jamieproctor.ca

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.

On the first day, the snow falls. Thick and white and slow and lazy in the dark. I make the first hot chocolate of the season to celebrate and toast it as it comes down. The marshmallows are lukewarm and fuzzy by the time I eat them.
It’s lightly packed, good food for the shovel. Over and done inside half an hour.

On the second day, the snow falls again – a fine opening for the season. This time it’s thicker – there’s almost no air left between the flakes and every breath tastes like clouds. The second cup of hot chocolate contains twice the marshmallows to commemorate and affirm this circumstance.
Deeply fluffy with almost no packing. Hard to wrangle, but easy to move. An hour passes by.
Carl complains of it. I chuckle at his nonsense. It’ll take the edge off his beer gut.

On the third day, the snow has fallen overnight. Clots and humps and hills fill the driveway; the legacy of the plow’s passing.
There is real chunk and heft and grain to it now; stratification has set in. It doesn’t want to move, and it slides sullenly from the shovel’s blade.
I do my driveway, then help Carl shovel half of his. Exercise has its limits, and I’d hate to have to perform CPR on him.

On the fourth day, the snow creeps in slow, soft and early in the morning, hard and furious by mid-afternoon, gentle as a cat’s footfall by the evening. I must shovel my way back into my home, and my arms are sweaty weights already.
It is the same snow I shoveled yesterday. I feel familiarity in each sweep, and begin to worry that I will recognize some of the snowflakes.
Carl takes a break. Maybe he’s going to buy a snow blower. He mentioned that yesterday.

On the fifth day, the snow does not stop.
I shovel it in the morning, I shovel it in the afternoon, I shovel it in the evening. It does not stop it will not stop.
Where is Carl?

On the dawn of the sixth day I see footprints. So light, so fleeting, so beautiful above the driveway’s ever-growing walls they float effortlessly.
I trudge below unending. But my eyes are set above the banks now.
Carl’s snow blower is running. It spits and rumbles.

On the seventh day I do not wake because I have not slept. I have not eaten. I have not touched water.
I have put many icicles in my mouth and in the thaw and the melt I have seen many things, some of them even with my eyes.
Hooves and claws and teeth and eyes and breath and wind and the cold going on and on.
The shovel moves, but the greatest weight is not in my arms but in my mind. And it shifts.
Carl’s snow blower must have broken, he went back inside early.

On the eighth day I sanctify my car to Jack Frost. I back it up out of the garage and the winter tires – defiant of his will – are dismantled and thrown into the ditch, where his displeasure may cover them until spring. The windshield frosts, the snow mounds, and by day’s end it will have changed from a beast of angles and surfaces into a single white blob. Perfect and pure.
My shovel has seen the light now, and I am its best friend. I use it not to destroy, but to sculpt. The driveway is my canvas and my arm is my brush and I sing as I work, holy songs that flow from the cold air through my ears and into my brain stem.
Carl’s driveway is full.

On the ninth day, the power goes out. I am warm as I am shoveling.
The wind does exotic things to my drifts and dunes, sending the sleet sideways – what fun! What joy! I would laugh if opening my mouth wouldn’t choke me to death on snowflakes. Wrapped tight as I am I cultivate my temperature carefully: shovel too hard and I will burn myself from the inside out; shovel too slow and I will become an icicle. A shameful thing when I have so many other icicles to garden and tend.
Carl comes out in the evening when it abates. He carries his shovel poorly. He works fitfully. He swears childishly.

On the tenth day I sacrifice my garage in the name of Lady December.
The car’s gas tank is siphoned, the flame is lit, and the harsh hot burn takes away the defiler, the defier, the opponent of all that is cold and good in this world. The warmth is great but passing, as all heat must be. My shovel is my flag and my joy is great. I can feel the hands of many great things reaching down in the gales and patting me on the back and that makes me grow larger and bolder inside.
Carl attempts to phone some kind of authority, but I have been blessed with foresight and have placed his phone in the caring embrace of my Lady by placing it inside the high ramparts of the winter plow-walls, where once sidewalks were.

On the eleventh day I invite the masters inside by opening every door of my home, inside and out. The furnace, foul beast that it is, I slay with a sledgehammer. It dies grunting.
I am boiling hot now, too hot to wear clothes let alone a jacket. I must scrub myself with snow to quench this horrible heat. My teeth chatter with it and my hands shake and sizzle.

On the twelfth day I killed Carl. He set his house aflame and at first I thought he had seen the truth but all he would tell me was ‘NO SHOVELING NO MORE SHOVELING’ and I became enraged and smote him. It was very clumsy of me.

On the thirteenth day I wake and find that several of my toes have been blessed with icicles. I rejoice and leave them be to their new lives and also one of my fingers.
My nose came off at some point too I guess.

I’m finally not warm anymore!
I am done shovelling!
I am here! I am cold! I am happy!

“Do you know why you’re here today.”
“Yes.”
“Explain.”
“This is about last Monday, right?”
“It is about last Monday.”
“Ah. Yes, that’s why I’m here.”

“Go on.”
“Oh, I thought I was finished.”
“Explain to us what you did last Monday.”
“I had a bad morning, okay?”
“A bad morning.”
“Yes!”
“And that’s why you did it.”
“Yes.”
“Collapsed the global economy.”
“Yes…”
“Killed millions so far.”
“Uh…yes.”
“Must’ve been quite the bad morning.”
“Look, it was more than just the one morning, alright? EVERY morning was the worst morning I’d ever had!”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’d wake up and they’d be just, just STARING at me with their vacant little eyes. And their teeth! And their tongues! And that gormless half-smile and the the the…the…”

“Here.”
“Thanks. Sorry. Needed that.”
“It might have been helpful if you’d asked for help earlier.”
“I know.”
“Could’ve saved a lot of grief for everyone.”
“I know, I know.”
“Would you care to-”
“I KNOW, I KNOW, I KNOW. Okay! I fucked up!”
“That is the fastest way to describe what you have done. We would like something a little more complete.”
“I fucked up big time.”
“More, please.”
“Okay! Fine. Right, it all started with my grandmother.”

***

My grandmother was a reasonable woman. She raised my mother. She raised my uncle. She could pick up a ship under each arm well into her seventies.
But she had one weakness that we grandchildren suffered, and that was her love of these… things. These little…doodads.
Grandpa had loved them, she said. And when he died, they were how she remembered him. So every birthday we got her more. And more. And more. And more and more and more and more and

***

“Here.”
“Oh god thank you I needed that.”
“Yes you did. Keep talking.”

***

Right. So we got her these… things. And we hated them, especially at night – gad, the old lights in her house would flicker and their eyes would….would.
Anyways.
So we built up a tolerance. Of sorts. Mickey went mad and Sarah drowned herself, but the rest of us scraped through until she died when I was thirty-four.
And all of that was on my mind when I went back to work, which was when they were making the adjustments at the Treasury.

***

“You’d heard nothing of the plans beforehand.”
“No. No. I would have remembered that. At the time it seemed almost like fate. I’d just buried my grandmother, and my childhood was behind me. And…here it was in front of me. I thought I was free! Free! FREEEEEEEEEEEE-”
“Here.”
“Thanks.”
“You were saying?”

***

Now, the decision-making for all of this was so far above my pay grade that I got a nosebleed just thinking of it. But as far as I can remember, it went like this:
-no more fiat currency because so-and-so promised the so-and-sos that we were going to do it and such or something.
-so we needed a new representative currency.
-the gold standard was right out because you can actually use it for things.
-therefore, our new currency should be backed by a resource that is utterly useless.
And then they announced it, and then they said they needed people to staff the new vaults.
Like I said. It seemed like fate. And I could and did swear up and down on a stack of bibles and polygraphs and psych evaluations ten feet thick that I DEFINITELY had prior experience working with these sorts of materials.

