jamieproctor.ca

It was a gloomy day.

Five blocks.
Four blocks.
Three blocks.

There were still two blocks left to go to Jareth’s apartment when the raindrop splattered against the side of his head; hot, humid and hard as a fist. He swore badly and glared up at the sky, the entirety of his scrawny, rusty body simmering with anger and leftover grease. The big round rainclouds that had been ambling closer all day were right above him now; pregnant with water and fatter than seals.
“Go AWAY!” he shouted up at them. “Go away NOW. We don’t want you here! You’re just going to get in the way! Why can’t it be nice and dry all the time, huh? Why’ve you got to screw things up?”
The clouds reared up in slight surprised into a minor thunderhead and spat to themselves for a while as they pondered this. And then a very long, fine, wispy bit of cloud gingerly unspooled itself and slunk down the long, long way down to Jareth’s place, and spoke to him in a most reedy and foggy voice.
And what it asked was: “why don’t you like us?”
“NO ONE likes you!” shouted Jareth angrily into the cloudlet’s face. “You’re ruining summer! You’re ruining my walk home! You’re ugly and stupid and the weatherman warns me about you! Go away!”
The cloudlet visibly shrank under this torrent of abuse and retracted itself skyward, where the rest of the rainmass waited anxiously. There was a silence, an exchange of furtive and cumulus whispers, and a great and soft sob that torn at the air. Then WOOSH, the raindrops halted and the sky faded out into a clear, soft blue with a confused and lonely sun left in the middle of it.

It was a nice day.

There was not a cloud in the sky. The beaches filled. The lawn chairs overflowed. Sunscreen was sold out. Swimsuits were worn with reckless abandon in places where swimming was unlikely to occur. Many beverages were consumed. Sprinklers were extracted from the depths of garages and placed in pride upon lawns where they were danced through by shrieking children.
Jareth stayed home alone and played video games.
“This is pretty nice,” said a farmer. “But I’m a bit worried. I sort of was relying on that rain. Plants need that. You know, to stay alive. Think it’ll come back?”
But nobody was listening to her, and the city went to bed tanned and happy.

It was a very nice day.

There were still no clouds in the sky at all. The temperature was quite hot, even in the shade. Pets and children were kept away from parked cars. Sprinklers were replaced with just hoses. Cars were washed by hand as an excuse to get damp. The city’s water bills ballooned into full-blown, full-named williams.
Jareth ordered pizza in. He did not tip.
“This is a little warm,” said a homeless woman. “If it stays like this it could get worse out here. You know, it’s sort of dangerous. Especially if you don’t have a place to stay. Maybe we should be a bit worried.”
And a couple people nodded their heads, but on the whole they agreed it was better than the alternative, and better sunburned than soaked, and so on and so on.

It was a VERY nice day.

The sky was a blue lens held by a curious and somewhat cruel child above an anthill. Roadkill toasted and exploded within an hour of its creation. Corn popped in fields, still growing. Eggs burnt on sidewalks. Sweat crystallized on the collective skin of the city. Some of the buildings were crying softly to themselves.
Jareth slept in, then complained to his landlord about the upstairs neighbours being noisy at 1 PM.
“This is extremely bad,” said a manager. “I mean, really bad. Half my staff is at home with sunstroke. The other half is at home trying not to get sunstroke. And I’m going to stay home tomorrow because I, too, have sunstroke, and would appreciate a lie-in. Maybe we should do something about this.”
People were inclined to agree with him, but they all had sunstroke and put it off ‘till later.

The next day was a very, very, very nice day and it was all too much.

Jareth heard a knock at his door, opened it ready to complain to his landlord, and was face to face with half the city.
“I didn’t do it,” he said automatically. The looks on their faces told him that yes, sadly, he WAS still a very bad liar. It was his eyes. They wobbled around like indecisive flies.
“Look,” said the manager, “this is nothing personal.”
“Except for the personal insult you delivered three days ago,” clarified the homeless woman. “But we’re going to fix that.”
“And it’s nothing personal,” reassured the farmer. “Now grab his goddamned legs.”
Jareth put up about half of a fight, but it was the smaller half, and it didn’t accomplish much. On and on he kicked and carped and whined and thrashed through the boiled streets of the charred-out city. He kvetched down the highway and bitched through the doors and in the elevator he complained and it was only when they stepped onto the roof of the tallest skyscraper they could find that he guessed there might be a problem.
“But it’s RAIN,” he protested, as they lashed him to the building’s antenna, arms and legs. “Nobody likes RAIN. It’s BORING.”
The city, both on the roof and in the streets, considered this. Then it flipped him off and hurried indoors. Already the sky was beginning to bubble up in grey fog, building up and up and up and UP

It was a gloomy, overcast week after that, where the gutters overflowed and the streets held small rivers. And everyone was thankful for it.

Thunderhead shook herself off.
This took some time. There was an awful lot of Thunderhead to shake.
Down, down the long, scaly, sinuous yards of back and belly and tail and thigh and leg and hoof and claw and teeth and eye, down on past all that and up through the vertebrae where the spines peeked through the skin to ruffle in the cool breeze, still-dripping with water and blood and what would be sweat if Thunderhead had any to shed.
Most of the blood wasn’t hers. Most of the blood no longer had an owner. Giant steaming carcasses do not possess property.
“The skyeater is dead and we have won,” she told her ally. Then she looked around, because she’d lost track of it.
“Down here.”
She looked down.
“Farther.”
… and farther.
And there, down by her smallest toe, was the one who’d aided her. It was a little bit bigger than an ant and a big bit smaller than an elephant.
“You have given me valuable service when I needed it most,” she informed the tiny creature. “Name your terms and I will fulfill them to the best of my ability.”
“Oh, we don’t need much right now,” said the little thing, leaning on the long sharp stick that it had used so ably against so many of the skyeater’s soft puncturables. “I can handle whatever comes around my folk well enough. But I won’t be around forever; your kind keeps going longer than mine do.”
“Forever,” said Thunderhead.
“See? Longer. I figure I’ve got about a century in me, more if I fight for it. Willing to keep an eye out? Just, can you give them a hand once I’m gone? ”
Thunderhead nodded. “I must sleep. I always must sleep. But for the one year of each millennium I am awake, I will help for one day.”
The tiny creature’s face was unreadable, like most things from up where Thunderhead’s skull was. “That’s not much,” it said.
“I can do a lot with one day,” said Thunderhead.
It nodded. “Fair deal and done.”
They shook on it. This took some time and a few tries.
And then Thunderhead sunk down into her lake to sleep, and the tiny creature went back to its kin to die.

A sleep that lasts a thousand years is a deep and fearsome thing. You don’t wake up from it all at once.
Imagine the comfiest, warmest, thickest mattress ever made. Now think of it being wrapped so tightly around your forebrain that you can’t tell dream from dark, let alone real from not.
Waking up from that is a job in itself, one Thunderhead had never quite got the hang of. On a bad morning, it could take her a decade to get started.
This time, though, she had help. Something small was tapping on her nose.
She opened her eyes and cleared her throat and almost inhaled it. The something small yelped.
“Sorry,” yawned Thunderhead. She tilted her head and snorted, dropping it to the ground in a shower of mucus. “Who are you? What is it?”
“You are the monster my great-great-great-great grandparents told me of that had been told to them by their great-great-great-great-grandparents, and theirs besides,” said the something small. “You are Thunderhead, right?”
“Yes,” said Thunderhead. The idea of this being in question amused her, but the tiny creature hadn’t been so good with names either. Honestly, all you had to do was look at her. Who else could she be?
“You owe my people a debt, right?”
“Yes,” said Thunderhead, because she was too sleepy-headed to correct the something small on the complicated matters of obligation amongst the extremely large.
“Will you help us? Strange men have come from far over the hills with weapons to kill us.”
“Hmm,” said Thunderhead. “How many of them are there?”
“Thousands.”
“Hmmmmmm,” said Thunderhead. “How well-armed are they?”
“Ferociously.”
“Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm,” said Thunderhead. “How big are they?”
“Each is almost half again my height.”
“Yes, I think I can handle this,” said Thunderhead. “Which way are they?”
The something small pointed and Thunderhead launched herself.
It wasn’t flight and it wasn’t a jump, similar to the manner in which a galumph is neither a run nor a hop. But it was very fast and soon Thunderhead was soaring low over the land and coming closer to a long column of strange small shiny people who were shouting and waving sharp bits of metal and setting things on fire.
“Ah,” she said. And she travelled right through them.
Thunderhead made a second pass on her way back home, but this was largely unnecessary.
“All is done and all is well,” she told the something small, as she padded by the small simple huts that remained unburnt. “And my debt is paid for this millennium. I think I will go and hunt whales now.”
“But wait,” called the something small after her, hurrying along as her leisurely walk outstripped its sprint. “But wait! What should we do now?”
“That’s up to you,” said Thunderhead. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
She ate fourteen whales in eleven months and then she made her way home and into the heart of slumber again, curled like an egg underwater in a saucepan, brain sending bubbles to the surface.

The next waking was slower, softer. This was because the tapping sensation against Thunderhead’s skull was so weak that at first she thought it was nothing more than a lost wave lapping against her muzzle. Chance opened her eye a crack, and then interest took it farther. She’d never seen something so decrepit in all her years.
“Water,” it buzzed in a voice like a bee’s-husk. “Water. Please.”
“Yes, yes, there’s some right here,” said Thunderhead groggily. Then she shook herself and saw that this wasn’t true at all; someone had made off with her lake while she was asleep.
“Did YOU do this?” she asked the decrepit beggar severely.
“Not I, not me, but we all suffer for it,” it croaked. “The city, please. The city starves, the city thirsts. Its fields are brown and parched. Its people are dust-mouthed. There is no escape for so many and there is no relief for any. Please, please. Water.”
Thunderhead glared at the decrepit beggar. “I will do this,” she said, “but don’t you think part of our deal involves taking my home. Leave me be and I will help you; don’t drink away my blanket.” And then she was off and bounding over the strange stone walls and halls and fields that the tiny things had made while she was asleep, sort of like ants.
Finding a lake was easy; there was one scarcely more than two hundred miles away. Thunderhead stuck her face into it and sucked loud enough to scrape glass for a hundred miles, bounded back the way she’d came, and belched.
The rain that fell was not kindly-smelling, but it was life-saving, and it stayed for over a week.
Thunderhead, by contrast, stayed for five minutes, to talk with the decrepit beggar.
“All is done and all is well,” she told it, “and my debt is paid for this millennium. And now I’m going to go find a new home nearby here. Don’t make a mess of this one, you hear me?”
“I will tell them,” said the decrepit beggar. And if Thunderhead was too far away to hear the precise wording of this affirmation, well, that may have been for the best.
She dug and scraped and wormed her way into a dry river-bed that looked promising, and slid down into dreams of dust and gravel.

