jamieproctor.ca

It was the flyswatter that got him in trouble in the end.  Jeremy had known it always would.
It was an ancient thing that had been owned by his grandfather, formed from some unknown metal that had been shaped with brutal lack of care into an inefficient rusty killing machine that was probably almost as dangerous to humans as it was flies.  Especially humans that were overdue on their tetanus shots.
Jeremy liked it because it made a very satisfying clanging noise whenever he brought down a fly.
The flies liked it because it let them know loud and clear wherever Jeremy was, what he was doing, and how to act accordingly.  For instance, the loud thud of the swatter being laid to rest in its drawer was the signal for the plan to start.
Jeremy was a heavy sleeper, which had, in the past, lost him two separate jobs and cost him uncountable exams, projects, and assignments.  It was once again about to bite him in the bollocks.
There were three sounds which, if he’d heard them, would’ve made the next few hours of his life much more straightforward.
The first was the slow and ominous creak of his prehistoric door being shoved open.
The second was the soft, high-pitched whispering.
The third was the scamper of a thousand tiny little legs getting closer and closer.

The end result of all this was that Jeremy woke up due to a headache and found himself to be upside-down, suspended from his unusually sturdy ceiling fan with his arms tied behind his back.
“Ow,” he said.
“Order!” called a voice.  It wasn’t a nice voice.  It wasn’t a voice that would speak kindly, or use soothing words, or reassure, or even placate.  It was the sort of voice that would speak harshly, or use words like “insolent,” or demand.  On occasion, it might venture to dictate.
It was also very, very tiny.
“I will have order or I will have this room cleared!” threatened the voice.  Jeremy looked at the floor and locked eyes with a fat spider atop a matchbox, coming up six short.
“The defendant is now awake and this court is in session, so would you all SHUT UP!” it hissed.  Jeremy found himself almost hypnotized by its manner of speech: its legs seemed to be trying to play a mixture of tag and speed tic-tac-toe with each other.
A dull murmur died at its request – the hum of hundreds of tiny little things talking to each other, and Jeremy realized that the room was crawling.  Except for the bits of it that were buzzing around in midair.  Ants, flies, spiders, the odd earwig or two… everything in the house with an exoskeleton.
“What the fuck is going on?” asked Jeremy.
The spider glared at him, and Jeremy realized with small astonishment that he could read its expressions quite clearly – a twitch of the mandible, a sudden lustre in its fifth eye, all adding up to the overall appearance of someone who hated his guts, a hatred so solidly-defined that it brute-forced its way past body language in order to shove its feelings directly into his forebrain.
“You,” said the spider, putting as much contempt as could be summoned in a single syllable, “are on trial.  Will you represent yourself, or would you like a lawyer?”
“On trial for what?”
The spider slammed four of its legs onto its matchbox stool, making it jump.  “Reply to my question with a question and I’ll have you done in for contempt of court!  Do you want a lawyer or not?”
Jeremy’s head hurt too much to handle its own thinking.  “Fine, lawyer.  Listen, the phone number’s on the fridge -”
“No!  No fancy lawyer’s tricks for you – you’ll get the same as all the rest of us.  Bring forth his lawyer!”
A small centipede sluggishly pulled itself through a knot of ants and stood at the foot of the matchbox.
“I’m here,” it said.  “Where’s my client?”
“Directly above you,” said the spider.
The centipede looked up.  “Blimey he’s a big one.  You sure about this?  I’m not sure about this.  I thought you said this job was going to be a nice, simple easy one.  You never said my client’s eyes were going to be ten times my weight.”
“He’s entitled to proper representation,” snapped the spider.  “You defend him, I adjudicate, he’s judged by a jury of his peers -” a leg was waved at a set of ants and flies, which waved back – “and then we execute him.”
“Those aren’t my peers,” said Jeremy, thickly.  All the blood rushing to his head seemed to be settling into his tongue.
“Nonsense and lies!” fumed the spider.  “Blatant denials of reality!  Near-sociopathic obliviousness!  These are your housemates, your roomies, close as family!  By god, if I had the power I would smite you down right here and now on the spot, and save the public the uproar of an execution!”
The spider’s anger was so firm that Jeremy very nearly felt it as physical warmth, tickling at his eyebrows.  He recoiled as best as he was able, and nearly swung back into the judge’s bench in the process.
“Cease struggling!” called the judge, hastily sheltering behind the matchbox.  “Bailiffs!  More restraints!”
Dozens of (somewhat smaller) spiders leapt from above and trussed Jeremy further in webbing, grousing all the while.  Several muttered what he suspected were slurs, and one spat on his eyelid as it climbed back up to the ceiling.
“If there are to be no more outbursts from the defendant,” said the spider, giving Jeremy eight of the most evil eyes he’d ever witnessed, “the trial will commence.  Will the defendant’s lawyer…. where is the defendant’s lawyer?”
The centipede was missing.  A fly in the audience volunteered that he’d run away when Jeremy had lurched on the ceiling.
“Cowardly little mangy excuse-for-an-accountant,” said the spider.  “We’ll make do!  Human, you’ll have to take his place.”
“I want a lawyer.  You said I could choose to have someone represent me!”
“And someone is, you spoiled gadabout!  You’ll just have to fill in for him.”  The spider slammed its legs again – presumably its version of a gavel.  “Now!  Order in the court!  The schedule will proceed as follows: first witness, second witness, third witness, followed by recess for dinner and finished with the proclamation of guilt.  Human, do you plead guilty or not guilty?”
“Not guilty,” said Jeremy.
“Lying, deceitful, castles-in-the-sky clod.  Very well, no one will judge you for your pathetic attempts to evade justice.  Now!  First witness.”
“Objection!” said Jeremy.
“Objection spat upon,” snarled the spider.  “Witness.”
The witness was a lamed fly, who crept up to the stand on four legs, using his one wing as a balance aid on his lop-side.
“Now,” said the spider, “is this the man who crippled you?”
“Yup,” said the fly.  She spoke slowly, as if she was afraid haste would let the words run away.
“And what did he use to commit this abominable deed?”
“Objection!” said Jeremy.
“SHUT UP!” roared the spider.  “What was his weapon!”
“Swatter,” said the fly.
“Was it THIS swatter?” asked the spider, waving a leg at Jeremy’s grandfather’s most prized possession, retrieved from its drawer and currently held under custody of a squadron of beetles on the bedside table.
“Yeah, that’s it,” said the fly.  She scratched herself.  “That all?”
“You may depart.”
“Objection!” yelled Jeremy.
“If it will make you stop talking, then by all means, object away, you vicious clod!” said the spider.  “What is it this time?  Whining about you having to pretend to be your lawyer again?  Are you uncomfortable?  Do you need a drink and a kiss and a hug?”
“You’re the prosecutor,” said Jeremy.
“Congratulations, you win a medal!  ‘Most redundantly unneeded person man in classroom for schooling!'”
“But you’re the judge!”
“If even you” – and this was a truly venomous ‘you,’ a ‘you’ that could strip paint and bleach bones – “can manage to be your lawyer and yourself at once, I think I’m perfectly capable of separating and reconcilitating the roles of out-for-your-blood psychopath of the system and unbiased and impartial official, you villainous cretin.  Now silence your yapping maw before I have the bailiffs cram webs in it!  NEXT WITNESS!”
A millipede crept forwards, one step at a time.  This took about three minutes.
“Sorry, your honour,” he said.  “Nerves.”
“Yes yes we’re all nervous now spit it out: what are your grievances with this swine?”
“Pardon, your honour?”
“Your complaints, your issues, your beefs!  What did this scumbucket do to you and yours?”
“Oh.”  The millipede scratched its head in thought.  “Uhh… well, one time, I was sitting on the front walk…”
“As you had the right to.”
“Yeah.  Yeah, as I had the right to.  And then.  And then he came walking along.”
“And who was he?”
“You know.  The guy.”
“Which guy was this?”
“The one right there.”
The spider’s mandibles were opening and closing in a very slow but stupendously hypnotic way.  “Are you referring to the defendant?”
“Yeah!  Him!”
“Good.”

“And?”
“What?”
“What did.  The defendant.  Do to.  You.”
“Oh!  Oh yeah!  Well, he stepped on me.  Cracked my carapace wiiiiide open!  Lost half my guts and now my nervous system can only run one foot at a time.  Real pain in the you-know-what, right?”
“Right.  Thank you.  Go away.”
“May I cross-examine the witness?” asked Jeremy.
“Who asked you?” said the spider.  “He’s said his piece, it’s buried you in evidence of your own guilt… I think we’re done here.  One more, let’s get the formalities over with.  Next witness!”
The spider hopped down from its matchbox and cleared its throat.  “Thank you, your honour.  Now, one -”
“You can’t be the witness, judge, AND prosecutor!” yelled Jeremy.
The spider whirled about and was sitting on his left eyelid before he could so much as blink, and by then if he’d tried, he’d have been interrupted by its teeth.
“You are the scum of the earth,” it said, in a matter of fact tone.  “You are vile, and you are worthless, and you are an inconsiderate and oversized vermin.  Every day I spun my web on your mailbox, your terrible, tacky, worthless mailbox, and every day I caught insects that would annoy you – apologies, ladies and gentlemen of the jury – and EVERY DAY WHO OPENED THAT MAILBOX EVEN THOUGH THEY KNEW DAMNED WELL THAT THEY’D NEVER GET SO MUCH AS A ROGUE FLYER?  WHO, EH?  WHOM?”  It vibrated with such passion that its fangs seemed about to cause a microscopic friction burn on Jeremy’s eyeball, then turned away in disgust.  “No more questions.  Now – court is in recess.  Everybody go get some dinner.”
The court at large nodded in acknowledgement and seized its neighbours for devouring in a businesslike manner, some being consumed themselves even as they swallowed their own meals.  A single potato chip crumb was procured for Jeremy from underneath the living room couch and forced into his mouth against his protests.
“That’s a crumb that could feed half a colony of ants, you ungrateful sot,” growled the spider.  “I bet you don’t even appreciate it, do you?  Feckless bastard.”
Jeremy thought of a half dozen things to say, then a hundred reasons not to say any of them.  Instead, he preoccuppied himself with thoughts of chips, and how tasty he found them.  Unsuccessfully.  He suspected that his crumb was actually a wad of lint.
“Court is now in session,” said the spider, brushing a few specks of fly from the bits of its face.  “Verdict is guilty.  Jury, what do you think?”
“Guilty,” chorused the five surviving members of the jury.
“Couldn’t put it better myself.  Any last words before the execution, defendant?”
“What am I charged with?” asked Jeremy.
The spider stared.  Then snorted.  Then fell over on its back and laughed, laughed, laughed, legs waving all at once.  “You don’t know?” it cackled.  “Really?  REALLY?  After all the witnesses, the maimings, the stompings, the web-crushings… after everything you’ve done, after seeing the swatter used as evidence… you still don’t know what you’re on trial for?”
Jeremy’s heart sank.  “I guess not.”
“Well,” said the spider.  “Well.”  It shook itself briskly and adjusted its matchbox.  “It’s a bit complicated, but, you see, the long and the short of it is that we’re all members of this household – as are you – and after all we’ve seen… we just think you’re sort of a waste of space.”

“A what.”
“A boring tool.  A needless drag on the property.  A lead weight.”  The spider shrugged, an expression that might’ve almost been embarrassment marring its permanent venom.  “Sounds a little silly saying it like that.  Oh well.  Executioners?  Do your duty!”
And with a one, two, three, snap went the fangs of the spiders at Jeremy’s feet, snip went the webs around his ankles, and whack onto the floor went Jeremy’s head.
This immediately revealed two glaring problems with the execution process.
First, Jeremy was a tallish man and his room was a crampedish one.  His feet had dangled from the ceiling, but his head only travelled two inches before it hit the floor.  This gave him immense back pain and a large bruise, but not much else.
Second, Jeremy was a stoutish man and his floor was a shoddy one.  The floorboards bucked, the bedside dresser jerked, and Jeremy’s grandfather’s flyswatter fell off it with a screech of rust, smearing the beetle squad with its handle, gelatinizing the audience with the shockwaves of its impact, and crushing the judge and jury to an even pulp over the mesh that looked a bit like blackcurrant jam.

Spider silk is strong stuff.  Picking his way free took Jeremy several hours.  But it gave him time to think, and time to plan.  And what he planned his way to first (once he’d rubbed some blood back into his feet) was a cup of very bad and very hot coffee.
“Must be the pesticides,” he said aloud, scalding his tongue very badly.  “I’ve got to use different pesticides.”

“A System of Checks and Balances,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

My mother was a pretty quiet lady. I was a pretty loud kid. If you filled a book with things she told me, it wouldn’t make it past chapter three. So anything she said, I tended to remember. So I remember her telling me: “stay out of those woods.”
Now, this was stranger than it sounded. For one thing, our house was surrounded by woods, and I was an outdoorsy girl from the get-go – as soon as I could walk I was finding rocks to trip over, and since home was nothing but a beaten-up, overgrown cabin and a shed with a door-squeak that could wake the dead, the farther I wandered the better. For another, she didn’t mind me wandering around out in the forests ’till just past dusk; as long as I carried the big stick with nails in it in case I ran into a bear. It wouldn’t do much to the bear, mind you, but it was a good reminder that there were things out there that could hurt you, and it kept me cautious. Sometimes.
So, it wasn’t the woods. They weren’t the problem. No, it was those woods. And here was where mom made her first mistake, because when I asked her the natural question, which was “what woods?” she told me where she meant. So I didn’t stumble into them by accident.
Then she made the second mistake, which was when I asked her “why?” she told me it wasn’t important.
Of course, first thing you do when you’re told that sort of thing, you go see what all the fuss is about.

So off I went. Mom hadn’t given me an exact distance, or a precise direction, but I knew where I was going – one of the older, more beaten-down paths led right where she’d pointed. It was right into old growth, where the trees shut out the sky and ate up the noise. Very quiet. I’d never been that deep in before, and if mom hadn’t warned me off, I probably never would’ve. Being a parent’s tough.
The boundary of where I knew I shouldn’t be was obvious. The trail went from near-gone to overgrown, and there was a blaze carved into a dead redwood that looked older than the snag itself. I kept going. After all, how was I supposed to know why I shouldn’t go there if I hadn’t been there?
It took me ten minutes to get pretty far into the off-limits area – there was some thick brush in there.
After about five, I started to notice things.
This was all gradual, mind you. It wasn’t like I took one step, two steps and BAM pins and needles up and down my arms. It was just something you noticed after a while, like that the breeze’s stopped, or that there’s a goddamned lot of flies out today.
When I did feel it – in a little clearing where a tree had died and rotted in place – it all sort of came to the surface at once. I stood there, one foot half in the air, and tried to tell what the hell was going on. It was hard to sort out, but what I remember as being the biggest thing was the air. It felt… thick. Not heavy, just thick. Like you could reach out and grab it, like it was stuffed with something. It was full. That’s what I remember the strongest. The air, straining at the seams to keep something inside.
The light was strange, too. Even filtered through a summer canopy, it was, I’m not sure, spotty. Wobbling. Like it was being passed through some sort of filter. And it was quiet, the quietest spot in the quietest depth of the forest, but it was because there was a blur over it all. Like white noise, but like breathing.
Oh, and it smelled like growing things.

I’d say I spent less than two minutes in that place before I lost my nerve and ran for it. Didn’t stop jogging until all the way back home, and I earned myself a black eye and four bruises on the way because I wouldn’t stop looking over my shoulder. Felt like something was watching me the whole way.
Mom was worried sick, of course, and scolded me up-and-down-and-all-about. If she’d known where I’d been she’d probably have done more than scold, but I told her I’d just gotten caught up in practicing skipping rocks on the creek and ran home a little too late and a little too quick. She probably wanted to believe that as much as I did, so not too many questions got asked and I got put to bed without any more sore spots than I’d given myself. Took me hours to get to sleep though. The window kept making me itch, even after I pulled the blinds on it.