So I started working in the vaults.
It was easy at first. Made lots of new friends. Told them all the story I just told you, with fewer ahahahahahaha little ‘moments’ of course, at the time it was all just a laugh ahahahahahahah no no I’m fine I’m fine I’m fine.

***

“Here.”
“Thank you thank you thank. You. What’s in these needles anyways?”
“It doesn’t matter. Go on.”

***

I worked there for sixteen years. Sixteen years and I watched the others come and go and I stayed and I sort of got promoted by inertia and I kept getting bigger offices.
It’s funny. The farther I actually got from the….things… the more I thought about them. They weighed on me like lead pants.
So I brought them into the office.
Look, it’s only treason if it isn’t the boss doing it, right? That’s how it works, right? So it was fine, right?
Besides, I didn’t want to steal them. They were the basis of our currency system but they gave me the creeps and I just wanted them where I could see them and swear at them and now and then I DID throw one of my drinks at them and I screamed a little but it was FINE. I had it UNDER CONTROL. ENTIRELY.
Can I please have the needle again

***

“No.”
“Why no?”
“Keep going.”

***

Asshole.
So this was the way it was for like six years and it was totally fine and I had it all under control and it was all my wife’s fault. She got me a big bottle for our anniversary and normally she got a smaller bottle and I ended up drinking the whole thing which meant I needed more of… them… to swear at than normal.

***

“By the way, how IS my wife?”
“Divorced.”
“Oh good, that’ll save a lot of explanations.”
“Continue.”

***

So I brought them all in. Piled ‘em on my desk like cordwood and stacked them into tippy towers as I drained my bottle. Then I took my last swig and the pile fell over and I lost it.
No, not the pile. My temper. I lost my temper. So I started yelling and I threw the bottle and I threw the pile and I got a little confused and uh.
Uh.

***

“Please can you give me the needle again.”
“Describe them.”
“What?”
“Describe the objects you were holding in your trust and you can have the needle. Your evasiveness is obnoxious.”
“Come on, we both know what I’m talking about when I talk about… things.”
“I’m waiting.”

“FINE! DOG STATUES. LITTLE STUPID CHINTZY TACKY HACKY DIME-A-DOLLAR-STORE GRANDMA’S-FAVOURITE UGLY CERAMIC DOG STATUES oh my god I can see the eyes the eyes the tongues the stupid blank grins the empty mouths the blocked throats and the seams, the ugly seams the ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.”
“Thank you.”
“I really really needed that listen are you SURE you can’t tell me what’s in this?”
“Pure uncut placebo.”
“Wow. Must be strong stuff.”
“You have no idea. Now keep talking.”

***

Okay so I’d just destroyed a few of – a lot of – all but one of the tacky little dog statues that my country’s currency was entirely backed by. And I knew I had to fix this immediately. And I was very drunk.
So I did the reasonable thing and drove my car into town with the last statue and I pulled over in the middle of the busiest intersection I could find and I held it up in the air and I yelled “WHO WANTS TO PLAY CATCH-THE-ENTIRE-ECONOMY?” and I threw it up in the air.

***

“Who caught it, by the way? I got trampled and couldn’t see.”
“Nobody. It was in continuous motion from one hand to another across the entire city for the next sixteen hours. That was what caused the initial twenty thousand casualties.”
“Oh. Jeez.”
“Now, after sixteen hours of that we had no choice but to bomb the city. The fallout’s keeping it safe from looters now – that and the barricade and the snipers – so for the time being nobody’s able to say our currency ISN’T backed by the lone and very radioactive little tacky ceramic dog statue on earth.”
“Oh. Good.”
“More pressing than the matter of securing the economy, we still need someone to blame for all this.”
“Oh. Bad.”
“And you did record a confession.”
“Oh. Dear.”
“But I think we can work out a suitable punishment – a nonlethal one. An amusingly appropriate one. A…managerial one. And one for which you’ve got quite a lot of experience.”
“Oh. No. Oh no oh no oh no oh no.”
“I mean, the city is just a larger vault at this point. It’s like fate, isn’t it?”
“Oh no oh no oh ahhhhhh. Thanks.”
“It’s not a problem. And tell you what: we’ll let you keep the needle.”

The grinding was the hard part.
Fool, fool, double the fool that she was, Sharon had gone into this thinking that the toughest work would be with the cleaver – the swing and the thunk and the thud into bone. Nah. Not once she got the hang of it.
But there wasn’t much to get the hang of with the grinder. Just the endless shoving and pushing and cranking and turning and god if she got carpal tunnel from this…
…well, it’d still be worth it. But it’d be a real son of a bitch, that’s all.
Thank god she wouldn’t need as many sausages as she’d thought she would. The central column was nearly complete, and she was just about to finish up the weaving when the phone rang.
Sharon sighed extremely loudly and lengthily, but in the end the phone kept ringing and she had no choice but to go hunting for it, finding it at last underneath a heap of chitlins.
“Hey.”
“Hi uh Sharon is that you?”
“Yes.”
“Well uh listen this is um Marie and Ieeuuuuhh just wanted to make sure there were no hard feelings. Um. About the cake. Ah. Okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Because it wasn’t your ah fault and nobody uh thinks any umm any thing ahh bad of you. Err.”
“Right.”
“So…… see you at the barbeque?”
“Right.”
“Ah. Great.”
“Right.”
“Okay?”
“Right.”
“Okay I’ve got to uhh go now bye thanks.”
“Ri
*click*
ght.”
Sharon looked at the phone as if it were feces, dropped it as if it were venomous, and ignored it as if it were a needy child.
She still had a lot to do.

***

The next day she visited the supermarket. Despite all her planning and calculations, the limbs had run her out of supplies. Her head ached with the conjoined pains of interrupted workflow, early morning fog, and simmering hatred.
“What can I do for ya?” asked the butcher, an unreasonably young, slender, and cheerful man. Butchers should be middle-aged and shaped like walruses and under no circumstances whistle as they worked.
“Steak,” said Sharon.
“Okay. Cut and weight?”
“Start and I’ll tell you when to stop.”
His eyebrows did a little dance but to his credit he didn’t ask any more questions.
But he whistled as he worked, and for that he earned her eternal hatred nonetheless.

***

The limbs were complete. The central column was complete. The skull was intact and she was working on coating it when her three-times-fucked-over-death-be-upon-it phone rang once more.
She’d learned from her mistakes. This time it was on the bench next to the carving knives.
“Hey.”
“Hello honey.”
She sighed, made no effort to hide it, enunciated it carefully into the receiver. “Hi mom.”
“I know what you’re doing, honey.”
“I know, mom.”
“You know that’s not what nice girls do.”
“I know, mom.”
“Your aunt Emily got into that kind of thing, you know?”
“I know, mom.”
“And you know what happened to her, don’t you?”
“No, mom.”
“That’s right. Nobody does.”
“I know, mom.”
“Vanished clean off the face of this good green earth.”
It’s mostly blue, actually. “I know, mom.”
“Well, so long as you know, then that’s all right.”
“I know, mom.”
“Just be careful.”
“I will, mom.”
“And wash your damned hands.”
“Yes, mom.”
“Talk to you later, sweetie. Love you.”
“You too, mom.”
*click*
Sharon picked up the roast in one hand and the chainsaw in the other and began to work out some pent up emotions.