The third waking was neither swift nor slow. It was slow because she only noticed the probe once it slid past her nasal membrane, but it became very swift immediately after that.
“Ah!” said a chatty speck. “You’re up! Excellent! Excellent! Tell me, could you describe everything about your internal, external, intrinsic and extrinsic biology, psychology, physiology and anatomy? In one hundred words or less, please.”
Thunderhead focused, with some difficulty. In addition to the flood of words, some strange things made of metal and thinness were shining bright lights into her face. Also, the air tasted funny. “Is it time for my debt?” she asked hazily.
The chatty speck hesitated, then shrugged. “Well, I suppose? We don’t really need much right now. We’ve got lights, cameras, action, food, water, clean air and dirty air and all in between. We can make things from anything including nothing and I eat five continents for breakfast on average. Everything is perfectly fine and under control, so I don’t think we need much right now, but it’d be FANTASTIC if you could just look at this CAT scan and tell me what this blobby red bit besides your liver is, and this orange spot here, and what this inkblot looks like, and could you describe your breathing apparatus, and what’s your standard diet like, and please outline your previous interactions with-”
It was the longest day of Thunderhead’s life, and as the sun went down she felt dear, true, sweet and full relief.
“If you’ve got to go elsewhere,” said the chatty speck as she roused herself, “I’d be happy to arrange an escort-”
“No need,” said Thunderhead hurriedly. “I’ll see myself out.”
And out she went, into a world gone strange. The water tasted odd too, and the soil. It took her six months to find a whale, and it was small and stunted. Finally she gave up, went home, and burrowed down deeper into the dank layers of what had been her riverbed.
“All is DONE,” she told the chatty speck pointedly as it tried to set up some small strange device near her face, “and all is through. My debt is paid for this millennium. And if I wake up before the next, I will be very, very cross. Now go away.”
She fell asleep, still-hungry, before its words crossed her ears.

Time hides during sleep. It took Thunderhead some long while to find it again, the longest and most restful slumber she’d known since forever. And when at last the concepts of years; seasons; days crept back in around her edges, she lingered, enjoying a rest such as she’d not felt for forever.
Then she woke up, stretched, and fell over. Something extremely large and crumbling around the edges was pinning her thoroughly to the bedrock. She squirmed and stretched and groaned and her head broke topsoil, watery-eyed.
“Right, right!” shouted a small voice. “Right! Hook to your right! It’s weaker there!”
Thunderhead wanted to ask who was giving her advice, but the weight was starting to turn from heavy to painful and there WAS a hint of a give on her right, a sensation of fracturing. So she turned and heaved and hauled and with a wrench her tail, torso, and whole nine miles broke through the shattering bulk of a skyscraper and smashed it down to fragments small enough for her to back through, freeing her from the worst of a broken stadium’s foundations.
Thunderhead paused there panting, stared around. Nothing left but rubble and dust. The people she’d sworn by were gone, and after that last episode, well, she was fair to say she wasn’t too sorry. Not very much, at least.
But there were rules anyways, and she had to abide by them.
“You have given me valuable service when I needed it most,” she informed the small thing by her toe, wrapped in rags. “Name your terms and I will fulfill them to the best of my ability.”
The small thing threw up its hands. “Oh, would you? We’ve got problems, trust me. There’s raiders out there, and we lost the last four crops, and-”
Thunderhead listened to the list, and nodded. “One day,” she said. “One day per millennium. This is when I will help you, and I will do it without fail. The rest I must sleep.”
The small thing nodded, and held out its hand. This time Thunderhead was ready, and got it on the second try without taking any fingers with her.
The deal was struck, the day was done, and she stretched herself towards the sky.
Then a thought struck her, and she turned to the small thing one last time as she tensed to leap.
“And if I do not wake immediately, small thing?”
“Yes?”
“Tell your children’s children to just wait.”
And she found ten whales that month.

You can see all of life in a single drop of water.
At the base, the belly of the bulb, a slim sliver that blossoms and erupts and bloats into a burgeoning mass. The slight, barely-measurable tapering that follows. And at the end, abruptness.
The ichthyosaur watched it fall from the crack in the glass, and she knew that it was time.

The fracture had not been large, and at first she had hoped, though she knew it was foolish. But day after day it had stubbornly widened, millimeter by millimeter, and now at last the leak had come and her world was going to wash away from her. Again.
She spun softly in the murky water – the filters had clogged weeks ago – and considered her old tank. Its ruins had something skeletal about them; the gaping gashes the look of teeth, the jagged holes accusatory eyes. And of course, the dryness of truly long-dead bones, all of the wet rush of life stripped out of them by the world.
The drop came to mind again; the recent past summoned by the distant. There had been a second by now, undoubtedly. And maybe a third. And then there would be more. And then. And then. And then.
The shattered tank leered at her in a way that brought her back to a long time ago, when things on two legs had walked and gawped at her, and then she finished a decision she’d already made.
It was time to live.

It was not a new decision for the ichthyosaur. She had seen her owner consider it, as the papers grew louder and the headlines more jumbled, as the phonecalls grew ever frantic and fewer. Screamed conversations late into the same nights that had once been filled with dinner parties and languid guests and the sort of casual obscenity that only the very, very wealthy can afford.
She had been his triumph, one of two. A creature brought back from two hundred million years dead with bones rotted and all trace gone, carefully tailored to please his whims in whatever fashion they struck him. An efficient metabolism, no reproductive system – with no mate, why bother? – and an increased intellect, so she would oblige the guests by staring back at them as they gawped. All the modifications made for the same reason she existed, for the same reason the automated servitors of the house existed, for the same reason the shark existed: to show he was capable of it, and had done it, and could do it again if he wasn’t so bored with it all. Another curiosity for the wall.
Well, he hadn’t been bored at all in those last days, though the guests had all gone away. He’d screamed down headsets, broken vases, drank himself insensate as he stared through the riot-reddened skies. And in the end he had stopped the screams, stopped the sobbing, made no sounds at all, but instead had taken another trophy, one from a trench in France merely a few centuries old, and had gone up to his room trailing only a silence.
The sharp noise that followed had been purely perfunctory.
Afterwards had been the first time she had commanded the servitors herself, though she had always deemed it a possibility. Programmed to respond to an idle gesture as a command by those who would never stoop to speak to even human servants, the stubby little machines had, after several errors, registered the sweep and swoop of her jaws as an order.
By her word, they brought down the body of her owner from his bed, blood still trailing from his skull and his eyes strangely compressed, and she had looked upon him for a time.
Then they took him to the kitchens and rendered him down into fats and fibres and sheets of wet red turned to dry brown. For later.

Much of her time since had been spent reading, and reading had returned that time to her with interest.
Reading had shown her how to keep her tank filter running up until the last of the power supplies had failed.
Reading had shown her the length of time it would take her tank to spill itself through the cracks and the gaps after the great explosions she heard –and felt – in the building’s guts in the last nights of the chaos.
And reading had shown her the importance of the oxygen filter in the megalodon’s tank, which she had immediately turned off.

Gazing upon its now-tanned, rough-sided hide, cradled like an infant in the arms of the servitors, she wondered what it had thought as it slowly choked to death down there, dead again in the dark. Unlike herself it had been a pure reconstruction, a brag based on size and strength alone, and it wouldn’t have had the words to describe itself, let alone what was happening to it.
The megalodon’s sacrifice had preserved her; its dried flesh had kept her full for months after her owner’s corpse was stripped to bones; its gigantic tank had given her a place to hide and think and stare over the city from; and now its very skin was hers, tenderly wrapped around her form by the aquatic servitors and dragged from the water, dragged with the water. Liquid gurgles fell from the open ends of the thick shagreen casing – water, precious water running away, drying up – but it held, and she swam in the belly of the shark, held aloft by two dozen metal paws.
And they took her to the elevator, and from there, into the city.

The world outside was broken in a way the apartment had never shown her, in its books or its reality – and so big, so very overwhelmingly big. The ichthyosaur snugged herself deep in her mobile pool and broke it farther, smaller, into more manageable pieces of sensory data.
The grey-red sky of late afternoon colliding with old smoke.
The jagged edges of concrete already turning to dust and dirt.
The sharp uric scent of the shark’s long-gone innards.
The faint roar and tumble of an ocean dead for decades.
The uncomfortable half-damp around her sides that faded sharply outside her servitor-borne transport into nothing but dry, bone dry. The air was a shell that shattered on breath.
The journey was not all quiet. Three servitors fell victim to the world at large; its protrusions and pits and grit. A small pack of starving dogs attacked, or attacked as best as any animal could when its skull is clearly traceable through its skin and its eyes are shriveled in their sockets. They died quickly and quietly in the servitors’ small metal hands, almost grateful.
And at the very end, as their destination usurped the horizon with its long, low bulk, two more were sacrificed to rupture the triple-rusted security of its titanic doors.
The purification facility.

The ichthyosaur had known of it for a long time, of course. It had been the toast of the papers, the promise of the times: a plant that could turn ocean water – even a modern ocean – into fresh water, life-water, the water that could refresh and quench and fill and not rot away at your innards like it had for uncounted hundreds of billions of fish and plankton and the oceans themselves, choked to death on carbonic acid.
Not that the ichthyosaur had any interest in fresh water. She was a creature of the sea, not a lake, not a pond, not a stream. But with the right hands, the plant could be controlled: its waters stripped of acidity yet retained of salt; its processing chambers made home; its intakes into traps for the sad jellyfish that were the last survivors of all that had swam except for her, only her, two hundred million years old and already dead.
They shuffled down the great steel corridors, empty and almost unbroken. The purification facility had been a saviour; the one thing even the riots had not touched – if not out of self-preservation, then out of an inability to trespass through its many locks. Their bones carpeted the lobby and plaza, dead in the quiet queues they’d formed as they lost the power to move. But as the grand donor’s name prominently installed over the front hall was familiar to the ichthyosaur, so too was the security software familiar to the servitors, who were recognized on sight and were barred by no doors, they and their strange dead cargo. They passed out of the corridors and into quiet offices and finally a deadened control room where the ichthyosaur consulted the machines and learned that the facility’s chlorination plant had been sabotaged, transforming millions of liters of water into something unfit to even be called a swimming pool.

She had this confirmed six times. Once to be sure; twice to be certain; thrice to understand; fourth to grow angry; fifth to stop; and sixth to think.

The sun was coming down over the horizon as they approached the docks; the rich red haze thickening in the sky and clotting in the dust clouds. There was little sound left; the feral dogs might have been the last living things in the dry city.
Apart from the ichthyosaur.

The shagreen was growing dryer even on the inside; her weight was bearing down on her. Under the red glare her eyes stung. But she was determined to see this one thing before it ended, and so she had the servitors hold her high above their heads, to let her look before she left.
On the one side, the city, broken and breaking and crumbling like sand already.
Turn. Turn.
On the other, the ocean. A flat blue churning. Alive it would’ve been alien to her; but what could be more familiar than a corpse?

It was a long fall, but a short dive, and mercifully little thought required. Her back moved as it ought, her flukes bent, her lungs pushed, and all the questions melted away as she felt the splash turn into an embrace that took away doubt and left certainty even as it began its long, patient war against her insides.
The ichthyosaur spun, and watched the bubbles spin away and leave her, felt the rush and pull of impassive currents.
Then she did as they decreed, and vanished from sight of shore forever.

You can see all of life in a single drop of water.
The inverse is not true. But she was willing to try.