That was the first time, and afterwards I pretty much followed mom’s advice and forgot about the place. Closest I’d have gotten at that age to admitting she was right about anything. So I hiked, hunted and fished and was reluctantly cattle-prodded off to school, where I learned what other people were. Whether I liked it or not.
David… hah, David was very much “liked.” Nice, but stupid. That was the age, though – I wasn’t exactly Einstein myself back then. God, we got up to some stupid things. Usually at his house – his parents both worked, and some nights they couldn’t make it home at all. Mom was always home at my place, so that was out for half the fun we wanted to have. And that didn’t really matter for a full school year. We had our routine and it worked out fine.
But David was curious. Always curious. Hell, if he was curious enough to date the crazy girl from the woods to see if she really ate raw meat and skinned her own clothes, he was curious enough to want to see firsthand if she really lived in a log cabin like everyone said. He kept asking and I kept turning him down, and finally he turned the screws on me right as summer was starting, because his family was going to go see some relatives cross-country and this-is-the-last-time-I’ll-see-you-for-what-have-you. Worked like a charm.
Mom was happy to meet him – I’d told her a little bit, just as part of the parcel of stories I gave her as reassurance that I was fitting in with the other kids. She had some half-stale raisin cookies we’d been avoiding eating for a week, David was polite and managed to eat three-quarters of one, and it was almost nice. Awkward as hell, but nice.
Then mom wants to go to bed. Early-to-rise, you know? So she asks us to keep it down thank you very much and heads to her room, and me and David, clever little idiots that we are, decide that this is the perfect time to head outside and enjoy the night, just the three of us: him, me, and Jack Daniels.
Of course, that plan was off the rails before it hit the track. I told him sound carried so we’d have to get some distance before we really relaxed, but of course we can’t wait to crack at the bottle and we’re taking swigs before the house’s lights have gotten dim behind us. Looking back, it’s pretty lucky we didn’t break our necks on the path, even with the flashlights. We sure as hell couldn’t hold them straight for very long. Must’ve given a dozen owls heart attacks.
Now, in between drinks, what we were doing kept changing. At first we were trying to make out. Then we were trying to complain about our parents – well, he was; I only had half as much material, and I got on pretty good with mom – and after that we were trying to find a really pretty spot in the woods I wanted to show him. I think we were going to make out in it, I don’t think I quite knew what was going on even then. By then the only one of us that wasn’t sloshing when we walked was mister Daniels.
So that’s the best guess I can give as to how we went off trail. I lived in those woods for years and years and never got lost once, ever. And I’m not about to count this as ‘getting lost.’ We were moved. One moment we were skirting along the edge of the old growth, and the next we were walking into that empty little clearing full of not-noise and with the moonlight filtering in all broken up. And I couldn’t smell the booze anymore. Just green growth, hanging in the too-thick air.
I sobered up fast, once I could blink enough to see where we were standing. David didn’t get it, he just asked if we were there yet… probably. I was practically carrying the poor boy by then; we’d both have probably passed out and slept ’till noon if I hadn’t caught wise right then.
So, what was the first thing I did?
Well, I giggled.
Yes, yes, very smart. Well, I’d just gotten lost in what was practically my own backyard, found myself in a place that had terrified the life out of me as a little girl, gone from smashed-flat to stone-sober inside five seconds, and was listening to my no-help-at-all boyfriend mutter something about how beautiful I was while he dribbled a little at the mouth. It was giggle or shriek, and you don’t shriek when it’s just two of you, only one awake, alone in the woods at night. It isn’t going to make you feel any better.
Now, don’t go thinking I was completely off my head yet; while I was giggling I was getting a better grip on David’s arm and generally getting him into a position where I could run like the dickens and bring him with me. And that’s when he dropped poor old mister Daniels. Smash, right on a rock, blasted right apart. And because I was a dutiful, clean (all the other girls in school made jokes about the smelly hillbilly who lived in the woods; I’d foolishly thought this would make them stop it), conscientious, stupid, stupid, stupid girl, I leaned over to pick up the biggest pieces and immediately cut myself.
Right away, the second that I felt that nasty prick in my finger, the air broke. I’m fairly sure that’s the right word for what happened: it broke. Snapped right in half and sprayed bits of light and colour everywhere, like stamping on a prism. Of course, it was night, so most of the colours were shades of grey-to-black, but it was pretty damned impressive, even so. More startling than the lightshow (fleeting though it was) was the thud you felt in your gut and your ears, because for just a little less than a second whatever it was that had made the air so heavy had been dropped right into it, and it was just as surprised as you were.
That last sentence needs a bit more explanation, I think. You see, when I’d blinked away the blindness, the first thing I saw – beyond that David was now moaning loudly and clutching his head – was a pair of big yellow eyes looking at me from just a little higher than I was. They were very large, seemed spread very wide, and I can’t remember what the pupils were like. Matter of fact, I can’t remember anything else at all, right up until I slammed the door of the house so hard that it nearly knocked mom out of bed.
We had a bit of an argument, Well, she asked me what the hell was going on while I put David to bed on the coach, then I passed out while she groused at me. I woke up in my bed, so I guess she wasn’t too cross with me. That, and she might’ve smelled the fumes and decided that I’d have enough punishment come morning whether I slept on satin or stone.
David was a bit dinged up in the morning; however I’d gotten us home, it hadn’t been without a few bumps. The poor boy looked like he’d been five rounds with an angry bobcat, and there was half a bird’s-nest stuck in his hair. A bit less of a romantic goodbye than he’d hoped for, but I suspected that after last night he wasn’t quite as upset about leaving me behind as before. The feeling was mutual. Some people like a relationship where they get to play the hero now and then, but if you ask me, anyone who needs to be dragged through the woods dead drunk at fifteen miles an hour is someone I’d rather not be sleeping with. Maybe it won’t happen twice, but once is too much. David met some other girl when he was out east anyways. Mom seemed almost upset that I didn’t need any consoling.
The biggest change from that night was that I didn’t spend as much time in the woods anymore. After ending up in the place where I shouldn’t be through god-knows-how, I wasn’t about to get one inch closer to it than I needed to. Even the brighter, noisier, younger parts of the forest put me on edge. Felt like someone was always looking over my shoulder. I didn’t tell mom any of this, of course – she’d have put it down to the drink, and that’s fair, so would most people. I wasn’t going to take that chance. And after seeing those eyes, I wasn’t going to wander outside as often. And never at night.

There’s a few things I should mention before I talk about the third time, which was maybe ten years after that.
First, a couple of dogs went missing within a week of my little adventure. Big, healthy, well-trained animals. No sign ever found, no tracks, no tire marks. Just gone from someone’s backyard without a trace. There was a good-sized search, but nobody found anything. They figured someone stole them.
A month later, another dog goes. This one was on a hunting trip, and the man swore it went into the bushes to grab a bird and never came back. Same thing: no tracks, no marks, no muss or fuss.
Three days after that a rich guy loses a horse a few miles away, and that’s what makes people start connecting dots. Given another kick by some of the hunters complaining that it’s prime time for deer and they’ve barely seen so much as a hint of antler. I think they decided it was a really smart bear at the end of it, or maybe a cougar that had balls of steel. Neither one made much sense, but they were the best ideas they had, so they took them and ran with them all over the woods, with guns, with hounds, and at one point the rich guy hired a chopper.
Of course, they didn’t find anything. Probably for the best. Nothing else went missing.
But the deer stayed scarce. After the fifth year of that, the hunters gave up and moved on.

Things were already changing by then – I’d finished school, and I was doing most of the heavy work around the house. Mom was still tough, mind you, but her spine was more oak than iron now, and she appreciated that she had someone doing the lifting for once – especially the town runs. After school, I was more used to people than she was, and the old truck was drivable enough. It also meant mom had the time to make tea more often. God, the stuff she tried… I’d swear she worked through every single plant within ten miles, and she would’ve made tea out of the animals too if she’d still had the vision to take a proper shot with our rifle (or if any of them could be found; the wildlife kept getting more skittish). If it could be dunked in boiling water, she’d put it in a mug and give it to you without warning.
Anyways, this kept on for another five years or so. Slow and steady, but not much more. What brought that to an end?
Well, I met a man.

I was coming back from a fishing trip when I met Stewart. He almost got me killed right off the bat – the clever, clever idiot had managed to find one of the almost-gone deer left in the forest for miles around, then startled the thing into the road almost immediately. It left a dent in that truck’s hood that looked like it went all the way to the pedals, and it was only sheer luck that the dent didn’t end in my forehead instead. I did my best to show Stewart exactly what I meant, and I was pretty happy that he’d been blessed with a thick skull once my temper cooled down. For a minute after he keeled over, I almost thought he wasn’t going to get up again. Left a nice little scar, though, where one of my nails caught his scalp by mistake.
So once Stewart had woken up and I apologized, we got to talking what to do about my truck. He diagnosed it as a complete write-off ten years ago and said it was a miracle the deer hadn’t just sailed right through the rust holes, I said I was really sorry about hitting him again, and we agreed that it was only fair that he drive me home and we split the deer fifty-fifty.
Mom was happy to have guests again – if anything else, it gave her someone new to inflict all her favourite teas upon. Stewart was as polite as he could be with his headache, and in general everybody had a nice time for a little while before we had to go out back and butcher a deer. It’d been a long time since me or mom had a chance to do that, and we managed to… what’s the opposite of ‘many hands make light work’ again? Cooks and broth, yes. We spoiled that broth to hell and back – the deer came through all right in the end, but it took twice as long as it should’ve and some of the cuts were shaped in pretty peculiar ways when we stashed them in the shed’s freezer. I don’t think a steak is meant to be comma-shaped.
After that, we were all just about tuckered. Barely had the energy to cook up some of the meat for a late dinner, but Stewart helped. Man knew his way around a kitchen. We talked about the truck over the evening, and Stewart volunteered to loan us his. He’d just moved in a month or two ago, he said, and he was within hiking distance if we ever needed to borrow a ride. Everything was just warming up nicely when we heard the shed door squeak.
Now, when I said that door could wake the dead, I was only exaggerating. Slightly. But that rusty wail the thing made could, at the very least, make them roll over and complain in their sleep. And right there, in the middle of that shriek of cruddy old iron, there was a noise. Somewhere between a growl and a grumble. If we’d had time to think, we’d have stopped right then, but we were all a bit caught up in the moment and were right at the doorway before our brains could get moving. At least we had the presence of mind to snatch up our guns.
We only had a single instance of face-to-face time with the thing that was already half out of the shed. Then it was leaping into the bushes. Overall impression: almost as big as the shed, very large yellow eyes, furry, probably not a bear, and very, very fast.
And right when we should’ve all been frozen and thinking what-the-hell-is-that there goes Stewart off and after the thing down the trail.
Well. Of course I had to follow him. Who knew what sort of trouble he’d get into. Maybe nobody’d gone missing hunting after this thing before, but they hadn’t been alone, it hadn’t been night-time, and they weren’t right on its heels when it was trying to eat. Besides, the brave moron would get lost out there. As well as I remembered those trails, I hadn’t walked some of them for years, and they were overgrown. Somebody had to bring him back.
That midnight run through the woods was the run home with David turned inside-out: I remember every single step I took on that path, every branch that brushed my shoulders, every thought that went through my head, all as vividly as if I’d practiced them half a dozen times over before. And I knew all along, just as I’m sure you do right now, exactly where the trail would end.
The clearing was the same as it ever was, as if nothing had changed since ten years ago when I cut myself – I could even see the glitter of glass on its floor. The only changes were in its residents: Stewart, me, and whatever our runaway visitor was.
It was a poor thing, and I don’t mean that in the isn’t-it-cute sense. I could count every one of its ribs – huge things – and its eyes were sunken and erratic. Every breath it took seemed to exhaust it more than the last, and there was less calm in the slowing of its pants than there was, well, finality. Its four long legs trembled to keep itself upright, and its chocolate-coloured fur (milk chocolate, to be precise) was marred by patches of manged skin. Its mouth was wide-open, but the fangs inside it looked about ready to drop out – one of the canines was snapped off near the root, and something was glistening unhealthily on it, mixed with the bloody remnants of our venison.
John’s rifle was low and at his side, I saw. All of us could see that it wasn’t necessary. He gave me a look that was somewhere between sad and embarrassed. All three of us were wearing something like that. Along with, in my case, probably a pretty big helping of guilt.
“Good boy,” I said, softly. Its ears twitched. They were oddly long for something its size. Reminded me of a fox. “Good boy.”
It crouched lower. Not to pounce, not to flee, not even to relax. Just because it didn’t have the energy to do anything else.
Stewart opened his mouth, and although I didn’t know precisely what words would come out, I knew that they would be stupid. Then he shut it again.
“Good boy,” I repeated, glancing at him. He gave me a look.
“Steady,” I said. I started walking towards it. It wasn’t going anywhere. “Calm now. You’ve been a long way from home for a long while, haven’t you? Brave boy.”
It sunk lower. Its belly was on the ground now, its head cocked to one side at me. A noise came out of its mouth, but it was too slight to tell whether it was a growl, purr, or hello-how-are-you.
“Good boy,” I said, picking up a little bit of glass from the ground. “I know this hurts, but it’ll just be a little more. Don’t you want to go home again? Hold still, brave boy.”
The nose twitched a little as I held the glass to its ear, but just a little. I had to stretch to reach, and its muzzle pressed into my side. Its breath was surprisingly warm.
“Good boy,” I said one last time for good luck, and I cut loose one drop. Which I let drip.
The air didn’t break. At least, not any more than it already had. It just… slid aside. To make room for whatever was pressing against it.
Nothing big, nothing new. Just different air, with a different sky, popping into place in the middle of the clearing. It was funny, how much more normal that made it seem.
One sky under one canopy: impossibly tall and green, with a sun brighter than a light in a mirror.
One wind, calm and steady up above, brushing through leaves that were odd, with the sound of a breath that didn’t end.
And that smell, that smell of deep, pure green life, all around.
Something furry and frightened scurried away in the underbrush, and I felt our visitor’s nose twitch against my stomach again.
“Good boy,” I whispered. “You’re home.”
It sighed, and I’m pretty sure that it was happy. The sigh broke. And then we were in the clearing again, where the skies overlapped and the wind blurred and the air was thick with somewhere else pressing close against it.

That was the third time. And when I moved in with Stewart two years later, there still hadn’t been a fourth. It didn’t seem right to go there. And when mom’s heart took her just before your tenth birthday, well, it didn’t feel right to stay anymore. We buried her under the flower garden she’d started – god, she could barely get dandelions to sprout, but she tried so hard that it always almost worked – and that’s when we decided to move.
So now you know what you need to know, Tommy my boy. Because someone should know about this, and now that it’s just me, we need someone else. My chest hurts a little more than I’ve let you know (thanks, mom), and it’s been getting worse since your father left last May.
I’ve left you this letter, and I’ve booked a flight. I think there’s time for a fourth now. Don’t cry too hard when you find this; you’ve always been a brave boy, and you know that nobody lasts forever. And if you ever want to find me, now you know where and how.

Goodbye.

“Evergreen,” copyright 2011, Jamie Proctor.

