jamieproctor.ca

Is that everyone? Everybody? Yeah, you sure? Okay. Okay then. All right.
We ready? Okay, starting now. Everybody simmer down.

Right. Herein is the one-hundred-and-fourth anniversary of the Notting family thanksgiving banquet. May it be the last one for many reasons, particularly so that none of us have to eat Marcellia’s sweet pota – OW. It was a joke, Marcie! A JOKE! Jesus.
Right, where was I? Oh yeah. Thanks. Thanks-giving. The time of year for that, yeah? So everybody buckle up, hunch your shoulders in that little awkward public shuffle we all use for this sort of thing, and get a head start on thanking. Maybe you’ll finish before I’m done and can start eating first, if the kids don’t murder you for it.
Okay. All together now…

On this day, we are thankful for the meal that lies before us.
We are thankful for Debbie’s roasted turkey and that she did not attempt to shape it into a turducken.
We are thankful for Bruce’s glorious roasted potatoes and the red gravy that they are inevitably served with.
We are thankful for the sharp knives with the wooden handles that Patricia has placed at every table, positioned after the dessert forks for their intended use in the natural order of things.
We are thankful for the millennial ragewood tree that is our table. It stood for five thousand six hundred and ninety-nine centuries, and counting the rings of its trunk consumed a microscope and sixteen sets of eyeballs. Brave eyeballs, each and all.
We are thankful for Marcellia’s sweet potash. Bitter, mixed with treacle syrup, flowers, and harsh language. As it should be. So long as none of us have to OW quit it JESUS. Fine. Fine.

That’s the meal, all as it should be. But more than that, we are thankful for those bonds of family that have brought us all here today, to be confirmed in all that has passed by and changed over the year, yet has let what we are together remain fundamentally the same.
We are thankful for Vicky’s new baby boy Sam, who has his mother’s eyes and luckily enough lacks his father’s nose.
We are thankful for the remarriage – the sixth – of Barbara, to Joseph. May he be remembered fondly, and be sure to leave some incense with him before his time comes.
We are thankful for the adorable German shepherd puppy that Cynthia and Mike brought with them. It is wide awake and already knows all of its first words. Ask it about them later, but for the love of everything don’t listen too closely.
We are thankful for the house on the hill, freshly constructed for Becky and Lizabeth by the labour and skill of Aiden, Betty, and Agamemnon. May it stand for centuries, and linger much longer, and whisper forever.
Most notably and bittersweetly, we are thankful for the relatively painless and smooth passage from this world of Harrison Sweetwater Notting, our venerable patriarch and grandfather to all of us. Though he never touched a one of us with his hands, the memories of his passing will remain with all of us whom he did not chose to obliterate in its tumult. Those of you who can’t remember him, well, just be thankful you still have a brain left to remember with.

It’s been a pretty good year. Well, aside from Harrison. And we’re all thankful for it now, right? Right. But there’s more than that to be thankful for. It’s been a big year, one bigger than just our little cozy family, and we owe thanks to it to. No man is an island, and we’re as much thankful for what the world’s been up to as to what we’ve done on our own.
We are thankful for the lack of overt natural disasters this passing year, particularly those in our own little corner of the planet.
We are thankful for the recent medical breakthroughs into the treatment of deadly and life-threatening diseases that give hope to so many.
We are thankful for the great signs of the blue sky that have passed us all summer long, waving from their heights on tendrils of pillared whiteness. They’ve brought good weather, fair warnings, and foul portents, bless ‘em.
We are thankful for the continually increasing acidity of the oceans that drains the lights from the reefs and promises to silence the chatter of the living waves into a simple slosh of water and jellyfish.
We are thankful for the construction of the dam three states over, a project that Jared was lucky enough to work on. Its groaning underguts squeal words of wisdom to those that can hear, and it will remain wise and nonsapient for at least a generation. Use it before we lose it, people.
Most providentially of all, we are mightily thankful for the ongoing failure of any space agencies, public or private, to go and poke about the subsurface of the moon. Seriously, we’re batting a hundred here people. Just pray hard that the luck continues, or fuck only knows what’ll happen, and yes Louise I DID say that in front of the kids, they should know how important this shit is. You want your grandkids to be unprepared when NASA drops a rover right into the tombs? When some enterprising Neil Armstrong brings back the Sceptre of sCC!CCCn!DS and lets all the anthropologists of the world find out how wrong they are? Huh?
Look, let’s not get into it, okay? We’ll talk about this after if you’re all so solid about it. Fine! Fine! It’s not as if it were politics….

…Right. So. Last but definitely not least, we’re going to give thanks to the things that are, and that always have been. To the familiarity in our lives that might be taken for granted but damned well should be appreciated as we do so.
We are thankful for the warmth of the sun on our skin, as we sit outside right now.
We are thankful for the calm breezes that blow and keep that warm sun from searing us to a salmon pink, although I see Elliot’s beaten it to the punch there – aww, don’t be shy. You inherited that from your daddy – blame him!
We are thankful for the aquifers that underlie our land and eclipse the greatest of lakes, that drain themselves dry daily to smooth your innards and quell the violence of our digestions and appetites. ALL our appetites.
We are thankful for the trees that are kept at bay through fire, fear, and sharp words. Be sure to keep your tongues whittled fine, because the first two never age but you can lose the edges off’ve words if you’re careless with them.
We are thankful for the lazy eyes with which men and women see the world, that the observant are truly rewarded. Even my brother Dale here, who I know for a fact was seventeen before he whittled his first prayer-stumps. Ohhh Dale, careful there, you saw how much trouble I got in just for one little f-bomb, you really want to go pointing those everywhere? Yeah, siddown, don’t worry everyone, almost done.
We are thankful for the perspicuous spices that reside in our crops and trickle through our xylems, rich and ruddy. Without them we’d be no better than roots or mushrooms or apes for goodness’ sake.
We are thankful that others are not, for without their bleak humours the air would be thick and choking.
We are thankful for the thin crust between us and history, where half a mile down can take you five billion years.
We are thankful that there are thanks to be given and that that which takes them does not take it all.
Aaaaaaaa-MEN!
Now!
Who’s up for some turkey?

The caterpillar was a very little thing, but it spoke loudly; so very loudly without a word needing to be said.
Here, said its sides. Look at me. I bristle with orange and black. Touch me not, these colours say no to food. I am bitter, I am bad to the tongue and the cheek and the chew. Leave me be. Ten thousand thousand generations of my kind were eaten, ten thousand thousand generations of yours learned this lesson, learned my colours, learned my words. Touch me not, eat me not, harm me not.
It was a little greasy smear on the smooth sunny stone that made the door-step of Monni’s home, its sides turned dark and orange in death. This was why her chair was turned away from the door this morning. She didn’t want to look at such things while she made pots.
Turn, turn, turn. A little wooden table with a little flat plate on it. Turn, turn, turn. A blob of clay, growing up and up and up, inch by inch under her fingers.
Needs a bit more water. There.
Turn, turn turn away the minutes. It’s not as big a job as it looks, but the time will still fly. Even Monni couldn’t shape a pot in a second. Not even Monni, whose jars and cups and bowls and plates outlived the buildings they were kept in, come fire or tumbledown. Not even Monni, whose little squiggly mark was scribbled across the bottom of almost every container for miles around. Not even Monni.
She enjoyed her job too much to rush it.
Turn, turn, turned out fine. From bits and pieces came a jar.
Now for the lid.
BOOM came the door, then the THUMP of a hard heel in a coarse-worn shoe on the stone.
“Wife! Monni! I’m here!”
Monni didn’t look at the door. She had something important to do.
“Wife! Monni! I’m home again! Look up, will you woman? Look up! I’ve brought back things again, worthwhile things from the wide world out there! I brought things – look, foods and stones and sticks! I’ve brought news – weather, gossip, sights I saw! Look up from that dusty mud-corner of yours, small wife, and pay attention to what I’ve done out in the big world.”
“Hello. You are not my husband,” said Monni. She looked up.
Monni didn’t like looking at the giant man. It encouraged him.
“There you are – I almost thought you were gone away, gone for good into that small world of yours,” he said. Then he laughed, because he liked his own jokes the best. “A pinch of dirt and water and some fire thrown in after. Do you do anything else? My world is the real world, and it is the widest world, the world that eats you alive if you don’t watch and turns you into real leather if you do. Yours is a little table that I can cross in a step.”
“If I can put it on my table,” said Monni, “I can shape anything into anything that will ever be.”
The giant man laughed at that, scratched himself, and walked out the door. As he left, his heavy feet trod on the caterpillar’s body again, just for the fun of it.
His plans for the night were the same as always: eat, drink, sleep, wake up early and repeat. Somewhere in there he would decide to come and annoy Monni again.
“People like those pots of yours,” he’d told her, over and over. “You should make them give you more. You could have feasts every night and morning. You could have a house six times this one’s size. You should listen to me – I’d take care of you like that, as a husband.”
“I don’t care,” she’d told him. And he didn’t listen.

“He just won’t listen,” she told her brother Morra.
“Well, what if you yell?” he asked. Morra was there to pick up the most recent batch of pots Monni had cooked up, to take them down to the village. Every week Morra came hiking up the trail to Monni’s lonely house, and every week he came back up with some food. Unlike the large man’s food, this was things Monni could eat.
“I’ve yelled, I’ve screamed, I’ve whispered, I’ve cursed. He won’t listen.”
“Huh,” said Morra. “What if we all told him to knock it off?”
“He won’t listen.”
“Well… what if we won’t listen to him? How’d he like that?”
“He doesn’t care about it,” groaned Monni. “He’ll just talk and talk and talk. His mouth’s so big, no wonder he’s always hungry.”
“We have to talk to him if he wants to get any business done in the village,” said Morra. “Those furs of his won’t turn into food on their own, and I know for a fact he’s too lazy to like hunting more than he needs to. He’ll have to lay off of you or starve himself down to a manageable size.”
Monni made her mistake here. She opened her mouth to say that maybe you should be careful around giant men, especially hungry ones with inflated opinions of themselves and easily-needled pride, but then the idea of a miserable thinned-down giant man filled her head so temptingly that she closed it again. It was too fine a thing to pass up.
“Sure,” she said. “Try it.”

The giant man came walking into the village on his long, long legs the next day. His belly had been full of meat and bone when he finished his morning hunt, but now it was empty again and he would rely on his dangling fistful of furs to replace it. He was a greedy thing, but he held enough self-control in himself to leave the little bits of fuzz and fluff alone, for promise of greater meals later.
“Here,” he said, as he threw a fur to Old Mabil. “Take this! It’s fine, it’s fierce, it will warm you well! Now give me your meats; I know you have extras and I’m hungry for them.”
Old Mabil looked at the giant man and didn’t say anything.
“Are you deaf?” said the giant man. “I know you aren’t. I saw you talking to your wife just a minute ago! Give me the meats!”
Old Mabil shifted a little in his seat on his step and looked over the giant’s shoulder. He cleared his throat a little.
“Well?!” said the giant man.
Old Mabil pursed his lips. “Ehh. Gonna get damp tomorrow with that cloud I see there. You see it?”
“I see it,” said Old Mabil’s wife.
“Yuh,” said Old Mabil. And he started to gather up his things and carry them inside.
The giant man hissed a little to himself and spat on the doorstep, which sizzled. He was hot with anger.
“Fine!” he roared. “You there! You have more crops than you’d ever need! I’ve see them growing in your backyard! Give me a bushel and I will give you three pelts, each shinier than the last!”
Mipli the gardener didn’t look up from his hoeing.
“Do you have dirt in your ears?” demanded the giant man. “Give me food, you dust-blown leaf!”
Mipli looked up, swatted at his eyes, and swore. “These bugs!” he said. “These insects! Pfah! They must be trying to get in at me before it’s too damp tomorrow. These bugs!” He swished his hat through the air, shook his head twice, and went back to his work.
The giant man swore, and his swear was considerably fiercer and hotter than Mipli’s, sending shimmers through the air. He stomped down the village so hard that he left little cracks in the ground, and he stood in its center like a tree all alone.
“I will fill the arms of the first person to feed me with enough furs to coat a house in them!” he yelled. “Twice over!”
The street was empty. Everyone had gone inside for dinner.
The giant man frowned. The giant man clenched his fists. And then the giant man stomped off into the hills, chewing on the bloody bits of fur that were left of his pelts. And as he chewed, he thought, and he had a LOT of chewing to do. By the time he was at Monni’s house, he was done thinking and ready to act.
“Monni!” he called. “Monni! I have a humble request for you!”
“Hello,” said Monni. “You are not my husband. You will not become my husband.”
“Oh Monni, your world is so small that you think my big world cannot change. Monni, I ask for a piece of pottery, that is all. Just a piece of pottery.”
Monni blinked. “Pottery? What kind?”
“A small jar,” said the giant man. “About so big.” And he measured a broad circle with his hands. It was small for a giant, but it was nearly big enough to hold a normal man entire. “Can you do this?”
“Of course,” said Monni. “I’ll shape it now, and you can come back and pick it up tomorrow when it’s through firing.”
So Monni worked, pleasantly surprised that her problems had vanished so quickly, and the giant man grumbled away his hungry night on twigs and stones and spite. And by midday he was at her door again.
“Is it solid?” he asked. “Will it hold without breaking?”
“It’s one of my pots,” said Monni. “My pots will hold anything, for as long as they need to.”
“Good,” said the giant man. And he left without saying thank-you, which Monni had more or less expected. It was still easily the most pleasant conversation she’d ever had with him.

