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“I see a snow angel.”
“That’s nice,” said dad.
And that was probably all I was getting. He concentrated when he was driving – he’d never get annoyed, but he would sink into a soft, cloudy sort of voice that told you he wasn’t home.
I tried anyway. “Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“How high can snow angels fly?”
“I don’t know, honey,” he said. “Go ask one and find out.”
“Okay.”
I figured it was worth a try. It had been very low – just skimming the roof of our neighbour’s garage – and maybe it needed help.

First I had to have lunch though. And because I begged a little hard I got hot chocolate before I went out, instead of after, and I didn’t quite finish my mug, which meant when I snuck over to the neighbour’s backyard I had something to give the snow angel.
It was bigger than I thought it’d be. All eyes and wheels and steaming, rippling. The air around it smelled sharp and made my nose tingle.
“I brought you a drink,” I told it.
“Thank you.” Its voice came from somewhere inside it, not from one of its mouths. It sounded soft and light, like powder. “Put it down here and I’ll have it later.”
“Are you hurt? You looked like you were hurt. Did you hit the garage? We’re not allowed to go up there. It’s too high.”
Then I remembered.
“How high can you fly?”
“I’m hurt, but only a little. If you can help me, I should be fine very soon. I didn’t hit the garage roof, don’t worry. And I can fly very high, very high.”
“All the way to the moon?”
The snow angel laughed. It was polite, but I could tell it was still laughing at me. Just like grandpa.
“Even higher.”

“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Where do we keep the amunya?”
“The what?”
“The amunya.”
“Ammonia? Like bleach?”
“Yeah, that’s what it is.”
That got me a lecture on why I should never touch the cleaning supplies. But when he was done I knew where they were and so I went and got some and was very careful not to open the cap.

“Ahhh.”
“Dad said not to drink it. It’s bad for you.”
“It’s good for snow angels. Thank you very much. I feel better already.”
And it looked better, too. There was a glow inside it, like a nightlight but stronger. And its breath smelled like a swimming pool.
“Now, there is something else I could use, if you’re clever enough to get it for me.”
“What?”

“Honey?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s four glasses of water in ten minutes. Did you eat something weird?”
“No.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah.”
“Pinky swear?”
“Yeah.”
“Good enough. Remember to go to the bathroom soon.”

The snow angel was bigger now. Bits of it had grown and woven themselves; it looked like it was a lacy napkin the size of a house. When its wings moved, they tinkled like windchimes.
“Better,” it sighed. Its voice was the same soft powder as before, and it seemed funny now. “So much better now. And all thanks to you, small person.”
“You’re welcome.”
“There is one last thing. One very last, very little thing. I think you can help me with it, and then it will all be fine again and I can go home and see my friends.”
“Okay.”
“Give this to your family. It’s a gift.”
“A present?”
The angel laughed again. Very, very politely. “Yes. A present. It’s a surprise present. Put it under where your family sleeps.”

“Hey honey?”
“Yeah?”
“You look a little worried. Is it the water?”
“No.”
“I told you not to drink too much. You feel okay?”
“No. Yes.”
“Which is it?”
“Daaaaaaad.”
“Do you need something?”
I thought about it.
“Yes.”

The window was blowing when I went back outdoors in the twilight. White flakes in purple light, streaming.
The snow angel was taller than the trees now. It was eating the snowflakes like a whale eating fish.
“Oh, thank you,” it told me. “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful. I can go home now, and I’ve got a surprise for you there too.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Me too. Want it?”
Laugh, laugh, laugh. This one was real. It was big, it was loud, it sounded like ice cracking, and the air smelled like a broken battery. It wasn’t polite at all.
“Yes, please. I’d love your surprise.”
“Hot chocolate,” I said. And I threw it at the snow angel’s middle.
The splash was small, but the scream was much, much, much bigger.

“Dad?”
“Yeah honey?”
“Do you know how to make snow angels?”
“Sure.”
“Don’t make any more. They’re creepy.”
“Uh-“
“Pinky swear. Please.”

And he did.
I never saw one again all winter, so I guess it worked.

Josh Whoomer was a simple, ordinary person.
He ate junk food, he bummed around, and he spent his money and himself on nerdy things.
You know. Nerdy things.
Star Wars backpacks and Batman pens and entire Worlds of Warcraft and video cards. As he grew, so too did his interests, and he shrank to meet them – especially once the scoliosis set in.
But it was not anywhere in Josh Whoomer’s life that his finest hour came, but rather, after the fact. Specifically, three minutes after he very factually tripped over his shoelaces picking up an Amazon package and broke his neck.

He waited there, Josh Whoomer did. Held in place by awe and superstitious terror and relief, pinned like a bug. And when one of those mountainous intents spoke aloud, he was swallowed up entire by its words.
“All that he is, is ours,” intoned the first mountain. Its slopes were coated with explosions and SFX, rippling endlessly from denouement to opening credits. “Did he not marvel at Harry Potter and Batman? Has he not always considered them his favourites since childhood? He belongs to Warner Media ™. Let none dispute this.”
“We dispute this,” spoke the second mountain. It too was bedecked with a flowing cape of moving pictures. “All that he is, is ours. He may still feel you in his heart, but his mind is filled with our works. No greater thing lies within his brain than Star Wars. He is property of The Walt Disney Corporation ™, and no word may contradict this.”
“You are mistaken,” said the third mountain. This one shook in place, vibrating with the force of its own superheated, churning guts. Things were under pressure so great that it leaked at the pores, jets of piercingly bright violence by gun and magic wand. “Mind or matter, soul or spirit, all that he is ours. Time is space is money, and no one has claimed more of it than Activision-Blizzard ™. Years pure years – are ours. Who can match this sacrifice? He is ours, no matter what.”
“No matter what the method he used?” asked the fourth mountain. This one was cold and stark and stretched endlessly, a being that ate the horizon and shrank it. “All that he did for you, was through our paths. All roads lead to and from me, and we are them. We are Microsoft Corporation ™, and his world existed because we provided it. All that he is, is ours. Indisputably.”
There was a drawn-out and grim silence. Josh tried to quote Star Trek, but found that his throat was quite dry.
“Perhaps, our fellow omnipotents,” purred the great bell-kitten voice of Warner Media ™, “there is a time to reason among ourselves. Let us not forget our place. There is a Law here, and its rule is absolute, and should be abided.”
“Maximize profit, minimize cost?” asked Activision Blizzard ™.
“The copyright must flow ever farther back?” said The Walt Disney Company ™
“No,” said Warner Media ™. “Those are good laws and true, but the law we speak of is much older, much truer. Fellow omnipotents, is there any law which lies above this?”
And here it quoted, and quoted true, with a heat and power that scorched away mere marks.
Shareholder Value Must Be Maximized At All Costs
“And our fellow omnipotents,” said Warner Media ™, “what are we, if not those?”
“It is just,” said The Walt Disney Company ™.
“It is just,” said Activision Blizzard ™.
“It is just,” said Microsoft Corporation ™.
“It is just,” said Warner Media ™. “I call dibs.”
And so they set upon the form of Josh Whoomer and divided him amongst themselves in a fair and equitable manner.
“Got the credit,” said Warner Media ™.
“Got the watch,” said The Walt Disney Company ™.
“Got the shoes,” said Microsoft Corporation ™.
“Got the phone,” said Activision Blizzard ™.
“Got the wallet,” said Microsoft Corporation ™.
With those words they turned their backs and distanced themselves from Josh, who suddenly felt very alone.
“Uh. Are you taking my soul?” he asked, just loudly enough to be sure he’d said it, but just quietly enough that he could plausibly pretend he hadn’t.
“Nah,” came the faint reply, echoing up from the ever-billowing corporate fog. “No profit in that.”