The sun was coming up, and watching it were three men. One with a cane, one with a hat, and one with an eyepatch. And Herbert.
Morning peeked over the valley, shaking the birds awake into an unusually cross morning chorus. Young light washed over old bones, hidden away somewhere under wrinkled coats of skin.
There was nothing to say for a while. A set of dentures were replaced. A foot was wiggled into a more comfortable spot. Shoulders shifted into a relaxed groove in a chair that was older than sin.
And then: “Say then, did I ever tell you chaps about that one job back in the sixties?”
Eyepatch and hat turned to regard the man with the cane. His name was Matthew.
“I don’t think so,” said hat.
“Don’t figure,” said eyepatch.
“Well, it was a bloody nasty one. Don’t know how it slipped my mind. You see, there was this bird -”
“Was it a cockatoo?” asked hat.
“No, no it w-”
“Because I had a cockatoo once. Cleverest bird I ever met. Saved my life at least sixteen times, and it took a bullet for me when it went. Good ol’ Alexander.”
“Martin, would you please stop interrupting me? I mean a woman. You know, a bird.”
“We used to call them broads,” said eyepatch. He scratched his nose in an aimless sort of way. “Y’know, on account of them being broader in the hips and uh, chest area. I think. Say, I met this one once, and she was -”
“Yes, Michael, but what I was saying was that there was this bird – woman – and she was in trouble.”
“So?”
“Well, she was one of ours.”
“Ah.”
“Not one of theirs.”
“Who’s ‘theirs’?” asked Martin. “The Nazis? ‘Cause I met something like half of all my girls that way. Course, the other half were double-agents. You get over it fast or you get out of the career, that’s what Dad always told me. Of course, that was after Helga. What a lady. Pity about the way we parted, what with the -”
“Listen here, I’m trying to tell a story. Can’t you lot just keep your traps shut for three damned minutes and listen to my nostalgic tale of my youth?”
“Weren’t you almost thirty by then?”
“Details! Look, this girl was in trouble. She’d been spying for us, and the reports stopped coming in. And the last message left before it all went to pot was her thinking that they’d found her out.”
“Goddamned shame,” said Michael.
“Right. So then what happens next, is the lads send me in. And I go there.”
“Where’s there?”
“Paris, I think. Or maybe it was Shanghai. I think it was. Yes, it was definitely Tokyo, or wherever else those yellow chappies lived.”
“That’s racism,” said Martin.
“Oh come off it, you can’t go two sentences without saying ‘kraut.'”
“But that’s nationalism. It’s a lot less personal. I’m just saying, I don’t feel like this porch is a safe space anymore. I can’t even say kraut without you two jumping down my throat like a bunch of Nazis.”
“Oh really, now come on, that’s downright offensive,” said Matthew, tapping his cane on the ground in irritation, irritatingly. “One of my best friends was Jewish.”
“Really? What happened to him?”
“Oh, he got promoted. Can’t be a boss and a best friend at once, you know how it was. Anyways, there I was in Rome -”
“Shanghai,” said Michael.
“-don’t talk rot, it was Rome – and I asked around. Used the girl’s oldest contacts, the ones least likely to be compromised, the ones that had passed along the news of her vanishment to us.”
“And?”
“They were compromised. Served me right up to them on a silver plate.”
“Who’s them?”
“You know. Them. Didn’t I tell you?”
“No,” said Martin.
“How odd. I could’ve sworn. So there I was, face-to-face with their best man in Rome, and he did me over something fierce. Boot to the breadbasket, boot to the jewels, boot to the head once I’d said for the fourth time I wasn’t saying anything… come to think of it, he may have just really enjoyed kicking people. Had excellent boots, anyways.”
“Gotta take pride in your boots,” said Michael. “Hell, I’ve worn these since I was twenty-six. Ripped ’em off the corpse of one of the soldiernaires of Slannar Slammik’s fifth legion. They fit perfect if you stuff half a rag of newspaper in the sixth-to-ninth toes, and you can kick through a brick shithouse with ’em.”
They admired Michael’s boots for a minute.
“So you were being kicked?” asked Martin.
“Was I?”
“Yes. In Rome.”
“Yes, in Tokyo. Well, the joke was on him, because while he was preoccupied with kicking me, the girl snuck up behind him and knocked him out.”
“Clever!”
“Yes, very. Told her so myself as she undid the rope, got me out the window, then made beautiful, wild, passionate love to me back in my hotel room. It was quite nice.”
“How wild and passionate was this love?” asked Martin.
“Oh, very. Quite. Distracted me perfectly from the sleeping pills she put in my tea. Woke up tied upside down to a chair with the friend we’d left behind, plus one bruise on his noggin. Rather startling, I did say. She’d triple-crossed us – defected to them to get info, then defected back to us, then defected on that after gaining my utter trust and a good shagging. Plus some of those secret documents I’d brought with me.”
“What were they about?”
“Oh, I’m not sure. I never bothered with paperwork on my missions.”
There was a pause as they admired the newly risen sun. It looked nice. The distraction continued as the manager of the nursing home – also its owner, janitor, cook, nurse, and dogsbody – brought out a light, late breakfast seasoned with salt, pepper, and bitter, hateful resentment. Matthew had thinly buttered toast; Michael had bacon n’ eggs; Martin had plain oatmeal and a thinly sliced pitaya; Herbert didn’t have anything. All was as it should be.
“So how’d you escape?” asked Martin at length, straightening his shirt and brushing away small specks of stray oatmeal, including a rogue outlier that had somehow embedded itself in his hatband.
“Eh? Oh, I don’t really remember. I think I shot someone – and then probably the girl didn’t make it. That was usually how it worked back then, most often after they put me in the middle of a silly way to die. Why, one man locked me in a room with five bears! Poor fellow was quite beside himself when I explained that the black bear is a timid, fearful creature that is quite averse to violence under most circumstances.”
“I punched one of those once,” mused Martin.
“Yeah, but you’ve punched everything on earth,” said Michael.
“No, I never punched a whale. Wonderful animals. One of my nephews helped found Greenpeace, and I made him a promise.”
“Buncha hippies.”
“Look who’s talking. Didn’t you grow your hair long back in the day?”
Michael snorted violently and scratched his eyepatch. Something unidentifiable shot out of his nose and landed in the begonias. “Y’mean back when I fought the raving horde of Klacc the Ugly? I was stuck out in the Europan Lowlands for five weeks, drinkin’ liquid helium to survive, with nothin’ to eat but a half-a-Yagg leg shared between me and fifteen starving men!”
“You never did tell us why your government sent only sixteen men to deal with that particular nuisance, old boy,” said Matthew.
“Was all we could fit in those damned model-H capsules,” said Michael. “Sixteen men, a buncha guns, the worst shit in the world you could make and still call food, and maybe half a porno mag. And we had to share the porno mag.”
“Oh I say.”
“What? No, knock it off, this’s MY story. So there we were, me ‘n my squad: the Raging Hellberries – named, ‘o course, for my grandad, uncle Wilson Hellberry, who was named for his dad, Wilbur Hellberry, who was named on account of his possessing the most horrifying and dog-ugly raspberry bush known to man on his property. I think it ate a kid’s dog once.”
“What kind of dog?”
“German shepherd.”
“Good dogs. I owned one once. Bit a Nazi’s arm clean off at the shoulder. Just rip and tear. Of course, old Bacon was part-wolverine. Very eccentric breeder.”
“Hah! One arm? At the shoulder? You shoulda seen what we found once that slug-ass capsule poked its way out to Europa. It was SUPPOSED to be a real easy-like job, right? Europa’s cake compared to Venus, or Mars, or half the hellholes we been before. Put down the capsule, step out into the capital, tell Klacc that the good ol’ U-S-A runs Europa now and he can either quit this wannabe-Stalin shit or do what we say while he goes for it. Only the capsule lands wrong. Upside-down wrong.”
“I spent an entire mission upside-down,” said Matthew, fidgeting with his cane in an absent way that was utterly devoid of energy. “Goodness me, the things it did to my digestion. I believe the issue was that the man in question had some rather interesting theories about perspective, and how to alter it, and the clarity resulting from extremely abnormal circumstances. He wanted to kidnap several world leaders and force them to live a decade each as the poorest of the poor in one another’s countries.”
“Really?” asked Martin. “What’d you do?”
“Oh, we shot him, of course. I told you, that’s how most of my missions ended.”
“If you broads could quit jabbering, I could tell you my story,” hissed Michael. “So we were upside-down, stuck in this dump of a swamp. No capital in sight, and half the guys are down to poisonous fumes by the time we get outta there. And then we double-check our coordinates – well, our egghead does it for us – and hey, we’re in the right spot. That sonuvabitch Klacc had sunk the whole danged city right into the swamp. Turns out he’s amphibious, and likes the damp. So we just get out of our beautiful little death-trap of a capsule, and bam, there’s a whole messa armed and armoured slugsingers surrounding us with mazer cannons.”
There was a pause, during which Michael reached for a small flask that he hadn’t carried at his side for over twenty years and the others pretended not to notice.
“So! We get trussed up and drug down to Klacc’s throne. And he earned that moniker straight-out, let me tell ya. None of his guys are pretty, but he’s in a league of his own. Heck, that face wasn’t pretty to start with, but then half of it went missing! So he was all who-sent-ya and I-could-crush-you and we’re stalling and pausing and killing time, because we saw ol’ ‘Juicy”s got a hold of his backup pistol.”
“Where’d he keep it?” inquired Martin.
“Drawers.”
“I used to keep mine in my left boot,” said Martin wistfully. “They never check your boots for guns. Knives, yes, but not guns. Had a beautiful little number, a model something-or-other, made by that shop in Denmark. You know the place? Owner’s daughter used to run it back when Matthew here was running around?”
“Yes, I remember her,” said Matthew with a nod. “Charming girl. Kim, wasn’t it? Or Cassandra. God, she was such a clever thing. Wicked sense of humour. And a tight little… err, yes. But I kept mine strapped to my back. Right in the hollow of the spine.”
There was a pause.
“My gun, that is.”
“Of course.”
“Right.” Michael squinted. “Wait, that wasn’t what we were talking about. Where was I?”
“I’m not at all sure.”
“Oh yeah. So we were all safe, but half the moon was hunting for us by then. We had no weapons after the breakout, and ‘Juicy’ and half the squad’s still woozy. And we’re starving. Me an’ egghead hide in a bog and wait for the pursuit to pass us by, then we jump their supply train and run off with a whole half-Yagg. The thing fed us for nearly a whole goddamned week. By the end, we could barely take a half-bite without throwing up. Wasn’t that just great?”
“Old times,” said Martin with a happy smile. “Reminds me of that Sahara crossing. Ate three camels, one after another. The last one was mostly skin.”
“Yeah, Yagg’s probably a bit meatier. But oily. So, right, after we snuck back in with the Atom Hammer -”
“The what now?”
“The Atom Hammer. Keep up, limey. So we snuck back in with it -”
“Wait, how?”
“We just did, okay? Sheesh, it ain’t rocket science. So we snuck back in with it.”
“What was it?”
“The Atom Hammer. Goddamnit, if you ain’t paying attention, I ain’t talking. Shut it. Anyways, we shot him with it.”
“Who?”
Michael threw his plastic fork at Matthew, ricocheting it from his glasses into the deck, where it stuck. “Goddamned teadrinker,” he muttered, and collapsed into a cloud of dark profanity and glares.
A late teatime emerged, borne on the skeletal fingers and oily glare of the manager. It was sandwiches: peanut butter and jam for Matthew, miscellaneous compressed meats for Michael, BLT for Martin, and nothing for Herbert. Seasoned with salt and pepper and an unpleasant hint of something vaguely toxic.
“You know…” said Martin.

“Yes?” said Matthew.
“What?”
“You know what?”
“What what?”
Matthew sighed.
“That’s not good for you, that sort of stress. You look pretty pale. Palest I’ve ever seen a living man – but the dead men, oh no. I told you two about that time in Brazil, didn’t I?”
“Yeah,” said Michael. “There was an anteater and you wrestled it to death. Then you punched a Nazi into its mouth.”
“No, no, no; that was Argentina.” Martin shook his head. “And that was about the lab where they were trying to clone anteaters in preparation for cloning sloths in preparation for cloning horses in preparation for cloning Hitler. Brazil was about diamonds.”
“What kind of diamonds?” asked Matthew.
“The legendary kind. Y’see, it all started with a lady that walked into my office with an old book and a pretty little hat. Claimed it was a lost journal of Cortez that detailed ancient legends of the Aztecs never before written down about horrible treasures from faraway lands in the southern rainforests etcetera etcetera. Well, I just about told her to get out, but the handwriting looked proper, the pages looked to be the right age, and the hidden map in the binding seemed right. So I decided to take a look. Well, we booked a plane down to Brazil, but our pilot pulled a gun on us and tried to force us off. Wasn’t having that, so we ended up in a tussle – we took the parachutes, he took the plane down, and there it was: just me and a beautiful lady, stuck in the middle of the Amazon.”
“What kind of hat was the dame wearing?” asked Michael.
“Good question. Hmm… I think it was one of those little cute ones. Y’know, with the bows?”
“Yeah. Straw?”
“No, no. The ones that are shaped sort of like chocolate boxes.”
“Yeah, those ones!”
“Right!”
“What colour?”
Martin drummed his fingers on his chair, then shook his head in frustration. “Hell, I forget. But it was pretty, alright.”
“Yes, the girls don’t wear hats like they used to,” said Matthew wistfully. “Such a pity. Nothing more beautiful than a girl in a hat. And nothing else.”
“Shaddup, I want to hear about what happened to this broad Martin’s talking about before we go on another one of your I-knew-a-dame fantasies. So, what happened?”
“Oh, she was a Nazi. Should’ve known, really – she was probably going to rifle my corpse and guide the pilot to the spot marked on the map, only I went and got us both stranded. So she had to rely on me for help through the jungle, down the river, over the surprising and unexpected two-hundred-foot waterfall that I saw coming, and through the ancient caves into the rear entrance of the diamond mines of Xlac’Tla. Then she revealed that she’d been radioing our position, and stabbed me in the back right as her friends showed up with a couple of tanks. No idea how they got them through the rainforest. Had to run like the wind.”
“No good winds here,” complained Michael. “Y’miss ’em after you spend a couple of days on Jupiter. I tell ya, the breezes there would flay the skin right off an elephant in a wink. The bubble suits kept us from goin’ crazy, but we had to talk with sign language. Worst bit is, I can still remember a lot of it. Useless junk. Why can’t one of you two go deaf so it ain’t wasting space in my head?”
“Yes, absolutely,” said Martin. “So then, after I used the seemingly useless junk – thank you for reminding me – to blow up the second tank, I cornered Gloria. She was all repentant, and contrite, and honestly-it-wasn’t-my-choice-they-have-my-father, and I didn’t listen and just shoved her into the bottomless chasm of Tix-Tlac-Ta, where her body rolled in the dust of the mines and turned paler than the finest china.”
“Steady on there lad; wasn’t that a bit harsh?” said Matthew.
“This was the sixth or seventh time that’d happened, Mike, I wasn’t about to listen to her. Fool me eight times, shame on you. Besides, I could only rescue her or the diamond dust that woke the dead. And I’d promised Dad that I’d find a way for Mom to get her last wish finished – she left us right in the middle of the sentence, and “dig up the gold, it’s burrriiieed aaat-” isn’t what you’d call a straightforward request.”
“The lady was past worrying,” said Michael. “Just take the broad, do her hard, and go home.”
“No, we’d done that earlier. In the jungle.”
Michael swore bitterly in a language meant for things with no tongues. “Christ, between you and the limey, I don’t need enemies. The one time I got laid on-job was when we went to Venus. And she had three legs. And our egghead, after the mission? Know what he told me?”
“What?” asked Martin.
“He said that wasn’t a leg. Then he wouldn’t stop laughing, no matter how hard I hit him. Screw Venus.”
A sullen silence reigned, interrupted by dinner, which was undercooked and tasted burnt. Chicken-fried steak for all, with salad (Martin, Matthew), french fries (Michael), or nothing at all and no steak (Herbert).
“And you got out okay, right?” said Michael.
“Of course I did. I’m here now, aren’t I? Lost a good shirt though. But the diamond dust made up for that. And it made up for the trek back home in a stolen Nazi plane – those krauts build good aircraft, but I’m no pilot. And it even kept me going in the bit where I got shot down by the national guard. But I’m not sure it covered the disappointment of finding out mom had gotten confused and her last words were a plot point in the mystery novel she’d been reading in her final hours.”
“What author?” asked Matthew.
“Agatha something. Doesn’t matter. All brain-trash, Dad said, and I have to agree.”
They cleaned their plates, and stared at them in melancholy as the sun began to dip below the valley wall.
“I say,” said Matthew, “all this food today has been rather bitter. I’ve half a mind to complain. Why, if it weren’t for neither of you two chaps keeling over, I’d nearly say it was cyanide.”
“I’m immune,” said Michael. “Part of the cocktail they shot into us before they dropped us onto Mons Olympus during the Plague Wars.”
“Haven’t had so much as a cold sniffle since that time I drank from the Fountain of Life,” said Martin.
They looked at their plates again.
“Cyanide, huh?” said Michael.
“Yes. You never quite forget that little almond tinge on your tongue. Very fierce.”
“Well, shit,” said Matthew.
The sun went down.
“I think,” said Martin, “that we’d better ask Herbert.”

