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West Wind and East Wind, children of the sky. One from above, one from below; a clash and a thrash and tied in a bow.
They were good, obedient children all day and all night, except on one little topic.

West Wind and East Wind, bickering all day. Never giving ground, each in other’s way.
Oh how those two fought and fumed. No sidling, no idling, no taking turns, just WEST or EAST with no backing down!

West Wind and East Wind, whistling through the glens. Ruffle through a tent’s walls, that’s where it begins.

The tent walls belonged to an old man, and this was their first mistake, because it is generally considered unwise to offend or trouble those who have had more planning time than you’ve had birthdays. “Hey!” he shouted up at them. “Who did that?”
The two winds paused for a moment on either side of the meadow. Because they were not bad children, they felt sorry. Because they were children, they looked at each other and glared.
“THEY did it!” each shouted, and then oh they were back at it in a flash, whirling and snarling and thundering against each other fit to wake the dead, blow away topsoil, and set the old man’s tentwalls flapping hard enough to give it wings. Which it did.
He watched the tent walls sail away over the trees with sorrow in his lined face, annoyance in his clenched hands, and vengeance in his (surprisingly strong) pulse. “Right,” he said. “That’s time to do things about this.”

So he went to their parent, the sky. It was a short trip.
“Problems down there?” asked the sky.
“Your children are endlessly quarrelling, which is giving us all no end of grief and also they have destroyed my tent.”
“Whoops,” said the sky. “Sorry. Kids will be kids, right?”
“They have kept us all up night after night with their swoosh and swish and wrestling.”
“Ah, I’m sorry,” said the sky. “Whatchagonnado, yes?”
“There’s starting to be Talk going around about your parenting skills.”
The sky bristled, giving people quite a start from here all the way on to there. “They WHAT?” it said in a voice so frosty crops failed three miles away.
“Oh, you know, the usual. Idle young people without enough to do, talking about how you leave your idle young people without enough to do. Nonsense! Chatterfluff! But it’s happening, and it’s happened, and it’s not stopping. Best fix that.”
So the sky yanked itself off its hinges and stood up and stomped on down to the glade and it glared at the two winds fit to give them hives of embarrassment which they acquired immediately.
“YOU!” shouted the sky.
“Yes?” said the winds meekly.
“YOU!” exclaimed the sky.
“…yes?” mumbled the winds feebly.
“YOU?” expounded the sky.
“What is it, parent?” asked the winds, somewhat confused.
The sky scratched its head and tried to wrap its head around this question. It didn’t get up very often, and the blood rushing from its head was a very strange and disconcerting experience. And seeing the ground from this angle was making it woozy.
“Be good. Or something,” it said somewhat lamely. Then it stomped off and lay down again, and no amount of fuss from the old man could rouse it from its snores. All that walking took a lot out of a body, even one made of blue and air.
The winds looked at each other in chufty disagreement.
“You heard the sky,” the West Wind said. “You must be good.”
“You mean YOU must be good,” said the East Wind.
“You mean YOU” and so on and before long the glen rustled with the gusts and gales of wrestling winds once more.

The old man’s hat blew off his head. That was surely the final final straw. His wife had told him it had granted him a rakish character. Without it he just looked like a character. Nobody takes those seriously, as he had found throughout much of his younger years.
But he still had plans. Big plans. So he made a big cone of his hands and put it to his big mouth and let out a big holler.
“Hey up there!” he hollered.
“Hello down there,” said the clouds in a breezy, pleasant sort of voice.
“Nice weather, huh?!” bellowed the old man.
“Sure is,” said the clouds contentedly. “Feels good to give it, too. Better to gift than to receive, our mother ocean always said.”
“You could give a mightful gift of peace and quiet to everybody right now, and also my lost hat, if you would do a favour and go and tell those two winds off, over yonder in the glen!” the old man shouted.
“Mmm,” said the clouds, in a polite way. “Well, we could… but I’m not sure if they’ll listen. They’re awfully noisy young things, and we don’t know if it’s our place, and besides it’s only Tuesday, and…”
“Just do it!” screamed the old man. “Go on!”
“Oh alright,” murmured the clouds sadly, and they slid sideways through the air (discretely, and apologizing to it for the trouble) until they hovered over the glen, which was still filled with thrashing air and cursing. The clouds practically turned sunset-pink at the language, which was not at all fit for ears.
“We beg your pardon,” the clouds said, “bu-”
“Your head in a platypus’s belly!” shouted the East Wind.
“Your face on a rhinoceros’s rump!” snarled the West Wind.
The clouds cleared their throat and tried again. “We’re sorry to interrupt, but if it’s at all possi-”
“A weasel’s guts and your brain!”
“Defecation in your eye!”
The clouds were now almost fluorescent, but they made one last heroic effort. “Would you both PLEASE stop-”
“Brown bear’s anus! You!”
“Copulation! Sideways!”
The clouds stiffened their spine, hardened their resolve, and fled without dignity.
“What was THAT then, eh?!” yelled the old man at the clouds. But they only apologized at him, and he took his leave with much muttering and griping.

After THAT the old man’s pants blew away, and this was the final final FINAL straw for good, seeing as the old man’s skinny chicken legs now did not even belong to him but rather to anybody passing by in possession of working eyeballs and a reasonable amount of bad luck. He sat and he grumped and he didn’t cry because he was a big boy, but his not crying made such an awful fuss that an old woman slipped out from under a corner of the sky (which was snoring) to check on him.
“Boy,” said the old woman (who was his wife) to him. “Don’t you remember anything about all the things I said to you?” You’ve screwed up good here, my love.”
“I know, I know, I know,” muttered the old man (who was her husband). “But they blew away my hat and my tent and now my pants. I have nothing left, not even dignity.”
“Aw, nothing of value lost anyways,” said the old woman. “Come on, use that little brain of yours, husband-mine. What’d I always tell you?”
The old man’s brows knit. There was a lot of brow; you could’ve made a sweater with their output. “It takes more muscles to frown than to smile?”
“Naw, the other one.”
“A watched pot never boils?”
“Warmer. But no.”
“A kind word gets more done than a harsh one.”
“Yeah! That one! Now get ‘er done smart guy, that’s my lad.”
The old man nodded and gave the old woman a kiss on the cheek. They both blushed a little, and then she went back under the sky where all the dead people went.
“Right,” said the old man. He straightened a hat that wasn’t there and hiked up pants that weren’t there and he put on some real and very solid determination. “I’ll do this now.”

So he walked up to the clouds and whistled them down again.
“Hello,” they said.
“Hey,” said the old man. “Listen, I’ve got a message for you. It’s from the sky. It says it’s awful tired and sore after all that running around it did today, and would you mind giving it a nice soft place to sleep for tonight?”
The clouds puffed to themselves. “Oh! Oh yes indeed! Sure! The poor sky. We’ll help it out, no fear. Thank you.”
“All good,” said the old man. Then he strolled away nonchalantly and the moment he was under tree cover he ran like mad because clouds travel slow but so do old men.
Next up he walked down to the loose corner of sky that the old woman had slipped through, and he picked at it until the sky snorted itself awake.
“Ow,” it complained. “That stings.”
“Hush up,” said the old man. “I’ve got news for you. The clouds are all tired tonight, you see? Your Winds are keeping them up all day and all night, and they just want a place to have a nice nap. Do you think you could give them a nice place to sleep tonight, where there’s no fuss?”
“Oh, the poor clouds,” said the sky sympathetically. “Nothing worse than to be tired, and woken up all the time. If you know what I mean. Yes, of course I can help them.”

So that evening the sky comforted the clouds, and the clouds comforted the sky, and everybody else sort of coughed and looked the other way and hummed to themselves a lot. And in the morning down in the glen, as West Wind and East Wind paused in their labours, both of them felt a shove.
“Was that you?” asked East Wind.
“No, it was you,” said West Wind.
A shove, a shove, a shove shove shove, and West Wind was spinning and East Wind was twirling, all out of direction, gridlocks broken.
“It was us!” sang a happy fresh voice.
“It was me!” added another, proudly.
“And who’re you?” asked the two winds, confused – and a little happy – as they were blown all off course and away from each other, already starting to slide over distant lands and far-off horizons.
“South Wind!”
“North Wind!”
“Oh no,” the two older winds groaned, “more siblings!” And they grumped and complained and whined but they were basically alright with this because they were already seeing so many new places, and it had got awful boring wrestling with each other in that glen. Besides, the new winds were so very young it was hard to stay angry with them, or with their far-away sibling. Not with so much new to say and do.

All in all, it was a good day for most people. The winds explored. The sky and clouds snuggled together, beaming quietly. And the old man retrieved his tent and hat with the aid of a fine stick.
His pants took some doing, though.

It has been said that life is a cabaret.
This is true.
It has also been said that life is like a box of chocolates.
This is also true.
Furthermore, across varying times, places, and people, life has been asserted to be a highway, a theme park, a rollercoaster ride, and a bitch.
All of these claims are true, both independently and collectively. This is possible because life is, when you look at it under a microscope, essentially fractal, and therefore any given portion of it, however small, inevitably turns out to be a precise blueprint of the whole. Once you know that one fragment, you know everything.

For Addrea Cut, life at the moment was a rough-sided pit whose bottom was stubbornly resisting her past three hours of extertion to shift it from dirt to sandstone. It was also tired, sweaty, and sore-kneed from three hours of exertion. She was trying to place her perspective of life in general and hers in particular in perspective despite this recent disappointment, but it was a little tricky due to her having just wasted three hours of exertion.
Really, when you looked back on three hours of exertion, it was all to laugh.
Addrea sighed, the sort of self-pitying sound her grandmother would’ve thrashed her for (now, in adulthood, secretly relished), and glared up at the lazily uncaring sides of her trench, taller than her head and a monument to wasted effort after THREE HOURS OF etc.
“Fuck this blind,” she declared, and with the patience and care of someone who knows there’s only one obstacle between themselves and a good (well, filling) dinner, she began to commit violence upon her pockets. Past three layers of wadded paper, pencil stubs, and crumbs from lunch her fingers closed on cold stone.
Once upon a time, it had been a claw, attached to something slightly taller than Addrea, six times as wide, and shaped a bit like an armadillo crossed with a pile of rocks.
It knew what to do with soil.

