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Iris woke up to the sound of a zephyr blowing overhead, blowing through the cracks in the walls of her shack, blowing through the gap where her right canine should be.
It was practically an open invitation.
Snick, snack, snap, open and shut went her wiry, rawbone jaws, chew, pulp, munch, down went half of the zephyr, leaving the other half to run away crying. Swallow, stretch, belch and the walls of the hut shook.
“That’s lucking,” she said, wiping away a shred of uncertain air currents away from her jowls, “that’s gooding. But not besting. Best is the whole thinging”
First things first, such a fortunate moment had to be recorded. Iris hobbled with purpose to the big moldy book that dominated the room, dominated the oaken table it rested on so thoroughly that it almost continually groaned. It was thicker through than the body of a child of ten years, and greater in height from header to footnote, and it was bound in the hide of a thunderhorse, though it was so aged that only the loudest flashs of lights would lead it to rumbling.
Iris heaved it open to the second-to-last page and chewed over her lip without gentleness. It had the consistency of jerky, and was a great comfort between meals, but her mind was elsewhere now. Important work had to be done.

Zephyr, she wrote. Chocolaty, with a hint of a sigh. Soft against the palate but only becomes more tender with each chew, mild as mother’s milk and twice as sweet, but just a hair’s-breadth short of cloying. Succulent raw, would cook using light sautéing with some fresh mushrooms.

Iris stretched her cramping fingers – her writing grew more and more roving and uncertain by the minute, like a drunken dog – and returned to her efforts.

Acquired by happenstance on awakening one early Tuesday morning. Set traps in likely locales and it will cheerfully bumble straight into them. Attempt nonlethal, relatively calming capture to ensure a lack of muscle tension in the meat.

Iris set down her pen with a grunt. It was made from an eagle’s wing, filled with the blackest blood of a stormcloud. Terrible tough, rank eating storms made, but they were useful. You could write pages about all the exciting, dangerous things you could do with their blood and flesh and electrical fields, and Iris had done that, at the cost of four fingers, several cumulative yards of skin, and the ability to control the direction of her right eye, which now did as it wished at all except the gravest moments.
“Almost doning,” she croaked, stroking the freshly inked page. It sparked, but didn’t smear. “So nearing. Just one more, my loveliest. One more, and then the world will know of all that I am knowing. One more.” She pursed her lips. “And what better day is there to go do this thinging, hmm? It is a sign of good luck. I should be off and away while it is lasting. Who knows, maybe it will being flying into my mouthing too, ehh?”
And so Iris prepared herself. She put on her bonnet made from briars, and took up her stone walking stick that could strike a bear dead with one blow, and on her back she slung her trapping-bag, which was woven out of her hair and was stronger than the strongest steel. She smiled, and her teeth shone like angels in the sunlight.
“It is good lucking,” she said. “I will catch a rainbow today.”
And she limped out the door.

Rainbows were harder to catch than they sounded. Things like that usually were.
For one thing, they were rare, rare, rare. If you wanted a chance, you either had to bait them – and they were wary of that, oh so wary – or wait and hope. And Iris was old and impatient.
For another thing, they were too big. Seven stripes! Seven colours! Each was more troublesome and fierce and touch-shy than the last, and if just one of them got away from your grasp the whole thing would wriggle after it no matter how hard you clutched.
Finally, they were as shy and quick to run as cats in a strange house. The first hint of the first sign of anything from anyone and they would be somewhere else before most people had even noticed they were there.
Iris had stalked nine rainbows before. Every time she’d gotten a little bit more frustrated, but today she felt confident. There was luck on her side this time. And luck beats anything.

Iris’s shack stood at the hinge of two mountains, huddled on top of itself in a scree of boulders and broken stone. On one side, a sheer drop. On the other, a soaring wall. Front and back, a small thicket of bitter-thorned shrubs that had been doing slowly for over one hundred years, and then empty space. No living thing had walked up there for as long as Iris could remember. Which suited her fine. She liked her privacy.
Today the west mountain suited her intuition of luck. The zephyr had come from the west, it only stood to reason more might follow. She took her walking stick between her teeth and pulled herself up the cliff hand-over-hand until her house lay below her no bigger than an ant’s and a thin ledge came to her grasp. It was just wide enough for her to shimmy on, greasy hair clawing its way free from her bonnet in thin strands as she wiggled her way to the broader grounds of a little mountain meadow. The air tasted clean and sharp enough to cut taste buds clean out of your mouth.
Iris bit into it four times as she walked, chewing each forty times with her needle-bright teeth. A little snack to whet her appetite properly for when she found the big game. The rumble of her quarry’s home was already loud in her ears.
The waterfall started maybe halfway up the mountain and dropped straight to its base, smashing its face into the cliffs three or four times on the way down. It sounded like the world’s largest bear being woken up from the world’s coziest nap with the world’s pointiest stick, drawn out long. Iris sometimes hummed along with it when she was thinking. It made her floorboards creak and the lantern flicker.
She looked at the spray and roar, then squinted at the sky. “Too early for the misting,” she commented. “Waiting time.”
So grey Iris sat down there, near the top of the waterfall, with her walking stick, and she hummed along to the waterfall as she repaired the small damage that the wind’s careless buffets had done to her bonnet of black briars. She sat there for three days, sustaining herself only on nips and bites of the most faintly eddying breezes, watching and waiting and waiting some more.
On the fourth day, the rainbow came.
It was thin and translucent in the sunlight, a bit uncertain and startled as to its existence. It stretched across the mountain sky with the tentative air of a bird first flapping its featherless winglets.
The rainbow lasted ten minutes, and in that time Iris made no move at all. She was old and experienced; she’d lost her first two rainbows to hastiness and greed. Patience was her watchword now.
“Time loses nothings,” she muttered into her teeth, “and it brings luckings. And luckings beats anything.” And she bedded down for the night with her trapping-bag as a pillow, resting her skull on its unbending coils.
On the fifth day, the rainbow came again in the morning. It was more solid now, more sure. It was a vain creature, as all its kind were, and it flittered most fetchingly in the sun, still wobbly but bolder and more adventurous, testing its limits. It swayed and it shimmered and once it even doubled itself in a fit of pique, though the effort seemed to exhaust it.
Iris hummed in thought, masked by the waterfall’s ever-roar. A double rainbow was twice the catch, but twice the difficulty. Should she wait longer even, hoping for it to properly split itself?
“No, no, noing,” she scolded herself that night. “Greed is a curse. A rainbow is a rainbow is a rainbow, doubled or no, and better one than none, truth be telling.”
On the sixth day, the rainbow was mature. It stood astride the valley of falling waters like a prince newly crowned, with the confidence and beauty of a freshly-greened maple. It held a shimmer in its sides that was the secret envy of every trout and the love affair of countless bad poets, and it knew it and owned it. It made Iris’s mouth water just looking at it.
“Soon, soon, sooning,” she said that night, speaking to her walking stick in a fit of pique that evening. “Sooning.”
On the seventh day, the rainbow innovated some more. Secure in its resplendence, bored in its effortless existence, it shaped itself in strange ways. It reflected from ice particles in some clouds, bending itself into a halo. It shifted its perspective no less than three hundred and sixty times. It even tried to see what was over the mountain top, but grew dizzy before it had grown large enough. And then evening came, and it tucked itself away for the night again.
On the eighth day, the rainbow was confident, determined, and bursting with impatient new ideas. It faded into the visible edge of light with the casual ease of those who belonged there, and was grabbed by fingers so strong and quick that it didn’t even know anything was wrong until a bag of grey iron was spread over its head and it was stuffed straightaways into it.
“Caught! Caught! Caught!” laughed Iris, waving her bonnet overhead in triumph, where its cruel thorns tore at the belly of an innocent breeze. “Caught at last and caught for realings! All one, two, three, four and so on to seven stripes! All of them! All mine!” She laughed so loud that the rocks bleached white with fright everywhere she stepped all the way home down the cliff as she skipped with joy, jostling and bruising the poor rainbow something fierce as it wriggled in her trapping-bag.
“Caught!”

Iris’s home had no cage for her prisoners, but she was wily. She pulled the rainbow out of her trapping-bag by the scruff of its neck and stuffed it inside her black briar bonnet. At every wince the rainbow made, a hundred tiny spikes poked its flesh terribly.
“So good, so good, so gooding,” chuckled Iris. “The last one, the lasting! The final page of my booking! The last sampling! Where shall I start, where shall I be starting? Inside or outside? One big bite or three little ones? Shall I eat it raw or cooked, kill it with my sticking or eat it raw and struggling? Choices! Choices!” She poked the rainbow in the heart with her finger, and it nearly doubled up from the pain.
“If you want to eat me,” said the rainbow, “you had better listen to what I have to say. Eat me now, before my colours fade! By four days time they’ll have faded away, and they’ll be deadly poison to an old hag like you.”
Iris squinted at him. “Liar, liar, lying liaring,” she hissed. “You know well what brightness and light do to an old woman’s tummy. You want me to eat you fresh and sparkling, so bright it burnsing! You evil thing! I’ll coop you up for all four days, and eat your rawing! RAW!” She hissed and laughed and spat once and went to bed with a snore that could scrape lichen off rocks.
Cooped up in its prison of black briars, the rainbow smiled so hard that its teeth nearly jumped out of its mouth. Then it sat up as straight as the thorns would allow, cupped its hands to its mouth, and sang in a sweet low voice.

Winds, winds, here I am, here I am. Rainbow, your prince, is all caught up. Attend me! Help me! Winds, winds!

There was a quiet whistle from far away, and in swept the east wind, wet and lush as a steaming river, long as the end of the world. “Trouble, my prince?” it whispered warmly.
“Free me, free me,” said the rainbow, in a hushed voice. “I have three days before I die, if I am not freed.”
“I will do as you ask on this day,” said the west wind, “and then I am needed elsewhere in the wide world.” And the west wind breathed deeply in and out and flooded the dried old briars with damp, nurturing moisture, suffocating their bitter thorns.
“Free!” called the rainbow. “I am free!” And it leapt out of the wilting briars, and straight into the iron-haired trapping-sack of Iris.
“Woke me woke me woke me!” she yelled. “Smells of clean water and warmth? In my home? Unkind thing! Unwelcome fooding!” She beat the rainbow so hard that it nearly went black as well as blue, and all the next day, the second day, as she wrote notes in her old creaking book she gave it the evil eye.
“Watch it carefullying,” she muttered aloud as she wrote, “or it will be most escaping. Pah!” And then she knotted up her trapping-sack and left the rainbow alone for the second night.
The rainbow huddled in a heap, nursing its bruises, and waited until the old woman was fast asleep and louder than ever, then it hitched itself up, put its fingers to its mouth, and whistled high and fast.

Winds, winds, here I am, here I am. Rainbow, your prince, is all caught up. Attend me! Help me! Winds, winds!

There was a low hum from far far away and up came the south wind through the floorboards, dry as a bone’s soul, turbulent and coarse. “You ask for aid, my prince?” it spoke softly.
“Free me, free me,” said the rainbow, begging open-handed. “I have only two days to live if I am not freed.”
“I will do as you ask on this day,” said the south wind, “but then I must soon speed someplace.” And the south wind spoke strange words that made the air jump and billow with dry, fierce heat, and the iron-hard hair of the trapping-sack withered and shrank until it was no more than a tight little collar around the rainbow, which burst it with a quick shake of its head.
“Free!” yelled the rainbow. “Free! I am free!” And it leapt out of the window and was nearly in the air when Iris’s stone walking stick strike it in the back, knocking it prone.
“Woke me!” she snarled as she thrashed the rainbow without mercy. “The sound of sanding? In my stone homing? Thief! Burglaring of my hospitaliting!” She cracked the rainbow across the head so hard that it saw eighteen stars at once, then stabbed it through its middle and right into the dirt with her walking stick. Squirm and cry as hard as the rainbow might, it could not budge itself and for all of the third day she refilled her eagle’s-wing quill with the bright blood of the rainbow. “Proofing,” she said. “Proof of my capturing.” She went to bed laughing and in no time at all she was asleep for the third night.
The rainbow cried for some hours, hurt and alone and growing more dim by the day. It missed the sky so much, and the ground hurt against its back. But still, when the pain had grown dim, it pursed its lips, cleared its aching throat, and hummed strong and angry.

Winds, winds, here I am, here I am. Rainbow, your prince, is all caught up. Attend me! Help me! Winds, winds!