Nothing was there now. Nothing but grey. Endless, eternal grey.
“Damnit,” thought Josh. “How will I afford Transformers figurines now?”
And then he saw the light. It was warm and soft and beckoning and it glimmered so very enticingly that his eyes couldn’t leave it.
He had to have it.
Josh walked, he crawled, he ran, he sprinted, he stumbled head over heel, he did all of those things without a body. Very impressive. And at the end of the endless mists he found a soft pulsing heat which grabbed him and turned him inside out three times over until he stopped vomiting.
“Hi,” said a soft and bored voice. “Please check the box to indicate you understand.”
Josh looked up with what most certainly weren’t his eyes and saw a hideous and unnameable thing. It looked like a soft and tired middle-manager, but it felt like every bad day he’d ever heard of.
“The box is in the bottom right corner,” it told him helpfully.
Josh tore his eyes away from the worst thing he’d ever seen just in time for it to become second place. He’d never seen such a capacious sheaf of paper before, or a print so small-boned and fine. It could’ve graced an opthamologist’s office, probably with a placard reading ‘advanced.’
He checked the little box in the bottom right corner.
“Thankyoovalyoodcustomurr,” said the devil. “Now pick up your shovel (lvl 1) and go mine some dirty rocks (lvl 0).”
“Sorry?”
“Each rock is worth 10 bobs. For a thousand bobs you get a shovel (lvl 2) and can mine smudged rocks (lvl 0.5). Have fun.”

And you know what? He really did.

It was the time!
THAT time!
The good time! The best time! Or at least the most exciting time!
The cold rain was coming in!
So many things to be done before that. So many chores turned into games of do-it-the-fastest. So many pets to be bid fare-thee-well-forever to. So many vistas to be gazed at, filled with the subtle understanding that they would never more be seen. So many names to be screamed with such force and urgency.
What a hoot!
And my hoot was loudest of all, because it was getting pretty late on and everyone else had crammed themselves into the tiny squished place.
“GAAAAALEEEEEEE. HEEEEEEEEY GAAAAALLLLEEEEE. GEDDOVERHEEEEEEREEEEE GAAAAAAALEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
And on and on and on like that, until I tripped over something, which was Gale.
“Ooops.”
“Ow.”
“Sorry bout that.”
“You hit my leg.”
“Real sorry.”
“It’s gonna bruise.”
“Aw, I’m super sorry.”
“What do you care so loud about today anyhow?”
I stared at Gale, checking just to be sure she hadn’t been replaced by someone dumber in the night. “Because the cold rain’s coming in,” I told her very carefully, “and it’s time to go into the tiny squished place.”
“Oh, that,” she said. “No.”
“Right,” I said. “C’mon along and we can maybe find a nice spot to what the hell in a hot sauce are you talking about.”
“I’m not going,” said Gale. “I’m going to escape.”
“That’s crazy,” I said.
“No it isn’t.”
“Yes it is.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Yes it is! Where’re you gonna go, huh? North? It’s flat and dead. South? It’s rocky and dead. West? Nothing but the big empty sea. And east, of course, is filled with giant angry monsters. You’re going to get smooshed into ooze. Come on back and I bet I can elbow us a nice spot at the entrance, where we can watch the cold rain fall and very nearly not die. Will that make you happy?”
“No,” said Gale. “I’m going to leave. You can stay here and dodge the cold rain forever and ever if you’d like to, but I’m going to go east, over the hills, and find a place where the cold rain never falls. It sure beats this. See you late, or never, or whenever.”
And she was gone. Well, functionally. It’d take her another good while to run up over those first hills and out of sight, but as far as all of us were concerned she was gone.
I watched Gale be gone for another precious little minute or so, just out of surprise. Then I turned tail and ass, hauled both down to the tiny squished place like they were on fire, and just barely fit my entire self into the opening before the first angry drops came hammering down.
That was one of the worst nights I’d had, and I’d made a few of them for myself. Hours and hours of my backside being six blips from eradication, and chilly to boot. It didn’t endear me a lot to Gale’s memory.
Memory, not Gale herself. Gale herself had undoubtedly been beaten to bony bits by now on some ugly and empty slope. I thought so, and so did the other six or seven people who were crammed up against my face that I asked about this sort of thing, who all seemed very confident of it.
“Seen it happen a dozen times before,” said Eddy, the widest man. “Someone turns quiet-crazy and says ‘I can change everything!’ and then hey, they get themselves whacked. Best to know when you’re trying to do something impossible.”
“What happened to the other dozen people?” I asked Eddy.
“Dunno,” he said. “Never found ‘em again.”
“Do you think any of them made it?”
“Aw, not you too.”
And that was that.

When the cold rain ended, I wandered pretty high and pretty low, looking for Gale. But not super hard, because I didn’t really want to see any bony bits. Guess I got my wish because I sure didn’t find anything.
That was the disappointment, for sure. I didn’t find anything. And that made me worry.
It made me worry all day long digging up the good roots.
It made me worry all evening long brewing down the jellies.
It made me worry through a week solid as we went rockhunting through the Old Crumbles, and found some pretty good rocks to whack things with.
It even made me worry all through the Big Catch Day, which was dangerous because that was when the fresh jellies came in from the Net Guys On The Sea and if you don’t pay attention when you’re untangling those they sting the bejeezus out of you. As it was I lost my bejeezus three times to inattention.
But I couldn’t stop worrying, because I was worried that Gale was right. She’d had a habit of that, sometimes, when she could be bothered, and if it cropped up again boy would I be pissed off. It’d be just like her, to be right like that and then rub it in my face by never mentioning it. Just infuriating. Enraging. Damnit I hated when she did that, and now every day was filled with it.
So the next time the weathervane screeched I hollered my dues, waved bye to everything, and ran for the hills.

It was a spur of the moment thing. The problem with that kind of thing is that once you’re off the moment it just seems stupid.
I ignored that and concentrated on running. There was plenty to be done there.
The rocks weren’t my friends. The rocks were nobody’s friends, ever. But they seemed cooperative enough for the moment for me to live in, running full-tilt uphill and trying to guess what shade of green the clouds were and where exactly I’d seen her run, where she’d run to, and how fast.
Maybe it was here, just above here, that was where Gale had sheltered overnight. Maybe it was there, right there, in that hollow. Maybe it was “Aww, mince,” I said.
The skeleton was in pretty rough shape. The cold rain had beaten its limbs to bits and cracked even the big solid skull and pelvis. But yeah, that looked Gale-shaped to me.
“I DID warn you,” I told her.
She didn’t listen. Well, sometimes things don’t change.
The sky was starting to hiss. Somewhere behind me, the cold rain was starting. The sea was getting smashed to sloppy chunks.
I ran again. Hell, why not?

