jamieproctor.ca

April 14th
Weather: rainy/lazy
Breakfast: toast, no butter.
Weather’s gone sour again; no forecast for anything upward of drizzle for a week minimum. Good excuse to stay in office all day; nobody’s going to commit crimes out in the damp, right?
Evening postscript: well, somebody did. Nothing important; break-in at museum, stole small, useless, valueless knick-knack from visiting exhibition on obscure mythology. Left graffiti on walls in what am told is misspelt sanskrit. Thing’ll crop up in some pawn shop sooner or later, business = usual.

April 15th
Weather: rainy/bored
Breakfast: probably porridge, no milk.
Homicide as of 4 AM, some dink in a raincoat and ski mask. Multiple stab wounds to face, with care to remove eyelids. Crime scene marked by graffiti on alley walls in what am told is grammatically-correct sanskrit. No trace of small, useless, valueless knick-knack. Victim possessed surprisingly nice watch.
Afternoon postscript: downtown bagel trip extremely rapid today; almost no vehicle traffic, few pedestrians. Rain keeping people inside.
Midnight postscript: power outage. Window check shows hit entire town. Cell phone reception inexplicably nil. Going to bed.

April 16th
Weather: rainy/irritated
Breakfast: leftover bagel.
Had dream of small, useless, valueless knick-knack, in which object slowly melted into puddle of reddened water, woke up hungry. Power restored around 6 AM, another homicide report straightaways. Engineer appears to have hung himself from high-voltage tower in such a way as to wreck entire power grid and fry himself before strangulation. Selfish jackoff. Victim had no mental history, boring, dull, single but not distressingly so, blah blah. Eyelids were removed shortly after death.
Evening postscript: victim was close friend of dink in raincoat + ski mask. Possible guilt of having poor taste in colleagues led to death wish? Good enough.

April 17th
Weather: rainy/tepid
Breakfast: last night’s coffee
Power went out at midnight again, restored at dawn. Three more suicides, all with removed eyelids, all under 30, all around 3 AM. Stupid kids do any fad nowadays, probably got idea from internet.
Afternoon postscript: bagel trip futile, store was closed despite clear violation of posted operating hours. Will consider giving warning.
Evening postscript: bagel store manager missing from home, workplace, entire life. Annoying. Left a note for family, consisting entirely of something probably sanskrit. Very annoying.

April 18th
Weather: rainy/irked
Breakfast: dry cereal.
Nightly outages continue, four more suicides, all by drowning in tubs. Eyelids removed postmortem, pupils carved out. Sick of bullshit. Bagel store manager located in park floating in pond. Eyelids removed postmortem, pupils carved out, breadknife lodged through ventricle. Frustrating. Downtown almost entirely empty all day; frequent lightning, no sound of thunder. Dream of small, useless, valueless knick-knack recurred, during which ate entire town. Woke up, had to piss.

April 19th
Weather: rainy/gloomy
Breakfast: hard-boiled egg, no toast.
Good news and bad news. Bad news: one more suicide. Good news: it was Henry Hopkins. Bad news: owed me fifty. Good news: found it on him during process of investigation. Suicide consisted of Hopkins slitting open wrists, groin, belly, neck in probably that order. Initial tool used was a rusty, blunt knife, apparently broke it on left scaphoid, finished job using nails, teeth, edge of the kitchen counter. Blood used to scrawl cryptic symbols on the floor, addition of probably sanskrit. Surprisingly bad mood for a Wednesday, must be the weather.
Noon postscript: crowds gathered at waterfront today, along beachfront, on piers. Inquiries produced blank looks and very slow blinks. Fed up with John Q. Public today. Fifteen lightning bolts on way home striking inside two minutes, one per 8 seconds like clockwork, each striking different building downtown. Fires stopped quickly due to rain.

April 20th:
Weather: rainy/dreary
Breakfast: pickles
Rain rain rain and power didn’t come back on today. Entire downtown crowd vanished after midnight without trace, few remaining citizens barricaded in homes, refuse to open up. Rain coming down hard. Museum vanished leaving small traces of rubble, bagel store burnt shell from lightning strike, rubble defaced with probably sanskrit in likely blood. Stupid, already mostly washed away. Bad mood.
Afternoon postscript: storm intensify, thunder now audible, strangely metallic and gong-like. Can barely hear self think, put on Randy Travis CD as sleep aid.
Midnight postscript: Massive thunderclap, looked out window and rest of town was missing, ate last of pickles, went back to bed.

April 21st
Weather: no
Breakfast: ketchup.
Woke up to find rain stopped, sky grey, flat, pancake-ish. Town vanished bar charred asphalt and stones, including office – woke up sleeping on remains of basement floor. Thousands of tiny sharp pebbles everywhere, engraved with single alphabeticalcharacters of who cares. Going to hike to highway, request transfer to somewhere with better bagels, weather, citizens.
Afternoon postscript: tripped over small, useless, valueless object en route to highway, took evidence into custody/emergency pawnshop fund. Will hitchike as soon as car stops not containing dead bodies without eyelids. Irritatingly common as of present.

It was just around past the sharp edge of the twenty-first century, around eleven o’clock in the evening on the last day of an old year. And it was time for the end of the world – ask anyone. There was nothing after the next morning, no point in delaying the inevitable, and that was that. It was the last night of all, and that meant it was time to wrap up all the loose ends.
Paul John Bob (just Bob, not Robert) had thought about it ahead of time, and so the only loose ends he had were two bottles and a quarter-bunch of bananas. So he poured himself a cup of something paler than pure water that hissed at the air, and he poured himself a glass of something darker than the inside of a rock that seemed to hum in its cradle, and he sat himself out on his porch, which was five boards of different sizes put together any old way, and he waited for the end of the world.
It sure was taking its time, it felt like. He was two bananas into the bunch already and time seemed to be standing still. A nice night at least – the stars were bright and sharp up there, twinkling their little hearts out all over everybody’s last evening, and that made it easy to see that person shambling up his hill and into his yard.
“Evening, Sherlock,” said Paul John Bob (Jerry, to his friends and neighbours).
“About there or so, Jerry,” said Sherlock, “if you ignore all the doom and despair.” He was a round, roly-poly man with a face that was built for beaming grins and a mind that lived in grim defiance of this.
“Still an evening,” said Paul John Bob. “Siddown. Have a banana.”
“I don’t have time to sit and talk,” said Sherlock. “I’m on a tour of my closest friends and relations; the last thing I’ve got time for before it’s all over.”
“Well hell Sherlock, that’s one hell of a compliment. I thought we barely spoke outside the bar.”
“What? Nah, nah, I said closest. I live just down the hill, of course I’m going to stop by. Only so much time to say goodbye to folks, we’re almost done, you know?”
“Right, right.” Paul John Bob squinted thoughtfully into his clear drink, then his dark drink, then decided against either. “How about that then, eh?”
“It’s going to be pretty bad,” said Sherlock. “Meteors left and right. Going to slam us into pancakes and the pancakes into mush and the mush into dirt and the dirt down to nothing. Then the ground’ll just shake apart, the moon’ll fly away, and we’ll just be left with a big pile of rocks where earth was.”
“That’s a damned shame,” said Paul John Bob. “I heard we were all going to be infected with a super-powerful virus the likes o’ which shoulda never left the lab, and we’re just counting down the minutes ‘till we all go into septic shock, pass out, and never awaken.”
“That’s nonsense, Jerry.”
“Shucks. Was hoping I’d leave something for my cat.” Paul John Bob sighed. “Ain’t much point in that if he’s going to be pounded into a pancake right alongside me. A real downer, that.”
“That’s life,” said Sherlock. “Nobody said it was going to be fair.”
“Nobody told me any differently, neither,” said Paul John Bob. “Aw sorry, I don’t mean to be grumping. Must need another drink; y’sure you don’t want anything?”
“No,” said Sherlock. “I’m off now to say goodbye to my fourth cousin eight times removed, just over the hill. I might have to jog – goodbye forever, Jerry.”
“And see you later too, Sherlock,” said Paul John Bob, and he raised a glass to the tubby man as he trotted out of his yard and off up the road, a wobbling mass on two dauntless little legs. Then he took a drink out of both his cups and felt pretty good.
Still a good ways to go before it’s all over, he figured. An hour’s a long time, practically years, and there’s still two-thirds of it left. That’s almost a decade. And that’s enough time to finish these two cups here, which is good because leaving half-gone drinks around is something his mother drummed out of him good and hard when he was a lanky thing with too much hair, back a while back.
Moving thing on the upper road, lurching down the hill like Frankenstein, arms waving and wobbling with the force of not a single muscle behind them, a creature that ran on tendons by itself.
“You look just like Frankenstein right now, Julius,” said Paul John Bob (Hob to his dear friends).
“That’s Frankenstein’s monster, Hob,” said Julius, pulling himself up onto the porch with a complicated batch of joints and pulleys deep inside his skeleton.
“Yeah, like I said.”
“No, you said Frankenstein. That was the man what made the monster. The monster’s got no name at all, not a bit. Nobody to name him ‘cause he got no parents. It’s one of those things.”
“Fair enough,” said Paul John Bob. “I’ll remember that.” This was a lie, but they both knew it and it got said almost every visit Julius made one way or another, so there was no awkwardness at all there. A bigger tradition than Christmas-time, no way about it, no two ways about it, or even three.
“Mind if I have a knock of that drink right there?” asked Julius.
“Free country, free to the friends,” said Paul John Bob. “Which one?”
Julius shut his eyes for a bit of thinking. “You got that creamy, thick, sweet one with the colours on top like an oil slick, all rainbows and fumes?”
“Nope. Just the pale one that hisses at the air and the dark one that hums in the glass.”
“Shit,” said Julius dourly. “Forget it then. When’d it run out?”
“Five years ago. Blake died, and his brother can’t make it the same way. Comes out more milky than creamy, and you only get a three-colour rainbow.”
“Man, man, time slides the less you look at it,” said Julius, shaking his head. “Forget it then.”
“Sorry ‘bout that.”
“Eh, forget that too.”
“Done. Nice night, eh?”
“Good enough,” agreed Julius. “Good enough. Bar for the whole oncoming apocalypse and all.”
“Yeah. All those meteors and meteorites. Can you remember the difference ‘tween those again? I never can.”
“Meteorites hit the ground, otherwise they’re just meteors,” said Julius. “But it makes no difference, seeing as we’re not getting neither of ‘em.”
Paul John Bob raised an eyebrow, and the bananas. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” said Julius, and he took two of them. “I met Sherlock down the way, he was spouting the same hickory-corked bullflies as I hear from you just now. No idea where that came from. Man probably made it up out of half of things he remembered from school days and a misunderstanding on the television. No, there’s no meteors. Calm yourself and your so-and-so.”
“I’m calm and relieved,” said Paul John Bob. “I was pretty scared for my cat there.”
“Nah, he’s got nothing to worry about,” said Julius. “Cats are too furry to get chewed on.”
“Chewed up?”
“Nah, chewed on. Y’see, the aliens, Hob, they finally talked back to us. After all those years of pointing up big dishes into the sky and listening hard, somebody spoke up and sent us back something for all those years of radio messages and mis-broadcast programs.”
“Well now, that’s a stroke of luck!”
“Damn near amazing, Hob. We find something with the right sort of tech, and the right sort of brain to decode us, and the interest to care, and they can talk back faster than light so’s we got a reply nice and quick.”
“So what’d they say?”
Julius was halfway through both his bananas now, alternating bites. “Weell, they didn’t say much. Just screamed a lot.”
“Shrieked?”
“No, pretty much a scream. All one note, very constant, no variations. Not really any room for language there, so we reckon it’s a threat, and they’ve made no diplomatic overtures since. The ships are orbiting us right now – see that bit of dark that blotted out that star there for a second?”
“I took that for a bat.”
“Nah, nah, it’s a ship. They’re powering up their horrible weapons right now. Awful things, they’re going to paralyze the planet and drag us all up to be lunch, supper, and dinner.”
“They’re skipping breakfast?”
“I tell you, Hob, they are just beyond our thoughts. And midnight, we’ll meet ‘em face to tentacle.”
“Grisly,” said Paul John Bob.
“Damn straight and sideways,” said Julius. “I was just heading down the hill now to say goodbye to my auntie – well, and you.”
“Ah thanks Julius, you’re a good people there, you know that?”
“I’m not sure ‘bout that, but thank you much for it. Sure you got none of that drink?”
“We took our last bottle out on your birthday.”
“Sorrowful. Well, good luck to yourself.”
“And yourself too,” said Paul John Bob, and he raised both glasses to his friend as he loped his way away into the thickening dark.
The night was wearing on a bit now, and clouds were starting to crop up around the horizon, making Paul John Bob’s knees ache a bit. There was a breeze in the air, playing with his hair, and the bugs were sparse and polite enough to stay out of his teeth.
“Night like this sure is a waste, only getting half of it before doomsday,” he remarked.
“I agree,” said Sally-Jean, who was sitting down beside him.
Paul John Bob (Petey to his wife) gave her a sidelong look. “Thought you were phoning the kids?”
“Eh, they’re all busy. Partying, hollering, getting into sticky situations with silly sorts. Y’know children, the end of the world’s just a game to ‘em.”
“Yep. Bet they’ll even try to get it on with the aliens, once they land.”
Sally-Jean sighed. “Petey, my love, you denser than my mother’s tombstone. Why you still listening to anything Julius says that ain’t trivia? The man taught himself out of the backs of encyclopedias.”
“They were pretty nice books,” said Paul John Bob. “Had leather covers and everything.”
“Pleather, Petey, pleather. Big difference.” She scratched her back and took one of the bottles. “Ah well, it’s no harm. We got a little ways to wait yet, and time with friends’s not really wasted anyways.”
“Ymm-hmm,” said Paul John Bob. “Hey now, how’s you heard it supposed to go on then?”
Sally-Jean pursed her lips, and took the other bottle. “Well, the phone was a bit busy at the children’s end, but I think they said the ‘states finally pushed the wrong button on their missile silos, and we were all going to get dunked in enough nuclear war to leave us glowing fifty thousand times over in every cell.”
“Ow,” said Paul John Bob.
“Yep.”
“The cat too?”
Sally-Jean spun the empty bottles on her longest fingers, just like pinwheels. “Yep.”
“Well shoot. I was hoping he’d be alright.”
“That cat steals the damned pillow out from under your head nine nights out of eleven.”
“Yeah, but he likes me.”
“Not even a little bit, Petey.”
“Jealous ain’t attractive, Silly.”
“Pshaw,” said Sally-Jean, elbowing him dead in the ribs. “I never was, and you know it.”
“Fine, fine, fine. I admit it. You beat me, woman.”
“I always do,” she said. “And just in time.”
“I guess that’s it then?” asked Paul John Bob.
She tapped her big clunky watch that had belonged to Paul John Bob’s great-uncle, steel and ceramic and a lot of duct tape. “Fifteen seconds.”
“Oh, is that so?”
“It is so. Give or take a picosecond.”
“Shoot twice, hit and miss.”
“Don’t use those words in this house.”
“I’m outside it.”
“Don’t use ‘em outside either. I taught you to swear properly, you want to swear, you can do it that way.”
“Fine, fine, fine,” grumbled Paul John Bob. “Is it time yet?”
“Just about…. Now.”

