jamieproctor.ca

It was a good day for a funeral; grey and clotted, with the clouds swirling around the sky in muddy daubs. No sun shone, no thunder cracked, even the rain restrained itself to the dampest possible spittle. All plants seemed to have been replaced with slickened moss, and all ground seemed to have been replaced with mud. The pond down the hill was as tepid as a cat’s conscience.
It was a good day for a funeral. But the man in the pit didn’t have one. He lay still and alone, rigor mortis firmly set in, neck still twisted at a curious angle, head-first in a little hollow twice the depth of his body that only so recently had been hidden by ferns.
Time passed, seasons changed. The skies cleared and the plants blossomed, the ground bloomed and the world froze. Over and over again and again over again. And as this happened, the man crept deeper and deeper into the hole as water trickled in and tunneled, bored and buried. He lay under twelve feet of soil, dirt and stone now, naked bones that were he. His teeth were the loveliest part of him, gleaming brighter now than they had when he breathed. A mole burrowed through his ribcage once and nearly blunted a claw upon his thoracic vertebrae. It never came down that tunnel again.
Time passed, years flowed – like glaciers, not water; an impossibly huge mass descending slowly but inevitably, a liquid that shammed solid. An earth tremor spilled the pond that lay to the man’s northwest, sent its beautiful translucent guts away to fade into dust and left the frogs all mourning. Half a hill fell atop the burial-place of the man, pressing with patient weight on softer soil and bone below it. Compacting it, bearing down on it, thrusting it deeper and lower, past soil and into places where light was not even an idea, leaving the song of the earthworms far above and fading out of mind.
Time passed, and the man remained dead. His bones, however, merely slept, and as they sank deeper, they began to stir in their slumber, as things formed from carbon do. From primates to protists, all things dream, even if they never wake enough to realize it. But given time, all sleep ends, and death is sleep writ large and in extremely firm print.
The bones were fitful. They had spent their youth growing, building, binding, and in time, breaking; exuberant pursuits, energetic, the best times of their lives. And fittingly, they had done so as sleepwalkers, leaving the thinking and the feeling and the experiencing to others as they just did what came naturally. To do was unnecessary, to be was enough. That had always been enough.
Now, far underneath the land they had walked, they woke to the strange sensation of mineralization – a cold, clammy tickle through the spine, an icy grip on the skull, a slow seepage into the tibia. A drowsy feeling, but not one to lull you back into torpor; rather a numbness to be shaken off. First out of surprise, second for alarm, third for a determined struggle for consciousness, or whatever semblance of it that had been washed into them. A long, hard battle towards awareness, pinned in place under a million tons of dirt and stone.
It took decades, felt like mere years, but in the end, the hard part was over. The man was gone, but his bones were awake. Immobile, but that didn’t matter. Awake and aware, open to the world beyond their borders. Dark. Silent. Heavy, so infinitely heavy.
Above was life, unreachable and a dwindling not-memory. Below was darkness, opaque and inevitably approaching. Mercifully, the bones had no time to grow fearful before the second major tremor of their existence rumbled past them in an instant, tore apart the world below them, and sent them cascading downwards in a split month, still-entombed in a solid slab of rock.

The dark was always something that they never quite got used to. No eyes to see it, but they had a mind to feel it, or at least something close enough to a mind. It was more of a pressure than a lack of light at this level, a constant sensation that vibrated through every moment.
They were never used to it, but they were able to move past it. Time still passed when years and seasons were never-memories, and with time came change. The bones began to search outside themselves, to go hunting along cracks and crannies, to dance upon pebbles and squeeze under the stubs of mountains. Sometimes they almost lost their way back to themselves, and it would take them many decades to once again work up the courage to go a-voyaging, for fear of what would happen to them if they were left alone and gone.
One day, they found a fissure grand and cavernous, a full hairs-breadth of unoccupied space that must have stretched downwards until the stones melted. They wandered far and came no closer to that endless burn, but found something far strange still: a gap in the wall that touched them with whispering echoes dredged upon from deeper layers, places where the rocks had slept like the dead for half an eon.
What was in the rocks was awake. More than awake. It was in motion.
Identity was ambiguous down there. What they found could have been millipedes, sea scorpions, fish, or amphibians. That long dead, all had been stripped away to the bedrock, and a new self had emerged from the most basic core: predator, prey; animal, vegetable, all locked away in mineral form, all emitting a part of the same breathless whisper-song that permeated the rocks of their fossilized bed. Life that had been thickened to the tiniest, most concentrated scraps possible.
That was just the surface. It was nearly comprehensible.
Far below, hidden in seams beyond knowing, there were murmurs. The old ones talked to each other, deeper down in time, using words without a language. Time passed, the world changed, but they would never raise their eyes to know, would never even realize they no longer had eyes. The stone cracked away at their touch as freely as if they walked in air; shambling, ancient bodies alien to the thoughts that moved them. Old grudges, ancient hunts relived. Bone eating bone, hidden in the dark.
They did not linger there. Instead they retreated, and only now did doubt arise in them, in their trust in themselves. They had plunged too low too quickly, had been pulled far down below their rightful depth. The dark was familiar, maybe, but it was not home – not yet, and maybe now it never would be. The bones now knew what lay beneath them, and they didn’t want it. To be pressed down to nothing but ancient instinct might be appealing by the time the process was nearly through, but to see it from afar, a long time before… that was less appealing. And that was supposing that they did not fall victim to their fellows before they were boiled down to their essences; they were only safe thus far because they were insignificant. As they grew more concentrated in their presence, they would be prey, and easy prey.
And so it was that the bones had their first goal ever conceived, though they did not know it then: to escape.

