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I’m not sure what to say. I’m not sure how to feel. And I really don’t know what I’m going to say when everyone else comes running.
Uncle Ellis is dead. But it’s not how I thought it would happen.

He’d been so full of night last night, all cheers and chortles. Beer frothing from under his moustache and red veins throbbing in his eyes.
“More,” he was saying, mostly, probably. It was his favourite word. “More, more more.” More food, more drink, more admiration, more respect, more praise. More more more more.
All of us handing him it, nodding at him, smiling at him, and wondering when it would be enough. And which one of us would do it.
Would it be kindly cousin Harvester, with his twinkly eyes and frizzy beard, who’d put too much money into too many of Uncle Ellis’s sure-fire investments?
Would it be miserable old Uncle Paul, who’d never stopped complaining since his little, little, tiny sister had up and married?
Would it be ferocious little Laurie, the most ignored niece in the history of family, who saw her brothers and sisters lavished with praise and expensive uselessness while she got pats on the head and tousled curls?
Or maybe it would just go to Borgia, the dog who lived as a footstool. Lord knows I’d have snapped years ago, but the thing was fifteen and counting and had yet to bark, snap, or even whine under the weight of those pudgy feet.
More, more, more. Uncle Ellis always wanted more. And he never shared what he was owed for it, not one morsel.
Not alive.
More was never enough, but he took a break then, eventually, seven courses in. Pulled out his pipe, sucked it down to a cinder, threw the ashes on the table and said “look!”
In came Aunt E, so small she didn’t get a name, and with her came the journals and the papers and the collection jars.
Here were all the astounding articles on the exotic wildlife that Uncle Ellis had told his servants to write.
There were all the vibrant sketches of magnificent wilderness that Uncle Ellis had described to someone with artistic talent.
And in sealed jars and displays cases, pinned and pickled and glassy-eyed, were the creatures Uncle Ellis’s employees and staff had snatched from their burrows, dens, webs, nests, and branches. Some of them had scales, some of them had feathers, some of them had fur and some were just bald and clammy. Many of them were segmented and crunchy.
And one of them was in a big, smooth glass tank that wasn’t filled with formaldehyde but plain, nourishing air.
We couldn’t see it, and said as much.
Uncle Ellis laughed at that, then picked up his pipe and gave the glass a good whack.
Something small and alarmed darted across the tank’s gravel and slipped underneath the big dead branch that had been, until that second, the only thing inside it we could see.
“Ribbon snake,” he said. “Leptogracilis fragillimus, as I’ve called it. See its spine? So tall and thin. Prickly too! Funny thing. Took a keen eye to spot it, which I did.”
We all smiled and agreed that the incredibly thin snake – almost as narrow face-on as a page of paper – was indeed a lovely creature, worthy of intense praise. Truly he was astounding, a genius, a true noble, a worthy soul.
Then we all retired to our rooms, waited, and wondered who’d go first.

Maybe Grimbly. He was a good friend of Uncle Ellis’s son, Hubert. Hubert who’d been bright, who’d been curious, who’d been disinherited for asking questions that made his father feel foolish. Not that it had taken much to do that.
Maybe Edith? She’d been a maid for a long time, she’d cleaned a lot of floors, she’d carried a lot of laundry, she’d put up with a lot of shouting, and she could use a little cut of a promised inheritance if she’d just put a foot in and speed it all up a bit. Accidentally confuse the rat poison with the salt shaker, maybe.
Speaking of meals, what about poor trembling Joshua? Best friends for forty years, ever since the day Uncle Ellis knocked him down and broke his leg and laughed at him. Through thick and thin, like the time Uncle Ellis drove away his fiancée by starting a fist fight with her father. Comrades ‘till the end. Which frankly, he might appreciate being sooner rather than later.
Or of course, me. No particular motives there beyond annoyance with blowhards and a fondness for money, but I counted those as honest commonalities with the folks seated around me at dinner that evening.

So. Who first?

Creak, crack, crunch. The floorboards are whispering and whining, shaking and twisting in their old wooden beds, trying to get comfortable underfoot.
Who’s taking a stroll? Who’s visiting the privy? Who’s just getting some fresh air?
Better wait it out, better not go just yet. If they’re innocent, they’ll ask questions. If they’re guilty, why interrupt them?

It had been well past midnight before the real dead of night hit over Uncle Ellis’s manor, before I really felt comfortable moving. Soft slippers, a careful tread, and not even a candle to wander by. I had felt my way along the halls like a drunken spider, waving limb by careful limb and squinting in the odd patch of starlight a window leaked in.
I had a plan, a very simple plan. I would creep up to Uncle Ellis’s bedchamber and smother him with his own pillow. No muss, no fuss, no wounds, no blemishes. A nice softy mushy pillow. He’d have at least three of those.
Of course, this was assuming someone else hadn’t reached him first. Like Burroughs, his assistant, who had illustrated, composed, and edited so many of those papers he claimed as his own. Or Taft the batman, who had lost a leg to sepsis after saving him from a crocodile, and had found his pay cut by half as recompense for his new tardiness.
I supposed I would raise a fuss, once I was sure the coast was clear. Maybe faint away, so nobody thought to accuse me. So long as uncle was dead, fair enough, but there’s a special kind of unfairness in being blamed for a murder you didn’t even get to do.
The floor was dusty here, bar the center. Feet had shuffled, fingers had groped. Uncle Ellis’s private chambers had to be close by, near at hand.
Near at foot, however, was a corpse. I almost fell flat-out, but caught myself on a giant and hideous door handle that was probably the entrance to the study.
The body, I determined by feel and smell, belonged to my cousin Janice, who had many of my own qualms about the likelihood and magnitude of her inheritance. She seemed extremely dead, with little trace save for some froth along her lips.
This puzzled me as much as it alarmed me, and it was with this in mind that I put paid to notions of true darkness and filched a candle from the wall, which I lit.
Illuminated (faintly) Janice became slightly more edifying – there was a faint red swelling on her palm. I considered this, then considered the door whose handle I had grasped.
It was festooned with ornate images of sea shells from Uncle Ellis’s voyage of a decade and more ago. Beautiful, colourful, coiled.
I looked closer.
One of the sea shells – a cone snail I believe – had a small dart protruding from its tip. Something cloudy glistened off it in the candlelight.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t shriek, didn’t gasp, didn’t mutter ‘hmm!’
But I DID reconsider how easy this might be. Clearly Uncle Ellis was less unaware of his popularity than I’d presumed.
Carefully, gingerly, daintily, I opened the door with a single finger and slid inside without so much as a creak.