The night was dead dark now, and the clouds had eaten up the stars. There was a distant rumble of thunder, so small off that it sounded like a purr. The air smelled like tree breath and seaspray.
“Rain, eh?” said Paul John Bob.
“Looks to be so,” said Sally-Jean.
“Well then,” he said, “there’s no matter waiting out here all night anyways anymore. Let’s abed.”
“Let’s,” said Sally-Jean. “The cat’s beat us to it already, and the longer we wait, the harder he’ll fight you for the second-best pillow.”
So they went to bed, and they still woke up the next morning.

“At the End of the Day,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.

“Tell us a story, granna.”
“No.”
“Pleeaaasee?”
“Bug off.”
“Pretty please with-”
“-no damned way. Besides, there’s no good stories left.”
“Daddy said everybody’s got good stories, you just have to ask them.”
“I didn’t smack your daddy enough when he was growing up.”
“Plllleeeeeaaasseee?”
“Get me the bottle and I’ll tell you a thing or two just to shut your yap. Right.”
glug glug and so on glug
“Right. Right. Now, listen up…”

In the beginning, there was Something. And the Something was probably like it was now and it was big and really neat.
Then later, after the beginning, there was also Nat.
And Nat looked at the Something and its bigness and neatness, and Nat said “I can do something better!”
So Nat picked up a big ball of dirt from the ground and stuffed it full of sticks and stones and shook it up and down and side to side and right-left over-and-out until it was all done. Then he stuck one big eyeball up against its surface, real close, and he took a peak at what he’d done.
Well, the place was a mess. Some bits were too cold and others were too hot and most of it was too dry. Almost all of it was water, and almost all of that water was out in the middle of nowhere and no good for anybody, or even any fish.
“Well, I can fix that,” said Nat. So he grabbed some people from the Something without saying please, thank you, or would-you-kindly, and he shook them all over his ball of dirt. They landed all dizzy and put out and none of them in the same place.
“Now you go and make sense of this mess here for me, will you?” asked Nat in that way that wasn’t a question. Then something caught his eye out there in the Something that’s somewhere, and Nat went to go check on it.
That was a long, long time ago. We’re not sure if Nat remembers us. But it’s probably for the best.

“That was lousy, granna.”
“You’re telling me. It’s all we had in the old days, and we had to share it. One story a week, too, not a hundred thousand a minute or whatever your damned internet gets you nowadays.”
“But it was so boooring. Don’t you have another one?”
“Sure, if you’ve got the stomach for it. Get me the other bottle.”
bloop swish glinginging etc
“Oookay. I think I remember this right…”

So a long time ago then, right, everyone was pretty angry and mad all the time, because Nat had dumped ‘em all off without so much as a by-your-leave. Hell, most of them didn’t even know the man’s name, and he certainly hadn’t bothered to introduce himself. So everyone was all over the place all off by themselves wandering around too grumpy to say “hello” or “pleased to meet you” or “mind if I sit here?” and that meant fights. Lots of them. Back in those days you ran out of teeth before age fifteen, had a nose bent triple by twenty, and were lucky to have an ear to call your own by middle age. The elderly didn’t exist; most folks that old got ornery enough to tick off something bigger than they were.
This was a pretty big problem, and that’s why someone decided to do something about it. And that someone was Bil.
Now, Bil was a good enough person, and that was downright weird. He didn’t hate anyone, and nobody hated him, because Nat bless his leathery ass, Bil was too thick to loath. You couldn’t look into that big dopey grin and spit back. Clouds would part over Bil’s head when thunderstorms came, and mama bears would watch him walk right up and over their cubs without more than a bit of a twitch.
Of course, his hide was still stitched up and down with more scars than anyone knew how to count back in those days. Even a kindly universe can’t stop a big enough doorknob from doing something to himself.
That day in particular, that something was a gift. See, Bil had made himself a ladyfriend, a nice enough gal who was willing to put cheerfulness over good looks or brainpower. And he liked her so much, he wanted to give her something to make her happy.
So he went out looking, Bil did, and he wandered the world for years. There’s been whole books written on the adventures Bil had in his quests. There was the time Bil found the People Made Out Of Dried Bark, and ate them. There was the battle of the World’s Angriest Hornet Nest, which Bil lost. There was the time Bil Saved the Sun, which the Sun always said was just Bil misunderstanding the concept of a solar eclipse. A lot of these stories are a bit mysterious, see, because the only one writing them down was Bil, and he wasn’t who you’d call Francis Bacon, or Shakespeare, or whoever the hell it is this decade.
Any rate, we can skip over those, because Bil finally found the fourth-tallest hill in the Near Vicinity, and from up there he could very nearly see over the edge of the bit of the world he knew. It wasn’t too warm or cold, the weather was cloudy with sunny, the landscape sat at his feet instead of sprawling, and as Bil sat there on his buns staring out into a pretty mediocre view he felt a strange and unfamiliar sensation a-creeping up on his tiny little brain.
“That’s it!” he said as he sat up, and he almost lost it in his excitement. But Bil was careful after that, and put it in a box he made out of the leftovers of the People Made Out Of Dried Bark. It was small and shoddy, but it did the job and kept the present safe and dry until he got home to his sweetie and opened it up with a big smile.
The girl, she looked at the box, and she looked at Bil, and she looked at the box, and she looked and Bil, and they sat there for five minutes. Then she screamed and jumped in the lake and ran down the river yelling and whacking her head over and over. All the folk from miles around heard her yelling and got themselves out of their funks and walked over to see what the fuss was about, because maybe it’d be something they could get angry at.
“What is it?” they asked her.
“Get it out of my head!” she screamed. “It’s stuck in there and it won’t go away! I’ll do anything to make it go away! GET IT OUT!”
Well, everyone had a bit of a puzzler at that all afternoon, but she couldn’t describe what it was she was talking about. But that night, when those folks all headed home for the evening? Hoo-wee did they get it bad. That little present of Bil’s had spread to them all – boredom stalked their steps forever now, sending them loony with it every big, empty, grumpy day from dawn to dusk. People were still grumpy, sure, but there was nothing for it but to hang together now, because the only thing worse than staring at some idiot’s face all day in a bad mood was staring at rocks.
As for Bil, he never got what all the fuss was about, but he never ran out of things to do, not until the year afterwards, when Bil Brought Fire To His Hair. That put a damper on things.

“Granna, is Bil why we feel the way we do now?”
“Yup. Hey, you asked for this.”
“Did not.”
“Get me another bottle.”
“Promise it’s over?”
“Over? Sure. Let me tell you how it’s all going to be over.”
click-psssh-gulp
“Ahhh….”

My grandmother said her grandmother told her this when she was good and pissed, so that’s good enough for me.
In the end of the end, the whole world is going to go rotten. The middle of the ground will start to go runny and smell bad and it’ll leak up through the ground and everyone will be feel just sick as dogs. That’ll last for about a hundred years, and we’ll know those hundred years are up when the smell turns sort of eggy. Before that, it’ll be more like bad meat.
Once that smell turns, the sky’ll turn green-yellow, like grandpa’s throwup, and there’ll be lots of damp stuff in the air sort of like damp underpants. Every single person in the world will throw up at the same time and it’ll all go in the water, where all the fish will die and smell even worse. All the water’ll smell gross too then, and everybody will feel so bad they’ll spend all day on the outhouse instead of punching each other. The animals will all run away and hide under all the beds, and then they’ll throw up too, and the beds will all run away and hide under the horizon, so nobody’ll be able to sleep and they’ll get really cranky and complain all the time.
And then – just when the cranking gets the loudest, just when the smells get the foulest – then Bil will come again, and he will try and wrestle the earth into not smelling so bad. But Bil is going to mistake a hornet’s nest for the earth, and his ears are going to be so full of dirt from his little rest that nobody’ll be able to tell him different, except in sign language. And Bil doesn’t know sign language.
So after that, while the whole planet’s watching Bil try and put a headlock on a set of pupating larva, the bad smell and noisy bickering’ll bring Nat over to check out what’s making all the blather, and he’ll say “ew,” then stomp on the earth three times, then scrape his foot off three times, and then run away.
That’s about it.

