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It was a little after ten AM when Evermind came by my stand. 

“Hello, my friend Leslie!” it said brightly, all ten legs at eager attention and its thorax at a jaunty angle.  “Are you very busy?”
“Kind of,” I said distractedly.  I’d just put on the last of my first full batch of lunch wieners, and now I was trying to figure out how many buns I wanted ready and waiting.  “Make it quick.”
“I have been murdered!”

“Yeah that’s niwait what?”
Evermind beamed happily at me, then fell over stone dead. 

I went back to unpacking buns until Evermind came back, this time in a cleaner-form. 

“Told you not to do that in front of the stand,” I told it.

“Sorry,” said Evermind apologetically with one mouth as it fed the runner-form into its primary mastication pinchers.  “But I was so excited!  My friend Leslie, I’ve been murdered!  Just like in one of your mystery novels that you so generously have shared with me!”
“How does that even work?”
“I have no idea!  That is why we must find the murderer, to understand how they did such a thing.”
“’We’?”

Evermind’s eyestalks looked everywhere but at me for a second.  “I told the police at first, and they told me to contact the garbagemen.  Then the garbagemen told me to contact the police.”
“Did you tell them it was murder?”
“Yes but they didn’t care.”
“Most people don’t bounce back quite as readily after a murder as you, Evermind.”
“Bounce like a what?”
“Never mind.  You PROMISE this won’t take long?”
“Not long at all – especially with your expert assistance, my friend Leslie!” said Evermind, chitin standing at attention and vibrating with eagerness.

“I just read lots of shitty thrillers, you know.”
“Yes!  Lots!  Making you an expert.”

I gave up and swung the little sign on my stand from OPEN! to BACK IN FIVE!!!  You just couldn’t say no to that face.  Or the other ones in its lower abdomen. 

“Okay,” I said.  “Take me to the crime scene.”
“Wonderful!” cried Evermind, aquiver with violent enthusiasm.  “You’re standing in it.”

“I’m sorry?”
“Yes!  I was murdered in town!”
“More specific than that, please.”
“Oh.  About three blocks south.”

I pursed my lips.  “So… in one of those shady little backalleys the up-and-up restaurants stuff their dumpsters in?”
“You are entirely correct!  I was having lunch.”

***

The crime scene was a mess.  Evermind’s feeder-form had been a big one, rounded and full of delicious nutrients to share with itself.  Something had gone at it with…Christ it was hard to tell.  I wasn’t a police officer; I didn’t even do my own butchering.  It looked like it had been stabbed with a shotgun and then fired into over and over. 

“Behold!  The crime scene!”

“Sec.  Gotta throw up.”
“Of course.”
Luckily there was a dumpster handy.  Luckier still that I was too preoccupied to smell whatever was brewing in it.  “Okay.  Ok.  O.  Right.  Alright, describe what happened.”
“I was murdered!”
“In more detail please.  If possible.”
“Well, I was processing more nutrients from the dumpster you just vomited into.  This is a convenient place to leave a feeder-form – there’s always a nice meal handy, and it’s right along my main trunk.  Under normal circumstances I’d have a runner-form here every three minutes on the minute.”
“You’re not going to starve are you?”
“Only a few dozen of me.  It’s very surprising though!”
I looked at the corpse, then opened the dumpster again. 

“Shall I describe the wounds to you?”
“Hrlllrlpppghgl.”
“There is a powerful incision on the left-”

“SLORT!”

***

“Alright,” I said.  “You can put me down now.”
“Sure thing, my friend Leslie,” said Evermind in the great grey monotone of its hauler-forms.  I’d passed out after the second vomiting fit and in the middle of the third paragraph of a very detailed autopsy, and woken up being courteously held upside-down so my breakfast would leak out my mouth instead of down my windpipe. 

“Alright.  Alright.  Okay.  So… you have no idea what did this to you.”
“No.  I was alone when it happened, and didn’t see who did it.  The blow came from behind me.”

“We need witnesses.  Anyone who might’ve seen what happened?”
“Trudy might have.”
I squinted up the seven feet of chiseled Evermind-abdominals.  “Trudy?”
“My neighbour, Trudy.  She lives two dumpsters down from my murder scene.”
“Oh.  We should talk to her.”

“Excellent.  Onwards.”
“Yeah.”

“My friend Leslie, are you going to get up anytime soon.”

“Yeah I just need a moment.”
“Because I can carry you.”
“I’m aware.”
“It would be no problem.”
“It’s fine.”
“Because I know you’re dying to solve this-”

“One minute.  Please.”

***

I knocked on the dumpster for a good twenty seconds before it opened. 

“What?!  Can’t you see it’s noon!”
“Eleven-thirty,” I said. 

“Whatever,” said Trudy, crossly.  “What’re you doing making such a racket?”
“We’re investigating a murder,” said Evermind.

“Oh yeah?  Whose?”
“Mine.”

Trudy stared at it, then at me.  “The hell?”

“Just roll with it,” I said wearily.  “Did you see anything?  Hear anything?”
“When?”
“That’s a good question.  Evermind?”
“Exactly nine twelve AM.”
“I was asleep.  Like I was before you started up with your damned racket just now.  Why the hell would I notice something if I were asleep?”
“Evermind was being murdered sixteen feet away from you with some sort of giant blade or firearm?”
“None of my damned business, frankly.  You heard the sounds this one makes when it’s eating?  I don’t pay attention anymore.  Maybe the retired guy did it, now fuck off and leave me alone.”

“The retired guy?”
Trudy’s dumpster slammed shut about a centimeter shy of my fingers. 

I looked up at Evermind’s sensory plate.  “The retired guy?”
“Oh yes.  LMT-CQ04281.  He’s in the square we walked through to get here.”
“I didn’t see anyone else around.”
“He lives in the exact center of it, my friend Leslie.  You can’t miss him.”

***

“You know, this is a bit awkward,” I said.

HOW.

“I thought you were a statue at first.”

OH.  THAT HAPPENS A LOT.  DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT.

“Yes sir.”
NO NEED FOR THAT.  I’M RETIRED AND YOU’RE NOT UNDER MY COMMAND.
“Yes sir.”

WHAT CAN I HELP YOU TWO WITH.
“I’ve been murdered,” said Evermind proudly – or as proudly as it could emote with a voicebox shaped like a little grey rubik’s cube. 

WELL DONE.  WHO DID IT.

“You don’t know?”
I HAD MY INFRASONAR DECOMISSIONED OUT OF RESPECT FOR THE PRIVACY OF MY FELLOW CITIZENS.  MY SENSORY RANGE IS LIMITED TO SIGHT AND SOUND, AND I LACK EASY ACCESS TO THAT ALLEYWAY FROM MY POSITION.  THE BEST I CAN OFFER IS I HEARD SOUNDS INDICATING A FATALITY AT THE MOMENT EVERMIND HAS ALREADY DESCRIBED TO YOU.
“Damnit.”
TRY ASKING THE FISH AND CHIPS PLACE.
“I’m sorry?”
THEY HAVE A CAMERA POINTED AT THEIR DUMPSTER.  LIABILITY REASONS.

“Oh.  Sure.  Thank you.  Sir.”

LMT-CQ04281 waved farewell to us and then settled back into a crouching position, all seven meters and sixteen tons of it.

“I thought most of the war criminalizer droids went to quiet places.  Mountain peaks.  Oceanic trenches.”
“Oh, the CQ-models prefer more urban environments.  The right balance of open sightlines and confined horizons is essential to a proper and healthy state of mind.”
“You talk a lot?”
“Absolutely.  We’re best friends.”
“How many best friends do you have again, Evermind?”
“Approximately 38% of the population of this planet, my friend Leslie.”
“Way to make me feel special.”
“You’re welcome,” said Evermind.  And then it reached the end of its hauler-form’s life cycle and expired on the pavement next to me. 

***

“Look,” I said in exasperation, “there’s been a murder.”
“If it’s THAT thing,” said the waiter tersely, “it’s just pest control.”
“That is very hurtful,” said Evermind’s observer-form from my shoulder.

“Shut up.  You’re more eyeball than anything right now, I don’t have to pretend to like you.”
“Oh come on we just need thirty seconds of security footage.”

“Get out or I will call the police.”
I took a moment to decide whether or not I’d regret never eating fish and chips here again.  It wasn’t a long moment. 

“Catch,” I said. 

“What?” said the waiter.

“What?” said Evermind. 
I gently plucked Evermind from my shoulder and lobbed it underhand into the waiter’s lap. 

“AUGH!” said the waiter.

“Oh goodness!” said Evermind.
“Good catch.” I said.  And I walked into the backroom while the waiter was trying to detach sixteen sucker-covered tendrils from their arms.  Six monitors, two of which were turned off.  Three of them were security cam footage.  One of them was pointed at the dumpster, Evermind still sprawled in front of it.

I rewound.

Password?
I entered ‘password1’ and to the everlasting shame of my species it worked, and I beheld the face of the murderer as it finished gutting its prey, because it stopped and turned to the camera and waved with a big happy smile.

“Happy birthday, my friend Leslie!” said Evermind, on the monitor.

“Happy birthday, my friend Leslie!” said Evermind, in the hands of the waiter. 

“GET OUT!” said the waiter.

“Oh for FUCK’S sake,” I said. 

***

And to top it all off, I missed the lunch rush. 