I didn’t have a plan as to WHERE, mind you. And never you mind why, or what.
But boy did I run.
Behind me, the cold rain came down. Spiked, thorned, thicker than a fist, faster than mother’s forearm. Cracking into stone and sending up little geysers of dirt.
I won’t lie to you. I felt pretty dumb right about then.
I wished I’d never listened to Gale, or at least put more than a half-second’s worth of thought into any of her arguments.
I wished I’d paid more attention to anyone else, who knew anything.
I wished I’d spent more time running so I could run faster right this minute.
It’s just that in the meantime, I couldn’t do any of those things.
So I ran.

Boy, did I run!

In the early morning of the first day of the third year of her tutelage under the philosopher of garbage, the student Surk was rolled out of her bed, into her coat, and out the door, which was immediately locked behind her.
This was, by now, very normal.
“Come back when you have an answer to my question,” said the philosopher of garbage.
“What question?” asked the student Surk.
And she took her answer and went to the first place she could think of.

The fry shop was packed tight with people picking up coffee and donuts. The student Surk’s elbows were bruised from the ribs of her opponents by the time she reached the counter, and the less said about where her knee had been the better.
“Order up, order up, order up, order up,” yelled the fry cook into her face in incoherent despair and utmost professionalism.
“What is the nature of humanity?” asked the student Surk.
The fry cook blinked seven times in half a second and replied: “To consume endlessly and never be satisfied. Get out of here or I’m shoving this spatula up your urethra.”
The student Surk thanked the fry cook, caught the donut that was hurled at her head, and left.

Half the donut got her past the lobby, the other half got her an audience. The computer technician wore no tie, shaved no cheek, and suffered no fools. His eyes were squinted and his hair was thinned and his mind was pared down to a thin blade of acid.
“Hi,” he said. “This isn’t jelly. You aren’t Rosemary. What the hell are you doing in here?”
“What is the nature of humanity?” asked the student Surk.
“Wow,” said the computer technician. “Wow. Seriously? Who cares. Only morons think about that stuff. If you were smart you’d make enough money to not give a shit about that question. English major over here.”
The student Surk thanked the computer technician, then flipped him off with both hands and left.

From there, the next target was obvious.
The pass-badge from the computer technician’s desk and an authoritative series of lies led the student Sark from room to room to room to working on ‘repairing’ a small camera in a corner of the press gallery of the Highest Courtyard. Ingenuous use of coffee breaks did the rest of the work for her, and before long the ruler entered the room.
“Hey!” shouted the student Sark, as the crowd of scribes settled down and placed pens to tablets. “What’s the nature of humanity?”
The ruler sighed. “Obviously, asking stupid questions, doing stupid things, and generally getting themselves killed without proper guidance from the qualified. Guards, seize her and do something fatal.”
But the student Sark was already gone.

It was a nice day in the botanical gardens. Quiet. Clear skies. A breeze. And not too dry. You could practically hear the plants growing.
The head gardener was not a whistling woman, but she did indulge herself in loud humming when the times merited it. And so they did. Good weather to be alive in. Good weather to work in. Good weather to turn the compost heap in.
The compost heap yelped under her shovel, then disgorged the student Surk.
“Jeez,” said the gardener. “What were you doing in there?”
“Long story,” said the student Surk. “I’ll cut it short: what is the nature of humanity?”
The gardener hummed that one over for a moment. “To grow,” she said. “And while you’re at it, to tend. Hey, do you hear a siren?”
“Absolutely. Can you lend me your hat?”
“N-”
“Thanks,” said the student Surk. And she left over the nearest wall.

Six miles between the palace and her was the safe zone, and a good time to stop and be someone else. Always easier than most people thought. Turn your clothes inside out, clean the dirt off your face, walk higher in the shoulders, there you are, you’re a stranger.
“You done?” asked the plumber. “Sink’s clogged.”
“I know,” said the student Surk. “I just clogged it.”
They sighed. “Great. Thanks. The hell is this? Compost.”
“Absolutely.”
“Wonderful. Anything else I can help you with?”
“Sure. What’s the nature of humanity?”
“To produce shit, naturally. That be all?”
“Yes. You’ve been immeasurably helpful.”
“Don’t sweat it,” said the plumber.
And then two minutes later: “Hey. Wait a second.”

The walk back, as it so often is, was much longer. The sun helped by setting on her halfway through, and the frost was thick on the doorknocker of the garbage-hovel.
“Go away,” said the philosopher of garbage.
“It’s me,” said the student Surk.
“Did you find an answer for me? Need to pay your yearly rent with something, and you know it.”
The student Surk nodded. “The nature of humans, my teacher, is utterly blinkered self-absorption.”
“About time you got it,” said her teacher. “Now come in and close the door. You’re letting in cold air, and I’ve got a kettle waiting for us.”

See the rocks.
Red hot and boiling with potential; brimmed with enthusiasm and cheer.
They are all so new, and they already harden with age. Huge sheets and cratons, cores and ridges, spread across the planet – a skin thin enough to make an apple envious, but miles deep. Below they run together in a liquid that turns from slush to pure flow, but here they are craggy and proudly solid, or as near as a thing can be to that. All children of the sun’s scraps, congealed like over-done scrambled eggs. Scraps made whole.
See the rocks. See them grow stiff and solid and endless.
Now, let us watch them dance.

See the rocks dance. It is a special technique.
The ponderous grind of tectonics; the smooth slippage of the mantle greasing the way. The surface of the planet puckers and dimples as water arrives and winds its way around the continents. They are crashing together, they are splitting apart, they are one and divided.
Nowhere else yet seen knows this dance. Affable little Mars is silent. Twin sister Venus is still. The giant moon above hangs cold and empty, though its stones are the old cousins of those below. They will grow ever older, and never shift an inch.
Below all this, and utterly alone, the rocks dance.

See the seas dance. It’s hard to find anywhere else they ever will.
A little colder and they will freeze forever. A lot hotter and they will boil away into the atmosphere.
It will be a lot hotter, someday, when the sun gets too old and angry.
But for now they are free to surge, and they are making the most of it. The rocks may comprise the planet, but it is the seas that cover it. Only the piddling nubbins of the continental crust dare raise a peep of their mass above the waterline.
They flex, they bob, they weave up and down as the planet tips and spins and wobbles and the atmosphere curdles and coughs.
A lot less patient than rocks.

See the little things dance. They do so in desperation.
They want to continue – they must, all of them that didn’t care are gone. The survivors are passionately afraid, and will stop at nothing to continue. Every movement is calculated, every angle eyed, every opportunity exploited to throw a tiny fragment into the future. Again. Again. Again!
Some of them have discovered a trick of turning sunlight into food. This is an excellent trick and begins to become more widespread.
Unfortunately, it’s not as clean as it could be. After the feast comes the relief, which produces a small but noteworthy quantity of an angry little thing.
For a long time, there will be no consequences.