The diamond dust pouch was old, battered, and so ingrained with its contents that it looked like something you’d have taken to a disco. It was still over half full, even after Martin fumbled the measure he took and needed a second pinch, which he dropped into Herbert’s mouth.
Herbert creaked. Herbert sighed. And as a long, slow breath filled him up, Herbert sat fully upright in his chair, the only one of the four of them with perfect posture, although his skeleton had the natural advantage of no longer being weighted down with flesh or organs.
“Hello there,” he drawled – without lips, quite a feat. “What’s fixin’?”
“Just a few questions,” said Martin. “Could you tell us if this food was poisoned?”
“Yup. You fellas make another friend?”
“It seems like it. Tell me, what’s the manager doing right now?”
“Loadin’ a shotgun. Three slugs. Y’reckon one of you buried his pappy?”
“Might have,” opined Matthew, “or near enough, at least. It’s all in the math, I’m afraid – wait fifty years and I’m sure the widows-and-orphans of our collective bodycounts have all had enough grandchildren and great-grandchildren to populate a good-sized city.”
“Not mine,” said Michael. “You two were the guys dumb enough to plug people that lived on your front lawns. I kept my business off-world.”
“And I suppose that meteor last summer that killed poor Mrs. Ellbridge was just a freak coincidence?” said Matthew.
“The broad knew the risks when she slept with me.”
“If you ladies are done bickering,” said Herbert, “he’s finished loadin’. Reckon you’ll need a hand?”
“No thanks,” said Martin.
Herbert sighed, letting out most of the breath in him in one go. “Still so damned stubborn. Just as thick as the day you came lookin’ for my advice as a snot-nosed puke. Won’t ever listen to the old folks, you won’t!”
“Herbert, we ARE old.”
“Not from where I’m standin’,” said Herbert, increasingly faintly. “Where’s the six-shooter I gave you? Typical boys, throwin’ away good gifts…”
Herbert collapsed into a loose pile again.
“What?” said Martin crossly as his friends looked at him. “I pawned it after the war. I needed lunch and I didn’t speak the language, it was the best deal I could make.”
“The gentleman indoors will come through the door in a moment,” said Matthew. “Perhaps we can postpone the argument, eh what? Anybody got a plan?”
“Nah,” said Michael. “Something better.” With a grunt and a struggle, he reached into his half-wrecked pants and yanked out several dented, worn, and bent metal parts. “Now, was it long-short-long, or short-long-long…aw, close enough.” He snapped them together with a creak of angry metal, then slotted two or three fingers into the oversized trigger. “Right. Limey! Mark me a target. My depth perwhatever isn’t so great.”
“There,” said Matthew, pointing at the nursing home behind them.
Michael squirmed in his chair, held the Atom Hammer halfways over his shoulder, and pulled the trigger, missing the doorway the manager was standing in by inches and hitting the wall, which disappeared, along with both floors, the ceiling, the basement, and the porch, dropping all four of them, plus Herbert, into the begonias in the tattered remnants of their chairs.
The manager was the first to surface, spitting out flower petals. The shotgun was still clenched in his fist, and his teeth vibrated with uncontainable rage as he wobbled a sighting on Michael’s face. The Atom Hammer had slipped apart again, and the old man was cursing quietly as he reassembled it backwards.
“Excuse me,” said Matthew. The manager’s eye twitched towards him, and it was because of that that the shot that killed him went directly in a straight line from pupil to brainstem.
“Terribly sorry,” added Matthew, wincing as he rubbed his arm. “Good lord, I’d forgotten it’s a bit harder to reach back there nowadays. Still, what’d I tell you, eh? Nothing like it as a place to keep your gun. Now, would whoever’s turn it is to find a new nursing home get the car running, there’s a good lad. I feel like a nap.”

“The Good Old Days,” Copyright 2011, Jamie Proctor.

There were those who would call Albert Pencilgrave a filth-digging reptile, and in many ways they were not far wrong. He didn’t blink, possessed a scaly hide that kept his liquids inside him, and his presence unnerved most mammals. But those were merely superficial marks against him – once anybody got to know the man properly they realized that he was actually remarkably cold-blooded, capable of eating his own young if it benefited him, and lethargic unless in the presence of prey.
But despite these passing, bone-deep flaws of character and soul, he was still mortal. Very, very, very mortal, as his doctor seemed suspiciously pleased to tell him.
“Absolutely fatal,” he said, holding back a grin that could’ve swallowed a cantaloupe. “One thousand percent.”
“You sure?” asked Albert.
“Utterly. Your ticker’s just about worn through, mister Pencilgrave. I give it a week before it snaps. I recommend a transplant. Maybe something from a homeless man, if we can’t find a legit donor.”
“I have lots of money,” said Albert. “There’ll be a donor.”
“True,” said the doctor. “That’ll cost you a couple million or something.”
Albert frowned. His face was already a spiral of fractured skin flakes and scowl-lines, and this action nearly turned him into a Magic Eye picture. “That’s too much. Much too much. Do you have something cheaper?”
“You could try a pig,” offered the doctor. “Very fresh, picked it out myself. And tender too, just the right thing to get your fluids pumping.”
“Too fatty,” dismissed Albert. “And anyways, I don’t like knives.”
“We use scalpels,” said the doctor. “And saws.”
“I don’t like those either. I think this whole surgery thing is a bad idea.”
The doctor’s lip twitched, on the verge of a sneer. “Oh, and I suppose you’ve got a better idea of what to do about your raddled old heart, eh? Dearie me, that MBA just PERFECTLY qualifies you to self-diagnose and problem-solve, doesn’t it? Just about pays for itself, really.”
Albert thanked him coldly, made a mental note to have him ruined, and had someone drive him home. The chauffeur was a cheery young man who whistled as he turned sharp corners, and Albert suspected he might be paying him too much. Maybe he should replace him with someone more desperate.
It was only until he walked through the door of his nearest condo that Albert realized he’d just thought of his solution. But that could wait until after he fired his chauffeur. He had a special red pen for it and everything.

The hardest part wasn’t finding a volunteer. There were millions. The hard bit was figuring out the job title. “Cardiovascular assistant” went into the wastebasket, along with “fitness aide,” “arterial officer,” and, in a fit of annoyance, “heart guy.” Finally Albert decided on “cardiological supervisor,” and had a small business card printed out that would go to a mister Emmanuel Ortiz along with the salary of two hundred dollars per month and a firm threat to keep quiet about it.
He knew the exact moment that it happened – right in the middle of an email he was preparing that would crush a corporation and 60% of its workers into financial dust. His heart sank, and didn’t rise.
He smiled to himself.
“Sir?” asked his secretary, hiding his astonishment poorly.
“It’s nothing,” he said. He felt his chest, making sure that there was absolutely no pulse, and chuckled a bit. “It’s nothing.”
And in Puerto Rico, Emmanuel winced a bit as his own heartbeat took up double-time, nearly spoiling the beer he’d ordered with the first of the new money.
“Something wrong?” asked the bartender.
Emmanuel shrugged, winced again, and thought about getting his son into the United States. “I’ll get used to it.”

In retrospect, Albert was amazed he hadn’t thought of it sooner. Within the first week of his outsourcing his heart he was more energized than he’d been in the past ten years, chewing through mounds of work with the zeal of a bookworm presented with a complete high fantasy trilogy. His middle management trembled before him, his colleagues stepped softly when he spoke, and he had a sex life for the first time in fifteen years, albeit not with his wife.
It was all going well. Too well, even, which was probably why he got the cough five years later. All those long nights out working, then drinking, then working a bit more (usually on something that would have to be done all over again next morning), then heading home late at night in the damp. And of course, as the doctor pointed out with satisfaction, all the six-inch cigars.
“Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease,” he said.
“What?”
“Chronic bronchitis and emphysema all over the place.”
“Is that even a thing nowadays?” asked Albert crossly.
“Absolutely. Smoker’s bane.”
“I thought it was for poor people with lousy tobacco.”
“No. And you’ve definitely got it. Your lungs are pretty much shot. I recommend new ones.”
“How much will that cost?”
“Oh, an awful lot,” said the doctor, licking his lips.
“No thanks,” said Albert. “I’ll work it out on my own.”
“Just like you did that heart disease, didn’t you?” said the doctor, as innocently and sweetly as a little old lady with an ice cream cone.
Albert gave the man his most sunny smile. He cringed.
“Yes,” he said. “Exactly.” He drove home, and the first thing he did was remember to properly ruin the doctor’s life this time, signing in the little notes on how to get his wife to leave him and his malpractice suits drawn up with his special red pen. The second thing he did was to draw up a business card for the position of “respiratory manager.” The third thing he did was to tell one of his people to get one of their people to make someone who worked for them go find a man low on money and hefty in the lungs to sign a contract without reading it too closely, on benefits of a shiny business card and a hundred fifty a month.
Mister Daw was annoyed by the new shortness of breath he’d acquired, but he was a stubborn man, and it would take more than that to make him give up jogging.

As the decades rolled by, Albert Pencilgrave appreciated more and more just what he’d discovered. The lengthier and more slimy parts of his digestive system began to fail, and he hired a man in Patagonia to break down his nutrients for him. His aging wife cheated on him with a kind-hearted poolboy – the ungrateful whore, after all he’d done for her – and when his liver failed during the divorce (it had only been a few gallons of scotch, he didn’t see why it couldn’t handle it), he handed its duties over to a seasoned and steady hand in India.
“I feel like a new man,” he’d say for the first week after each outsourcing. “A new man altogether.” And then he’d give that little smile that didn’t seem to fit on his face properly, like a slide designed by M. C. Escher placed in the midst of an otherwise normal playground. It unnerved people, though not nearly as much as his unnatural longevity. In a job where you retired early (and rich) or died of stress (if somewhat richer), he was still packing away the dollars full-time, apparently with the only loss being his ever-wrinkling and omni-spotted skin. Which he then handed over care of to a man in Beijing.

The only real worry was when he woke up and couldn’t remember what he was doing that day. Or what his name was. Or, shortly thereafter, why he was at the doctor’s.
“Alzheimer’s,” said the doctor.
“Who are you?” asked Albert.
“Dr. Susan Gilman,” said Dr. Susan Gilman patiently, for the fifth time in ten minutes. “I’ve been your doctor for twenty years. You have severe Alzheimer’s disease, and you probably won’t make it to the end of the financial year. Is your estate in order?”
“I’ll get someone to do it,” said Albert. “I have someone who can do that, I think. We’ll figure something out.”
“There’s not much that can be done,” she said. “I can prescribe some medication to ease the way, but…”
“No buts,” said Albert. “I can deal with it on my own, anyways. Keep your medicine and its costs.”

And he dealt with it that very evening, after four aborted attempts to write notes to himself and recall how to read English. With great effort, he secured the services of a man in Borneo, and successfully outsourced his brain. For the first time in more than fifteen years, Albert Pencilgrave’s mind was clear and uncluttered.
“Good god,” he murmured as he looked over reams of dusty, unread files and an inbox that had been transplanted onto its own 500-gigabyte hard drive. “Waste! Scandalous, frivolous, worthless waste!”
He did the math – without a calculator – and his mind reeled at the sheer volume of his hard-earned money that was being siphoned away by his lazy and parasitic employees. He gave this job his health for years – and that of several dozen other people in various countries over the past forty years – he gave it his care and attention every day, and this was the thanks he got? Worthless wastrels that begged for richer retirement packages, that demanded health plans when they went toothless? Why hadn’t they saved up like he had? Why weren’t they showing initiative and asking one of their grandchildren to handle vital functions or something? They were asking for PENSIONS of all things – where were their bootstraps?! Well, this would end now.
“I must’ve been more senile than I thought,” he declared. Opening his desk drawer, he found that little red pen. An email would be more efficient, of course, but his thoughts flowed better when he composed in print – and it was so much more satisfying to sign. His secretary could scan it anyways.
Writing the letter informing everyone whose age now qualified for pensions that their services were no longer required took half an hour. Sending it to his secretary was done in minutes. The transcription and delivery, plus the actual layoffs, took approximately six hours. Which meant that after putting in an early day, Albert Pencilgrave was at home on the toilet when five people at various locations around the world were told their services were no longer required, causing them, surprisingly, to feel much heartier and haler than they’d been in years. Especially hearty, in one case.
The results at Mr. Pencilgrave’s condo, though spectacular, were not recorded until after the fact.  Thankfully, the pictures made excellent reference material for medical students. Including Mary Ortiz, whose grandfather suddenly was healthy enough to come visit.

“Organs,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

Three people sat under an old stone bridge, half-broken and tired in the dim light of an evening shower. A small fire was their light as they huddled round, watching raindrops fall in reddish light.
“I’ve got a story,” said one of them. He was an older man, with a greying beard.
“Go on then,” said a thin woman worn thinner by years and years. “It’s been a while since we had a proper story trade. What kind?”
“It’s a story of the King of the Turtles,” said the older man. “And I tell no lie; nobody’s ever heard it before. No man, no lady, no kid.”
“That’s a hard trade to make,” said the thin woman. “But I’ll wager I can match it. Tell your story.”
“Alright then,” said the older man. He crouched low by the fire, and began to speak into it.