There was a fierce shriek from farther away than ever, and down came the north wind, storming in the chimney and through the fireplace, colder than a corpse’s heart, fierce and hungry. “You need help, my prince?” it rumbled, nails needling on the rainbow’s skin.
“Free me, free me,” said the rainbow, pawing at its feet. “I will die tomorrow if I am not freed.”
“I will do as you ask on this day,” said the north wind, “and then I must fly away to eat.” And the north wind reached down with one clawed hand and tore the walking stick free and cast it to the floor where it shattered into a thousand frozen fragments, leaving the rainbow to struggle quickly to its feet.
“Free!” screamed the rainbow. “Free! Free! I am FREE!” And as it screamed it ran, ran, ran, and it was barely out the doorway before Iris was pelting pell-mell after it, roaring and spitting.
“Fooding!” she shrieked. “Mine, food, mineing! Come and be eaten!” Her feet cracked the rocks between her toes, her breath curled at the nape of the rainbow’s neck, and it nearly fainted from fear. In between the terror, panted between footfalls, too small to hear for any distance at all, the rainbow called “help!”
There was a soft whisper, just a little ways away, and curling up to wrap around the rainbow as it ran came a gentle little zephyr that had been hiding just down the mountain as it mended itself, so close that it could hear even the tiny little cry for help that the rainbow made, as luck would have it. “Are you all right, prince?” it asked with worriment.
“Please,” gasped the rainbow. “Save me. Save me.”
“I am small and half-eaten,” said the zephyr, “but I will do everything I can.” And the small zephyr sped all the way to the waterfall and seized a handful of its precious spray and whisked it back again quicker than anyone could ever run, woman, man, rainbow, or witch, so gently that not a single drop was wasted. “A path, a path!” called the zephyr as it threw the water into the air, and as the rainbow ran straight up the waterdrops back into the sky it burst into full colour for the first time in four days, as brilliant and bright a light as may ever be seen anywhere. It turned night to day, set Iris back on her heels with a squeal, and in Iris’s shack the old thunderbeast-bound book smacked itself shut with a snap and let out a thunder that would’ve made the mightiest storm stand proud.
The earth shook, the sky yelled, and the hinge of the mountains that Iris’s cabin stood upon – the broken rocks, the shaky cliff, the crumbling wall – fell all to pieces at once in a heartbeat, smashing all the way down to the bottom of it all until nothing was left that was bigger than a gentle calm.

“That was a good thing you’ve done, little zephyr,” said the rainbow as it shone in the sky. “A very good thing.”
“Thank you, prince,” said the zephyr.
“You will watch over the west, if the sky will permit,” said the rainbow.
“But I am small,” said the zephyr.
“You are gentle,” said the rainbow. “That is important. And small means nothing. Luck means everything. And you have been good luck to me.”
And that’s the way it was.

“Taste the Rainbow,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

There was a man. An old man. This sort of thing happens, over time.
He was also dying. And didn’t much like it. This too was not unusual.
“I’m not going to stand for this kind of treatment,” he said, and that WAS a little strange, and he phoned up his three daughters and two sons and told them to get their asses over to the hospital.
And they got their asses along properly, because he was their father and he was dying and they all felt like they owed him that much. In limousines and taxis, motorbikes and minivans, up came each of them, one after another, all within five minute’s time. Up they paraded in their suits and their brightly coloured socks, and they listened.
“My beloved, successful, wealthy, entrepreneurial children,” said the dying old man, “I have a last request for all of you from your father, on his deathbed. I humbly request that you all do your best to fulfill it.”
“Yes,” they all said. “That sounds fair enough.”
“Dying isn’t that great a thing,” said the old man. “I don’t want to go through dying – the thought gets me all tense and wired, like a squirrel stuffed in a spring. I want you to fix it. Go on, give it a try.”
Five moments of thought overlapped.
“I’m not so sure,” said the oldest daughter.
“Doable,” disputed the oldest son.
“Possibly,” seconded the youngest son.
“Absolutely,” said the middle daughter.
“No doubt about it,” said the youngest daughter.
The oldest daughter made a face at her siblings. They made faces right back.
“Enough of that,” said the old man. “Get to it. I’ve got a few hours left and the clock’s ticking. As incentive, the one who pulls it off gets my wallet and buys a free round for the family.”
“I’ll go first,” said the oldest son. He stood up and straightened his tie in a very menacing way, then walked over to the nurse.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I would like to see the doctor, or I’m going to sue you for obstruction of obfuscation of objectification of the Oldowan.”
“Right this way,” said the nurse, and he led the oldest son to the doctor.
“What’s your problem?” asked the doctor.
“I’d like to see the director of this hospital,” said the oldest son, “or I’m going to sue you for breach of privacy, breach of conduct, breach of hospitality, breach of hospital, and breaching with malicious intent to spyhop.”
“Whatever,” said the doctor. “Not my problem.” And she sent the oldest son onwards to the director, who was trapped on his desk surrounded by four ringing cellphones, three laptops blaring with virus alerts and unanswered emails, forty-five unfilled forms, and a savage blackberry.
“What is it?” asked the director. “I’m a little busy here.”
“I would like to meet your supervisor of death,” said the oldest son, “or I’ll sue you for libel, liability, liberalism, and lagomorphism.”
“Screw off,” said the director. “I’m too busy for that. I’ve got forty-five other lawsuits to deal with this afternoon.”
“I’ll give you a chocolate bar,” said the oldest son.
The director’s hand darted out faster than the strike of a praying mantis, snaring the treat from the son’s grasp almost before the words had left his esophagus. “Done deal,” he muttered through the crumbs, and he directed the oldest son to the office of the local supervisor of death.
He was texting with his feet up on his desk, chewing a novelty scythe-shaped toothpick in the corner of his barely-obese lips.
“‘Sup,” he said, without looking up.
“Laws,” said the oldest son.
“Shit. What kind?”
“I am going to sue you for defamation of character, declaration of independence, and defenestration of crepuscularation if you don’t reverse my father’s impending death immediately.”
“Hit me with your best shot, dumbass,” said the supervisor of death, still not looking up from his phone. “Crepuscularation isn’t a word. ‘Crepuscular’ pertains to twilight or dusk, and as a noun it’s ‘crepuscularity.'””
The oldest son returned to his father’s deathbed, his cold blue eyes brimming with tears.
“I tried, dad,” he said. “I tried.”
“It’s okay, we’ve got time,” said the old man.
“I think it’s my turn,” said the younger brother. He pulled himself off the wall he’d been leaning on, took out his laptop, and wrote a very serious research paper.
“I’ve been planning this for a while,” he told his father. “This is really just the perfect time to sum it all up. Nothing like panic to give you that good kick in the ass you need to write more than three pages a minute.”
“What’s it on?” asked the old man.
“What isn’t it? I’ve got philosophy applied to sociology applied to anthropology applied to history applied to biology applied to chemistry. Then I applied that to physics, astronomy, and brought it back around to philosophy again. The gist of the central thesis is that your mind makes other people real but can’t control their beliefs and worldviews, which explains the U.S. Civil War, and how an unusually obvious gene pattern in the skull of Ulysses S. Grant confirms the overall necessity of this, as well as how uranium is a false concept just like the existence of other humans. This means that most of what we know about physics is fake, which throws our beliefs about the universe at large into question and ends up confirming my initial premise, which is that if enough people believe each other not to be fake they become immortal.” He blew his hair out of his eyes, rattled his fingers across the keyboard one last time, and spiked his laptop.
“Done and good as already edited,” he said with satisfaction. “I’ve just disproved death. Published ten seconds ago.”
“I don’t feel any better,” said the old man.
“Wait a few days for the peer reviews,” said the younger brother.
The old man gave him a look.
“Oh. Right.” The younger brother slouched against his wall again and didn’t look at anyone.
“Good effort,” said the old man fondly. “Reminds me of those frogs you sent into orbit years back with nothing more than matches and old cellophane tubes. Anyone else got an idea?”
“Of course,” said the middle sister. She put on a pair of appropriately stern glasses over her contacts, adjusted the indestructible plastic sheen that coated her hair, and beckoned her finest cameraman in for a close shot, adjusting the angle of her head so that it was perfectly silhouetted against the flag a helpful aide was quickly nailing to the nearest wall.
“Citizens, my opponent is all about death,” she announced, the sincerity in her voice sound enough to split redwoods with a single blow. “Death is a necessity, he claims, death is a vital part of our economy, death is there so that there may also be life. But this cold, clinical analysis, which may remind us of Auschwitz (I am most certainly not implying my opponent is a Nazi at all what gave you that idea perhaps you are implying something YOURSELF hmm?), is not the only way to look at death. Death may be necessary indeed, death may be economically sound, death may indeed define our entire species and outlook upon life – upon our very existence – but this cannot excuse on-two solitary facts.”
The music swelled.
“My opponent wants to raise your taxes and is a possible pedophile,” she said. “Goodnight, and god bless.”
The middle sister sat down again as the camera turned off.
“Election won,” she said happily.
“You’re going to abolish death then,” asked the younger son. “Won’t that be a bit messy? I can do the math for you.”
“Oh, nothing so crass as that,” she said dismissively. “I’ll just have the supervisor in charge of his case file fired and get dad lost in the shuffle.”
“Metaphysical affairs,” said the youngest sister. “Out of your jurisdiction.”
“I can get an appointee in there.”
“Sure. They take a few hundred years to process applications.”
“What?!”
“They say it weeds out the applicants that aren’t catchy enough.”
“Fiddlesticks,” said the middle sister, and she sat down again in a frump.
“I believe it is my turn,” said the youngest sister. “Tell me,” she asked the older brother, “where was the supervisor of death for this district?”
“Five rooms and four layers of willing disbelief to your left on exiting the room,” he said.
“Good,” said the youngest sister, and she went there.
“Heya,” said the supervisor. His feet were no longer up on the desk, but he was still texting. His tongue, once prepared to whet his lips once per minute with clockwork precision, had become stuck just to the right side of his mouth. It seemed to leer at the youngest sister.
“I will donate one billion dollars to you if you remove this unnecessary red tape from the path of my family,” she said.
“Nah,” said the supervisor.
“I will place one trillion dollars towards making your life absolute hell if you do not remove this useless obstruction from my father,” she said.
The supervisor shrugged and flicked an errant snotcrusting from the rim of his largest nostril.
“I’ll put in a good word with your boss and get you some stock tips,” she said.
The supervisor looked up from his texting. “Get in line. Position eight quintillion. Rounded down.”
“I’m really sorry,” the youngest sister told her father. “That’s the first time that hasn’t worked.
“Bureaucrats,” grumbled the old man. “Well, I’ve got five minutes. Anyone got any plan Bs?”
“I used all my lawsuits,” said the oldest son. “My tie is flaccid.”
“I can’t make people peer-review any faster,” said the youngest son.
“I’d be accused of flip-flopping,” said the middle sister.
“I don’t have enough money,” said the youngest sister. “I should fix that.”
“Well, shit,” said the old man. He sighed, with an underlying gurgle. “Good tries, everyone. Guess that’s it.”
“I might have an idea,” said the oldest sister, carefully unhooking her stethoscope and coiling it into a neat loop.
“Well, go on and try it,” said the old man. “Can’t hurt to try.”
“It’s going to take a little while,” said the oldest sister. “Just bear with me, and listen hard…”
So the oldest sister talked to him about world war II, and the effect that had probably had on his parent’s upbringing of him, and the possibly psychological effects this might have had, and about his fierce and competitive drive that had so obviously ingrained itself in his children, judging by their career paths, and how the seeds of resentment so easily sown between generations when the children had been in their teenaged years had only fuelled their fierce pursuit of independence, and of how reconciliation had come gradually, achingly, lovingly over the past decade, and of how this whole deathbed effort they’d all put forth really was the most heartwarming and coordinated family event they’d had since, well, ever.
“That’s a really nice thought,” said the oldest brother.
“Well, when it’s put that way, sure,” said the youngest brother.
“Homey,” said the middle sister.
“Cute,” said the youngest sister.
The old man didn’t say anything.
The oldest sister lifted one of his eyelids and critically inspected the pupil. “Gone half a paragraph ago, I’ll wager on my medical license,” she said. “And judging from the amount of tension in his muscles, I’d double or nothing that he didn’t see it coming either. Anesthetic’s for people without a little creativity.” She extracted his wallet and turned it over with a critical eye. “Five bucks. Let’s go get some juice.”