The idea was simple, the concept less so. There were limits to their grasp, limits that the surface lay well in excess of. Their grasp on the stone was weak and hesitant, their substance still soft-formed, near-bone. Cracks were their avenues rather than the result of their passage, and strain as they might they could not free themselves from their matrix, stuck fast where they lay.
Time passed, and now too quickly. They heaved and hauled and sank nearly as quickly as their reach expanded, murmurs from below growing closer every day – and now day existed again, an infinitesimal change in the moisture and temperature of the dirt that once more arose at the very verge of their expanse.
Once days existed, time seemed to move faster still. Tense, sunrise, untense, sunset. Reach, sunrise, relax, sunset. Over and over and over and farther down they sank, the world pressing them towards the rumbling elders down below.
And one day, as they scraped away at the soil above, something strange and hauntingly unfamiliar stirred at the very tip of their awareness. A strange…emptiness.
Air.
Stale air, in a soft-earth pit half a dozen feet below the surface. So very close to far away, but so far. And in the pit, something sleeping, a distant cousin, a far-away relative of themselves. But softer, and so much younger. They had forgotten that anything could be so young. It smelt faint, but vibrant and strange, unmistakable.
Sleeping. Still asleep. There was still matter heaped atop those bones, still decaying. It would be gone soon.
Exploration, tentatively conducted, at the very edges of their strength, showed dozens more, all either new bone or not yet unfleshed.
The plan was intuited immediately. The justification took but a significant moment longer. They were young and asleep, not really awake. This was a necessary act of survival. They would eventually fall victim to the same descent into the not-there if they remained. Why should they care anyways, it was irrelevant.
None of it was successful, but it didn’t need to be.
They reached up,
up,
up,
up,
UP
and raked at the sides of the corpses above them with desperate strength, the dangerous sort. They were no great ancient walkers of stone, but their lives depended on it, and that gave them the power they needed to flay the diffuse, weak, but somehow intoxicating shreds of fresh life from the hides of the graveyard’s crop of bodies and send them hurtling down, down, down. All the way down below they flung them, stretching them to their limit, an ethereal rope of that which separated bone from rock – faint, so faint, so diffuse in its presence in the newly-dead, but unmistakably alluring in the novelty of its freshness. They carried it through cracks microscopic, they carried it through the grand fissure, they carried it to the gap in the fissure’s wall and they flung it into that strange and remote deep where the murmurs leaked through from far down below.
Time passed, and at first nothing changed. Then the whispers stopped.
Time passed, and the world stood still and the darkness deepened. They moved not at all, as paralyzed as if they were true stone themselves.
Time passed… and the rocks fell away.
After a life lived in years and decades, it was a shock extreme to see such change in mere months. First there was silence, and then a roar; stillness, then turmoil. The bones bobbed in their rocky bed as corks in a stream, and watched as life’s grandfathers tore their way free of the roots of the continents to seek the trail of their children’s children’s children ad infinitum.
The bones found that their confining matrix was gone and that they were falling, half-fossil, half-there, still unnoticed. Not safe, though – the migration of the ancients was indifferent as to what it crushed. The brute strata vanished under their limbs as if nothing, the passage of their bodies ruptured geological formations massing a million mountains, and they did not notice, did not care. All of history had passed them by, and they passed it by in turn on that hellish climb, one claw, one heave, one limb after another, chasing that long thread that had been drawn down to them until the first of them broke through and felt sunlight for the first time in half a billion years.

Some days later, the bones emerged from the yawning pit that had been the graveyard. Movement was almost unimaginably swift now, but they had decided to play it cautious.
They looked down into the pit behind them – ten miles across and more, though they could not measure it with eyes – and for a moment they wondered if what they had done was worth it.
They decided it was irrelevant.
Time passed, things changed. Time was passing, always passing. It was never too late to see what you could do as it did.
They stepped out under the bright blue sky.

Is this thing on? Okay. Right. Almost ready then. Want a drink?
No? Good, more for me.
Okay, shoot.

Do I still remember the first time I saw him? No, not so much. By then he was everyday, y’know? Business as usual. But I remember my mom telling me about the first time SHE did. The first time anyone did.
So my mom was walking down the street, right? And she’s going to the bank. To drop off a cheque. And there’s this van parked in front of it, – a plain white van – and as she’s walking down the street these guys come running out of the bank. And they’ve got covered faces, and they’re holding guns – no, she didn’t say what kind – and they start piling into the van.
So my mom said she was a bit freaked out then, right? Which is normal. An armed robbery right in front of you freaks you out; she was worried about the tellers, too, one of them was a friend of one of her friends. And she sort of ducks into a shop doorway because she isn’t sure if it’s safe to stay on the street or not, but she doesn’t want to run away because she’s worried about the teller and she doesn’t want to get closer.
And as she’s in the doorway there, she hears this big loud voice yell “STOP, VILLAINS,” or something. I think it was ‘villains.’ And she looks up and she said she always remembered that the first she ever saw of the guy was his ass. He was swooping down as he aimed at the van, and his ass was level with her eyes as he scooted along. She said his tights were baggier back then, but it was still a pretty firm butt.
What happened next was pretty fast, and she was still a bit in shock from the whole robbery thing, so she always said it got a bit blurry in her head. But the papers corroborated her memory the next day: he picked up a car and hit the robbers with it. It was a little Volkswagen Beetle, Christ only knows what would’ve happened if he’d used their van or a truck or something, because he could’ve; he picked it up one-handed.
So he beat these four or five guys with a Volkswagen for maybe ten seconds – three or four whacks, full-arm, god knows how many bones he broke on them – and then he ripped out its muffler, the whole thing, and he wrenched it around them and twisted it together. A tight fit. And then he yelled again “CRIME DOESN’T PAY, BOYS!” and shot off into the air and he was gone.
That’s my mother’s story, and that was the first time anybody saw the Super-Maniac. Nobody called him that yet, though. The papers hadn’t thought that schlock up yet. He never seemed to mind, I’ll give him that. He wasn’t self-aware enough.
We all waited with bated breath for a few weeks after that, she told me. Nobody figured it’d be a one-in-a-lifetime thing. Not even the guys desperate enough to hold up convenience stores made a move for a month. Quietest, tensest time the place had seen since the bomb scare.
And then, some idiot jacks the mayor’s car. Hotwired the thing right in the parking lot and takes off. He’s dumb, he’s young, the cops have a blockade set up, everything’s all ready to sort itself out, and then “STOP, EVIL-DOER,” and down swoops a streak of crazy in electric blue tights. Picks up the mayor’s car, flies it over the harbour, and starts shaking it. Shaking it like a rattle. The kid’s getting smashed around like crazy, he’s crying and sobbing – he didn’t belt himself in – and finally the lunatic tips the car the right way and the kid’s foot hits the door latch. Out he falls, into the bay, head-first. Sheer luck his spine didn’t snap, even more that he wasn’t unconscious when he made contact with the water.
God, the pictures the press got when he hauled them in, car in one arm, idiot in the other. Such a big, cheerful, friendly, beaming grin. The most genuine expression of happiness you’ve ever seen in your life.
God help us.
No, really. That was the headline that the Post went with. A bit extreme sounding at the time, but in retrospect, well, I mean it was perfect. The next decade alone was –
Ah, damnit, I’m losing track again, aren’t I? Let me start over.
But first, another drink.

Right. The first time I saw the Super-Maniac was when I was ten. My mom and dad and all of us had gone down to see a ball game. Just a good old fashioned, all-American ball game. I think we even bought hot dogs, ferchrissakes. No giant foam hands at least. And it was a pretty good game, you know? I mean, baseball was never my thing it turned out, but we had fun and the scores were close and I still remember sitting in my seat as I watched a home run go flying up, up, up, up…. And then realizing that it was heading right for me. All I had to do was reach out and touch it, it was almost there, then WHAM. Ball’s stuck inside an ice cube, drops like a rock, almost smashes the brains out of the man sitting in front of us. I think it broke his thigh.
Now, I can’t recall the exact details of the speech made by the man who ran out into center field just then – I was too busy staring at his ridiculously loud, clunky, shiny steel suit. But I remember the cliff notes: he was Doctor Igor Madderson, this was his magnificent robo-fridge armour, and he was going to prove that he was better than the Super-Maniac once and for all something something unless he showed up he’d freeze us all solid in our seats.
Well, he showed up fast all right. The ball players barely had time to run for cover before there was a helluva fistfight going on at the pitcher’s mound – the noise was terrible, like a tractor trailer fucking a conveyer belt coated in sandpaper. Some of that freeze ray ended up being sprayed everywhere; half the bleachers got frostbite. And at the end of it all, the Super-Maniac stood victorious, after tearing every single bit of moving metal out of the suit and smashing it everywhere, then hurling its inanimate body through the billboards and proclaiming it a “HOME RUN.”
And then he smiled.
Then he stripped all the ice off the “INNOCENT BYSTANDERS” by shooting lasers out of his eyes. God there were a lot of burns. Scalding water, you know? The paramedics had a field day, and they already had a full plate just making sure ‘Doctor’ Igor (he had a BASc – well, most of it) didn’t go into cardiac arrest. That fall almost killed him outright, good thing he wasn’t in half bad shape for a man in his fifties.
Oh, and he’d crushed four cars in the parking lot when he landed. One of them was ours. Just about put us out of house and home; dad had to work weekends for a year solid to get us sitting pretty again. Didn’t see my father’s face except at night when he came stumbling home, but you know how fast kids adapt. That was just business as usual.

