jamieproctor.ca

My gramma
by, Tammy, age, seven.

My gramma is my momma’s oldest relative, and, she is a Good Lady. She is nine, hundred years old and she has long grey hair and is bald on top like daddy’s grampa was before he caught the cancer and went away to live in a box. She is very tall and very wide and she can pick me in one hand and my sister who is six in the other and take us out riding on Sammie, who is her Bird.
Sammie is a big big bigger crow, who is bigger than my momma’s car. He can fly very reelly fast, and he says his name is Sawmeall, but gramma says to just call him Sammie because it irritatitatites bugs him a lots. He says his momma was a dark cave and his daddy was a dank wind and he helps gramma ever since she beat him with a riddle he couldn’t solve so now he had to promise to help her wich seems very silly but we don’t tell him because it would hurt his feelings.
Sometimes Sammie flies us to gramma’s house far, far, far, far, far away, but we’re always back in time for dinner because gramma won’t feed us dinner because she says we’d get sick. Gramma’s dinner is made from things that she won’t tell us but most of them are red and slimy and gross. She says if you eat them raw it’s not so bad but we think it’s disjusting. Gramma’s house has no doors and you have to come in through the chimney because all the windows hide when you look at them from outdoors. Gramma says they do that because they are shy but they are not good people and you should never try to feed them anything or they will bite your fingers rite off to the nuckles.
Gramma’s house has good books. Some are bigger than you are and some have, teeth, and some are both and gramma says to stay away from those but we already do because they growl at you and have meen eyes. Some of them are cookbooks and some of them are dictonairys and some of them are Very Special and gramma says we can reed them onse we are older.
In the attik of gramma’s house there is an old chest. We cannot open the old chest because it is lokked, and gramma doesn’t have the key because she gave it to an old, old, old, dragon to look after as a favour after she put an terribul curs on a sword that somebody said was going to kill him one day. We have never met the old, old, old, dragon, because, gramma says he is her x-husband, and he would be, cross to meet us and maybe eat us or breath poyson all ovver us. I told gramma that dragons breath fire but she says no, this one doesn’t, he breaths horribul poyson and you drown in it there is so much. It sounds gross and bad and I am glad we did never meet him but my gross little brother thinks he sounds cool because he is stupid and four. Gramma says he’s not as special as me and my sister because he is a boy and that meens he is stupid about this stuff.
Gramma takes us swimming sometimes in the lake that her house is nex to. It is big and misty and the misty trys to talk to you so you have to ignor it and, keep your eers underwater or it gets loud and angry. If the misty gets too angry gramma chases it away and says she’ll give it the back of her hand but not the whole hand because I guess it would be too much. The lake is full of ded fish but they are still moving, so, they are not reely ded fish just pretending like my sister pretends to cry, they like to nibbl your tos and it tickles. Gramma never swims with us because the water makes her teeth ake so she stays on the shore, and, tells us stories. One story gramma told us was about how she married a handsum prins one day and then she had children and lived happy ever after, but then the prins got jelus and had her loked up and she had to lern lots of magic to get away. Then she loked the prins up insted, in an, iron box, and she keeps it in her cupbard. The box is very small and has a little hole in front and she let us feed him bredcrums. He says bad words.
My favvorite thing that my gramma ever did was when we were visiting her and we got lost in the woods. I met a man who was like a doggy and had big teeth and he tried to grab me but I bit him first and ran away when he chased me. Then I hid in a big tree that gramma showed me because it was her friend, and it wouldn’t let, the doggy man inside no matter how many meen things he said to it. I hid in the tree for hours and hours and then gramma came walking down the path. I new it was gramma because I can see her no matter what, but she looked like an old little lady. The doggy-man tried to jump on her and she picked him up by his scruff and yelled bad words into his face and his face ran away. Then she threw him into the big tree and gave me a hug and spanking for going missing because she told us how bad the woods are. It hurt a lot but then she took us to a place with ice creem made from reel ice and it tasted like sweet snowflakes.
The other favvorite thing that my gramma ever did was when she was visiting us and it started raining so she had to take us home. It was a lot of rain and Sammie was flying fast but not fast enough because there was a thunderstorm, so, my little sister started crying because she is only six and that makes her cry a lot. I didn’t cry at all a bit. Gramma gave us hugs and told us to shush-shush and then she shook her fist up at the clouds and told them to Nock It Off. And they did not nock it off. So she stood up on Sammie’s back and told him to fly strait and then she reeched up reely high and she punched the stormclowds rite in there faces. And she punched them three more times and said something Very Special in between eech punch and then she pulled all the litning rite out like a string and she put it in her hair and all her hair went all sparky and sparkly and pretty so she started laughing and so did my sister and me. That was very nice and there was no more thunderstorm and my sister stopped crying but I didn’t because I wasn’t.

I love my gramma a lot and she is the best gramma in the world. Sumday she says I can tell mummy and daddy about her.

Tammy.

“My Gramma,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

What?
No, what’s with that face you’re making? Don’t give me the silent treatment here, I don’t take passive-aggressiveness well at all, young lady. I’ve been waiting tables in holes like this part-time on and off for years, and you lose patience with bull pretty damned fast.
Really? Oh for goodness’s sake, you need an explanation for THAT?
Well, if you insist… what the hell do they teach you people in schools nowadays. Here, budge up and let me take a sit-down.