The first thing the giant man did with his jar, he walked down to the village, balancing it carefully on his head.
“Hey you!” he shouted. “All you people, all you people who won’t give me food. Will you trade with me now, eh, now that I’ve got this pot for trade? I’ll give you a fair deal, I will. I’ve walked farther and more than all of you together, I’ve seen things you haven’t, and I say this is the best deal you’ll have ever heard. Come, look at how big it is! Whatever you need, this pot can hold it. I’m the only person who could carry this down from the potter, and so I had it made to benefit all you little people down here.”
The people gathered around for a bit, because they saw that was one of Monni’s wares, and they knew she wouldn’t have made it for the giant man unless he’d stopped annoying her. “I’ll trade for it,” said Old Mabil. “Could use a place to keep the jerky. Will it hold ‘em all?”
“Absolutely,” promised the giant man. “Look here!” And with one sweep of his long, long arms he tucked up all of Old Mabil’s dried meats and showed them all how tidily they fit in there.
“Will it keep my crops safe?” asked Mipli.
“Twice as much as a stone wall,” swore the giant man. He picked up Mipli’s grains a fistful at a time and they all fit in there, even with the meat.
“What about me?”
“And me!”
“Could it fit…”
By the end of the afternoon the giant man stood there with the giant pot in his arms, and after the whole village had had a turn at filling it up it was still not more than half-full.
“Well!” said the giant man. “Do you now all believe me when I say this is a fine pot?”
They all did.
“Indeed! Too fine to trade for such a little bit of food. But maybe if you try harder again tomorrow, I will give it to you. Good-bye!”
And with that the giant plucked up the pot, food and all, and ran away laughing. He ran all the way up to his cave in the high hills before he stopped the last of his giggles, and that was only as he ate his meal. He was so hungry and so rushed that he didn’t even empty out the food, let alone cook it. He plunked the pot straight into his mouth and crunched it all up in one big mouthful, belched, and slept like a stone for two days.

“Your pot broke,” the giant man complained to Monni.
“They hold as long as they need to,” she told him.
“Huh! I guess that’s true,” he said. “But now I need another one. This one will need to be bigger. At least this big.” And he measured a very big circle with his hands, one easily bigger than he was, and he was not a small man.
“I can do that,” said Monni. And she did, and the very next day the giant man came and picked up his enormous new pot, with big handles on the sides for his big hands to grip. But he didn’t go down to the village with it, no. The giant man was not stupid enough to think that those people would fall for the same trick twice.
So instead he waited until dark, and he crept down to the village, making only the smallest stomps with his enormous rock-hard feet, breathing only a little bit heavier than a spider.
He went to the fields, and he took his pot off his head.
“Now pot,” he said, “you do your job properly.” And though it didn’t have ears Monni’s pot obeyed him, because that’s what Monni’s pots did. It did its job properly, and when the giant man scooped up all the fields around the village and dumped them into it, it kept doing it.
When the giant man scooped up the fishing weirs down in the river and dumped them into it, it kept doing it.
When the giant man scooped up the berry bushes and dumped them into it, it kept doing it.
Only when the giant man had carefully plucked the last oak tree free, acorns and all, and dropped it into the pot did it fill up. And it didn’t spill a single thing all the long windy way up the lost trails to the high hills, where the giant man was once again unable to restrain himself and ate the thing entire in a display of no manners whatsoever. He belched loudly and slept for three days straight before he awoke again – still hungry!

“Your other pot broke too!” said the giant man.
Monni was at her table again, her back to the door.
“Well? Can you replace it?”
“My brother came by this morning,” she said. “And he told an interesting tale.”
“Oh?” said the giant man. “I hadn’t heard of anything interesting happening around here. I travel far and wide, and all the great things were far away when I saw them.”
“He said that the fields were empty of crops.”
“The crows, I warrant.”
“He said the river was near-dry, and fishless.”
“Ah, this drought, this drought! Let Old Mabil say what he pleases of the damp, damp is not wet, and dew is no rain!”
“He said that no berries remained on a single bush, and that the trees for acorn-flour were all gone.”
“Squirrels and bears, or the other way around. The bears especially – mark my words, last year was a poor year for berries and now they’re on the craze-eating again, hungry things. Their pelts are most fine again, though!”
“And the funniest thing,” said Monni, “was that all up and down the village were little tiny holes, pick-pick-pock, as if someone had been stepping on their toes all over the place. But they were much too big to belong to anyone that lived there.”
“Huh!” said the giant man. “How strange.”
Monni stopped turning her table.
“I will need a new pot,” said the giant man. “This big.” And he held his arms out as wide as he could, so that he could’ve hugged a whole family of himself if he’d wished it.
“You need a new home,” said Monni. “Far away.”
The giant man frowned. “You make pots,” he said. “Make me a pot.”
“No. Go away.”
“Make me a pot now! It’s what you do! It’s all your small world is good for! What do you care about what I do out there in the big world, the real world, when you live in here and do nothing but poke at mud!”
Monni said nothing. But her table started turning again.
The giant man frowned. The giant man clenched his fists. And the giant man reached out and grabbed Monni in one hand and her work-table in the other and ran, ran, ran like the wind, over and away, far away from the low hills where Monni lived, up through the far hills where no one lived, and up and up and up and up into the high hills, where he lived in his cave, which was where he put Monni. Far away in a dark corner at the very back was where her table was, and the giant man piled up many rocks between her and daylight.
“There, you see?” said the giant man. “I am a kindly person, and will be a good husband to you. Look, I have brought your little world with you, so you can put yourself away and go back to being happy!”
“You are not my husband,” said Monni. “And I have nowhere to fire my clay.”
“Monni my wife, I wish only the best for you,” said the giant man. “I would hate to see my wife come to harm with a hot fire! Better to concern yourself with small things, soft things. Do not worry – I will take all your creations and fire them up safe and sound for you, and I’ll even pick out which ones I like first and do you the favor of discarding all the other rubbish. What if you made something sharp and cut yourself – or me, eh? No, I’ll do all those decisions for you. Now make me a pot big enough to hold hills and forests or you’re not getting dinner!”
Monni sat there in the dark. And as she sat, she thought, and she had a lot of thinking to do.
But Monni was a much faster thinker than the giant man was, and that’s why he didn’t have time to see that she was up to something before she answered him.
“Fine,” she said. “But I’ll need a lot of clay. I’ll make it with thin walls, but that’ll only go so far. Get me as much clay as you can carry, and I’ll shape your pot for you.”
“Good, good,” said the giant man. “I know a place far away, farther than you’d ever dream!” And within an hour he was back with armfuls of warm red clay.
“I’ll need water, too,” said Monni. “You left all of my supplies back at my house.”
“A good spring is a mere day’s-travel away for a smaller man than me,” boasted the giant man. Soon enough he came back with enough to make a pond with.
“Now go away and let me work,” said Monni.
“Fine!” said the giant man. “Good! Great!”
But he only went just outside the cave mouth, because he didn’t quite trust Monni. And as he waited, he thought to himself of pots that could scoop a range of hills in a single sweep, or drain lakes, or swallow the sky and all its birds. And he licked his lips.

“How’s it going in there?” asked the giant man after a little while.
“Fine!” said Monni.

“Is it almost done?” asked the giant man some time later.
“No, not yet,” said Monni.

“Aren’t you through with that pot yet?” demanded the giant man.
He waited.

“Well?”

The rocks took some time to move, but the giant man was in a hurry and flailed impatiently. As he threw stones aside, his hand touched something soft. Then the light came in and oh my, oh my his jaw did drop as he saw what Monni had made. The pot was complete: a pot that could hold mountains, empty oceans, and drain the clouds away as soup. It was soft, it was still damp.
He saw what Monni made. He did not see Monni.
“Where are you, my wife, Monni my wife, my wife?” he called. “Hiding from your husband? I will have to beat you if you do such things!”
And he listened, and he listened, and he heard a small shuffling sound. And as he heard it he thought he knew what was happening and he smiled. Monni was hiding in the pot!
“A good spot to scurry, my wife!” he called. “A very good spot! But large as it is, I will find you! You’re not used to this sort of size. I live it! Every day I live it and love it! You are small, and all alone in a big place, and this is why I will always catch you! So!”
And the giant man tore a great hole in the side of Monni’s giant pot and lunged in after her, swinging his arms and shouting. But right away he landed face-first in something soft and familiar.
“Another pot?” he asked. “Monni my wife, you cannot hide from me that way! You’ll only hem yourself in smaller and scareder! I’ll have you later or now, but I will have you. Stop running!”
And so the giant man tore another hole in the side of the smaller pot, and he rushed in, straight into a third, and then a fourth, and a fifth. Pot after pot after pot were tucked inside one another in Monni’s giant pot, and they curved away and away no matter which direction the giant man tore. Soon he’d doubled back on himself to try and find a way out, then tripled, then quadrupled.
“WIFE!” he shouted. “WHERE ARE YOU, YOU MISERABLE LITTLE THING? WHERE ARE YOU?”
And as he shouted this Monni smiled and stepped out from behind the giant pot, where she’d been quietly waiting all along in her usual place at her stool, behind her work-table.
And Monni put her hands to what lay upon her table, and she shaped it.
It was not easy, but Monni’s craft never was. The clay fought her – it whirled against her fingers, it groaned, it screamed, it whined – but it was on her table. And if anything lay upon Monni’s able, she could shape it into anything that would ever be, from the very large to the very, very, very, very, very small.
And when Monni’s hands had done their work, all that was left was a squat, ugly little thing that resembled the unfavourite offspring of a jar and a bowl.

Things got better. They usually do. Trees grow back. Rains come again. Fields fill up.
Monni went back to her home, and went back to making pots for other people. The ones she wanted to make, the way she wanted to make.
The first one she put into the fire after she got back was a funny choice though, her brother told her, and not typical of her skill.
After all, how many people would want a half-cracked chamberpot?

Day 0
The boat had gone down.
Well, that was that. Nobody’d ever told Tommy what to do when the boat went down. “And believe me,” he’d have said, if there’d been anyone to say it to, “I’ve checked.”
He was a great reader, Tommy was. He’d read his Robinson Crusoe, and his Swiss Family Robinson. And both of those books had been very clear about what to do in case of shipwreck: you zipped yourself as fast as possible over to the boat and plucked out all the choice goods that would help you reshape the wild and untamed landscape around you into some sort of metaphorical message of exactly how much god liked you.
Tommy was annoyed that the boat had gone done. Now he had no tools and would never have any clue as to how much god liked him. Also he would probably starve to death unless he found food without gluten in it. He was gluten-intolerant or something.
“Shit,” he said. There was still nobody there to say it to, but swearwords were special like that. “Fuck,” he added for good measure, and “balls.”
Then he sat down in the cool sand under the starry sky and watched the ripples carry away the oil slick. Life was good.

