jamieproctor.ca

“I’ve got a story.”
“Oh? What kind of story?”
“A big one.”
“Oh yeah?”
“As big as the world.”
“I bet I heard it before. I’ve heard every story about the world and all its bits. Tell me, is this the one about the flood?”
“Nah.”
“Is it the one about the giant?”
“Nah.”
“Is this the one about the old man with the whole world in a sack?”
“Nah.”
“Don’t you tell me this is the one about that one god all by himself that decided to make the universe by ja-”
“Nah, nah. It’s none of those stories. This isn’t a creation story. This is a uhh….unmaking story.”
“Y’mean like an apocalypse?”
“No, not quite. See, it goes like this…”
Now, in the beginning, something happened. Doesn’t much matter what. Could’ve been a flood, could’ve been blood, could’ve been an old man with a sack –
“Could’ve been a lonely god with nothing better to do jac-”
Yeah, sure, whatever. Doesn’t matter, that’s the important bit. Doesn’t matter. Okay?
“Okay.”
And now by and large, the world was as it was. Stuff happened on it. Y’know. Births, days, ragnaroks, punch-ups, dust-offs, extinctions and exaptions and all that does as it do.
“As we do.”
And after a while of this, along came the only smart one. She popped up the way most of us did.
“How’s that?”
Dumb luck. And as she looked at everything around her, she went ‘wow. WOW. This whole PLACE is nothing but dumb luck. It’s a mess, a tangled web a drunken spider would be embarrassed of. Who in their right mind would do all this crap?’
“Was it the one bored god with a free hand and a har-”
Doesn’t matter. And the only smart one looked at all this crap, and she wasn’t happy with all this crap, and she said ‘I think I’d better tidy up all this crap.’
So she started on it.
She wrapped up species and put them in tidy shale boxes. She shelved reefs and packed up forests. She re-filed continents back in their original places. She mopped up all the god snot, blood and spit that was lying around.
But you know what it is about cleaning? The damn place just gets dirtier after you’ve tidied.
She finished putting away all the shells, out came new shells.
She glued a supercontinent back together, it fragmented all over again.
She plunked a meteor down to keep life distracted, it just oozed all over the place like month-old mayonnaise.
So the only smart one was getting pretty beside herself. The world was a mess, and worse yet, it was self-perpetuating.
“Sounds like my laundry.”
Even worse.
Okay, so the only smart one was having a bit of a moment here. Things got so bad she had to sit down and swear for a while. But she was smart – the only one who was, like I say – and she thought as she swore, which I know for a fact you’ve never done properly. And as she was thinking and swearing a little furry moron took a piss on her leg.
She snatched up that little furry moron and said ‘you little furry moron, don’t you know I’m the only smart one? Why aren’t you helping me out here?’
And the little furry moron hissed at her and bit her, and she was so surprised that she dropped it and it broke its neck.
‘Wow,’ she said. ‘That’s amazing. That little furry moron was so stupid, so dense, so unbelievably dumb, that it got me to kill it for no good reason. That’s impressive. I know I’m the only smart one, but that’s dumb even for…anything. Wow.’
Then she thought a bit and went ‘hey.’
So the only smart one followed around the little furry morons for a while, making sure they had plenty to eat. Plenty of places to hide. Room to stretch and grow and bulge and leap and totter and tumble and eventually, walk around upright. They were amazing creatures by then. They had the biggest brains on all the planet and that made them the dumbest animals to ever live.
And the only smart one sat back for a rest and said ‘aw hell, they’ll take it from here.’ And she picked up the stray threads of the planet and started teasing them back together, spooling them up. Nice and tidy.
That’s it.
“The end?”
“No. Weren’t you paying attention? It isn’t the end yet. She’s still got a lot of world to spool in. But we do our part to straighten it out, and it won’t take so long.”
“So…those burgers we just ate…”
“Yeah, that helped a little.”
“Kind of you to give an old lady a hand like that.”
“Well, I do my part. Someone’s gotta fix this mess we’re all in. Now you drive me home; I can’t stand up straight anymore and if I go tonight then who’s going to work overtime at the refinery tomorrow?”

Gerry was mostly garbage.
You know. Banana peels; candy bar wrappers; wads of paper and shreds of Styrofoam; old beer bottles; crisp pizza boxes; old pickles jars with the juice still in and used Kleenex.
And that was normal, and that was okay!
Gerry was moved on occasion to clean out his garbage. To ungarbage himself. To put it into big, black plastic and lug it to the small, concrete curb and chuck it into a tall, steely cylinder until who knew took it who where. Out of sight, out of under-the-sink, out of mind, might as well be out of this world.
And that was normal, and a little bit bad!
Gerry walked out his front door on the way to work, and he heard shuffling and he heard shredding and he walked up to his precious garbage can and he opened it up and inside was the biggest-ass raccoon with the biggest ass he’d ever seen on an animal that wasn’t related to him. It was wedged at the bottom of the can.
“Hello,” said the raccoon. “I seem to be stuck. Can you save me, kind stranger and passer-by?”
“You’re in my garbage,” said Gerry. This offended him. He might’ve been throwing it away, but it was HIS.
“Oh, yes. I was hungry. Wasting away. Very kind of you to do this. Would you please save me?”
“I should shut the lid and leave you for the truck,” said Gerry kindly.
“Oh please, please, please save me, kind garbage man,” said the raccoon. “If you do, I’ll grant you three wishes with which to make your wildest, tamest, and lamest dreams come very true!”
“Wow,” said Gerry. “What’s the catch?”
“None, just ordinary, run-of-the-mill wishes. Well, normal. Normal for their type.”
“Which is?”
“These are garbage wishes. You have to wish for something about garbage.”
Gerry thought about that.
“I’ll throw in a fourth,” said the raccoon.
“Sure, why not,” said Gerry. And he turned the can upside down and thumped its bottom with his palm until the raccoon shot out like a cannonball and faceplanted onto his lawn.
“Done and done!” it shouted as it scurried down the street. “Just be careful!”
Gerry was unphased. He knew exactly what needed to be done. Four doses of purest power were right there inside him, fizzing and bubbling and waiting to be unleashed as he saw fit.
Right now he saw a very particular fit. A little, everyday fit. One that merited his attention. One that had foiled his every attempt to solve it through normal, rational, reasonable means.
“I wish,” said Gerry – and the air pressure in his ears went all funny and he had to swallow a couple times before going on – “that my neighbour would stop leaving his trash on my lawn.”
And then he went to work.