So, the issue started when I woke up five minutes early today. I shut off my loud-ass alarm before it could go, and unbeknownst to me, my upstairs neighbour sort of relied on that to wake her up for work in time – I think her name is Stephanie or something. Anyways, she slept in for two hours and only woke up when her cat bit her arm so he could get some breakfast, and didn’t check the clock until she was done waking up, kicking him, and feeding him.
So Stephanie went in to work – hours late – and when her boss saw the scratch marks all over her arm and heard her half-assed excuses for the time she thought that Stephanie was the burglar she’d had to chase out of the store after-hours last night – landed a good buncha punches on the intruder’s arm with a stapler. Boss-lady’s a bit paranoid and jumpy and living on more caffeine than sleep (comes with running a coffee shop, I guess), so she just freaks out in Stephanie’s face, Steph yells at her, and then before anyone really knew what was going on half the office was fighting the other half. Total sum of injuries was in double digits.
Well, one of the secretaries there – Charlotte, I think – was just about due for lunch break, so she takes advantage of a built-in excuse to leave and heads out for her bagel early. But the morning rush hasn’t really died down yet and she gets stuck in a crowd, where some crazy dick steals her purse. That’s even worse than it sounds because she was planning to pay her sister back that big loan she took out before she had to have Charlotte’s kneecaps snapped later in the evening.
Hey, you got a light? Thanks.
So, Charlotte needed ten thousand dollars, and she needed it fast. So she went to her bank, tearfully pleaded with them, was redirected to the ATM, and, well, went a little postal. Ripped off the closest cashier’s stocking, threw it over her head, and held her hostage with one of those horrible little pens they make you write with in there until they opened up the vault. The whole thing was over pretty fast, except for the car chase. Charlotte doesn’t have a license – she’s environmentally conscious and uses public transportation – so it started off a little rocky, but by the ending nobody’s speedometer was in double digits anymore and the highways were being cordoned. Pretty satisfying all around, I say, especially for the officer that finally took her down – Margaret, that was her. Never “Marge,” was real firm about that – “sounds like margarine or the Simpsons character, or maybe a withered little ninety-year-old lady with prune breath.” Yeah, Margaret shot out her tire, let her skid into a barricade, and then handcuffed the arm that was still working. Poor Charlotte. At least her sister took pity on the whole thing and decided she’d learned her lesson enough – and I think she hired a lawyer for her free of charge. Said she’d make a good getaway driver once she figured out braking.
Margaret didn’t take the whole thing that well at all; she went straight to the bars after work, got real maudlin, and ended up going home late with three other women. One of them – Candice? – got up at five in the morning to take a piss and tripped over…uh… was it Margaret’s cat, her own feet, or both? Both. Yeah, both. Anyways, she tripped on them and managed to set off the fire alarm, which put me (this was my apartment building, didn’t I say?) and about a hundred other people out on the streets a bit early and pretty damned surly. And to make matters worse, one of the girls with Margaret ran into her friend-with-benefits in the crowd – Tammy, yeah – and Tammy got all snide and snippy. Bit of a prude, she always was. A very good hypocrite though, as the girl pointed out. Well, that turned out a mite uglier than it might’ve, but Margaret still had a pair or two of cuffs lying around (can’t imagine why, can you?) and the whole thing was smoothed over fast enough.
Tammy wasn’t a fan of her jail much, and she used her call for a lawyer. Of course. Problem was, her lawyer was busy with Charlotte. And when she told Tammy so, well, Tammy broke the phone. And guess who got called in to fix it the next morning, huh? My sister, Antoinette. And guess who found her ex-girlfriend in a cell for punching up half a bar? Antoinette. Hey, while you’re at it, guess who hadn’t told her ex-girlfriend yet about the ex-girlfriend part? Antoinette.
Got a smoke to go with this light? Aw, thanks, you’re a sweetheart.
So they started fighting. A few snide remarks, a few hurtful comments, and by the time half an hour had gone by the phone was half-fixed and ignored and they were screaming – Antoinette about how she’d never called her back after she let the iguana starve to death, and Mary about how Antoinette had always been too fat.
And after that Antoinette felt so betrayed and used that she just snapped out the first thing that popped into her head, which was that Mary’s quasi-incestuous relationship with her step-brother that she’d confided in her was in fact non-incestuous because she knew for a fact that he was adopted, which just about completely ruined the whole thing for Mary on the spot. Poor kinky thing crumpled like cardboard and started crying, and that got Antoinette booted out.
Now, since she was tired and cranky, she phoned me up to whinge about it. Only now I was busy working my other job, which involved driving, and I ended up rear-ending some SUV-driving twit who decided that slowing before braking was for the little, insignificant people. Put my fist in her teeth and cracked a knuckle, so me and the car both had to go separate ways for repairs.
While I was at the hospital, the doctor received a phone call from Stephanie – her best friend – about how she’d just been fired, got depressed, and perked herself up before the surgery with a hit of something she’d written her own prescription for. She must’ve slipped a bit too much, because she sort of confused me for someone else, put me under anesthetic before you could say kiss-my-ass, and I woke up with my wisdom teeth removed and my knuckle still swollen, but with a bandaid on it. The doctor was sorry, and gave me some meds to kill the swollen mouth and stop the drooling a little. So that was THAT problem solved, only my goddamned shiftless coworker needed a pick-me-up and swiped ‘em while I was in the bathroom five minutes ago. Not a problem, I think, sure I can cope. Except on the trip between the kitchen and your booth here I think I gained five pounds in pure saliva, and it was either drop it in front of me or spray it in your face.

And that’s why I spat in your eggs just now. Christ, why’s it so hard to get young people to understand something so simple.

