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“I don’t want to.”
Trevor’s father looked at him with his eyebrows in that particular way and he knew it was already over. “Trevor, whose fault is it the book is overdue?”
Trevor looked at his shoes. They were normal – dirty, badly-tied, slightly blue underneath thick grime – and he felt somewhat foolish for checking on them. “Mine,” he admitted.”
“And whose responsibility is it to fix that mistake?”
“…mine.”
“Attaboy. Go on.”
So sighing, slouching, and shameful, Trevor left his home with bag in hand and heart of lead, slinking southwards towards destiny.
The sun seemed a bit dim today, he thought. The seagulls delighted in his misfortune, and aimed their calls at him and him alone. Loser, they called loudly. Sap. Chump. Dope. Simp.
He ignored them. What the hell did birds know anyways? Eggs. Well, eggs to them.
Alas, his mind had wandered and now his destination was in sight. Small, round, and shingled, the county library stood before him. Brightly-coloured letters filled one of its windows – the children’s area – and for a second Trevor’s feet halted, tempted by memories of younger days.
But that wasn’t where the book in his bag belonged, and so he walked across the street to the titanic, brutalist, and incredibly concrete edifice of the libary.

***

He was challenged immediately, of course. As per libary protocol.
The first warning sign was the drops hitting Trevor’s shoulder. Rain, he thought. And then maybe hail. But it was fragments of stone, and with a loud and angry grunt the manticore tore itself free from the decorative fresco above the libary door and landed in front of him with a weight that eclipsed a ton of bricks.
“Answer ye these riddles three,” it croaked in a voice like a frog that had eaten a lion.
“’kay,” muttered Trevor. He felt the urge to look at his shoes again rising, and fought powerfully against it.
“Name?”
“Trevor.”
“FULL name.”
“Trevor Bartholomew Hendricks.”
“Card?”
Trevor held up his hand and the manticore licked it. The acrid saliva stung his skin and the rough tongue made his palm tingle, even as the blood rushed to the surface and formed an intricate pattern. The sound of dying doves filled his ears and he could smell burning hair.
“Purpose?”
“Late return,” he mumbled. Oh shoot he’d looked at his shoes again without meaning to.
“HAH! Fourth door.”
And with that the manticore hurled itself into the air and lodged itself in the fresco again, next to the screaming frozen faces of all those who’d entered the libary and asked if they had video games or films or cassettes.

***

It was dark inside. Cold. Dry. Trevor had seen a documentary once on Antarctica, and when the camera rolled over the endless ice plains and the dead mountains he’d thought he’d never seen a place more like the libary in all his life.
Except for the penguins. The libary was mournfully bereft of penguins.
Disappointing lack of flightless fowl aside, the greatest feature of the cavernous, lightless hall of the libary’s entryway was the obelisk of pure granite cut from a mountain’s colon. On it were engraved the three rules of the libary.
1: RETURN ON TIME OR PAY THE PRICE
2: QUIET
3: OBEY
Trevor did as he was told, cringing at every shuffled step his feet took through the draft-ridden air.
The halls were endless. Each shelf stretched on long enough for a human lifetime to end a trillion times over before its end was reached. Dewey would’ve disemdecimaled himself rather than set eyes upon it.
Trevor shut his eyes and felt his way along until he felt something hard and metallic and handle-like under his hands.
“One,” he muttered, and let it go. Behind it, something hissed in disappointment.
A rough-hewn slab rocked at his touch, balance on a pivot so finely-tuned that a passing breeze could’ve made it swing wide.
“Two.” He thought he heard a rustle as he moved on, but that could’ve been anything or nothing.
About an hour after ‘two’ Trevor stopped for lunch in a half-empty bookcase, tucked out of sight behind a discarded pile of expired magazines. He stared at the underside of the shelf above him as he swallowed his baloney and mustard, and traced with his fingers an etching made by a long-lust fellow traveller.
‘andi sux diks’ it read. What did it mean? He might never know.
By what his watch said MIGHT be nightfall he found three, and three was this.
This, specifically, was a huge iron knob, so massive a normal human would need a monkey wrench to stand a prayer of moving it.
“Three,” he said, and hurried away while it was still silent.
The fourth handle moved easily under his hand, and as it did so Trevor chanted to himself.
“Pleasenochasm, pleasenochasm, pleasenochasm – shit.”
It was the chasm.
The aisle he found himself looking down was six feet wide and the ceiling was twenty feet high and the floor was infinitely far beneath his feet, lost in damp grey mists that groaned and screamed with the cries of the elder beasts of the libary as they fought and fucked and complained with each other.
Trevor wished it had been the arena of blood. He didn’t like heights.
His bag’s strap went between his teeth, his shoes went around his neck, and his toes clung to shelves with the careful dexterity and lack of grace of a very slow and stupid monkey, or maybe just a sloth. Halfway down the aisle he had to stop as a questing tendril from below drifted by, hunting for prey, but it contented itself with a shelf of poetry and left him be after a half hour of cramping, aching waiting.
At last he reached the far end of the unending row, leaned far over, slipped, caught himself on the door’s handle, and fell face first into an airless inky void that sucked him in like plankton in front of a whale’s snout.

***

Alone, he floated. Or rather, floating was occurring. This was a place too vast for individual beings to matter.
The Libarians surrounded, waiting. Not for anyone or anything. They just waited. Space expanded, time continued, the Libarians waited. Anything else was impossible, contrary to the very nature of reality’s keystones. You might as well ask gravity to turn itself off, or electromagnetism to consider trying harder.
DUE, they chanted. DUE, DUE, DUE. OVER. OVER DUE OVER DUE OVER.
The offering came to them in a bag woven from primitive matter that had once imagined itself to be animate.
A vial of mercury and tears.
A cannister of frankincense.
The memory of a childhood day, frozen in ice so pure it contained no hydrogen nor oxygen.
And the last known copy of that inscrutable and incomprehensible tome, Madame Malarkin’s Magnificent Murders: Vol IV, The Big Jabloni.
ACCEPTED, they chanted. ACCEPTED ACCEPTED ACCEPTED. FINE PAID PAID PAID PAID FINE PAID.
And Trevor was eating his breakfast cereal with an ache in his brain and a searing pain in his liver.
“Woah!” said a voice, a normal voice, transmitted through vibrations in the air. Father. “Y’okay?”
“Ow,” agreed Trevor, clutching his skull and his side and his soul in one complicated crouch.
“Ah. Sent you back early again, did they?”
“Mng-hngh.”
“Well, chin up. You didn’t leave for another six minutes, so you can skip breakfast this go-around and throw up if you need to. Here’s the book. It’ll be fine, eh? Three thousandth time is the charm.”