“Granna?
“Yeah?”
“Can you pleeeease never tell us anything again?”
“Maybe.”
“Pretty please with sugar on top?”
“Tell you what. Give me that last bottle in the back of the cupboard and I’ll never speak to you ‘till the day I die.”
“Promise not to after that, too?”
“Sure. Good girl.”

“Oral Travesty,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.

I was five years old and the sky was big and blue and boring, but not nearly as boring as my father, who was standing next to me at the time talking to a man about something tedious and financial. So I let my eyes wander across the concrete, the asphalt, the steel, and finally traced my way up, up, up into that blue blank above my head, filled with puffy white shapes. A rabbit, a dinosaur, a bone. One waved at me. A tree, a mountain. One waving at me.
I checked one more time. The cloud – a somewhat wispy and remarkably tiny specimen, more of a cloudlette – waved a bit more firmly. I understood, with the absolute certainty of a five-year-old, that it was definitely waving at me and no one else. I informed my father of this, of course, but he provided no comment, and by the time we had reached home the cloud was missing. This irritated me, but not so much as to be left grumpy after a nice dessert.

I was ten and knew absolutely everything, something my math teacher was shortly to disabuse me of. I was making snow angels in the fourteen square feet that composed our backyard to celebrate this, heedless of the harm my idle games were doing to my future chances of constructing a snowman, looking up at the sky and seeing how big a puff of vapour I could blow in the subzero air. Pretty big, it was, and it showed up nice and clear against that December sky, empty as hollow could be.
Except that one cloud, waving at me. It was bigger, it was a bit sleeker, its wispy sidetrails had filled out into a bushy and well-rounded bulk, but it was still that cloud that had given me an instant’s entertainment on a dull day half a lifetime ago.
I waved back, of course, and was pleased to see it shiver most happily in a foggy sort of way. It looked all alone up there in that empty sky, and I hoped that it was doing alright. It certainly seemed sure of itself as it set out, staying low and close to the horizon for safety as winter twilight set in, ready to let all the cold, old stars out to peer down at everything. I watched it until it was too dark to see, then a bit longer, and then my father dragged me in and told me to stop being ridiculous or I’d freeze my nose off, which sounded very unpleasant.

I was twenty and hated everything a little bit still, but that was starting to strike me as annoying and a waste of effort, along with my degree, my off-and-on relationship, and my continued existence. I certainly wasn’t planning to do anything about any of those, though, because that would take some sort of effort, and effort was a hard thing, a wrong thing, especially on a day like this with the fog rolling in and hugging the whole city as close as a teddy bear. No, to coast was the safe move here, to glide on your past and ride the broad-beamed rail of your habits until it ran out from under your feet. So I sat at my desk and let my papers go unwritten and watched the world roll by, from the little cars running down the streets (invisible except for their lights, and on some old clunkers not even that) to the yelling people on the corners (sounding like their mouths had been muffled with socks) to the big billowing gusts of fog that were eeling past my window, thick as smoke and damper than a fish’s breath.
One particular strand of it was patting against the window most insistently.
I opened it up and the whole mess poured inside. A cloud up close is a chilly, moist thing that smells of birds and water, and it set me to shivering even as we caught up on old times. It had grown spectacularly, and in its eagerness to say hello it filled my entire apartment building from tip to top. Complaints followed the next day, but I wasn’t quite stupid enough to be the one willing to admit opening a window.

I was forty and out on a business trip, all the way up in a big flying can in the air and being bored by a man in a suit who wouldn’t stop talking to me about things that were tedious and financial. I dearly wished that I were important enough to ignore him, but as my position was I had to nod my head at least once a minute and make the occasional throat-clearing noise. Because of this, although it was a surprise when the plane lurched in the sky, it was also a very welcome distraction and I became quite happy. As the man in the suit hammered all the buttons on his chair, eager to have someone to complain to, I leaned towards the window and looked outside over the broad shiny sweep of our wings.
There was my friend again, a towering thunderhead, ruler of all the miles its blackened bulk surveyed, and with a gravity and pompousness that matched its exalted position exactly. I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurd size it’d reached in its wanderings, only now fully visible to me at its natural altitude, and I think it did too, a big rumbling roar of a chuckle that bounced us about like a bowl of eggs on the lap of an anxious vegan. My seatmate did not approve in the slightest, but I was hard pressed to care as the flight wore on, only feeling the slightest hint of melancholy as we slipped away from the heights and dropped into the world down below.

Now I am eighty years old, and find myself retired and at loose ends all around, with a stable of grandchildren, a missing spouse, an awful lot of Christmas cards taking up room on my refrigerator, and a coming anniversary. It took me an awful long time to catch the pattern; too busy to pause and think, to gather up woolly old hints from a long time ago, and to compare dates.
It’s time about for an anniversary, I guess, which is why I’ve rented a boat. The weather reporters are making an awful fuss about this, and I’d better go say hello out at sea or there could be a bit of a mess for everyone else. I’m proud of what my friend’s made of itself, I really am, but it’s a bit too large to squeeze itself into an apartment building anymore. Or a state.
As panicky as those weathermen were, it was rather nice of them to give my friend a name – as old as it is, it has no business being a stranger like that. Charlotte, the third of its kind of the year, right? That’s how they name them.
Such a pretty name; I think I have a granddaughter called that, if I’m not mistaken.
I will have to congratulate it.

“A Friend on High,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.

This boat – sorry, this ship – is the SS Donovan Mitchell. It’s not a bad ship, and it’s not badly captained, and it’s got some things on it you should know about, because they’re important.
This is the first important thing that is aboard the SS Donovan Mitchell: a ticket for passage, one-way, in a berth that’s nice enough to have no rats. Or at least rats that are discreet. It’s more dog-eared than a kennel club squared, and has been nervously folded over and into itself at least a dozen different ways, unbent hourly for another round of neurotic origami.
It is currently scudding its way across the deck of the Donovan Mitchell on the breath of a foul-tempered gale, having escaped from the musty space of the pocket of Jonathon Cranberry. He is the second important thing that is aboard; as scrawny as a kite stripped down to the string and with a frightened, wide-eyed look about him that has a touch of the gecko without that lizard’s broad-smiling charm and appeal. The ticket is beneath his notice as he scrabbles up the deck, swearing at the wind and the world, sweeping his lank hair from his eyes with a shake. Another foot, another four inches, and his hand is on the ladder up – up to the bridge! There’s something important there too, but we’ll get to that later. First, we must speak of who bought Jonathon Cranberry’s ticket.
That man is the third important thing aboard the Donovan Mitchell, and he is now cold and a little stiff where he lies in his bunk down below, in the second bed of the nice clean berth that is only home to one (most discreet!) rat. What a frightful muss surrounds him! His clothes are rumpled, his bedsheets scattered, his face still set in a snarl halfway between fear and defiant bravery. His name doesn’t matter anymore, though Jonathon Cranberry might beg to differ – but Jonathon is busy now. A trunk lies open beneath his bed, kicked on its side by hasty, heavy feet and left to hang at its own discretion.
This trunk is the fourth important thing aboard the Donovan Mitchell. It is old and formed from some probably-extinct tropical wood, browner than the king of all walnuts and heavier than an angel’s sin. Not one mark mars the wood from its recent excitement, and that it was breached at all was a fault of its lock, not itself; the rusty old thing, being but mere iron and steel, gave away at pressure that the trunk proper barely deigned to notice. To its credit, though, it did creak, and that was the rub that led to the shout that ended in blood and running.
The blood in question is leaking down the man’s chest and over the blade a big knife that, despite being iron, appears to have been hewn rather than forged. The jagged rusty bits got stuck on a rib, and it appears to have been trapped within its latest, lastest victim for the present. It is the fifth important thing aboard, though it barely makes the list, deriving, as it does, much of its status from the hands that held it recently.
Those hands are pulling their owner upright now from a pile of freshly-created debris one deck beneath the fluttering of Jonathon Cranberry’s ticket, trembling with leftover fright-and-flight but still tougher than mere bone and meat have any right to be, levering up all two hundred and sixty pounds of muscle without a hitch. Except for that one large splinter in the right palm, which prompted a moaning extraction. But they’ve seen and done much worse, those hands. Beatings, bludgeonings, batterings, bashings, and breaking of bones. Why, not ten minutes ago they drove that big knife – one of a couple of gifts from a friendly employer – right through a grey man’s chest, then snatched up that old carving from his traveling trunk before his heart had stopped its last beat.
The carving was the seventh important thing on the Donovan Mitchell that night – did we mention the hands were the sixth? – and it’s no more, just a fine layer of ash and something finer still, a glaze and a glimmer. If anger gone sour has a smell, it’s in those ashes, as glossy and bright as an oil slick. They’re wafting through the night air in that angry wind now, spilling out of the Donovan Mitchell’s smokestacks. Way down there below, way down in the hull’s guts, is that boiler they came out of.
That boiler is old, old, old. It was the first piece of this iron ship that saw the daylight outside of the smelter, and it’s been chugging along for years and more without so much as a stutter, turning coal and worse into fiery red light and force and motion. But now it’s choking on ashes, this eighth important thing, and it’s choking on the skin-and-bones of a tall thin person with altogether too many teeth and fingers like knives without handles. The doors for its fuel are slammed fast and nearly bent from the force of it.
That tall thin person, the ninth important thing, is far from stranger to the grey man with the knife inside of him, and no stranger to Jonathon Cranberry, even if Jonathon doesn’t know it. It was waiting for that carving down here, all ready to take home its prize and dispose of the evidence. Those two scarred hands were strong and wary, those big solid bones are tough, but there’s power wrapped up inside of some prizes that’s too old to care about strong, and tough burns the same as anything else. The tall thin person knew that, but the hands didn’t, and that was just how it was going to be. Clean, after the ashes went up the pipes. Quiet, once the first scream died. Calm, once the one heart in the room turned black and stopped.
But all of that went wrong, didn’t it? The tenth important thing aboard the Donovan Mitchell happened. Just one loosely stacked crate, rocking just a little too close to the wrong rivet in the floor, at just the right moment. Spang!, and down it goes, crash-thud right between those two pairs of reaching hands. Whoops!, and there flies the carving, twisting in that fiery red light as it comes to meet it.
Well, what happened to that tall thin person after that wasn’t very nice at all, almost as unkindly as it was. Such a shame that nobody knows what it was, seeing as those two strong hands up and ran away so sure scared, ran blind and blubbering and hurled themselves into an empty cabin and fell all over the furniture. But now they’ve chanced upon a prize, those hands. Look, the room’s not all empty – a bottle! Just one important (well, maybe eleventh) shot. Just to calm your nerves, that’s all, that’s fine, no harm. Liquid courage, that’s all you need, a little something to drown out whatever it was that happened down there in the dark. That’s it, back on your feet. Better get out of these tight quarters, you got all turned around. Better get moving.
The Donovan Mitchell is really moving now, and that is the twelfth important thing that happens aboard it tonight. The ship’s wheel is turning as it will, too and fro, slow and slow, and of course the one manning it is Captain Neb, who’s staring out past the windshield with his thousand-mile eyes that look like sad little raisins in a face that’s a sad little prune, darkened to midnight by a million sunburns but still too pale to be healthy. That little kick that hits the Donovan Mitchell just then, maybe it’s from a real big swell, maybe it’s from the engines chugging, maybe it’s the last of those all-wrong ashes clearing their way up from the beast’s iron belly, maybe it’s just an angel dancing on the head of the right cosmic pin, but whatever it is, it makes Captain Neb blink, and he shakes his head and that’s why he sees something out of his eye’s corner
(which is the thirteenth thing)
and hits the deck.
(which is the fourteenth thing)
The fifteenth thing is that Jonathon Cranberry is carrying the worn-out bone talisman in his right hand. The sixteenth is that he’s left-handed. Both of these come into play when that twelfth-lurch hits and nearly sends him over the rail of the staircase and into the big black blue out there. As it is, he drops his treasure, his hope, and his odds of success, and that little trinket, carved by an old shaman in Siberia to while away her eldest years, it goes out there instead of he. Jonathon Cranberry is just young and senseless enough to curse at that, he is. Spilled milk isn’t worth that, Johnny. But because he’s young and senseless, that setback doesn’t hold him down, and he lurches his way up and onto the bridge just in time to be really too late.