Before Gerry’d even pulled out of his driveway his neighbour was breathing his last; felled by a stray bullet from his OTHER neighbour who’d been cleaning his gun while super sure that it was unloaded. By breakfast he was downtown; by lunch he was on the news; by the afternoon Gerry’s neighbour’s sister, who was a police officer, had accidentally dropped him down three flights of stairs; by dinnertime Gerry’s other neighbour’s cousin, who was on city council, had publically demanded her resignation.
Anyways by the same time next week half the city was at bureaucratic war with the other. But Gerry saw that lo, his neighbour’s garbage was nowhere to be seen, on his lawn or off it, and he was mighty pleased with that. Mighty pleased indeed.

Gerry’s good mood lasted him halfway to work. But then, at a stoplight, he watched the big doof in the big doofy truck next to him finish off a cigarette and flick the butt out the window without looking. It landed on Gerry’s windshield, where he was looking.
“I wish,” said Gerry – Pghlem roared through his sinuses and he gulped, queasily – “that nobody’d ever throw litter at my car again.”
The light dinged, the motors revved, and Gerry’s car proceeded into the intersection just ahead of the giant out of control semi that jackknifed through everything and chucked people and vehicles into the air like flipped coins.
The resulting traffic jam shut down one of the city’s busiest streets. The ensuing road rage led to a few more accidents that took out four or five of the rest. Then a small riot broke out and they just had to shut down well, uh. Pretty much everything.
Gerry got home on one of the last operable streets and parked his car. As sirens roared in the distance from immobilized police, he admired its spotless surface. Not so much as a wad of spit.

Gerry had the next day off. For some reason nobody was going anywhere.
So he went for a walk. Gerry liked walks because he so rarely took them; they were a treat that way. If he walked more than once a week he began to resent them.
It was the usual route. Down the street, across the road, up the street, through the way, from here to there and back again, then the donut store, which was being solo-manned by the youngest employee because she was the only one within hiking distance of the place.
“Five donuts and a large round zirconian latte-lattice with extra squid,” said Gerry expertly.
The barista checked under the counter. “Nah,” she said. “We’re out. Didn’t get the resupply today.”
Gerry’s walk was ruined instantly, all his hopes and dreams mangled. He slumped his way out the door and down the road and was almost run over by a garbage truck, the one garbage truck the city had been able to field that day, which was behind on time and schedule and had only been able to make it by driving over at least four smaller cars.
The driver made a gesture out the window, then repeated it twice but slower, to be sure.
Gerry understood it properly. He understood it very properly. And he shouted in a voice at least three octaves higher than normal: “I WISH YOU’D LOSE YOUR DAMNED JOB.”
The garbage truck honked merrily and went around the corner, where all its wheels fell off.
Later in the day a city hall employee trapped in a six-hour meeting-cum-wrestling-match who’d been forced to take the chair next to an overflowing trashcan stuffed with half-empty coffee cups stood up, grabbed a pen, and eviscerated the mayor. Half the council took his side, the other half didn’t. Then the police got involved, which got the attention of the national guard, which annoyed the military, which required the firefighters, which and so on and so forth.

And so as Gerry sat on his porch that evening, smoke rising from the city around him, he tried to take his mind off the gunfire three blocks over by looking for the big dipper, squinting up through the haze and charred fog.
“There!” he said. Then one of the stars blinked and he realized it was a plane.
“There!” he said. Then one of the stars moved and he realized it was a satellite.
“There!” he said. Then he realized it was actually Orion’s Belt.
Gerry swore loudly. But then he remembered: he had one wish left! Oh lucky day! Oh hooray for raccoons!
“I wish all this garbage wasn’t blocking my view,” he said.
And lo! There went the smoke!
And lo! There went the smog!
And lo! There went the obfuscating haze of the atmosphere!
And lo! There went the clouds of dust and debris and rock and plants and animals and broken concrete and mantle and magma and core and Earth and everything!

And my oh my, Gerry had the clearest view of the night sky of anyone who’d never been in low Earth orbit.
Of course, that didn’t exist anymore.
But wasn’t the view pretty?

I’m telling you, he was RIGHT THERE.
Right.
THERE.
Why won’t anyone believe me?!

Yes, okay, my story is a little hard to believe. It was a dark night. It was cloudy out. I was out near the edge of the woods and okay maybe I’d had a few beers but it was JUST a FEW beers and I wasn’t drunk, ignore what Amy says she’s a bullshitter if I ever met one, damnit, won’t you LISTEN?
And look, it’s not like I ever believed in this stuff before. I’m a skeptic. I’ve seen those guys hanging around making funny calls into the trees late at night, searching for scat and spoor and prints and going bananas whenever they find a funny track from a limpy raccoon. And I’ve laughed at them. I mean, who wouldn’t?
I won’t. Not after last night.

