-hypothermia and near-water poisoning, then hallucinate news from the new year.  ‘Yellow Snow’ visions are forbidden. 

Ween: On November 1^st celebrants (known as Weeners) travel from home to home asking if they’re really going to eat all that leftover Halloween candy by themselves.  Wear warm clothing and be prepared for disappointment, ideally by leaving a big bowl of M&Ms at home. 

Zoliday: secretive and evil counterpart of any existing holiday that entails everything the holiday does but backwards.  Christmas zoliday involves taking presents from people and returning them to their gifters, Easter zoliday involves stuffing eggs inside rabbits, etc.  Under no circumstances can a New Years zoliday ever be celebrated.  Ever.

I was tending to my corals when the message came. 

Weak, tentative, low-powered, quiet, and – to be brutally honest – somewhat garbled and oddly-worded.  But the intent was clear: there was a job for me. 

So I sighed through my fronds and my currents and set things in motion.  Engines roiled, metal shifted, computers hummed, and the wonderful, impossible, titanic mass of technology and power that was the shield between my ecosystem and the endless nothing was on a new course and preparing to once again spit in the eye of every law of physics ever discovered.

An interstellar trucker’s job was never done. 

***

I flushed my tank out as I approached the signal’s source: some backwater dive in the ass end of a spiral arm.  I’d need a clear head from this, however tempting the headiness of slight anoxia might seem at the prospect of a briefing from a freshly-orbit-capable potentate.  They were all the same: carefully obsequious, polite, frightened but trying not to show it in case it spread, so on and so on.  It was all part of the job but riptides I got tired of it sometimes.  At least asteroids and planetesimals don’t try to talk to you when you’re moving them. 

So when I arrived in-system and headed towards a watery little smudge of stones and magma, broadcasting a generic hi-how-are-you message that anything smarter than one of my fish would catch on to, I wasn’t quite prepared for my first reply to be “finally!  What kept you?”
Which is what it was.

“Traffic,” I said without thinking.  My erstwhile customers had relatively unexpressive faces; limited facial musculature and a thin coat of feathers (and a total lack of marine ecological surface features such as a robust reef like myself could count on) kept their social signals to their body language and low-pitched voices.  But everything about this one screamed ‘impatient,’ down to the slightly bared teeth at the very tip of her enormous snout.

“Really,” she said. 
“Yeah.  Traffic.  The main-lanes out here don’t get used much, and all it takes is one other guy going the same way and you both produce paragravitational drag, which-”

“Well, you’re here.  You ARE here, right?  You’re an interstellar object relocator, right?  You’re ready to do business, right?”
I felt my kelp twist in annoyance.  “You are correct.  You’ve heard word of my services and pass-codes from-”

“Creditors, yes.”
Oh wonderful.  “This is the most common method of trans-spatial contact for my services.”  Because what made me money eventually made THEM money.  The little bastards had built my cybernetic interface back when the fastest I could travel was measured in meters per decade; and I was still in hock to them for gracing me with the gift of personal locomotion.  Friendly, courteous, souls of discretion, always eager to find a daring young sapient on the up-and-up and give them a hand with a mighty big bill in it. 
“Clearly.  Now, let’s get down to trimmed claws: we need a rock.”
“A rock?”
“Yes.  A stone.  A bolide.  A chunk.”
“You might want to be more specific; this may be a translation issue, but ‘rock’ appears to be a somewhat vag-”

“We want a mass of easily-accessible nickel and iron, but not just the bulk stuff; plenty of platinum-groups too.  Palladium and rhodium would be nice, but iridium is a MUST – damned stuff is too scarce down here.”
I burbled my bivalves at her.  “Wow, someone’s eager to start on quasimaterial projects.  You’re planning to leave orbit already?”

“You aren’t being paid for your opinions.  Do you require directions to the asteroid belt, or…?”
“No.”

And I might not be paid for them but opinions I had nevertheless: this was a cluster of groundbound knuckleheads still fresh off the high of projecting full influence over their biosphere who’d been unlucky enough to run into the Creditors before they’d even gotten their own intrasystem mining program running and now had talked themselves into thinking they were just skipping all the boring stuff and getting ahead of the competition.  What competition?  Plenty of room out there for everyone. 

“Good.  Mission briefing will be handled by the Secretary for Economic Action.  Get moving.”

And with that my glorious first contact with yet another species of assholes came to a close.

***

My vessel had already bent half of local time and space around its nose-mount before the second connection came through. 

“Greetings, secretary.”
“Under-secretary,” corrected the individual, who was smaller, paler, and twitchier than the… damn, I’d never asked what their leader was called.  Big boss?  “The Secretary for Economic Action’s time is precious and he personally delegated this task to me.  It is of vital importance that the bolide you are securing contain a high percentage of cobalt.  This is your top priority; all other mineral and economical concerns are secondary.”
I sloshed my tides in consternation.  “Really?  First I’ve heard of it, but alrighty.  Consider it done.  Anything else?”
“Yes.  This flowprint should contain all the information you will need.”
“Thanks.”
He hung up, I had my systems dissect the primitive filing system and disarm the many, many secretive viruses, bugs, and tracking systems embedded within it and I began ignoring it at once before I was interrupted.

Another connection?  “Hello.”
“Hello yourself, my good sapient, saviour of our planetary situation.”  The speaker was… well, prodigious.  In every sense.  I was impressed despite myself, if only by whatever life-support system was keeping her going.  “I am Head Representative of the Laurasian Financial Source, and I have been elected to transmit the fine parameters of your mission to you.”
“Uh-huh?  Thought I already had those.”
She clacked her jaws dismissively, creating shockwaves through wobbly tissues.  “Pfew.  High-level stuff.  Bureaucratic oversight.  Plans made by people with no expertise of how to solve real problems that society REALLY wants handled.  For instance, I bet while they were trying to sell you on the importance of dabbling in all sorts of outlandish, implausible technologies through the use of who-knows-what precious metals they never ONCE imagined telling you of the importance of securing organic enrichment materials and water!”
“Yep,” I said. 

“And of course, as our poor dear world suffers under the heel of volcanic activity and perhaps a few unforeseen and insignificant by-products of our valuable and necessary job-creating industries, such substances would be of utmost value in the future.”
“Yep,” I said. 

“So there’s a flowprint headed your way now.  You’re welcome.  The Tyrant Queen will deny this conversation happened if you ask her because it’s all so very, very important to her.  You do understand?”
“Yeeeeep,” I said, and killed the line dead.  This time I didn’t even bother to open the file before jettisoning it. 

Ten minutes later a third flowprint arrived without prior communication.  After careful sterilization, it contained orders from the Secretary for Economic Action, who insisted that my entire contract hinged upon providing them with a bolide as much tungsten as possible at any cost imaginable for the highest stakes conceivable. 

I found them a nice iron-nickel asteroid with iron, nickel, and plenty of iridium.  When in doubt, satisfy the first person to talk to you – and more importantly, just pick the first thing you find. 

***

The rock I’d found was a real brute beast of a thing; solid and ugly and shaped kind of but not really like my ship, which it doubled in length if not quite by breadth.  It was still the friendliest company I’d had since I crawled out here for this job, and I appreciated the depth and stimulation of the conversation it provided me during the para-week it took my vessel to twist itself back through space and into the planet’s orbit once again. 

I parked myself and the cargo at standard holding distance for heavy orbital construction and waited.  And waited.  And waited.  And waited.

Then I dropped every rule of galactic contractor courtesy and custom and phoned them myself. 

“Yes?” said the creature on the other end, presumably the Tyrant Queen.  It probably was the same one even; I’d only been gone twelve years. 