This isn’t the seventeenth important thing that happened aboard the Donovan Mitchell. It happened a long ways away, and a long time ago, and it wasn’t a very new story, even in those days. Someone did something with someone else that somebody didn’t appreciate very much at all, and they expressed that displeasure. And when that didn’t work, well, they expressed it differently. Artistically. Good, healthy way to get rid of your aggression and jealousy and all those other emotions you’re telling yourself aren’t in you, as you hack away at that old wood and pour every little bit into each stroke of your little stone knife. Well, maybe healthy’s the wrong word.
Let’s try potent.
And maybe ‘get rid of’ isn’t how to put it.
How’s ‘re-locate’ sound?

And that’s why the seventeenth important thing on board the Donovan Mitchell is what meets the eyes of Jonathon Cranberry as he struggles that slippery latch open and staggers into that room. No proper descriptions for its look exist, because it wasn’t the sort of thing you see with eyes. You see it with your head, and what the head of Jonathon Cranberry saw there that night, well, it wasn’t pretty. Old rotten anger and seeped-in bitterness, all curdled and malformed, stunted from being squashed up inside all those knots and gnarled bits for ages on ages. It’s so big it’s amazing it fit all up inside that carving in the first place – so big it sprawls out over half the bridge and through the ship’s wheel and squishes up against the windows – and that amazement nearly got Jonathon Cranberry’s head taken off, because it hated everything – including him – too much to stand and stare like he did.
The eighteenth important thing that happened aboard saves Jonathon Cranberry’s head, and that’s Captain Neb’s wrinkled old hand reaching up from the floor and groping for the wheel and yanking it. Those little black eyes weren’t needed to see what the Captain did then, and that is that something is trying to take away his ship from him. And that is all that there is to know for Captain Neb, because first it had been his father, then his mother, then his wife, and at last his children. The nineteenth important thing that’s happening there on the Donovan Mitchell, is that the Donovan Mitchell is all that there is for its captain, and he’ll be damned afore he lets it be taken away from him, twice and thrice and twice again.
Now, there’s no shape to this thing that you can see with your eyes, but that doesn’t mean there’s no shape at all, and it certainly doesn’t mean there’s nothing that’s tangled up in that ship’s wheel. And it damned well doesn’t mean that doesn’t hurt it. And maybe it doesn’t have sounds either, that you can hear proper, with ears, but that scream it makes tugs on the heartstrings of the lovesick halfway to Boston and back. Up close it does a lot worse, and Jonathon Cranberry’s on the floor now, holding his ears and yelling, one hand half-into a pocket that just might hold some sort of help. Captain Neb’s fighting hard, harder than anything on his knees, but he can’t get up. Which is why the twentieth thing happens, as the eleventh thing barges in the door sealed inside an iron gullet inside a body attached to two big hands. And my almighty is it courageous now, and aching for a fight, and what does it see but a big blurry mess. Well, what’s a body to do but punch the biggest and blurriest part of that mess as hard as it can?
Lightning strikes, thunder smacks across the bow as the Donovan Mitchell crests a wave, knocking the whole of the bridge around in a jumble, and what but number twenty-one could bring Jonathon Cranberry skidding around and lying right smack against the side of the thing in that cabin as it tears the two hands from its throat. Muscle is strong, but it’s only so much, and it isn’t so old. Doesn’t snap away easy, though. Oh lord, it doesn’t snap easy.
But number twenty-one isn’t that.
It’s the other half of the couple of gifts given by a friendly, thin employer, and it’s just as jagged and clumsy-carved as its sister-blade, and it just fell out of a bloody coat pocket and practically into Jonathon Cranberry’s lap.
Well now, what Jonathon Cranberry does with that is what anyone would. He panics, hesitates, then nearly cuts himself snatching it up in his right hand. Careful there, could put an eye out, but he won’t put that thing out, because it’s got him sized up now, squaring off, holding its ground. Fear of iron is a spiritual thing, it is, but this is older than iron, and what’s older is stronger than iron, stronger than strength itself. It’s even older than Captain Neb, hard as that seems. He’s hanging on tight to that wheel, and his arms are shaking even if his eyes won’t blink. Who’s steering this ship, well, it’s still a close race.
The twenty-second important thing is that Jonathon Cranberry is still left-handed, and so when he makes his move, breaks the stalest of mates, he swings wide and lurches and sends that old iron blade flinging out of his hand and misses everything in the whole damned bridge except for the window, which gets smashed all to shards under that big iron blade. Gone out the window without even a clatter, and good riddance to that thing made by the tall, thin person. Even if it could’ve stood to wait a few more minutes before it took its leave.
Now the twenty-third important thing happens, and that’s that this thing in the bridge, well, it laughs. That scream, it hurt, but the laugh, it makes you sick, right in the heart, right in the head, right where you feel it when you see the wheel of a car strike a kitten. Right there, all swollen and sad.
Thing is, it laughs so loud, it misses that next thunderbolt come down; flash, roar, and all. And it misses, but Captain Neb doesn’t, and in that light he sees the next wave, the twenty-fourth wave of the twenty-fourth hour of that night, coming down on them, and knows it’s time to turn or they’re sunk. And since we know that number nineteen is true, we know they can’t sink.
So Neb takes his hands from the wheel, and that thing wins its wrestling match. And this surprises it so damned much, well, it just about bowls it over – quite a stagger, especially leaning into a trough like the one the Donovan Mitchell just plunged into. Especially when here comes Jonathon Cranberry, young but foolhardy, clumsy but a good fullback. Shoulder-first.
That shoulder takes twenty-fifth, it takes its target, and it takes the thing in the bridge right out of the bridge, through the window, into the storm and the wind and the rain, all the way out onto the deck. All that wavy mass-that-isn’t isn’t so good in a north gale, is it now? But it grasps, and holds tight, and clings to the prow of the ship just as it comes through the trough, held up high to the sky on a metal pole like a bird perched a thousand miles from any tree.
The twenty-sixth comes white and searing hot, and as old as the first storms. And what’s left over is for the ocean’s mouth, and if that isn’t old, nothing is.

There’s quite a fuss come morning, and even more come arrival in port. But all of that isn’t what we’re here to talk about, and there’s just one more bit of that. The twenty-seventh important thing that happened aboard the Donovan Mitchell is that Jonathon Cranberry, apprentice occultist, amateur fullback, and orphan, lost a father, and that Captain Thomas Neb, ex-father, widower, and walking silence, was saved by a son. And there’s nothing that binds a tie so firmly as a tragedy.
Mind you, this all led to a lot more later on, and some of it was even important. But that was afterwards and elsewhere.

“Twenty-seven Important Things Aboard the Donovan Mitchell,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.

At the start, there were three. As always.
The three watched, the three waited, the three judged and reigned and brooded over a single little planet of a single little star, left all alone and drifting in a corner of the biggest, blackest sky that was everything.
Let us call them the three sisters, even though they are not. It’s simpler that way.
The three sisters watched that little planet, watched as it cooled from molten fragments of dust and screaming heat. They watched the impacts, the bombardments, they waded through the magma and endless winds of its birth and let them blow away as the years of the planet’s birth dripped farther into the past. The three brothers saw the first moisture, the first condensation, vapour, rains, and then the terrible storming floods that led to the seas and the oceans. The cold that turned the whole earth ice, they saw that too. And when it thawed, they saw the little bits and pieces that had stewed in the oceans for a time were getting bigger, swarming, multiplying, moving. They were strange; so small, but so many, and so determined.
First sister deemed them life. Ephemeral and feeble, but moving in a way that mindless matter did not. And they were worthy of watching for this reason.
Second sister deemed them changeable, ever-warping, ever-altering, forever seeking something they could never find. And they were worthy of watching for this reason.
Third sister made nothing fact, but watched all the same. And third sister was final, and that was how it should be.
So the three sisters watched the planet turn and its life move and grow, and they watched as great masses of rock and iron slammed into it and blasted life an inch from the endless. Over and over. Each time it was almost through, each time it scraped back with boundless tenacity. Cell by cell, it came up and up, and it grew in all ways, mental and physical, in size and complexity, in number and diversity. It lurked in every pool and every den, it was guided by tiny minds enshrined in miniature thrones of flesh. All crude, but all working.
And then one morning, the three sisters looked down and saw that life had found a new way to make things. They watched as a hairy creature of the near-plains chipped a rock to fit its hand, then attached it to a stick.
Using matter to serve mind, so deliberately? How interesting. Could they do that? They could do that. Why not?

First sister is first. That is first sister’s nature. First sister reached down, down, down, through the times and the spaces and the formless world-that-might-be and touched the little fleshy form of one of the near-plains things as it stood in a dark place, watching the sun disappear. Touched lightly, and softly, and shaped it. Matter to serve mind.
It worked, and first sister was pleased. Piles of stones were heaped at first sister’s direction, through her flesh-puppetry, and more matter was dismantled atop them, joint by joint and limb by limb, heaped higher. The piles of stones grew finer as the years grew on, and carvings were added to them with the many odd names they gave to first sister. First sister didn’t know what a name was, and didn’t care for them, only for their matter. Bodies. Bodies upon bodies hurled into piles for first sister inspection, to be shaped and made servile, and first sister made life take on forms it never would have dreamed of otherwise in its dull plod. Things made terrible music under the moon as first sister listened, and the night was a dangerous place wherever the bonfire lights of the stone-piles shone.
First sister watched, and was pleased, but first sister’s watching was only so long. As the time of life changed, it turned against first sister, and first sister’s stone piles became battling-grounds of life against life, where spear met flesh and bones were shattered. Years dropped away and so did first sister’s names, from hundreds, to dozens, to one lost and ancient shrine. And then that too was forgotten, and first sister watched a world that knew first sister no more.