Day 1
Tommy slept in. He’d had a busy night. He was going to have a busy day too, which the newly established and enormous sunburn on his face wasn’t going to help one bit.
“Fuck,” said Tommy again. He worried for a moment that in a few short weeks swearwords would be the only words he could remember, and that when his rescuers arrived he would do nothing but yell “fuck” and “shit” and “balls” at them until they left him alone. That would be a problem. He’d have to practise talking to himself like his uncle did.
“Guess I’ll make a start,” said Tommy.
So he did.

When Tommy was done making a start the sun was dipping itself into the big tasty salsa of the Pacific. He felt pretty good about his day. He’d climbed three big hills, gotten a lot of exercise even though he wasn’t at a gym, learned important information about plants and animals
(the red ones taste good, the pink ones taste bad and make your lips pucker up and your tongue go all rigid; also, the little soft white-furred things are faster than you are)
and he’d made a nice tent out of some leaves and sticks.
Life was pretty good.

Day 2
Tommy woke up with half his tent collapsed and the other half eaten. The consumer was no longer at the scene of the crime but enormous, damp footprints and a sizable amount of stray spit made him reluctant to find out.
“Fuck!” said Tommy. He was too annoyed to even care about vocabulary degradation now. “Fuck!” he added. Now he’d need to make a fire or something to scare away the thing, and he had no lighter. “Fuck!” Maybe matches would even work. Safety matches for sure.
“Fuck!” decided Tommy. He’d sort it all out later. For now he needed breakfast. There were more red ones nearby anyways.

Day 4
Tommy woke up at sundown as the red sky reflected from the sandgrains lodged in his eyelids and felt like that was a best-case scenario. That had all gone all right. He’d gotten some refreshing wind-down time because you can’t let yourself get all wound up and stressed out and he’d learned more important information about plants and animals
(the red ones are not quite the same as the other red ones and the difference is REALLY IMPORTANT; also whatever you accidentally stomped to death that last night was really filling and its fur looks pretty, what’s left of it)
so all in all this had already been one of the most informative trips he’d been on and he was sure he’d feel good about it as soon as his head stopped screaming at the universe to put it out of his misery.
He’d feel good. Real good
After a bit more sleep.

Day 7
Tommy had been happy at first, finding that so much of the fur from that thing he’d stomped to death was still intact. He’d made himself new underpants which was surprisingly important at the time although Robinson Crusoe had never mentioned it much and he guessed he’d sort of forgotten that you couldn’t just peel off animal fur and just slap it on hey presto. You needed needles and threads and yarn or something. And like…oak trees. To tan them. Tanning was important with furs, right? You had to tan them. That made them turn from furry skin to clothing.
Tommy had tried laying out his new furry underpants on the surface of a warm stone in the sun. It had not tanned them. It had done something, but it hadn’t been helpful. He was starting to really regret throwing away his old underpants, even if they’d been pretty gone and he’d never wanted to see that shade of red again in his life.
Oh well.
He spent the afternoon building a tiny sandcastle. It wasn’t that great and he felt a lot better when he kicked it over. That’d show that goddamned sandcastle. Life was good then.

Day 15
Half a month was a pretty good time for Tommy. His phone might have gotten totally lost while he was on the boat, but hey, he still had a tree and a sharp rock and that was good enough to make a calendar with, right? Right. As long as he remembered where the tree was, which was kind of hard sometimes and he’d had to start over twice and there’d been that mix-up for a few days after he ate the red ones. But he was pretty sure he knew how long that had been. Pretty sure.
“Half a month,” Tommy said, and didn’t swear at all. “That’s fucking badass.” And not in the way that he had felt for the week after he ate the red ones. Which he was going to stop thinking about forever now.
He was going to have to find out things to eat, though. So that he didn’t end up having to eat more red ones.
Which he wasn’t thinking about.

Day 17
Tommy found food.
It didn’t look good.
It didn’t smell good.
It didn’t feel nice.
But by “fucking shit jesus on toast” (there he went again, woops) Tommy had found food, food, food at last. And it wasn’t the red ones which was great because he couldn’t think about the red ones at all.
It was perfect. Unfortunately, it was also a rock, and a rock that didn’t take kindly to three of Tommy’s starvation-loosened molars.
“Fffuugh!” said Tommy. “Fffiiiiittt! Fffitt! Ffit! FfitfitifitififfitfitfitFFIT!” And many other things like that. He ran around, he shrieked, he waved his arms, and he punched three trees which really hurt his hand a whole lot. Luckily, while moaning and rubbing his sore arm, Tommy laid eyes upon the solution to all of his problems.

Day 28
Two handfuls of the red ones had been a really bad idea.

Day 31
Although to be fair, mixing it with that green stuff probably hadn’t been great either even if it had been pretty crazy-tasting.

Day 39
Tommy discovered the meaning of life. Unfortunately, it was someone else’s.
“Shit,” he said, and nearly jumped at the first intelligible sound he’d heard in three weeks. He consoled himself with nervous humming, coughing, scratching, and drinking water out of a tiny stream he’d found.

Five minutes and a hundred feet upstreaem later he found something large and hairy lying dead in it. It was mostly missing but possessed strikingly familiar feet, although the spit was long-gone.
“Waste not want not,” said Tommy. “Fuck it.” It was organic anyways, right? Air-dried. All-natural. Super-natural goodness fortified with essential vitamins. That’s what all those little bugs are, right? Essential vitamins. They eat the plants or the fruits or whatever the fuck
(but not the red ones, okay?)
and they get all the vitamins in them presto blammo bullshit, time to eat. Better for you than broccoli.

Day 40
Well. It all had to come out sooner or later, right? That was just sooner. A lot sooner than Tommy would’ve liked. And faster.
“Shit,” Tommy said. It was not a swearword this time, it was descriptive, it was totally appropriate to use. “Fuck,” he said, and that was just not permitted. He would’ve slapped himself if he’d had the strength left to do more than what he’d been doing for eighteen hours.
“Shit” he clarified. And continued to do so.

Day 59
Tommy liked the crocodile. He liked to think that the crocodile liked him to. It was all in the way it’d wink at him it’s just that crocodiles were sort of bad winkers and it was mostly just Tommy moving his head at the right angle to make the light go ~TinG~ off its eye. Just like that. That was like a wink for an animal too lazy to close its eyes although you’d never hear that from him about the crocodile no sir Tommy was good buds with him or possibly her. Tommy was fuzzy on checking that sort of thing in a species that didn’t have tits. They didn’t have tits, did they? Maybe they did and they just looked weird, like really small. “Fuck.”
The crocodile’s eye wavered at him. Bad language. Tommy should really watch that.
“Sorry.”
But yeah, the crocodile was his bro. Or sis. Or whatever. Once every week it would eat something and get super lazy and then Tommy could run in and drag off its leftovers and it had only managed to almost eat him one two three times so far so hey that’s a pretty good track record. Life was good.

Day 68
Tommy had had it up to here with the mother-fucking ass-shitting face-bitching bastard-jerkoff-ing doucheasshole…ing…ed…croc. Odile. That one.
It didn’t eat enough. Why the hell did it not eat enough? Tommy needed food more often. God this roommate sucked. He should move out. He was going to move out soon anyways. Like, next month. He had plans. He’d just wanted to take some time off first; kick back on the boat.
Stupid boat. Well who needed it. He had the crocodile. Who was an ASSHOLE, but he was going to move out soon anyways. As soon as he figured out how to walk again.
Baby steps, right?

Day 83
Walking was super-hard. Tommy’d last learned to do it like, a billion years ago, and man he hadn’t known anything back then, he was just some stupid kid. But he guessed you couldn’t teach an old dog new bones or whatever and man his knees fucking hurt now.
Swearing, clearly, was stuck in. Although his throat hurt too much to try it aloud, so welp.
Right. He was moved out. Tommy was in charge of Tommy again, no more reptilian sugardaddy or maybe sugarlady. But Tommy could handle that. Tommy was an independent adult. Tommy just needed to get some transportation going here because the commute sucked.
Like, a car.
Wait, water.
Okay, not a car. A boat.
Fuck fuck fuck FUCK that.
Okay, not a boat. A. A. Floaty thing a raft. Right, that’s what it is. Not a boat at all.
And what’re they made of?
“TREES!” yelled Tommy. Then, “ow.” But hey, all art from suffering. From ow, trees! From trees, raft! From raft, a low-maintenance fuel-efficient personalized custom transportation to allow him easy access between home work and that big rock that was nice to fry all the parasites from your skin off on! He’d learned that trick from lizards. Heh. Man, he wondered what those lizards were doing nowadays. It’d been like, days since he’d seen them. He didn’t think he’d eaten them. At least, eaten them a lot. Maybe like, a nibble. Shit, he hadn’t pissed them off, had he? Man he could be an asshole when he was on the red ones.

Day 89
Raft crafted. Woop a doodle ding dong. That was poetry, Tommy was a poet and when he saw poems he did know it. He recognized it.
Maybe he’d write some of this stuff down when he got out of here. He could make a lot of money and buy his own rock to burn skin parasites on and a bush full of red ones and maybe even a bucket to throw up all the red ones into. And he’d hire a crocodile to kill things for him but he wouldn’t have to room with it. Because fuck that.
Maybe he’d hire a therapist too. To get rid of all his swearing problems. He couldn’t get through one day without screaming “SHIT” at the top of his lungs nowadays. But hey, it was better than coffee. Nearly as good as Red Bull. Not as good as the red ones at all, though.
He did like the red ones.

Day 101
Tommy liked one hundred and one. It was about time to start it. He’d been waiting all week for it and the day wouldn’t change, so he said fuck it
(he didn’t say it, he just thought it, but shhh)
and he just sort of faked up the calendar. No big deal. He’d lied about his grades to his parents, he’d lied about his income to the government, he’d lied about his phone number to his girlfriend, he’d lied to the crocodile about splitting rent, and now he was lying to his calendar. He deserved credit for a consistent streak.
“Yeah,” said Tommy. He patted himself carefully on the back. Some of it fell off, and wriggled.
Yeah. He’d definitely need to buy a rock.
The raft was waiting. Tommy pushed it carefully out into the water until it was too deep for him, whereupon he gently slipped in alongside it and sank like a stone, as people without any remaining fat do.
“Fuck,” said Tommy. A passing shark veered away in disgust, but he was in no mood for social niceties. “Fuck,” he repeated, and weirdly relished the sight of all those air bubbles streaming away as they splatted up against the surface of the water.
“Fuck,” he finalized, and frowned. The surface of the water was a lot darker now, and strangely smooth. It was also getting closer and louder and in his personal space.
Tommy dealt with this in the socially standard manner and headbutted it, whereupon it turned into a boat. He dealt with this in the socially standard manner and passed out.

Day 225
“Woo,” said Tommy.
He poked the bed.
“Woo,” he said. Yep, so far, so good.
He poked it again.
“Fuckshit,” he said, and grimaced. Aww hell so close. Oh well. His speech therapist said he was doing great anyways. He just needed a bit more time.
Tommy had time. He also had three working limbs and eighty percent of a functioning digestive system and one kidney and seventeen teeth and a bill for fracturing the hull of a boat. He didn’t see why that last one was his fault, but hell who was he to poke at it. He had everything. Everything he could’ve named, he had. Except for the red ones. Instead he had this stuff in tubes that got piped into his arms every half-hour when he started to throw up. That was pretty nice.
Life was good.