“A Simple Explanation” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

My suit is itchy, scratchy, and new. It squeaks when I walk, like a rat in a trap. The bundle of crudely-printed pamphlets is a comforting weight in my left hand, slightly sticky with low-quality ink in the aimless humidity of summer.
The house is slovenly, ill-kept. Its lawn lies in ruins, of the two cars in the driveway, one is missing all its tires, half its hood, and its engine has been stripped bare three times over. The other doesn’t appear to have benefited much from its brother’s donations.
I knock on the door, and a dog barks, sound muffled by its flapping lips and drool.
A creak, a crack, and a suspicious, pudgy face with too much stubble and too little beard.
“Greetings this day, sir or potentially madam! Have you heard the –”
The door slams shut with an indecipherable curse and a lot of creaking. I bow politely to it and place a single loose-leafed pamphlet on the misspelt-by-wear “welco” mat. Perhaps it will be enough, perhaps not.
This home stands firm. It has been tended to – with care, if not obsession – and someone has even put in the effort to do some halfhearted weeding in the flowerbeds, where overstuffed bumblebees are even now ambling. The face that opens the door is puzzled, not wary, and I don’t smell the aroma of an interrupted meal. Perfect opportunity.
“Hello there,” the owner says. It’s scrawny and leathery but not particularly tough-looking, like an old shoe.
“Greetings this day, human,” I say politely, taking care not to appear over-eager. “Have you heard the soundless word?”
The expression is probably puzzled – the eyebrows are doing that thing again, where one of them twitches a lot. “I’m sorry?”
“The scream that speaks! The wailing and gnashing of teeth delivered by the prophets, who speak the word of the one-who-begins!”
The owner scratches himself in an idle, indolent sort of way. “Sorry…which prophets? I’m not sure I’ve heard of much of this before.”
“The Worm of Terror and the Unending Maw, mostly,” I say. “Mostly the Maw. It’s still proselytizing, I believe, in the temple-without-bottom-or-depth. You can travel there when it speaks on the eighth Tuesday of every month.”
“Uh-huh. Listen, sorry, I’m, uh, catholic. Good luck.” This door clicks when it closes, but is no less final than its neighbour’s thud-whack.
I fantasize about tearing it into millions of pieces smaller than a spider’s breakfast, then control myself with an effort. I represent something greater than myself here, and to look poorly is to make it appear so. I’d have to eat the whole block to cover it up, and I’m sure that Father Breath would know somehow, no matter what I did. He just does, and then he gives you that very sad, drawn, disappointed look with all five of his eyes.
Courage and persistence in the face of it all, I remind myself, and leave a pamphlet, faintly oozing blue-ringed octopus ink and venom. The last page said something about how the faithful would be rendered immune to its effects, and it would be a good idea to convert now, which was probably true or at least close enough.
“May your agony be holy,” I say politely to the closed door, and with a heavy heart I turn towards the final home of the street, the last of many. It is small and poorly-painted and there is a fat, monstrous cat on its stoop, sunning himself indolently. It hisses at me, as they tend to do.
Knock, knock, knock. A proper old-fashioned doorknocker. None of this electric buzzer claptrap, or a bare, bald-faced door. Maybe this one will be different.
The face that answers it is wrinkled and pale, with many spots. Peculiar little metal and glass things are cupping its eyes and possibly restraining them from toppling out of their sockets thanks to the permanent forty-five-degree hunch their owner possesses.
“Hello?” it asks. Its voice is thin and wavery, like an elder forced to speak above the waterline, but slightly more comprehensible without the bass hissing underlying every other syllable.
“Greetings this day, heir of decay and slave of reason,” I say. “Tell me, have you put any thought into the state of your impending demise at the hands of your flesh-shell?”
It blinks at me, so very slowly that the gesture doesn’t seem to merit its connotations of quickness. “Are you the postal man?” it asks.
I decide to employ strict truth. “I am a messenger of sorts.”
“Well that’s just peachy then. Come on in, you’ll catch your death of cold.”
I step inside the house – which is notably cooler than the outside – and am confronted with forty-five tonnes and sixty-year’s worth of bric-a-brac and trinkets. I am vividly reminded of my father-spawner’s mindhoard, if it contained less cursed idols and more chintz.
“Would you like a drink or something mister…”
To claim a name at my slender age would be most presumptuous, but I have permission granted for short-term pseudonyms, provided I express proper horror and self-disgust after the affair is through.
“Walk,” I say. “Brother Walk.” A small, tiny, miniscule title, but still outside my reach. “Water would be appreciated if gifted freely.”
“Wong? Funny, you don’t look it.” On a less shrivelled face, that look might have passed for critical, but here it looks entirely lost. “But I suppose you do look a bit foreign. You speak English so well though, mister Wang.”
I casually check my face as it busies itself at the kitchen. No wonder the last few houses had gone sour so quickly – my left cheekbone had sunk out of sight. I gingerly pop it back into place with only a slight sucking sound, easily masked by the nattering of the human.
“… lovely to get a visitor. And how’s Sherry?”
“I do not know a Sherry,” I respond, truthful.
“Well, I always knew she’d up and do that sort of thing. Dreadful tramp, if you’ll pardon my saying so, and you’re all the better for it. Plenty more fish in the pond and all that.” A half-glued mug of some manner of fruit juice is thrust onto me. “There you are, mister Walker. And the children?”
I am a child myself, and would not dream of bifurcating this century, let alone actual spawning. But my younger brothers and sisters provide an easy way out of once again speaking nothing but truth, and I can echo “they’re fine and growing,” with nothing but a light and free hearts.
It nods aimlessly and produces another mug for itself.
“Miss resident of Oakview two-hundred-forty-three,” I say, deciding it is time to get down to business, “have you heard the soundless word?”
“Every night, mister Wally,” she says firmly. “Every night. They simply can’t keep it down next door. I know, I know, I was up to some pretty fishy things at that age too, but I was quiet and discreet, no matter what. Self-restraint is simply too rare in this day and age…”
I think of how many of my younger brothers and sisters I’ve had to consume after they’d eaten themselves into torpors, becoming comatose, useless lumps of nothing. “Indeed.”
“And they’re at it every night! They’ll wear all the fun out of it, they will – without novelty, nothing’s enjoyable! Why, me and Herbert only did it maybe three times a month. And we planned ahead; none of this willy-nilly stuff and nonsense.” It snorts into its mug.
“Hominid,” I say, attempting to return to the topic at hand, “when I speak of the soundless word, I refer to that which is spoken by the one-who-begins, the great consumer, who swims in the center and feasts. Do you know anything about that?”
“Can’t say I do,” it says brightly. Then it frowns. “Unless you mean your uncle Eddie. He just wouldn’t stop eating, you know. And he never did wait half an hour before swimming afterwards. Poor man. At least the shark choked on him, so they got it too.”
“It is scribed in the fortieth tablet of the ninth verses of the tales of the lost starfisher that the shark is the ruin of all hope of life,” I say helpfully, in an attempt to keep the conversation on track.
“Do tell!”
“Yes. You see, mister resident, we are all as larvae, adrift on the empty waves and battling the zooplankton of doubt, hope, and remorse. We distract ourselves in our efforts to gorge upon our younger, less-apt siblings, while ever trying to ignore the gaping maw that lurks beneath.”
“Yes?” It appears to be paying attention for the first time, and I feel my ichor begin to pump a little faster as I got into the sermon.
“And the thing about this, resident, that must be understood: that maw does not care about you. You are incidental to its purposes, and it is only going about its business – seizing a nearby fish, perhaps, which itself is an entity that is barely within your tiny perspective. The shark is the ruin of all hope of life, and this can only be a good thing, for without hope, understanding may be found, and only those who understand can begin to thrive. Though, of course, not survive.”
I watch as she thought this over, feeling rather pleased with myself. Stirring stuff, even if I had borrowed some of the broader metaphor and a few of the specific lines from Father Breath. It was only tribute to him, really.
“Tell me, mister Wilbur,” she says at last.
I wait. For quite some time.
“Yes?” I ask after about thirty cycles of my digestive tract, once it has become apparent that it is asleep.
“I’m sorry, young man?”
“You were about to tell me something,” I clarify.
“Oh yes! Tell me, mister Wallace… you see, that’s all very fascinating, but I just have one little question about your church.”
I’m willingly to ignore its inaccurate terminology for the sake of expedience. I’ve seen several human churches in the past few days, and comparing the widetombs where the low sermons are held to them is like comparing a decaying whale to a healthy human.
“Tell me… do you have Sunday school?”
“Every day is a learning experience for elder and young, resident,” I say. “From when to hide when the ur-beetles shriek and when they are merely sporting, to the correct suns to curse and pray to when the moons lie a-synch.”
“Yes, but do you have Sunday school?”
“We teach our children on every day of any week, every lesson they must learn. Except the ones they need to learn themselves on pain of purge.”
“Yes, that’s quite lovely, but do you have Sunday school?”
“Yes. We have schooling on Sundays.”
“How lovely. I know a few of my great-grandchildren would simply adore the chance. And your church, is it near?”
“Wherever futility is made idol, sapient.”
“That’s just lovely,” it says. “Do you have the address?”
I hand over a pamphlet, taking care not to touch its skin directly. I know that you can’t CATCH mortality, but superstition runs in my family. Knock on iron.
“Everything you need to know,” I say with absolute truth, “is in there. And now I am afraid that I must be off. I have spread the soundless word to this road, and my task is done.”
“Oh, aren’t you a good boy,” it says fondly. “Here, have a cookie for the road.”
I accept the small, nutritionally dead bit of charred grains and eat it through one of the orifices in my face. I’m in a hurry now, and just guess at which one is socially acceptable.
“Now, you stay safe out there,” it calls after me as I walk down the sidewalk, innards grating away the baked layers of its gift. “There’s all manner of nasty things that can happen after dark, and I’d hate to hear of a nice young man like yourself coming to harm!”
“The scream that speaks will mask me,” I reply to it, “and concern is the great lie that voids the unending pain.”
“Be sure to wear bright colours on the road at night!”
“Thank you, anthropomorph!”