After first sister, second sister watched too, and knew that first sister’s time was over and hers was dawning, as that is how things are. The three sisters – no, they are three brothers, yes, that will serve them – rearranged themselves, and second brother looked down at the things that first brother had shaped, now alone and wandering (some may live yet, in the sorriest corners of the darkest pits), all the old piles of stone abandoned and destroyed or hidden away. But the plains-apes were still shaping matter, still making minds real. And in a village in a wide swath of sand, second brother saw one change all the minds of all around him, using no tool, mind to mind without matter. This was worthy of work.
So second brother reached up, up from beneath the dead weighted dust of infinite distance and empty ages, and touched a mind, stripped it bare of its fleshy sheath, and showed it everything, then put it back.
The first one died. The third died. But many many primes later, second brother had shown itself to the mind of life that did not die, and placed it down among matter once more.
It told others, and they told others, and they told others. And that is how the little things that called themselves humans came to build new places for second brother – carving tunnels like worms, meeting in dark places, shedding light in caverns where it was never meant to gleam so carelessly. Their thoughts they held out to second brother like candies to their children, and second brother gave them new for old. Some lived, some died, none cared. They played flutes for second brother in those days. Strange piping things that whined and droned and seemed to spin in and out of hearing in a way that had nothing to do with pitch and everything to do with depth. Prayers were made that had no words, only screams, and fungi burned in braziers that set minds alight with frenzy.
But as second brother watched, time saw the world of life grow ever more filled with the purpose and tools of the humans. They fought one another as fiercely as ever they had under the eye of first brother, and with hate and fire came ingenuity great enough to shrink oceans under the steel keels of strange things upon the sea that were not fish, and roaring monsters that had iron where bone should suffice. The world filled up, and as it filled the ideas and thoughts of second brother became packed in tightly, confined to few minds, then fewer, then fewer yet until they were no more than bad dreams and errant scribblings in the most hidden journals of over-imaginative and susceptible poets. And second brother held no minds, and left no trace of what had been upon the planet, or beneath it.

After second brother, third brother – no, third, just third – third’s time was then, as the others retracted themselves from the little planet. It was how things were meant to be. Third is last, and third is finality, built on all that comes first and second.
Third bore witness to the great rock-and-mortar mounds of blood and congealed flesh that had been the work of first, and thought upon their empty, silent stones.
Third bore witness to the eldritch, lurid caverns of ghastly light that had been dreamed of by the mad minds of second, and thought upon the silence where gibbering had flown freely.
Third bore witness to the world-that-was, and knew that there were too many bodies and too many weapons to bring blood and sacrifices to its humans. Third knew there too many minds and too many moving mouths to hide in the corners, to whisper of forgotten madness.
Third bore witness, and third saw that vanity and pride was as weak and vulnerable as fear and careless thoughts, and third did not reach but MOVED, as humans might, and spoke using a mouth, and whispered words of air and matter that put seeds of mind and motion in the head of one architect, then another, and many more.
Third spoke of air and heights, and lofty perches that would be the envy of any eagle. There would be mirrored walls and steel-framed skeletons and monuments to the ingenuity and power of the peoples that made them, who would make of their dwellings darts to pierce the very sky they would span. Lies all, but pretty, oh so pretty, and the men with blueprints and charts followed them by the dozens and the scores, fighting over one another to build the highest, the next highest, then to best all the records and start over. Cities sprouted like mushrooms – upwards, reaching, grasping, straining up into the air. Men and women squinted their eyes over blurred heights that their instincts, made for trotting on near-savannah, were hapless to judge, and scrabbled nervously at their desks in offices a thousand feet above the ground. Air was piped in and treated specially at those thin heights, and the walls of the tall buildings whispered faintly with the winds that fought to tear the lofty places down. A tiny, artificial haven for humans that grew more artificial themselves; hollowed and scurrying and more and more nervous without knowing why, feeling lost and emptier as each day drained. The armour that gave those castles in the air false courage was glass-all-polished until it was as bright as mirrors, and their mirrors were as brilliant and soulless as the sky that they delved into ever farther, until they finally scraped its heights.
And when they reach there, just now, just a little past now, they will find third waiting for them.

After third? There is no after.
Third is last, and third is final.

“Three,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.

Albert was not a bad man; he was an accountant. Staid verging on stale, yes, but not a bad man, just a quiet one, a small one. A lot of people said he was dull, but none of them knew the first thing about accounting so he paid them no heed and got on with his life, which was mostly columns and rows. He loved them as some people loved trees: tenderly, but without overt sentiment, as he did his children, who subsisted on a series of good firm handshakes and level-headed compliments throughout their more difficult years in school.
And then one kindly Monday morning, everything changed – at least for Albert. He was walking to work one day, to a big sweeping skyscraper with a stuffy little room for him hiding somewhere in its esophagus, and a street was blocked off for construction. As it happens, there was a little park down the side path he hurried through, and there was a little pond in that little park, and Albert’s eyes did alight upon a rather smaller pair of eyes in that little pond.
They went “chugga-rumph” and vanished with a plink of water.
Albert stood there for five seconds, then went to work and made an inquiry of the security guard about eyes in pools and chugga-rumph.
“Frog,” said the guard. “The park’s been doing nice this year then. They like clean water. They can take in the sick real easy through their skin, y’know?”
Albert y’knew – at least, now he did. So he went upstairs to his office and locked the door and did all his work inside one hour, so that he had the rest of the day free for a sudden and somewhat bigger problem. And most of the evening, and a good bit of the night until the security guards came upstairs and kindly but firmly turfed him out onto the street with a bit of money for cab fare to skip the muggers. Albert slipped the money back under the front doors and went home by the long way again, stopping by the pond to peer with wary eyes for a glimpse of a hint of a theory.
The glimpse went “ribbit.”
Albert slapped his forehead, let fly with a volley of cursing that would’ve made a twelve-year-old blanch, and ran home in a mist of numbers and calculations and division thick enough to slice timber with. He dashed through his door, up the stairs, and sealed himself in the bathroom, where he covered both sides of each and every sheet of toilet paper with notes.
Albert took the next day off, then rethought that and made it the next week. This was easy as he had accidentally performed all of the week’s work the day previously, before he began work on his little problem.
His oldest child phoned him in the late afternoon.
“I thought you’d be at work. Are you sick?”
“Mmmm,” said Albert. “Busy.”
“More work?”
“No! No, not really. I’ve got to solve for it, that’s all. I’ve got to solve for it, and it won’t add up.”
“Well, if you’re not working, you should get some fresh air. You spend all week cooped up indoors, you should get a bit of a breather while you’ve got a chance.”
Albert smoothed down the frantically rumpled remnants of his hair and looked out the window. The sun was shining firmly, if a bit murkily.
“Yes!” he agreed, and he hung up.
Then he went to the zoo. For a bit of research and experimentation. It had been years and years since the family’s membership had expired, and it took him three tries to find the exhibit he was seeking, two of which ended up with him lost in the restroom near the orangutans.
He squinted carefully against the glass, read the placard thoroughly three times, cleared his throat, and cautiously enunciated “chugga-rumph?”
A pair of tiny glossy eyes peered back at him from a stretch of preserved bark and replied “cree-ree” with piercing disdain.
Albert said some strong words loudly enough to attract cruel looks from a nearby zookeeper, and began making furious notes on his arm. He moved from exhibit to exhibit. Cree-ree, ribbit, chugga-rumph, each dialect was tried and discarded in kind against case study until the gates closed and he was guided with firm not-quite-anger from the premises, shouting questions to the zookeepers all the way about nutrition and sleeping habits and the level of activity during the summer.
Cut off from that particular route of research ‘till past the next dawn, Albert grew restless and fierce with inactivity, prowling the extremely small and tidy halls of his home through the evening. His eyes alit at last upon his salvation: a tome of mathematics dense enough in volume to kill a horse, and filled with enough formulae to pop clean of skull the average brain.
He’d read it long ago in school, and discarded it soon afterwards. But if you’ve got to learn something new, best to start over at the bottom…

Dawn found Albert already wide awake, fortified at his breakfast table with a pot-full of coffee, hold the mug, and no fewer than six textbooks of mathematical and biological knowledge, with an eye to the amphibious. His eyes were jumpier than a fat summer fly, and skimmed from page to page with a peerless disregard for the boundaries of cover and spine. Entire paragraphs were ignored, chapters parsed with a glance. His fingers ached with neglect, but his mind was as limber as a preschoolers and a million times more trained.
“Yes!” he said at last, past nine o’clock, making dusty vocal chords shimmer and shake. “Of course! Exactly!” And then he jumped up from his desk with the force of joy only to be found in the freshly awakened, and nearly broke both his kneecaps due to stiff muscles.
Some hours later Albert made his way once more to the zoo, and a few scantling minutes more took him to the cages containing his test subjects.
“Ribbit,” he proclaimed with confidence empty of any trace of presumptuousness, firmness without arrogance.
A chin inflated at him lazily, then gave up halfway through for want of motivation. “Gluk.”
Albert walked home that day slumped with despair, his shoulders stooped under the burden of a much larger and crueller world than he had ever dreamed. Every other block his head would lift, buoyed up by a hopeful thought, then a shadow would cross his face and his chin would sink to his chest once more, tugged down by blackest reality in all its pendulous grotesqueness. His feet were his visible world now, one step two step look at the crosswalk, three step four step hear the stoplights talk, five step six step where’d that grass come from.
The grass had come from a little park, with a little pond, and Albert had almost walked into it. He raised his eyeballs to it, reddened with exhaustion and unshed tears, and met a very small pair of clear dark eyes that were resting quite comfortably on a rotten yet pleasant log.
Albert opened his mouth, to speak what he could not guess, but all that emerged from his raw and aching throat was a feeble croak.
The eyes blinked once. “Ribbit?” they replied.
Albert stood there, poleaxed.
“Ribbit?”

The rest of Albert’s trip home was unknown to all, including himself. What mattered was that he was back in minutes and scribbling calculations with a pen in each hand and one in his mouth, tongue protruding from the corner of his lips only to stab in anger at its inability to grasp a fourth pen. At one point in a burst of maniacal energy he attempted to write with his feet, and found to his astonishment that he could. This redoubled his efforts, and soon not a scrap of his office, then his bedroom, then bathroom, then his living room lay unmarked by scrawling ink. Tile, linoleum, boards, drywall, sofas – all was blank medium to be marked clear with math and mindpower. He had to invent over fifteen new symbols and double the size of the greek alphabet on his way, doing the math on the fingers and fingernails of his left hand. There was material in that for a book of essays large enough to crush a coffee table.
At last it was done, as much as done could be, all but for one thing.
Albert stood there, triumphant in the middle of the floor, stood at that final pair of parallel lines engraved at his feet before his favourite chair, and wrote one word.
Then he vanished.
Along with the house.

There was quite a ruckus when word got out that Albert Pendmuss had got missing. He had not been a volatile or extraordinary man, and the abruptness of his departure was a shock to his neighbours and workers. His children, at least, took it in stride. There was always something that had been cooking under Dad’s flat hair and quiet voice, and if it chose to express itself in his up and disappearing one day and leaving a pretty nice little pond where his house had been, well, so be it. And they made sure nobody thought of putting harm to that pond, though only the most soulless suit-wearer would’ve ever dreamt of it.
It was a nice little place, on a nice little lot, and the water was strangely kindly and clear, warm enough for little lily-pads to sprout up (look, if you turn them over, you can see little veiny squiggles that could almost be words: ‘zetta,’ ‘rana’) clean enough for frogs to pop up with little inky spots all over them, like pen blots.
And there was one big fellow right there in the center of it, fat and pleased as a king on his throne. And when we asked him if he’d solved for it, well, all he said was
“Chugga-rumph!”
and that’s a good enough answer for anyone.

“Problem: Solve for Frogs,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.

