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Jordan brought the weed.
I brought the rum.
Steve brought something in an unlabeled bottle he swore must be vodka.
And Mark brought us down Mill street and through seven sticker bushes and down a hill made of sharp rocks and onto a twenty-foot scrap of almost-sand with a rotting-ass shack in it that looked like it had been put up by thumbless drunks and smelled like it too.
“Gross,” said Steve.
“Sick,” said Jordan. “What, you never wanted to get wasted on beachfront property? What’re you, a peasant?”
And it was true, the Atlantic was right there – made a little smaller and safer by the rocks. Hidden, too; nobody was seeing this place from the water. I made a fire – well, I piled up a fire, then it wouldn’t light so after the fourth miserable little puff of dead smoke I gave up.
“Hell with it,” I said. “Breeze wouldn’t let it work anyways.”
“Breeze is cutting my ass apart,” said Jordan. “Mark, you sure this is a building? I’ve seen nets with fewer holes.”
“I know one way to get warm.”
“No matter how drunk I get, you aren’t good-looking enough.”
“Nah. Hey, Rob, pass that rum.”
“Pass yours first.”
“Fine.”
Slosh, slosh, slosh, clink, chug.
“Eww!” said Mark. “Straight outta the bottle?”
“It’s a disinfectant,” said Steve.
“I don’t want to catch dumbass.”
“You’ve had it since birth.”
I spat out my mouthful.
“Hey! Don’t waste it!”
“Nothing to waste – the hell is this?”
“Vodka.”
“Vodka? It’s got no flavour.”
“Vodka has no flavour, dumbass.”
“I know, but it’s got no kick!”
“That’s because it’s working. It sneaks in.”
“No it doesn’t.”
“Yes it does.”
Jordan grabbed the bottle out of my hand and swallowed a quarter of it.
“Jesus, careful!”
“Nah.”

And so the circle began. Take a pull, pass it on, vocally suspect Steve’s claims and my taste-
“It’s the same one my mom buys!”
“Your mom’s taste then.”
-and then pass it on. We got into a rhythm and it started to feel good, or at least normal.

“How’d you find this place anyways?” I asked Mark.
“Fell down a hill.”
“How’d you fall down a hill?”
“Steve’s brother and his friends picked me up and threw me into a bush.”
I whacked Steve on the head.
“Hey, I didn’t do anything you prick!”
“Yeah. Pass it on to your brother for me.”
“Fuck that! He’ll throw me into a bush.”
“Worked out for Mark.”

The bottles made a circle again.
“Heyy, Jordan. When you gonna share?”
“Not until I get more booze in me. You have no idea how hard it is to hand this out to you assholes. Know what I had to pay my sister for this?”
“No?”
“It wasn’t anything,” Steve said, “because you stole it from her sock drawer while she was at work.”
Jordan leaned over and smacked him on the cheek.
“OW!”
“Sorry. I’m almost drunk enough to share, and I’m getting all reckless. Can’t control my own strength and shit.”
“Bullshit.”
“Can’t hear you. Too drunk.”

The bottles made a circle again.
“It’s not so bad. This is vodka?”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, maybe.”
“Ech. Whatever this was, it’s more water than drink.”
“Says who?”
“I did. Better find the man who sold you this and take off a thumb, because you been robbed six ways to Sundays and back again.”
I looked to my left. Someone had squeezed his way between me and Steve without noticing – he was crazy-thin, which explained a little.
“Uh. This your shack?”
“No, but no one’s said otherwise for a long time.” Oh Christ he was a gargler. Sounded like half his teeth had been pulled out and put back in the wrong order. “Been a decent place for me and the boys to lie low.”
“Oh. Sorry. Should we… go?”
The new guy turned to face me, and maybe the rum and…maybe-vodka was kicking in, because he had the most sunken eyes I’d ever seen on anyone who could still talk. “You got another bottle?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s in it?”
“Rum.”
“Deal us in and you got the place for the night.”
I tried to think this over with whatever brain cells I still had at 100%. Potentially offend a strange man living in a shack, or invite him and his shack buddies in and risk offending them later?
“Sure,” said Steve.
“Fuck,” I said.
“Booze’s up, boys!” said the new guy.
And then his buddies pulled themselves up out of the dirt to join us.
Jordan had been sitting on the biggest one’s head. Neither of them were thrilled about that.

His name was Jack Witless. The others were Big Louis and Half-Shin Terry and Chop.
Chop had one arm and Big Louis was about six five; the rest were less obvious. Mind you, it was hard to tell them apart in the first place, on account of all of them being skeletons held together with glowing…stuff.
“Ectoplasm,” said Mark.
“Jelly,” said Half-Shin Terry.
“I sure as shit wouldn’t put it on toast,” said Jordan.
“Quit hogging the bottle,” said Chop.
Jordan threw it to her and she caught it with her missing arm.
“Shit!”
“Three hundred and sixteen years and you still haven’t figured that out,” said Jack Witless.
“It was my good arm!”
“WAS. Get over it.”
“You cut it off!”
“It was your arm or your life, you whinger. And I don’t recall any complaints at the time.”
“You’d shoved two bottles of rum down my throat!”
“And never got any thanks for that neither.”
“Quit hogging the bottle,” said Jordan.
Chop threw it to her with her missing arm, starting a quiet but angry wrestling match until Big Louis took it.

“So,” said Steve. “You guys were like…pirates?”
“Yup,” said Half-Shin Terry. He’d pulled a pipe the size of a baby’s arm out of his rags and was trying to light it with…something.
“Woah. What was that like?”
“Boring.”
“Woa – oh, yeah?”
“Ever sailed?”
“My grandpa has a boat.”
“Don’t inherit it. Dullest profession on earth. Winds and braces and mainsails are one-tenth of it and the rest is weevils.”
“What’s a weevil?”
“Good lad. Stay ignorant.”
I gave him my lighter.
“What’s this?”
“Click the top.”
He clicked the top.
“Well. Thanks.”
“No problem.”

And to think I’d been worried we’d brought too much. Lucky our landlords were light sippers – well, sort of. They TRIED to chug, but the muscles didn’t seem to want to cooperate. Or exist.
Mind you, some of them still did. Big Louis arm wrestled everyone one after another and then all at the same time. He won all of them, which wouldn’t have been so bad except the winner had to take a drink each time and by the end our rum was down to half the bottle and he was laid out flat on his back which meant half the shack was full of dead ghost pirate man.
“Budge up, you bastard,” said Chop, kicking him fruitlessly.
“That’s your missing arm,” said Jordan.
“Wha’?”
“You’re kicking him with your missing arm.”
“Aw fuckoff,” said Chop. Then she switched to her missing arm and didn’t catch on until Jordan almost threw up laughing.

The fifth time the bottles made a full circuit Mark started doing his stupid pirate voice impression. Good thing he was a mumbler and they didn’t seem to understand what a pirate voice sounded like, otherwise that might’ve started some shit. Chop was still sore over the arm thing.
Everyone else was having a good time though. Especially Steve, who was sitting close enough to Half-Shin Terry to get a good second draft of whatever-it-was he had in his pipe. And Mark, who didn’t seem to realize how close he’d probably come to getting shanked by dead pirates. And me and Jack Witless who’d decided to finish Steve’s maybe-vodka all at once between us to see if it actually did anything or was just pure water.
“S’garbage.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. Y’know. Thans.”
“Yeah.”
“Yur a goo’ lad, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Been a goo’night.”
“Yeah.”
“Lissen…hate to ask, but need a favor.”
“Yeah.”
“C’n you….clean up? Tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
“Thans. Y’know what?”
“Yeah.”
“Yur a goo’ lad.”
“Yeah,” I said. Then I threw up in my mouth, but just a little.

Things got pretty good after that, I think. Some laughing, some swearing, I think someone started making out and I’m PRETTY sure I didn’t imagine Mark using Big Louis’s ribcage as a xylophone. But it was harder to remember stuff after Half-Shin Terry gave me a toke of that whatever-it-was he had in his pipe which must’ve been pretty good because when Steve shook me awake I was wearing someone else’s pants.
“No,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Steve. “Morning. C’mon, we gotta hurry up.”
“No,” I said. The wall I wasn’t looking at was comfy. My face fit right into it.
“Yeeeaah. C’mon, we need help.”
“Aww. S’just. Bottles.”
“No it ISN’T. C’mon!”
I was rolled over and opened one eye in protest and was eye to eye socket with someone. I think it might’ve been Big Louis; whoever it was had nice solid brow ridges.
“Oh,” I said.
“Yeeeeaaaah.”

It took us four hours to bury all those dead pirates, and man my parents were pissed when they caught me sneaking back into my room smelling of three-hundred-year-old dank and corpses.
But y’know, what’s a grounding compared to a life experience? And let me tell you, that was one hell of an experience. Valuable and educational – Jordan says she’s got her career figured out now. I told her I thought the pirate market in Somalia is pretty saturated but she says naw they won’t be expecting it in New England this time of century, so she figures she’ll have a few months of easy money before she heads for college.
And hey, everyone needs a first mate, right?