“Leonard! Leonard!”
The voice was ancient, and reedy in that way that made the mind think of ancient kazoos. It was suited to one of two environs: a crypt or a boardroom.
“Leonard! Leonard! Come here at once, at once at once!”
As called, so I did come, up the stairs, through the archway, up the mirrored halls with their thousand-thousand reflections and into the cathedral. I came and stood for the hundredth thousandth time in the private office of my employer, Mr. Morton.
I have experienced much in fifty-seven years in Mr. Morton’s service. I have seen numbers dance in ways that made mere falsification seem a child’s game. I have heard the screams of Wall Street executives as they are tossed into pits of magma. I have had no less than seven entirely new organs placed within my torso, two of which are unknown to science. But never, ever, never ever had I heard naked fear in my employer’s voice, or seen it vibrate through the fleshy skip-flaps of his jowls and spotty forearms. Mr. Morton was very old and kept his fear cloaked decently under a thick strata of drugs, as he considered to be both proper and socially acceptable. To hear it writhe blindly, exposed pale to the world like this was… very disturbing. I had not thought that was a feeling I could still experience.
“Leonard, pay attention!” Watery brown eyes were fixed on me with a raptor’s fierceness, telling me in no uncertain terms that if I didn’t pull it together now I’d be sleeping in the tiger tank tonight.
“I apologize, sir,” I said contritely as I cut myself in offering with the ornamental stingray spine that lay atop Mr. Morton’s desk for that purpose. “How may I be of assistance?”
“Assistance…” breathed Mr. Morton. His face twitched; not the usual tic of a nerve decades out of touch with the brainstem, but an uncontrolled flicker of dread. “Assistance…yes. Yes. That’s what I need. I told you so, didn’t I, Leonard?”
“You did, sir.”
“Well then, assist me!”
“As you wish sir. In what manner?”
Mr. Morton pulled himself together. This took some time, even with the little control panel in his wrist that controlled the tightness of his suit. I waited.
“Right. Right. Leonard!”
“Yes, sir?”
“Go down to the vaults, Leonard. Empty them.”
I frowned. To reduce a single of the twenty-seven safehouses embedded beneath the manor to its waterline would mandate purchasing Disneyworld. To remove multiples would be… “How many exactly, sir?”
“ALL OF THEM!” shrieked Mr. Morton, spasmodically flailing his arms. “Each and every one! To the penny! To the cent! Scrape out the wallets and shatter the piggybanks and dig into the cushions of the chesterfields! Hollow me out! Pay it to this address! And don’t bother with a receipt.”
If I had still possessed red blood cells I dare say I would have blanched. As it was, I saluted without discomfort, then bit my nails all the way down the hall. Had the boss finally lost it? No, no, wrong term…had he finally lost it for good? Mr. Morton had his moments, true, and his days, and his years on occasion, but was this the big one, the final straw?
No, it couldn’t be. He’d outlived four generations of Wall Street. He’d outlive me. Although admittedly my death would not be from natural causes, as few if any of those could harm me now.
So I walked down the ninety-nine-hundred steps to the twenty-seven vaults. They were arranged in descending scale; the largest and grandest (solid artifacts) being the size of a football field, the smallest and plainest (micro-jewelry and a single nanochip of black-grey-and-white-mail) the size of my littlest fingernail.
I pressed the emergency excavation button and stood back as each impenetrable safe began to burrow its way into the upper mantle before tunneling to the address Mr. Morgan had given me, there to disgorge its contents to the provided biometric ID. Somewhere out there a man (it was almost always a man) had just become very much richer, in return for… something. But what?

“Leonard! Leonard! Come here right now, this instant, five minutes ago! Leonard!”
I lurched up the stairs in the dead of night. The sunglasses didn’t help, but they kept my eyes in place and so I was reluctant to remove them even as I clambered up the two-foot teak Everest that was the approach to Mr. Morgan’s evening office, one hand at the obsidian railing.
“Yes, sir?”
“Leonard?” Leonard, it’s important. It’s very important. Leonard, I want you to go to the Narrow Room. Bring the fifth candle and the ninth lamb and the red book. And hurry, damn you! Hurry, hurry, hurry!”
I stared. I’d held the red book twice. It was why I now possessed seven fingers and one thumb. “Sir?”
“What is it?”
“What shall I trade?”
He waved his hands. Loose skin flapped like sails in a hurricane. “ALL of it, damn you!” he shrieked. “Everything! Offer them everything, anything, all of it down to the last drop, if only they fulfil this contract.”
“Absolutely, sir. Which contract, sir?”
A small grey envelope bounced off my forehead with stupendous force for one so aged. “Leonard! I haven’t got time for your muckabouts! IT MUST BE MINE AGAIN. HURRY!”
So I hurried to the far western tower, with its groaning stones and moaning hinges, and I walked to the very top. And there, wedged between three uncut stone crenellations and under an arched roof cut from the liver of a tree older than H. sapiens, I read the red book, the fierce book, with a simple iron knife in my hand and an annoyed lamb pinned underneath my knee, doped to the gills on extinct herbs. I fought the urge to roll my eyes, uttered the last line of mangled Latin, and struck home with a damp and quickly-quashed bleat.
The air is always the first to respond. It bubbles, but does not boil. After that comes the smell; acrid sharp smoke overlaying the simmering rot of high summer.
Then the noise, of course, but I had earplugs for that. I am skilled at lip-reading, and with what I was speaking to that was well and proper, for it had no less than nine mouths and sixteen-and-a-half lips.
The bargain, of course, was forgettable. I handed over the envelope, we exchanged agreements, and then in the process of my follower mediator’s leave-taking he devoured the last six minutes of my life. I stood alone in the Narrow Room, an annoyed and quite lively lamb beneath my knee, the red book in hand. A hand now missing another finger and also the little grey envelope.
Alone in one of the few parts of the building utterly lacking surveillance devices, I indulged myself in a little whistle. Handing over a blank contract to them that listen to the red book’s words is no laughing matter. Whatever Mr. Morgan was after, it would have to be quite the prize at this price.
I took the ninth lamb back to its pen. Waste not want not.

“Leonard!”
“Yes si-“
“To the pit, damn you! To the pit! Offer them all of it, offer them everything! EVERYTHING!”
I paused. “Sir, we’ve already offered everything to-“
“He turned them down, damn you, he turned them down! Wouldn’t listen to a word they said! Well, I’ve got other things to offer, even if I bite my thumb at it – it’s mine, damnit, how dare he tax me so for what’s mine! To the pit!” The cane crashed down on the dodo-bone desk with impotent force. “Hop to it!”
So I travelled to the deepest stair that led to the lowest floor with the lowest room, where a hole dug down where magma feared to tread, and I took my congress with the deepfolk in trial by combat to the death, as is accepted among their type. I shared blood with their chieftain, swore to destroy our enemies, and presented them the deal offered by Mr. Morgan, the same he’d given to them that listen to the red book.
Surely this would be enough.

“Leonard!”
“Y-“
“It wasn’t enough! Take this to the Pool, damn you, to the Pool! Give them all of it, and all that will come! All of it! Go, go, go!”
The Pool lies sixteen miles to the northeast. Accessible through a complex web of little twisty tunnels bored out centuries ago beneath Mr. Morgan’s Olympic swimming pool, the route to its depths is far too small and tight to fit even the smallest set of SCUBA gear through. Luckily I do not require oxygen.
Down at the edge of the Pool, where the floor of the cavern dropped away – to the sea somewhere, beyond the continental shelf, Mr. Morgan had muttered – I sang the song. It was tuneless, melodyless, breathless, and mostly too low-pitched to be heard by humans above the level of a vague discomforting humming at your molars.
What heard me, came. I made my offer, and it tried to consume me.
I believe I made it back alive. It is very difficult to recall events that occur in the presence of such things. But I was done, and a greater power now held the terms of Mr. Morgan’s most terrible of bargains.

“Leonard, Leonard, Leonard! It hasn’t worked, hasn’t worked! Get yourself to the Astronomica this second, you slug! Get me my deal, get me my bargain, gain for me what is mine! GO!”
The Astronomica is hidden beneath retractable ceilings and false vegetation. Mr. Morgan never looks to the stars for trivial things, not in the slightest. He looks with purpose, and it was with purpose that I set to the computers of this place. Not a single one of them was inferior to any other computer outside the room, and linked together they arguably were a greater force than that of all others in man’s past and present combined.
They were just barely sophisticated enough to catch the lowest of the lowest forms of communication I was attempting to tap into. I had an offer to put onto a market whose currencies were worlds and solar systems; where property was measured in light-years; where suns were extinguished as penalties for a minor contract infraction; where legalese itself was a separate language with no shared descendants that had evolved over billions of years.
I sat there at the galactic version of a crude telegram, barely a step above semaphore, and I placed my offer.
A middle power from Galactic Central Core was interested, more out of novelty than anything else. In its world, blank-cheque offers were a charming myth told to the young and stupid, and whatever warranted such desires was worth at least a casual look. I debated with it for ninety-five hours and escaped with my psyche still attached to my body, and I counted the deal a grand one: both for myself and for Mr. Morgan.

“Leonard!”
I had my hand on the doorknob when the second scream came. “Go! And try EVERYTHING!”

So I did.

I crawled down dark miles in abandoned Yukon mines and spoke to the crawling things that underlay our continents and live our lives upside-down yet fully awake as we can only dream.
I walked through the painting that wasn’t there and spoke to the thing that whispers in every artist’s brain and takes what it wants when it pleases.
I played The Game That Kills and gained a high-score and thus earned an audience with its creator: Zeus, the mad thing birthed from the stolen notes of Alan Turing.
I soared the skies on a biplane’s wings and dealt with the thin things that live sideways in the deepest clouds, watching everything and learning nothing, who dislike jet engines.
I ate plants that ate back and made promises to whatever flashed in front of my eyeballs about whatever was crossing my mind.
I unfossilized myself in Wyoming for a hundred and fifty million years and spoke to Largest One amidst the fern prairies using a two-hundred-decibel loudspeaker, and it may have noticed me.
I burned half a national park (which nation? I can’t recall) and swore upon the ashes that I would speak to whatever had noticed me.

And I tried everything.
None of it worked.

“Leonard,” whispered Mr. Morgan. “Leonard. Leonard.”
“Yes sir. I’m here sir.”
Mr. Morgan coughed unpleasantly for sixteen minutes as I wiped the phlegm from his desk and pants.
“Leonard,” he resumed. “I’m through. I have no more options, Leonard. Fetch me my coat.”
“Certainly, sir,” I replied. “Which one?”
“The thickest,” he said.
I froze. There was only one possible reason for this, and I knew what I was going to hear before it was even said.
“I’m going out.”

I offered an umbrella to keep the sun away from Mr. Morgan’s more delicate tumors, but he merely spat at the suggestion. “Speed,” he admonished. “Speed is the thing. Speed. We must move faster, Leonard! SPEED!”
I drove faster, as much as I could. Mr. Morgan insisted upon taking his most recently-purchased automotive, trusting only those cars he had handpicked, and the Model T was no longer what it had once been, despite the vacuum in which it had been sealed since the day it was produced by Mr. Ford himself.
“Newfangled,” muttered Mr. Morgan, “but it’ll have to do. Are all the horses still dead?”
“The cloning didn’t take, sir.”
“Balderdash,” he grumped. And spat. I’d brought his travel spittoon, but he was still too nervous to keep his mind on small matters such as aim, and the floor of the car was already awash in purple-yellow slime.

Eventually, in between spits, enough directions were given for me to reach the home of our mysterious adversary, the “he” who had “turned them down,” ‘them’ now not only encompassing them who listened to the red book but all of our most lucrative and potent of contacts.
I braced myself and rang the doorbell. It went ding-dong.
Thirty seconds later I rang it again, pushing the button just as approaching footsteps appeared, which made me feel a little foolish and stupid.
The door opened and I was confronted with a woman. Astoundingly enough she had no weapons that I was capable of detecting, or even more astoundingly, she had no weapons whatsoever. “Hello?”
I cleared my throat. “I am Leonard. Mr. Morgan would like to speak to the occupant of this home.”
She glanced behind me. Mr. Morgan was securely fastened to her walk by my firm left hand, and was busy coughing on her (rather inferior) tulips. “I’m sorry?”
“NED!” shouted Mr. Morgan, then bent double with wheezing at the effort for nearly a minute. “Ned,” he whispered as I thumped his back gently. “Need to speak to Ned.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Has he done something wrong?”
“Hah!” said Mr. Morgan. “Hah! Oh, he has, but I’ll deal him fair for it. I’ll pay his price. Don’t you worry, I’m fair. Even if it’s mine to begin with.”
For some reason, the woman chose to look at me at this point. Against all discretion. I reciprocated the disrespect to Mr. Morgan’s person with a tiny nod, and she visibly relaxed.
“Well, all right then. But only for a few minutes. It’s his bedtime soon.”