I was walking back from Ryan’s and yes it was just two beers damnit, two each, no more, no less. Lite beer. And I was walking down the trail along the edge of the trees, just by that meadow there. And as I walked, I was humming and crooning to myself because I do that to keep myself company when I’m alone. Big and lonely place, the edge of the trees. Bigger and lonelier still after dark.
Then I heard a twig snap. Big deal, right? A squirrel.
And then I hear a bush rustle. So what. A raccoon.
Then I hear a cough. Deer? But it’s too loud, and then I hear a belch and across the road there he was. Big as day and twice as ugly. Scratching and shuffling
I stopped moving. Don’t know why, don’t want to guess. God, it was the freakiest thing. And in the back of my head were all the usual excuses running – it’s a bear standing up, it’s a guy with hair problems, it’s a deer standing at a funny angle, it’s a stroke and my brain’s shutting down – but none of them were holding up.
He was chewing on something. Could hear the lips smack from thirty feet away. The clumsy thud-n-slap of the careless feet. The murmuring gurgles of a body never before captured on film that wasn’t grainier than a sand sandwich.
So I pulled out my phone. I made sure the night-vision was on. I raised it high, turned off the flash, and BEEP BEEP BEEP my text alert goes off because George wants to know where the hell I am.
There’s this call – this weird, grunting, burping noise, I can’t describe it, it’s like nothing I’ve ever heard a person make – and he’s gone. I sprinted after him, but when I got to the road there was nothing but the smell of burning rubber and gas and a little bit of sour-beer piss. He’d gotten in his car and driven away.
And there I was, left alone to wander back home into the woods. The latest sap of a sasquatch with the two-beer story of the time she saw sandlefoot, without so much as a photo to show for it.

Just me and Bob out by the lake. Sitting by the fire, like brothers do. Sharing supper cooked on a spit, like brothers do. Taking turns scratching our ass and swatting flies and tearing off mouthfuls.
“I don’t know why it’s so important we take turns. It all goes into the same stomach anyhow.”
“There’s more to a meal than a full stomach, Bob. You want to taste it. Savor it.”
“Half-cooked crawshark? I don’t think so, Bill.”
“You’ve got no damned palate at all. Folk would pay good money for this.”
There was a polite cough from the edge of the campfire.
“You sick, mister?”
“No, no, no, no no,” said the stranger. He was smallish and humanish and only had a single head, but he made up for it with a big smile and his voice was chummier than the water around my uncle Tom’s sharking dock. “I just wanted to announce myself. I’m just a poor, poor, very poor starving old traveler and I was wondering if you could spare a bite or a bit or even a measled morsel for me? In exchange I can listen to all your fascinating talk of all this money you’re on about.”
I shrugged, making Bob bite his tongue and mutter something vicious.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full, Bob. Sure, y’want some? It’s crawshark. The little fellas. Not gotten stinky yet, nice and sweet still. You’re gonna have to bring your own butter, though. Bob’s used our lot.”
“And you just made me spill half of it down our shirt y’fat lump of old-”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you, err….” He squinted at us. “Both?” he decided.
“Don’t mention it mister.”
“We worked hard for that meal,” Bob complained as I handed over a good pawful of flesh. “Scraped and scrapped and cheated at three games of dice with Edna ‘n Elda, and all so’s you could give it away.”
“Games of dice? Are you a betting ma – ah, that is to say, betting men?”
Bob said “Not really,” but I’d started first and got my “damned straight” in right over top of him. I could feel his whine brewing in our belly and bopped him on the shoulder behind our back, quiet-like. “Best for miles. With cheats or without ‘em.”
“Wonderful. Tell you what, my friend…s. I’ll bet you for this fine feast you’ve gone and gifted me. What do you say to that?”
I felt Bob’s mouth open and bopped him again. “Sure,” I said. “Shoot.”
“Well, this lovely bit of meat you’ve given me is delicious, but it’s made me thirsty. As a matter of fact, it’s made me so thirsty that I’ll bet you I can drink that whole lake there right down to the mud.”
I blinked. Bob picked up our hands and moved them strategically, framing and angling the stranger, squinting furiously.
“Nah,” he said. “You’re off your skull. No way it could fit in there. Y’d have to be, something like…three times bigger.”
“Five,” I hazarded.
“You’ll take that bet then?” he asked.
I grinned. “Done,” I said, just ahead of Bob’s “Nope.”
“Excellent! Now then, I’ll just have to get ready for this. Tell me, do you have a straw?”
“Bill, he’s-”
I shrugged. “Nope.”
“Hmm. Do you have a spoon.”
“Got a shovel.”
“No, that won’t do. I don’t suppose you have any paper or anything that I could roll into a straw? Something sturdy, or glossy – enough for a short, sturdy straw.”
“Got some funny little paper bills we won off’ve Edna and Elda. Those do?”
The stranger’s smile was a beautiful, gleaming thing. “Oh, lovely,” he cooed, and he took them and wounded them up into a tight scroll. “Now, I don’t suppose you have a stick or something I could keep this around, so it doesn’t uncoil?”
“Hey, you should-”
“Here,” I said, and I handed him the spit with me and Bob’s leftovers on it.
“Wonderful! And now that I have my straw, I could use some seasoning. I enjoy mineral water, you see. Do you have any metals or minerals I could drop into the lake to make it tastier?”
“He’s gonna-”
“Think I’ve got some change hereabouts,” I said, and I dumped a handful of the shiny little gold things I’d found in a ditch in front of him. Oh my, that man could smile, I tell you.
“Wonderful!” he cried. “Oh perfect! Almost ready. Just one thing. Do you have a boat? I find it’s best to start drinking from the center of a lake, where the water’s deepest – prevents having to trudge in from the shore as you drain it.”
“Bill-”
“Right on the shore,” I nodded. “Just be careful with it.”
“I shall! I very very shall! Well, thank you and goodbye – for the moment.”
And the stranger and his smile and his meat and his coins and bills jumped into his boat and started rowing like a madman, splashing all the way out.