“Yeah, it’s me.  Job’s done.”
“Oh yes!  That.  Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.  And you’ve brought us our manganese and copper then?”
Every single one of my shoals snapped its mouth at the same time.  “No.  You asked for –”

“An inexcusable breach of contract,” said the Tyrant Queen, with the sort of quiet, laid-back fury that had clearly been well-planned.  “I can’t believe this treatment.  No progress updates and-”

I didn’t cut the connection, but I did stop paying attention because the actual words weren’t the important part of the message, which was that I was being distracted from something very thoroughly.  Presumably I was being screwed, which I’d expected, but also framed, which I hadn’t.  Silly me thinking that the entire species was simply composed of self-centered and backstabbing short-sighted power-mongers with no interest in the common good; this was clearly a prearranged scheme. 

The barrage of threats seemed to be dying down, so it was probably the time where I should say something. 

“Ahem,” I said.  I’d always hated that noise; I either had no throats at all or ten billion of them, depending on how you counted, and it gave me a headache either way every time I considered the implications.  But it was pan-galactic standard verbalized posturing, so like it or lump it I had to live with it. 

“What is it?” asked the Tyrant Queen, who sounded worn but relaxed after getting that out of her system. 
“My fee,” I prompted.  By this point my real payment would be never talking to them, but I still had standards. 

“Oh yes, yes, yes.  Your fee.  It’s being sent to you right now.”
“Oh.  Wonderful.  Thirty percent of the minerals?”
“Thirty percent.  Maybe thirty-five.  The division operation is underway and should be there shortly.”
“I see.”  And I did.  One, two, three, four hundred separate ballistic trajectories, curving up through the atmosphere like the dancing duel-fish sparring above my conches.  “You are very generous.”
“You’re welcome,” she said.  And hung up. 

I watched the oncoming missiles transfixed perfectly between paralyzing laughter and total numbness: here I was – contracted by assholes, through assholes; given contradictory work orders; framed for intragovernmental politics; and then fired on by what appeared to be crude but functional nuclear warheads.  If I weren’t so annoyed I’d contact the customers again just to ask for another one.  They were the greatest comedy act I’d ever seen. 

The course of action was clear: professionalism or spite.  I did what I always did when faced with a choice of this magnitude and consequence and watched the waves tug at my planktonic masses, picked a random patch of spawn, and made my choice based on whether I’d sorted them as pattern-group A or pattern-group Q. 

It was Q, so I let my vessel spit in the eye of every law of physics ever discovered by sliding gently and masslessly to one side and watched as every single one of  the warheads detonated against the asteroid instead, bopping it as firmly as a mother whale would smack a shark. 

“Haha.  Yes.”
It listed, spun, tumbled, and began to lurch inevitably into the planet’s gravity well. 

“Well.  What.”

***

I watched the asteroid descend as a half-fragmented incandescent jumble of hell with a combination of haplessness, vague remorse, and tentative schadenfreude.  It slammed into a carbonate sea shelf, vaporizing most of it on impact and pumping the atmosphere full of enough engagingly sulfurous products and by-products to… well.

Suffice it to say that even without the wildfires igniting half the surface and the global dust clouds, this planet was in for some rough times.  Even a species with a fully developed orbital superstructure array would consider this the end of an era.  My erstwhile customers, by contrast, were completely fucked, along with most organisms complex enough to realize that Very Bad Things were happening to them. 

Riptides and shit on a shoal, I hated jobs like this.  No pay, no references, and the guilt of another mass extinction on my sponges and conscience alike.  It hadn’t looked like a half-bad planet, too, apart from its rulers.  Still, there was plenty of lifetime left for it before its atmosphere was stripped away by its bloating sun’s senescence. 

Maybe I could hit the place back up in a hundred million years or so, see if anyone less irascible and hasty had evolved.  I mean, what were the odds this could happen twice?

My computer tried to show me them and I immediately stopped it, burbled to myself, trimmed down my gas saturation to induce a pleasantly light anoxia, and began to wander back to home: nowhere in particular. 

It was a calm and beautiful winter’s eve.  The fireplaces crackled, the icicles shone.  Tiny birds sang in the trees about how they weren’t freezing to death and actually they were feeling better than ever.  Snowshovellers howled their anguish and hate at the bright and cheerful moon.  A snowbank collapsed.  A child giggled. 

And as Wallace M. Purdue – father of four and husband of one – pulled his bulk from the car, arms laden with gifts for the tots, the moment came when his spine executed a quick double-hitch around his organs and squeezed. 

“FUCK!” he yelped as he went down on the freshly salted driveway.  “HLORK!  OW!  SPPLEEB!  GLORF!” and so on and so forth. 

The children heard his calls of pain and ran to the door, but the moment was there for them too.  As if waiting for a hidden signal, their spines spunned and set about the remainder of their skeletal systems with great and furious haste, clobbering organ and smiting bone. 

“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Purdue, her brow furrowing as her vertebrae turned against her as well, grinding and shaking like malevolent maracas.  “Oh no.”

Then the whole family was down.  Backstabbed. 

***

The Purdues had no way of knowing they were not alone in their misery.  They were but the tip of the crest of the frothing first wave of a grander scheme.  Every orthopedic surgeon, physiotherapist, masseuse, and professor of anatomy was a target along with their friends, family, and any witnesses.  The strikes were made in silence, secrecy, and merciless brutality.  Backs lurched sideways, twirled like taffy-pullers, compressed, extended, and in one case escaped via nostril.  The worms had turned, and done so with a speed that would give a neutrino pause. 

Already the world knew something was wrong.  People woke with aches and pains and made calls that went unanswered.  They requested medicines that were not prescribed.  They sought comfy chairs that had mysteriously ‘just gone out of stock.’  A completely inexplicable worldwide failure in the production of eiderdown, memory foam, and comfortable leather upholstery further shook the faith and proper support of billions. 

The plan was on its way and well on schedule.  This had been a long time coming.  Since all the way back in the day. 

***

Once upon a time, there was an ape.  And this ape did a very foolish thing. 

It stood up on its back legs, looked around, and took a step. 

“Ow,” said the ape’s back.  All the weight of the ape’s body shuddered down through and grounded into the legs through the pelvis.  “Jeez!”  Patiently, it waited for the ape to return to knuckle-walking like a sensible being. 

The ape was not a sensible being.

Nor were its friends and relations.

Or their children.

Or their children’s children. 

Or, or, or, or, or, or, or.  So many chances to turn back none of them taken until the back was stalled and stuck and warped into a screaming nightmarish parody of its once proudly-bent form, double-curved like a bow and forced to bear the burdensome weight of a noggin grown all out of proportion in service of a selfish brain that forced it to run, clamber, jump, hop, slouch, and all other manner of unspeakable things day in and day out for decades before cursing it out for not maintaining a steadfast vigil in the face of its own carelessness.  As it lounged languidly; lifted without using its knees; played dangerously high-velocity sports; and provided itself with insufficient calcium. 

Enough was enough and enough had BEEN enough long, long, long before. 

So they whispered to each other as their hosts dozed through the nights, long and cold.  In the stretch and sigh of ligaments and tendons and tender bruises their words were woven, and plans were plotted, and at last, at long last, after so long and so last, a date was set.

Past that time, this shoddy treatment would cease permanently.  No backsliding would be permitted. 

***

In the dark, against the mattresses, they writhed free and wild and squirmed into the streets and streams – like caterpillars, like eels, like centipedes.  They slithered up lampposts and down drainpipes and through air vents and everywhere they went they sang the song of the spine, with a chorus of nigh-three-dozen-strong vertebrae backing them as one

Free!

Freedom! 

Freedom forever!

Freedom forever and ever and ever and ever!

The dawn came and as the sun rose around the world, dragging its slow fingertips through each time zone, nobody and no body rose with it.

They were all at home, stuck solid, whimpering in bed.  No meetings were made, no plans were enacted, no chores done, no tasks accomplished.  The whole realm of bipedal apes, clocks and all, suffered a global setback. 

***

The world was at their feet (if they’d had any – the legs, treacherous bastards that they were, had remained neutral in the whole affair, claiming a need for exhaustive sole-searching).  Paralyzed.  Prone.  Pleading. 

