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I am beset by doldrums of implacable size.
Colonel Thomas P. Fiddlegate stared at the sentence he had just scribbled, and found that it was so apt that he had no energy to press onwards. His eyelids felt like lead, his limbs iron, his mind a stone. Also, he was over seventy. That was probably the worst bit.
“Pinfat, my friend,” he somberly addressed his servant, as he tossed his journal to his desk, “I am altogether through. Finished. What is there left in life for me?”
“Lunch, sir,” said his servant. “And my name is not Pinfat, it is Paul. Pinfat is your cat, who is presently occupying your lap.”
“What greater purpose, Pinfat?” continued the Colonel, ignoring the noises of the underclass with Victorian ease as he stroked his cat. He eyed the majestic, weather-beaten globe atop his desk with grim displeasure. “What prime mover that shall shape my life and fortunes? I have done all that there is to be done, have I not? Have I not also seen all that I might see? I am rudderless!”
“It was just a little clam, sir. Hardly the end of the world.”
Colonel Fiddlegate’s moustache made the best effort at bristling that it could, though frightfully undernourished. “Just a clam?” he muttered in disbelief at the gall of servants. “JUST? Pinfat, that clam was the last of its family in all of Africa I had not hunted, and with that, the last of all clams in Africa I had not pursued, and with that, the last of all clams in all the world that I have not laid bare claim to! Pinfat, I am FINISHED! I am DONE! I am altogether THROUGH with clams now!” He stomped his foot firmly on the floor, causing Pinfat to bite him toothlessly in protest. “Only one clam left in all the world unseen by these faded old eyes, and that one a myth, I made sure of it!”
“Congratulations, sir.”
Fiddlegate slumped. “I am pointless without clams, Pinfat! Whatever will I do? What can I do?”
“Look to your peers for example, sir. Perhaps your brothers.”
“I’m intolerably poor at cards, Pinfat. And gambling is an acid of the soul.”
“The scotch, then.”
“No, I’d drain the bottle. I’ll take my misery in sober silence, thank you very much.”
Paul left the bottle. After about an hour, he came back and retrieved it for the garbage, leaving an extremely battered and cat-furred blanket to keep his master’s scrawny kneecaps warm against the cold. And so went the evening of Colonel Fiddlegate, who had killed all of one man during his glorious forty-year career (inadvertently: he could’ve sworn that the oyster he’d offered his sergeant was a good one, and nobody had ever argued differently).
Evening wore on, grew threadbare, and dissolved into night.
And in that night, came the dreams. Most were nonsensical. Some were anecdotal. And one, one was inspirational.

“AUSTRALIA!” bellowed Colonel Fiddlegate, starting upright in a fit and causing Pinfat to cling to his legs with the agility of a squirrel. “Ow,” he added, and hastily scooped up the paralyzed cat. “Australia!” he whispered to its surly face. “There! That’s where I’ll find it! I never looked for it there!” His eyes turned to the globe on his desk again, this time filled with hungry fire. “Australia!”
“You hollered, sir?” asked Paul. “It’s nigh-on five in the morning.”
“Fudge to the hour Peter, fetch me my bags!” ordered the Colonel, leaping to one foot and then with some difficulty to the other. “We’re off to terra incognita! The lost continent! The land of the kangaroo and the emu-bird! The Last Clam, the Myth-That-Burrows, the Hidden Pearl – it’s got to be there! I’m sure of it! The one place I never looked! Australia!”
“That is a most strenuous voyage to make at your age,” opined Paul. “And my name is not Peter, sir, it is Paul. Peter is your brother-in-law who passed away three springs ago, god rest his soul.”
“Bah, the devil himself would’ve been hard-pressed to squeeze a drop out of him. He’ll be fine! And Peter, don’t worry your head about me. I’ve made worse voyages and longer treks in my time, in my time with you, and with all the other years between! Remind me to tell you a few of those stories.”
“Were there clams involved?”
“Indisputably,” mused the Colonel, as he patted down his sides for his notebook. “Indisputably.”

The air was as fresh as the waves were salt. Gulls cried out in greeting to the ship, surprised once again to see such a large, wooden gull that sat so firmly upon the ocean. They were just gulls; it was hard to blame them for believing that sort of nonsense, especially when it was doing such a lively job of regurgitation, presumably to feed its young.
“It is indisputable,” Paul noted, “that you are ill.”
“Just a bit under the weather, that’s all,” mumbled the Colonel through a mouthful of unspeakable fluids never meant to touch human lips. He coughed damply. “This boat moves far too quickly up and down and not nearly fast enough forwards. How long have we been out here at sea? No, wait! Don’t tell me! Oh lord I wish to walk the land once again, to find the Hidden Pearl’s soulful-smooth shell beneath my fingers. There’s barely any details on it, you know – just whispers on the wind, between errant lips. They speak of what it is, but not WHERE, never where. Oh lord, I must walk!”
“Courage, the shore’s in sight. Australia awaits, much to the displeasure of your cat. I believe he has grown used to feeding upon the rats of the hold.”
“Thank the lord and every single one of his guppies,” whispered the Colonel. “Let Pinfat moan as he will; I feel better already. Haven’t felt wind of an illness like that since I went after the Coughing-Clam of Peru. Did I tell you about that one?”
“No, sir. You were busy vomiting.”
“Ah. So I was.”
“About this clam, sir?”
“Yes! The Coughing-Clam! That was a tricky one. Very easy to find, you see – when it coughs, it spits up a great big trail of bubbles. You can track them through any streambed with naught but your wits and a magnifying-glass, and in a pinch a keen eye substitutes for free!”
“Impressive.”
“Of course, I didn’t have a keen eye, but after I dropped my glass into the stream I learned to make do.” The Colonel broke into a shuddering dry heave, but more out of habit than anything else. “But anyways, Peabody, the hard bit wasn’t the finding. No, no, no. The hard bit was the CATCHING.”
“How so? And my name is not Peabody, sir, it is Paul. Peabody was your nurse as a child, who once tanned your hide near to the bone for playing in the chimney and getting soot all over the carpet.”
“The catching, you see, it’s the catching,” the Colonel continued. “Oh, it looks easy at first – just any old clam, eh? Grab ahold, yank ‘er up. Except it turns out the Coughing Clam can holler with such force underwater, Peabody, that it can numb the fingers and paralyze fine muscles. Trying to pick one up with tongs is no great shakes either; the force transmits up the tines, you see. I nearly shook my hands to pieces seizing one. Finally had to kick the damned thing free and onto the shore – no easy work, that, given how firmly they wedge themselves into the mountain streambeds – and even in the open air it made my hairs stand on end just having the thing wrapped in canvas in my backpack. My left pinky never did stop shaking, Peabody – not to this very day! Not now, even – see?”
Paul saw. “That’s just from the stress of vomiting, sir,” he opined.
“Possibly,” admitted the Colonel. “Excuse me a moment, one more for the road.” And he doubled over the railing again.

“Enjoying the road, sir?” asked Paul.
“Oh, damnably hot,” replied the Colonel, squinting at the nearer of the three horizons he could see, “but otherwise, yes, quite pleasant. I can almost see the shell of the Myth-That-Burrows before my eyes, even in this hellish heat-haze. It’s as if Helen of Troy herself stood before me – well, if she were a mollusk. Tell me, do you think you could ask one of those three fetching young ladies over there how much farther it is to Alice Springs? I feel quite light-headed, and a cool shade-nurtured drink would give me quite a rousing turnabout, I think.”
“There is only one lady, sir.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. And she is a camel.”
“Oh,” said the Colonel with a frown. He swayed a bit in his saddle, waking up Pinfat, who perched atop his shoulder. “Oh dear. I’m mad with the heat again, aren’t I, Paul?”
“Yes sir. Although you did just get my name right. Thank you.”
“Oh. Think nothing of it! Are you sure she’s a camel?”
“Yes. And technically sir, a he.”
“Oh. Oh my. Well then, nothing to be done for it but wait. We ARE close, are we not?”
“Within the hour.”
The Colonel slapped his hands together. “Time enough for a story then! Paul, did I ever tell you how I wrestled the Dread Anklecrusher of the Phillipines?”
“Not once, no,” admitted Paul. A faint spark of intrigue glimmered in his eye.
“A deficiency in your education!” proclaimed the Colonel. “This was all, you know, quite some time ago. Now that I think on it, probably before you were born.”
“Most of your stories are that way.”
“True, true. Anyways! This one was earlier in my career, you understand. I was still full of enough piss and vinegar that I thought nothing of haring off into the wide unknown on a rumor and a whisper of a clam to test my mettle!”
“As opposed to now, sir?”
“Precisely! So there I was, on the tiniest, least hospitable reef ever to host a human body. Sharks at every turn! Barracuda at my heels! Jagged, razor-edged coral lurking at every stroke! I’ve still got the scars, you know. My left buttock will never again resemble its youthful shape, alas.”
Paul coughed in that way that has nothing at all to do with clearing the speaker’s throat.
“Right, so I was on the reef. And I knew I was looking for a clam there in the shallows, but I didn’t know what kind it was. I estimated it was going to be about shin-high at best. You know, for crushing ankles and so on and so forth.”
“A logical assumption.”
“I thought so too. Unfortunately, it transpired that the Dread Anklecrusher starts at your ankles and works its way up to your neck.”
“Its rough dimensions, sir?”
The Colonel frowned and thumped his right ear, causing Pinfat to gum his neck in protest. “Can’t quite remember. I was awfully short of breath when those nice fishermen dragged me out of the sea, and I can’t really recall anything I did that year without it looking as though someone’d draped gauze over my eyes. But I was still clutching a fistful of the beasty’s innards in my right hand, and they said it’d probably expire within the week. So, hunt successful!”
“I’d always speculated on what was in that musty jar you keep at your bedside.”
“Well, yes. I figured it was probably good luck, you know? Tell me, have we reached Alice Springs yet?”
“We have indeed, sir.”
“Good, good. Ask that nice man for a drink, would you?”
“That’s the bar, sir. You’d best have a lay-down on the double.”
“Quite right, quite right. We’ll head to the springs tomorrow.”