Addrea staggered into camp some three minutes and six steps later, covered in speckles of backwashed soil and disappointment. Dinner was whatever was within arm’s reach. Dessert was disappointment and note-taking.
Test pit B complete failure. Again. Will try tomorrow. Again.
Food low. Still. Again.
She wished she had more to add, but she’d run short of both facts and pencil.
This was almost worse than the Hihle Marshes had been. At least the wildlife in the badlands was friendlier. Mostly by dint of its absence.
One more try, right? One more. Tomorrow she’d wake up, spend half the afternoon scraping out a damned pit, and then go to bed and then the day AFTER tomorrow she’d get up and leave and travel down to the rails and go home and be scolded at by her mother in between attempts to feed her with real food that wasn’t half-rotted trail biscuit.
Addrea looked up at the just-emerging badlands stars and contemplated their endless, happy twinkle.
Well… the day wasn’t QUITE over. And if she started now, and finished (failed) now, she could catch tomorrow’s rail instead. Really, it was good scheduling.
And so, with the noble aim of perseverance in the face of adversity in her heart and visions of pie in her head, Addrea Cut stepped out from her camp and into the past again.
For good.

Time was the thing, the principle, the money-maker. Any excavationist worth their hunch would say that. Time wore away at you, whether beast or rock; it eroded soil; sagged skin; ground stone to sand; and chewed away flesh from bone.
And, as had been illustrated oh-so-many-years-ago by Menny Agling on the gloomy cliffs of a faraway beach, in both cases the ultimate result is the same: the preservation of the toughest core when all dross has been devoured by the centuries.
The Hadly had understood that. Eight thousand years ago they’d understood that. Living on the sides of old buttes, growing crops in the short and surly shadow of erosion, counting pebbles as they fell off crumbling mountains and ground them down to immortal molehills, they’d have been idiots not to.
And then, they’d gone one step better.

Addrea turned over the little fragment in her paw – her hand. She tucked away the claw and concentrated: no pigmentation; the barest of geometric design, curvature showing something deep-dished and thick-walled. Built to last forever in all respects.
Hadly.
Late-era Hadly, to be precise. Geistoff Hadly himself had speculated on that in his later years, theorized that as time wore on and on at them they decided to emulate what they saw around them, every day, and strip away the extras. The earliest Hadly pottery sherds were coloured like dreams; purple and blue and a searing pale pink stolen from sunsets. Their sides were eggshell-thin and marked with pinprick care.
Pretty, but mostly useless. Not like this one.
Addrea clenched her hand and sorted her thoughts, in order: grubs, maize, antelope, nuts, berries, wa-
cool blue pale grey light dust of red sand on top trickle down
-ter. Her hand unclenched, and she smiled. Then she nestled it in the dirty dregs of her empty coffee pot, concentrated for about a minute, took it out, and set the batch to brew.
The Hadly had been a remarkable people, really. It took skill to build to last. It took more to build to accumulate.
She fortified her plan over the coffee, turning the map in her head over and over. Pits Z through B had been on good ground for Hadly; in the shade, out of the deadly badlands sun that would eat your mind and then your body; and with enough soil to grow the stubborn dead-end stalks they had settled for as corn. Pit A was – and she felt a bit guilty at this now that she admitted it – a token effort. Right at the very southern corner of the butte, where the sun would fry you from morning to midnight, and on ground that was more rock than dirt. She’d just been planning to scrape the surface, call it a night, and head for home.
But this was the first Hadly artifact she’d found since she’d set up here, three weeks ago.
What had they been DOING?
The claw was back in her palm again, and Addrea hummed to herself in tune with its urges, low and lower, grumbling in a clueless sort of way. It had been a simple animal in life and death and age, like the Hadly knew, had only focused it further.
Dig.
“Hope you’re ready, pal,” she whispered to herself. “Hope you’re ready.”

Four feet down, she found the firepits. Charcoal and ash spewed like vomit through the straggly turf, fragments and drifts locked up and now free to drift away.
They looked like ovens to her eye. The sort of heat they’d been trying to generate here was beyond anything a bonfire could want; this was something you’d rig for pottery firing. A pit of late-Hadly sherds, even discards… that would make her rich. But why build the oven out here in the blazing sun? Even a potter had a boiling point, and there was no clay nearer nor farther to here than anywhere else.
Five feet down she hit the pit, and things started to make sense.

The profession of the excavationist was made respectable by the efforts and diligent scholarship of Dr. Geistoff Hadly, a man so impeccable in his presentation that he never dug in anything less than a full suit and tie, and so resilient in the face of danger that he had survived no less than forty-three cases of severe heatstroke by his retirement to academia at age fifty-seven.
The profession of the excavationist was made period by the pressing need of Menny Agling for money in the face of an ailing father, a dead mother, and a society that viewed an unmarried woman as only slightly more respectable and useful than an unkilled rat. She couldn’t sew, couldn’t sing, couldn’t cook, and couldn’t clean. But as a child she’d spent days wandering the broken shorelines of the Grey Coast, bringing back crabs and shells and stones to her father, and as an adult she went there with a pick and brought back… well, money. Seashells that sounded of waves when you held them to your ear. Flattened stone fronds pressed into rock that smelled of dew and heat. And at least one famous fish that had almost seemed to move under your eyes, although no measuring tape had ever confirmed it.
She’d never made all that much money, Menny Agling – that she had been able to live on her own at all was considered socially appalling at best. But she’d made a little dent into history, and as the years pressed down on her dozens of others had quietly lined up to take a crack at it, pickaxes ready.

Now, as Addrea stared down into the half-empty hole in front of her, it struck her that the Hadly had been there first. And they hadn’t so much left a dent as a full-blown smash.
It certainly made her own work easier; now she was excavating someone else’s backfill, rather than chewing through stone by stone on her lonesome – the Hadly ovenfires had cracked the side of the butte open like dried mud in the sun, giving them room enough to dig what seemed to be a deep, if narrow pit. This had been filled in; the layers were all out of sorts, the stratigraphy was a jumble of hastily-squashed dirt and rock.
A hurried burial. Was she about to break into a Hadly tomb? That’d be a first. Most speculation on the Hadly had their dead as burned into crisps; the one case where their preoccupation with aging and weathering was deliberately averted. The Hadly would build a spear-point of mammoth bone that would soak in the weight of centuries to build a killing edge, but they’d turn themselves to fickle smoke and ash in a heartbeat.
Maybe if you spent that much time using and copying the bones of the long-dead, you started to get a little concerned about what your grandkids might do with yours.
Addrea’s claw stubbed against solid stone again. She was at the bottom of the Hadly pit, and no coffin or bone in sight. So much for that theory. No garbage either; not a midden. It was past midnight now and ten feet down and she had nothing to show for it but another layer of dirt, sweat, and bruises. She leaned back against the butte and sighed, then fell through it.
A short and confused burst of flailing with the claw later, Addrea had cleared enough space to breathe and light her lantern in. In the quick flash of its light against her swollen pupils, she could almost see the air streaming in around her, filling up…
A tunnel. The Hadly had dug a tunnel into the side of the butte.
For all the bone-turned-stone and finely-ground rock that were material fixtures in almost all their artifacts of all eras, no-one had ever found an undisturbed Hadly fossil mine.
‘Till now.
Addrea’s face felt funny and after a moment she realized that she was grinning to herself like a maniac. It had been a while, since she’d felt this hopeful. The last time had been… on the rail home from the Hihle, she thought. No more lice and midges and fat-mouthed fish that mistook your toes for minnows and especially, ESPECIALLY no more of the damned storks. Ever.
This was that moment turned inside out: she wanted this to last forever.
But first, she had to see what happened next.
Claw out, she began to tunnel, humming its song again. This time it was perkier.

Six feet in the dirt thinned out and she was left in the raw newness of the old tunnel, the floor still strewn with the same dust, the same pebbles as the day it had been filled in and abandoned. It was the early morning now but Addrea hadn’t felt as awake as she was in… years, even. Her mouth tasted like blood and victory. She held the lantern high like a conductor, basking in the sight.
The walls were full.
This was an impossibility, she admitted to herself through the haze of giddy greed that had settled over her mind. There were chisel marks everywhere; the Hadly had collected thoroughly from this place. But somehow, each and every track and turn of the stone was reflected, trick-image-like, into a backbone or a leaf or a rib or a limb or a skull.
Skulls. A hundred glittering tiny emptied eyes looked back at her.
It was like an entire forest had been gift-wrapped and packaged in stone, just for her, all for her. What had happened here? A flash flood? Eruption? Whatever it was, it was hers, beautifully and fully hers in a way she hadn’t felt as piercingly since the birth of her little brother.
Then she leaned in deeper and started to examine them, because she was a professional. A very rich one.

