jamieproctor.ca

Things have become very difficult since I replaced every single thing with clocks.

I was warned about this. Other people said I might want walls, or a ceiling, or books, or a calendar, or maybe food.
But I pointed out that all those things were basically clocks already, just single-minded ones. Time to repair; time to reread; time to go places; time before expiry, and so on.
Why not stop pretending?

So I replaced the walls and the ceiling and the books and the calendar and the food and everything else. I replaced every single thing. With clocks.
Now when I want to know if I should go outside, I look at a clock for that. When I want to know what I should think, I look at a clock for that. When I want to know if I need to check my clocks, I can look at a clock for that.
It’s very effective. I don’t think I’ve done anything in forever.

The trouble was other people’s fault. They weren’t clocks, you see. I would see them when I went outside and they would tick onwards in a very messy and uncoordinated way. You could not set their clocks by them.
I tried to explain about clocks for a while but they didn’t seem to get it. Eventually I would have to go home, to my clocks, where it made more sense because every six hours I would look at one clock, and every sixteen hours I would look at another clock, and every three days I would look at a third, and so on and so forth. And that made things make sense.
It wasn’t exactly perfect, but it made sense. That’s better than average for anyone, right? I really didn’t feel like I had grounds to complain.
So I added a few more clocks, because some of the old ones had stopped working and there was space, and a few other clocks, because there wasn’t THAT much cramping, and a few more clocks because I liked the look of them.

By this point it was a little hard to sleep soundly with all the ticking. Even the digital clocks do that, just not aloud. It’s hard to rest comfortably when time’s passing in about six hundred different ways along seven thousand different roads.
Especially with the alarms going off too. I used those only for the very important clocks, but since every clock was going to be important in its own way at least once those added up quickly.
The real problem wasn’t the alarms though. It was the older clocks, the ones that didn’t tick anymore.
By my count every third clock I knew of was finished, completed, and done. But I couldn’t just throw out a clock like that, so I kept them around as reminders, stopped on the moment they finished.
The space constraints were troublesome to deal with, but doable. The lack of ticking, though; that started to be a little much. That was so much more tricky to keep track of than the ticking; a ticking clock you can keep an eye on in your sleep, but a stopped clock needs to be checked constantly, every time, all the time, or else you forget how old it is.
I started to keep extra clocks for my stopped clocks. This problem got worse, especially when I started bringing home clocks that had already stopped. Some of them were loved and cherished clocks, some of them were brand-spanking new clocks, some of them were deeply irrelevant clocks mass produced on a conveyer belt somewhere and slapped on a six year old’s wrist for fifty cents forty years ago.
But I needed to keep clocks on them. It was important.

I’m not entirely sure exactly when things went out of hand, but I’m very sure of when I noticed it.
I was walking along somewhere, someday, with my mind on clocks, and I thought of how troublesomely odd it was that nobody else seemed to do this. I looked at all those people and thought about how they didn’t think about clocks.
Then I paid a little more attention and I saw my problem: everyone else was also clocks. They got larger and hairier or smaller and wrinklier and they wouldn’t stop doing it right in front of me. It was compulsive, and it was unavoidable, and it was most disconcerting. Worse yet, each action in their day was also a separate and integrated clock, starting up in the present and counting backwards as we moved forwards together. They weren’t just clocks, they were clockmakers. Profligate ones.
I asked some folks about this and they seemed to consider it normal. This was troubling, and suggested that I needed a lot more clocks at home or else I’d never be able to keep track of every single one as they interacted with every single thing, and clocks for those interactions too as they grew older and stopped, and clocks to track the stopped clocks, and clocks to track the time of the clocks that timed the clocks that had stopped. It seemed unfair for the world to work this way, and it seemed still more unfair that I had to do this all the time. I was very tired of this. I was very tired of paying attention to my clocks.

Then about a half second later (precisely) I paid a little more attention, just a little more than a little more and then a little more than that, and I realized I’d been overpaying all my clocks for years and years and months and weeks and days and hours and however long they’d been doing it.
I had slowly and entirely and inadvertently replaced my attention with clocks. It was very upsetting. It IS very upsetting.
I would like to correct this, but I seem to have also replaced my intentions with clocks. I don’t enjoy doing this, but all I seem to want to do is count backwards and forwards in a very precise and careful pattern.
I’m not sure what I’m counting now. But I’d better not stop.

I think.

Patient history
The Mad Master
Age: 42
Height: 5’10
Weight: 200 lbs
-Patient applied for treatment by kidnapping entire staff of hospital and putting them through his ‘trial of medicalamity’ to ensure only the wiliest would treat him.
*Patient was reached by Dr. Brussel, who cunningly removed his monitor collar with the aid of Nurse Braxley and then ambushed the droid sent to collect her ‘deceased’ body, using its armaments to blast a hole in the wall.
*Patient was waylaid and then diagnosed with appendicitis and compulsive villainous megalomania (CVM). Appendicitis operation was conducted ad hoc on site by Dr. Brussel and Nurse Braxley; CVM went untreated as patient was rescued immediately following surgery by his elite mandroids.

-Patient arrived with toothache. Upon being provided with the names and addresses of several local dentists, patient attempted to transmit entire hospital to the darkforce dimension for daring to defy his manifest will.
*Patient was subdued by Nurse Braxley, who heroically threw himself on top of the darkforce device and absorbed its energies into his own frame, catapulting them both into an apparently irreversible and sympatric coma.
*Patients are now in the long-term care ward, awaiting consultation by Mr. Mystical pending his return from the Otherlands.

Patient history
Fyrness the Scorched
Age: 11,290 yrs
Height (length): 178 ft.
Weight: n/a (broke scale)
-Patient applied for treatment for stiffness, aches.
*Source was found to be ‘wealth hemorrhoids.’
*Patient’s hoard was reshuffled so that the upper layers were exclusively small objects such as coins and the larger bulk goods and sharp objects were safely covered.

-Patient complained of recurring nightmares of tiny, defiant heroes wielding unspeakably sharp blades.
*CBT was suggested as the solution, but patient declined care as ‘feeble.’
*Nyqil was prescribed at 2 gallons/night. Patient claimed relief from all symptoms.

-Patient came into emergency clinic at 3 AM in a panic about their sore throat due to it being the source of their livelihood. Ensuring histrionics posed public threat due to magnitude of patient’s physique.
*Diagnosis: basic cold compounded by a severe panic attack. Allowed the patient a surface to recline and calm down on (hospital roof); provided 4 pounds fluoxetine and gave prescription for a followup half ton for future recurrences.