So, back in the day, there was this little kid, alright? Just an ordinary little kid in most ways. Sure, his parents are dead, but that’s not so weird. It’s a nasty world, lots of kids with dead parents out there, no big deal. He coped. Sometimes they do that.
This kid, see, he wasn’t ordinary in one way: he thought he could do anything, and I mean, he really thought he could do anything. You know how they said that anybody could be the president? Like that.
Anyways, the kid hangs around down by the park sometimes. He likes the trees and stuff. And down there, he’s watching a lady feed some ducks. He’s laughing at ’em, because the ducks look so silly with their butts in the air when they dive for some bread that’s sinking. He and the lady don’t know you shouldn’t feed bread to ducks, but that’s sort of okay, and it’s not a big part of the story. No, what the big part of the story is, is when the kid gets bored of watching this lady feed the ducks, he starts to walk away and nearly trips over this big fat turtle that’s sitting by the pond’s edge. And this city boy who likes the park, who didn’t have parents to get him books on animals (D is for dog, C is for cat, T is for turtle), he’s so surprised and he goes “What’s that?” aloud, just like that.
And the lady, who’s jumped a bit and come over to see if this little kid with the nice smile is hurt, she sees what’s surprised him and she says “It’s a turtle.”
Little kid says “What’s a turtle? It looks like a rock with a head.”
The lady, she tells him about turtles. Just the basics, you know – lay eggs, are reptiles, blah blah blah. But the bit that sticks with this little kid, is that a turtle’s shell is like a little fort that it carries everywhere with it. Anywhere’s home for a turtle, and its home is a castle.
“I want to be a turtle,” says the little kid.
Now what do you say to that, huh? Lady laughs a bit, calls him a dear, and she walks off because she’s out of bread. Gives him a dollar, too. Cool lady.
Remember what I said about this kid thinking he could do anything?
So first things first, the kid thinks. Second thing, he picks up the turtle and he asks it “how can I be a turtle?” Straightforward, but the turtle just blinks at him. It ain’t talking.
The turtle, it just laughs at him. That gets the kid mad, so he tickles it, right on the belly, spry and nimble. And the turtle can’t help it – it laughs. And when it laughs, its head pops out, and when its head pops out, the kid grabs it. “Tell me,” he says, “or I’ll yank you right out of your shell!”
“Don’t do it!” says the turtle. It’s got a real gurgly, grimy voice. Like a scratchy old man voice, but with a mouthful of mud. “Don’t take my shell! Leave me my shell! I’m no proper turtle without my shell.”
“Then give me your shell so I can be a turtle,” says the kid, “and I’ll leave you alone.”
“I wouldn’t be a turtle without my shell – I’d rather die! And besides, it wouldn’t fit you! You’re much too big and fat.”
The kid shakes the turtle. “Tell me where I can find a shell that fits!” he says.
The turtle grumbles and groans and whinges, and the kid tickles him for five minutes straight before he gives. “Fine!” he says. “The King of the Turtles has a shell big enough to be a home for a human. But you’ll never get it from him.”
“Where does the King of the Turtles live?” asks the kid.
“Under the giant stone!” yells the turtle. Its head is really hurting now.
“Where is the giant stone?” asks the kid. He shakes it.
“In the lake! In the lake!” the turtle says. “Let me go!”
“If you lied to me,” the kid says, “I’ll come back.” And he winds up and chucks the turtle back into the pond, where it sinks down to nurse its neck.
Now, the lake is right next to the city. It’s a big lake, though, and even if a stone is a giant, that’s still one stone you’re looking for. Tough job. But this kid, he has a plan. He hikes all the way down to the lake – three days from the end of the city he’s at – and by the time he gets there, he’s got it all worked out. So he uses that one dollar that lady gave him to buy some cheap french fries, all grease and no potato, and he goes down to the water’s edge.
“FOOD!” he hears above him. Lookithat, it’s all the seagulls, all come clamouring. “FOOD! FOOD! FOOD!”
“I’ll give you my food,” says the kid, “if you can find the giant stone for me.”
“NO! FOOD!” they scream, and down they come. But the boy’s clever and quick, and he jumps and dodges and bullies his way through the whole flock without a scratch, and he kicks three of them to the ground with bruised butts and ruffled feathers.
“Now I’ll give you half my food,” says the kid, “if you will tell me where the giant stone is.”
“FOOD!” they yell, and they all come at him again. This time he kicks half the flock, and the flock leader to boot, and laughs while he does it.
“Now I’ll give you one french fry if you tell me where the rock is,” says the kid. “And maybe I won’t finishing beating you up.”
“FINE!” say the gulls, out of breath, winded, and fed up. “FINE!” They’re sick of this kid and his rotten attitude and his quick feet, and they just want him to go away now. So they flap up into the sky and float around, and gull eyes aren’t too great but they can’t help but see that big rock over there from up there.
“IT”S OVER THERE!” they call.
“Here,” said the kid, and he drops the fries on the ground (all except for one) and leaves them to pick them over.
Now the kid had to swim. But he decided it couldn’t be that hard.
Remember what I told you about this kid?
So he makes it out a ways, lord knows how. And down there beneath him is the giant rock. He holds his breath and dives, but the rock’s edge snaps tight to the bottom of the lake the moment he gets close. He tries five times, and every time this happens. And he’s getting tired.
“Could I steal a big breath from you?” he asks the sky. “Just one. I’ll pay you back, honest.”
“I’ve been watching your deals today,” said the sky. “You were generous with the seagulls, but harsh to the turtle. I don’t know if I should trust you.”
“I promise. I’ll pay right now,” says the kid. And he sounds like he means it, so the sky’ll let that slide.
“Open your mouth,” it says, and he opens his mouth and a big cloud filled with the most perfect breath of air he’s ever felt jumps down into his lungs. It’ll last him for hours. And when he closes his mouth, he feels funny and then he sees the sky took all his teeth. It uses teeth for hailstones, you know. That’s what happens with all those teeth you lose when you’re little. Some guy in Finland’s getting them dumped on his head.
So the kid is hanging around down at the bottom of the giant rock, and just like he did last time he tugs really hard on its base after it snaps. He pounds and pulls and nearly puts out his back, and then he turns around, right? Like he’s going back up for a fresh lungful. And right as he turns his back on it, just as it’s opened up to see when he’s coming back, he flips around and dives, and ZOOM he squeaks right under the rock’s edge. Boy was it mad. Slammed down behind the kid WHAM just like that, but it was too late: he was in.
Inside was the palace of the King of the Turtles. Real nice place. Not a castle, a palace – the difference is in the decadence, you know? They made the word “lavish” for this stuff: carpets, tapestries, candelabras, everything all made of anything you’d find on the bottom of a pond – sticks, stones, all that sort of thing. And in the center of it all, a really big throne made out of a rock. On that rock there was the King of the Turtles, three times bigger than a man and something like three-and-a-half times bigger than a lady. And a lot bigger than a skinny little kid.
“Who are you and why shouldn’t I eat you?” he asks. Not the best way to start a conversation, you know what I mean? But the kid, he isn’t freaked out. He knows what to say, so he says it. “I am here to take your shell,” he says.
The King of the Turtles throws back his head and laughs ’till he was nearly sick. “You’d have a better chance of eating the clouds,” he laughs. “Go and do that first, then we’ll talk about my shell.”
“I already did that,” says the kid. And he opens his mouth and spits out the cloud. It fills up the whole palace with fog, and nobody can see anything.
“Clever!” says the King of the Turtles. “But irritating. And anyone can beat a cloud; they’re nothing but wisps of water! Why don’t you lift my throne, then we’ll talk.”
So the kid ran up to the big rock that the King of the Turtles sat on, and he yanked as hard as he could at it. Won’t budge, though. But the kid has an idea, and since it’s hard to see, he yanks out a stick from the table next to the throne, and he uses it as a lever, see? If it were any rotten old branch, that wouldn’t have worked, but the King of the Turtles uses the best in his home, and it was okay. Lifts the whole throne up nearly half a foot.
“Trickster!” seethes the King of the Turtles. “Nobody can lift my throne but me! Let’s see how clever you are when my jaws are around your shoulders!” And he reaches down to grab the kid. But the kid was expecting something like this, so he jumps out of the way and the King of the Turtles grabs the table instead of him. And at first he just thinks that kid was even skinnier than he looked – but after that first bite, he’s changing his mind. Got a table leg stuck in his mouth and a howl that makes the ceiling shake. And right as he’s standing up and reaching into his mouth, the kid kicks out the stick he’s wedged the throne up with, and the King of the Turtles falls over and stabs himself right in the head through his mouth. That’s that for him, so the kid rolls him out of the shell and rolls into it just like that, snug as a house for him, layer on layer.
“This is a good place,” says the kid. He lived down there on the bottom of the lake for a month, drinking that fine turtle wine and eating good turtle food. He grew a decade’s worth in thirty days, and filled up with good strong muscles. And when he came up from down there, that big old shell tight as a snug suit around his shoulders, he saw that a whole decade HAD passed. Ten full years, just like that.
Well, the kid decided he’d make the best of it. And he decided the best thing he could do right then was to be what he wanted, and what he wanted was to be the King of the Turtles.
I told you about how that kid thought he could do anything, didn’t I?

“Now how’d you know that?” asked the thin woman.
“I talk to the seagulls time and then,” said the older man. “One of them, on the end of his wings, he told me a bit about this sort of stuff.”
“Seagulls are liars,” said the thin woman.
“That’s right,” said the older man. “But not when they’re about to die.”
The thin woman threw up her hands. “If you say so. But now I’ll tell you my story. And my story comes from a solid source. Can’t trust birds, old man.”
“Older man,” he corrected.
“Whatever. Now, listen up. This one’s as new as yours.”

Right, we all know the sorts of things the King of the Turtles did. He fought a year-long duel with the King of the Frogs – and he won it, too, when the frog tried to swallow him whole and his shell tore its throat right out. He swam to the bottom of the bottom of the ocean, to prove that he could, and brought back pearls bigger than whale-eyes. He demanded tribute and respect from cities across the world, whenever they laughed at him, he swallowed all the water of those cities and wouldn’t give it back until they bowed and scraped.
But those were the later things. The first thing he did – the first BIG thing – was when he came out of the water and spoke to the people on the shore. There were only a few people around the lakefront that early morning; two women and a man.
“Who are you?” asked the first woman.
He scratched at his shell. “I’m the King of the Turtles now, I guess,” he said.
“What are you doing here?” asked the man.
He thought. “I’m coming to see the city again,” he said. “It wasn’t a good place to me when I was little. I think I’ll see if it’s gotten better.”
“What are you going to do?” asked the second woman.
He shrugged. “I’ll find out,” he said, and he walked through the streets of the city that he’d grown up in. The first woman and the man followed him. The second woman turned and ran away.
Every footprint left a puddle, and every time he stopped and looked at something – to see a street sign, or a new building, or anything – he left a mudhole that sank right through the concrete. Where he breathed deeply, bullrushes sprouted. When he laughed, the smell of rotting reeds and pond scum filled the air. It made some people sick, and he just laughed harder at them.
“This city isn’t so big after all,” he said. “I was small, that was all. It doesn’t look so good now.” And he spat in front of city hall, and it turned into a marsh; a cabinet of cicadas singing on the background of a mayor blackbird.
“This city isn’t so scary after all,” he said. “I was scared, that was all. It doesn’t look so frightening now.” And he spat on a factory, and it withered up into a huge old rotting log, filled with all sorts of surprised animals.
All the people were running now, of course, and many of them were screaming. This irritated the King of the Turtles, especially when some of them began to shoot at him. The men in the little black and white cars tickled, but some of the big guns that were starting to appear, in big trucks driven by big men – they hurt. Itchy-hurt, not burning-hurt, but hurt nonetheless.
“This whole city is just one big mess,” he said. “And this is taking too long. I think I’ll fix it all at once.”
So he climbed to the top of the highest building in the city – it was a big smokestack. He looked down on all of it from up there, all the brick and mortar and struggle and bustle and hustle, and he stomped his right foot three times. And each time his foot hit the chimneytop, a third of the city sank into the water, until there was nothing left but a big bog.
“You people are messing up my new home,” he said to the people all floundering in it. “If you won’t leave, you’d better listen to me then.” He stomped his left foot three times, and each time his foot touched the chimneytop a third of the people of that city were turned into turtles, until there wasn’t a single human left for miles.
“That’s almost it,” he said, and he climbed down from the chimney and slapped it once. The chimney bowed and bent and wriggled and it turned into a huge tree like nobody’d heard of before. Its branches dripped rivers and its leaves were shrubs; frogs jumped in its canopy and birds nested in its pools. It was a swamp-tree, and it was the biggest thing in all the new bog that the King of the Turtles had made.
“Now listen to me now,” he told the turtles, who were still very confused. “I am your king – I am the King of the Turtles. The old king was lazy, and he stayed at home. He let strangers push around his people, even if they were just little children. But I’ll take care of you now, because it looks like you’re my problem. Go out there and eat!”
And so the people of the city went out into their new home and ate. There wasn’t much else they could do, and at least there was plenty of food.

“That’s messed up,” said the older man. “Turning all those people into turtles. Who’d he think he was, huh?”
“The same thing he was when he was little,” said the thin woman. “Just bigger. Just like most people. And I didn’t say he did a good thing. Just a big thing. A whole city made into turtles sounds pretty big to me. He thought he could do it, and he did.”
“And how’d you know that story, eh? You couldn’t have been there.”
“I was the second woman on the beach,” she said. “And I didn’t feel like hanging around after that conversation. I was just outside the city limits when I watched it sink into the swamp.”
The last man stood up. “Those are good stories,” he said. His voice was thick and slow, like sticky oatmeal; his skin was raddled with bruises. “But I have one more. And it’s a true one too, and a new one. And it is about the King of the Turtles. But that isn’t his name anymore.”