Dr. Geistoff Hadly had published the bulk of his writings on the excavationist trade some sixty years ago.
Menny Agling had died forty years before that.
The Hadly had persisted from approximately nine to five thousand years ago before…disappearing.
Addrea’s claw had been estimated by a particularly obnoxious yet useful professor as being somewhere between five hundred and two hundred thousand years old.
The oldest tools used by the Hadly were often reshaped from the limbs of creatures that looked much like rhinoceroses, but far too large. Addrea had seen a skull once, with a strange and malformed-looking set of horns that resembled a pair of balloons grown out of control.
Most of Menny Agling’s fossils had vanished into private collections once she was dead enough to become acceptably fashionable. The Revered Goven had examined one of her larger fish, once, and had said that there was something odd about the shape of the bones that didn’t quite make sense… but that was a textbook and ten years ago.
But she didn’t think anyone had ever seen anything like these.
A herd of… things. Words defied her. The skeletons made no sense; the tails were too long; the posture was alien; the teeth were…
Lizards, maybe? Iguanas? No.
She reached out and touched the smallest skull she could find, concentrated, and felt a brief burst of pitter-patter terror as over-large lungs and a lightning heartbeat failed to carry her away from…something. She had no skin she had scales or no wait that couldn’t be right.
None of it made sense. But oh how she could see now with her hand there, could see fresh new colours and so bright in the darkness. A useful one, whatever this was.
Addrea drifted deeper down the tunnel in a daze, a hand on the skull in her pocket, light shining on new old bones. Larger ones.
This was a horn. A horn attached to a skull. A skull bigger than she was.
There were two more horns. She considered this superfluous in the best possible way.
A touch…
force unimaginable a thirty-foot frame solid legs sharp beak chewing through the stalks brace your back and face it head-on
…and, just to see if it was possible, one hand carefully gripping the horn, she lightly smacked her forehead against the stone wall.
It gouged open like soft cheese, and her smile would’ve split her face if it could’ve. Too big to carry out in one piece by herself, but just the horn would do for now.
Pockets filling, the deeper calling, the tunnel narrowing, on and on and on past bones and bones.
Here’s a toe. A touch and its owner comes rising up, strong legs under a body forty foot and more, voice echoing forever deeper.
Here’s a claw. A nimble thing from a nimble thing that hops and leaps and scurries through ferns and ferns and ferns like the ones mashed deeper into the stones.
Addrea shook her head and looked closer at the claw, followed the thin leg into the barely-there body splayed against the wall, fingers tracing its deeper outline and the rough marks around the tiny torso.
Something on her skin she could feel, soft and tough and protective
feathers.
Now she looked with fresh eyes, saw the deeper shape of the limbs, the deeper angle of the neck. Tiny sharp teeth but oh how it looked like a bird to her. Deeper.
Deeper.
The tunnel was curling deeper she was sure, wrapping around itself like a snake. Her pockets were full of bones-come-stones and as she went deeper she found more and more she was overflowing with the past. Her heart was a drumbeat and her skull was a weapon and her eyes were lamps and she reeled with the intoxication of being the first, the absolute first, to see or know any of this as she went deeper.
Deeper down she traced the ferns deeper and found the plants that looked like horsetails from deeper days, giants that meshed with half-air-drowned fish like lungfish that took deeper breaths of air but died anyways and fell deeper into time go on deeper and come down where she was deep.
A breath. Addrea took one and realized she’d been holding it, or maybe she hadn’t. She was certainly dizzy enough to feel it. The air was…no, it wasn’t bad down here, just a bit stuffy. She’d smelt bad air before. She’d smelt
the haze in the air from the ash and slurry
No, no, that wasn’t her. That was from something
the blood-slick smell the soft grunt the wet tearing fear
in her pocket.
Addrea’s jacket was a gift to her from her parents and had lasted her over ten years by dint of stubbornness and a watchful eye, particularly around her mother whenever she made meaningful noises about replacements. It had character, Addrea always argued. It had comfort, and character, and no it is not worn down to a hole-mangled nub that’s just slander.
It was also blessed truth because it was what allowed her to shuck it off and onto the floor without so much as undoing a button. Bones scattered against her toes and the lantern jangled in her grip.
It was out. How long had it been out? How long had she been down here with nothing to guide her but… but hallucinations, pictures from inside an ages-empty head?
Well, she wasn’t blind yet. Her hand was on the wall, and she could still feel the grooves of the Hadly chisels. Someone else had been here, someone else had left their mark, someone else…
The grooves stopped. And on her face she could feel the soft movement of once-stale air, moving on and out as it escaped from something
Deeper.
Addrea’s legs were moving before she could even swear, and then they were moving over nothing as she slid and bounced and clattered and the lantern flew away and she landed and it landed on her and dirt landed on that and stone and.

At some point, Addrea opened her eyes. There was still nothing but the dark, but now she could see it a lot better, and she was almost sure she didn’t have a concussion.
There was dirt on her. A little dirt. And stone. A lot of stone. She probably didn’t have any broken bones though. She remember what THAT felt like.
Well, she could make it. The contents of her pockets might be scattered some…however many feet above her head in the tunnel, but her PANTS pocket was sitting tight, claw inside. She could dig through this.
Her free hand crept its way inside, gripped smooth stone, and paused a little, sorting through an unfamiliar feeling leaking its way out of the old bone.
Absolute terror.
Addrea realized she was humming again, this time slow and soft. Like a lullaby.
Slowly, softly, with the tenderness of a mother tending her cradle, she began to scrape away the layers of years covering her, fingers brushing stone that was also bone, mind ready to reject the images that were…
…absent.
Nothing was speaking. Back above, the fossils had seemed practically seeping with life, diving in through any sense she exposed. Here they were mute rock.
The last layer shed itself from her, and with it her patience for the mystery. Right. She’d get up, feel her way out with her jacket QUICKLY, make a lot of money and hire people that weren’t her to dig this place up.
She stood up, brushed herself briskly, felt her way to the wall of the slope she’d toppled down, and realized that her fingers were touching something breathing.

There was a moment.
It was a moment shared across countless childhoods, when you turn around and realize your parent was there all along, watching you.
It was a moment from Addrea’s days in the Hihle Marsh, when she met the eyes of a giant Murdun stork as it ate an entire flock of ducklings, one after another.
It was a moment from hundreds and thousands and millions of years ago as the thing under her fingers raised her head from her kill and peered at the small creature huddling in the bushes through the sulfurous clouds.
And then, Addrea made the mistake that small, terrified creatures always do in that moment.
She blinked.

The cave was emptied. The tunnel was a broken mass of debris. The camp was hollowed, left waiting for the badlands sun to smooth it away into nothingness.
And the rail had an extra passenger that night, headed towards a home.
It was a strange new place she found herself in, but this was nothing new. Life is, after all, essentially the same across time and space. It gets simpler as you grow older and harder.
Once you know that, you know everything.

These are the rules of civilization.
A civilization must: begin, seed, spawn.
Oon-Above grew from a single family lost in the drifts meeting a single family stuck in a hollow. It filled the hollow and tunneled into the drifts and found them pleasing, if chilly. A safe place, and less cold once you wrapped yourself in the furs of a lemmer. Food and comfort both, down under the midnight that lasted months.
A clan dared venture beyond the forest for want of room and roots, and found that the oldstone, though so much heavier than wood, was ready to carve and twice as strong. If you heated it just so, if you hummed to it just right, it would do as you said and make homes that no fire could consume or storm thunder down. That was the root of Tnekt.
Guna was already ages-old when it was settled, but it had only poked itself above the surface some forty years before the canoes came. Then came more canoes, and more, and more, for the fishing was so very good. There were too many canoes and not enough Guna, and then someone asked what if they encouraged the growth of the atoll through fishmeal, and cleaning, and regular blood. And then came Great Guna.

These are the rules of civilization.
A civilization must: grow, thrive, sprawl.
Oon-Above filled quickly, oh too quickly. The crystalline snow-domes arched higher above the many hollows and the tunnels were bored deeper into the drifts for more space, more room, but still there was not enough. They flowed through the ice like water through cracks, and at last they came to a crack and chiselled it through to see a strange horizon that was green and blue, not white. They had found the edge of the glacier, and underneath them lay all the taiga in the world.
Tnekt did not grow. Tnekt chiselled away. Dispassionately, carefully, endlessly. Giant ridges and blocks are shaped hollowed and stamped. Walls are made from buttresses. Lamps from lumps. The average size of a dwelling in Tnekt is over fifty feet at the shoulder, and it holds hundreds. The inhabitants struggle to reach their own steps, like children wearing their parent’s clothes. But it is sturdy and invincible to assault and every day there is less oldstone and more Tnekt.
Great Guna grew and grew and grew without limit, feeding off the sea and its heady intellect both. Coral-shaping and coral-breeding were the greatest of professions, artistry and craftsmanship swirled together like the rainbow colours of its output. Some shone softly for light; some grew into natural fishtraps, some even floated, and then Great Guna grew rootless islands and sent vast expeditions into the world, to chart and to explore and to recruit. Join us, they said as they sailed. Join us, and make land from nothing. This is our word. This is Great Guna.

These are the rules of civilization.
A civilization must: crush, mangle, mutilate.
There were people down there beneath Oon-Above in the taiga in the trees, soft strange people who had never known the low creak and groan of living encased in ice that could crush continents. They did not know of the tunnels and had never seen hollows, not until they were brought back packed in slush and too cold to feebly resist. There they were warmed and put to work digging deeper, ever deeper, to grow, to expand, to render the hollows grander, the tunnels broader; to tend the lemmers and slaughter their flesh; to shine the ice-mirrors until they gleamed and spat fire from the sky. They hated and were despised and this was good and proper as Onn-Above took their timber and their bodies and their metals and crushed their land flat one league at a time.
Tnekt grew restless. There were wars to be fought, and feuds had grown dull; there were riches to be coveted, and their own had become everyday. Beyond their borders lay new foods, new goods, new trinkets. So they clothed their warriors in oldstone hauberks and gave them flaked spears and set them loose to demand tribute and teach construction and burn villages and sow crops. And in Tnekt’s name, they accomplished much of this.
Great Guna encompassed three separate island chains by the time of the breeding of towermaker coral. Less than a decade following that, it held eleven; seven in shackles. A war-island would sail into a bay. Join us, they said. Join us, and make land from nothing. And if they were received impolitely, or perhaps not eagerly enough, or maybe refused, they would flood the bay with towermaker spawn. Without the hour it would be a clot, within the day spires fit for ballista would raise. A bay into a beachhead, a village into an abbatoir, an island for Great Guna, which grew greater still. The corals still needed blood.