That was the beginning of it. Doctor Igor was a has-been, a nobody, a nothing. Some poor chump whose medical fees almost bankrupted him, who lurched his way through the prison system, retired in poverty, died in obscurity. His obituary was the most press he ever got, and it was only because of historical note: the first nutcase who ever picked a fight with the Super-Maniac.
Why couldn’t he have been the last, huh?
The summer that Doctor Igor showed up was a busy one. By the time fall was on its way out, Clonemageddon, Laser-O, and Mister Matchstick had already popped up and popped a shot at the guy. And in retrospect, we really should’ve seen this sort of thing coming. The local, everyday crime was dead and gone by then, and the organized stuff wouldn’t set foot in town. Too dangerous and too unpredictable for too little gain. Word spreads, and eventually it kept reaching the same people: total nutjobs with axes to grind. And god was Super-Maniac a perfect grindstone. Most people looked into that big happy smile he flashed the papers and wanted to go home and hide for a while. The crazies looked at it and saw a target.
Clonemageddon got cancer back in the seventies. All of him. Laser-O was another Doctor Igor – I think he actually went back to university and got a physics degree. Mister Matchstick, well, we all know about that.
Anyways, we all kept hoping it’d calm down. There were only so many lunatics in the country with so much time on their hands, right? Wrong. We hadn’t even scraped the surface of the barrel and it turned out the damned thing was four miles deep. Hell, two months after my fourteenth birthday, the cops six counties over in Oakfall City started finding guys tied up black-and-blue outside their station. One guy, three guys, four guys, six guys. Some of them they were looking for, most of them they had no idea who they were – muggers, pickpockets, or just somebody’s kids. Never a damned clue. The one common connection: they were always beaten to a bloody pulp. Some of them acted like they’d been pepper-sprayed too, but worse. Some kind of gas. The best they could do was get them to the hospital.
It took six months for any sort of photos of Oakfall’s nighttime predator to get out there. And god that was a feeding frenzy – photographers, reporters, everybody out trying to solve that mystery, get that shot. I guess I sort of fell into that same trap, huh? Started fooling around with my granddad’s camera and look where that got me.
Well. Let me tell you where it got me then.
It was four years later, and I was out looking for a target to shoot. Something big, something bold, something that’d make an editor sit up and take notice. Just me, an ancient, sorta-shit camera, and a pressing urge to get as close as possible to the chemical fire down at the plant to get the finest angle available of the really weird flames in there. They were practically candy-coloured, and the smells were amazing – god knows what kind of cancers I skirted by inhaling all that. Anyways, I was close enough to see what everyone else wasn’t, which was someone banging on an emergency exit’s window. Must have gotten stuck thanks to shitty contractor work. Business as usual, just a little more evil than average.
Now, because I was young and eighteen and therefore immortal, I ran straight in there and started trying to get the handle working. And it was creaking and groaning and I like to hope it was about to give when all of a sudden FWOOSH half the lake falls on my head.
It was Super-Maniac, of course. He’d seen the fire brewing from miles away, and decided to pick up a tugboat, immerse it in the lake, and then upend it over the chemical fire. God almighty, the stink and the smoke – a lot of things in that blaze didn’t care for water at all. That’s where I got this little cough of mine from, you know. I guess I got lucky, got that raspy barroom crooner voice without having to smoke a pack a day for two decades. Never was much of a singer, though.
They never did find whoever had been on the other side of that door, but Super-Maniac found me as I washed up against a pile of rubble, half-drowned. Hauled my sorry ass up by the scruff of my shirt and told me that “Fires are DANGEROUS, CITZEN! Leave this sort of thing to ME!” and so on and I was really half-concussed at the time so mostly what I said was ‘huh?’ and ‘awuhhur’ and stuff like that. But I guess he appreciated it, because he flew me down to the hospital before up-up-and-awaying off into the distance.
It turned out Mister Matchstick had started the fire or something, testing out his new chemically-derived pyrokinesis. It fried a few dozen workers, and that was new. That was ugly. We’d all known it’d come to this, but we’d all HOPED it would just… fade away. No more nutcases, no more collateral damage, all gone and over with before it got any sloppier.

I had a bit of a close-up view on all this next part, as you know, but I should explain how I got it. See, a week after the chemical fire, I was talking to a homeless man in a parking lot about the upcoming elections. He was pretty upset about the frontrunners, and he was getting energetic about it – arm-waving, shouting, stomping, and so on. Well, out of nowhere, he gets yanked into the air and hung off a lamppost by his jacket, while Super-Maniac’s lecturing me on how I’m “A REGULAR MAGNET FOR TROUBLE, AREN’T YOU?” and laughing at how he’s “PRACTICALLY GOING TO END UP BEING YOUR MOTHER AT THIS RATE.” I tried to tell him to take the man down, but he perked up at “A ROBBERY AT MAIN AND GRAND!” and left. We had to wait for the fire department.
Now that was a bit disconcerting, but the very next day I was taking pictures at the opening of the new dam up the Calley River when Mister Matchstick decided to showcase his new powers. He was more than just a nut with a flamethrower, he was a walking furnace. Why he decided to attack a dam was beyond me though – after a pitched fight that set half the place on fire, Super-Maniac threw him off it. He superheated so much water that the steam clouds took days to fade, and of course he got away scot-free because Super-Maniac had recognized me in the crowd of “INNOCENT BYSTANDERS” and had stopped to talk to – talk AT – me and my “CONSTANT SCOOP-HOUNDING.” And then he gave me that big smile and told me all about his problems and how swell it was that he had a good buddy like me.
That was how I became Super-Maniac’s official “BEST FRIEND!” and personal reporter. That’s how I got up close to most of things I’m talking about, and I’d rather not go too much into it because it makes me feel sick. Suffice to say that I followed the big stuff, and in return he paid enough attention to me to make sure that none of it squished me. At least, not as often as the typical bystander. God, the casualty rates just went up. Like I said, it was a trend. We hoped it was just a temporary thing, that the destruction would die down over the winter or something, that it was cyclical and would stabilize itself. That this wasn’t the new normal.