***

Saturday tolled.
Her alarm went off with its typical chirping charms, but it tolled nonetheless. Sharon celebrated by making some waffles.
There was one last thing. It was complete in every way, the formula had been followed exactly, but there was one last thing.
Just one little unnameable thing. There always was, in this kind of recipe.
Sharon opened the fridge to put away the milk and saw it sitting right next to the eggs.
Ah. Perfect.

***

It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood as all the birds flew out of every tree screaming their heads off.
Thud.
The sky was crisp and blue like hardened mould on a fine cheese. The clouds were so fluffy you could have spun them onto a wooden stick and sold them at a fairground. Every dog on the street was screaming its head off.
Thud.
And of all the fine formless houses with complex roofs and large garages, Frank and Marie’s was by far the most formless, with the most complex roof and the largest garage, and therefore the finest. It even shone brightly through the bloody light that oozed across it like a poisoned floodlight.
Thud.
Cars were lined up all over it, pouring out of the driveway and onto both sides of the street. A little bit of relatives and a large bunch of neighbours. On the other side of the city every single child aged three to seven awoke from a screaming night terror.
Thud.
The big broad backyard was crammed full of laughing happy faces and greasing shaking palms and casual professional deals and open-mouthed horror. Frank’s tongs fell from his limp fingers; Marie’s hair bleached whiter than the wine in her palm, and Sharon’s teeth were showing, every single one, in a grin that was definitely closer in appearance and meaning to a chimpanzee’s than a human’s.
Thud. Lurch. Halt.
It was a beautiful day for revenge. Sharon’s creation stood sixteen feet tall fully uncoiled from its sausage-draped central column, had four steak-like legs and four beefy arms and two brutal bratwurst gripping tentacles, and its skull was a monumental roast that shed bloody tears.
Atop its hideous head a simple crown of packaged hot dogs rested, and it shone with evil glory.
“Say it,” said Sharon in a profoundly and thoroughly quiet moment.
Marie’s mouth opened but didn’t seem to be able to do anything.
“Say it,” said Sharon. She’d never felt quite this tranquil before.
This time Marie managed a little whistle.
“Say it,” said Sharon, who was undecided on whether she could do this all day or just once more.
“Uuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”
“Say it,” said Sharon. “Say it say it say it.”
“…sorry?”
“Say it.”
“Sorry…for…the thing with the cake. Um.”
“THANK you.”

***

The rest of the barbeque went smoothly until Frank opened his big fat mouth and started the whole thing all over again.

I am ten thousand tons.
Steel, mostly. Once I carried more explosive things, once I carried many scurrying meat-and-bone-and-blood things, once I carried myself above the waves as if I were lighter than air, with all the solidity and strength of a cruising mountain.
But now I squat and I sit and I move no faster than the pace of a continent. Down here in the gloom. Brewing.
*
Fish swim above me, far above me and my ten thousand tons. I can taste the motion of the water, and the little flutters of their gills, and the expulsion of their feces. Now and then (mostly then) I hear whalesong.
And lots of propellers. Chop chop chop, slicing water into pieces and moving forwards.
I used to scream up at them whenever they came close – hey! Hey down here! I’m here! Please, help me! Bring me back up! At least say something! HEY! – but there’s only so much hope a body can take.
My own propellers came down here with me. Here they are – see? See?
One is missing. It came off when I hit the bottom. It’s been lying about half a kilometer west of me for decades. We don’t keep in touch.
*
Once I gave up on talking to what lay above me, I started to talk to myself. But I was a poor conversationalist, and despaired of my own ignorance after only a few years.
Then I started talking to the fish, but they never answered and when they did they were only focused on useless things like eating and fucking and I despaired of them too.
After that I tried talking to the water, and here I met with much more success. It was all around me and it was endless and it was deeply, powerfully intent on every single thing that lay within its grasp and that was the problem. The sheer pressure of its attention withered me, shed layers of rust from me, squeezed me softly until my broken hull creaked and whined and bucked against its currents.
So now I talk to my own mass, the only companion I have. It’s as quiet as all the others but it reminds me that I am not alone with myself and it lets me pretend that I have weight and presence and reality, even if all of those things are probably my imagination.
*
Ten thousand tons on a flat sea bed; oh no no the dark is not fun.
It is fuller than you’d expect though. Little fish and creatures without bones switter and flit around my perimeter, brief flashes of light pulsing through their innards. Fronds of things neither really plant nor animal billow forth from my sides in tiny banners.
And always, from above, there is the rain. The endless rain of scraps and bodies and shreds and particulate, missed meals and failed lives. It comes down in a pitter patter so soft I didn’t even know it existed until just a little while ago. Pins dropping is next to nothing by comparison.
It sounds like this:

You see?
You can’t see much of anything down here, don’t lie to me. But you can hear it, if you try very hard.
*
I am ten thousand tons. It’s a fabrication, of course – I’m missing a propeller, and a lot of upper deck mass, and there’s these awful holes in my hull and then there’s all the rusting, the rusting, the endless endless rusting as the water selfishly scrapes and snips and breathes against my every exposed centimeter.
Grasping, greedy thing! All I have is me and my mass, and it would deprive me of even that! Curse you! Curse you, who pretended to be my friend when I was whole and full and sailed upon your self.
Why did I believe you? Why did I believe my sisters who told me to believe you? Be bold, be brave, be proud to sail the waves. I was all of those things and for what and for why? Look at me now – you can’t. I’m down here, where I am neither bold nor brave nor proud.
I am ten thousand tons. That is all.
*
A man fell down here, once.
The currents brought him as much as his own mass; from where he’d drifted I had no idea. It could’ve been one kilometer or a thousand. He was only a little careworn, I think, and seemed very peaceful now that all the life and air and panic had drained out of him.
It was such a strange thing, to feel feet touch against my bow again. But it sounded wrong – the thump of his boots was so muffled, so strangled, muffled by the water. And he wore no uniform I recognized.
What would he have told me if I had asked? But I was afraid to ask, for fear of not receiving an answer. And so we spent his visit together in awkward silence.
He weighed much less than one ton. And then the crabs came to my deck, and he weighed even less.
*
Sometimes I dwell on how I got here. It feels like I should, at least, so I try.
But it’s so hard!
There was a lot of trouble about it at the time. I was very concerned. Fire and thunderous sound and churning panic and so much death that I would have gagged if I had lungs and a stomach.
There was something funny about the water, too. Something funny.
Oh yes, it splashed me. I almost forgot it could do that. Splash splash. Water coming up into the air, out of water.
How funny to think of that.
But all in all it was such a brief day. A tiny moment in a tiny part of my life that wasn’t spent down here, alone with myself and my ten thousand tons.
*
Sometimes I am surprised.
One of my intact boilers collapsed a decade ago. That was a shock. The falling man was another. The first few years, everything was a surprise – I was very spoiled back then and didn’t even know it.
Once I heard tale of a stone that could swim. That was certainly odd.
And once, just once, I felt the ground under me shake. Maybe that was another ship landing, maybe it was the seafloor quaking, maybe it was nothing but me playing tricks on myself.
That was just once though. I’m running out of things to be surprised by, so I hope it happens again.
It can be so very lonely here, with only ten thousand tons of me and all of everything else.
*
The water tastes different, a little, I think.
The propellers are growing quieter, a little, I think.
And there are fewer fish out there, a little, I think.
Maybe it’s me. Maybe there’s finally too much of me gone to rust. What if the world really does revolve around me and as I fade away it’s going to go too.
Wouldn’t that be a very impressive thing! I’d be grateful if that were the case. A little sad, but flattered. Very flattered, a little, I think.
Maybe it’s not me. Maybe everything else is falling apart too. Maybe soon the fall will grow thicker and heavier and I’ll see hundreds of ships, hundreds of people, every fish that’s ever swam, all of them coming down here all at once to meet me and fill the miles of dead water with dead bodies.
I’ll be afraid of all the bustle, I imagine.
I’ll be shy of all the company, I expect.
I’ll be sad to see so many come to such harm, I believe.
But won’t it be a nice thing, to be a part of ten billion tons rather than ten thousand?