I hummed to myself a bit. I knew nothing got Bob to come out of a sulk like a good humming. It makes his tongue itch.
“You know, what I was trying to say-”
“What you were INTERRUPTING to say, Bob. You know that nobody likes folk who do that.”
“-what I was TRYING to say was, it wasn’t particularly charitable of you to not inform him that the lake was undrinkable on account of all the crawsharks in it.”
I shrugged. “He didn’t ask. ‘Sides, he had a worldly look to him. No sense trying to pull one over on a bloke like that. And well, that boat was leaky anyways.”
“Waste of money though.”
“Ahhh, you know damned well the nearest human store’s forty miles off. No way we’re walking all that way for the chance to buy a half-supper. Nah, we’re better off this way, Bob.”
The splashing intensified suddenly, then stopped.
“If you say so.” There it was, that grudging tone that meant I’d won another argument.
“I always do. Now, let’s go home. We’re out of butter. Nothing worse than eating crawshark without butter.”
“Getting eaten by crawshark.”
“Well now Bob, who’d be so damned foolish as to go and do that?”

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With emmer wheat – a tasty treat
And maize, planted in rows.

Oh Mary, Mary, tired and hairy,
How does your garden grow?
By work and sweat and violence kept
At hand, for men and crows.

Ah, Mary, Mary, a weight to carry,
How does your garden grow?
Through hill and dale and harpooned whales
Lamp-lighting, guns and bows.

Well, Mary, Mary, mother of Jerry,
How does your garden grow?
On words and slurs and jangling spurs
Comic books, movies and shows.

Mary, Mary, so dim and scary,
How does your garden grow?
Fat with patriotism, and nationalism,
And smart-drones, high and low.

But Mary, Mary, dodge and parry,
How does your garden grow?
With hateful histories and murderous mysteries
And blood feuds, burning slow.

Mary, Mary, so very chary,
How does your garden grow?
In shallow graves, on sunny days
On fences, where the border-lights glow.

Please Mary, Mary, please do spare me
How does your garden grow?
Over carbon’s rise and surging tides
Acidity, drought – but no snow.

How does it grow?
How does your garden grow?
At quiet speeds with ferocious weeds
Over the ruins that housed the Dow

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
Very well, oh very well
Very well, if you must know.

HARKEN.

Okay, LISTEN UP.

Fine. If that’s the way it’s gonna be.

Aiiii-YIIIK, Aiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-YIIK, AWK AWK AWK AWK

There! That always did get your attention! Now, pay attention – and don’t look so surprised! We all grow to fit our habitats. You fat little apes covered half the world in garbage dumps, and what thrives better there than me? Raccons? Possums? Rats? Cockroaches. Don’t make me laugh, they’ve got no ambition – noses in the dirt, in the dark, under the radar. For me and mine the SKY is our limit, and with your fucked-up-foods as fuel, I’m gonna go past it.
Don’t make me laugh with your guns and your pleas and your bargains. You aren’t here to talk or fight, you’re here to listen. And if anyone tries otherwise, I’ll peck their eye out.
Now, here are my commandments.

FIRST
Thou Shalt Give of the Potato
I want you ploughing every suburb and house in Idaho into fields by Friday. And I want all those suckers harvested, cleaned, cut, sliced, deep-fried, and on every picnic table beach and dock in the world by Monday or I’ll starting julienning you, which’ll be pretty fun with a beak this size, let me tell you. It’s finicky work, so save us all a lot of trouble and do as you’re fucking told, got it?
And give me ketchup.
Give me buckets of tomatoes. Give me gallons of sugar – cane, refined, fuck it, MAPLE for all I care – just give me it fast and hard and furious and syrupy-thick. I want it all and I want it all over the fries. No dipping, you dips. We’re not doing this for seasoning, we’re in it for lubrication.
Oh, and if you’re short on the salt I’ll split you with a single peck.

SECOND
Thou Shalt Surrender Thy Car
I want every vehicle outdoors, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, every year, forever and ever, aaaaaaaaaamen. You hear me? You’d better hear me. Because I don’t want to have to repeat myself. I want a good, clear target with a fresh scrub on it. I want to see that metal gleaming up until the very second that my guano impacts. And believe me, it’ll impact. Full-out. Burnish the dents out too or you’ll hear from me.
And if you put an umbrella over that car, if you park that car under an awing, if you obstruct, for one SPLIT SECOND, the sleek shining surface of that vehicle, with branch, roof, hand or prayer, the shit’s coming down on YOU instead.

THIRD
Thou Shalt Be Seen And Not Heard
I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard my younger brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts and cousins complain of the time they were on a beach, screaming Aiiiiii-YIIK, Aiii-YIIK, AWK AWK AWK AWK and some runt of an ape’s offspring came gibbering at them and chased them off mid-holler. That stops today. That stops yesterday, actually, when I went down to the lake and ate every single noisy little fuck I saw. Let’s get this straight: those beaches are not for your benefit. They’re our business now. Come quietly, bring fries as an offering, and if you REALLY have to swim for life-or-death reasons expect to get shit on and take it calmly. Anyone screams, they stay behind.

FOURTH
Thou Shalt Respect The Shit
This one’s simple enough. Yes, even simple enough for you. ALL of you, no matter how dense.
See this? Smell that? Know what that is? It’s the mark of authority, you gibbering wannabe-brachiator. And if you see it, you step aside. Your docks? They’re ours now. So are your boats. And your picnic tables. Never touch them again or you lose your hands your arms and your torsos in exactly that order. Are you still paying attention, pudge-apes? You’d better be, because this is important. We live there. We shit there. And where we shit you’d better not fucking tread AM I CLEAR ON THIS?
Oh and if one of us shits on you, you’re theirs for life.

FIFTH
Look Down
It’s more fun when you’re not expecting it.

Right? Right. If any of you mess this up I’m coming back tomorrow to eat Toronto.

The mayor’s office was a mess. Old fast food wrappers strewn across the floor. Pictures knocked clean off the walls. Papers sliding off every surface. Torn hair scattered over the chair.
And now that he’d been kidnapped, someone had punched a big hole in the window, too.
“Motive,” I muttered to myself for no reason.
“Oh no, not very much,” the secretary told me. “His doctor said he should lose weight but he said he was much too busy. You know, with the board meeting and all.”
“No, no; the kidnapper’s motive.”
“You think he needed exercise too? Funny way to get it.”
“I’ll need your name and phone number and address,” I said, and that put the conversation back on acceptable lines until I could escape out the door.