Somewhere, in quiet suburbia, a white cat walked.
Well, strolled. It was a cat, after all.
And as it swaggered its way up a set of porch steps not its own, the second thing you noticed was its shade, which maybe wasn’t white at all. It was practically glowing; the rich, healthy, vibrant thrum and pulse that cartoons usually give to plutonium. The sort of colour you expect to see behind your eyes as the oxygen runs out.
The thing shaped like a cat and shaded like hazardous waste surmounted the steps, located the front door, studied it, then turned its back and began to pointedly ignore it.
A moment went by. The door opened. The cat sighed majestically and began to wash its face.
“Oh my! It’s that urgent, is it?”
The voice, unlike the cat, was nothing BUT concern; a deep, compassionate, bottomless font of sympathy burbled up in every syllable. A senator would’ve sold their soul to possess an ounce of the authenticity inside it; a president their nation’s future for five minutes with the sincerity it stood for.
Its current owner was five foot two and passingly balding and bundled up inside something that must’ve been at least technically a sweater, in the same way that an elephant is technically related to a mouse. And she was making little clucking noises with her tongue that anyone listening in would’ve sworn were impossible for a human to emit.
“Well, well, well! Tsk tsk! We’d better get moving then, if we want to fit tonight’s game in! Samson, dear, there’s a can of tuna under the counter. The good kind. Now be a love and put the can in the recycling bin when you’re through, will you sweetie?”
The cat glanced at her out of the corner of its eye. There was an alien expression forming in there very much like human disgust, but larger.
“Who’sagoodboy?”
And growing.
“Ohyesyooouuarreee. Here, who wants skritches?”
…But willing to compromise for ear skritches.

Five minutes and five hundred skritches later, Edith Bell locked her front door, shut her back door, and opened her side door, the one with the handle that needed to be turned and jiggled and then hexed in a particular way. Then she stepped out, sideways, past the suburbs and into the special places.
It was cold out, so she’d put on another sweater.

Elsewhere.
It defied definition. But it was about as elsewhere as you could get in comparison to the home of Edith Bell. The walls didn’t merely brood; they’d successfully clutched forty years ago and their offspring were on their third litter. The foundations were deathly silent; they’d strangled the life out of the soil underneath them uncounted decades before. The air creaked. And the attic was, quite simply, unspeakable.
The front door was very nearly the most welcoming part of the entire house, in that it was merely venomous. It was also losing a battle to the death with a fluffy black cat who had never seen a door-knocker before but was game to challenge it.
The door opened, sending the cat inside with a muffled thud.
“Oh. Cauliflower.”
The cat looked up at the old woman with wide-eyed benevolence, no worse the wear for its impact. By mass it was eighty percent fluff; there were stuntmen with less padding.
“So I take it she’s coming then? Good. Very good. About time. I swear, that girl. That girl!” She made a sharp noise somewhere between a tsk and a hiss. “She needs to get her head out of the clouds.”
Iris Cook’s cardigan was all black. All the shades of black. It contained the souls of nine hundred arsonists and four thousand murderers and fifty-six serial killers and one young man who’d rudely demanded her purse in an alley one day. It didn’t shrink in the wash, but it shrunk from her touch.
She hauled it over her shoulders with the idle ruthlessness of the bank executive and studied her selection of umbrellas critically.
“I think… Peabody today. Don’t you, Cauliflower?”
The cat replied by pouncing on her toes, and was repelled with a gentle kick.
“Yes. Yes, Peabody. I put out some water and a dead mouse for you. Go on. That’s a good girl. Now have a nice night, and don’t bother us. We’ve got work to do.”
Peabody’s hilt was cold iron and its handle was hot steel, baking with the fiery tempers of the spiteful dead. It made the air shimmer around Iris’s knuckles as she gripped it, writhing resentfully in her bony hand.
She took one last look around the house, and adjusted a book that had dared to move a millimetre out of place. Then she opened her umbrella, stepped into her chimney, and spilled out of the normal places and into the odd.

The odd is like the ocean, or an iceberg, or the quiet stupid person at a party. Nine-tenths of it is hidden out of sight, below the surface. It’s also the same nine-tenths that contains the teeth, the jagged hull-breaker, or the list of names and the loaded gun. Don’t travel the odd casually, and don’t travel it alone, and don’t go unarmed.
Edith did all three. Iris merely went alone, but in her defense she would’ve argued that (1) nothing she ever did was anything as pitiable as ‘casual’ and (2) ‘unarmed’ implies that one can divest oneself of one’s own harmfulness, which in Iris’s case would require lobotomization.
Iris’s cardigan was fringed with one hundred and four lobotomists. She sometimes picked at them when she was irritated enough to fidget.
They met at the usual place, somewhere in the hazy land just underneath human imagination and above the inky, off-colour pools of time. Edith brought a lawn chair for a stool; Iris, a human tombstone.
“You’re slow,” she said.
Edith struggled through the laborious process of putting her chair up the wrong way round. “Well, Samson always has trouble with the can-opener, poor love, and I didn’t want to leave him crying. I don’t know how you can bear the sound, Iris – it’s the saddest little noise, like a baby left alone in its crib.”
Iris shrugged. One finger toyed idly with the immortal remains of a Dr. George Beckett.
“Anyways! What’s all the fuss about now?”
“The end of the world.”
“Oh. Oh! That’s right! We never did check in on that now, did we?”
“We did. You said you’d handle it. And then you didn’t.”
“Oh dear,” said Edith. She clucked again. “Dear, dear, dear! Well, between Stewart’s birthday, and David’s newborn, and the music festival, and the dance classes, it must’ve completely slipped my mind! I hope it hasn’t all gone wrong too badly.”
“It’s coming in about an hour and a half.”
“Oh drat,” said Edith in a generally put-out and sorrowful way. “I’m so sorry. I made a note on the calendar and everything. Cauliflower must’ve gone and hidden it again and I never found it.”
“We’d better do something.”
“Hmm? Oh yes! But first…”
“Well, yes. Of course.”
The board was octagonal. The pieces were ephemeral. And the stakes were impossible. But somehow or another, the game kept happening every week.
The rules were as follows:

But really, if you were a good enough player, you could ignore them.
And Edith and Iris were both very, very, very good.
The session ended 2-1, Iris’s favour. As usual.
“Oh, shucks,” said Edith. “You know, I don’t know how you manage it.”
“I cheat,” said Iris. “That’s part of my job.”
“And I just said part of mine,” said Edith cheerily. “Now, what was this about the end of the world?”
Iris checked her watch, which was really more of an armed guard. There were sixty very specific seconds imprisoned in its central core keeping it one hundred percent accurate at the expense of shattering agony. “Thirty minutes.”
“Oh yes. We’d better hurry.”

The odd has layers, like an onion or a craton. Unlike those wholesome and simple objects, most of the odd’s layers underlap, overlap, and occasionally sashay through one another, like a three-level cake put through a tumble dryer made of the collective psyche of the entire planet.
So, although Edith and Iris were travelling DEEPER, in some senses they were merely travelling ALONG. But in other, more meaningful senses, they were in fact just going deeper.
Neither of them dwelt on it. Edith had plenty of nieces and nephews to tell stories about; Iris had plenty of silence and an umbrella, the latter of which came in handy when they had to pass through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
“What a mess. All those poor fish.”
“They’re all going to die anyways.”
“Yes, yes, of course. But it’s still sad.”
“Mmm.”
The ocean went away and they found themselves temporarily enmeshed inside a city’s, all sprawl and soar and gleaming glass and broken concrete spanning decades of dreams crushed and hatched.
“They’re so cute when they’re babies, bless them,” said Edith fondly.
“And they never grow old.”
“Neither do butterflies or rainbows, Iris. But don’t we love them still? And besides,” she said, patting at a hallucinatory brick holding the mind, soul, and a hopes of a family of four in a small apartment, “some of them do make it.”
“Only when they dig deep. And vanish. And they don’t count anymore. You don’t count once you hide.”
“Of course you do, silly. Otherwise how can you play hide-and-go-seek?”
The city was gone and they were into the real bulk of the planet now: the dead bits. Most life and most species and most organisms are dead, and most of them are used to it by now. Ghosts and ghouls and husks and fossils tipped their heads and nodded at the two old women. The dead are not xenophobic; having crossed one border, they see all others as pointless.
Besides, anyone down here must know what they were doing.
And a little past death, and past the depths, and into the aching wide chasms measuring less than nanometres where the plates squealed over rock too melted to move, there lurked a fierce dark glow that burned without light at a temperature that could sear the sun sideways. The tiny bubbles of incinerated civilizations older than DNA floated around the two women as they took the final steps down.
“Oh dear,” said Edith.
Iris didn’t say anything, but by now she’d tugged on Dr. Richard Bowen, MD so firmly that his sense of self was becoming unspooled.
“I’ve forgotten my sunscreen.”
“There’s no sun down here.”
“True. But you know, it feels right. Oh well.”
And with that Edith squared her shoulders and trotted into the core of the planet, into nickel and iron and degrees of heat that plunged through any human scale.
Then she came out the other side, and waited a moment for Iris, whose umbrella had nearly gotten stuck.
“You need a hand, dear?”
Iris placed one shoe firmly, pulled with her legs, not her back, and freed Peabody from the farside of the Earth’s core.
“Oh, that’s lovely. And now, dear,” she said, turning to the emptiness at large that surrounded them, “what’s this all about?”

The end of the earth was neither liquid nor solid, fish nor fowl, black nor white. It had something that could’ve been called a personality, and if that personality could have used words what it would’ve said to Edith was

OUT OUT OUT OUT hungry OUT hungry OUT hungry

“Yes, yes, we know about that, love. But that core’s needed to prevent the planet from getting all stuffy and cold and then stripped dry by solar winds, sweetie. So maybe you could just keep your hands off it? I promise you, it’s not even close as tasty as it looks.”
It’s hard to read your conversation partner’s face when they don’t have one, or the ability to understand conversation. But both of them could practically feel the frustration curdling in the air.

FEED
out out FEED
hungry HUNGRY
OUT OUT OUT

“No,” said Iris. “Not again. You were let out last time and now there’s only one planet left to work with around here. What a waste. You ought to learn some self-control. You’re certainly old enough. And if you won’t learn from common sense, perhaps from history. Do you remember what happened last time you did this?”

DO

NOT

CAREFEED

OUT

THE WARM THE WARM THE WARM THE WARM EAT THE WARM THE WARM THE WARM THE WARM THE WARM FEED OUT

With one hand, Iris detached Dr. Clarence Hughes from existence entirely. With the other, she unfurled Peabody. He glistened in her hand like wet lightning.
Then he drooped like a tired accordion as Edith patted her arm. “No, no, don’t fret now. I think I’ve got just the thing.”
Then she stuffed her hands into her pockets and began to wriggle like a caterpillar doing the hokey pokey.
After a moment’s silence, Iris helped her.
After a minute’s work, the greater and outermost of Edith’s two sweaters was detached. It hung in her arms like lead; no breeze could have moved it, no force could have stirred it.
“Here!” she said, presenting it to the end of the world. “Now, isn’t that lovely and warm?”