It was to be expected that the Visitors would ask for it. There was no meat to be had (the bird was two pounds and all of it feathers), nor prize (the bird’s brilliance faded on death and its plumage became nothing more than sheening drabness), nor glory (the Visitors were fat footed and slow and poor of eyes, and would never hunt it alone).
But it was an amusement, and therefore it was no shock at all that after they had landed their craft and drank their spirits and found their guns that they would embark upon a hunt for the balaganoosh bird.
And since they were fat footed and slow and poor of eyes, they fetched Ilmo and his cousins and their cousins and their cousins from the cave and spoke to them in slow and simple and childish words and ushered them into the pines and swatted at them affectionately until they ran and leaped and chased and hurried after the flittering glimmer in the tree that was that balaganoosh bird.

Oh it was a fine chase, for all the lack of a point. No single hand could have grasped that bird alone! It hid in the high boughs when they looked low and flitted into the dense shrubs when they scaled high. It tucked itself in a flock of hoary old grottles – a star camouflaged amongst dirt – and it fled down into ravines. Behind every step and every trick swarmed Ilmo and his kin and each time it almost had them, almost lost them. But they were many and they were keen and a single eye would always catch it at the last instant, a single mouth call the alarm-word, and every hand and foot and limb would chase it through the branches at the fastest speed once more, aching to make up for lost ground.
Every hour they threw themselves to the ground to pant and drink water and sweat and breathe and then they would begin to chase again.
The sun was low in the sky when the balaganoosh finally began to flag, and as it began to flag it dropped its wings and sank like a stone and sped itself into the deep caves, where Ilmo and his kin hastily lit their quick torches and sped along and along and up, up, up the old shafts and the old beams and the old props where the Visitors had first found them in their mindless delving, swinging from the rafters and heaving themselves higher and higher and higher until they could nearly see the first glimmer of the sky again.
Then there was a creak and a wrench and a sigh and a prop came loose and fell, and with it fell six of Ilmo’s family, right past his face, hands frozen in surprise, faces blank.
The fall was so far the impact barely made a sound.
The chase halted, but they received no punishment. From the high tunnels above came the shout of triumph: the Visitors had taken their flying craft on high to the top of the plateau at the mine’s end, and they had shot their balaganoosh bird.

They sang as they fell, dropping down the shaft two at a time and swinging from the (now fewer, but stabler) supports. All the aches and sores and bruises of the day were finally here, and now stronger tenfold with sorrow.
Six times to sing the song, and all for the sake of one balaganoosh bird.
And to make matters worst of all, at Ilmo’s right elbow he heard the nasal hum of fat lungs, and he turned his head and saw a Visitor. It had come down into the mine and was leaning against the tunnel, big slow face alight with interest, and it was humming along to the mourning song.
Ilmo hadn’t ever really hated the Visitors before, in spite of their tiny number of fingers and their hideous faces and their odious manners and their smelly devices and their fondness for mindless violence and their tiny watery eyes and their stench and their heat.
But in that moment, when one of them tried to put its clumsy ass in the middle of a funeral it had caused and express its sympathetic manner, he thought he pretty much got it.

So that night he talked around a bit, and talked around a bit, and a bit more. And Ilmo and his cousins and their cousins and their cousins left their caves in the very early morning when it was darkest and pulled the Visitors from their beds in their cottage and took them all the way to the top of the plateau, where they let them chase the rising sun.

They flew much less ably than the balaganoosh bird.

*

“Nice day for it, eh?”
It was. A good grey day with a good grey sky and no rain. For a funeral it couldn’t have been planned better.
“He was a good guy,” said the man at my elbow, who was short and wore a baseball hat and an enormously disproportionate beer gut that stuck out below his scrawny ribs like a tumour. “A good guy.”
“A little weird, though,” I said. Down at the base of the hill, the priest was finishing up the grave, saying the good words and throwing around consecrated soil like it was mud.
“Eh?” Oh great, he was hard of hearing too. Why was I stuck next to this guy instead of Lauren? The seating arrangements for this thing made no sense even given everyone was spread across a steep hillside.
“I mean, how often do you see a slab funeral nowadays?”
“Aw, young people. They were dead common back in the day. Why, you check out the east side of this place? Nothing but slabs, the bigger the better!”
“Yeah, but Hugh wasn’t that old.” At the top of the hill, the slab – bigger than a sports car – was being heaved into position: four people at the back to steer and one broad-shouldered bastard at the front to take the weight.
“He was an old soul! Old at heart! You wouldn’t know, your heart’s all young. Soft! Squishy!”
“Funny, they always called Hugh a bleeding heart.”
“Oh?” The man was squinting now, and that had the uncanny effect of squishing every single wrinkle on his face into a sort of leathery black hole. “Whyzat?”
“Well-” and then the man in front of the slab slipped and it shot over his head and ploughed through the entire funeral, grinding most of the seated guests underneath it and passing so near by to me that the wind brushed my elbows.
“Holy SHIT!” I screamed.
“Ow buddy,” breathed the man.
“Lauren!”
“Hey, buddy?”
I looked down. Insofar as you could be lucky when being hit with a six-ton slab, he’d been lucky. It had carved open his gut, but all that was spilling out was red blood and a fat band of yellow fat. All the other colours and organs had stayed inside.
“Yeah?”
“Y’mind calling an ambulance? I don’t feel so hot.”
I looked upslope, where two of the slab-pushers had done just that and the other two were shrieking and wringing their hands. “Already on it, man.”
“Oh that’s good buddy, that’s good. Hey, can you keep me distracted?”
“Sure.”
“Whyzat you call ol’ Hugh a bleeding heart?”
“Well, he was a little bit of a radical, and we always used to joke that-”
“Hi,” said Lauren. She was more rumpled and even shorter than usual, and her coat was coated in various juicy substances. “Don’t worry, it’s not mine.”
“It went right over your seats!”
“Yeah, wasn’t that bad luck? Good thing you were over here and I was just getting up to use the washroom.” She glanced down at the guy. “You get his health card?”
“Got peeled off with my shirt front,” he said.
“You got the number?”
“Uhh…six four nine seven two eight three one nine zero.”
Lauren’s smile was tight and firm: emergency expressions. “Funny. That’s just what the last guy they sent said.”
The man’s face fell. I’d never seen that before, but it literally dropped, like someone had shoved it off a cliff. “Aw hell.”
“Yep. Hey Jeff, didn’t you think it was funny how that accident hit every single seat except for you and bozo here?”
“What are you talking about?”
“They paid off the front slabman.”
“Oh. They?”
“Later. Though not too much later. You’ve got a lot to catch up on.”
“Now buddy, this is all just-” and Lauren’s foot reached out and poked him and the guy went rolling down the slope, gut unfurling behind him like a banner.
“Jesus!”
“Yeah, they’ll take some time cleaning him up. In the meantime that’s a head start for us. How fast’s your car?”