The study was in some disorder, and I decided to put some time into taking stock.
Dark-paneled wood, with thick black curtains drawn firmly around what must be quite high and sweeping windows. A desk that could anchor a ship of the line, built right into the floor. Several chairs so overstuffed they sighed to themselves in the draft of the opened door. Rugs so plush that my feet nearly vanished in them. And a big sturdy door, with the key still in the lock.
After I was through with that, I began to catalogue the causes of death.
Laurie had stepped on the wrong floorboards, judging by the large and ferociously bladed beartraps that were latched around her ankles.
Grimbly had paused to check the desk for something – perhaps the key? – and appeared to have instead found an exotic and large spider, whom I hurriedly shut back into its drawer, where it hissed angrily.
And finally the door appeared to have been opened by Cousin Harvester, because when I stepped through it and found myself in a stairwell it was his bobbing body that I found, suspended rather alarmingly from a leg-trap that had misjudged and caught his neck instead. Rest assured, I was very careful to check the stairs as I went.

The staircase was clear, as far as I could tell – though I did leap the last five steps, and so can’t verify their safety. The hallway was similarly safe, although my careful and suspicious proddings at the closed and silent doors did lead to my discovery of Uncle Ellis’s bathroom, where Joshua had stepped onto a bathmat – hunting for a weapon in the medicine cabinet, perhaps? – and into a twelve-foot tiger-pit that must’ve eventually emptied into the furnace, by the smell.
The master bedroom was surprisingly simple to locate – Uncle Paul had gotten halfway through the door before a pair of decorative axes had collapsed on him. The other half remained in the halfway, leaking.
I had stepped gingerly over him, into marvels and horrors.
Heaps of papers, all crisply unruffled by any prying eyes or greedy fingers – Uncle Ellis did not like to read.
Great mounds of fine clothing and luxurious canes – Uncle Ellis did not like to dress up.
Opulent furniture crafted from the heaviest and most indestructible timber, gilded in pearls and gold, with dirty plates sitting atop them – Uncle Ellis left that sort of things for maids.
Edith, the maid herself, face down and ghastly pale on the floor, where she’d slipped and cracked something vital – Uncle Ellis appeared to have left his slippers in the most peculiar place.
And finally, quiet and deadly vast as a mountain, heavier than the roots of the world, the bedframe and sheets and covers and mounded pillows. Because Uncle Ellis always wanted more.
I picked a sizeable pillow, whipped back the blankets, aimed for the face, and smacked down, hard. And it wasn’t for a good minute that I risked to raise it for curiosity at the ease of it all, and found the thing soaked to its eiderdown in blood.

Such a thin little cut across his throat, like a papercut. And when I looked around for explanation, for excuses, all I could find was the little glass tank with its one dead branch and a perfect missing circle of glass. Like somebody had taken a little blade to it.

Good lord, I’m still thinking on that. Good lord.
What kind of snake SLITS someone to death? Can’t it just bite them?

There’s shouting and gasping and running feet. Someone – Taft? Burroughs? Loyal for their salaries, unless they were paid off to tuck themselves to bed early – must’ve come looking for him when he didn’t call for breakfast. I should be running, jumping, screaming with the rest, fixing my alibi and making my excuses.
But all I can do is sit here, like a stone on a riverbed, and let the current rush around me. Thinking about that ribbon snake, and where it might’ve gone.

A long time ago, there was a man, and this man made the most important, necessary, life-giving, in-all-senses-of-the-term VITAL substance known to us all.
No, not water. That’s harder to manufacture.
He was a baker. And he baked bread.
He baked the BEST bread.

The problem with making the best bread is you grow concerned with all the people wanting a slice of the action. Everyone in his village, in the city, in (as far as he knew, he didn’t travel much) the WORLD lusted for the merest crumbs of his labours.
So he hired some of them, as guards, to keep the bread safe and secure.
Then he hired guards to watch the guards. Who, themselves, needed guards, and guards for those guards, and well I’m sure you can see where this is going don’t you.
Anyways, it came to pass that so many of the guards were tied up in watching guards that were watching guards that were watching guards that were, in turn, distracted and nervous due to being watched, that nobody had been watching the baker. Or where he’d been putting the bread.
There was a great interest in finding those two things at that moment – principally for purposes of payment – but as the efforts bore no fruit or bread or anything much people soon gave up and wandered away, disappointed and breadless. But the legends remained.
And somewhere, too, did the bread.

This was all a very long time ago, when people didn’t know any better. Everybody in the rest of this story had no damned excuse.
Especially Edd. Edd with her old worn bag over her shoulder, walking so carefully through the gates of the old city. Edd with her furtive looks and darting eyes. Edd so obviously getting away with something that four separate merchant guards almost detained her on principal, saved only by the obvious and odious emptiness of her old worn bag. A proper thief would have standards, or at least one standard.
But Edd made her way in, like a salmon wandering upstream, and at last she stumbled into the old city’s marketplace, held her old worn bag above her head, and yelled the following.
“I have come and I will bring the bread!”
Which got the same reaction as ‘I know where Jack buried the spare beans’ or ‘I’m going to go and catch the end of the rainbow.’ A couple people threw (stale) bread at her, and someone took her hat off her head and dropped a few coins in it and put it back on.
“Thanks,” said Edd, “but I was looking for more.
The hat was removed again and more metal was added to it.
“No, like, in terms of support. I’m not looking for money, I’m looking for bread. And I will find it. And everyone will love it. It’s going to be amazing.”
“That sounds interesting,” said the hat thief, whose name was Mun. “I will accompany you on this pointless endeavour if you let me keep this hat.”
“Fine,” said Edd. “But give me back the money first.”

So they walked together down the long surly alleys of the old city, which had emerged where buildings argued over who was going to stop first, and they stopped for lunch.
Mun had bread. Edd had bread.
“This bread is pretty garbage,” said Edd. “When I find us the good bread, we’re going to be set for good. Everyone will remember and love us forever and ever.”
“Damn that’s good,” said Mun. “What’s so great about this bread in particular?”
“It’s extremely tasty.”
“Oh.”

After five or six near-robberies, an exciting chase sequence, a dance number, and a soliloquy, they stood at the heart of the old city. You know, just slightly farther left of center than most people think it is.
“Now I must use the secrets that my great-aunt told me,” said Edd.
“Sounds great,” said Mun. “And I’ll hit the secret switch.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The secret switch. About a hundred years back this wall over here was getting rebuilt and they found a big secret switch inside it. It used to open up a big trapdoor in this plaza, but it was rusted shut. They fixed it up too and I think the guy over here was using it as a cellar, but then he died and it might be empty now.”
“Fine,” said Edd. “Please hit the stupid secret switch. Thank you. Let’s go.”
It was actually full of casks of oil, but nobody was around, so they passed unchallenged.