But it didn’t, and it was. Ever year there were more nuts, more fights, and more deaths. Oakfall’s thug calls himself The Creeping Vine (they started naming themselves after the newspapers christened the Super-Maniac – guess they learned that lesson fast enough), and gets in full public view for the first time battling a guy called Alley Gator, who looked like, well, guess. Soon he’s got a pack of loonies after him too, one of whom – a failed sitcom star calling himself no-shit Hugh Larious – turns into the biggest news since the Super-Maniac fought Bob the Blimp over the city during a thunderstorm, when he threatens to gas the whole city if the Vine doesn’t reveal his identity. The psycho snuck around behind everyone’s backs and punched him out instead, risking about four and a half million people against the chances of him getting turned in for vigilantism. Six months later he was charged with more than that – footage during a brutal outdoor brawl with a gang of honest-to-god ninjas showed that he had a kid with him, a little kid whose balls hadn’t even dropped yet running around in some stupid little getup trying (and mostly failing) to kick men with giant knives in the crotch with tiny fire-engine-red pixie boots.
Yeah, they got the kid about a year after that. He broke his leg or something and the cops nabbed him before the Vine could. Took a lot of therapy, a lot of work, but he’s the mayor now. Got some sweet biography deals out of it too. Good for him, good for anyone who’s managed to turn lemons that massive into lemonade. But there was another kid out there with the Vine inside the year, and another after that, and another…there must’ve been five or six of them. And by the third, we’d almost gotten used to it. Business as usual.
Besides the Vine finally leaking into the limelight, there were suddenly more than a dozen others. Oildozer, Lord Hippo, Deadbolt, Admiral Flag Patriotism, and Sheila the Sultry, off the top of my head. And they all attracted their own crowds of enemies. It got to the point where you couldn’t go downtown without being a bystander in some bunch of costumed nutso’s brawl. And the arms race didn’t slow down, it went up and up and up. Super-Maniac and the Vine teamed up to stop Alley Gator, so Mister Matchstick and Hugh Larious teamed up in self-defence. The Admiral starts a ‘Navy-SEAL-style combat response team,’ whatever that means since he’s as much a government man as I’m a hamster, and its members are six of the most high-powered bruisers on the planet. So in response to that, Doctor Doobie (an actual chemistry Phd.) takes over a nuclear sub and tries to nuke their headquarters. The thing gets ‘heroically diverted!’ into the ocean by Oildozer, the idiot, whose ‘noble sacrifice’ irradiates half of the richest fishing grounds this side of the Atlantic. Fucking Christ, how many years before you could guarantee you wouldn’t be eating two-headed salmon around here? Oh god, and the fishermen. I don’t even want to think about how many ended up in emerg thanks to that whacko.
They put up a statue to him in the park, you know? Thing got removed before you were born, but let me tell you this: they only took it down because there was no more room for graffiti on it.

Well, legislation takes time, and like I told you this all happened awfully fast. By the time the Supreme Court was weighing in, half the population of the country’s mental institutions was running around armed with explosive limbs and cybernetic bees and fuck knows what. So the ruling was about to go through (can barely remember the wording, it was so legalistic – but it basically boiled down to ‘being a loony in tights is now the biggest offense ever please turn yourselves in and maybe we can help you use those physically impossible abilities like a responsible adult rather than a playground thug’), when the Vine, the Admiral, and Super-Maniac storm the building and start yelling at the court and assembled press that they’re a bunch of appeasers and ungrateful know-nothings and they’ll all be stuck at the far end of the wedgie line when Bob the Blimp conquers the world unopposed and puts them to work slaving away in his helium mines. And then, of course, Hugh Larious saw that they were all in one place so he bombed the building. The court didn’t make it because they weren’t immune to explosions, the lunatics did because they were, and then they loudly denounced the outcome as the expected result of this sort of foolish fascist oppression. Regulation never quite got off the ground after that, especially after what happened two months later.

Two months later, the first world-wide catastrophe hit. Doctor Doobie kidnapped Mister Matchstick, replicated the formula that turned him from a pyromaniac to a pyrokinetic, and used it on a small army of Bob the Blimp’s Zeppelmen. Every first-world capital had twenty five-hundred-foot flaming blimp-people in its front yard, torching monuments. About a hundred thousand people died, millions were injured, the Eiffel tower got melted down, and during the final showdown at New York where Mister Matchstick exploded inside Bob the Blimp’s engine chambers, Super-Maniac impaled him on the Statue of Liberty and crushed that too. It took all of us years to recover from the damage economically, and I think the shock still lingers. But Super-Maniac? The Super-SEAL-Six? The Creeping Vine? They looked sad, they looked mournful. I took their pictures. But the very next month, they were back on schedule. Beating burglars to a bloody pulp, stringing suspected ‘EVIL-DOERS” from skyscrapers or dangling them a mile high in midair, and conducting their personal lives in a way that made B-list celebrities look like cloistered nuns. I think the sickest point had to have been when Sheila the Sultry got killed in action, so Lord Hippo cloned her and tried to pretend that effectively she was the same person and therefore they were still married. Can’t blame that girl for going crazy and trying to stab him to death; she had more reason than most.
Still got beaten to a pulp, though. And escaped. We did our best, but our jails can’t hold the damned loons, and every time we thought we found a way to remove their powers Hugh Larious would steal it and try to use it to murder Super-Maniac or something. And whenever it didn’t work, because they’d always take the half-functional prototypes, whatever vigilante they’d tried to use it on was sure to ‘accidentally’ destroy it while “FOILING THE VILLAIN.” Like clockwork, it was. I think the feds went through four rays five serums and a single full-scale power leeching facility. That last one got drained dry by the Human Brazilian Wandering Spider, after she learned how to suck out the innards of things made of metal, not just meat. What a nightmare. Went from being a serial killer to a global menace, and one that still liked to pick fights with the Creeping Vine. He always won them, but he liked to play rough with city infrastructure to do it rather than ask any of his five billion superpowered friends over to help out. Like that time he rigged the entire city’s power grid to run through a pair of mechanized gauntlets and punched her in the head. Christ, what was that, a four-week blackout? And that wasn’t even the end phase. By the time that fight was over he’d used hidden ballistic missiles to tear up half of downtown, and finishing her off had involved flooding half of city hall.

