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Arapach the Fat lived alone in the woods, spinning and weaving and snaring and suckling. As befitted a spider, and Arapach the Fat was a very good spider, due to having long practice at being one. Arapach’s webs were the finest in the woods, they said, they being those in-the-know. There weren’t many of those-in-the-know anymore. To be one, you had to get caught in one of Arapach’s webs and get back out to talk about it.
They were very good webs. Which is what the man on the horse in the shiny, noisy clothing found out when he rode face-first into one, launching him face-first to the dirt with a clank and a crunch.
Arapach came out, of course. No proper spider misses a stir on their web such as that, if not for the chance for a feast then for the hurry to get on with repairs. Flies don’t catch themselves, as Arapach had always said.
This, however, wasn’t a fly. That was most peculiar. “Pardon me for asking, person who just destroyed my web, but what are you?” asked Arapach.
“Sir Karrowich,” said the man, muffled somewhat by dirt and the odd angle at which his head was stuck. “I am Sir Karrowich, and I am a knight of Rudonia. And I am a dead man; I fear my neck has broken.”
“That is a great pity, and I am sorry,” said Arapach. The knight’s hard skin seemed entirely inedible, and it would be a waste indeed. “Since I have caused this, can I help you in some way?”
“There is one thing you can do, stranger,” said Sir Karrowich. “I rode in haste with a message of utmost importance to my lord, King Gistoff of Rudonia. The Duke has risen against him, and his army rides but a short ways behind me, under the command of Sir Bannagan of Binstron, with a secret darkness at its rear that I cannot see and have not named. Make your way to our king and warn him! Warn him, and ride to arms against the traitor in my stead!”
“Well, all right then,” said Arapach. “But I’m not sure they’ll listen to me. I’m not the sort of person that kings speak to often.”
“Take the ring from my left hand,” implored the fallen knight. “Hold it high and proclaim yourself my squire and they must listen! They must! Succeed, stranger, succeed, or all our fair land will”
Arapach waited politely. Then Arapach nudged the knight gently with a leg and realized with a spider’s instincts that the man was not going to say any more, or do anything at all, ever, except maybe transition into topsoil.
“Well, I suppose I owe him that help now,” Arapach sighed. A little silk net was made to catch the air, and soon enough Arapach was ballooning miles above the comfortable little forest and into the big blue sky, circling in the drafts and searching for a grey stone castle on a rocky and inhospitable hill more suited to scorpions than spiders.

Finding it was easy enough. Finding the right window was a bit harder, and by the time Arapach was peering at a man in a court on a chair with a crown the sun had sunk down to near nothing.
“Where is Sir Karrowich?” asked the man with the crown to the men in metal that stood around him, who Arapach knew must be knights. “Where is my champion, friend, servant and scout? He said he’d bring us word before dusk, but dusk has arrived and Sir Karrowich remains gone. What will we do?”
At this, Arapach dropped into the room on a silken thread and hovered in front of the king’s nose, which caused a stir.
“Hello,” said Arapach. “I am Sir Karrowich’s squire.”
“Poppycock,” said the largest of the knights present. “You’re a flycatcher at best, and Sir Karrowich could defeat ten dozen men at a time without pause for breath. Why would he take such a small and silly thing as his squire? You must be lying.”
At this, Arapach showed the ring from Sir Karrowich’s left hand, which had been placed upon Arapach’s leftmost leg, to show synchronicity.
The knight reddened. “You could have stolen that.”
“Sir Karrowich, gravely injured, passed it on to me,” said Arapach. “He said that I was to warn King Gistoff of Rudonia of the oncoming army of the Duke, under the command of Sir Bannagan of Binstron, in whose wake a secret darkness follows that he had not seen and had not named. This is his ring that he gave to me as he lay dying in the forest, and this is the warning that I promised to deliver in his name.”
“Then we are dead all the same!” cried the king, tearing with wild abandon at his beard. “Woe! Alas! Alack! Sir Karrowich was the best of our knights in all respects, and against Sir Bannagan of Bistron we have no equal present! We will be shredded to snippets at the castle gates by cock-crow!”
“Surely you have some knights right here,” said Arapach, waving at the largest of the knights present, who glowered uncomfortably at the spider.
“They are but pawns and pudding-heads as to Karrowich,” sobbed the king inconsolably. “Halmsley there is the best remaining, and Karrowich could kick him up and down a tourney as if he were a child with a toy ball-and-string. Woe! Alas! Alack! We are done for and done properly!”
“Well then, it seems my debt to Sir Karrowich is outstanding yet,” said Arapach. “If your straits are so troublesome, I shall improve them.”
“The Duke shall be here in scant moments,” bleated the king, twisting in the utmost misery atop his throne.
“I will work quickly,” said Arapach.
“You are insignificant and will do us no good in any small way whatsoever,” declared the largest of the knights present, who was apparently named Halmsley.
“I will work cunningly,” said Arapach.
“Do be careful,” said the queen, who’d been listening to the entire affair carefully.
“I will work carefully,” agreed Arapach, and departed for the castle gates.

The duke’s army was already encircling the base of the rocky and inhospitable hill more suited to scorpions than spiders when Arapach came to the gate. At least five thousand men in all, each armed, armoured, and if not dangerous then dangerously enthusiastic. Bloodlust rode in the eyes, plunder sat heavy in their pockets, and recklessness twitched between their teeth like a lizard’s tongue.
“We’re doomed,” said the largest of the knights present. “Best to begin working out ransom rates for yourselves, lads. The king’s going down but at least we can get off with our necks intact.”
“You may do as you like, Halmsley,” said Arapach, who was beginning to spin, “but I’m staying here.”
“Who would ransom you anyways?” snarled Halmsley with a flip of his hand. “And it’s SIR Halmsley, bug. Knights are ‘sir,’ bugs are ‘nuisance-fit-to-be-squashed,’ is that clear enough?”
“What about kings and queens?” asked Arapach, with interest.
“Kings are ‘sire,’ which is like a bigger ‘sir.’ Queens are whatever you please; they’re women, and women don’t get to be knights.”
“Why’s that?” asked Arapach.
Halmsley shrugged. “Just don’t. Same reason bugs are nuisances-fit-to-be-squashed, bug.”
Arapach made a complicated gesture at Sir Halmsley whose meaning was entirely apparent across species borders, and the knight stomped off swearing. Most of the others followed him, leaving Arapach alone at the gates to finish weaving.
Soon after dusk, the first man came. He was large and he was angry and he was frightened and he was gravely puzzled as to why the castle gates had been left flung open wide, but that did not stop him. A howling war-cry on his lips, ferocity in his heart, he soon had webs in his mouth as he ran full-tilt into Arapach’s snare, as did the man behind him, and the man behind him, and the man behind him. Before fifty seconds had elapsed the entryway to the castle was clogged with a yelling, clanking morass of dangling men, all of them stuck fast and twitching too violently to allow their fellows to cut them free.
“A good start,” said Arapach. But there were thuds from the walls: the clanking sound of siege-ladders. Arapach made haste but no waste, and laid a second snare.
The first man reached the top of his ladder no more than a few moments later. He reached for the battlements and walked neck-first into a thin little band of unsticky silk, the sort of line Arapach used to run along the webs without getting all eight feet stuck. It was firm and resilient and stretched taunt as piano-wire, and it bounced the poor soldier head-first down his ladder – or rather, helmet-first, much to the sorrow of his companions beneath him. The ramparts were alive with the sound of cursing and thudding.
A clank and a call of triumph came from the courtyard; the gate had been breached at long last by the careful removal of several men whom nobody had liked very much. Within a moment’s minute the inner walls were awash with a horde of men, indeed, all the remaining army, packed tighter than fish in a barrel and three times as salty. Their dander was up from their humiliation, and their torches waved with fierce abandon; to burn was as good as to loot now, to their slighted minds.
This made Arapach smile, in that horrible way spiders smile. Arapach smiled so broudly that it almost stretched all the way around and back again, and then Arapach did a very cruel and clever thing, which was triggering the great pit-web that had been so quickly dug into the soft and loose soil of the courtyard.
Right away, the whole army was balled up tight. And perhaps that would’ve been no more than a distraction. Earlier, maybe. But this was now, and the men were angry, which is easily frightened, and bloodthirsty, which is readily panicked, and most importantly they were all waving torches. Spider-silk, contrary to what some may say, is not very flammable. Oiled armour and leathers, regrettably, are.
It was all very unpleasant.