A twitch of an eyelid. A too-casual picking of a very specific tooth. A curl of a lip.
They were very good, very good, as good as anyone could be.
But Charity had her good eye on them, so she saw through it right away.
Player One, the fat long one, he tossed a pair of hips.
Player Two, the sleek big round one, he pulled a set of phalanges, and made a snort of discomfort.
Player Three, the one with the smile he couldn’t quite hide, he tossed down a complete cranium with half-ribs, and he let his face fly its flag high. And why shouldn’t he? He’d won, and his friends (who were VERY good at hiding it) would split the pot with him later.
Now if Charity were ten years younger and in a forgiving mood, she would’ve smiled happily, rolled her bones, and sharked them so flawlessly they wouldn’t realize they’d lost their legs right out from under their pants until they stood up to piss the next morning.
If she were twenty years younger and in an unforgiving mood, she would’ve called them all cheats, flipped the table, and killed them with her bare hands.
But she was twenty years older now, and so instead she took the pieces, gave them a fumbling toss, and casually let an entire set’s-worth of bones slide out from her right sleeve into the middle of the table in front of everyone.
“Full cadaver and uh…. Some other pieces,” she said into an extremely loud silence. “Calling it.”
Their eyes got even louder.
“Oh. I thought this is what we were doing now. Was I wrong?”
Someone somewhere sucked on their teeth.
“Drop it and call it quits?”
There weren’t any tells at all for what they did next, which told her they were even more used to it than cheating at bones. Out came the guns; small, well-worn things that didn’t shine or glisten but sure as hell smirked with the straightforward gumption of machines that killed things.
But Charity had closed her good eye, which meant her bad eye was out. So things didn’t go their way.

Their pockets were full, at least. Even after she paid back the bar for damages she was up on expenses for a few days if she was frugal and the rest of the night if she was bored.
And she was so very, very, very, very bored.

***

When Charity woke up there was the morning sun in her eyes and there was a cold wind blowing over her face and there was a sleeping bag half-unwrapped around her thigh and there was a snake on her boot.
It was a very beautiful creature. Longer than her leg and thicker than her arm, with eyes like jewels and a rattle like a drum and probably enough venom to sock out an elephant, not that it’d ever need to.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” said the snake.
“Hope I didn’t kick you.”
“Nah, you’re a heavy sleeper.”
“You’re telling me. Time was I’d have heard you coming.”
“I’m pretty quiet.”
“I used to have pretty good ears.”
“What happened?”
“Now I snore.”
“Huh.”
Charity really wanted to stretch.
“Sun’s getting high,” commented the snake.
“You’re telling me. Shoot, can’t believe it’s already this late. I haven’t slept in this hard in years.”
“What brought it on?”
“Hangover.”
“And the time before this?”
“Oh, I was going to have to shoot someone at noon in the middle of town.”
“Stayed up all night worrying?”
“Stayed up all night wiring the street to blow.”
The snake snickered. It was not an attractive sound, but it WAS interesting.
“Dumb move, really. How was I supposed to know he’d stand on the other side of the street?”
“What’d you do?”
“Shot him on count of two and ran for it.”
“Some’d call that cowardly.”
“Waiting ‘till ‘two’ instead of ‘one’ was a damned brave thing considering how short I lit that fuse. At ‘one’ I’d be missing more than all the hair on my back.”
“Hair,” said the snake, shuddering in an eloquent and ripply sort of way.
“Not a fan?”
“It’s indigestible and execrable and generally lousy. Blech. Less of it you have the better off you are, trust you me.”
“I’d be awful cold without it.”
“Bask more.”
“Well, I’ll try. Reckon you could move off my boot so I could stretch out some?”
“No,” said the snake, and its rattle twitched somewhere uncharitable between comfort and annoyance, tickling against her knee. “I got here first.”
“Fair. Mind you, that doesn’t always work.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. A while back – a WAY while back – I found a lode out east of Sqobbish.”
“What kind?”
“Pure.”
“How pure?”
“PURE pure. You could scratch it with your little finger and your nail would glitter like a mirror for a month. And it ran deep. Good deep. Finders keepers, right?”
“Seems so.”
“Right, except the one person I trusted with it trusted it to his drink, and he wasn’t so good at whispering. So by the time I got back out there –”
“-You had company?”
“About fifty of ‘em. Lucky enough I took so long to get back they had time to start arguing without me.”
“Hah. What happened to the lode?”
“Who said anything happened to it?”
“These aren’t a rich woman’s boots.”
“You ever seen a rich woman’s boots?”
“Nah, but I heard of ‘em. These aren’t snakeskin.”
The pause was so pregnant its water almost broke.
“Right. Well, uh. I brought explosives with me. Just in case. Y’know. For mining.”
“Yes.”
“And I may have gotten carried away with cleaning up my self-defense, and well. Blew half the mountain down. Biggest landslide I ever saw; would’ve had to mine out the whole lode just to pay for the cost of digging it up again.”
“Easy come, easy go.”
“A good philosophy for an ambush predator.”
“Or a congenital fuckup.”
Charity laughed at that one. Not a fully-belly, mind you. She didn’t want to jostle her leg. “Hey. I’m not the worst, you know?”
“You’re asleep in a ditch at midday with a rattlesnake on your boot and you haven’t had a real conversation in years.”
“Well. I mean. I’ve never really been the partnering kind.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I value my independence.”
“Yep.”
“Stop making noises at me like I’m talking horseshit.”
“Wouldn’t dream it.”
The sigh hurt her ribs and made the back of her head bluster at her. “Awright, fine. Look, there was this guy. And we didn’t plan it – just a one-bar team-up, then a one-town scam, then a two-person job, then… well, then it had been five years.”
“Times fly when you’re having fun.”
“Yeah. Yeah they do. And of course, a lot of it we were drunk.”
“Well, that helps too.”
“No foolin’. But then we stayed one day too long in this town – this little dusty dried fly-bitten corpse of a fly’s taint of a town, damnit, don’t know why we even rode in – and the morning we headed out we run into a whole band of, well, bandits. Banditing, or at least extorting. And since we were still technically ‘in town’ that day, we got to be part of the protection tax.”
“He objected?”
“I don’t travel with idiots. We groveled and paid up. Then they went into town, cased everyone –”
“He objected?”
“-now WHAT did I just tell you? Anyways, we followed them out of town, waited until they finished drinking the bar’s payment, shanked the sentries, let loose the horses, and took off with their loot.”
“Sounds fine to me.”
“Well, it was. But well. We were a little keyed up, and he stopped to take a piss without telling me, and when that horse came galloping up without so much as a by-your-leave, I kind of. Well.”
“You shot him?”
“Yeah, but it missed. Boy we laughed.”
“Wow. Lucky.”
“Yeah. But the guy following us heard it and well, he didn’t. Hell of a day for highs and lows.”
Someone cleared their throat.
“’Scuse you?”
“My neck doesn’t work that way.”
“Up here.”
Charity rotated her head a tenth of a degree and squinted harder. A powerful moustache blotted out the sunlight. Behind it was an unfriendly and prominent set of teeth, and behind THEM were a couple of distant twerps.
“Oh. How long you been there?”
“Long enough. My boy Tenner here says you put a shot through his friends.”
Charity turned her good eye on the distant twerps. Ah yes, one of them was about two-thirds of a twerp. That fitted the state she’d last seen Player Three in. His smile wasn’t there anymore, making him look awful drab and small. “Well, they were cheats.”
“Makes you of a kind, what else he told.”
“Yeah but I wasn’t a sneak about it.”
“Says the lady laying down with snakes.”
“Leave me out of this,” said the snake.
“First I can’t move my leg for your sake, now you don’t want to share in my troubles? You’re damned fickle, snake.”
“Says the human.”
“Fair play. You sure you won’t pick sides here?”
“No sense in it.”
Charity sagged. “Oh well.”
Well, it was just her and her gun and her good eye – which was closed – and her bad eye.
Which was wide open and ready.
Charity’s boot moved fast but her foot moved faster and they separated soon after, the snake’s fangs snapping an inch shy of her leathery toes before soaring, gloriously soaring, terribly soaring, beautifully soaring into the face of the moustache, which they attached to with violent force.
“AUGH!”
The boot, meanwhile, smashed into the arm of the distant twerp who wasn’t Player Three, throwing his aim afoul into the side of Player Three, who let out two-thirds of a scream before wholly and finally collapsing.
“AUGH!”
By then Charity had time to sit up, and things got over with pretty fast after that.

“Ungrateful jackass,” hissed the snake from atop the moustache’s hat.
“Sorry,” said Charity, halfway through a dead man’s pockets. “But I DID offer nicely the first time.”
“And after all I did for you! See if any serpent in the state shares your bed with you again.”
“Fair enough. Fair enough. I said I wasn’t the partnering kind.”
“You did. And I said not to move, and look what you went and did.”
“Exactly. I break all my promises, or didn’t you notice?”
The snake laughed at that, a little dry chut-chut-chut. “Get going before I start rattling.”