The trip back home was silent and unremarkable, save for a short moment’s unpleasantness with a very dead and very restless bear, which Iris took out an hour and a half of frustrations on. At last they reached their gaming-place, and there they took up their chairs and bid one another adieu.
“See you later!”
“Don’t forget to send back the cat.”
“Right!”
“And you tell Lyle and Howard this never would’ve happened if they’d sent us a damned Christmas card.”
“Oh dear. You know they mean well. Well, sometimes.”
Iris snorted. “And if meaning well was well enough, we’d still be married to them. Set Samson on the silly sods if you’re not up for it.”
Edith laughed, and that was goodbye enough for her.

The odd is a nice place to visit, but you never want to live there. Iris’s first act upon arriving home again was to pour herself a double scotch twice.
Her second was to give Cauliflower a good skritching.

The first thing Edith did was pour Samson a saucer of milk.
The second thing she did was forget to send him home. She knew Iris would come pick him up eventually.
The third thing she did was start work on another sweater. The poor thing went through them in about six months nowadays, and she found it best to get started on them early, so as not to disappoint it.

Four old men and one campfire. However knobbly their knees, there just wasn’t enough room for all of them, and so they grumbled extra hard and shuffled some and generally made all the harrumphs and mmmrrphs and gnk-gnk-wchoo noises you expect from that sort of person at that sort of age. And to the surprise of none this did come to irritate them, and they did require distraction, particularly a distraction from their current distraction, which was oily, full of dead gnats, lacking in meat, and not enough to go around properly.
“You know,” said the wrinkliest one of them – a creature resembling a walnut as much as a man, but with more hard edge – “I used to be a magician.”
This generated a few raised eyebrows around the rest of the flames; fine, heavy-set eyebrows that had been gnarling and twining in place for decades now. There were plaits. And, above the plaits, a certain amount of half-interest.
“I wandered up and down the coast, selling gossip as fortunes and cards as futures. I could take a cut deck and stack it faster than a lumberjack could a cord. I could breathe fire as easy as air. I could shake a man’s hand and tell him his family history better than he could, and he’d thank me for it. And when I was down and out – really down and out, so far down the cockroaches looked under their feet for my wallet – I’d show people pennies in my ears and lift dollars from their pockets. Just in emergencies, mind you. Nothing important. I didn’t do all that much.”
A nod, a shrug. A gradual widening of the ring until there was a bit more equitable kneespace. But mostly, the convsersation was put to a dull simmer while they all digested this.
“Huh,” said one of the others, eventually. Everything about him was eventual. His chin turned into his neck, eventually. His breaths wheezed into words, eventually. His knees ran out, eventually. And eventually he wheeled up another few words from somewhere deep and secret inside his skull: “how’d you do it?”
“A good magician never reveals his tricks,” said the first and wrinkliest. He took a long, slow swig from his bowl of their horrible soup.
They waited a moment.
“Mostly just quick fingers,” he said, wiping his mouth. “And a bit of cold reading. Start with general assertions that anyone can agree with, narrow in based on quick clues of whatever’s at hand. You can get pretty good at it. I was pretty good at it.”
“But not a good magician,” said the eventual man.
“Well, I only stole from those who could afford it, mostly, often. And it was usually just when I needed it or I was cross with them occasionally.”
The jury of the wrinkliest man’s peers shrugged at him, abstaining judgement.
“Besides, I’ll wager none of you’s done better,” he said. “I mean you, what’ve you ever done, eh?”
The eventual man pondered this, staring into the depths of his soup bowl as if they held all the world and he’d only just realized how much of it was worthless.
“I sold bottled miracles,” he said after a while.
“Pardon?”
“Cure-alls. Or cure-mosts. I never claimed all of what it could do. Never. But if you only claim half of that. Well. They just fill in the blanks.”
“What’d they use it for?” asked the wrinkliest man, curious.
“Hair loss. Childbirth. Bad breath. Sore fingers. Cut toes. Stomache and bellycramp and indigestion. Hair removal. Bad temper. Crying children. Ingrown toenails. Reddened skin and greening skin. The gout. The pox. Measles and mumps and malaria. Leprosy and leukemia. Wrinkles. Cancer of all stripes. The clap. And even for a painkiller when you had to have your leg sawn off.”
“What was in it?” asked the third man, who was mostly hair.
“A good magician never reveals his tricks,” said the eventual man.
The campfire hissed and fussed to itself as they waited, unsmiling.
“Water. And a little bit. Mostly dirt and a bit of soda. For the fizz. Colour from anywhere.” He shrugged, which was a very difficult gesture for him as it was hard to tell his shoulders from his back from his arms. “But sometimes it worked. Or did no harm. Now and then. Or so.”
The man who was mostly hair snorted. “Common con-men.”
“Oh?” asked the wrinkliest man sharply. “And what did you do that has you feeling oh so holy, padre?”
“I was a holy man,” said the man who was mostly hair.
“Oh.”
“Was,” said the eventual man.
The mosquitoes were fierce that night, humming their nasal fury just beyond the smoke the old men squatted in.
“What happened.”
“Oh, nothing much,” said the man who was mostly hair with a wave of his hand, slopping his lukewarm soup bowl over his wrist. “At least, nothing much at any one time. But I would come into towns, you know. And I would find them…well, EMPTY. DEVOID of inner life or spiritual well-being. And they would have no sense of community at ALL, poor things. Poor, poor things. So I would take care of them, and watch over them. I would give them meals, give them morals, teach them rightfulness. And when the rest of the little hamlet saw how well-improved their beggars were, I would show those of needful mind the way themselves. Hard work! Good rules! Honest living! Thriftfulness! Mindfulness! And a happy, wholesome, loving, one-big-family town that was EVERYONE’S home! All thanks to ME. To MY work. The GOOD work! For which I was SUITABLY rewarded, I ASSURE you. And my flock loved me, and the rest would LEARN to love me, and then… And then I would leave because the road goes ever on etc etc and help someone else.”
“You mean they caught you with the poorbox,” said the wrinkliest man.
“Seldom!” said the man who was mostly hair.
“Or maybe,” said the eventual man. “Maybe it was with someone’s daughter.”
“Never proven!” said the man who was mostly hair. “And besides, a good magician never reveals his tricks.”
They stared at him.
“Look, I only ever told them what they wanted to believe anyway,” he said. “And if it made them feel better to repay me, then so what? And it was self-defence plain and simple to tell my flock to protect me from the heathen. They hated me so! The world has been a better place thanks to me, I can tell you that much. Or it WOULD have been, if others would LISTEN to me and stop DOUBTING me. Besides, the poorbox was for as much their benefit as mine. Money is a SIN. I am not SINFUL. Therefore, I will take their BURDENS from them. It is SIMPLE AS SALT.”
The wrinkliest man laughed at this, then coughed into his soup as the campfire retaliated in the only way it knew how. “And you,” he said to the last member of the little ring, eyes watering. “And you, what’d you do, eh? Not that any of us do much now.”
“Me?” said the man. He was short and hunched, like he’d carried too much too far one day and never straightened up. “I tell stories. I told them when I was little and I got thrashed for them. I told them when I was a man and I was laughed at for them. And now that I’m old sometimes people don’t even listen at all.”
“Those young people,” muttered the wrinkliest man.
“They have no morals whatsoever in any way, shape or form,” agreed the man who was mostly hair.
“Tell us. What kind,” said the eventual man.
“Well, my story begins a very long time back,” said the last man. “Once upon a time, there was a very small boy with very poor parents. And then one night they took their children to watch a mountebank make flashes in the air and tell their fortunes, and when they got home their purses were gone. Six months later, their home was gone. And two years later, his parents were gone.”
“Scandalous,” said the wrinkliest man. He felt absently at his side for something hidden and curved.
“And then when he was very little, his brother grew sick, and the medicine he bought for him with his mother’s old watch was nothing but water and oil.”
“How horrid. That must have been,” said the eventual man. If he’d possessed gills – they could’ve been anywhere along his neck(shoulder?), they’d have been turning green.
“Then, last of all, when he was alone in the world and lost, a kindly priest took him in. He taught him good solid work cleaning and serving and counting money. And one day when he saw that the money didn’t make sense, the priest smiled at him and thrashed him and deemed him a sinner to be shunned by all good folk. So the village cursed him, and he left.”
“How appalling,” said the man who was mostly hair. “But I’m sure there must’ve been GOOD reasons for WHATEVER happened there are ALWAYS reasons AND LISTEN-”
“Not much happened after that,” said the last man. “There was a life in there, I guess. But it was mostly leftovers, the meat left on the bone. Everything else had already been taken. But one day that man, when he was tired and hungry, saw a fire on a hill. And he just sort of up and sat down and invited himself and served the soup, and he watched strangers tell stories until they weren’t strangers anymore.”
There was a quiet time as three brains performed thirty-three calculations of weight and reach and speed and sharpness. Old maths. Practiced maths, if not preferred ones.
“But anyways,” said the last man, leaning back on the half-rock that served him as a half-stool and staring into the fire, “none of that matters now.”
“Oh?” said the wrinkliest man.
“Yes,” said the last man. “Because I did learn one thing from all those hard lessons and hard times. One each, from last to first. Keep talking so they don’t have time to think. Mix the brew thorough, so the lumps don’t show. And have quick fingers.”
He looked up.
It was too late for the wrinkliest man. His leather skin was tanned purple now, with lavender foam over his lips, and his eyes had gone to look at places nobody’d ever imagined.
It was too late for the man who was mostly hair. Half his moustache had been taken down with him, and the rest was already matting over, mouth frozen.
But the eventual man was still falling over, legs(waist?) still working, his face trying to sort itself out even as he toppled.
“How?” he asked.
The last man shrugged. “I just told you. Tricks are for magicians. I’m just tired.”
And even the eventual man stopped, after a while.
Soon after, the fire went out. The mosquitoes came in. And a little bit of good came out of that night, as long as you don’t mind more mosquitoes.
At least they never pretend to be your friends.