Anyways. That little episode with Bob the Blimp and Doctor Doobie was the first taste of what to come, but it was the smallest. Three years later, aliens – the Sleebos – drop out of the sky and start shooting up half of the USA looking for super-powers to drain. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you what THAT did to our infrastructure; how many years before you could take a bus coast-to-coast without seeing at least one stretch of plasma-melted highway? And then two years later, some shiny lightbulb that claims it’s a god promises the winner of an all-lunatic Fight Club tourney a free wish, and they all gather up in one spot and punch the shit out of each other for a good six months before any of those bright sparks goes ‘hey, what if that ‘god’ is just Mesmermastermorpho tricking us all into becoming weak and vulnerable before blowing us all up with an h-bomb?’ In all fairness, who could’ve guessed? It wasn’t as if he’d had conversations with his conspirators in front of active security cameras that the Creeping Vine could hack into. Oh wait, he did. God, they’re all as bad as each other.
And the year after that, one of those conspirators turned out to be a clone of Super-Maniac made from a tissue sample from Clonemaggedon. And there ended up being one thousand of them. God, that mess took all year to fix, and then the summer after that it turned out that Deadbolt was a secret agent of the USSR, except he wasn’t because only an idiot would blame him for that and it was just Lord Hippo framing him so nobody would notice that the CLONE EXPERT was probably behind the previous year’s ARMY OF CLONES. Jesus Christ, Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ on a Crutch With a Crouton Up His Crack.
Of course, the next year reality folded in on us during the big war with Stellaron the Living Supercluster. About half of the human race vanished or was merged with their counterparts from a parallel dimension, which lead to something like a 33% increase in superpowered whackjob populations, good and bad. I’m one of the five or six non-loonies who got to remember it happening, and I wish I didn’t. The oceans were vaporized, during the last battle Africa’s atmosphere was peeled off and left to boil away into space, and Stellaron disintegrated Antarctica to halt Doctor Doobie’s attempts at developing a toxic agent that could kill him. Unsuccessfully. In the end, he died and wham bam, back to normal. Except for the changes.
My fiancée vanished. Half the presidents of the last century are new to me. There’s a city that was called Tokyo that used to exist, and now there’s a country named Canada that didn’t. And you, I’m pretty sure, didn’t exist before then because I knew every person working at this paper damned well. Still do.
A few things’re still the same: the trend for the big, bad stuff is almost every summer now, and the body counts are going up and up. Even the powered nutjobs don’t always get out clean now – but there’s still hundreds of us poor commoners going down for each one of them, and they just don’t damned seem to die otherwise; Super-Maniac should be twice my age, but he looks thirty still, fuck knows how. Ten thousand Parisians die screaming as the seventh Eiffel tower explodes under one of Hugh Larious’s jackass whims, and the Creeping Vine sheds a single tear, business as usual. His latest semi-abused adolescent sidekick gets beaten up? He’s thunder and lightning and dramatic showdowns at midnight on skyscrapers. Skyscrapers, hah – we build them, and Super-Maniac punches people through them and flies away from the rubble. Fuck him, and fuck him sideways, and fuck that upside down on a trampoline.
It doesn’t matter. It’s not our world, not anymore. The big stuff is getting bigger and coming faster, and it’s caring less and less about us and more and more about them. We should’ve sided with the Sleebos. Better life as a slave than life as furniture.
Shit, I’m too drunk for this. Come back tomorrow, huh?

***

Timothy ‘Timmy’ O’Reily, Super-Maniac’s best friend, was found dead in his apartment yesterday, burned to a crisp. Mister Matchstick has claimed responsibility for the murder as a message to the super-hero of the seriousness of his intent. A tear-streaked, emotional Super-Maniac vowed that the villain had “GONE TOO FAR!” and that “THIS ENDS NOW.”
As Timmy would say, fresh from the rubble of a skyscraper or the waves of a Depth-Master invasion: “business as usual.”