Patient history
Murderface
Age: 36
Height: 6’11
Weight: 300 lbs
-Patient suffered grave difficulties during sign-in due to being mute, illiterate, fluent in no forms of sign language, and encased inside an unreadable iron mask. Chief form of communication was through expressive machete flourishes and meaningful head-tilts.
*Patient’s arm hurt. Diagnosis was acute tendonitis due to excessive machete use.
*Patient was given a bracer and instructed to hack left-handed for the meantime, and to strongly consider a less strenuous livelihood.

-Patient was struck by vehicle on Highway 12. Paramedics found him deceased at the scene.
*Six minutes after being placed in the hospital morgue patient clawed his way out of the room using his bare hands and embarked upon a deeply disoriented rampage, apparently fueled by deep-seated animosity towards the co-patient who struck him with her car, who was being treated in ward 12 for a fractured wrist as a result of the collision.
*Patient was unrestrainable and unreasonable until Dr. Brussels raided his belongings from the morgue, which included a tiny music box. Playing it repeatedly calmed the patient until it broke, at which point the patient’s co-patient was forced to shove him off the hospital roof. Patient has not been seen since, but is presumed healthy.

Patient history
‘Big Shot’ ‘Danny’ ‘Allthumbs’
Age: ‘just a kid’
Height: ‘big shot’
Weight: ‘big shot’
-’Patient’ was admitted into intensive care due to pressure from a significant hospital donor, see?
*‘Patient’ wouldn’t stop hitting on the staff despite repeated censure, said he never could resist a pretty face.
*‘Patient’ vanished from his cot between the hours of 2 and 4 AM June 24th, during which time he was definitely not being dangled from his window by the Bigsby Bastard, the extremely nefarious masked adventurer that Dr. Brussels has nothing to do with and most certainly has never illicitly treated.
*‘Patient’ requested pen and ink at 5 AM June 24th, to write out his ‘memoirs’ which were more of a brief ‘confession’ of the ‘whacking’ of ‘Lemmy’ ‘Crowbar’ behind the ‘Big Cheese’ ‘Restaurant’ the previous week.
*‘Patient’ made a full recovery from various ‘bullet accidents’ but reentered treatment for mask-related PTSD the same week and CBT for ‘compulsive’ ‘quotation’ ‘use.’

Patient history
Mirg the Star-Sucker
Age: sixteen minutes
Height: one atom
Weight: n/a
-Patient was born destined to devour the sun and plunge the earth into darkness as foretold by the old tales, but suffered severe anxiety attack related to performance stress and admitted herself into professional care.
*Diagnoses: anxiety, depression, OCD, high-functioning autism. Some PTSD may also exist from seeing her mother defeated by the Warrior of Rain and Sun at the dawn of the last universe.
*Patient is currently on week 12 of an intensive therapy course conducted by Dr. Graxus. Medication pending full exploration of all permutations of the issues at work here.

Patient history
The Inevitability and Inescapable Reality of Death
Age: n/a
Height: n/a
Weight: infinite and inescapable
-Patient admitted itself upon the arrival of Tommy Witkins and his best friends, Gabby and Jimmy, to visit his dying grandfather.
*Patient was diagnosed with overwhelming depression and existential crises.
*Patient was treated with frank and earnest homilies about how to accept the inescapable, providing a wholesome lesson for all involved that they will bear with them even as their bodies grow old and tired and cease to function, their childhood dreams long left behind.
*Also prescribed some ritalin for Tommy, who definitely needs it if he wants to stop having that godawful series written about his hijinks.

Once upon a time there was a wicked dictator.
Wait. That doesn’t narrow it down much.
Many, many times upon all the time there were many, many wicked dictators, and one of them was this guy.
This guy was extremely powerful and had many tools at his disposal. His army was mighty; his voice echoed forth from millions of screens across the world; and his personal polling agency was much respected.

Nonetheless, all tyrants have enemies – and it was such a cabal of those that met one evening, cloistered in an awkward conference call.
“We should kill him,” said one of them.
“No, that would be sinking to his level,” retorted another. “We should make calm and clear statements about his evilness and he’ll just stop or something.”
“We should do nothing, or else it might get worse,” concluded a third.
“I have a completely different plan from all of yours,” said a fourth, “and yet it incorporates elements from all! It will not sink to his level, AND we will not have to do anything.”
“What about my idea?” demanded the first one.
“Oh right, it’ll probably kill him.”
“Thank you.”
“There is one – just one – something we must do before we do nothing,” said the fourth conspirator. “We must break into the lair of the dictator and steal his feces.”
The ensuring silence was long, and at least two conspirators hung up without saying anything.
“…why?” inquired the second one.
“All will be made clear,” intoned the fourth conspirator.
Everyone else hung up.

Luckily in the end it was very easy to bribe a janitor to retrieve a sample the next time the dictator’s toilet clogged, and so the fourth conspirator was saved from having to stage an enormous and elaborate plan with many intricate action sequences and a lot of unnecessary deaths of security personnel.
She had what she needed. She had the feces, and she had a single egg from a single fly.
So she put one inside the other, in a small room, and walked away.
For the next while very little was required. Every so often the fourth conspirator would re-enter the room, moisturize and feed the little maggot, and leave it to its joy in its tiny fecal dwelling. In time it grew fat and happy and in more time it grew through its own skin and sprouted wings and hideous little compound eyes and became that noblest of god’s creatures, the thing named for wings: the fly.
It began doing what it was named for in delirious little circles, and that was when the fourth conspirator re-entered the room and caught it in a little net.
On the television, the podium was ready. It was time.

It was a good day for speeching. The dictator was waiting for the applause to die and practicing his gesticulations, smiling and bobbing his head like a renegade sandpiper.
“My fellow” or something.
“It’s an honour to” etcetera?
“What a great crowd, what a” maybe.
In the great crowd the fourth conspirator pulled out a tiny little box and opened it and silently, carefully, inconspicuously started to leave.
The fly was alone. It was deprived of food, of moisture. It was in a place it did not understand, in a world it had never known. In its small fly soul it was filled with a great and heartbreaking homesickness, when into its acute fly senses came a smell that seemed….almost familiar. It reminded it of home and also feces.
It wanted both of those things very much.
The applause ceased. The mic was hot. The throat was cleared.
“Hello the-ACK.”
The fly was on the nose. It spun in wondrous loops, singing a song of joy with its wings.
“HEY GET OUT OF THERE SHOO AUGH!”
It took off, it landed, it took off, it landed, it dodged and swerved and all the other fly tricks and it did them all without a moment’s thought needed, all of its fly soul filled with endless joy in its place.
It had found Home again.