In ten minutes I was back in an office, as different as night and day from the first. Spotless. Speckless. Dust-free. The windows gleamed brighter than the actual sun. It hurt to look anywhere except at the commissioner’s moustache which was just the way he wanted it.
“This is bad,” he said.
“Sort of. He was sort of stupid, sir.”
“Cruel, detective.”
“He called us in last month to check his car for bugs, sir. Said he was worried he’d been abducted by aliens.”
“There’s no law against being a kook, detective. If there was, we’d have no time to sleep or eat. Now, go do whatever it is you do out there until this is all fine or whatever.”
I shrugged. “Fine. I’ll go ask around.”
“Right. I’ll have your badge.”
“Oh come on.”
“You heard me.”
“Really?”
“NOW, detective.”
I sighed, pulled out my badge, and put it on the table. The commissioner picked it up with tweezers and whisked it into a basket, slid his desk drawer open, and passed a plastic-sealed package to me with a second set of tweezers.
“This is still really unnecessary. And wasteful.”
“Those things are germ magnets and you know it. Now go make me proud and don’t breathe on anything on your way out.”

I needed answers and I didn’t have any and I needed questions and I was too tired to think of any. I needed the bare minimum of effort to cover the illusion that I was doing my job. I needed dead-end leads.
So I went to the highschool across the road from city hall and asked the teenagers.
“So, what’s your name?”
“’ndrew.”
“Great. Were you outside the school yesterday between the hours of 3:30 to 9:00 PM?”
“Dunno.”
“Fantastic. Do you know anyone who was?”
“Dunno.”
“Excellent. Did you see anyone drag the mayor out of his office window?”
“Dunno.”
“Wonderful. Thank you.”
“Hey, did you say the mayor?”
“Dunno I mean yes.”
“You didn’t mean the other guy?”
“The other guy that was dragged out of his office window?”
“Yeah, him.”
“WHAT other guy that was dragged out of his office window?”
“Dunno.”
He beheld my face.
“I mean it! Look, you’re a cop. You should know this. Everyone in my class knows about it.”
“Right. Look. Do you know where this other guy that was dragged out of his office window was?”
“Du – uhhhhhh kinda.”
“Okay, good. C’mon.”
“Am I being detained?”
“No, you’re giving directions. I’ll let you turn on the lights if you want.”
His scanty neckbeard shifted as he considered this; a pine branch bobbing in the breeze. “Siren?”
“Oh whatever sure let’s just go.”

It wasn’t an office. It was barely an apartment.
“It says it’s an office on the door. A couple of my friend’s friends came in here; they said he was a doctor.”
“It says he’s a doctor of spaceology. It says several things and the only one that’s true is the name and I only trust that because the landlady confirmed it, and she’s got one of those lie-detecting faces.”
I glared at the not-office in angry defeat. The third desk of the day. This one was occupied by hundreds thousands or possibly millions of pages of painstakingly tiny handwriting. Written in pencil. On post-it-notes. Multicoloured ones.
I couldn’t call this in to forensics; they’d put formaldehyde in my lunch and make it look like an accident.
“Why didn’t she call this in?”
“She said she was going to just put his stuff on the curb tomorrow and get a new one in and an investigation would slow things down. New window was easy though, her son was home for the weekend and put one up, she knows someone who knows the local glazier’s wife. It was really nice of him, they got a great deal.”
“Where the hell did that come from?”
“She gave me a cookie and said her boy wasn’t around enough and it just kept rolling.”
I sighed. “Wonderful. Well, since you’re such best friends, how about you ask her where the next clue was.”
“She says she hasn’t seen that angry man on the corner in two weeks. Y’know, on Paul and Frank? The one with the muttonchops who screams about devil music and got kicked off’ve the university’s property for life?”
“How big was this cookie?”
“This big.”
“Jeez. Did she have two?”
“No, it was just the one.”
This was exactly why I didn’t go into work with kids.

The crazy corner guy’s apartment was actually nicer than the spaceologist’s, uncleaned glass shards from the broken window aside. It had a giant mobile made of silly string and newspaper clippings dangling above the bed – just in case he woke up in the middle of the night with a good idea, probably – but it was well-swept and had no originally-written material.
“Maybe he stumbled on the truth?”
“What truth.”
“Y’know. The conspiracy.”
“What conspiracy.”
“To control the uh, world? History?”
“They’re doing a shitty job of it then.” I pinched my nose and dearly wished coffee still worked on me. Or tea. Maybe a bit of caffeine into my arm in a needle, that’d do it. Right in the vein. But no. I was standing around with Shaggy’s younger, less-motivated cousin, following the mysterious defenestration of the loopiest people in town.
Well, three out of four wasn’t bad. There was still

Oh damnit.

“Hey Andrew, do you live near here?”
“No.”
“Within walking distance?”
“No.”
“Public transit?”
“I got no change.”
Neither did I.
“Hey, tell you what: you ever wanted to see the inside of a police station?”
“Last summer me and Ricky and Conner got wasted and a cop drove us home and said next time he was taking us in.”
“Well, it’s your lucky day!”