The Colonel inspected the flat sand in front of him with faint suspicion. “Perdue? Where are my glasses?”
“At home on your desk, which we both lamented greatly over the day we set sail from England. And my name is not Perdue, sir, it is Paul. Perdue was your closest colleague in elementary school.”
“So he was, so he was,” agreed the Colonel. He frowned at his feet, which Pinfat was sitting on, having disdained the dirt as a bed. “Blast it. You’ll have to verify my eyes then: isn’t this supposed to be, well, the springs?”
“Alice Springs has no springs, sir. This is the Todd River.”
“Ah. But it has no water.”
“Astutely noted. The Todd River is dry almost entirely year-round, save for when heavy rainfall sends it trickling along its bed. The flood is quite sludgy, and can usually be outpaced at a reasonably brisk walk.”
“A brisk walk?”
“A walk might be overstating it. Perhaps a nimble amble.”
The Colonel sighed with displeasure. He half-heartedly booted Pinfat off his toes and onto the dirt, where the cat resigned himself to examining twigs and meowling crankily.
“Don’t fear, sir. The weather’s been poorly lately; perhaps the rains will come before we leave.”
“Before we leave?” The Colonel smiled sadly. “Perdue, how old am I again?”
“Modesty precludes my mentioning it, sir.”
“Speak up, man! Give me credit for a little temperance!”
“Ninety-three and one-half, sir.”
“Nearer to a century than to seventy-five. That’s not the sort of age one makes trips of this kind at, Perdue. Do you suppose I’ll survive another voyage on that… death-bucket?”
Paul didn’t say anything. Instead he provided a small flask of whiskey, which the Colonel drank.
“Thank you,” he said. “So! We wait. How long can we afford to wait? How long can I afford to wait? I’m not young anymore, Perdue. I can’t spend eight months here in the desert, like I did when I hunted the Mad Lurker of Morocco!”
“How exactly was this clam ‘mad’, sir? Surely clams behave in much the same manner, living or dead?”
“Oh-ho, not this one!” chuckled the Colonel. “Had the tale not passed to you? Surely I mentioned it?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“I shall remedy this then, if only to distract me from our present troubles. ‘Twas all back in the old days, when I was young – I think forty? Yes – and the world was new to me. Clams were but a word for something I ate as part of a seafood feast. I was barbarous, but I claim youth and ignorance as my defense.”
“Now, at the time I was in Morocco for… some reason or another. I can’t recall, wasn’t important. And I had, at the time, acquired an enormous ball of hashish through some sort of accident.”
“Accident?”
“Yes, I can’t quite recall, but I think it involved a few dogs, a game of cards, and someone having to leave in a hurry before their wife caught them. So here I was stuck with this MASSIVE ball of hashish. The question was what on earth to do with the damned thing. I couldn’t throw it away or someone would notice, I couldn’t turn it in to the authorities without raising awkward questions, and I couldn’t just hide it. Someone would be bound to find it, probably Parkinson. Your predecessor thrice removed, I believe, though much shorter than you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“It’s just the truth, no need for formality. Nice man, Parkinson, but he could no more keep a secret than he could reach the top shelf of my whiskey cabinet. Anyways, the only thing to do was to ingest it. Which I rather foolishly did all at once, at night, on the shoreline.”
“I see.”
“So as not to be disturbed.”
“Indeed.”
“Now, my memory is difficult to sort out from my imagination hereafter –“
“Can’t imagine why.”
“-don’t interrupt, it’s terribly rude, you know. But yes, everything is a bit of a blur. I think I waded out into the waves at first to see if I could catch them, and then after about half an hour of THAT I decided I’d seen something shining on the seabed and decided to see if I could pick it up.”
“Oh?”
“Oh indeed. Indeed. And I had! Addled though I was, my eyes were keen back then. I reached down to that glimmering red-and-gold shape and plucked it up and it bit me, bit me hard and deep into my left index finger. Such a nasty shock! See here, you can see the mark – where the veins blacken.”
“Gruesome.”
“Oh yes. And that’s after fifty years; back then I believe it went bright purple and green very quickly. Now of course I grew very angry at this little nipping thing after that, so I did what any sensible person would’ve done.”
“Which was?”
“I stomped upon it. Wait, did I say sensible?”
“You did.”
“Scratch that from the record: I meant to say ‘damned stupid.’ It’s the reason I’ve had to wear extra-thick socks on my right foot at night the last fifteen years. I think something got into the bone down there, and it’s been eating away at it for decades now. Pretty fierce stuff in that clam. For that’s what it was! The Mad Lurker of Morocco – a shining little star in the sand that will nip you and fill you up to the brim with loony-juice if you dare touch it. Quite fatal, of course. Eventually. You run around like absolute bonkers for at least an hour before expiring.”
“And yet you sit before me living and breathing, sir.”
“With difficulty, yes,” admitted the Colonel. “This air is too thick with heat. But your point is made; I went quite mad, of course. Howling at the moon like a dog, barking like a seal, ran the streets like a bull… I even tried to eat the front door of my quarters. Lost a tooth doing that, which is why my smile is so golden these days. But I made it through the night, and the five-day hangover after that, and when I finally stumbled out of my bed and changed my clothing, what did I find in my pockets but the Mad Lurker of Morocco! Gave me a start, and made me glad I’d been out so long – a few days earlier and it might’ve still had enough fight in it to give me a second nip. And THAT would’ve put an end to me, for as everyone told me afterwards, all that saved my life was that hashish. It did something quite queer to that poison, and saved my life, albeit in one of the most miserably sickening ways I’ve ever experienced. If I close my eyes on a bad night, Perdue, I can still taste the fire and dirt on the back of my tongue.”
The air was quiet for an instant or three. Pinfat bristled his fur at some imaginary cat-nemesis and scuttled to his master’s shoulderblade with supple ease, ears twitching.
“And that was what made you decide to hunt clams?” asked Paul, breaking the silence.
“Hmmm?” replied the Colonel, dragged back half a century at once. “Oh, yes. All that pain and distress all caused by one tiny creature, and yet saved by such a slight sampling of the Lord’s favour. It was a sign, I thought, and all my life I’ve strived to live up to it. And that’s how it was. There, wasn’t that a pleasant distraction from the vast and groaning weight of my failures, Perdue?”
Paul stared at a fixed point on the horizon, and said nothing, though his hands twitched.
“Oh, blast it, I suppose it wasn’t. It feels heavier than ever! I am finished, Perdue! Absolutely done! Demolished! All the work and all the adventures and all the hunting and scraping and harm a body can stand, and all for naught – all for naught! A man can end happy knowing he’s collected every clam, but what can a man who claims all-but-one say for himself? It’s worse than having never started at all!”
“Sir,” managed Paul. “Sir. Would you care to look upwards, sir? To the north?
The Colonel slumped dejectedly. “Oh fudge to it, Perdue. You know I can’t see worth a half-pence without my glasses. Why, the clam itself could pop up right under my toes and I wouldn’t see worth spit.”
“Sir! The river!”
“Eh?”
“It’s coming!”

It took the Colonel some ten minutes to make out what was going on. This was good, because that was how long it took for the slow, sludge-driven, mud-choked Todd River’s currents to ooze their way to their feet, driven onwards by the relentless pressure of rainfall and gravity against a mouthful of grit and muck that would’ve throttled a less determined river dead in its cradle.
“My word,” said the Colonel. “I’ve never seen such a stream.”
“Very silty indeed, sir,” observed Paul.
“Ah, needs must! We’ll manage just fine – here, help me search the streambed, and mind your toes. I doubt crocodiles have had time to move in, but all the same, let’s be wary fellows and sing out if something grabs ahold of your legs, eh?”
“At once, sir,” said Paul. He gently removed Pinfat from the Colonel’s shoulders and placed the unresisting cat on the riverside. “One question: what exactly am I searching for?”
“I haven’t the faintest. Anything clam-like will do. Now scoot!”
The water was warm, despite its recent fall from the sky; the Australian soil was nearly half its bulk now, and had lent a sun-baked heat to it in addition to a chocolaty thickness. If Paul squinted his eyes just right, held his head at the right angle against the sun, and blinked rapidly, he could just barely see nothing at all.
“Go by feel, man!” called out the Colonel. He was bent double in the stream, groping about with fingers and toes. “Go by feel! We can’t be wasting time now!”
Paul did so, though he paused to roll up his sleeves first. “Sir, what do clams feel like?”
“Ridged!” shouted the Colonel, raising his voice over the rumble of the waters. “Patterned! Anything that’s too regular to be a stone! Look for-”
At the exact moment the Colonel’s voice subsided, Paul realized that the waters shouldn’t be rumbling when they were moving at a nimble amble. He looked up in alarm, and it was because of this that he managed to be standing upright when the entire Todd River tackled him in the midsection in a very slow, ambling, muddy way that drove him several hundred yards downstream and deposited him on a high bank, plastered with enough sediment to start an orchard.
Paul stared at the sky for a moment, reflecting dreamily that he now knew the meaning of Brown. His vision was Brown. His mouth was filled with Brown. His body was Brown. The entire world and everything in it made a little more sense now that he’d been through that. At least the bits of it that were brown.
He blinked, flicking mud from his eyelashes as he did so. There was something important. He needed to do something. For someone. Who. Whatever it was, he had the feeling it wasn’t Brown, and therefore was going to be difficult to cope with.
Pinfat came into his view, then sat on his head.
“COLONEL!” yelled Paul – with difficulty, emitting a good deal of Brownness from his lungs as he did so. He coughed viciously and bolted upright, fell over, then picked up the alarmed Pinfat and lurched desperately along the riverbank, legs dripping with Brown. “COLONEL!”

The Colonel was nearly a mile downstream. He was a much smaller man than Paul, and the flash flood had buoyed his bird-light bones along on the foaming crest of its waves, almost tenderly.
It was still too much, of course. Too much.
“Oh,” sighed the Colonel. “It’s you. Good.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Paul. He leaned down to pick the old man up, then stopped himself when he saw him wince. “Can you move?”
“Move. Uhm. Hmm. No, no I don’t think so. Maybe in a few minutes, but not right now. There’s something… rather… I think important. It needs doing, but I fear I can’t seem to move my hands. Coughing Clam seems to have caught up to them at last – or was it the Mad Lurker?” He coughed. “Bit stupid name for a clam, really. Not sure it was the right one at all.”
“Sir?” asked Paul. “What do you need?”
“Could you – would you mind – if you could just – grab my hand there, and pull it over. No, not over there. A bit up. Right. My right. Thank you. Now close my fingers.”
The Colonel’s eyes were hard to see under the mud, but the wrinkling of his face showed they’d just closed in satisfaction. Then they creaked opened again, with renewed purpose.
“Yes, that’s right. That’s right. Now please, can you please, would you please hold up my hand? A bit close, good fellow – my eyes, they aren’t what they were, I think. I can’t seem to see much now.” He peered closely. “That’s strange. It’s… browner than I expected.”
Paul leaned over and wiped the Colonel’s eyes clear with his pinky, as carefully as he could.
“Ah. Oh. My,” he said, and the drying mud cracked around his mouth as it spread into a smile, breaking free his shabby little moustache. “There it is.”

The shell was a mottled sort of brown-and-grey, where the greater Brown had not overcome it. It was just a bit smaller than the Colonel’s palm, and little bubbles were leaking from one end as the clam breathed.
“Now tell me, Paul,” said the Colonel, as his eyelids began to droop again, slowly but implacably, “have you ever seen a more beautiful thing?”

So, how old were you?
“You really want to know?”
It’s important.
“…Shit, nine?”
Does it always happen that early?
“Well, you’ve got to remember, today’s youth isn’t what it was. We grew all knowing about it – it was something the cool guys did. Hell, half our parents did it, and only half of THOSE even tried to hide it. Kids aren’t that dumb, we all knew what was going on.”
So you were nine. How did it happen?
“I can remember it pretty good. A lot of stuff from back then is all gone except for the colours, but I held on tight to this. It’s late November. The sky’s that total off-white grey thing you get during the first real snowfalls – you know what I mean? – and me and my friends are all out late on our street messing around. Throwing crabapples on the road, you know. Pointless kid stuff. I won’t name anybody; they’re all doing fine, that’s all I’ll say. But they’re damned lucky to be that way. They could’ve been me. All of them, could’ve been me.”
“So we were goofing around, and then out of nowhere, this guy – let’s call him Jake, he was my best friend’s friend, not my friend, you know how it is – just up stuck his tongue out and ate a snowflake. Just like that, not even showing off. Like it was normal.”
What was your reaction?
“Well, I flipped the hell out, of course. I was a little tightass back then, and I knew that you were supposed to be hiding this stuff, and we were right near my house of course so I had to act up for any parents that were, don’t know, hiding in the bushes or something. But, uh, Jake just laughed at me. And then he dared me to do it.”
Your response?
“I said that was gross and he was a freaky weirdo, and he was going to get sick from all the crap in it. But Jake said I was a dumbass. Said around here all the snow was white as milk, all clean and fresh. No impurities. Then he double-dared me.”
“And then I did it.”
What was it like?
“Cold, mostly. I got so nervous I swallowed down the wrong pipe, spent five minutes coughing my lungs out and trying not to throw up. By then everybody else’d got over their laughing and given it a try. So I made a big show about how they were all gross and stomped off home with them laughing at me for being such a dip. And then… just as I’m reaching for the doorbell, swear to god….this big, fat, soft flake lands right on my mitt. It’s practically winking at me.”
What did you do?
“What do you think? And it was so much easier than the last time. Crisp. Clear. Clean. Perfect. Love at first shot. Nine years old.”