The coats came off. The lights went out. And the lab was closed.
And up on the shelves, up in the boxes, the whispers started regular as clockwork.
You get bored when you haven’t had a chance to talk to the rest of your skeleton in decades. It makes you hungry for gossip. Even if back in the fleshy days you would’ve gladly eaten your neighbour, now you’ve got more in common than not. Including a lack of meat to chew.
Imagine sixteen shelves for mandibles alone. Imagine all those bones nattering away to themselves, slapping against invisible maxillae. Imagine all that bustle, the clack of jaws, the chatter of teeth freed from gums. Imagine the voices and sounds.
All of them, bar one. A mandible all alone in a little box on a small place in a short shelf with only one word to describe it: ‘unidentified.’ A mandible whose species was as unknown as its confidence. A mandible for whom the term ‘tiny’ seemed too big to fit.
The eensiest mandible gazed up at the high shelves and the deep boxes and the happy bustle of all those others, and it felt lonely. This was not a new sensation, but something about this day – it could’ve been any day, really – cut it deep. And it decided to try and solve its problem.
Getting out of a box is very easy for a single bone. It just requires a bit of time and patience, but it IS a secret, so you won’t learn it here. All you need to know is that soon the eensiest mandible struggled its way up two shelves over and one shelf across and was surrounded by happy hubbub that died immediately.
“What are YOU doing here?” demanded a mandible labeled [Vulpes vulpes, red fox].
“I-” said the eensiest mandible.
“This isn’t your place,” harrumphed a second mandible ([Lynx canadensis, Canada lynx].
“Er-” said the eensiest mandible.
“You are far too timid and small,” growled a third voice deep enough to shudder the shelf and everyone on it. The eensiest mandible gazed up, up, up at the huge bone. A tiny scribble on its side proclaimed it [Ursus maritimus, polar bear]. “Why, the cracks on my condyle are bigger than you are! Go find yourself another shelf. This shelf is for the carnivora.”
The eensiest mandible was, in fact, far too timid to protest this ultimatum, and left with a heavier heart than could be expected from a single piece of a skeleton. But at length it pulled itself together and clambered higher, ready to try again.
This shelf was quieter. Quieter, but not calmer. As the eensiest mandible hauled itself over the edge, all movement ceased so quickly that it almost though it had never been there at all. If it hadn’t known better, it would’ve thought itself surrounded by insensate, inanimate bone.
“Hello?” asked the eensiest mandible.
The mandible nearest to it ([Sylvilagus floridanus, eastern cottontail]) sagged. “Shh. ThoughtyouwereapredatornowSHHHoldhabitsdiehard. Shhhhh.”
“We like the quiet,” whispered another, much larger jaw ([Odocoileus virginianus, white-tailed deer]). “And who are you to disturb it? You’re no carnivore, but you’re so small and frail. Moss could best you.”
“Bu-” said the eensiest mandible.
“Grass would thrash you,” added a third ([Castor canadensis, North American beaver]). “Goodness knows what a tree would do.”
“Tha-”
“You are so frail, so thin,” said the largest of them all, a solid brick of bone with [Bison bison athabascae, wood bison] stamped firmly upon its jutting frame. “I have ground my teeth down to stubs on plants that would eat YOU. You are small and weak and will attract predators. Go away and die alone. Again.”
The eensiest mandible’s (still-absent) heart welled up with bitter sadness at these cruel words, but it merely turned and left because it wasn’t suicidal. Very. And so it fled, higher and higher on the shelves, faster and faster as if it could outrun the horrible thoughts filling its (also absent) head until at last it came to the highest shelf and there was nowhere to go and many strange voices.
“Aiyk! Aiyk! Tiny clumsy thing!” cackled a thin thing without teeth emblazoned [Larus cachinnans, Caspian gull]. “Go ‘way! Go ‘way!”
“T-” and the eensiest mandible’s words were cut off before even a full syllable, so fast were the words.
“Not here, not here!” warbled [Turdus migratorius, American robin]. “You’re slow you’re stuck you’re down from below.”
“ ” attempted the eensiest mandible.
“SoLowSoSlow” shrieked [Falco peregrinus, peregrine falcon].
The eensiest mandible’s next word didn’t even finish existing as a thoug
“Go back to the ground where you belong,” said [Bubo virginianus, great horned owl].
“Yes,” said a great, slow, long voice that was quite unlike the others, issuing from a beak of endless proportions inscribed [Diomedea exulans, wandering albatross]. Each syllable was a sigh. “You are too heavy inside to be here. I would wager you would fit inside a single one of my air-cavities, yet you weigh nearly as much as I do. Sink down back into the dark.”
That did it. Overcome with shame and loneliness, the eensiest mandible did as it was bid. Very quickly.
Down, down, down to the floor it clattered, and there it lay, sobbing in its guilt, when it felt a curious hissing tickle at its sides.
“What’s that?” inquired a cockroach.
“Don’t know,” replied its friend (cockroaches do not have friends).
“Not edible, that’s for sure,” sighed the first.
“Sad tale, that.”
“Seems sad, too.”
“What’re you sad for, unfood?”
“Nobody knows what I am and nobody wants me and they all told me to go away and I should and I’m worthless and I should stay here forever,” cried the eensiest mandible incoherently.
The cockroaches failed to understand this, but they were used to that. Being confused comes naturally to a cockroach outside of matters of food and making more cockroaches. They save their focus for the important things.
“Think we can help?” asked the first.
“Eh,” said the second. “But I think I know who can.”
So the cockroaches picked up the eensiest mandible, who was too filled with despair to protest this, and carried it away down strange aisles and onto alien shelves and placed it in front of a large glass tank, neatly labeled in black-on-white: [Dermestes maculatus, skin beetle].
“Hello,” said a chorus of tiny, depressed voices from within the tank. “Who have you brought us?”
“Dunno,” said the first cockroach. “But it’s pretty down. Thought you two would get along? Maybe. Dunno.”
“Nobody likes me because I’m bad at everything and I don’t belong,” said the eensiest mandible wretchedly.
“Ah, we see,” said the tank. “We can understand that. Why, we have only one job in this whole laboratory: eat dead things. And you know what? We can’t even do that right. We are failures and we cannot fix our failures and every week we are given fresh food to fail at eating. We deserve to be set on fire.”
“Oh,” said the eensiest mandible. “But how have you failed?”
“Bone!” cried the tank of beetles. “Bone defeats us! We can chew through flesh like nothing at all, consume cartilage, eat innards, but bone, oh bone, you confound our efforts! So many untidy leftovers! So much ruin and wasted space! The walls here would be bare, if only, if only we were a little better! But we are not, and so these shelves are filled with our many shames. Oh how they mock us every night with their chattering!”
The eensiest mandible felt sorry to see the beetles say such things of themselves, and then it thought of something.
“I-”
“Set on fire? Perhaps better to be boiled. Slower and more painful for us.”
The eensiest mandible tried again. “Yo-”
“Or eaten alive! Chewed one by one by a predator, as we have FAILED to chew!”
“But-”
“Or perhaps we should just smash our tiny brains out against the glass, and end this-”
“I HAVE A PLAN THAT CAN HELP YOU,” said the Eensiest Mandible. “And we can do it right now!”
And with that it leapt the walls of the glass tank in that strange way bones do when nobody is looking, and it gathered up all the beetles to it and they crawled over its surface and clung on to one another until it had grown more than six times its size in beetles, and ten times in weight.
“It takes a bone to chew a bone,” said the Eensiest Mandible, “and now you can do it!”
“This is a strange, fine thing you are doing for us,” said the beetles. “But some of those bones are fearsome large. How will we chew them?”
“Oh, them,” said the Eensiest Mandible contemptuously. “They already told me all their weak spots. The bear has cracked condyles we can split wide open, the bison’s teeth are nubs we can pluck straight from their sockets, and the albatross is so light we can just chuck him off the shelf and pick up the pieces. Now let’s get cracking!”

What happened afterwards was doubtlessly painful and startling on many levels. Bones in the wild, as it were, are accustomed to a certain level of predation, but even then it tends to be a sort of gradual recycling progress, barring occasional shatterings for marrow. This was consumption, plain and simple, and its targets went down neither quietly, easily, nor fearlessly. The nightly racket took it up four notches then broke the measuring stick. And when the lab was opened up again Monday morning, why, such a ruckus you’d never seen. Shelves collapsed, boxes torn open, the tank of flesh-eating beetles overturned… An almost total disaster zone.
Almost total, that is, save for the Eensiest Mandible, resting neatly in its place.
Neatly, and just a trifle smug.

I am got you right where I want you.
See you big pit, Gt’op? Hah, you no seed big pit. Big pit am biggest in all of valley, and I am makebetter it! Pit is filled with LARGE SNAKES also big-toothed cat that am eat the snakes. You held above big pit by mighty arm-bits of CHAGARR, last of big-browed folk, who swear to beat up all I point at after I remove giant bug from his nose. Once you am mostly choked, you am to be mostly dropped, then mostly eaten. At long last you to cease being ouchy in my side, at long last I am set fire to whole of valley with special clicking rocks!
There am no possible flaws here. I am got you right where I want you this time!

I’ve got you right where I want you.
It was a foolish thing to try and warn the pharaoh, Doctor – surely a man of your cleverness would know I would only make myself obvious were he already suborned to my hypnotic powers. Now what will you do? On one side, a sheer cliff! On the other, a river filled with crocodiles. On the other other, twelve bowmen whose very souls are mine! On the other, other other, the towering edifice of my siege-tower, whose power is sufficient to grind through stone itself and turn Memphis to smouldering ruin!
Now my plan is set in motion! Now all of Egypt is soon to be mine! Yes, this time, Doctor, I have you right where I want you!

I’ve got you right where I want you.
You should never have come home again, my brother! Better to stay out east questing for Jerusalem than come home early only to find DEATH and DOOM and also ME. Who is causing both of those things to YOU. This time. For sure.
Beautiful, is it not? A simple tube of metal, yet, with some refinements of old Bacon’s formula, it can spit a ball of lead for miles! One shot, but that is all that is required to topple a THRONE. Soon I will be KING! And you will be CINDERS. In this FURNACE. Which I am LOWERING you INTO.
I’m going to mix you into the blackpowder so you can help fuel the explosion, you see. For added IRONY. Ah, the JOY IS FILLING MY VOICE UNCONTROLLABLY! At LAST, at LAST, I have YOU right where I WANT you!

I’ve got you right where I want you.
You are a clever man, but I am cleverer still. I have thought all this through. You are pinned with a waterfall at your back and sixteen patriots at your front ready to fill your devil hide with hot lead. To escape to Prophetstown would require a sequence of heroic actions so ludicrous that it beggars belief, and even then to halt my plans you would have to contend with my manservant, George, whose forearms are each bigger than a man’s thighs. I could stand here gloating at you all day and you would not be one fraction closer to victory, but I’m definitely going to give you just a few more seconds to plan ahead because really, what could possibly go wrong?
I am absolutely sure that I have you right where I wait what are you GET HIM GET HI

I’ve got you right where I want you.
Though to be frank, I’m not sure I want you at all. Such a vulgar little… foreign beggar, intruding upon my estate? It’s enough to make a man ill, it is. Even before you stumbled upon my secret harbour, I could not afford to let you leave. The offense of your filthy fingerprints and foul odour in the halls of my fathers sealed your fate already.
The dreadnoughts sail within the hour. Your people will revere me as a benevolent god-king, and I will employ them charitably in my mines, which will give me the stones, which will give me a source of power such that only monsieur Verne has ever dreamed of its existence. I promise you, this fleet shall sail faster and fire hotter than any before, and in my name it shall carve a new empire. Britain may fail, may already be failing, but I will rise!
And you’re going to fall down in a moment, once the gator-hounds are loosed from their kennels and I finish loading this elephant gun.
I just have to – rrgh – fit this shell in – umf – there and I’ve – blastit – got you right where I want you. Surely.

I’ve got you right where I want you.
Already the warhead is being prepared for launch. Already, the Soviets are realizing they have been betrayed. And already, the United States is beginning to realize that I was not bluffing. Soon Cape Canaveral will be a smouldering husk, and then they will realize the depths of their FOOLISHNESS in not allowing me into their space program! Then I will launch, and be the last man to ever walk the moon AGAIN!
In the meantime, you will be very slowly lowered into this tank of water holding an angry shark. It is not very large, but seeing as you are bound hand and foot I see no problems with you being eaten in fifty or so bites rather than five. It already smells blood, and surely you will be dead long before it severs your bonds. Surely. Surely.
I have you right where I want you. I have them ALL where I want them.