These are the rules of civilization.
A civilization must: bloat, fester, rot.
The lenses kept Oon-Above safe. Who could threaten them from below, with the ability to reflect light until it steamed flesh and fired wood? They took what they wished and burned what displeased them and crushed the rest as the glacier moved under their feet. And as time went on, they took more and more. The hollows and chambers of Oon-Above grew clotted with loot and plunder; the gentry competed and boasted and outdid one another. This one had more slaves. This one had more gold. This one had grander chambers. The chambers in particular were easy to rectify; have your slaves carve more, have your gold commission more. Oon-Above was already a warren, but year by year it was nearly coming to resemble a collection of soap bubbles.
Tnekt glutted itself. Every year thousands went to the fields on its behalf and every day thousands moved cartloads on its behalf and every night it took itself to the table and satiated its stomach on their offerings. The stone was cold but the nights were warm, and warmer still if you were of the oldest of the oldstone, the families who traced their roots back to the dawn of Tnekt itself, when that ingenious clan had first began to heat it and tap it and hum at it just so, just so. HE was of grander lineage than SHE, but not as much as THEY, and so on and so on. Harmless arguments that turned deadly when it came to politics and it always does.
Great Guna wrapped half the world, albeit much of it quiet blue. They decided what was land and what was sea, and dominated wherever the two met. They took up the spear and the shield and the great ballista when this was questioned. Where the war-islands sailed they were obeyed, and they sailed everywhere, expanding as the years rolled on and each being caroused and welcomed and feasted when it returned home with an admiral bragging their conquests. All were glad to listen and toast. Except, perhaps, the other admirals.

These are the rules of civilization.
A civilization must: rupture, erupt, drain.
Oon-Above’s most sacred and respectable and beautiful of places was the Hearthollow, where the oldest and riches and most impressive of its gentry lived. And this was why when the slaves revolted, it was here that the fighting was fiercest, and this was why it was here that the lens-operators grew desperate enough to turn their glares on Oon-Above itself, and this was why it was here that the thin-sliced shelled of Oon-Above was first revealed to be, alas, only too thin. Entire hollows slid away, sheared side from side. The glacier groaned and bucked underfoot and slid and crumbled at its edges. Oon-Above burned as it froze, screamed and fell silent save pattering footsteps and muffled weeping.
The Tennekta died. This was not unusual. The Tennekta died young and childless. This was unusual. The Tennekta’s mother’s family was accused of treachery by her father’s family, and the Tennekta’s father’s family was accused likewise by the same. This was not unusual. The Tennekta’s families put each other’s crops to the flame after a hard, drought-ridden year. This was unusual. Six months later, half of Tnekt was starving and the other half was putting each other to the spear. This, by then, was usual.
In all of Great Guna’s grasp, none were greater than Admiral Deeg. Born on the eighteenth isle of the fifth chain of the ninth conquest, his ambition had risen him from slave’s-son to island-driver to Admiral to the heights of the fleet. He had brought thousands into the grasp on voyages of years, each time returning with a fresh crew of strangers to behold Great Guna itself for the first time. And although all toasted him in the streets, his fellows stared at his back and groused at its foreign shade and shape. It was not right, they said, for Great Guna to rely so upon a man who was not proper of it, raised right. And one day they all said so to each other, and they gave him a toast that night that was a good deal stronger than usual. So strong, in fact, that he smelled it as he raised the cup. That night, Deeg returned to his war-island. That night, Deeg sent word to his old lieutenants. That night, Great Guna itself saw towermaker coral fill its harbours.

These are the rules of civilization.
A civilization must: wither, unravel, crust.
Oon-Above was emptied, its people long-fled into the forests to hunt for roots and beg aid before its greatest accomplishment was done. After the long slow years of its dissolution and collapse, very little of the front third of the glacier remained, and it retreated in sulky silence, leaving broken trees and grooved ground and the odd lump of shiny metal that had once been an admirable statue in the halls of a respected family. Now gone.
The oldstone heated just right and hummed to just right came apart in just the right way, and soon enough just the wrong one. A building falls into a building falls into a building like dominoes made of oldstone and flesh and screams and the fields and the harbour are clotted with screaming refugees. What is left is gripped by war-lords, and soon after the strange great coral-island appeared on the horizon, its walls manned by keen-eyed and hungry-toothed warriors, they found themselves grasped low and made to bow in the ruins of their grandfathers. Now gone.
Great Guna’s grasp reached halfway around the world the night of Admiral Deeg’s escape from death. By the day he breathed his last, it no longer existed. The last of the war-islands had sunk each other ten years before; the secrets of the towermaker had been long lost, running into the saltwater with the blood of the coral-architects as Guna was laid low by ballista and torch and thunderous strife. As the fleets streamed home to devour one another their subjects rose up one by one to look above the horizon and find that where once land had been made from sea, only blue remained. Now gone.
And they thought about what they would build now.

These are the rules of civilization.
Much as they would pretend otherwise.

The sky was boiling into purple from gold and the clouds were a deep red and even if the children were too young to think of it as anything more than pretty they weren’t about to be put to bed at now of all times, when there was still so much left of the day.
“I’m not tired,” said the oldest child.
“I’m not hungry,” said the middle child.
“And I’m not thirsty,” said the youngest child. “Why do we have to come indoors?”
And their mother, a long, tall woman, shook her head and sighed and coughed and shuffled them indoors to their last meal, and as she chided them and pushed them into position she saw that the grumbles weren’t going away.
“Well then,” she said, placing the dish in the center of their little circle, “I suppose it’s time enough to tell you now about the dark.”
This did not interest the children very much because all of them already knew that they were not permitted to go outdoors after dark. “You just told us that,” whined the oldest.
“Yes,” said their mother. “But I didn’t tell you why. So sit now and listen to me and eat, sit now. Tell me, do you know of your uncle?”
Three heads shook.
“Then I will tell you. He was my brother, and he was noisy and rowdy and happy and even longer and taller than I am. If you’re lucky I think you” – and you was the youngest child – “might match him someday. A good man, if a little lazy. But the girls liked him a lot.”
“He was handsome?” asked the oldest child.
“He told us that he could catch fish just by smiling at the river,” said their mother.
They giggled.
“Anyway. This was a while ago. Back when your grandfather was still alive, but getting on a bit. You know our goats? Those were his goats, back then. Not quite as many, of course, but oh he kept them well. Grandma used to say he was half-goat himself by his beard. He loved them almost as much as I do you. And you can imagine how much it hurt him then, when he woke up one morning and found himself one goat short.”
“Did he find it?” asked the oldest child.
Their mother shook her head. “No. He looked all day long and not a trace. It was as if it had dropped off the face of the world. So he came home sad, and he slept, and the next morning, what do you think he found?”
“A giant!” said the middle child.
“No,” said their mother.
“It’s never a giant,” the oldest child whispered. The middle child poked them.
“No,” said their mother, cleanly pushing her hand in the way of the vengeful fingers of the oldest child,” but another goat missing.”
“They were running away!” said the youngest child.
“Not from your grandfather,” said the mother. “No, for he loved them almost as much as I do you. And there was something there this time: he found tracks. Great, big-footed tracks. It was a lion.”
Now the children were all ears. “Did he catch it?” asked the middle child. “Did he kill it?” asked the oldest child. “How big was it?” asked the youngest child.
“Patience,” said their mother. “Now, your grandfather was not a young man anymore, and he was largely resigned to cursing his fate. But your uncle was a young man – a VERY young man in his heart – and he proposed to stay up for it. He took his own spear and grandfather’s knife for weapons and his favourite dog for an alarm and he put himself up by a thorny wall near the goat-pen, so he would be prepared. He ran himself to all exhaustion the night before (oh, and he came back to find your grandfather another goat short) then slept all day, and when the sun had fallen he woke himself and crept out to his place and waited. There was a very large moon and it was easy to see him even as he walked away from the house. Almost like lamplight, but pale.”
Here their mother stopped to have a mouthful and the children squirmed wilfully. Patience. Patience. Easy to say and so hard to do.
“Patience,” she reminded them. “And that next morning, we walked out the doors, and we found a dead dog. It had blood on its mouth, and a broken back. Next to it was my broth – your uncle’s spear. It had a clean tip, and a broken halt. And your grandfather’s knife and your uncle were not to be seen, then or ever.”
Another mouthful. And a few more as the silence stretched.
“Did you kill the lion?” asked the middle child.
Their mother shrugged. “Who can say? No one was going to sit outside and wait another night, not after that. We lost more goats, and one day we lost none. Would it have lasted longer without my brother’s watch at the night? Who knows. Would it have lasted shorter without my brother’s watch at the night? Who knows. It’s a big darkness out there, my children, and it belongs to things that will hunt us if they find us in it. It’s no place for us to put ourselves, however young and strong and beautiful we may be, however bright the moon shines, however strong our blades or loyal our dogs. Keep to indoors under the night, children, keep to indoors when it’s dark. And keep safe.”
And then it was time for bed. And because they were good children (if impatient) and they listened to their mother, they went without further protests.
Not one sound was made all night, though they waited long before sleep in the dark. It seemed thicker than was right.