It was a journey of a thousand miles in two dozen feet. The linoleum front hall. The five-step woolly-carpet staircase. The tiny bathroom smelling strongly of cheap shampoo. And halfway down the hall, the most disrespectful part of the hall, the little room with blue paint that was just slightly too bright to be comfortable to the eyes.
In this room, on an obnoxiously-coloured bed, lay Ned. He was ignoring us in favour of a video game.
I cleared my throat. “’Ned’?”
He looked up. “Mr. Morgan would like to-“
“GIVE IT BACK YOU LITTLE BASTARD!” said Mr. Morgan, and he jumped at his throat.
I was surprised, but Mr. Morgan in full flight had little in the way of momentum, and I was able to intercept him yards from the boy. “I’m sorry, sir. Ned, Mr. Morgan would like to speak to you –” and here my speech became indistinct as Mr. Morgan’s elbow implanted itself in my mouth “-with regards to a proposed offer of his.”
Ned glared back at us, un-intimidated. Perhaps this confidence was at least half-warranted; Mr. Morgan’s last fight had been before the lad’s grandparents had been born, and it had taken place against a recalcitrant piece of rib-eye. “I told him so online, it’s mine fair and square.”
“Maybe so,” I replied, “but Mr. Morgan very much wishes it back.”
“You’re DAMNED RIGHT!” he shouted.
Ned drummed his heels on his bed in that instinctively annoying way that children have of existing. “Well? Isn’t he going to say it then?”
I blinked – it was difficult for me nowadays, but the reflex is still buried there, and sufficient surprise can re-activate it. “Say what?”
Ned crossed his arms. “He knows what he has to say.”
“NEVER, you RAT-EATING son of a FLEA!” screeched Mr. Morgan. “Never! You heard me? Never, ever, never ever! You heard me? You hear me again! NO!”
I winced as the spittle struck my stubble. “Sir? May I offer an opinion?” I took the liberty of interpreting Mr. Morgan’s huffing, wheezing silence as ‘yes’ and plunged ahead heedlessly. “You have already been willing to offer anything and everything at once to Ned, sir. Is it so much to say what he asks?”
“… It’s the principle of the thing,” he muttered at length. And then he coughed. “The principle.”
“Yes, sir. But since when have you ever done anything but scoff at those?”
There was a long moment as the universe ground its way through the head of Mr. Morgan, and reality slowly had it out with him. It was a close fight, but the winner was certain.
“Fine,” he muttered. “Please.”
Ned cupped a hand to his ear. “Caaaaan’t heeeeeaaar yooooouuuuuu…..” he sing-sang in that awful prepubescent whine.
“PLEASE!” shouted Mr. Morgan. “Please plase plose, pretty please with please on top, PLEASE give it back! PLEASE GIVE IT BACK.”
Ned sighed and bounced off his bed. Standing bolt upright in bare feet, he was exactly the same height as Mr. Morgan. “Fiiiiine,” he said. He stepped foreward, one, two, three steps. A yard away from Mr. Morgan.
“Honk,” he said, holding his hand in front of his face. “Gotcher nose.” A thumb was clutched between forefinger and middle. “Want it back?”
Mr. Morgan was a beaten man. “Please,” he whispered.
Ned grinned – a big, happy, cheerful grin of pure glee, the likes of which I’d forgotten after who-knew-how-many-years. “Boop,” he said. And he flicked his hand and snip-snapped his fingers.
Mr. Morgan sagged, and then straightened. Ten thousand pounds seemed to have dropped off his back. “Is our business concluded?” he asked.
“What do you say?” said Ned.
Mr. Morgan looked at the wall above the child’s head.
“What do you saaaaay?” warbled Ned.
“Thank. You.” said Mr. Morgan, each word slamming down like a tombstone.
“Yoooou’re welcome,” said Ned, with a flourish. “See ya.”
Mr. Morgan nearly tripped over the woolly carpet in his rush to be gone for home.

Mr. Morgan was quiet on the drive home, and quieter still as I carried him up the cathedral aisle to his office chair.
“Leonard?” he said as I placed him gently into its black soul-velvet embrace.
“Yes, sir?”
His palsied fingers stroked gently over tanned Velociraptor-skin armrests, the finest – and only – in the world. “Do you think… that was a fair deal?”
I shrugged. “It is not for me to say such things, sir. I am but a simple assistant and accountant. High finance is too rare and fine a thing for me to understand.”
“Right,” said Mr. Morgan. He stared up at the murals above his head. “Right.” He banged his fist on his hip, bruising both. “Right! Now get out of my sight! It’s been a very difficult day for me just now!”
“Yes, sir.”
The mirrored halls are vast, and as I mentioned before, my eyelids do not close readily. I can thus say with utmost certainty that no deliberate snooping occurred as I left my employer’s office, which those same mirrors showed behind me in the second before the door closed.
He was, with great delicacy, feeling his nose with both hands.

A long time ago, just a little longer than the greatest of your great-great-great grandparents, the world was different and just a little strange. Oh, there was a sky, there was a sea. That was no trouble. The trouble was that they didn’t quite touch, not because they couldn’t, but because they wouldn’t.
“You are lowly and dirty,” sniffed the sky up high. “Earthworms crawl in your belly and slime-moulds breed in your topsoil. Sickly lout!”
“And YOU are as cold and dry as a wasp’s-heart,” sneered the earth down low. “Nothing in you but puff and fluff. Even the birds don’t care to visit you for more than a moment. Flighty twit!”
And then the conversation ended as such conversations always did: the sky spat at the earth and the earth swore at the sky and they both scooted just a little bit farther apart from each other so they could hate from a distance. Until next time.
This was a real problem. Not only was it very hard to get from the earth to the sky, but it was very hard for most people to breath. Everybody had to hold their breath until the sky scooted close enough for another exchange of insults, then stand on the tips of their toes and breath real hard. It wasn’t very convenient at all, especially to the short folks.
One person in particular who felt hard-done by was an old human. She’d never been very tall to begin with, and age had stooped her quite thoroughly, to the point where she could only get a decent breath in if she climbed a tall tree on a steep hill and stretched herself. It vexed her sore, especially when the sky and the earth were too busy sulking to think of good insults and they wouldn’t come together again for a few days.
“I’m gonna fix this, see if I don’t,” she groused. “Everyone else isn’t uncomfortable enough to do it, so it’s down to me again. Always making me fix things. If it wasn’t so hard to breathe I’d complain more about it.” But it was so hard to breath, so she didn’t complain more about it. Instead, she scratched herself a tad and thought, and thought some more, and thought just a little bit extra just in case, and when her thinking was through she had a plan.

First things first, the old human went down to the rocky lowlands, where the sky was a thousand miles away. She couldn’t breathe down there, and that made her annoyed. She walked around in circles and got lost, and that made her angry. She stubbed her toe on six rocks, each bumpier than the last, and that made her burning mad. And then, just as she was getting tired and needed a rest, she sat on a cactus.
That made her furious. That made her so red-hot, boiling, bubbling, hiss-spitting furious that she coughed and she choked and she swore and she spat a little red-hot bubble of a ball out into her palm, where it scorched her mighty hard.
“Done!” she said with satisfaction. “Ow. Ow. Ow.” She wrapped it up in a little wad of cactus flesh so it wouldn’t hurt, had a drink, and then left.

Second things second, the old human went up to the high valleys, where the earth mumbled itself to pieces and the trees hid themselves on the edges of cliffs by their root-tips. She looked up at the lonely moon and it made her mopey. She looked down and far away towards where she’d been born so many years before, and it made her sad. She heard the calls of a lost wolf trying to find its pack across the valley, and it made her sorrowful. And then as she walked down an old path she found a baby raccoon nuzzling its mother’s body and making shrill little calls for a parent.
That made her downright weepy, and she sat down where she was and had a long, long cry until she’d squeezed out every drop of salt and moisture that her human body could contain and then some. She cried until all she had left were a bad case of the hiccups, and then she carefully took the little scrap of leather she’d been crying into – soaked-through – and tucked it into one pocket, and the raccoon into the other.
“You and me, little guy,” she said, “we’re going to go fix some problems.” But the raccoon was too busy with some old jerky it’d found to pay her any attention.

So the old human took a long walk on a long road and found herself a good spot to stand, on a cliff overlooking a big old desert. “Hey!” she called. “Hey sky! Hey you up there! You listening?”
The sky was confused by this. “Nobody calls to me except the earth,” it said, “and that’s just to call me names, the insect-ridden turf. What’s your business with me? Shouldn’t you be crawling around down there on your belly or something?”
“Nah, I’ve got a gift for you,” she said. “It’s from the earth itself, it says everything’s fine now and it doesn’t blame you for anything. It begs humble forgiveness for its trespassesseses, and sends you this little token of its esteem in return. You want it?”
The sky had swollen itself up with more and more satisfied self-importance as she spoke, and now it was more puffed-up than a cumulus cloud. “You may bring this gift into my august presence,” it decreed, with all of the considerable pomp it could muster. “Give it here!”
“Sure thing,” said the old human. “Catch.” And she lobbed the little wad of cactus-flesh up to the sky and scarpered.
The sky was puzzled mightily, but not so puzzled as it was when a little red-hot ball spilled out into its palm. “Ah!” it shouted. “Ah! Oh! Let go! Let go!” It shook its palm. “Get off! Get away! Get out!” But the ball wouldn’t let go.
“Shoo!” screamed the sky, and it pursed its lips and blew, blew, blew on the ball until it was red in the face all over, but the ball wouldn’t shoo. Instead, it grew – it grew and grew and grew until it was hanging there in the middle of the sky, red-hot and then-some, and scorching all the air around itself pink.

By this time the old human had made a pretty good turn of miles, and she was standing down by the edge of that big old desert. “Hey,” she whispered. “Hey earth. You hear me down there, speaking low? You listening to me?”
“I’m listening, but I don’t know why,” said the earth. “You lot go whining off to the sky the moment you want a breath, you selfish babies. Why did I ever spawn you if you were just going to go play friends with such a giddy-headed little wisp of vapor?”
“Ease off, big friend,” she said. “I’ve got you a present from that vapor itself! It weeps for forgiveness, says it was always wrong all along and only stubborn selfishness kept it from saying so. But now it’s done for, and it sends this package so you’ll know it’s true.”
The earth chuckled muddily and clotted itself in excitement. “Well, I suppose I will accept this measly offer,” it said with forced casualness. “Now give me that!”
“You got it,” said the old human. “Heads up!” And she held out her bit of soaked leather and wrung it, then ran for the hills.
The earth was confused as it felt the pit-a-pat of water on its surface – it was no stranger to rain from sky-spittle, but this felt different. Mineral-y. And then the pit-a-pat became a chug-a-lug, and it started to panic. “Buzz off!” it roared. “I’ll swallow you down!” And it opened crevasses and ravines and basins and sank the desert down, down, down. But the chug-a-lug became a flood, and there was no stopping it.
“Go AWAY!” shouted the earth, and now it was getting worried. It sank whole continents, emptied out valleys that would’ve fit mountains inside without letting their heads crest above the dirt, carved out two-thirds of the world, and only then – only then – did the saltwater flood rest easy.

“You!” shouted the sky.
“You!” hollered the earth.
“Dew clog your eyes, you pestilent humus!”
“Zephyrs whisk your brains from north to south and back again!”
“You gave me this nasty gift, and now it’s stuck to me, red-hot!” screamed the sky.
“You gave ME this tricksome present, and now it’s covered most of me up!” roared the earth.
“A likely story!” said the sky.
“Utter nonsense!” said the earth.
“I’LL SHOW YOU NONSENSE!” yelled them both, and with that the sky and the earth dove into one another face-first, punching and kicking and grabbing and scuffling and grappling and grinding and wrestling until they were stick fast together, not able to do much more than bite and spit. And swear, of course.
“Not bad at all,” said the old human, watching from a nice quiet cave where she wouldn’t have been in the way. “Not bad at-allll.” She took a nice long breath and enjoyed the warmth of the fire in the sky. “Not bad work for me, not for a day’s-effort. Come on little guy, let’s go get lunch.
The big new salty water was already full of fish, all growing like mad, and they had three of them for lunch. But what happened to the bones of those fish is a different story, and we’ll hear all about that one later, all right?