What happened next?
“Well, I sort of hid it from my parents. Obviously. Hid it from my friends too, because kids are dumb and don’t want to admit they’re wrong. Started a bad habit of covering shit up there, that did. And it probably didn’t help my addiction process – the other kids, they were social snow-eaters, sneak a flake or two to help them all relax together after school. Me, I was eating handfuls in the corner of the playground and making ‘ew’ noises at them for it.”
Did they ever find out?
“No. Not seriously. We did grow apart a bit as the years went on, and part of that was that their habit was less and less of one and mine more and more a compulsion. Especially after the third summer. Christ the hard times were hard.”
Tell us what made that summer so difficult.
“The first summer was sort of sad. I missed the flakes, you know? The second summer I was annoyed, but got over it. But the third one…I kept taking more, get it? Your third high isn’t as good as the second isn’t as good as the first. Nothing beats the first. So you take more and more and all of a sudden the summer’s here and you’re not going to see the ass-side of a droplet for six months. Rough stuff, when you’re twelve. Rough stuff. Puberty AND a snow problem. I wouldn’t stop fighting with my brother. All that stuff about how it makes you relaxed – that shit’s only when you’re high. When you come down, you just don’t give a damn about anything but when your next shot’s gonna be.”
How did the third summer change things?
“Well, I knew I couldn’t handle that twice. Got grounded so many times I almost forgot what the world past our driveway looked like. So I started a stash. Kept a plastic bag in the meat fridge out in the shed – not too big though. Wasn’t a total idiot, knew I had to keep it small enough that nobody’d look inside. Sometimes I think mom found it and thought it was dad’s; I knew he’d been up to some cold stuff back in his youth. Maybe I helped the divorce along a little more roughly. Didn’t think of it at the time.”
Did the stash help?
“Fuck no. Made things a lot worse. See, now that I was calmed down enough to go out and about during the summer, I saw kids acting just I’d been. I could spot what they were wanting a mile off. I was looking through the eyeballs of Adam Smith’s asshole there, and what I saw was demand. And then I looked back at my bag at home, and I saw supply. And we all know what happens when demand chunks the hell out of supply, hey?”
So you sold it.
“Yeah. I just gave away little bits at first as favours, then when I ran low I started charging. Was cutting my own throat at the start, really, ‘till I saw the sort of desperation I was working with. Ran a pretty tight monopoly ‘till grade nine.”
What happened then?
“Bigger school, more freedom, more competition. Some kids out there had access to fridges even. Nobody was going to pay fifty bucks for a half-assed palmful of melted sludge anymore. So I had two options: I could quit, or I could go whole hog. Guess which one I did.”
You were a dealer.
“Yeah. And a good one. I got by without even having a fridge; I ended up being almost more of a broker than the product-man. Found clients, talked them along, hooked them up with the cold stuff, got the commissions. Made me a really popular guy. And of course that was a feedback loop, because the more people liked me the easier it was for me to get them to bring in new customers. Repeat ad nauseum. Shit, that’s the only Latin I remember from grade twelve.”
When did you realize how serious what you were getting into was?
“Honestly? I don’t think I ever did, and there’s one clear memory I got that really shows that. I was seventeen and fucking around with some bad friends of mine – all the guys I worked with; really we had a better work ethic than anybody else our age, we were the entrepreneurs – and, let’s say, Trish, she breaks out an icicle.”
Just like Jake and the snowflake.
“No, no, no. Jake, it was casual, and that drew your eye. Trish, it was a showpiece. ‘Check THIS shit out, kiddos.’ I remember her saying that. I don’t know if she said it, but I remember her saying that.”
Did you have some?
“Well, with these guys I didn’t have any squeaky-clean image to preserve, AND I knew what I was doing – I didn’t, but that’s what I thought – AND I was pretty sure I was immune to the side effects of the stuff. Wilful blindness. So I did it. I saw the hard stuff, and I took it.”
And?
“I’ve never beaten that high. I swore off snowflakes and never looked back.”
Because they’d led you to icicles.
“That’s right. Pure gateway chill, they were. Wasn’t a pure icicle, though. Years later, when I had more experience with this sort of thing, I think I decided somebody’d cut it with dog piss. Still the best stuff I’d ever had. Have ever had.”
What happened then?
“Well, I kept my hand in the snow trade, but I sort of slacked off. Spent a lot of time looking up ice and stuff – never on school computers, I wasn’t an idiot; deleted my home browsing history too – and decided that it was way too complicated to deal with in high school. So I went into university as a climatology student.”
This is a common perception of the profession, isn’t it?
“Yeah. Everybody ‘knows’ the clime students are just in it to get super high, right? Right. So of course nobody’d ever believe one of them really WAS chilling up homecooled ice in his fridge in the dorm. Cover story was that it was too obvious a cover story – sort of smart, but really stupid. And risky. My roomy found my stash at one point; I could tell he’d moved the boxes of old waffles I hid the cooling racks behind. But he never said anything, and I wasn’t sure if he was planning to rat me out or if he just wasn’t going to talk. Spent three months worrying I’d have to kill a guy if I didn’t want to earn my Bachelor’s in the fed.”
Obviously, he didn’t talk.
“Nope. Christ, I spent ninety-seven days sweating like a pig and dropping grades because of this guy, and in the end, he probably’d never even recognized what he’d been looking at. How stupid is THAT?”
After graduation, what did you do?
“Failed, mostly. If I’d been more self-aware, I could’ve seen it coming.”
Oh?
“Yeah. I kept abusing my own product. Couldn’t make enough to sell in uni, so I got in the habit of just shooting it up as I made it. Fancied I’d make myself a connoisseur or dispose of the evidence or some shit, I don’t know what the hell. But it was stupid as fuck. I made myself five times the druggie I was in high school, and once I lost access to easy lab materials, well, that was it for my savings. I went through the motions of trying to have a life, but I didn’t anymore. Not really. My life was ice, and ice didn’t come cheap. Fuck, I couldn’t even go on a date without ducking into the washroom to crunch the ice cubes in my drink. Couldn’t go for two hours in a nice restaurant with an attractive single without cooling down. I was pretty much on the fast-track to human waste.”
And what saved you?
“Well, I had to start living at home again once my savings were gone, and my dad was concerned enough about my finances that he started to notice I was losing more than I was claiming. So he had a friend look into me. On the force.”
And you were caught?
“Busted hardcore. I think dad was hoping I was being exorted or something, he was really shocked when it came out that his kid was an addict to the hard, cold, long stuff. And I really was by then. Third day of custody I was begging to do anything for some ice – any ice. Ice from an industrial gutter, black ice off the highway with salt in it, ice made from frozen cat piss – way worse than the dog stuff, real sharp vinegar that cuts your eyes and mouth both. I had to have ice. The only thing separating me and those dead-inside-schmucks that hang around airport runways to lick the residue off’ve returned planes was that I hadn’t sold my nice clothes yet.”
And where did that get you?
“Well, here. Thirty-five to life for possession, with no parole. Minus five years or so for taking part in this. And that’s only because I was never convicted for the snow-selling back in school; that’d net me life without parole.”
Do you have any advice for our audience?
“Sure: kids, just don’t fucking do it. It’s cheesy as hell, but Just Say No. No to Snow. It’ll take you down a bad, hard road that don’t stop ‘till it hits the bottom, and that’s just a pause to catch its breath.”

Sam Hardin was a snow user. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of all snow users become snow addicts. One hundred and ten percent of all snow addicts end up taking icicles and becoming homeless degenerates that crowd the streets of our nation.
End the campaign to legalize snow: Just Say No to Snow.

Recess came to Double River Elementary, and the bell rang ding-ding-ling-ding-dong. A signal for the first-grade class of Mr. Buckle to troop outdoors and enjoy the fresh mountain air and for Alan Sebastian Buckle himself to stand in the parking lot and set tobacco on fire in an unobtrusive corner while jamming it in his mouth, a curious habit that was becoming scarcer by the year.
The children began their recess playtime as they always did, in the same curious, well-behaved way that all the adults of Double River commented on so encouragingly. Two lines, just like the Old Milsop and the Young Milsop, just like the rivers (well, streams, really) that ran either side of main street, as formal as a marching band, each six-year-old looking another six-year-old straight in the eye. Glaring another six-year-old in the eye. Judging. Calculating. Strategizing.
It was all part of the game, you see. And it was always properly random, so it was all fair and nobody could complain except for the people who were paired off with Leslie Walnut and Gregory Macintyre, because you had to cut them a little slack after that sort of luck.
Silence reigned. Well, it reigned all day in the schoolyard anyways, but now, full of children, it reigned with a little more authority and gusto. A day-old newspaper displaying a lady with no shirt on blew its nervous way from one side of the playground to the other. Fingers twitched.
Claire Benedict, standing at the side of the line closest to the fence, cleared her throat and stared at the torso of Tim Maple opposite her. “I pretend,” she said, “that I’m a giant robot transformer.”
There was no noise, though it seemed there should’ve been – no whoosh, no foom, not even a good-old-fashioned zzzap! Steel shone and gravel flew as Claire sank into the playground up to her treads. She had to flail her enormous gun-arms a bit to stabilize herself, and knocked over the school flagpole like a toothpick.
Tim narrowed his eyes as a cannon that would’ve been oversized on a battleship pointed itself at him, and his six-year-old brain took the easiest way out. “Well I pretend that I’m a BIGGER giant robot transformer,” said Tim Maple.
The easiest way out was taken, and Tim stood over twice the height of Claire, towering over the schoolyard like a colossus. A colossus with even worse balance than she did, as a quick shot to the kneecap proved.
Tim fell over. Half the school went with him, including two kids that were a bit slow to duck and Mr. Alan Sebastian Buckle, who’d just wondered what the hell those noises were.
Everyone stared at Tim – or at least his left leg, which was most of what could be seen of him. Then Claire pulled back her cannon-arm and shot him in the head, removed most of it and filling the air with the smell of burning wires.
That was the signal for everyone to start all at once.

Charlie Norton swallowed excessively hard, looked at the expectant face of Gregory Macintyre, and decided to get it over with.
“I pretend that I’m –”
“Ipretendyoumeantheoppositeofeverythingyousay,” said Gregory with the poker face and deadly aim of a quick-draw master.
“-super strong,” finished Charlie. And fell over.

“I pretend,” said Emma Thompson, whose family had seen a movie or two over the past few evenings, “that I’m a vellossoripter.” She flexed her claws and pounced.
“I pretend,” said Toby Fenton, whose family had seen those same movie or two and had let him watch all the scary bits without skipping, ‘”that I’m a T-rex.”
There was a brief moment mid-leap where Emma attempted to complain of the unfairness of this and also dodge. She failed at both and forfeited everything north of her ankles, sending sickle-tipped toes spinning across the playground.

“I pretend that I’m Darth Vader,” declared Ethan Stewart, sticking to what he knew worked.
“Well I pretend that I’m Luke Skywalker,” argued Donna Timmons, who spotted the problem right away.
Both of them fired up lightsabers, ffweeooowr, Both of thew swung –zweeoooh, swish, swing, zap. Both of them cut off one another’s sword-hands. Ouch. Thud.
They stared at each other in mutual frustration.
Leslie Walnut cleared her throat, drawing their attention. “I pretend,” she said, with perfect inflection, “that I’m the Emperor.”
Zap.

“I pretend that you died,” said Hanna Hamilton to Douglas Fur. Doug opened his mouth, took a deep breath, and was slightly too late.
Hanna grinned triumphantly and turned to her next opponent, Jennifer Finch. “You too,” she said.
Jennifer Finch hadn’t trained herself to be the first hand up when the teacher spoke for nothing. “Nuh-uh,” she shot back.
“Yuh-uh,” replied Hanna.
“Nope. I’m in an invincibubble. You can’t hurt me.”
Hanna glared at the soft velvety sphere that had formed around her opponent. Then she recalled the science class of that very morning, and grinned. “What can break an invincibubble?”
“Nothing,” said Jennifer, cautiously.
“So air can’t break it. You’re gonna run out of oxx-y-genn,” sing-sang Hanna triumphantly.
“Nu-uh!” blurted Jennifer as faint purpleness crept in around her gills. “Air can go through ‘cause it’s see-through.”
Hanna snarled. Which was a bad idea, because you can’t talk when you’re snarling, and it gave Jennifer the three seconds she needed for her second idea. “And,” she continued, “it’s super hard and tough. I pretend I bounce up and down on your head one hundred and eleventy times.”
Hanna wasn’t in a mood for math. Math had stolen the best half-hour of her morning. Given this, it was probably a good thing that she wasn’t able to count past ‘one’.

“I pretend,” said Zack Newton with the confidence of a man who’s got it all figured out, “that I can’t die.”
Gregory Macintyre considered him calmly. “I pretend you’re stuck a billion feet underground forever and ever.”

“I pretend I’m Batman, and I punch you” said Robert Cross.
“I pretend I’m Spider-Man, and I tie you up in webs” countered Frankie Edwards.
“Well I pretend I’m the Hulk and I smash you really hard!” replied Robert, struggling to get his mask out of his mouth and succeeding in cobwebbing his tongue.
“I pretend I’m Superman now and I punch you SUPER hard!”
The resulting shockwave destroyed what was left of the area around the school and sent the other combatants tumbling through the air, forced to pretend parachutes, wings, and anti-gravity jet packs or just fall like rocks, a choice that half of them took.

“I pretend that I’m the best at everything,” said Tammy Windhouse. And just like that, she heaved up Stewart Maclean and Susan Dean and tossed them into outer space. “See?” she said. Then she poked Jennifer Finch’s invincibbule with one finger and pop, it faded.
“I pretend that I’m the infinity best at everything!” yelled Jennifer. She tackled Tammy and sent her careening through the town, slamming into the Main Street bridge and straight to the bottom of the river.
“I, pretend” slurred Tammy through a mouthful of bruise as Jennifer lifted her up by her neck, “am the infinity best. Plus. One.” She caught Jennifer’s fist in her teeth, then bit it off into Jennifer’s face, which vanished along with most of the rest of her. Then she cackled.
It was the best cackle, of course. The best plus one.
The dust settled, and from its obscuring swathe came a lone, slightly short figure.
“I pretend I’m the infinity best plus two,” said Leslie Walnut.
Tammy glared at her. “Are not. No such thing.”
“Yu-uh. Two is better than one.”
Tammy opened her mouth to argue this, but Leslie Walnut was plus two faster than her. And suddenly plus two more alive.

Two lone figures alone in the parking lot of the mall. The cars have been pretended away. The shoppers are hiding inside, peering through windows.
Eyes narrow. Teeth clench. Fingers flex. And then a breath is taken, and then:
“I pretend I’m the prime minister,” said Hal Green, “and I tell the whole army to come and kill you.”
“I pretend I’m the president of the United States,” countered Leo Grouse, “and I tell MY whole army to come and kill YOU.”
There was a moment there, as the countless men surrounding them reloaded and the battalions of tanks that had flattened the mall in their approach revved their engines. A moment where their expensive suits ruffled softly in the breeze.
“My army’s better,” said Hal, sulkily.
“Are not,” said Leo. “Geography told me so.”
Standing directly in between the two opposing forces, neither of their opinions soon mattered to them, or to two-thirds of Double River in general.