It came to pass that the peoples of Slebb were known for their overwhelming, incomprehensible, staggering, unbelievable, absolutely bonkers levels of wealth. Money flowed in and out of their hands as freely as if they were reverse-alcoholics, and millionaires became known as their pauper class, with their humanity, ability, and right to life regularly questioned in all the opinion pieces of the great Slebbese newspapers.
The state of Slebb was indeed perfect. There was just one little problem: they were absolutely bored shitless. Grinding the poor underfoot had become little more than work, and once given to someone else as the unpleasant duty it had become, there was nothing left to do.
Then Lord Beaucoup Blitherish Von Parakeet VII Esq. Etc. looked out his window one day while ceremonially spitting into the street and saw a young orphan watching a scrap of wood floating in a puddle of urine.
“Ugh, how vulgar,” he said, and made sure to spit into the orphan’s eye. Then he had a very good dinner of the last known Slebbese warble-fowl and had very lurid dreams and woke up early before the sunrise with a fascinating idea boiling in his brains.
“A SHIP,” he shouted, and expired from fatal indigestion.
Luckily the full record of his activities the prior day was extracted from his household servants as they were ritualistically tortured to death before burial alongside him, and so the idea was preserved and handed to his next of kin, Joe Parakeet, who immediately commissioned the construction of what was to be the first of the greatest and most obscene fad ever indulged in by the wealthy of Slebb: the pleasure-liner SMH Indulgence.
It was a beautiful boat, about a mile long and half a mile wide and every inch of it blessed by the blood and sweat and tears of the unprosperous. Its decks glimmered, its hull shone, and a ticket cost half of your entire savings, rounded up. The only way it could’ve been more attractive would be if it fucked you, and since most Slebbese aristocracy were incapable of attaining orgasm without witnessing fiduciary crimes in a way it sort of did.
Every ticket for its maiden voyage triggered a bidding war, in the course of which some ten thousand sons and daughters of the great and powerful were killed in the line of battle. It was a huge success and so of course the only thing to be done was to absolutely try to get one over on it, starting with the launch of the Incomprehensible next summer (which was a mile and a half long and half-a-mile-and-six-inches wide) and going from there.

Ah, the competitive spirit those ships created! Oh, the awe and the power and the grace that were on display! Every steel plant in Slebb was forcibly bought out; every foundry annexed; every single mite capable of pouring molten metal enserfed and shackled, and across all the country you couldn’t sleep for the din of hammers without special earmuffs made from sumptuous furs, which all the most fashionable of the wealthy immediately purchased. Every year, a new height, a new glory!
The Incomprehensible, with its seventeen triple-layer decks!
The Incredulity, whose fountains spewed molten platinum!
The Invigorating, which boasted that not one second of its passage would be spent sober by anyone on board!
The Inviting, loaded so full of drugs and Slebbese master prostitutes that its waterline was six inches below the rails!
But as with anything else the competition irked someone, and so finally Sir Julian Marzipan Glorium Fistmouth Triumph Berserk, the most peevish of his generation, commissioned the construction of a ship to end them all. This was accomplished by conscripting all the impoverished of the country for a year of toil, during which they entirely severed the county of Blurbinghamlet from the Slebbese mainland and attached great plutonium engines to it before expiring from radiation poisoning and exhaustion.
“It’s called the Indecency,” said Sir Julian. “Top that, you fucking peasants.”
And nobody could.
Oh, those tickets sold fast, let me tell you.

The Indecency, in retrospect, had one fatal flaw: it was so large that literally everyone of even remotely attainable means could fit on it. This reduced the prestige of a ticket markedly, and everyone was very distressed until Sir Julian’s marketing riff-raff, Tremorous Punt, announced that the more money you paid for a ticket the greater square footage you personally commanded around yourself at all times during the voyage, including control of the very lives and souls of those who infringed upon your property. The bidding war that followed was enthusiastic and unrestrained, and claimed two-thirds of the peerage’s heirs, thereby solving all conceivable space issues and problems of exclusivity at once both ways.

That ship. Oh that ship. It’s almost impossible to put into words. New ones were commissioned and fitted into gilded dictionaries, but even then…
When it launched, it did so on great skids constructed from the skeletal remains of the underpoor who had shaped it, greased with their scant bodily fluids. Its horn was a live Plabian megaphant, bound in chains and amputated and tickled with a feather. The lanterns that hung off its many, many bows were gold and diamond and whenever they dimmed from overuse they cut them overboard and hung up new ones so its wake glowed in their passing.
It hadn’t even sailed yet and already it was the best thing since sliced poors.

And even if the voyage itself hadn’t begun, the festivities surely had – as each passenger boarded, they found plenty to do beyond mere mingling with their not-quite-peers.
Oh, the great activities available upon that great ship’s decks! The emerald-gargling competitions, where a lucky fellow capacious in saliva and jowls could win his mouthful! The ruby-snorting parlour, where the greatest men of their age gathered to smoke and discuss serious matters like who could get absolutely blazed off of crushed gems the hardest! The sensorium, where everything from meat cleavers to baseball bats to toothpicks to ruby-encrusted shoe horns were gifted to a passenger and a crewman selected by lot was tied down in front of them and they could do whatever!
Several of the eldest passengers were so overcome with joy that they almost cried themselves to death and had to be placed into the Indecency’s wealth-support wing, where financial experts carefully supervised the transplanting of their funds into their healthier and younger heirs before their cashless husks were thrown into the ship’s furnace. What a way to go that surely was.
But of course the fiercest competition was the placing of the deck chairs. Every passenger boarded with a small battalion of forcibly-drafted millionaires arranged into squads of forward strike teams, special operatives, Stormtroopers, artillery command, and engineers to seize, hold, and fortify their spots in the sun. Many a jovial bet was placed as to whose men would triumph and whose would be swept aside in the great race for space, and such was the good spirit and fellowship present at this time that even the losers laughed as their faces were sprayed with the arterial fluids of their conscripts, which they supped down as if it were honeyed oil!

There was a feast, of course. To save space, the courses will simply be listed in order, without elaboration.
An appetizer of eviscerated infant eels, in marmalade.
Bread-rolls baked and served inside the skulls of executed prisoners.
Salad of plebeian testicles fried in aromatic oils and diced, then tossed with rose petals and peeled grapes in a wine vinegar.
A choice of gutted infant of the Plabian megaphant that served as the ship’s horn (served with mint); or a live and angry shark (served with a chainsaw).
Side of potatoes stuffed with every single spice known to man and then roasted or spices smeared over every vegetable known to man and then roasted.
Dessert of cake baked from the blood and bones of street urchins that had been fed nothing but cream and honey for six months before harvesting.
The wine list was not available, but is believed to have been comprised largely of Sir Julian’s urine.

The morning after the feast was one of furious activity, the last moments before history was made and driven white-hot into Slebbese memory forever and ever. Prayers to Wealth were muttered, errant items were stowed, the last shift of the dockworkers who had prepared the way were formally disemboweled and thrown overboard for a lucky voyage, and so on and on and on, a thousand little chores – all typical, yet rendered extraordinary by the momentousness of the occasion.
The last aboard the ship was the captain, Lord Plord Hob Smear-Bandicoot-upon-the-mighty-river, whose eyes of chipped-and-somehow-blue-granite and incredibly authoritatively trimmed beard had made him the obvious choice. His plain but perfect jacket of midnight silk could blind an errant eye with a casual roll of his shoulders. At his elbow was his indentured billionaire, Blordo, who would be doing the actual busywork of steering and all that bullshit. At his other elbow was his other indentured billionaire, Tweedo, who would be doing the other busywork of thrashing Blordo senseless whenever he screwed up.
The horn brayed out its departure, the loading ramps were stowed away, a motherless, penniless child was smashed against the hull for good luck, and the whole ship sank to the bottom of the sea under the sheer weight of its overindulgence, carrying every single person of means in Slebb screaming to their graves in tremendous agony along with all their wealth. Not one speck of money nor one fragment of their bones was ever found, and it’s believed by many that the ship was so heavy it punctured straight through the planet’s crust past the mantle and into hell itself, where it crushed the devil.