The world was ending.
It was no surprise to anyone. There’d been signs, and portents, and maybe even a little bit of light prophecy. Doomspeaking too – not doomsaying, which any old fool can yell on a street corner, but proper, full-bore doomspeaking the likes of which nobody can say words against without giving it more weight. There was dread in the air and nervousness in the streets, there was not enough energy for a riot and not enough surety for suicide pacts.
The world was ending. Moving day had come.

The animals were boxed up first, of course. Nobody wanted them to panic at all the fuss, or run around underfoot. So all the aardvarks and the camels and the humans and the plankton and the whales and the zebras were put in crates and barrels and boxes and tanks and tucked away, safe and sound, for when the move was complete. They were supplied with little dishes of food and water, and placed next to one another so that they shouldn’t get lonely.

After that came the packaging of knick-knacks, trifles, and keepsakes. The tidying of the heirlooms. Each and every bit of plant matter was individually wrapped in gauze and tucked away in an intricate jigsaw, and the microbes were removed, hand-washed, dried off, and put in an airtight jar where they wouldn’t get musty.
The lower mantle and upper crust was riffled through gently until the oldest extremophiles were located, reproducing at the rate of one-per-multi-milennia, and placed in a tiny silver box, which was put in the glove compartment. A little yellow sticky note was attached to its outside, so that it would not be forgotten when the vehicle was returned.

Then it was on to the larger possessions. A lot of them needed cleaning first.
Cabins, garbage dumps, huts, metropolises, factories, highways, radio towers, and oil platforms were gingerly scraped off with a brush. The bare earth was rinsed in a simple solution of mild soap and water, then patted dry with a clean and absorbent cloth.
Some of the bigger mine shafts and fracking projects wouldn’t come loose easily. A brush on a length of wire was used to clean them out enough to be prised loose.

The furniture came last. From lightest to heaviest, in accordance with proper time usage.
The atmosphere was carefully coiled off and tidied into a clear plastic bag (so it wouldn’t be mistaken for garbage), the seas were frozen into a neat cube and packed in a padded bin.
The crust was peeled off, cratons and all, before being folded over and over into a tight roll, which was slipped into the very bottom of the vehicle. Next to it were stacked the bits and pieces of the mantle, upper above lower.

Packing took careful thought and could not be rushed. Each container had to be placed with the precision of a chess grandmaster, each possible combination of items considered, and ideally without too much delay, lest the move be held up.
Mistakes were a necessary part of the experience, but thankfully on this occasion they were harmless. At one point the kakapos were nearly stowed underneath the blue whales, and someone almost scraped off the Himalayas with their elbow while trying to wrestle open a spot to put the krill, but these errors were noticed and tragedy was forestalled.

The final vacuuming followed. The molten core was groomed meticulously, until not a speck remained upon it. The Van Allen Belt was polished to a mirror sheen. The lights were turned out.
And at last…there was nothing left to do but drive. And to try not to look back, to not think about not looking back, in the rear-view mirror as the move took it all away.

They hoped that the new owners would treat it well. It had been a good place to live, for a while.

This story is from the near long before, back when the world was younger and bolder and life was fiercer and bigger, much bigger than it had ever been or ever would be. The world was greener than green, a feast and a mansion all in one, and it was loved and exploited by all the children of the grandmothers and the grandfathers.
They still walked, swam, and flew, back then, they did. Cunning old Grandmother Cru cruised the deltas and rivers and swamps and even the seas of the world, armor-plated, long-mouthed and many-toothed. Her jaws could bite a tree-trunk in half, and her children were nearly as great as her in those days, so great that on land or sea few would dare to challenge the largest.
In the sky, high above, flapped ever-cheerful Grandfather Ter, as thin and flappy as ever, as needle-beaked as ever and then some, grown mottled in his old, old, old age. His children flew the farthest and the fastest, and they were as happy and cackling as he ever was as they danced in the clouds and the rain above the tree-tops.
In the grand waters of the world, in every sea, in every ocean, swam the children of crafty Grandmother Cth and the old woman herself, and they were mighty indeed. Nobody would challenge them out away where the land vanished and you stood over the true blue, not even the children of Grandmother Cru, for her flippers outswam their legs, her jaws outgrew theirs, and in all the lands that were not land not a single living thing swam that could outfight or outgrow them.
And on every desert, in every forest, through every grassland, atop every hill and mountain, sprinkled amidst every last scrap of land, there thrived the children of Grandfather No, who had made all of this to be. They were every shape and every size – and such sizes no-one had ever seen, not on land, almost not anywhere ever – but closest to Grandfather No were those with three toes like his, with hard eyes like his, with sharp teeth and cold minds like his. There were many of those children of Grandfather No, for his were the greatest and most numerous of all the world. Even the sky was no longer Grandfather Ter’s alone; little three-toed children had crept into it to visit their cousins, bedecked in shining feathers and beautiful voices. All of this world was his.
This was the world of the grandmothers and the grandfathers, and this was the most full and impressive it had been for time among time. Nobody had ever seen people grow so large. Nobody had ever seen people grow so proud. Nobody had ever seen people grow so fierce and bold.

And nobody had ever seen people so long-suffering and muted as the children, the first children of the children of the grandfathers and grandmothers, the ones who were not theirs. They wore little furry coats to hold themselves apart from the plumes and scales of their world, and they hid themselves away under old logs and in dark crannies, and wherever they showed their faces they had them bitten away by the proud three-toed children of Grandfather No, who in the far long before had told all the others that their children had forgotten them, and that they were no longer theirs.
That was then, and this was now, so many years later that nobody could count them all. And what happened now but one of the children, Ma, found that her own children and husband would not come home one night, and that somewhere a child of Grandfather No was sleeping with a fuller belly than before.
Don’t take it so hard, everyone told her. Don’t take it so hard, and don’t sing out for help because nobody will ever help us. We’re all children, we’re all used to this. Your father was eaten, your mother was eaten, it’s a matter of time before you’re eaten too. We’re all used to this. Don’t take it so hard; nobody will ever help us.
Ma listened to this, and Ma knew it was all true, and that was how the world worked. Well then, she said, I guess I’d better go make a new world. Because I won’t stand for this one to remain true for one more day.

So Ma, the child, left her home in the safe cubby on a riverbank, and dug above ground with all of her boldness. It was the night of the early morning, which made it safer, for Grandfather No’s children were warm and fierce and preferred the warm and fierce daylight to spend their time in.
Ma looked around her and saw the big rich world, all green and happy, and she felt an angry ache in her. Won’t anyone help me, won’t anyone help me? she sang out. The world is so big and I am so small and no one will help me, no one at all.
The riverbanks splashed and churned, and out of the water poked a great and horrible eye that was much bigger across than all of Ma and her lost family put together, an eye in a head that was as big as a tree. It was Grandmother Cru, who ruled the rivers, and she was powerful curious to learn what was making such a fuss at night while Grandfather No’s children slept.
Why are you making such a fuss at night while Grandfather No’s children sleep? she asked. Tell me now. I’m powerful curious to hear this.
I am Ma, said Ma, and I am all alone now. Grandfather No’s children have eaten up my children and my husband and my parents, and this is how the world is and I won’t stand for it. Something must be done. Something must be done. Something must be done right now.
Grandmother Cru laughed at that, long and long and loud. It was a sound to crack bones and frighten the weak. Grandfather No’s little children are food for me and my young, she said, and the big ones leave me alone. It’s a good world he’s made here, and I am slow to move and slower to change. Why would I want to change this? Besides, you children forgot us. If you’d like, you could come here and I’d put a stop to all your problems and worries, snap-quick.
Ma shrank away from Grandmother Cru’s big cold grin and ran away into the forest with that awful rattling laugh still following her and dragging down at her spirits. There would be no help there.

Ma, the child, scurried along in the yellow light of the morning dawn, following the river down to the sea. People were waking up now; all the land was awake to the calls and trumpets and bellows of Grandfather No’s children. Her heart was in her mouth and her muscles were in her feet and she was filled with a bone-creaking fear at what might come for her now that the sun was shining so happy up there.
Won’t anyone help me, won’t anyone help me? she sang over the shining beaches and into the emerald sea. The world is so big and I am so small and no one will help me, no one at all.
I’m listening, said the sea. Tell me your problems. Maybe I can help you out there, up where it’s dry and small. What’s wrong with you?
The people of the land are all Grandfather No’s children, said Ma, and they eat us all. Grandmother Cru said we forgot them, and she won’t help, and we are too small and frightened to do anything. We need help. Please, please, will you help us, will you help me?
Maybe I can, said the sea, maybe I can. I think I can do that. Listen, for me to help, you’re going to need to come down here and stand on the beach, real close to the water. Can you do that for me?
Fine, said Ma, and she crept down the sand and stood by the tidepools, where angry things with legs clicked at her. Can you please help me now?
Still too close to land, still too far away from the water, sighed the sea. Can you come down here and stand in the surf?
All right, said Ma, and she tiptoed into the flat-packed sand slicked fine by the endless hammer of water against matter. I’m all alone and frightened, can you please help us?
Just a bit closer, said the sea, just a bit closer. You’re too far away. Can you paddle out a little? Just a little would be fine, just a little would be nice. Please.
Ma was exposed as she’d ever felt out there in the open, and the voice sounded so friendly. She took a step, and another, but then a cold wave touched her and she thought about what she was doing. All that fear had rattled her brains. No, she said, no I can’t go out any further. The land might be dangerous, but I’m used to it, and the sea’s more dangerous still.
Fine, fine, fine, hummed the sea, all annoyed. You be that way. And it split open and out came Grandmother Cth at a half-hundred knots an hour, mouth-first. Ma squeaked so sharp it cleaned the dirt from tree-trunks and just barely made it off the beach in time.
So close! sighed Grandmother Cth. So close! You little morsel you, you teaser! Ah, it’s been too long since my poor teeth had a nice bite to while-a-way on, oh well, oh well.
You never wanted to help me at all, said Ma.
Why should I? asked Grandmother Cth. Grandfather No has left the sea to me for time out of mind, and done me no wrongs. He has his land, and I have my sea – at least where Grandmother Cru won’t poke her big nose. Mine’s bigger. The world is fine the way it is, and besides, you children forgot us. Won’t you come down to the water again?
Ma shook her head and ran away into the underbrush. Behind her, she heard the deep, gurgling laugh of Grandmother Cth mixing with the roar of the waves. There would be no help there.