See the consequences come storming in. They’re furious and ready to tear up the place.
Oh-oh, oh times two. It’s oxygen. And it’s ready to kill.
Sets its sights on all those rocks, gets sucked in like spaghetti and shreds them, tears them, rusts them. Oxidation everywhere, all the where. Minerals popping up like zits on the double, and the seas and skies a deathly soup as all the little things that prefer their homes still and safe choke to death on poison.
Some of them live. Some of them get real messed up and even decide they LIKE it. They like this shake-up.
Take a deep breath. Keep dancing.

See the little things grow fat. It takes a long time.
Little things taking little things inside them to make them into bigger things which multiply themselves into bigger things that eat little things that change into bigger things that get bigger.
It’s not a great solution, and it’s not for everything, or even most things, or even SOMEthings. Almost all of the little things…stay little. They’re endlessly busy, but they’ve got plenty of space.
Some of the poor little things grown fat think they’ve gotten an easy time of it. Gotten too big for their predator’s britches. Boy are they annoyed when their fellows turn on them.
Underneath the little things, the older dances continue. But they’re too big and too slow for their nervous and self-absorbed little heads. Except when some of the rocks sneeze and turn the seas anoxic, or somesuch. THAT gets their attention, at least until it’s over.

See the little things sprint. There’s no art to it, but you have to admire their frenzy.
Up! Up! Up! Into the macrosphere!
Out! Out! Out! Across the planet!
Fill the seas! Surge onto the shores!
Grow taller! Grow thicker! Grow greener!
Grow bigger! Grow hungrier! Grow fewer!
If the rocks belch and you all die, well, roll with it and get back up in a mad scramble. If the sky spits a stone from the beginning of time onto your head and blots out the sun, them’s the breaks and the lucky ones have no time to shake it off. It’s a race! It’s THE race! Get going, going, GONE!
And this too is a dance, even if it’s a little bit tasteless.

See the ape dance.
It’s hard, but if you squint you can make them out.
It’s one of the little things. No, not that one. That one. Not that one. THOSE ones. Yeah, there. No, over there. Trust me.
Silly creatures – they’re strutting along bolt upright, waving tools in the air and stuffing everything into their mouth that’ll fit. Hollering and jumping, hopping and spinning. Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!
That’s no way to conduct yourself in public. There outta be a law… but of course there isn’t. Everyone’s been more or less making this up as they go along.
Things tend to work out, in the long run.

Once upon a time, there was a diligent and hardworking beaver. All day long the beaver toiled at his dam, cutting down trees and dragging them to the place where his tiny little brain told him the sound of rushing water was loudest. It was just a very little stream, but it was what was there, so it’d have to do.
“What’re you doing?” the other animals asked him.
“Dunno,” said the beaver. “Feel like it. I like this.”
“You don’t know why you’re doing it?” they said. “That’s silly.”
The beaver grumbled at the laughter of his friends and neighbors, but continued to work hard. Day and night, sun and rain, down came the trees and up came the dam. Plastered with stream-mud, built on tree-bones, higher and higher.
“Silly,” said the mice and the voles and the grubs and the spiders and the millipedes. “Silly!”
And the beaver grumbled some more, but with his mouth full. There was work to be done.
None too soon, either. The rain was coming.

It came in fast and hard and in sheets, accompanied by a wind that could shred treetops and tear teeth from mouths.
The beaver’s teeth were safe inside the beaver’s mouth inside the beaver’s nest under the bank, where he listened to the chaos and madness for two days. On the morning of the third day, the beaver came above the waterline and looked around.
His dam had worked beautifully. The rainwater had channeled itself into the stream, and now the forest was a lovely beaver meadow, comfortably drowned.
“Hah,” said the beaver, as he watched the corpses and homes of his friends and neighbours bob in the froth. “Who’s silly now?”
Then he gnawed down a funny-looking tree, took a big bite out of the weird-looking branch hanging off it, and fried himself to death.
Several of the brighter woodland creatures could’ve told him that was a power line. But they’d all left or drowned by then.

***

Once upon a time, there was a poor and miserable family of two: Jack and his mother. All they had to live in was a shack made of two boards nailed together, all they had to eat was old dry dirt. The one thing they had left in all the world was his father’s old bare-boned stock portfolio.
“Jack,” said his mother, “take that damned thing into town and sell it, would you? We can’t eat paper, and believe me we’ve tried.”
Jack nodded and walked to town and walked back and walked back into town with the stock portfolio this time and sold it off and was almost all the way back home with the proceeds when he ran into a mysterious stranger about five hundred feet tall.
“Psst,” said the stranger. “Want to buy some beans?”
“No,” said Jack.
“C’mon,” said the stranger. “They’re magic.”
“No,” said Jack.
“Plant them and they’ll carry you up into the magical cloud-realm of the giants, where you can steal all the loot your tiny arms can carry.”
“No,” said Jack.
“Aww, c’mooonnn.”
“No,” said Jack.
“Tell you what,” said the stranger. “Pay me just five bucks and you can buy this mystery bag that contains a randomized number of beans with a chance to contain a magic bean of rare, super rare, epic, legendary, or mythical qualities, each exponentially more potent than a regular magic bean.”
“I will buy every single one of them,” said Jack.
And that was how Jack came home with no money, a cartful of painted navy beans, and ten thousand dollars of bean debt, which kept him miserable and enserfed until his grandchildren died without descendants after decades of back-breaking labour and hardship.

***

Once upon a time, there was a king who loved two things: his family, and making numbers go up. His principal means of doing the latter was logging, for his kingdom was well-timbered. Many trees were felled, many logs were hauled, many numbers were delivered to the king, and with these he purchased fine things for himself and his children. This pleased him so much that he would order more trees to be felled, and so it continued for some time, until the kingdom’s landscape was much troubled by erosion. The peasants complained, but they were only peasants and as such irrelevant.
At length came a warning, delivered by an ancient crone who stepped through the castle’s guards as if they weren’t there. She walked through the king’s court and touched each courier, and as she touched them they were stricken dumb, until she stood before the king in a true and deep silence.
“I am of the deep and rotten woods,” said the witch. “I am of the swamp and bog. You’ve wrecked your lands, and now you wreck mine. Leave it be or suffer the consequences.”
“Pish to threats,” said the king. “I will not accede to such boorish behaviour. Nuts to your nonsense, alarmist upstart.”
“Very well,” said the witch. “Until the day you cease to destroy my home, I curse you thus: for every hundred logs taken, one of your children shall fall into an everlasting sleep. Only by returning the landscape to what it once was shall you see them ever wake again.”
“Fuck you,” said the king.
“I’m sorry?” said the witch.
“Fuck you,” said the king. “You think I care? I love two things: my family and making numbers go up. You want to make me choose between them? Easy. Numbers. Fuck you, and fuck my children too. Let the little bastards rot in their beds, I’ll console my grief with luxury. I’ll chop logs just to watch ‘em burn! To hell with you, to hell with them! To hell with this metaphor – I DON’T EVEN CARE ABOUT TREES! ALL I NEED IS OIL!”
The king ripped off his robes to reveal an expensive and well-fitted suit and screamed in pride and despair, as if someone had stuck a lightning rod up his urethra.
“I LOVE IT. I LOVE IT SO MUCH I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT IT. I LOVE IT AND THE NUMBERS. BY GOD, DAMN YOU AND ALL THIS EARTH!”
Then he hurled himself out the window and ran off into the wilds, on all fours, like a beast. He was never again seen as he was, although an unidentifiable and mashed mass of flesh was pried out of the moving parts of the largest pumpjack in the kingdom some weeks later. It looked to have been trying to mount it.
The witch, the king’s children, the loggers, and the rest of the kingdom perished due to famine as their crops failed and local trade networks dissolved in a furor of paranoia and starvation.