And that is the story of Indecency Day, which will be celebrated forevermore in Slebb until the end of time.

The moment Mult stepped back into the woods, she knew what had happened.
The grass was bent.
The branches had been snapped.
And the ground – so soft and spongy from last night’s rain – had been pulverized, torn, and stomped by feet bigger than she was.
She swore – silently, as per mission protocol – unholstered her longgun, checked her surroundings, waited for five minutes, and began a stealthy approach (for all the good any of it would do her).
Ten minutes of patient scuttling through the undergrowth later her bunker did not come into view because it was squashed underneath ten tons of bleeding flesh and bone, which had until the last hour or so belonged to a very large and healthy specimen of Lee’s Greater Chatterback. Its slackened mouth, removed spine, and dangling limbs gave it a look of surprise even in death, possibly prompted by the way its entire carapace had been scooped out and all of its organs placed in it.
Mult wasn’t surprised herself, but she was annoyed.

***

The bunker door was accessible after only a few minutes of machete-work, mercifully. The second time she’d had to blow some hi-incendiaries on the corpse and let the embers settle until the door was cool enough to touch. Then she’d had to re-camouflage it and ugh ugh ugh. Sleep was an important resource and a vexing limit for her; she’d resented that timewaster for days.
She’d stopped resenting it this morning, actually. It had been a good night. A little light reconnaissance had turned into a little light bushwhacking with the smoothness of an oily breakfast, five separate shots and five bodies bang bang bang bang… bang. And then the last one had made a foolish and brave dive for her squad leader’s communications equipment, and hadn’t lived long enough to be embarrassed at not noticing her first shot had blown through it and into his chest.
A good night. A nice relaxing walk home. And then she got back and for the third time that month her hidey hole had become an open air abattoir.

***

Mult’s grandmother had raised her with a simple set of basic skeptical tools for life, and they had served her well for almost forty years.
If shit happens once, shit happens.
If shit happens twice, sometimes that’s just how it is.
If shit happens three times someone is fucking with you.
And that was all well and good and had allowed her to kill many people that had attempted to kill her very successfully, but it had never before been applied to… a whatsit. A thingy. Damnit, she’d never been very good at macrofauna. A uhh. An uhm.
Mult opened up a half-eaten ration and popped her fieldguide, searching by footprint.
Ah, there it was, page…ninety.
A Bosian Anvil. About sixteen feet tall and sixty feet long (eighty with its forelimbs extended fully) and one of only two animals on the planet listed as ‘dangerous to armoured vehicles.’ You could kill them with long-distance precision strikes from the air or low orbit, slow them down with concentrated artillery fire, and sensible infantry tactics was to scatter and hope it ate the least important person.
There was no advice on what to do if one of them turned your hiding place into a garbage can.
She’d have to get rid of the corpse again. God. It was tempting to try and use it as camouflage, but the scavengers would come and make things difficult, and ugh ugh ugh ugh.
She’d do that.
Tomorrow.
It was too late and it was getting dark; the fire would be noticeable, and her legs were killing her. So this was a tactical decision. Right. Not lazy. Right. Tactical.
Tomorrow.
Then Mult passed out, lulled to sleep by the siren songs of chores postponed and wilfully ignorant bliss.

***

She awoke instantly and knew that it was just after four, it was still dark outside, she had to piss, and someone had just rapped something metal against the bunker’s main exit hatch.
“Fuck,” she said aloud in clear breach of mission protocol and immediately wished she hadn’t because the banging stopped immediately.
Well, she might as well screw up every way possible at once and get it over with. Of course that damned carcass had attracted attention; she just hadn’t thought anyone who noticed it would’ve been crazy enough to approach it.
Of course, she had been killing foraging parties, so maybe they were just that hungry.
“Fuck,” she said aloud, because why not and she felt like it. “Fuck.”
At least while she was busy swearing her body had made itself useful, loading up her field kit and emptying her bladder. She clipped together a few things and slapped together a few more and planted four or five packages around her room and one on the door.
They probably wouldn’t set it off unless they were REALLY stupid, but at least she wouldn’t be leaving any useful evidence, and the shockwaves should crush the escape tunnel’s entrance oh right she should probably use it before that happened. Could be painful otherwise.

***

The bunker’s main exit was a solid metal door, designed to hold the enemy’s attention as much as their progress.
The escape tunnel was a scummy dirt-and-mud tube writhing unknowable yards through the soil, just deep enough that it wouldn’t collapse when stepped on unless the thing stepping on it was a Bosian Anvil, in which case Mult ended up pawing her way into a blockage of sloppy earth.
She poked it with her machete. Nope. Solid. Probably collapsed it all the way upstream.
Well, only one way out. How deep had she dug this again? Best not think about it, it won’t help.
She stabbed up. And up. And clawed, too. Grasp and slash and shove and pack down the earth behind her.
There was a deep THUD and she felt as if someone had squeezed her entire body and then let ho. Oh, there went the mines. And probably her air source.
Slash and grab, slash and grab, slash and grab and dig and delve and someone screamed because she’d just carved into her foot from underneath.
“Shh,” said Mult, grabbing the ankle with one hand and stabbing up farther. “it,” she concluded her thought, as she saw seven people turn to look directly at her.
Blood was on her face, but it wasn’t in her eyes. They’d shipped their longguns (thought she’d blown herself up or run for it? maybe). It was almost light on the horizon, and there was no rain.
Those were all very good things but she was probably going to die. Her body didn’t know that yet though, so it violently yanked her longgun out and started shooting.
One, two, which was very good considering how much mud coated her weapon inside and out. But then the only ones left were smart and lucky and they were in cover and she was half in a mud puddle and half behind a wheezing corpse.
Oh well.

The ground didn’t shake, which was why the Bosian Anvil came as a surprise.
It shouldn’t have been, because Mult knew enough basic biology to be aware that any loud noises from a creature that size just walking around meant it was also probably going to break its feet under its own weight.
But she’d seen a lot of movies, and it was amazing how a bad idea could stick with you.
Those were the thoughts she had as she saw two long, long paws come out of the trees, pick up a woman each, and shake them hard enough to snap something important loose.
“Shit,” she said. And then again “shit” for rhythm.
It was bigger than the statistics had made her think it was.
It was also looking directly at her, which made sense because the three remaining soldiers had enacted sensible infantry tactics when confronted with a Bosian Anvil.
Damnit. She’d just read that chapter, and it seemed unfair. Normally her body would’ve taken care of this sort of thing on its own but it was still stuck in a collapsed hole and didn’t want to leave.
The Anvil stepped forwards, gills fluttering, feathers quivering, and it plucked her out of the ground like a carrot and set her down again with all of her limbs and then it picked up the two people she’d shot and started making snuffly noises like a sleeping dog the size of a freight train as it ate them, one after another.

Then it tore the (gun-bitten, explosive-battered) corpse of the Chatterback in half and offered half to her.

***

Sixteen years later the war was over the forest was back to being a national park and Professor Mult had finally managed to have the army fieldguide updated to include the courtship behaviours of the Bosian Anvil, which included leaving carcasses out in the woods for your beloved.
Because even if shit happens and that’s the way it is, some things are nice to know ahead of time.