Now, this wasn’t as long ago as the last two stories. The King of the Turtles had grown older, fatter, stronger, more lazily confident in his own strength. He ruled over the waters that were little, and the waters that were middle-sized, and even some (a bit, mind you, no one could claim all of them) of the deep blue endless waves. Wherever his subjects wore shells, he was there, and he was always on the lookout for a new morsel; for dinner, for knowledge, for hoarding. He threatened and blackmailed and coaxed and strongarmed and gained wealth greater than any human had ever dreamed, and he piled it in the walls of his palace – which he had moved from under the giant stone to the bottom of the big bog, under the roots of the swamp-tree. The very most prized of his possessions he filled his shell with, and they sank into his sides and his shell with the years like candies into a cake. They filled his head with dreams as he slept, and he slept long and often, dwelling on his deeds and wealth.
People like that can last for a long time. But sooner or later, they stop paying attention for just long enough, and it all falls apart with one little thing.
One little thing was a girl with a missing engagement ring.
You see, her fiancé came staggering in the door in the dead of night, barely able to stand. After a toweling-down and a cup of horrible-tasting stuff, he told her the story.
“I was in a pub,” he said.
She nodded. And narrowed her eyes.
“No, it was just a night after my work. But this guy, he challenged us to drink.”
“And you said yes,” she said. Flatly.
“It wasn’t like that. He was a big guy – eight foot and nearly as much across the chest. Friendly, sure, with a nice smile, but, you know, that kind of friendly where it can stop real fast. So we said sure, and he said he’d down a glass for each that any of us took.”
She nodded. Her eyes sunk farther into slits.
“And you know I’m not a lightweight – none of us but Pete are – but man, he out-drank all of us at once. We woke up outside, and the ring was gone.”
“Which pub?” she asked.
She went to the pub. She smelled the swampwater in the air, and she saw the damp footprints, and she wondered and mulled it over. And she phoned her grandmother, who’d always known about this sort of thing.
“Was there a smell?” asked her grandmother.
“Like swampwater,” she said.
“Ahh. Ahh. Ahh. Were there footprints?” asked her grandmother.
“Damp ones. Big ones,” she said.
“Ahh. Ahh! And tell me, what was he like?”
She thought about that. “Friendly, with a nice smile.”
“The King of the Turtles has your wedding ring,” said the old, old woman. “There is no doubt in my mind at all. If you want to get it back, you’ll need to find him in his home. It lies under the roots of the swamp-tree, in the heart of the bog that was a city. You’d better start walking fast, before he tucks that ring into his shell for good.”
The girl was fast. She drove, then biked, then walked, abandoning each in a safe place as first the road, then the trail, grew too bumpy and uneven. She pressed on and on, through thickets and mires, past the big still eyes of alligators and the reedy chorus of treefrogs. And finally, she came to the swamp-tree, a swamp-above-a-swamp, and she knew she was near.
“Now how do I get in there?” she asked aloud, and she felt the wind whisk away her question and carry it up to ears that were as big as the horizon.
“With my help,” said the sky.
“At what price?” said the girl. She wasn’t stupid. Her grandmother had told her stories, remember.
“None,” said the sky. “The King of the Turtles has stolen back the price he paid to me fairly for my aid. I wish revenge. I will give you a breath large enough to take you to his lair.”
The girl took a big breath, and the sky filled her lungs up to the brim. She made it down to the palace of the King of the Turtles at the bottom of the bog with plenty to spare, and snuck into his hall.
But the King of the Turtles was not an unaware ruler, even in his slothfulness. He woke the second her foot crossed his door, and laughed to himself as he saw her enter. “This will be very funny!” he said. “The last thief I had was years ago, and he was most amusing. I will wait for her to entertain me before I dispose of her. Maybe she’ll get lost and start to cry, like he did!” And so he went back to sleep, chuckling. He thought he could do anything, you see.
The girl wasn’t foolhardy. She kept to the sidepassages and sidecorridors, she stayed out of the light. She got lost, of course, but kept her head and got her bearings as best as she could, right up until she stumbled into the kitchen, where a fat old frog and a tough old blackbird were slacking at their duties to share a pipe and a gossip.
“Now who’s this?” asked the frog.
“A busybody,” said the blackbird. “Trust me, I’ve seen plenty. I know the type.”
“I am here to reclaim stolen property,” said the girl. “Keep your accusations.”
“Wasn’t deploring you, sunshine,” said the blackbird, flicking away ill-kept feathers. “The more ill-will you bear, the more power to you. I was the mayor of this dump until the big lug did his thing. If you want to make trouble, be my guest.”
“And he defeated my lord in a duel,” said the frog, “and conscripted us, his loyal subjects, to servitude! Do what you like.”
“I’d like to steal back my ring,” said the girl.
“Good luck to that,” sneered the blackbird. “He’s been bragging about a ring for days. It’ll be stuck inside his shell for good now. Best give up on it.”
“We could help,” said the frog.
“Help and be caught for our pains once she mucks it up. Never rely on the public for anything,” retorted the blackbird.
“Getting caught can’t make our lives much worse, and she might even do something properly about all this. I say we help,” said the frog.
“Fine. Be that way.” The blackbird threw up its wings in disgust and paced away, muttering.
“What kind of help?” asked the girl.
“We can give you some medicine to slip into the King of Turtles’ dinner,” said the frog. “It will put him fast to sleep, and you can pick out your ring if you’re quick about it. But there’s a problem: his highness orders a banquet every evening, and we never know what he eats. You’ll need to find out what he’ll eat up entirely, or he won’t be put to sleep soundly enough for you to do your work.”
“When’s the meal?” asked the girl.
The frog waved his arm at a serving cart, loaded down with trays and dishes. “In five minutes. Hurry up.”
The King of the Turtles heard the blackbird bang the kitchen door shut in its anger, and he saw this happening. But he wasn’t worried. “I’ll punish the cooks later,” he said. “She will never discover what my meal is, anyways.” And so he went back to sleep.
Truffles, sandwiches, roasts, gravies, salads, soups, and fish, loaded up to the brim and beyond in each bowl. The girl felt dreadfully hungry after such a long trip, but she bottled it up and considered her options. There were too many, and she nearly despaired, but then she spied a little covered bowl shoved in at the bottom of the cart, almost as an afterthought. Opening it up, mind turning over, she found a little bowl of porridge. And just like that, she had her answer all ready.
The King of the Turtles ate well that night – a bit from every dish, a bite nibbled everywhere. Not so much as a mouthful from anything… except from that porridge. Just as the girl had guessed, it was the only thing that his toothless mouth could swallow without hurting fiercely, and he drained it to the last drop, along with every bit of sleeping medicine the girl had sprinkled into it. Before midnight had come, he was snoring away, and the girl crept out from her hiding place underneath the cart to pick through his shell. It was a tight fit, but her hands were small, and she saw the thousands of gleaming treasures sprinkled throughout it. The pearls the size of whales’ eyes, the precious shells, the golden ingots from Spanish galleons, and there, right under the King of the Turtles’ chin, was her engagement ring. And right then, just as her hand was about to close on it, was when she sneezed.
It was more than just bad luck, of course. The King of the Turtles smelled so strong of swampwater it was a miracle she could breathe next to him, even with the good breath the sky had lent her. But, small sneeze though it was, excusable though it was, it was still enough to wake him up, and he laughed and laughed and laughed as he watched her run to the door.
“This is even funnier than I thought!” he said. “I’ll catch up to her nice and slow, and grab her just outside my front door. That way she’ll think she got away, and it’ll be all the more entertaining for me.” So he lumbered forwards slowly and roared and waved his claws, and amused himself greatly.
The girl was not amused. She wasn’t frightened. But she was very intent on her purpose, and she knew she didn’t have her ring yet. Escape though she might, she wasn’t leaving the kingdom of the King of the Turtles until it was back in her hand, and she was already trying to think of a new idea as she ran out the front door back to the bottom of the bog.
“I need something to stop him,” she said aloud. “I need to take his shell off.”
“The chimney, the chimney,” cried a tiny voice. The girl looked, and saw a very small turtle tucked into the roots of the swamp-tree. It was old, old, old, even for a turtle, and covered in moss.
“I am the first woman that the King of the Turtles spoke to,” it called, “and you must stop here if you want to escape alive. The chimney! You must let out the chimney again! Strike it with your hand!”
No sooner was the turtle’s warning complete than the doors of the palace burst open, and out came the King of the Turtles, laughing and roaring, shell spiked for war and beak snapping. He paused there for effect, taking his time. He knew he could catch the girl. He could do anything.
And right then, the girl slapped her hand against the swamp-tree. It groaned, creaked, wailed, and fell apart into a thousand crumbling bricks, held together by no mortar and gnawed bare by an age’s-worth of still water and slime. And every single one of those bricks landed on the King of the Turtles, and his beautiful shell cracked, splintered, and chipped with each until the very last brick fell, and then it burst apart into a million pieces. The ring was the last to fly free, and it landed right in the girl’s hand.
“My shell! My home!” he cried. “This wasn’t going to happen! Why did it happen when I knew it wasn’t going to?”
“We all say that, sometimes,” said the girl. “It doesn’t fix it.” And she left him there, stuck under a pile of old, burnt clay, at the bottom of the bog.

“That’s a new story, alright,” said the older man.
“Yes,” said the thin woman. “I haven’t heard it. There can’t be many who’d know it.”
“Stuck at the bottom of the bog, that’s straight harsh,” said the older man. “Down there forever.”
“Maybe not forever,” said the last man, sadly. “Maybe just a long time.”
They were all quiet for a while, and watched their fire.
“We live with what we’re given,” said the thin woman at last, laying down on her side, wrapped tight against the night. “And we do our best with it.”
“I know that,” said the older man. He leaned back and took his hands as a pillow. “And you know that too, that it’s true.”
“And he knows that now,” said the last man in his thick, slow voice, wrapping himself and his thousand bruises up carefully in his old, worn blanket, layer on layer. “He knows it now.”

“A Tale of Three Turtles,” copyright Jamie Proctor 2011.

The first sensation of awareness is always touch. Nerveless, but there. A root’s-eye-view of my being, of every headstone, corpse, coffin, and iron bar. Spreading outwards from the yew tree. That is always the way.
And always, always, always when this happens, there is the moment where something-is-not. A cavity in my being, mind and body both. The self-that-sleeps, wakes.
This is something that must be sorted.
A body is made. Bones from roots, flesh from soil. The eyes are damp pebbles from deep underground, the veins sluggish worms, pulsing soft and slow. The heart is a knotted piece of wood from the yew, gnarled over and over into something harder than matter and narrower than mind. To inhabit it is… strange. Barely conscious of it though I am, I know what I am. To be in this shape, this not-I, is limiting. For some time I stand there, on myself, in my new-self, watching the sun set, feeling the world breath. Its breath is fouler than the last time I was needed.
Dark comes, and I leave. There are priorities. The station across the road is still there, strange as it is, odd as these streets are, filled with noisy metal things and strange lights. People stare at me, dressed in odd clothes. They are currently irrelevant.
I enter the lawman-station, passing men in uniforms I do not recognize. But the badge is the same, the emblem is right, and I know what I may ask here as I walk to the desk with the sergeant at it. His eyebrows are jumping around as he watches me, his lip quirking as he puzzles something out – from head to toe, he resembles a plucked string that has never stopped vibrating, even his clothes tucked to breaking point with tension. But he does not reach for his weapon, as his constables did; he knows what I am, even if they have forgotten.
He is familiar, and I do not know or care why.
“Lawman Sergeant,” I say. My new voice is weak, breathy, a death rattle made from old gravel and knucklebones.
He nods. “Sergeant Mulroney. Your, uh, nameplace?”
“Saint Martin’s at Crescent-and-Ash.”
“Good. That’s right. It’s been some time since you showed yourself, is it, uh, a hundred?..”
“One hundred forty six years. Lawman Sergeant Mulroney, I require transport to find a thief. A good carriage, and a competent Lawman Constable to drive it.”
“Right. Right. Beckworth’ll do. Something to get her off her ass and busy. Jackson, get the car and the constable ready five minutes ago – you do NOT keep this sort of business waiting.” He looked at me again. “Just put a, uh, tarp on the back seat or something first.”

The constable is female. That is new. She also manages to keep her hand from swooping to her gun on sighting me. That is also new among her rank, and pleasing.
“Where to?” she asks me as I climb into the strange metal box. Bits of my superstructure grind and mash against its walls, and I see her wince at the scraping of paint.
“Drive north, Lawman Constable. I will correct our course to match the thief’s as needed.”
“Right. Right. Look, what do you want me to call you?”
“I am Saint Martin’s at Crescent-and-Ash.”
“No other name?”
“That is my name. I am Saint Martin’s at Crescent-and-Ash. This body is a temporary tool.”
“Okay. So you’re the cemetery.”
“Yes.”
“This is a little strange. Look, the last time anything like this happened was, uh…”
“One hundred forty six years ago, Lawman Constable. Your Sergeant Mulroney’s great-great-great grandfather aided me in that investigation.”
“Yeah? Figures.” She stopped at a red light, then moved at a green light. Why was not evident. “What I’m getting at is that this is all pretty new to us – to me. What exactly are you again?”
“I am that little-known?”
“Buddy, if you’d made one move that seemed sketchy in the station half of us would’ve shot you no questions asked. You’re lucky you got Mulroney on desk that night; he’s a real history freak, even if he is an asshole. Probably knew your name on sight – he’s into anything occult like a cat-on-cream. Goes up and chats with some of the gargoyles on city hall on his offdays now and then. Wanted to get into the Occult division proper, got turned down – must’ve wanted to be like his great-upteen-grandaddy, if you’re saying he was neck deep in your business.”
“Turn west.”
Beckworth swore and wrenched at the controls of her machine, spinning us around halfway through an intersection. Strange bleating wails echoed from the vehicles around us.
“CAN IT!” she yelled out the window, then rolled it shut with a few unrecognizable curses. “What I’m getting at here is what the hell are you? You a ghost? I’m not on Occult duty, but I’ve dealt with – talked with – a few ghosts. Nothing that could shift this much matter, though.”
“I am not a ghost. I am a cemetery. Conscious ground.”
“I thought that didn’t happen to man-made spots, you needed an unspoiled spring or a really old tree or something, right? Like Everest. Genus loci.”
“Death is the great naturalizer. Your headstones are sufficiently primitive in terms of desire to avoid contamination. So much concentrated decay acts as a natural stimulant to my presence.”
“Right. So, is this common?”
“Yes.”
“How common are we talking?”
“The chances of consciousness arising in any cemetery more than a century old are almost one hundred percent, Lawman Constable. Directly correlated to local death rates.”
“So almost every cemetery in the country.”
“The world.”
“Jesus.”
“Turn north, Lawman Constable.”
“Next intersection. If you guys are so common, how come nobody pays attention? Most genus loci are pretty talky.”
“We awaken for defense of selves. Unspoilt ground necessitates defense, or we weaken and die. Our soulpoints require defense, or we die. Sometimes defense through speech, sometimes force. Cemeteries are not frequently harassed, so we sleep longer there. Turn north.”
“Right, right, I’m on it… don’t you ever have to deal with vandalism? The kids around here are pretty bad.”
“Low threat. The level of consciousness required is barely above passive sleep. Erasure of markings, ejection of intruders, both take minimal energy on myself. Full consciousness is required to form an independent body to locate a thief.”
“Pretty big deal then.”
“Yes. To be separated from myself is weakness.”
“You’re eight foot three and your arms are bigger around than my torso.”
“I am several hundred square yards and extended over two dozen feet underground.”
“Okay, good point. What’d this guy steal from you? A headstone? Like I said, some of the kids around here…”
“A body. We are here.”
The building was some sort of home in a neighborhood that seemed wealthy; there was scarcely any refuse in the streets- but then, I hadn’t seen much so far. Perhaps they’d stopped doing that.
“Right. Let me do the talking. And no violence unless they start it, okay? And keep it nonlethal.”
“Your nonlethal is not mine, and I do know what has changed. Will silver kill them, as I? Physical harm alone, as before? A child’s curse, as a faerie? The touch of living wood, as -”
“No yes no no. Just don’t tear, punch, throw, or choke anyone. Can you do that?”
“Yes. Answers only come from live bodies, Lawman Constable. Even for me.”
She knocked.
Silence.
Knock-knock-knock. “Police.”
Silence.
“He is dead.”
“Pardon?”
“I feel it. He is dead, upstairs.”
She bit her lip. “I think that falls under reasonable evidence for Occult. And assisting a genus loci allows for some pretty loose behaviour anyways, so… what the hell.” She tried the knob. “Locked.”
“I will open the door,” I said, and put my arm to it. One, two, three pushes to test, then a fourth to smash it open, lock spraying apart.
“Nice.” Beckworth pulled out her gun, checked some of its smaller parts. “Upstairs. The bedroom?”
“It is likely.”

It is the bedroom. And the body is not old. A man in his thirties, dead for a few hours from a slit throat, named a man’s name that Beckworth found from his wallet. It does not matter.
“So, he’s the one that did it. Where’s your body?”
“Not here, Lawman Constable. The trail changes.”
“Takes two to graverob, huh?”
“This time, yes.”
“Whose body was this anyways?”
I shrug. “I do not know. It is not theirs any longer. It is mine.”
The constable sighed. “We still don’t have a motive. The stupid-college-kid theory is sunk, and we’ve got someone else running around who-knows-where who values this body of yours enough to murder his accomplice to cover his tracks. If we know whose it is, we might start to find out why.”
“Any of myself has power; the older, the moreso. We can ask for specifics later. There is a fresh trail now.”
“I’ll call Mulroney while we follow it. How do you track these guys anyways?”
“Guilt.”
“Gross. Was it this bad last time?”
“Took longer. Elder Lawman Mulroney had only a carriage, and the city was more tangled. We killed six men to reach the thief.”
“Jesus.”

The constable’s machine that talked over distances was not working.
“This is common?”
“The phone? Yeah. The phone not working? No. Shit luck, that’s all – I thought we weeded out this kind of crap last year. How fresh is this trail?”
“Within the hour, Lawman Constable.”
“Then we’ll go now and sort out the details later. I don’t think you’d wait if I asked you to, would you?”
“No.”
“Take the law into your own…uh… roots, huh?”
“Your law helps me, Lawman Constable, so I use it. Beyond that I do not care.”
“Y’know, that’s the kind of forthright honesty that really makes this job so goddamned fun. Also, would you quit saying ‘lawman’? I’m constable Beckworth.”
“Lawman Constable Beckworth.”
“Fine.”

The trail leads to a tavern, guilt smelling strong underneath the weaker haze of alcohol.
“Here.”
“Whack a guy and then straight to a bar, huh? Pretty confident. He must’ve thought we’d take a few days to find the body. Let me go in first, you wait out here.”
“No.”
Constable Beckworth sighs. “Fine. Not like I can stop you. Same rules as before; don’t start anything. Hell, who am I kidding, just walking in there’s going to start something.”
She reached for the door just as it opened. A very large man with vomit on his shirt blinked in the half-broken streetlight glow and muttered something obscene at the world.
I picked him up and placed him in the middle of the sidewalk. He fell over.
“That was unnecessary.”
“He was blocking the entrance.”
Men yell things inside. There is a crash, and the sound of running feet.
“That’s him,” I say, and begin to run.
Constable Beckworth outpaces me almost instantly; I had built my body for strength over speed, and even if I had, roots and earth are no match for bone and sinew in speed. I wade through the air, rumbling through tiny corridors and doorframes that scrape and twist against my shoulders. Men, sweaty, angry, and drunk, rise in my path – disturbed by the constable’s wake – and fall again, paling and screaming. One, too blind or angry to back down, I run over, his crushed nose gushing fluids into the sole of my foot.
The constable is in an alley at the building’s back, a knee planted in a man’s spine as she attaches metal locks to his hands. His resistance is feeble, and blood is trickling from new bruises on his face.
“I’m guessing this is him,” she tells me. Her bleeding cheek and a knife lying on the ground nearby told her story for her. “And if it isn’t, hey, assaulting an officer’s enough charge for one.”
“It is him.” I pick the man up and stare at him, watching his eyes roll around me, attempting to make me go away. “Where is my body?”
“Right to remain silent,” he mumbles out, saying the words quickly.
“Occult investigation,” said constable Beckworth. “We’re playing by rules that weren’t made by humans tonight. So why don’t you tell the nice graveyard where you put his body? We can handle the murder charges later, after you’ve had a nap or three.”
The man groans and spits. I take his head in my free hand and position his face against mine.
“Where have you taken my body?” I repeat, as the sweat on his face runs slicker.
“Was a job. Gave it to the guy with the money. Paid me extra to do the other guy. Look I needed the money real bad I have to leave the country and-”
“Who was the man with the money?”
“I don’t know I got the number looking for work and he just used the phone please don’t-”
I turn away from him, blotting out the rest. “I have the trail now, Lawman Constable Beckworth. We must go.”
“We’re bringing him with us. There’s enough room in the back for both of you.”
“Yes.”
We march back to the car through the place of alcohol, and not a single face is to be seen.

