jamieproctor.ca

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.

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.”