Past the oil cellar and through the side-tunnel and under the old bridge and beyond the farthest dregheaps there was a maze of twisty little passages, none of which looked quite like another.
“This is what my great-grandfather told me about,” said Edd.
“Wow,” said Mun. “Did he say if it was up the fork or down the warren or through the hen’s teeth?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Loads of kids play down here. My auntie showed me a lot of these tunnels. Is your path up the hen’s teeth? I hope it’s the hen’s teeth. See, when I was really little I’d hang around there a lot and once I swear I saw a giant lizard, and hey wait up.”
It was through the fork. Mun complained loudly until Edd told her to shut up.

They stopped outside a deep pit. Bones crunched underfoot, rot swept into nostril. The air felt inquisitive in the least friendly way.
“What?” asked Mun.
“Go on,” said Edd.
“What?”
“Go on and tell me how your cousin’s friend’s so-and-so’s told you all about this. Go on and tell me how the great and terrible wortalask has been dead for fifty years and all the cool kids had a tooth they pulled out of its rotten old skull. Go on!”
“What? I’ve never been this far. No-one’s ever been this far. There’s bones and stuff. Nobody was dumb enough to try.”
The pit belched and heaved and the wortalask crawled out, broadside-first. Six big legs like an elephant’s opposing three little legs like a stork’s. It peered around its own ass in a surly, myopic way and hissed.
It still extremely had all its teeth, which had grown significantly.
“Woah,” said Mun.
Edd strode forwards with determination in every vein of her body. She held up her worn old bag and rubbed it on the wortalask’s face, slapped its rump three times, gave it a skritch behind each of its five ears, and gave its face a good tussle. It collapsed, burping happily.
“Did your great-grandmother tell you that trick?” asked Mun.
“No,” said Edd. “But she said you just had to make it look good.”

Down under the pit.
Under the shaft
Under the crawlspace
Under the big rusty grate
Under the big stone circle
And just beside the enormous combination lock
There was a door.
Edd and Mun looked at the combination lock and then at the door.
“Now what?” asked Mun. It seemed to be a fair question since there were eighty keys on the lock, none of which were numbers or letters.
“Now,” said Edd, “I use what’s in the bag.”
“What’s in the bag?”
“I told you during the soliloquy,” said Edd, who felt she had a right to be irritated. “Weren’t you listening?”
“I got embarrassed and stopped. It was pretty loud and people were trying to sleep.”
Edd sighed and opened the bag and opened the box and opened the jar and opened the tin.
“That’s overkill.”
“That’s prudence. Anyone could’ve stolen my wealth from me.”
“Your wealth smells funny. What is it?”
“The perfect dipping mix for the perfect bread. Passed down to me, after so many years.”
Edd held the sauce next to the lock and squinted a lot until the blobs and shapes within it congealed into something that looked familiar, then punched them in.
And with a groan, the door slid open under weight of years.
And with a sigh, the two women peered inside.
And with a creak, the gentle gust of fresh air made the dessicated, emaciated, mummified corpse of the long-lost baker fall over precisely on his face, which broke with a blunt ‘crunch.’

“Wow,” said Mun.
She poked at a loaf, stale as dead sea air. “Wow,” she said again, looking up at the colossal, endless ruin surrounding her. “Wow.”

“Huh,” Mun concluded. She looked at Edd, who was looking at the bread, which was beyond looking at, and shrugged. “You want to get a pizza instead?”

The pizza was pretty good.

One day, which very well may have been a Thursday, the sun went out.
It was really very distressing. One moment it was there, and then – ffftt – gone. Pretty shocking stuff, especially for the half of the planet that was in the middle of a perfectly good noonish.
Some peopled wailed. Some people cursed. Some people rent their garments and lamented.
Most people were pretty pissed off. “The damned thing was practically new,” they said, and they were right. You’d never see this kind of shoddy worksmanship back in the Precambrian.

There were a lot of decisions to be made in those first few dark hours. Hard ones.
First off, who the hell was going to pay for this. Some folks maintained that we ought to track down god, the universe, or whoever and give them the bill, while others insisted that we should probably get the sun fixed under the table before we ruined the solar system’s collateral. In the end the latter prevailed, if only because nobody could remember our landlord’s contact info.
Options were considered, dismissed, debated, discouraged, pushed forwards.

But the obvious first solution was duct tape. It was cheap, it was durable, and if it didn’t look like it was working we could always add more of it.
Ten billion rolls coalesced in the sky, spherical and mad. Ten billion more were added to get it looking real nice and round. Then we threw in a hundred billion more and everything was starting to look almost normal when it rained and half the sun came unglued from the other half. The whole damned thing nearly fell apart.

So it took a bit after that to work out whose fault that was – obviously someone else’s, it was decided – and then we were ready for the next plan, which was to send some people up to the sun to try screwing it in a bit more firmly.
The problem was, they got a bit confused. It’s righty tighty, yeah, but which right? Whose right? So while they were figuring that out the damned thing got so loose it nearly fell out – and then everyone was so embarrassed that they tightened it so far it got stuck fast. Christ knows how we’ll ever replace it now.

I won’t lie, after that happened things got ugly. Blame gets thrown around when things are bad, especially if there’s nobody obviously screwing up, because that means it’s EVERYONE’S fault and that’s just no fun at all. Who’d forgotten to check the bulb? Who hadn’t bought spares? Who’d been leaving it on all the time, day and night? What, did you think the sun was free? They don’t grow on trees, you know!
Eventually the problem ate itself: nobody really knew why the sun had gone out and therefore it was either everyone’s fault or nobody’s. Therefore, we blamed nobody. Selfish bastard.

With that important business settled, we tried to plug the moon into the sun to see if that’d help. It didn’t. The sockets didn’t match. Frankly, I don’t know who came up with that one, because I’m not even sure they use the same kind of gravity. We’re lucky we didn’t burn out anything or start a fire. You can’t just mess around with celestial engineering like that; this is how people get bolides dropped on them. Leave that sort of thing to the experts.

After that little episode things picked up. More solutions at greater speed, but fewer and emptier results.
We tried shouting at the sun. Didn’t work, didn’t make anyone feel better, caused noise pollution.
We tried begging the sun. It didn’t have ears so that was never really a good idea.
We tried threatening the sun. This made as little sense as the last thing, but felt a lot better.
We looked up the manufacturer to see if we could order a new sun, but they’d gone out of business several billion years ago due to industrial entropy and the whole field of solar construction was still in a state of perpetual collapse.
We even tried making peace with the fact that the sun had gone out and working on adapting to the new understanding: that things were going to be very dark and inconvenient for a long time. That lasted about five minutes before we all went nuts again.

Finally, when all hope was lost, when we’d just about given up on ever seeing another morning, someone suggested turning it on and off again and hell, what do you know, there it was.