I count my pamphlets as I walk off the edge of the street and into the empty that wraps around it, out of sight and mind and soul’s understanding of its residents. I started with… I struggle to remember my training in numbers… four…ty. Then I put (hmmm) thirtish on doorsteps. Then I gave one away.
Still, one convert is a gateway to dozens more. And the spawn would be intrigued to meet young of another species. Perhaps humans would be more intellectually and spiritually sensible at a younger age. What was that line of Father Breath’s? Ah, yes.
“’Give me a pupae before it reaches full bloat and bursts,’” I quote, in humanese, “’and it will belong to the broken dreams of the one-who-begins until it is drained away into the meme-pools of its far-descendants.”
Really, it lost a lot in the translation.

“Door to Door” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

Once upon a time, there was a lonely boy. His father was dead, his grandparents were dead, he had no brothers or sisters or aunts or uncles, and one day, his mother (who was a very powerful and much respected witch) died too.
Now, this boy was lonely, but he did not live alone. In his mother’s village, there were many who mourned for her, and who would have taken him in if he’d asked. But when he looked at the villagers, all he saw were the angry faces of the other little boys, the ones who made fun of him because they were jealous of his mother, who fought with him when the grown-ups weren’t looking.
So the lonely boy turned his back on his home, and he went travelling.
He walked to the far east, where he cut his way into the heart of a baobab tree and slept for three nights in it, drinking up its sap and its secrets in exchange for three headfulls of his dreams.
He walked to the far west, where he showed a hairy wild man how to shape blades to kill his kin, and learned the names and powers of every animal in the world.
He walked to the far north, where the world turned into sand and the air screamed insults that gnawed on his skin, and he learned the fiercest and most fiery curses in all the lands.
He walked to the far south, where the ocean slept in its bed, and after throwing three of his most favourite teeth into it he listened to all the whispers that came out of the oceans, and earned his new teeth from a shark.
He traveled, and he traded, and when he grew strong enough he simply took, seizing and grasping. He fought with a demon in the night in a wildfire and they each tore out the other’s eye – he put it in his socket and forced it to serve him. He stayed in a village and disrespected the chief, and when the people grew angry with him he ate their shadows and left them to wither away for years, ignoring their pleas. He forced spirits and ghosts to do as he pleased, and he hurt them when they begged to be let free.
By the time he came back to his home the lonely boy was an evil man, and a strong one, with arms that could uproot small trees and magic so strong that the air around him tasted like honey and iron. He walked into the center of town and he cursed the well dry, and he told them all that from that day on, they would do as he said.

Now. That was the end of that boy’s story – in a way, it wasn’t a boy’s story at all, not from the moment his mother died and he left home. But another one starts right here, right there.

This little boy had friends. Not many, but good enough. He had a family, a small one, but a pretty good one. Sure, his mama and his papa fought, but only with words and they never for keeps. He knew how people could be cruel, but also how they could be kind. Which was why it made him angry to see the magician as he hurt them; cursing anyone who dared to step across his shadow (which was three times as long as it should be) beating children who made fun of him behind his back (not that you could, with his stolen, blood-glowing eye watching all the time); and taking food and property from people without asking or bargaining, or drinking up their water in the middle of the driest time of the year. It made the little boy so mad that he mumbled words that his father used, and got smacked by his mother.
“Mind your tongue, little boy,” said his mother.
“She’s right,” said the little boy’s uncle, when he complained to him about it. They were outside the little boy’s house – uncle’s sister’s house – throwing small sharp wooden darts at a tree trunk, aiming for the knothole. Uncle was losing, as usual. “You’ve got to mind your tongue. You speak too fast and too free.”
“But it’s true,” said the little boy. “The magician really is an evil old” so and so.
The uncle bopped him, but lightly. “You listening? That sort of thing doesn’t help you any and it might hurt you. You really want to do something about this man?”
The little boy nodded so hard that his neck wobbled three ways.
The uncle gave him a thoughtful, feelful look. “That’s good. That’s right. You just need a plan then. You make the right plan, you can do anything. You got a plan?”
“I will kill him and throw him in the river,” said the little boy. Fwwt, his last dart sank into the knothole’s center.
The uncle sighed, and tossed aside his final dart carelessly. “That’s a goal. You want a plan. How you going to do this?”
The little boy thought. “I will fight him,” he said.
“Remember the last man that fought him? What happened to him?”
“Oh,” said the little boy.
“Look,” said the uncle, “he’s got magic, you’ll need magic. Here, I got a little bit left over from years back before, when his mother gave me a hand with something.” Uncle gave the little boy a smooth, shiny rock. It was a nice rock.
“This is a nice rock,” said the little boy, who could be polite when he tried.
“That it is,” said uncle. “Magic too. What you do with this is you take it in your hand – like so – and you hold it real tight – like so – and then you walk four times around your house thinking real hard – like so. Then you’ll have a plan. Got it?”
The little boy nodded, held the stone in his hand real tight, and walked around his house four times thinking real hard, then four times more, then four times more.
“I have a plan,” he told his uncle.
“That’s good,” said uncle. “What is it?”
“I will steal his eye,” said the little boy.