Arapach stood there above the gate, surveying the lands, and spotted one man who remained, a man nearly the span of two in size and plainly a knight by his shininess, although in his case it was a rather dulled and sooted shiny. He rode past the hanging-men of the gates and surveyed the great bonfire with contempt in his eyes, unmoved by the unwholesomely pork-like scent that filled the air.
“Greetings,” said Arapach. “Am I to believe you are Sir Bannagan of Bistron?”
“Am I to believe that you are the insolent bug that has destroyed the Duke’s army?” asked the knight.
“Yes,” said Arapach.
“Yes then,” said Sir Bannagan of Bistron. “Now stand your ground and be squashed, or clear off.”
“I am the deputized Squire of Sir Karrowich of Rudonia, and will not clear off,” explained Arapach. “It is my duty to face you and defeat you.”
“Fine,” said Sir Bannagan of Bistron, with a roll of his eyes. “Let the duel begin.” And with that he raised one foot and brought it down very heavily.
Arapach was not there.
Sir Bannagan of Bistron swore softly and brought down his other foot, twice as hard.
Arapach, an old hand at this game, was not there.
Sir Bannagan of Bistron snarled and brought down both his feet in rapid stomping succession, stamp-stamp-tramp-stomp-tramp.
Arapach, who was ready for that, remained not there.
Sir Bannagan of Bistron swore loudly and robustly and flew into a fury, feet stamping, sword slashing, arms waving, throat bellowing curses black enough to tarnish silverware, the earth creaking under his limbs.
Arapach was not there. Instead, Arapach bit Sir Bannagan of Bistron rather firmly upon the nape of his neck.
Sir Bannagan of Bistron shrieked with a pitch that would startle a screech-owl and swung his hands to his neck, where Arapach was not. Due to his superior discipline and training instilled by a thousand thousand hours of practice he did not drop his sword first, and the pommel impacted with considerable force.
Arapach stood atop Sir Bannagon of Bistron’s boots with a well-earned satisfaction, and surveyed the horizon. Still the darkness behind the army loomed, even after it was decimated (in the common-use sense of the term), even after its commander was felled most thoroughly.
“Come on then,” said Arapach impatiently. “Flies might not catch themselves, but there’s no catching to be done if they won’t at least show up for the snaring.”
The darkness rumbled. And then it shattered.
The figure behind it was revealed to the eyes of all; slavering, bellowing, and thunderous. It was a dragon of unreasonably large size, and who knew what promises of treasure and meals had lured it from its undermountain home and brought it sepulchrously squinting into the light of day with eager fangs. The land groaned under its scaly belly; the clouds squirmed away from its sides; the sky roiled against its back. In its breath was the noxious scent of corpses long-decayed; in its heart was lustful greed; in its eyes was hungry death. Its claws were half a league long and its teeth were half a league longer and its deadly gaze that could stop a man’s heart cold and dark was keener than an eagle’s and thrice as cruel.
“Hmm!” said Arapach the Fat. “This will be interesting.”

There were many songs written about that battle afterwards, which is how this sort of thing goes, really. Fish swim, birds fly, spiders spin, and singers lie, lie, lie, lie until they run out of money, and then they lie some more. In this case the lies were exceptionally bold and blatant because not a single man dared peek out a window at the hideous racket and see what transpired, lest they see their doom approaching and die horribly aware rather than peacefully ignorant.
So the tale of how the dragon breathed poisonous fire that no man could withstand, but Arapach did, was a lie.
Furthermore, the tale of how Arapach’s shield withstood a dozen blows that could fell a castle, yet still stood tall, was also a lie.
In addition, the tale of how the spider’s counter-strike slit the worm into two halfway along its body, tearing the earth with its agony, was a lie.
And the tale of the fight’s-end, where the dragon swallowed Arapach whole only for Arapach to cut through its belly and let out all its innards, that too was a lie.

So what happened was this: Arapach the Fat climbed atop the dragon as it ate the bonfire in the courtyard, blissfully ignorant of the spider’s tiny presence, carefully clambered to its eyeball, and bit it exceedingly hard there in its most sensitive place with as much venom as Arapach could muster.
The dragon reared and roared and pawed at its eye, blinded and pained. It was shocked that something could harm it, and baffled that it could no longer see it. The fury of a pained immortal is a sight to see, and so too must have been what the dragon expressed when Arapach bit its other eye ten seconds later.
Oh the racket! Oh the calamity! Oh the rage of it all, the spiteful anger, the fury, the indignation! But underneath all that show-fury and ire lay the heart of a true predator: a cautious coward that cannot afford to die for a meal. And so it was that at the fangs of Arapach the dragon knew caution and terror for the first time in millennia, and retreated to its undermountain home to nurse its eyes and brood upon the treachery of Dukes that offer gold and land but say nothing of hideous pain and blindness.
“Huzzah!” called the king.
“Huzzah!” cheered the knights (who’d appeared again rather suddenly).
“Good job,” said the queen. “Thank you very much.”
“A pleasure,” said Arapach. “I have not laid such snares since I was a spiderling, and the challenge was a treat.”
“A treat you have earned, brave, noble, excellent Arapach,” gushed the king. “Squire you may have been, but a knight’s heart you possess! I hereby knight you SIR Arapach, and may you shield us for years to come!”
“Oh,” said Arapach. “Oh, but that’s impossible, I’m sorry to say. I must decline.”
“What?” said the king, blinking dubiously.
“Knights are ‘sir,’” said Arapach, “and that’s all well and good. But I am a woman, and women don’t get to be knights.”
“Besides,” she added, “I’m not sure they’re all that to make much of. No offense to your Sir Karrowich, of course.”

In the end, an arrangement was reached that satisfied all parties. Arapach remained Arapach, or Arapach the Fat on respectful occasions, and had a seat at high table in the court of Rudonia that she never attended, and her woods were put under royal protection, so that she might spin there for as long as she liked and as long as her great-great-great-great grandchildren lived.
Which was a very long time. Spiders have many children, and Arapach the Fat was a very good spider, due to long practice.
But she always was good at improvising, too.