So she did, and she went, and though she never saw a snake in her sleep again she did run into the odd spider.

Ugh. Fall.

Such a meandering, dreadful, suspenseful time of year. Waiting with baited breath for the moment when it’d all start to go wrong, when the winter would peel in and sever summer once and for all, for a while.
The children get hit hardest by it, bless their simple little selfish heads. The least to worry about of us all, but still they groan and grumble at the back-to-school sales – the notebooks, the backpacks, the guywires and tethers. Little idiots don’t realize yet that these are the best days to be alive. All summer to be free and fancy as they please before they have to deal with fall, or rather, others deal with it for them. Ah well, aren’t we all that selfish at heart, just better-hidden? How much of the innocence of children is simple shamelessness?

Fall’s getting closer.

Everyone’s got a checklist, the hard part is getting them done when the right times are obvious. Of COURSE it’s sensible to go early for rakes; that’s why the mall’s a hellish swarm in August. Of COURSE it’s smart to pick up leaf bags at the same time; that’s why they’re all sold out. And of COURSE you make a nice tidy list of everyone to leave emergency contacts with and check in with them in the last week, which is why the phone lines are overflowing with tearful goodbyes and just-in-cases and I-promise-I-love-yous.
Frustrating but understandable. Planned-for-frustrations. The prisoner’s dilemma and everyone makes the same moves at the same time and everything clogs. What’s a seasonal event without a seasonal stress? It adds spice, it’s true. Even if the spice is pure bitter almond.

Fall’s getting closer.

It’s that common purpose, that strange common purpose that arises from shared hardship. Universal yet delicate. It brings friendly nods and casual judgments as you all walk around doing the same chores the same tasks the same plans. “Oh, hello there.” “Hi.” And then in the wake of that, the thoughts.
Hmm, doesn’t look like they’ve shored up the foundations yet. Hmm. Have they really done a good enough job of chopping down the big trees? Wellll…. That’s good enough, I suppose, but is ‘good enough’ the kind of diligence I want in a neighbor, is it what I admire? At least I did MY best, nobody could say otherwise. Could they? Did I? Are they looking at me the way I look at them?
…And other such human neuroses. Social animals, what are you going to do about it? Suffer, but in a friendly way.

Fall’s almost here.

The sirens are ringing on the dawn of the day. The flags fly briefly, then are quickly taken down along with the poles. A celebratory cake is served for good luck and eaten in haste. The gutters are triple-checked – were they cleaned? Will they hold fast? The panic rooms are inspected for the last time – are they padded well enough? Will the ceiling stand the stress?
The last of the pumpkins are harvested; the rest will simply become squash. The corn came in long ago and the farmers have abandoned their fields for the deepest, strongest shelters they can dig into that fertile soil.

Fall’s about to come.

All around the block people are gathering leaves, hanging horseshoes, whispering prayers, hugging loved ones goodbye and tending to wills. Just in case. You can’t be too careful in fall. No amount of preparation is too much, no obsession too stifling. Every hand is needed and every thought is demanded and hurry up hurry up hurry up THE CLOCK IS TICKING.
Lash on that last bit of extra padding. Cross any extra fingers you’ve got. And for god’s sake take a big breath.

Fall’s here.

DOWN come the leaves.
DOWN come the trees.
DOWN come the walls.
And the dam bursts and DOWN go the streams into the earth; DOWN topple the steeples, bells tolling into the dirt; DOWN fall the radio towers, collapsing tidily on prehinged joints; DOWN go the birds, little lead airborne weights aiming for soft spots on a hard world (stack your leaves carefully!); DOWN come the clouds sucked like reverse silly string; DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN and up up up above the town comes the roaring avalanche of an entire mountain range sinking another six inches into continental crust.
Thirty-one seconds of that and then the weight comes off everyone’s chests and they can breathe again.
Take an hour or two to do just that. It’s good to breathe. Soon the winter walls will need to be constructed, but for now? Breathe.

Ugh. Fall.
At least THAT was over.
But really, spring was going to be a nightmare this year.

I watch the cars. Someone has to.
See, that one is an angry car. Look at the angle of its headlights, the set of its grill. Observe the truculent set of its tires and the grudging grumble of its brakes. That car must be owned by a ninny or a nincompoop, the sort to really grind your gears. Oh, poor car.
That one is a happy car. Its antenna is at a jaunty angle; its engine whines with the excitement of a dog with a leash in its mouth. Wind is whistling over its windshield. How pleasant!
I never get tired of this.

***

When I was very little some relative whose name I don’t recall and whose funeral I probably attended gave me a little set of toy cars whose wheels didn’t work and whose roofs were crumbled and whose innards were clotted up with sand from a thousand ancient sandboxes.
They were easily the best thing I’d ever seen in my life, and I cared for them diligently until the dog ate them and died. It was a great shame, but it taught me a valuable lesson: if you must care for cars, you should care for ones that are too big for someone to eat. I have lived by that every day since, and it has served me very, truly, really well.
Every day on my way on the highway I put my knowledge to good use and great pleasure.

***

I watch the cars.
That is a very puzzling car indeed – quite old to be out and about on the road in this heat. Its lights are glassy and shiny, its cab is bunched up in a sort of confused box. There is a powerful sensation of befuddlement and uncertainty about it, but it moves spryly and in good order. A reassuring reminder that even the oldest of us can learn and move and grow! Good going, car! Good show!

***

The key thing about a car, of course, is its reliability. I have known many people and many cars and let me tell you, the people were FAR less reliable creatures, which I put down entirely to locomotion.
Every car I have known has kept all four of its tires in contact with the ground at all times, low-slung and ready to roll.
Every person I have known has tottered about balanced on two wobbly and unsettlingly-jointed legs, and has spent much of their time with only one of them planted on the ground. It is deeply disconcerting and a sure sign of an indecisive and weak-kneed personality.
No, no, no to people, I say. It is the cars for me!
And besides, I can actually read their expressions. Never quite managed that with people. The eyebrows get in the way.

***

I watch the cars.
This car has something to say, and it’s trying so hard to say it that it’s impossible to even say for sure what ‘it’ is.
Its other car is a Mercedes. It is the proud parent of an honour student. There is a little family of stickmen on its rear windshield and a little happy face on its trunk. It encourages you to honk if you love Jesus, cinnamon buns, and dogs, and its bumper boasts the fading names and logos of half a dozen politicians, one half-atop of the other.
I have never seen a more scatterbrained and incoherent vehicle, and I feel a sort of pity at its wild disarrayment. It needs a firm hand in guidance, and I wish that I could provide but alas, my trailer is full of cars and there is no room for one more. I will simply hope for my cargo and my co-traveller here: for them, a life of hope and purpose; for it, a car wash that will remove these unsightly snarls from its mind and body.

***

The big bay stretches out alongside us, and my horizon fills with a dubious material.
Water. Hmm. No land for cars, that’s for sure. But out there prowl the boats, pointy and slow, and I feel my brow furrow in apprehension.
Now, I’m no bigot. I don’t hate boats – god no!
I just don’t quite trust them. I can’t read them. Their faces… they all just look sort of the same to me. Funny old world, right? But I like a vehicle I can look in the face. And I can’t. Not these ones.
Not that I’ve got anything against them of course. I’ve been on a boat – hell, one of my best friends had a boat back in the day. I just like them where I can see them, not where I can drive with them.
But I’ve got no problem with that. As long as they’re in their place.

***

I watch the cars.
This car is huffing and puffing. It’s hauling a little trailer – a tiny mockery of the huge transport trailer at my heels – and its cargo is one (1) boat.
It’s a pretty big boat, I guess. Does that make it a ship? Not sure.
The car’s doing very well for itself under the circumstances. It’s not complaining, it’s not blubbering. Its sun roof is down and its mirrors are flipped and it’s ploughing forward with the determined badger-bulling air of something that can do this all day because it knows it damned well will whether it wants to or not.
I tip my hat as it passes. Good going, car. Good going.

***

I stop for lunch. Gas for my truck, and a burger for me, and an extra burger which I ceremoniously unwrap and place on my truck’s hood for it to contemplate and sacrifice to the gulls above us all.
It may not be able to eat it, but respect is priceless. Without respect you haven’t got anything.
That had been the problem with my family. They hadn’t respected their cars. I had told them so over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and somehow they’d never learned, not even a little. Some of them had even gotten worse.
I’d warned them about rust, and about the proper tires for the proper seasons, and about windshield wiper fluids and wiper blades and windshield cracks and body work and oil changes and all the components of the rainbow, one after another. I’d even made up little rhymes for them to help remember the important parts.
None of it had helped. Disowning them had been the best day of my life. It was as if a great weight had been removed from my trunk.
The burger was gone, the gulls had taken it quickly and decisively and silently, with no squabbling. A good omen.
This was to be a portentous day.