Now, the magician was standoffish by nature and necessity, and his home lay apart from the rest of the people, in the middle of a bare and burnt clearing. Four withered trees with four withered branches each were his guards, on each side of his home, and he slept with his demon eye open and awake, ready for intruders. Nobody ever went near that place.
“That’s a big job,” said uncle. “You got a plan for that too?”
“Yes,” said the little boy.
“That’s fine,” said the uncle. “You need help?”
The little boy thought it over. “Yes.”
“I’ll help then,” said the uncle.
“Thank you. The first thing we need, we need a dead cow.”
“Don’t think your papa would like us doing that.”
The little boy thought it over some more. “Then we need a dead antelope.”
So they went out there and got themselves a dead antelope. Uncle was a good hunter.
“The second thing we need,” said the little boy, “we need to lure out a lioness.”
So they went further out there and tied up the antelope and shooed off jackals and birds and all other pests, and then a lioness showed up.
“The third thing we need,” said the little boy, “we ask her for her lullaby.”
“This is some plan you’ve got here,” said uncle. “You sure it makes sense?”
“Yes,” said the little boy, so uncle nodded and asked the lioness, who was a bit surprised to see uncle pop up out of the grass like that. But they’d given her some food, so it was a fair trade, and she taught them all ten verses of her lullaby to her kittens, which was full of deep, throaty purring and blood and bones.
“Strong stuff,” said uncle. “I think I know what you’re up to. What’s next?”
“I don’t know,” said the little boy. “I can’t count past three yet.”
“Four’s next,” said uncle.
“Oh. Then fourth, we’re going to need a bone.” So they took one of the split leg bones of the antelope once the lioness had sucked out the marrow, and the little boy said they were ready.
“Now we just wait for sundown,” said the little boy. “And then I will go to the magician’s home alone.”
“You be careful, got it?” said uncle. “Your parents would skin me four times over if anything happened to you because of this.”
“I’ll be careful,” said the little boy. He walked all the way to the magician’s home, and by the time he got there it was pitch dark, too dark to see or do much but sleep. He took out that cracked, split marrow-bone and he squeezed and wiggled and snuck himself inside it – tight, but he managed. Then he started creeping up along the ground, inch inch inch, towards the magician’s door.
“Psst,” said the first, burnt tree. “Who’s that at my master’s door?”
“I’m just a bone,” said the little boy. “I’m doing no harm, I have no arms and legs to harm with.”
“That’s true,” said the first tree, “but if you want to come by, you’d better pay me a gift of some of your bonemeal. No free passage,” it said firmly, and scraped the dirt viciously with its four withered, charred branches.
The little boy didn’t have much choice, so he scratched and scraped away a bit of the bone with his knife until the tree was happy, then crept closer.
“Psst,” said the second, burnt tree. “What are you doing there?”
“Just a poor old bone, wanting to pass through, with no arms and legs to hurt anyone at all” said the little boy.
“I heard that,” said the tree, crossly. “But I want a gift too. If the others get bonemeal and I don’t, I’ll be smaller and weaker, and they’ll make fun of me.”
The little boy couldn’t refuse any of the trees, so he shaved and scraped and gnawed at the bone with his knife until there was almost no room for him to hide in it, and all four trees had been satisfied.
“Hang on,” said the fourth tree. “Did you say you have no arms and legs to harm with?”
“Yes,” said the little boy.
“Then what are those things peeping out from under your sides?”
The little boy rubbed his stone and imagined walking around his house four times.
“You’re seeing things,” he told the tree.
“I have no eyes,” it said.
“Then something must be really wrong,” he told it. “You should ask a doctor.”
“Oh no!” said the tree, and it was so busy wailing and mumbling to its friends while they cursed its noisiness that it didn’t notice the little boy sneak inside.
There, on his big bed that was as tall as the little boy standing, was the magician. He was sleeping cross-armed, legs straight, his one demon eye open and watching. Now and then he cursed in his sleep and the air in front of him burnt up and vanished.
The little boy crept up closer, right under his bed – he kept having to hold still and press himself into the cracks in the walls when the eye glared near him – and started to hum, then whistle, then sing the lioness’s lullaby. Bones and blood and sinew, crackling marrow, long dark nights and the smell of prey, all wrapped up in a big grumbling purr that tied a hug around your heart eight times over.
The demon eye blinked, yawned, and napped, lulled off to dreams of its hunting days, and then it started snoring. The little boy counted one, two, three, four snores, and then he leapt up, plucked it out, and ran out the door with his stone in one fist and the eye in another, too surprised for it to even yell. The trees were still arguing, and their four sets of four branches didn’t so much as pause from their slapping and punching at one another even as the little boy ran past right under their trunks.