Ruddy red gleaming pure white tore the edge of the sky to shreds, flaking away the dark into morning. It was a time for rest now, for full bellies to absorb their burdens.
This was something she was explaining to her three cubs, which were not inclined to listen. Little bodies with little bellies burned as fast as they ate, and the cubs were very little indeed. But venturesome, and quarrelsome, and forever yowling.
“Mother mother mother MOTHER!” shouted the largest into her ear. “Get up! Get up and go! Let’s go running! Let’s go prowling! Let’s find something and hunt it and eat it and do it again! Come on come on come on come ON!” The last comment was coupled with a furious assault on her tail-tip, which placidly whisked itself away from the pounce.
“Shush,” she murmured softly. “Shush. It’s the day now. It’s too warm to hunt. Too bright to hunt. We’d be seen and we’d catch nothing. And worse than nothing is failure. Shush and digest.”
“Bored,” whined the middle cub. “Bored bored bored bored BORED bounce on your side pounce on your ear GOT YOUR EAR hah got it.”
“Yes, yes,” she grunted, and aimlessly pawed the cub away – carefully. “You got it. But you hunt nothing more than ears for now. We must rest.”
“Why must we rest, mother?” complained the largest cub. “Why? We’ve got room. We’ve got room for food. We’ve got room for the fight. Let’s go and get something.”
“Well then,” she said, stretching herself out on her side until her stomach seemed to last for miles, “I suppose it’s time enough to tell you now about the weight. Pay me some attention.”
So they did, and although they were now too big to really nurse they pawed and kneaded and jumped on her belly for old times’ sake as she spoke.
“Before your father, there was another,” she told them. “And he was bigger than your father, and he was tougher than your father, and he was bolder than your father. Handsomer too. And his teeth!”
“So where is he?” asked the largest cub. “Why isn’t he here then?”
“Because one day he grew bored and hungry and out of temper. We’d made no kill that night and he was angry. Fit to roar down the sky. So he went out prowling by himself and he came back full and happy. ‘What did you find?’ I asked him. It was very strange you know, for him to hunt without us. Stranger still to come back with anything. It’s hard to hide with all that mane.”
“’I found a herd of tasty little horned things in a village,’ he told me happily. ‘Goats. All bunched up with nowhere to run. Hairy, but tasty.’”
“That sounds good,” said the middle cub. “Let’s go get some let’s get some of those now I don’t mind hair look see I can bite your hair just fine mwike diff.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” she said sedately. “But no. We will not. And I will explain why. You see, it came to pass that we were slow in killing the next night as well. And though we all had some to eat – and he most of all – he was annoyed with it, and he went and fetched himself another goat. And the next night. And then the very next night he came back near-dawn, and quite vexed.”
“’What is wrong?’ I asked him. I could see that he walked slowly, and his temper was sour.”
“’A man was waiting,’ he said shortly. ‘A man with a stick and a dog and a knife. I broke the stick and I broke the dog and I got that man – ah, so poor next to a goat, hairless but scrawny! – but I think he may have poked my paw.’ And of course I rubbed faces with him and consoled him and so did we all, but he didn’t go out again. I think it hurt his pride. But of course it had hurt more than his pride, for here we all knew – and he wouldn’t admit it, but he most dearly of all – that the weight had set in.”
The cubs yowled confusion and sought battle with her nose. She nudged them into submission.
“What’s weight,” yelled the largest cub ineffectually, swatting at her whiskers. “Why should any of you care about weight? It sounds lousy.”
“The weight,” she said, “lay inside him. In that paw. Such a little cut from such a little tooth, little things, but it dragged at him, and the more he pretended it was not there the greater it grew. By three days in he limped, by a week he hopped, by two he crept, and by three he no longer moved much at all save to haul himself to food. And by four your father came upon us, and came upon him, and when your father took us all away he was hard put to do more than mumble at him. If you look over there at that hill, you can see the trees where we left him.”
The cubs looked. They were short, but they made up for it by hopping.
“I see it! I see it!” said the middle cub. “I can see his bones! Bones! Big bones!”
“Liar,” said the oldest cub. “He’ll be all eaten up by now. Anyway, I don’t see why we shouldn’t go look and eat something and-“
Thump, went her foot, and the oldest cub was pinned for a brisk washing against all protest and struggle. “The lesson,” she instructed them serenely between lashes of her tongue, “is not learned. It is incautious to hunt needlessly with full bellies in the day. And incautiousness leads to bad luck, and bad luck feeds the weight.”
“I d-n’t. H’ve-no-w’i’ht!” proclaimed the oldest cub with as much mouth as was not being licked.
“Lies,” she said, tranquility spreading from her like a sunbeam. “Why, it’s there right now, in each of us, trembling in our chests. Age feeds it. And injury. And by injury, ill-chance and happenstance and carelessness. Take a step wrong, and the weight will pull at you. Be incautious, and the weight will slow you. And come to harm, and the weight will take you. It’s an old world out there, my cubs, and though we fear none that walk it we must respect its rules. Be mindful. Be careful. And should you feel a heaviness in yourself, be doubly so.”
The cubs grumbled at that endlessly, but they were sensible enough to be grudgingly persuaded to be sensible, and so subsided into naps in the shade, one after another.
The smallest cub slept last of all, tucked as near to its mother’s side as its siblings would permit it. It looked out across the wide plains and shivered in the rising heat.
It could put name to the heaviness inside itself now.

Hannah was a morning person. She’d never said so, but she’d felt so for years. Like some flowers, she woke with sunlight. As a child, her mother had told her the crack of dawn was loud enough to wake her. She regularly beat the early bird to the worm.
And now, with the day fading into evening, she’d pulled into the driveway a little too quickly and beaten it to the ground, too.
Hannah pulled herself free of her seatbelt, cursing quietly in time with the angry treetop chattering of the bird’s mate. She’d never liked birds. The scaly-dry legs; the beady eyes; the ruffled, battered shapes of the feathers that covered and protected the pink, naked scrawniness underneath. But like them or not, it didn’t feel right to leave the corpse lying there. It’d give her the creeps, and attract cats, raccoons, or who-knew-whats.
So she took an old spade and ten minutes and pinned the little red bird under a foot and a half of cold, close-packed dirt and gravel.
Then she went to bed.

Dawn rose soft and rounded at the edges but sharp enough to cut; it was just past five when Hannah slid away the covers and yawned herself awake. She glanced out the window and a flash of red sped into her mind. She jumped – was it? No, a cat must’ve dug it – but no, no, another, longer look showed that she was wrong.
It was another bird, another red bird, not hers. The second half of the pair again? She couldn’t tell under all the feathers. It was nestled on the gravel mound down there, staring up at her window, but unhurt. Unwilling to move, mind – even when she started her car, not so much as a blink crossed the thing’s face as its feathers billowed in warm engine exhaust. It was still there when Hannah turned the corner out of sight.

It was still there when her car crunched into the driveway nine hours later, head full of fog and arms full of groceries. For all she could tell it hadn’t moved a muscle. Except its head. Its head followed him, towed by those giant, unblinking eyes, fixed tight in their sockets.
It didn’t scare her, mind you. Didn’t scare her at all.
But she took the stairs two at a time, and closed the screen door to the warm April night.

She woke up in a grey place and found her face pressed to her bedside window, as if her body was already preparing to ask the question at the back of her brain.
Clotted red bled through the morning haze by her car. It was still there. Amazing a cat hadn’t got it.
Breakfast was squishy, tasteless and rushed – anything to get her up and out the door faster, farther away from that endless glare. She approached her car from behind and fumbled a bit too quickly with the handle, swore as she shut the door on her coat, and spent all day at work full of dry lips and fast twitches.
She looked up red birds. Pictures of robins and cardinals and red-winged blackbirds filled her screens.
No. Not those, not those. She had a book at home. She’d find out at home.

The bird was still there that evening. If it weren’t for the tight, tense movements of its neck as it watched her go in, she’d have thought it was dead. It was those eyes. Those wide, bright eyes. They were meant for flies to crawl over, not madness.
Hannah found the book after a long search and a tasteless dinner – it was a dust-chewed old thing that weighed more than a bowling a ball – and found herself watching the bird as it watched her, flipping through pages and chewing at her hair.
Not a waterfowl. Not with that sharp-tipped beak. How had she missed that?
Not a songbird, not with it being bigger than a cat. How had she missed that?
Not a hawk or eagle, not with that drab, crusted-red spatter of colour over its wings and body.
She closed the book and returned it to its tomb, glanced out the window.
Still there. Still watching.
It took her longer to fall asleep that night. There was too much red in her dreams.

The next morning Hannah woke up saw the bird had breakfast got dressed went downstairs forgot her keys found her keys went outside and found it sitting on her car.
For a moment she just stood there in confusion. No wonder she hadn’t found it in the book, she thought. It was bigger than a turkey. How had she missed that? It must’ve escaped from a zoo. Or somewhere.
There was something else, something jangling at the edges of her nerves as time cramped and her eyes slid molasses-slow over the thing from its mad eyes to its long, scaly legs, claw-tipped, clutching. Tufts of fur and red matted them, calico and grey and white and
Oh, she thought. So the cats did find it. And she took a small step back when she knew this, and as she did that the bird let out a shriek that rattled the windows and launched at her.
It was so fast, so fast. Barely a blink and now wings were around her, feathers in her mouth, cold grips at her shoulders and a sharp stabbing pain in her scalp and an all-engulfing scream so loud that she couldn’t tell if it was her or the bird. Her arms were useless flapping things pinned down and trailing but her legs were thundering up her steps and it wobbled for a second, just a second and that was enough, just enough for her to shed her skin and blunder through the door, coatless and crying.
Blood was in her eyes. Germs too, probably. And her phone was on the porch, in her pocket. And just as she thought that, she heard the scrabble and thud and clank of what only yesterday she would’ve called a raccoon on the roof.
She locked the back door and all the windows before she went to her computer and saw the flash of red at the corner of her eye, the screen.
No connection.
The line was out.

It was strange to see morning this way, not from a bed as a fresh start but as a change in the air, a glow that grey in the sky by inches.
Hannah wasn’t sure she liked it. She wasn’t sure of anything by now. And she couldn’t see the bird.
Empty grey gravel in the driveway. A spade-width, maybe a little more. She pictured her shovel, pictured the little dead thing she’d buried, pictured the animal that had torn at her head.
How?
She looked and looked and saw no answers, and no bird, and then she thought of her coat and her phone. Maybe it was too far to her car, but if it was still on the porch…
It was. Top of the steps, a stride and a half from the door at most, and mostly undamaged beyond twin tufts of down lining at the shoulders, blowing in the cool air like wings.
Hannah stood with her hand on the door, screaming at herself to take action. And when that didn’t work she swore at herself aloud, and when that didn’t work she thought of how she’d never get help without leaving the damned house anyways, and when that didn’t work and she finally had to admit that the hairs on the back of her neck weren’t coming down she gave in and went upstairs and fetched the very small mirror from her cosmetics kit and held against the just-opened crack of the door, biting her lip as it tilted along the side of the house from sky to trees to paint to brick.
To red, rust, blood red. And an eye.
She dropped the mirror. It broke against the porch with a soft crack and something leaped past the window in a feathered blur at eye-height.
That night Hannah stayed up and counted cans in the kitchen until the early morning faded away her fingers. Sooner or later, someone would come. Sooner or later. She was grounded, and she was bleeding, but she was alive.