And so finally there were only two. But a different two.
Leslie Walnut and Gregory Macintyre come sauntering down Main Street towards one another, north and south. Piles of demolished cars surround them; deceased pretend-ninjas and pretend-pirates, pretend-cyborgs, even a pretend-space-whale are scattered about like disused action figures.
“I pretend,” called down Leslie, “that I got a really big gun.” The biggest gun; a hand cannon that looked more like a hand howitzer.
“I pretend that I got a bigger gun,” said Gregory, cautiously. And it was, but only barely.
“I pretend that I got a laser plasma gun,” said Leslie. It was so full of glowing tubes that there was barely room for the barrel.
“I pretend that I got a rocket launcher,” said Gregory Macintyre. “And it launches actual rockets. Moon rockets.” His arm nearly broke. “And I pretend that I can pick it up ‘cause I’m super big and strong.”
Leslie’s brow creased as she looked up at the thousand-foot colossus, whose shoulder-mounted weaponry was about the same size as he was. “I pretend,” she said, “that I’m Godzilla’s mommy. So I’m ten times as big as he is, and I’ve got ten times as good breath. It’s like a super nukular laser times a hundred.”
Gregory glared up at the giant lizard now facing him thanks to the power of multiplication. “I pretend that I’m as strong as the whole planet all at once,” he said.
Leslie’s eyes watered as an abstract concept crossed them, then snapped back into a focus that would probably be impossible past puberty. “I pretend that I’m as strong as the whole world at once plus the sun and moon at once.”
“I pretend I’m stronger.”
“I pretend I’m stronger than that.”
“I pretend I’m the strongest.”
“I pretend I’m the strongest plus one!”
“I pretend I’m the strongest for infinity plus one!”
“I pretend I’m the strongest for infinity plus infinity plus the earth and the sun and the moon and all the stars at once.”
“Well I pretend I’m just as strong as that!”
Leslie considered this. “I pretend you can’t-“
“Ipretendyoucan’tpretendwhatIpretend.”
“-pretend anymore,” said Leslie, in annoyance. “AND Ican’tbepretendedbyanyonebutme.”
They looked at each other. No last minute thoughts? One.
Two.
Three. And BAM.

When the dust settled, most of the universe wasn’t there anyore.
“I pretend that nobody was dead anymore.”
The tiny biomass of earth floated in an emptiness that didn’t even include space.
“Oops.” A moment’s careful thought was applied. “I pretend that everything was back to normal.”

And that was when the bell rang dong-ding-dang-dang-long, because recess was over and Mr. Buckle wanted them all back inside now that he’d had some nicotine in his veins again. The rest of the day would be nice and smooth and quiet, yes. He was relaxed, and not just from the smoke break – the kids were always so quiet after recess. Nice to see they were so well-behaved on their own.

Heaven knows why what Marjorie did came as such a shock to her family. She’d given them plenty of warning for it.
Why, that very morning, as her husband stalked the house in a full-blown mantrum, she’d told him so, cautioned him carefully. As he pointedly exchanged one-to-four word responses to any of her inquiries, deliberately ignoring anything that indicated how thoroughly wrong he’d been in their discussion, she sighed and said: “I swear, one of these days you lot are going to drive me to go out and live in the woods.”
But her husband was busy picking up small objects and putting them down unnecessarily firmly in the same place, and so he did not pay her any attention.
Later in the afternoon, her two children were fighting. Somebody had taken somebody else’s piece of plastic, and then they’d broken it, and now whose fault was it because if SOMEBODY hadn’t been grabbing their arm they wouldn’t have dropped it and why won’t you spank them mom huh why won’t you spank them WHY DON’T YOU BELIEVE IN CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN THIS SPECIFIC SITUATION HUH MOM?
Marjorie was trying to compose an email to a client and had been stuck on sentence three for the past half-hour. She shook her head and once again tried to remember what an adjective was, tried to imagine a concept that existed outside the ingrown skull of a seven-year-old. “Christ,” she said, “if you guys don/t pipe down soon, I’m just going to go and live in the honest-to-goodness woods. I’ve got a spot picked out and everything, really and truly.”
But her children were both under the age of ten and therefore unable to hear anything but themselves, and so they didn’t pay her any heed.
Finally came dinner, which Marjorie’s husband had prepared by picking up many ingredients and firmly slapping them together without looking at anyone or any of the labels. Consequently, it was mysterious, and possibly contained pasta, and for some reason Marjorie’s favourite mug was being used as a container for the tomato sauce, and it made the children complain almost as bitterly as they snipped at one another. Almost.
“Quit pushing me.”
“YOU’RE pushing me.”
“Am not.”
“Are so, ‘cause you’re still mad that you broke the toy.”
“YOU broke the toy.”
“Did not.”
“Did too.”
And so on ad nauseum.
“Pass the tomato sauce, please,” said Marjorie to her husband. He picked up her favourite mug and placed it in front of her, wordlessly and excessively firmly. She sighed.
“This tastes gross,” complained the older child.
“Eww,” agreed the younger child.
“Copycat.”
“I thought of it first.”
Marjorie’s husband poured himself a glass of water and drank it with a needless amount of force. She counted to ten inside her head, wondered why her mother had always told her to do that, and said: “You know, this is pretty good.”
The children bickered. Her husband grunted.
“Tomaatooooo sauce,” said her youngest child.
“What do you say?” asked Marjorie automatically.
“Tomato sauce NOW,” repeated her child.
“No.”
“Tomato sauce now or else?”
“Also no.”
Marjorie’s husband picked up her favourite mug and passed it with excessive force, causing it to crack and split in half.
“IT WASN’T MY FAULT,” proclaimed her children simultaneously.
Marjorie counted to eleven, got up from her chair, and walked downstairs, where she retrieved her shovel and left her clothes. She was halfway up the hill in the backyard and making for the treeline before they noticed she was gone.

“Where you going mooommm hey where are you going what are you doing mom,” asked her oldest child, all in one breath and immediately running out of it.
“I told you all, and warned you properly,” said Marjorie. “I’m going to go live in the woods. There’s no use arguing, my mind’s made up. You can all go and be obnoxious by yourselves.”
“But moooooooooooommmm,” managed her youngest child before succumbing to near-anoxia.
“Be reasonable, honey,” said her husband. “You’ll freeze to death or starve or get eaten by coyotes or something.”
“No,” said Marjorie, halting at a likely spot on a pretty hillside. “That’s not going to be a problem. I’m going to be a tree. And you can all just go straight back home, see if I care.” And she shoveled a small pit open and stood in it.
“This isn’t very normal,” said the husband.
“Don’t care. Bug off now.”
So they bugged off and Marjorie stood in one place and focused on thinking about roots.

A short, burly-hurly man (more hurly than burly) came up the hill the next day, with some glasses. “Hello,’ he said. “I’m a psychologist. Are you the lady who thinks she’s a tree?”
“I AM a tree,” said Marjorie. “Look, you can see the bark.” And she showed him her arm.
“Oh, how fascinating – tactile delusions. That’s very interesting. My word. What is it, pine?”
“Larch.”
“Oh, how very interesting. Tell me about your mother.”
“Ask her yourself and she’ll tell you. That’s a bit personal, isn’t it?”
The man frowned. “Uh, I suppose so. Gosh I’m sorry. Right, uhm, what about your father?”
“Same thing.”
“Oh dear. Oh dear. I don’t suppose this is all something about repressed urges? Maybe, uh….sexual? Something about incest I guess – it’s a bit gross.”
“No. Not even remotely. That was mostly just Freud.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“He was a bit strange then?”
“Yes. You’re not really a psychologist, are you?”
He sagged. “No. Not really. But I read a book once, and I’m a friend of one of your husband’s friends, so…”
“You can tell my husband that I’m perfectly fine, and you can tell your friend that this is none of his beeswax. At all. If I want beeswax there’s a perfectly good hive just up the hill in a friendly pine. Now clear off, and if I were you I’d take my advice and read something written in the last century.”
He cleared off. Marjorie composed herself and focused on needles.

The next day an extremely short woman came up the hill and prodded Marjorie with her finger. “Larch,” she said sourly. “Larch. I didn’t raise a daughter of mine to be a larch of all things. Sakes alive, Margie, couldn’t you have at least been a nice redwood or something?”
“Hi, mom,” said Marjorie. “They phoned you in, didn’t they?”
“I mean, they’re pretty at least,” continued her mother, blissfully ignoring the question and thereby confirming the answer. “You could’ve consulted me on this.”
“We’re too far north and too dry for redwoods, mom. I’d fall over. Besides, they’re too big. I wouldn’t feel comfortable.”
“Oh, and other trees are so much smaller, I expect? Typical nit-picking. Just typical. And you didn’t even tell me – oh what a MOOD you’re in this week.”
“Mom, they were driving me completely nuts. It was this or kill them all and burn the house down.”
“Oh really?”
“Yes, really.”
“Well serves ‘em right then. Mind if I smoke?”
“Yes. I’ve got needles now and you’ll get them all sooty.”
“Right.” Marjorie’s mother lit up her cigarette after three minutes fumbling with the lighter and muttering, then had a nice hourlong chat with Marjorie about how her boyfriend was a nuisance sometimes and had she heard about what Julie did? (She hadn’t) It was half-past midnight before she left, leaving Marjorie just enough time to comb the tar off her needles and doze off.

She woke up to the sound of a polite cough and the sight of her neighbour, Tammy, holding an axe.
“You’d better have a better explanation for this than I think you’re going to,” she told her.
“Well… I was thinking that maybe if I just get your legs free you’ll go home, and I do all the forestry work so-”
“They talked you into this, didn’t they?”
“Maybe,” said Tammy. “Look, you really shouldn’t be doing this. Trust me, people make lousy trees.”
“Well I’m staying put and I’m doing all right so far. I’ve got needles and bark and a good spot with enough sun and water to keep me going all year round for years. No reason to move at all and a lot less stress than down there. All my neighbours may be green and trying to passive-aggressively kill me through competition but at least they’re quiet.”
“Oh fine,” said Tammy, with an exasperated sigh. “Well, if that’s the way it’s going to be, we need a Christmas tree this year and-”
“No.”
“We wouldn’t use the axe I mean we could just leave you up here and put some tinsel on-“
“No.”
“But you’re in a great spot, I mean the lights would be visible for-“
“No. Go away, you’re in MY light.”
Tammy sighed again. “Fine. Be that way. Don’t listen to the experts.” She left Marjorie alone, giving her enough time to practice her twigsprouting before the day was done.

Three days went by.
They go fast when you’re sleepwalking, and they go faster when you’re busy adjusting your sap levels for the winter and bracing your roots for frost and getting those needles arrayed just right. Rest is for the deciduous.

And on the evening of day three, up the hill came the family, two small and one big.
“Hey mooom,” said her youngest child. “Are you gonna come back inside yeeet?”
“No,” she said. “It’s nice up here and the air’s clean and tasty. And I’m busy.”
“But it’s coold,” complained her oldest child. “And there’s bugs.”
“The bugs are DEAD,” said her youngest child.
“Not all the bugs.”
“Yeah they are.”
“Nu-uh, I saw a bug on the way here.”
“Liar liar.”
“Shush,” said her husband. “Look, honey, do you think you could come back inside? It’s going to start snowing soon.”
“I’ll be fine,” said Marjorie. “I’m not really as temperature-sensitive as I used to be. Really. None of you are even wearing your jackets.”
“We were in a hurry,” he mumbled.
“I’m sure.”
“Give her the present give her the present come ON what are we waiting for give her the present go on go go go OOOoooON!” chanted her children.
“Present?”
Marjorie’s husband put a little box on the ground – he had to, because Marjorie couldn’t and wouldn’t move her branches – and opened it.
Inside was Marjorie’s favourite mug. It had been glued back together with that painstaking lack of care and patience that was unmistakably childish. It had also been repainted with somewhat more detail.
“It’s very nice,” said Marjorie, with the practiced ease of half-a-decade of Mother’s Day behind her. “Very, very nice. Did you spend a lot of time on it?”
“Ten minutes,” said her oldest child proudly.
“And I did all the work,” said her youngest child.
Her oldest child opened its mouth and had it immediately covered by her husband. “We made some dinner for you.”
Marjorie considered this. “I don’t really eat anymore.”
“It’s fish and chips.”
Marjorie considered this a bit longer and more carefully. “Well, maybe just a little. Pass me that shovel.”
It took an hour to dig up her roots and rebury them properly so she’d be able to fetch them again in the morning. It took six minutes to find a way to fit her inside (through the patio door – the screens needed to come out anyways). And it took seven tries before it was determined that yes, Marjorie didn’t really eat anymore, even if she tried fairly hard.
But the mug was very pretty, and water seemed to taste better inside it. And the walking had worn the children out, so Marjorie got to talk to her husband a bit that night and that was nice.