The fisherman and his daughter lived in a smallish woodenish thing that passed itself off as a building day and night in the teeth of the sea and its whims, mostly through outrageous temerity. And yet despite this unconscious bravado that fueled their very lives in their every waking movement, their days were spent in dull necessity. The fisherman fished. The daughter mended nets, cleaned the catch, cured and cooked food as needed, stopped the shack from falling over through carefully applied patchwork, kept a small garden alive in the teeth of the salt winds, and sometimes helped fish when there was a big run on. When she had spare time, she sat on a rock in the wind by the waves down the shore, with her toes in the water, and hummed to herself as she turned bits of driftwood into miniature ships. They were big, small, canoes, caravels; every kind of ship in the world but for the white-streaked gull-haunted wreck that her father piloted over angry waves. As she finished them, she pushed them gently into the water and watched them set sail, wondering where they would find their way.
One of them found its way back on a fine spring day, when the sky was too cloudless to be real. As the daughter sat on her rock, humming her song and whittling with the knife that had belonged to her mother, she heard a splash and a polite cough, a precursor to a question.
“Is this yours?”
The speaker was a shark, a rather young one with a hide still more gloss than scars. In his hand was a little boat that the daughter recognized, one she had set into the water just the other day.
She thanked the shark politely, of course. Where had he found it?
“A hundred miles and more and still sailing sound. You carve a fine craft,” said the shark.
“And a compliment on carving from a shark is a fine thing itself,” said the daughter, eyeing the glittering white needles inside his mouth. “Thank you.”
He saw her gaze, and smiled as sharks do. “Here, take a closer look, if you would like,” he said, and opened so wide that he nearly out-sparkled the sun and the sea themselves.
“They’re pretty,” she told him. “You know, if I could ask… do you have any to spare?”
“Dozens and dozens a year,” said the shark. “Here, take this one – it came out as I ate a white-fish on my way here.” He spat a stout little fang into her palm. It was smoother than a pearl, with a ragged edge sharper than her mother’s knife.
“I want to try carving this,” she said. “Can you bring more?”
“Dozens and dozens a year,” said the shark. “Tomorrow, then?”
“Tomorrow,” said the daughter.
And they both had something to look forwards to.

The days went by placidly after that. The daughter labored and mended and cooked and cleaned and gardened, but she did so with a small smile tickling at her now and then, one that filled the fisherman with grave and deep-seated worries now and again.
“Have you been seeing a man, daughter of mine?” he asked her, brows beetling. “You look it. I’ve seen you smiling.”
“No,” said the daughter, who was speaking the truth. “No, I haven’t been seeing a man.”
“Huh,” said the fisherman. His eyes grew less hard, but she saw his fingers twitch yet. “I won’t have it. Not that. I won’t stand for a man who won’t look me in the eye and sneaks around behind my back. Trying to steal my daughter, that is. Take my helper and leave me old and lonely with a cold hearth and an empty belly – a man with no more wife, no more brother, and now no daughter. Won’t have it. Not one bit.”
He sat back in his chair with a sigh, content to have said his piece and then some, and picked at his teeth with a fish-bone. Then a strange look came over his face, and he wrenched the bone free and stared.
“Hang off. I didn’t go out today. Where’d this come from?”
“I caught it,” said the daughter, just a little too quickly.
“Tunny, was it? Awful close to shore for tunny.” The fisherman’s eyes and lips moved as he examined the bone. “And a big one. Too big for little arms. You hiding gifts from me?”
“It must’ve been sick,” said the daughter.
“Feeding me sick fish? Hoping I’ll die? Ungrateful. Ungrateful. Your mother must be rolling over. Ungrateful sprat, trying to leave me cold in my bed and have the place to yourself. Bah!”
With that he stomped off.

“Let’s get married,” said the daughter.
The shark was surprised. Not surprised at the offer – no, no, it had been months and months now, and dozens and dozens of beautifully carved little teeth, all hidden under a stone on the beach. A long time to talk and think, time enough to get used to each other. But the way the daughter said it sounded like a declaration of war.
“It’s my father,” she explained. “He’s all out of sorts. He knows there’s something going on, and it’s making him angrier and surlier by the day.”
“We could run away,” said the shark. But he knew it was foolish even as he said it. The fisherman was old and lazy and cantankerous, but he was a man of the sea through and through, more water than earth in his feet. If they ran, he’d find them.
“You’ll meet him,” said the daughter. “You’ll meet him. As long as he thinks someone’s plotting to steal me away he’ll be jealous and angry, but if he has to deal with a proper suitor he’ll have to give in.”
“This seems like it might not work,” said the shark.
“I’ll make it work,” said the daughter.
And so she did, with her needles and her thread and her scissors and her wits, she made it work and made that shark a man.
She sewed man-gloves to hide his flippers, and a pair of man-pants to hide his tail. A man-shirt covered the tall grey triangle on his back.
“It is a fine outfit,” said the shark, looking at himself in the water as he stood on the beach – a bit unsteady on his new legs. “But look! I can see my eyes.” And there they were indeed, two big black shark-eyes.
“I thought of that,” said the daughter triumphantly. “Here, take this hat. I wove it from the beach-grass, to keep the sun off.”
It was a bit big, and a bit more silly-looking, but it was an authentic beachcomber’s hat and it shaded the shark’s face as smoothly as could possibly be. And to draw her father’s own eyes away from it, she placed her latest carving-project around his neck on a string; a fine big tooth with a simple sketch of a sail.
“Now, remember not to smile,” said the daughter. “And try not to grit your teeth either – he’ll be angry. Just be calm, be calm, be calm.”
The shark listened to her carefully, as he always did. And he was sure that he could manage this, because if there’s one thing that sharks are often good at, it’s calmness.

“What’s this ugly lot, daughter of mine?” said the fisherman. He peered at the shark threateningly, and his fingers danced near the great gutting-blade that he kept at his belt. “I knew you had a man! I knew you did! Lying to me, eh?”
“I only met him just the other day, when you were out in your boat,” said the daughter with the most technically accurate of truths. “Father, we haven’t known each other long, but we love each other, and would like to be married. Will you permit this?”
The fisherman stared long and hard and dark at this, face blooming over with ugly red, but he was an older man, and had spent enough time in his life angry to learn how to think through it. If he said no flat-out his daughter might try and leave, and even if he brought her back she would never do as he said again. He liked his meals and he liked having all his chores done for him each day, so this was out of the question altogether.
“Fine!” he said. “Fine! Marry any old man you want, if that’s what you want! Fine! But it’s not what I want, because what I want is what’s best for you, small sprat. If he’s so fine, let him prove himself as such. He’ll prove he’s a man to make you happy or I’ll gut him, see if I won’t. The sun’s too high already; I’m off to fish. You two tend to the garden, clean my last catch, and get a meal going – and be careful! I won’t lose my good blade to the likes of his careless misuse.”
And with that he left the house, slamming its small creaking door so hard that it grew a fresh crack right beneath the handle.
“I’ll see to the garden and prepare the meal,” said the daughter. “Run to the pile outside and clean the fish.”
The shark hurried outside, and the sight of the pile of dead things was of a scale to impress even him, who had been fed on the fat of whales at the side of his grandmother. The gutting knife felt awkward and clumsy in his hands, and he grumbled fiercely to himself as he tore at the bellies, whispering words in the language of sharks that were not fit to be heard by anyone at all.
But they were heard by one other, in some manner.
The fisherman was out at sea by now, heaving on his torn-up old nets with a fierceness that belayed his age, but his sight was far afield from his body as it searched the lines and planks of his boat by instinct and touch. The old man had learned things out there over his years, and made blackened agreements and terribly cruel bargains with the gulls that draped over his vessel like reeking sails. His eyes were clutched in yellowed beaks now, circling high in the air over his home on whitened wings and fixed fiercely on the strange young man far below who was threatening to steal away his daughter from his home.
And so it was that the fisherman saw the strange young man drop his gutting knife – a rusted, battered thing with an edge duller than a stone spoon that the fisherman avoided sharpening whenever possible – and sink his teeth deep into the bellies of mackerel, tearing and shredding with the keenness of oiled steel.
“Hah!” said the man to the gulls on his boat. “What’s that? I’ll see about that!” And he hauled up the last of his catch and headed home as fast as he could, calling his eyes back to him as he tied ropes and spat to himself.
“I am finished,” said the shark to the daughter.
She was surprised to hear it, but she almost shouted when she saw the bodies of the fish. “What did you mean by doing that?” she asked. “He’ll know for sure something’s going on; look at all these jagged cuts!”
“I thought of that,” said the shark. “Do not worry about it.”
The daughter grumbled as she finished the cooking, but she didn’t worry about it much. Only as much as was needed.