Professor Tiana Pilkin’s Biannual List of Most Obnoxious Teeth

Some of my younger readers will have grown up reading this column, and to them I say thank you, and welcome.  Some of my older readers will recognize some of its contents, and to them I say ‘some things never change.’  Some of my crabbier, more opinionated older readers will complain about repetition and to them I say they can take a long walk off a short dock and play count-the-dentition with a crocodile.  If you’re so smart, you can do better.

Anyways, here’s the damned list. 

Anything in a Crocodile’s Mouth

This is the problem with being an expert in your field: you get invited to do all kinds of experimental procedures.  No, measuring a crocodile’s mouth for dentures is neither ‘trivial’ nor ‘perfectly safe.’  Especially if you cheaped out on the anesthetic.  Thank you very much, Sogelvale Turnpike Zoological Gardens.  I miss you, but not nearly as much as I miss that settlement payout.  Or my right pointer. 

Chompsticks

Chopsticks are perfectly valid utensils that are not improved at all by having human dentition attached to them, or by being surgically implanted into the jaw.  I have testified against Dr. Mervin Plonc sixteen times under oath to say this and I have no doubt I will do so again quite gladly. 

The Crooked Left Canine of Joshua Semaphore Ulysses

Possibly the only case of non-Euclidean AND non-hyperbolic anatomy I have ever encountered in my career.  Cameras break.  X-rays jam.  My assistant’s eyes boiled in their sockets.  All attempts to manually correct the tooth have failed either manually or mechanically due to the sudden and violent introduction of 3-4 unfamiliar dimensions into the patient’s mouth along with the removal of at least 2 familiar ones.  I’d recommend it as a site of global importance if it weren’t impossible to observe it without causing gratuitous harm to the observer. 

Elephant Dental Batteries

These are closer to cobblestones than teeth, and they’re almost impossible for me to replace without my patient chewing my head off.  So what if they’re going to die without them?  I’ll die without my head.  If they don’t like dying they shouldn’t try to kill me.  Thank you very much AGAIN, Sogelvale Turnpike Zoological Gardens, and you’re very fucking welcome.  

Fangs

Classic look is offset by inadequacy of human lips, resulting in long-term dental decay via long-term unprotected exposure to air.  ‘Dracula with cavities’ is nobody’s idea of impressive, to say nothing of the odour.  And let’s be honest: the version of Dracula you’re imagining is either inspired by Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee, not the original hairy-palmed paranoid British metaphor for a terror of being infiltrated by evil eastern Europeans. 

Fingers

Keep them out of your mouth.  If someone’s fingers must go in there, they should be mine.  I know what I’m doing and it’s unlikely you’re remotely qualified. 

Giant Bony Shears

Not actually teeth.  Leave these in the mouth of Dunkleosteus, where they belong.  If it only worked once for one dead fish it isn’t worth doing twice. 

Giant Keratinous Beaks

Seem multipurpose and simple to maintain – and they are – but result in unfortunate ‘turtleface’ syndrome and occasionally self-severance of fingers and/or tongue.  Also they aren’t teeth. 

Giant Mangling Dental Mats

See: giant keratinous beaks.  Although they tend to grind, rather than sever.  And they are teeth. 

Giant Metal Gnashing Plates

Actually, you can just put down the entire catalogue of Dr. Morbidia Von Stecklehommer here.  Or should I say, “Lauren Peck.”  That’s right, LAURIE.  I remember you.  Couldn’t make the big grades so you ducked out of dental school early and set up shop as a common back-alley mad dentist, eh?  I knew you were a failure.  Always did. 

Inscissors

Fly in the face of the actual use of incisors – to nip, to slice, to cut – by adding a wholly unnecessary dimension to the cutting face.  Also present a tremendous slicing hazard to the nose. 

K9s

Excessive.  Most people barely get full use out of their K2s.  Typically the extra K7 end up crammed in and around the front of the mouth, but in some cases they end up sort of vertically-stacked and invade the nasal cavity, resulting in unique forms of self-mutilation when sneezing occurs. 

Lead Teeth

Yes, they’re historic.  No, they’re not a good idea.  So what if the romans used them?  If the romans invaded all their neighbours and had civil war as a national sport, would you do that too?

Molar Bears

Good for grinding tough matter, calm, authoritative, inquisitive but can become nuisances if habituated by garbage and are currently facing extinction via anthropogenic climate change. 

Needles

These aren’t teeth.  And if your teeth are like them, please contact me as soon as possible so I can assist you.  Or laugh. 

Open Cavity in the Skull with No Jaw or Teeth or Esophagus

I’m still not sure why this patient was referred to me.  And I will likely never know, since I fired that receptionist immediately afterwards. 

Postpremolars

Too damned confusing, spatially speaking.  And to make matters worse, in commonwealth countries they come AFTER the premolars, while in the states they come BEFORE the premolars.  I’ve seen a lot of poorly-aimed surgical procedures thanks to that little terminological gap. 

Quasincisors

Powerful tools for shearing through tough plant matter, but the plant matter is required to exist in an extra four dimensions, two of which render it invisible.  Impractical, fancy, high-maintenance, and frequently disintegrate standard matter on contact, which isn’t great if you like having a tongue. 

Turkeys

They are not teeth but they irritate me so. 

Tusks

Leave them to the walruses, elephants, and other creatures that are used to navigating spatial environments with two giant protrusions jutting out of their faces.  For humans, this is the facial equivalent to running with untied shoelaces. 

Tyrannosaurus rex teeth in general

They’re not razors.  They’re more like bananas, or maybe railroad spikes.  Everyone calls them razors, but they’re possibly the least razor-like objects you could find in a predator’s mouth.  Murder bananas are a perfectly acceptable kind of tooth but everyone seems embarrassed about them. 

‘Wisemouth’

An interesting effect to observe but not a pleasant one to deal with.  Plenty of people don’t need the paltry amount of wisdom teeth they’re born with; dealing with them slowly multiplying and pushing out your existing teeth in a ghastly parody of exfoliation is something in even less demand.  And they’re not wise.  If they were wise, they wouldn’t pull this crap. 

Wolverines

Again, not teeth.  No matter how carefully you’ve trained them, or how ambitious your plans for miniaturizing them are.  Cheap sensationalism is a lousy replacement for effort, thought, or care.  Isn’t that right, LAURIE? 

Professor Tiana Pilkin is Dentist Emeritus and Dean of Enamel at Wurblemass’s Institute of Highest Dental Learning.  She has seven degrees, countless awards, and one-and-three-quarters fingers. 

Smokewater Drive was a good street.  Quiet.  Expensive.  Covered with millions of gallons of grass. 

On that day it also had a squad car.  Empty, like a snailless shell. 

It sat in front of 148 Smokewater Drive, and that was most certainly NOT empty.   Stuffed, cramped, overflowing, bulging, crammed, those were the words for the dining room.  Everyone from the corner of Smokewater and Clarence on, all squished into every chair and every corner and Mr. Wallthroose was sitting on the table.  Mrs. Chinbone and Mrs. Wallthroose had tried very thoroughly to persuade him to move, but he was feeling deaf at the moment and wasn’t budging. 

This minor drama aside, all focus was on the man of the hour, of the plan, on Mr. Burton Q. Benthic.  He was short and moustached and astonishingly bald.  He didn’t gleam; he somehow exuded light from every dead would-be-follicle, every pore.  If the power had blown out in the house, Benthic’s skull would have lit the room quite comfortably and indefinitely. 

“I suppose you’re all wondering why I gathered you here today,” he said. 

“It’s about the murder,” said Walburt Heddington. 

“Yeah,” said Mrs. Wallthroose. 

“Obviously,” said Edith Goose.

“Yes, yes, get ON with it,” said Mrs. Chinbone.  “Come ON, Mr. Wallthroose!”

“Can’t,” said Mr. Wallthroose serenely.  “Waiting for the murder.”
“There’s already been a murder!”
“Exciting part’s already over then.  Not budging.”
“OFF!”
“Alright, alright, alright, settle down,” said Benthic.  “Fine.  I’ll tell you.  It’s about the murder.”
“Knew it.”
“OFF THE TABLE!”
“No.”
“Yes, it’s about the murder,” said Walburt Heddington, peevishly.  “We all knew that.  Shut up and get on with the damned thing.  What’s the news and who did it?”

“I’m here to reveal that I know who committed this crime, the killing of local garbageman Henry P. Floss, on his Thursday route, on this very street!”
“Yeah, yeah, put up or shut up,” said Mrs. Wallthroose.  “Get talking!”

“First, I will explain how I came to my conclusions, in excruciating detail.”
“Boring,” complained Mr. Wallthroose.  “Hurry up!”
“My first suspects were you and your wife, Mr. Wallthroose,” said Benthic, twinkling smugly in his own balding incandescence.  “You had the motive: an overflowing recycling bin, obviously caused by Mr. Floss refusing to accept your recycling last week-”

“Bullshit we did NOT put the cardboard and plastic together, he was lazy and-”
“-and you most certainly possessed the means, in the form of Mr. Wallthroose’s collection of antique haberdashery blades.”
“Originals,” said Mr. Wallthroose proudly.
“But you lacked that most crucial of elements: opportunity.  You are known snorers according to your neighbour, and never awaken before 10 AM on a weekday.”