It was just a little red-and-brown smear on the white tile of the shower wall, but it wouldn’t come off. Lisa tried with her thumb, then she licked her thumb, then she spritzed it with tile cleaner, then she swore at it, and finally she lost her temper and started chanting, whereupon a tattered, shrieking form clad in its own dissolving flesh lurched through her wall and halted an inch from her face, eyes boiling in its sockets.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” said Lisa.

She tried exorcisms first, of course, starting with gentle rebukes and moving up to firm nudges and stern commands before concluding in fiery demands to Get The Hell Out Of My Shower.
None of them worked, they just made the spectre soggier and more desperate. Its wails intensified and heightened in pitch, reminding Lisa of her childhood music lessons before mom had given up and admitted her daughter couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. With a lid.
So after the sixteenth failed effort (it cost her the last of her mistletoe, too) Lisa swallowed her pride and picked up her phone and dialed a number that was marked very firmly with an EMERGENCIES label.
“Hello?”
“Hi, grandma.”
“Oh, Lisa, darling. How’ve you been?”
“Bad, grandma.”
“Oh no honey, you always seem to have problems when you phone. What’s wrong?”
“Ghost in my bathroom.”
“Well that’s not appropriate.”
“I think it was a lady.”
“Still, she should’ve asked. Manners cost nothing, for fuck’s sake.”
“She’s tied to the tile on the shower wall and I can’t seem to exorcise her.”
“Is it ceramic?”
“I think so?”
“Well, that’s nice nonweathering material, sweetie. Ceramics last for ages, that’s why your brother won’t shut up about them, most of what he digs are the damned things.”
“Grandma, please.”
“Oh come on honey, you’ve got to admit he’s a bit of a bore.”
“He’s got tenure.”
“And a fat lot of good that’ll do him if anyone looks in his basement. Material possessions are a weight and a burden, honey.”
“Speaking of, my shower…”
“Oh, right. Well, the only thing to be done is either renovation or killing the one who wronged her. I’m guessing you’ve got a factory worker, so you’ll need to hex her boss – ooh, or better yet, her boss’s boss. Generally blame for this sort of thing is like a tree: it gets bigger farther up. Aim high and you’ll be sure to kill the whole thing.”
“Trees are cut at ground level.”
“Oh shut up. Do you want a hand? You know I love a good hexing.”
“No entrails.”
“What? Why? I have some on hand, you wouldn’t have to chop them yourself.”
“I’m a vegan.”
“Shit. You’re going to have to get over that someday.”
“Thanks, grandma.”
“Aim for the guts, mind you. Capitalists tend to be susceptible to blows in the digestive tract.”
“Thanks, grandma.”
“Good luck!”
“Thanks grandma.”
“And call more of-“
“Thanksgrandma,” said Lisa, and she hung up.
Guts. Right.
She could work with those. Sort of.

There were no entrails. There were, however, many pulverized cashews. The seed of potential life in them wasn’t very big but if you got a big enough bowl together and boiled it into a thick mush it was both a convincing entrails substitute AND easier to work with.
Lisa had told her grandma this a dozen times. She continued to insist she was being childish.
The tile was tricky; the diagrams kept dripping off. Finally she used a combination of cellophane and duct tape to strap everything in as she drew it, and even if it did end up being the ugliest hex she’d ever scrawled at least it stuck to the damned wall.
The ghost was behind her again; her back hair was standing up.
“Quit fussing,” she said. And she bit her thumb and jammed it just off the center of the diagram, in the stomach.
The ghost shivered, hummed, and stopped existing.
“Great,” said Lisa.
And she washed the wall off and had her first shower in three days. It felt like creaky and faintly tin-scented victory, and she was in there for at least forty minutes before she realized the phone was ringing.

“Hello?”
“Lisa!” The voice was enthusiastic, with pauses in odd places and a hint of sandpaper wrapped around a dried bone.
“Hi grandpa, how’ve you been?”
“Just peachy, but there’s something I need your help with.”
“Me?”
“Yes. You see, I was at a meeting just now-”
“I don’t think I can help with that.”
“-and the dean’s stomach erupted across the table.”
“He had the flu?”
“He had every organ in his abdomen escape at once.”
Lisa winced. “Oh.”
“Now, Lisa, you wouldn’t know anything about this, would you?”
“Uh…was the dean an investor in any tile-making businesses?”
“Just one.”
“Oh.”
“Joint partner.”
“Oh.”
“Lisa, I’m the other partner. And now I’ve got buboes on my groin.”
Lisa winced. “Grandpa!”
“Think carefully: DID you have anything to do with this?”
“Grandpa, it wasn’t personal. My shower was haunted.”
“Well, that’s pretty bad luck. Did you know ninty-nine thousand times out of a hundred thousand times it just makes the tiles more stain-resistant?”
“Grandpa that’s just ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”
“This isn’t about math. This is about practicality and quality and the buboes you’ve cursed onto my groin.”
“It wasn’t intentional!”
“Well, that’s not how the real world works. Consequences don’t care about your intentions, Lisa.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Won’t do the job. I’m greasing up the table.”
“Grandpa that’s dangerous.”
“That’s the POINT.”
“No I mean with your back.”
“My back’s fine!”
“You can’t walk around the block without taking a sit down.”
“So hoisting a small goat onto a table should be easy-peasy.”
“You’re going to throw out your back and the goat is going to stand on your chest and make it worse.”
“Don’t give me your lip, it’ll only make this worse for you.”
Lisa hung up.
Then she drew some circles around her bed – just in case – and passed out.

The phone woke her, vibrating with petulant force against her nightstand.
“H’lo?”
“Hey. Grandpa’s in the hospital.”
“Hi bro how are you.”
“Oh? Fine. I guess. Maybe. Anyways, it’s his back.”
“Yeah, he threw it out trying to curse me.”
“What?”
“I told him not to.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t intend to give him buboes on his groin. He was collateral damage.”
Her brother hung up, and Lisa slept through the morning with the peace of the righteous.

And her shower didn’t even smell that much like tin anymore.

The world ended.
It happened very nearly as they’d been warned. One slip, one faltering instant, one crack in a lance, one death on the skyline, one moment of weakness and the whole thing fell apart.
In came the auroras, the other skies. They seized the breach and the knights and their icy lances and the walls and the towers and all of it and they threw it away, into the sky, so far away that it couldn’t be seen.
And then they came south, and began in earnest.
Up went the keeps.
Up went the ice-farms.
Up went the occasional unlucky bastard who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and didn’t see the sky change.
Up went trees, stones, surprised deer, anything but not everything, just some things, yanked into the air and carried up and away to who knew what for god knows what reason.
The cities fell apart in chaos. The high command was torn apart. The sky ran bright with alien colours.
The world had ended.
So what was everyone supposed to call where they were living?

The sun came up.
The sun went down.
The sun came up.
The sun went down.
The sun came up and went down and the auroras muddied the sky and the world still had ended and it still wasn’t gone.