In came the fisherman, shoulders streaked with white guano, beard bristling and eyes red from strain. “Where’s my meal?” he called. “Where’s my food? Ah, there it is, there it is. Good, good. Sit down and eat!”
No sooner had the shark and the daughter perched atop the rickety wooden stools that served as chairs than the fisherman gave a shout that saw fit to raise the roof from its moorings. “Look at this! Look at this! My meat’s been chewed, my fish has been torn! What’s wrong with this, what did you do to it?”
“It is an old trick from faraway, where I come from,” said the shark. “I cut it jaggy to purify the meat, to make it good healthful. It trims the sick from the fish and leaves the good food.”
“I don’t like meddling in superstitious matters,” said the fisherman, who only an hour before had trusted his eyes to the beak of a pair of gulls sworn by wind and wave, “but I’ll allow it this time, though your presumption in assuming my catch is sickly irks me sore.” And he did allow it, and seemed to soften over the evening. He lit his pipe and told stories, old stories, from back when he’d been younger and his brother had yet been his friend and alive. Stories of riotous youth and screeching upright citizenry, of the pious mocked and the proud brought low. They tickled and tickled and tickled the shark’s funnybone, and at last – right after a tremendous anecdote of a crab in a priest’s smallclothes – he opened his mouth wide and laughed out loud, sending the firelight all ajudder from his jaws.
“Ah! What’s that there, what was that?” asked the fisherman, jolliness rolled up and vanished away with thundercrack swiftness. “What’s that with your teeth? Are you hiding some secret in there, strange man? Are you up to some trick to eat my daughter, is that it?”
The shark was too surprised and embarrassed to say a word, but the daughter was waiting. “Father, it’s considered a token of good fortune from faraway to sharpen your teeth like knives. It shows you’re rich and eat only the good meats and fine foods that merit no chewing. No man who means to remain poor would dare do so.”
“A spoiled princeling or an ambitious do-nothing then,” snarled the fisherman. “No, no – definitely not the former, not in those raggedy strips of cloth, nor with that beachcomber’s cast-after on his head. Bah!” he said, and he retired to his warm corner with his pipe, where he sent up fumes fit to choke the fireplace.

“I feel it’s time to check the crab-traps,” said the fisherman in the early (but not too early) dawn. “Mend my nets, you strange man – and be careful with them! They’re older than you are and much more valuable. And daughter of mine, you take care of that door. One of you damn-fools knocked it half-silly yesterday.”
And as soon as he was away and offshore, out of sight, the fisherman whistled and hummed and bobbed his head and did all those things that were demanded of him by the gulls in exchange for their obedience. They took an ear this time as well as an eye – soft as baby-fingers their hard beaks and dry tongues – and soared away over the currents, back home.
Back home the shark was attempting to mend nets. It was a difficult task at best granted the use of a full four fingers and a thumb, and the shark possessed neither. He tore and fidgeted and tweaked and grumbled and repeated some of the unspeakable, unhearable words which he had used the day before quite loudly; loud enough to travel all the way up to the white bird in the blue sky.
“I am finished,” said the shark.
“So quickly?” asked the daughter.
The shark held up his arms and she saw that his gloves had been torn away in shreds by the coarse ropes of the nets and his own excessive force, and she said some rather more speakable but equally unhearable words of her own at this.
“I am sorry,” said the shark. “Can you fix them?”
The daughter shook her head. “But I’ve got a better idea. Here, take this bedsheet in your teeth…”

“What nonsense is all this then, eh?” said the fisherman, as he barged in the door scarcely ten minutes later. “My nets are a snarl and a tangle, and here I find you sitting inside with….what happened?”
“Your nets had caught jellyfish, father,” said the daughter in a tone of perfect disgust. “You could’ve mentioned it.”
“No such – I didn’t see any, not one!”
The daughter pointed wordlessly at the shark, who held up his arms with a sad little smile. Each had been carefully wrapped in bandages over and over and over, packed tight and dressed with a little saltwater poultice.
“Useless….jellyfish, I won’t…not a chance,” managed the fisherman, but he managed it at little more than a mutter and left it at that, stewing off outside to sulk in his chair that overlooked the rocky bay, pipe smouldering evil thoughts. He puffed out there, long into the night, and he mused on suspicions and on strange curses that the gulls guessed at, and he thought to himself.
“A plan,” he said. “A pretty little plan, that’s what it must be. Well I’ve been planning longer and harder, bitter and deeper, they’ll see. They’ll see.” And he chuckled to the gulls and to himself as he sat out there and counted the minutes to the edge of dawn.

“Wake up.”
At first the shark thought that the words weren’t even the fisherman’s, they were so quiet. But there was no hiding the harshness in that tobacco-clotted throat, nor the rustling anger hidden beneath it when it was aimed at him.
“Up, you laggard. Dawn’s soon to come, and the fish come with it. Daughter of mine’s too tired to help with it, after you ran her ragged with the cooking and cleaning, so I’m stuck with you, strange man. Up with it.”
The shark looked to the daughter, but she looked tired indeed and he saw the truth hidden in the fisherman’s hardness. So instead he rose – quietly – and came down and down to the little cove where the white-streaked boat that was the fisherman’s life was left. Gulls adorned it. A fat specimen mounted atop the bowsprit squawked disreputably at him.
“Untie the rope there and let us be off, be off! Hurry up!” snapped the fisherman. And he half-turned his back as he said this, but only half, so he saw the shark uncoil away the line with his bandaged forearms quite easily. And he smiled when he saw this, but only in the smallest way, and he gripped the wheel a little tighter.
“A good current,” he proclaimed, idling as he went. “We’ll go south-south-east. That’s where the good stuff is. Always is.” He spat, and kept the corner of one eye on the shark as he spoke, darting like a snake in the underbrush. “No better a spot when the wind’s this way, I say that now and challenge any man to say better. It’s the truth.”
“Southwest is better, with the current this deep” said the shark, without thinking.
The fisherman made no sound of protest, which was unusual in itself, and had the shark been looking at him rather than the current, he would’ve seen that the smile on his face was not so small this time. “Aye, that it can be. We’ll take it a look, we’ll look.”
The water was bountiful, and the nets were bulging-full – if slightly less than untattered thanks to the delays and difficulties of the day before. As sunlight began to peer through the twilight haze, the fisherman straightened his back with a sigh and pronounced their work “done and more than done.”
The shark nodded.
“You’re not so slow on the fishing business, sore paws or no,” he said, humming to himself as he set the course of the wheel. “Takes a strong man to take a jellyfish rubbings all over his arms and not scream himself raw for hours, that too.” He grinned, and whistled a quick tune that could’ve been part of a mayday fair. “So, stupid outfits or no, it looks to me like I’m going to have to have a son-in-law, then. That’s fair. So shake here, son; give me your hand.”
The shark was almost too surprised to move, but relief took over where his mind left off, and he clasped arms with the fisherman gladly.
“Thing is,” the fisherman added, voice not changing a bit, “thing is, I can’t trust a man who can’t look me in the eye. I won’t stand for a man who won’t look me in the eye. So now, SO!”
And just like that, the battered beachcomber’s hat was whisked away in a puff of squawking, whirling feathers, and the shark and the fisherman were looking at each other, young to old, black to blue.
“Dogfish,” said the fisherman. “Damned bait-stealing dogfish. I should’ve known, and I do now.” His left hand clasped at the rusty gutting-blade on his belt. “I know how to deal with that. They’re hungry too. Too hungry.”
With that, the fight began. And it was no fair one either, and not in the way it seemed. The shark was younger, he was stronger, he had a mouthful of sharp teeth and all his future to struggle for. But the fisherman was angrier, he was craftier, he had a great razor-sharp blade that had slipped into a thousand soft bellies and spilled them empty, and he was fighting against time, fighting against the hope of anything changing. And around them the air seemed nearly alive with gulls, thick with screams and the smell of droppings, hardened with sharp beaks that pecked at unblinking eyes and tore away at layers of bandages.
They were on the floor now, the fisherman on top, the shark wrenching his back against the hull, hoping against the world to reach the side. If he could just get to the water… but the water was far away, beyond a pinning knee and a halo of suffocating white down. His bandages were tearing loose, and in a moment of desperate ingenuity he tangled the fisherman’s arm in them and pulled hard, smashing the man head-first into the wooden wheelhouse with a snarl and a shout. The path to the rail was free, the path to safety was there; surely he could race back home before the fisherman did; surely they could flee farther than the fisherman’s boat could follow; surely, surely, as sure as could be, as sure as the great iron flensing hook that slammed into his tail and nailed him to the outside of the hull, head in the water, arms flailing.
“Bastard,” said the fisherman. One blue eye wasn’t sparkling now, hidden behind a curtain of blood from his brow. “Bastard, bastard, bastard.” The gutting-blade glowered in his hand like a demon’s claw. “Here’s a good spot for it. They like it out here. They took my brother, they’ll take you too.”
The arm raised, the shark screamed, the arm fell, and as it came down the battered old knife’s blade skidded against the shark’s own tooth that he wore on his neck, skidded down its whole length ‘till edge met edge, then shattered hard and cold. The pieces flew into the water and sank away.
The fisherman’s curse turned into a scream as blood poured from his hand, the boat shuddered, and the old, old hull gave up resisting under their weight and the pull of the hook and split its sides, folding itself down into the blue with barely a whisper.
The shark was free – from the boat – but still imprisoned, wrapped around with clothy tatters as timbers and drowning gulls snared in sails fell past him into the dark. He wriggled and squirmed in his strait-jacket as he sank, and he felt the terrible pain in his tail of the flensing-hook grow harder and fiercer still. It was the old man, the fisherman; his hands a wound, his smile a fang, his eyes hate, weighing him, weighing them both down as he climbed up and up.
Arms reached for him. Fingers grasped him. Surprise filled him.
And as the shark sped away from that endlessly spiralling wreckage, as the hook fell away from his tail, he could not remove from his mind the close and clear resemblance of the face that had glared hatred into the fisherman’s.