They always tell you to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes before you judge them. You know, ‘they.’ The same ones that tell you your shirt looks nice and you shouldn’t swim after eating or you’ll cramp up and drown.
Well, a fifty-fifty track record is enough for me to give them the benefit of the doubt. And when that angry old woman yelled at me I figured hey, why not? I’ve got the morning free anyways, and it’s not like the car hit or nothing. How long could it take? It’s just one mile.
So I tracked her home, broke in, stole a pair of sandals, and now I’m taking a hike. Seemed a bit ethically dubious, but we’re following advice here. Not our legal responsibility.
Well the first few meters of this walk are dull as ditchwater. Sleepy, hungry, poopy, and screamy. Mostly screamy. Screamy, screamy, scream, if you liked screaming so much kid why didn’t your parents NAME you screamy? I figure maybe that’s what this whole deal is all about: everyone was a yelling dingbat from birth, and the sooner you realize it the more sense everything they do will make.
A few more steps and hey, cognition kicks in! Now we’re cooking with gas – and woah, are those legs I see wobbling around underneath me? Hot damn, walking’s fine as can be. Look at how fast you can go! Whoosh – from one side of the room to the other! Whoosh – up the stairs to bug mom! Whoosh – halfway down the stairs backwards!
Wait, ow, ow, ow.
So there’s a broken arm there tagging along. That lasted for a good pace right there, that did, and it just weighed me down like a lead brassiere. The world seemed sadder and greyer, people were meaner, and candy didn’t taste as sweet. Wait, it was hospital candy. Damnit, even the vending machines in those places can’t escape the taint.
The cast popped off and I sort of had to relearn walking, but it was way faster this time. And then came the toys. All those wonderful toys. I’d had a spoiled older brother and my parents weren’t about to go spending good money on new toys just so I wouldn’t be getting any sorts of unwomanly ideas as a week tyke; I got a whole pile of old tin soldiers. They were just sturdy enough to stand up straight after a good stomping and had just the right bit of give to quiver like shell-shocked soldiers after an artillery foot came swooshing through their frontline. Here we were, with world war II just over and I’m already reminding people of the key strategic importance of airborne bombing. Damn I had no style, bringing all that up while everybody’s doing their best to shrug it off and get back to their feet. Not that I have to care about any of that. It all was across the ocean, and the ocean’s really big, like, hugely. I think my guess was about the size of a highway, but water.
Oh wow, what a coincidence. Up next comes the first trip to the ocean. That was a bit of a shocker. Though not as much as the crab in the dress. You jackass Thomas, I barely dented your shitty ol’ tin soldiers and you’d outgrown them, grow the hell up. Yeah that’s right you take that punch, you take it right in the kisser. Kiss through that lip if you can, twitface. Nice shark tooth, and hey, free crafts project! Necklace time with mom as a make-up for the spanking. Yeah, that was a good time there, and a good run.
School. Oh damn, damn, damn and it was all going so well, too. Here’s your As, here’s your Bs, here’s your Cs. Excuse me miss I already know those well shut up and learn them again and you can sit in the corner you little idiot. Education is bliss. Except for math. Math wasn’t hard, and it was even fun. Despite the teacher’s best efforts. What a mouth on that man, not that you could see it under the beard. Christ, looks like a mangy badger bit his fourth chin and never let go.
Now we’re picking up the pace here! School just makes those days fly by, which is funny because every single one feels like it lasts forever. Like filling your pockets full of lead and then falling over, I guess. Hey, right around now I started getting interested in guys. So that’s what that feels like. Aww, I told Clarence how I felt and he told me I smelled gross. Cuuuuute. Oh wait, I feel terrible and I’m crying after I shoved him over and ran away. Do I get cookies for that, mom? Nooo I get told to be nicer. Thanks. Thanks a lot for showing you care NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ME.
Score, next week I got cookies. Pure chocolate too, none of that chocolate chip crap. If I’m getting chocolate, I want all the chocolate. Don’t chip off what you can just chuck in.
I really got into my stride now, time just flapping by. No more toys, no more games, just run, run, run. Run through school, run through a part-time typist job, run as fast as you can until high school’s over and you’re still doing the same part-time job and your boyfriend just drove into a street lamp and got himself killed without a seat belt.
Ow. Now that hurts. Really tore me up inside, y’know? Hadn’t felt that bad in a few forevers. Lots of crying, lots of yelling. A few fights with mom. Time’s crawling now, but the days are still sailing by, year by year. More jobs, more fights. Booze started to show up just now too, and look who’s my new best friend! Wow, I went from Lucy Lily-Liver to Sally Chugsalot overnight – check out that vodka action! Stagger in awe as I down whole bottles of substances served in small glasses! Behold as I end up in the hospital after another few hundred yards of this and a near-fatal encounter with alcohol poisoning!
Hey, that doctor looked really nice. Aw well, you can’t mix business and flirty looks, hippopotomi oaths and all that. Besides, I can’t really ask him out for drinks.
Oh. Well, I guess I did. And hey, I just took water. And a ring. And a really nice dress mom had been saving in mothballs for a few decades. Aw jeez, did we really cry when we were hugging? No, no, that was just her. I just got my eyes all wrinkly from the mothballs and it squeezed out some moisture, that’s all.
Whatever.
Wow, that’s the smoothest stretch I’ve travelled yet. Nice and firm-packed, well worn as the stones in my sneakers, but still dreamy with misty memories. I can ever tell what colour the floorboards were: some incompetent idiot’s efforts at fixing up the varnish had left it a half-and-half piebald. The stained glass made up for it, except for that one window right over the altar where they made Jesus all cross-eyed and it was pretty funny because Mary looked so pleased about it in a quiet way. “Oh good, my son is healthy and the son of god and also god and also his eyeballs nearly meet. This is a good day.”
Yeowch those details flew away fast underfoot! The moment that altar goes into sight, it just tunnel visions away from all those flights of fancy and turns into a deadlocked sight aimed right at that man’s face. Hah, he flubbed the kiss – poor sucker forgot to shave and I nearly chewed the stubble off his lip. But it was so cute.
Now what’s that up ahead in the road, eh? I think it’s.
Well.
I’ll just.
Uh.
Avert my eyes a bit here.
Don’t want to be a rubbernecker or anything. Besides, I’m sure the next big thing’ll stick out (ha ha oh god don’t look) just fine AAAUGH MY GUT IS ENORMOUS. Jesus I can’t sleep on my freaking back OW OW OW my feet are sore ARRRRRRGH VOMITING.
The road here is a goddamned mess. It’s swerving up and down and all around and I think it just did a triple backflip and I can’t tell because I’m delirious with sleep deprivation from something kicking my stomach from the inside out GO TO SLEEP YOU LITTLE SHITHEAD IT’S FIVE IN THE MORNING.
Okay, okay. I can calm down now. Wow that last ways just dragggged. But we’re almost half a mile down now, and HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHRRRRRRRRRRRRRRNNNNNNNNNNGHHH.

Aww. She is just precious. I hope someone wrote down the name, because I am gonna pass out now.

Right, all’s well. I think I can get moving a bit faster from here on out, seeing as I’ve gained some valuable perspective on why someone would yell at me for no goddamned reason because Jesus fucked if that isn’t a good excuse. Now I can just pick up this particular pace and take it past that incessant screaming, screaming, screaming and get all the way into OH COME ON NOT TWICE? TWICE? Really. Really. I just went through all that last year and now I get to do it again? Well, at least it can’t be as bad the second ti

Nope.

And this is where the pacing goes all funny and it turns into one sprint at the speed of snail’s molasses dropped into quicksand. That first third of this mile I had to walk? It sprints by in a few steps and a bound for those two girls of mine. I’ve barely budged before they’re crawling, then walking, then talking back (skip just plain talking, it’s of no mind and no notice to anyone). And just like that, without moving much farther I’m old. How can’t you help but feel old when you look at something that young? They’d turn a mayfly of sixteen hours into a grizzled grandfather by comparison.
I’m so proud of them that I can’t help but yell at them day and night until they move their beautiful, clever, lazy asses out because they’re sure as hell not giving me any rest until they do.
Now I’ve got all the time in the world to rest, and I’m lonely, lonely, lonely. Then they come for a visit and afterwards it isn’t so bad. And well, it’s not like I’ve got no company. I’ve got him, right?
Oh. Something else got him too.
My these feet are just flying now over these souls of mine. I’d better keep running in case I have to look back.
Check it out! Grandkids! Well damnit if I can’t taste that arthritis as it crackles through joints and up into bones. Cute as buttons – can’t have gotten that from my son-in-laws. Aw bless their hearts, I taught ’em a few bad words. Hah, that look on your momma’s face isn’t going to leave my memory that easy. Good as a photograph it is. Yessir this whole day’s been alright, time to go get a snack with the kids AW C’MON SON I ALMOST RAN US OVER FUCKIN’ HOOLIGAN DAMN RIGHT I’M GIVING ME THE FINGER I COULD’VE KILLED A LITTLE KID ASSHAT.

Well.

Well now. I’d better put these back; they’re a little sweaty but I bet she’d like to keep them. Lotta stories in your average set of feet, more than I’d have guessed. Strange mile to walk though. Clock says nothing and reads nothing, mind says about sixty years.
Wait a second, I forgot something. I walk, and then I, then I…
Yeah, then I judge, that’s it. But there’s no way I’m picking that lock twice, say nothing about walking that mile all over.
Aw well, law’s too much of a pain in the ass anyways.

“A Short Walk,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.

Many years ago, there was a youth. The youth asked a question of his elder, and the elder thought about it.
“I do not know the answer to your question,” he said. “But my father’s father was told a fable by his father’s father that may help you deal with it. Would you like to hear it?”
“No,” said the youth.
“Good,” said the elder, “it is called “the Mantis and the Spider.” Now you sit down right there and listen up…”