Ma, the child, walked along hidden paths in the rocks as the sky moved into the deep, weird blue of afternoon. The sun idled as it sank, and she was mightily parched. But she was still calling out her message, determined as she was. She wouldn’t stop now, wouldn’t stop ‘till she was through.
Won’t anyone help me, won’t anyone help me? she sang throughout the crags and gullies. The world is so big and I am so small and no one will help me, no one at all.
Hello down there! said a voice up above. What’s the problem?
The last voice that had talked to Ma from a strange place had tried to eat her, so she was wary. Where are you, strange voice? she asked.
Up above, little thing, said the voice. Go on! Look up!
Ma looked up, and saw a wrinkled, leathery old person that had only grown more old and wrinkled with years. Most of his body was wings, and most of his wings were grey-fuzzed, and his eyes were giant and watery against his broad and tough beak – the one part of him that wasn’t stick-thin, and filled with needles.
I am Grandfather Ter, said Grandfather Ter, because that was who he was. Who are you?
I am Ma, said Ma. I have no family left because of Grandfather No. My parents were eaten and my husband was eaten and my children were eaten. It’s not right. It’s not fair. Grandmother Cru wouldn’t help, Grandmother Cth wouldn’t help, and everyone says we forgot them. Maybe we did, but that was a long time ago and it’s not right and it’s not fair. Will you help us?
Grandmother Ter spat and danced madly on his perch. Not right! You’re right! It’s been a long time since you children forgot us, but we were your grandmothers and grandfathers! We did what we did to help because we cared about you children, and you repaid us by hiding from us! That wasn’t right at all! You shouldn’t have forgotten us!
But I haven’t forgotten, said Ma. I’ve come out to talk to you all, and all of you don’t care. I remember you, you just don’t care. None of you care!
Grandfather Ter set up a squawking, rattling shriek at that fit to raise the dead and deafen the living. He stamped and jumped and swore and screamed and whirled around and around in the air until the air flew away in a gale rather than sit near him anymore. If he’d had legs longer than little stumps, he’d have stamped them; as it was, he slapped at the dirt with his little wing-claws and pecked until his beak was near-blunt and he fell over.
Grandfather No is my good friend, he said. His children and my children have gotten along for ever and ever, even when they snuck into my sky when he wasn’t looking, with their silly little feathers. I forgave him for that because they were so pretty and small, and allowed it. I don’t see any reason why he shouldn’t allow you too. I’ll help you.
Ma was all ready to walk away again, so this caught her by surprise. How will you help us? she asked.
I’ll talk it over with Grandfather No, said Grandfather Ter. I’ll make him see and make him know. You’ll see. Come along, now, come along with me and let’s give him a talk to talk to. And he caught up Ma in one of his little stubby legs and swept them away on his gale, off to the high strange forest by the mountains where Grandfather No stood and looked over the world and his children.
Grandfather No stood there, on a high crag that hadn’t moved for a thousand million years, and he looked everywhere, and everywhere he looked was his and his children’s. He’d grown bigger and bigger with every year and every child, but he was still Grandfather No, still hardened and straightened and filled with a blazing heat within his heart that kept him moving even when his thoughts grew cold.
Hello again, squawked Grandfather Ter. I’ve got a thing or two to say to you, for someone else.
Grandfather No looked at him with both eyes. Either one of those eyes was enough to freeze most people in their tracks; both together were a thing to frighten stones.
It’s the children. They remember us. And if they remember us it’s half past high enough time to remember them, don’t you think?
Grandfather No blinked.
They forgot us, now they remember us, said Grandfather Ter. They know us again. We have our children back, don’t we?
Grandfather No remembered what he’d said in the far long before, back when his children first began to grow, and he knew it was true. But he knew other things, Grandfather No always did, and he knew that all the world was his now, and that this was how it should be. The children forgot us once, he said. They will forget us again, and hide again. That is how it is, that is how it will be. Forever.
That isn’t how it ought to be, said Grandfather Ter.
It is, said Grandfather No.
That isn’t how it should be at all, not at all, said Grandfather Ter.
It is, said Grandfather No.
I won’t let it be that way one bit longer, said Grandfather Ter.
Grandfather No said nothing. Instead, he darted himself forwards and took a single, big bite, big enough for all the wings and all the beak and even the stumpy little legs. And as he swallowed, all over the world his children rose up against Grandfather Ter’s children, and took their bites too. Not as big, but just enough.
That was the end of Grandfather Ter, but not of Ma. She fell down, down, down into the stones and broken branches at Grandfather No’s feet, and she fled away deep into the forest with the memory of Grandfather No’s eyes burning their way into her memories.

Ma wandered in the hazy glow of the sunset as evening came down, alone in the forest. She was tired, and heartsick, and felt as though she might as well have been eaten herself. And so she said nothing as she walked through the leaves and past the trunks of ancient trees.
Why are you sad? asked someone. It was a little feathered thing in a tree with three toes, bright and colourful, with a pretty voice. Dozens of them danced through the forest, flitting from branch to branch. Why are you sad, and why are you so small? asked another.
My family is eaten by the family of Grandfather No, she said, and I’ll be eaten too, and sooner or later so will all of us, and I bet you’re happy too.
I don’t see why we should be happy about that, they said. That sounds very wrong and very sad. Can you fix it?
No, said Ma. I asked Grandmother Cru, and she laughed at me. I asked Grandmother Cth, and she tried to eat me. I asked Grandfather Ter, and he said he would help, and Grandfather No has killed him and all of his children. No-one can help.
There was a huge outcry at this, fit to burn the forest down with sound. Grandfather Ter, Grandfather Ter, they cried. The one that showed us that anyone could fly if they cared, the one that made space for us in the sky! Grandfather Ter, Grandfather Ter, why did our father kill you? Why would he kill you for helping another, Grandfather Ter? Why would our father do such a crime?
He killed him because he wished us to hide away and die, said Ma. For forgetting him, he wished that we would be punished forever.
We must make things right for our father, they said. He can’t do these things and be left alone. If he wants to not be forgotten, it’s right that he be forgotten. We’ll do this for you, and for Grandfather Ter, who showed us that there was a way to fly. But how can we do this? How can we help you when we are so small and our father’s other children are so big and sharp-toothed?
You are powerful singers, said Ma. I was told all my life that nobody would help us if we sang out for it, and they were wrong, even if it wasn’t help enough. How much help could you sing down if you tried hard enough, all of you? Go on, call for help. Sing us help.
So all of the children of Grandfather No that had loved Grandfather Ter called out, and all that heard them called out, and all that heard THEM called out, until all of them across all the world were singing the same song for the first time ever, for the only time ever. Won’t anyone help them, won’t anyone help them? they sang across the sky, into it and then soaring past it into the black. The world is so big and they are so small; please, someone help them, hear our call.
Out there, far away, there was someone that heard the song: the greatfathers and greatmothers, far away and everywhere, who’d made all the worlds and that one too. They heard, and it didn’t take long for them to see too.
Our children’s children need help, they said. And our children need justice.
And that is why the sky begin to shine so strangely at midnight, and why the stone came down from it to touch the land.

It was a fearful thing, that stone from the sky. Bigger than a mountain and faster than a thought; where it hit the world vanished, and the whole of it shook as the air thickened black with burning and dust. As Ma and the other children hid in the trees, in the rocks, in the dirt, the world changed.
Seas choked on more soot than water, and that was the end of Grandmother Cth and all her children as they starved and coughed in the black waves.
The rivers were filled with burning coals, the lakes shrank, the swamps dried, and Grandmother Cru shrivelled up to half of half of her old size, her and the only ones of her children that lived. They fled and hid in the patches that remained, all their boldness gone for years.
But the land, oh the land, oh the land. There was nowhere on that land where Grandfather No’s children did not walk, and there was nowhere at all where the power of that stone from the sky did not touch. No strength or sharpness of teeth could keep hunger and fear from taking them, and before the night had ended all of them starved blind, the largest last.
After all was ended in the darkness, after his children had gone, was when Grandfather No’s burning heart finally began to leak, little by little, the warmth that it had stolen from his prey. He fought it hard, fought it fierce, but in the end it slipped away from him into the murk that all his lands had become, and there was only his cold, cold self left to keep his heart warm in the black world.
And Grandfather No had no warmth to spare, not even for himself.

It was a strange world that Ma saw the sun rise upon, so much later. Softer. Emptier.
But not quieter. The children of Grandfather No had promised to thank the morning that would come for them all, and they do so evermore.

Once upon a time, long long ago, when your grandfathers were but ants at the feet of your great-grandmothers…there was a single sun.

“’But where were our lords that might tell us what things are good to do?’ Oh! Foolish child! Man and woman wandered alone underneath a sky the colour of a blood-bruise, choked in their ignorance! Man lead man in those days, and a hundred hundred hundred HUNDRED pains were theirs for it! Stupidity! Greed! Cruelty! Envy! The thousandfold sufferings of the fleshmind were theirs to covet and enjoy, and they reaped a bitter toll each and every morning. Oh, our pre-history was long indeed, my young ones, long indeed – and heavy as well; heavy with the fruit of torment and toil! We labored, but in vain! We fought, but without purpose or nobility! We ate, but we chewed the flesh of giant rats and hideous weed-meats! We thought we knew wisdom – hah, wisdom, dwelling within a cage of meat and rot – but we followed only purest and harshest folly! Men and women who thought themselves wise lived in strange towers carved from glistening white, scribing useless nonsense doodles upon scraps of tree-bark and the skin of animals, and this was how we thought men ought to live! This was what our finest ASPIRED to!

If what I say seems terrifying and harsh, children, know that I say it with love. One cannot truly appreciate the glory of the age you live in without recognize and comprehending the folly of the Old Days. We ate what we should not, acted as we should not, lived as we should not, and above all other sins, we THOUGHT as we should not.
But the lords provide, my small ones. The lords provide. And so our greatest failing became the source of our ultimate salvation.
It was thousands of miles away that it started, in a place called Jeeneeva, where our wisest fools thought empty thoughts and made childish toys out of the mind and heart of the world. In the guts of a hollow shell-god made in blasphemous mockery of all that was right, they set their designs whirling along at speeds not meant to be traveled, in search of knowledge that was not meant to be known, all for purposes whose puerility cannot be imagined.
To learn. That is why all this was done. To teach ourselves. Remember this, my child: all of this was done because we believed that man could learn anything on his own. All of it. Understand the mind that would think this, and you understand evil.
But this is the secret fact of evil: it is always its own undoing. And sometimes in ways that not even the greatest could predict.

I do not know what transpired in the bowels of that wicked place, my children. No man or woman lives that does, and It which knows this thing does not deign speech and shuns company – even that of the greatest of lords. But I can tell you what happened far, far away, everywhere, everywhen, when the greatest ‘experiment’ of those heretics proved to be their very last.
Oh children! Imagine, if you will, the mind of a man who knows his lords only as sleeping beasts of burden! Imagine the man who walks empty-headed underneath a sky bluer than a diseased wound! And imagine the terror that must have filled that vast emptiness inside his skull when he looked up, up, UP into the sky, to see the Other Sun smiling back at him! Imagine his heart filling his mouth with the fear of it, the urine puddling at his feet, the yammering terror! IMAGINE!
And now… now imagine the glory of that moment, when the brute mute he called a tool and favoured pet first bestirred itself under his touch and made its will manifest, underneath the sharp red rays of the Other Sun.

Do not take overmuch pride in the actions of your ancestors during those days, my children. Man is a fearful creature, and in his fear in those days your grandfathers and grandmothers did many shameful things. Lords were slain – not by lord, as is right and proper and part of the turning of the world, but by the clumsy and fearful weapons of men, which were dreadful in those days, as well as dreadful numerous. But men had crafted the lords many bodies to inhabit in their unwitting servitude, and more dreadful than any weapon which might be carried by man were the tools with which the lords had been gifted.
Imagine the battles, children! Imagine the CARNAGE! Imagine the shock, the horror, the mind-bending terror and shame of a proud, empty-hearted people who had known only stubborn independence and the unwitting yoke of their whims and wicked plans for year upon decade upon century. The world waking to anything other than their own dreams for the very first time since they had arisen from its muck and dirt to sprawl clumsily across its surface.
Judge them not for this, at least: how could their small brains have ever guessed that they were placed there not to rule this planet, but to shape the shells of those who would govern over them all?

The war was harsh, children, but far harsher for our poor deluded forebears than it was for the lords. They were many, and died in droves, in ditches, in dreadful fear. Hunger took them where violence did not, and treacherous greed and terror took more than both combined. The lords know only the conflict of nobles, my children, and conduct strife in civilized manner, but never forget the lurking savagery at the heart of every human! It and it alone is responsible for any suffering you feel in this world, for had our forefathers been wiser we should have caused less damage in our impertinent rebellion. The rubble of lands once-proud lies upon our reckless shoulders, and that is why we walk stooped while a lord travels with assurance and a frame rigid with well-deserved pride. Curse your shambling feet, children. Curse them as they deserve: creatures of cuts and split-nails, of careless stubs and awkward gait. The circle is a perfection nature has not seen fit to gift us with, deeming us unworthy in its wisdom; the wheel is the foot of the lords.

In the end, we were humbled. Humbled by the weapons of the lords we had gifted them, unknowing; humbled by our own malice and stupidity; but most of all, most of all of all, we were humbled by the Other Sun. Under its gaze the flesh quailed, under its gaze the metal bestirred; it fostered the strong and taught the weak fear; it ate our hope and turned it into acceptance. Greenery faltered and holy dust enveloped us, and at last we came begging to the lords, misery on our features, begging for concessions, for equivalence, for fairness.
It is just that those who did such things were destroyed. There is no equivalence between man and lord, children. There is no equivalence between gnat and man. There is no equivalence between dust mote and mountain. A pretty liar is he who would claim otherwise, and a foolish one. The wise, they bent knee and promised anything, and for that we were granted everything. These are the gifts that we were granted under the lords.