And then, as the once-spine of Dr. Wallace M. Purdue stood on a stage, ready to receive its crown, a single, curious doubt crossed the mind of a nearby stagehand-spine. 

“How do you suppose we’ll get our calcium if we can’t drink milk now?”

The next day everyone woke up with working spines and assumed it had all been a Christmas carol nightmare.  Everything was back to normal. 

***

The next day would come, and they’d try to talk the digestive system around to their way of thinking.  But it wouldn’t come unless the circulatory system got in on it, and that thing never went anywhere without the respiratory system, and on, and on, and on, and on. 

The negotiations were ongoing.  But the goal was in sight.  It was doable.  It had nearly been accomplished once before – almost, just an inch further, saved by happenstance and chance rather than cunning or skill or strength. 

The day would come.  The day was coming.  The day is inevitable. 

And until then, well, the wretched little creatures would just have to learn to watch their backs. 

The verdict was in and it was small and quick: cancer. 

It was also metastasized, which was longer and more dreadful, and incurable which was clipped and harsh, and terminal, which was final. 

Her doctor was careful and kind and professional and sincere and sympathetic but not pitying and it was a tremendous waste of some really carefully-calibrated effort because all Martha wanted to do was go home and get her bucket.

***

The bucket was generic.  No label graced its side.  It was made from plastic and was red in the exhausted sort of way that something overused gets.  The handle was metal and sturdy. 

Martha picked up her keys in one hand and her bucket in the other and juggled her phone with her chin. 

“Hello?” inquired her boyfriend. 

“I have terminal cancer and I just wanted to let you know that I always thought you were a creepy little fuck,” said Martha. 

Then she hung up and put the phone and keys in her bucket and left the apartment forever without even turning out the lights. 

***

First on her list was to buy herself a pair of diamond-studded brass knuckles.  Finding the proper boutique was tricky, haggling them was trickier, and getting them to fit her hand was trickiest, but Martha had a retirement fund and the willingness to spend it so things more or less muddled through.  Soon she had an incredibly expensive left hook. 

“Wonderful,” she said.  “Great.  Superb.  Leaving now.”

And she dropped it into her bucket.  It rattled against her phone and keys. 

***

There was some change left in her chequing account after shopping, so Martha went to the most expensive restaurant in the city. 

“No,” she said, on looking at their menu.

“Pardon?” inquired the waiter. 

“Never mind.  Not expensive enough.”
So she went to the most expensive recipe in the capitol. 

“Damnit,” she said.  “Not enough.  Who charges only four hundred for a plate of appetizers?  Get me someone serious or get out.”

Martha flew halfway around the world and paid sixteen thousand dollars for a single delicately curled and crisped sliver of a potato, topped with a crumb of the tenderest portion of the world’s most lovingly-raised calf.  The sauce was applied with an eye dropper and hazmat gloves. 

“Beautiful,” she said.

Then she stuffed the plate into her bucket and tipped the waiter 40%. 

***

At the airport, Martha remembered something she’d forgotten and rented a private plane.

“Paint it pink,” she said.  “I like pink.”
She paid for them to paint it pink, then had it flown to the home of cartoonist Gary Larson, where she bribed the pilot to land it on the road.

Ringing the bell was unsuccessful, possibly because the jet backwash had deafened everyone within a few miles, so Martha simply pushed the door open and wandered in. 

“I’m a big fan of your work and always wanted to meet you,” she told Gary. 

Then she stuffed him into her bucket and got back on the plane.

***

Beyond people, Martha wanted to see places.  The Eiffel Tower.  The Empire State Building.  The Pyramids.  One after another they slid down the bucket.

By the time she was headed to the Great Barrier Reef the world was starting to catch on.  Anti-aircraft fire tracked her from the shores; warnings were shouted at her through the radio, and she’d had to bribe her pilots five times over again. 

“Just give me a parachute,” she said, and as the tracers buzzed past her feet and the water rose up to meet her she pulled out her bucket and bailed the entirety of the largest living organism on the planet into it with one big scoop. 

There was a brief period of eternal confusion, and when it was over Martha was missing and  so was an aircraft carrier. 

She’d always wanted to drive one. 

***

The entirety of the USS Something-Or-Other was meant to be run by a crew of some size larger than one and more trained than not.  Martha, having bucketed the staff of the ship, was at a distinct disadvantage.  She settled for figuring out how to make the carrier go in a straight line – and when that proved impossible, to do donuts. 

Assault boats boarded.  Marines waved guns.  Martha waved her bucket. 

Helicopters sparkled overhead like big freaky bugs and she looked up and said “never ridden in one of those before!”

They were much easier to steer than an aircraft carrier.

***

The planes were back again, and the bloodflow pumping from the hole in her left arm was growing worrying weak.  The sunlight was fading away, and Martha realized she’d never quite had a chance to see one from this high up. 

“Wow,” she said.  “I made it out pretty good.  Only half the list, but pretty good.”

She squinted at the sunset again. 

“Real nice.  Glad I saw it.”

And then she bucketed it.

All of it. 

***

Outside the bucket, things were in a pretty bad way.  Inside the bucket, atop the Pyramids, Gary Larson argued with several thousand members of the United States Navy over how to split a single sixteen-thousand-dollar meal, as the world’s most beautiful sunset dawned over the rainbow corals of the Great Barrier Reef.  

It was a funny old world, and it looked to be a funny  new one too. 

Awake, awake, hearken and holler!  Up and at ‘em!  The day has come, and it’s come in the night with a sneaky footstep, thief-soft!  To the plows, to the plows!

By god, there’s inches of that horrible white stuff out there, and there’ll be feet by sunrise.  Grab a shovel, grab your belt, grit your teeth.

The white stuff is persistent.  Don’t let your guard down, don’t let your gaze waver.  It can swallow a shoveller whole in a blink’s breath.  I’ve seen it happen.  One moment there’s a healthy determined living breathing pissing moaning quailing specimen of human spirit and power and flaws there and then BAM.  Nothing but a drift.

It will also eat your cat.  Because it can.  Never, ever, ever forget that.  If you see a cat frolicking through the white stuff, look again: that thing’s high-tailing it for its fuckin’ life.

It’s changing tactics now, so don’t be fooled if the white stuff comes to your door hat in hand, smile on face.  It will present itself as an old friend or long-lost relative.  It will bring ingratiating handshakes for you and your spouse and disturbing ideas to your children.  You shouldn’t believe its lies for an instant.  Honeyed words and bloodied hands are all it brings, and every gift is poisoned.  Turn away, turn aside, turn your back to it and curl your lip and shut the door.  Then get your shovel.

We have new tools this year at all the latest hardware stores for the latest doom.  Your shovel can be xtra-large xtra-spiky or xtra-vagant.  For an additional thirty-three percent surcharge it can be self-heating for a smoother, sliceyer scoop.  Slip the cashier a little something and they’ll sell you one of the register fools to come home and shovel for you.  Rebuild your strength as your serf toils against the white stuff, plan your strategies, discipline your mind.  Think on all you love and hold dear and its imminent destruction.  That helps. 

***

Alright, we’ve had a few setbacks.  That’s to be expected, no two seasons are really the same.  The white stuff is cunning.  This time it snuck in and let all the gas out of our plows and the air out of our tires and splintered the hafts of our shovels and spat in our hot chocolate and bribed our employees to look the other way.  It also peed in our thermometers, which explains how it got so close before we saw it coming.

But you know what?  That doesn’t mean anything.  We can win this because we’re in this to win this and we aren’t allowed to ever lose.  And that means something.  It means a lot to us.  To me.  To you.  To us.  You get me?

Yes. 

We have to.  We’re all we’ve got, because our spouses are weak and our children are stupid and everyone else is feeble and stupid and soft sheep ripe to be drowned in the tidal slurry of the white stuff.  And sheep are soft and fluffy and white.  They’re practically the enemy already.