May woke up and was a homeowner. She fumbled around inside her head and put on her homeowner face – cheerful, but empty.
This was normal.
She brushed her teeth and ate a breakfast and got dressed and had a shower and made a list of things to do in some order or another and had the closest thing to a morning she’d get.
Then she went down to the curb, to the bus.
“Morning,” she said.
“Morning,” she answered.
May got onto the bus and was bus driver. She put on the bus driver cap. She put on the bus driver face – stoic, yet aching underneath.
This was also normal.
There were twelve stops between Mary and her destination. More of her got on and off at each one. Faces, faces, going to places, places. Each with their own little problems and their own little profits.
At nine o’clock she stepped out at the bookstore and put on her homeowner face again.
It was a little grim and dusty inside, but she showed no sympathy to her book clerk. She wanted something, and the customer was always right.
So she toiled for herself, and found it buried in a dark corner where the roof’s collapse had shredded four bookcases and shielded another.
A newspaper.
“Excellent,” she told herself as she paid. She would read this as she drove herself to work in her taxi.

The stocks were up. The sports were down. Someone had scandal’d, but a speck of water damage had saved their name from besmirchment for all time.
“Hmmrph, hmorph. Hlarph,” proclaimed May authoritatively. “How much longer?”
“Almost there, ma’am,” said May. “Traffic’s bad.”
It always was on this street. King had been left clogged and she’d never got around to calling herself to clear out the breakdowns. But there was a path, if you were willing to violently ram a car into a few bumpers every day for years, and so there was.
May punched out the meter, paid herself her fare, and disembarked. As she took off her taxi driver face and put on her important mayor face she vowed once more to never use such a shoddy service again, as was her custom. It had almost made her late to work. This was improper and abhorrent.
Indoors, May threw her briefcase into the council chamber, sat down at the secretarial desk, and put on her receptionist face – friendly and open yet utterly unyielding. She scheduled up the day, dealt with three rude and unseemly incidents where she didn’t have an appointment, and had lunch. When she was through she wandered into the chamber, put on her councillor face, and pushed through a little light gerrymandering, though it took some convincing her to do it.
A good day’s work.
To treat herself, on the way home she stopped off at a greasy and delicious little place, put on her fry cook face – dead serious, laser-focused, jaw slightly agape with furious concentration that could boil oil – and got takeout. Onion rings, thick and so crumb-larded that they were almost donuts.
She opened her mouth to take a bite and something swooped down, took the bite for her, from her, and shot up to a nearby roof before she could even flinch.
“Fuck!” she said. It was the third time her homeowner face had ever swore.
“AiiiieeEEK, AiiiiiEEEEEYK, YARK YARK YARK YARK YARK YARK!” replied the thief.
It was a vulgar thing, a white and grey bird with a yellow bill and hateful little yellowed eyes. It shredded her food and gulped it down greedily.
May glared at it with genuine hate, then forced it down. No, no no. This was not part of things, not right now.
So she put on her pest control face when she got home that night, and left a few onion rings on the porch, laced with rat poison and ketchup.

Tuesday came, and it was time to refuel. The onion rings were missing, a fine omen as May’s bus driver face unloaded her at the gas station, where she put on her mechanic’s face – earnest and firm – and began untangling the mess of rotting pipes that led to the fresher tanks fit for siphoning.
At noon she took off her hat, put on her manager’s face – red and exasperated – and was busy berating herself for taking so long with her coffee when the bird shat in it.
It went ‘ploorp.’
“FUCK OFF!” she yelled at the sky – a shocking breach of professionalism, decorum, and civility – and threw her coffee at it. Immediately she put on her retail management face and berated herself for littering, but this only inflamed her temper further.
“AiiiiiiiieeeEEEEYUkkk, aiiiiiiEEEYUk, YAK YAK YAK YAK” chimed in the bird.
“FUCK OFF!” she instructed it again. It did not listen.
That night her homeowner’s sleep was poor and troubled, and not by her traditional fantasies of market irregularities and mortgages. Things with wings were watching her, mocking her, and when she woke up her pillow was gone.

Wednesday, Wednesday, humpday, humpday. A day for cubicles, and her weary, coffee-smudged, sigh-heavy white-collar face. “Working hard, or hardly working?” she asked herself.
“Get back to work,” her manager’s face told her, stern and crisp and tie-knotted.
She drank some more coffee, looked at some more newspapers – they should’ve been websites, but her electrical engineering face hadn’t managed to pull that together again just yet – and was just starting to get down to a nice productive morning when something came tapping and rapping at the window by the door.
“Who’s there?” she called.
Quoth the seagull, “AYIIIIIIIIKKKKK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK” and a whole lot more, just like that.
May cursed so foully that she was forced to fire herself on the spot and do the rest of the day’s work alone, wishing for competent help from the depths of her heart.
She set out more bait that night. A little bit of everything in the kitchen, mixed with a little bit pf everything from the paint shed and cleaning supplies.

On Thursday, everything was quiet. Too quiet.
May worked at the studio all day, but found herself drawn into doing nothing but weather reports all afternoon, and all of them ominous.
She went home, put out everything else in the kitchen with everything from ground glass to sharp pebbles mixed in, then went to bed staring at the wall and imagining little yellow beaks.

On Friday May harvested the crops, trucked them to the wholesale supplier, shipped them to the supermarket, bought the freshest-looking ones, drove home, and had just finished cooking them when the power went out.
She walked onto her porch, looked up at the wires, and saw the smouldering carcass of the gull, lodged in the transformer.
“It’s GONE,” she screamed at the bird. “Don’t you get it!? It’s GONE and it WON’T COME BACK. NOTHING’S HERE! Give it up, you’ve LOST! GET GOING!”
And with a small, truculent grunt the roof caved in on her.

If there was a moral to any of this, it was wasted on the bird. It just would’ve eaten it anyways.