“Deathbed” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

Games for children that are no longer played.
Game: Frog-and-go-seek.
Proposed by: Benjamin.
Rules: One frog is caught and designated “it.” “It” is marked with an unremovable marker filched from Tammy’s dad, then hurled into the swamp. First person to find “it” wins and gets to keep the marker.
Duration of existence and reasons for cancellation: Four weeks, four games, four near-drownings, four mandates from four sets of parents to cease and desist.

Game: Throw rocks at the loser.
Proposed by: Tammy.
Rules: Rob is selected to be the loser. All participants must throw rocks at him until he cries for a combined total of no less than five minutes. Winner determined by quality, quantity, and breadth of bruises caused plus bonus “sob value” point system.
Duration of existence and reasons for cancellation: Three minutes, three-fifths of a game, Rob’s older brother, Jake, and Jake’s right steel-toed-clad foot.

Game: Monopoly.
Proposed by: Rob.
Rules: Let’s just try playing Monopoly okay?
Duration of existence and reasons for cancellation: Five minutes, proposal of better use of time (see below).

Game: Monopoly is boring.
Proposed by: Susan.
Rules: Monopoly is boring so let’s make it so whenever you land on a space you get punched once for each house and an Indian burn for each hotel.
Duration of existence and reasons for cancellation: Thirty minutes, Rob’s sensitive bruises, Jake again, Jake’s other foot.

Game: Queen of the mountain.
Proposed by: Tammy.
Rules: Tammy is the Queen of the Mountain, aka the biggest pile of rocks and dirt in the old quarry behind Susan’s house. Whoever knocks Tammy off the Mountain is the next Queen.
Duration of existence and reasons for cancellation: Forty minutes, half of players refuse to be Queen, Susan treacherously uses shovel to undermine the Queen’s throne and instigates an instantaneous counter-revolution.

Game: Pin the tail on the frog.
Proposed by: Benjamin.
Rules: One frog is caught and held immobile by a judge as blindfolded competitors attempt to attach a twig to its rear by any means necessary.
Duration of existence and reasons for cancellation: N/A, vetoed by parents in pregame warm-up on grounds of animal cruelty, unauthorized borrowing of powered screwdriver.

Game: Dictionary wars.
Proposed by: Benjamin.
Rules: Flip the dictionary open at random, then point your finger at it without looking. Whatever you picked, you have to beat the person on your right at.
Duration of existence and reasons for cancellation: Three hours, Rob kept trying to pick “rhinoceros” and whining when he missed, Benjamin picked “pugilism,” Tammy was on Benjamin’s right, Benjamin had a glass jaw.

Game: Rake the lawn.
Proposed by: Susan’s mother.
Rules: Rake the lawn clear of leaves. Payment will be granted according to the size of each contestant’s leaf pile.
Duration of existence and reasons for cancellation: Two hours, failed argument with Susan’s mother that one big communal leaf pile is worth fifty dollars, downfall of unionization due to treachery in the ranks from Rob who accepted the scab paycheck of a popsicle.

Game: House.
Proposed by: Rob.
Rules: Let’s make houses out of paper mache and whoever has the coolest house wins.
Duration of existence and reasons for cancellation: One hour, Susan made a house shaped like a bear and declared victory early, Tammy’s “butterfingers,” Tammy said it was an accident, Susan disagreed, parents involved, parents discovered paper mache houses, walls, ceiling, partial carpet.

Game: Booooring.
Proposed by: Susan.
Rules: I’m bored so let’s think of boring things and the winner has to think of a more boring thing in ten seconds.
Duration of existence and reasons for cancellation: Ten seconds, apathy.

Game: Egg wars.
Proposed by: Tammy.
Rules: Two teams are created. Each team must select a member’s house as “home.” On Halloween, each team must egg the other team’s “home” while preventing egging of their own.
Duration of existence and reasons for cancellation: Half a night, illegal intervention at blue team “home” by mercenary party Jake and Jake’s absolutely terrifying and startlingly realistic werewolf mask, illegal defense of red team “home” by throwing rocks above permitted size of pebbles not exceeding 1 cm in diameter.

Game: Let’s try alcohol.
Proposed by: Benjamin.
Rules: Let’s all see who can drink the most alcohol without throwing up.
Duration of existence and reasons for cancellation: N/A, Jake’s refusal to buy, parents’ refusal to buy, impossibility in smuggling 1.5L bottles of vodka out of the store in coats.

Game: Snowman duel.
Proposed by: Rob.
Rules: Each player must crafted the largest snowman possible, then tip them down the old quarry behind Susan’s house. The winner is the one that looks the coolest afterwards.
Duration of existence and reasons for cancellation: Six hours, logistic difficulties causing all snow in Susan’s backyard to be consumed, bickering, trash-talking, theft of snow, sabotage, voluntary snowmanslaughter.

Game: Exxtreme snow tag X.
Proposed by: Susan.
Rules: Tag with the houserule of a direct torso or head hit with a snowball also counting as tagging another player.
Duration of existence and reasons for cancellation: Forty minutes, exhaustion from continuous running and leaping in full snow outfits, hunger, Rob accidentally kicking Tammy in the teeth when she tackled him.

Game: Icicle fencing.
Proposed by: Tammy.
Rules: Stab the other person, who is Rob, with an icicle.
Duration of existence and reasons for cancellation: Forty seconds, inaccuracy due to blurry vision, falling over due to overexertion and aching teeth.

Game: Just hang out.
Proposed by: Susan.
Rules: Let’s go get some hot chocolate and write some lists.
Duration of existence and reasons for cancellation: One hour, Benjamin’s gotta go home now and Susan and Rob have dinner at six.

Good game.

“Games for children that are no longer played,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

Come here now you little boys and girls, come here and sit by the radiator and listen to an old man talk too much. That’s it, come on in – yes, you too there, big fellow. You’re all little boys and girls to me, eh?
That’s it, come here and listen. The chilly wind is blowing outside; you hear that? You feel that? Jack frost left his fingerprints all over the windows last night; you saw that? You felt that?
Now let me tell you a story then, about that same wind, about a time back when your father’s fathers were little boys.

Those were the days when Riverside was at its height! The men were real men, their pipes were real pipes, heaped high with authoritative soot! The women were real women, their smiles real plastic! The children were real children, obedient and sparkling clean under threat of wilting disapproval! Yes sir, those were the days of the days. But I digress, and what’s worse, I stray from the root of my tale.
You see, life in Riverside was not all that it appeared to be, at least not all year round. Oh the spring sparkled, the summer simmered, the autumn was lush with great feats of yardsmanship and lawnrakery – those were the days! The days, I tell you!
But this suburban community held a dark and terrible secret, a blemish upon an otherwise flawless apple – the sort of apple you might put in a good-old-fashioned one-hundred-and-ten-per-cent-American pie. And it was so shameful that they spoke of it to no outsider. Each newcomer to Riverside only learned the troublesome truth when the first signed of winter came to them, when the chilly breeze blew. And blow it did that one November day, when the frost spackled the windows of the squat little suburban home owned by the squat little suburban family that was the Hoovers. Short, sweet, always-smiling Helena; lanky, loutish, too-loud William; whiny, wimpy, bed-wetting Jack, and Mr. Hoover. Mr. Hoover might have had a first name, but if he did, no one dared speak it aloud. They might get a Stern Look. Some fathers would lecture you, but not Mr. Hoover – never Mr. Hoover. A single moment of paternal authority through eye contact and you would be begging to be thrashed.
But today Mr. Hoover’s thoughts were elsewhere. The chilly wind had blown. Last night, Jack Frost had crept across the windowsills of Riverside and left his handiwork glittering for the children to innocently coo at in the morning, little tykes. For them it was a seasonal wonder.
For Mr. Hoover, and every other red-blooded all-American man in Riverside, it was a warning.
Mr. Hoover looked out the window, brow furrowed in fatherly thoughts as he watched his neighbours go about their business, planning for the future.
“The tramp is nearly here,” whispered the Joneses across the road, as they boarded up their car tight as a drum.”
“Winter’s coming,” muttered the whippersnapper next door as he triple-reinforced the flimsy roof of his convertible with rolls and rolls of masking tape.
“Goodbye,” said an old man to his driveway, stroking its asphalt surface as he held back the tears.
Mr. Hoover’s looked at his own, brand-new car, the pride of the household, as it sat in his immaculate driveway, and his finely chiselled jaw moved. Calling it clenching may have been too hasty, but it most definitely tensed.
What Mr. Hoover said to his wife after that, well, no one knows what he said. Probably nothing, because Mr. Hoover never spoke, merely commanded with firm, authoritative gestures of tie-straightening, eyebrow-raising, and pointed-looking. Mr. Hoover never spoke because that would unclench the pipe from between his teeth, and that was something that would not do, would never do. It had been his father’s pipe, and his father’s before him, and his father’s before him, and Mr. Hoover would hang himself with his best tie before he would let that heirloom be taken from his living lips.
That’s why we don’t know what Mr. Hoover said to his wife on that fateful evening. We know only that he gave a manly and authoritative nod to each of his children, clucked her under the chin, and strode out the door with his hat and coat.
Mr. Hoover stopped in the garage on his way and stayed there for some hours, tinkering with his tools as the sun fell down along with the temperature. The neighbourhood emptied with quiet panic, every single suburbanite holding their breath, waiting for something they were all-too-familiar worth, a named, known fear that was even worse than the strange and unfamiliar. Probably. Maybe. If the strange and unfamiliar went to the right sort of parties and had the right kind of job and combed its hair properly.
The sun set. The curtains of every window in house on every street of Riverside snapped shut at once – bar one. And Mr. Hoover stepped out of his garage.
It was dark and quiet and cold. No dogs barked, and the wind was low and cruel, hissing through the bare branches of each and every one of the single trees permitted upon each lot. The sky was a dead black blot, without so much as the glimmer of a single star or the reflection of light from that horrible “Sputnik” thing that the godless commies had shot up into outer space a few months ago, god knew if they’d be launching atomic bombs up there next, the fiendish red bastards.
There was a new sound. A soft whirl and moan, the whisk of a thousand thousand little bits of cold hard water hitting a new surface every tidbit of a second, far away at first and getting closer imperceptibly quickly.
Nobody was brave enough to look out those windows, but if they had, they would’ve seen a tall, white figure at the head of the oncoming blizzard, a lady that walked the way a proper lady should: with prim, forthright, businesslike daintiness. Where her heels touched, the whiteness spread like wildfire. The street became a mire, the sidewalks hillocks, and at each and every driveway she stopped and knelt and planted a tiny seed of snowflakes. And as she turned her back, each of them blossomed into a snowbank that made the mightiest pile of October leaves look puny, engulfing cars, consuming steps, encroaching saucily upon the doorframes.
The white lady came to the Hoover’s driveway, and stopped. Mr. Hoover was standing in her way, coat frosted over with shining silver from the sky. His pipe was held in his teeth with firm will and steady jaws, with only the frantic weaving of its smoke to betray the strength of the biting wind. A strange instrument was loosely gripped by his right hand, something that wasn’t quite a spade, still bearing the fresh scratch marks of its creation. The snow seemed to slide away from its edge.
The white lady gestured imperiously. Surely a man might be so bold as to approach her, but only to kneel in her presence or at the very least hold open a door. She was of a class quite beyond that of these peasants, no matter how impressive the grades received by their two point five children of indeterminate sex, the lustre of their lawns, or the magnificent of their newly purchased automobiles.
Mr. Hoover stiffly tipped his hat, but nothing more.
The white lady slapped him.
The air cracked for half a block with the approach of her palm, and the smack struck with the sharpness of a honed thunderbolt, just high-pitched enough to make a dog yelp. Falling snowflakes for half a block froze into hail in midair and dropped like stones; the lake crusted over with two feet of ice; Mr. and Mrs. Joneses, who’d forgotten to turn on the heat before going to bed, woke up as frost formed on every surface in their bedroom at once.
Mr. Hoover did not flinch, although his tie was knocked quite askew by the impact. Slowly, carefully, he reached up with his left hand and readjusted the vital piece of attire. Then he eased both hands into a batter’s grip on his not-a-spade, wound up, and struck.

What happened next can’t be said, little boys and little girls – the window frosted over so fast and so hard that my nose – which was pressed up against it, as you can see – froze right up at the time and nearly fell off. The doctors made quite a fuss over it, but not nearly as much as I did at having to miss what happened out there that night on fifteen Maplerow Avenue, Riverside. The aluminium siding on our home nearly shook itself all to pieces with the thunder and fury of the night’s battle, and it wasn’t until nearly six in the morning that it fell quiet outside.
Past dawn that morning, Helena, Jack, and me got out of bed and walked outside. The strangest sight met our eyes: our driveway was completely empty of snow, spotless except for three things: a tattered and snapped high-heeled shoe (white), a battered old pipe, and a strange and miraculous wide-bladed shovel that looked to have been quickly hammered out of a spade, the likes of which we’d never seen.