***

I watch the cars.
Oh, there are so many of them now. We’re near a town, we’re near the end of the workday, we’re in the zone and the hour and the time and the place and the space.
See them bustle and chuff and jockey for room! More on the other side of the highway than mine – folks heading home to the exurbs – but that just makes those fleeting glimpses of my fellow-travellers all the more striking.
Ah, this one is fierce, with his bumper tucked high and tight and his blazing-red roof!
Oho, this one is jaunty, with her convertible top down and the breeze in her teeth!
Well now, that’s a little one, but sturdy and fast – electric engine roaring invisibly as he takes up the space of half-a-car. Suffer no mockery for this! Children like this are our future.
And there is…
Oh.
Oh no.

***

The police car is professional, sitting at the side of the road as if this were its own parking space, traffic whizzing by two feet away totally and profoundly ignored. Its staid power is blameless to me.
The tow truck is gentle yet uncaring. Its job is at work here, and so is it. Up you go, up you go. Not even a flicker of uncertainty in its crane, the mechanisms and the engine smooth as butter. Seen this all before.
But the car, oh the car, oh my god the car. The poor little thing is as tremulous and lost as a dove or a busted bicycle. Ah! Ah! How has this happened? Its tire is gone, its windshield is cracked, its bumper is all but gone. Oh god! How has this happened?
And there is a man, a dirty little big man beside it, sweating and bellowing and cursing at the police and the tow truck and the world at large, swearing up a storm no doubt that this was everyone’s fault but his own.
The rust on the car’s body belies otherwise.
Oh. Oh you. This isn’t even the first time you’ve done this, is it? IS it?

Well well well. A portentous day indeed.

The red-hot rage of the truly righteous grips me like a steel gauntlet and my wheel smokes through my hands and the median barrier is a tiny wisp of an obstacle before me and then….
There I go. Flying onwards to justice.

***

I watch the cars. So many expressions!
All of my cars are planes now, sailing through the air, free of the earthly bonds of my trailer! See their hoods flap open in joy and disbelief! Ah, what wonders we live to see.
But my eyes are not for them, they are for the lonely little lost car that corkscrews towards my windshield. It looks surprised to me – its grill a big round O – but I think I see the glitter of hope in its dented headlights.
Have no fear, car! I am coming to hel

Damnit it all. Such a ruckus I could barely hear myself think. All I had to do was apply three layers of paint to my snout but the whispering and scheming and plotting out there was fit to wake the dead and send them over to complain.
It was the Sun-days. These days, it was always the Sun-days. At my age I should be sprawled out wide in the morning bask, guzzling heat out of the air like it was dead cattle, but no, no, no, no – I had to be a priest. Had to be all respectable, a pillar of the community; the same community that insisted on waking me up at the crack of dawn with four sacrifices and a pleading look and absolutely no offer of help whatsoever.
Oh no priest, we wouldn’t dare intrude upon the sacred pool.
Oh no priest, we wouldn’t insult you by offering help.
Oh no priest, we’ll just slink off and start basking without you. It’s Sun-day, after all.
Jackasses.
At least the pool always looked nice. Water glistening on the jagged, bloodstained rocks. Barely a ripple to mark the water, a hundred feet below us. Clear and cool and filled with bones gleaming in the early yellow light. Very lovely.

I applied the last layer of paint with a little more force than necessary and stepped out of my meditation chamber and recognized every single one of the faces looking at me. Not the individuals, no – the squishy ape-things all looked the same to me – but the faces.
I sighed. Why did they always have to be like this? If horrible little sacrilegious murdering looting ape-things were going to ruin every single Sun-day for the rest of my life, couldn’t they at least be varied about it?? But no.
Might as well get this over with.
I approached the one that was trying and failing to look frightened. A wiry thing with a permanent quirk to its eyebrows (god how those things nauseated me; they looked like caterpillars) and a smirk waiting behind every twitch of its freakishly mobile lips.
“Oh please, sir,” it said in a voice it probably assumed I wouldn’t recognize as sarcastic, “spare me, spare me.”
Ah. This chestnut. “No,” I said. Damn, their language grated on me even coming from my own maw. It was so high pitched everything sounded like whining.
“If I can’t be spared, sir, then may I make one request?”
Heeeere it comes. “Request?” I asked.
“Please, please, please, please sir, on behalf of all that is kind and merciful, don’t throw me in that sucker-vine clump halfway down your sacrificial pit. A quick death please, sir, not a slow one. Please don’t throw me there.”
I glanced into the sacred pool. “Okay.”
“Wait, wh-”
I added a little spin to the throw, which was unnecessary but made me feel better. He had good reflexes – still managed to scream most of the way down before it cut off in that messy way that suggested sharp rocks.
“Request granted,” I said.

***

The silence after the first always was a little louder than any other, and of course that’s when my stomach decided to rumble.
Oh c’mon. I’d practically eaten last week; surely I didn’t need more now?
Well, a little wouldn’t hurt. In a bit. A day or two.
Hell with it, I was famished. As soon as I was done with these chumps I was going to swallow a damned cow.
The holy man was next. I had to admire his composure; you’d have thought he was perched at home in his own little heathen temple from the expression on his face. The smell of urine did spoil the effect a bit, but he was doing a great job of pretending it wasn’t there.
“Why do you do this, lizard-creature?” he asked as I picked him up by the front of his robes.
“Prayers,” I said.
“Prayers to what wickedness? Surely this is not the will of the Glowing King.”
Oh good, one of those. “Explain.”
“The Glowing King is all that is bright and good and great and powerful and wonderful and admirable and worthy of care in this world,” said the priest, who was clearly warming to his subject and probably eager to take his mind off the dampness in his clothing. “He is the most spiritually and physically vast of all gods, existing wherever there is light or life. Your barbaric actions here will win you no favour with him, and can only consign you to an eternity in the glowless pits of-”
“Request granted. Not interested. Bye.”
The priest didn’t scream on the way down, possibly because he was out of breath. But I still heard the bonk.

***

I paused to work out a kink in my shoulder. Oh hell, had I pulled something? Not exactly as young as I used to be; maybe I’m bigger now but I don’t heal any faster and there’s a lot more of me to muck up without warning. Could even swear I lose more teeth now than I used to.
The third one was…oh hell. He was wearing even more elaborate robes than the priest. Gaudier, too – spirals and runes and etchings and who knew what kind of claptrap. Most of it was probably for show, just like him.
Wizards. Ugh.
(sorcerers, warlocks, witches, whatever they were called they were all bad news)
“My request,” he said, “is much less tedious than that oaf’s.”
“Explain,” I said.
“Simple. I challenge you to a game of chess.”
“Chess?”
“I win and you release us. You win and you may throw us into your holy hole or whatever it is. I’m sure a mighty priest such as yourself can easily best-”
“Request denied.”
“What?!”
“Don’t know chess. You’re up to something. Bye.”
“You can’t just-”
The one pleasant thing about wizards: you can get a pretty good distance on them. The man couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred ten under that robe, and even all the flailing didn’t spoil the aerodynamics. He skipped three times before sinking.

***

And at last, there was one. Glaring at me with generic stoicism. Chin jutting out in what I was pretty sure was meant to be defiance, (I wouldn’t laugh, I wouldn’t laugh, I wouldn’t laugh….DAMN human chins looked funny), eyes smouldering with generic justice and rightful fury.
“Request,” I said.
“Untie me,” he demanded. “I’ll throw myself in.”
Ah. One of THOSE, and right on schedule.
Heroes. Ugh.
I bent over, mouth agape, and shredded his restraints. Much to my surprise he didn’t bother jumping me – not that any weapon he could’ve hidden would’ve penetrated my scales – and instead stood slowly and deliberately, rubbing his wrists and ankles and pacing slowly at the edge of the sacred pool. Calculating. Weighing.
Oh, this could be good.
At last he straightened up to his full (deeply unimpressive) height, looked me in the eye, and spoke.
“I will return.”
“Bye.”
A beautiful dive for a land mammal, arced like an arrow. He hit the water with barely a splash, and no red flowed forth – every rock had been missed.
Astounding. I broke into applause as he surfaced, gasping for air, and I think he must’ve impressed the sacred crocodile too because it didn’t attack until he was halfway out of the water.

A job well done and noon still not here. Might be just enough time to eat a cow and bully my way into a decent basking spot.
Maybe Sun-days weren’t so bad after all.

The well was deep, dark and smelled like clean old moss. There was a sound about it that reminded Jesse of ripples.
“Now, throw in the pebble and shut your eyes,” said his grandmother.
He did.
“Now concentrate.”
He did.
“And breathe out-”
He
“-and in.”
did.