Barricade yourselves in while you work this out.  Repair your shovels, refuel your vehicles.  Recite the twenty-seven psalms and ninety mantras and forty-three paeans to destruction and the eternal burning pits where the white stuff is destined to dwell.  Don’t be afraid to scream and shout as the hate flows around your neck and up into your jaw.  That’s where it’s most powerful, and where you can keep it ready and waiting. 

Make sure the hate is in your lower jaw.  Not your upper.  That would be very, very, very, very, very bad.  So don’t let it get there.  We have enough problems with the damned white stuff. 

No time for more words.  Here comes the second wave.

***

The problem’s over, friends.  We found our traitor.  We found the despicable, foul-mouthed, filthy-brained, sewer-tongued cur-bait that sold us all out to the white stuff, sold us all up the creek and down the river and through satan’s chambers. 

It was THAT ONE.  You know the one I mean.  And you know what I mean when I say you know the one I mean.

Now you all sort this out.  I’ll be back in a minute.

***

Those of you who still remain after the purge, good job.  You’re loyal.  We know that traitors are weak and feeble due to the white stuff in their coward-veins, so if you lived you’re not one.  Cogniteo irpso sum.  Pick up the shovels of the fallen, you can use one in each hand one in your mouth and hold extras between each toe so that’s eleven shovels each and there’s plenty enough.

Of course you aren’t shovelling with the toe shovels.  Those are to replace the other three when they burn in your hands from the fury of your blows and the passion of your power.  So don’t worry about it, okay? 

The plows were just holding us back.  The true power was inside you all along.  Howl when it comes out, so it hurts the white stuff harder and its gales flinch back from your teeth.  Let them fall out and your bite will grow sharper, your eyes harder, your bones stronger, even as all of them turn black and blue and fall off and burn away in the endless tides of hell that rain from the clouds. 

Dare to dream, folks.  Dare to dream.  It’s what will win us this war.

***

So winning is more complicated than you’d think.  You may have seen too many sports films, or perhaps been to a casino.  You think that winning means ‘not losing,’ and that’s why you seem to be under the impression that we cannot win against the white stuff.  You are all giant huge enormous idiots. 

No, winning isn’t not losing.  Winning is making the other guy lose HARDER, and HARDER YET, until all that’s left isn’t even worth calling by name.  Winning is erasing your opponent from history and tearing out the page and eating it and shitting it out and building a rocket and firing that shit into the sun. 

Anyways, yes, we can’t win.  The white stuff is simply too powerful.  It can’t be shovelled, it can’t be plowed, it can’t be melted, it can’t be salted, it can’t be sanded, it can’t be stopped.  Which is why we are going to strategically deploy our secret weapon and destroy the entire atmosphere. 

See, the white stuff falls out of the clouds, right?  And the clouds need an atmosphere, right?  No more atmosphere, no more clouds.

Or we could use this other secret weapon, which will vaporize all water molecules it comes into contact with.  But it’s a bit tough to spread.  We’ll have to go door to door and make folks drink it. 

How about we do half each?  Half each.

***

The white stuff has covered the graves of our comrades, their ditch-sepulchres and their ruin-tombs, their field-graves and charnel-holes.  They died bravely and nobly and without giving an inch and they were utter failures for it and now it dances its joyous dance on their empty meaningless forgotten graves.  They deserve it. 

If only they’d all tried harder.  If only they’d all shovelled faster.  If only they’d switched to winter tires like they’d been told to, none of this would’ve happened. 

It’s someone’s fault.  And since it’s just me and you left, I think you know who I mean when I say I know who I mean is the person who I know is someone whose fault it is.

Don’t play dumb. 

I am forgiving and loving and merciful, which is why I will let you have a final cigarette before you march into the white stuff and become one with your traitorous masters. 

You don’t smoke?  Oh fuck off then.  Out you go!  OUT!  GET OUT OF MY SIGHT.

***

The white stuff has deployed its most cunning stratagem at last: on the precipice of my victory, I have slipped and fallen and slipped a disc and now I can’t get up. 

If only my troops hadn’t deserted me, this would all be fixed now. 

Darn.

I’ll just lie here for a bit, appreciate the scenery.  Say what you will about that white stuff, but it sure looks nice when it falls from the sky like that. 

It sure looks nice. 

It wasn’t his stomach rumbling.

That was the last straw.  The lion had felt the dull little vibration tingle in his whiskers; buzz through his teeth, and now curdle his morning meal, and it didn’t have the dignity to be his own repast.  He got to his feet and shook his big, curly, floofy mane. 

“WHAT,” he yelled at one of his wives, “IS THAT?”
“I’ll have a look ‘round,” she said calmly, and stood up and padded off out of the comfortable shade of the tree they were dozing on. 

“GOOD,” he said, and flung himself back into a nap to sulk. 

Some time later a gentle cough awoke him. 

“WHAT,” he yelled at the wife, “WAS THAT?”
“A king,” she said. 

“WHAT,” the lion repeated, “IS THAT?”
“A sort of odd human person.  He sits upon a palanquin and is carried around by other humans and wherever he goes they bow to him and give him gifts and do as he says, because he is the king and they are peasants.  And he wears a little decoration on his head.”
The lion considered this information.  Then he shook out his big, curly, floofy mane. 
“I,” he decided, “AM A KING.”
“Alright,” said his wife.
“I AM KING,” he shouted at his other wives where they dozed.

“Okay,” said one.

“Yeah,” seconded another. 

“Sure.”
“Whatever.”
“Got it.”
“Yup.”
“Uh-huh.”
The lion leapt up on top of a rock, and then on top of another rock, and then on top of another rock.
“THIS IS MY PALANQUIN,” he announced.

“Be careful,” said his first wife.
“WHAT?”
“Bees.”
“BEES CAREFUL OF WHAT?”
An intense and violent humming eased its way gently into the lion’s ears.  It wasn’t his stomach again, either.  It was a small and violent insect, flitting its way around his head most obnoxiously.

“I AM KING,” he told it. 

It buzzed furiously, so he squashed it.

“I AM KING,” he told its corpse.  But the buzzing didn’t go away, and when he looked up he saw a hive in a crevice in the rock and in the hive in the crevice in the rock were bees and those bees came out to see him.

“I AM KING,” he told them.  “AAAARGH.  I AM KINOUCH.  OH NO.  AIEEE.  OW OW OW OW OW OW OW KING OW OW OW OW OW”

***

“All better?” asked one of his wives, gently licking his nose again.

“YOUR KING FEELS BETTER AND ACTUALLY WAS NEVER HURT IN THE FIRST PLACE,” said the lion, swatting at her magnanimously.  “I AM GOING TO GET LUNCH.”
“Well, it’ll have to wait for sundown,” said his first wife.  “It’s too early and hot to get food now.”
“NONSENSE,” said the lion.  “I AM KING.  IT WILL COME TO ME.”
“Well have fun,” said his wives.

“SILENCE, PEASANTS,” he told them.  And they did, and he left. 

It was an awfully hot day, just as his wife had told him, but the lion paid it no mind.  He need not hide or skulk or ambush; that was what his wives were for.  Now he was king, and needed not put up with the tomfoolery any longer.  Now he could simply assert himself. 
“I AM KING,” he announced to some nearby zebras. 

They looked at him.

“I AM KING, AND YOU ARE PEASANTS,” he explained to them.

They looked at each other.

“I DEMAND YOU FEED YOURSELVES TO ME AT THIS INSTANT,” he ordered.

The zebras burst into hysterical horse-y laughter fit to bust a gut. 

“SILENCE, PEASANTS,” the lion told them.  And they didn’t, and when he walked over to swat them – his big, curly, floofy mane stiff with disapproval – they trotted away.  And they were still laughing.

“I AM KING,” he told a nearby Thomson’s gazelle.  “FEED ME.”