The rest is history, boys and girls. Once we’d given that thing a try on the Joneses’s driveway and saw what it did, snowed-in cars became a thing of the past – especially once word of what had happened, or might have happened, the night before. Soon driveways were being cleared without fear, cars once abandoned tearfully for the whole winter scraped free of frost overnight in a matter of hours. Women sobbed in relief, men nodded with a hint of moisture in their eyes, and all the other kids at school gave me and Jack their chocolate milk all winter. Which almost made up for all the shovelling.
We haven’t seen the white lady since. And neither have we seen Mr. Hoover.
But we keep the shovels close to our beds, and we haven’t given away the pipe yet. Just in case.

“A Suburban Fairy Tale,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

Two old men and an old woman sat in a dusty room, watching the world go by. Such as it was. It was all the world they had, it would have to be enough.
Besides, they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

“I’m bored again,” said one of the men. The words were very nearly a whine, spoken in a voice completely at odds with their sullenness, a voice made for pronouncements, documentaries, and extolling the virtues of chocolates.
“You’re always bored,” said the woman. Her words were tired. She wasn’t.
The other man didn’t say anything. He didn’t even blink.
“That’s scarcely true. I loved having nothing to do back in the good old days.”
“Please, let’s not talk about the good old days again. We just did that. And they weren’t that good.”
“They were wonderful!”
“No they weren’t.”
“Well, what else IS there to talk about, eh?”
They all watched the world again. It hadn’t done anything.
“The bad times,” said the second man. His voice was dryer than a mummy’s innards, and just as expressive.
“We don’t talk about the bad times,” said the first man.
“We should,” said the second man, conserving his syllables with effortlessness that spoke of practice. “Less dull.”
“Well, those weren’t any fun at all,” said the first man. “I’m sure none of us want to think about THAT sort of thing.”

“You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” said the woman.
The second man didn’t say anything. He also didn’t blink, because he couldn’t.
“Hell with it,” said the first man. “I’ve always wanted to know exactly how you two ended up like this. Right. So. Back in the day…”

….in the day, it was a hot, muggy late afternoon and the world was just tipping over into evening, which meant it was time for me to wake up and go get something to eat. I was feeling my years a bit, I’ll admit, but I was as stout as anyone a third my age, never mind what that upstart that chased me out of my territory had to say about it. The cheek! That land had been mine for years-on-years, and if he hadn’t landed that lucky shot and that other lucky shot and the lucky bite that had almost gotten my spine, I’d have shown him a thing or two.
Well, enough whining. I got up and then I walked off into the woods to – wait, no, I got up and then I fell over.
Oh damn, I’d forgotten about it again.
I got up while very carefully not putting any weight on my left rear leg and hobbled off into the sunset, trying not to make too much noise and failing at it, as I told myself.
“Myself,” I told myself (who, for most of my life, had been my only conversation partner – as is usual for my kind), “this is not a good time. Having this sort of problem is a bad time, and the only good thing about it is that it might be over pretty fast.”
“I agree, self,” I told self. “This isn’t good. And I haven’t eaten for too long. My ribs are starting to poke my tongue when I groom myself, and my stripes are getting dull and flat enough to look like dead grass. I need to eat.”
So I limped away to my new hunting grounds – which were much smaller and shabbier than my older ones – and focused on trying not to brush my foot on anything. It smelled funny when I broke the scab.
“This isn’t good at all, myself,” I said about an hour later, as I watched a big, healthy, juicy sambar hind bounce away into the brush with the most infuriatingly indolent shakes of her legs. “And it’s getting too familiar.”
“Be patient,” I replied. “Remember when that crocodile almost bit off your tail? You surprised it and had a good meal that night. You can turn this around too.”
“Easy for you to say,” I said, and so-

“Did you do it THAT often back then?” asked the woman.
“Do what?”
“Talking. To yourself.”
“I do it just as often now, I just do it inside my head. You two wouldn’t stop complaining, remember?”
“I don’t complain,” said the second man.
“You looked at me. It was the way you looked at me.”
The second man didn’t say anything. He just looked at him.
“Anyways, may I continue?”

-and so I went down to the river for a drink. Nasty, bitter stuff that water was; salty and as conducive to nourishment as liver to a day-old cub.

“And how nourishing is that?” asked the woman.
“Not at all. Milk is the preferred food.”
“I’m no mammal, you’ve got to tell us these things.”
“Noted and acted upon.”

And while I was at the river, sipping this dirty, brackish stuff and getting more and more frustrated by the minute – it’s one thing to die of starvation, and another to die of starvation with a mouth that feels like it’s been scrubbed with grit and insects – what did I see down across the way but a human, filling a bucket of water.
“That’s strange,” I said. “I haven’t seen those for ages.”
“Well, I did get pushed into the edges of things just now, didn’t I?” I replied. “No wonder this is bad land – salty water, wary game that runs too fast, and there’s humans. Well isn’t that just the dhole’s lunch.”
“Hah, I’d rather have dholes than humans. Look at it. Look at that ridiculous gawky thing. How can it even stand upright? And that ridiculous face! It looks like a bird had a baby with a monkey. A naked bird!”
“And an ugly monkey.”
“I don’t think it’s even seen us, so it must’ve been a blind monkey too. What a nuisance.”
“Absolutely.”
“Should we warn it off?”
“No. Let’s see what it does.”
The human filled up its bucket. Then its other bucket. Then it put them both on some sort of ridiculous stick and picked them up, shoulders sagging. Why it did that I still have no idea – it didn’t even take a drink!
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Utterly and fully.”
“Look at it, just taking up as much of that filthy rubbish as it can hold. And for what reason?”
“None at all. Infuriating, isn’t it? Look at it. Stupid. Slow.”
“Pointless.”
“Surprisingly fleshy.”
“It is, isn’t it? They aren’t that meaty normally.”
“Must be a special case.”
“Yes.”
I watched the human begin to walk away. Slowly. Oh-so-slowly.
“I think I’ll go after it.”
“Whatever for?”
“Well, just in case it scares up something to eat with those clumsy feet. It might flee right into me.”
“Clever. But it’s more likely it’ll walk right into a bear or tread on a snake at this rate – only they could sleep soundly enough to not hear it coming.”
“Hah, yes. In that case, I’d best stick extra close to it.”
“Just in case something kills it, yes? Scavenged meat tastes no less sweet, and better my mouthful than someone else’s.”
“Yes.”
I moved closer now, and followed the human down its little human path, as broad and as obvious and strange-smelling as the human itself. Well-trod, it seemed – there must be many that used it. But only the one right now.
“All by itself.”
“Very brave.”
“The forest is frightening after dark, isn’t it?”
“No, not really.”
“Well, for other things. That aren’t me.”
“Because of me.”
The human tripped over a root and made some sort of stupid human noise, then looked around anxiously.
“He’s worried.”
“I wonder why? He certainly hasn’t seen me. He can’t smell me. And I KNOW he hasn’t heard me.”
“He can feel me. Anyone can feel when they’re being hunted.”
“Hunted? By me? …Well, I suppose he is.”
“How curious.”
“Yes.”
I really was very close now. I watched the human move on again, quick-stepping now, looking behind itself every few steps, breath coming faster. I could see its chest heaving as I smelt the sweatdrops.
“It’s just one human,” I said.
“Just one,” I said.
“Anyways,” I said, as I slowly bunched up my leg muscles, bringing my body to bear for a spring, “this is just what I was talking about. A turnabout. Providence.”

The story stopped there for a moment while everyone, speaker included, digested that.
“And what did it taste like?” asked the woman.
The first man thought. “Do you know, I’m not quite sure?” he said. “Peculiar, I know, but it seems to have slipped my mind altogether.” He growled absently to himself as he checked dusty memories. “Strange,” he decided. “I remember that it was strange.”

“That’s strange,” I said.
“I know. Barely any effort involved. I think it died before the bite.”
“Amazing.”
“Is it all gone already?”
“It seems so.”
“Well, I WAS hungry. I suppose it’s only to be expected. And besides, it wasn’t as much meat as all that. So scrawny.”
“But so much meatier than a monkey.”
“Yes.”
“Just the once, though.”
“But… one meal. That was one human, not one meal.”
“Oh surely not. A meal ends when you’re full. I don’t feel full at all, do I?”
“Not at all. I believe this trail should be followed. Yes indeed.”
The trail led me to a very strange place. Wood and stones and dirt and clay, all piled up into shapes. Like anthills. If the ants were a hundred times the size, and noisy, and smelly, and surprisingly fragile.
“I don’t like this. Too many of them. Is it possible to have a home in a place like this? So many of these things. Taking up space. Chopping up bushes and trees. Putting water in ridiculous little buckets.”
“Don’t mention the water. Just thinking about it makes me angry. It’s like an itch inside the inside of your throat’s insides. Except worse. It makes my teeth squeak.”
“Why would they want it? It’s so stupid. Look!”
A human had staggered out of one of the strange shapes. He was yawning in the darkness, and seemed to be adjusting something near his legs.
“What’s he doing out here at night when he can barely see in the daylight? That’s even stupider! These things are idiotic.”
“Yes. I’d be doing them a favour, really.”
“Absolutely.”
It gets a lot easier the second time, you know. And the third time, about two weeks later. Of course, I had to wait until I was really hungry again, to properly argue the point to myself. By the fifth or sixth time – I think? – I no longer really had that particular issue.
Tell me, do either of you really know what it means, this human word: ‘king’?

“I don’t think so.”
“No.”

I think I learned what it means, based on what we’ve all overheard since. It’s something like a mother. Except you can never get bigger than her, and instead of cuffing you if you disobey her, she kills you.
Regardless, I was king for several years, and I can tell you this: it’s a miraculous thing for your self-esteem.
I was still…a bit slow. I was still…not quite as young as I used to be. But it didn’t matter one whit. And the respect, I tell you, the respect – do you know that one moment you get, when the prey knows you’re there, and it knows it should’ve started running two seconds ago? Humans can live that moment for days. Days! More than a hundred, all thinking that same thought. For days!
I would hunt, and I would kill, and I would watch them scurry and moan for hours and hours. It was amazing, I tell you.
Two years, and dozens of humans. And truth be told, before that first kill I hadn’t been sure if I would make it another week.

“So what happened?”

Nothing unexpected, really. Good things never last.
You see, one day some new humans appeared. Humans with strange machines. Humans with strange machines that weren’t afraid.
This annoyed me. You can’t imagine how annoying it is to not be feared, for a king. So I decided to do something about that. I wasn’t even hungry that night and I planned to hunt – that’s how annoyed I was.
Come to think of it, I wonder if it was the water. The water was so terrible. A mouthful of that stuff would drive a saint to slaughter, and I had a good bellyful that night.
“The big one?” I wondered.
“Yes, the big one with the ridiculous moustache.”
“That sounds good.”
So I crept into the village – that’s what the humans called it, and I usually didn’t press them this closely, but they’d REALLY tried my patience this time – and made my way to the building that I knew the strange humans were in. They’d tied a donkey or something a good ways off, why I’m not sure. I don’t think I was even hunting anything that wasn’t a human by then, there just didn’t seem to be any satisfaction in it. Well, non-humans tended to fight back a lot harder. My station’s dignity would not be enhanced by a broken rib.
“Asleep?”
“It seems so.”
I walked in, and yes, they were asleep. And what a lovely picture they made: four of those strange men, and one other.
“Maybe not just one,” I decided.
“A good idea. After all, this isn’t quite about food, is it?”
“No. Now that you mention it, that’s a bit odd, isn’t it?”
“A bit. But it’s only my right.”
“It is.” And I paced forwards and let my claws slip out and I trod very heavily on a sharp thing sitting on the floor. With my injured foot.
Well, I had a good set of lungs on me still, and I used them. And deaf and blind and dumb as those men were, they couldn’t help but wake at that yowl in their ears – AND one of them was between me and the door.
“They’re just humans,” I reminded myself at the back of my mind, as I took the big one with the ridiculous moustache between my teeth. There was a lot of shouting and small, frail limbs smacking against my sides. One of them was fumbling with one of those strange machines and seemed to be ignoring me, of all things. “Just humans.” My breath caught for a moment, and I slipped on my hurt foot and landed on the floor, half-expecting to cut myself again. But the sharp thing wasn’t there. Funny, how I couldn’t catch my breath.
I realized that something was hurting an awful lot. I looked down, and the human that wasn’t strange had planted the sharp thing in my chest and was twisting it back and forth like a misplaced tooth. I wanted very much to hit him, but my legs were turning lazy. I felt tired again.
“That’s silly,” I said.
“Yes, humans don’t have teeth.”
“I think I know this one, don’t I, self? Did we take his daughter? Or his son? Maybe a wife?”
“I’m not sure, and I’m even less sure if it matters. It’s getting hard to see. Almost human-blind really.”
“Oh dear,” I said. The human in the corner had finished whatever it was his machine did and was pointing it at me, but it was just then that I couldn’t see or hear much of anything. I’m not sure what happened next.