Probably should replace the cord though.

On a particular and particularly rocky stretch of a road, a fight was breaking out, or maybe a discussion.
“Are not.”
“Am so.”
“Are not.”
“Am so.”
The participants collected themselves for a moment to consider their options; the debate was becoming too technical and abstract. A grounded, fully-developed statement was needed.
“You are NOT the most disagreeable of all of us pebbles. I’m much spikier than you.”
“Well I say I AM the most disagreeable of all us pebbles, because even if you’re spikier I’m pleasingly irregular – I can’t sit still against someone’s foot, I’ve got to rock and roll my way around and mess them up heart and sole. I’d take any bet you can name that I’m the most disagree, unpleasant, nasty piece of pebbly business ever to chip off the old block, and I dare you to bet me right now or give up your case.”
“Fine,” said the dissenting pebble. “Listen: an extremely holy and enlightened man is walking down this road. In five minutes, he’s going to step on us. I dare you to hop into his shoe. If you can drive him nuts, I’ll accept your idiot claims to being the most disagreeable, unpleasant, and generally shitty pebble to ever exist.”
And the candidate for that title was pleased, and so the bet was struck.

Five minutes later the holy man came walking down the rocky road, head down, mind above. He was yet holier still than the dissenting pebble had described; just looking at him was like taking a valium. Even the disagreeable pebble felt itself soften a little as his feet approached, but it had a job to do and it knew it. It shook its pebbly head, shrugged its pebbly shoulders, thought of its reputation, and leapt into the holy man’s shoe with the force of a thunderbolt covered in prickly thorns.
The holy man hop, skip, tripped and nearly tumbled down the sloping road, but he caught himself on a little tree and continued apace, unflinching.
“Right,” said the disagreeable pebble. “Time to work.”
And it did.
It worked itself through epidermis and into raw red flesh.
It spun and nudged and whirled and gyrated like a weasel in a war dance.
It sang all the correct pebble songs, such as ‘I’m shifting from toe to toe’ and ‘your heel is a fiery land of pain.’
Soon, very soon, the holy man stopped his walk to mop his brow and have some water. A passerby stopped for a quickie blessing and asked precisely where he was travelling.
“To the sea,” said the holy man. “There’s a holy place there, so it’s very much necessary.”
“That’s a long walk,” said the passerby.
“Oh, that’s not too much of a problem,” said the holy man. “Discomfort is fleeting.”
And he smiled when he said that, and the disagreeable pebble cursed and began to plan the next angle of attack.

For the first hundred miles, the disagreeable pebble rolled constantly from ridge to ridge, never resting, always moving. It left no inch of flesh unjabbed, no callus unshredded.
The holy man hummed holy things to himself as he walked those hundred miles, and those things passed, and the pebble swore and planned again.
For the next hundred miles, the disagreeable pebble sat still, rock still, stone still, immobilized and unyielding as it slowly ate through a single spot in the holy man’s heel until it was practically lodged against his bones.
The holy man sang holy songs to the wind and the birds as he walked those hundred miles, and that thing passed too, and the pebble snarled to itself and planned again.
For the final hundred miles the disagreeable pebble went mad and struggled on top of the holy man’s foot and attacked its soft skin like a rabid dog, worrying and chewing at it with flinty teeth until it looked like he’d gone dancing in a rosebush.
And the holy man stopped, and the disagreeable pebble rejoiced at first, but then it realized they were at the sea, in all its vast blue, and the holy man had only stopped because he had succeeded in his journey.
“Damnation and rubble,” mourned the disagreeable pebble. “I was so close!”
“Not as far as you thought, for sure,” said the holy man. “But farther than you would’ve liked to hope.”
The disagreeable pebble was greatly surprised by this interjection into its private thoughts, and said so.
“Everything talks, and I’ve tried to learn how to listen,” said the holy man. He fished the disagreeable pebble from his abused shoe and held it on his palm. “This is far too big a world for any of us to not learn to get along with all sorts of neighbours. Look! Look at how big it is! Look at the sea!”
And the disagreeable pebble looked at the vast and briny water under its huge sky and was humbled as pie.
“I’m sorry,” said the disagreeable pebble. “I’ve been presumptuous and petty, and caused you pain because of my own small insecurities. Will you forgive me, holy man?”
“Sure,” said the holy man. “Be seeing you.”
And then he overarm chucked the pebble out into the sea, where it skipped seventeen times at increasing velocity before sinking.

The first thousand years the pebble spent screaming. It was a shocking thing for a small pebble from the backroad countryside, to find itself immersed in the deeps.
The second thousand years it spent swearing vengeance as it crawled its way along the ocean floor, buffeted by currents, hurled about by the grinding of the great tectonic plates, insulted by slimy things with bony fins.
The third thousand years the pebble spent getting warmer, hotter, faster as it boiled with fury and also increasing heat as it dropped down back into the earth.

Finally, as its prized ridges melted off, as its perfectly irregular and torturous surface was crushed into a layer so thin that it didn’t exist, the pebble understood.

It understood it was not a pebble, but a particle. An undifferentiated one.

It understood that it had always been this way, and only its own ignorance had kept it so small, so focused on itself.

It understood that it and all that it had just joined were one.

And at that moment, at the pinnacle of its scope, it understood that it remembered the holy man’s voice extremely clearly, along with every one of the seventeen times it had skipped across the water.

And this is how we get earthquakes.

It was eleven thirty in the morning and Carl still hadn’t gone to bed because he’d been conquering the universe.
God knows it had taken too much effort already. He couldn’t afford to stop now.

He’d tried it dozens of ways.
At first Carl had been subtle. He’d tried to establish bare facts.
“I am in charge,” he told the universe. “Me!” he shouted. “Look at the capacity of my braincase! Look at the bumps on my skull! Look at the dexterity of my fingers! Look at the shape of my face! This constitutes my authority.”
Then he’d gotten really cunning, and had appealed to simple logic and rationality.
“I have personally built a coat rack,” he told the universe. “My father couldn’t afford a coat. Therefore, you haven’t got a prayer. Tomorrow I’ll seize you. I’ll take all that’s in you, and I’ll have it, and it will be mine. It’s inevitable.”
Finally, he’d gotten down to brass tacks.
“I, personally, unlike everyone else that’s ever lived, am definitely going to live forever and see my legacy expressed as I see fit,” he told the universe.