So she re-rooted herself on the back lawn – but never too deeply – and they raised the ceiling a little bit, and altogether that worked just fine.

It began, as most troubles do, with mail.
The pamphlet was cool, slim, and professional; a really sleek and ergonomically designed piece of work that looked almost triumphantly uncomfortable in the rusty, wall-eyed mailbox that the mailman had stuffed it into not thirty seconds before. Howard’s puckered old fingers shook with excitement as he yanked it free and gently nudged it out of its sheath. A quick ogling confirmed his joyous suspicions, and he couldn’t contain his glee.
“Yiiiiiiiiiipeeeeeee!”
“Consarn it Howard shut the hell up. What will the neighbours think?”
“Nothing! They live forty miles away and who gives a flying fig, Lyle? Who really does give a single sweet jumping fig if I feel good in the mornings, eh?” Howard skipped his way back up to the front door with the verve of a younger and less arthritic man, waving his mail like a trophy. “Look! Look at this!”
Lyle’s face was already a mass of frown lines, but they seemed to deepen by oh about a foot each as he looked at the pamphlet. “Museum,” he said, each syllable elongated with disgust. “A Special Exhibition. Eugh! Tastelessness!”
“Oh Lyle, really?”
“The history of mankind and womenkind is the history of tawdrykind, Howard! You know mother warned us off against that sort of thing! Half the informationable boards will be filled with luridness and cheap filth, no doubt! Best to keep yourself at home and yourself’s mind out of the gutters. The turnips need weeding.”
“I weeded the turnips yesterday afternoon, I did, I did. Almost lost a finger but I did I swear it’s true. And besides anyways, this is an exhibition of prehistoric and archaic flora and fauna – no humans at all.”
Lyle’s watery, razory eyes blinked with venomous slowness. “No humans?”
“Not even so much as a baby sandwich.”
He considered this. “Not even a…small baby sandwich?”
“Not even that. No sliced bread or babies for at least a million years after their youngest item on display.”
“Pah, even worse then! At least people have the decency to do….that sort of thing… indoors behind closed curtains and locked doors and guard dogs! Animals get up to that sort of…business… in the streets! Prehistory?! Nothing but a long, sweaty, pounding tour of fortification!”
“Oh Lyle, don’t you mean ‘fornication’?”
“I know what I said that I meant what you knew, damnit! Isn’t proper English good enough for you? I’ll get in the car while you sort yourself out and pack us a lunch. And be quick about it! My lumbago is acting up.”

The Museum had been renovated in the last twenty years since Lyle and Howard had visited it; a giant crystal sprouted from its side and bulged shining light all across the street, a monument to architectural excess and the relative cheapness of reinforced glass in the modern era.
Howard loved it, and didn’t even need to ask Lyle’s opinion on it because Lyle gave it to him right away and he could ignore it safely.
“Now when we’re in there,” he told his brother, “you must NOT, I repeat, must NOT, I repeat, MUST NOT, one more time, MUST NOT AT ALL buy any CHEAP TOURIST TAT, are we clear on this set of particulars, Howard?”
“I have never done any such thing Lyle and I don’t feel that saying that to me is particularly fair.”
“Phah, we’ve both seen that look in your eyes when you look at….that sort of thing. You’ll spend half your life’s savings on monkeys in barrels and prostitutes and bagels if I don’t keep a sharp eye on you.”
“I don’t have any life’s savings, Lyle.”
“All the more important that you safeguard what you don’t have then! You’re a spendthrift soul, Howard. Why, you would’ve had us pay for parking even! PAY, for the privilege of being shut away in a great dirty underground garage!”
“It really was much nicer out in the fresh air,” agreed Howard. “Bracing, too. The thrill of the hunt for a parking space! The honk of horns, the screams of slurs…”
“I don’t see how everyone had missed that last space. It was plenty obvious. Public territory, too. Perfectly sound as a perfectly sound bell’s sounding.”
“I don’t think people nowadays are used to cars parking on the sidewalk.”
“They had plenty of space to squeeze round unless they were fat. And I say me to you, Howard, if any man today realizes what he has done to his belly to make it swole as a result of squeezing round our car, we have committed a minor act of grace without even trying.”
“Wow,” said Howard.
“Excuse me,” asked an extremely polite and very annoyed voice that they had been ignoring for the past two minutes, “are you two going to buy any passes?”
Lyle squinted through his ornery eye at the ticketmaster. “We were having a conversation, young, young, young lady,” he said severely. “No need for that sort of lip.”
Howard handed over a small and neatly shuffled sheaf of bills from a few decades back. “Two for the special exhibition, please.”
“Right. Here’s your stubs.”
Howard dithered. There was a specific way in which the foot is held and the hands work as the human body dithers, one that is hard to describe. Howard’s hands practically oscillated.
“What?”
“I don’t suppose I could get a hand stamp?” he asked hopefully.
“Got rid of them ten years back.”
“Oh. I’m quite sorry,” he said, as kindly as he could manage.
“Just as well,” said Lyle. “Leads the youth to tattoos and violence and eating fries with the improper sort of condiments past midnight. Good riddance! Where’s the first stop?”
Howard unfolded his map. “Well, it’s….hmm. Some Triassic fossils!”
“Walking ones?”
“No, just regular old ones.”
“Well that’s just failing for lack of trying. What about giants? They got any giants?”
“They’ve got a giant ground sloth, but that’s part of the main museum.”
“A giant giant ground sloth?”
“Just a proper regular giant ground sloth.”
“Well this is turning dull. I believe you’ve picked up the wrong map, Howard. As is usual of you as our mother warned me of.”
“My feelings are being hurt, Lyle. Right here, just above my breast-bone.”
“Don’t use words like that in public or I’ll wash your mouth out with stoats. “
Howard sighed. “Excuse me miss, but do you have another map?”
“Sir, would you please get out of the way of the line.”
“Absolutely, just in a moment. You know, the OTHER map.”
“No sir. There is no other map.”
“The one with-“
“The good stuff,” interjected Lyle.
“-the good stuff, yes.”
The ticketmaster looked at the fifty-person buildup in her aisle, looked at the two withered old men, calculated the cost of making a fuss or calling security versus playing along with the burdens of senility. It was the sort of math that only a human brain could do, and hers did it very quickly indeed.
“Of course, sir. The other map. Here you go.”
Howard took the map politely and Lyle snatched it from his hand. “Thank you very much, miss. Have a pleasant day now.”
“You shouldn’t give away that sort of thing for free, Howard. People will get used to it.”
“Nobody can ever have enough pleasant days,” said Howard with perfect serenity. He ruffled his map. “How odd. She seems to have gotten mixed up. This is just the regular map with a doodle of….a stegosaurus. In pen.”
“The heat must have cooked her poor stupid young brains on account of being young, Howard. You should know about that sort of thing. If you hadn’t gotten your stupid young brains cooked on account of being young.”
“Sure enough, Lyle.” Howard tapped the map gently with his thumb and shook it four times. “There we go. All sorted out. See, here’s the entrance! Just besides the elevator you hit the wall with your thumb and it sends it to the bottomth floor.”
Howard did so. The wall cracked open, broke into little pieces, and opened up into a large, bulky device made mostly of quartz and extremely unfriendly angles.
“Never did trust these things,” muttered Lyle. “You can never trust anyone who doesn’t trust Euclid, mind you those words.”
“Euclid wasn’t due to be born for…” Howard flipped through his pamphlet. “…seven million years or so when this elevator was built, Lyle. Says here it was made by a race of terrifying monkey-men who worshipped the other side of the moon that no man has ever truly known.”
“No wonder the damned thing gives me the heeblies. Cheap monkey-man labour never did last reliably; I know a man who knew a man who had a sister that bought a watch off one of the little hairy bastards that only lasted two hundred years before it snapped in half and let all the demons out.”
“Lyle, you can’t just pass judgment on an entire people like that! What will the neighbours think?”
“They’ll hate our guts on account of us being the wrong colour, same as always. Why should I care?”
“I’ll admit that you make a convincing argument, Lyle.”
The doors creaked, groan, and mashed their way through another wall, disgorging the brothers into a space that was more cave than basement. Occasional marks on the stalactite-infested walls showed where someone had optimistically attempted to place a brick before giving up in perfectly rational disgust.
“Now, what’s up first? And be sharp about it! We want to get done with this place and leave before you learn anything that isn’t good for you.”
Howard flourished his map. “Let’s see…well, we’ve seen the protosimian transport. Next up is the trhinosceros.”
“Nothing but a cheap hoax, a P.T. Barnumism. Sew a third horn on a rhino, bam wam mystical magical creature cross my heart swear to god very cheap thank you very much sir. And then you take it home and it doesn’t have enough supernatural hootenanny in it to fertilize the turnip patch.”
“No, no, no, this one’s real! Not like the one that Lewis sold you.”
“Who said that was the one that Lewis sold me? I was doing him a favour, that was all. Rhino-sitting. For money. Which I paid him. There was no…grift involved!”
“Of course, of course.”
“We skip it,” said Lyle firmly. “What after that?”
Another map-ruffling. “A Lemurian Dodecahedramid.”
“Huh. They bring the whole thing in?”
“It says they had to leave it wedged halfway through the wall. But you can go in and wander around!”
“Pass. Damned lemurs loved traps. Getting forcibly devolved in the great interprimate wars was too soft on a bunch of critters that got that much joy out of making razor wire and bottomless pressure-plate-operated pits, I’ve always said that and I always will. Hope the whole lot of ‘em get poached out of existence toot sweet.”
“Extinction is forever, Lyle,” said Howard primly.
“No it isn’t. Remember the right whale?”
“Yes I do and I still fully support that action.”
“Damned hippiemancers. They sucked the flavour out of canned tuna for all time just to power the comeback of one itty-bitty extinct goddamned whale.”
“You hated canned tuna, Lyle.”
“Well I hate it MORE now. Forever. What else they got in here?”
Ruffle ruffle. “The skull of a mammoth-king.”
“What rank?”
“Hmmm…. Third dynasty, first Epoch. Fifth from the throne, ended his cousin’s reign by backstabbing and frontstabbing and side-smashing and skull-crushing.”
“How big’re his tusks?”
“Lyle!”
“Well?”
“That’s just not the sort of question you ask!”
“The mammoth’s been dead for thousands of years, Howard, and unless some goddamned hippy brings one back in the next ten seconds none of them are going to get offended at me so you can take your self-righteousness and piss on it. How big were those tusks there?”
Howard stalled and hummed, then caved in. “Ten feet,” he whispered. And blushed.
“Hah! Compensating for something, was he? Ten feet. Hah! Aha! Ha ha ha ha ha!”
“ANYWAYS,” said Howard, much, much too loudly, “they’ve got him in the third vault on the left if you want to take a-“
“Oh hell no Howard! Looking at that sort of thing is straight-up-straight-down-indecent and it might get IDEAS in your head. What else is there?”
“Let me see….oh! Oh!”
“What oh now?”
“They’ve got the bones of the last sorcerersaurus!”
“What?”
“And, uhm, also the bones of the first sorcerersaurus.” Howard crossed and uncrossed his map, squinting at it.
“What?!”
“Apparently there was a bit of a time paradox.”
“They’ve got those damned things here? NOW? Near PEOPLE?! Get us the hell out of here five minutes ago damnit!”
“Calm down, Lyle.”
“I’m not calming down! You don’t calm down when you’re four seconds from being possessed by something seventeen clades away from your biggest throwback of a relative! Christ on a cracker with cheese what if he’s already GOT someone? Get in the elevator, get in the elevator, GET IN THE-“
“No, it’s fine. They’ve got his bones locked up in a ten-foot-thick solid iron cube made of leftovers from the Yucatan meteor crater.”
Lyle considered this, hand frozen halfway to the enormous rusty lever that summoned the lift.
“Ten-foot?”
“Ten-and-three-point-sixteen-onwards-inches.”
Lyle’s body lost the nervous tension that had temporarily rid it of fifty years of wrinkles. “All right. Alright. All is right. Damnit, don’t do that sort of thing to me. You KNOW I got a bad heart.”
“You replaced the heart fifty years ago, Lyle. I picked the baboon out myself.”
“And you picked a damned lousy baboon, Howard. I told you and I told you and I told you again and again, you have got the worst way with monkeys I’ve ever seen or heard of.”
“No need for insults, Lyle. Shall we go see-“
“No. I’ll stay in the same building as that…thing but there’s no way in hell’s left clavicle that I’m going to be the closest breathing object to it when it decides it’s time for a jailbreak. Now shut up and tell me what’s next on the list.”
Howard said nothing.
“Well?”
“I thought you wanted me to shut up.”
“Oh quitcher sulking and gimme that.” Lyle snatched the paper from his brother’s unresisting fingers and ran a cursory squint over it. “Lessee….uh. Uhm. Hmmm. Ah. Okay. That’s good. And uh. Right. That’s no good. Right. Yeah.”
“Would you like me to read it to you, Lyle?”
“Look they make the damned print too fine nowadays, you know? It’s all those computers. Too much binary makes your alphabets shrink.” He thrust the pamphlet back into his brother’s hands. “Go on then. Show off. See if I care.”
“Well, there’s a fully crystallized mammal resistance stronghold. Half a mile across originally, shrunk to the size of your Adam’s apple. Part of the sorcerersaurus exhibit.”
“Howard, the only thing duller than living rats is dead, crystallized rats. And the only thing duller than THAT is self-important holier-than-thou underdog rats. And these are all of those things at once except for living. So no. Let ‘em be.”
“These are our ancestors, Lyle, who fought against a dreadful power for the future of their children!”
“Sure as hell not THEIR kids then, ‘cause they got fossified to their sixth degree of relation. Pass – there’s enough living idiots for us to gawk at; we don’t need to go find dead ones. Go on, what’s next.”
“The Tyrant’s Tassled Tscepter,” said Howard, rolling the words like bowling balls.
“I won’t tolerate tassles in the house, I won’t tolerate tassles in the public. Next.”
“It was an emblem of might and strength for a multi-million-year succession, Lyle.”
“Yeah but not a man jack or woman jill of ‘em thought that putting tassles on their instruments of authority was anything less than the bee’s knees and I don’t see why I’ve got to put up with that sort of tripe. Next! NEXT! Next.”
“A leviathan’s rib, fresh from Greenland.”
Lyle squinted up at the cavern’s ceiling. “They could fit that in here?”
“Well, a one-tenth square model. Half of it. Well, almost a third. Rounded up.”
“Pass. We’ve got no time for the little stuff.”
“The bones of the first sorcerersaurus.”
“You already mentioned that!”
“Well, the list IS chronological, Lyle, and I DID say there was a bit of a time parad-“
“I’ve said my piece on the damned thing. What, are you trying to make me say everything twice? Hoping I’ll run out of air, choke to death, leave you the house to yourself? I should’ve known you’d pull that sort of trick and as you can see I have, so you can take your plotting and shove it lengthwise, you little sneak!”
“Lyle, I would rather die than cause you a moment’s intentional distress, I swear it upon mother’s grave.”
“Oh you ain’t good enough to kill me intentionally. You’ll just get careless one day, see if you don’t. But I’ve got my eye on you, and THAT’S how I’ll get the jump, you’ll see.”
“Yes, yes.”
“You’ll see, you know, you’ll see.”
“Of course.”
“What’s next now?”
“Ummm… a Dimetrodon High-Knight in full regalia.”
“Chivalry isn’t obsolete enough; you want to drag me to a version that was old, dusty, and extinct by the time of the first tyrannosaurus?”
“The Great Tower of the Scorpions.”
“Fat lot of good it did them against the spiders if you ask me which you did.”
“I didn’t!”
“Yes you did. Go on.”
“The First Step.”
“The what now?”
“I don’t know, let’s see…uhm….’The rock where the very first little bug intentionally hopped out of the water to avoid a predator, then successfully hopped back in. Do not touch.’”
“Bah, a tourist-trap. Just trying to sell plastic assembly kits of it in the gift shop, no doubt!”
“No, no, no! But they do have grow-your-own-First-Sprout kits.”
“What now?”
“’The very first little green algae that grew just barely outside the splash zone of the shoreline.’ They’ve got its fossil here, and you can buy a little kit that lets you-”
“The garden is for turnips. Our mother planted it and grew turnips, we have grown turnips in it, we are growing turnips in it right now, and we will continue to grow turnips in it in the future. NOT tourist tat. Understand my words, Howard?”
“Clear as crystal, Lyle.”
“Is there anything else?”
Flip flip flip. “Just one.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, the very first copulation. They caught it on record – they think a mudslide trapped the couple mid-”
“WHAT?!”
“Well, they didn’t know what to expect, I suppose – it says here that they were asexual up until that moment and the pleasure sort of caught-“
“Alright, that’s it. We’re off. Time to go home.”
“But-“
“No buts! Not a single but until your butt lands in the car and you get to driving!” Lyle spat on the floor. “THAT! A grown museum for grown humans and other grown sapients displaying THAT like it’s something to be proud of! Hah! A signal to head home if I’ve ever heard one!” He pursed his lips in thought. “Does the gift shop have reproductions of it?”
“Err…yes. Assembly required, thou-“
“Good enough, here’s the money, go fetch it. And don’t spend more than ten dollars on yourself, you hear?”