“Nothing happened,” he said.
“Look.”
He looked, jumped, and dropped the top six scoops of the ice cream cone down the well. Then he said a few words that he normally pretended he didn’t know.
“Oh, poor little Jesse. Well, at least you still have half the cone!”
“Wow.”
“Eat it slow, love. Only one wish per customer – more would make a mess. If wishes were fishes… well, you’d eat more fishsticks. Than you already do, that is.”
“Wow,” said Jesse, but now it was filler, just a verbal tic while his brain rolled around. “Wow.”

***

Jesse’s brain kept rolling. He grew up and up and it rolled on and on as he got older and older and finally it stopped on a conclusion right around the time he received his MBA.
“So,” asked Ben, “you got a plan?”
“As of five seconds ago,” said Jesse. He looked at Ben – his best friend or probably something close to it – and he looked at the number of glasses in front of him and he decided this was just about right. “Hey, want to invest in something?”
“Huh?”
“Real estate.”
“What kind?”
“I’m gonna buy the farm.”
Ben’s brows furrowed, taking most of his head with them. “Woah. That should be your LAST plan, not your first.”
“My grandparent’s farm.”
“Oh. Why? Condos?”
“Not quite.”

***

Inconveniently enough, Jesse’s grandmother had gone and gotten herself buried on the lot next to his grandfather. He had to pay quite a lot of money to have them moved, and he hoped they hadn’t seeped into the water table. Grandfather had certainly had enough time to percolate.
So they were overbudget already, which made Ben nervous. But that was fine, that was fine, that was fine. The main thing was the hydrology, and the charts and the maps and the funny little man with the fussy little ruler were all in accord on that.
It was a fine day for cautious optimism, but Jesse indulged himself and speculated recklessly for half an hour.
What with the land deal, the survey, the permits, and the contractors, a new pair of pants could squeak onto the company ledger without anyone noticing.

***

The test bore was shallow, shone under the flashlight’s beam, and smelled like freshly turned soil.
The pebble was tiny and irregular and as deeply, thoroughly dull as Jesse could find.
He flicked it in.
“Holy shit!” said Ben.
Jesse’s triumph was undimmed by the toppling of very nearly all the ice cream cone down the well. Twenty scoops had been a bit much, but he’d been guesstimating.
“So… what are we thinking? We’ve got to keep this exclusive or else whackaloons might get at it.”
“Agreed.”
“Got to keep it among the hands of those who wouldn’t abuse it.”
“Of course.”
“There’s at least one way to ensure that, I’d wager.”
“I know exactly what you’re thinking.”
“So then…a million a shot? Two million?”
“Ten,” said Jesse. “But if you buy a shot at each well, you get the second one at half price.”
“Nice.”
“Nice.”
Their fists bumped together lightly.

***

Fads rippled through the wealthy. Some now flew without the need of private jets. Some stopped aging. Some owned castles made of candy that never spoiled.
There was an art to one-upsmanship, especially of the kind you only ever got two (at a great price!) chances to exercise.
Around a year in they started to run into problems with repeat clients.
“No, you can’t pay someone else to make your wish for you. Doesn’t work.”
“No, you can’t make a selfless wish and get it to happen anyways. Doesn’t work.”
“No, you can’t wish for more wishes. Doesn’t work.”
“No, you can’t wish super hard and get half a wish out of the same well. Doesn’t work.”
“No you can’t.”
After that last one Ben and Jesse knew they’d reached the tipping point.
So they let the great and powerful and obscenely, fabulously, gloriously profligate squirm and writhe and twist in the wind for six months more, and then they unveiled the all-new Third Well.
Ben unexpectedly died while testing it of completely natural causes that nobody was even a little suspicious of, after signing over all of his worldly possessions to Jesse in a manner that everyone agreed was completely normal.

***

Well Four was a big splash.
Well the Fifth did big trade.
Six Wells was many little pipes and faucets linked together in a way that gave the illusion of hundreds of wells and hundreds of wishes, a haunting sight indeed.
“Lucky” Well Seven had one of the longest reservation lists in their history.

Really, it was only at Wellty-One that they ran into problems. Big problems to go with the big money – Forty Well and Seven Gulps To Go had cost ninety billion a shot; this one was due to stand at an even trillion. Of course, it all wished the same, but at this point the exclusivity was the real draw.
Anyone who was worth anything had taken a shot at the Wishing Well. But how many had taken the queue all the way?
“It’s dry.”
Jesse fidgeted with a perfect, golden fountain pen that beautifully matched his perfect, golden, unaging fingers. He liked the pen; it had been his tenth wish as a little present to himself. “So? Drill deeper. The water table’s still there.”
“Oh no, sir. The water’s fine. It’s the wishes that are missing.”
Jesse broke his pen in half quarters eighths sixteenths and stopped halfway through thirty-seconds to scream himself hoarse entirely in swearwords.

Doubling the depth worked, especially once Jesse wished himself a few tons of brandy.

***

The subsequent project – Well, the Universe, and Everything had to be drilled half again as deep.
Then half again.
Then double that twice.
In lieu of expensive mining drills, Jesse began to wish for deeper wells. That lasted him up until Well Five Zero.

Well Five Zero was so deep you couldn’t imagine it as real. Well Five Zero was blacker than the inside of a cave cricket’s innards. Well Five Zero smelled like the secrets that Earth itself had forgotten.
Jesse dropped a pebble down Well Five Zero and wished for Well Over Halfway and got nothing but an itchy nose a sneeze and a feeling of grave and terrible remorse.
“Personal appointment only, no listed price,” Jesse muttered. And he ran into his office and began sweating his way through his carpet, which he’d managed to get a good head start on before someone knocked at his door and told him that Forty Nine: The Well seemed to be having some sort of problem.

***

Wells forty-eight to thirty fell apart in the course of a few days, causing a corresponding riot in the news, stocks, and private lives of thousands of excessively to obscenely wealthy individuals and societies.
It held stable for a week at well sixteen, and that was enough time for hope to get nice and big before it was crushed in the loss of everything down to well three.
Two.
One.

Jesse’s email pinged.
He stared at it.
The Wishing Well was now dry.
“Wow,” he said.
He sat there in the office, sixty stories above the spot where his grandparent’s farmhouse had once stood, vaguely but powerfully sure that he was meant to say something else.
“Wow,” he said.
Nope. Nothing else came to mind.
“Wow.”
Maybe there was something else he was meant to feel?
“Wow.”
Not particularly.
“Wow.”
Come to think of it, he didn’t feel like he wanted to say ‘wow’ anymore either.
Or wanted anything else at all.

***

Sixteen rescue efforts at the Wishing Well Center failed due to instantaneous and overpowering apathy before attempts were called off indefinitely and the entire complex was condemned on account of total depletion of the local wanter table. Trespassers were prevented by sign, barricade, and a little life preserver attached to a rope that could be used to retrieve the aimless, listless bodies of anyone that made it three feet past the fence.

It wasn’t all bad. Much like Chernobyl, nature took over where humans feared to tread. Vines climbed; trees grew; shrubs ran riot. Topiaries and potted plants seized their days, their time in the sun.
The wells overflowed and trickled everywhere. Little ponds and streams came and went.
In those fleeting waters swam fishes, so many fishes. And not one of them wanted for a thing.

The last person into the room moved hard and fast, but not as much so as their words.
“Alright. This job can’t wait, so introductions are fast. We’re in the parking lot in three, at the scene in ten. Ready? Steady. Go.”
A finger snapped out, pointed at a wall of meat with a man’s head on it. “This is Lenn. He’s our backup. If something goes wrong, Lenn deals with it. If one of you gets cold feet, Lenn deals with it.”
“Heh,” enunciated Lenn. He picked his nose with calculated menace and discarded the results with calculated indifference.
A second finger, aimed at what appeared to be a twelve-year-old. “This is Jenny. Jenny’s our electronics expert. No alarms, no problems.”
Jenny waved.
“Now, since our regular locksmith got busted for drunk and disorderly last night, this is our backup plan. Yugopogo. His mother was an earwig, his father was a whale, got a little bit of head and hardly any tail. And he gets us through the door.”
“Hello,” I said. Jenny waved again; I bobbled a flipper politely.
“And my name’s Your Boss and I’m your getaway driver tonight. Now let’s get out there and make some money.”

The drive over was tense, although Jenny and I got in a couple rounds of rock-paper-scissors to shake out some of the worst jitters. But then we were there, and we were parked, and Your Boss slammed the door open and whispered something very urgent and we were out and up and at the employee side door of the city’s finest chain pizza outlet, established 1992.
“Ready?” asked Jenny.
“Steady,” I replied.
“Go,” said Lenn, bopping me on the back.
I flinched, nodded, pulled out a finely-braided strand of dampened seaweed, and pushed it into the lock, which it bonelessly glided off of and fell apart.
“Uh,” I said.
Lenn cracked his knuckles.
“Maybe try again?” Jenny suggested.
“Sure. Sure. One second.”
This time I used my backup seaweed. No good.
“Shoot,” I said. I sagged against the door in sorrow, popping it off its hinges and sending it flying into the building, where every single alarm went off at once. Half a second later the twenty-nine cop cars filling the parking lot turned on their lights.
“Oh no,” I said.
“Oh YES,” said Lenn. He raised his hands above his head, hollered, shaped them into fists, and ran towards the ruckus making whooping noises.
I looked to Jenny for moral support, but she was already inside and accelerating.