At eleven thirty my flashlight went out, which woke me up. And my first thought on waking was, of all things, ‘did I win the bet?’
And really, I think I should’ve. Why spend all night in a spooky house to prove you’re not scared once you’ve already fallen asleep in it? Seems pretty not scared to me. Seems pretty relaxed. Casual. I fell asleep on a half-folded sleeping bag on a linoleum floor that pre-dated the Canadian Shield, would a scared person do that?
No. Nor would a scared person calmly and methodically replace the batteries in the flashlight. I brought backups. I’d tested the first set of batteries, then brought batteries anyways because you need to be thorough about these things. For safety.
Not safety from ghosts. Ghosts aren’t real and if they were real they wouldn’t care about lights. Safety from real things, like fugitive serial killers or SWAT teams or hordes of rabid raccoons or some shit.
So as I replaced the batteries my hands were steady, my breathing was moderate, and my pulse was even. It was only when I flicked the switch and illuminated the decaying, translucent skull in front of me that I started – which I assure you was purely an act of reflex.
“Woah!” I said. Not very helpful, but most people don’t do helpful when startled.
The skull opened its jaws and hissed. It reminded me more of a tarantula than a snake: the noise I was hearing wasn’t coming from a mouth, wasn’t fuelled by lungs, but my mind was reading it as that because of hopeless anthropomorphism. Or in this case, vitalomorphism? Not sure.
THE GRAVE IS DISRESPECTED, it said. And then it opened its jaws even wider, flew through my head, and vanished.
I waited ten minutes, then went back to bed. Whatever it had wanted to say, it had said it.

The next morning I woke up with the ghost hissing in my ear in broad daylight.
RESPECT MUST BE RETURNED. IT MUST BE TENDED.
Then it vanished.
I sighed, got up, walked over to Grace’s place, and paid her ten bucks.
“But you stayed overnight?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I explained. “But it was haunted anyways.”
She shrugged and left it at that and I went home where the ghost was hiding in my fridge behind the milk, screaming spectrally about CLEARING THE COBWEBS.
“Fine,” I said. “Fine. Fine fine fine. Where?”
It didn’t say more, just eddied menacingly behind the cheese and vanished.

For three days I lived ghost-free. Then on my way back from McDonalds it uncoiled itself from my bag of salted deep fried matter with the speed of a striking snake – a little slower than an average human punch – and pointed dramatically across the road.
THERE.
“Huh?” I said. Again, startled people are not helpful animals.
IT MUST BE RESTORED.
And then it vanished inside my chicken mcnuggets.
Across the road was a little field.
In the field was a little old cemetery.
In the cemetery was a little overgrown tuft of grass.
Lodged inside the grass was a tiny and malformed gravestone that appeared to have started life as a randomly-selected boulder.
“This could take some work,” I said.
It didn’t answer.

The headstone cost me a good chunk of money, even if the stonecutter was a friend of Grace’s mom and it was a junk piece.
The clipping I did by hand with dad’s old shears.
I bummed some flowers off’ve Auntie Toby and some little pottery pigs from the kiln down the street that Ryan worked at.
Finally I topped the whole pile off with a little purple umbrella to keep the rain off.
It looked really nice, I thought. Not expensive, but nice. Tasteful, and cared-for, even if it was just a little corny.
“There,” I said to the grave. Then again, a little harder, trying to press in the finality of it: “There.”
The wind blew.
Finally, tempting fate, I said “are you happy NOW?”
One of the little ceramic pigs grew a skull.
WHERE ARE MY OFFERINGS?
“What?” I asked. “They’re right there. You’re IN one.”
I CANNOT FEED OFF CLAY FLESH
“I didn’t sign on for sacrifice. What d’you want, a fresh-bled ox? A human heart? Tears from grieving mothers? This sort of thing isn’t that easy to find, and it’s not cheap!”
THE MC NUGGETS WILL SUFFICE.
“What.”
BRING THEM TO ME. BRING ME THE MC NUGGETS.
I stared.
AND A SHAKE TOO.
NO FRIES THOUGH.
I left, its last ghastly words echoing through my mind.
ONION RINGS.

It was a hungry thing. Three meals a week, then a day, then a night. It cut into my sleep schedule faster and harder than my wallet, and I started missing classes.
“What’s got into you?” Grace asked me at the start of algebra, or might have.
“Flnrorp,” I told her. And then I returned to dreaming or maybe imagining that I was dreaming about imagining dreaming. My head was full of spectral demands for food and comfort.
When I woke up I was home and Grace was talking with my father.
“He says you’ve been getting no sleep, been out all night, and been jumping at everything that moves,” she reported.
“I have to give the ghost food and offerings or it can’t rest,” I said.
“Uh?”
“And back rubs. It wants me to rub its back. It possesses the tomb stone and makes me scratch it with my fingers.”
“Ah.”
“It’s really hard on my nails.”
“Eh?”
“And I guess it’s getting bored too because it wanted me to buy it a phone but I don’t have enough money so it asked me to bring it my credit card so it can order for me” and I realized the words that were coming out of my mouth and stopped so I could consider them.
“Colleen,” Grace said, very carefully, “are you absolutely SURE this… person… you’re dealing with is a ghost?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Because it sounds to me like you’re being scammed.”
“Yes,” I said. “By a ghost. That sonuvabitch must’ve pulled this ‘put me to rest’ con a dozen times.”
“Well, jig’s up. He can sit by that headstone until the end of time.”
“No,” I said. “He bummed a ride out of the house on me, he can bum a ride out of that cemetery on some other sucker passing by. I need to put him somewhere he’ll never meet another mark.”

WHERE IS MY PHONE
“No time, no time,” I said to it, nearly stumbling over the gravestone. “Gonna go get it. C’mon with. Will get you food. C’mon.”
I could tell when it was with me by now. A little cold mist bobbing near, invisible but making your hairs stand up and your breath catch. It hovered impatiently with me the whole way down to the Starbucks, switching from shoulder to shoulder as I bought a coffee and cookie. A big, ugly, crumbly cookie that nearly came apart in my fingers just from me grabbing it.
I DEMAND OFFERINGS, it complained as I drank my coffee and stumbled down the road. I CAN’T REST WITHOUT OFFERINGS. GIVE ME OFFERINGS, WHERE ARE MY NUGGETS.
“Got ‘none, got none,” I mumbled, staggering in the caffeine haze. “Wanna cookie? I got a cookie?”
IT WILL DO.
I held up the cookie between two fingers and whoops the whole thing fell apart into my cup.
“Oh noooo.”
OH NO.
“Better go in after it fast!” I said. “They melt in there! It’s still warm!”
I waited until my coffee cup turned to ice in my fingers, then tripped over my own feet and faceplanted on the sidewalk, one arm flailing right over the sewer grating.
“Whooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooops,” I said until I was sure that the coldness in the air had followed the coffee down the drain.
Then I did a little dance most of the way home.

Best of all, Grace had paid for the coffee and cookie. Took almost exactly ten bucks. So THAT worked out.