Many conventional remedies, sadly, were out of the question. The tyrant could not be swatted; refused the idea of spray (‘not my hair!’), and drank any sugary water placed near him.
Alternate solutions had to be found.
“Fetch me my grand pollster!” he shouted.
“Bring forth the grand pollster!” shouted the head of security.
“Summon the grand pollster!” called the communications team.
“I’m here,” said the grand pollster, who had been standing in a corner of the room fiddling with his laptop.
“Pollster, remove this fly from my person,” said the dictator.
The grand pollster leaned carefully forwards until he was eye to eye with the fly (currently on the tyrant’s forearm) and blew gently on it.
It took off, then landed again six times.
“Damn,” said the grand pollster. “That used to work. Here, let’s try a statistical analysis. I’ll write the whole thing up in five minutes.”
“Great!”
“It’ll just take a few weeks to collate all the data.”
“Get my grand pollster out of here.”
“Eject the grand pollster!” yelled the head of security.
“Remove the grand pollster!” screamed the communications team.
“I’ll uh just go now uhm okay bye,” said the grand pollster, who hastily stowed his laptop in its bag and left at a fast walk.

Perhaps it would go away if he ignored it.
Not so. The fly wanted not his attention, just his presence. It basked in the warmth of his body, it breathed in the scent of his hair, it rhapsodized in the sound of his blood squirting through his veins. No love had ever been so unconditional; no joy so all-consuming. The fly had died, seen hell, and now was dwelling in a little piece of heaven. Mere time would not erode this affection.
But maybe something else would.
“Get me my media!” shouted the tyrant.
“Acquire the media!” hollered the head of security.
“Yeah sure here they come now!” replied the communications team at the top of their lungs.
The media came in as a roving pack, but less like wolves than a deck of cards. Each was trying to shuffle behind the last.
“We were present,” sources said.
“Good goin’,” said the tyrant. “Listen up! I’m denouncing this fly!”
“The fly was denounced by the leader,” sources said.
“It’s terrible! It’s garbage! It’s vile, infiltrating filth! It’s seditious! It’s treasonous! It’s unhygienic and unpatriotic and noisome and obnoxious and nothing but a big fat waste of time! Away with it!”
“The fly was denounced in the strongest terms,” sources said. “It was made a matter of top policy.”
The room fell silent. Except for the fly, which was orbiting the dictator again.
“FUCK OFF!” he shouted at it.
“Strong language was used, showing the deep emotions involved,” sources said. “Some claim it undignified; others say it shows the depths of passion the leader shows for our country. Who can say? You decide.”
“GET OVER HERE AND SWAT THIS THING!” he screamed.
“The meeting ended abruptly, although no specific schedule had been arranged,” sources said. “All present were escorted from the premises.”
“No! Wait! Come back!”
But there was no one there.
Except the fly, which loved him so.

After that there was really only one logical place to go.
“Fetch me my defense minister!” he yelled.
“Acquire the defense minister!” roared the head of security.
“Where the hell’s the defense minister!” hooted the communications team.
The defense minister was in the toilet, but was persuaded to come out.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“Bomb this thing,” ordered the tyrant, gesturing at the fly. It was lying on his shoulder, deceptively passive yet perfectly ready to take off and land on his eyelid, where it would try to drink his sweat. Yet again.
“Could be hard, chief,” she said. “Could be hard. Don’t know if we’ve got ordinance for that.”
“Execute her!” he yelled.
“Can’t do that, she’s got popular support in the army!” shouted the head of security.
“Politically inadvisable if you want to maintain power!” hollered the communications team.
“Fine! CENSURE her!”
“Naughty!” shouted the head of security.
“Shame!” shouted the communications team.
“Aw,” said the minister of defense.
“Get me my chief of defense staff instead!”
“That’s also me,” said the minister of defense, who was chief of defense staff.
“Piss!”
“I was doing that, but you wanted something.”
“Eradicate this insect!”
“Gonna collateral damage your face there a bit. You fond of that shoulder, or would you prefer we wait for it to switch sides?”
“Threat to the leader’s life!” shouted the head of security.
“Take cover!” shouted the communications staff.
Bang, went many guns.
“Piiiisssssss,” whispered the minister of defense, who was chief of defense staff. And she was silent and pissed no more.
They all stood there together in a moment of awkward acknowledge and potentially-brewing coups.
“I’m going to go to bed,” said the tyrant.
“Find the be-!”
“Shaddup.”

After a long, sleepless night filled with only an erratic and inescapably whining set of wings, the dictator got up, looked himself in the mirror, pretended he hadn’t, and decided to put some hot water to good use. His entire body felt filthy and soiled, and inch by inch, scrub by scrub, he determined himself to deny that.
Shampoo. Bar of soap. Loofah thingy. Bottle of mysterious thing whose label had come off. All were old friends, all eased away all the godawful mess the week had turned into.
In time, in his exertions, in the shower he felt calm. Serene. The water flowed, and he flowed with it. If he closed his eyes he could almost pretend he couldn’t feel the slight tingling in his scalp that was the result of the fly standing directly in the center of his forehead.
“YOU!” he screamed in raw anguish, and with that he struck himself a mighty blow, slipped, bashed his head on the faucet, and drowned in less than half an inch of water.
The fly would’ve been heartbroken, but as it was buzzing in sorrowful circles above the dictator’s corpse a stray fleck of water struck it, gumming its wings and sucking it down that great metaphor of inevitability: the drain.

But the dictator was dead and so the land rejoiced, or at least those parts of it that hadn’t enjoyed the fruits of the tyrant’s reign, and thus the underlying faults of the society that had permitted, nay, even encouraged a dictatorial seizure of power went unaddressed and unanswered because they were a feature not a bug.

Speaking of bugs, they made a little mausoleum for the fly. Very nice and classy, marble and everything. About three by eight inches. You can see it downtown for a dollar.