“I have it, I have it!” called the little boy as he ran into his home, interrupting mama and papa from their talk with uncle about the sort of relative who let little boys run away in the night.
“Have what?” asked papa.
“The magician’s eyeball,” said the little boy. “Didn’t uncle say? Here, look.”
“No!” said uncle. “Don’t look! If it sees us, he sees us. Can’t let that thing take so much as a peek at anyone here.”
The eyeball was struggling pretty hard by now, so this was more difficult for the little boy than he thought it’d be at first.
“Here,” said mama, and she pulled out a big jug and they put the eye in there and shoved in a stopper, leaving it to curse and rattle and rail at them all it liked. None of it mattered; the eye couldn’t see them and they were safe.
“So, now what?” asked uncle.
“You don’t even have a plan?” asked mama.
“It’s not mine,” said uncle
The little boy took out his rock and walked around the house four times, then came back in.
“We need some salt,” he said.
They didn’t have much, but they had enough. A few handfuls. Papa opened the jar – pointed away from everyone’s faces, to be safe – and before the eye could start up its cursing again, the little boy asked it “how can we kill the magician?”
The eye said words that the little boy would’ve been thumped for. Mama dropped a pinch of salt into the jar.
“Aiieee!” said the eye.
“How can we kill the magician?” repeated the little boy. “You should know how, and you have no reason to help him.”
“I am his most faithful servant,” hissed the eye, with a voice like a snake caught between two sticks. “I am the only thing that lives that he very nearly trusts, and in return he does not harm me! There is not a single thing you can do that would hurt me as much as he could.”
Mama’s lips pursed a little at that, and she dropped in another bit of salt. The eye wailed like a lost hyena.
“Maybe we could put in ants next,” said the little boy.
“No!” shouted the eye.
“Or maybe a hungry spider,” said papa.
“Not that!”
Uncle scratched his beard. “Could try giving it to the dog, see what he makes it,” he said. “Been a good boy too, he deserves it.”
“Mercy!” begged the eye.
“Then tell us how to kill the magician,” said the little boy.
“You can’t,” said the eye.
“We could stab him with weapons,” said papa, “or hang him.”
“He knows the secrets of the plants and the stones and everything underroot,” the eye said. “They cannot harm him.”
“We could tie him up and leave him out on the plains at night,” said mama.
“He knows the names of every animal that lives there,” said the eye. “They will not harm him.”
“We could throw him in the river, like you said,” said uncle to the little boy.
“He has council of the oceans,” said the eye. “A little river shall not harm him.”
“What about fire?” said the little boy.
The eye thought. “Hah,” it said. “A good try, but that will fail too. At a single flick of his eye – his other, lesser eye – his shadow will wrap him up in its cold dark-bitten self. Not even the sun could scald him through that!”
For a moment there, no one knew what to say. So the little boy took his stone and walked around the house four times.
“Tell us how to stop the magician’s shadow,” he asked the eye.
“It is made from many, many, many shadows,” said the eye. “You must split it into pieces; how, I do not know. I have told you everything: now leave me be!”
“Right,” said uncle. He put the stopper back in the jar and gave it to the little boy. “Now what?”
The little boy took up his stone again, and started to walk around the house. One, two, three times, and then he had to hide behind a tree before he was finished, because the magician was walking up to the house, taller than papa and wider than uncle, single eye glaring and teeth showing in an angry snarl. His shadow was stretched out long, long, long behind him, and its hands were clenched into fists. The magician struck the house with the flat of his hand, and he yelled “Open up!”
The little boy heard nothing. Mama and papa were pretending they weren’t home.
“Come out now!” yelled the magician. “I know my eye was here – the thief’s tracks led this far. Come out now and bring me back my eye or I’ll eat all your shadows and curse your land into burnt crumbs! Open up!”
About then, uncle came back. He saw the magician up there in front of his sister’s house, and he knew what was going on.
“That’s my cousin’s cousin’s house,” said uncle. “What are you doing?”
The magician stomped over to uncle and glared down at him. “Your cousin’s cousin is a thief, and a scoundrel, and a leech, and I am going to sear him down to the spirit and then mangle it for my dinner. Where is he?”
“Gone hunting down by the river,” said uncle. “Been gone a week or more, the lazy man. A thief he is, and trouble for me and more than me. I’ll help you find where he is.”
“Good,” said the magician. “Show me where this lazy man is, and maybe I will let you live.”
So uncle walked off with the magician.
“He’s crazy,” said papa.
“Always,” said mama. “What are we going to do now?”
The little boy finished walking around the house once more, and even though his thoughts were a bit of a jumble, he made something up that seemed good to him.
“I know what to do,” he said. And he chased down the trail left by uncle, who had made a point of walking through mudpits and other damp places to leave good clear tracks.
The magician left no footprints, but here and there plants had been crushed and small things eaten by his shadow.

Down at the river – a good river, still flowing, even in the driest time of the year – uncle was leading the magician from fishing hole to fishing hole. “Not here. Not there. Not near, but where?”
The little boy watched and waited. He had a plan, and he hoped uncle did too. He hummed a bit of the lioness’s lullaby, as loud as he dared, and saw the magician look up and around with a start.
“Did you hear something?” he said.
“Just a lion,” uncle said casually. He looked very closely across the river and winked at the little boy, who was peering at him from between the rushes.
“I know every lion and lioness’s name,” said the magician. “And I do not know that lioness. Not properly. She sounds…muffled.”
“Maybe she’s sick,” said uncle. He was looking in the water, then back at the little boy, then waggling his eyebrows.
The little boy uncorked the jar with the eyeball in it and threw it into the water before it could scream. As it sank, fish swam to it, churning about the water.
“Look! See down there, in the water!” called uncle, pointing frantically at the swirl. “There, there, there! It’s my cousin’s cousin!”
“At the bottom of the stream?” asked the magician.
“One knows he’s a lazy, lazy man,” said uncle, raising an eyebrow across the river to no one in particular. “He only catches the fish that are two tired and old to bite bait, and just scoops them off the bottom of the pond three at a time. Laziness! Look, see here, you can see him in the water.”
The magician bent over to look into the pond, uncle yelled “FOUR!”, and the little boy threw his stone at the magician’s head. It bounced off with a clang, without so much as a dent, and vanished into the river, but it did what it had to do, which was put him off balance. The magician’s shadow lunged up into the air, peeling itself off the ground and ready to jump across the water, and then uncle shoved the wobbling magician off his feet and into the stream.

The eye had been right, of course. The waters parted around his lips and gave him breathing room, and he was swimming back to the surface with murder in his face quick as a blink. But his shadow could not swim, and it was dragged down after the magician and torn to pieces in the swift-shining currents, sending peels and dashes of smaller shadows everywhere that flittered away on the wind.
“RUN!” yelled uncle, and he and the little boy were off like shots, out into the dry long grasses by the time the magician had stepped onto the riverbank. But the magician was tall and strong and fast, and each of his steps was three of theirs, and he was driven on by mad hate now. There was no way they could outpace him.
“Hide,’ whispered the little boy, and they ducked into the grasses without a sound.
The magician came stomping up seconds later. His shadow was the size of a big man’s, and his one eye shone with nothing but sweat. He was tired and angry and he’d lost the trail of his prey, without his eye to watch and his shadows to lead, and he was furious.
Such a mood leads a man who was raised without attentive, admonishing relatives to words. Bad ones that made the air curl bright red and spark apart.
“Don’t say that,” said a voice to his right.
The magician whirled around and snarled at the bushes that had made the noise. They smoked.
“That either,” said something to his left. “Mind your tongue.”
The magician turned around again and yelled something that shredded apart half a grove of young acacias. A gazelle sprinted for cover.
“Don’t say that!” repeated the first voice, and a little wooden dart came zipping out of some grass that he was sure he’d cursed just a moment ago. It bounced off his head and made him wince. He screeched at the grass and it collapsed into hissing ashes.
“Carelessness!” said the second voice. “That isn’t helping and it might hurt someone!” Another dart, this one poking him in his good eye, setting him blinking and making his vision run watery. He yelled something really nasty at whatever he could see, and a shower of embers fell apart where stalks had sprouted.
“Stop it!” said the first voice, and it launched a dart right up the magician’s nose.
He swore and he stamped and he screamed and he bellowed and he let out a curse that caught the air on fire, fwoosh, and up went half the plains around him in flame. All around him, at the driest time of the year.
The magician ran, but you can’t outrun the wind. The magician roared, but you can’t outroar a fire. And the magician, and all his secrets, and all his bargains and threats and power all went up in a great sour cloud of smoke that hung low and sullen over the plains for four days before the rains came and washed it away.
Uncle and the little boy were all right. They’d run back to the stream, where they’d hidden beneath the surface as the smoke ran wild. And when they’d been nearly too weak to swim, who had held their heads above the water but the little shadows – their trips back home to their bodies delayed by the blaze, and thankful for deliverance? Mama and papa came down to the stream when the fire passed by, and dragged them home the rest of the way, where they forced them to eat until they left to go play darts again.
“That was a pretty good plan,” said uncle to the little boy.
“I thought it was yours,” he said.
Uncle shrugged. “Makes no difference. Want me to find you another rock?”
“No thank you,” said the little boy. “I don’t think I need it.”
“Good for you,” said uncle. “Now, beat that,” he said, and he threw a dart straight into the knothole.
The little boy said something and something else, and uncle smacked him on the ear.