People began to come back.
They crept back into the cities, slunk out from cellars, emerged from the woods and all of them realized they still weren’t alone. There were other people out there.
Some of them reacted very poorly to this.
Maniacs and madmen aside, there were voids that needed filling. Safe places (what was safe, with the sky now alien?), food, water, and direction to all of those things. Leadership was sought.
Some of them reacted far too eagerly to this.
Little tyrants rose and little tyrants fell. It was very hard to oppress anyone when your iron grasp began and ended at arm’s-length, plus two of your friends. Harder still when there was nothing to tie anyone to anywhere beyond their feet. And hardest of all when even the mightiest would-be-ruler still scurried inside for fear of the night sky… and may just find that someone had removed the roof of their dwelling.
The auroras took fewer these days, but memories were very vivid things.

The sun came up.
The sun went down.
It wasn’t going anywhere. Neither were the auroras.

Some things started growing.
Not the icicles – the auroras might be less fierce in the skies, but they still came down like lightning on any attempts to make new lances.
Not the old crops.
Strange things. Fruits that sprouted from roots; tubers that dangled from the tops of the trees. They smelled red and tasted loud but they nourished and that was more than enough to make them desirable.
Farming was being relearned, slowly but surely. Crops needed water, and sun, and the midnight suns that glowed in the air and dragged them skywards, inch by inch. And they were ripe when they began to sing.
Some of the old guard, the ones that had been powerful once, they said nothing good would come of it. They ate the old crops, the wheat, the barley, the maize.

The sun came up.
The sun went down.

At night, songs came. It was hard to tell if this was new or something that nobody had listened to before.
They used colours instead of melodies, and they spooled themselves away before dawn could spoil them. No harmonies were used.
Covering the ears did nothing; beeswax did nothing; singing loudly to yourself annoyed your friends but otherwise did nothing.
Covering your eyes worked, though only the most stubborn insisted upon it. Former knights, mostly, who insisted that they’d never heard this sort of thing before, back on the skyline. The auroras had been quiet then, desperate and fierce and quiet, even in the deep heart of the long night.
Some of the younger ones said they could still hear them at midday, faintly. Somewhere up above, where the sky was always dark.

The sun came up.
The sun went down.
The world moved on regardless.

Things came from above. Some of them were unrecognizable and some of them were just barely familiar and some of them hadn’t changed at all and it was hard to say which of the three was the most unsettling.
Cats were the same. Except for the floating.
Deer didn’t have legs, or eyes, and they had stone teeth. They fed on pebbles now.
It was entirely possible that the Longarm had been some kind of spruce before, but nobody wanted to get close enough to confirm it. Any distance from a Longarm had a nasty way of becoming close.
It was their arms. They were very long; to say nothing of their needles.

The sun came up.
The sun went down.
That was just the way the world worked.

The world worked.
Oh, sometimes it creaked here and there. Someone was lifted too high and never came back down; a field grew too tall to be harvested; a mad old relic tried to grow icicles in her basement and her whole house vanished overnight.
Sometimes an aurora died and the corpse landed on someone. Those things could happen. Those things did happen.
But that was just the way the world worked. It was normal.

It was normal to listen with your eyes at midday.
It was normal to drift up above the trees as you slept and descend by daybreak.
It was normal to ask permission of the Longarms before you walked into the bogs.
It was normal to send any message that needed speed (if not accuracy) by cat.
It was normal, because it was natural, because that’s how things were.
And if it was a little different from the way it was before, well. That was just the old days, when things were strange and they hadn’t discovered normal yet.
Back before the world began.

“Hellllooo! Anyone alive down there?!”

“Hellllooooooooo?”

“HEY! C’mon now, no fuss. I can hear you swearing.”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“Hah! Now you are!”
“Oh fine, you caught me. I’m here. Now will you stop trying to shoot me?”
“If I said yes would you step out from behind that hummock?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”

“You’re not stepping out from behind that hummock.”
“I don’t think I can trust you, not after you shot Lord Archie.”
“I shot him fair and square!”
“You yelled ‘ahoy the climb!’ and then when he looked up you popped one right between his monocles. It was pretty dirty.”
“Nonsense! Nothing can be dirty on top of a mountain! Look around you – nothing but the most pristine white snow such as God himself could have laid down on the third day!”
“Fourth day.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Third day is the separation of water and land and the plants show up. Fourth day is when you get day, night, seasons, and so on.”
“Don’t be stupid. Snow up here exists year-round.”
“Alright, fine, have your technicalities.”
“I shall, thank you!”
“Now that you’re in a better mood, will you stop trying to shoot me?”
“Yes.”

“Well, that didn’t work again.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m still a little reluctant to take the word of a man squatting on a mountain peak shooting honest mountaineers for no reason.”
“I’ve got plenty of reason!”
“Name it.”
“Well… I’m on break.”
“I can wait.”
“Well I can’t. Not while you’re here.”
“Why not?”
“You might steal it.”
“I might steal a mountain?”
“You might climb it. Before I can.”
“I could just let you climb up first.”
“And nip away the glory the moment I let my guard down? Fat chance. You may as well ask me to stop trying to shoot you!”
“I’ve done that already.”
“And now you can see the serious breach of trust I’m already trying to work through.”
“Why don’t you work through it by climbing that peak so you can stop trying to shoot me?”
“You’ll just shoot me in the back the moment I take my eyes off you.”
“How?”
“With the gun you’ve got on you.”
“I don’t have a gun on me.”
“Prove it. Throw it out and come out with your hands up.”

“There, now you see why I can’t trust you.”
“Even if you thought I had a gun, why not just climb the damned peak already? It’s twenty foot from where you’re sitting!”
“You’d shoot me in the back.”
“Why?”
“To claim all the glory for yourself!”
“Glory? On a glorified hillock?”
“None more glorious.”
“We only climbed this thing because Lord Archie said it had a lovely picturesque front slope. It’s practically rolling.”
“Grand horns are a dime a dozen. Truly lovely little summits like this are PRICELESS and I will not have you stealing my thunder.”
“What thunder? ‘Mad hiker arrested for murder after defending summit of hill’?”
“Well, nobody has to know about that.”
“How in your paranoid little delusions do you reckon that?”
“Well, just come up here and promise me you’ll never tell.”

“Come on.”
“No.”
“Aw, c’mon now, no whinging.”
“No.”
“You can’t wait there forever.”
“Longer than you can. I’ve got a thermos.”
“Oh, lucky. What’ve you got in there, hot chocolate?”
“Soup.”
“Oh wonderful. What kind?”
“Tomato.”
“Marvelous. Mind sharing?”
“Yes.”
“Selfish bastard. You can’t live on soup forever!”
“Lord Archie had a thermos too.”
“Oh no.”

“What wa-”
“Also tomato.”
“You fiend.”
“Tell you what. Both my hands are definitely busy while I’m eating this soup. Why not make a dash for the peak?”
“You could hold the gun in your mouth.”
“I’ve got a short tongue. Could never pull the trigger.”
“You could hold the thermos in your mouth.”
“It’s a broad-necked sort, although I’m flattered at your appraisal of my gape.”
“I’m still feeling a bit bushed.”
“Well, never failed just means never tried.”

“Promise not to shoot me?”
“I can promise not to shoot you.”
“You sure?”
“Only one of us has a history of shooting people on this hill, and it isn’t me.”
“Uppity little thing, aren’t you?”
“Mother always said as much.”
“Alright. No budging, right?”
“Right.”
“And no peeking, right?”
“Right.”
“And no trying to race at the last minute, right?”
“Right.”
“Alright! Here I goooOOOOoWOOOOOPS”

“SHIT”

“shit”

“shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii”

thump

“Huh.”