“Red wire or blue wire?”
“There are no wires.”
“Oh. What do we do then?”
Jenny looked under the desk next to the safe, said “it’s two-five-six-seven-nine-four,” and entered that. It popped open, revealing it to be completely empty.
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Didn’t expect that.”
“How’d you know?”
“Well, people write down their passwords in the worst places. But I what I MEANT was that I thought there was supposed to be money in here.”
“So did I.”
Someone kicked down a door (unnecessary) and shouted something very authoritative (maybe necessary?).
“Hide!”
We ducked back into the corridor, spun through two doors, ran into the employee washroom and crammed ourselves into the single stall – Jenny on the toilet, myself inside it. Exactly two seconds later six cops crowded in with us.
“Freeze,” said the smallest cop.
“Already done,” said Jenny. “Muscle cramps.”
“Yeah, you gotta stretch first. C’mon with us.”
One of the larger cops looked down at me. “Hey, you seeing this?”
“Just a shoal of fish,” said the smallest cop dismissively. “Now let’s do that c’monning. We’ve got an early night ahead of us.”
They left, and six minutes later so did I, trailing shame and toilet water all the way out into the now-deserted parking lot.
“Hi,” I said, sticking my head into the car.
Your Boss wasn’t there.

As a matter of fact, Your Boss was standing four feet behind me with a taser in one hand and a cellphone in the other.
“Hi,” I said again.
“Shut up,” she growled at me. “Last time I bring a damned lake monster on a job. Do you know how fast you screwed this up?”
“Gosh I’m real sorry.”
“Not sorry enough. There was barely enough time for me to clear out the safe while you three kicked up a fuss! I almost got caught! I almost got nabbed! Do you know how depressing that is?”
“Sort of,” I said. “But I pretended to be fish.”
The parking lot filled with flashing light again; a lone cop car with five unalone cops. They spread out in an elaborate series of showy poses.
“Officers!” said Your Boss. “I have apprehended the mastermind behind tonight’s events.”
The cops looked at me.
“Well, you can’t prove that,” one said.
“Security footage will show otherwise,” she said.
“We already checked that, lady. Two perps showed up.”
“What!? There were THREE.”
“Nah, nah. A big guy, a little girl, and a suspicious floating log. Nothing strange about it. You should go have a lie down.”
Your Boss shot me with the taser, which failed to penetrate my blubber. In the confusion of the arrest I slunk away across the road, through the culvert, down the creek, and back into the lake.
Why did this sort of thing always happen to me? Next time I was going to try retail.

When Molly was four, one of her friends made a serious and heartfelt promise to marry her when they were grown-ups.
At the time she had no reason to think of getting six of those conversations in one week as anything but normal. In retrospect? That had been the early warning signs.

*

Elementary school brought new challenges, along with the first inklings that something seemed out of place. Half the class took it in turns to endlessly pester her while loudly announcing that they thought she was GROSS. Every Valentine ’s Day her locker overflowed with adorably sincere yet hopelessly embarrassing hand-crafted gifts.
Molly was allergic to chocolate. Her little sister loved her for it.
But oh, that was just the first little trickles. High school began, and the dam didn’t burst – it EXPLODED.

*

“Listen, Molly, there’s something I gotta- oof!”
“Molly! I need to tell you- OW”
“Molly! Where are you?!”
She was inside her locker, hyperventilating. She came out twenty minutes after the principal had hosed down the mob with a fire extinguisher, and snuck home that evening under cover of darkness, moving from shrub to shrub like a criminal chipmunk.
By her second year, Molly had felt out some basic rules for herself.
She couldn’t be too popular, or she’d be beset by swarms of suspiciously good-looking nerds, geeks, outcasts, and rejects.
She couldn’t be too unpopular, or she’d spend her days running and hiding from the most popular kids in school.
She couldn’t be too normal, average, or ordinary, or the school’s jocks, star students, and elites would make every excuse in the world to spend their time following her around, offering advice, and furiously trying not to stare at her.
In the end she found a nearly-perfect balance of being almost-but-not-quite ordinary but in a very boring way that wasn’t particularly quirky. Not liking ketchup on her hot dogs, for example, was safe. Enjoying peanut butter and bacon sandwiches? Too peculiar. Playing the trombone? Fine. Playing the tuba? Unsafe. Pet gecko? Doable. Pet spider? Too far.
By the end of her senior year the weekly lineup of boomboxes outside Molly’s window had shrunk down to three-to-four holdouts, all of them long-lost childhood friends she’d been secretly expecting to show up for years now, and she felt pretty proud about managing to attend prom without a date. Even prouder when she left without being detected by her thirty-six sighing, wistful, dateless best-friends-but-more that surrounded each exit.
If she’d known what was ahead of her… well.
Well, everyone said that.
But boy did she mean it.

*

“Your credentials are impressive.”
Molly smiled in what was the world’s most carefully neutral way.
“Yes, I think we can work with this. We can talk to Dr. Gordon and get back to you by the end of the week.”
Molly’s eyebrow twitched. “I’m sorry?”
“What is it?”
“I was under the impression that Dr. LaFontaine was in charge of this lab.”
“Oh, his heart got to him. Retired just last month. But Dr. Gordon was practically running the place before – such a bright young man. You’ve heard of him before?”
“Elementary school,” she said, blankly.
“I’m sorry?”
“Nothing. Don’t call me I’ll call you.”
“What are you-”
Molly tucked and rolled through the window in an expert dive, then brachiated home through the hedges like an arboreal shark.

*

“Secretarial work seems a little below the quality of this resume.”
Molly nodded.
“But then again, Mr. Stevens has high standards.”
Molly nodded.
“You start Monday.”
Molly nodded.
“Be early.”
Molly nodded.
“And try to ignore his…eccentricities.”
Molly nodded, then squinted suspiciously. “I’m sorry?”
“Mr. Stevens has particular qualities, and –”
The office door opened a crack and a ridiculously handsome and mildly dishevelled man stuck his head around the corner. “Tim? Where’s my vodka cart, my meds, and my quantum electronics handbook?”
“Coming right up, Mr. Stevens. I’m sorry miss, but I’ll be right…huh.”
“Who are you talking to, Tim, and why aren’t they ME? I’ve got some outlandish personality defects that need to be ceaselessly catered to in order for me to be minimally socially acceptable!”
“She was right here a second ago.”

*

“This is the fry cooker put the fries in the basket and pull them out when this goes ding.”
“Wonderful.”
“This is the ice cream maker it’s always broken so don’t ask how it works.”
“Great.”
“This is the patty grill just leave them here all day and put them on a bun. Use this flowchart.”
“Amazing.”
“First customer, go for it.”
A stretched limousine screeched to a halt in front of the restaurant, sixteen security guards, professional selfiers, and a wine-taster poured inside, and from amidst the chaos emerged an internationally known pop star.
“I’ll have the…” he began, and then his perfect face froze in a very familiar expression.
Molly sighed, swallowed, then threw the fries in his face and escaped out the drive-in window in a hail of bullets.

*

The monitor went ‘beep.’
Sometimes it hesitated.
Molly was tired of waiting for that little halt. She was ready to listen to anything else, or nothing else. Whichever came faster.
“…and I admire you so much for it,” finished up George.
She sighed. “How long we known each other?” she asked.
“Since you came to the home. So, ten years.”
“How long you felt like this?”
“Ten years.”
Molly coughed and gave up halfway through.
“Molly?”
Arms quivering with the weight of years and tubes and fluids, Molly reached up, took George’s hand, and yanked him into a Glasgow Handshake that exploded his nose like a bushel of overripe strawberries.
“I WIN, MOTHERFUCKER,” she cackled, and then she died.

The burial was logistically complex. In the end her nieces gave up, put two shovelfuls of dirt atop the writhing mound of sobbing funeral-crashers, and went home.

It had been going so very well for all of them just five minutes ago.
There had been a half-open window. Terrible shame that; not even necessary in this heat. The Older had tut-tutted at it very firmly as the rust ate into its extremities and peeled it off like a grapeskin.
There had been a security door. It had been very fine and very expensive and incredibly modern and it had fallen apart like soft butter under the ancient and tender serrations of the Sleek Shark, its barcodes and binaries and PINs shearing off and away.
There had been a guy at a desk who’d said ‘password?’ and that was where the problem had started because Jimmy had said ‘uuhhhhh’ and no password in the world had ever started like that and they both knew it.