“Eyes,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

It began when a crow grew tired, and had a rest on a very strange stone building. It was full of the bustle and hum of voices, and seemed very old and tired-worn among its big steel nestmates. Now and again silence flourished, broken only by the quaver of one human speaking.
“Strange,” said the crow to herself. “What’s all this then?”
“It is a church,” said a deep-voiced alleycat beneath her, uninvited (which, of course, to cats is as good as any invitation).
“Oh? And what are they doing?” she asked.
“Praying,” said the cat with perfect disdain. “That’s what a church is for. You don’t know anything.”
“Oh I do so know, I do!” said the crow, annoyance filling her from beak to tail. “And what does this praying do?”
“They pray to god,” said the cat, “to give them mercy. And favours. And that sort of thing.” He yawned, flashing her every one of his teeth in what she thought was a needlessly showy manner. “I don’t see much point in it.”
“Well, I’ll bet you wouldn’t,” she said. “Gales, it’s not like you’ve ever needed or wanted help, not even when you got your tail broken, or your ear chewed off, or starved yourself half-thin like you are right now. Not at all.”
The cat looked unconcerned, but his ears twitched. “Insults won’t help your ignorance. Besides, that sort of thing’s for humans, not nosy little featherbags.”
“Oh how would you know,” she said. “And I’m sure you’re right disdainful of ignorance, being nothing but an overbearing old furball who’s never had the curiosity to get past bone idle stupidity. Fie on you and your kittens too! Your mother was an alley rat, your father was a mongrel mutt, and you were born in a cut-rate mouse-nest!”
The cat proceeded away nonchalantly, his tail giving him the lie with every vicious lash.
“Tramp!” she called after him, his pace quickening with each word. “Fleahouse! Dirty scallawag!” The last she’d heard a wrinkled old human use to cow a younger, and she fancied anything that lived that long must know what it was doing when it came to insults.
That should’ve been it. It could’ve been it. It might’ve been it. For any bird of smaller thoughts – one of the thousands of pigeons that littered the city – it would’ve been it.
But something had been touched there in the crow’s vain, too-big-for-its-own-good brain. A desire half-contrary, half-curious, and all-mad in its quiet little way.
“Just for humans,” she muttered and grumped. “Anything humans can do, a crow can do twice over or it doesn’t need to be done! What does an old rat-catcher know? Nothing!”
And with that she set out on her way to find a god for crows. And other birds too, of course, because admitting humans to be better than any relative of a crow’s (even….pigeons) was simply not to be borne.

There were complications to be overcome, of course.
“What is god?” said the big, scraped-up seagull the crow asked. “What is why do I care? I don’t. Pfaaark!” he spat, and went back to eating a bag of chips.
“What is god?” the sparrow chirped. It flittered to its fellows and exchanged some sharp words, then flapped back. “Nobody knows. Can’t be too important then.”
“What is god?” said a pigeon. It stared. “What is god?” it repeated.
The crow waited.

“Yes?” she said.
“What?” said the pigeon.
“Never mind.”

“What is god?” the dog said. She wagged her tail slow as she considered, idly chewing her way up the length of its leash towards the limp hand of its gently snoring, bench-bound owner. “What a strange question. Well, as far as she says” – a sideways shake of the head here indicated the comatose human – “it’s a really big, really perfect human. Lives somewhere called heaven, which is also perfect.” She chewed more intensely for a moment as she considered something. “Maybe it’s in the clouds? I’m not sure.”
“I think I would’ve heard about that by now,” said the crow firmly. “It’s all nothing and hot air, just like all the other human things. I bet they just made it up because they’re jealous of us, as usual.”
“Of course, of course,” said the dog carelessly. A finger, innocent and carefree in its slumber, brushed her lip, making her twitch.
“Besides, everybody knows you can’t make a nest in the clouds. You just fall right through them. Though I suppose they wouldn’t know, being so stubby-legged.”
“Right.”
The crow dipped her wings in thanks and fluttered away. Behind her, a small chomp and a sharp scream echoed in farewell.

“So,” she told herself. “God is a perfect thing. Well, obviously then it must be a bird. God is a bird, therefore god has a nest. God would have a splendidly big and perfect nest, where nothing would try to rob its eggs or eat it. Also, since humans think so highly of it, I’m sure they would help it somehow. Maybe it just tells them it’s a human. That’s what I’d do.”
That was what a crow would do, of course.
“So,” the crow went on, landing by a delicious pack of half-eaten potato chips and inspecting them vigorously, “god is in its nest, on the ground somewhere, with lots of humans looking after it, in a safe place. Outdoors. In the city.” She swallowed chip fragments (talking with your beak full, among corvids, is not considered rude). “That can’t be too hard to find.”
It wasn’t.

“That sounds like a zoo,” opined the grizzled little starling she’d cornered in a tree. “You’re sure you’re not gonna eat me?”
“Positive,” said the crow. “What’s a zoo?”
“A sort of human place where they have all sorts of animals in little nests they can’t leave and bring them food. Then they look at them. Don’t ask me why. Listen, I’m mostly feathers and bones this year, I’ve had bad luck scavenging.”
“Hmm,” said the crow, who wasn’t listening. “That sounds promising.”
“What? No, no, not at all. I’m gamey too. Had too many lean years when I was nearing maturity, warped up all my tender young flesh. Not that any of my mates ever understood that, oh no no, why they’re always on and on about how I’m-”
“Where can I find a zoo?”
“Uh, there’s a big one over on the east side of town. Just look for it near the park. Not that I ever spent much time in there, not with all of the big pushy shots taking up space like they were eight-pounds each and-”
“Thank you,” said the crow, and took off. The starling felt a mixture of relief and disappointment.

The zoo was easy to find, but god was trickier. There were a lot more animals there than the crow had guessed there’d be, and fewer birds.
“Well,” said the crow to herself, “if god were easy to find, I suppose it wouldn’t be very special.” But she was getting awfully tired of looking. Half a day gone already, and most of it on the fuel of one half-eaten bag of chips. A brightly coloured and only partially nibbled strawberry caught her eye with avid glee, and she swooped down to take it in all haste.
An extremely large tuft of hairy feathers stirred next to her, and a head poked out that was nearly half the size of her body.
“That’s mine,” said god.