“I guess I claim this peak in the name of, well, Lord Archie, who died a little before reaching it but who the hell’ll ever know better. He was a peculiar man, but he did know the front slope was a lot safer than the back, which from this angle appears to be a sheer cliff of some three hundred feet. May this offering of tomato soup light your way, ol’ buddy.”

-First, create the universe.

-Second, check your materials. If you’ve got a proper universe you should have a lot of hydrogen right away, which you’ll need if you want to have stellar bodies and such instead of a distorted groaning trainwreck. For tips on crossing this crucial threshold, see pages 8-12: Baking A Bigger Bang.

-Third, stir repeatedly. You want continual expansion.

-Fourth, pick a star, any star. If you’re an expert try for one that isn’t going to burn itself out in the next few billion years but most of us aren’t and if you choose wrong you’ve lost nothing but time so who cares about that anyways.

-Fifth, find a planet near your star and prepare to get some kind of complex garbage in a self-replicating mood. Prod the atmosphere with whatever materials you have to hand in the rest of the solar system and just keep dropping rocks on it until you see something that looks sort of but not entirely like rock diarrhea. That’s the miracle of life.

-Sixth, wait.

-Seventh, wait some more.

-Eighth, keep waiting. What you’re looking for is life to get just complicated enough to be capable of stellar observation and stupid decisions. If your life seems to be stuck for more than a hundred million years or so, try dropping more rocks on it and seeing what happens. Again, time is not your limiting factor here.

-Ninth, make sure your life doesn’t invent light pollution before it invents astronomy. This happens more often than you’d think and it always makes you feel like a complete putz.

-Tenth, watch as they figure out how the sky seems to work. They’ll likely alternate between being dead on and totally and incomprehensibly incorrect, savour this while it lasts.

-Eleventh, cross your fingers. You’re hoping for a calendar that doesn’t run back to front or have a month inserted inside another month or get decided purely by whenever’s the best time to have elections but even those rejects can sort themselves out if you wait a few thousand years (see: Rome; Earth – Sol system).

-Twelfth, get ahold of a lot of something fermented and just barely this side of toxic. You want to feel like your ass is in orbit without removing your liver all at once.

-Thirteen, party down. Hoot, holler, eat whatever passes for food, make bad decisions and rash promises! You’ve successfully brewed up your very own New Year’s! Now that you’ve created one of the simpler holidays, why not try your hand at whipping up something more complex and unrelated to astronomical phenomena, like some kind of parade* or national holiday**?

*Only applies if your lifeforms are capable of marching in a somewhat straight line; nobody likes a zigzaggy parade.
**First see pages 7890-7891: How to Create Nationalism, and be sure to only do this in an open and well-aired space: nation-states explode easily when they feel threatened.

Alright, first thing we do is check your kits.
EDWARDS! Quit picking your nose and pull off that backpack! Dump it out! ON THE GROUND, NOW!
That’s better. Alright, let’s see. Yeah. Yeah, both your kits are good, although Edwards clearly didn’t pack this himself. Tell your mother to quit holding your hand, kid.
So, now that we’ve sorted your packs, let’s introduce you two to the glorious and manly pastime of Santa-hunting. Your dads learned it from me, and my dad taught theirs. Someday I’ll have to create one of you little miscreants and hope he takes after me or your kids’ll be in right shit. For now, do as I say and we’ll have bagged your families a saint for Christmas day’s dinner, which you will be taught to cook using my very own great-great-great-great-grandmother’s personal recipe, passed down in the family. So clear out your earholes and listen to me.
First lesson: aim high. You pukes aren’t done growing yet, but our target’s a big boy. Anything you don’t want him to step over? Shoulder-height minimum.
Seriously? “What if he bends over?” Edwards, never ask questions, they show everyone what a dumbass you are. Target has a gut like a bowlful of jelly; he hasn’t seen his toes in fifty years and he couldn’t bend down to count ‘em if his life depended on it. Which it will, if you’d stop ASKING QUESTIONS and start LISTENING.
Now put up this razor wire.

Good, that’s good. It’s shit work, but that’s better than anything you’ve done before. Make sure to tinsel it up properly, we want this to look legitimate. Camouflage is the name of our game.
“Won’t he notice it?” Edwards, what did I say about questions? And of course he’ll notice it, that’s the point. If he’s busy noticing it, he’s not paying attention to the floorboards. Now take out a jigsaw and get cutting. If we don’t have a pit trap leading to the basement in thirty minutes I’m cancelling your snack break.
Pratt, excellent work on your tinselling. Take a load off and survey the perimeter. Both of you meet me downstairs when you’re done.

See, this is where we have to get intricate. As you can tell, Edwards’s incompetent sawmanship has created a pitfall that drops NEXT to the furnace. If he could aim properly we could just open up the top of it and we’d be done – come back and skewer the fat bastard like fish in a barrel at sunup – but now we’ve got to get tricky.
No, Edwards, we couldn’t just incinerate him. You’re trying to be clever and it isn’t a good look on you; how the hell do you think the sonuvabitch gets through all those chimneys unsinged if he isn’t fireproof? Blades yes explosives maybe fire no way Jose. And you should’ve known this already if you’d read the goddamned handouts. Go upstairs, raid your mother’s cutlery, and come down with enough sharp objects to make a punji trap blush. We’re making a deadfall here, let’s put the accent on those first coupla syllables.
Pratt, you can start preparing these boards with duct tape and gorilla glue. There’s a lot of sharp shit to be set here. And have one of my smokes while you’re at it. You’ll need steady hands.

Now, can either of you tell me what we’re missing right now?
No, Edwards, advance warning for the household is NOT it. This is a booby trap, and if you go around telling folks it’s here YOU’RE the booby. Loose lips sink ships, and your family couldn’t keep a secret if I paid them to.
Hah, good guess Pratt – but no. Although some grenade bouquets aren’t a bad idea…pity, but we don’t have the budget for it. Maybe next year, eh?
Right, the real thing we’re missing is a backup plan. If he manages to dodge the pitfall the worst he’s going to get is maybe a cut or two from some razor wire – and although we COULD rub human feces on it to make sure he bites it sooner or later, we want a fresh kill, something we can find lying on the floor right here and cook on the day of. That’s why we’re going back upstairs to set up those spring-loaded scythe blades.

Right here will do. Right on the milk and cookies. Yes, that’ll do it. He’ll be confident by now. He’ll have dodged the tinsel, skirted the floorboards, and he’ll be pretty full of himself. Ready to refuel. Let that be your lesson, kids: you’re always at your most vulnerable when you’re eating.
So we rig this wire attached to his glass of milk. Pratt, you can attach the wire because I trust you with duct tape; Edwards, you can nail these scythe blades to this rake and then hold these giant springs coiled tight as I put the rest together. Hop to it.
I said hop, damnit. And quit straining and grunting like that Edwards; these only push a hundred pounds or so when fully coiled. Sit on it if your arms are that puny.
Well I don’t care if it hurts your butt, just do it! Whiner.