One day, far away and long ago, a mantis came across a spider in his web. This is all metaphorical, so don’t get too worried about talking animals and all of that. It’s a metaphor.
“Good day,” said the mantis.
“Guess so,” said the spider.
“How is there a doubt in your mind?” said the mantis. “The sun shines bright, without rain to trouble us. The little insects which we both feed upon are abundant and delicious. Truly, it is indeed a good day!”
“Always room for more of a bad thing in any good thing,” said the spider.
“Pessimism, pessimism,” chided the mantis. “Now tell me, what good will that attitude do you? It saps your life of joy and throws away the chance for relaxation, leaves you a nervous juddering wreck! Your nerves will be shot, your eyes will grow dim and fearful, you’ll be dead before you even have the chance to be cannibalized while mating! Put aside your weary doubts and feel the refreshment of happiness.”
“If you always expect the worst, if you’re ever surprised it’s pleasant,” said the spider. “That’s all the happiness I need and more. Why’ve you got the time to go around bossing me on how cheerful I sound, eh? Don’t you have something better to do?”
“I am fed and I am looking for a mate at present, tracking for pheromones left, right, and center. What more is there for me to do?”
“Pshaw,” said the spider. “That’s barely anything. You have too much time on your hands.”
He meant claws, okay? Some idioms don’t translate too well across species.
“Excuse me?” said the mantis.
“That’s nothing, what you’re doing. Everything can do that much, and most of us do more. Look at me, I’m a hundred times busier than you are. That’s why I don’t have the time to go popping off on how danged pretty the sunshine is this morning: I’m doing things.”
“I’m hunting and searching for a mate right this second, and most of us do no less,” said the mantis, who was now getting annoyed.
“Oh sure, you’re hunting alright,” said the spider. “The problem is that you just aren’t willing to put any real effort into it.”
The mantis bristled. It was a natural thing for it to do, being so thin and sharp. At least half of its existence was composed of automatic bristling. “No real effort? Do you have any idea how long I can stand here, in one spot, waiting for a single little tiddly piece of prey? Not a single twitch, not a jot of a snippet of an ounce of a sound, all for hours on end until prey comes. And then I wait more, and more, and more still, and only at the very moment of success, THEN do I strike. Are you telling me that all of that takes no real effort?”
“Oh, it’s effort,” said the spider. It scratched its leg with one of its other legs. “But it’s not REAL effort.”
“I beg to differ.”
“Listen, I hold still,” said the spider. “I keep close and quiet. I can do that fine. But first, I have do real work. I have to build a web, and build it strong, and build it in the right spot at the right time. Got to make sure the breeze won’t rip it, got to make sure the rain won’t spill all down it and wash me out. That’s planning, that’s real effort. Then I’ve got to get down to nuts and bolts and brother-bug, you haven’t seen effort ’till you’ve seen the effort that goes into web building. I have to plan and measure by bodylengths and spin all around ’till I’m blue in the face and red in the spinnerets. Then it’s not over, oh no it isn’t. I’ve got to repair it after every catch, and every meal’s a struggle to wrap it all up before it gets away. THAT’S real effort.”
“Real effort?” said the mantis. “Now look here! I’ve tolerated your tone thus far, but this tripe is simply too much to bear. For your information, each day I must find a good spot to hunt and eat. YOU on the other hand need simply sit atop your spinnerets – which, for your information, are not red in the slightest but are rather of more-than-ample-dimensions – and wait for your dinner to fly into your mouth. Do you think these wings are for show? Do you think that my lanky posture is that of a frame that gives way under the slightest bit of travel? May I ask, oh One of Great Effort, when was the last time you had to subdue prey that wasn’t safely entangled in your silk? Every meal I take must be earned, and I eat my food as tough as can be: bite by bite! None of this faffabout liquification followed by suckling like an infant mammal at its mater’s teat, no sir, not for me! You are a lazy sod, an indolent cob, a selfish attercop without a bite of venom in his fangs but rather poison atop his tongue for those who work harder than he dreams to survive.”
The tongue thing is just another idiom. Pay it no mind.
The spider raised himself up on his web, swollen with indignation. “Indolent cob, is it now?” he hissed, all those hairy little needles on his body rubbing on each other to make a sound like cockroach hell. “Speaks the berk who’s too stupid to mate without getting his head chomped off and taken for his lady’s lunch, that’s who’s talking to me about indolence and laziness with as many pretty words as he pleases!”
“And you’re one to speak of mates that dine on one’s own flesh, aren’t you, my little arachnid friend?” said the mantis, waving his long thin arms around in a somewhat alarming manner.
“That’s for the widows, and I’m no widow, you pompous pinhead! Give me an excuse and I’ll silk your head and have it off before your pretty little friends get a crack at it!”
“With you I won’t have the head off, oh no no no,” whispered the mantis. “You’re too small to be a serious struggle. I’ll just eat you live. Bite by bite. As is only proper.”
They sat there for a minute, tense as lightning.
An antenna twitched. A mandible tweaked.
The breeze let another carefree gust blow through the web, making it whistle at a range just barely too high-pitched for any ear on earth to hear. Startled, the two little invertebrates looked up into the sky and saw nothing above them but that big blue wildness and its moving heat.
“Well, it’s not exactly a bad day, is it?” said the spider.
“Quite nice,” said the mantis.
They looked back down, at each other. Neither was sure what to say next.
Then a very large booted foot tumbled down from the sky, the breeze playing at its dangling shoelaces, and squashed the mantis flat. As it uprooted itself for the next stride it tore a hole clean through the spider’s web, dooming him to face a lingering death of starvation some two days later.

“Is there a moral to this fable that will help answer my question?” asked the youth.
The elder snored, like a gentle breeze.
The youth wandered away, disgruntled, and thought up his own answer. Much as it had been for the previous six generations, whether or not that had been the intended result remained entirely opaque.

“A Fable,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.

CNS 0352, Full Shipcrafting, Outmoon Semester. Dr. Mannemeul Cirtosh, Phd.
Week 1
Class is small this term, but enthusiastic. Word must have gotten around about the failure rate last year; just as well, to have fewer slowpokes in the hammocks. Four students, three of them all heart and soul in this, one more who’s interested and bright but might just be dabbling in the end. Stencils flying at notes all through the introductory lectures, eyes pinned to the charts, immediate, clear questions from all quarters whenever prompted. This is going to be a good one.
They all should pass, that’s a given, sure as the tides. It’s who makes the biggest splash by the end – that’s the suspense.
Students
-Mafi
-Holliburt
-Gilmer
-Slikes

Attendance’ll be easy to track this year.

Week 2
Students made a bit more of a mark this week. As I thought, the planned pace is too slow; all of them have already made preliminary blueprints and have crafted prototypes on their own time as pre-coursework. Agreed to grade them as their first assignments, next class we’ll begin drafting work on their final projects. More time can only mean higher quality.
-Mafi, she’d designed a skirmishing warship with a specially crafted hull that shaped its wake with adjustable settings in the form of all kinds of flaps and ridges. You could erase almost all trace of your passing, and in combination with a muffled engine and a low profile, you can slip through places a rowboat would be tricky with. Great in theory, a nightmare in fact. Originality’s worth a lot of points, even if the breezy math’s going to take them right back. But the detail on the armaments keeps her mark high. The lady knows weapons. If she wants a recommendation for navy work when she graduates, I’ll sign her off before she can finish the sentence.
-Holliburt had put together a novelty. A damned interesting novelty, but a novelty; a fishing boat whose sails could be converted to soak up moonlight in a dead calm. You could see where he’d thought “this would be a good idea” and then where he stopped. Good draftsmanship on the papers, a nice concept, but no follow-through, no thought put past his one idea. If anyone stops at the end of this course, it’ll be him.
-Gilmer’s father owns one of the industrial shipworks out in Motash. Shows through the freighter sketches he gave me: artsy as anything that could be dreamed up from past midnight, but built to survive a blast from God’s own broadside. Seeing all those big prefabricated tankers get hammered out all alike all day, every day, from childhood to youth, that just sets a creative mind squirrelly with thoughts on what to do different.
-Slikes’s proposal was the farthest out of mind: a ship that ran almost entirely underwater, with just the solar sails sticking above the waves, designed to be quiet, unobstrusive, discreet, and blend in with the colours around it, so nothing took it for lunch. Crazy, but thought out thorough, and the math she’s got scribbled out there in the corners has stuff I’d use a calculator for. Top marks for her.
Good stuff overall. Too many big ideas with not enough fine print, sure, but we can work on that. Build the things piece by piece, I always tell them. Piece by piece.

Week 4
More theory this week, and had all their assignments graded out before it was done. Another perk of a small classroom.
The main objective for the first session was to get their brains humming. Think about the whole ship and all of its parts, don’t tie yourself too hard to one big idea – but don’t confuse one big idea with the One Big Goal: the thing you’re making this ship to do. Keep that goal there in your eye at all times, and make sure every single thing you do reaches it. Then you’ll be alright.
Day two, all four of them have a pretty good clue of what they’re working on. Gave the go-ahead to all of them.
-Mafi’s doing a heavyweight fearbreaker. I guess she figures that if she can design whatever she can dream up, she might as well dream big. Can’t wait to see her choice in cannons for that thing, there’s going to be more guns than rivets.
-Holliburt’s going to try and run off a midweight storm skiff. Ambitious choice with a good rate of failure; must be trying to impress me. Making ships that’ll keep afloat in a bad sea is tough. Making ships that thrive in a bad sea is downright nasty.
-Gilmer has a mind to stretch himself out of his comfort zone; no tankers from him, but a roly-poly coral rover, all belly and all living space to hold a full-sized clan from grandparents down onwards. A craft made from pure practicality, but I’ve a hunch he’s going to make it pretty.
-Slikes, she was almost too busy scribbling away to even talk to me, adding between sentences. Said she was working out her idea as she went, and the endpoint could change a bit as she goes, but one thing’s for sure: it’s going to be travelling below the waterline.

Week 5
Piece by piece started up this week with the hull. Started off with information: gave them the full story of all the golden oldies, a rundown of the latest tricks that haven’t made it into catalogues yet, and encouragement to look up as much as they could.
-Mafi’s gone with a mix of old and new that both the crustiest admiral and the scrawniest techman’d approve. The hull’s good-old-fashioned triple-plated fearbreaker steel, forged through the lens of the innermost moon for that unbending tenacity that soaks up an impact and spits it back out at you; but shaped to a setup of her own design: strange wavy patterns and ripple-soft swirls that according to her should give the thing an unbeatable amount of forward momentum. Asked her about stopping, she just said “don’t.” Pithy, but I’m not so sure it’ll sell to an accountant.
-Holliburt took Mafi’s plan, but in reverse: a design not too far off the classic storm skiff, with all those outriggers and the twin hulls. But the material, now, that was new. Sharkwood, they called it; special stuff that was successfully created in a laboratory in the last decade and only fabricated non-commercially even now. Took forever to get the saws working right, took longer to get just the right size on the trees, but the natural grain on those planks lets them just slide through water without even a twitch, like the boat was greased by angels
-Gilmer’s hull is out of its norm. Round, sure. Made of living coral, it goes without saying. Bloated, a bit, if a tad sleek for something of its sort. But it’s smaller than any coral rover I’ve ever seen by about a third. He’s up to something, I can guess it, and what’s more, I trust him to make it all play out fine. Can’t wait for the interior plans.
-Slikes’s plans…well, for a minute there I’d thought she’d handed in her biology work by mistake. Long and lean, thin as an eel’s blood and sleeker than sin. But then you look closer, and it all makes a bit more sense. She’s making something that’ll travel under the surface, yes. All the way under. For that, there’ll be no wind power, no moonlens, no nothing. This girl has to solve energy problems that’ve beaten half the engineers on the planet hollow for centuries.
I talked to Odarrion, the unlucky man stuck with physics this term, about her chances. He says to just wait and see what happens. I don’t know if I trust a man with that laugh of his, but we’ll just wait and see.

Week 6
Propulsion’s turn to shine. Same routine as always: I give them the lowdown on the old, the new, and then they go out there and come back to me with the strange and beautiful. That’s the theory. Hasn’t failed us yet.
-Mafi’s moonblend-fuelled turbines are on the oversize even for a heavyweight, and there’s five instead of the standard three. She’s tripled the fuel compartment size too. A hunk of steel this big is going to take a minute or eighty to get going, but once it does, it should move faster than a cork in a cannon. And maybe as smoothly; the crew on this had better have seasoned stomachs.
-Holliburt’s going with wind power to keep the storm skiff lightweight. The sails are like the hull: just a little bit different. They’re made of the toughest lyreweeds, like the old days, but with triple the density. Only high-powered industrial equipment could set the weave that tight, and they’ll need special calibration for it. This boat sees water at all, it’ll only be in small numbers crewed by canny men: high-grade or go home. The mast is an old plynth pine, hard to come by these days, but they’d rather bend double than snap in any gale. More’s to the point, they’ll spring right back upright once that gale’s moved on.
-Gilmer’s opted for a inmoon diesel. A solid, sturdy, slow-moving thing that’ll keep going long after the rest of the ship has bloomed its last, sloughed off, and ground itself down to seafloor slime. Though with that hull he put on it, it’s going to take a while. I took a second or third look at it over the last few nights, and he’s got the coral layered with precision a master gardener would envy. Got space to grow for decades before anybody on board needs to raise a trimmer to it.
-Slikes has a, well. A thing. She gave me all the data for it, but it’s seventeen pages of pure mathematics and the citations include twenty-nine blackwater biology periodicals. Got halfway in and stopped for the night; it was accurate as best as I could see and there was something going on in there. The only recognizable part of the whole mess – and it’s a downright real mess, it’s going to fill at least half the hull of the damned thing – is a little outmoon chugger. Not the most common lensblend, but it’s got a damned powerful kick to it if you can get the finicky tweaked out of it. But Slikes’s plans are going deeper. This little engine’s just the primer for whatever’s lurking in those notes of hers.
I’d show Odarrion them, but what if he calls it off? Man doesn’t know the first thing about shipcrafting. Never could appreciate the sort of risks creativity demands. No, she deserves all the trust she can hold.