Surprisingly, the universe had not responded to his arguments, despite the fact that so many of his facts were totally correct and therefore his conclusions were unavoidable. So there Carl sat, on his roof, staring up at a sky that had possessed the indecency to take away its romantic (in an adventurous sense! Not in any way connected to anything as messy and unscientific as feelings, sociology, hormones, or the anatomy of the human brain) blanket of bright stars on black space for a bland blue sky with tufts of cloud.
“Fuck you,” he told the sky. “Get out of it. Bring back the universe. The universe is outer space, you’re just trying to hide it from me. The universe is mine, and you’re trying to keep it from me. I KNOW YOUR TRICKS.”
The sky didn’t answer him either, not even when he threw his bottle at it.

This was, of course, not the beginning of the whole problem. It had been brewing for years.
It was the universe’s fault. It had definitely promised Carl things, things which it had brutally, painfully failed to uphold – nah, reneged upon utterly!
And they had been such wonderful things. The most wonderful things of all.
Flight! He would soar, he had been told, he was very sure. If not himself, then his car; if not his car; then his species. All of them. Gloriously, eternally, entirely. Everything would fly to all ends of all places forever, and ever.
Prosperity! Everywhere he voyaged, all things would be his, or if not his, used to make something that was, which was useful, and practical, and satisfying. This would be the most beautiful thing of all, and actually useful which beautiful things weren’t so there.
War! In the path of Man – his path – there would be honest, uncompromising, and utterly inferior enemies who would be mulched in a straightforward test of strengths in which they would inevitably come up wanting, unless they sneakily attempted to triumph by means of deceit in which case they would learn that Man was not only a violent animal but the smartest one, and also the best, at everything, consistently and comfortably. It would be good and wholesome, and build character for the young men.
And finally….freedom. He, and every other Man worthy of the title, would do exactly as they wanted and bow to no one and organize themselves according to common sense and the laws of nature as their common sense understood them. They would all agree on these things all the time.
Those were the wonderful things that had been promised to Carl of the universe, and he was pretty pissed that it had welched so thoroughly on him. It hadn’t written him; it hadn’t called; it hadn’t even let him out of low earth orbit for decades. He’d been used in a most outrageous and unseemly way, and he couldn’t believe the universe had the gall to pretend this was permissible or acceptable behaviour.

Sitting there, on his roof, with his beer, without a prayer, Carl tried to remember what his father had told him. Or some assertive older man with a command of orbital physics, which was close enough. It had been a long time, but he recalled something about hard work and determination and maybe apple pie for some reason.
Carl closed his eyes. He gritted his teeth. And he reached out, out into that uncaring universe, grabbed it in fistfuls, wrenched it to him.
Then he opened his eyes and realized he’d almost fallen off the roof and the universe he thought he’d grabbed was actually just boring ol’ air. Instead, the universe was still above him, hiding. Laughing. Flaunting its impossibility in his face. The conniving tart.
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t real, but it was still there. An unconquered universe, and Carl without so much as a sword to pillage with.
There must be a way. There had to be a way. But there wasn’t a way, not in all the sky he stared at. He’d wheeled, he’d proclaimed, he’d coaxed, he’d threatened, he’d even pulled out his calculator and done some basic mathematics on it, proving at a single stroke both his utter mastery of the invisible magic that ruled all interactions of matter and his infinite creativity.
Nothing.
Which, in a tiny part of his mind, was what he was beginning to suspect the universe actually was, by volume.
God he hated that nagging thought. It was not only absolutely irrelevant and entirely unconnected to his extremely coherent worldview, it ascribed unnecessary importance to Earth, which was the opposite of the universe. Earth was tiny, squalid, and frivolous. It spent zillions and zillions of atoms every year on entirely useless things like plants, animals, and geography, when if it was halfway practical and sensible it would be building spaceships and large, sentient computers. And it did it all through some kind of random willy-nilliness.
Not like the universe. The universe was cold and pure and pristine and worked in perfect math and everything happened for a reason out there which was why he was tremendously disappointed in it for ignoring him for no reason at all.
“YOU’LL DO WHAT I SAY!” he yelled. He threw his bottle at it, but he’d already done that five minutes earlier and ended up throwing his suntan lotion at it instead. “I WAS PROMISED AN ORBITAL HABITAT AND MINERS IN ASTEROID BELTS! I WAS PROMISED BUSSARD RAMJETS TURNING STRAY HYDROGEN INTO THRUST! I WAS PROMISED SOME KIND OF PROTECTION FROM COSMIC RADIATION AND I WAS PROMISED I’D LIVE TO SEE IT ALL HAPPEN! YOU OWE ME, GIVE IT TO ME NOW!”

An awful lack of silence descended.
It was filled with sound carried by air, with annoying insects and birds and dogs and neighbours being inconsiderate and people calling the police and the stink and stir of that smallest of things next to the universe: a planet.
Carl felt himself going mad from the inside out. But as he opened his mouth to scream, filled with awful, awful atmosphere, a light turned on inside him.
Ah. Of course.
How had he missed it? Naturally, as the universe hadn’t responded to him, it was proof that it agreed with him. His case had been made and he was right. Now that his claim for the universe was acknowledged, all he had to do was conquer.
Patting himself on the back (carefully, with stiff joints), Carl climbed in his bedroom window, walked downstairs to his computer, booted up his obsolete operating system, and carefully began to type.

Naturally, it is in the nature of Man to expand, by force if necessary, and so, it is equally true, that Man shall expand until the Universe is His. Quod era demonstratum.

“Done,” he said.
And then he had another bottle, and saw the man jump over the moon.

Jonathan had many things.
A house.
A cat.
A pile of old and dangerously outdated magazines.
But most importantly, Jonathan had his smile, which was a particular sort of smile, a very specific kind of smile. A sunny sort of smile.
(Oh, and he liked the summer. In Jonathan’s opinion, July was at least three months too short.)
So when Jonathan woke up bright and early one day to see the shade already cooking off the morning pavement with the snap hiss and pop of frying dew, WELL
he was pretty pleased.
Him and his smile, his very sunny smile.
“A good day, to-day!” he told his cat brightly. It ignored him.
There was no time to waste, not on something like this. Jonathan had a quick breakfast of whistles and cereal and hurled himself out on the streets, every pore wide open and sucking in the furious sunshine.
“What a lovely morning!” he told a twitching songbird. It peeped at him and slowly slid backwards off its twig, dangling from its toes.

Downtown, that was the place to go. Jonathan would get a paper there, and some coffee.
So he walked, because the busses were held up by traffic which was held up by all the tires and asphalt melting together into a sort of petroleum omelet, hissing with tar and bile.
“A good day to walk, to-day!” Jonathan sang out at the honking, screaming masses. “A very good day indeed!”
He took the time as he walked to compose another little song, which he whistled freely to the world. Each note scraped and sparked against the air, like a flint and steel.
“A paper!” he said to the last newspaper stand in town.
“A drink!” he said to the fourth of the fourteen coffee shops he’d walked past.
The coffee had evaporated in its cup, leaving only a lukewarm residue of droplets. But the paper warmed his hands as he sipped it, cinders flaking from its edges.
“Heat wave?” Jonathan asked sardonically as it crumbled into ashes in his palms “Balderdash! Poppycock! Why, this is the nicest it’s been since ’08!”
He snorted – which blew away the smouldering remnants of sections A through W – dusted off his palms, and headed down to the park.