Now, we’re almost set. Just one last backup. Always have a second backup.
Third backups? Shut up Edwards, that’s nonsense.
No, no, this one’s simpler. Say he notices the giant blades or the wires and disarms them, gets his milk…that’s when he makes his mistake and drinks it.
Poison? No, no.
Saint Nick’s got a peanut allergy. Which is what I’ve been carrying around this Planters package for.
Now I’ll just grind this up real fine and pick up the glass of milAAAAAAAAAAAAGH

***

ADDENDUM: Grandmater Montgomery’s Famouse Saint Nicholass Recipiee
First ye will neede 1 sainte nichelis, striyke hime grate aboute ye braine-pain witt force an furie.
Tayke outte bellye-fattes an stuffe his gyutte with crane-barry preserves.
Roaste until saynt noe longyer bleedes, then cutte mightyily.
Sayve the testicules, fore they are greate aides in priapisms.
Serves 1 feaste.

Ah, now this was a beautiful icicle.
Thick at the base, a steady taper. Perfect symmetry. Just barely opaque. Twinned grooves to lighten the weight without compromising the balance or the strength. A tip that a needle would think of as sharp.
And all of it turned to uselessness on par with slush by a hint of a smear of a smudge of a tiny little crack two-thirds of the way down.
Nobody ever checks there. If they know a little they check the tip; if they know a lot they check the base, but nobody ever checks two-thirds of the way down. That’s where I check, because I’m the best ice-farmer around. And there’s two things that make me that: first, I check two-thirds of the way down; second, I know that the tiniest crack ruins the whole thing.
This icicle had been growing for months. I’d lavished as much care and attention on it as my own son. And now it was useless.
Well, I was used to that. I’d chop it out tomorrow and start over again.
“Father?”
Ah, yes.
“We’re here.”
I turn to my guests – my surprise guests, oh how could I have known they were there, what with all the coughing and shuffling and clumping of big booted feet – and put a smile on my face. Or at least removed as much of my expression as possible. “So you are. Welcome back. Who’s this?”
He looks down his arm and up the man’s arm and the look on his face tells me it before he even gets out the words. “We’re engaged.”

His name is Biln. He met my son when he was delivering lances to the knights up on the skylines and the knight receiving them was Biln, they talked, they met again, they fell in love. It’s so tepidly romantic I can barely hold the laughter off my face. Probably for the best; they mistake the quirks of my lips for smiles.
“When’s the wedding?” I ask over the soup. Biln has brewed it, turning a mess of half-eaten leftover root-scrap and salted fish into something with almost a flavour.
“We… were thinking in the spring.”
After the auroras fade away for a few quiet months, leaving the skylines empty and unmanned while they rearm and retrain. “Good. You’ll be back in time for the fading nights production run.”
Biln’s hand rests on his shoulder at the same moment his eyes leave mine, and once again I know what’s said before it begins. “Father…”
“What, you’re quitting? Don’t make me laugh. This is a family business.”
“Mothe-”
“Your mother’s sister’s children are idiots and don’t have an eye for this. You’re inheriting. What else could you possibly do?”
“The skylines need local icework too,” he says. “Not just lances.”
That question wasn’t meant to be answered. He knows that question wasn’t meant to be answered. He’d been letting it go unanswered since he was born.
“Well,” I say. “Well now. Look at you.”
After a minute or two of quiet eating, Biln takes his hand away.
It’s good soup.
A real pity, that. Would make this all so much easier if it were shit.

***

I walked them around the place after the meal, showed them how the season’s crop was coming on in the barns, took them up to the sleet-troughs to help check the gutters, even sent Biln down into the tanks with an icepick to clear out a bat colony. He did it without so much as a complaint; no knight too proud for civilian work here, though his training paid off: every one of the little bastards he brought up in his net had been speared precisely through the eye.
“A good shot,” I said. He nodded. Not curt, either.
I could almost like this man.

On the second day we begin the harvest. Me and him, side by side, and Biln carrying the fresh lances. The weight surprises him, but he doesn’t complain. The diligence from my boy surprises me, but then it doesn’t. For once, he isn’t doing it because I told him to. He’s doing it because this is the last time. Because he wants to.
Well.
“Long one,” I say, and I clear the beautiful icicle from the wall and pass it down. His eyes widen – he’s never seen anything so perfect. Because he isn’t the best.
He’ll be that someday. I’ll make sure of it.
Biln takes it and sixteen more besides before he makes the trip to the sledge. Thirty-eight lances in his arms, purest ice, destined to pierce the hearts of a thousand auroras each at the skyline, and he carried them without complaint.
Ah, I could almost like this man.

***

On the third day we fit the shipment. Final adjustments, handles attached, crates packed, markings applied. Grunt work that once I’d given to my son, now gone to Biln.
Biln doesn’t complain, and my boy keeps up. He would’ve done well as an iceworker on the skyline. Even without lances – if you can do lances, you can do anything.
Good handwriting on Biln. Strong, firm, certain, clear.
I could almost like that man.
The boy goes to get us mugs and as he leaves, I put down my chisel. “Not that one.”
Biln looked up. “Why?”
“That’s yours.”
He looks at the lance in his hand. Oh it was a beauty now. Barely a touch of steel required to leave it hungry for an aurora’s heart, it shines without light. “I can’t-”
“You can and will. I wouldn’t have a son-in-law go to war with anything else.”
Biln checks the tip. He even checks the base. And he nods thanks, and he bows once, very respectfully.
Ah, I liked him. Damnit.

On the fourth day they leave in the early morning.
If I was any judge it’d give way not on the first or the second or the third or even the thirtieth blow, not with his deft hand. Maybe the sixth major battle. Right where it was thickest, and when he’d be operating on instinct, surrounded by the auroras and unable to pause or hesitate. After he’d come to trust it. Yes, that would be it. I know these things.
Yes, I could have liked that man.
But you can’t let even the tiniest crack past your sight, or everything falls apart.

I wave goodbye once, shortly, then stamp inside and make myself a hot mug. I deserved it.

***

Months and days and however later, I wake up to midnight sun.
Nothing new there. How soft have I gotten in my elder years? Back when I was on the skylines we sat through this for half the year, and we never peeped about it.
Back when I was on the skylines. A long time ago.
A very long time ago. And farther north.
The muzziness cuts out of my head, my feet hit the floor running, and the floor shakes twice fast, sending me spinning against the wall. Something wet is on my shoulder and it might have come from my head.
Oh no.
This midnight isn’t sunny after all, it’s on brilliant fire, rippling and tearing. Bright spiralling sheets in the heavens, come to earth. Auroras, the sky come to earth to steal it away.
Steal me away. Oh no no no.
I scramble and scrape and claw my way across the boards; the world tipping around me, my nails are bleeding, the doorway is a thousand miles away.
This was insane. This was absurd. This was what the skylines were for. How had they gotten past?
How had they done that?
Surely it would take a grand breach. One little crack in the wall wouldn’t do this. One little crack wouldn’t let this pass. It would have to be more. One little crack couldn’t cause this.
The door slams into my face, my hand claws it open, and I drop through it and into thinnest air, like a stone. Above me the house and the barn and the tanks and everything all shimmer, clutched in the hungry sky, and they get smaller so very quickly that I don’t even have time to be frightened.

It was just one little crack.

It was a fine day to dive. The sun sparkled on the water so hard it almost hurt Riksi’s eyes before he hit it.