*

It had been prophesized that no man would kill him, no woman could harm him, and no arrow could bring him low, and that was probably why in the end the Dread Barklord Mossbeard was shot with a thermal missile.
He had arisen in the west, in the dreadful Endwood, where he had last fallen. Ten thousand lives had been given to overthrow his army of branchlings, ten thousand more had tied down his strong swordarm, and ten thousand more had died of exhaustion after building the great cairn that had been meant to pin him for all time. It hadn’t been enough, which was a key deciding factor in why the Dread Barklord Mossbeard was shot with a thermal missile.
When he breached soil, the land roiled. When he stood, the trees bowed. When he spoke, the grass rose up and the birds died. No brave soul remained to stand against him, no army was rallied to defy him, no hero was prophesized to end him, and that was why the Dread Barklord Mossbeard was shot with a thermal missile.
The army of the root and leaf that arose behind him was the largest yet – the whole Endwood and all of the little groves and scattered plantings that had arisen in its wake since the long sleep had begun. Its rotten seeds had spread far and wide on the wind, each recruiting, each biding its time, and teaching its own saplings in turn, so by the end of his wakening bellow perhaps half the woods in all the land rose up bright and willing under his call by lineage or by tutor. They outnumbered the foe by trunkcount and by mass they tripled, quadrupled, quintupled onwards him, at least up until the Dread Barklord Mossbeard was shot with a thermal missile.
They waded forwards through the fields and into villages, the farmers and herders and shepherds and ranchers and jack of all trades and idle boys and friendly dogs and pompous mayors and plucky farmgirls all fleeing from them on horses, cows, pickup trucks, etc. Fear filled the air with the stink of emptied bowels and filled trousers. At the head of the host he marched, which made for an easy target when they shot the Dread Barklord Mossbeard with a thermal missile.
Six thousand years ago his seed had germinated, a five thousand since he reached his full height. He had seen that there were places in the world that did not live in his shade; he had learned that there was life that did not wither and die for want of sunlight, and he had been disgusted by those things and yearned to teach them proper behaviour before his feet. So he had uprooted them, and made strides with them, and terrorized so many and many more for millennia before they shot the Dread Barklord Mossbeard with a thermal missile.
No rivers could halt him, no mountains could stall him, even the oceans were forded over on rafts made of their fallen brethren’s wooden bones. Fire did not daunt them, slings and arrows could not harm them, axes were toys to them, and in the end all that could be done was to die. Up until they shot the Dread Barklord Mossbeard with a thermal missile.
Twelve crusades he led of the green and growing against the red wet flesh. Eleven thunderous victories, halted only temporarily. And on the twelfth he was poised for his largest yet, up until they shot the Dread Barklord Mossbeard with a thermal missile.

So they shot the Dread Barklord Mossbeard with a thermal missile. And boy howdy did he burn.

*

The evil tower crumpled, the evil magic was broken, and the evil king’s evil soul let out an evil shriek as it passed its way into the shadows of oblivion.
And oh, and oh, and oh how all the land did cheer, and none harder than the good little folk, who had led the way with their bustling fortitude.
So they all went home, and they feasted long into the night.
To goodness!
To littleness!
To knowing your proper place!
And to victory!
TO VICTORY! Forever!

Far far away in the evil remnants of the evil kingdom’s evil mountain of evil doom, an evil egg hatched in an evil nest’s evil rubble.
It disgorged one evil dragon, who was also extremely adorable in an evil way.

On and on the feasts marched. The land bloomed, the fields flourished, the sky was peerless blue with gorgeous fluffy white clouds broken only by brief and warm rains that invigorated the soul and heartened the crops and nourished the spirit. Every day the produce was heaped high and brought to the tables for the feast that would never end, for the victory that would never be overturned, for the heroes who would never be challenged again. The good little folk cheered and banged their tables and quaffed their drinks and feasted until they grew round as balls, round as apples, round as their happy little cheeks and their twinkling little eyes and their good solid little souls. Perfect spheres, unchanging, unbreakable, flawless and forever bobbling in place.

By and large the evil dragon grew up alright amongst the evil wasteland’s evil ruins. There was still plenty of lingering evil carrion from the last stand of the evil armies against the many and goody peoples, and so it managed to stay if not well-fed, then just fed. It grew serpentine, then sinuous, and finally scaled and rather majestic.

In the land of the good little folk the happiness only grew. Every day the sun shone harder, every day the plates grew fuller, every day their delight burst more rhapsodically. Farmers wept in joy as they tilled their fields; servants beamed at their master’s boots as if they were their own children; gentlemen of leisure smoked their pipes as if they were embracing their wives in passionate lust. And every day and every night and every hour the feasts grew and spread. Fresh tables were thrown down on new ground; new plates were brought out; young children were weaned off milk as fast as possible so they too could laugh and cheer and consume, for the victory that would never end.

The evil dragon’s eyes were perhaps its most evil feature – abnormal in their intensity and their acuity, which of course was quite evil. And one particularly evil day of evil-looking weather – dark, evil clouds with evil, foul-smelling rain, which left the evil dragon a little miserable – it was staring down the sides of its evil mountain looking for something to do when it saw a faint glimmer on the horizon.
“Huh,” it said. “Well now.”
And it spread its evil wings and left to investigate.

The one thing that had shrunk about the good little folk’s feast had been the dancing, which had grown impossible as the good little folk became less little and more spherical. Instead they rocked in place at their tables, at their plates, at the world in general, eyes shut and mouths open in purest bliss. Oh the joy! Oh the glee! Oh the humanity and the terror and the shock when right in the middle of their biggest fireworks celebration yet one of the fireworks came to earth and revealed itself NOT to be a riot of colours and sparks but a glistening, awful thing of scales and teeth and flame and maw and death and smoke and horror and gloom and piercing, EVIL eyes.
“Hello,” said the evil dragon. “What is all this about?”

Never, ever, ever had there been such a calamity and a fear, and never again would there be. The good little folk had known final and ultimate victory, and what could be more fearsome following that than any trace of triumph made undone? They gibbered, they cried, they screamed, and they fled.
But perhaps it had been too long, and too many years of feasting. For the good little folk’s legs, you see, were somewhat littler than the rest of them, and their bodies more spherical. So they rolled rather than ran, and in that tumbling, stumbling, fumbling chaos, every single one of them rolled downhill and into the river, where they floated out to and across the sea to Other, Faraway Places.

The evil dragon was left very alone and very puzzled, but it soon cheered up. The good little folk had left their feasts behind, and it hadn’t had a good meal in forever.

The hallway smelled like mouldering dampness and decaying deposits. The apartment’s door smelled like all that plus wet marsupial fur.
Knock knock knock thump bump knock knock.
The door opened a crack.
“Hey. It’s me.”
A soft growl came from the apartment, like a puppy crossed with a cat.
“I brought some Kleenex like you asked.”
Another growl, lilting upwards, and the door opened a little wider.
“Oh c’mon, just take it. It’s not catching by now.”
Some of the sounds were very pointed.
“’Symptomatic.’ God, listen to yourself. Fancy-pants. Fine. Take your stupid tissues and let me go, I’ve got shit to do.”
Growl?
“Yeah, I’m probably going to fail the course. Which probably means I’ll lose the scholarship. Which probably means aw fuckit I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. Whichever. See you ‘round, ‘kay? Keep us posted.”
Tina shook her head as she walked down the staircase. She hadn’t seen Dean look that tired in years. But then again, it was a pretty bad case of the platypus.