“Jackass,” said Mrs. Wallthroose.

“Hey now!” said Walburt Heddington.

“Poltroon,” said Mr. Wallthroose.

“Look, I’m just saying!”
“So it can’t have been the Wallthrooses.  Of course, what of Mr. Heddington?  Unlike the Wallthrooses, he is an early riser – as a peeping tom, he has to be, in order to set up his camera network that peers into your bedrooms and bathrooms every morning.  That kind of complex system costs money to maintain, update, and operate.  And of course, they could be used to memorize Mr. Floss’s route, memorizing the exact moments at which he might let his guard down to scratch his groin or eat a snack or urinate on someone’s lawn.  Such as he did every week to Mr. Heddington’s lawn, as verified by the small patch of dead grass next to his driveway.  Motive and opportunity both!”
“Hey, I never-”

“But not only is Mr. Heddington lacking in firearms, he is a noodly person with feeble arms and no grip strength, while Mr. Floss was a robust specimen at six foot three inches with arms like a gorilla.  No, Mr. Heddington lacks method, or at the very least, proper armaments.  His rage must remain fully impotent.”
“Hahahahahahaha,” said Edith Goose, politely. 

“Oh my goodness, tee hee,” said Mrs. Chinbone.

“Heh heh heh heh,” observed Mr. Wallthroose.  “What’s so funny?”
“He’s IMPOTENT,” said Mrs. Wallthroose into his ear.

“Oh.  But what’s the joke?”
There was a very brief and very simple and sad struggle to keep Walburt Heddington from violence until he got tuckered out. 

“Right,” said Benthic, mopping his radiant scalp with a handkerchief that came away shining as if it were diamond-laced.  “Where was I?  Oh yes, Walburt Heddington is impotent.”
“Heh heh heh he-”

“Shut up, Mr. Wallthroose.  So what of Edith Goose?  She’s young and strong and the provincial shot-put champion, and has a clean line of fire from her bedroom window to her garbage pickup location.  Furthermore, Mr. Floss’s skull was crushed by a large, heavy object!  Furthermore, she is a known early riser due to the demands of her training!  Furthermore, she has been repeatedly ogled and cat-called by Mr. Floss!  Method, motive, and opportunity!”

“Three ‘furthermores’?” said Edith.  “Really?”
“Excuse me,” said Benthic crossly, “but I’m trying to dramatically implicate you.”
“Yes, but come on.  Three?”
“Shut up,” said Benthic.

“Make me.”
“Alright, alright, alright.  Fine.  Anyways, yes, Ms. Goose does indeed possess all three essential qualities to any good murderer, but in addition to having his skull crushed Mr. Floss was also electrocuted, stabbed, strangled, and shot.  Although I’m certain Ms. Goose has knives and rope in her home, this all seems a bit excessive for one murderer.  Speaking of which, we come to Mrs. Chinbone.”
“Oh wonderful!” exclaimed the lady in question.  “This is so exciting!”
“Indeed,” said Benthic. 

“Not you.  You’re sort of boring.  And you smell funny, like skulls and oil.”

“Be quiet.  Now, Mrs. Chinbone.  You have despised Mr. Floss for years: the garbage department has no less than sixteen annual complaints on record from you for the past three years, all of them relating to Mr. Floss and his conduct.  You took an instant dislike to him for picking his nose and wiping it on his pants, fumed when he stepped on your lawn, and got into an argument about him about whether Batman could beat Spider-man.”
“Batman doesn’t have radioactive blood.  The whole idea is nonsense, and I told him as much.”
“Indeed.  Motive, you are not lacking in.  Opportunity?  You have time on your hands to spare.  But method?  Mrs. Chinbone, you are – permit me to be blunt – as frail as a clay pigeon.  You couldn’t hurt a fly, let alone Mr. Floss.”

“There you are, then,” said Mrs. Chinbone.  “And you aren’t too swole yourself, young man, so kindly watch those stones you’re casting from your glass home.”

“I undergo the same physical training as the rest of the department.  But that is neither here nor-”

“Lifting donuts, perhaps.”
“Shut up,” intoned Benthic gravely. 
“Make me, you impudent little scamp.”
“ANYWAYS, what Mrs. Chinbone does have interests me a good motive.  Everyone in this room has a good reason – well, a reason, anyways – to want Henry P. Floss dead, although some of you lacked the means and others lacked the opportunity.  But you all would have wanted him a corpse.  And now we must return again, to the curiously mutilated nature of the body.”

“Are you going to accuse us of pulling a murder on the orient express?” demanded Mrs. Wallthroose.  “Because frankly, I’d rather be dead than cooperate with that Walburt creep on anything.”
“Hey!”
“Same,” said Edith Goose.  “And no offence, but I don’t think I’d need that much help to kill someone.”
“Kill someone?” inquired Mr. Wallthroose with interest. “Who?  The detective?”

“Christ no,” said Benthic hastily. 

“Excuse me,” inquired Mrs. Chinbone, “but I’ve never read ‘murder on the orient express.”
“He’s insinuating we all murdered Henry together,” said Edith Goose. 

“Oh.”

“More implying, more implying,” said Benthic.  “But now we must consider a final clue: the piece of porcelain embedded in Mr. Floss’s left sole.”

Everyone sat there. 

“Well?”
“Stop screwing around,” said Mrs. Wallthroose flatly.

“Yeah, get to the point,” said Walburt Heddington. 

“Fine,” said Benthic.  “Look at this piece of china: does it look familiar?”
“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Chinbone.  “It’s from my favourite teapot!  I broke it last week.  Such a pity, I was enjoying a nice cup and then there was this awful noise from outside-”

“That was me,” interjected Edith Goose.  “I’d crushed one of Walburt’s cameras between my hands and was screaming at him.”
“Oh my.  I thought it was cats making love.  Anyways, I dropped the teapot.  Had to junk it.”
“Just so.  Mrs. Chinbone, how much garbage do you produce in a week?”
“About a ha’-pound, after holidays.”
“I see.  And in your experience, is Mr. Floss a cautious man?”
“Goodness no.”
“So we might presume that Mr. Floss might carelessly heavy your bag onto his shoulder, expecting little to no resistance, and suffer incisions due to his laissez-faire attitude?”

“Oh why not!” said Mrs. Chinbone cheerfully. 

“Quite so!  He cut his shoulder, then dropped the bag on his foot and suffered further injuries.  Vexing, and likely deeper than he suspected, but not enough to keep him from his duty.  So he proceeded to Mr. Heddington’s residence, where he emptied the trash in a bad mood, as can be seen by the violence with which he threw it in haphazardly, in these photos of the dump truck.  After that came the Wallthrooses, and here is where things begin to go awry: Mr. Wallthroose, do you recognize this gun?”
“Never seen it,” said Mr. Wallthroose, very quickly. 
“Wait a sec,” said Mrs. Wallthroose.

“No, put it away.”
“Wait a sec.  Wait one cotton-fucking second.  Herman, you piece of shit – you threw out my elephant gun!”
“No I didn’t!”
“You did!  You threw out my grandmother’s rifle!  This is an antique!  You can’t get ‘em like this anymore!”
“Said you’d shoot me with it!”
“It was a joke!”
“You don’t joke six cups in!”
“I’m HILARIOUS six cups in!”
“Not where I’m sitting!”
“Excuse me,” said Benthic, “but I’m solving a crime here.  Now, see how it’s been fired recently?”
“You threw out my grandmother’s rifle fully-loaded?!”
“You kept it loaded?”

“Just in case!”
“Case of what?  Elephants?”

“Shut up,” said Benthic politely.  “Now, Mr. Floss was hasty in his pain, and as he stuffed the Wallthroose household’s garbage away, he seems to have inadvertently fired this gun into his left shoulder.  The pain sent him staggering backwards – even though it missed any large veins or arteries by some miracle, it shattered his bones quite badly – and he put his foot into Ms. Goose’s trash, where it crushed the already-mangled remains of Mr. Heddington’s surveillance camera.”
“That’s his fault, legally, right?” asked Edith Goose.

“Hey!”
“Shut up, creep.”
“Anyways, he then spasmed his way into the back of his truck, where an item of Mr. Heddington’s trash – a USB cable, I believe – was dislodged and became tangled around his neck.  In his thrashing, oxygen-deprived, electrically-shocked state, Mr. Floss lost all sense of balance and reason and half-choked himself to senselessness before falling over and smashing his brains out on the sidewalk.  An act of god caused by negligent trash disposal.  Quite rare.”

He smiled at the room.  

“So the murderer is….nobody?” asked Edith Goose.

“Quite so.”
“What’s that, a reverse orient express?” asked Mrs. Wallthroose.

“Maybe!” said Benthic. 

“Are we going to be charged with anything?” asked Walburt Heddington. 

“Oh, the garbage department will send along some small fine or something,” said Benthic.  “And now I must bid you all farewell.”

“Excuse me, young man?” inquired Mrs. Chinbone.  “Do you mean to say that you stressed us all out and wasted a whole street’s time just to inflate your own ego?”
“Quite so,” said Benthic.  “Quite so.”
With a quick tip of his hat, he covered his glowing cranium.  And as the light left, so did he. 

Behold the Struthiomimus. 