She woke to the sound of splintering wood and silence.
Eyes widened, fingers tightening on cold metal, small and hard and the only weapon to hand. Canned chicken. Who would eat canned chicken? From the back of the cupboard, from school?
Standing up took an eternity of dying muscles and groaning floorboards, ears wide for anything from the front hall.
Quiet. The kind of quiet that watches you.
Three awful, noisy steps to the knife drawer. A long, slow creak and a half-foot of precious, stainless steel.
Quiet. Maliciously, perfectly quiet.
And then, wishing in every bone and muscle and nerve that she still had her mirror, Hannah leaned around the corner.
Early light seeped through the front door. Its window was smashed. Its panels bulged. Its rubbing lining spilled onto the carpet like dried intestines. But it stood.
She sighed with the sob of the death row paroled, cheek to the wall, and turned around to see the rust-red fade to light crimson under the morning sun as it stood in her kitchen, head cocked, eyes mad. The feathers ruffled in the breeze from the gaping back door behind it, splinters still stuck in its scaly three-toed feet. It was taller than she was, and smelled of mist and must. Dew sparkled on its claws, the feathers pluming its stiff tail, the teeth in its just-open muzzle as it peered at her.
And then it leaped.

They arrived two days later and found it empty and torn and abandoned. And in all the fuss over what they found in the kitchen, barely any notice was taken of the little pit in the driveway, barely wider than a spade. A tiny, bright red feather in it spoke of a lost songbird.
Maybe a cat got it, they said, and returned to the business of the strange prints by the back door.
And the soft dawn wind plucked at the feather and carried it away over the trees and through the mist into the early morning of the world.

The warrior-queen stumbled.
It was only a light tremble, a waver in her arm, a quick spin of her arms for balance, but it magnified itself as it worked its way up her body and the blade of her long, shining sword dipped noticeably, which gave Klalmxxydor just enough to bite it off along with a third of her right arm.
She dropped, cursing quietly and ferociously, legs kicking away the smouldering skull of her bodyguard to clatter into some corner of the burned husk that was her throneroom. Her blood was pouring but her eyes were blazing, and as she slumped back against the seared stone of her throne itself she gave him the finger with her spare hand.
Klalmxxydor paused mid-chew and carefully inclined all five-foot-eleven-inches of his skull just a fraction of an inch downward, teeth bared in a mockery even recognizable to humans.
The spark in her face turned cold, but not with death, and she spat something at him in high-pitched gobbledegook.
“M’lady?” he inquired snidely as his claws drew back.
To his surprise she laughed – blood bubbled and it cut off quickly – and then repeated herself, this time in old saurish, accent harsh and thudding.
“May you become as insufferable to yourself as you are to me at this moment, lizard,” she said. And then she smiled, and then she spat.
And then she fell over as Klalmxxydor’s foreclaws penetrated her torso from four angles at once.

The city was burning brightly under the cool crisp evening as he stepped free from the burning rubble of the palace, the city sprawled below like a dead deer just beginning to become temptingly bloated with putrid aromas. Klalmxxydor breathed in soot and screams like a good wine and shook himself, relishing the clank of twenty thousand scales as they slid up and down his body. Then he stretched his wings and…
…and…
If he’d possessed the facial muscles for it, he’d have frowned. His wings…
He craned his neck to stare back over the length of his own body. Yes, there it was, all the same as he’d left it. Upward of seventy feet long, a third of that his tail, plated in armour even a charged knight armed with a lance couldn’t hope to penetrate, standing on four legs strong enough to support a castle and lithe enough to swat gnats out of the sky, with his two broad wings the size of mainsails just now unfurling to catch the sunset air and-
The unfrown would’ve deepened here as his mind caught up. And. And not moved at all.
Klalmxxydor shook his head three times, then snarled to himself. He scanned the sky for reassurance and caught sight of a bird fleeing the flames – a little pigeon.
There, there was his proof.
He looked back up at his own wings, his own body. It was ridiculous. It was moronic. But it was undeniable.
He was just too damned big to fly. He’d need wings big enough to cover half the city just to glide, and the muscles to drive them would be large enough to triple his torso’s width and breadth.
An ill-tempered hiss escaped Klalmxxydor as he stomped inelegantly down the lanes of the burning city, torching fleeing peasantry and merchants alike to lighten his bad mood. It wasn’t every day he got to consume royalty, and now here he was having to walk home owing to the tragic unrealities of his own physical form. There was simply no fun to be had.

Walking was unusual and tiring both, one feeding the other, and unusual was halfway home when he felt a great and ferocious trembling in his gut. Oh, he’d eaten his share of king and queen on his little expedition, but that was a lean meal, and mostly armour – especially the queen. The woman had practically been an armoury with legs.
Still, luck was with him yet. A deer lay in the copse just ahead, paralyzed with fear of the reptile and the faint and stupid hope that its nose wasn’t working properly or its vision clouded.
He breathed in air, and breathed out heat. The air ahead of the dragon turned red and seared itself into white and blue and beyond, shimmering into a heat so pure that it caught fire in self-defence. The copse withered from the temperature just a split instant before the flames erupted from it, the deer screamed like a knight and fell still, and as the fire danced and whirled over the ground around him all that Klalmxxydor could think of was how tremendously ridiculous the whole thing was.
Fire. Not volatile chemicals such as a beetle might spray, not a spark such as might snap from the impact of flint and steel, but pure heat. And produced from his gullet, which was scarcely the most scarred and durable portion of any creature’s anatomy.
What, by cinders, was THAT meant to be?
And why the smoke that issued from his nostrils? What was he burning in there? His own organs? His last meal? If it came from his stomach it could very well be and no wonder he was hungry. If it came from his lungs… then how? How had he not seared his own breath away?
No. He would not be party to this farce. Not anymore. People would sneer at him.
The deer tasted like ashes in his mouth. This was still better than the third through fourth deer, which simply ran away.

Home arrived at dusk, a broken mound of stone and charred trees that had once been a respectable hillside. Klalmxxydor was so tired from walking that he didn’t even bother to round upon the small party of vengeful knights ineptly tailing him some half-mile back. They’d wait ‘till morning, and then he’d finally get some triple-cursed food for breakfast.
Right now all he wanted was sleep.
The bed of Klalmxxydor was gold and gilt, silver and steel, and it was piled in drifts deep enough to nestle his head and broad enough to cradle his body. He’d amassed it since he was barely big enough to spark, and by all rights it should’ve expanded slightly today but he couldn’t carry things and walk at the same time so he hadn’t. What a waste of a long trip. Next time he’d…
Well. He supposed he’d just have to walk AGAIN. But be more prepared next time.
Klalmxxydor sighed and turned himself over in his wealth and shut his eyes and felt the coins drip down his forehead and became so suddenly furious that he nearly breathed fire again in spite of himself.
He was seventy feet long and thirty feet tall and eighteen feet broad even if a third of that was tail and he was lying quite comfortably – not so comfortably now, stiff with ire as he was – on a bed of gold at least twice his diameter when curled and deep enough that he did not simply grind through it into the floor when shifting.
That was probably half as much gold as had ever existed anywhere already, just there in his bed. Even if half or more was silver. And.
And.
Klalmxxydor’s eye twitched uncontrollably.
That was implausible.

The treasury was much smaller now; half its wealth scraped and crushed and mangled into the cracks in the floor so deep that Klalmxxydor’s great thick claws could not get at it. It was not gone, but it was at least out of sight and therefore mind and it soothed him. There. Plausibility.
He sighed and rearranged his wings, curled himself up around his single, tiny treasure-heap, rested his head on his legs and-
Icy dread crept up his spine. That was it. That was it. That was what had been bothering him all along.
No wonder he had nearly gone mad today, with such an atrocity lying underneath his very nose – literally – all this time.
Damnable dukes of ash and smoke, how had he MISSED it? His legs – four of them. His wings – two of them.
SIX limbs? What in the name of all that crackled was that meant to BE? A hawk crossed into a cat? An ant grown scaled? Six limbs. SIX LIMBS!
He’d have to fix that.

It was very painful, lying on his belly with the stumps tucked raw against the ground, but Klalmxxydor bore it in good humour. At last, at long last that filthy uncertainty had drained from his mind. And now he was as he always should have been. Plausible.
He sighed with contentment, and as he noticed this it was as if his happiness had pumped itself out of his lungs with that very breath.
How is it, he thought to himself, that a seventy-foot, narrow-chested body covered in heavy armour does not collapse its lungs under its own mass?

The knights waited for dawn, passed the night coating their faces with the ashes of their homeland and quietly wishing one another goodbye. As the day broke their swords unsheathed and their faces set and they descended, one by one, into the great smoke-fogged pit of the dragon’s lair.
They nearly stumbled over the body.

Ed stood up and rubbed his great big gnawing flapping groaning empty belly-sack and he knew that he was hungry.
Again.

So he walked down down down all the long, long way to his car, his blessed car, and he put wheels under him and a roof over him and he took himself all the way down in a short tight clip to a place where he could eat his fill.