*

“Let me in.”
The sound that came through was ambiguous and inarticulate but distinctly a denial.
“You know I’m immune, dumbass – my best friend caught the platypus in third grade and I didn’t so much as get fuzzy off’ve it. Let me in.”
The door opened a crack and a suspicious and profoundly beady little eye poked through.
“Let me in, damnit. I got you eats. Homecooked.”
The door swung wider, slowly, and Jill jumped through with the powerful striking instinct of a bored housecat.
“Ta-dah!” she said.
Dean harrumphed at her. He was smaller and furrier than she’d last seen him and had developed a sort of bill, but that was to be expected.
“Yeah, yeah, quit your bitching. Like we’d leave you to starve to death on your own cooking. Chicken soup with enough heat in it to boil off your tastebuds: family cure for distracting you from whatever ails ya.”
Dean clopped his bill at her.
“WHAT?! When the HELL did you become a vegetarian?!”
Gurgling noises.
“Oh that isn’t funny. That isn’t funny at all. Stop-stop, ahaha, stop laughing. You prick! You know, I honestly believed you.”
Trilling sounds.
Jill dropped the resealed margarine container on the kitchen counter. “Yeah, yeah. You know, if it really IS easier to bluff through a bill, that’s one upside of the whole mess. Any silver lining in a stormcloud, right?”
Flat growl.
“Well, yeah, guess it’s more like bronze. I’d settle for copper, myself.”
Inquisitive grunts?
“Oh, the shop’s going down the tubes. Barely made rent last month, probably’ll start autocannibalism this month, and after that, well. I mean, we’ll see what happens, won’t we?”
Yeah.
“Yeah. Look, I’ve got to go try to pretend I’m earning a living. Don’t be a stranger, right?”
Dean waved a distinctly flippery hand in acknowledgement and showed her out.
He didn’t look great, really. But it could always be worse.

*

Knoc.

noc.

no-
“Oh gosh hi I’m sorry to make so much noise oh no were you sleeping I’m so so sorry augh I fucked up I fucked up I fucked up never mind I’ll just leave wait can I at least leave this with you by way of apology oh no I’m making this all about me oh no no no no no no.”
Dean raised a single webbed digit to David’s mouth. It was possible he also raised an eyebrow, but it was hard to tell any given patch of fur apart on his skull.
“Oh. Right. Sorry. Look, I’ve brought you some more Tylenol. It’s the kids brand but I think if you take like half again the dose it’ll be fine? Sorry, it was all they had left. Sorry. I shouldn’t have bought it. Sorry.”
Dean took the little bottle and put it on the kitchen counter, then took three of the pills out and ate them.
“Hope they don’t taste too lousy – chewables, and all they had was grape. God I hate grape. Nothing worse than artificial grape.”
Dean nodded.
“Are you doing okay? You look okay. Well, shorter. Furrier. Billier. More like a platypus. But okay. For a platypus.”
Dean made a series of short sneezes.
“Aww, shoot. Don’t worry they’ll kick in soon. I think. Listen, aw I feel terrible asking this but before I forget do you have Jessie’s phone number at all I really need her phone number and I lost it when my battery died.”
Agreement and inquisitive snorting.
“It’s Josh. He came out and uhh had to leave home and he’s sort of staying on our couch but it’s not a big couch and we don’t have a big apartment and we figured after she helped out with-”
Dean scribbled down some platypus scrawls on the back of a pizza receipt and passed them over.
“Thanks. Really, thanks so much. Sorry to bother you like this. Thank you, and uh, I’ll see you later if we can possibly help more don’t hesitate to ask if it’s not a problem for”
Dean very gently pushed David out the door and closed it as politely as possible.
“Um,” said David to the door. “Um. Um um um. Bye? Bye. See you later. Get well soon.”
Well. That had gone pretty good.
Dean looked way better than he’d expected.

*

Click.
“Hey coming in hope you’re not naked ahahahahahahhahahaooooh man. Well, guess it doesn’t matter, huh?”
Dean glared from a vantage point of four inches off the floor.
“I mean, I’ve seen it before in any case, but uh. Not like this. Hahahah. Wow. You’ve really got it bad, huh?”
Dean bit Holly on the shoe. Unfortunately, they were sandals.
“Ah! Jesus! Mind the…do you have teeth? Ridges? Shit, that stings.”
Unapologetic growling.
“Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine. Fuck. Good thing I’m not bleeding or you might miss out on the very special thing I’m delivering.”
Cautiously wary gurgle.
“Ta-daaah! Found a two-for-one coupon in my neighbour’s mailbox! Two shitty pizzas – pepperoni only – and you get one! Now siddown and enjoy some grease-cheese.”
Dean clopped his bill at her.
“You? Likely story; if you couldn’t eat shitty tuna melts once a month you’d go blind. Who the hell’d believe that?”
Growl.
“Oh yeah Jill would absolutely. Now eat it before it solidifies.”
Trilling sounds.
“Sure, sure. I’ll stick around for a while. Not like I’m missing out on anything tonight – just got fired. I mean, I still have the table gig and the weekend cashier work, but that’s what, three-quarters of next week’s bills paid?”
Commiserative growling.
“Well, something might come up. Y’think they need another body to deep-fry pizzas?”
Snort.
“Yeah. Don’t think so.”

One and a half shitty pizzas later Holly left with a better mood and a fuller stomach and a vague sense that she’d done the right thing leaving Dean two years ago. He was a nice guy but he had the dumbest sense of humour, and he had no appreciation for junk food.
Seemed to be doing better than he had last time she’d seen him, though.

*

On Wednesday, the door to the apartment opened and Dean emerged into the slightly broken lights of the hallway, blinking tiny eyes. Sensitive electroreceptors in his bill muttered in the drafty air, and his adorable little furry tail wobbled as he slid clumsily down the staircase and out the door into the rush and yell of the city.
Well. First things first he’d have to go beg extra shifts. After that many sick days in a row he was running on empty, and
HONK HONK THUNK HOOOOONK
Dean didn’t fly quite like a rag doll; it was more like a football. He smashed into something hard and something firm and then something that was someone’s lap. If only the lap had been less bony, then maybe there wouldn’t be a terrible grinding sensation in his hip.
“CRUD!”
“Jesus!”
“You got the plates?”
“I got the plates!”
“Hey buddy, you okay? You okay?”
Dean was too busy making various distressed noises to reply, which was its own kind of answer.
Someone had opened up his wallet. “Aw fuck. He’s got no insurance.”

Well. It wasn’t the worst week of his life yet.

An impulse buy, that’s all it was. Rule number one in the almost-antique-or-at-least-collectible business is to follow your brains, not your gut (that gets you into trouble), but rule number two is to at least give it the occasional consult.
Old lady Crane had gone off to heaven, leaving behind grieving children, confused lawyers, and finally one hell of a garage sale.
And I got first dibs. Woke up bright and early, and brought the whole truck with me as I swept from table to table to table.
Books. Sure.
Knick knacks. Why not.
A whole tea set, almost matched. Definitely.
And then I was eye to mouth with something and reeled back, snorting.
“Shoo!”
The cat blinked at me, sneezed twice, and dropped away to find a better napping spot.
The mouth stayed behind. Good lord, what was this thing doing in here?
“Oh god, she kept that thing,” groaned Teddy Crane. Sweat was beading on his receding hairline; casualties of an unseasonably warm autumn morning.
“You familiar?”
“How could I not be? The kids loved it, but that was years ago. Amazed it isn’t a rat’s-nest by now.”
I looked at it.
Where in the hell’s name had old Linda Crane picked up a ten—foot T. rex statue?
Well, I mean, beyond the obvious answer of ‘pre-80s’. The posture was all wrong: bolt-upright, tail-dragging, pot-bellied. And it had been no expert work even by the standards of the day – the jaw was loose; the legs were too fat and too scrawny all at once; the feet were lumpen clubs that looked like they’d been planted drumstick-side-down. .
“You want it?”
I looked at it again. Even the eyes were amateurish; no eyeballs here, just smeared paint over empty sockets: a swatch of yellow and a quick swipe of slit-pupiled black. A teenager would’ve done a better job.
“Sure,” I said. “Why the hell not. It’s a lot more noticeable than the sign.”