There were two ways back from a party on New Years: the safe way or the dangerous way.
Terry meant to take the dangerous way, but was misinformed of the contents of the punch and had to forgo such hazardous joys. Then she meant to take the safe way, but she was a stranger in the neighborhood and turned left on Elm instead of right.
So Terry took the wrong way, and things happened as they would. Three turns down a tumbled path and who knew which way was home, or barely even which way was up? Oh, it was too late for such things.
So she kept driving, because why not and she had snow tires; whatever was the worst that could happen, they’d stop. The night was clear and the year was still sparkling new and there was no reason not to go and nothing for it. She turned left on a hunch, right on a whim, then three lefts in a row because her right arm felt itchy and she wanted to spite it.
The first sign was the snowflakes. The wind was just right to send them slipping over the windshield and off the hood of the car as chilled water, catching them for brief seconds. But after about ten minutes, they grew fatter, and stopped melting. She flipped the windshield wipers on and watched them grudgingly scoot free, scraping against the glass with their reluctance.
At some point the stars winked at her, and it was only shortly after that that she found herself passing the first snow structures. At first only tiny blobs in the distance, Terry was soon cruising through a village of squat, stout little cottages of congealed ice and slush. Periwinkle and lime lights twinkled past sheet-frosted windows, all lit by the comforting glow of snowball lampposts.
This confused Terry, and for a time she wondered if she indeed had taken the dangerous way home and was bleeding out in a ditch with only dying hallucinations as company. But that was silly, so her body ignored the fancies of her mind (as was usual) and kept her firmly on the road even as it faded from gravel to dirt, dirt to slush, and finally to a lightly snowed path through a grove of pines so thoroughly covered in frosting that they put ice cream cakes to shame.
It was at this point, to Terry’s everlasting annoyance if not sorrow, that her beloved, faithful car, veteran of many miles, gave up in despair as its battery noisily froze itself to death. Neither repeated attempts at reinition, nor thumping the hood, nor swearing would force its tires forwards one more inch; it was resigned to remain where it was, to become an unusually boxy snowdrift come hell or sleetstorm.
Terry was tired. Terry was angry. Terry very much had wanted to be drunk four hours ago. Terry was covered in snowflakes that still seemed very much reluctant to melt, even the ones landing directly on her exposed skin, which was making her look a bit like a snowman. Terry also needed to find a place to get some help, which was why it was very helpful that her car’s battery had died as its license plate brushed against the very front door of a sumptuous, crystalline palace, rimmed in rime, surmounted with snowflakes, and filled with frost.
She tried knocking, and nearly lost the skin from her knuckles. A heavy tread, a thud, a bump, a crunch, and the door swung wide.
“Good night,” said the doorman. He was about ten feet tall, thickly furred, and had tiny little pinpoints of black eyes hidden underneath a veil of hairy forehead. Also, tusks. “Welcome to Winter.”
Terry briskly but politely made it known that her car was broken and did he have a phone or something oh my name is Terry what is yours.
“Bergmann,” said Bergmann, “servant of Lady Winter. I do not have a phone. I do not know what a phone is. But I can help you, if you do as I say.”
Terry informed Bergmann that she had a can of mace, but politely. She didn’t want to offend the man too much, because frankly, she was freezing to death and there was a snowflake in her eyelashes that seemed to stuck there.
Bergmann listened to what she had to say, cocking his head occasionally, almost like an owl. “You may choose and take any three objects within the palace of Lady Winter,” he said, ignoring her last comment. “You may not choose more or less than three. Then you may depart for home. But if you fail to reach home before dawn, Lady Winter will extract payment from you.”
Terry had a credit card, that didn’t worry her. Did Lady Winter have a garage?
“I do not know what either of those things are,” repeated Bergmann. “You should choose, and choose quickly. Lady Winter will begin to stir soon, and you will fare better with a good head start.”
Terry brushed past him and started searching the house, opening and shutting random doors.
One room was full of at least seven hundred and ninety-four bears – black, white, brown, and slightly blue. All of them were asleep, and snoring. That door was shut extremely carefully.
A second door led to a gallery of extraordinary icicles, all keen-edged and jagged, with vicious cutting edges and wickedly needle-sharp points. Their grips were crafted with sheets of thick walrus-hide leather. Terry didn’t need a weapon – she had some mace, and that was good enough for her. But she took one anyways, because hey, conversation piece. And she had room for two more.
Another was not a room, but the sky – a door opening onto an endless, hazy expanse of grey, washed-out cloud that turned the whole world into a dirty eggshell. It made her dizzy, and she slammed the door shut a bit more forcefully than necessary.
A fourth handle, a fourth turn, a fourth door. This appeared to be the inside of an ice hut, complete with a seemingly infinite supply of empty and half-empty glass bottles and a sweaty, fishy sort of scent. A small fire crackled in an iron pot, and half of the biggest trout she’d ever seen simmered in a pan above it. Terry took the fish, because she was hungry and the last thing she’d eaten were some quarter-cooked vol-au-vents before midnight. Besides, she still had room for something to fix her car with or something.
The fifth door opened out of the largest snowman she’d ever seen, its head somewhere high above her and obscured by its massive, rippling pectoral muscles. Terry couldn’t help noticing that it was so anatomically correct that it very nearly became incorrect. A faint stirring high above showed that it was leaning down to look at her, and she closed the door quickly.
What lay behind door number six? An ice-block stable containing a white yak twice as wide as Terry’s car, browsing idly from a bin of frost-speckled clover. It looked up to greet her, and puffed warm air from its nose.
She patted it. It felt like burp-scented velvet. And that – and some of the harness from the wall too, because they were really a package deal and thus only one thing, really, when you got down to it – made three.
Bergmann watched over her as she bustled her way outside. Then he helped her attach the harness to the car, because really, how on earth could just ropes and things be that complicated it was quite ridiculous. Terry didn’t know how people managed before cars.
“Much more slowly,” said Bergmann, “judging by the speed you came in at.”
Terry thanked him for the sarcasm and wished him good day and gave him her address, so they could bill her.
“If Lady Winter doesn’t reach you,” said Bergmann, “no payment is needed. If she does, it will be taken on the spot. This,” he said very slowly and politely, as if to a toddler, “is a fair trade.”
Terry thanked him for the ominous threat, clambered onto the luggage rack of her car, swished the reins, and was off through the snows of Winter at a fast, yak-puffing clip. Sleigh bells jingled-jangled on the reins like the obnoxious noisemakers that Terry had twirled no less than three hours past, filling her with sadness yet again for the hangover that would never be. Also irritation that that same snowflake seemed to have set up permanent residence in her upper left eyelash.
Winter closed in around her again, a sea of pines filled with unsavoury eyes that seemed to follow her. The road was even more snow-filled than before, and she doubted that she would have been able to move her car under its own power at all, even if the battery were working. Which reminded her, she’d need to pay for that. And borrow someone else’s car for work. Maybe she could carpool. Or just ask for time off. They’d probably make her use sick days for it, the bastards. Well then she’d just have to
oh my, there was a creature on the car hood with her and it was trying to eat her kneecap.
Terry booted the little squealing pest and watched it flop into a snowdrift up to its neck, backside-first. It glared at her from its chilly prison, and bared fangs too big to fit in its mouth.
It was a goblin, obviously. Terry had no experience with this sort of thing, but that’s just what goblins looked like. All twenty-seven of them swarming up over the car’s sides, shimmying along the yak’s reins, jabbering and shrieking and making obscene gestures.
Terry had good, strong boots. Her mother had given them to her three years ago, and the worst they’d picked up since had been some stains on the soles from her dog. They had no-nonsense, tough-as-leather laces, firm metallic buckles, solid, unflinching heels, and toes that had been lovingly steel-capped.
Terry put them to work with great gusto, but even so, this was all a little much for just two feet. It was time for mace, and an exciting time it was until the fourth goblin that reeled away wheezing took the can and the last half-centimeter of her left pointer’s fingernail with it between its teeth. She swore into the wind, fruitlessly flapped her hands at the critters attempting to crawl up her legs, fell over, and nearly split her head open on the walrus-leather-wrapped hilt of the icicle blade.
Oh. Well then, that problem was solved.
What happened over the next few minutes for Terry was something of a blur – a messy, inelegant blur, with lots of fumbling, swearing, breathless cold, and the hack-chop-thud of blades into meat. It reminded her of carving the turkey at thanksgiving, but with less appetizing aromas. By the time she was finished, the icicle blade was a gleaming ruby red stub attached to a hilt, steaming with the heat of gobliny torsos.
Then she threw up. When that was over, she looked up and she was somewhere else. The pines had vanished from around herm, replaced by the snowy little houses of Winter’s village. Calm. Placid.
All the doors were open. Tiny little furry creatures were standing in the streets, shaking their fists and hooting and howling in unison. It sounded like the end of the world as forecast by a herd of Chihuahuas.
Terry thought about yelling out something friendly and welcoming, then thought better about it and clicked the yak faster. She’d had enough small angry creatures trying to bite through her jacket tonight already. The last thing she needed was for a wolf the size of a school bus to peer around the side of the nearest house and snarl at her, which was not what happened next. It was more the size of a tour bus.
Terry had a three-step process to dealing with her dog, and she followed it here as faithfully as she would’ve at home. First, she ignored the wolf and hoped it would go away.
Second, as it closed in on her, she frantically flapped the reins like a deranged chicken’s wings and yelled incoherently at it and hoped it would go away.
Finally, as the drooling jaws began to open wide and the neck aligned itself with the spine, she gave in and threw the fish at it and hoped it would go away.
It made a noise that was a cross between a yelp, a wuff, and a burp, then set to. The sounds of its tearing and gnawing didn’t die down for a full half-mile, by which point Terry’s teeth had nearly stopped chattering. She blew on her hands to warm them up and peered forwards through the shallow veils of snowflakes. The road was more slush and less ice under the crunching footfalls of the yak, the coffee-cream sky was visible in between flurries. She was going to make it.
At this point, she looked up at the sky again.
In the long, long moment that followed as she saw the first sunrays creeping across the fading stars, she heard a sound billowing up from behind her.
Terry made the worst mistake of her life then, which was turning around. She looked Lady Winter full in the eyes, and what she saw nearly drove her blind with reflected snowglare, sending her skidding onto her back and tumbling off the hood of the car – bump bump WHAM onto the road, all over the sound of the suddenly-roaring winds. She hauled herself upright against the reins, cursing, and jumped back aboard the nearest object she could reach, which was the yak, and was promptly flipped off its back head over heels and into a snowdrift.
Terry was not burly, and the snowdrift was not compacted – a natural feature, no creation of the plow this. She shot straight through it like an error and rolled across asphalt. Blessed, comfortable, real-as-dirt-is-real asphalt, coated in a thin layer of wonderfully real, thankfully tiny snowflakes.
Lady Winter’s face hove into view above her, and Terry rescinded her opinions and shut her eyes very quickly.
“You have something of mine,” said Lady Winter. Her voice was hollow, wide as a frozen sea, deep as a glacial rift.
Terry was sure that she’d made it by sunrise. If that wasn’t how this worked, she recommended the Lady get better taste in manservants.
“You have something of mine that was not yours to take.”
Bullpoppy. Terry had taken three things exactly from the Lady, and not only that but she’d lost all three of them.
“Four things. One too many.” And Lady Winter reached out a long, cold, dead hand from her fur-covered greatcoat and touched the snowflake that was clinging, still stuck, to Terry’s upper left eyelash. “A fair trade is a fair trade. You had the chance to take three for a good race. Your loss of the three is no violation of mine, but the fourth is not yours to steal.”
Terry’s mind raced, in circles as minds do under stress. And as she ran in circles through the hamster cage of her head, screaming in blind panic, her body opened her mouth for her and asked “How would you like a car?”
“I do not know what that is,” said Lady Winter.
“That’s fine,” said Terry’s body. “It has snow tires.”
Lady Winter cocked her head to one side, like an owl. She was beautiful, in some ways, Terry supposed. But she suspected she’d liked her better when she wore her coat more thoroughly. It was a lot less bright.
“Fair trade,” repeated Lady Winter. She raised her hand, extended the middle finger, jabbed once, and was gone.