Getting home took a bit longer than expected. Somebody’d attached a truck to their car and was trying to move it, and Lyle had to yell for over ten minutes before he gave up and let them go.
“Senility is god’s gift to the elderly that haven’t got it, that’s what I’ve always said,” said Lyle, cradling the extremely calm and plain brown paper bag his prize rested within. “No excuse quite like it in all the world.”
“That’s the truth, Lyle,” said Howard, as he pulled into the driveway. “That’s the truth.”
“I still can’t believe you spent money on that tripe. It’ll rot your brain and drive your gonads to depravity while leaving your wits in Muddles, Alabama.”
“The Scientific American is a fine publication, Lyle, and their articles on dinosaurs are most entertaining. This book will last me for hours and hours of joy and discovery!”
“How good can it be? They still think there’s only three periods in the Mesozoic, for the love of Jesus’s littlest toenail!”
“Ignorance is bliss,” said Howard. “And we all need a little bliss in our lives, eh? Admit it, this trip was fun. A nice bit of relaxing to soak up the afternoon.”
Lyle peered into his bag. “Yes. Yes I suppose you could say that. Yes indeed. Now do me a favour and piece this together for me; the print’s too small to read.”

Behold the city, millions of souls strong, all of varying sizes and shapes! The site where ten thousand cultures and ethnicities dropped themselves off for a sleepover and stayed forever, bickering and embracing their neighbours and watching their children grow up. A hotbed of humanity that put any greenhouse to shame, a beehive with more frequent sex, an anthill that needed no queens. A billion mouths opening every second, talking, trading, pouring waves of sounds and information over one another, evolving constantly and using a trillion words from every language you could name.
A trillion and one, now. And that was the problem.

I nodded to Finneas Fabian as he picked his way over the broken glass of the study. “Professor. Glad you could spare a moment of your time.”
“I have it in plenty,” he muttered. Already peering at the walls, examining the hundreds of incredibly outdated packages of information stashed away behind sheet glass, safe from mildew. “And I’d say this takes precedence over any of my research, Inspector.”
“I more meant the Linguistic Singularity. Only every five years for a week, be a shame for you to miss –“ I pulled up short because I was being fixed with a glare that could’ve melted steel. For someone with eyes that watery, the professor could focus them until they gave you sunstroke.
“The Singularity,” he stressed, “of which we have had more than sixty, is hardly singular. It is also notably lacking in novelty. I will not be missed or looked for, and I hadn’t intended to go at all. They are not interested in my field, and I return the feeling tenfold.”
“Right, right, right,” I said, holding up my hands. “I get it. Forget I said a thing. You want to see the evidence now?”
Fineas relaxed, if only a little. He was a short, round little man, but his spine seemed to uncurve when he got angry, expanding him upwards like a vertical pufferfish. “Yes. Yes of course. Show me.”
There wasn’t much to show. A chalk outline, where the body of Sir Agnes Gabbley had been taken away. And a huge outdated monitor, the screen nearly a full foot across, monstrous compared to the sleek modern puter hooked into it, its case an inch across.
The screen’s monstrous width was even more pointless than it had been since the invention of the ICU. Only a single thing remained visible on it: a smudge of writing on a word processor.
“Prehistoric,” I said. “No idea why she didn’t just pop in an ICU – it’s not like her affection for old tech made her use these, uh, books any often. Lab sweep said the cases haven’t been opened for thirty years, and that was just to put them away.”
“I-C-U,” said Finneas absently, as he peered at the screen. “Eye-See-You. An initialism for a small screen placed across the surface of the eye, usually the right eye this side of the Atlantic. Very pleasing phrase, formed with punster’s heart. No. I am allergic to them. Put any electronics that close to my eyes and they give me seizures. I suspect Agnes shared my condition. Not uncommon. Point four percent of all humans.”
“Thought you were the Professor of Obscure and Forgotten words here, Finneas. Isn’t that a bit modern for your tastes?”
“I think better when I talk. A bit of a curse, you know.” He pointed his finger at the screen. “Don’t worry, Inspector. This… this I recognize.”
“Great. What’s it mean?”
“LAN.” The word came out without force, almost carelessly, cushioned. “A full-blown acronym, Local Area Network. Twentiesh century. Hasn’t been used in, oh, a few hundred years.”
“Brainlog says it’s the last thing she did. Sat down, mucked around with work and such, sent a letter to her brother-in-law-“
“Anything interesting?”
“It was about bonsai gardening.”
“Oh.”
“And then she pulled up another letter, wrote, uh, ‘LAN,’ and drops dead. Shock, right?”
Finneas pursed his lips. “Definitely. A word that old can be a bit of a surprise, dropping right onto your tongue – err, so to speak. And Sir Agnes was elderly and had a bit of a congenital heart defect. That’s the problem with nobility; too much inbreeding leads to all sorts of nonsense.”
“Professor, someone is dead.”
“Yes. Yes they are. And if we don’t do something fast, they won’t be the only one.”
“What?”
“The word won’t stay put. It’s mobile now – I’d say it escaped from someone’s private collection. Can you get your men to check on every linguist or dabbler of words in the city who keeps any sort of data on twentieth-twenty-first-century language?”
I made the call, and I winced a little inside. A lot of the names that were scrolling across my ICU were important with a capital Self, and wouldn’t take kindly to an emergency property search. This could have fallout. Hell, this could have half my career path glowing in the dark. But like I’d just told the professor: someone is dead.
“Good. Now, while that’s underway, find me the location of the next crime scene.”
I checked my messages. “How’d you know?”
“A guess. Where is it?”
“Coco Café. Downtown.”

Coco Café was a lovely building, even surrounded by big swaths of alarmingly-coloured police tape. Real nice walls, early twentieth-century stuff renovated only a few times, cared for with love. Even the paramedics rounding up the gurgling, twitching stroke victims seemed to be admiring the view.
“I will need a compilation of their ICU’s displays at the time of event, please,” the professor had asked. “Hardcopy.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Put it on a piece of paper or something or transfer it to a monitor. I need to read this.”
Now, twenty minutes after thirty amateur novelists had screamed and dropped their morning coffees all at once, here it was. Five pages of dead tree, single-spaced even with my bad handwriting. Contents: a bit of porn, but mostly dictionaries, thesauri, and grammar guides.
And the last page. The last page was just one word, on each ICU:
lol
I blinked at it. “What the hell does this even mean?”
“It’s an initialism.” Finneas was sweating now, sweating in the coolness of the September evening. “El-oh-el. Laughing Out Loud. Originated as a descriptive phrase, became a quick way to express amused and happy emotions in a text-only medium. Again, early twentiesh century. Inspector, can you get your men to search faster? Have they found anything, anything at all? A hint?”
I checked. “No. Most of them just got permission to search, and one team hasn’t even gotten the guy to answer the door yet. What’s the hurry? It took this thing three hours to jump from Agnes to the Coco.”
“Yes, but it’s not the same word,” he said. “There’s a link, but it’s not the same word at all. Same era, same area of prevalence in dialogue, but nowhere near the same meaning. Inspector, we are dealing with a reigning word.”
“A what?”
“You know about bees, Inspector?”
“What?”
“Apologies. Ants?”
“Sure.”
“This is a Queen word we are hunting. So far we have only found her children, left behind in the wake of her passage. She could have a handful, Inspector, or she could have dozens. Or a hundred. Have your men found anything?”
I checked again. “No.”
Finneas shut his eyes. “Oh dear.”
I blinked, and the ICU changed. “Get in the car.”