The fisherman’s daughter was on the rock again when the shark came back, bright as a candle in the firelight from the windows of the house above the shore.
“Is he dead?” she asked. And the shark didn’t know what to say.
She sighed at that, and hugged herself a little. “Shall we go?”
“Do you need anything more?” asked the shark. He did not ask if she wished to stay.
“I have my mother’s knife,” she said. “And I have you. And that’s enough.”

They slipped away into the dark currents under the moon’s eye, and were gone. And behind them, stranded alone on the rock in the wind by the waves down the shore, lay a little wooden boat crafted in the shape she’d never carved.

Look, there’s just one thing I want you to know, okay? It’s all your fault.
“Sure, you can have the place,” you said.
“No really, it’s fine,” you said.
“For the weekend? Absolutely,” you said.
And then you said it: “just clean out all my stuff first, okay?”
“It’ll just get in the way.”
You rotten sonuvabitch.

So we got our party supplies and our drinks and our friends and our drinks and our drinks, and we all went out there. Because we trusted you.
And then we opened the door, and were face to face with stuff. All your stuff.
“Just clean out all my stuff first, okay?”
Well yeah. There was no room in there otherwise, was there?

Jenny, she figured it’d be no big deal. We’d get some bags, get some bent backs, get your stuff in the bags. Garbage bags’d do fine, for that stuff.
Well, the bags got filled, the backs got bent, but when we’d emptied out the whole fifty-bag box, guess what we were still stuck with? More stuff.
So, more bags. There was a store right down the corner. Got a couple of boxes.
So, more stuff. ‘Nuff said.
So, square one. Again. With more stuff.

Where’d you get all this stuff, anyways? You never struck me as that much of a packrat. But fuck me, I’ve seen hoarders with less of it. I’ve seen millionaires with less of it. So much damned stuff.
Steve just moved a few days ago, still had time left on the truck. It was a big truck, too. Steve also has stuff, you see.
He pulled it up, said we could fill it up. Just until the party was over.
So we filled it up and up and up and up ‘till the door couldn’t close. With stuff.
Now how’d you guess that wasn’t good enough, huh?

Well, Steve was real mad after the truck got full up, and we had to take out some of the party supplies and drinks and calm him down, him and Joey. So while we were doing that, Joey said that what we should do is just shovel it all out, worry about the cleanup later. And hey, we’ve all had worse ideas while we’re drunk, right? Right.
So we took the snowshovels from your garage, and we started shovelling your stuff. Out the windows, out the doors, THROUGH the window in one case…
(Steve said it was an accident, and we don’t believe him, and neither should you).
Didn’t matter. Too much damned stuff. Ankle-deep and sometimes it looked like it was rising.

We were getting desperate. Well, Bob got more than desperate. All that stuff. He said hey, your house has a metal frame, right? And stuff burns damp, right? And we could just soak down the walls first, right? And you had fire insurance, right?
So, right?
Stuff don’t burn damp.
Stuff barely burns at all.
I swear to you that we dumped every bottle of charcoal lighter fluid, oil, machine oil, and olive oil we could find in the house and in our cars all over that stuff. We went through sixteen books of matches, four lighters, and your little candle-lighter.
Stuff smouldered. And it smelt like a horse’s armpit, if that armpit were in an elephant’s asshole. The smoke could be seen for miles, but if you wanted to catch wind of a spark, you’d need a microscope.

Well, after we’d finished coughing
-and wheezing-
-and stomping-
-and smothering-
-one of us must’ve said “hey, let’s try it going the other way, and that’s why we turned on all your faucets and showers and flooded your toilets and ran your hoses.
Because if you can’t fight stuff with fire, water’s worth a try. Right?
Right!
Wrong.
The stuff thickened like concrete. A lot of it had congealed by now, and separating stuff A from stuff B was going from hard to impossible. There were no stuffs now. Only Stuff.

Steve had gone missing in the fog, I guess. I guess he did.
I mean, we didn’t notice him going missing. But then he came back in a bulldozer, so I guess he went SOMEWHERE.
Drove that thing in full throttle, foaming at the mouth. I didn’t hear a word he said, but I suspect if I’d had it would’ve driven my ears black and blue.
He hit the stuff. The stuff hit back.
That big old yellow bulldozer that looked like a child’s my-first-Tonka rumbled, roared, shrieked, and started smoking from every jowl.
We pulled old Steve out and started trying to back it up. That’s when we realized there was more to it all than smoke.
It burned a lot better than the stuff did.

Electrical fires, slow-burning fires, all that loose damp and muck from the stuff….it was one helluva brew, let me tell you that.
Especially since Karen dropped some of our party supplies in there by mistake.
We all got a little distracted for a while. And then the cops showed up, went in without gas masks, and well, they got a little distracted too.
And once we’d woken up, the stuff was set.
Dead set.
In every doorframe.
You ever try to claw through taffy with your fingernails?
Well, it’s not as bad as stuff.

The fire department got us out. Blunted six axes on the stuff and gave three firefighters chronic back pain for a week.
But the good news was there too. You know those chemicals they use as fire retardants in fire extinguishers? That stuff?
Turns out it disagrees with your stuff. It disagreed with it all the ways down the drain.
Then the fumes disagreed with everyone else all at once. Lord-a-mercy that thing did not sublimate cleanly.

So.
We’ve cleaned out your stuff.
We didn’t even get the weekend.
And we’ve all got damaged lung tissue.
And the fire department, the police department, and the department of health and safety are all mad at us.
So that’s why you’re going to step the hell up and fork over the cash for fifty-nine paintjobs on the cruiser force and firetrucks. And quit trying to pass the blame here. If you’d had more self-control when it came to stuff, none of this would’ve been an issue.