Terry was able to replace her fridge by putting the snowflake at the bottom of a big, insulated crate. So overall, she came out of the deal all right.
The new snow tires cost a fortune though.

They looked like trees. That was something we didn’t expect, something all those movies and books and games didn’t prepare us for. Little green men, big green men, giant bugs – even probation-era gangsters; we’d all thought of those decades ago. A plague of vampires, a plague of zombies, a plague of giant, man-eating spiders; all had been considered and taken into account by the most dollar-hustling filmmakers we could train and pay. But in the end, nobody’d really expected them when they came to be covered in leaves and bark and stand fifty feet tall (if thin).
I remember the first tree I ever cared about as a child. It had a swing in it, made out of a cruddy old tire. I got oil stains on my clothes when I played with it too long.

They looked like trees. Why, we weren’t so sure. At first we figured it was some sort of secret government experiment that hadn’t gotten hushed up properly. Then when they started to pop up across the ocean, we figured it was some sort of secret doomsday conspiracy. But in the end, I think most of us figured they were aliens or something, come down from the skies to seize the world for their own. Dunno why they’d bother. Unless they wanted our trees.
They never asked us for them, of course. Never negotiated, never responded. I’m not sure how many different kind of signals and messages and treaties and threats and bargains all the experts tried, but they gave it their best shot. It was worse than talking to a brick wall. At least the bricks don’t crush you mid-sentence.

They looked like trees. Exactly like trees, down to the roots and the stems and the tips of the leaves. And the needles. The first six we found were maples, and that lulled us a bit, got us to thinking that they weren’t so imaginative. Then Canada lost contact with every single settlement north of the prairies, half of Russia went dark, and the Amazon started boiling over with them. They looked like all kinds of trees – pines, oaks, red cedar, baobabs, elms, eucalypts, sequoias. God, I remember footage of the first ones that looked like sequoias. That was when we all started to think we were in trouble.
That wasn’t the problem of course, the problem was that there were more and more of them each day. But humans respond faster to size than anything else, really.

They looked like trees. They sure as hell didn’t act like them. They had the tree patience at least; laying low for hours, sidling closer and closer by inches, staying still for days if that’s what it took to guarantee a stealthy approach. It took weeks for us all to even begin to overcome that instinctive urge to overlook them, consider them part of the scenery. But the bit where they pounced and grasped and crushed and mangled – that, that was all them.
We never did learn how to tell them apart from trees.

They looked like trees. What was up with that? They could’ve brought deadly weapons – technology beyond our grasp. They could’ve used machine guns, rifles, bayonets, daggers, boiling water, sharp rocks. They could’ve used tentacles or fangs or claws or something, anything, but instead they went right on looking like trees. They had to practically fall on you or run you over to kill you.
We had to use heavy artillery, massed fire, and explosives, mostly. A lot of all of them. Ever tried to cut down an oak with a rifle? It’s not particularly pleasant, especially when the oak’s charging. And there were a lot of things that looked like trees out there.

They looked like trees. It was hilarious, really – up until one found you. Unless you were the world’s quickest hand with a chainsaw or were inside a tank, it was pretty much over by then. They could outrun anybody that wasn’t a sprinter on open ground, and the sprinter’d get tired a lot faster than they could.
How’d they move? I’m not sure. It was sort of like wading. but more like an octopus hauling itself along a few rocks. You’d have had to look at the roots, below the surface.

They looked like trees. Well, there’s one way around that. You get rid of the trees. You clear forests, you set watch, you move people out of their cottages and their sprawling suburbs and you stuff them into cities and burn big swathes of countryside. And that works fine, as an emergency. But sooner or later, you need cardboard, or paper, or planks, or any one of a thousand, thousand, thousand things you need trees for. So you go out to the trees again, take up forestry one more time, and this time you keep the lumberjacks under armed guard.
They needed a lot of guards. And not all of them – any of them – came back home. Poor old me, bearing the bad news.

They looked like trees. Say what you will about them, they stuck to that through thick and thin. We never had so much as a moment of worry from grass, not a single rogue thing that looked like wheat. Our lawns remained benign, our fields were safe and sound, right up ‘till the moment that they were filled with things that looked like trees. There’s a lot of cropland all over the world, and there really weren’t enough soldiers, and those soldiers didn’t have enough weapons that could take apart things that were as tough as trees.
That was when things went really bad.

They looked like trees. And that kept the cities safe for a long time, because it’s hard not to notice that sort of thing. But when you can’t grow food worth a damn and you’re out of everything and anything that uses lumber or wood pulp and you’re crammed into a city bursting at the seams with refugees and probably half your family that lived in the country got mashed by things that look like trees, well….
By that point they scarcely had to do anything. They just waded in and cleaned up what was left over. And it was a messy cleaning. The rain washed up the streets nice though.

They looked like trees. Could find them almost anywhere you could find a tree. None in Antarctica. None up in the mountain peaks. The deserts were probably okay. Anywhere with permafrost – though a lot of that’s melting these days, so who knows. Then again, not many people up there. Were up there. Maybe they did a pass since.
I’d wager most humans are gone now. Not much left of the cities, that’s for sure. Or anyone in them. Even the skyscrapers are falling over now, like this old broken thing.

They looked like trees. Inside and out, absolutely and utterly. We’d known that for a while. Their biology must be something so strange it barely qualifies as the science. We don’t know where they came from, but they must have come from somewhere. You can see where they’ve been since by checking the trunk, finding the spent bits of ammo lodged inside, checking the knives and saws and axes wedged into wood as trophies of last-ditch defenses crushed. This one was in Canada (see the knife?), this one fought the Indian army, this one crossed China and entered Europe before a tank shell blew it apart…
This one lying here in front of me came from our back yard. It’s still got the tire attached.

They looked like trees. There was no way they could be, though. That wouldn’t make any sense. But now there’s that nagging, endless thought at the back of the skull, scratching away wondering exactly what was the last straw that set them off, the final indignity that snapped the camel’s spine bone-by-bone all at once.
I saw something growing today, out of the ruins of the roof of the building next door. I never did learn how to tell them apart.
Guess I’ll go find out now. Damn I’m tired.