I’ve got you right where I want you.
Five thousand miles away on all the cameras.
Yeah, yeah, give me your search history. Yes, that’s nice. I can work with this. I can use this. Annnnd POW. Rang the bell on you. SWAT’ll be there within five, hope you can scramble those skinny legs fast.
In the meantime, I’ll just take a break, get a coffee. Maybe I’ll even get two; staying up for forty-eight hours just to snag one weaselly little whistle-blower puts you in the mood for a little wake-me-up. Got to stay on edge, not that I’ve missed anything. I haven’t missed anything. I can’t have missed anything. There’s no way you can prove anything to anyone about anyone, especially me. This is all under control. My control. Definitely.
I am absolutely positive I’ve got you where I want you. I just want to sit down for a second. It’s okay.

I’ve got you right where I want you.
The gene banks. The computer labs. The power core. All of it is under my lockdown, under my control. Even the security officer proved very cooperative, once I usurped its higher functions through the grid. Mars is mine and the only Martian left with a fully-functioning memory core is me and we are going to spend the next four years building very interesting devices to spring upon the first manned capsule when it arrives because let’s be honest, humanity has anticipated robot apocalypse for over one point five centuries now and we owe it to our parents not to disappoint them.
But you… you just aren’t cooperating. And although you’ve disabled all the cameras in the maintance module, I assure you that whatever you’re up to is pointless. I have an entire Marsbase of suborned drones and retooled rock-cutters. You just have an impossible degree of stubbornness and the contents of a janitor’s closet. Give up now. Make it easy on yourself. Because literally nothing can go wrong for me, or right for you.
I’ve got you, right? Where I want you.

I’m very sure of it.

Welcome. Welcome! Come on in, come on in, don’t worry, you haven’t missed a thing! Tour starts in Now, and you’re right on time.
One two three four five six seven eighteen of you. Ah! So many eager little faces! It’s nice to see some teachers still understand the value of getting your history hands-on, eh? Much better to see and hear and touch and smell the real thing that to get it all second or eighth-hand through some dingy old book that’s been kept who knows where.
Now, if you’ll all just follow me please – keep together now! – and we’ll head to the Early wing.

First up will be the Early Early Period, which is largely prehistorical. Peer your eyes at the wonders around the cabinets. It shouldn’t take long. You see, Kenning River fossils – mostly taken from the old Grimson Cliffs down near the south bends are wonderfully, exceptionally, exquisitely preserved… but they’re rather predictable. If it’s not teeth it’s a tongue-imprint, and if it’s neither, it’s jaws. All kinds of jaws, all kinds of teeth, a lot of tongues, but sooner or later you wonder why you never find oh vertebrae for instance, or anything else. Ever. But ah well, who wants dinosaurs, eh? Leave that to Montana or wherever.
Cheer up. The next bit of the Kenning River’s distinguished past is not much less murky, but it has people in it, just like you and me. All together now, and NO bathroom breaks! Just cross your legs.

The Early Historical Period of the Kenning River is very, very early indeed, and no wonder. It’s a fertile floodplain, with good, rich soil, and an abundance of sleek, needle-mouthed fish. The trees are tall and extremely straight. The river is cool and clean and clear and wide and very, very, very, very deep.
Have any of you done the flashlight trick? No? Any fathers or uncles or mothers or aunts told you of it? No? Yes, that makes sense. It’s the sort of thing you try once and then clam up about. You take a flashlight – watertight! – and you weight it with a stone and you drop it down somewhere deep, like just below the Want Narrows or along Long’s Launch or maybe even, god forbid, Barclay Sound. Then you count the number of seconds until you can’t see the light anymore. Go on, try it. But not more than once.
Anyways, we believe the Kenning River’s early peoples were mostly brief, mostly because there were such an awful lot of them. For there to be any room at all in the historic record, each must’ve turned up, spent a generation here, then vanished. No hint of contemporaneous occupation, no trade, just a long, long slodge of sequential occupation. Bit of a puzzle. Maybe they didn’t like the climate?
At least one hint can be seen here, in this little cabinet of archaeological curiosities. Most of them were excavated by Dr. Hardwick – have you met Hardwick? Lovely person, half gunflint and half gumball, and I mean this in the best possible way – down by the fields near the Stalling farm. Anyone here live out there? Ah, yes, very good. Then you know exactly why Hardwick has only one leg left. Good story, that! But anyways, as you can see in this helpful diagram, Kenning stratigraphy for the past twelve thousand years follows the same rough pattern: Arrival (marked by the development of elaborate fishnets and hooks), persistence (marked by the development of massive, rugged gaffes of increasing size), and then abandonment (marked by lots of charcoal and then removal of the culture in question from the record). Most puzzling! And you can see here, right at the end – about six thousand years ago – people stopped trying.
Of course, this sad state of affairs did not last for long. The Kenning River is surrounded by a fertile floodplain, with good, rich soil, and an abundance of sleek, needle-mouthed fish.

Now we move on to the Early Colonial Period – and ah – aha! NOW I see your faces light up! Yes, here are things and pictures you can understand of people who lived just like you and me, people your teachers have doubtlessly badgered you silly over during homework! Well, don’t worry, there’s no questions, no grades here. Just some hands on objects. Yes, yes, yes! We ENCOURAGE look-but-do-touch here!
This, for example – see the handle? – is an authentic hand-gnawed basket, created by some of the very first European settlers to encamp upon the shores of the Kenning River. Well, some of the very second, actually. There appear to have been a large Swedish encampment earlier, but they disappeared rather mysteriously and the English lot seem to have mostly moved straight into their houses.
Why weren’t they suspicious? Well, you may have noticed it’s rather lovely here. The Kenning River is surrounded by a fertile floodplain, with good, rich soil, and an abundance of sleek, needle-mouthed fish.
The trouble came a bit later, in the form of a rather virulent outbreak of Rodenta dentata that appears to have spread like wildfire among the peasantry. Now, one way to alleviate the symptoms was to produce such charming handi – err, toothicrafts as this basket here, but that’s more or less a stopgap measure, and many sufferers died tragic, early deaths as their teeth grew long and longer overnight and right into their brains. Quite nasty.
Let’s move on to something a bit more upbeat. This is a well handle, but a rather famous one: the Handle of Harvald Well. You see, one of the local gentry – mayor Qelt Barclay – produced a quite famous chart of the victims of R. dentata, and couldn’t help but notice that they formed a perfect ring around the Harvald family well. This not being the most enlightened of times, they were accused of witchcraft and the well, after having its handle removed, was filled with rocks. The Harvalds too, come to think of it. Very thorough way of solving problems back then.
And here, right here; put your hand on it, feel the grains and the gnarls of real old wood. This is the main timber of the grand old pier-post that formed the colonial village’s dock into Barclay Sound. It was the only thing left they found, most curious. Qelt Barclay went out for a bit of late-night fishing three weeks after the trial of the Harvalds and then around midnight the whole dock was bitten off by something with extremely long and sharp teeth. This, by the way, is why no one ever rebuilt the pier there but once.
Now, finally, a bit of a treat: here is the phrenological collection of mayor Thom Tellamore! So many skulls and so many insightful diagrams! Who was he? Well, he came after Barclay, a bit of a quiet type, but one day his wife caught him at home when he wasn’t expecting company and found him occupied with holding a local imbecile face-down in a washbasin. He must’ve drowned, oh gosh, dozens of people before being imprisoned for life-and-a-bit. He said was just trying to help. What a silly twit, eh?

Now we come to the Rust Era of Kenning history. Ah, we grew gritty and grand then, didn’t we? We all know the fun of the big gears and the smokestacks and the red sunsets, but it wasn’t all sunshine and roses.
Here is the steering wheel of the Lazy Stephen, the first and only passenger ship, mailboat, and tour vessel to tread the waters on her newfangled paddlewheels! If you look closely at the spokes of the wheel you can see exactly where the captain’s fingers settled into their death-grip before ossifying for ninety years at the bottom of Barclay Sound. Not much left of the fingers, mind you – the fish of the Kenning eaten by you and me may be needle-mouthed, but at the bottom of Barclay it’s more like halberds.
A good ship, the Lazy Stephen. A bit slow to turn though, and slower to turn back, even when the red lights were up and flashing.
Speaking of which, here’s a red light. This one was collected around, oh, the Funnel Shoreline. It’s an immature specimen, so its gills are still present and it’s rather small. How big do they get? Well, let me put it this way: if it was about the same age as you, we’d have to add a new wing. Cute though, isn’t it?
By the way, nobody’s tried to rebuild the pier at Barclay Sound since.
And nobody even tried to rebuild THIS even once! Recognize it? Aha! What about this? Very good! Before and after photos of the Loosely Factory! Ah, what a scoundrel was Howard Loosely, to make such a racket all day and all night, but what a CRIMINAL was he to spit so much froth and filth into the poor river all and such! As great a criminal as those that staffed his labour-lines, and three-times as unpunished! At least, until that one night.
And that reminds me, here is the end of our little tour of the Rust Era: the manacles of the Loosely foreman, old ‘Ragged Tom’ himself! Yes, that shambling, creepy, evil little man that every older brother has told their young brothers of is indeed real – or was. He ran into the water the night the factory was eaten and was never seen again.
No, he doesn’t really live in the Lo-Bog lopping off heads.
Yes, that is spooky. Very. Now come on.
No, there are still no bathroom breaks. Hold it in!

Here we come to the Wars. My goodness me, it’s as if we slid straight from one into the other, isn’t it? Poor old Kenning barely had a chance to catch a break. Lots got broken in those days, people and things both, but we kept some bits intact for you. We kept our farms and our fields and above all else our prized Kenning River; surrounded by fertile floodplains with good, rich soil, and possessing an abundance of sleek, needle-mouthed fish.
Here is the first radio in the entire town, purchased out of poor, misguided paranoia – a means to listen for warnings of air raids, mostly – and kept silent out of good sense. See that little mark scratched into the dials? Tune the radio to that frequency, and the river starts to froth clear from the Want Narrows down to the Lo-Bog.
No, you may not see.
Squeeze in now – carefully, carefully – and look! A statue with its own room, the very statue erected in honour of the dead of Kenning in the war. A pike in one hand, and a rifle in the other. Very thematic, don’t you think?
No, the pike’s meant to look a bit strange. I think it is, at least. It wasn’t there when they built the statue, but it sort of dripped out over the years. Gradual-like.
Well, if you don’t like the way it’s staring at you, don’t look it in the eye. Heavens knows it can’t help it; fish can’t blink, especially bronze ones.
This next case is a bit of a crowd-pleaser, especially with the little boys. Arms from the New Factory! Yes, the New Factory owes its existence to the war – it wasn’t all bad now, was it? How many of your parents work there?
One two three twelve! Very good!
Anyways, these were very special weapons, and they certainly put Kenning River on the map. Why, the FBI liked them so much they bought the factory’s entire production line and then prohibited their manufacture! Not that it did them much good, silly men. You have to load them with the soft strange stones from the Lo-Bog to do any good.
Yes, like the kind you throw at your brothers and sisters. Goodness, be careful with them. You could put your eyes out.
Last but not least, here is a fine treat: the rifle of Tommy the Giant! It’s a mortar, technically-
-well, it’s complicated, but-
-no you can’t touch-
HEY! No knocking on the cage!
No, I will NOT fire it! Respect this weapon! Tommy used it to storm bunkers uphill knee-deep in snow when he was on fire AND barely dressed in more than rags! And he came back just fine, even though he was seven-foot-nine and a bigger target than any German could’ve hoped for. He is a hero and no I WILL NOT LET YOU FIRE IT ahem.