“So what did they taste like?” asked the woman.
The first man thought about it. “All right,” he said. “Not fatty, though. Very lean and not a great deal of meat. You had to work at it fairly thoroughly. But why do you ask?”
“I didn’t check at the time.”
“Really? Now I’m curious. Tell us.”
“All right.”

Unlike you, she wasn’t that old when this happened.

“I wasn’t OLD. Just a bit creaky.”

I’m sure.
She was past adolescence and young adulthood and into the broad, well-worn beginning of the current that was middle age, with two litters of pups already behind her. She was well-fed enough (a second difference)

“Enough with the editorials!”

and was currently aiming to add to her bulk with a seal. Which, for those in her audience who are less enlightened

“Stop it!”

is a fatty delicious animal shaped like a rolly-polly ball of meat. They are best eaten by ramming them violently from below when they’re at the surface, so as to minimize the directions in which they can escape.
They really are very tasty.
Now, it so happens that in her eagerness to consume an especially fat and unaware seal, she perhaps was overhasty. But then again, ramming speed does not afford substantial time for doubt, and it looked seal enough until her teeth sunk into it and decided it wasn’t.

“What was it?”

Some sort of flat thing with a human on it. She’d seen humans before, and never bothered with them because they were lean and scrawny. Well, this one was scrawnier than most, and it was just disgusting. Nothing but hard bone and muscle, amazing there was any room for blood in there. Which apparently there was; quite a lot of it, in fact. It was also making some noises that were just on the upper edge of her hearing, very loudly and shrilly.
So she spat it out and swam around for a while to see what it would do. She was curious, after all. You didn’t see quite as many humans back in those days. In the end she shouldn’t have even bothered – some more of them came, dragged the flopping, leaking human into a floating thing, and left after pointing at her a lot.

“You didn’t even eat it?”

She invites her audience to consider whether they would waste stomach space on dirt and stones.
Humans did strange things, and none of it meant much to her. She didn’t think about it any further until the next day, when she bit another seal and found that it wasn’t a seal at all. It was attached to a strange sort of shiny object that got stuck in her teeth and seemed to be attached to another floating thing.
Then she was dragged up alongside it and yanked out of the water, where she suffocated in a large amount of pain for some minutes while a human tried to find her brain with a strange exploding stick, succeeding on what was probably the fourth attempt.

“That was quite horrible,” said the first man.
“It’s over and done with. At least it didn’t take too long.”
“And you said it happened the very next day? It took them simply ages to work up the nerve to interfere with my doings.”
“You’ve been here longer than I have. I guess times change.”
“For them, not us. At least, not as fast. And speaking of speed, will the sluggard here get around to speaking his part?”
The second man didn’t say anything.
“Go on then,” insisted the first man. “You’ve heard two, the least you can do is tell one.”
“You talk too much,” said the second man.
“And you talk too little. Look at us – I, myself, have had no company but my own voice and the very occasional partner-in-dalliance since my mother left me to run wild. And our esteemed lady here never knew her mother past birth.”
“Nor my children,” added the woman.
“And yet here you sit – you, who have basked with dozens – and remain the most anti-social of us all! Pray tell us, how does this come to be?”
“If I had talked as much as you two,” said the second man, “I would have been killed in annoyance.”
“Make up for lost time and give us your story,” said the first man. “We’ve got all day here.”
“Fine.”

You are large. You are old. You are one of many, many, many in your family on the riverbanks. You have outlived most of them.
There aren’t as many of you as there used to be. And one day, some humans come and drop explosives in your river. And your organs rupture against your scales and you die.

“That’s it?” asked the woman.
“Yes,” said the second man.
“What about the part where you ate them?” asked the first man. “Surely that stuck in your head.”
“I don’t recall it.”
“Not even the first time?”
“It was a long time ago. And it happened often.”
“How often?”
The second man paused to think. He did not rush.
“Often.” A verbal shrug. “It was no matter.”
“Of course it was!”
“Do you remember your first deer?”
“…no.”
“Your first seal?”
“No.”
“They are no different. Not to me.”
An uncomfortable silence reigned.
“Cowards,” said the second man, very calmly.
It reigned a little harder.
“Well, now we know better than to complain when you don’t say anything, you morbid thing,” said the first man.
“Yes.”
“Still,” he continued, wistfulness touching him, “telling the old stories… it does put the fire in your veins again, doesn’t it?”
“A bit,” agreed the woman. “A bite.”
A pause for thought. “Yes.”
“Ah yes. Nothing like the bad old days to get your heart moving – if any of us still had one of those. And revenge does make the blood stir yonder. Tell me, what is the relation of the current master of the house to my procurer again? I believe he is the great-great-nephew of that man, the one who wanted a new rug, no?”
“Yes.”
“And his father, the father of the master of the house, he did obtain our graceful lady and hang her – most fetching – set of jaws over the mantelpiece on a somewhat-gaudy plaque?”
“Yes he did. And he took my biggest tooth for a gold necklace.”
“And the man himself of this house, he would be the one who claimed our quiet friend here and had what was left of him stripped fleshless and mounted?”
“Yes.”
“Hmmmm.”

There was a space in which ugly thoughts grew and became beautiful to the mind’s eye.

“I believe I have an idea,” said the first man.
“So do I,” said the woman.
“And I,” said the second man. His voice now had a tone: irritation.
“Unity is the thing,” said the first man. “Now, I summarize our situation thus: two of us are lacking teeth, two of us are lacking a body, and two of us are lacking a proper set of skin. Coincidentally, each of us has one of these things.”
“It seems that way.”
“Yes.”
“I also notice from the time that it is a quarter to two past midnight. This would be fifteen minutes before the man of the house takes his nightly walk downstairs to empty his bladder.”
“I’ve noticed that. He’s predictable.”
The second man said nothing. He was growling (rumbling, really, a roaring bellow slowed down) at a pitch just below the perception of the human ear, and making the dust on his display stand dance.
“Now, given that we all share such common ground – even if how we view it varies,” continued the first man, “I believe that it would be to our advantage to work together. For a short time.”
“I agree.”
The growl grew deeper, and the floorboards creaked.
“We are in accord then,” said the first man. “Now, let’s get ready. We may only have one chance at this, but we can still turn this around one last time.”

“Three Old Ones,” copyright Jamie Proctor 2011.

Eyclth in the month of Broog.
I have arrived at last at the lone, dismal plod-port of this planet, and watch the trok-barge leave with great admixture of feelings. Oh! the fire of adventure, how fiercely it burns, yet how quickly is it put out by the watery slurry of loneliness! And no-where in all the uni-verse is a Splarg more alone than in that dismal backwater called by the brute natives Errth. But I am resolute, and shall not give in to despair. My splargian rationality, so cultivated by our Distinguished Tutors, persuades me of the inevitability of my success. My form is masked beneath a wunggdraclowk of fabulous ingenuity, whose techna veil shall never be pierced by the most intrusive and rude methods that the Natives possess. I am well equipped with both provisions and defensive techna, and my unburdened use of my rational minds will lead me to use both as dictated by Providence.
The secrets of this murmured-after, near-fictional city that have whispered its way to our ears even unto the hollowed halls of Melthachung will be in my many-grasp before the mooncycles wander through a full pass. I will be home by chrysalmass, and shall propose to you, dearest Frrreee, with the knowledge of Nu You’rek as gift to your father.

Tremmelith in the month of Broog.
Near-disaster, dear Frrreee! In my haste to acquire transport, I came within an inch of losing my life! Quite solicitations and the bribes of a few papery and plastic trinkets to the local gossip-mongers of the street-corners told me that the fastest means to travel north (where Nu You’rek is rumoured to lie, though none of the savages I asked could give me precise coordinates, relying as they may on their rudimentary and primitive metriks for guidance, like the careless children they are, ignorant of love and lurf as they are gifts given not naturally, but in the name of Hrrrrrfsyrup, our Lurfener and Lifesalver, He of the Unblemished and Broken Caraplating and Caresser of our Brainstems and Bodies), and anyways you are put into a very big box – made of steels, of all things! – and shipped away like plapple set for the platter at your father’s manor.
Made of steel! A most curious tale, and all the stranger that they believe it so fully. Would you credit it, sweet, mindless Frrree, that these heathen hyyu-men even dare to say that the whole of the city of Nu You’rek is crafted of such material? As if there were enough in all Splargadia to make so much as a house! One might as well claim that one could produce light with a flick of a switch, and not by focusing the implant graciously permitted to be installed in one’s forehead at the behest of the Priechery of the Provident and most kind Lurfener Hrrrrfsyrip – but of course, you are female, and thus unknowing of these things or much else, dear sweetling, since your father consumed your forebrain when you were a Splarglor. But I digress from my tale, and must continue post-haste, else this Dimling grow too lengthsome for the telethinkers to transmit and they complain to me of care-worn lobes and request additional compensations. My moneys are better spent here on bribes to the locals, for even they, in their primitive stupidity, admire and covet the splendid coins of our people.
You see, adorable Frrreee, as I searched for the terminal of this buhss, I was accosted by a dangerous mad-man, who in their ineffable and munificent stupidities, the lazy and shiftless men of the villament allowed to roam free. “Spare change, meister?” he did ask me. Yes, you hear awright, Frrreee, my honeyslurple: this madman demanded a full removal-and-replacement of my chitenholm, and did so in full public, without so much as a batted eye given in his direction. Lurfener save us from the perfidies of savages, children, and madman! I am a restrained and peaceable Splarg as you know too well, Frrreee, and yet I was scant able to prevent myself from thrashing the blackguard in twain. Only the piteous shrieks the poor wretch emitted in his sorrow and alarum, and the attendant charge of insipid would-be-sympathizers, saved him from becoming one of the Many Unfortunates who die un-slathered by the Priecheresters and are condemned to eternal Spaff. I was forced to hide amidst the dank brick jungles of the villament to escape my pursuit, and will begin to head north tomorrow on good solid feet, as the Lurf intended. By the time I return for home (hopefully laden with the treasures of knowledge and wealth that will be the key to your father’s cold, rotted middle-heart, Frrreee), the whole incident will have passed from the fickle minds of the residents and I may depart the plod-port unmolested by troubles and of carefree mind.

Temeltremmelith in the ha-month of Broog.
My pseudopodonous footpendages grow wearisome, Frrreee. The paths the locals have littered the landscape with are long and gruelling, and they are most arrogant in their presumed claim to exclusive use. I can scarcely walk down the middle without some manner of savage jabbering abuse at me from the safety of his metallic transportation – but this is the true news, and it is not just any metal, beautiful Frrreee: it is steel! Yes, steel, and I saw it with my own five eyes – no fable, no half-heard rumour, no child’s tale! Think of what this means, Frrreee! Nu You’rek may be fact and not fancy after all, your father’s moneyed lust sated, our union permitted! If even a tenth of the wealth of this city is as it is promised to be (which I can full believe, with the sheer swarming quantity of these strange steel-wheeled transports I have seen, which the locals call in their rough tongue “karrs”), I may even be able to bribe my way to a post of authoritation!
A short entry for now, sweetness – I believe that I am being given some sort of rude direction in flashing lights. One of the steel-machines is slowing to speak with me! Perhaps its driver shall be less uncouth than the common

Temellemontremmelithith in the ha-ho-month of Broog.
I apologize and beg your forgiveness, gentle, unassuming, reader, but I was accosted by the most vile of brigands, and found myself mostshackled firmly in the back of a karr before I could so much as hail-and-good-day to its brutish driver. I believe him to be even less evolved than his fellows; he is a burly, insipid fellow with a bulging jawmount and a most detestable air of superiority that would be looked upon as arrogant even in a well-assured Splarg of later years and great personal authority. In this primitive, it is putting on airs of the worst and foulest kind, and the high-handed method with which he recited his tribal chant while laying hands upon my person was quite un-appealing.
I shall dismantle and un-plate him the moment I am unshackled. You know me to not be a Splarg of violence, my honeyslurple, but this creature tests me greatly, and no rational being would disallow my use of force in reclaiming decorum.
Aha, I am to be released! I shall embark upon my punishment.