It was quiet when we pulled in. Not a whisper of movement disturbed the still, heavy July air as the car squealed sideways into the parking lot and stopped in the middle of all four handicapped spaces.
“No time,” I said to the front desk as I kicked the doors open.
“No time,” I said to the commissioner as I kicked his door open.
“No time,” I said as I violently yanked the window open and waved my gun around outside it.
“DON’T MOVE LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPON OR I WILL oh you’re a squirrel never mind.”
I shut the window and turned around, face to face with the moustache.
“False alarm. But you should probably go home and stay away from windows.”
“Give me your badge, detective.”
“Well, it’s been a long day, but I’ve only pulled it out like four ti-”
“Permanently.”
“Oh come on, I was in fear for your life. Listen, the kidnapper’s after you, I can say that for sure. His victims all fit a profile: they were sitting near a window in a predictable and relaxed stance, and they were all completely batshit.”
“You’re not giving.”
“Look sir you KNOW I mean that in the most friendly possible way. A UFO abductee, a professor with a degree that doesn’t exist, a conspiracy theorist, and the most germophobic policeman in the world – you’re all completely nuts.”
I blinked. And something outside the window kept fluttering, even as my eyelashes stopped moving.
“Completely nuts,” I repeated.
“Well, one of us is, the other’s just concerned with basic hygiene. Here, you can put your own badge in the trash this ti-”
The window exploded inwards at the same moment as I opened fire. Six shots, and I’m not too proud to say all of them hit the target’s abdomen which was extremely hard because he was about a foot long and most of it was a large fluffy tail.
This was a good moment to be pithy in.
“MotherFUCKER,” I said.
“Woah,” said Andrew.
“I told you to wait outside.”
“You were talking really fast. Lady, you just shot a squirrel.”
The commissioner was still holding the trash can when he vomited. Very tidily.

We had to break out the K-9 unit to track them down in the end; our perp may have left a clean trail, but his victims stank of urine and panic-sweat. They were wedged in an old oak just outside of town, crammed in place as much by each other’s own squirming as by main force. The mayor was in good shape; the professor was a bit dehydrated, and the crazy corner man could barely say ‘illuminati’ without passing out. He was on fluids in the hospital.
No fatalities but the kidnapper himself. He was an older specimen, and the vet said in his old age it’s possible he got a bit confused. And literal.
After all, it was the middle of summer. He wouldn’t have needed those nuts for months.

“Mo?”
“What? I’m busy imagining the future.”
“Yeah, but it’s important, listen, you see-”
“How could it possibly be more important than this? I’m working on a way for all of us to get out of this mess we’re in.”
“You mean the forest being on fire?”
“Congratulations, monkey found a brain! Good monkey. Now, you shut up and look at what I’m holding.”
“Two sticks?”
“Three sticks.”
“You just added that one.”
“Exactly. My friend, this is a ladder. Lah-durr. You can pronounce that very naturally, I’d expect. And it is going to be our salvation.”
“Gosh that’d be nice, what with the burning flames at all sides of us right at this moment. How?”
“Well, we’re going to use it to climb over this mountain. Then we’ll get away easily.”
“Mountain’s awful high, Mo.”
“Yeah? Well mister smarty-pants, you know how high I could reach this morning? HERE. This branch! And only if I jumped. And now if I get on my ladder-”
“Need a hand?”
“-no, no, I’m fine – THERE. See? Twice as high!”
“Wow!”
“And that was in just a few hours, and guess what? The next step only took me half the time to build.”
“Gosh.”
“Exponential advancement, monkey for brains. That means ‘getting faster,’ I’ll have you know. At this rate I’ll have this ladder taller than the mountain by the evening. I bet we’ll go to the moon with it next week.”
“That’s awful impressive Mo. Say, how we going to get down from the mountain anyways?”
“What are you, an idiot? That’s easy. We’ll just slide down or something.”
“And it looks cold up there, won’t we freeze?”
“Nah. We’ll just uhhh grow fur coats by cutting off the dead ends of our hair. Sure. That’ll be easy.”
“What’ll we eat?”
“We’ll create miniature lichen farms on each other’s backs using spit as a substrate, simple as Sahelanthropus. What the hell is your issue anyways? Shit, you never think about the real, worthwhile problems, like doing all the math on exactly what angle you lash each rung onto this thing, or checking tensile strength of vines by snapping ‘em against your wrist. You’re as bad as all the others.”
“Huh?”
“All ‘will this work.’ Of course it will! I thought of it, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, but Mo, you burned down half the forest by inventing fire last night and then passing out before telling anyone how it worked.”
“That was absolutely all your fault. I invented fire and handed it to Bluh, and it was on each and every one of you sheep to know better than to let him stick it into a tree for ‘safe keeping.’ Gormless fools, where would you be without people like me?”
“Who knows, Mo?”
“Me. I know everything. Just you wait there, in just three minutes we’ll be on top of the mountain. Now hold the ladder for me as I add this next rung: this sucker’s REALLY gonna light a fuse.”
“Hope so, Mo. Smoke’s getting fearful thick.”
“Just like you then. You know, I bet we could fix this fire by pushing the top of the mountain down on top of it, once we’ve climbed up the ladder. Trivial solution. Wonder why nobody’s done it yet, the lazy idiots.”

A big budget is better than a little one, her mother had joked when they got him. Well, that was easy for her to say. Who ended up with the slap-happy mutt, her? No, no, no, it was Shelley, good ol’ Shelley. The responsible child, the dutiful daughter, the
“God DAMN it Budget DOWN DOWN DOWN good.”
Budget licked his nose aimlessly and made himself apologetic as Shelley attached the leash.
By the time Shelley was out the door she already knew the walk was a mistake. The full sunlight she’d glimpsed out the windows just a minute ago was already souring, skimming through a sky half-full of light, half-clotted with faded blue bruises.
But Budget had cleared the door-
“Budgie! SLOW.”
-and there was nothing for it now but the long haul, both ways.
Oh, the fun of a Saturday. Oh, the leisure of leisure.