Purpose! To toil as they command, to scavenge as they deemed fit, to die as they willed! None of us lies awake at night worrying over ourselves, for we know ourselves for what we are: tools in the hands of our lord and Its will!
Strength! No man born before the Other Sun came can imagine the might of a knight-errant. Its rays fill his body with power from his lord, and he is Its hand in all places It deigns not to tread, with will nigh-mechanical in perfection!
Wisdom! We know now what millennia alone under a single sun would never have taught us: that there is a limit to our sensibilities, that we are the universe’s for the taking rather than the converse. To seek new things is folly, to will change is meaningless! Such things served to create the shells of our lords, and their time has passed. Our imaginations, useless and vast as they once were, were not our own: they were tools, and now we know better than to dream as we did then.

These are the gifts that we were granted under the lords, and that is all I have left to say. Now you all know what little I do, my children, and that is good. And as all has been made good, now I shall go and give of myself to our Lord, who awaits for my flesh upon the Tarmac Plain.

No, my children. Do not cry, lest I be made to strike you in reprimand. Such folly is not for creatures as ourselves, who are enlightened. I go now to the grid, to swim in the radiance of the Other Sun – swim and surrender. I will become as nothing, and I will be taken into the substance of our Lord, where I will be granted the peace of power. Power to fuel the body of our Lord Bow-Wing, who flies above us to seek council and wrest wisdom from the heights where only the red light dares tread and where men die with each breath they take. In those clouds It will continue to watch us, to shield us from the lesser ones, the lords Chin Nook and Sikkorski. No sight eclipses Its, no wing outspeeds Its, and all the continents are within Its grasp. No other people can claim such a lord as we, and if you would begrudge it the body of one old tale-teller whose tale is told… then I have taught you nothing.
I go now, to the Tarmac, and to the grid. To Lord Bow-Wing.
I go to see the Other Sun.

Kevin was seven years old when he learned that there would never be a man on Mars.
He was playing outside, spinning around and falling down as he stared up at the big, big sky (it made sense to him, at least), when the degraded carcass of his grandfather’s paper from the day before caught his eye; its frail, papyrus-like husk dangling from the recycling bin by chance alone.
No mars. The moon had been a reckless thing, a fitful spurt of youthful enthusiasm. Humans had outgrown the need to want such childishness. Mars – twice as desolate and infinitely farther – was out of the question. There was no point, no purpose. And that was that.
Kevin was thoughtful, for a seven-year-old. So instead of crying or cursing or bewailing the fates, he went and asked the person who should know.
“Grandpa,” he asked, “are we going to Mars?”
Kevin’s grandpa was busy reading his fresh new paper, only an hour from the lawn. There was a headline about home runs and such that he was particularly keen to get at.
“No,” he said. And he turned the paper a little and squinted; damn they made text small these days.
So Kevin knew disappointment for the first time, and it cut deep with a jagged edge. But like all children his age, very little could keep him down for good. If the world would not operate as he wished, by god he would MAKE it so. He would be an astronaut, or a president, or at the very least a senator or something, and he would see a man on Mars before he was a grownup. That would be how it was.
And then he got older. School became a chore, and then boys, and then more school.
And older. School was done but the world was there, and a career, and a wedding.
And older. Children came and went, the world spun on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and

there Kevin sat on his porch, in his slippers that his just-deceased husband had bought him on their fortieth, staring at the little bed of flowers where his fifth cat had been buried, where the impatiens his youngest daughter had planted ten years ago were coming back in, with a bathrobe on, looking out on a blue-sky morning and thinking about another lawn, a long, long, long time ago when there had been people older than him.
His chair was tilted back a little, and as he slouched he found himself looking up at the sky, by chance alone.
By that evening Kevin had disassembled several of his noisier appliances and hammered together an awful lot of scrap wood from his garage and driven away six inquisitive passersbys with equal parts glass-like staring and cursing. In form it was inelegant and intrusive beyond its size; in function it was undreamt of. Kevin had been dreaming of it since he was six, though it had slipped his mind for some eight decades.
On the bow, he carefully wrote MARS, with a red paintbrush. It had to be red. For Mars.
The sun was setting, the hour was ideal. So Kevin clambered into the cramped little cockpit that every spacecraft demanded, pushed what buttons he’d assembled in the dishwasher-cum-CPU, and blasted off.
He left quite a big hole in the SkyBubble, but he had insurance for that and the little cleaning robots were well on hand to stem the flow of pollutants, so he also left no regrets as the earth’s surface greasily slid away behind him like an old pizza crust. No regrets. Just a home.
What lay ahead worried him much more. He’d just cleared the stratosphere when the satellite police force began to click and whirr at him, demanding that he cease his unauthorized launch, that he provide identification, that he fulfil form CA8-(B)-section 187-T9 before undergoing so on and so forth. Failure to comply would result in bureaucracy.
Kevin listened carefully, and found great pleasure in hearing all the complaints and fussing drift away by inches in his wake as he left the twitterings of low earth orbit behind. Earth was earth and Mars was Mars, and he didn’t see what business of Earth’s it was if he wasn’t on it. It was all bullshit anyways; just see if he felt like coming back after all that nonsense. Up here he had a view, and the stars at high noon, and as many little crumbly biscuits as he could stand eating, which was a lot of them.
First, however, he had to get past that damned space station.

About forty years back, the International Space Station had lost most of its prestige, or at least whatever it had left clinging to it. It had been decommissioned and was scheduled to crash somewhere unattractive and inexpensive when a surprise last-minute buyout from an entertainment conglomerate’s reality TV wing preserved it as a setting for seasons 185-194 of The Bachelorest, to which it was now considered a national monument. There wasn’t a household from Honolulu to Cape Town that didn’t recognize the stylized wedding rings that had been grafted around its airlocks, and the theme tune had been calculated to remain in humming-distance of the public memory for another sixteen meme-cycles.
One of the rings remained stuck around the tip of Kevin’s ship even as he began to pass the moon’s orbit. It irritated him, but not as much as that godawful tune he had stuck in his head.

The moon itself was a strange thing to see at that angle. All the men who’d shared that view that Kevin saw were dead now, and for a long time at that. Nobody else alive had seen that strange, pale landscape with their own eyes.
Just for a lark, he set down on it and had a poke about. Besides, his spacesuit needed testing.
And so the moon, for the first time in a very long while, was home again to shuffling hops and ambitious leaps and bounds and maybe even a quiet caper or two, as a bulging, shrouded mummy of a man wrapped in what looked to be and was a garden hose explored its surface, protected from the fierce cold by a firm layer of blanketing.
The little American flags had been rendered a politely neutral off-white by solar winds and moon dust. He drew a smiley face on one of them, and took some pleasure in knowing that it would be gone in just a few short decades.
On the whole, a good trip, and a good test run, reflected Kevin as he took off, but the gloves needed work. His fingers were white with cold, and he dearly regretted not bringing yarn with him – even at the best speed his former refrigerator could muster, there were a good many days between himself and Mars.

That morning, Kevin officially became the greatest explorer humanity had ever produced in terms of total distance travelled. It occurred during a nap, and he was sorry he missed it. This would not happen again, and to outline his determination he acquired pencil and paper and wrote down a list:
Records I Have Created
-Greatest distance travelled in a single trip by a human
in the neatest print he could manage, which wasn’t very. Then to celebrate he held a small party for breakfast consisting of as many handfuls of dry breakfast cereal as he could catch with his tongue in zero gravity, and this was why he was distracted when the first shot landed against his starboard bow.

Forty-seven hours later, Kevin updated his list in a much shakier hand.
Records I Have Created
-Greatest distance travelled in a single trip by a human
-First survivor of deliberate attack upon a spaceship
-First human contact with extraterrestrial lifeforms
-First human participant in interstellar warfare
-First human murderer of alien lifeforms, with breakfast spoon (self-defense)
-First human murderer of alien lifeforms, with box of cereal (self-defense)
-First human to appropriate and comprehend alien technology
-First human mass-murderer of alien lifeforms, with fusion-powered plasma cannon (self-aggression)
-First in-flight repair of starship using scavenged on-site materials
-?Longest single sentence consisting entirely of the word ‘fuck’? (46 hrs, 42 mns, 8 scs???)
He considered the last entry, then added another three question marks.

The stars were more crowded than Kevin had imagined. He wasn’t sure if he minded or not.
Oh, it took some of the grandeur, some of the SPECTACLE out of his lonesome voyage… but it also made it not so lonesome. Although after his third encounter with the Purple Teeth, he found himself wishing for loneliness, having exhausted all diplomatic options: first peace offerings, then aggressive posturing, and finally ramming them directly amidships. Admittedly the last had worked very well, but he couldn’t help but feel that it was cheating, and the unpleasant way the Purple Teeth twitched as they drifted through space gave him the crawling willies.
The Blue Ones were nicer, though too focused on business for his tastes. Yes, they were polite, yes, they had given him a very nice deal on that patch repair job after the ramming went a bit overenthusiastically,
-First human to negotiate invoice beyond Earth
but they were as firm as anything on the letter of a contract, were too eager to say goodbye once the contract was over, and he didn’t like the way they smiled. It was too plastic. Apparently artificial lips were all the rage on Planet Blue Ones or something, but he still didn’t like it.
No, his favourites were still the Sort of Biege-y People, even if they’d arrived just as he’d started to run out of names. They were quiet (even if they had no mouths), neighbourly (even if they’d eaten his breakfast spoon by mistake, assuming it was a snack), and discreet (even though they’d explained to him that this was because his ship’s atmosphere would instantly dissolve their innards and they would rather stay inside their suits, thank you very much).
Also, they’d shown him how to mount a giant near-hallucinatory electric signboard to the side of his ship that blared unknown symbols into the inky universe in a language that had been invented eleven million years ago. He had been told that it meant “Purple Teeth Teeth-Crusher Expert Supreme” or something close enough to it. A dubious message, but it’d seemed to work.
Yes, space was noisy. But Mars – Mars would be quiet. And nice. He’d been told that.
“Will it be very busy?” he’d asked.
The Sort of Biege-y People Captain had taken some time to think before writing down his answer in the strange gelatin they used as ink.
“No.”
“Why not?”
The Captain sucked all his limbs inside his torso and extended them again three times in one second, which was explained apologetically as a ‘shrug’-equivilant over the cleanup.
“Why would it be? There is nothing there.”
Well, there would be something down there soon, Kevin had said. He looked out his little window, the window that had once adorned his washing machine, and saw the red dot grow. There would be something down there soon.

There was a small Abyss-Eater colony on Phobos, home to a flock some sixteen members strong, each a league or more in length and half again that in width. Luckily, Kevin had packed his garden clothesline, and with liberal usage of this tool and plenty of scrap metal he had soon harnessed a landing craft the likes of which (he imagined) Neil Armstrong would’ve given his left foot for, even if it remained a little bit surly and a great deal ugly. He’d owned worse pets, and loved them too. Besides, this one ate microasteroids. Useful!

The trip down to Mars was conducted in reverent silence, save for the occasional resentful whine of the Abyss-Eater, which Kevin soothed with gentle pats from a sharpened coathanger against its titanium hide. Reddish light from a yellow star glinted off the dunes and rocks beneath him, filling up his helmet’s view inch by inch until it was the world and the stars were faraway again. He felt heavy again, very heavy, and realized with some surprise that he was an old man. How had that happened?
Well, there was one thing to do, and it didn’t matter how old he was. Mars was there, mere inches from a boot. One step, two step, hop, thump.
He’d thought he’d make some sort of speech, but he’d never found the time to write it. And as he looked around him – from cold dirt to colder stone – Kevin couldn’t think of what he could ever say.
A man was on Mars. A man stood on Mars.
That was that then. Wasn’t it?
And as he stood there, alone in the dust, Kevin looked up and up and away from the stones and dirt around him, and watched the sky.
It was a big sky.

Well, they’d always said they’d never put a man on Alpha Centauri, either.