City Councillor was one of those positions that depended entirely on the person holding it. You could change the lives of a hundred million people, or you could take lunch breaks and read novels during meetings. Councillor Brevish had opted for the simpler option.
We got there before the emergency response this time. It made accessing the ICU a bit difficult. Well, finding it anyways.
“Aren’t you going to help?” I asked Finneas.
The professor had turned an unusually green shade of brown. “I’m sorry?”
“Professor, a cutting-edge ICU is the size of a fingernail. A LITTLE fingernail. And it’s somewhere inside, oh, call it eleven pounds of pulverized meat and bone, spread over three square meters of floor and wall. Any help would be appreciated.”
“I understand that there are forensic sweeps-“
“Don’t have one. I haven’t had the time to upgrade in six months. On your knees, Professor.”
To his credit, Finneas did as I asked, and without even throwing up, although his hands shook an awful lot. Within four minutes the cleanup crew was there and I was running a search through the blood-and-brain-stained ICU of Councillor Herman Brevish.
“What does this degree of response tell you, Professor?”
Finneas looked up from the corner he’d slumped in. His hands were still shaking. “What?”
“The head exploding.”
He turned a bit green again. “Massive force. He must’ve been neglecting it. We put out warnings and instructions on proper care every week, Inspector, but there’s always some fool that doesn’t listen, that wants to keep some multisyllabic gargantua in their attic and check up on it only when they want to show off their vocabulary to guests.” He shook his head, the anger overcoming the nausea. “You cannot do that. It simply doesn’t work. Pen up something big like that and the pressure just…builds. And builds. And then it.-“
“Explodes?” I asked. The search was running slowly. Brevish’s files were a mess; something had rampaged through their guts and thrown them willy-nilly.
He looked at his shoes. “I was going to say escapes. But yes. Sometimes it is violent.”
“So this is expected?” There we go, clarity was emerging. I’d had to practically rebuild the whole damned thing.
“NO!” he shouted. “No it damned well isn’t and I’d thank you to stop reminding me that I spent any amount of time picking through a human being’s grey matter, thank you very much! At most you get cerebral hemorrhaging, perhaps if milder a concussion! This is…unheard of. God knows only what sort of monstrosity this moron was keeping cooped up in here. But it’s escaped and now who knows where it’s off to. Are you listening to me Inspector? We are facing a worst-case scenario here!”
I blinked.
“Inspector, would you please look at me?”
I blinked. My ICU didn’t change. Still stalled. Still dead still.
And right in the center, a word.
(Of course it would’ve come home to hide)
A word with a thousand words on it, crawling with them, dangling off its sides, a concept made of concepts coated with concepts concepts concepts concepts concepts
I woke up and rolled to the side, head aching from where the floor had made contact, eye a blazing pain of soon-to-be-swollen flesh, fists ready to strike back at whoever’d socked me.
Finneas was wincing and rubbing his hand. “Are you alright?”
I remembered, and relaxed. “Barely. Thank you. Head hurts. Do you have my ICU?”
He pointed at the floor where a white-hot puddle of metal and plastics was quietly spitting to itself and ruining three-hundred-year-old marble.
“Needed the excuse to upgrade anyways.”
“Do you remember anything? Anything at all? Inspector, did you see what we’re hunting?”
I thought fast, because the headache was cruising in over the horizon, fast and furious, ready to turn conscious thought into a thing of short sharp peaks and deep, aching valleys. “Yeah. Yeah, I saw it.”
“What was it?”
I frowned. A nonsense word. “Internet.”

The emergency team had brought along a spare ICU. Kindly of them, although using it in the left eye American-style made my head hurt – well, everything made my head hurt.
Finneas hadn’t stopped pacing and muttering since I’d spoken to him.
“Professor,” I said.
He stopped.
“We need to know what this thing is, and where it’s going next.”
“Right. Right. Of course.” He ran his hands through his hair. “I’m trying to think, you see. Inspector, you just came face to face with the word for, well, ah, hmm, well, uhm. You know, it’s sort of hard to explain. I imagine fish have a similar problem describing water.”
“Tell me.”
He pointed at my ICU, and at the bloodstained puter on the Councillor’s desk. “The…linking mechanism between these machines. Between all machines. The ability they have to communicate over distances.”
“That’s what this thing is?”
“Of a sort. That is a rough description of what the internet was. Is. Was.” He ran his fingers through what hair he had left – was it thinner now than it had been at the night’s beginning? “The term lasted from the late twentieth century up until, oh, about a hundred sixty years later. Past that, well, why bother? It’s too ingrained to describe.”
“And what makes this word so…loaded?”
“Because it in itself contains almost every single odd-end and discarded concept, meme, and thought formation that existed during the period of its conception!” said Finneas. “It’s a damned linguistic dragon, a conceptual giant! You look at it and you look at an entire series of dialects, all overlapping, all cobbled-together on the crudest levels! It’s like wringing your brain through a kaleidoscope! And that damned dolt Brevish kept it cooped up like a spelling-bee prize.”
“Halfway there, Professor. Where’s it headed.”
“Well, for the biggest target where it can feel safe,” he said. “Somewhere it can get lost in the noise. It won’t help it, of course, poor monster. It’ll tear apart its own cover just by using it, like a brushfire trying to hide under a single blade of grass.” His face went blank.. “A single blade of grass. Single single oh no no no.”
I was already running to the car.

The Linguistic Singularity could’ve been hosted anywhere. It could’ve been held in any one of its attendee’s studies, on a puter somewhere on the moon, inside Oxford… and all without a single person having to budge from their homes.
Thankfully, the convention’s guests were just stodgy and old-fashioned enough to want a big, physical get-together. This made following the screaming much easier.
The doors were wood; an ancient luxury. My boot was steel; a modern convenience. It was an easy contest.
What a damned sad, horrible sight. Dozens of them, writhing in the aisles between display racks of ancient books, of carefully-preserved hard drives.
“Get their ICUs out!” I yelled to the crew behind me. “And whatever you do, don’t read anything!”
I ran to the side of my first victim: steel-haired, iron-spined lady, foaming at the mouth. I put my finger and thumb to the corners of her eye socket and PUSHED.
Nothing. Damnit, must be wearing hers American-style. I tried the other socket.
Nothing.
I looked closer. The eye was blank with mindless terror, but also empty. Physically empty. “FINNEAS!”
The professor was staring around him in total horror, trailing in the wake of the emergency response squad. Whatever tough line he’d talked about his colleagues before, I doubted he’d have wished this on them. “What? What?!”
“Where’re their fucking ICUs?!”
He twitched under the swear. “Reg. Regulations! They changed them ah, uh, three – two years ago! Naked eye only! Purists, stupid purists did it!”
“Then where are they getting the damned seizures from?!”
A short, sharp yell of panic and total existential terror came over my ICU link, then a thud. Man down, Jean Chang was down. He was on the second level, above us.
Above us, dangling on a tether thicker than a human torso from the sky-high ceiling of the hall, was a monitor, a screen. Magnificently obsolete, a titan of the old ages, measuring more than fifty years across. I could practically feel the static of its power from underneath it.
A thousand tiny lines of text were streaming across its face.
I averted my eyes hurriedly as I strapped my handgun to my palm, never being so thankful as now that I was a slow reader. Power source: built into the frame. Had to get up twenty feet and inside a titanium casing. The staircase seemed to turn to molasses under my feet as I ran up it, adrenaline turning my ears into ocean-roars, sounds from the insides of seashells.
It was a ten-foot gap, and over a railing? Could I make it? The question didn’t enter my head until I was in midair, which was perfectly fine because the answer was yes. At least for my fingertips.
I dangled there, underneath the belly of the beast. And that was close enough for me to reach up and twitch the trigger on my handgun, sending a gratuitous amount of volts straight through the metal of the monster’s base and into a coiled serpent’s nest of delicate wiring.
Smoke filled my mouth. I cough, spat down, nearly hit Finneas. “Is it cooked?!”
He glanced up, froze, and started foaming at the mouth. The professor froze for a split second, then ran to his side.
“Shit!”
I glared up at the monitor above me. Of course it wasn’t using the old power source; the thing was a century out of date, maybe two. They would be passing the current through the air straight into the screens: no muss, no fuss, no worry of staining ancient, precious wiring. No way to block it, no way to stop it.
Fine. Old-fashioned it was then.
I’m no jock, never have been. And it was the happiest day of my life when I got promoted to a (mostly) desk job. Paperwork was a chore, not a curse. And I never cursed these parts of myself as much as I did then, as I hauled myself up and up over the face of twenty-seven feet of sheer-faced screen, ripping what handholds I could with boot and nail.
Words leaked in. I kept my mind on my job and my eyes on my hands, not on what they clutched, but words leaked in. So many words.
lol lmao lmfao lolcats lolcatz lulz brb wtf
Acronyms, right? Finneas called them initialisms. Don’t pay attention to them, you’ll just attract the big one…
Climbing faster now, eyes moving quicker, but so’s the brain, and it’s picking up more and more and more raptor jesus first-world problems at first I was and then I lol’d rofl roflmao LAN browser Google Google Google Yahoo anyonymous blog blogger
I shook my head – shaking my whole body in the process – and nearly slid away as my fingers clamped onto solid metal again. So much empty space beneath me. Empty and filled with words like omg omg gtfo gtfo qq moar GTFO
I raised my hand, gripped the base of the cable, flicked the grip of my handgun to heat.
And there it was, right in front of my eyes, a thousand words suckling at its belly, half-formed. The internet.
It looked back at me, straight into my hindbrain.
wtf pwnt wut
And I’d love to say that I had a one-liner ready, even if it would’ve been wasted on a word, on a nonsapient linguistic concept. But I’ll be honest: when your entire body stiffens up in unconscious dread-induced paralysis, your hand clenches. And mine clenched at many, many thousands of degrees Celsius, taking about half of the cable with it.
The rest met gravity, and embraced it. And that was all for me for about a week.

Rough job. I got a promotion, though. New title, new ICU, new hand (new forearm, nearly). New hookup, too, if Finneas’ll get off his ass long enough to phone me back.
And a new vocabulary. But he’s advised me to try to keep that under wraps. I’m inclined to agree.

In the beginning there was nothing. And then there was a dial tone. And there was an answering machine, and a message left. And there was a name of business as well the concept of ‘names’ and ‘businesses’ and the business was Bailey and Sons Home Creations.
Near the end of the beginning, they arrived and did a preliminary project assessment. And Bailey said “this job’s a good ‘un,” and it was a very good ‘un indeed, and the project began.
And Bailey did say “Shit, I can’t see worth balls in this dark. Someone turn on the lights.” And someone – Simon, the youngest of the Sons – turned on the lights. And Bailey said “that’s great.”
And Bailey said “Christ it’s damp, fetch me a freakin’ mop willya? So Thomas, the second-youngest of the Sons, fetched a freakin’ mop, and used it to sop up some of the moisture so that there was a space above the rest of the waters, but he didn’t clean it up all the way. And Bailey said, “that’s no goddamned good, Thomas, but we’re rushed so I’ll let it slid. Just pull your thumb outta your ass and LISTEN, okay?” And Thomas did that, and Bailey said that was just fine.
And Bailey said “I guess if you wanna do somethin’ right you gotta do it yourself,” and he took the mop and shoved all the water into one large mass with a bit of dry space in the middle, where he stubbed out his cigarette. And he vowed once again that he would quit soon, just so Lorraine would get off his back. He’d quit soon, real soon – tomorrow or something. And that was good enough.
And Bailey said “Damnit this thing’s as sterile as your uncle Rob’s nutsack; Joey, pour some fertilizer onnit.” So Joey took the big burlap sack of ancient and musty Beget-Thou-Hence and spilled it like the clumsy sot he was, being the biggest even if he was only the third-youngest. It sprayed all over Bailey’s cigarette butt and the genes got all scrambled and algae and plants colonized the sea and the land. And Bailey did swear a blue streak at him and cuff him and spent a good half hour trying to pry up the weeds before he gave up in a huff, stuffed his cigarette butt into orbit, and decreed that it would ‘have to do.’ And it did.
Then Bailey complained that it was ‘too damned bright and unfocused, somebody tune the light a bit.” And Douglas did, and he accidentally ended up guaranteeing the land widely varying intervals of freezing cold and searing heat on seasonal, yearly, and geological time scales. But he did trim the lights, so that there was one big one during the day and a lot of tiny little ones at night, plus Bailey’s big dimly-glowing cigarette butt. And Bailey said that this was good.
At this point it was realized that they hadn’t been keeping close track of time, and Bailey said that four days would do as a guestimate.
And Bailey did squint heavily and slope-browedly down upon the land, and he did say “Jesus H. tapdancing Christ on a crutch with a piston up his pooter, the place is CRAWLING with the little green SOBs! Get me a can of heterotrophic herbivores, ASAP!” So Daniel brought the big metal canister, rust and all, and carefully tipped out about one millionth as many herbivores as were needed in the sea, and Bailey grew impatient and wrested it from him, and spilled animals of all kinds and types and diets all over the sea and the sky, and blamed Daniel for it and punched him in the jaw and hurt his fist because Daniel, the second eldest son of Bailey, was nothing but skin and bone and brainless vapidity. And Bailey sucked his bruised knuckles and remarked bitterly that it was ‘done, at least.’ And that was the fifth day gone and blown, as far as he said it.
And Bailey said, “Fuck it, nobody looks in the ocean anyways. Let’s just do a good job on the dry stuff, okay? Just that. Then we can ship it and book it.” So Bailey and ‘Rat-Nose” Rasputin, his eldest son, carefully put animals all over the land, aiming for style over substance and writing off all of Australia’s fauna the moment anything else came into contact with them. And Bailey said that it “painted a pretty picture,” which was good enough.
Then Bailey said, “Hey now, we’ve still got time and a bit in the budget. Boys, take lunch, I’m gonna leave a little showpiece here for our customer.”
So Bailey grabbed together a few piles of ape genes and kludged together something amusingly bipedal, something that would get just as many backaches and achy shoulders as he did, a handful of males and females was good enough to get the job done.
Then Bailey said, “Tool-users…yeah, that oughta do it. Man oh man, either they’ll croak it during their first glaciation or they’ll turn into motherfuckin’ locusts.”
Then he said, “Hey, see that big mess over there, lying all over the place? All that crap my useless good-for-nothing kids made? Go on, give it a try, take it on. Dare ya. Double-dog-dare ya, you ugly li’l primate shitheads! G’wan!” And other things like that.
Bailey straightened up and rubbed his back as he looked upon all that he had made, and it looked good enough to ‘pass the eyeball test and get a check cut.” And that was the sixth day. By his watch and his hourly pay rate, at least.
That was when the project was deemed ‘done.’ At least, after lunch.
Lunch took up all of the seventh day, and it was billable. Then Bailey poured one out on the ground to celebrate the project’s completion, killing all the marsupial mammals of South America, because screw it, it was time to go home.
And in the end, there was a mess, and we sort of coped with it.