SPLASH

Underneath was a rush of bubbles and his fins and his spears darting darting stabbing stabbing into the bag fast into the bag fast come up for air come up for air

SPLASH

And up Riksi came, bag full, chest exploding outwards, lungs filling and mouth cackling along with all his brothers and sisters surrounding him and their sharp sharp teeth.
Oh that was a good haul. The shoal underneath them was fat and broad and sturdy and this could keep them going for days.
Quick, quick! Up onto the ledge, toss your bag in the pit and grab a fresh one and take the steps up to the nearest high perch.
In you go! LOOK AT THE SUN SHINE!

SPLASH

Deeper deeper now they flee deeper they know you’re coming after the first wave and you’ve got to push to thrust to drop farther down with your flippers to grab and tear and bag and spear and bag and pull back the bag’s full the bag’s a weight back up again to the air

SPLASH

Out again, and a new bag again, and off the cliff again

SPLASH

And again and again and

SPLASH

Again. His muscles were burning through his skin and the air was freezing up his lungs and ah the sun wouldn’t stop SHINING!
What a good day to be bored, to do something so very well that his body required no guidance at all! What a great time, to let every moment slip by in careless perfection!
Watch me, he thought as he leapt. Watch me, because I don’t need to.

SPLASH

Deepest yet looking for the stragglers the slowpokes the weaklings thrust and take and lunge and take and ahh in the eyes the sun the sun the sun is still bright down here how is the sun so bright down here there it is it’s beneath how is it beneath it’s
swimming away with bright little fins

slow within range could take it but that sparkle that shine
that shine
air

SPLASH

Riksi was out of breath and out of sorts and then he got onto the ledge and realized he was also out of bag.
It must be down there somewhere, dropping into the dark and out of sight of all sunshine forever.
What a strange fish. It had shone so very brightly. He’d never seen fins with quite that sparkle before, and he’d speared fish for years, and eaten them for twice as long, and even when he was very little and still fed milk and his eyes were gummy portholes he’d seen the scales littered across the floor of his home.
What a very strange little fish, to pretend to be the sun down there.
Everyone was coming in, the morning dives completed, the hunt fulfilled, the food gathered. Time to empty the bags and clean the catch and eat the best bits.
He should be very pleased right now.
Instead he went swimming again after eating, with all the bold tingles of a child that had been told by a trusted adult ‘no, you will sink.’
Of course like every child he’d done that anyways and learned it was all lies to keep the tiny and nervous and overly-inept from venturing out alone, but the feelings were familiar.
A quick walk to the empty diving ledges, a jerk of his head to check for the lazy eyes that might ask awkward questions, and in he slid.

SPLASH

No rush now, take it smooth and steady, moving with the currents and heading deeper, big pulls, one, two, one two, no spears, no bags, just one, two, one two, there it is, that’s the shine, one, two, flittering near, one two, close enough to grasp, to catch, but should it be caught, it’s so pretty, what if the air dries it, look at its eyes, look at it watch, it’s watching, fish don’t watch, they’re food, maybe it’s not food, maybe it’s not a fish, maybe
Air

SPLASH

Out on his back, flat, flattered, trying to remember how lungs worked. Riksi’s blood felt like acid in his veins, but now he didn’t need to move it at all. Just his mind.
There was a lot on it. He sat out the afternoon forage up the cliffs to the bird-nests, in hopes of shifting some of the weight. Mocks, taunts, accusations of age, all the good part and parcel of them, of his brothers and sisters. They left him in good cheer with a good dinner.
Fish, of course.
Riksi held his meal in his hands, comparing it to the ideal.
Yes, it was supposed to be the same as that shining fish he’d seen. Broad, strong sides. Deceptively thin fins. A grasping, barbed mouth. Bulbous little eyes. A large, rounded skull tight with muscle and mind.
What was missing was that it didn’t shine. It shimmered, maybe, just a little. But the lustre wasn’t there. Even polished, its scales were not bright.
And so it wasn’t the same, it wasn’t the same at all.
Maybe it was his imagination. Maybe it was his mind playing tricks on him. You could see odd things if you pushed the edge of a dive, send splashes into parts of your head that had no business being disturbed.
But he’d seen it twice.
But he hadn’t seen it three times.
Yes, that would do it. Nobody ever saw anything crazy three times. It was never consistent enough for that.
Yes, that would make all of this make sense. He would go and look for the fish that was so special it might not be a fish at all, and he would find it, and that would prove he wasn’t crazy.
The bird-foragers were home now, bags fat with eggs and some of the more fat and inept hatchlings. There was enough good-natured hullabaloo to hide ten of Riksi slipping down to the diving ledges, which was where he slipped.

SPLASH

Calm strokes, even strokes, there’s no rush and it’s right there
Right there
The sun is lower in the sky, but it’s right there and just as bright as before, and the glory wasn’t all the sun’s, it still shines, oh it still shines, so beautiful, it permits this closeness, so beautiful and generous, yes not at all like the other fish, the ones that flee and turn into flesh for the belly, this one is not like them, what must it feel like, no no don’t shy don’t run come back ah no
Air

SPLASH

Riksi bellyflopped onto the ledge like he hadn’t since he was a pup and pounded his nose with his flippers. Damnit! Damnit! Damnit! He’d learned something, yes yes, a very important something, but he’d been denied something too. Unacceptable. Unacceptable.
It could tell he knew it was different. Why couldn’t it show him the same grace he was displaying towards it? He hadn’t eaten it at all, even a little. Ungrateful scaly thing.
The evening fire was up and burning. He would miss the first stories if he didn’t hurry.
So he hurried, and he went, and he thought all through the evening and in the end he made a bit of an idea tied together with a few others and didn’t hear one story.
But it was a fair trade. Now he knew what to do.
He would catch the fish. That would keep it safe. It would keep it from the white teeth of the sharks and the eels and his careless brothers and sisters; it would keep it safe from the accident and happenstance of the currents and the waves; it would keep it safe from the whims and foolishness of the fish itself, because it was a bit silly and didn’t know its way.
So. It was to be done.
A bag was all he needed; he could catch them without a spear, and had done so before.
Yes, that was a plan.
A good plan.
In fact, it was a plan so good Riksi couldn’t possibly imagine sleeping on it. It would only fizz inside his brain and keep him awake until he was too tired to execute it the next day.
So, in the spirit of total and absolute logic and sensibleness, he walked away from the embers of the fire and the crowding of his brothers and sisters and dove from the ledges again, into the darkening red of the evening sea.

SPLASH

It’s right there, right under the ledge, it was waiting, it knows what needs to be done, such a good thing, such a fine thing, it knows it will be better off, come closer, no not farther, closer, closer, closer closer closer come back here chasing it now chasing it faster than anything ever moved want it want it the one that matters it’s not like all the other dull things the food things thousands used as meat but this one is special yes this one is special it will be treasured yes it will never going to eat it never ever promise a dear promise oh it sparkles so close now oh there are other sparkles white glow in the dark it’s leading me there towards them white rising glow in the dark of-
An unstoppable impact so great that it’s unfeelable. Billowing inky fluid in the water. Limbs failing.
-teeth
Kick for
The
Air
It shines

splash

The flipper waved once feebly and sank back under the surface. The shark swam away.
And the little fish that shone so brightly hurried away back home to its anxious dull-scaled brothers and sisters, so many of whom it had lost.