Ip in the month of Broog.
My kindest, most orificed Frrreee.
There has been little time to write this past qui-monthlette; it seems that the man I struck down occupied some manner of rank in the local community, and I was obliged to freeflee post-haste, only to be caught again and thrown into dankest, darkest imprisonment! Alas, I, like the Lurfener, am now subject to the torments of an unjust and unreasoning system supported on the backs of goons and captained by degenerate and unthinking creatures lifted high above the status to which Providence had assigned them, in its infinite and incomprehensible majesty.
After an exhaustingly long trial, I have been imprisoned in a small cell made from some manner of brittle, easily split substance, which I shall splinter with some of my techna – thankfully, the stupid Natives had not thought to frisk under my wunggdraclowk! I will begin drilling my way to freedom within the hurrr, and hope to be away and over the horizon by sunslip. This time I shall stay off the karr-trails, and proceed by celestial navigation.

Hup in the month of Broog.
Nu You’rek, Frrreee! I am here! It was nearer than I’d thought, less fleeting than I’d feared! Why, a scant detour from the plod-port – from a crash, for instance – would’ve landed me right in the heart of the shining city of steel. Yes, steel, Frrreee – the legends were true! And it is not the only one, I am assured (though with equal surety, it is stated to be the grandest of all by my informants, who, uncouth though they be, proclaim themselves experts in such things, and whose judgement we must assume to be punctilious and correct for the moment, lacking the input of those who might be said to be wiser, such as your father, may he splag for many years and live amongst the comfort of the grandchildrets, which, Dearest Frrreee, I hope that you and I will consent to provide him, together, after we embrace one another in the tender grips of matrimoistness, to the great celebration of our friends, comrades, relation and family) and then I found five of their strange dolars that they lust after just lying on the sidewalk, so rich did they consider themselves! But I digress.
I sleep in the shade of soaring spires tonight, Frrreee – cold and beautiful with wealth, so unlike the humble bioscrapers of home, with their svelte plankton ducts and plump, homey vesicles. But by tomorrow, these awful secrets will be secret no more, and warm familiarity shall illuminate the gluttering fescidness of their innardparts..

Na in the month of Broog.
Today I met with the chief of one of the great corepourette tribes – a proud group that claims one of the mightiest of the steel giants in the city. This man, by title the See-Eee-Oh, was the first of these Natives that I have found striking in any way complimentary – his features were pleasantly assymetrical, his eyes piquantly small and pleasingly beetled, and his hideous internal caraplating was coated so thoroughly in smoothed blubbermeats that its horridness was barely apparent to me throughout our meeting.
Reaching such a great man, of course, was a most difficult endeavour, even with the aid of Providence. Such bribes I paid, Frrreee! My pazzle has not been so empty of coins since I was a mere Splargar on the verge of disemsuffixation, and I confess that the empty jink-jank of its coins spent in the pursuit of knowledge has become (daringly!) sweeter a sound to my audioholes than any contented squeak of a well-stuffed wallet.
The audience went as well as could be demanded, reader. I proposed a simple trade: as many of my shiny trinkets as his people wanted for as much of their precious, sumptuous steel as they would part with. I was coy, of course – it pays little to let children and savages know how dear you value their possessions, lest they become greedy and unfair in their dealings with proper folk. I told him tall tales that would make your maticles curl, Frrreee – of how my people had so much steel that we would even use it as cutlery, or for trifling things like public transit lines, or how our very wealthiest would even fashion entire furnishings out of it! He was quite impressed, and claimed that for a modest fee, he would put me in contact with another corepour-nation that dealt heavily in that most precious of metals. I gladly doled out his payment and hailed him farewell in the patois of his people that I had learned, wishing him good luck in acquiring for himself some manner of tail (the Natives, poor, envious things that they are, lack such, even though much of Errth’s fauna does not). It seemed to please him, as he watched me leave in respectful noiseabsence.
I must make haste! It is a long walk, and my footpendages grow flurrisome with the chill of this place. I shall write again soon, fear not.

Ak in the month of Broog.
Disaster, Frrreee! After a long, nightmarish trek through the cold bowels of Noo Yourk (upon careful examination of the Native’s language patterns, I have accordingly adjusted my spelling), I finally came to the dwelling-scraper of the corepourette tribe to which I was referred, only to find them abandoning their position for the eve! I made inquiries as to what emergency could require this, but was brushed off with fearfully rolling eyes and exaggerated grimaces. No commentary could be made but for hasty, half-heard mutters, and I was ignored as they fled.
It was at this point, Frrree, where I confess that my hastefulness – always a flaw, so our family Priecherester told me – got the better of myself. “Fine,” I told myself, “so the savages flee. There is no terror in this place that cannot be weathered by a hardy Splarg as myself, and I shall conduct as fair a trade as can be enacted by any, judged true by all.” And so doing this, I left my entire wallet, plus a deed of credit, and prepared to extract the steel from the building by means of my technameantle, for miniaturiziting and carryment homewards.
I had just turned on my machinery, after gingerly destructmantling the front portalcullis, when a shrill sound began to nag at my head, just at the upper registrata of my hearment. It was most alarming, and it only seemed to grow louder as large, oddly-shaped chunks of steel began to shred their way through the walls and hurl themselves violently into the miniaturnmatorium. My attention was quickly drawn from the alarming sound and towards the imminent collapse of the ceiling upon my head – for what reason this disaster occurred I cannot say, and I must resign myself to assuming it to the mysterious demands of Providence, which to those unenlightened must often appear as fickle whims of fate. I barely managed to escapement myself through the splenchwards wall before the roof of the building collapsed, and had to take myself away at a dead run as the whole magnificent structure folded itself into a mangled ruin, cause unknown. A devastating sight, darling Frrreee – and not just for the loss of wealth, for I had a good sixteen chunks of steel in my pazzle, each originally larger than I am by approximately 12% and a good eight times my size as I appeared to the savages, swathed in my wunggdraclowk. Wealth beyond imagining was mine, but, tender-heartsed as only I can be, Frrreee, I could feel many a pang in my appendix for the poor peoples of that corepour-nation, now homeless and doomed to dispersion and extinction after the inexplicable collapse of their dwelling. Such terrors may never occur at home, Frrreee (at least, not after the great bio-gluing-edict of Hrakzefflepithecus the Fearsomely Paffed, which mandated that a house be made of sufficient firmness to withstand the loss of up to eighty percent of its superstructure on pain of decaraplating and liquefaction for use as his personal wax), and I know it is only brute ignorance that enables these tragedies, but I still feel for those poor, foolish savages, empathetic as I am.
I depart for the plod-port. I have wealth enough in steel and knowledge, and I cannot bear to stay and witness such suffering and chaos. Hark! Flashing lights! I had best abscond, lest I draw the attention of uncouth gadabouts.

Hikapeckleasophagusmackerateernapplemorgaphilldillynorperstraughgerhacklefipkipbik in the demi-qua-sali-fo-rth-meg-arung-nep-monthoidlette of Broogsquared.
My last entry for this trip on a strange place in a strange space, this Errth, Frrreee. I sit in the plod-port, awaiting a glok-barge’s preparations for return to Splargadia, and all I can think of is your darling belly-face (and your adorable little maticles – but such salacious talk would turn bright green the face of any gentle readers, and I must cease such nonsense before it flushes with embarrassment my text entire).
I have been hunted, and I have been hated. The howling mobs here understand nothing, and what they do not understand, they fear. I have brought them wealth and a hint of a much larger uni-verse, and in return, I have received naught but abuse. I suffer as the Larf did, Frrreee (praised be His ripps), and for no less worthy a cause: the bringing of knowledge. Knowledge, true, pure, brilliantly illuminating Splargian knowledge will be these people’s saviour, Frrree, and it will only be delivered if they are known to require it.
This journal will be my gift to the poor, starving creatures of this queer Errth. It is a plea to the noble society of Splarg itself to take up the burden that is its own greatness, for every soul and ha-soul within it to descend to the depths of suffering and remove it. We must tame these poor creatures, so they may be educated, so they may be lifted up from their natural lowliness into the edges of a grander society such as ours.
They must know the teachings of the Priecherester, they must know the discipline of an oversubduest such as your father and mine, and finally, when obedience and learning has been beaten into their tired, wretched hides, they must feel the pity and grace of the Lurfener, Hrrrrfsyrip, the Lifesalvener.
Only then, Frrreee, lurf of my life, may we call ourselves truly civilized: when we have given this precious gift to those below us.
The barge approaches, I must cease these scribbling squirtings and embark myself into its innards.

Yours and alls,
Ylolheim Freeeed Yalstogr III.

“Being the Dimling-Journal of his Exxorship, Ylolheim Freeeed Yalstogr III; an Account of Travels of a Youthful Splarg of Much Vigour in the Lands of the Savages,” Copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

On a crisp-yet-sullen day in late August, Maxwell was taken by his parents to watch a witch being tried.
It was very straightforward, an open-and-shut case, and every bit of care had been taken to make the procedure as dull as possible for an audience. The accusations were droned rather than flung, the inquiring priest was unshaven and yawned frequently, and even the victims seemed more tired than tearful as they described how the evil eye had poisoned their livestock, soured their mouths, broken their windows, and set their children crying with fevers.
The punishment was delivered with similar apathetic thoroughness. After all and sundry had said their piece and a little bit extra, the accused was tied up with an old clothesline and dropped into a pond. The witch floated like a cork and was summarily stoned to death, making no protest and seeming only slightly more annoyed than the crowd.
“Let that be a lesson to you on wickedness,” said Maxwell’s father firmly. And Maxwell took it straight to heart: wickedness was one of two things in all the world, the other being good, straight-razor, stand-up wholesomeness. And after living thirteen years of one and seeing maybe a half-day of the other, he was fairly certain which was more interesting.
“I shall become a witch,” he announced, “and be a fearsome monster.” To himself, when he was quite certain he was alone, in the middle of the woods. He wasn’t crazy. At least, not in a directly self-destructive manner. No, about this he was serious. And he proved how serious when he made his first attempt at witchcraft that very night out behind his house, with a tiny little thimble of blood stolen from his thumb with the aid of mother’s silverware (she wouldn’t dare thrash a witch, would she?).
“I abjurr. I abjoor… I abjuu. I renounce you, Lord, our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name on earth as it whoops, I renounce you.”
He looked around. Nothing much seemed to be happening.
“I embrace you, Satan, who is the Devil,” he continued. “Our uncle who are in hell unhallowed on earth as it is in heaven no wait hell. I, uh, embrace you.”
Nothing happened some more.
“A lot,” he added.
Nothing continued to happen. He checked under his bed, just in case, and found that nothing was in plenty there too.
“God damnit,” he said, at which point his father found him and had him thrashed for swearing before turning him over to his mother for a second go-round, as payment for the vandalized silverware.
That evening, as Maxwell went to bed, he hated his parents more than he’d ever hated anything before. He hated them more than chores, than work, than his cousins, than the terrible rusty old axe he had to cut firewood with. He hated them so much that he started to choke his pillow without noticing, and as his hands clutched at an imagined father’s neck (or maybe a mother’s skull), he felt a slight hum and smelt a whiff of brimstone.
His index finger touched paper, and he carefully extracted a small missive, printed on plain white paper, with text on it in plain black ink.
Stop it.
Maxwell made a face at it, then turned it over, lured by limitless optimism.
Be careful what you wish for.
Maxwell never made a second attempt at witchcraft, but he did run away the next year, after being thrashed something like every other day for sullenness, moodiness, surliness, malign spirits, and refusal to stop sulking. His father and mother blamed it on their undue moderation in his upbringing, and forbade his younger brother from smiling.
Maxwell left Pennsylvania, and took ship to the Old World as a cabin boy and general dog’s-body. “Perhaps there,” he speculated to an able-seaman, “if not witches, the other creatures of blackest night may be easier to find.”
“Gnarr,” opined the sailor, squinting haphazardly over the rail at the foamy waters. Then he vomited.
Maxwell was filled with the desire to reprove the man for his slovenly ways, but stifled it. This was a tumultuous night, filled with Saint Elmo’s fire and waves bigger than the ship. He wondered if it had anything to do with that large pretty seagull he’d killed earlier as it perched on the bow. He’d thought it would make a nice roast for dinner, but everyone had been rather upset about it. Then the sea split open and spat out a ship masted all in black, and his thoughts were put to a second priority at best.
Her name was illegible, and her hull worn grey from age. Her crew were ghastly spectres, and they lined up every man from oldest to youngest and worked their way down the line, questioning them all.
“Will you serve?” they asked. And every man felt fear close his throat to a pinhole, and could but nod yes. From the old, old navigator to the greying captain down to the freshest-faced of the able-seamen, not a man dared say anything more.
They reached Maxwell.
“Will you serve?” croaked the spectre.
“Yes please!” said Maxwell, unable to contain his eagerness.
The spectre stared.
“If it’s no trouble,” he added.
The spectre gave him an unfathomable look, then yelled something in dutch. The captain came to his side, a broad, decayed man who looked more solid and unyielding than the deck under his feet.
“What did you say?” he asked, every syllable a restrained request for a chance to hurt something.
“Yes please can I serve thank you very much,” said Maxwell.
The captain punched him firmly in the eyesocket, and Maxwell woke up in the rotting timbers of a half-sunken hulk next to a pier. Upon disembarking, he quickly learned that he was about a century late, but he’d never considered tardiness to be as sinful as it was cracked up to be.