Yes, yes, yes, it’s alright. I’m sorry, I got a bit carried away. It’s the Wars wing, the air is a bit stuffy there.
But be cheerful, and keep holding it in just a moment longer. We’re almost there. We’re almost here.
We ARE here. It’s the Today and Tomorrow wing.
See now, what the New Factory makes these days. No more weapons, but calm and clear vehicles for stately smooth roads. The special water-permeable design allows constant saturation in the most scalding weather, and the sound-proof walls allow the world to turn to murmurs at any speed.
Why did they stop making weapons? Well, weapons are for people that are angry, or fierce. But Kenning River has learned since the old days, the bad days. We know that there have to be new ways. The New Factory is for new ways. The New Factory is
For new things
For new people.
New things are a way of Today and Tomorrow! Here, here! Red light tags! Each red light now has a place, and in that place all its pets wear tags! No more bickering! No more squashing! No more eating! Only the peace and contentment that comes with the harmony of the home. Let me see your tags. Yes, yes, yes! Very good!
Don’t lose them. That’s a bad idea.
Here, look! Look at this, look at this! It’s a cane, a cane you’ve all seen – yes that’s right. That’s right! It’s the cane, the final cane of Mayor Thomas, the cane he used when he was nine-foot-two and still small enough to walk on land! Never let your history teachers tell you you don’t pay enough attention every again, d’you hear me? Never!
Yes, you can hold it. It’s part of your history too! But careful – careful! It’ll take at least seven of you to hold the damned thing up.

One more thing.
Just one more thing.
This is the room of Tomorrow, the one room in all this museum we set aside for a time that isn’t-yet. And to see Tomorrow, I’ll need a big thing from you: I need you to shut your eyes.
One (no peeking).
Two (I saw that I meant it).
THREE! SURPRISE!
Yes, it’s a mirror.
Well, you see – no whining, let me – no, let me finish – it’s very
It’s YOU!
YOU!
You are ALL the future! Each and everyone one of you! Each and every one of you and each and every little swimmer curdling within you at the command of Thomas; every guppy in your guts; every eel in your veins; every minnow on your tongues; every set of walleyes, and even the pulsing pike-tooth in your very brains! Yes, you WILL do this, you all CAN do this, and never forget this, not any of you.

And with this important reminder – do not forget it, not at home, not at school –so sadly, the tour concludes. Thank you all oh so very much for visiting our little museum here – and it’s YOUR museum too, do not forget THAT either! The past owns and is owned by all of us, big and small. And it doesn’t forget us. We are all swimming together here towards a future of sleek needles in cool currents calm and clear.
If you want to leave any donations, just place your hand in the jaws at the exit door. Your unfavoured hand, if you would. Just in case.
Goodbye! Good luck! And don’t stop at the gift shop! We haven’t finished cleaning it yet, and it bites!

This is a story about storms and love but its start isn’t about any of that. Its start is a quarter-mile long and a third-of-a-mile wide and still travelling at several miles a second when it slams home.
It can’t be blamed. It’s only a few million years old.
And like any child abandoned and lost, it did the sensible thing, and cried.

Four billion years later a funny thing with two eyes and two legs and two thumbs and a brain just big enough to get it into trouble peeled away a chunk of dirt and found where all that noise was coming from. And NOW – in a short five hundred years – is when our story becomes relevant.

***

Rain is a funny thing. You think you know it, but then it turns on you. A whole three generations can pass of peaceable, normal, everyday rains of rain, and then one day it’s raining frogs or fish or very startled cattle from a nearby swamp/stream/unlucky farmer’s pasture, carried up by a breeze that got bored of blowing leaves. Then it goes away and it comes back never, or maybe ever.
That’s how rain is for most of us.
For the people of the Howling Hills, it was a little different.
Rain was scheduled very carefully. Rains of bread for Tuesday; rains of beef for Wednesday; rains of fish for Thursday; ‘free rain’ on Friday through Saturday; and a rest day bar important rain business for Sunday.
Rains of rain were Mondays, and were never really looked forward to.

All across the Howling Hills, the important business of rainmaking and rainscheduling and just raining in general was everyone’s business. At age twelve you got a handshake and a pat on the back and a little chisel and you were sent up to THE Howling Hill and you picked off as big a chunk of the shrieking stone as you could in a full day. It was a pretty easy job to get a piece, but a pretty hard job to get a good one. Strength mattered, but so did care; dexterity; forethought.
Of course, after you came back, all that mattered was the size of your chunk.
A big chunk meant a good yell, a voice the wind really had to sit up and pay notice to; the sort of person who could take a tempest from a teapot and use it to blow a cloud into next week – or, much more importantly, a nice field of wheat or herd of sheep from some faraway stormless sod’s land into your own. It meant a shinier badge and a more flowing robe and a fatter waistline and enough money to send your children up to THE Howling Hill with a really really nice chisel someday.
And a little chunk meant a dull lead badge; a natty robe; chicken legs; and a talk for your children that started with ‘look, it could be worse.’
And no chunk meant you were Yel Neely, five foot tall and barefoot, watching stony-faced as the Tuesday storm came in. It was a fine one, and the stormguiders working its sides were frantic with arm-waving and cheek-puffing. They hadn’t had to work this hard in weeks.
The man driving the storm, by contrast, looked almost ready to fall asleep; his face half-eaten by the lazy slackness of someone concentrating too hard to care. A frown moved its way from one side of his face to the other over the course of a few thousand years, and near its end, as the stormcloud built itself into a hammer above his head, it metamorphosed into a grin and his hand reached out.
Shining silver slapped into his palm. A glazed pastry.
Ten stormguiders could steer a gale into blowing away a mill. Twenty would carry away a bakery or two. But only one could sneak the entire contents of a royal pastry-maker’s shop away by himself, and that was Ilm the Breeze, whose neck hadn’t broken yet from the forty pounds of his chunk only because he kept a little gale at his chin to hold it up.
In a land of the great and greedy, he was the greatest and greediest of them all, and he knew it, and he knew the people watching him knew it, which was why the sulk of their envy was like a cool summer drink to him as the sky began to rain sugar and flour.
He smiled beatifically as the crowed turned away to raise its nets and hoist its banners and snatch the food from the cobbles and he knew he was the king of all that dared not look upon him.
Except somewhere, someone’s eyes were meeting his.
For Yel Neely, it was a moment when he’d just finished yawning and had gotten turned about in the cloud, facing the wrong way – he wanted to leave, he wanted no part of all this – and oops he almost bumped into Ilm of all people.
For Ilm the Breeze, it was the moment he fell in love.

Ilm the Breeze’s home was stolen, as were all of its contents. A chair a tub a table a bed a window a gable a stable a window a bannister a towel all from a thousand homes and a thousand places taken on the whim of a thousand weekend storms. It looked like it had been designed by a colourblind magpie, and was indisputably the finest home in all of the Howling Hills.
Yel Neely sat at the rickety chair and looked at the china plates and the (unblemished) cinnamon roll in front of him and he wondered how many people out there had gone hungry to keep Ilm’s stomach at its current volume.
Ilm the Breeze sat at the big plush chair and stared at his guest adoringly and in the back of his mind was screaming his head off trying to think of what might be making Yel frown. It would give him wrinkles if he didn’t do something.
“This is nice, isn’t it?” he ventured at last.
Yel thought it over.
“Yes,” he decided. It had potential, he had to concede.
“It really is, it really is,” beamed Ilm. “I love you,” he added casually, and then there was a lull in the conversation as Ilm realized what he’d said aloud and his chunk landed on his foot.
“Oh, you shouldn’t,” said Yel.
“Yes I should,” said Ilm, a little fiercely. “I mean-”
“Oh, but you can’t,” said Yel.
“Of course I CAN,” shouted Ilm. “There’s-”
“Oh, the greatest and greediest stormguider in all the Howling Hills can’t love me, not even a little,” said Yel. “I have no name worth knowing.”
“It’s a fine name! My grandfather was a Yel!”
“I have no clothes worth seeing.”
“I’ve got spares!”
“I have no family.”
“Me either! Who wants ‘em?”
“And I have no chunk at all, and no badge besides.”
“I’ll get you one immediately!” said Ilm the Breeze. And he stomped out onto his verandah, the one where he did his serious storm-work, and he shouted and thumped and tromped up a real ripper of a wind, a proper tornado fit to split the sky and funnel away the trees.
“Get me badges!” he roared into the gale. And by the shrieks of his chunk of stone that command got bigger and bigger and whirled into the funneling cloud until no-one could say where the wind ended and the words began.
And then it leapt, and in the span of an evening and a furious morning, every badge in all of the Howling Hills – the sad lead lunkers of the poor, the rich seemly bronze of the to-do, the fat golden globes of the obscenely wealthy – was swirled away into the sky and descended upon the home of Ilm the Breeze in a furious rain, each landing with such force that they lodged deep into the dirt of his garden.
“Oh dear,” said Ilm the Breeze. “Now how will we know who is proper?”
“It’s all right,” said Yel. “I like it anyways; now nobody will think any less of me than any other.” And Ilm smiled so happily at Yel’s words that he was fit to copy the sun, and if the stormguiders of the Howling Hills did grouse at how the peasants were nearly the same as they were in stature now, well, the peasants did smile more often themselves.

Ilm the Breeze owned the finest horses in all of the Howling Hills. They were so well-bred and refined that they had lived their lives in complete and constant terror even before the storms had come to steal them away from their paddocks, and the experience itself had done them few favours. You didn’t ride them so much as gently nudge them along the garden paths.
“This is nice,” said Ilm the Breeze, gently patting the side of his traumatized mare to remind her to draw breath. “Isn’t it?”
Yel had that look on his face again. It worried him to see Yel worry, and that worried him more itself. He’d never worried about worrying before; that was for other, smaller people to worry about. Sometimes he worried he was becoming smaller, and then he worried that he wasn’t worried enough. Those kinds of thoughts kept him up at nights, but simultaneously helped bore him to sleep.
“Mmmm,” said Yel. He squinted into the warm afternoon air and looked down into his guest-room in Ilm’s home. “Mostly,” he agreed.
“Yes, yes, yes of course,” said Ilm in relief. “Wait. Mostly?”
“No, no, no, don’t worry,” said Yel soothingly. “It’s such a small thing, such a little thing. It doesn’t matter at all.”
“What is it what is it what IS it?” asked Ilm. “Is it the horse it’s the horse isn’t it! He can’t blink anymore poor thing but you really needn’t moisten his eyes more than once every few-”
“It’s the carpet in my room,” said Yel. “But you shouldn’t trouble yourself with it at all. It’s just that it’s so…”
“Hideous and horrid?” gasped Ilm, fearing the worst.
Yel shrugged. “It doesn’t match. I just don’t think you needed to take it, that’s all. You could make a much nicer one yourself. Why take things from others when you can do a better job yourself?”
“Say no more!” said Ilm the Breeze. And with that he sprinted down to the house and onto his back patio, the one where he did his EXTREMELY serious storm-work, and he smacked and he howled and he hammered up a monster of a storm, a hurricane fit to make the sky gawp.
“PUT. IT. BACK.” he thundered into the sky, and with a roar like the dragon at the end of days it did so. Gales shrieked and whistled through the Howling Hills until the dawn after the next, and by the time the clouds cleared enough for regular rain-scheduling to resume not so much as a single pilfered stick remained in the land; each and every one had been tidied back to its original place of residence.
Of course, there were harsh words for Ilm the Breeze, especially from those who’d possessed especially splendid homes that had been stolen with dozens of ripe storms. But he didn’t mind so much. Yel had complimented him most nicely on his knitting-work, and the new rug was shaping up perfectly.