So now Jimmy was hiding in a bathroom being shot at. Again.
“Wish you guys had helped me out,” he said, and convinced himself he’d definitely been trying and failing to keep the resentment out of his voice.
No he hadn’t, the Mind All Light told him.
“Where were YOU?”
Right there. He’d just decided to say ‘uuhhhhh’ instead of asking it.
“Fine,” said Jimmy. He wasn’t sulking.
He was sulking, the Mind All Light told him.
“Am not!”
Was too.
“Am not!”
Duck, suggested the Older.
Jimmy ducked and the top of the bathroom stall sheared off and banged him on the head.
“Shit,” he considered. “Shit, shit, aw shit, shit shit shit.”
So he gave up and listened to the Completely Invincible Lizard.

Four floors later Jimmy kicked down a door shot five security manglers and placed a perfectly flawless thrown ball-point pen directly through the eye of a man in an impossibly expensive suit.
Then he sat down at the desk and threw up for a minute. Stitches.
When he was done he took the very small and expensive computer out of the pen-eye man’s pocket and slipped it in front of the Sleek Shark, which vanished into it without a ripple.
No traces. No records. As if he’d never been there.
Well, besides all the blood and everything. That’d be a giveaway.
It was times like this Jimmy wished he was still a janitor. There’d be nothing but quiet cleaning for days now. Very soothing.
Found another, whispered the Sleek Shark directly behind him.
Jimmy threw up again, almost but not quite masking the sound of tramping feet. Weapons were clicking to themselves, lungs were bursting with purpose.
“Awwwwww nuts,” said Jimmy. And he reached out to the Completely Invincible Lizard again.

***

Jimmy had spent very nearly twenty years on a derelict space station, keeping it running with polish and spit and elbow grease. He could clean anything. Anything.
Still, getting the blood off that stubborn little spot between his shoulder blades was extremely obnoxious.
Don’t bother, said the Completely Invincible Lizard.
“Pardon?” asked Jimmy.
No one said anything.
Well. He didn’t know what that was about. I mean, they had another name, another chance, another link in the long chain of folks that had decided to put people out in the middle of who-knows-where dark space to give them who-knows-who in their heads so they could be used for goodness-gracious-knows-what purposes.
And this time it would be perfectly quiet and safe and fine.

***

When he woke up he was in the middle of a firefight with sixteen other humans in a lobby the size of a baseball stadium, all of whom were larger than him, had bigger guns, and were huddling behind various makeshift barricades and screaming at each other over inbuilt comms. The Sleek Shark was porpoising through their electronic voices, turning them into helpless ripples and splashes.
“Aw dang,” said Jimmy.
Go away, said the Completely Invincible Lizard.

When Jimmy woke up for the second time that day he was standing in a different office, one that looked to have a bit of doomsday bunker in its genetics. There were office chairs, but they were bolted to the floor and had little deployable blast shielding covers.
The woman in front of him had been just slightly too slow to deploy hers. Her head was safe and secure but someone had used some kind of heavy-duty thermal weapon to incinerate everything below her neck.
“Gross,” said Jimmy. He dropped the heavy-duty thermal weapon he was holding and tried to throw up.
None of that, said the Completely Invincible Lizard.
“This is getting a little out of hand, you know?”
Look at the computer.
“You fried it if it was on her.”
In the table.
“Don’t wanna.”
This time Jimmy was awake for the entire firefight, and it was inside his head and he didn’t enjoy it one bit.
He had never seen the Completely Invincible Lizard up close before. He wasn’t seeing it now, but he was getting a very strong impression of teeth and sharpness and hardness and unflinching and uncaring determination.
Around them, uncaring, unceasing, spooled the Sleek Shark. It carried the names in its mouth and it shone very brightly with them. They brought out its smile.
You aren’t doing a very good job, said the Completely Invincible Lizard.
“But-”
And we don’t need to keep anything clean right now.
“Hey-”
So go away.
Jimmy went away.

***

Away was a peculiar place. It was dark and quiet and intangible and didn’t exist but Jimmy couldn’t see or hear or touch or exist either so that didn’t matter.
Things were happening out there. Animate, physical, material things. Murdering dodging sleeping (reluctantly) killing and so on.
It was almost soothing to watch until Jimmy remembered that was him. He’d had him taken away. That was uncalled for and unnatural.
It was very natural, said the Older, at his side. (It was the most brittle thing he’d ever imagined and it wouldn’t break). It is completely invincible. If it wanted to defeat you, it would. And it has.
But that’s not how it works, thought Jimmy. We work together.
Yes, and how often did that happen? You tend to ignore good advice. No wonder it got frustrated. Now it’s out there, and it’s doing what it does. And the Sleek Shark cuts its path, because it can never stop swimming and it doesn’t care who’s there as long as it can move.
Jimmy wondered how the Older felt about this.
Very similarly to him, as it turned out. They both knew about dirt. They both knew about waiting. They both knew about keeping things running. Although Jimmy was a little more laid back about those, and a lot of other things.
Two for two?
The Older suggested that starting a fight between them all might end poorly. Besides, their adversary was completely invincible.
You aren’t thinking, said the Mind All Light. It was warm and full and shining and it was remarkable because none of those things existed there, in away.
Jimmy wondered what he wasn’t thinking of.
It’s completely invincible. That’s in its name.
Yes.
Yes and?
Yes and what?
What ELSE is?

***

The Completely Invincible Lizard was not satisfied. It was incapable of it.
But it was something kissing-cousin-close to pleased.
Another emptied boardroom, another scourged databank, another cloud sucked out of the ether, and another target. And this one was in the same building, so it would have very little downtime needed.
Admittedly, the floors were sealed under standard doomsday protocols, but that was what hacking your way through the ventilation system was for. Also admittedly there were safeguards against that, but that was what the extremely large and destructive blade in its hand was for.
Not that the safeguards merited it. This entire shaft was dilapidated. Dusty and cobwebbed. Disused. Fousty. Cobwebbed. Dry. Cobwebbed.
Are there any spiders around? inquired Jimmy.
The Completely Invincible Lizard realized its mouth was slightly open and shook its head.
Looks like it to me. Big ones. Maybe some other stuff too if they’ve set up that many webs. Crickets?
The Completely Invincible Lizard found itself calculating the length of its tongue.
You’ve got to clean these things out regularly, or you end up with bugs everywhere, under every nook and
The Completely Invincible Lizard launched itself mouth-first at the cobweb, swallowed it and its (long-mummified) inhabitants whole, and lost itself in the wonderful sensation of mashed carapaces.
In that long, long pause, several careful things happened. A few people blinked and turned off and on again.
Then Jimmy opened his eyes and stretched and had hands and senses and the world again. “Everything’s sorted out!” he said triumphantly, as the top of the ventilation shaft opened up and someone dropped a grenade down at him.

The Sleek Shark handled that one.
The Older collaborated on the vents.
And the Mind All Light very carefully persuaded the somnolent and deeply full Completely Invincible Lizard that maybe if it could spare twenty seconds of its time to cross the lobby they could give it a break to digest and bask somewhere for a bit.

***

On the whole, although everyone personally agreed that they’d learned something, none of them were sure of the others.
But then again, isn’t that sort of skeptical and dubious love exactly what most families are made of?

It’s rude to hammer on a stranger’s door like that, but the night was ruder still. Leering licks of rain on my cheeks, salacious lashes of wind against my stomach…nothing but damp, eager grossness for miles and miles around.
I doubled my rudeness and was rewarded with footsteps. Slow, stolid footsteps, unhurried but unhesitant. So I wasn’t surprised at all when my host opened the door and was revealed to be extremely fat.
I was a little surprised that it was a bear.
“Hello, hello, hello,” intoned the bear. “Who’s that knocking on our door?”
“Me,” I said. “I mean, me, Melanie. Sorry to bother you, but it’s miserable out and if I could just duck inside for a minute, I’d really appreciate it.”
“Why not?” said the bear. “Bad weather makes for good neighbours. Come in, come in!” There was a tie around its neck which bobbled in a disconcerting way whenever it spoke, and its mouth held an impressively tiny little pipe.
I maybe should’ve found it odder, that a bear spoke, but it didn’t seem shocked by it so neither was I. Clearly this was all intentional.
So I went into the house, which smelled of fur and soap.