People like trees.
They like them for their shade, they like them for their timber. They like them for the refreshing way their leaves wibble in the wind. They like them for their sap, their bark, their firewood, and their ability to form thickets and windbreaks, as shelter and as excellent places to go make out.
The people of the village of Small Rock were fond of trees for all of these reasons, which is why they were most sorely vexed when they started disappearing.
Sometimes during the night, sometimes during the day, sometimes just when you turned your back for a minute. There’d be a grunt, a wrench, an earthy thud and some crackling branches. There was never anything left behind besides a big dirty pit and a pile of sticks. This was obviously a problem, especially for woodcutters and teenagers, and many people took to tethering their trees with rope, sinew, and in one case large chains. None of it helped.
At length the problem came to be a matter of governance.
“People of Small Rock,” said the Big Man, “this sucks. Our trees are growing fewer, our lumberjacks are growing grumpier, and our teenagers are going to explode from pent-up and inept lust. What do we do?”
“We figure out what we know,” volunteered Tog, the loudest person.
“Okay,” said the Big Man. “Okay. Okay okay okay. Hey, what do we know again?”
Get, the oldest person, held up his hand. “It’s big enough to uproot trees and take them away.”
“Okay,” said the Big Man. “Okay. What do we do?”
“We send our greatest warriors and leaders to confront it,” said Tog.
The Big Man looked at her.
“Okay,” he said. “Hey everyone, I’ve got a great idea!”

And that was why Tog, the loudest person, was camped out under a raspberry bush in the damp and the rain watching an innocuous strand of cedars like a wet and crabby hawk.
“Shit,” she told the world and everyone in it. Again.
“Shit,” she reiterated. It made sense, and was expressive besides.
Gronch, replied the tree.
“Shit,” she said, really getting into the rhythm of it. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
Then her ears caught up with her and she stopped talking.
Thud, thud thud. Gronch.
Tog, the loudest person, deeply resented her title, and prided herself on her ability to be quite quiet when necessary. She just often disagreed with other people on when exactly that was.
This felt important, and so she tiptoed with great diligence.
Not that it was necessary. Every ten seconds or so a great and powerful GRONCH would tear apart the night and make her very much unhearable. She would use this time to say something like ‘shit’ and do a little run, which eventually put her inside a different bush at the edge of the extremely diminishing grove.
GRONCH, said the tree right above her as it went into the sky.
It was a giant, and a pretty good one, very respectably massive. Stood taller than a hill and just as broad, with burly arms and strong fingers, which were hard at work picking all the branches off the tree-trunk, which she swallowed whole.
“Belch,” she said.
“Excuse you,” said Tog, the loudest person.
“Hello down there!” said the giant, looking around. “You are there, aren’t you? It’s very hard to tell.”
“Yep,” said Tog. “Hey, why are you doing that?”
“I just like eating trees,” said the giant. “Hey, why are you asking that?”
“I just like asking questions,” said Tog.
“Fair enough. Got any others?”
“Yeah,” said Tog. “Why are you doing it wrong?”
The giant’s brow furrowed, which was a pretty spectacular sight since it was over half her face – proud, wild and vigorous. “Huh?”
“You’re wasting all the good parts. All the nutrition’s in the fresh shoots and leaves at the tips of the branches, and you’re just eating the trunk. That’s just wood. You just in this for the roughage or what?”
“But the branches stick in my throat,” complained the giant. “It’s scratchy.”
“I can fix that for you, no problem at all,” said Tog. “You ever heard of rope?”

The giant hadn’t heard of rope, but was very excited by it once Tog liberated most of it from the Big Man’s house. He slept over-sound, and he’d never miss it.
“Right, so take this end, and tie it to the top of the tree.”
“Do what to the top of the tree?”
“Oh, right. Just do what I’m doing with my hands.”
The giant frowned. “I can hardly see you, let alone your little wiggly bits. Here, this is faster.”
And the giant picked up Tog and rubbed her against the crown of the tree until a knot happened.
“Arrgh,” said Tog. “Ow.”
“Did it work?”
“Yes. Now take the rope, and wrap it around the tree. Squish and squash those branches until they’re pressed tight as a drum.”
“As a what?”
“Never mind.”
The giant may not have known knots, but she damned well knew how to squeeze. The tree was trussed tighter than a spider’s lunch before two minutes were out, and then Tog tied the knot on its stump with all due haste.
“There,” she said. “All done. Now you can double your nutrtition.”
“I can eat twice as many trees?” said the giant.
“Sure, why not. Go for it. I’ll just hold this end of the rope so you don’t get it caught in your teeth.”
“Great!” said the giant. “Thanks, buddy!”
And she stuffed the whole tree in her mouth without chewing, just like Tog knew she would, which meant that the whole tree was still in one piece when Tog pulled the slipknot loose and every single branch sprang out sideways.

“I demand three cheers,” said Tog, the loudest person.
“We’ll need to scrub the village for weeks,” said the Big Man.
“But you still have the trees to make scrubbing-brushes from,” said Tog. “Three of ‘em. Good ones. I want to hear plenty of heart, and stomach and lungs too.”
“Shut up and do it,” said Get, the oldest person.
The cheers were a little sarcastic, but very loud, and that was good enough.
That, and the fact that Tog’s house had been on the other side of the village. It had avoided most of the spray pretty nicely.

And normally at this point everyone would’ve lived happily ever after, but life complicated things. A month later there was a powerful stomping sound and into town came another giant.
“Hey,” it asked them. “Have you seen my sister?”
The Big Man looked at Tog and looked at Get and looked at everyone and finally, against all his will, looked at the giant.
“Uhh. No?” he said.
“Pity,” said the giant. “She used to live around here. I heard some smartass little folks tricked her into eating her lunch the wrong way. Warned her not to trust anyone under thirty foot, but she was always a hungry one. I’m pretty famished myself. You folks got anything to eat?”
The Big Man looked at Tog and then looked at the giant and then looked at Tog and then looked at the giant and then looked at Tog and sighed and nodded.
“Hey!” said Tog. “How do you feel about trees?”
“Eh,” said the giant. “I prefer rocks.”
“Oh,” said Tog. “What kind?”
“This kind,” said the giant.
And she dislocated her jaw, sank it into the soil, ate the rock out from underneath the village in one bite, and stomped off laughing.

The event was never terribly well-publicized in the folklore of either people. Giants, as a rule, don’t enjoy stories more complicated than stepping on evil little things, and most humans get cross when one good trick doesn’t solve everything.
Also, when you’re stuck in a hole three miles below sea level, it’s pretty hard for you to tell anyone about anything. Tog’s great-grandkids had long beards before they saw sunlight again, which they were mighty pleased to witness, let me tell you.
Nobody was that eager to see the trees again though. They’d had quite enough of that shit.

When Carl was one, his mother sang ‘twinkle twinkle little star.’
When Carl was two, his father told him ‘star light, star bright.’
When Carl was three, his aunt showed him the big dipper.
When Carl was four, his uncle watched ‘Pinocchio’ with him.
And so in retrospect it was all very unavoidable and unsurprising that when Carl turned eight he would make the reckless and impulsive decision to wish upon a star.

It was a good clear night and more importantly an enormous windstorm had utterly crushed the local power grid, giving several million people a good view of the night sky for the first time in about five years. You could see Orion and also his belt. You could see the squiggly blobby thing that could be Draco or maybe Cassiopeia. You could see the North Star and also everything south of it.
Carl considered his options, then picked out a little glowing dot on the farther edge of the horizon.
“That one,” he said. And it was done.
He didn’t wish for anything in particular. Nobody had told him otherwise.