7/12: The meat shipment arrived two hours late. Demanded recompense, was denied. A full half of the beef provided was clearly aged past fit consumption, stored at inadequate temperature, filled with disturbing quantity of tendons (possibly not even from cow?). Demanded recompense, was permitted to return half of it now, half next week, must store excess in the rear freezer.
Name of driver: William Henderson. Will report him unfavourably; customer service is a priority too often disregarded.
P. Morgan asked for raise again, was denied. Gets free coffee, what more does the leech want? Should be more like T. Gordon; man’s worked here since ’79 and not a peep of it from him. Minimum wage and minimum complaining keep a body pure, steadfast, and noble.

7/13: Milk arrived five minutes late. Demanded recompense, was denied, threatened consequences, was permitted refund. Name of driver: mumbled too quickly to hear, left before clarification could be demanded. Gutless.
P. Morgan asked for raise again, told him if he was so greedy he could take home some of our unfit ‘beef’. P. Morgan complained of this. Loafer.

7/14: Bread arrived on time. Good. Heavy traffic this weekend, employees will have to volunteer for unpaid overtime. Trouble foreseen from P. Morgan, E. Cheswick, S. Nancy, the usual stockroom box-haulers and supply-shovers. Doubtlessly union sympathizers the lot of them.
P. Morgan uncommonly shiftless today, requested time off for sick leave, whined of beef being hard on delicate stomach. Transparent ruse, ordered him back to work.

7/15: Produce truck arrived six hours late and with half our load missing without explanation. Demanded recompense, was denied, demanded name of driver, was referred to “Hubert Jassol,” demanded real name of driver, was denied, demanded name of supervisor, was flipped off. Altogether unsatisfactory, a downright shame. Would change produce supplier if their prices weren’t competitive, will settle for complaining of the matter to police.
P. Morgan has absented himself from work today without even phoning in. Astounding nerve and gall. His job is forfeit, as is reputation, if that even existed.

Addendum: P. Morgan did not sign out last night. Drunk on duty? Burglarized backroom and left through a window? Possibilities numerous, outcomes revolting.

7/16: Monday, the slow day. Just E. Cheswick and T. Gordon plus myself as supervisor. E. Cheswick came to me three times complaining of rats in the backroom. Ordered more traps put down.
P. Morgan does not answer his phone.
Addendum: While placing traps and otherwise doing E. Cheswick’s job for him, T. Gordon found decapitated, gutted rat. A stray cat has taken up residence, providence be praised. Money saved on traps used to purchase a donut for myself.

7/17: S. Nancy whines incessantly of strange noises in the stockroom shelves. Informed him of our feline guardian, admonished him for timid and small-hearted nature, mocked him for attempting to explain self as having marathoned horror films previous night, chortled at his slothful childishness being the source of his workplace misfortunes. Offered to have T. Gordon do the rest of his job for him, as if he didn’t already.
A good day.
Addendum: P. Morgan’s phone is no longer in service.

7/18: T. Gordon is now the only staff member willing to enter the stockroom alone – others travel in pairs, even to move so much as a box of coffee filters. Shameful degenerates, hallucinatory nitwits. Still they waffle of strange noises. S. Nancy claims he heard breathing. S. Nancy is so fat he hyperventilates every three steps without rest. S. Nancy has had his pay docked for the evening.
P. Morgan has still not tendered his resignation, and his landlady denies having seen him or heard news of his rent. Commiserated with her on the state of the young and lazy thugs that make up this country’s next generation for three hours. Got her number.
Addendum: Woke up four times overnight in my office. A bad donut? Too much coffee? New Coke fridge too noisy? Hard to say, but sleep is bafflingly elusive tonight.

7/19: Awoke, opened office door, found a trail of what appeared to be bloodied footprints strewn about its threshold, well-crusted and old.
A shoddy prank. I would suspect P. Morgan of it were he not absent, S. Nancy is too timid and E. Cheswick too lazy. T. Gordon? An impossibility.
Shoplifting has gone up. Half our meat aisle is depleted, and our sales do not match. May yet need that spoiled meat from the back.
Addendum: On closer inspection, some of them were handprints.

7/20: Friday. A busy time. We must stock up, regardless of panic and prankage. The staff refuse to enter the backroom at all now, all save T. Gordon. May they one day know one-tenth the courage and steadfastedness of an 83-year-old blind, deaf near-mute. Nothing but some red paint and their livers turn to lilies
The spoiled meat is gone, and the freezer left wide and gaping. P. Morgan, curse him! Not only did he desert us, he stole company property! I will review our cameras so the police will take him to task.

Addendum: Our backroom cameras have been defaced with more red paint for some days. All records useless.

7/21: Saturday night and T. Gordon has gone missing. Even the most faithful desert me! T. Gordon may have injured himself somehow. E. Cheswick and S. Nancy will search for him, or so help me I will peel their hides and staple them to the bulletin board.
Update: No sign of T. Gordon.
Update II: The building is closed, and not only is there no sign of T. Gordon, E. Cheswick, the worthless lout, appears to have crept off from work without leave. The impertinence of the youth of today is eternal. A good man is missing, and they think only of their own inconvenience! Without T. Gordon, how will the Sunday stocking be undertaken!?

7/22: E. Cheswick’s roommate came looking for him. Told the filthy pothead off, I will not allow such smells in my store. The wad of spittle was a fair trade against five more minutes of his odious presence.
Oh T. Gordon! Why leave me alone in this hour? S. Nancy refuses to leave the front desk at the day and flees openly from the prospect of a night shift, and I can spare only so much time from supervision! Without you, Holbert & Holbert Grocers is less than it was. Without you, the coffee is without taste. Without you, sweeping is a chore once more.
Addendum: Have shut up my office door with a padlock. For caution’s sake. Vandals cannot prank their mischiefs upon the contents of my files! Will sleep lightly tonight, as a cat, in wait for intruders.

7/23?: Believe it is early morning. Woke to use washroom, used doorknob without thinking, found padlock missing and door already slightly ajar. Difficult to tell due to (apparent) power failure, but stickiness on floor (and small bump – inspection reveals it as T. Gordon’s glasses? How?) suggests further vandalism has taken place.
Update: Cannot exit through front door. Padlock has been affixed to it and bashed so severely that key will not enter it. Lack of power prohibits phone line (would that I had a youth’s cellphone, curse it) but 7/11 across the way still shows lights. Perhaps the fusebox is damaged?

Update II: Fusebox has been torn from the wall and violently shredded. Crowbar maybe?

Update III: Stockroom full of rats by sound of it. Unhygienic. Will remain in power closet for now. Hantavirus would not be pleasant, nor rabies.

Update IV: Door is being scrabbled at. P. Morgan! It must be! Fool cannot possibly know my presence, must be coming back to commit further vandalism! Pocket-flashlight is ready, will catch him in the act w/red paint and all. Look on his face will b

It was an ill wind that came ‘round the cape that evening, and it lasted for close enough to a week. The waves grew teeth, the air was a bludgeon, and the rain shot down fair to stab anyone that poked their nose out of doors.
But the fish needed catching, so we all went out in the mornings anyways, or what might have been mornings under the clouds and above the whitecaps. And most of us came back on time every night. As our grandparents did, and theirs before them. Because doing things the way they must be done, that comes before safety. And that means coming back with fish.
One day, one of us came back with something extra, something more than fat greybacks and bulging nets. “Found it in a bucket,” they said. “A bucket, just bobbing in the waves.”
The bucket was black and rusted and made from who knew what, and it went to the trash heaps.
(anything placed in it slicked with oily who-knew-what. no-one dared taste food cooked in it)
The child was pale and plump, and he went to a willing couple who had milk to spare.
We named him Walter, and we called him Walt. And that was well and good enough to let him grow up properly and kindly, if not straight and tall. Stout and stubby-fingered, that was our Walt, always short of breath and ready to lend an extra hand. Not so much strength in him as stubbornness, as vast a supply of that as you could find in any mule.
He was such a small little thing, Walter Newman was. Four inches behind the other children, always scrambling to keep up, always with a bulgy belly and sunken dark eyes. With a smile ready though, held in place behind his teeth. Always ready, just waiting for the right moment to burst out from that round face. If you worked for it, he’d reward you just so. Just so.