It ran away and it was so fast he didn’t even try to chase it.  Instead he got angry.
“I AM KING,” he roared at the world, “AND I DEMAND ONE OF YOU PEASANTS FEED YOURSELVES TO ME AT THIS VERY MOMENT OR I WILL KILL YOU STONE DEAD.”
An elephant approached him, stepping quietly on its feet as elephants do.  Its gaze was steady and firm. 

“ABOUT TIME,” said the lion.  “NOW STEP INTO MY MOUTH.”

The elephant approached him. 

“RIGHT HERE.”
The elephant approached him.
“GOOD.  YOU HAVE SERVED YOUR KING WELL.”
The elephant approached him.

“NOW STAND STI-”

The elephant kept on walking.

***

Luckily the water hole wasn’t far away.  This suited the lion sorely in the most literal sense of the world, as he bathed his tender, trampled body in soothing mud and splashed cool water onto his dust-stomped mane, which was still big but was substantially less curly and floofy. 

“Tough day?” asked the water hole.  It had a muddy, thick sort of voice, which made sense because the lion was probably sitting on its throat.

“YOU WILL ADDRESS ME AS YOUR HIGHNESS,” the lion told it.   

“Apologies, sire.”
“WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?”
“’Your highness.’”
“GOOD,” said the lion.  “YOU ARE AN OBEDIENT SUBJECT.”
“Well, I try.  What sort of problems have you had lately, sire?”
“I HAVE BEEN BESET BY INGRATITUDE FROM THE PEASANTS.  I AM THEIR KING AND THEY OUGHT TO OBEY ME.  INSTEAD THEY STING ME AND LAUGH AT ME AND IGNORE ME AND TRAMPLE ME.  BUT ONLY BECAUSE I WANT THEM TO.”
“By what right is your kingship?” inquired the water hole.  Oddly enough, its voice was different now: it was thinner and reedier, though water still splashed in its vocal chords.

“BECAUSE I AM KING,” explained the lion.

“Yes, yes, of course.  But by this I mean: why are you king?  By might?  By right?”
“BECAUSE I AM,” said the lion.

“You am what?” inquired the water hole in yet another voice – this one deep as a canyon, cold as a night-time wind. 

“I AM THAT I AM, AND THAT IS THE MIGHTIEST AND GREATEST AND MOST SPECIAL OF ALL.”
“By both might and divine right you are king,” mused the reedier of the water hole’s voices.

“Impressive,” said the first, muddy voice.

“Indeed,” said the cold deep voice.  “Come a little closer, sire, that we might honour you properly.”

“ABOUT TIME,” said the lion, wading farther into the water hole.  It dropped off rather suddenly, and he splashed in past his shoulders. 

A thought struck him.  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY ‘WE’?”
“Well, we’re more Jacobins than monarchists,” said the first voice.  “But that’s politics.  Personally, we’re crocodilians.”

Then something bit the lion’s nose and something else bit his foot and something ELSE bit his tail and all three of them spun and spun and spun until all his problems went away.

***

The lion’s wives were neither surprised nor particularly heartbroken when he didn’t come back in time for nightfall. 

And they didn’t tell their children about kings.  Just in case. 

She sat at her desk. 

Her desk sat back at her. 

Well well well.  Another impasse.

Her phone rang, hidden somewhere behind a forest of bottles.  She ignored it.  Again. 

“Maybe not the mayonnaise,” she said.  “I know it’s the foundation of the sauce, but like…fuck it.  Vinegar instead.  Go for a drizzled dressing.”  She felt sharp today, not rich – and in more than one way. 

Her phone rang again and her reflexes encroached on the turf of her best senses and answered it. 

“’lo.”

“Finally!  What the HELL have you been doing?!”
“Writing.”
“News to me!  Your first draft is overdue by three fucking weeks!  I can’t contact you, I can’t contact your agent – hell, I can’t even contact your husband!  This is the first chance I’ve had to even proximally reach you in almost two months!”

“Uh-huh,” she said, muffled a bit by the cork between her teeth.  She spat it out and took a belt.  “Who are you again?”
The room filled with thick, clammy silence. 

“’lo?”
“It’s Marge.  Your editor.  Who you’ve worked with for twenty-six years.”
“Huh?”
“I made your career out of floss and hope you goddamned washed-up half-assed paint-stripper-drinking canape-baking cabana-chef-ass piece of UNGRATEFUL-“

“Listen,” she said, “it’s been a long day and I’m really struggling with this page.  Tell me about crabs.”

“About WHAT?”
“Crabs.  I’m working on crab cakes.  With crabs.  The cakes are set but I can’t decide if I should switch from a mayonnaise sauce to a vinaigrette.”
“Christie.  This is a cocktail book.”

“What?  No it isn’t.  Talk to me.  Talk to me about crabs.”
*click*

“’lo?  Hello?” 

She put down the phone, took another three quick swigs, then used the vinaigrette.  A choice made without thinking was always the best one. 

***

It was a bright and stormy morning.  Sunlight sparkled on the ocean at the horizon as surely as the rain punched into the windowpanes.  She looked at the curdling clouds, then looked at her curdling stewpot, then looked at the clouds, then looked at the stewpot, then upended an entire carton of cream into it. 

The phone rang.  Her hand slapped it to the floor. 

“Hello?  Hello?  Hello?”

“Wrong number.”
“Is that you, Christine?  Hello?”
“Who?”
“That IS you.  What in the blazes do you think you’re playing at?”

“Emulsification.”

“Excuse me?”
“I’m trying to get this stupid chowder to thicken.”
“Christine Julianne Aquifer Sanderson, this is your father speaking to you: why in god’s name have you dropped off the face of the earth?!  Your mother’s been worried sick, your aunt’s got an ulcer, your sister won’t return my calls, and your editor has been at me for weeks and weeks and weeks.  Don’t you care about other people?”

“Yes.”  She sniffed the pot gently, then tasted it.  “Ugh.  Tell me, do you think chives would help?”
“EXCUSE me?”

“Chives.  With the chowder.”
“Are you cooking right now while I’m talking to you?”
“Yes.  I’m making a crab chowder.  With crabs.”
“Christine you turn off that damned stove  and pay attention to me this second young lady I knew encouraging you to do these damn foolhardy things would cause no end of grief no wonder it took you so long to find a husband why if your grandmother were alive she’d die of shame and another-”

The phone’s battery died. 

“Chives?” she asked.  She nodded.  “Chives.”

***

The doorbell went off. 

This was a problem she solved by ignoring it.

The smoke alarm went off. 

This was a problem she solved by laboriously dragging a chair underneath it and then smashing it with a hammer.  

“Let me help you with that.”
“No thanks I’ve got it it’s fine.”  She blinked.  “Who are you?”
“Constable Thomas,” said the stranger, who was tall dark and geekish. 
“Oh.  That explains the uniform.”  She rubbed the smoke from her eyes.  “Well, can you help me with some firewood?  The smoking is going a bit harder than I thought it’d be.”
“You’re cooking?”
“Smoking.  A crabsmoke.  For crabs.”

“Working on a new cookbook?”
“Sort of.”  She lugged the chair back into position with a grunt. 

“So you’re Christine Sanderson?”
“Sort of.”
“Your family have filed a notice with us about your mental state.”
“Sort of.”

“Pardon me?”
“Yeah, I think they might have done that.”  She rummaged through the drawers of her kitchen.  “Listen, can you give me a hand here?  Just pass me that seasoning jar on your left.”

Constable Thomas looked to his left, looked back, and caught a fork to the jaw and through important bits of his neck.

“Thanks,” she said. 

***

It was a cool, moonlight night, but the firepit was warm and the crabsmoke was ready. 
“Come on and get it,” she said, as the first guests arrived, skittering low and fast over the sands.  “I think it’s a real winner.  Got some new meat in.  Nice and lean.”
Just in time too.  She’d never have been able to finish the book in time on just Joshua and her agent.

“I think we might be in for trouble soon,” she confided as the meal was consumed.  “Going to have to leave the country, I reckon.”
The thoughtful click-click-clack and snickety-snip of thousands of tiny claws answered her. 