It was bright and early in the park. The lake shimmered and steamed, generating its own surly haze. The trees roiled spasmodically in the murky air; half-wilting, half-combusting.
“A lovely day for a dip,” said Jonathan. He took off his shirt and socks and hung them on a panting, immobilized seagull, then splashed in with a slosh and a cheer and a “brr! Lovely!” He swam out to the dock and back again three times – once on his front, once on his back, and once on his side – and then floated there blissfully, staring up at the dried, withering sun. It looked like an old cranberry.
“Wonderful!” said Jonathan.
The sun made a noise like ‘pbblt’ except smaller and exploded.
Jonathan frowned, decided that wasn’t important, and felt the back of his skull touch sediment. The lake had evaporated.
“I could use a nice sandwich,” he said to himself.
The café was closed. The fry truck was fried. And what had happened to the ice cream stand was simply unspeakable.
“Gosh, that’s awful,” spoke Jonathan, who didn’t let that sort of thing stop him. He wrung the sweat and evaporated fat out of his shirt and squinted through the burning plastic and chrome of the marina. “Aha!” he said. “The tuck shop!”
The tuck shop was also rubble, but through a minor miracle one of its fridges was only partially incinerated. Jonathan extracted a single unpunctured Freezie from it, and inhaled its sugary vapour through his nose.

Jonathan’s walk home was brisker than it had been that morning, despite the increased heat and the incineration of whole blocks. Where his path took him uphill he took off his shirt and used it as a sail to harness the searing winds generated by the firestorms; and the sidewalks were liquid and splashed under his feet, sliding him on his way.
As he stood at the door of his house once more, Jonathan stopped for a moment – at first to extract himself from the molten remnants of his sandles, but then to consider some deeper thought, something that cried out for expression.
He looked up at the sky, boiled cloudless and seared red.
He looked across the city, at the running, liquid glass and crackling wood.
He looked down at the ground, which was belching forth pockets of sulphurous gas.
He frowned, pursed his lips, shook his head, cleared his throat.
And he spoke.
“A bit hot out there, eh?” said Jonathan, as all around him passers-by burst into quiet and consuming flames. “Boy, it’s a real screecher.”
Then he went inside his house, which exploded.

His cat made it out just fine though.

Make way, make way!
Stand aside! Clear the path!
Make way for the most important, average, humble, righteous, special and relatable man to ever walk this earth!
Make way for John Q. Protagonist!

Step aside please – give us room to breathe, and breathe softer, lighter, less obstructively. We don’t want anyone to get in the way of the point of view. It’s a dot, not a line, and it sits in his pupil. Don’t clutter it, don’t insert yourself, step meekly and be judged as he sees, ‘cause he sees FIT and FINE.
You, you, you and YOU! You are antagonists now! You dislike him for petty reasons, prepare to be put in your place. You – yes you – behind the counter! You are infatuated with his everday charm, his exceptional attractiveness, and will flirt shamelessly on-shift! Not a love interest though, you can stop existing after this. And you…all the rest of whoever you are. You will be our canvas, our backdrop, our stage. Applaud, swoon, dance, sing, sing, sing! Let the world respond to the act that is the actions of he!

Make way for John Q. Protagonist! He’s a busy man, with so many people to be.
He’s everyone that matters, and he isn’t you but maybe he could be! Buy a lottery ticket to your closest theater, bookshop, or video game today! Step up, step up, no need to be shy – claim a few minutes in the sun as the most important man to ever walk, love, laugh, kill, and live.
(for the ladies, Jane Q. Protagonist will be appearing down the road Thursday night, because we care)
Put on the blank face and be amazed at how much it resembles your own from inside your head. Speak words and watch them matter; take action and watch it succeed; spend time and have it matter, oh sweet god matter, each hour filled with action, emotion, and precious sweet honey-suckled angel-kissed god-blessed meaning – and even metaphor.

Make way for John Q. Protagonist; there will never be another like him! There never was another before him; he’s as old as the first story, and always just in the prime of life. A perfect demographic flashpoint; he’s always the majority, but always goes his own way, fearlessly giving them what they desire! What a democratic maverick! A truly independent man of the people! He breaks all the right rules and makes all the right laws; he’s got his finger on the pulse of the universe and tells us its heartbeat with total confidence in that awkwardly charming way of his. What would we do without him?
Hah, as if we’d ever do anything without him.

Make way for John Q. Protagonist; he needs time and space to mend!
His heart’s been broken, his job’s been lost, his best friend shot him in an alley and left him for dead, his mentor disowned him and his dog died. He needs time and space to mourn, but in a way that makes him look good and leaves him emotionally sound yet wiser.
Pour him a drink, give him some advice, give him some space, pick a fight with him and let him get beaten up and tossed out in the alley like so much garbage to prove how much he cares (more than anyone else, nobody else cares). Soothe him, comfort him, tell him harsh truths; whatever it takes to get his mind moving again before the plot stagnates and we all give up.
Just don’t hog the screentime. Remember, this isn’t about you.

Make way for John Q. Protagonist right this second! Roll out the way under his feet and wrap it back up behind him as he goes, because you never had it to begin with. It’s his way or no way, you see – not that you see anything. You think you had a point of view? You think you had a soul? Get real, get lost, get off your high horse. If you were somebody, you’d be anybody, and you’d be John Q. Protagonist. You may challenge him, you may obstruct him, you may even kill him, but you can’t replace him. Without him, nothing matters, and you’re not even nothing.

Make way for John Q. Protagonist! He’s an ordinary guy just like you with a very special set of skills! He’s hopeless at something; maybe even something important. He’s okay at something; maybe even something stupid and useless. Bet you a dollar that both of those things create a satisfying narrative with some intriguing character development. Go on, BET you nameless troglodyte! Bet against the will of the universe – nay, the universe itself!
PIT YOUR WILL AGAINST A WALL AND LOSE.

Make way for John Q. Protagonist, and steel your empty souls, for their fulfillment is at hand. You oppose him in the most fundamental way: you are barriers between him and the conclusion of this story. Maybe you love him, maybe you hate him; maybe you help him up or shove him down, but you’re all there on the page, clotting it up, weighing down the wordcount, shoving your stubby generic bodies between him and that bold-font THE END.
You disgust us. You try our patience. You wear out your welcome. Get going and good riddance.