Maxwell travelled fast and meandered hard, skipping from village to village, hunting folklore. He slept in fairy circles and woke up with nothing but crude statements in dead languages painted on his forehead, he crafted upside-down crosses and prayed at them, only to find his socks smelling of brimstone and his shoes of sulphur. He even once ate a whole raw onion. It tasted better than he’d suspected.
His next big break came as his carriage hit a pothole in an old, terrifying road in the midst of an overcrowded Germanic forest. The coachdriver ran away into the woods and the driving rain, screamed once, and didn’t come back.
Maxwell couldn’t be happier. Well, he could’ve if his luggage hadn’t been dumped into a puddle with ambitions of pondhood when the coach overturned, but he felt that might be asking too much of life.
A beast howled. It lasted for forty-five seconds and one long lungful of blood-scented air and felt like three hours. Small things cringed deeper in their burrows, and the bats flew a little higher. Maxwell nearly urinated in his trousers from excitement, and began to dig through his soaked belongings. Spare (soaked) trousers, sextant, compass, maps of (soaked) middle Europe…
The howl sounded again, closer. And faster.
…spectacles, spare codpiece, wallet, watch…
A third time. From the volume, whatever was calling seemed to be located just inside Maxwell’s left eardrum.
Aha! The raw steak! A bit past its prime by now, but any sirloin in a storm. Maxwell rubbed it all over his torso and took a big bite just as the werewolf bounded into the fading puddle of light left by the coach’s single, dying lantern. It was as tall as he was at the shoulder and blacker than the sky and all its clouds.
Maxwell growled haplessly at it and made stiff, jerky, uncertain movements, and was immediately bowled over and had a mouthful of his jacket torn away.
“No, no, no, no! The skin, break the skin!” he cried in excitement.
The werewolf chewed its mouthful three times, swallowed, and considered him.
“Right here,” he said, pushing away the ruins of his collar. “Right on the shoulder. Upper half, if you don’t mind – just so I don’t bleed out before it sets in.”
The werewolf stared away into the trees, either deep in thought or having heard a squirrel. Then it cocked its leg, urinated on Maxwell’s already-stained trousers, and trotted off, ears pricked, leaving him to brood over another wasted opportunity and laundry bill.
By the evening’s end, things were looking up. Maxwell had somewhere dry for the night, a meal under his belt, and he was paying back the host already, so he felt no shame of obligation. True the dryness was due to the furnace two feet from the crude pallet, the meal had mostly been tripe, and the repayment in labour involved rustily and ineptly sawing through the corpses of some fifteen executed men, plus a few horses, two-thirds of a cow, and something unidentifiable that was mostly liver. As well as very nearly his own hand, on some six occasions so far.
“Pull the switch!” called the doctor, finish the last of a forty-some series of injections into their combined labour of love. “Pull it! While the storm lasts and the spark holds! Make it so!”
Maxwell pulled a switch on the enormous slab of metal and clockwork that took up half the basement.
“No no no not THAT switch! THE switch!”
Maxwell pulled the switch marked “THE switch,” and was rewarded with immediate and thorough electrocution, flashing white light, and a rich, meaty scent that brought to mind that perfectly good (if a little ripe) steak he’d ruined earlier in the night. Then the monster exploded and his hair caught fire. The doctor screamed something blasphemous that was cut out by a sudden bolt of lightning, and Maxwell woke up with no sense of smell on the roof of a little inn in Munich, without the faintest idea of how he’d got there and a searing case of tetanus. One was cured with ignorant bliss, the other with inadvertent consumption of mouldy bread.

Years passed, and Maxwell grew no less determined. He slept in the beds of self-mutilating artists and had terrible nightmares walk right past him. He plumbed his family tree’s darkest depths in castles once owned by depraved ancestors, and found in the cellars a few dead rats in the walls and some empty stills set up by squatters. He swam in dark, cursed coves from which no man had ever returned alive in skimpy bathing costumes, and was attacked by an irked bull shark, for which he received many stitches. He drank wine with men who did not, and woke up the next morning with nothing more than a hangover and a terse request to leave it’s been three days you know what they say about guests and fish.
All of this took quite a lot of time, by which Maxwell should’ve been an old man. Instead, he was merely an aged man. He blamed it on his delayed trip to Europe, feeling that the whole continent had been a waste, and struck out for distant shores and more exotic mysteries. But alas, his further travels bore no greater fruit. In Africa he participated in the hunt for a mysterious lost city and succeeded in finding only a lost village, which had fallen off the map about a decade ago and had been getting on pretty well since. In South America he found El Dorado and was kicked out for drunk and impious conduct. Among the jungles of Asia he shot (or at least was on hand while it was shot) a demon-possessed man-eating tiger that turned out to be merely rabid, although he did have the excitement of a dose of rabies to contend with after that. Near to the southern pole he found a hidden, ancient cave full of what he initially thought was a monstrous and inhuman civilization older than mankind’s most creaking nightmares, but turned out to be merely hallucinogenic spores, and his attempt at finding the Min-Min light in Australia ceased when it led him into a billabong occupied by an irate bunyip, for which he received many more stitches.
“I’m getting closer,” Maxwell told the nurse in Melbourne, as he managed to feed himself without aid. “I can feel it!”
“Yes sir,” she agreed, and caught his spoon as it missed his mouth and dove for his navel.
It came that he returned to America. The witches were long gone, yes, but there were strange things out west, things that he couldn’t wait to check. He deliberately defiled a few ancient burial grounds (he was seized by virulent diarrhoea for three years and one month), and attempted three times to become shot dishonourably in a high-noon showdown only to be repeatedly pistol-whipped. It seemed the unlife of the restless spirit was as denied to him as that of the eternally cursed.
The first world war was a nasty nuisance (he’d been planning on checking under the Vatican for sealed vaults of heresies before the knives came out), but the second was a golden opportunity for Maxwell. Rumours took him to enlistment. Hair dye got him past the recruitment officers. Incredibly awkward slang terms carried him past the critical and alert eyes of his sergeant and fellow grunts, aided by profound apathy on their part. And a carefree and amoral spirit took him away from duty and deep into the heart (or at least the lungs) of German territory, where he found a creaking bunker, lined with medical waste and fraught with horrors.
He kicked in the door with his boot. He’d been wanting to do that for almost a century, ever since he’d missed the opportunity back out west. “Stop right there!” he yelled or something very much like it, to the mouldering, decayed corpse of what had probably been a Nazi scientist.
A few forlorn hours followed. Maxwell poked around the bunker (a cut-rate, shoddy thing, barely hidden underground at all), and discovered both cause of death – crushed underneath his own giant, dial-ridden belljar set – and experimental purporse: creating a master race of biomechanical goldfish while inhaling as much nitrous oxide as could possibly be smuggled into the budget. He hadn’t gotten far, which was probably for the best – the degree proudly framed on the western wall looked to be for gothic architecture.
Maxwell left in dejection, barely remembering to set fire to the bunker on his way, and deserted somewhere farther away, where the disappointment wouldn’t follow him as much.
He searched the Himalayas, and found the abominable frostbite, much to the dismay of three of his favourite toes.
He wandered the swamps of Borneo, and found the real wild man of the forests. Who noogied-and-ran.
And at last his wandering took him to Japan, where, in the midst of lunch after a disappointing morning following traces of radiation to no avail, he felt the ground shake and his drink spill on his crotch. Stepping outside, he came face to face with a receding tail bigger than buildings and devastation that matched anything he’d seen anywhere.
“Take me!” he cried after it. It didn’t listen, and vanished around a corner. Sweating bullets and crying, he wrested a miraculously undamaged motorcycle from the grip of a dying man and sped after the creature, dodging rubble and serious, ashen-faced men with Geiger counters that clicked and whirred like cockroaches.
“Take me!” he called, spinning around a block corner. A toe loomed overhead, somewhere above it, a body measured in kilotonnes.
“TAKE ME NOW!” called Maxwell, passion filling his soul. “I EMBRACE YOU, IN THE NAME OF THE ATOM!”
The creature stepped over him and continued on his way. A crushed pedestrian moaned, and Maxwell was filled with envy and spite.
“That’s easy for YOU to say,” he muttered viciously as he stared after the retreating backside of the monster. “YOU didn’t have to work for it, oh no no, it just happened to you. You had it easy. You didn’t have to try. You didn’t spend three hundred years and more running around trying to just once, just ONCE be the lucky one, oh no you didn’t. It just happened. ‘Just happened.’ Spoiled little shit.”
The pedestrian rolled his eyes and expired, leaving Maxwell alone, bitter, and with a mild case of radiation poisoning that made some of his hair fall out and cost him one of his particularly favourite teeth (the left maxillary canine, which had long been his preferred tearing instrument during meals).
“Hard work,” he grumbled as he wandered the streets of Cairo, purchased coffin after coffin and found them empty of curses and full of useless raggedy old limbs and archaeological knick-knacks. “‘Hard work is the way the Lord will admit you into heaven, boy.’ Well thank you, father, but I’ve been working hard at this for long enough without so much as a snippet of success. Where’s my excitement?” he complained as a mummified, shambling figure revealed itself to have been an inhumed minor scribe and waved off offers of vengeance upon the defilers of its rest in favour of investigating modern accounting.
“Where’s my trauma?” he grumbled as a bestial tribe of long-lost ape-men ceremonially exiled him with flung fecal matter.
“Where’s my insight into matters beyond the ken of cautious men?!” he yelled as the eightieth ancient crumbling scroll recovered from a sealed marble vault in the Mediterranean proved to be Socratic dialogues on recipes involving olive oil. He flung it aside in a temper and paced to the window. He already knew everything about cooking with olive oil.
Maxwell gazed out over the tranquil hideousness of a New England downtown with moody negativity. Home again, after three hundred years, and not a single step taken forwards. Not one vampire bloodletting, or werewolf bite, or even a conversion into some sort of ghoulish freak. No mutation, no satanic rites, no induction into hidden societies.
Of course, no UFO abductions. That was just silly.
“It’s all rot,” he said to the countryside in general. “All of it. And especially you,” he said to his father specifically, who had quietly begun hovering behind his back. “Yes, I know you’re there! You can’t fool me that easily.”
He turned around to face him. Father was much less frightening than he remembered. Faceless, yes, but shorter, and he’d seen almost more things without faces than with by this time. “Look at you! You haven’t moved one inch since we last talked. Where’s heaven now, eh? What about your hard work?”
The ghost raised its hands and made an ambiguous gesture, then took off its head.
“Yes, yes, very frightening, father,” said Maxwell. “God, how I was I scared of you as a boy? No, no – god DAMNIT. Look at you! You’re stuck, you’re wedged, you’re in a rut! And you jammed me into one too,” he spat. He threw an antique skull belonging to a depraved ancestral man-father at the ghost just to hear it shatter. The wraithish man drew back in alarm. “Maybe not the right rut, not the one you planned, but one all the same! Well, I’m fed up with it. I’m fed up with you and all this rot! I’m THROUGH, do you hear me?” He was advancing on his father now, sending the frail old spectre back on his heels, quailing in the corner of the room. “I’m GOD. DAMNED. THROUGH.”
There was a small piff, and two things happened, the second before the first. First, the ghost vanished.
Secondly, Maxwell didn’t believe in ghosts. He also didn’t believe in witches. Or werewolves, or vampires, or himself, or much of anything. It didn’t do you any good.
“What a crock,” he muttered to himself. Hair dropped from his head like a light spring rain, whitening itself as it hit the boards. “Rot, all of it. Unheard of. Rubbish.”
Plunk, plunk plunk, out fell the teeth.
“rot,” he mumbled

The landlord was surprised when he checked in the next day; after last night’s gale he was doing the rounds to see how many windows had fallen victim. Upstairs had already cost him a fortune, and he was thinking something more modern and durable. Can’t live in the past forever, and those old windowframes were deathtraps for glass. The man leaving so suddenly was a bit of a shocker, but he’d seemed the roaming sort, and at least he’d left his wallet – a great hulking slab of leather that could’ve doubled as a steak in an emergency. The landlord upended it, and cursed a bit as something very small and indisputably not a bill fell out.
He picked it up. It was a small note of plain white paper. Printed on it in plain black ink was this:
You too.
It made his teeth itch. Almost hum. Impulsively, he turned it over, and found some more text.
Look behind you.
He did, and came face-to-teeth with the head of a somewhat elderly puritan man.