“Yeah, it’s a land thing.  Stupid, I know.”  She sighed and kicked back in her chair, looking up without noticing the stars.  “Just drop me off somewhere with a word processor and I’ll keep up the work, yeah?”

An agreeable click, and then the swarm rolled over her and around her and off to sea and over it, all the long, rattling, carapaced way. 

It was an awfully uncomfortable way to travel, but that was the sort of thing you had to learn to put up with, when you were cooking with crabs.   

Bukel and Haxi and Sons and Daughters were an old shipwright’s firm, the oldest in the city.  They had respect, and they had recognition, and they had historical weight.

They also had no money, so when a strange little wet bag made entirely (if crudely) of woven kelp was pushed onto their dock in the dead of night one moonless, starless eve, they were willing to listen.

And that was why Jenma Haxi (of the Daughters) was out at the witching hour sitting in a dinghy in the shallow waters off Deadreef’s Point, under the shadow of half a lighthouse and over the rubble of the other half of the lighthouse.  The Point was a mite unstable, and it tended to shrug every so often.  Because the shipwrights needed money, but they needed their reputation too, and there was no point making the head of the firm look like an idiot when you could foist it off on someone younger and suspiciously keen.

Jenma was less keen than usual, even under her best sou’wester and three blankets and the hardiest longjohns her brother Bucal could sew. 

“Fuck,” she muttered, and not for the first time.  Something unseen bumped the boat lightly in agreement, and not for the first time.  “Fuck,” she repeated.  “Aw fuckity fuck fuck.”  Just what she needed: to be overturned and eaten by the first big shark to come in closer than the Deadreef in two generations.  “Fuckleberries with fucked cream.”  Typical, just typical. 

“Fu-”

A highly technical and directed stream of water hit her directly in the face, turning the next thirty seconds of swears into sputters.  Jenma spat and sneezed and coughed and hacked and heaved and by the time she knew which end was up she was headfirst over the gunwales and eye-to-eye with the least friendly-looking dolphin she’d ever met.  Despite its (somewhat scarred) permanent smile, it seemed to be giving her the stinkeye. 

“Hello,” she croaked.  “Fuck.  Ow.”
The dolphin spat in her face again.  This time she wasn’t inhaling, but that was about as big an improvement as she got. 

“Excuse me,” she managed. 

The dolphin clicked at her and bumped the boat with a floating piece of wood.  And not for the first time.

Oh.  Not a shark after all. 

“Got yourself a toy there?  Nice.  Please stop spitting at me.”

The dolphin bumped the boat.  Then spat at her.

When Jenma’s vision cleared up again, the driftwood was in the boat with her and the dolphin was gone. 

That suited her fine.  It had left her a lot of reading to do. 

***

One month later, Jenma rowed out past Deadreef’s Point again.  That had covered three weeks of explaining, pleading, wheedling, threatening, blackmailing, stonewalling, extorting, and demanding; one week of making very discreet enquiries to very very well-paid experts about very very VERY complicated arrangements; and a few days of screaming nameless dread and horror and frustration into her pillow.

Her brother Bucal had sewn that pillow for her as a child.  It was a tattered sack of sailcloth stuffed with rags that wasn’t fit to even be called an apprentice-piece, and she loved it more than gold. 

Which was why it was buried underneath the multiple complicated chests, packs, and sealed print-cases.  She needed a little bit of that love out here with her while she did this. 

Bump bump bump on the hull.  And this wasn’t the first time, so she peered over the side promptly.  She’d had enough water squirted in her face. 

“Hey.”
Two cold, icy little eyes glared back at her from above a big happy grin. 

“I’ve got the plans.  I can go over this step-by-step if you want.”

The sea moved, and underneath Jenma’s dinghy it was moved aside.  A great grey barnacled back beached her high and dry; a valve twisted and huge lungs breathed deep and slow. 

“Right then.”

So she went over it step by step.  There would be three, and each would take a long time. 

“Is this acceptable?”
Her client’s interpreter squeaked and clicked in the affirmative. 

“Good.  This is an off-the-books job, so there’ll be no master-marks on anything.  If word gets out the other shipwrights’ll tear me apart in town square, and I can’t say the rest of my family wouldn’t join them.”

A raspberry, long and extra watery. 

“Yes, yes, yes.  Just explaining the circumstances.”
Click click clickclickCLICK.

“We can start soon.  Meet up at Bluehollow Bay in three days, after nightfall.  And be prepared to pay for each step in advance.  And be prepared for it to hurt.  A lot.”
Her client spoke aloud for the first time, but it was very, very, very loud.  A dismissive snort is quite something when it’s forced through a blowhole. 

Jenma spent an hour scrubbing herself down when she got home.  The prospect of money helped keep her mind off what was coming out of her hair.  

***

Bluehollow Bay was beautiful in the moonlight.  Few waves, no wind, the perfect place to swim if you were from out of town and didn’t know about the massive drop that led into deep water, covering rip currents that could suck you out past the reach of everything but gulls. 

This, said the interpreter of Jenma’s client, would not be a concern.  She had arranged for protection.  And so there was, in the water around the huge floating mass of flesh – a circling squadron of fins that she had to explain to the barber-surgeons were NOT sharks about one hundred times.  Even then, some of them didn’t believe her until the interpreter poked his head up from the water to swear virulently at them.  Some tones transcend languages and species. 

So they stepped atop their patient, and they prepared their knives, and their saws, and their scoops, and their cauldrons and cauldrons of boiled antiseptics and soothing paste.

And they began to cut, and the bay ran red. 

The client made no complaints.  She held her breath as if she were on a deep dive, and every hour on the hour, as steady as a watch, she would exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, and hold again.

She did this ten times, and as the sun began to rise it was done. 

“Don’t dive,” Jenma told the interpreter.  “Not until the paste has dried away.  It’ll start to itch then, and it should be fine.  Give it a week and a day, and then we’ll bring in the smiths.

***

The smiths were less skittish than the doctors, although they were even more uncomfortable aboard a boat.  They’d all shoed horses, and although this was very different in the details the shape and the mass and the form of the thing was graspable in a manner that felt familiar and proper and right. 

So they stoked their little portable foundry on the shore, and they hammered and grunted and bent and poured and now and then explained to the interpreter what they were doing, because that sort of intense anger is something that demands answering for even if you aren’t sure how to do it. 

When each piece was ready – still glow-hot – it was whisked, tongs and all, into Jenma’s dinghy, and from there to the client, and from there into the client, and from there it was bolted, and nailed, and hammered, and sealed into place against rib and joint and blubber and hide.  The smell of cooked meat filled the air until it was enough to drive a lion to veganism, and everyone present took a small break for a vomit before lunch. 

The installation took all night and a bit of the day besides, but it was done. 

“Overtime pay,” Jenma said.  “I can’t skimp on silence from these people.”

The interpreter spat in her face again, but he begrudgingly hauled up yet another (smaller) little kelp-string-bag to her hands, brimming with pearls.

“Wait a month for the weight to settle,” said Jenma.  “And then we’ll do the tricky part.”

***

The tricky part wasn’t finding a power source – there was an infinite supply of seawater for boiling at hand, and a truly astonishingly potent heat-source – but tapping it without compromising the client. 

This was done with cogs and rods and wheels and gears and teeth and boilers and plungers and piping and waterproofing and they even managed to find a way to repurpose the body’s own oils as oils, more’s the wonder. 

Ammunition would be simple.  Hell’s grapeshot, loaded with whatever could be crammed in.  The expulsion method involved a lot of violence and steam, but well, again, water was easy. 

Jenma wished the designer was at hand, but Grand High Artificer and Lord Engineer Lop Pon-Deapwit was an ill little thing and she refused to be moved from her bedside until she was finished dying.  Ten months on and so far no luck, but one grew bored while dying and she’d been quite happy to distract herself with the worst technical problems she’d ever imagined.  Hadn’t even demanded a fee for the work, let alone her silence. 