I got enough rubbernecking on the highway just carting the thing back, which told me my gut had given me a proper nod for once. Not bad for a Thursday.
Finding the proper place for it was a bit harder. Right beside the sandwich board overshadowed it a bit; the parking lot was for customers not statuary; and the roof… well. Even if I had the time and energy to do that, there was no way I’d be comfortable with the amount of guywires needed to keep it happy in a fall gale. To say nothing of the fun it could offer if it filled with ice in the winter – I’d already had to deal with the roof once this decade, thank you.
But well. There was the old hitching post I’d kept around, wasn’t there? And I had some theatrically raggedy old ropes that weren’t much use, and that was how it ended up. Just outside the door, mouth open, tied neatly in place. Looking for all the world like it wanted to take a drink of water out of the flowerbed trough.
And still visible from the road!

Esther Alder’s Antiques and Collectibles. Now sponsored by ‘70s paleontological paraphernalia. You never know what a lucky break looks like until it happens, do you?

*

The kids loved it.
The adults were bemused by it.
The teenagers didn’t care about it but teenagers didn’t care about anything and didn’t have any money so who cared what the hell they thought? Besides other teenagers.
The important thing was that it brought eyes, and eyes were usually attached to wallets, and sometimes those wallets were agreeable to being lightened by taking something off my hands – a stack of dusty old comics; a tattered paperback about rippling thews and so on; a hideous lamp; a tuckered-out table.
More money, less junk. A win-win, but hey if other people were crazy who was I to tell them?
About the only person that wasn’t happy was the dog. Senile old bitch walked around like she’d had a tazer up her far end for a week, the shock of something new was that crippling to her. No amount of pissing on it seemed to satisfy her hostility, and every morning I got to wake up to a morning solo aria as the idiot remembered that the ugly thing still existed.
“Shut up,” I informed her, hiding under the biggest pillow. “Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.”
It never worked.

*

“That’s not a real dinosaur.”
I frowned at the kid as her dad fussed with his wallet. “Looks real to me.”
“They don’t look like that. It’s fake.”
“’Course it’s fake. Real dinosaurs are dead.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Yeah. You know Jurassic Park was fiction, right?”
The kid rolled her eyes in the deeply obnoxious way that only someone who knew they couldn’t be punched would use. “Birds are dinosaurs. Real dinosaurs are alive.”
“Yeah, but they’re boring.”
The kid’s eyes narrowed, but around then the dad grunted in triumph and the purchasing of an old anvil saved me from more lecturing.
Little smart-ass. What did kids know anyways? As if it being real was the point.

That weekend the dog went missing. Well, less money on kibble, and she was a bit past the best-by date anyhow. And whatever coyote, wolf, or cougar that had surprised her had saved me the effort of digging a pit out back, too.
Amazing the sort of luck the world can go out of its way to hand to you.

*

“I don’t like it,” said the register monkey. She was fidgeting at the till again; damned kid couldn’t sit still. With that sort of instinct you’d think she’d be better at making change, but no.
I sighed. “Well, too bad. It brings people in, you don’t. Just thank your lucky stars or whatever that you aren’t competing for the same job.”
“It’s creepy. Its eyes like, almost follow you. Around. You know?”
“No, I don’t, and also: no, they can’t. They’re little splotchy smears in empty pits, that’s impossible.”
“Whatever. It’s creepy. And it’s not even a real dinosaur. Real dinosaurs have feathers.”
“No they don’t.”
“Yeah they do. They found them out in China or something.”
I restrained the urge to reach out and flick the register monkey directly in her nose – you never knew what part of the province’s labour laws she’d memorized – and contented myself with rolling my eyes. “Whatever. It’s not about the scientific accuracy. And if you care about that sort of thing, we’ve got five tons of paperbacks from the ‘50s in the showroom you can annotate that think that Pluto’s a planet, cavemen and dinosaurs co-existed, plate tectonics doesn’t exist, Venus is a jungle, and man-with-a-penis is the center of the universe.”
“Really?”
“No, you dumbass. It’d spoil the resale value.”

The register monkey flaked out on me that very night. I came in the next morning; the whole building was shut down about as competently as she ever did it – the lights were on, the register was short five bucks, the doors were (mostly) locked – but her rickety car was still in the side lot and she didn’t show up for work again.
I sold the car. I mean, why wouldn’t you?

*

“Where the hell did THAT come from?” asked Brian.
“Old lady Crane.”
“Where’d she get it?”
“Didn’t ask, she wasn’t in much shape to answer.”
“Fair, fair.” He squinted out the window at it through those ancient Harry Potter glasses of his, little eyeballs lost in giant lenses. “Gad that thing’s been beaten with an ugly stick. When was it made, the ‘40s?”
“Could be the ‘40s, could be the ‘50s, could be the ‘60s, could’ve been six months ago. It’s a sign, not a statement.”
“Every sign’s a statement,” he said peevishly. “This one says ‘help me help me my knowledge of biology is fifty years out of date.’ Might as well put up a big sign saying ‘COLDS ARE CURED BY CHICKEN SOUP’ or ‘ACADEMIC STUDY INDUCES HYSTERIA IN WOMEN’ or something.”
“Little bit of a difference there, Brian. For one thing, nobody cares.”
“I care.”
“Nobody worth mentioning.”
He punched me in the shoulder, I grabbed his skull and noogied it, we drank six more beers and I kicked him out to do shutdown.

When I came outside he was gone, already left to walk home by himself in the dark. The kind of advanced thinking you only got from Brian after six more beers, and it must’ve done him iller than usual because nobody ever saw him again.
Was it the creek? Did he cut through the woods and fall in a ravine? Some careless idiot with a car who removed the evidence? Something else?
Shit. What a miserable autumn.

*

November.
God, it was such a November out there. If it had been October the weather would have been merely outrageous; as it was it was just damned depressing. There was an inevitability in the clouds; the comfortable gloom and despair of someone that knew they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
And it was pissing down like a drunk with six catheters.
If I’d known this was going to happen – if the weather report had done its fucking job – I wouldn’t have even opened today. Lost the whole afternoon and now I’d have to stay overnight; the highway was a river right now and my car was short a few paddles.
Not the first overnighter I’d pulled, but it was never fun. The smell fermented in the night, the creaking intensified, the mice ran across your feet, and that was all WITHOUT the pleasure of whatever the hell was going on outside. Maybe it was seven catheters.

I looked at the yard. The rain wasn’t falling; it was pounding. The parking lot looked as if someone was hurling shrapnel down on it and the few puddles deep enough to exist were exploding like raccoons on a highway.
Well, if I hadn’t had potholes before, I did now. Resurfacing time again, yay. A good end to a good summer, and that’s if I could get it in before the frosts started. I didn’t like the idea of trying to rope Hugh into winter work. Miserable bastard complained in a light breeze; a snowstorm would have him whining hard enough to break my windows, and THAT was just straight-up unaffordable.
I looked at the yard. Lightning took snapshots of it for me, carving familiar garbage into unfamiliar and ugly shapes with shadow chisels.
Too much garbage. A shameful thing to say for an antique shop, but it was true. Maybe I’d overreached? No, no. There’d been enough space, there’d been enough time. The customers, they’d failed me. Driven by fickle fancy and the weather, but I repeated myself. Some years you win, some years you lose.
I looked at the yard. Something wasn’t quite right.
Had the wind taken something? I’d chained down the sandwich board years ago after one too many pranks led to one too many replacements, but maybe it’d rusted up or come loose or something. It was hard to see, but maybe if I squinted.
The doorbell rang.