“I will have the pizza,” he told the waiter. “The pizazz. This is necessary.”
The waiter knew Ed and knew his appetites and he nodded and went to the kitchen and they both waited then.
Ed looked out the window and checked cars. All of them had people in them, but he couldn’t see them. He counted five red cars and a blue car and one hundred silver cars and a green car. The green annoyed him, and he itched all over. It must be his allergies. He needed food and fast or all the aches and scratches and biting nags of life would catch up and he’d be flat on the floor and bubbling hot piping steaming.

The pizza came.
It was red like blood and golden like pyrite and brown like a buffalo’s disjointed haunch and all the colours were in their specific purposeful places and he loved them dearly. It was cut neatly into ten slices. Ten was a good number. Basal. Like a spine. It was too hot to handle so he used a fork and knife and then there his plate was full and the pan was already cooling down. Time to eat.

The forkful was good. All the colours and such pretty patterns. It had tomatoes from Central America and it had cheese made from cows from North Africa and it had a bread ground from grains that had sprouted their roots in the Near and Middle East. It was topped with slices of pig from Eurasia seasoned with salt scraped from North American rocks and spices that had grown in America, the Mediterranean, and South and Southeast Asia. The pan was stainless steel and had been made in Spain using the contents of rocks from Australia and South Africa, and power from uranium that had been found in Canada.
Ed ate it. He bit the fork and damnit that hurt.
Then he took another.

Nine slices down and half to go and oh man Ed was full and his belly was groaning a different tune now. One half. One half. One half and it tasted so good but he was so sick of it but come on one half. Right there. You can do it, Ed. You can do it. You don’t want to put it off for later later’s later and right now you want it. Come on Ed. Go get ‘em Ed. Good for you, Ed. Why stop now, Ed? Who would?
Ed ate it. And he bit the fork again and oh MAN that hurt.
He tipped the waiter. It was short, but his teeth ached.

Home came home and oh the walk from the car was a killer his legs ached his belly wobbled his head thundered to the tune of the singing molars in his mandibles and maxillae. He could barely make it up the stairs his breath was waving wildly he put a hand on his knee for support he put a hand on the stoop for support he crawled in head-first through his door like a dog panting a bit a lot oh that’s a wheeze oh

Thud.

No that wasn’t good. That wasn’t good at all. How long had Ed been lying there on his side with his sides aching and splitting and looking up at the golden yellow light on his ceiling through his red eyes fuelled with bulbs that had been made somewhere by someone with power from who knew and feeling himself begin to crisp over at the edges and bubble.
Man, his teeth ached.
Ed laid back and hummed and that didn’t help.
They really ached bad. He shouldn’t have had that one last piece. He should’ve ordered seconds.

I just want you to know that I didn’t really mean anything of it, right? Anything bad, I mean. You know?

So I was there and I was here and I was also most places. It’s an old habit, right? Easier to do that focus, let me tell you. But I was bored and by and by I started snooping around and looking at stuff. Rocks. Trees. A little fuzzy thing making little weebly noises under a broken tree.
Y’know. Stuff.
So I went down to that tree and because I was bored I picked it up and chucked it. And I said “Hey you! Go on and get up, huh? Why don’t you move yourself now, hmm?”
But it just sat there making weebly noises and I admit this did pain me some because I went to
Some Effort
for its benefit.
So I poked it for a while until it got more annoyed than scared and it tried to bite me well that didn’t work at all let me say to you. “Good job!” I said. “Now what’s eating ya, eh?”
“Not enough trees,” it mumbled and whimpered (and there was a bit of pout in there, I hate to say). “No more trees! The forests are all patchy and the plains are all bakey and the sky is on and off and on again with the rain year after year and it is SO HARD to find fruit oh no oh woe is us so hungry so hungry so hungry oh no no no.”
Now I am a compassionate person or whatever and I was moved truly deeply by this request, especially since the thing was depressed at the world rather than itself. That’s the sort of foresight that was rare in those days.
“C’mon, hey?” I told it. “Lemme show you a trick.”
So I took its paw and I pointed at the sky and we followed the circling birds ‘till we found the least-delicious parts of a big hairy thing that had run into something that wasn’t as big or hairy but sure as hell had a lot more pointy bits.
“Ick,” said the thing.
“Don’t give me ick now,” I admonished it. “You eat lizards. You eat bugs.”
“But not something this big!” But it was licking its little lips and I could see the so hungry so hungry turning around inside that little melon.
“Well,” I said, and I stretched myself real casual and started to walk off, “first times, eh? Go for it.”
So I left it there. Because I didn’t want to get all clingy, right? Nobody wants that.

Now by and by I got bored again which is my own fault because really there’s no excuse for that sort of behavior in a world as big and bold and bald as this one that we’re all in. But I did. So sue me.
So I started paying attention to little things and hey now WOAH what did I see but a really big fuzzy thing!
Well, sort of fuzzy. It was pretty bald these days, and it was one big monkey now. And it was walking all funny, up-and-down like a toy soldier.
“Heya,” I said to it (oh it jumped alright). “How’s you going?”
“Hungry,” it muttered to itself.
“Again?”
It was kicking at the dirt with its big, stubby toes. That looked pretty satisfying so I joined in and between the two of us we raised quite a damned dust cloud before we got tired and flopped over on our backs to stare at the sun.
“Look,” I said. “You know how to feed yourself, right? Go find a dead thing.”
“But they’re so gristly,” it whined. What a big, unattractive whine. It was real impressive. Must’ve been because of that nice new nose it had on its face. No little pick-pocked noseholes right into the skull, oh no me no. This thing had sinuses upon sinuses. “And they’re cold! And the bones have all the marrow cracked out and it makes me mad enough to split flint!”
Which it did. It picked up a flint and it smacked it into another flint and BAM razors fly everywhere hoo-wee that’s how I got this little scar right here. Above my ear.
“Sorry,” it said.
“All good,” I told it. “You’ve given me an idea and I’m gonna give it back. C’mere, huh?”
Well it was nervous but I took its hand and I put the flint in that hand and with my OTHER hand I gripped up that nice fine dustcloud we’d kicked up. Then we went on and went roamaround, walkdown, all the way through the valley until we up and surprised a little family of gazelles.
“Stick ‘em,” I said. And I made that flint hand into a fist and pointed it at the nearest gazelle, which was running the wrong way right into our faces.
Splash, piss-hot on the dust. What a pretty mess of red that made!
“Now that’s a trick I think you’ll say, yeah?” I said.
“Yeah,” agreed the monkey.
It hit the gazelle again. Then again. And again. And at some point I got bored and wandered off, but I had faith it’d work out. Right? I mean, it was already trying to carve out the meaty parts to carry ‘em back home, in case someone nosy with big teeth showed up. That’s foresight, and that was rare in those days.

Things got funny after that. I’d left that place and those monkeys alone for five minutes and WHAM BAM I nearly walked into them again! This time I wasn’t even paying attention you know I was just sort of killing time and unwinding and woosh bang slam wham they’re up my nose and through my face.
“Hey you!” I said. “What’re you doing here? Here’s a long way from there. There was back there. Where I met you before. You remember, right?”
It poked me in a pretty rude way with its stick, and I saw it’d stuck flint on it. Hoo-man, that’s clever. That’s what I said, that’s what I told it. “Hoo-man! That’s clever.” What a good name, too. Waaaayy better than monkey. Unless you’re a monkey.
“Yeah, sure, right, yeah,” said the hoo-man. “I’m clever. We’re all clever. And you know what being clever means, right?”
“Getting lazy,” I said.
“Damn straight. I’m so lazy I put my flint on a stick, and I made a springy thingy to throw those sticks even farther. I’m so lazy I made a tent so I wouldn’t have to dry my clothes. I’m so lazy I made a pelt off’ve my lunch instead of evolving one when it got nippy.”
“That’s some fine lazy, yeah,” I agreed. I was a little proud. And a little jealous. But mostly a little proud I think. “So what’s wrong?”
“Thing is,” it said slowly, “I think I’m too lazy to keep moving. It’s nice right here. Got some good eats. But y’know, you get bored just standing around. And that means kids. And that means less eats. And then you’ve gotta move. Sucks, right?”
“Yeah, right,” I said. And I was feeling generous and genius and I decided to share the latter by the former like SO and I said “c’mere, watch this.”
So it followed me and it watched as I did this: yanked some seeds off some real good eats and chucked them in the dirt and stomped dirt on them and POW WHAM BOOM KERBLEWY up POPPED a big old whack of good eats right fresh as roses.
I passed the hoo-man a few more handfuls of the seeds. “Get some water on there,” I said. “And then wait a while. And then have yourself some good eats and your kids too and don’t worry too much about having to move.” And so I walked off. Didn’t want to get too clingy.
Did glance back over my shoulder though and hey I saw that it was already setting up a few more of those seed-beds. All in a row, nice and tidy. So I figured it’d work out, with that sort of foresight. It was rare those days.

Now here’s where it gets funny: I looked back twice.
First time I saw what I told you I saw when I saw hey that it was already setting up a few more of those seed-beds. All in a row, nice and tidy.
Like that.
Second time was just right after that and WOAAAH all of a sudden there’s those hoo-mans everywhere and all over the place and man alive they are hungry, hungry, hungry. Strangest thing I ever saw anywhere. How’d that happen?
“Now what did you go and do now, you silly things of mine?” I asked them.
“Hungry, hungry, hungry, hungry, hungry, hungry, no no oh no we’re hungry,” they groaned.
I looked around and I could sort of get why. I mean, they must have gotten REALLY bored with all those good eats because woah, there were an awful lot of them. Not too many to feed yet, but they were getting there and to be honest a lot of them were sort of pigs and were really hogging the good eats. Just rude, really.
But I felt a bit bad, too. I mean, it wasn’t my fault what they did with my advice. Can’t blame someone for just giving advice. Not my fault. And I only looked back a moment later. And I looked back. And so it wasn’t my fault at all.
But still… man, so many of them. “Hungry, hungry, hungry,” they were all saying.
“I can see that,” I said. “Alright. Let’s try something here.”
So I took up a big handful of nitrogen, and I took up a big handful of machinery driven by petroleum-derived energy, and I took up a big handful of pesticide. And I sort of smeared it all together and I threw it all over the place where all those good eats were growing. WHAM. BLAM. WOOSH. Up comes sprouting ninety thousand million tonnes and tons and kilopounds of good eats.
“Dig in,” I said.
And lo and behold they pulled out their combine harvesters and their oil rigs and their forks and they did just that as I walked off.