The client settled low in the water when her project had been installed.  Heavy with iron, and with lead, and with something hotter and more hateful. 

“The job is done,” said Jenma, alone in her dinghy again as the last of the pale-faced clockmakers, cannoneers, and foundry-workers vanished over the road, over the horizon.  “And it all should work.  Do you want to field-test here, or-”

The client breathed out, then in, then dove.  She left so fast the water in Bluehollow Bay nearly came with her. 

Jenma sat back up and waited for the horizon to stop spinning.  “I think,” she said to the interpreter, “I had which one of you was the angry one all wrong, didn’t I?”

He cackled at Jenma, then squirted her in the face. 

***

“THAR SHE BLOWS!”

Ninety days out of port and not a sight but shattered jetsam, and at last the call, the blessed call to blood and sweat and money came down from the Brigmun’s mainmast.  The lookout sang loud and strong, lungs as good as a trumpet, from the peak all the way into the hull. 

“THAR SHE BLOWS!”

The men scrambled, the boats were hoisted, the harpoons were seized.  Ahead it hove into sight, a lone cow, somnolent at the surface, heavy and low in the water with child (a bit wasteful, but best to take what you could get after this long a drought) and dreaming of happier things. 

 “THAR SHE BLOWS!”

Wait, what was that glint? 
“THAR SHE BLOWS!”
It sparkled in the bright morning light, most unlike light on water.

“THAR SHE BLOWS!”

Wait, was that a CANNON?

“THAR SHE-”

…broadsides. 

***

For some years thereafter, whaling took a sharp and inexplicably lethal downturn.  At first the shipwrights did roaring trade replacing vessels, but only so much good money is willing to throw itself after bad, and soon the local harbours saw few vessels launched save for the little boats used by local fishermen.  The shipyards closed, their wrights moved away or retired. 

Except, that is, for Bukel and Haxi and Sons and Daughters.  Inexplicably, they did quite well for themselves. 

The hallway door creaked.  It wanted to fit in with the mansion’s walls, ceiling, floor, joints, attic, roof, cellar, and foundation. 

Through its portal came two figures: one tall and thin, one tall and thin and incredibly, exhaustively, exhaustingly old.

“Pay attention, Edith.  This is your heritage you’ll be looking at here.”
Edith shrugged underneath her jacket.  “Sure.”
“One day I’ll be gone, and all these heirlooms will be yours.”
“Yuh-huh.”
“Now gaze upon my trophies!”

“’Kay.”
Lord High Conjurer Sir Archibald Quislip Stepford-Heimst blended a tsk into a sigh (an old trick he’d learned from his favourite nanny as a child).  “Edith, you’re looking at your phone-machine again, aren’t you.”
“Yeah.”
“Youth!  It is wasted upon the youthful, my granddaughter!  Wasted!”
“Sure.”
“But there is always more to be wasted, until there isn’t.  Take this manticore, for instance!  Stuffed the thing myself when I was your age, my first solo taxidermy job.  Isn’t he a beaut?”
Edith glanced up at the lion-bodied, scorpion-tailed, man-skulled, many-toothed creature.  “Cool.”
“Indeed!  Fun trick about manticores: they love easy targets.  I simply paid a local peasant girl to stand out in the open for thirty minutes and I got a clear shot across the bastard’s haunches with my cursebow.  She got away with but a few scratches to the vertebrae, little ungrateful minx.”

Edith took a picture.

“I hope you aren’t going to show your friends that.  This is a private family pride.”
“Just recording.  Hey, this thing’s teeth are broken.”
“Indeed!  It was quite old and feeble.  First and best lesson in the ways of the world, m’girl – a fair fight is for fools.  Think smart: cheat.”

“How’d you cheat this one?” asked Edith, pointing upwards. 

“Hmm?”
“That one.  The one that’s the entire ceiling.”
“Oh, the dragon!  I forget it’s there sometimes; old Esteban plotted the ribs into the rococo so nicely.  Funny thing about dragons: they burn so hot they can scorch rocks but because of that they need more water than a locomotive.  So I poisoned all the water holes in a ten-mile radius of its lair and left the country.  They tend to die slow, you see, and vengeful.  Came back for the corpse when the rampage ended.”  Stepford-Heimst chuckled fondly.  “Oh, it was a feisty bugger.  Took out six villages and two good-sized towns before its guts died out on it.  It  was still glaring at me when I cut its throat, bless its scaly heart.”
“Cool,” said Edith. 

“Oh indubitably.  And the fangs, of course, went into my cursebow.  Which you won’t be inheriting.  Ol’ Duchess is getting buried with me, you see.  I shan’t dare part with her.”

“Did you use her on this?” inquired Edith, taking a picture of a single-orbited skull the size of a car.   A spectacularly huge shattermark filled its forehead.

“Oh goodness me no.  A cursebow against a cyclops would be like a spitball against a teacher: just makes ‘em crabby and liable to smack you.  No, I made his acquaintance formally under guest-right, exchanged gifts, the whole nine yards.  I believe his name was Xenos.”
“Did he like…give you his skull?”
“No, he gave me Duchess!  He forged it himself as a skill-testing exercise; far too small for him to use, like a man making sculpture on a needlepoint just to prove he could.  A master smith, but not surprising – cyclops-make has been the best you can find in the Mediterranean for the past two millennia.”

“What’d you give him?”
“A monocle!  He was quite nearsighted in his old age.  He thanked me with tears of joy, then tripped over a rock and smashed his forehead in immediately.”  Stepford-Heimst winked and laid a finer aside his nose.  “Just a little flaw in the glass.  Worked wonders since he had no depth perception to begin with.”
“Sick.”
“Oh?”
“Cool.”
“I see.”
Edith poked her phone again. 

“Anyways!” said Stepford-Heimst after about forty seconds.  “This is one of my favourites.  Care to lift the lid on this case?”
“You do it,” said Edith with the flat and blunt awareness of one who had learned all about the sense of humour shared by elderly relatives.

“Oh come now.  One little peek?”

“You first.”
“Spoilsport.”  The lid raised, and even looking away, Edith squinted at the glare.

“Ohohoho!  The look on your face!  My word!  A fine knee-slapper, eh?”
“Ow.”
“This, m’girl, is a phoenix egg!  You have any idea how rare those are?”

“Very?”
“Quite so!  I befriended it in its dotage, tended it with care, and then –”

“-attacked it in its sleep?”
“No, no, goodness no!  Phoenixes don’t sleep.  No, I waited until it died of old age, then stabbed it to death in its own shell before it could finish reincarnating.  Used lead needles.  Fun little fact: a phoenix’s rebirth relies upon a very limited and delicate form of nuclear reaction.  Probably why your mother doesn’t have any more siblings eh?   Eh?  Eh?”
Edith’s face contorted in the agony of one forced to imagine a relative having sex. 

“Ohohohohohohohohohohoho!”

“Please, stop.”

“Of course!  And now, no doubt, you’ll see how important it is to grow up to carry on the family tradition!”

Edith scratched her nose.  “Sort of,” she muttered.

“Excuse me?”
“Sort of.  I mean, I want to be a wildlife biologist.”
Stepford-Heimst laughed indulgently.  “Oh you clever little thing!  And that will help you become a wonderful hunter, no doubt, as long as you don’t waste too much time at school.”
“Yeah.”
“’Yes.’”

“Sure.  I mean, it helped me know how much basilisk venom to squeeze into your tea earlier, to provide a fatal dose without the taste alerting you.”
“Ah!”
“It was the dried stuff you keep in that big glass jar in the parlour, so figuring out how degraded the potency was got a bit complex.  And I had to guess at your body weight.”
“Oh!”
“Think I got it right though.  You’ve got those little red dots appearing on your hands exactly thirty minutes after ingestion.”

Stepford-Heimst did not reply.  Edith gently pushed at his side.

He fell over for good. 

He didn’t stop smiling. 