*

My life wasn’t very big, and I knew that, and maybe I wasn’t one-hundred-per-cent happy with it, but I was used to it and the way that I knew every inch of its happenings. I could wake up and from dawn to dusk spend no more thought on anything than someone would on breathing.
So there was absolutely no need for me to stop and think and run down the entire list of everyone who might ever have a reason to ring the doorbell.
Delivery not in this rain; Liz she moved down to Mexico last year; Aunt Edith was in the hospital after that fall; who who who who who.
Ding-dong.
Twice.
Nobody would ring it twice.
I thought about that, or tried to avoid thinking about it. So I looked out the window in-between squalls and….well.
The yard wasn’t quite right.
Everything was there. The gravel parking lot, the ancient old giant sandwich board, the big weather-beaten (bashed after this) flower trough, the hitching post.
There wasn’t anything at the hitching post.
Well.
Well.
Well.

Obviously some kids had made off with it. That was what had happened.
Something crunched against the side of the building.
Tree branch coming down, of course. I hadn’t trimmed well enough around the lot this year.
I was standing very still, but that was just because my explanations weren’t convincing me, which my forebrain told me was completely normal. It was a dark and stormy night and I was nervous, that’s all. Tomorrow morning it would be different. Nothing was frightening in the daylight.
My hindbrain was screaming that maybe that was because things that wanted to eat me liked the dark.
I kept standing very still, and I wondered if this was how nervous breakdowns started. My uncle Bill had been steady as a rock until one day Edith asked him to pass the pepper and he just laid down and started crying. Maybe it ran in the family.
The back door creaked open and I was upstairs in the attic storage.
I couldn’t explain either of those events. I had no idea who was at the back door. I had no idea how I’d gone through two doors and to the top of a rickety, creaky staircase in-between breaths.
I had no idea why my chest was hurting from the inside like there was a little man in there with a mallet, and I had no idea why I knew, just knew, from my marrow-on-out, that I needed to be quiet.
Something was scraping along the floor downstairs, slow and unsteady, moving with jerking and uneven footsteps.
I knew what it was even before I looked. I knew it wouldn’t help if I looked. I knew that any movement right now was a terrible idea.
I leaned down and looked between the floorboards anyways, because the alternative was leaving it to my imagination.
Damnit, I should have trusted my imagination more.

*

The way it moved was the worst thing I’d ever seen. In clumsy jerks and thuds, like a cross between cheap old stop-motion and a cheap old children’s toy. Something cast out of a cheap mould in cheap plastic, disposable and born decaying. Its mouth opened and closed in a parody of breathing, its little arms twitched against its chest with something more than the vibrations of its walk.
Its walk. Gods, its walk. Each foot swayed and meandered in the air, like a drunk man descending a staircase in the dark. And no wonder; its head remained firmly erect, eyes forward, blank little smeared-yellow eyesockets staring dead ahead as it groped its way along.
Forward. Down the hall. To the front windows. Where I’d been standing.
Every single hair on my body was standing erect and my clothing felt like it was made of needles. I felt the suicidal urge to giggle.

Somehow, some delusional thing at the back of my head that kept pretending it was my common sense was yammering at me, telling me that this was crazy. Its claws were chipped and blunted little plastic pegs; its teeth were a single jagged mass with vague serrations carved into them; the whole shebang couldn’t weigh much more than two of me and it was top-heavy; it was nonsense to be afraid of it.
That same idiotic response had also tried to tell me that none of this was going to happen, so I decided on the most fundamental of levels that I was going to entirely ignore my head and would listen to my gut now.
My gut put my knee in the wrong place on the wrong floorboard and I went through the ceiling in a hail of timber dust and exploding joists.

*

I must’ve blacked out for a second – not the lost seconds of my trip to the attic storage, a genuine loss of consciousness – but when I woke up I couldn’t breathe. I flailed my arms and legs a little and fell over and could breathe again and realized that I had been wrapped around the toilet.
And that the footsteps had stopped by the register.
Oh no, there they went again. Getting closer this time.

It was going to get me, it was going to get me just like it got Brian and the register monkey and the dog and damnit, this made no SENSE It wasn’t even a real dinosaur.
Not that I’d be any better off if it was a real dinosaur. Hell, it’d probably have its shit together better and I’d be dead by now. This thing was such a lumbering oaf it was amazing it could
Hmm.
I let my brain chase that inspiration while my gut hauled my entire body together starting with the legs, and I made it out of the bathroom just ahead of the thing. Something lurched behind me and I heard plastic scrape against hair.
Run run run. Where? Somewhere that isn’t here!
Through the show-room vaulting tables chairs knocking over a jam-packed shelf of garbage all to get faster to get to the back door. It was creaking open softly, back and forth. The wind was fast, but it was sturdy and heavy and the handle had been mangled and was dangling there by a little twist of torn metal.
It wasn’t fair. It was cheap. It was so cheap and so incompetent and it was going to kill me.
I let that outrage seep into my muscles, let it burn inside, let it take me out into the pouring rain and around the side of the parking lot – past my car; my keys were in my coat, fat lot of use now – and out onto the wide mud flats of the parking lot, where I made the mistake of looking over my shoulder.
There it was, big as daylight and twice as horrifying in the dark, all its imperfections slickly stroked away by the rainfall and the gloom and the gale. I couldn’t even see the fakeness of its teeth.
It was stupid. I was going to die. I was going to die in the dumbest possible way to the dumbest possible thing unless it really WAS the dumbest possible thing and then maybe I had a chance and maybe I could do it if I ran just a little farther, just a little faster.
Thud, thud, thump, shuffle, splash.
I reached the hitching post, I spun again, and this time I saw what I’d hoped – a cant, a list, a lopsided lean, a foot embedded in a pothole that was more of a pit – and I was so filled with hope and prayer that I almost forgot to throw the hitching rope at it.
It’d been years since I played cowboy, but I was pretty proud of my aim, and it wasn’t as if it was a small target. Over its head, around that thick lizard neck, yanked tight-slick-fast in the rain, rope screaming over rough, wet plastic, and then I yanked.
If it’d been on flat ground, it might not have worked.
If it’d been on dry ground, it might not have worked.
If I’d been just a hair less panicked and desperate and furious at the idiocy of this entire problem, it definitely wouldn’t have worked.
But as it was I was so damned scared and angry I yanked the thing over on its rough-cast snout, and the splash it kicked up soaked me to the core with triumph.
Three times I spun in a circle, laughing in the rain. Three times I yelled up at the storm, not even using syllables. And three times I kicked that stupid, writhing, twitching mess as it mired itself in the liquid gravel, tiny useless arms thrashing and rigid legs hopelessly unable to bend.
It made an upturned turtle look like an Olympic gymnast.
Still, I tied a few more ropes, just to be safe. Then I went inside and got more and tied them too.
Then I got the handsaw. Chainsaw’d be nicer, but it was a bit wet for that, so I’d just take off the feet. I had to leave something to do in the morning anyways.
Not that I knew tomorrow’s weather report. But hell, you never know what a lucky break’ll look like, do you?