The ostrich mimic, but it does a poor job of it – not only is it over ten feet long, even in this immature state, but it’s got a great big tail and its eyes aren’t fixed in their sockets and it lives millions and millions of years ago so it can’t mimic the thing it precedes.  Its feet are fast and its movements are darting and its toothless keratin-sheathed bony beak is opened just wide enough for it to breath a tiny bit harder, because it’s been running for a while, picking its way through dense thickets in the highlands as it descends through growing forests and fallen trees.

Its name is Billy.

***

Behold Billy. 

He looks both ways at the intersection, just like his mother told him to.  It’s a busy time of day down in the valley where the river runs wide, and the traffic is thick and plodding.  Great big thunderingly slow hadrosaurs are on the move from hither to thither; heavy-skulled and pointy-browed ceratopsians are ambling down for their noon drinks.  They’re swapping filthy stories as they go, telling the tall tale about the titanosaur that sat on a cycad. 

Billy tries to pay them no mind.  He’s on a mission.  His mother told him he needed to do something important for her today, and he’s a good boy. 

***

Behold the good boy. 

He’s headed downtown, where the new monkey puzzle trees have grown in fast and furious and thunderous, towering up and up.  His mother complains about them, says they’re a gentrifying blight on the landscape, but Billy isn’t sure whether or not she’s talking about something real or just griping, like when she bitches that mammals are taking all the jobs that used to go to good honest saurs, which his father has told him is total bullshit and not to be listened to.  She’s not that bad on most days though, now that the news is off the air.  Real tragic what happened to that anchorman though, but silver linings and it’s an ill wind that blows good for nobody and so on and so forth and etc and the like. 

Billy stops for a drink.  His mother gave him money for that, it’s okay.  He sips from a cheap little rivulet, but it’s strongly sweet and just what he wanted.  He watches a couple of cute coelurosaurs sipping from the other side of the brook, wishes he knew what the hell you were meant to do in circumstances like this, and shakes it off.  He has an errand. 

***

Behold the errand.

The corner volcano lurches into view, surrounded by pale plastic palm trees.  Billy scurries inside past the obese caveman at the entrance, cheap faux-leopardprint loincloth adorned with his last meal – and the meal before that, and the meal before that, and so on and so on. 

“No browsin’” he belches out, scratching himself somewhere unthinkable, unimaginable, and unspeakable. 

Billy is not here to browse.  Billy is here for a purpose.  He scurries past the shelves of pet rocks, the bins of home hardware rocks, the boxes of jelly rocks (takes effort, that one – oh, he’s loved those ever since he hatched), and finally he stands at the rock racks.

His mother wants a rock magazine about home and shale.  Billy is looking for it very honestly, of course he is, but his eyes wander and bobble trying to find it, and what should they rest upon – quite accidentally! – but the hard rock section. 

Wow. 

He’s never seen a tail quite that thick before. 

There is a distant belch and Billy is overcome with impossible and inescapable shame at the mere idea of anyone knowing he glanced at that part of the rock rack, let alone thought about it.  He hunts frantically, digs through the back issues, and there it is: home and shale’s top ten picks of the burgess. 

Those long slender hands are good for grabbing; it’s snatched up and dragged to the front of the store before you can say ‘non-pronating forelimbs.’ 

“Thirteen pebbles,” says the caveman, exploring his nose with the hairiest of his fingers. 

Billy puts down what his mother gave him.

“That’s ten,” says the caveman.  And sonuva b-word he’s right; mom must have slipped Billy two fives instead of a ten and a five.  “Gimme three.”

“I don’t have it,” says Billy.  And he doesn’t; he’s a good boy, but now and then he feels temptation – the dark urge to blow his money on candy.  So he left it at home.  All he’s got is ten pebbles from his mother. 

“Tough luck,” says the caveman.  “Beat it.”

***

Behold the beating of it. 

Billy walks home slow, dejected, one slow foot at a time, uphill into the suburbs where the homeless are forbidden and the fern-coated lawns are perfect and hideous.  The concrete is hot beneath his sneakers; it’s a boiling day in Laurasia and even the rain that starts falling feels pre-fried before it hits the ground, hissing away into nothing as soon as it listlessly spatters against the old red sandstone road. 

It’s about then that he remembers that he forgot to take his pebbles back from the caveman.

“Fuck!” says Billy, for the first time without premeditation.  It feels hot and spicy in his beak, and he looks around guiltily, sure someone is about to tell him not to do that.  But there’s nobody around except for an elderly tyrannosaur across the road, dozing at the bus stop, and it clearly is going to take a lot more than some spontaneous profanity to get them to move or give much of a shit about anything ever again.  He wonders if they’re dead.

Billy sort of wonders if it’d be better to be dead or to have to explain to his mom that he doesn’t have her home and shale magazine.  This makes him feel shame, for what seems like the hundredth time that day.  It’s almost as hot as the air, and he’s thirsty again.  Oh no.

Oh no.  Oh no no no no no no no he stopped for a drink!  How much did it cost?  Did it cost three pebbles? 

He thinks it costed three pebbles. 

“FUCK!” yells Billy, loud enough to wake up the elderly tyrannosaurus with a snort and loud enough that he can’t even be embarrassed about it.  “Fuck!”  He screwed up!  He had a drink and he ruined everything!  His mother’s going to be furious with him!  “Fuck.”  He should’ve just given up and bought more garbage and claimed he dropped the magazine in the river.  “Fuck…” now the caveman has the rest of the money and he’ll deny it if Billy goes back and all he has to show for it, all his mother has to show for it, is a sort of tepid drink in Billy’s stomach and a lot of regret. 

***

Behold the regret.

It’s scorched into the sandstone and into Billy’s soul as he trudges up the steps to his house, a little split-level slab that gets paid for by alimony and desperation.  His palms would be sweaty if he could sweat. 

There’s movement from inside the curtains.  His mother is awake.  Probably waiting for her magazine. 

Fuck, thinks Billy, because this close to home he sure as hell isn’t going to say it aloud.  Fuck.  Fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck fucklestein fuck fuck fuckosaurus rex fuck me fuck you fuck everything. 

He wishes the ground would rise up and swallow him.  He wishes the seas would rush in and wash him away.  He wishes the sky would fall down and pop him out of existence, and it catches him by the most surprise anyone’s ever had when it does just that.

It’s a big bright flash to the south. 

“Woah,” he says, as the shockwave ripples closer, evaporating trees and soil and dinosaurs and cavemen and buildings and knocking over the Bronto-Burger down the street and kicking its sign towards him at one thousand miles an hour, the cheerful stupid grin of Buddy Bronto the last thing he knows he will ever see. 

Behold: a wish granted.

Finally, the time had come. 

But there was no sense rushing to meet it, so she poured herself a cup of coffee and selected a single cookie and ate it and chewed every mouthful and forced herself to taste every bite and she put her thoughts in order.

Her long, arduous graduate work refurbishing polar bears under Dr. Hammerneck, the unbearable old asshole. 

Her years spent barely able to afford breakfast every other day.

Her sixteen total revisions on her thesis from ground zero, transforming it from a modest piece on reticulating koalas into a greater Oceanic GUI into a thoroughly radical yet eminently well-grounded hypothetical blueprint on the long-term reinsertion and patching of urban megafauna. 

Dr. Nomann, PhD.  It had a ring and a necklace and a whole damned bracelet to it.  And now, after all those years, the first jewel was about to be added to them.

She opened up the document, cool white and blank as a baby’s face, and typed:

Fern 2.0

Then she stared at it for a while, sipping her coffee. 

***

Reimagining an entire group of this magnitude was a hell of a first project, but she had heavenly credentials and the hellish scars to prove them.  Her word was trusted.  Her mind was wanted.  Her expertise was needed. 

So.  First draft.  What did ferns really need?
She tapped her thumb against her forefinger five times, gulped the last bit of coffee, checked her hands for crumbs, and typed for six hours. 

Then she got up and stretched, walked back over, deleted half of every other sentence, resorted everything, turned it into a blueprint, turned the blueprint into a proof, turned the proof into a certainty, formatted it, inked it, blotted it, licked it, sealed it, and sent it. 

Then she had dinner and went to bed and slept the sort of weighty, reassuring dreams shared only by cats and infants and murderers. 

She woke up the next morning, had a nice breakfast, opened her mail, and read the follow criticisms of her design:

‘Inadequate.’

Ten minutes later, after ten thousand years of internal screaming, she had changed everything in her head and prepared herself to spend the next twenty hours reconfiguring reality to match it. 

***

This time it said ‘Undirected.’

***

Four complete redrafts later she phoned her workplace.

“Oh!  That’s the spam filter!” said the helpful, eager young man at the desk.

“Thank you,” she said.

“We’ll take you off that.”
“Thank you.”
“Have a nice day.”

“Thank you.”

***

“Too technical,” was the reply.  “No vision.  We don’t want to just have ‘fern, but better.’  Fern 2.0 must appeal to all that the public has come to expect in a fern while also opening entirely new avenues of the fern paradigm.  We want it to be familiar, but novel.  Surprising, yet welcoming.  Bold and comforting.”

Seven days of intense meditative autotrance sing-a-longs later, inspiration struck her with the force of a thunderbolt in a magazine and she worked through two nights and three days before editing and submitting her draft. 

It was a very small fern.  It was a very small fern that contained many organelles that were themselves very small ferns down to the subatomic level, and could link together itself to form very large ferns up to the size of redwoods.  She called it the fernctal, and attached a small 20-page annotation suggesting possible use cases for it, ranging from children’s playgrounds to designing planets. 