When Carlos was three, his parents took him down to the river, and he saw the footprints.
They were very big – much larger than he was – and even at that age he knew that wasn’t quite normal, and was probably very special. He was so overwhelmed with their size that he couldn’t quite bring himself to remember much else about them; impressions of shape and depth and so on slid off his mind like water from an eggshell. The one detail that stayed with him was their colour: the sand in them was a deep soft dark brown, shaded by the edges of the prints.
He took a step forward, then another, and he was just teetering on the edge of the hole, one leg raised, when his father’s arms wrapped around him and he heard the ever-hated words ‘time to leave’ and oh how he whimpered over that.
But he couldn’t cry, because he knew he’d be back.

Next time they came back, the prints were missing. If it was some wandering dog or a bored teenager or a rainfall or a big splash he never knew, but they weren’t there. And that was when the troubles started.

“He won’t listen,” the teachers said, which wasn’t fair or true, and “he can’t do the simplest thing right,” which was. It was as if someone had wrapped Carlos up in a blanket and every little thing he had to do was conducted through blind fumbling past layers of thick, muffling cloth. He could walk, he could talk, he could listen, but when it came to execution someone had replaced all of his fingers with thumbs and his arms with jelly.
He graduated with the lowest marks in the school or indeed ever – a note of some distinction – and he listened to what his teachers told him and his father had casually mentioned once or twice and he joined the army.

His marks kept him out of a lot of things, but they gave him a gun. Then he cleaned it very carefully and put it back together backwards. Then he did that again, and again, and when he did it properly they said he’d taken too long. So that was a problem.
Drills should’ve been easy. Just walk. But it was always a little too slow, or a little too fast, and whenever it wasn’t one or the other his legs would wander off on him.
“The hell’s the matter with you?” the drill sergeant asked him. “You got two left feet? Can’t be, ‘cause the doctors would’ve kicked you out. Now pull your head out of your ass and MARCH.”
He tried, he really did, he tried so very hard. But it just didn’t work, and shortly thereafter, neither did he.

After that the ideas were thinner on the ground, but sometimes he found places that needed something mopped, or some papers stapled, or boxes moved, or data entered. But wherever he went it was as if a song was playing, and everyone but him could hear it.
“Won’t listen,” said his boss, and there was a familiar tune, with memorable lyrics. “Just simple things, but he takes forever over it. The guy’s a burnout.”
Carlos was listening – he always listened – but he found himself agreeing. Something had burned out, right there, in his life. And nobody seemed to be able to find a spare match for him.

Then he missed rent.
Twice.
Three times.

It was five strikes in the end, some louder and sharper than others, and really it could’ve been as many as seven or as few as four depending on how you counted them – less a hard line than a fat blur. He spent more time out of his apartment until he didn’t have one anymore.

The streets were no less confusing than the buildings had been. There were things he could’ve done, should have done, would have done; but Carlos remembered how all the rest of the things he could have and should have and would have done went and so he didn’t. Instead he walked until he got tired, then he sat, then he walked again.
Eventually he sat down and fell asleep.
When he woke up he was tired, so tired, and very thirsty.

The river was a terrible idea. Don’t put that in your mouth, he’d been told. It’s dirty. Needs boiling. But it was nearby and he was exhausted and what was one more bad idea?
Almost enough, it turned out. He did more sitting than walking, and by the time the evening took him to its brink his eyes saw more spots than sunlight. The bugs were free and fierce upon him.
Carlos found the water by toe, then fell in, but it was summer and at low ebb so he couldn’t even drown properly, just sputter and splash and eventually scrabble himself into something of a slouched squat. It felt like his skin was boiling off his bones, but calmly.
He drank, and it tasted just as nasty as his parents had always warned him. Grit got in his mouth, and maybe a bug too listless to even fight back. But it cleared the spots from his face, and that was when Carlos could see that he was sitting on the cusp of a footprint.

It looked bigger than he remembered. Surely before it hadn’t filled the streambed, or else someone else would have seen it, or failed to destroy it.

Slowly, carefully, precisely, Carlos put his foot down.
It fit perfectly. Not well, but perfectly.
Then he picked up his other foot and put it down, and that too fit perfectly.
And then he did it again, and again, and moved forward, upstream, walking smoothly, carefully, and in a rhythm that matched the water flowing around his ankles.

They were far too big for him. But maybe he’d grow into them until they fit.

The building was three stories, but you could see it for miles. The lights wouldn’t permit anything less.
Each of them was twelve feet in diameter, backed by a bulb that would’ve made an IMAX blush and cover its face. They never stopped; turning and glowering and peering like a great-aunt checking for dust on bookshelves.
There was another light. It was smaller, and gaudier, and it was only just now beginning to scream.
ALERT was the meaning. It was discernable in any language and in several species. ALERT. DANGER. PROBLEM. WARNING. And in case you didn’t get the meaning it was spinning at a few hundred rotations per second, spackling the world bright red on and off again.
Prolonged exposure to it would result in deafness. Luckily, it only needed to be on for a few seconds: one millisecond for the team to engage; the other four-and-a-bit for everyone else to get out of their way.
The team was organized in pairs. One slept while the other waited, all equipment within arm’s reach. They blinked at a precisely calculated rate. They thought only of performing their task. They dreamed of the floor plan, and of its weaknesses (imaginable?) and its strengths (incalculable). When they moved, they moved together: the waking guard on point as their partner followed two seconds behind.
They were armed. Their weapons were indescribable and numerous, and their feet were fast. There was a lot of ground to cover.
The intruder had come.

The grounds themselves were a little park, underlain by some mulch, gravel, a little brick path, and seven hundred million dollars of electronics and metal. Some of them were warnings, many of them were detectors, and one or two were intended to deter the bejeezus straight out of anything that came into their firing range, which was considerable and rapid.
All were silent.
The walls themselves were higher than the building, although the last forty feet was the most translucent and undetectable plexiglass (and yet more invisibly, they extended far higher in a perfect dome of electronic security), and every unbreachable inch of them was ablaze. Every corridor was filled with quiet, furious footfalls. Staff took refuge in any room to hand, trusting in auto-locking codes to ensconce themselves from the patrols. Anyone in a hallway without the hand pass and that morning’s badge-code was an enemy.
The intruder was here.