Make way for John Q. Protagonist – and hurry! He has no time for you, or you, or you, and you, and yours!
There are three sequels and a prequel due by tomorrow, poor bastard, so give him some space and get lost.

I see you like squirrels. Yeah, me too. Who doesn’t?
They don’t count.
Listen, I’ll tell you something good about squirrels. Something nobody else has ever told you.
I’ll tell you why squirrels have big poofy tails.
No, shut up, I don’t care what you’ve heard. Yeah, yeah, your mom’s an ecologist, but shut up and listen you little scumbucket.

***
So there’s a squirrel. Regular old squirrel, of moderate stature and years. She lived in a highly lovely tree, and one particularly nice spring morning she ran down its trunk and was surprised to see a human being there, leaning against it. It wasn’t at all the season for that sort of thing.
“Hello,” said the squirrel. “Who are you?”
The human being turned its head to look up at her and the squirrel was somewhat surprised to see that it was unmistakeable the great disciple, sage, seer, prophet, fortune-teller, well-wisher, and dogs-body, Kem.
“I’m being pursued,” said Kem, “and I can’t stop to chat.”
“How about a bite to eat?”
“Can’t stop for that either.”
“Jeez,” said the squirrel, “you must be HUNGRY.”
“Thirsty, too,” said Kem. “But you know what I really miss?”
The squirrel didn’t know and said as much.
“Sleeping,” said the disciple-sage. “I haven’t had a nap in a decade. You see, I am continuously and constantly chased by the three great demons of Ignorance, Despair and Cruelty, and if I halt for a moment I’ll be caught and mangled by them.”
“Well, why don’t you put your feet up here and have a little rest?” asked the squirrel. “Being chased when you’re half-asleep never helps – trust me, I’ve lost a few cousins that way. And this is a really shady and most refreshing tree to sleep under. Besides, I can keep watch. You’ll be fine.”
“They are extremely great demons,” said Kem.
“My teeth are very sharp and never stop growing,” said the squirrel.
“Fair enough,” said Kem. And without so much as a good-night or thank-you-very-much the disciple-sage rolled up in a small and extremely holy ball and began snoring.
The squirrel combed through the disciple-sage’s pockets for any stray nuts and found nothing, then immediately climbed up to the top of her tree and began the watch. She didn’t have to wait long. The ground was trembling, the leaves were shaking, and over the horizon came the great demon Ignorance. It was sixty miles tall and forty miles broad and it had to walk bent double and double again to prevent its head from being lost high above the clouds. In each of its huge warty hands it carried a brutally spiked war-club the size of a well-travelled highway; from each of its ears dangled incongruously small but splendid little earrings, decorated with emeralds a deeper green than oak-leaves.
The squirrel was very impressed by Ignorance’s appearance and wondered if there was any deeper symbolic meaning behind it. “I’m very impressed by your appearance,” she told Ignorance. “I wonder if there’s any deeper symbolic meaning behind it?”
“Dunno,” said Ignorance in its small, somewhat flat voice. “Hey, you seen the disciple-sage, Kem?”
“No,” said the squirrel. “Hey, is that her?”
“Where?”
“Just over your shoulder.”
“Where?” asked Ignorance, craning its neck about three times.
“Your left shoulder.”
“Which left?”
“Your left.”
“Huh?” said Ignorance, twisting its head back around the other way six times.
“Now she’s right behind you.”
“Huh?!”
“Right above you now!”
Ignorance spun its head around five times each way, reared straight up, bonked its head on the moon and toppled over into outer space, dead as a doornail.

The squirrel checked the horizon, ate some nuts, explored the inside of the great disciple and sage Kem’s hat, and generally made up things to take up time. At last she sat on a branch, utterly deprived of things to do.
“I’m done,” she said.
“Tell me about it,” whispered the great demon Despair into her ear.
The squirrel nearly leaped out of her fur. The great demon Despair was very quiet, so very quiet indeed that it had crept right up to her in her tree without so much as a hint of a warning. This was in spite of both the fact that it was the size of a mountain range and was being dragged on top of a jeweled palanquin by the innumerable labouring efforts of millions of tiny nagging doubts. In its right hand it held a jeweled flog; in its right hand a blacksmith’s-puzzle made of two perfectly-trapped circlets; in its other right hand it clutched a few stray nuggets of mucus, as it was currently knuckle-deep in its nose.
“Get your finger out of there when you’re talking to someone,” said the squirrel sternly.
“Sorry,” sighed Despair, brushing crumbs out of its palm and flicking them into the distance. “I’m hopeless, aren’t I? Well, I’ve screwed this up. Tell me, have you seen the great disciple-sage Kem?”
“Nowhere near here,” said the squirrel.
“Really?” asked Despair. “Not even under your tree, where I followed her tracks?”
“Nope,” said the squirrel.
“Not even huddled under that cloak and hat, which I have seen in the distance just ahead of me ten thousand times?”
“Not in a million years.”
Despair sighed again, a wind that dragged on forever. “Gosh, I’m just WORTHLESS,” it said wretchedly. “I can’t believe I’ve screwed up so badly. I can’t do anything right. I’m not a real person. I’m going to go home and never do anything again.”
And it did, towing its nagging doubts behind it like fishing-lines. The squirrel watched it leave, thoughtfully munching an acorn, then shrugged.

The great demon Cruelty was less subtle – and not merely because it was a vast and crawling thing with a thousand thousand arms and a million claws and sixteen hundred mouths with a billion very sharp teeth. It took an hour and a half to walk from the far horizon to the squirrel’s tree because it kept stopping to uproot and shred every blade of grass and crawling beetle it could see.
“HRRRNRNRNRNRNRNNRNRNRNGHGHGHGehehehehehehehhehehehehe,” it said to the squirrel.
“Hello,” said the squirrel.
“HRURURURURUURruururrrr,” said Cruelty, and it reached out with six of its arms.
“Are you looking for the great disciple-sage Kem?” asked the squirrel very quickly.
“HAHAHahahahayes indeed,” said Cruelty. It tore a few branches off the squirrel’s tree and began to strip the bark off them.
“Why?” asked the squirrel.
“I wish to commit unspeakable tortures upon her,” said Cruelty, idly scouring an ant colony with its heel. “I have plans.”
“Tell me,” said the squirrel.
“I just said they were unspeakable,” said Cruelty, and a wasp-whine of annoyance filled its sixteen hundred mouths. “There will be no words. Only flayings. And mutilatings. And wrenchings. And so on and so forth. There are a thousand complicated steps and seven thousand winding substeps and ten trillion individual components”
“Astounding,” said the squirrel. “How sure of them are you?”
Cruelty glared at the squirrel, eyelessly. “Very. My plans are astute and exact.”
“Well then luck is your ally! At the foot of this tree, vulnerable, blissful, and unaware, slumbers the great disciple and sage Kem!”
Cruelty clapped with glee and all its hands, knocking every bird in the sky senseless. “Hooray!” it said.
“Now go to work with your plan then,” said the squirrel. “Just don’t mess it up. Because you have only one chance and a thousand complicated steps and seven thousand winding substeps and ten trillion individual components.”
The great demon cruelty considered this. Then it considered the sky. Then it considered the squirrel. Then it considered the sky again.
Then it opened its mouth and said “well, I would begin at the forearm…”
“I don’t quite understand,” said the squirrel. “How do you mean?”
“Just here, at the nerve.”
“Where?”
“There are no words,” sighed Cruelty, and it held up its thousand thousandth favourite arm. “So. Starting from here…”