It was the easiest problem in the world. A plumber wasn’t needed, a child could’ve fixed it. An illiterate child could’ve fixed it. An illiterate child with parkinson’s and amnesia with agoraphobic tendencies in an open field could’ve fixed it. Left-handed.
Just… tighten a pipe. It was that simple, that straight-forward. John plucked the sorry old monkey wrench that lived in the secluded depths of the garage from its perch, wrenched a nut, wrenched a bolt, wrenched all the other bits of the pipe the tool could fit around (righty tighty, lefty loosey rigorously adhered to), and that was that and that was all she wrote.
The next day, the sink didn’t work.
“Well, that makes no sense,” said John.
“Better give it a look anyways,” said Jane.
So they went and had a look. One of the pipes under the sink had come loose slightly and was vibrating majestically in place, like the reed of an oboe.
“Huh,” said John. And he went away and came back again with the creaky, protesting monkey wrench, and he once more tightened everything that he could until it squeaked like a chimpanzee with its finger stuck in a termite mound.
That night, John and Jane were awoken by the squeals of metal and found that no less than six pipes had come loose – two in both bathroom sinks, one in the kitchen, two in the shower, and the toilets.
“Maybe we should call a plumber,” suggested Jane.
John rolled his eyes. It was just pipes, for goodness sakes. He wasn’t handy, but you barely needed hands at all to fix these sorts of problems. He rode the monkey wrench hard that night, sending shivers down the house’s metallic spine, and went to bed with the angry rest of a man who’s had it up to here with the day.

The next day, the shower exploded. It was most abrupt and occurred when Jane was trying to use it, which annoyed her to the point of shrieks.
“I could’ve sworn I tightened those,” said John. He took his mighty master monkey wrench once more and replaced the fitful pipes with their shadowy backups, retrieved from the darkest corners of the shed. They were cold and silvery and beautifully ugly, and that evening as John and Jane had dinner they all vanished and half the house was covered in mixed water of varying temperatures and sewage.
“Maybe we should call a plumber right now,” ordered Jane.
“All right,” said John.

The plumber was a tall, slimly-built man who absolutely could not have existed in any cartoon of his profession, with a high forehead and a nose that had previously belonged to a 19th-century British aristocrat and no moustache. He took three steps into the house, and seventeen downstairs to look at the pipes. He frowned, creased his brow, pinched his arm, spat on the floor with great venom, sniffed exactly twice and broke into an ear-splitting scream of terror before fleeing out the door while crossing himself, leaving behind both his toolbox and his truck.
The toolbox had a new wrench in it, one with sleek lines and a rubber grip and a lighter built into the handle. John took it up in his hand, raided the truck for pipes, and went about his duty with grim efficiency. When he was done the house’s guts gleamed as brilliantly as a silver fork in a streambed. He threw the old monkey wrench in the garbage and proclaimed himself satisfied. But he kept the new one. Just in case.
All was serene the next day. Peaceful. Quiet. The showers were taken and luxuriated within, the toilets flushed, double-flushed, triple-flushed. The sink provided gently-warmed cleanliness.
Breakfast was had, the civilized meal of the morning. And at its conclusion the dishwasher was loaded, filled, soaped, and gently purred into motion for all of ten seconds before breaking down in a heaving fit.
John opened the pipes and came nose to nose with a tiny agrarian civilization, peopled by thousands of creatures no bigger than dust mites. He frowned down upon them, uncertain of his place in this newly discovered world until someone shot a miniscule ballista at him, whereupon he exercised the justice of the Old Testament and threw the pipe into the garbage.
“Maybe we should just replace all the pipes,” said Jane.
“I’m working on it,” said John.
That evening he replaced all the pipes.
That midnight he woke up and heard a mysterious clanking from beneath his bed, in the cellar. He sighed, coughed, removed the plumber’s wrench from his bedside table, shuffled downstairs, and came face to face with an enormous metallic creature in the front hall, still rife with the dusty particles of the basement. It was made entirely of piping and shaped roughly like an enormous lizard of the Permian.
John wrenched it until it stopped moving, but lost a leg. Jane called the police, the ambulance, and the animal control unit. The first took away the wrench (“evidence”), the second John and his leg (“reattachment”), the third the remnants of the pipe-lizard (“disposal”).
“Do we still have a wrench in the house, dear?” he inquired of Jane.
“No,” she said.
“Oh well,” he muttered, as the doctors measured the diameter of his leg-stump. “I guess we’ll think of something.”

John had surgery on the third, and therapy on the fifth, and was discharged on the seventh, because he was out of money. He went home (limping) and found that his house was entirely filled with pipes, like a thornbush thicket.
“I tried to phone you,” explained Jane, from the makeshift hut she’d crafted out of their car, on their lawn. “But I’ve been busy, and you didn’t answer.”
“Have you bought a new wrench yet?” asked John.
“No,” she said. “They’re too expensive nowadays to be bothered. Go and ask the neighbours for a loan or something.”
John went to the neighbours (limping). One of them had a wrench. It was a socket wrench, not a monkey wrench, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
So he walked up to his front door (limping), and he wrenched his way into the hallway, then wrenched his way upstairs, and wrenched his way into the bathroom, where he got his toothbrush and his deodorant and had a quick piss and floss. As he gargled, a throat cleared next to his ear, and he turned around (limping) to find himself face to face with a small band of pipes. Each of them stood no taller than his waist, their leader barely passed his knee. A white flag was clutched in its maw.
“We would like,” said the pipe, “to discuss terms.”
John wrenched them, then wrenched his way into his bedroom to liberate a suit, which he put on. He couldn’t feel himself in that lousy little hospital gown, even if it did afford some ventilation to his reattached leg. In his suit he felt like a new man. A new, leg-cramped (limping) man who smelt like grease.
After wrenching his way to the bedside table for his keys, John wrenched his way back out the front door (the piping had regrown in his absence), turfed Jane out of the car, and went to work as she shouted abuse at him from the lawn.
Work was unpleasant. He couldn’t go to the bathroom without his wrench in his pocket, and he found himself eyeing the toilet bowl suspiciously. After his business was concluded, he stayed an extra half-hour overtime to personally tighten the thing’s u-bend. He didn’t like the look it had been giving him.

At last, home came John. Home again, home again, his home had walked off. His neighbours showed him cellphone footage of it rising to its feet – its enormous, piping-made feet – and negotiating with Jane, who secured transport with it to Belgium. It had strolled off at a pace just above a leisurely stroll, which was a problem for John because of his (limping) and the fact that his car only had about five minutes worth of gas left in it.
Well fine. If that’s the way life would be, that’s the way life would be. John still had his wrench, and that was all that mattered.

After spending the night in his car, John awoke to the polite windshield rap-rap of his neighbour’s knuckles. He politely requested that his wrench be returned.
John made a rude gesture and roared away to work on his last wisps of gas, where he found the entire lobby clogged with piping. The whole thing had started yesterday evening, said the receptionist, who was sharing a cigarette with the homeless man that worked their corner.
“Well, that makes no sense,” said John.
The receptionist shrugged.
John felt the comfortable weight of the wrench in his back pocket, and eyed the doors of his office building with fresh determination.
He strode in (limping) manfully.
All he’d have to do was tighten a few more pipes.

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.