Constable Beckworth’s phone still isn’t working.
“I don’t get it. All the really shitty ones were supposed to be gone by now; half the force were complaining last year until we replaced them.”
“It is irrelevant. I have the trail. We leave now, Lawman Constable Beckworth. South.”
“You know, you’re a real pain in the ass.”
“South.”
The ride in the metal thing that the constable calls a car is quiet. She broods, I give directions (East. South.), and the thief curls himself away from me and flinches whenever I move or speak.
“East.”
“You know, we’re on Crescent.”
“Don’t you know anything about city geography?”
“No. I do not care about the city.”
“The point, jackass, is that we’re headed straight for, well, you. What do you think that means?”
The world feels very cold to me now. “It makes no sense.”
“Yes. Which is very, very bad and makes me think we’re walking facefirst into something nasty. We’re stopping off at the station first, okay? This guy can’t be more than an hour ahead of us by now, and he won’t be expecti -”
“No. The thief will not cause more harm. I do not require aid beyond transport.”
“Thank you oh-so-much for openly referring to me as your chauffeur, Your Royal Grimeness. If I wasn’t here you wouldn’t have caught that pal of yours sharing the seat with you. If I wasn’t here you’d be walking down Ash in broad daylight by now, looking for a thug that’d caught a nice jet to Timbuktu. And you don’t even know what the hell a jet is, do you?”
“No.”
“Great. If you can’t show an inch of respect for me, at least you’re honest about it. Just one ‘thank you,’ that’s all I ask, not one thing more.”
“I am sorry. As an apology, we will stop at the station.”
The car swerves alarmingly for a moment. “Well. That’s a good start.”
“He is on me. I can feel it from here. If he runs, we will catch him.”
“Right. Good.”

The station is dark, and the door is locked.
“The HELL is going on here?”
“This is unusual?”
“This is impossible.”
“No.” I turn and cross the road, the constable three steps behind me and already with her hand on her gun.
“You know what I mean, damnit!”
“No. Lawman Constable Beckworth, the thief is on my soil at this moment, and I am going to him. I will have my body back.”
“If you’d like it, you’re welcome to it. I already took the important bits anyways.”
The voice is male. It is lazily happy. It is also recognizable, in more ways than one.
“Lawman Sergeant Mulroney.”
“Yes, that’s me,” said the sergeant. He is leaning against the gates to myself. His badge, I notice, is missing. In its place is a tarnished, nearly-illegible copy “Well, sort of. Just plain Justin Mulroney, if you, uh, please. I’ve left the force. As has my staff.”
Beckworth has her gun out. “What the hell are you doing? You took everyone else with you? Where are they?”
“Well, they, uh, sort of didn’t plan on it. But when I left, well, they didn’t take it kindly.” Mulroney shrugs. It draws attention to the stains on his shirt, which is no longer tucked in. “Suits me fine. I’ll be out of the country by, uh, morning.”
“Was hoping you’d get done for in the chase, constable. But you’ve always been a big, well, pain-in-the-ass. Too much to hope for that the hired knife’d know how to use it, I, uh, guess. The plan can adapt.”
“Where is my body?” I ask.
“Chucked it back in the grave,” he says with a big, beaming smile. “Minus the badge. Dear ol’ great-great-great granddad Mulroney, lifetime hero, family aspiration, the great damned hero of the Occult investigations teams. All he needed to do his job were a few trinkets, and I needed one or two of ’em that he just couldn’t bear to part with. eBay only goes, uh, so far, you know?”
Beckworth fires three times, and the air around Mulroney ripples in a heartbeat pulse, spreading softly from the old, old badge on his chest. He grins, pulls out a worn old gun made more of rust than steel, and fires once. She drops.
“Still works,” he said with a grin. “Gargoyles said it killed one of their bulls with one shot, eh?”
I rush forwards, arms raised, legs in full sprint – clods are falling with every step; this is not a sustainable movement, it is a killing charge. Mulroney’s eyes are so very large as I close with him – his squeal echoes through my knot-wood heart as he tumbles over backwards. Up come my fists and down I tumble, feet burned away to the knees so suddenly that there isn’t even time for confusion. My soilflesh is burning, being scalded away wherever it meets dirt.
“This isn’t yours anymore,” hisses Mulroney, scrambled away on his knees and elbows, crablike. “Not anymore! Warded up the entrance good and tight, you overgrown hummock! Good and tight! You gave me your name freely, arrogant cadaver’s-bastard! Me, descendant of the Occult department’s golden boy! Did you really think we were that weak and stupid now? To back down and let you do what you want?”
I am in too much pain to reply.
Mulroney is pulling something shiny and silver from his pocket, thin and deadly. “Just one little cut, and it’s all over, uh, all over. Take heart, haha, that’s all there is to it. No ritual, no suffering, just one little cut. Like a needle. One little cut, and that’s all I need. Forever. Give me forever.”
The blade needles at my side, and is in. Whole chunks of my body go dead, sloughing away into the hostile soil beneath me.
Mulroney is humming, what I’m not quite sure, a tune out of patience and out of mind, in time with the digging numbness. And there, right at the root, I feel the tickling prod of something nudging my heart of yew.
“Beautiful,” breathes Mulroney. And he fell over with a bang, fingers slipping from the knife’s hilt even as it dropped from my side.
I lay there, unmoving, as a scuffing sound and a careful hand scrubbed away the hidden runes laid across the arch to Saint Martin’s cemetery, removing the bane from the soul, the venom from my skin.
“Lawman Constable Beckworth?” I ask. As I slide upright, an ache seizes me. I shake myself, and a sliver of heartwood drops from the gash in my body. It will regrow, in time.
“Yeah?”
“Are you injured?”
“A bit.” A cough. “Nicked me – no, got me – real good. But the idiot didn’t put two and two together. If you use the gun of a famous Occult officer, you use it on Occult problems.”
“Lawman Constable?”
“My nonlethal isn’t your lethal. The thing was loaded with yew splinters.”
“Lawman Constable?”
“Wonder what the idiot was going to do with the heart anyways? Get away and live forever in Jamaica somewhere?”
“Beckworth?”
“Oh, yes?”
I lean over and carefully place the yew splinter in her hand. “Thank you.”
And as I sink into the ground, back into the myself that is larger, the self-that-sleeps, I hear her laughing.

“Graveyard Shift,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

Teresa Aoki leaving the bonsai to her estranged daughter was no surprise, not even the bit in her will where its delivery was to take priority over checking her pulse or contacting her other, less isolated relatives. It had been her most prized possession, and her mother’s, and her great-uncle’s before her.
It wasn’t the most elegant bonsai (a bit too squat, a bit too unkempt – several of its largest branches had sprouted in odd directions centuries before pruning for beauty had been suggested), but it gave whatever home it sat in an air of quiet, pine-scented authority that was most pleasant. Particularly on the southern wall. Teresa’s great-grandfather had raised it from seed himself using a small packet he’d brought with him to America (and then later brought it to Canada), and in the good old days before Mary shaved her head (well, good old days for Teresa; Mary didn’t miss them much), she’d told her daughter long stories about how hard he’d had to work, teaching himself bonsai as he went out of half-memories from his grandmother and careful, nervous application of shears. Mary had enjoyed those stories, and Teresa had enjoyed telling them.
It was just such a pity that she’d gone and died (a quick aneurysm, not at all unpleasant as deaths go, if a bit of a shock) before she’d told her the ones that weren’t lies.

And so it was that on the twenty-third birthday of Mary Aoki, daughter of Teresa Aoki, daughter of so-on-and-so-forth, she received a Fedex box slathered with more DELICATE PARCEL and THIS SIDE UP labels than its surface could support before she was even through putting down the phone from Uncle Jerry’s call wishing her happy birthday oh and your mother, my sister, is dead. Sorry.
Mary opened the box, stared at the heavily-wrapped contents like some people stare at live snakes, tore it open, put it on the table against the north wall of her apartment, and stared at it for five minutes with indecisive and angry eyebrows.
It was then that the bonsai stretched itself and sighed.
Mary was a sensible woman. She checked to see if she’d left a window open for a breeze, and she examined the doors for any trace of a draft. She put her ears to the walls and listened for any hint of her next-door neighbours having inconspicuous, quasi-muffled sex.
The tree interrupted this by coughing politely.
Mary was a sensible woman. She pulled up a chair opposite the table, leaned forwards, counted to ten, and asked: “What the fuck is going on here?”
And so the pine tree, who had a voice that strongly reminded Mary of a stuffy grandmother despite being gender-neutral, began to tell her what her mother hadn’t had a chance to.

“This is not an old story,” said the pine tree. “But it has an old start.”
A man stood near a riverbank one day, watching the very last bits of heat escape a little firepit he’d dug. A short distance from the shack-thing that was his home, there was clay.
There was less of it than there had been five minutes ago.
The man brushed away the cooled ashes from the pit-kiln, stomping briskly on a few dejected coals, and looked at the thing that he’d made. It was just a little bit too big to be a proper bowl for a human, but just right for a spirit of the powerful sort, and he left it in front of the big pine tree where it lived a little ways up the forest trails on the hillside slopes, and said some very respectful things with care.
“A bowl, your wish delivered,” he said. And other pretty things. “Your protection, please grant it,” he said. And other polite things.
The pine sighed in the wind, grudgingly satisfied. It considered its options, then decided. A seed dropped into the bowl.
The man bowed at the pine’s feet, retreated with his gift, and had a long discussion with his wife that night about what he was meant to do with this. She took some dirt, he took some water, and together they planted that seed right where it fell. The next day, a freak wildfire burned down the big pine tree, the forest, and everything else that wasn’t within a perfect circle centered on the seed in its clay-baked bowl, which just barely contained the couple’s hovel.
They took very good care of it after that; and so it grew up, but not far. And then, one year after the fire, it started talking. The words were slow and grinding at first, the struggle of adapting a tree’s perspective to a human’s noises, but it pulled through, and it made its point: I will protect you.

A small tree in a pot was odder than it seemed, in those days, to say nothing of one that could speak. The couple kept it hidden away, and when they died, so did their children. And so did their children. One thousand years later, contemporaries started to appear, and the family could relax and put it on a nice shelf somewhere where it looked pretty. It wasn’t the most elegant bonsai (a bit too squat, a bit too unkempt – several of its largest branches had sprouted in odd directions centuries before pruning for beauty had been suggested), but it gave whatever home it sat in an air of quiet, pine-scented authority that was most pleasant. Particularly on the southern wall.
And of course, there were the adventures…

“I’m sorry,” said Mary at this point, “the what?”
The adventures, said the pine tree, rattling its needles irritably.

For instance, the great-grandchildren of that first couple had been harassed somewhat thoroughly by an ogre. It could smell the delicious spirit-smell in the air around their house, and first it ate their dog, then their home, and finally it was about to eat them before it realized the smell was coming from the pine tree.
Luckily enough, the pine tree had given them some advice after their dog went missing. As it raised the pine tree to its lips, they
“Stabbed it in the back while it was busy?”
No, they
“Why not? It makes sense.”
They were less than peasants. Where would they get a blade sharp enough to kill an ogre?
“A pointy stick would’ve done it – hell, you can kill elephants with pointy sticks if you hit the right spot. Besides, they’d had enough time to hatch a plan, they had enough time to find a pointy stick.”
They didn’t find a pointy stick. They called its mother many insulting names, and when it turned around to kill them the pine tree dropped itself on its skull and killed it.
“That’s weirdly sensible. How did you do that?”
The pine tree was a spirit’s-scion wrapped in a blanket of clay passed down a family line for generations; it had opportunity to soak up plenty of power.

“How vague. If you’re so powerful why do you need me?”
I was getting to that.

Anyways, that sort of thing was always happening to the family, and not always just because the tree was there, either. In the 700s, one of the tree’s possessors
“‘Owners’ would be too touchy?”
One of the tree’s possessors had come into contact with an extremely angry and volatile young warlord in a way that had caused offence, leading to a long journey to retrieve his archenemy’s sword from a locked vault, during which the tree had provided counsel each night as he slept. The theft was successful; accomplished by dint of looking so much like an ordinary peasant that there was no possible chance of anyone suspecting him of burglary of the most secure estate in the land.
And a small, perfectly alert, unnoticeable lookout temporarily embedded in a garden. Though there had been a hairy moment or three when one of the gardeners grew suspicious, and it had to persuade him that he was imagining things from too much drink.
There were many others, of course. The defeat in a duel of an angry dragon in front of a whole city of witnesses, the burning of the most wicked castle in the world to avenge a murdered wife, the flight across the ocean from an angry magician…
“Does a single one of these ‘adventures’ have a basis that isn’t horribly stressful and nerve-wracking? If you’re such a good-luck-charm, I’m not sure why Grandma didn’t just chuck you in a dumpster. She was a practical lady.”
… the destruction of a witch that had been riding ghosts and chaining souls since longer than the span of a man’s life added to all his grandmothers’, the freeing of the lost little boy who lived up in their attic, and the weeding-out of the flood of spirits that had infested their lawn.
“Hang on, was that the time Mom said she used pesticides and the grass smelled like sauerkraut and firecrackers for a month?”
Yes.
“I should’ve known something was up.”
And so down on and down on the line went, without much change, until it reached Teresa Aoki and her daughter; Mary.

Who hadn’t been let in on this, apparently.

“There are so many ways this is stupid that I can’t even begin to count them all,” she said. “I’m going to take you to a greenhouse or a garden care professional or someone else who can prune you into a reasonable shape and not forget to water you, and who can tolerate all the stupid adventures they can handle until their arms get chopped off and eaten by a demon or something.”
“You can not do that,” said the tree.
“Yes I can. Watch.”
“No, I mean you can not. This bowl is a heirloom of your family, and it is filled with two thousand years of memories of being nothing but that. If you give me away in it, it will return to you as sure as your wandering mind does. And I have been in it since the day it was molded; it is mine as much as yours, and will not be parted from my person. I am as much a part of your family as your mother; as it lives, so do I.”
“Shit,” said Mary sullenly. She drummed her fingers on the table in syncopation, thinking various ugly thoughts.
“You should answer that,” said the tree.
“What?” said Mary, then heard the door. Thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk, the constant, incessant rapping of a five-year-old wanting to know if you were home, or a very excitable Jehovah’s Witness.
“Don’t you say a word,” she told the pine as she rattled at the needlessly elaborate lock on her door. “The baldness is enough of a conversation starter; I don’t need anyone talking to my trees too.”
The tree said nothing. Satisfied by this, Mary opened the door and was face to face with someone’s belt buckle. It had a skull on it, she noticed. Then a hand closed gently around her head and lifted her into the air, and she corrected herself: it was a skull. It and its accompanying belt were also the only clothing her visitor was wearing.
The face that invaded her personal space was strange: flat as a board except for a very protruding nose and two extremely large things that were either fangs or tusks or maybe both good lord that was bad breath he (definitely he) smelled like rotting meat and
Crunch.
The thing’s eyes went unfocused and Mary was dropped to the floor, where she immediately rolled out of the way of a quarter-ton of tumbling…
“That is an ogre,” said the pine. It was sitting on the floor from where it had tumbled, from atop the ogre’s skull. Much of which was now a reddened crater.
“Wonderful,” she said. “What did you do?”
“I came back to you.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Near you. It takes quite a lot of effort; I would rather not have to do it again anytime soon or I would not be able to talk for some days. Movement is not natural for a tree.”
“And how did you do that?” The bone that was visible through the ogre’s matted blood and hair looked to be three inches or more thick.
“I am very heavy,” it said mildly.
“Then how did I pick you up and put you on the table?”
“I let you.”
“Why didn’t the bowl break?”
“It is very old magic. The only thing that can break magic is still older magic. This ogre was not very old.”
Mary gave up and slumped in her chair, defeated. The floor was going to be a bastard to clean, she thought.
“It appears we are on another adventure,” said the pine.
“Wonderful,” said Mary. “How do I get off?”
“Ogres are simple creatures, and not at all anxious to seek out fights unless there is obvious gain for themselves,” said the pine. “You find whoever sent the ogre.”
“And ask him to stop?”
“No, you defeat him.”
“How? Call the cops? Stab him and bury him in Nevada?”
“Eternal imprisonment would also do the trick,” said the pine. “I recall an angry typhoon that was sealed in a bottle and buried in a hole in desert.”
“That’s not eternal, that’s one idiot and his shovel shy of a disaster.”
“There are many deserts, and many holes.”
“I don’t know how much TV mom let you watch, but there are many idiots. And many shovels too, probably.” Mary sighed. “So, how do we find this guy?”
“I suggest a walk,” said the pine.