The target was one room among dozens. A door in a wall like many others. A resident who was quite specific in her qualities.
They’d been prepared for this. Not just this eventuality, this exact victim. There’d been plenty of warnings. Everyone had been tense as tenterhooks the past week, just waiting. Practicing. Honing. On the most literal of edges, staring out into the abyss, cursing and waiting for it to blink so they could kill it.
The chance was here the moment had come the time was now and BANG in flew the door off its hinges and the tiny chamber was filled with forty different bodies and a hundred muzzles sweeping every inch of its contents, eyes on special cocktails that let them see everything from infra-red to hidden-guilt, brains buzzing out of control.
The form in the bed was motionless.
Carefully but faster than the untrained eye could follow, the designated pointer went to its side, performed sixteen separate rites both physical and invisible, and nodded.
“Got away clean.”
Against all professionalism and training, someone said ‘fuck.’ Everyone silently and mutually did not notice.
With a lack of haste that was infinitely more alarming than their earlier speed, the medical examiner filled out a small sheet with the victim’s name (Bernice Pondsmith); C.O.D. (cardiac arrest); and the damnable, eternal, familiar name of the perpetrator:
Death.

The intruder had won.
Again.

Defeated but undaunted, the peerless, matchless forces of the Sunnyhill Retirement Community returned to their posts, weapons holstered, thoughts already on how to improve their response times, how to cut that last second out of the schedule.
The architect was on call. The walls would be made higher. The lights would shine brighter. The alarms would be surer. The guards would be faster.
Next time. NEXT TIME, it would be different.

And there was always one more next time, wasn’t there?

I stood there, and I stared at the porticullus, and I stared into the abyss and I knew it was staring back at me, eyelessly, infinitely.
My arm moved without me, and it reached the bell, and against all of my power and will I rang.

Three times the bell rang.
ding
DONG
ding
DONG
ding
DONG

The gate creaked wide.
“Oh HIIIIII! THERE you are, ohcomein, it’s SO nice to see you.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Harvest,” I said, as I was dragged over the threshold in a cloud of dread fussing. My hair was adjusted before my very eyes; my raiment tweaked; my glasses straightened.
“OhmyendlessnessyouaresoBIG now, ahahahahahhahaha, oh myyyyy. Look at you!”
“I can’t without a mirror, Mrs. Harvest,” I told her, and she burst into laughter that only ended as she felt the terrible tug of her duty at her ankle.
“Oohhhh, THERE she is. Say hello to Bethany, Teresa!”
Eyes the size of dinner plates stared at me, half-shielded behind tremulous, quaking hands. “donwanna.”
“Oh c’mon, be poliiite. Be a good girl. You know Bethany! She lives just down the road! She’s your babysitter!”
The hands balled into little fists. “donwan.”
“You’ll have a LOVELY time, I’m sure.”
“dw.”
“Now, Bethany: the others are upstairs in Julie’s room, playing, and you shouldn’t need to do much for them beyond feed them – I left some shepherd’s pie in the fridge from last night and you can reheat it for them.”
“d.”
“Alright now, we’re leaving. You have a good time up here, and help yourself to anything in the fridge once the kids are in bed, okay? You’re a growing girl, right?”
Her elbow was icy cold against my ribs, stirring permutations of my own mortality.
“Thanks,” I said. “Have a good night, okay?”
“You bet!”
And with a last hug and a fare-thee-well, Mrs. Harvester, Mr. Sower, Mrs. Sower, and Mr. Planter descended into the basement of the Harvester’s home, where the walls were ringed with unspeakable things and the floor was covered in glyphs that must not be described, all in colours of the farthest rings and motes.
The door went ‘clik.’

Teresa stood there in the middle of the floor, staring at me without looking.
“Hey,” I said.
She immediately began to cry.

*

There are many opiates available to soothe a troubled mind. In the cellar below us were dozens of potent toxins that could flay a soul free of its physical ills for all time; in the world around us were uncountable distractions and vices.
I had brought with me some cheap hard candy, which Teresa was induced to consume. She couldn’t cry and chew at the same time, though from time to time a small and trembling snivel would leak out of the corners of her jaws.
Still, she was tamed enough to be carried, and I ascended the steps to the dwelling-chamber of Julie Harvester, currently inhabited by herself and Jonathan, her brother.
They were screaming words at each other. Harsh, rattling syllables whose power made my soul quail and will shake. But I had a duty, and it lay before me. Emboldened by my intellect if not my will, I threw the door wide.
“Fart face!”
“Douche turd!”
“Shit nose!”
“Knock it off,” I intoned. “This doesn’t look like playing to me.”
“He touched my stuff!”
“She wouldn’t let me touch her stuff!”
“So you just took it!”
“I was just looking at it!”
“It came off!”
“It was garbage!”
“YOU’RE garbage! SHIT garbage!”
A terrible power pulsed at my temples and I felt my vision grow grey. There were forces here that were neither benign nor hostile; merely aberrant to all that I could comprehend in the context of a reasoned universe. There was only one path out of the insanity that surrounded me.
“Let’s watch a movie,” I said.
“I want Fr–”
“I WANT Go-”
“We’ve seen that!”
“We’ve seen THAT!”
“You’re dumb!”
“You’re STUPID.”
“Perhaps later,” I told them. The bell had tolled. The time had come. “Let’s get you guys dinner.”

*

The shepherd’s pie was rank with implications. It seethed with a sickening intensity that nipped at my eyes and watered my soul.
“Gross,” said Jonathan.
“Ick,” said Teresa.
“I don’t want Shepherd’s pie AGAIN,” said Julie.
It was just as I had feared – my careful plans and safeguards so innocently conceived by confident mortal minds were in tatters, adrift in the face of the true nature of the chaotic universe. Emergency was afoot.
“How about mac n cheese?” I asked.

*

“Ugh….this is from a BOX,” said Jonathan.
“Eat it.”
“It’s ORANGE.”
“Eat it.”
“YOU eat it.”
Madness throbbed at my temples. “Alright. I’m going to give it to your sister. She likes it.”
“NO! It’s mine!”
I stared at the ceiling and marvelled at the most merciful thing in the world: the inability of a youthful mind to comprehend its own actions.
“Ecchh,” said Teresa.
I passed her a napkin.
“Bloorph,” said Teresa.
I stood up to find a damp cloth. Distracted on my task, heedless of the world around me, when I returned to the kitchen table I was not prepared by the magnitude of the horror that awaited my eyes.
“She tried to take mine!”
“She said I could!”
“Not if I ate it first!”
“You spilled it!”
“You made me!”
The orange. My god, the orange. It was everywhere. Everywhere. Under every thing and over every one and inside every dream and thought and hope, it crept, endlessly. I felt madness about to overtake me, and it was only through the very greatest effort that I did not begin to laugh uncontrollably.
“You will help clean this up,” I said.
Teresa coughed twice and threw up.