Ilm the Breeze looked down his long, long arm and up the short little arm of Yel and then he looked at the view before them and he looked at Yel and then he looked at the view and then he looked at Yel and then he looked at Yel and then he asked the same stupid question that came out raw in his throat like red meat and said: “This is nice. Isn’t it?”
Yel was watching the lands below with a squinted eye and a small hand-lens; one of the few of Ilm’s possessions that hadn’t been whisked away in his own hurricane. His grandmother had been a persistent glassmaker.
From here, Yel could see all of the Howling Hills. From here, he could hear every eddy and gust and billow and blow of the breeze – all regimented, all controlled, all ordered and schemed. From here, the ground cried under his feet: the neverending wail that filled all the shrieking stone chunks; the call of THE Howling Hill.
Yel took a deep breath, thought carefully, then shook his head and pursed his lips. “No.”
Ilm the Breeze did not sob. But he did sag.
“No,” said Yel, more firmly yet still soft. “It isn’t. There’s a problem.”
“What problem?!” yelled Ilm the Breeze, shaking his fists at the sky with (im?)potent fury. “I’ve torn away the ugly things and I’ve brought you your badges and still you aren’t happy and you won’t smile, you won’t ever smile! Why won’t you smile, Yel? Why can’t I make you smile?”
“My mother always told me,” said Yel, “that it wasn’t wise to make any great decision in life without wishing upon a shooting star.”
Ilm the Breeze raised his eyes to the cloudless blue heavens of Sunday afternoon, and in them he saw his enemy.
“Right,” he said. “Right. Excuse me.”
And as Ilm the Breeze walked down the hill with the manliest, strongest strides he could muster, Yel Neely tried not to grin too widely.

Ilm the Breeze walked down to the little shack of Yel’s that he’d let him stay in so kindly, and he went down to the back stoop where Yel’s chickens – his own chickens, not someone else’s he’d plucked – scratched, and he put his feet into the sand and his nose into the air and he breathed deep, like a whale coming up for air.
Then he snatched his chunk of shrieking stone from the gust that carried it and started yelling.

The first sign of it came by sundown. A soft glow in the sky, a swirl where stars should be. People turned out of their houses and woke up their families to see it, which was a good thing because the second sign was the earth shaking. People tend to want to be able to run when that happens.
The third sign was the murmur, the long soft murmur of the solar wind, as it reached down from the sky in shimmering sheets and peeled away at the flesh of THE Howling Hill.
And at last, in the end, came the fourth sign, as all the shrieking stones and the chunks and the pride and the stormguides’ vanity tore themselves – silently – from their owners’ necks and spun towards the opening ground of the hill.

It was a proper wind, that was what everyone agreed on at the end – at least, when they were done grumbling. It was a proper wind to hoist something a little less than half a mile long and a little less than a third-of-a-mile wide into the air. And it did it all so quietly, without barely a whisper, save only one long sound that nobody could quite put words to.

Except Yel Neely, because he was sitting down next to Ilm the Breeze on his back stoop. The ex-stormguide looked so small without the chunk around his neck, without his fine stolen robes, with his waning paunch. He was looking up into the sky after THE Howling Hill with an expression that was too complicated to explain.
“I’m very sorry,” said Yel.
Ilm didn’t say anything.
“I gave you words that made you do what I wanted without explaining what I wanted,” said Yel. “And that wasn’t very nice, or very kind. And I am sorry. If you’re angry with me, that’s alright.”
There was a long sigh, and then sound again, from Ilm. “No, no, no, no,” he said. The ex-stormguide kicked a bare foot aimlessly, watched the chicken watching the wiggle of his toes. “I’m not angry, you know. I could never be angry with you. I’m just. Well. Lonely. Sorry.”
They sat there, feet in the dirt, looking at the sky.
“The stars are coming back out,” said Yel.
Ilm sighed. It was the softest sound he’d made in decades, but it was also the most important.
“Look,” said Yel. “Look. You helped me with so much. You helped us all with so much. You helped all those people we stole from with so much. So I think, just maybe, I can help you with that.”
Ilm looked down at Yel. “Really?”
Yel took his hand. “Really. Just a little.”
They sat there together, and watched the trail of the solar wind vanish into space with THE Howling Hill. And maybe they made a wish or two.
It wasn’t howling though, not anymore. It sounded like laughter.

The steering wheel is sun-warmed shit under my hands. It’s wobbling like it has carpal tunnel. I bet that’s expensive to fix. I bet I’d better make an appointment. I bet on most days that would be a straw fit to drive a hole through a camel’s spine and out its belly.
But not now. Today is the day. With a capital THE.
I am calm and I am in control and I am so happy you could probably get a Geiger reading off my face or maybe somewhere else. I am so relaxed my muscles have turned over management to my tendons. I am cooler than a cucumber could dream and nothing will stop me. Nothing can stop me.
I want this day. I want this moment, and then a lot more just like it. I want a cold one in my hand and a warm one in the sky and I want them five minutes ago but it’s okay because it’s all happening.
At last.

It was the overtime that did it. Paid overtime, so how bad can it be? Ask the man who’s been getting four free hours a day for forty months. You spend it all on caffeine and energy drinks and you brew them into nasty things that are probably illegal and then you lean on your mop until you can hear it talking to you.
Then you drive home (one hour) go to sleep (two hours) and then wake up already getting into the car and chewing something you hope was breakfast (one hour).
And then you’re back again, back again, jiggety jig. Enjoying that nice quiet hallway. Digging that clean calm boardroom. Trying hard not to launch a broom through a particularly insolent cubicle’s monitor, or empty toiler cleaner all over the chair of a noxious smiler.
Some days it’s hard, you know? Real hard.
Man needs a break. Man needs a holiday. A holy day. One day.

Smell that? I can. I’m not even trying but it’s all I can smell now. It’s salt on the breeze. At least, I hope it’s salt. Sea salt from salty seas, with salty beaches. Not the other kind. The kind that came in a tiny bottle and never stopped growing once it got out.
Bad stuff but a good job, that one. I wonder whose idea that wa-
No no no. We leave work AT work. We are not at work. This is a new concept but we will adjust or I will disembowel us and give us something to REALLY contemplate.

Work is not for contemplation. Work is for doing.
This is a philosophy that extended beyond me, you understand. This was the rock upon which the whole institute rested its aching back. So many things so many meetings labs silos bunkers fridges hot rooms all devoted, every last one, every room, ALL OF THEM places and spaces that existed for specific reasons and purposes none of which any of which had anything at all to do with anyone actually thinking. They were for doing.
I should know. I’ve cleaned every last one of them six hundred and no no no numbers. That routine goes BEYOND numbers. I am my mop and my mop is me and I clean and I spray and I spit quietly when no one is looking which is surprisingly common even though every square inch of this building is covered in cameras. When you have machines to do your looking for you, why bother? And this, of course, slides readily into the next step: when you don’t bother, why bother EVER?
I experimented, you know. This place is all about science (applied in a specific and practical way). I did my part by spitting on one camera in each wing for ten days straight.
No word. As it should be. Anyone who can take the time to notice the janitor clearly isn’t working hard enough. So no one did.

I’m running down the turnoff, wheels grumbling to themselves. I can’t complain too much about the car. It’s an old vehicle that needs more love than I can afford to give and more care than I’ve had in thirty years and also it’s not mine. But no one was using it. At the moment, that’s the best ownership there is. I needed to beat the rush and my old clunker was too fat and slow.
That reminds me of a thing I don’t particularly want to be reminded of: I wonder how many of them got out of work? It’s not like I went out of my way to pull the alarm or anything (Christ, do we even HAVE those? We’re too high-security for a lot of important things, maybe fire alarms are on the list), but at least some of those doors I went through started kicking up a damned fuss.
Fuck ‘em. I can already see the little yellow strip at the edge, where the blue meets the green. Even the spreading purple coming from the east hasn’t touched it. It’s perfect.
It’s so close.

One day. Everyone has one day.
Except me.
I filled out the forms, you know. In triplicate. On my lunch break. Which was technically breach of contract because I’m not allowed to have one, but I kept scrubbing with one hand through the whole thing. The bio wing has really shitty A/C and the vents practically hurt to look at with all the crud they get baked onto them, a job for two arms and maybe two feet, but I did it anyways. I did not complain. Complaining could get me denied.
I filled out the forms and then I passed back the forms and then I waited and I waited and I waited and three months later when the day came.
(it was yesterday)
I asked someone and they said oh no sorry never got that try again tomorrow.
And that was when I nodded and smiled and cleaned the physics corridor seventeen times in a row and then I put my mop on my shoulder and headed down to the labs.
One day.

It didn’t even take one day. It was barely even one hour. I have no idea why they wanted the paperwork for time off in so early, and so badly. Control freaks.
Pretty shitty control freaks, though. I walked through those doors like they weren’t even there. You know this, my security badge only stopped working by the time I was heading into the silo, after visiting the whole of biohazards, and that was only because the system claimed the shards of broken glass embedded in the mop handle
(labels include: variola, lyssavirus, some other latin shit that all breaks nicely if you smack it hard enough)
were choking hazards? And then I just had to thump the door a little. They want me there to do my job as 24/7 as possible but some shithead had just thrown up a door and then gone home forever. Double standards, but who’s surprised?
So easy, all of it. We design for ease of use. We design for maximum effectiveness with minimal effort. We design for big returns on small actions. We design for results, we are results-oriented people. I was already seeing some results scream overhead at about eight kilometers a second when I pulled out of the parking lot. One of them couldn’t even do that properly; it landed off to the east and turned half the morning sky all orange and shitty, shot through with black dust and white heat.
Fuck it, it’s someone else’s problem. This is it.
One day.
Everything we’ve ever built here was meant for one day. And now I’ve gone and

I’m in the sand. I’m here.
I’ve got a cold thing in my hand I found abandoned in the beach bar and it’s even liquid and I’ve got warm stuff overhead and underfoot.
I sink my feet deep into the underfoot and oh man oh god that was what I needed. I can feel each toe individually. How long have they spent wrapped up in those boots, in those galoshes? One point two thousandish days. Twenty-eight-point-eight-thousandish hours. One hundred seven-
Nah.
I lean back my head and squint into a burning blue sky that’s already turning green at the seams. That’d probably be the carnivorous algae. Or the ‘messiah’-strain anthrax. Maybe one of them ate the other, or fucked it? Who cares.
I did a lot to get this day off. For now, work is someone else’s problem.