jamieproctor.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OUT OUT OUT OUT hungry OUT hungry OUT hungry

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

FEED
out out FEED
hungry HUNGRY
OUT OUT OUT

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

DO

NOT

CAREFEED

OUT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m very sure of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.