Week 7
Time we gave steering a bit of a shot. Some of these kids have put a lot of power behind these hulls of theirs, but that isn’t to say they’ll go where they point them just yet.
-The controls and mechanisms on Mafi’s fearbreaker are all normal as far as they go, up until you get to the rudder. That rudder on Mafi’s baby girl is as outsized as her engines, reinforced from the inside out to put the armoured plating to shame, and has the mechanical muscles behind it to heave against the bad edge of a tidal wave with grit to spare. At the speeds she wants that thing going at, it just might be enough to steer it. Barely.
-Holliburt’s rudder is dreadnought-quality moonblend steel. Not something you see very often in a storm skiff, heavy metals like that, but he’s got a real fine cross-hatched build on it that should keep as much of the strength as it can while shedding most of the weight. And this is one rudder that’ll never snap in any gale, let the winds blow how they want. The strength of its attachment to the hull and the tiller atop it worry me, though. Sure, the rudder won’t break until the ends of the winds, but what good does that do if it’s been shaken off the boat forty leagues back?
-Gilmer could be a lensman if he wanted, his circuitry is so fine in the details. The controls on his rover’s steering are so simple they could be operated by an untrained child, and that takes a complexity that makes your head whirl. He even put in a rough sketch of a new-age autopilot, runs off a sensor system that checks currents to estimate the depth. First-draft, that thing is already patent-worthy. This boy is going places, and if his daddy isn’t proud of him for it I’ll pay him a visit and make sure he is by the end of it.
-Slikes has no rudder. She’s got fins though.
Yep, checked again. She’s still not handing in her biology work by accident. Flonis says she’s the most enthusiastic pupil she’s ever had though, so the girl’s obviously bringing some inspiration along with her. That’s fine. We only have the moonlens and all that comes with it because Berramont Tury thought to ask herself why and how a kraken’s eye glowed so brightly under the blackest waves. The pricklemine, bane of many a warship, that only bobbed in the tides thanks to the day Varn Nurris spotted a jellyfish and wondered what would happen if you substituted concentrated electric shock for the venom, and set your sights on what rode atop the sea’s surface instead of beneath it. And of course, who could forget the coral rovers, where some bright soul in centuries past thought that the only thing that stopped a reef from being the perfect home was that you couldn’t make it float. Well, they were all made fun of in their time, and they all came out just fine. No reason Slikes isn’t sipping from the same cup as all those geniuses of time ago.
But still…fins?

Week 8.
Time to work on the guts of these beasts, get them all tuned up and worked out. We’re getting closer to the time of construction now, where we make our votes, make our choices, call up the university shipyard and tell them we’ve got our orders ready. Only so many ships can see the open sea based on a single student’s dreaming. Even when the dreamers are these four.
Damn, but I’d build them all if I could, with my own hands.
-Mafi’s edited her hull a bit more with this week’s work: it’s double thick now, especially at the front, and the bow is more like a fist than a knife-edge. “Should set the spray flying,” she said, and told me not to worry about the speed, that’s what the engines were for, she’d done all the math. And she had, and she had. It’s just the question of “why” that’s got me all interested here. Anyways, for this week’s work she’s got triple redundancies and a hell of a lot of leak controls. Crew’s going to be smaller than your standard heavyweight with that much space taken up on safeties, but she says she wouldn’t trust anybody but seasoned professionals on this thing anyways. Too strange for the fresh ones. Pretty funny to hear that coming from someone her age, but I’m not going to laugh until I hear the punchline.
-Holliburt has four or five run-of-the-mill storm skiffs inside his storm skiff. The bunkroom’s in the old sprawling Halteen style, the catch hold is more streamlined and Arbesque, and the storage compartments for line and patching are the tight-packed Nashy method. Interesting. Maybe even effective. But nothing really new, not even in the old-made-new way. Good, but not great. Sure, novelty alone won’t set your name on fire and douse you in moonlight, but neither will rehashing last century’s tricks.
-Gilmer, well, he’s been shaping this girl for months, and only now does he tip his hand and show us that she was a queen all along. Look inside that coral rover’s tubby little frame, and you wonder why it’s so small?
Detail. Everyday, ordinary, perfect detail down to the last knothole in the final plank of old ommery ashwood. He’s got every single necessity that a rover should have, but packed into half the size it should be. Even the food’s shrunk down small, with a miniature cannery to keep the storage hold packed tight and neat. Half the mechanisms in here are brand new, and the other half have had so many parts stripped out to make room that they might as well be. I changed my mind: the boy wouldn’t make a fine lensman. He’d be a jeweler the likes the world never dreamt of.
-Slikes’s baby is tight inside. A cabin over the bow, with a little class viewing port, but most of the steering information is going to be coming in through sensors, second-hand. It’s packed tight with machinery, all unrecognizable, all low-energy stuff. She said she’d make it all clear soon.
Still no idea where the power’s coming from.

Week 9
Time for the superstructure and any other gewgaws that roll up at the last second. Next week we all tip our hands, and we decide who’s getting built and who’s staying put.
-The guns on Mafi’s fearbreaker are the heaviest the lady can carry. A bit heavier than anything we’ve got currently, actually – but then again, we’ve never made a fearbreaker with muscles in it like this one. The bridge is so armour-plated it’d put a bunker to shame, and it’s slung real low in the hull. There’s a communications mast, but it can be lowered straight down into the deck to streamline the whole ship. The final touch: a pair of outriggers that can be dropped down on either side of the hull. Between those and the bow, this thing’ll lift more of a mist than a hurricane once it gets up to speed.
-Holliburt’s followed old storm skiff doctrine and kept the deck as clear and clean as possible, with a minimum of durable, tough rigging. Good solid stuff though, and the cables he’s using may be old state-of-the-art, but the synthetic coating on them to ward off any manner of moisture is brand new, and should last for decades before replacement. Beats the bi-daily application of schutz juice of the latter days, or even that weekly oiling they’ve used for the last few decades.
-Gilmer’s got four moonlenses up on deck in a tight array for open-sea recharging, all of them convertible jobs that can soak any of the three moons’ rays without too much of a hitch. Sure, they aren’t going to be the most efficient tools for any one job, but with all four doing it they’ll make sure the fuel never stops coming. The deckhouse is sprawling and takes up most of the aft, but there’s room on the bow for dozens of lines to hang laundry or air-dry catches or whatever you mind. Not an inch wasted, and many more saved.
-Just a single hatch for exit and entrance on the back of Slikes’s little experiment, along with a completely retractable antenna that can poke just up above the surface if it sidles real close to it. No exterior drag, she says. Where she’s going, nothing can afford to get damaged. Not with miles up to go to get where it can be fixed.

Week 10
It’s all over with now, the project we make a reality is laid out flat. And I’d be lying if I said it were close. There wasn’t a single really weak chart out there, but the winner was plain the moment it was laid out for us.
Mafi spelled it all out for us. The contours in the hull, the outriggers, the bow, the engines… her heavyweight will kick up a mountain of spray when it moves, making its own fog. Between that and her engines, this lady’ll come to close blows faster than anyone could count on, and once she gets there, those guns and that hide of hers will keep her safe and her enemies blasted clean. If she gets close enough, Mafi said, she even built the prow sturdy enough to take a full-on ramming at top speed. Her numbers don’t lie: the lady could punch straight through another fearbreaker. Make a hell of a racket and need one big dry-docking afterwards, but if you land the punch that ends the fight, you don’t mind too much. A frightening machine, but a damned interesting one.
Holliburt, well, he didn’t have much to say. An updating of the storm skiff to match modern times, he said. Well sure. That can be done. It has been done. You’ve got the latest model, but it’s got no personal touch to it. It’ll sell, sure. You’ve got a job on your hands here Holliburt, you’re good, you’re right on the money. But you’re no artist, and it pains me to say it so blunt. If there’s one certain no-winner here, it has to be you, pretty as you’ve made your case.
Gilmer’s design is what it is: the perfect coral rover. All of the long list of needs and wants and structural demands condensed down into the smallest package I’ve ever seen, doing the job of a ship twice its size without a moment’s stress. Here’s what you could’ve done, Holliburt: refining an old job in a new way until it shines like a kraken’s eyeball. There’s love in every line.
Slikes finally laid it all out for us: this baby of hers goes deep, yes. And it stays deep, yes, all the way down in the blackwater, where every scientist wants to go and nobody ever wants to stay. And it all works out just fine, all of the weirdness. The fins, the streamlining, the powerful lights, but it still doesn’t explain her fuel problem. Krakens surface three times a year to fill their eyes, and they have to stay up for a week – Slikes says she wants this thing to stay down for as long as it needs. Forever, if need be. And that’s where her biology and physics come into this, because Slikes has given her submarine an honest-to-god gut, from mouth to stomach to waste vents. Suction pulls prey into that razor-edged maw at the prow and pipes it into a chamber, where a sort of chemical soup kicks in. All sorts of acids in there, nasty stuff. Once the digestion’s over, all sorts of heat’s been kicked up, and that’s what keeps it cruising. Streamlined down to the last inch, a single burst of thrust and proper current use can keep it rolling onwards for weeks – and with the autopilot she’s rigged up, built on the back of the brains of softline eels, it’ll find a path through the heart of a whirlpool.
Well now, it just wasn’t even a contest after that. Build order went out this evening. Let’s see what the shipyard makes of it.

Week 11
Grades went out.
-Mafi 93%. I showed her charts to an admiral I know. He said she’s crazy. Also, he has a job for her. Well, more of a career.
-Holliburt 85%. Not half-bad. He’ll have no trouble finding a place for himself out there at all. But it might not be as a shipcrafter.
-Gilmer 94%. His father will know men who know men that want this kid. He could walk into any shipyard on the planet and use this one project as his entire resume and get put in charge of half the new product lines on the spot.
-Slikes 99%. The 1% is excessive secrecy. The 99% is all hers. They laid down the foundations for her baby this evening, and they’re going to work fast. Should be up by the end of midmoon break, and first voyage right after the fact.

Midmoon field results for CNS 0352, Full Shipcrafting, Outmoon Semester. Dr. Mannemeul Cirtosh, Phd.
All right. Now the important thing is to consider what we’ve learned here.
First: softline eels are tenacious creatures that are almost impossible to discourage, and so are their instincts.
Second: softline eels will eat anything smaller than they are, and they’re pretty generous about estimating body length.
Third: experimental systems should always be tested, then re-tested, then tested a bit more. Especially if they’re auto-piloting subsystems that are intended to edit overlying manual control. No matter how good the math turns out.
Fourth: math lies. I don’t care what your teacher told you, math is a damned liar.
Fifth: legal immunity to prosecution doesn’t do a damned thing for your professional reputation.
Sixth: perspective in kind, this was still a hell of a good field test for the effectiveness of public safety standards in the average harbour.

See? As long as you learned something, it wasn’t a waste. And I think we all learned something.
I think I’m ready for a bigger class again come inmoon semester. Failing kids is hard, but it’s a hell of a lot less work than dealing with success.

“CNS 0352” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.