*

In hindsight my decusuibs were laughably optimistic; the wide-eyed innocence of a blind woman who cannot see the chasm gaping before her very tread. But I was naïve even of my naivety – as is so often the case – and so when I gave the children basic cleaning supplies such as mildly soapy water and some paper towels I thought to myself with the earnestness of the true fool ‘what harm could this possibly do?’
So I busied myself changing Teresa’s clothes, patting her back repeatedly, and putting her to bed in ignorant bliss.
By the time I returned with the mop to deal with her half-digested leavings, it was already too late. Too late for any of us.
Words could not describe what I saw. They tried their best, but in the end the truth of things could only be witnessed in the devastation.
It had begun as duty.
It had transformed into competition.
It had inevitably, loathsomely, fully transformed into immutable and eternal hatred.
And then, of course, had come the violence as humanity’s bestial nature overthrew reason’s paper-thin and infantile grasp on its brutish psyche.
“I’m bleeeeeediiiing!” wailed Julie.
“No you’re not! No you’re not!” yelled Jonathan. He was incorrect, but not by much.
“I’m gonna diiiiiiieeeee!”
“No you’re not!”
I recoiled in horror and shrieked with the voice of the eternally damned: “BEDTIME. Now.”

*

The basement door slid open. Foul vapours billowed forth, and in their gloom four hooded figures of horrific aspect slowly unmasked themselves.
“We’re BAAAA-aaack!” sang Mrs. Harvest. “Thank you SO much Bethany – how are the children doing?”
I steeled myself to the task at hand, carefully replacing the deeply illicit and highly salacious book on the living room shelf. It had been my only consolation since the cleaning concluded, and yet the fumes of apple-scented dish soap remained redolent and reeking within the inescapable confines of my mind.
“Teresa is sleeping; Jonathan and Julie were sent to bed early. Julie is watching a movie, I think.”
“What about Connor?”
I suddenly felt as if I were surrounded by horrifying implications I was not ready to understand.
“Connor?”
“Yes! Four children: Teresa, and Jonathan, and Julie, and Connor – you know, Mr. Tiller’s son. Five years old? Didn’t I introduce them to you?”
“No. You said ‘the others are upstairs in Julie’s room.’ And Julie and Jonathan were up there. And that was all.”
“Well, where could he have been then? Oh dear. I hope he hasn’t gotten himself into mischief. Always getting into things, Connor.”
A noise rose from the basement.
Something had bumped, lightly but forcefully.
“Mrs. Harvest,” I said, speaking quietly so that madness would not overtake me, “did you leave anything out?”
“Well, Connor, apparently.”
“No, no, no – did you leave anything out. Downstairs.”
“Oh no! Everything’s been put away carefully, I saw Robert lock the cabinets myself before we came back up. Except the nesting-shrine of course; that’s built into the floor. The Scrabbler of Old nests in there. But I’m sure Connor would never touch that; he’s such a careful boy!”
And then, from the staircase, the squamous, cyclopean, brobdingnagian, unfathomable, lunatic, unthinkable, wearily unmistakable noise of scuttling.
“CONNOR! Young man you are in BIG TROUBLE!”

She would’ve liked to have had it mailed, but the postal system flatly refused.
She would’ve liked to have had someone purchase it for her, but the local couriers wouldn’t do it and the idea of employing – even temporarily – someone who wouldn’t wear a uniform made her nose twitch. Paid in cash, even? Disgusting.
So Shelley drove a car down to town, downtown, and paid a certain specialist a certain sum of money off her credit like a civilized human, even if she had to carry the goods back in her own two hands.
Gingerly. Carefully. Even through the packaging, it was dangerous. She’d need to have someone clean the car afterwards.

At home she cut away the cords and the wrappers and the box and the padding and the second box and the airtight seal and lifted out her prize. Still fresh.
The durian was smaller than she’d expected, if slightly spikier. Its smell, however, was right on target.
Still, it wasn’t the smell she was there for.
Behind Shelley was a wall, and on that wall was a picture frame, and held captive in that cradle was an apple.
Beside that was a banana. To the left of THAT was a pineapple and so on and on and on from raspberries to pitaya to papaya to kiwis to kumquats.
There was an empty space at the end, at the bottom left. It needed something round and thorny that tasted like fine custard and stank like mustard gas. So Shelley sat at her easel, her canvas before her, the durian (on its own – no bowl, no lesser fruit) behind that, and she looked, and she looked, and she thought about art.
She thought about the curve of the brush, of the selection of the colour, of the blending of eye and hand together – one unmoving, the other never ceasing.
Then she shrugged her shoulders and stopped thinking and began to paint instead.

When you’re really concentrating you’re barely awake. Time and space go away, the body stops existing and the mind follows. All that’s left is motion.
Shelley sat in that state for a long beautiful moment and then sneezed.
God, the durian smelled. It smelled bad. Really bad. Worse than she’d thought. And that wasn’t even the problem, the problem was the PERSISTENCE. She wasn’t getting used to it. She couldn’t ignore it.
So she sealed it inside a plastic bag and sat down again and picked up her brush.
Time went away, space went away.
The body vanished and boy that reeked GODDAMNIT
Shelley got up and walked around the house and found a clothespin in a drawer she’d last opened about twenty years ago and slammed that thing shut on her nose.
She sat down with unnecessary force, hissed to herself, put time in her pocket and space in her wallet and counted to three and
Nope.

She put the durian in another room. It didn’t help.
She took a picture of the durian and painted from that. It didn’t help.
She moved to a different part of the house. It didn’t help.
She threw away her work, threw away her reference photos, threw out the durian, went to her summer cottage, found a picture of a durian on the internet with her tablet, and began to paint.
Five brushstrokes in she stopped and sniffed.
“Fuck.”
Then she leaned over, very carefully, and sniffed the canvas.
Her eyes watered.
“FUCK.”