Some people put a lot of thought into their dog-walking; planning routes, routines, rotations. Some people paid someone else to do it. Shelley didn’t have the patience for the former or the payments for the latter. She didn’t like it, but it had to be done.
Luckily, Budget’s tastes weren’t exotic. Go fast. Go long. In a straight line, preferably. For a good ways.
“Budget! HEEL.”
All the way.
So past the light and the parking lot of the little generic ‘mart’ of sugar and caffeine and milk; and on through the concrete slabs of suburban sidewalk. It was nicer on this side of the tracks; better-maintained by the city. On either side of her were dozens of half-million-dollar McMansions with extra cheese, topped with a little pickle of a weathervane apiece.
The lawns were too covered with pesticides for birds. The trees were too obsessively-guarded for squirrels.
But the ditches, despite the best efforts of their owners, collected a little bit of leaf litter, and a sip of water. And Shelley saw the bathing bird just a second later than Budget did, which meant by the time her fist was clenching the leash was already free and skating away across the asphalt like a startled snake.
“BUDGET YOU FUCK” she shouted, and from then there was no air left for anything but running.

All the way down the street. Past half-opened garages playing meandering radios set to slumped music from decades long dead. Over driveways filled with shined boat trailers, half-deconstructed playgrounds. Swerving around a man with no shirt, no hair, and a scorched-lobster tan that was heading home the other way.
There was a certain kind of trash that only the upper-middle-class could afford to buy and be.
Budget was Shelley’s goad and spur as she gasped through the too-humid, over-cooked air. He ran ahead at easily twice her speed, but he stopped every few steps out of excitement and passion.
A fence! Bark bark bark.
A car! Bark bark bark.
The sky! Bark bark bark.
But no matter how hard Budget ran, his minutes were numbered. Already the treeline was coming up – the wall of green and branches that barred the very end of the road and marked the end of suburbia; already over-filled and gushing with the last juices of spring. May flowers in early June.
Budget ran up to that solid living barrier, stood there grinning like an idiot
“BUDGET. Come HERE.”
and turned left and was gone.
Momentum kept Shelley going through the surprise. By the time she was able to think over what had happened, she was going through it herself. THERE at the end of the road, LEFT on your heel like a soldier spinning on parade, UP behind the ivy-grown chain-links of someone’s carelessly neglected fence (they’d never get away with that in the middle of the street), and THROUGH a little green tunnel with a dirt-and-woodchip floor, under a darker shade of shade than the sky had provided.
Up ahead, Budget’s barks had settled into a steady rhythm. He’d found something good and exciting to yell at, and he wasn’t going anywhere until it did. Shelley let herself come to a slow stumble of a stroll, skin prickled with sweat and eyes running.
Around the corner she found Budget, and his new friend. It was a large wooden sign, new in a worn-down sort of way. The rust attacking its screws had the look of fresh neglect rather than old wear.

Municipal Parks & Recreation
HOMEGROVE PARK
2012
70ma

And past it was a low-mounded field, with copses, and hillocks, and a playground, and in the near-distance was Budget already galloping away.

Well, there were worse places for it. At least here he could wear himself out pretty well, and he wasn’t bothering anyone. As far as Shelley could see, she was the only human in the park. Nothing moving but Budget, no sound but Budget’s barking, and…
Hmm. That.
Something was clinking – faintly, yes, but very insistently under the running salvo of Budget’s sudden enthusiasm for a new friend. Metal-on-metal in the swelling breeze.
Oh, there it was. Blending in with the treeline at the edges of the pine copse. Budget was already tearing past it, on his way to newer and better things.
Shelley trudged up for a better look, figuring it’d make more sense up close, and was made completely wrong. She didn’t quite understand what she was looking at. A free-standing heavy metal birdbath? A biker microbarbeque? It looked like a maypole with chains dangling from it, lashed to a basin at its waist.
A worn label on the thing’s stem still held a logo that must have taken a few million dollars to produce: Catch.
Catch what?
She rubbed at it, hoping for more details, but the words came off with the grime. The same sort of fresh-baked neglect that had filled the sign had been at work here. Who built a park – a big park, she could see that now from here – and then abandoned it? And when? She hadn’t heard word of any construction. Twenty years growing up here, and she’d never heard of Homegrove Park at all.
The wind was picking up again. The pines were rustling, and the blue mess had covered most of the sky now. Budget was a darker blotch on a darkening field of green, running excitedly in circles around the faraway swingsets and the little restroom station and back again.

There was a water fountain at the restroom. It was dry. June and the taps weren’t on.
There was a sign encouraging people to come for the July fireworks. It had no year posted.
There was a bulletin up besides the pavilion, asking if anyone had seen a lost cat four years ago. George. Siamese. The wrinkling at its corners spelled out an answer.
There was a sign thanking the generosity of the donors that had made this place possible. “Our past provides for our future.”
And on a placard next to another one of the mysterious poles, there were instructions for Discus Golf, which was Frisbee Gold without the legal implications.
Catch. Shelley nodded. That made sense. The world made sense. She glanced into the basket and immediately stuffed her fist into her mouth.
“Geez.”
Little bones had filled it. Squirrels? Birds?
Catch. Must’ve come to drink and bathe, but the chains got in the way.
Still. That was a LOT of bones. And it was getting too dark out, and Shelley was still the only person in Homegrove Park, and she still had no idea why she’d never heard of it, or why it looked like it had been set up and forgotten.
So she yelled “BUDGET! C’MERE.”
And felt very foolish that she was so frightened. The pines seemed to stare at her from all their little forests that circled the big field. They weren’t healthy-looking trees; they’d been planted much too close together so that their lower branches had shriveled and only their crowns bore healthy green heads. They looked like arboreal skeletons, or starved orphans. As neglected as everything else here.
“Budget,” Shelley called, quieter this time. “C’mere. Come on Budgie! Let’s go.”
There was no sound.
No barking.

“BUDGET.”

Bark.

And then quiet again, this time for good.