‘Too ambitious,’ came the reply.  ‘And the redwood department really doesn’t like your attitude.’

The next day’s mug of coffee was bigger, and the day after that she just took the pot. 

***

She submitted a fern that adopted the characteristics of any environment; hues, shades, texture, and almost the very essence of  the landscape in miniature, sublime in every detail.  It was rejected – ‘no practical applications.’

She submitted a fern that was robust enough to withstand freshly-cooled lava indefinitely, and could grow on any substrate.  It was rejected – ‘not sexy enough, no appeal to the customer base.’

She submitted a fern that was as hearty and filling as roast potatoes and as smooth and delectable as the finest gelato.  It was rejected – ‘too appealing to animals, would be eaten into extinction.’

She submitted a fern that came with its own accessories and a powerful grip and a small air-powered dart launcher.  It was rejected – ‘unsafe, might put someone’s eye out and contains choking hazards.’

She submitted a fern that was as soft and plush as a teddy bear’s soul.  It was rejected – ‘not machine washable.’

She submitted a fern that could absorb sixty times its mass in water and retain it flawlessly until wrung out.  It was rejected – ‘too expensive to manufacture.’

She submitted a fern.

Then she got up to put away her fern 1.0 control group and realized she was holding her latest project: a fern that could survive on less energy than a single-celled bacterium, and she’d just turned in the wrong plant. 

Ping, went her mailbox. 

It took half an hour for her to muster the courage to walk back to her computer. 

“Excellent work!  Fern 2.0 is approved.  Very creative.  We’ll keep your resume on file.”

Dr. Nomann, PhD, read the letter exactly once, carefully and slowly, cross-checking sentences and verifying each word.  Then she nodded, closed her files, threw the computer out the window, and ran away to New Zealand.

There were a lot fewer people there.  But there were plenty of ferns. 

She was the five-hundred-and-seventh of her father’s clutch.  The middle child, unassuming and unmemorable.

The elder, lower four hundred were crushed into the bedrock when the ice came; implacable, unstoppable, shredding the earth and eating the horizon.  The younger, fresher four hundred were scraped away by its ripping claws. 

Of the two hundred that remained, the outermost succumbed to the cold the fastest.  They collapsed into maybes and might-have-beens, their little furnaces slowing down to a dead halt.  Then their neighbours, and their neighbours, and so on and so on until all that was left was the five-hundred-and-seventh egg  in the center of what had been a thousand more, finally insulated by the fused shells of its fellows.

Still, she did not escape freely.  The temperatures were too low for far too long, and then when her own reactor began to properly engage, they were too high.  She had remained still and unhatched for ten times her natural course, and now she had to emerge early, half-formed, still-molten. 

But she was still lucky, and so she ate her way out of her own egg’s thorium shell and then the endless hollows of her long-cooled clutchmates.  Her jaws worked and worked and worked and bit by bit by bite she fed herself, the suffocating force of her own waste heat wrestling with the blank cold weight of ten billion tons of ice above and below.  

Six hundred years later she breached the rim of her nest, and at last, gloriously, freely, for an instant, she knew what it was to be cold. 

Oh, it was lovely.  So lovely.  She could have stayed and soaked it in for millennia.  But her abdomen was boiling away, so she savoured it for a decade and then pressed on.

And in.  And up.

***

To sleep, perchance to dream.  She didn’t know what dreams were, in the same way that fish were fuzzy about water, or apes were confused about ideas. 

But they were a fickle thing for her now, obnoxiously.  She was sure that once upon a time she had done nothing BUT dream, and now she found herself a light sleeper.  No sooner would she have settled a nice hollow in a thick layer than she would be started to near-wakefulness by the trickle trickle thump bump of liquid ice, seeping and steaming away from her white-hot sides.  Her breath alone would leave her head flooded deep after resting her head for a century, and above and around her the ice would crawl back sullenly until her comfortable pillows had vanished and left her encased in a too-wide mould of her own body.

Too-wide never lasted, either.  That was the other inconsistent thing.  Her reactor was trying to make up for its faulty start; churning greedily day and night in a space of endless cooling.  She burned away exhaust that would have smelted her to molten ruin ten thousand times over every year, funnelling it away into the melting world around her, where it formed streams that flowed down and away in search of a more peaceful dark. 

Something in her dreams suggested that perhaps she shouldn’t be growing anymore, that maybe her long infancy had charred away something small and important inside her that should have stopped this, that her own mother wouldn’t recognize her now.  Then she stirred, and nearly woke under the weight of a fresh lake steaming at her sides, and it was forgotten as she tunneled forwards again, hunting for a new bed. 

***

Something tickled at her atomic clock, and she woke up.

That was the simple way to say it.  In reality she couldn’t even pinpoint when it happened.  Her abdomen tensed; her mouths stilled; her secondary reactor chamber ignited, and then her eyes opened. 

They didn’t see anything interesting, and for a long time that was enough. 

But then came the itch. 

It was indescribable and unavoidable and it started in her head and it moved down to her tail and back again and every time it circled the six-mile length of her body it grew, and its growth was logarithmic, and after seventeen decades she realized two things.

First, she was not going to fall asleep again.

Second, she could realize things. 

This was a great shock and it almost drove her out of her mind in an entirely new way, but the shock of being shocked itself put a stop to that.  Consciousness was a self-assembling problem, just like her life had been, and in comparison to the struggles of her birth this was a cakewalk. 

Besides, her body only loosely needed to be connected to it.  She could think as much as she liked while her body began doing needful things.  Existential crises and regulating her immediate environment in accordance to her internal demands could be handled simultaneously with an ease that alarmed her only half as much as her ability to be alarmed. 

***

She tunneled more freely now. 

Before it was driven by demand.  A new body segment, an increase in water depth, a surge in ambient temperature, a restless dream.  Now she could see – metaphorically, not literally – and she could try.

Most of the trying was failure.  That was new too.  Some of it was success, and that was REALLY new, but she liked it.  She liked it a lot. 

And so she tried a lot. 

Tunnels that connected with themselves in pleasing ways.  Tunnels that enveloped her meltwater and ushered it into her past tunnels, turning them into frozen whirlpools.  Tunnels that dropped low, scraping the edge of the bizarre substance that was not-ice.  Tunnels that surged high, so high that the texture and form and rigidness of the world began to feel funny and she felt her first fear and dropped low again, where she could think about that. 

Patterns were a big thing, when she discovered them.  Symmetry in particular was astounding, and when she began to think on her own body she discovered modelling and made herself a hundred times over, engraved into the world and replicated down to the exact pathing of her ventilation systems.   

Then she tried to do the same to the ice, which led to mapping.  Which led to problems. 

***

Surely, surely, surely.  Surely there was more. 

She spiralled, a perfectly uncontrolled shape and one of her favourites.  It was unsymmetrical, which terrified her, and terror held its own appeals. 

Out from the center, which she put on her infant nest on a whim.  Out and out and out, swinging up and down in carefully-modulated waves according to the cycles of her own biology and her own mind and the worries that ate at her from somewhere deeper that told her that everything that had ever happened to her and from her was fundamentally a mistake. 

She had driven herself past ten million natural limits and she was planning something that would annihilate ten million more and it was all driven on a single small hunch somewhere in her restless core that told her that if she kept doing this it would be worth it, it would make sense, it would be correct. 

So she spiralled, slowly, certainly. 

And the next time she felt that strange weakness in the world at her side, up above, she did not back down.  Instead, she braced herself, felt that strange massing of forces underneath herself that she’d never ever noticed in a million years and more, and she pushed with all the strength she hadn’t known she had. 

***

The ice was gone.  Around her was nothing.  Not liquid ice, not solid ice, not vaporized ice. 

Nothing. 

It was so shocking she couldn’t even be horrified, so instead she fell over and out and the rest of her followed mile on mile, coil on coil, with curiously high-pitched and squeaky noises that she didn’t recognize because she was surrounded by so much vaporized…nothing. 

How strange. 

She tried biting it.  That didn’t work.

She tried burrowing through it.  That REALLY didn’t work.

She tried venting waste heat at it, which did SOMETHING but faded quickly and actually tuckered her out a little. 

All in all, it was very boring.  So when the ice cracked underneath her and split apart and began to move, she was very nearly as pleased as she was terrified.  She dug into it and wriggled with excitement and fear, turning herself in knots over and over again.

Then her head poked out into the nothing again, and her rear fell out into…liquid ice.

A lot of liquid ice. 

She turned her head about and then she opened her eyes – almost by mistake – and when she’d wrapped her head around THAT she realized that there was a lot more liquid ice than she’d ever imagined, and she was now floating in it, in a lump of ice that was, if her eyes were real, smaller than the thing she thought was her body. 

***

Burrowing through the liquid ice proved untenable. 

***

The heat was aching away at her. 

Bad enough to be kidnapped by liquid ice, bad enough to have nothing to dig through but this tiny little scrap, bad enough to discover boredom (the novelty had worn off fast), but now there was heat that wasn’t being produced by her own self and it was the worst thing she’d ever experienced.  If she sat on top of the ice she almost warmed faster than if she hid below in her own waste heat.  The world was different than she’d ever dreamed, and she hated it a lot. 