It took a long time for both of them to stop screaming.

“Persistence,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

“Now the thing is,” said Eddie, to Edward, as their pickup truck crunched its way into a resting position on the gravel driveway, “not to take things too fast. Hastiness makes mistakes. Slow and steady can’t hurt anything but patience, and we’ve got enough of that.”
Edward nodded at his father. Or maybe he was just listening to his iPhone, it was hard to tell.
“Well, I expect you’ll pick it up,” said Eddie as he swung himself out of the cabin and dug through the truck’s back. Extracting a large toolbox, he peered into it, then shut it with a satisfied grunt. “Allrighty. Pay attention.”
Ringing the doorbell produced no reply for approximately thirty seconds, after which the sound of something heavy falling end over end could be heard. There was a brief pause, and then a wincing, heavy-set man opened the door.
“Eddie North and sons,” said Eddie.
The man looked at them. “Where’re the others?” he asked, after a pause that was just long enough to be uncomfortable.
Eddie shrugged. “Give ‘em two, four years and they’ll both be in highschool and I’ll start bringing them along. Just don’t want to have to change the business name twice, you know?”
“If you say so.”
“You got a boggart in your fusebox, you said?”
The man nodded wearily as he beckoned them inside. “Alan Thompson, and yes to your question. Two weeks now. Little bastard’s got it worked out top to bottom – he turns the lights off right when I go down the stairs, pulls the plug on my computer before I can save anything, and if I use anything rechargeable he just waits until it needs a fresh shot of juice and then he gives it a power surge. I’ve been living out of my neighbour’s sockets for a week.”
Eddie nodded thoughtfully as they were led to the fusebox, its flat, grey face an impenetrable mask. “Righty-o. You try dislodging it yourself?”
Alan looked embarrassed. “Yeah. I would’ve called you in sooner if I’d known it could get this bad. At first I tried chalking a circle around the fusebox and burning mistletoe, but then it just set off the fire alarms. Then one of the guys at work suggested mare’s blood, but that’s hard to get ahold of. Took me four days to beg so much as a half-pint, and when I tried to use it, the damned thing took the power out of the fridge and hasn’t let it back on since.”
Eddie nodded solemnly as he wrenched open the box and peered at its contents. “Righto. Well, I hate to bear bad news, Mister Thompson, but you’ve made no mistakes that aren’t common. See, maybe some of those tricks might’ve worked if you’d caught the little bastard right away, before he could worm a grip in, but now he’s got a firm hold on your wiring. No, we can’t win this one by playing his game anymore. Son, hand me the screwdriver. Phillips”
“’Kay,” said Edward, putting as much sullen wretchedness into the demi-word as possible. The tool was extracted and handed over – rubber-handled, with a silvery tip.
“Now the thing with your basic boggarts,” said Eddie, as he sized up the fusebox’s innards, “is that they’re scarperers. You want to get rid of them, you got to get them when they don’t expect it and nail ‘em with one go. Sir, would you mind flicking the lights on and off repeatedly, just to get its attention?”
The man hesitated, but did as asked. There was a whiff of smoke in the air and a sharp and ear-cleaning whistle erupted from the fusebox, which turned into a truncated yelp as Eddie stabbed his screwdriver viciously into it, puncturing metal and something more insubstantial. The handle hissed, and he swore and let go.
“You okay?”
“Fine, fine. They like to leave a bit of a bite for you to remember them by now and then.” Eddie sucked his fingers as he watched the screwdriver’s handle gently ooze apart, flowing down its own blade. “Damn and blast. I’ll have to fix that up over the weekend. Should be fine now, unless it left a trail for its relatives. I’ll give you some milk spiked with holy water, leave that out a few nights.”
The man looked worried. “Have you got anything less… lethal? Only I think I’ve got pixies in the back garden, and I don’t want any collateral damage.”
“Nah, they’ll be fine,” said Eddie. “A little holy water might give ‘em diarrhoea, but it’ll all come out in the end. So to say.”

“Now that,” he told Edward, as they drove away, “was an easy one. They’re not always like that, and that’s why you’ve got to be careful, take as much time as you need. Plus, on some jobs – big jobs, the ones you don’t want to screw up or some silly thing runs off with your shadow or head or something – you get paid by the hour and there’s no sense at all hurrying it then. Understand?”
A half-shrug, delivered while staring out the window. Oh well, good enough.
The next stop, he was careful to point out, also wasn’t a big deal. A regular customer, a middle-aged woman named Susan who lived just a little too close to the park and didn’t keep her security wards running in the daytime – “to save on bills,” she said. Eddie was more than happy to take the money that would’ve gone to the magitechnical company.
“It’s goblins again,” she told him morosely, leading them down to the cellar door. “I just don’t know how they do it. I turn on security as soon as the sun so much as looks at evening, everyone says they’re nocturnal, no questions asked, and the little bastards still make it in. Just don’t ask me how.”
Eddie chewed his lip as he examined the door. What may have been ambient house-sounds leaked out from behind it, hinting at something more sinister than mere settling foundations or creaky boilers. “Son, go get me the sledgehammer – back of the truck. It’s all right,” he explained hurriedly at Susan’s pained wince, “I’ll be careful. You renovated recently?”
“Yes,” she said.
“More’s the better. They like the dark and damp, so I’ll have ‘em off-kilter. And they won’t have had any time to dirty the place up to feel like home yet.” Probably, he added in the privacy of the realm underneath his baseball cap. Then, after a moment, he appended: much.
Edward returned, sledge in tow, having taken neither an offensively long amount of time nor a particularly quick go at it. Eddie felt a little twist at his heartstrings – so, he had been listening to him earlier. He took up the big rusty instrument with a grunt, and reminded himself to polish it later – there was still some congealed ichor on it from its last use, an ice troll inside an industrial ice-cream maker.
“Righto,” he said, taking off his hat and replacing it with the special one from the toolbox. “Wish me luck.” And then he pushed the door open and stepped inside, shutting it carefully behind him. The click was extraordinarily loud, and gave the impression of having cut off a number of inaudible conversations, leaving the room that special sort of quiet you can’t hear, only feel crawling across your skin.
“All right boyos,” he said, words too loud, intensifying the silent feeling of incredible creepiness, “you know how it works. I’ve got iron in my hand, you’ve got hives from nice clean furniture and carpets. Clear out or it gets messy quickly.”
A high-pitched giggle – no, giggles were for children. That was most definitely a snigger.
“Right then,” said Eddie. “Don’t say I didn’t give you little shitheads fair warning.”
He flicked the light switch and was completely unsurprised to find that it did absolutely nothing. For effect, he jiggered it up and down a few times, then started swearing softly under his breath. The sniggering sounded in the dark, maybe five feet from him, and he heard the quickly-moving pitter-patter of little flat webbed feet.
Right, he thought. That’s enough of that. He flipped the headlamp on.
The first through seventh things he saw were an assortment of screaming, terrified goblins frantically covering their light-sensitive eyes and dropping their assorted nasty little murder implements. The tenth, eighth, and ninth things were the tasteful sofas that they’d overturned and pushed together to use as makeshift lairs. Past that the details got awfully vague because he was busy and there wasn’t time to waste – walk quickly up to a spasming light-blinded goblin, bludgeon with the hilt of the sledgehammer, repeat. The seventh one had time to shake off its paralysis before he got there, and received a somewhat more businesslike and vicious soporific in exchange for most of its front teeth and quick dose of impromptu rhinoplasty.
“All clear,” he called, signalling Susan and Edward to come in with flashlights. Susan looked weary at the mess, but somewhat pleased at the relative lack of carpet-staining carnage. Edward was mildly interested, or possibly bored. It was hard to say.
“Found your culprit too,” he added. He showed her the shiny little metal loop dangling with charms that he’d yanked from the trophy-festooned vest of the chief goblin. “They swiped your keys somehow. Keep an eye on them, will you? I don’t mind the business, but I think you could use the break.”
Susan looked equal parts irritated and thankful for his concern, and waved off offers to help right furniture. They departed while she was gathering cleaning materials to rinse up the sticky black goblin nosebleed from the carpeting.

“Right,” said Eddie. “One last job – best for last too. Some lady says she’s got a changeling hiding in her plumbing. Haven’t heard of that before, but they’re little bastards, and I wouldn’t put it past them; it’s not like they can’t breathe water or fit through a u-bend.”
A shrug, one-shouldered. Good as an answer, really. Within five minutes the truck’s tires crunched on gravel, in seven they’d been escorted inside the house by a nervous-looking woman named Holly, and now they were carefully examining the toilet.
“Most likely outlet,” Eddie was explaining confidently. “Sure, they CAN squeeze ‘emselves through a faucet and into a sink, but it’d take longer, and they get bored easily. I think we’ll need the plunger for this one – hand it over.”
Edward rummaged through the box and silently, languorously handed over the ash-handled, rune-engraved plunger. Holly hovered behind them as Eddie bent low over the toilet, accepting the tool with one hand.
“Right. So what we’ve got to do here is flush ‘im out – not literally, we don’t want to get rid of him, we want to keep him here, so what we’ll do is get that scaly creeping bastard GET HIM!”
By the end of the sentence the bathroom tableau had been slightly altered. Eddie was now standing, Holly now looked at least as angry as she did worried, and Edward was being pinned headdown in the toilet bowl by both of them.
“Right,” said Eddie in a menacingly cheerful voice as Holly yanked Edward’s head out of the water, “tell me where my son is or you get plungered.”
Edward was showing his first emotion all day, a mixture of befuddlement and confusion. “Dad, what are you –” the sentence ended in brisk plunging, with all the unpleasant sounds that came with it.
“Don’t you dad me, mister. My son is a cheerful and helpful young man and you are a walking cliché that was obviously manufactured by something with only the foggiest ideas of human nature based off of wild stereotypes. Also, my son would presumably recognize his own house, own bathroom, and own mother. You didn’t even take a proper look around when you took him, did you, you little attention-deficited moron? Now spill it: where’d you stash him?”
“I don’t –“ Vigorous plunging once again commenced, this time more forcefully.
“I can keep this up all day, you shapechanging son-stealing little shit,” said Eddie. “Where is he?”
The changeling looked at least as bedraggled as resentful now, but also slightly terrified and very much out of wind. “Attic. Bound. Unharmed. Please stop. Plunging.”
Eddie nodded. “Right. Holly, could you hold this for a minute?” The nasty glint in his wife’s eyes as she accepted the plunger hinted that she may have something more unpleasant in mind, and Eddie felt something almost close to sympathy as he left for the attic. The first squelching sounds of furious plunger-hammering began immediately behind him, and he winced as he opened the attic trapdoor.
Ah, there was Edward. Tied up in the Christmas tree lights and gagged with tinsel, but otherwise apparently intact. More annoyed that injured, really, as he proved by his first words upon freedom, which were “What took you so long?”
“I didn’t realize it wasn’t you ‘till we were out of the driveway, and by then, well, why waste time? My clients expect promptness. It was a tight thing squeezing you in before lunch as it is – we may have to eat and run.”
Edward brightened up at the thought of food, at least. Well, he had missed breakfast. “What’s lunch then?”
“Sandwiches. Your mother was going to make something, but she’s a bit busy with your changeling right now and I don’t think she’ll be through making an example of him for about an hour. We may have a cleanup job when we get home.”

“Business” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2010.