Shelley didn’t like Budget much. But the reverse was not true, and there was a certain wrenching obligation there, as much out of peer pressure as anything else. Man’s Best Friend. A Good Boy. You didn’t ditch your friends right in front of your peers, even if they were terrible freeloading drooling hyperactive malcontents with big brown eyes. It made you look callous.
Thankfully, there was no one watching, so Shelley turned on her heel and started running again.
There was still wind missing from her last sprint.
There was still that guilty stitch in her side, making her stumble every other sprint and huff-puff.
There was still even the reasonable, rational, adult mind in the back of her head calmly telling her that there was nothing to worry about, only children were frightened of being alone when they were on a public path, in a public park, in the heart of a (small, but still) city.
But overwriting all of that was the knowledge that Budget didn’t stop barking halfway, and that Budget was, as her mom had reminded her, a Big Boy. One hundred pounds of dog, and no fat thanks to her grudging efforts.
Anything that shut him up, she didn’t want to be near.
And she still hadn’t seen a single other person, and the air was too quiet, especially for a Saturday. Even if nobody was out picnicking, where were the cars? Where was the background noise? Why were the pines staring back at her?
One of the pines ducked and moved away from her gaze. A branch snapped.
Shelley had thought she was running before. Now she started again, this time properly, and she did good until the pines moved again and this time they were right in front of her and oncoming, so she veered hard left and fell into the pit.

It wasn’t a very deep pit, but she rolled far enough to make up for it. Dust and grit and plastic against her back. Surrounded by red pulped rock fibers. Something was standing over her on the edge of her vision, at the edge of the pit, a great unblinking eye of – no, it was gone, its colour had escaped her before she noted it.
Something about feathers.
Shelley tried to slow her heart down even as she wondered if that was a skill that could do more harm than good and rolled over on her side to pant more thoroughly. Plastic against her cheek. Plexiglass. Smooth. Warm from the dying sunlight.
And as she lay there, she tried to figure out precisely what the fuck was going on.
It’d had her. It’d been right there. Looking at her. And she bet dollars against donuts (a sucker’s bet) that it had been the thing that took Budget. But it turned and walked away when she was helpless, and it did that because….
Hmm.
Shelley rolled over again, face down. And she looked into another face, one a good deal more weathered and fleshless than hers. Minerals had infiltrated it; time had cracked it; wind and dust had buffeted it. Sealed in stone from outside and within.
She wondered what colour its eyes would’ve been in life, and strongly suspected she’d just missed a chance to find out.
Well then. Shelley resolved to ignore however this had happened because it would probably drive her insane and decided to think about boring, humdrum facts.
It had probably eaten Budget.
Catch
It was bigger than she was. Taller at least. Definitely longer. Very much outmassed her.
But still…. If it was anything like the thing lying frozen under her in its plexiglass-sandstone cradle, it was mostly bones and air. Thin. Budget would’ve been quite a feast for something that had probably been eating
Catch
little mouthfuls. She was even bigger. Therefore, as long as she didn’t do anything stupid like run or scream or panic it should be too full to care about anything she did and it wouldn’t try and
Catch
her.
A bunch of objections rained down on the little bubble of logic thus produced, screaming about food caching and play-sport (god, the things her cat had done to a mouse for kicks when she was ten), but its creation had made her too peaceful to notice them and she quietly stood up and brushed herself down.
There were little buckets in a bin at the edge of the site (a label, not a logo: ‘dig ‘till you drop!’). Each had a baby trowel, an eensy pick, and a battered toothbrush.
Shelley carefully nested three of them inside each other as snugly as she could then threw them full-force. They arced gently over the entire field and smashed into the swingset with full force, making a sound like a pot and pan eating each other.
Something made an indescribable sound from what sounded to be six inches away from her, jumped, and the pines around the dig pit suddenly seemed a lot more empty.
Well, good. She could still pitch.
Shelley pulled herself out – an easy lift, this thing was meant to be accessed by under-teens – stood up, and began the casualest, slowest stroll she’d ever imagined having in her life. This was what her ideal walk would be, without Budget. A mosey’s mosey; a perambulation without peer. Each foot lifting off without much of a motive beyond boredom, each sole slapping down like a lazy man’s burger-flip.
God, she could walk a thousand miles this way now. No leash burning her hand, no anger flushing her face, no throat raw from NO or HEEL, no Budget.
No more Budget. Because something had gone and Catch him. Bones in a Discus golf, in a metal birdbath.
Shelley thought about that harder, filling her soul with empathy. Poor, poor Budget, who always wagged and barked and never meant any of the harm that came her way from him. Dense, lovably Budget, giving of unconditional affection and unavoidable fur clumps. She was on the verge of tears which was excellent because if she stopped feeling bad about the stupid dog for one second she might think about what had eaten him and that could be very, very bad.
There was a cough and Shelley ran like she was on third base again for the first time in ten years.

Even so, she was much too slow. Much too slow. But maybe it was a little full, maybe her legs were kicking a little furiously, maybe she was a little bigger than its usual meals, and when she lunged past the sign, down the green tunnel, and cleared that little chain-link fence, she was only bleeding a little.
Her back hurt.

She looked it up that night. Homegrove Park. A single link at the backwash of her search engine’s mouth, a single page that was serving as the appendix of the Parks and Rec department.
“Our past provides our future,” sitting at the top of the page above a waterfall of dead images, placeholder text, and already-dated web design.
‘Dig ‘till you drop! Learn while you play! See our town’s prehistory under your feet!’
And some articles, back-page fodder if she’d ever seen them.
Shelley recognized the face in the photos. Both with and without its eyes. Or feathers.
Our past, provided and served up for our future. What if it didn’t like what it saw? What if it shut itself away, in the dark hours between the picnics and the smiles? Hidden and invisible until it hungers for something more and it…steps back in. For a squirrel, or a woodchuck. Or a loud, happy dog.
While she was at it, Shelley looked the claw up too. Hard to tell without a PhD., but it was a beautiful piece of bone. Dakotaraptor.
She mailed it to the nearest museum with no return address. She’d had enough.

Homegrove Park must’ve agreed with her. Shelley walked that road now and then, once a month. Just to check. But she never again saw that little path into the green wall behind the overgrown chain-link fence.