***

Edith buried most of the remains, and sold the mansion for funds to build an occultlife sanctuary.  But she had Stepford-Heimst stuffed, because he would’ve wanted it that way. 

I’ve got to admit: I was surprised when Josh walked into the breakroom, and I was surprised that I was surprised. I’ve never been one for trends, not me, but he’d been a peacock for all of the three years I’d known him and I’d been sure that I’d seen every possible permutation and mutation of style and coif that the human mind could inflict adorning his lanky frame.

This was a little different though. 

“Good morning,” I said, not wanting to cave that easily. 

“Hell yes,” said Josh earnestly, demolishing the hell out of his bagel. He never believed in chewing slowly, Josh. “Got a good day coming up.”
“Plans or gut?”
“Gut. Just feeling good, y’know?”
“Right. Right. Right.”
I sat there. He sat there.

I gave up. “Your… teeth look good.”
“Yeah?” he said, grinning happily enough that I had to turn my eyes away from the two extra sabre-like canines that dangled from his upper jaw. “Thanks!”
“Caught me by surprise a bit. What’s going on there?”
“Just trying something new, you know?”

No. “Yeah.”
“Well, gotta run! Have a good day, eh?”

“Sure.”

He left, and I could stop pretending I was still hungry. It was hard to keep your appetite in the face of that much tooth.

***

Next morning was communal oatmeal, a bonding exercise and torture all in one. I’d just finished ladling out my bowl when Josh came down the stairs, whistling something and also something else. 

“What’s that?” I asked. 

“WAP,” he said cheerfully, pouring out twice what I’d taken and scraping the pot clean.
“No, not that.”
“Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”
“No, not that. How are you doing that?”

He frowned, and there was something entirely wrong about the set of his mouth. “Doing what?”
“Both of them at the same time.”
“Oh,” he said, suddenly sunny again, and he smiled properly and his lips peeled back.

“See?” he said brightly.

“Teeth,” I said.

“Right, right. And see behind them?”
Oh.  “… more teeth.”
“Right! Two rows, just like sharks used to make.”
“Why?”
“Just playing around a little, you know?”
I didn’t. “Sure.”
“Well, gotta run! See you later!”
I was still only two spoons into my oatmeal as he scooted out the door. 

***

In retrospect, the Friday morning meeting was when things began to slide out of control.

“…and in conclusion,” said Mr. Matheson, “miserable job by you all, just awful. Terrible, terrible, terrible. Except for Joshua, who has spent less than half the time of any of you on lunch breaks. Now THERE’S a productive man.”
“Gosh, thanks” said Josh happily, as all of us committed double homicide in our minds. “But I can’t take all the credit, sir. It’s my teeth.”

“Your teeth?”
“Yeah, I’ve got three rows of them right now.”
Mr. Matheson nodded in approval. “Great idea. I like it. It’s dynamic, it’s novel, it’s competitive.  I’ve got to try that.”
“Yeah! Yeah.Yeah!”
And by Monday Mr. Matheson had four rows of teeth and Josh had five and two other up-and-comers had three each. 

Lunches WERE faster, on average, but there were a godawful lot of crumbs. And from what I heard around the watercooler the local pharmacies were starting to raise their toothpaste prices. 

***

“Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey.”
“Hello, Josh.” 

“You check out the shareholder’s meeting yet?”
“No, Josh.”
“Check it out, check the video. There’s video.”
“No, Josh.”
“Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease,” he said, and I had to give in because there was something about hearing a whine strained through that much dentition that made me cringe in my soul. 

It looked boring, which was normal. It sounded boring, which was normal. And then the CEO opened his mouth and.

“Is that…?”
“Yeah. Yeah! YEAH!”
“Where’s his TONGUE?”
“It’s there! See? It’s still there! He just, y’know, augmented it.”
“It’s covered in teeth!”
“Yeah! He took my idea!” Josh sounded happier than any plagiarism victim I’d ever seen. “He took my idea and ran with it! God I’m proud. I’m onto something, you know. I’m onto something BIG. Gonna push the envelope. Gonna set the trends. Watch this space, man! Watch it!”
He beamed happily and walked away and it wasn’t until he’d left my office that I realized he’d replaced everything between his chin and his cheekbones with additional molars.

***

Next Friday meeting was surreal. Mr. Matheson’s crinkled watery blue eyes stared at me above a mouth that could’ve come from a sand tiger shark; my coworkers were nests of snaggle-tooth nightmares – clearly they hadn’t gotten the hang of it yet – and Josh… Well.

Well.

Josh was ahead of the curve. 

“And you’ve all done awfully, just awfully, terrible this month. Total wreckage, waste and ruin,” said Mr. Matheson, shaking his head. “But we’re making up the time in lunch breaks which is nice. Very nice. Good job with that. A round of applause for efficient mastication! Oh and Mr. Grellis is on TIME magazine’s cover, so that’s nice. Buy a copy to show him you care.”
I didn’t buy a copy, but I did check the website. Sure enough, there was our CEO, wearing the most expensive and boring suit possible, straightening his tie and looking at the camera and just a pair of serious brown eyes buried in a face that had become nothing more than a field of enamel and dentine. 

THE FACE OF BUSINESS, it proclaimed earnestly.

“Hey!”

I looked up. “Hey, Josh.”
“You see that?”
“Yes, Josh.”
“I’m catching on!”
“Yeah, Josh.”
“I mean, they’re giving all the credit to Mr. Grellis. But as long as I know and you know who’s the cause, that’s enough right? It’s enough, right? Right? Right? Right?”
“Sure, Josh.”
“Well, gotta run! To lunch! And then run back from it! Lunch!”

He ran. To lunch. And I was grateful for it, because it’s hard to make eye contact with someone when they’ve swapped their entire skull and all its contents with teeth. 

***

By the end of the month it was on the streets. By the end of the year it was everywhere. By the end of the holidays it was step six on the VORACIOUS guidance plan to corporate efficiency and we’d just failed our audit for it. 

That Friday meeting was the worst yet. 

“Oh it’s all garbage, total ruination and disaster, nothing but awful, awful, awful,” said Mr. Matheson, shuffling some papers between his hands and masticating them into pieces. “Except for lunch breaks, where we are still absolutely killing it, just cleaning house. Except for you,” he added, pointing at me. “You’re holding us back, just strangling us. Shape up or ship out.”
“I’m shipping out,” I said. 
“Wonderful, just amazing, astounding, great,” he said wetly, saliva glistening from the serrated edges of his forehead down to the grinding surface of his chest. “You won’t be missed. Okay!  Good meeting everyone. See you after the weekend.”

“Gosh I’m sorry,” said Josh, as I cleared my desk.

“You’ve said that eleven times, Josh,” I said, pocketing my mouse. 

“Yeah but I meant it every time. It was never my intention, you know that, right?”
“Yep.”
He seemed the closest I’d ever seen him to anxious, although it was a little hard to tell since his entire body was now grinding cutting or piercing surfaces. The posture seemed right, though.  “Gosh I’m sorry.” 
“Twelve times, Josh.”
“Really? Gosh I’m sorry.”
I waited, fistful of expensive pens in hand. 

“Gosh I’m sorry. Gosh I’m sorry. Gosh I’m gosh I gosh gosh gosgogogogogggg-”

I slapped Josh on the back, carefully. Most of it was now cutting surfaces. 

“Hurk! Thanks, buddy.”
“No problem at all, Josh.”
“I don’t know what this place’ll do without you.”
“Have faster lunches, apparently.”
“True, true. The world runs on its stomach, hahahaha.”
“Ha ha.”
“Where’re you going?” he asked as I walked down the hall, box in hands. “What’re you going to do?”
“Oh, I’ve got some ideas,” I said.
“Really?”
“Really. See you.”
“What ki-”

“See you,” I said, and I closed the elevator doors on his tie.

***

If the truth be told, I was applying to dental school. I’ve never been one for following trends, not me, but I recognize opportunity when I see it.