Wretched thing.  Next time she’d spiral inwards.  That would be safer.  In fact, she could practice that now. 

So she did.  She spiralled herself up very, very tightly, tucked her head inwards and shut her treacherous eyes, and fell asleep from full wakefulness for the first time she could remember.  It was like riding a bike. 

She woke up when something metal poked her. 

***

It was a little bit like her body.  But incredibly small, and very fragile, and it melted when she turned to look at it. 

But there was more, so she followed it, curious, until her head burst up into the awful empty iceless world – warmer still, dreadful place – and came face to face with a tiny, tiny thing floating upon the liquid ice, wavering precariously in the ripples of her movement. 

You could DO that?  Wow.  That surprised her.  She nudged it carefully and it flipped over and sank.

Well, it clearly wasn’t very coordinated.  She followed it into the liquid ice, curious, and watched it split apart into bow stem and stern and settle on the sea floor and begin to rust, and that was when she felt more metal poke at her rear and came back up. 

She was surrounded by the little metal things.  Some of them were bigger, some of them were smaller, some of them were floating in the nothing.  All of them were very fast.  All of them were warm. 

An instinct she’d never known existed told her to greet these malformed children, and so she gently vented waste heat at them and watched in surprise as they all melted away like so much ice. 

Clearly these were very frail infants.  Or maybe they weren’t metal at all? 

No, she tasted the remains.  Metal. 

Something bright flashed on top of her head and she flinched.  For a minute it had felt like she was under the ice again, pressing down on her. 

And again.  And again.  And again.  Twelve flashes, twelve punches to her head.  It was very hot and all her ice was gone, leaving her aimlessly coiling in liquid ice and vaporized ice, and she couldn’t remember ever being more dissatisfied. 

So she left her spirals behind, and she did what she’d done so long ago: she went in a straight line, and she found something solid – the same not-ice that had lain deep under her tunnels, so long ago – and in a fit of irritated madness she burrowed into that too, digging deep.

WARM!

TOO

WARM!

OUT!

***

She popped up out of the hateful heat all at once faster than she’d ever moved and bellyflopped atop a mass of mixed metal and…garbage?… that was nearly as big as she was.  Four or five more flashes punched into her head, making her warmer still and vaporizing a lot of the garbage. 

So, this was the world outside the ice, was it?

Well. 

She’d do something about that. 

***

NEW YORK LOST

CREATURE ON THE MOVE INLAND

MILLIONS DEAD

NUCLEAR STRIKES CEASED

NORTH AMERICAN REFUGEES OVERWHELMING

ABANDONMENT OF THE CONTINENT COUNSELED

and so on.

It takes a certain kind of madness to live as far up south as Glint Strait.  And nobody can live through the winter.

Look at the water.  Look how it sits; too choppy to freeze but too cold to move.  Like mown grass made waves. 

Look at the cliffs.  They glitter in the summer; in the winter they sparkle.  Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful lethal faces, soaring up high. 

Look at Stonehead Glacier.  Hanging off its mountain, looming over the water, crawling its way along to its dissolution at its old-man pace just a hair slower than it’s being born. 

But the ship that had ventured this far so many summers ago didn’t look at those.  They were too busy looking at the little fjord underneath the glacier, and at the exposed rock there. 

It shone fit to make the cliffs look dim as a dead eye. 

***

Here is the Glint Strait harbour.  Tight and cramped; that sort of place that’s made to soak in the weight of the cold and snug beneath it rather than crack. 

There are no boats in it.  There is no air in it.

Here is the Glint Strait street, the only one for a thousand miles.  Company sheds, company walls, company halls.  Hammered in company steel-mills by company drill-presses and shipped on company rail to company vessels.

Here are the Glint Strait mines, crawling up underneath old Stonehead like ants under a house.  Chewing out the worthless stone and clawing frantically, nails bloodying and backs breaking for that one more fistful of precious soft metal. 

Here are the company bodies.  They’re standing still.  They’re talking.  They’re eating.  They’re laughing.  They’re swearing.  They’re sweating.  They’re not moving.

They’ve been doing all that for two months.

There’s no silence.  That needs sound to break.  This is just cold.  Words are hanging in midair.  Thoughts are stalled in cold heads.  Eyes are on pause.  The air is too thin to hold a sunbeam up; it creaks under the hazy weight of the southern twilight. 

***

The icebreaker is five thousand tons and it is filled with heat and light and coal and it shakes from bow to stern, sawing as much as sailing.  It chews the water up and spits it out again, moving like a hungry shark.

Its crew are moving and laughing and shouting.  They’ve never been this far south before.  They’re excited to see the mines at the end of the world, to judge if they’re really worth all this trouble and nonsense. 

They’re excited to put foot on shore for the first time in weeks, even if it’s in the ass-end of god-lost who-knows-where.

And a few – just a few, the young ones – are excited to watch their ship shred apart a frozen day that’s stretched on all winter, tearing a season in half with nothing but noise and heat. 

So it does.  It roars through the fjord and tears apart the ice and the air and the cold and the quiet and fills it all with a great billowing GOUT of warm life, blistering through Glint Strait’s single street and leaving it iceless.  Eyes blink.  Mouths talk.  Lungs breathe and hearts beat. 

And Glint Strait is alive again, in the heart of a bottomless winter that nobody could live through.

That is how things are.  Let’s see how they were in the end. 

***

The end started about three days later, when the good new booze had run out and everyone had gotten enough of the bad old rotgut in them to have bad ideas but not enough to be unable to act on them. 

More importantly, it was payday.  The company store took company pay, and if a company worker didn’t have any they could curl up and starve to death outside their company shackhouse with a belly empty of company food.  Glint Strait was the end of the world, the farthest south anyone had ever lived.  It meant a lot to keep things right and proper and natural there, and so effort was put into it. 

Now, things would’ve been alright if a few things hadn’t stacked up just the wrong way, just so.

First, Dinnel Haks, miner of the fourth shaft, was shorted by twelve cents on her pay.  This wouldn’t have put her back up particularly hard most days, but…

…Second, Matron Haks was ill at home, two thousand miles and more away with half her leg trying to get up and walk away without the rest of her.  And the medical fee to stop that sort of thing was expensive. 

And THAT wouldn’t normally have made much of a dent anywhere, but for third, which was that the paymaster was sick after overdrinking for the first six hours and the four after that.  So it was being handled by his aide, Kebbl.  And Kebbl, well, she was a good girl, but she had a bit of a temper.

Even so, things might’ve ended there, even if Dinnel was a popular lady around the pubs for her quick hand on her horn.  But she landed awful heavy on her playing hand, and there were a few of her friends waiting outside the paymaster’s shack, and well.

***

Words were exchanged.  Heated words, with some fiery euphemisms. 

Blood grew hot, pumped hotter-yet muscles and harder fists. 

Dinnel went down again, landed on her horn-playing hand again, and someone in the crowd decided enough was enough and fired a pistol for order and someone ELSE saw them draw it and drew theirs first and ANOTHER someone else saw that.

And after all that long cold winter, things got a little TOO heated. 

The crew ended up on the boat.  They were young and arrogant and tough and they’d been eating better than the miners, but there were fewer of them and they weren’t as angry by half, which was saying a lot because damnation on a caw-gull they were furious enough to melt lead. 

They’d come all this way to save those ungrateful slugs.  Those burrowing moles.  Those slow-witted sluggards, hauled up here like a boxful of coal and dumped in the snow, left to freeze themselves without their (gracious, gifted) aid. 

They told them so.

The miners had stayed here still and stocked through the worst in the world.  Frozen to the word, to the eye, to the mind.  They’d put up with that, and they were at work again.  And they weren’t getting their due, and that wasn’t half the due they were warranted.

The miners didn’t tell the crew so, though.  They were practical people.  Instead, they climbed the icebreaker’s hull to show them so firsthand. 

Funny thing about blood, it gets hotter even as more of it leaves the bodies.  The air was sizzling with terror and fury and it boiled over.  The icebreaker was screaming again, the captain barricaded in his cabin, the boilers overclocking.  Time to run, time to go.  But the ship was tethered fast to the docks and all it could do was roar and heave and fry until at last there was one noise that made everyone stop again.

It wasn’t a big noise, just a little hum.  But it came from old Stonehead Glacier, and it was getting louder.  And louder, and closer.  And louder, and closer, and faster.

The hull hissed, the metal screamed, the people roared, and out went the light, the heat, the sound, and all of Glint Strait

***

The next icebreaker was a long time coming, and when it did, it couldn’t find a thing, and that thing was Glint Strait. 

The water was a solid mass of ice. 

There were no cliffs, just endless tides of snow.

No mountain, no glacier.

And no fjord, no coast at all left to see. 

So it went home, and its crew were a little more sober and quiet than they’d been when they left. 

It takes a certain kind of madness to live as far up south as Glint Strait.  And nobody can live through the winter.

They’re waiting until it’s over. 

The following will be on the exam. I’m practically giving you the answers here, but don’t let that stop you from ignoring this.

-10: Bears
Any kind, really. Don’t touch them. Don’t approach them. Don’t look at them. Leave very politely and very immediately. You’d think by now they wouldn’t be on this list anymore, but some people just don’t learn.