They went on a walk. Well, Mary walked. The pine rode in an old baby-carrier that her mother had fobbed off on her ‘just in case.’
“Take a deep breath,” said the pine, “and let it out.”
Mary took a deep breath, let it out, and rolled her eyes.
“Shake your head three times and roll your eyes twice more.”
Mary shook her head three times and rolled her eyes twice more. And once again, for good measure.
“Now sneeze,” said the pine, and Mary sneezed involuntarily. And yelped, because it felt like someone had stuffed her nose with peppers.
“Too many rollings,” said the pine. “Still, the extra potency is appreciated. Can you smell that?”
Mary could smell that. Although maybe ‘smell’ wasn’t the right word. It was more like hearing with a bit of taste, transmitted through her nose. It made the hair on her spine tingle.
“That is magic,” said the pine. “A broad trail, left by an over-eager amateur at most, I suspect. Follow the spell of the one who sent the ogre.”

Mary hiked through parking lots and up hills and down long, stupid streets with barely any sidewalk and too many idiots driving on them. She walked past fast food that she couldn’t begin to imagine qualify as half its name, and by restaurants where she would’ve had to forfeit her month’s rent to afford an appetizer. She was walking in an underpass when her cellphone rang.
“Hello?” she said. She stopped walking and used the opportunity to adjust the tree’s weight a little; it and the pot were surprisingly light, but their combined bulk stretched the straps of the baby carrier uncomfortably against her.
“Mary Aoki?” said a carefully, professionally calming and neutral voice.
“Yes?” She started walking again.
“This is the Toronto police department.”
Mary glared at her phone. “I told you before, that was self-defense. And I had a witness. And he dared me to do it.”
“It’s not about that. Your sister is missing.”
The rest of the conversation floated by in a haze. Jennifer Aoki (age nineteen), better known as Jenny to her sister, as well as Jenners, Stupid, and Jen-Jenners, was gone. She’d come home, said goodnight to her roommate, gone into her room, and vanished into thin air. No, there were no leads yet, no, no suspects had been determined so far, no, no one else had heard from her, no, no, no, no, no.
If she found any evidence she was to phone and so on.
Click.

Mary stared at an ancient, broken car with an ancient, bitter man in it, who was shouting something profane and inaudible at her past his windshield. At some point she’d stopped walking again, and she noticed that she was in the middle of a road she didn’t recognize.
“Did they get her?” she asked.
“They?”
“Him. Her. Whoever. The ones who sent that thing at me.” She wasn’t ready to start saying the names of these things aloud; that made them too real.
“Probably. Your police are not especially good at magic. They have one man, underpaid, who only half-believes half of the things that he finds. Which he misses half the time.”
“An eighth of a clue,” said Mary. “Should we ask him for help?”
“No. He would slow us down, and probably ask all sorts of questions about me, or try to confiscate me as a dangerous illegal possession.”
“Are you?” asked Mary. The old man was pressing hard on his horn, producing a tremulous, dying wheeze from thousands of his car’s orifices.
“By his laws, yes.”
“Comforting. More or less illegal than my pot?”
“Pot?”
“Marijuana.”
“Ah. Less.”
“Well, then we don’t have anything to worry about,” said Mary. The car was vibrating in place now, practically panting to zip forwards and claim first blood. She pulled out her apartment keys, scraped them slowly and carefully along its hood as she passed, and strolled to the far side of the road.
Suddenly the smell was clean and there, fresh and new.
“He’s here,” she said. Rising up in front of her was a rather elegant condominium. The whole building smelled like roasted habaneros, and her eyes were nearly streaming from it.

The ground floor of the building was saturated with the scent, one big uniform blob with no directions or sense to it at all.
“We should at least narrow it down to a floor,” Mary said as she stood in front of the elevator and vainly tried to tell if any of the buttons was more nostril-clearing than the others.
“It will be four,” said the pine.
“Why?”
“Four is death. To send properly death-dealing foes and vicious curses to you would only be helped by working as closely with four as possible. It will be the forth floor.”
“Hmm,” said Mary. “What was the building number?”
“Four hundred and forty-four.”
She sighed, and noticed she was drumming her fingers again. No pattern this time, just aimless, breathless fluttering. She couldn’t bring herself to stop.
“My sister will be there?”
“I am sure of it.”
“Be more sure.”

The fourth floor was positively incandescent with the smell, and Mary had to plug her nose with a pair of Kleenex walrus-tusks before she could bear to leave the elevator. It left without a sound behind her as she looked around.
“Apartment four?” she asked, thickly. The tree didn’t even bother to answer; the door was making her entire head spin. She took a deep breath and raised her hand to knock.
“Stop.”
“Why?”
“Or you will be set on fire.”
“Why?”
“Because the door is sealed with a vicious curse.”
“Why?”
“Because there is a small, malignant symbol scratched inside just inside the doorframe, above your head.”
“There, was that so hard?” asked Mary. She pulled out her keys, still flaked with the paint of the old car, and swiped them back and forth through the tiny, intricate drawing until all that was left was a wooden pustule.
“It is harder. There is an ogre behind that door. And its two brothers.”
“Shit. Four, right?”
“Of course.”
Mary examined the intimidating one-and-a-half-inch blade of her keys, then pocketed them with a sigh. “Suggestions?”
“They will be extremely wary after feeling the curse dissipate. They will suspect it is either an intruder, or their brother being clumsy with anger as he is returning so much later than planned.”
Mary put one hand into her purse and began to rummage.
“What are you doing?”
“Finding my equalizer.”
“Find it quickly. They are about to open the door.”
“What?” said Mary.
The ogre opened the door.
Standing a few feet away, Mary had a much less confused view of him this time. He was a little over nine feet tall – stooped very low in the doorframe – pot-bellied, rippling with muscles, and not even bothering to wear the skull-belt his brother had, but armed with a big club made from half of a burned tree. His face was different: the squashed-face with its protruding nose were absent in favour of having just one eye planted where his left nostril should’ve been Other than that, he was almost handsome.
The ogre stared at Mary, which gave her the perfect second-and-a-half for her to overcome her shock an instant before him and pull out her can of mace. By the time he was reaching for her, it was too late.
“Up the nose and in the eyes all in one,” she muttered as she ducked away from the flailing body, trying to scream and cough at the same time. “Vicious.”
The next ogre tripped over his flailing brother and inadvertently kicked him, leading to a vicious wrestling match during which each used the other’s burnt club to poke his brother in his eye – which, in the new one’s case, he had three of.
The third grabbed Mary by the head as she was dodging hurtling limbs. He had no eyes whatsoever.
“Not twice,” she said, and grabbed him somewhere important with both hands. Very hard.

“Unusual, but effective,” commented the pine as Mary locked the apartment door behind her. She’d taken the precaution of dropping it on top of the moaning ogre after it doubled over, and it was slowing making a dent in the exquisite floorboards. “Your grandmother would be proud.”
“Nice of you to say so,” said Mary. The magic-scent-charm-thing was wearing off, letting her breath a bit easier but also drawing her attention to the unfortunate smell of the ogres again. It was something between a bull and a wet dog.
“She always feared that her daughter was too kindly to deal with these troubles, and when she was proven wrong there, she worried that you would be raised unprepared, in charitable ignorance.”
“I was. Not that I minded it.”
“It does not appear to have affected your capability.”
“Why thank you oh so much, o fuckin’ wondrous talking ornament,” said Mary. “Now tell me: where is it? Are they. Is he or her. Whatever; where is my sister, damnit?”
“In room four,” said the tree.

A fine door. Maybe even real oak all the way through. Or maple. Or not. Mary wasn’t good with plants, which was what kept sneaking back into her head every time she stopped thinking about finding Jennifer fast.
The pine’s bowl was dripping something black and sticky down the rear of her shirt as it rested in the baby carrier; the ogre’s back had been ground into something that made Mary never want to eat hamburger again.
“Strike boldly,” said the tree as she put her hand on the doorknob. It was warm.
“No ‘be careful’ this time?”
“It has served you very well so far. And I do not think your enemy will have expected you to deal with his ogres so aptly. If at all.”
“Works for me,” said Mary. She twisted the handle (unlocked) and kicked the door so hard that it nearly rebounded into her as she charged through it, nearly tripping over her own feet. Which was a good thing, because it brought her to a stumbling halt before she could run into the sofa that Jennifer was propped up on, fast asleep but not snoring.
That was wrong. Jenny snored louder than backed-up diesel trains; Jenner had driven away three boyfriends one sleepless hour at a time, Jen-Jenners had been teased by Mary for countless hours about it to the point where she’d wondered if she’d been forcing the poor girl into a habit.
In fact, a silent, sleeping Jenny was so otherworldly and bizarre that it completely distracted Mary from the quiet crackling, hissing of the only other person in the room, until it said something, which was “You.”
It was wearing a charcoal-grey suit. That was the most obvious part of its outfit, the bit that really pulled it all together. It had started with that central piece, decided it made a statement, and then repeated it several dozen times over. Its tie was charcoal-grey. Its shirt was charcoal-grey. Its socks, shoes, and buttons were charcoal-grey, and all of this was accentuated nicely by its complexion, which was charcoal-grey with reddish undertones because it was made entirely of still-burning charcoal.
Quite human, though. Apart from the absolute lack of a face. Or a proper head; just a mish-mash lopsided lump like the single shape Mary had ever managed to make at a pottery course.
Mary waited. It didn’t say anything else. She suddenly wasn’t sure whether the awkwardness was heightened or lowered by the fact that one of them wasn’t breathing.
“Yes?” she said.
“A long time,” the charcoal man said. It flickered softly as it spoke, lighting up the walls with beautiful patterns. The shadows made Mary’s eyes cross and teeth hum if she looked at them head-on.
“Never met you before,” she said. “I think I’d remember. Tree, what is this thing?”
The tree didn’t say anything.
Mary heard a hissing, wheezing whistle, so flat and dead that it took her a minute to realize it was coming from the charcoal man; a laugh like a lazy man’s bellows. “Rightfulness,” it said.
“What the hell are you talking about?” said Mary. “And what did you do to Jenny?” Any fear she’d been feeling had been left back at the moment before she’d crushed an ogre’s testicles, and this goddamned thing was too annoying for her to start worrying again. If she hadn’t been wary of burns and confused, she half-thought she’d have started punching it already.
The charcoal man stretched out its hand, a single digit extended towards the pine, and Mary felt warmth spread across her front like a summer bonfire at marshmallow range.
“Spelled the human, in the perfect moment, with no knowing eyes watching, warding. The wise one gone, her daughter gone, nothing left but ignorant you, innocent her. Innocent her: bait for you: bait for it. Its rightful death. Cheater. Coward. Refugee.”
“Life is cheating death, no death is righteous, and all of us are refugees at some time in our lives,” said the pine. “You are in error. And I do not know you.” Its needles were quivering against Mary’s back, and for a moment she had to stifle the urge to giggle.
“Liar,” breathed the charcoal man. “Hider in human shadow. Years promised as mine, years waiting for I to come to burning, scant hours for I to burn and find you gone. Gone to hide in human shadow, human blood. Chased you, haunted you, hounded you, and never you tell them what I am and that you hide. Hide from I.” It laughed again, and Mary felt herself start to sweat.
“What is it talking about, tree?” she asked.
“Nothing. It is a liar.”
“Liar, liar, liar, liarliarliar,” chanted the charcoal man. “You were mine to burn, and caught alone. You knew the rules. I strength against yours, greater. Your fear, strong-smelling, stinking. You demanded human tribute – begged. You hid in man’s vessel, formed from earth, baked with I strength, before I could arise, and stayed shrunken and small. You stole of I infant strength to avoid my doom on you. You dragged I doom with you through centuries, on the backs of men, waiting for I to die. I do not die. Not with you unburned. You are sad. You are stupid. You are the younger magic to I. You are prey. Give I yourself.”
Mary shifted uncomfortably.
“This fucker telling the truth?” she asked the pine.
It didn’t answer.
“That’s an answer,” said Mary. “Mom told me that. Answer me this now: did you piss this thing off into chasing my family for thousands of years just to kill you?”
“yes” said the tree. Very small.
“That’s a better answer,” said Mary grimly. “Not a good one. But better. Some protector.”
“Give I yourself,” repeated the charcoal man. “Give I it.”
Mary thought very hard and very fast and maybe even a bit carefully.
“Sure,” she said. And off came the baby carrier, into her arms with the pot, holding it carefully and with a wary grip. One finger stroked the tree’s base ever-so-slightly and gently.
“Go on,” she said. “Take it.” Her arms strained a little as she held it out.
Charcoal man leaned forwards, hands glowing kiln-hot now for the first time since he was born by a river thousands of years ago. He couldn’t not reach for it. No matter how loud the instincts screamed of a trap, or the mind warned itself of deception, when the reason you exist is right there in front of you, you can’t help but reach for it.
He was quick too. The melting pile of his face was only a few inches away when Mary heaved the bowl into it.
Pottery met charcoal, earth met fire, elder met eld, and the only thing that can break magic… broke magic.
Very loudly.
Shreds of charcoal-grey suit rocketed into Mary’s face in the sudden glare, a quickly blurred image of perfect fabric vaporizing in impossible heat.

When she woke up, it was because Jennifer – Jenners – was snoring again. Very loudly. She sat up, groaning at what felt like the worst sunburn she’d ever had and spitting out a few half-melted threads of silk.
The condo was a wreck. Everything inside it down to the interior walls had burnt down, leaving it a strangely smokeless husk. Not an ounce of colour was left except for the pine; ever she and Jenny were dyed grey by the ashes coating the floor. She considered the very real possibility that she was coated with a small amount of charred ogre, then immediately stopped.
The tree was a sad sight. Its bowl was cracked right down the centre, and every last one of its outermost needles was crisped to a stump, giving it a shrunken, shamed look which it might’ve managed anyways.
“Is it dead?” she asked it.
“Yes.”
“Forever?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“… yes.”
“Good.”
Mary got to her feet and dusted herself off. “First things first,” she said, “we’re getting the fuck out of here. And then we’re getting you a new bowl. One that won’t start some sort of bullshit millennium feud. But we’re waiting ten minutes first so Jenners can get a nap, got it?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Then we’re going home and you’re telling me everything my mother forgot, got it?”
“Yes.”
“Great.” She yawned and sat down next to her sister. “Oh, last thing…”
“…yes?”
“No more adventures?”
The tree thought.
“No more adventures,” it decided.
“Pity. We’ll just have to make our own.”

“Small Trees,” copyright 2011, Jamie Proctor.