What was left of Cruelty in the end was just a few wayward atoms which quickly underwent isotopic decay and vanished just as Kem yawned and stretched herself upright.
“That,” she said, “is the best nap I’ve ever had. And also the only. Tell me, squirrel, did you find yourself troubled?”
“Somewhat,” admitted the squirrel. “But not to any great degree. Your demons are not very clever.”
“No,” agreed Kem. “But they are persistent, and I imagine they’ll be back someday. I think I owe you something all the same, mind. For the sake of a good nap on a kind spring morning.”
The great disciple and sage extended her hand and blew on her palm and then and there, nose to tail, the squirrel’s furry tail shifted and shook and shimmied until it had turned into a marvelous swirl of colour, every shade of the rainbow and more besides.
“Gosh, thanks,” said the squirrel.
“Don’t mention it,” said Kem. “Now shoo! I’ve got a load of ground to cover.”

***

Of course, next Wednesday the squirrel asked for her old tail back, since her marvelous rainbow-fur made her extremely visible to hawks, foxes, and cats. And thus it was that the squirrel acquired her tail, which was the same as her old tail. Sometimes life’s like that.

It was a waste of time, just a stupid waste of time – I said that from the outset. But we were into summer now, where time didn’t exist. Schedules had slipped apart; weekends blurred into Thursdays; nobody had anything to do but nothing.
So me and Sam and Dan went down to the old school, just to kill an evening, any evening, whatever day it was didn’t matter.

The fence was short and wire, didn’t even have barbs. Its mesh was too fat to keep out a rat, or even a raccoon; its frame was too feeble to stop a bear; a coyote or stray dog would dig under in a flash. It only existed to prove its point and hold up a sign.
TRESPASSING
PROHIBITED
UNSAFE
CLOSED
SOLD
LOT
and so on.
We climbed it like it wasn’t there, first Sam, then Dan, then me. Slow Jo. But it wasn’t my idea to come here – it wasn’t anyone’s, really – and I didn’t want to see this place again all that bad.
Neither did Dan. Sam didn’t either, but she’d said she did and so there wasn’t any way around it and here we all were with Sam’s crowbar and the little side door by the gym breaking apart. We probably could’ve pushed it over.
“Dark in here,” said Dan, because he was the one that said the things people had to say.
We pulled out flashlights, switched on apps, poked around until we found the door that still opened and walked into the gym, where the first zombies were.

They weren’t doing much. Standing. Groaning, but softly. Life doesn’t move too fast around here to start with, and once it stops it drops without rolling. Four of them, under a dirty old skylight like bigger versions of the strange moulds and mosses that were sprouting up from the tiles around them.
We took some pictures. Sam whacked one of them a few times with her crowbar, trying to get the head off, but she gave up as fast as could be excused. People are tougher than they look, and zombies are the people that wouldn’t fall apart properly to begin with.
Dan smoked in the gym, like he said he’d always sort of wanted to. Then we went into the halls and the classrooms and the bathrooms and up and down, looking for something and finding zombies, always more zombies. Here and there, still wearing t-shirts and dresses and suits. Sneakers mouldy. Eyes turned off and lungs pumping for nothing, staring up at the ceiling and the water damage coming in through the roof.
One of them did stop us on the second floor – my fault. I recognized one of their shirts and freaked out a little. I explained about middle school drama, Dan said ‘wow, that sucks’, and Sam pulled out the crowbar again.
It didn’t help anyone at all, really. Like getting revenge on a tree.

The teacher’s longue was empty. Just another room, once you ignored the fridge with the two overgrown tupperwares in it. Dan made us spend ages in there – kept insisting that Sykes kept a bottle hidden in a sewn pocket inside the couch, that he was always sloshed after lunch. Sam ended up jumping up and down on it to show him there was nothing there, then the whole thing collapsed into a big explosion of spores and dust. Gross.
“It’s your fault if we all get hantavirus,” I told her. She just laughed at me.
The principal’s office was even less exciting. They’d taken all the paperwork when they shut the place down, so we couldn’t even look up our files or anything.
“They’d just be boring anyways,” said Sam. “Hey, here’s Jo’s: ‘this girl exists. Went home sick twice. Freckles.”
“And yours would just be blank,” I told her. “Since you never came in.”
We busted it up anyways. We had to use the crowbar for something. We had to do something. The desk was just as tough as the zombies – dead, cheap wood that wouldn’t crumple properly. There were no electronics.

It was easy to get onto the roof. They’d taken the paperwork, they’d taken the keys, but they hadn’t done anything with any of the doors that was more complicated than some planks and a few screws.
The lawn looked nice from up there. They’d come by and tore it up real good about six months after the shutdown, but the grass had grown back and all the trees had gone wild and bushy, really real bush-y, not fluffy but like something from ‘the bush.’ They seemed to be eating up the lawn.
Dan had brought beers. Lite beers. We drank them because it was what we had, and we threw some rocks off the roof. Sam bugged me until I threw the zombie head she’d brought with us. “It’s therapy,” she said. “Therapeutic. Do it. C’mon. Just do it. Go for it. Do it. Now. C’mon. Do it.”
I did it. Still wouldn’t blink, but I guess it might’ve helped.

By then it was getting dark – too dark, where’s-my-hand-in-front-of-me dark – so we pulled our stuff together and headed back downstairs after we threw the bottles at the old basketball net. None of us made it. Sam hit on Dan after he missed his shot, but he didn’t notice and she got embarrassed and gave up real fast. Nothing new.
I’d expected the trip home to be bad, for something to go wrong, but really… It was dark down there, and the zombies wouldn’t stop sighing, but it was ALREADY dark down there, and we’d already heard them, and there was nothing new there, just green and crumbling dampness, and, well, nothing had changed.
We talked on the way back, casually, about very important things. Dan was going to ask around at the auto shops; Sam was heading to college.
For me, I looked at the blank, breathing faces around us, and I couldn’t think of much else. Not much else at all.