-9: Snarks
Less-studied than sharks, and less common. Strong mothering instinct. Very, very, very strong. Historically this was neither known nor problematic until the 20th century saw an explosion of innovation in pool toys and it became clear that snark pups closely resemble water noodles. They don’t smell anything alike, but even the briefest of visual contact is more than enough for a thirty-foot snark matron to decide something needs her help, particularly if it’s pinned underneath some sort of splashing beach biped.
Snark attack victims can be differentiated from shark attack victims by the presence or absence of the victim’s torso, which an angry snark will generally swallow immediately.

-8: Lesser Warbled Puddleducks
Both lesser and greater warbled puddleducks are among the world’s most spectacular migrators; engaging in circuitous ‘round-the-world’ patterns that take them along the most inefficient and spiralling road possible from the north to south poles. Puddleducklings have a profoundly prolonged infancy, during which their fuzzy little bodies are practically begging to be picked up and cuddled. Unfortunately lesser warbled puddleducklings in particular have extremely delayed bone sutures and picking them up before six months after hatching will cause them to violently explode in bone splinters like a very damp and squeaky hand grenade, impaling the would-be-predator with puddleduckling shrapnel. Furthermore, due to their diet of rotten, regurgitated jellyfish, the puddleduckling’s violent expiration tends to drive putrescent venom directly into unfortunate bystanders.

-7: Jeelson’s Tendercattle
Possibly one of the greatest missteps of domestication ever committed, Jeelson’s Tendercattle are virtually identical to modern American beef cattle, a ruse that enables the cartilaginously lithe adult tendercattle to stealthily sneak into ranches and leave their calves to be cared for by unwitting surrogate mothers. Generally a frustration and a money loss for the ranchers, Jeelsons turn deadly when they fail to escape the slaughterhouse in time due to inattentiveness or use as veal, as – unlike other cattle – their flesh is riddled with tiny but incredibly vigorous tendons that will stick in a human throat like a wad of duct tape. Quarantine measures enacted over the first half of the 20th century all failed, and nowadays anyone consuming a steak or hamburger is encouraged to chew very, very, very carefully – and if possible, to let the dog have the first bite.

-6: Highlandbound Blowhardfish
Mature adults are innocuous and wheezy creatures that spend their lives trekking through glens from lochs to crags, where they lay their eggs. Hatchling blowhardfish are small and elverlike creatures that rely on rainfall to transport them downslope to their new homes, but the eggs themselves are so perfectly camouflaged that they are undetectable without highly specialized and unusual sticks. Annual casualties from tripping over blowhardfish eggs are tricky to document, but are estimated at over five hundred a year.

-5: Tennessee Water Beetle
The larvae are voracious cannibals that will consume an entire pond of life from the scum to the fish before turning on each other and leaving the sole survivor to clear out any remaining megafauna. This can include humans, and although the water beetles aren’t particularly bright they’re capable of surviving over an hour out of water and will do so eagerly once they realize there’s more food out there. Overconsumption can prolong this infant state of rapacity for years, and there is no upper limit on size. Once they get into the ocean either the killer whales get them or the salinity eventually does. Mature adults post-pupation are the size of a dime and docile, living only on dew and flower buds.
See also: ‘sea serpent.’

-4: Fuzzer-Wuzzer-Wumpkins
Adults are gigantic slabs of woolly muscle; cubs are adorable, fuzzy, sturdy. Parents are benign and encourage the naturally curious cubs to play with strange animals to broaden their life experience. Makes little squeals when tickled. Hypoallergenic. Causes cardiac arrest from sheer force of happiness nine times out of ten when handled resulting in fatality six times out of ten with immediate medical attention. Current hypothesis is that this functions to eliminate competition for food sources, as the cubs have been spotted adorably snuggly-wugglying up in beds made of the rotting corpse-worpsies thus created, but never nomming on them.

-3: Crotzwieler’s Great Gold-Plated Ruffous-Necked Belgian ‘Doomsday’ Juggernaut
The instars will step on you and possibly eat you.

-2: Whimpering Greebok
Adults and kits alike are completely deaf and easily startled. Lack claws, teeth, or even particularly robust jaw muscles. The adults run when alarmed but the altricial young will remain in place and emit ear-piercing shrieks that will pop the eardrums of anything within forty feet into absolute FOUNTAINS of blood. Requires immediate medical attention to prevent exsanguination, either from the ruptured ears or the packs of lions that whimpering greeboks tend to follow around.

-1: Humans
Yes, they start out cute, but let’s face it: we all know why.

I still remember the day we found him.

It was six months into the voyage and a month since our supplies ran out.  We were down to rainwater and rats from the bilge, and the only rats left were the swift canny little bastards that were all gristle and ribs.  If our boat hadn’t run into that mysterious mist-wreathed island covered in jagged rocks and overflowing with dark primeval jungle the likes of which no human had ever witnessed in memory living or dead I don’t know WHAT we’d have done. 

Anyways after our boat ran into it we all went ashore to find food and also something to patch the hole in it.  Ted found some crabs; Lenny found some coconuts; Jess found some kind of enormous crocodile; Joe found a rock to hit the enormous crocodile with; and then as we were all limping inland I swept away a patch of giant ferns with my left arm and saw the clearing and saw him.

He was resplendent in the light of the fading sun, eyes aflame with bestial wrath and a glimmer of almost-human intellect.  I stared in awe and gasped as he raised one mighty limb and, with casual ease, bit off a mouthful of leaves and chewed them. 

“My god….” I said, taking the name of the creator in vain for surely his attention was needed here.

“Whazzat?” asked Ted.  Then he saw and he too was stricken into silence. 

“Huh?” inquired Joe.  And he gawped too.  And so on and so on until every single one of was slack-jawed and paralyzed at the sight and not one of us had dared open our mouths to describe it.

Until Jess (slowed by his masticated state) stumbled up and saw the sight and dropped his jaw and said.  “Wow.  That’s a very large gorilla!”

And so he was. 

***

I won’t lie to you.  That very large gorilla caused us all to question the nature of the universe, god, and ourselves, in that order.  What truth did the scientists have to show us that would explain this very large gorilla?  What verse in the bible expounded upon god’s desire to create a very large gorilla?  And how could we sit here as pretty as you pleased and declare ourselves the pinnacle of the world’s animals when here, hidden on this island, was a very large gorilla? 

It was enough to drive one mad.  I know it drove Lenny mad.  It took him about an hour to get over it, and before he did he’d picked up all our coconuts and hurled them into the ocean.  Real inconvenient that was.  Ted was the only one that could swim good enough to fetch all the coconuts back and on the way he got bit by a shark.  Just a small shark, but he was really upset by that and we had to tear off Lenny’s pants to make a bandage and HE was really upset by that but hey fair’s fair. 

In the meantime, the very large gorilla had gotten curious and had wandered over to watch us as we swam for coconuts, screamed about sharks, tore each other’s pants off, and ran in circles on the beach waving our arms.  He picked up some fresh leaves and ate them, and the grinding of his mighty jaws was enough to freeze our blood in our veins. 

Not literally, of course.  It was a nice day out.  Practically a tropical paradise, aside from the slightly chilly mist.  And the enormous crocodile.  And the small shark. 

We wandered around the place and discovered all its secrets: the rotting log with spiders under it; the lizard family sunning themselves on a big rock; a snake hanging over a tree branch; a big dead tree with a bird sitting on it. 

Then we dismantled a sturdy-looking tree, patched the hull, and at the last minute – it was Joe’s idea, I think, but we all were on board right away – took all the chloroform from the medical cabinet, snuck up on the very large gorilla as he slept, dumped it on his face, and ran for it. 

Then we ran back for him, picked him up, put him on the boat, and locked him in the lavatory. 

It was many days of going over the side for us, but the rewards would be worth it. 

***

The city welcomed us home as heroes: it failed to notice any of us and tried to pretend we weren’t there.

So we did as heroes always do and made a big show of it.  Hired a theater, hired an agent, hired strings of lights and billboards and barkers ticket-takers and agents and even a small audience before people caught on and turned it into a BIG audience.  All on credit, of course, but once you’ve acquired enough credit people are eager to add to it because hey, everyone else CAN’T have made a mistake. 

The banner was a small problem.  Nobody could remember how many wonders the world was meant to have.  Was he going to be the eighth?  The ninth?  The twelfth? 

I credit myself this much: I was the one who suggested just calling him “a wonder of the world.”  Mind you, Ted was the one who said we should puff it up to “THE wonder of the world.”  Confidence.  Always about confidence.  And we were confident men, or confidence men, or well what’s REALLY the difference anyways?

So we put on our rented tuxedoes and we put on our borrowed manners and we fingered our best scars and we stepped out on stage and introduced THE wonder of the world, a beast that walks like a man, a creature that was once king of his world and is now a shackled piece of dime-store entertainment: a very large gorilla.

Maybe we should have bought newer chains on credit too. 

Whoops. 

***

So our very large gorilla was gone.  The good news was that while he ran for it he also spooked off all our creditors.  The bad news was that probably wasn’t permanent.  And the immediate news was the army showed up.  They were very upset about our very large gorilla, who was running through the city and disturbing traffic. 

“Just what kind of force are we going to need to destroy this very large gorilla?” inquired the general or maybe colonel or major or someone who was in charge.  He was tired and crabby and had somehow put two cigars in his mouth. 

“Loads,” said Ted.

“Tons,” said Joe. 