Inside the house were two more bears, seated around a little round table. The smallest was a little shorter than me but – in the way of bears – probably double my weight at least. The middle bear was wearing an apron, and was trying to pick up a spoon with no thumbs.
“This is Mother and Baby, and I’m Father,” explained my host. “As you can see, we were just sitting down to dinner. Want some? It’s porridge. Good, nourishing, plain porridge. No sugar, no milk, no h-word –”
“Honey?”
There was a bang. Baby had jumped and knocked over their chair.
“In this house,” said Father carefully, “we don’t use the h-word. It’s good manners.”
“Sorry.”
“It brings up decadent, degenerate thoughts,” said Father a little louder than was strictly necessary, even against the background clang and rattle of Mother’s ongoing efforts to seize her spoon.
“My mistake.”
“Hideous, crawling, STICKY thoughts, that trickle and…”
“Humble apologies.”
Father shuddered like a man dropped in an ice bucket. “Anyways! Please have some.”
“But there’s only three bowls,” I said. “I can’t take your family’s food.”
“No, no, please, I insist. Mother needs to watch her weight – she’s in real danger of getting hefty. And as for Baby, well…”
I looked a little closer at Baby. There was a muzzle fitted over their snout, hiding most of their face except for the little dark eyes. They seemed worried.
“We’re just having a Time Out to teach everyone to respect their elders,” said Father. “Might have to dole out a spanking later. Spare the rod or spoil the child. It’ll hurt me more than anyone else, really. Here’s your porridge.”
It was a big spoonful. I took a little bite. My tongue split the difference and was merely sort of burned.
“Aagh.”
“Oh dear. Perhaps my porridge is a little much for you. Mother, give our guest some of your porridge.”
Mother dropped her spoon again, and this time it skittered under the stove. Father tsk-tsked soundly, plucked up his own spoon – which seemed to be a repurposed shovel – and gave me some of her porridge.
It was cold. It was lumpy. Actually, it was lumps, verging on lump. If this porridge had ever felt the heat of flame, it’d forgotten about it and then some.
“Eegh.”
“Goodness. Perhaps not. Baby, would you mind letting this nice young lady have some of your porridge?”
Baby said something. Or maybe not. It was hard to tell, with the muzzle. Father sighed, chewed his pipe, stood up, and smacked Baby on the side of the head, sending the cub caroming ass over teakettle into the stove. Squealing.
“Baby, you know very well that children should be seen and not heard,” said Father. “Sharing is caring. Now get in your chair again – and for pity’s sake, sit up straighter.”
Baby’s porridge was soothingly warm, well-stirred, and smooth as butter. I wasn’t very hungry.

After dinner we retired to the living room. It was unpainted, although someone appeared to have dabbed pawprints along the east wall before giving up entirely. In attendance were a couch that looked fresh from the dump, a rocking chair that looked more likely to roll over on you, and a discarded beanbag.
“I must apologize for the state of the house,” said Father. “We’ve only recently settled in, you see, and my wife has been somewhat lax in putting our affairs in order. Making a house a home, you know.” He sprawled himself expansively on the couch, felt around in the cushions, and produced a tattered newspaper. “Sit, sit.”
Baby sat down on the beanbag, and Father ground his teeth against his pipestem, sat up, and flicked Baby on the ear. “Not until the lady’s seated,” he said.
I looked at the couch and saw that most of it was Father by volume; I looked at the rocking chair and saw an interesting obituary; I looked at the beanbag and saw a thriving, nourishing habitat for small things with six legs.
I also saw Mother, standing against the wall. She was chewing her paws, and at my stare she flinched and whipped them behind her back.
“Sit, sit, sit,” said Father, rolling his pipe around his lips like it was toffee-coated.
“Oh, I can’t take Mother’s seat,” I said.
“Nonsense. She’s been a silly flittergibbit – cooked the porridge all wrong, didn’t paint the living room properly, hasn’t said a word to our guest, spoke out of turn to me over breakfast, all that sort of nonsense, etcetera, etcetera,” said Father. He hummed thoughtfully through his pipe. “Really, it’s a wonder I put up with her. Now take a seat. It’s only polite. A watched pot never boils.”
I sat down in the beanbag chair, doubtlessly extinguishing thousands of tiny skittering lives under my backside. Father grunted in satisfaction, riffled through his newspaper, and proceeded to read it upside down, held high to catch the last of the evening light through the murky clouds.
I stared at it, and things made a lot more sense.
“Well,” I said. “It’s been very nice of you to put up with me, but I should be going now.”
“Oh, no, no, no, no,” said Father. “It’s still raining out there. Can’t put you out in the rain, it wouldn’t be Christian of us. Better stay in.”
“But –”
“No buts,” said Father. He looked at Mother and Baby, still standing against the wall. “No buts,” he repeated. “No buts. No. None.”
“If it’s not too much trouble, I suppose I can stay on your sofa…”
“Sofa? Lord, no! You’ll get a bed, and be happy with it.”
Mother raised her head.
Father’s pipe dipped meaningfully and she looked away again, out the window, to the rain.

Father’s bed was an enormous, beaten-up old thing that looked to have been used to smuggle at least three bodies, one of which had left scraps caught in the exposed springs.
Mother’s bed was a tangle of old spruce boughs and pine needles, dumped into an empty wooden frame that was somewhere between IKEA and archaeology.
Baby’s bed was the beanbag from the living room, dragged into the familial bedchamber and covered with a generous tea-towel.
“I really shouldn’t,” I said.
“You really should,” said Father.
I started to say something that’d start with “but,” and then I saw Father’s pipe shifting around again.
Baby tried to crawl in with Mother, but Father raised his paw and his voice and Baby was exiled to the corner of the bedroom, where they formed a sort of fuzzy ball with no external features. Or targets.
I adjusted the horrible tea-towel and waited for the snores to start.
Soft little whimpers, kept low for fear. That was Baby.
Uneven, jagged inhalations, somewhere between a pant and a whisper. That had to be Mother.
And then the deep, confident rumbling nasal-festival began, and that could only be Father. Nothing else matched it.
Ten minutes. Five was what I wanted, but ten was what I needed. Enough to make good and sure they were asleep.
Nine-min-utes-and-FIFTY. Nine-min-utes-and-FIFTYFIVE. And-now-it’s-TEN.
I breathed in, I breathed out, I tensed and I heard Father stop snoring.
He got up. Quietly, I’ll give him that. Quiet for his size. It was amazing how much smaller the room seemed once he was on his feet; it was as if his snores had forced the walls back and now they’d fallen in, leaving this cramped little cavity, full of fur.
Then he moved. He moved past the dead leaves of Mother’s bed, warding his big feet against the dry crunches. He moved past the little trembling lump of Baby’s corner.
He moved to my feet, sticking out under the tea-towel, out from over the edge of Baby’s beanbag. And he stopped.
It was amazing how loud his breathing was, this close. Louder than his snoring ever had been.
I hadn’t untensed. Had he noticed?
But he leaned down, and I knew he hadn’t. Not to be moving this slowly, this carefully. He could see better than I could in the dark – especially with my eyes squinched near-shut – but he wasn’t looking carefully enough. Why should he be? He was in his house, which was his castle. Impregnable. Unconquerable. The ringmaster of his own domain.
He’d gone to bed with his pipe. It was still there, dangling from the corner of his mouth.
“Shh,” he whispered. The pipe wiggled and hummed, and an idea that had been bubbling up inside me finally boiled.
I snatched it. Left-handed, which nobody ever quite expects. And I was in a hurry, and I was frightened, and I snatched a bit hard and fast, and that’s why it snapped apart in my hand – that and the fact that it was just thin lacquered wood, over a frail tin whistle.
Father reared up with a snort that was more of a swallowed shout – it moved enough air to give me a new hairstyle (and a few grey hairs) and sprayed me with a good glass-full of moisture. The ceiling crunched against his skull and gave way; plaster sprinkled over us and gave him a powdering a judge’s wig would envy. Big dark eyes in a fat pale face, and they weren’t friendly, and his arms were up now, and his claws were out, and who knows what could’ve happened because it didn’t because someone else did first.

“Someone’s been sniffing round my den.”
The voice was thick, rough, unpracticed, and moist – with harsh mucus, with trickling anger. It was a voice you could find carved into an old limestone cave.
And it wasn’t Father’s.
He flinched. Just a little, but impossible to hide on a body that size. I saw his lips curl – not in a snarl, not quite: they were reaching for his missing pipe.
“Mother, go back to your –”
“Someone’s been sniffing round my den,” said Mother. She didn’t interrupt Father, he practically did that himself. There was a wheedling, plaintive edge at the end of his every word, like a mosquito.
He tried one last time. And I’m no expert – on bears, on people, on families – but there is something I’m pretty sure of: he shouldn’t have started his last chance the way he did.
“But-”
“Someone’s been SNIFFING round MY den,” said Mother. “And he will GET. OUT. NOW.”
Father reared back, and whether it was to raise a paw or turn away I’m not sure because Mother moved faster. She hit him hard, she hit him fast, and he spun round and his ear went out one window and he went out the other. By the time he hit the ground his legs were running, and by the time the rest of him had caught up and got started she was after him, and accelerating.

I sat there for a good minute – not a measured minute, a good one. Then I got up, undid Baby’s muzzle, and got out of the way before they bowled me over, chasing Mother.
They were all gone, all three of them, and I didn’t feel like they were coming back.
But you’d better be sure I didn’t walk out of that house. I flew so hard and fast that I didn’t know until I got home that I’d brought the broken whistle with me, clutched in my left hand.
A whistle in my left hand and a headline in my head, stolen from an upside-down, claw-torn newspaper.
TR IN D B ARS ESCAPE CI CUS
ST LL MIS ING