Someone chipped a rock.
Nuk took the chip from the rock that someone chipped and put it on a stick. It was a spear.
Mala took the spear that Nula made from the chip from the rock that someone chipped, and she made it smaller, and fletched it. It was an arrow.
Neb took the arrow that Mala made from the spear that Nula made from the chip from the rock that someone chipped, and he shot a deer with it and traded the hide for iron, which he smelted and shaped. It was a dagger.
Titus took the dagger that Neb made using the arrow that Mala made from the spear that Nula made from the chip from the rock that someone chipped, and he had it smelted down and reforged into steel. It was a sword.
Gao took the sword that Titus made from the dagger that Neb made using the arrow that Mala made from the spear that Nula made from the chip from the rock that someone chipped, and he had it melted and reshaped into a pick. He mined sulfur and a few other interesting things with it, and shaped them into a sort of explosive. It was gunpowder.
Diego took the gunpowder that Gao made with the help of the sword that Titus made from the dagger that Neb made using the arrow that Mala made from the spear that Nula made from the chip from the rock that someone chipped, and he placed it in a long tube and fired a little bit of lead out of it. It was a gun.
Hiram took the gun that Diego made with the gunpowder that Gao made with the help of the sword that Titus made from the dagger that Neb made using the arrow that Mala made from the spear that Nula made from the chip from the rock that someone chipped, and he used all manner of interesting little machines to make it fire extremely, extremely fast. It was a machine gun.
Wernher took the machinery from the gun that Hiram made with the gun that Diego made with the gunpowder that Gao made with the help of the sword that Titus made from the dagger that Neb made using the arrow that Mala made from the spear that Nula made from the chip from the rock that someone chipped, and he arranged them and fuelled them and launched them into the air and watched them fly and fall down into the ground, where they exploded. They were rockets.
Julius took the rocker that Wernher made with the machinery from the gun that Hiram made with the gun that Diego made with the gunpowder that Gao made with the help of the sword that Titus made from the dagger that Neb made using the arrow that Mala made from the spear that Nula made from the chip from the rock that someone chipped, and he made a very special sort of substance to place inside it. It made small machines tick, click, and squeal when you held them close to it.
An elected official took the special payloads that Julius made with the rocket that Wernher made with the machinery from the gun that Hiram made with the gun that Diego made with the gunpowder that Gao made with the help of the sword that Titus made from the dagger that Neb made using the arrow that Mala made from the spear that Nula made from the chip from the rock that someone chipped, and he pushed the button.
There probably wasn’t really a button.

Someone chipped a rock.

A very long time ago in that misty location called Someplace, there was a man. And this man was a chef. And this chef’s name was Nim.
Nim cooked all the food for his village. It hadn’t always been that way, but now every last meal went through his fingers, a stream of cuts and chops and bushels and bundles. It was such a waste not to have this happen. Nim could make a fish fly straight through your stomach, could put a bird to swim inside its juices, could take a handful of leaves and an anonymous root and make a dessert that would bring an old miser to tears of gratitude and vows of charity for just a taste more. There was no count to the number of recipes he knew, for he knew none; each dish was spontaneous.
People asked him how he fit all that knowledge inside just his one head, how he did it. Very often.
And each time this happened, Nim would think it through carefully as he stirred the pot or tossed the pan or shut the oven door. And he would say, “Practice. First a bit, then a lot. Then more. That’s practice.”
Nim’s practice caught the eyes of all kinds of people, from the watery eyes of fellow serfs who tended his home for him during his long cooking hours, to the desperate eyes of mayors who pled with him for bowlfuls, to the very pudgy eye of his lord, King Jot. King Jot knew what he liked, and he liked the little bit of Nim’s food that he had confiscated from an upstart peasant. King Jot also got what he wanted, and so Nim was yanked bodily from his home in the dark of night and brought up to the king’s castle, hauled between the arms of a dozen strong and rough men.
“They say you’re the best,” said King Jot, to Nim. “Is it true?”
Nim thought about this. “Maybe,” he said. “If someone knows more, I do not know him.”
“Well, get to work then!” said King Jot. He sent Nim off to the kitchens, and inside an hour he had eaten the best soup of his life, soon followed by the finest breakfast, the perfect luncheon, and a roast that had him thumping the table with his palm after each bite, sending the silverware a-quivering.
Things changed for people that weren’t Nim. The peasants had to do their own cooking again, the castle guard endured the scent of that which was untouchable for them, the king managed (somehow) to grow broader. But Nim remained in the kitchen, day in and day out, having only a bigger stove. If he felt resentment, he didn’t show it. He just practiced. First a bit, then a lot. Then more.
One day the king’s brother came a-visiting, Duke Crumb. King Jot put especial emphasis on Nim that this meal be perfect, so as to properly show off – though he needn’t have bothered. Everything was exceptional, always exceptional, and the boar and potatoes was transformed into something unearthly for the plate. The duke, a thin and darting man, twitched and snapped at his plate until he’d eaten enough for five hungry lumberjacks, resentful though he was of his host and his endless boasting.
“Now wasn’t that the finest thing you’ve ever eaten!” laughed King Jot as the servants carried away their plates. “No chef can compare to mine, not even yours! Don’t you agree, brother?”
Duke Crumb fumed a little. “It is true, maybe,” he said. “Possibly. But tell me, is your cook a true royal chef?”
“What d’you mean?” asked King Jot. “He cooks, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, yes, any old housewife can COOK – well, maybe not like this,” admitted the duke. “But a royal chef must be willing to make sacrifice, to burn bright and hard and fast, to cook the finest no matter the cost to life and limb, to give himself to his employer body and soul!”
King Jot’s eyebrows were hopping like crickets. “Well now! Do I hear a suggestion from you?”
“Have him cook us his hand for breakfast,” said Duke Crumb. “A truly royal chef can make anything taste wonderful, even under the worst pain, even the least palatable morsel, without hesitation.”
King Jot grumbled and twitched. “Fine!” he shouted. “I’ll have Nim cook us his hand for breakfast! You’ll see how true and royal he is!” And so the order was given.
Nim woke up early the next morning, and prepared his kitchen carefully, with tourniquet and dressing (medicinal) and butcher’s knife and cleaver and dressing (light and fruity). Then he placed his hand in the frying-pan, and cut it with a strong blow and a twitch, and he fried it finely and sliced it thinly. And it was the best breakfast that either of the two royal brothers had ever had.
“Magnificent,” said King Jot thickly, as he licked his plate. “Wondrous. Amazing. Don’t you agree, brother?”
“Yes,” muttered Duke Crumb, “but we’ll see how well he cooks with one hand!” And he stalked away home, to his own (long-suffering) chef, who made him a very nice dinner that wasn’t quite enough.
Nim stayed up late all week in the kitchen, a tidy bandage wrapped around his stump, changed daily. He hoisted his pans and pots with exactly five fingers and one thumb, and became adept at holding many things in just one palm, salt shakers and pepper grinders and spice containers dancing from countertop to dish and back again, nearly juggling. He practiced. First a bit, then a lot. Then more. And he cooked meals exactly as fine as he had before.
The winter grew cold and long, and as his peasants shivered King Jot invited his brother over to the castle for a lavish solstice banquet. Nim laboured long and hard into the evening, and at the end of the food King Jot threw down his napkin and smugly pronounced his chef the finest there could be. “Even one-handed he is twice the match of any other, times ten!” he crowed. “Don’t you agree, brother?”
“Fine, fine, fine,” muttered Duke Crumb, steepling and unsteepling his fingers like an indecisive carpenter. “But he is no true royal chef.”
“What’s that?” asked King Jot, sharply.
“He has given a hand for you,” said Duke Crumb, “but it was his left! A TRULY royal chef would’ve given us his best and finest first and foremost, no less! Have him cook his right hand, and we’ll see what sort of chef your man really is.”
King Jot fussed with his moustache and sucked on his lip. “Fine!” he bellowed. “Let it be done, as proof of his skill!” And again the order was given to Nim.
Nim had a short nap after dessert and woke up before the night had left, and he prepared his tools once again, asking a brave and stout servant to swing the cleaver for him. Then with a swish and a thud, Nim’s next challenge began. He filleted the hand and fried it and drizzled it with oils and spices. It was prepared in time for breakfast and served crispy-golden, and it was the best breakfast that the two royal brothers had ever had, except for the last one.
“Glorious,” said King Jot tearfully as he picked crumbs from his beard and devoured them, one-by-one. “Outstanding. Beauteous. Don’t you agree, brother?”
“Fine,” said Duke Crumb, sulkily. “But let us see how he can cook without fingers!” He grumbled the whole way back home, and badgered his own cook to prepare him a snack at two in the morning, which he didn’t like for no good reason.
Nim barely slept for a month. He used tweezers between his teeth to grasp objects, and his toes to hold pans and pots, and his stumps to manhandle roasts and apply rubs. He practiced. First a bit, then a lot. Then more. And every single dish he prepared had never been more delicious.
Spring came, the flowers blossomed, and the kitchen became unbearably hot once again. To celebrate the labour of the farmers, Duke Crumb was invited to enjoy much of the fruits of their previous year’s labour. A great salad was made by Nim, with hundreds of different ingredients applied in exactly-measured quantities, and when the great bowl was emptied King Jot belched loud enough to rattle every window in his castle. “I own the greatest chef in all creation,” he proclaimed, boldly, “and may God strike me down if I say otherwise!” And God didn’t, so he smiled even wider.
“Fine!” snapped Duke Crumb. “Fine! I admit it! It is true! But he has not given you his all yet.”
“Whatever do you mean?” asked King Jot, puzzled. “He has no hands left!”
Duke Crumb’s lips were thin, bloodless strips already, but somehow he pressed them thinner still. “He still has his head,” he whispered.
King Jot shrugged and sighed noisily. “Will THIS prove his superiority to you, brother?” he asked.
Duke Crumb nodded once. “Indeed,” he said, and managed not to smile.
“Then let it be done!” roared King Jot. “Guards! Inform Nim!” And they did.
“This is not a good plan,” he warned the guard captain. “Tell the King to reconsider this. It will not end well for him.”
The guard captain gave him a look. “Just do it.”
Nim did not sleep that night. He sat and thought and planned. A great cauldron was set up, and spiced with every last thing in his kitchen, brothed and prepared five-times-over. The exact temperature was calculated and reached. The cleaver, honed to the thinness of a sliver, was clutched tight between his toes. And with a single, clean motion Nim cut off his head and sent it – plunk! – into the pot, where it boiled and bubbled until noon, when the servants obeyed his instructions and took it out and served it for lunch.
It was simply the best thing that King Jot and Duke Crumb had ever dreamed of. Ever.
“Terrific,” said King Jot with a sigh as he threw the bones over his shoulder. “Miraculous. Divine. Don’t you agree, brother?”
“Yes,” said Duke Crumb, face a twisted mask of misery. “Yes. I admit it. I MUST admit it.” He burped. “It does go down a bit…rocky though.”
“Does it?” asked King Jot, and belched. He felt most strange. “It does, doesn’t it? Ow! Ah!” And both the brothers clutched at their temples as migraines bloomed and blossomed inside their skulls, migraines with shapes and names, migraines that smelled of garlic and chives and knifes and soap and spices. A thousand thousand things and know-hows and to-dos and meal-plans and shopping-lists all sprouting through their heads, like a flower. First a bit, then a lot. Then more. Then more.
And all at once.

The new King was an estranged nephew; Jot had never found a wife, claiming them quarrelsome. King Root was a far more even-tempered and restrained man than his late uncle, and on the whole people were happy enough, especially since Duke Crumb’s estate had been restored to farmland. That fed a few more mouths in each house, and that’s always good.
The royal kitchen sat unused, as part of some agreement that no chef ever spoke aloud or broke. But now and then someone, usually an adventurous apprentice, would wander down there and touch the big cleaver embedded in the countertop next to the stove. For luck in their studies.

It never helped, of course. The only way to learn is to practice.