“Bring howitzers,” said Jess.  “Bring mortars.”
“Use planes,” I chimed in.  That was me.  I said that.  I’m pretty sure.  “This very large gorilla’s existence defies all humanity’s assumed knowledge of the universe, god, and ourselves.  You’re going to need at LEAST five planes.”
“Sure,” said the man with two cigars in his mouth.  “Whatever.  Fine.”  He doodled on his paperwork, then read it.  “Says here he’s gone to ground.  Let’s go get the big bastard.”

He’d climbed on top of some sort of factory – I think they made condoms? – and was refusing to come down.  He huffed and smacked his chest and punched the roof when people yelled at him, and we recoiled in awe at how very large he was.  He picked up a loose shingle and threw it down, where it hit Lenny on the head (Lenny didn’t come off very well in this whole affair) and roared at us with his very large gorilla mouth. 

Then the planes swooped by and riddled him with bullets and he tipped over and fell over and over and over and over and over and landed on the pavement right in front of us. 

“Looks like bullets killed the beast,” one of the swarming reporters commented.
“No,” I said.  “It was more metaphorical than that.  Say beauty killed him.”
“What beauty?  Didn’t see none of that he did, but lord that was a lot of bullets.”
“Don’t you dare trivialize this very large gorilla,” I demanded.  “He deserved better than that.  We’ll tell his story and tell it properly.  We’ll tell it on every stage from here to San Francisco and beyond.  This is THE wonder of the world here, and he will live on in the imagination of every man, woman, and child from now ‘till the end of time.”
“What do we do with the body?” asked another reporter. 

“Can’t just leave it here,” said the man with two cigars in his mouth.  “That’s littering.  You boys’ll get fined for that.”

“Dog food,” replied Jess quickly.  “My uncle owns a factory.”

“Good thinking.”

***

I still have one of the cans from that run.  Mind you, I think he was something like five percent of it by weight; even a very large gorilla can only provide so much dog food.

But in your imagination, he can give so much more than that. 

They come when I sit out for a smoke.  Always do. 

The sight of me sitting on the steps doesn’t do it.  The flicker of the lighter doesn’t do it.  The swearing when it won’t work doesn’t do it.

But that first long slow breath of smoke brings them scooting in low, rippling up the ground like giant fog banks, from cumulus to cirronimbus and beyond. 

I’ve told them a thousand times a thousand and more: I’m too old now.  Go play with the new girl.  But they don’t seem to understand that meteorologists can retire. 

***

It’s a lonely job, in its way.  You don’t see a human being for months, on the maintenance checks, and of course you’re both covered in environment suits so it’s more a human-being-shaped object. 

But you see people every day.  They’re just vaster and fluffier.  All my friends – my real friends, the ones you have long talks with and walks with and don’t even bother to say hello to because theyr’e always there with you even when you’re far apart – were clouds. 

Fat and grey and soft and thin and wide and faint and great big angry anvils all passed me by up in the meteorologist’s hut, perched on the top of the tower heaved up over the city, held against the sky by guywires and cables and thousands of feet of rickety metal poles. 

I spoke to a human once a week to request groceries.  I spoke to the clouds every day for forty years.

Not like it was a sentence or anything, mind you – I had holidays.  I just didn’t use them.

I had my work, broadcasted down a metal line to the people down below, who strained for every word.  I had my food, in little metal tins.  I had my friends, forever passing by and murmuring to me in my little box. 

What else was there?

***

My house is on a cliffside, on a hill.  I’m still way too close to the ground for my comfort, but it puts me at ease a little, even if six months isn’t quite enough time for me to have gotten my land legs back yet.  My feet still feel unsure with having all that dirt and stone under them instead of miles of air.

I wonder if that’s why the clouds come.  To make me feel at home, at peace.  It’s ot a paranoia of mine, not really – if they’re doing that, it just proves they care all the harder.  Not an easy or simple thing to do, to descend all that way from the sky to drift down here in the thick air just to see an old woman and her cigarette smoke. 

I only started when I came down.  It was too easy to breathe here.  Six months in and I’m almost feeling at home now, which makes up for the foul taste in the back of my throat. 

Today my visitor is a little wisp of cirrus, hurrying down from its perch to see me so quickly that it’s a good thing it doesn’t have legs or it’d be ass over teakettle.  It’s shedding mass in the breeze without a care.  Come on now; I can’t be THAT important.  How will you get home like that, all frittered away?  It can’t stay still even in front of me, bobbing this way and that like a schoolkid trying to think their way out of answering the teacher. 

“How now, tiny?” I ask it.

It shivers, trembles, and snatches the cigarette right out of my mouth.  Then it makes a break for it.

“Hey!”

I chase it, half-serious.  Maybe it’s a dare.  God only knows clouds do stupid things enough with each other’s encouragement; it’s a big sky and everyone gets bored, even the water vapour. 

But it isn’t running half-serious.  Cloud moves and moves and moves; doesn’t even stop to tease.  It slows down when I do to keep me in sight as my freshly tarnished lungs wheeze and gasp, staying a good dash away from me at all times. 

“What’s gotten into you?  C’mon.  I’m too retired for this.”
It shivers at me, and keeps moving.  It keeps moving until it doesn’t and then I almost walk right into it, and by extension, the ladder. 

Oh. 

I look up, and up, and up, and up. 

Yes, there’s no place like my old home. 

“No, I’m not going back up there.  There’s a new friend for you now.”
The cloud offers no comment.  That’s normal.  It wraps around me and seeps into my clothing and won’t stop shaking, and that’s not normal. 

“Come on.”
Nope. 

It already knows it’s won.  If I’m complaining to the world at large, I’m already moving. 

One hand at a time.  One hand at a time. 

So, for the third time in my life, I used the sky ladder.  And boy did I regret those cigarettes. 

***

The first mile is the hardest.  By its end I’m sweating and freezing and wheezing and barely holding myself together as I sit on one of the maintenance platforms, legs dangling.

Halfway through the second I’m so exhausted I can’t even think, which means I’m starting to pay attention and I notice all the things that are wrong. 

The clouds are moving against the wind.  And none of them are close. 

Well, except for the one in my coat.  It’s a bit reluctant to go away, which is nice because I need the insulation.  I hadn’t dressed myself for this today. 

The last hundred feet are the real warning signs. 

The air up here should be dry and thin.  But the rungs of the ladder are thick with dew.  Dripping, fresh dew.  A cloud was here.  A cloud that was falling to pieces, shedding itself as hard and fast as a summer rainstorm. 

But it hasn’t rained in days and we aren’t due for at least another week. 

I shiver again and I press on as the condensation grows heavier and heavier until I heave the trapdoor open and roll inside and I’m up to my ankles in cloudblood and I say “what’s going on oh” because that’s already a stupid question.

I’m eye to eye with my replacement for the second time.  I didn’t know her well because I don’t know any humans well anymore, but she seemed nice at the time.  Earnest.  Forthright.  A bit reluctant to meet my eyes, but that was something I’d noticed in a lot of people so not much to think of.

She has no trouble meeting my eyes now, even as her hands are busy tearing off strips of cloud.  There’s a knife in one, a snapped-off looking thing that seems to have been made of a piece of the ceiling.  A railing has been turned into a fishing rod.  All fabric has been unravelled and fashioned into line. 

And the walls and gaps and holes in the place have been filled with icy cloudbone, and the floor is awash in clear pure blood. 

She chews.  Swallows.  Stares at me. 

“I was hungry,” she says into the silence.  It’s a very normal quiet voice and it doesn’t sound like a monster at all. 

I’m not sure what I’m going to do when I take a step forwards but she decides for me knife-first. 

***

The knife is easy enough to fix.  Just don’t be where it is and then keep it far away from both of you until it’s less useful than a free hand. 

But hands are hands and hers are attached to arms with a lot more muscle than mine.  Time and tide haven’t helped me, and I don’t know how long she’s been at this madness but it’s clearly helped her grip strength.  She’s got a hold on my wrist that’s putting an ache there that isn’t from the climb alone, and it’s a lot of work keeping that other hand from my neck. 

My neck is tickling.  The cloud is still there, and I feel really bad about that.  It shouldn’t have to see this.  Not after all it did already, poor little bastard.  I wonder how big it was before it made that mad long dash down to see me.  I wonder how many friends it lost, how much pain it saw before it made its plan.  I wonder so many things I almost don’t see it in motion in time, see it pour out of my shirt, see it pour onto her face, see her moment of indecision as she tries to decide whether staying blind or loosing her grip is a bigger risk. 

But my reflexes aren’t bad, even if my muscles are sore and my lungs are weak, so I stomp on her instep and twist with the wind and maybe that shouldn’t do the trick but well.

Six months is a long time up here, by yourself.  But it isn’t quite enough to get rid of your land legs. 

So she falls, and I make sure she keeps falling, and she falls across the floor and I didn’t think to close the hatch. 

Not a sound.  Not one sound. 

***

I drain the floor.  I close the hatch.  I tear apart the rod and line and I hammer the knife back into something useful again. 

The cloud stays for six days to get its strength back, and by then its friends have come close again, cautiously, carefully, and someone’s sent a polite questionnaire up the metal line and I’ve filled it out and made myself clear. 

I’m still retired, obviously.  But for the time being I can be retired up here.

And I needed to quit smoking anyways.