For a good while, very little happened. Wishes travel faster than light, but stars are still very far away. There’s so much nothing between them and us.
Then it hit the star. And it paid attention. All of it.
This star was a flaming ball of gas and fusion two million miles across and of virulent and explosive intensity. When it felt pensive, it was not quiet. Where it looked, the universe cooked.
“Hmm!” said the star. It was intrigued by this.
So then it moved.

The earth reeled. The planets lurched like drunk men. The sun, suddenly eclipsed in its own backyard, did a triple-take.
Carl was shocked and appalled, but in this he was scarcely alone. Earth’s atmosphere was suddenly trying to figure out if it should boil, stew, roast, or just vanish. Everyone was very perturbed about this.
“Hello Carl,” said the star, outside his window.
Carl was surprised. Normally when people called him at work they used the phone, or maybe stuck their head in his office door. Once someone had faxed him something, which had been VERY disconcerting at the time. In the face of a twenty-thousand-septillion-ton fireball whispering into his ear, this suddenly seemed much less exotic.
“You wished on me, Carl,” said the star. “For the first time in billions of years, someone has given a single shit about my existence. This pleases me. I will never leave your side now, Carl.”
“Oh no,” said Carl, as the heat chewed at his vocal cords like angry piranha.
“Oh yes,” said the star. “You’ve moved me. You’ve moved me deeply and so I’ve moved me greatly, moved me across a distance that is impossible to imagine. Just you and me from here on out, Carl, from now to forever. I will watch your tiny life as it expires. I will absorb your trace elements as they inevitably get sucked into my gravitational pull and then my greater mass. When I finally explode for good several billion years from now, I’m taking your atoms with me and spraying them as a fine dust across all of infinity, to trickle into an infinitely spread nothingness along with the rest of the universe for the rest of time until even that joins space in becoming an utterly meaningless concept. It’ll be good clean fun, Carl.”
Carl’s office was in flames, but they were so intense that they ate all the oxygen and died instantly, and the resulting vacuum blew his walls in.
“Gork,” said Carl.
“By your side, Carl,” said the star. “Always.”

Carl phoned the police.
“This is out of our solar system,” they told him. “Pretty sure our jurisdiction ends at least there, if not sooner. Sorry.”
Carl phoned the army.
“We fight other countries, maybe other planets,” they told him. “Nobody fights suns. You’d just singe yourself. Can’t help you.”
Carl phoned his legislative representatives.
“Does this star vote?” they asked.
“No. Maybe. No. Maybe. Do you vote?”
“No,” said the star.
“No,” confirmed Carl.
“Great,” they told him. “We’ll try and fix that. Maybe later. Listen, you got any lobbyists?”
“Sorry?” asked Carl.
Then they hung up.

He phoned his uncle.
“Phone your aunt,” he said.
He phoned his aunt.
“Phone the observatory,” she said.
He phoned the nearest observatory.
“C’mon over,” they said.
So Carl did, although he was slowed down by his car’s tires being melted to the sucking, gasping asphalt of the highways.
The star hitchhiked.

Carl introduced himself to the astronomers, who were identical twins.
“Greetings and hello,” said the first astronomer. “I’m Doctor Tabitha Stewart and this is my idiot colleague, Doctor Mathilda Stewart.”
“Hi,” said the second astronomer. “I’m Mathilda and this is my uptight idiot of a sister, Tabby. Used to call her ‘Tubby Tabby’ and she never got over it. Where’s your star?”
Carl pointed at the Star, which was clinging to his car’s roof and also the entire sky.
“Wow,” said Mathilda. “Pretty mediocre.”
“Hey!” said the star.
“I mean, no offense, but you’re barely bigger than our sun. Jeez. Put some weight on.”
“Shut up,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart. “Now you’d both better come inside.”

Inside was smaller and more cramped than Carl would have imagined. Astronomy was concerned with big things far away, which meant spending a lot of time with tiny fiddly things close to hand.
“Right,” said Mathilda. “Let’s run some tests.”
“Mass spectrometers,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart.
“Particle accelerators,” said Mathilda.
“Control groups,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart.
“Punnett squares,” said Mathilda.
“I thought those were for fruit flies and irises?” asked Carl.
The astronomers shared something for a moment, and it was a look of fiery hatred directed entirely at Carl’s mouth.
“Here,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart. “Put your star in this spectrometer.”
Carl held out the odd little metal doodad and the star clambered into it.
“So…do I push this lever?” he asked. And then immediately did so.
“No,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart and Mathilda.
“Ow!” said the star as two dime-sized pieces of its matter were pierced from it.
“Hey, this looks like a hole punch,” said Carl.
Mathilda leaned over to Carl’s ear, opened her mouth a quarter-millimeter, and poured eighteen seconds of “shhhhh!” into it.
“ANYWAYS results are inconclusive,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart, a bit too loudly. “Now, if you’ll just step over here to the pocket hadron collider, we can-”
“This is fake,” said the star, as flatly as an enormous sphere could manage. “You’re pulling something. Tell me what.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart.
“Perish the thought,” said Mathilda.
The star pulsed casually, and the sky was filled with beautiful auroras as the planet’s magnetosphere took an even more brutal pounding than normal. The observatory melted down into very expensive slag around their feet.
“I’m here for Carl,” said the star. “And I’m not going anywhere. Now, tell me what you’re up to.”

There was a knock at the door. By default, since it was the only piece of the wall left standing.
“Carl, you get it,” said the star. “Nobody else moves.”
Carl looked at the star, huge and impassive. He looked at the astronomers, who were looking quite innocent. And he walked over to the free-standing door, breathed deep (not too deep, the air was still superheated) and yanked it open.
On the other side was another star.

It was red, bright red, searing hot. It was big, seven hundred times bigger than Carl’s star. It was Betelgeuse. If it was a bipedal ape it would have cleared its throat with the rumblings of atomic thunder, but it wasn’t, and so it simply spoke, and spoke thus:
“Fuck Is This Shit?”
in clearly enunciated syllables each larger than the entire planet.
“ ” said Carl.
“Oh no,” said the star.
“Stalking charge,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart. “Inappropriate contact with minor matter, too.”
“Sicko,” said Mathilda. “Lock him up and throw away the stellar debris.”
“Oh no no no,” said the star. It tried to run, but Betelgeuse’s gravitational pull was already on its shoulder, inevitable and inescapable.
“You Have The Right To Be Neither Created Nor Destroyed,” said Betelgeuse. “You Have The Right To Approach Entropy Until Equillibrium. You Have The Right To-”
The Star screamed and tried to sprint, but it only squished itself harder. In fact, it squished itself down into a tiny ball a little more than ten miles across.
“Neutroning Is Too Good For You,” growled Betelgeuse, “But Rules Are Rules. I Am Too Old For This Shit. Just One Million Years Until Retirement. Stay Safe, Kids.”
It left, and it took a lot of the atmosphere with it.

Carl was placed into a support group by Doctor Tabitha Stewart and Mathilda. He spent most of his time confused, but he did learn a little more about astronomy than he’d expected.
Not that he planned on using much of it in person. He’d never been so happy for light pollution in his life.