She tried febreeze.
She tried lemon juice in water.
She tried lighting matches, then she tried burning candles, scented and unscented.
She tried sniffing garlic really hard to see if it was her imagination or if there was something else going on (it wasn’t her imagination, and the garlic smell didn’t last long).
She tried, in a fit of desperation, switching entirely to drawing in charcoal to trap the scent. It didn’t work either but it was a nice effect so she kept doing it, and all her durian attempts became black and white and various compromises of grey.
She was getting closer, Shelley suspected. Closer. It was fainter now. Yes, that was it. It was fainter. Just a little closer. Yes.

The next day she finished it.
She woke up and she finished it.
She woke up and finished it and had an extra-long breakfast and then had a long, long walk along her private beach and tried very hard not to cackle. That would be admitting a struggle had taken place, which was all too close to admitting a defeat.
That last corner in the bottom left was going to look AMAZING when it didn’t exist anymore.
Then she walked back in, and stopped, and felt that buzz in the air before she even inhaled and confirmed it.
Durian.

The stairs to her studio room were broad and generous but she still took them four at a time, fury lending her wings, and even moreso the reek in the room as she flung the door wide.
Oh god it stank. Like a whale carcass in the sun, like a wheel of limburger in a chemical toilet, like rotten flesh in a blender full of peach juice.
“I FIXED THAT!” she yelled at the canvas. Oh god how did it still look normal? How was it still just a charcoal sketch? How was it not oozing, dissolving under the stench?
So many questions it made her want to fall apart and scream until her head split open and there was a durian in there too. How? How? HOW?
But Shelley was an artist, and so she stopped doing that and let time and space fall away and raised her brush and made art happen. Pointy-end first.
It hissed, and then it all came out at once and no amount of matches could’ve done anything at all.

Shelley was still lying there when they found her four days later. The body reeked, but the rest of the house was as still and sterile as a doctor’s office.
Except for the canvas, which smelled a little like febreeze and lemons and charcoal. But in a nice way.

The paintings weren’t left to anyone in particular and were auctioned off by a distant cousin to raise funds for charity, which worked very well – the strangeness of the artist’s passing was still in the news, which helped drive the prices up.
The Portrait of Durian: Grey in particular went for over half a million.

Somewhere in the skies above Newyorkopolis soared Large Hero, the largest hero. His name filled the whole sky, and he perched on it and looked at everyone and everything they were doing and asked himself where they needed two hundred pounds of completely invincible muscle to charge through a wall and physically annihilate people.
He listened to them. He watched them. He was the best and most moral of all panopticons, up there in the big blue horizon, invisible and omnibenevolent.
And then he saw a sight that could not be condoned. A sight that filled him with more horror than he could possibly imagine.
Quick! Quick! Disaster must be prevented.
Large Hero dropped from the sky like a bird that had remembered it was a brick, leading with his fists – the most important and heroic parts of his body. There was something far worse than crime afoot.
Change.
Sure enough, there on the very steps of the courthouse, there stood a vile, ruthless mob, brandishing filthy and unlawful signs and shouting most uncivilized rhetoric. And among them, dead guilty, stood a super-heroic being, unmistakably in her willingness to wear brightly coloured quasi-spandex in public. She had caught several tear gas grenades and thrown them into the stratosphere.
“Stop right there!” shouted Large Hero. “Desist! Halt! Avaunt!”
“Never!” called the super-hero. “I am participating in public protest, rather than remaining aloof from it! I am a citizen and should act within society to change it for the better!”
“Have you lost your MIND?” demanded Large Hero, rhetorically. “Once you start doing this sort of thing, where will it END? Interference in normal society, violating the good, clean, righteous letter of the law…these sort of delusions can only end in violence and despair for you and all of the public you delude into following your deranged whims. You should stick to simple and wholesomely apolitical things, like extrajudicially beating up, electrocuting, and/or freezing solid people that steal money from banking institutions, unless they use suits instead of guns in which case you should begrudgingly protect them from all retribution.”
“Preposterous! Outdated!”
“In that case, why not concern yourself with foiling ultramaniacal mega-death schemes executed by mad geniuses, who seek mass death and obvious self-aggrandizement exceeding that which is deemed publically laudable? Sweep out the upstart riff-raff, thwart the unseemly, revel in the applause of all as you protect and serve the rightful and unending order of things.”
“This seems morally dubious,” said the super-hero.
“THIS ENDS NOW,” hollered Large Hero, and he punched the super-hero and they went into a very long and extremely epic fight scene that destroyed lots of buildings and vehicles yet conspicuously avoided showing direct physical harm coming to a specific human being. It concluded with Large Hero being victorious and he made a quip and so on.
“Now you realize the error of your ways, which has been established by your losing a physical contest while I state basic moral homilies. You’d better listen to me now.”
“Ah, yes, you are correct now, I realize the error of my stupid, headstrong ways,” lamented the super-hero. “Your fists are bigger and therefore more moral. Your enemies are now my enemies; your battles my battles. You are my heart and soul and inspiration and I will live, die, and kill as you command.”
“Not kill!” shouted Large Hero. “Never kill! Slam their heads into concrete; render them unconscious with concussions and internal hemorrhages; break ribs and snap arms; bash skulls and crack spines – yes, yes, yes, revel in that, take great glee in that, make witty one-liners at that, be proud of that! But no, no, no, you’re never killing anyone (directly). Never! It is the line that shouldn’t be openly acknowledged as being crossed.”
“Aw jeez you’re right again,” mourned the super-hero. “I can’t get over how right you are. All I am is dumb and wrong. I should listen to my elders and betters and better-sellers.”
“Oh, we are not as different as you might think, young woman,” said Large Hero, as he led the super-hero to his impossibly expensive and super-futuristic satellite superstar base, the Good Star. “You see, I too was once misled in my ways!”
“Impossible!”
“Oh yes! In my heady youth, I thought that there were things that must change – minds, actions, the way of the world even. Such arrogance! Why, I took down slumlords, threw wife-beaters out of windows, and even disrespected the police. But in time I grew older, and became well-known, and realized this: with great publicity comes great money, and you can’t let shit get in the way of that. Best to ride the waves and not make them. There is no such thing as society; merely normal faceless interchangeable folks and the madmen and hoodlums who would take their wallets, lives, and comically large bank vaults filled with brown bags with little ‘$’s on the side.”
The young hero raised her head and her eyes were glistening with the tears of the awakened sinner. “Oh my god, my Large Hero,” she said, nobly kissing around his feet, “you are completely right. I will never try to change anything ever again! When I imagine the future, I imagine my fist whacking a garishly coloured man with an evil scheme to cause change, forever.”
Thunderous applause filled the Good Star. Thousands of beefy gloved hands smacking into each other, from a trillion giant muscly arms. Most of them belonged to slightly smaller Large Heroes.
“Wellll…. Maybe not forever and EVER,” said Large Hero. “You’re sort of new in town. You might just get bumped off the next time everyone has to fight off the evil ALIEN armies of Masterdooms. Don’t worry though, you’ll inspire a lot of heartfelt tears and rage from me, for at least five minutes. Now stand up! Raise your head high, recite our oath, and be redeemed! No more are you a person, now you are SUPPORTING CAST! Welcome to the status quo squad!”
Eyes filled with pride, the hero raised her hand. “I will fight for things as they are now, and not one step further.”
“I will be small, and contain a tiny core of character,” said Large Hero.
“I will repeat myself incessantly.”
“I will repeat myself incessantly.”
“I will repeat myself incessantly.”
“I will repeat myself incessantly.”
“I will position all disputes as violent conflict, and I will ensure that my side will always possess the greatest violence.”
“Nothing will ever change, ever, as long as we are on watch,” said Large Hero.
Everyone shed beautiful tears of joy.
“Now, if I’m not mistaken, there’s an invasion of evil people from far away coming this afternoon. They aren’t like us – they have no individuality, and all of them don’t care about the value of life. It’s war now, between the pure and innocent US and the vile and contemptible THEM. So feel free to kill as many of them as you feel like, as long as it doesn’t make you too grim and broody!”
“Hoorah!” called everyone.
Then Large Hero and the Status Quo Squad all flew up, up into the big bright sky, like birds seeking a plane’s engine. And they did it forever, in the golden, eternal moment that they made sure would never end.