That was just a moment ago, and I’m a bit scared to turn ‘round and look.

Still, I’m sure it’ll work out. Right?
I mean, with foresight.
But that’s rare these days.

A playground. Some slides and a swing and a pit with more sand than glass in because the high school’s on the other side of town and a jungle gym with monkey bars that’s claimed more young lives than dengue fever.
Some shoes. They’re sneakers that scuff at every step, with the heel running down and the tongue curling up and a less-than-friendly ceasefire brought on by the threat of the Velcro coming apart at the seams.
Negotiating the space between those two objects was Jen. She’d doing pretty good that day and had only scabbed her knee three times when a slightly larger kid (there were lots of those) had bumped her out of the way because that was his favourite swing so tough luck.
So Jen left the playground and wandered around the scabby stone and crud at the edge of the school where the grass sulked and the trees turned up their noses and she kicked little rocks back and forth, which was strangely satisfying to her even if they were much too small and slender to be called proper rocks. Flakes, more like.
Kick, fwik. Kick, fwik. Kick, fwik. Kick fwik thump ouch.
“Sorry,” said Jen.
“You aren’t,” said the irritable-looking woman. She was short and grey and dusty and aiding in all of those things were the two big sacks of stones she had slung over her back. A band ran from them across her forehead, stretching the weight into her spine. “You really aren’t.”
Jen shrugged.
“Kids,” the woman muttered. She turned around and continued doing what she was doing. Jen was bored enough to get interested in this, and said so.
“I’m picking up flint,” she snapped. “Now bug off, you’re standing on it.”
“What’s flint?”
“This.” The stone Jen had kicked was returned to her, pointy-end first.
“It’s a rock.”
“Yeah, smart kid. You know a rock when you see one.”
Jen squinted at her. “You’re being sarcastic. That’s original.”
“Smart-assed kid.”
“Why’re you picking up flint?”
“Because SOMEONE’s got to do it. Certainly not ‘cause I like it. My back is killing me.”
Jen looked at her back. It reminded her of her great-grandmother’s: parts of it were fighting over which direction to grow in.
“Could you stop?”
“Just said: someone has to do it.”
“I’m bored. I’ll do it.”
The irritable-looking woman turned back around to face Jen and hummed to herself a bit as she thought.
“Sure,” she said. “Why the hell not?” And she dropped the bags in the dirt – bam – just like that – bam – and she dusted the rock dust off her palms and started walking towards the road, still-hunched.
“What do I do with them?” called Jen.
“Just wedge ‘em somewhere. And don’t stop.”
And with that, she was gone.

That was an exciting sort of recess.
The next day, it was a way to kill time during recess.
The day after that, it was a chore, and one without a clear end. There was a lot of flint up in those cliffs around the edge of town. A lot of it. And Jen had already gotten yelled at by her mom for putting her clothes in the washing machine without emptying her pockets of flint first.
“This house,” she said, “is no place for rocks.”
“Flint.”
“It’s a rock.”
So by the fourth day Jen wandered at the very edge of the playground looking at the entirely empty swingset in front of her and kicking whatever rocks came nearest to her shoe.
“That’s my favourite swing,” said a slightly larger kid. “Don’t take it.”
“I’m busy,” she said. “Busy picking up flint.”
“What’s flint?”
Jen kicked some at her.
“That’s a rock.”
“Wow, so smart.”
“That’s sarcasm and that’s rude. And that’s BORING. Why are you picking up boring rocks, are you boring? A baby could pick up rocks.”
“I’m picking up the right kind of rocks and I’m picking them up fast and I have to find them,” said Jen. “It’s a job. A grownup told me I had to do it for them, and I am. A big fat stupid baby couldn’t do it.”
The slightly larger kid gave her a look at this. “It’s easy.”
“Is not.”
“I’ll prove it.”
“Will not.”
And for the rest of recess they both failed to prove it.
The next day they tried harder, and some of the other kids came over to check it out.
The day after that the swings were empty, and by the end of the week the slide followed suit. The jungle gym was last of all.
Jen was still the best at picking up fling. She had practice, after all. And for a while there was a sort of rhythm and peace to the class that hadn’t existed before, aside from the odd bit of griping over who reached for what first and a single quickly-cancelled gravel fight.
This state of affairs did not go unnoticed for long.

Your child has been sent home from school because they refused to remove the rocks from their desk.
Your child has been sent home from school because they refused to remove the rocks from their locker.
Your child has been sent home from school because they refused to stop flicking small rocks from their desk at the class turtle.
Your child has been sent home from school because they are overly fixated on rocks and neglected the lesson to play with rocks they had hidden inside their desk.
Etc. Etc. Etc.
And the natural conclusion was reached fairly rapidly after this, wherein a large chain-mesh fence was erected around the playground. Sand, glass, slides and swings on one side (plus kids); flint on the other (minus kids). Neat and tidy and addition simple enough for anyone.
Most of them got over it. Jen wouldn’t stop yelling for days. By next week it was old, old news. Just like the flint. Which became new news the week AFTER that, when it came up through the basement of Jen’s house.
“Well,” said Jen’s mother, looking up at the sheer-sided pinnacle that had erupted through their living room and up past their roof. “That’s a thing you don’t see every day except today.” She looked to her daughter. “I DID say this house was no place for rocks, you know.”
“It’s flint.”
“It’s a rock. Don’t be pedantic.”
“Sorrrr—eee.”
They looked around the neighbourhood.
“Well,” said Jen’s mother, “at least we won’t stick out.”

What a mess. Flint spires rocketing up from under your floorboards. Flint blowing in drifts of chips and bits across the highway and causing pileups. The sanitation, postal, fire, police, and legal departments were all mobilized but their cars kept hitting flint jutting through the asphalt streets and their cell phones couldn’t get decent reception because all the towers had been battered by airblown flint and half the town had no internet because of flint eruptions knocking down telephone poles. Flint was everywhere all the time now: clogging the taps and the drains and the sewers and making click-clack-SMAK noises on the windows at night when the wind got frisky.
After a few days the sound on Jen’s window started swearing at her too, and she popped it open.
“You SAID you’d do it for me,” said the irritable-looking woman, who besides looking more furious than not now also had a pretty good tan.
“I did,” said Jen defensively. “I did a real good job. It’s just that everyone told me to stop. And they put a fence up, anyways.”
“Shiiiiiiiiiiii. Tuh,” enunciated the woman with unnecessary force and spit. “Damnit kid, why did I listen to you?”
“Why did I listen to YOU?” asked Jen.
The woman waved a hand. “You’re little, you’ll listen to anyone. Now follow me.”

So they walked out to the schoolyard, the woman and Jen. They ran into rough spots a few times but the woman would just reach out and pick up the flint and slip it into a little purse she was holding.
“Found it while I was out,” she said. “Easier on the back.”
Jen thought it was a bit silly to put ten-ton slabs of flint into a purse that could barely hold a can of tuna, but it seemed to be working okay so she just nodded.
By and again and by and by they came down to the schoolyard, and oh man was that place a mess. A big sherd had come up at big speed. The swingsets were okay but most of the sand was missing and the slide had been shot into Quebec. The flint cliffs loomed over it, glowering like fat tabbies.
“Now look what you’ve fucked up,” said the woman to Jen.
“Language.”
“Now look what you’ve screwed up,” said the woman to Jen in an overly patient voice. Then, absently, “you fucker.” She waved a hand at the playground. “I mean, SHIT. All you had to do was pick it up, right? I told you that, right? Not so hard, right?”
“I said I was sorry.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Sorry.”
“That doesn’t count, it’s too late.” She scratched herself a bit and hummed some more.
Jen kicked at a rock. It seemed to move more sullenly than usual, and she resented it for it. Stupid rocks. Flint. Whatever.
“Right,” said the woman. “That’s it. C’mere.”
Jen c’mered before she thought to ask, and was picked up and thrown like a discus. When the world stopped spinning she was sitting on top of the cliff with one leg and both arms and all of her chin bar the edge, the rest was sort of flailing around in midair.
“You good?”
“I’m good. What do I do?”
The woman pointed down at her foot. “Kick.”
So Jen looked down at her foot somewhere inside the sneaker and she looked at the flint cliff and she looked at the playground the cliff had filled with its spare flint and she felt a lot of glowing, red-spicy pepper bubbling up through her body in all the veins and organs and limbs which she immediately put into work running her right leg as firmly as she could swing it.
whack
“This”
Whack
“Is”
WHACK
“No”
WHACK!
“PLACEFORROCKS!”
And with that one last WHACK!! still wobbling through it, the cliff gave up, gave in, and chipped off at full speed, shooting over the town a little faster than a speeding car and startling a lot of birds.
All that was left behind by the time anyone else got there were flakes.

Jen was still pretty dizzy when the woman found her later, tangled in a tree just outside of town.
“Good job,” she said. “You fucker,” she added.
“Language,” said Jen. Then she threw up.
The woman waited politely until she was finished.
“Ikpth,” said Jen.
“Yeah, yeah. Tough life. Look, your recovery was good, kid, but your work ethic is crap. Go to school, keep your head down, graduate, okay? And learn a little fuckin’ perseverance.” She reached out, grabbed Jen’s hand, and shook it before Jen could muster the hand-eye coordination to stop. “Look me up when you’re out and about and have your head in one piece, and we’ll see what we can do.”
And she slung her purse over her shoulder and walked off towards the road.

Jen was halfway home before she looked at her palm again, to see what was making it sting.
It was a little flint flake. With a sneaker-print smacked right into it.