When Walter was a small boy, but big enough to run, he wanted on the boats.
That was normal, that was fair enough. Little boys want to be their fathers and their big brothers. We all were little once, we all had grand dreams too big for our hands.
Walter reached too hard and too fast, but his grip served him well. Old Tim Hickory was eight hours offshore and seventeen fathoms deep when he heard the sneezing from underneath the old sou’wester he kept in his cabin. Pulled Walter out by the scuff of his neck and the roll of his fat, and shook him silly with cusses and threats. Told him this was no place for a fool little boy to be. Told him how dangerous the sea was. Told him about the sharks, and the waves, and the salt.
Walter listened, and Walter nodded. And then Walter stayed out there, on Tim Hickory’s boat, because Tim Hickory couldn’t turn back by then and he couldn’t spend his time minding little boys when there were fish to fish.
Walter spent his time on the bow, watching the grey bodies scooped into the sky, dripping and wriggling. He would hum to them, and sometimes sing. Nonsense songs, mashups of tunes he’d heard other children, parents, neighbors sing.
Sometimes the songs got on Tim Hickory’s nerves. But he was busy, and most of the time they would blend in with the sound of the waves and the nets.
Walter had only a little boy’s voice, of course. He couldn’t sing very loudly back then.
He got in all sorts of trouble when he got back, too. Bottom smacked black and blue, but not a peep from him, not a tear shed.

When Walter was a bigger boy, he tagged along fishing.
This was more organized, more proper. He got a longer lecture than most did, of course. Rules firmly laid, commands issued, fists thumped, threats levied.
He listened, and tied knots, and sat on the bow again, and watched the nets come in. Helped haul ‘em too, alongside his brother and father. And as he work, he whistled and sung and hummed.
His father told him to knock it off. His brother pinched him and giggled.
Walter kept on singing. And he listened hard. Listened far. Listened deep.
At day, nobody heard anything that wasn’t hull on water, grunts from lungs. At night, nobody was awake to tell. But Walter was a dreamer, and a good one. And he kept his ears open, in those dreams.
He smiled a lot that trip. And when he came back home, he sang songs to his baby sister in her cradle that she’d never heard before.

When Walter was a young man, he built a boat.
It was a good boat, firm of hull and fine of timber. Its paint was still fresh and almost sparkling when the water first enveloped it, its sails smelled of musty cupboards and dried timbers rather than salt. It was good – not astounding, not saddening, but good. Walter did a good job when he built that boat.
He took it out that day, him and his father. Came back in nets bulging, deck crammed full. Finned bodies spilling out of the wheelhouse, ropes tangled in slippery grey flesh and slapping muscled frames.
Walter didn’t pay much attention to the fish. He had an ear cocked and an absent stare for everyone, slaps on his back and congratulations aside.
The next day they went out again. Even bigger haul came with them this time. A shark was lashed to the boat’s side, big blue body writhing and wriggling as it twitched its way towards death by inches. They took the jaws and left the flesh for the gulls.
(It made them sick. Gulls will eat anything, but even they have limits).
The next day Walter left on his own.
The next day Walter came back, paddling.
A squall had come up and overturned the boat, he said, as he wrung the damp green-and-blue from his sweater. Nothing he could do. He’d ventured out too far by himself, got cocky. He’d swum the miles to shore without even a life-ring for flotation, it had happened so fast. The boat had flipped mast-to-keel and left him tangled in the nets, with just enough time to cut free and strike out before it brought him down.
It was a good story, as Walter told it in that shy, low voice of his. And we all nodded and sympathized with him – such a fine boat it had been – because after all he was a good fisherman, maybe even a great fisherman, and nobody could vouch against his skill. Bad luck and bad weather will stop the best of us in their tracks, and leave them lucky to still have their lives.
And nobody, not one person, not a one of us every spoke a word of how calm the weather had been for the past week.
Because neither had Walter.

Walter was a grown man with the bad luck of ten. But we loved him anyways, because he wouldn’t let it beat him.
A boat would be made.
A boat would be launched.
A boat would bring in one
two
three
four (once) catches.
Then it would be gone, and Walter would wash in with the tides, smiling that same rare gift of his, happy to be alive and with luck no better than before.
Months to build it. A week to lose it. At most. And how Walter did it, no one knew.
A gale.
Harsh water.
Struck a rock.
Angry shark, once. That raised eyebrows.
And we all would’ve scoffed at one of them, let alone all of them, but Walter’s smile when he came back was always so wonderful. And each time, it grew wider.
He sang in town, now. Mostly at night. Folks complained, but quietly, and soon they stopped. It was quiet, and almost too low to hear.

And then one year, not many ago, Walter and his brother and his father all got in their boats, cast off, and left without a word for one, two, three days.
They floated back in on the currents, damp and grinning, and they were changed men. Went straight down to their friends’ houses and stayed up all night talking.
The next day, six boats left, with Walter guiding the way.
Two days later, the tides fetch them back again. No sign of the boats.
The wives complained. The shorebounders complained. The children worried.
Walter smiled, and that made it all right. Walter stayed up and sang half the night as families argued and muttered and fought for hours, spend the other half listening.
Ten boats the next day
Eight the day after.
Nine after that.
Almost no boats left, but the fish came in anyways. Walter would strip naked and swim out there, come back in dragging net-fulls of things we’d never seen before. No greybacks, no fatmouths, things with too much eel in their blood and too little eyes. Slimy, but tasty.
Only really good to eat raw, though. Cooking liquefies the flesh. Disgusting.

Seasons went by. Walter kept us afloat as the boats were rebuilt.
(His father and brother joined him after a time. A few others later, I don’t recall who).
One beautiful day the first of the new hulls slipped into the water. And that was the day that they set hands on it and towed it away. No time for a motor, no time for paint, no time for nothing.
They needed that boat. We needed that boat.
“For mother,” Walter explained.
No-one had asked for the explanation. No-one thought he was talking about Lucy, Geoff’s wife, Jeremiah and Petunia’s mother, who’d fed him her milk when he was a little pale thing plucked from the waves.

The truth came out in bits and starts. Nobody much noticed as it did. It just happened. Oh, some people grumbled, some people muttered, but by the time we all knew anything it was already normal.
The boats were necessary offerings, of course. In the right place
(eight hours out, seventeen fathoms deep)
at the right time
(moonlight on the water, a dark starry sky)
in the right state of mind
(dreaming afloat, waves lapping on the rim of your hearing)
was where you left your gifts.
Here, mother. Take the land from us. We trust you. We love you. And you trust and love us.
Why else would you have given your son to us?

The last boat sank on the first day of summer.
Old Tim Hickory was on board. Mad as hell, he was.
We’d talked to him and talked to him, but he wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t pay attention.
Stubborn man. He set his heels to it and wouldn’t budge, not for that boat. His father’s father’s father had laid it, he would pilot it, no matter where it went. And he wouldn’t budge.
(Couldn’t, after he tied the anchor around and around and around and around himself)
So he followed his boat, captained it ‘till it was gone.
(He wore the old sou’wester. It was the first anyone had seen that happen in living memory, the faded old yellow against the dull grey of woollen sweater, tangled beard).
He must’ve been the first to see mother there, as keel met bottom.
Met bottom and passed on through it, into home.