The world had ended.
Well…
There was still land.
And water.
And some animals. The ugly ones nobody liked much.
And a lot of the tougher and more fiendish plants.
There were people, too. Just fewer of them.
The world had ended, but luckily nothing mattered.

Jackie was running, running across a desolate hellscape scorched with radiation burns and pursued by cannibal fiends. However, nothing mattered, and so instead she was being chased across a relatively boring overgrown meadow, and both she and her pursuers – all of them distressingly average-but-fit people in battered clothes and calloused skins – kept tripping and stumbling over vegetative hummocks.
“Hmmf. Shit,” said someone.
Something rustled at the treeline, and with the reflexes of a snake Jackie whipped out her scrap crossbow and sent a shredder-bolt straight into the heart of a drooling mutant. Nothing mattered however, and so instead she missed the normal if somewhat scrawny white-tailed deer by a yard with her distressingly plain arrow.
“Fuck!” she yelled.
The animal took off.
“Missed?”
“Missed.”
“Shit.”

That night they returned in shame to the pit-palace of Big Uncle, the murder-king of the slaughterpalz, in his circle of carnage.
“TRIAL BY COMBAT REDEEMS,” hollered the ten-foot tower of steel and meaty leather, as the ceremonial murderstickers were thrown into the blood-stained sand at their feet.
Except none of that mattered and actually her name was Belinda and she was more or less in charge of just the farm. Because she knew how to run the farm. They all went over to her firepit and ate some vegetables.
“Well, shit” they said. And they sat there like mooks.
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Shit.”

Tomorrow was another day. Tomorrow was another chance to find themselves, to face their own inner demons, to learn to live for more than just staying alive in the highly metaphorical teeth of the extremely literal apocalypse. They would venture deep inside the rusting hulks of the Old Dead Age, to bring back offerings of teknowlegend. The fire-speakers, the thunder-makers, and maybe even find a functional wheel-dragon to fend off the Darklanders when the season of blood began in its storm-clouded earnest.
That could’ve happened, but nothing mattered and instead they went looking for deer again through the old suburban sprawl, where they spooked one that was resting in the remnants of what could’ve been someone’s deck years ago.
This time Jackie was paying closer attention and her shot hit the deer. Unfortunately, it missed anything useful and it scarpered uphill onto the freeway.
“Up?”
“Up.”
“Shit.”

They were hunting for their dinner. The deer was hunting for a way to live. The motivations just didn’t match, and so it was that Jackie and her comrades spent a good three hours following a tiny blood trail over increasingly large obstacles until at last they found where it had gone to ground: an old world tomb-vault, the bunkers where the big moneymen had lived out their final days in purest decadent splendor before their supplies ran low and their tempers ran hot.
Nothing mattered, so it was basically a big estate with some defunct fencing. Pretty overgrown.
Panting atop the perimeter wall lay the deer, stuck in the effort of leaping it, lathered and exhausted.
“I’ll shoot it.”
“You’ll shoot it?”
Jackie shot at it, and her shot sunk straight and true into its head, killing it instantly and dropping it over the other side of the wall and into a half-eroded culvert which whisked it away.
“Shit!”

They ran down the old river, knives between their teeth. This was Cackler territory, and they had to be out by sundown if they wanted to leave with their tongues and teeth. Neo-crocs squirmed under the water – the bloated giant newts of the far past resurrected into the future. The sun was setting, and the deadwinds were starting to roar up from the Burned South.
Nothing mattered, however, and instead of any of that at all they trudged downstream for an hour until they found the deer being hauled out of the culvert towards an abandoned gas station by a large feral dog.
“Gun?”
“Gun.”
“Shit.”
The emergency pistol was possessed of one virtue and that was sturdiness and Jackie pulled it from her pack and aimed it and – possibly still compensating for her poor bowshots earlier – successfully put three shots all to the dog’s immediate right, directly into a large and colourfully red-hued gas tank.
Mercifully (as nothing mattered) the old canister dented under the bullets and refused to explode. Instead the force of the gunshots triggered a small avalanche of distressingly heavy yet dull chunks of cement which toppled directly at Jackie. She dodged under the hail of debris with lightning speed but nothing mattered and instead she found herself still standing bolt upright and letting it bounce off her face.
“AH! OW! FUCK!” she yelled. “JESUSSHIT AUGH owoowww.”
They dug her out and brought her home, where she stayed in bed for a week with a bad headache.
A few days after that she died from bizarre complications of an undetected internal hemorrhage.

Two years later the rains never came. Half the community starved and the other half wandered north in search of somewhere less sunny.
None of it mattered.