Life is stranger now, and we don’t do as our grandparents did, or theirs before them.
We spend our evenings down in the bay and leave the beds back upon land, rot in the trash heaps.
A hall is being made beneath the bay, a hall of stones and shells with no lights, a hull timbered in barnacled wood, scraped bare of paint by tide and time.
Our sides ache for the waves, and cry salt tears in the air.
The children swim like giggling minnows, hands grown small and over-webbed.
Babes’ teeth sprout early and needling, and their mouths eschew milk for fish-lymph.
Last Sunday we burnt the last of our homes, lighting the fires with kindling from our docks.
It can be hard, to change this way. But when we feel doubt, or pain, or confusion, we look to the face of Walt Newman. And we see that smile behind his teeth, waiting to be given.
If we work for it, we are granted it. Just so.

J. D. Hudson was a particular sort of man. He wore small, black shoes with no laces but with important names stitched into discreet parts of their leather. His keyboard was bare of lint and his fingers bare of ink, for his keyboard was all he needed. He dressed with a tie whenever possible, and sometimes whenever it wasn’t. His first and middle names were mysteries to all but his closest family members, in whose presence he frowned when addressed so. He starched his collars. He wore collars.
And he lived in Toronto, where, to the satisfaction of his property values but the irritation of his soul, he owned a lawn. It was small and grassy and made rather timid by the masses of concrete about it.
He loathed it.
Oh, J. D. Hudson did his best, he did. He always did. He purchased fertilizers and pesticides (rigidly defined within legally permitted lines), he applied shears with dispassionate skill, he weeded mercilessly and without pity for the young and sprouted nor old and rooted.
And yet still the damned thing vexed him.
He watered. He trimmed. He sheared. He even, in a fit of near-madness, planted a small patch of flowers once. They bloomed, wilted, died, and were dutifully tidied away.
And yet still the damned thing wouldn’t stop growing.
The last straw came when he had to go away for a week. The trip was fine – on his favorite topic too: serious business – it was the return that filled him with horror and disgust. The fine weather of late spring had come and gone, bastard thing, and filled his lawn with vigor and delight to a scandalous degree. It had become feckless. It had become unruly. It had become overgrown.
J. D. Hudson looked at his lawn, and he looked at the clippers in his hands, and small well-used muscles in his lower jaw twitched in a most unseemly manner. This would not do. This would most patently not do. This was a Problem, and Problems required Solutions. In the name of tidiness.
J. D. Hudson was not a man who knew things about lawnmowers. But one of his brothers knew a man who did, and he recommended a company. An obscure one. A very obscure one that didn’t even own a website, and whose purchases must be conducted through mail-order.
J. D. Hudson frowned on such things. But J. D. Hudson did not frown on what was avowed to be top-notched product at rock-bottom prices, and so he committed his untrained, keyboard-reared fingers to the fumbling tool of the pen. His handwriting was unspeakable, his signature unpronounceable, but in the end, all was filled, all boxes were ticked, all stamps attached, and the lot of it consigned to the hands of the mailman, whom J. D. Hudson suspected of petty theft and inadequate devotion to his career.

A week festered by, during which J. D. Hudson’s lawn grew more riotous still, deterred not by his unbending glare. His fingers clenched, his teeth ground, he woke in the night arguing with himself and his daily zero point five cups of breakfast oatmeal (without sugar) lost its taste, which it had never possessed.
And then, gloriously, beautifully, divinely, came the mail. And came a parcel that was rather smaller than J. D. Hudson had expected. It had arrived mostly assembled, lacking only the attachment of the handle to the main body with a complicated series of ingenious bolts that hurt J. D. Hudson’s knuckles as he turned them in and made him say improper words in clipped, exact tones.
Assembled, it stood atop the lawn in brooding glory as a colossus: the Accelerationist Townmower (his illegible handwriting had apparently resulted in his receiving an older, off-brand model whose name he did not recognize, but no matter), over sixty pounds of slightly dented metal and mysteriously oily machinery. He allowed it to bask there for a time as he read and reread the manual, which was in six languages, none of which were English, French, Spanish, or Mandarin. Complicating this was the typesetting: at least one paragraph was upside down, another was printed backwards, and an entire four pages of text were printed upside down, backwards, and in increasingly small concentric spirals. In red ink.
J. D. Hudson frowned to himself and shut the manual with a disappointed thwap. Well, he’d used these before, or at least seen people use them before. You primed them – like so. Then you pulled the cord – like so. Then you moved it over the grass – like s

J. D. Hudson, as with many people, thought of his life as a series of events, each following the other. Cause and effect strung together like Christmas lights and wrapped in circles around the big confusing evergreen of your mortal coil. He could recite his history since birth as a perfect series of points A through Z, laid in order exactly as prescribed in kindergarten song.
This made the events of that day very hard on him.

The Townmower slid over the grass like a greased pig over a skillet of warm butter, and with much the same noise. J. D Hudson planted his feet firmly to check the machine’s advance and was immediately hoisted off them, dangling from the mower’s handlebar as a fly on a fishing line. His first instinct was to hold on tight, which was unfortunate because that meant he was still gripping the Townmower as it touched the concrete of his sidewalk.
There were noises. Some of them sounded like falling rocks, some like screaming winds, and several as the calls of coyotes and squirrels. Tiny chips of cement and sidewalk screamed past J. D. Hudson’s face as the mower accelerated underneath him, screeching down the street at highway speeds. He pawed feebly at the ignition shutoff, and the shift in his weight sent it swerving wildly into traffic, where a car honked at him loudly for a little less than half a second before being mowed down.
J. D. Hudson found the courage to look back after the shock of having all his limbs still attached to himself wore off. A confused looking man – one of his neighbors, possibly – was sitting in the middle of what had been a road and was now a spry (if narrow) thicket, up to his thighs in prickerbushes and entirely naked bar a pair of sunglasses and a necklace. A tiny fragment of steering wheel crumbled from his hairy paws as he watched, silhouetted against the rambling, untidy hedge that half the sidewalk had become.
J. D. Hudson tore his gaze away from this sight and was spared the trouble of dwelling on it, because that was when he swerved onto Yonge Street and the world was reduced to many small things that flew away in his wake, captured only by his eyes.
A streetcar tumbled away, crumpling into dirt and dust.
Power cables snapped into roots that latched onto buildings that were suddenly very confused trees. Executives hooted in alarm from their canopies, ties dangling as they swung from branch to branch seeking a way down.
The street become a river beneath the blades, lashing violently out around it as dashes and dots and crosswalks were suddenly dashed, dotty, and cross ducks of varying species.
A streetlight fell to the ground, rose up as swamplight.
Streetlights to stumps.
Pedestrians went scurrying into the blossoming copses of shops in fright, hiding in the undergrowth that had once been a rack of t-shirts.
Somewhere in the midst of this, he turned his eyes forwards again and found that the mower had grown substantially, and was chewing up entire rows of housing, shredding bits of tile everywhere as it dropped the structures down to neatly levelled-off patches of mixed woodland forests. Then the Don Valley Parkway was ahead of him, and he shut his eyes again as the blades did their grisly work. Asphalt flecked his face and stuck to the moistness of his tears. Car horns sounded in alarm, then were hushed into the roars of bears and the cackle of birds. Then it all fell away again, far below and far away, leaving him alone in silence with only his thoughts.
The CN tower made a strange creaking noise in the mower’s suspension.

Morning found a slightly different city. For one thing, it now consisted entirely of a single home of modest proportions, with a scandalously unkempt lawn. In its over-lush grass lay a man, naked bar a rumpled collar, whose mute horror left him known only as John Doe.
As for the Townmower, the 401 had been replaced by a series of rolling meadows. It must’ve gone off-road somewhere, but if had, it had left no trace.
Tidily.