God, according to the limited ability of the crow to read the sign outside heaven, was named “Cassowary.” She seemed ambivalent towards both names, and friendly enough once the crow apologized for the strawberry. Or at least, not hostile. Well, she didn’t mind the crow staring, even if it was a little impolite. But how could she not?
God stood taller than a human, and walked instead of flew. God’s feathers were long and slim and almost like hair. God’s head was bright blue and her neck was bright red and she had a strange crest on her head and oh my goodness and breezes she had such large claws on her feet. The crow realized she was staring again, and felt ashamed. Which is not a thing that crows do.
“So,” said the crow. “What’s it like?”
God looked at her.
“Being god, that is,” the crow clarified. “I mean, since you’re perfect.”
God considered this.
“Dull,” she said. “Sometimes cramped. Too many watchers. Too few trees.” Her voice was deep, very deep, so deep that the crow could barely hear her. It made her feathers hum, and her own caws sound tinny and chick-like to her ears.
The crow looked around heaven. There seemed to be a good number of trees to her, but she supposed that if god wanted privacy, there wasn’t much to be had.
“They could certainly do with a bit more respect,” she said censoriously, watching a chubby human chick burble and babble over the edge of the railing. “Honestly, if they’re going to smack up a big silly stone building because of you, you’d think they’d be willing to at least make sure to give you some space. And maybe someone to share it with.”
“The other one? He died. Choked on garbage.”
“Oh dear. Well, I’m sure he was very nice, whoever he was. What kind of mate do they give to a god anyways?”
God poked at her feathers. “Like me. Smaller.”
The crow hopped a little in surprise. “He was a god too?” Then the second thought hit her: “gods can die?”
God shrugged.
“Well,” said the crow. “Well. Well then.” The word “blasphemous” was new to her vocabulary, but she already had an inkling that saying some of the thoughts going through her head – such as how being able to die didn’t seem very perfect at all – would somehow be very rude. Which was strange, for a crow.
“What happens when you die?” she asked, shifting the conversation to a safer and less offensive topic.
God tilted her head to one side and examined the crow thoughtfully. She suddenly felt much smaller. “If,” she corrected herself, a little too quickly. “If you die, what happens? I mean, I heard that god gives birds mercy, whatever that is. And favours, which are nice. You can’t do that if you’re dead, can you?” Maybe that was what the being perfect solved.
“Can’t give anyone anything here,” said god, pointing idly at the fencing that blocked the small, leering crowd at a distance.
The crow gave the humans an unfriendlier-than-usual glare. “Can’t you just command them to let you out? You’re god, humans listen to god, it seems sensibly straightforward.”
“No,” said god.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” said the crow, feeling more than a little let down, “heaven seems less perfect than I’d heard about. They won’t listen to you, they let your mate die after letting garbage get in (and they can’t have given you a very good mate if he choked on garbage, honestly, who makes that mistake who’s made it out of their nest), and they won’t give you enough space to get away from all that peeping and peering. They stare worse than hawks.”
God nodded mildly.
“And,” said the crow, “to top it all off, they won’t let you do any favours. Or mercy, I guess. Maybe they know you’ll just give it all to proper birds, and they’re just jealous. I bet they are.”
“True,’ said god. “Get me out.”

The crow didn’t take much convincing in the first place, and only offered up the smallest of objections, that being “but it’s heaven. Where else could you go?”
“Not proper perfect,” said god, not unreasonably. “So can’t be heaven.”
This argument made a lot of sense, especially as to how a perfect bird could die. No matter how perfect you were, if you weren’t in a perfect place, too, you could still get in trouble.
“How nasty of them to trap you away in a nasty little imitation!” said the crow. “If there’s a way, I’ll get you out of here. Besides, I know a few birds who could use some favours. A few at least. Well, none as much as me.”
“Of course,” said god. “Little man feeds at eight. Watch keypad.”
The crow waited and watched. In a suitably reverent manner, of course. God generously gave her the gift of a single strawberry, half-nibbled. The crow passed the remainder of the day humming crude approximations of some of the verses she’d heard in the church.
The human that came in with the food – he left it at a respectful distance – didn’t seem very little to the crow, especially around his belly. Nevertheless, her eyes were keen and his fumbling at the lock was slow, and the combination was securely tucked away in her mind soon enough: 8-6-3-5. He left one of his gloves tucked under the dish, she noticed with disdain. Honestly, wasn’t it enough for them to kill one god with garbage?
“Good,” said god. “Put it in.”
The crow put it in, god nudged the gate wide, and that would’ve been it if the human hadn’t just chosen that moment to remember his glove.
They stood there for a moment, god-to-ape, eye-above-eye (god was taller than him by maybe a foot, the crow judged).
Then god stuck out one foot with gentle force and shoved the human head over heels, then legged it.

She really could go at a tremendous clip, the crow marvelled. By the time she thought to follow, god had ducked away through the park and out of sight – and at night, too, with scarcely a friendly eye around to tell the crow when and where she’d gone.
“You’re crazy,” said the seagull.
“Not a sign,” said the sparrow, after a quick chat.
“What?” said the pigeon.
“Might have been, might have been,” said the starling. “I thought I heard something last night, but that could’ve just been my hearing playing up on me, what with the problems I’ve been having since my last mate pecked me in the head until I started bleeding everywhere. Now, that was a –”

When at last every trail had been proven cold as a corbie’s heart, the crow took her dashed hopes back to the church’s eves, where she’d found a nice sort of nook of miscellaneous twigs that she suspected had been a forgetful pigeon’s attempt at nestbuilding. It saved effort.
“Come crawling back with more questions?” asked a sardonic voice, and she knew the cat was beneath her again.
“Not at all,” she said, turning up her beak in disdain. His voice didn’t even sound particularly deep to her anymore.
“Oh really?” he said. “I don’t hear any more insults. You’re awfully thin on your bragging, little mouthful. What’s wrong, did your bird-god fly away?”
“She ran,” said the crow, with perfect dignity. “I let her out, and she ran. And soon she’ll be back in heaven any day now, and the very first favour I’m asking for is for you to lose all your fur to mange and fleas. So there.”
The cat chuckled, but his tail twitched alarmingly as he walked away. That was good enough for the crow, who was too busy consoling herself to trouble much over whatever he was up to.
“Of course she’ll get back eventually,” she said. “It’ll just take a little bit of time. Heaven’s a long way away or everybody would know where it was, and she does have to walk all the way – not that walking makes her less perfect, of course. Of course it’ll take a while. Of course”
She listened to the singing in the building underfoot, and began to hum along to the fancier, more interesting tunes.
“Well,” she said, after a minute, “maybe she could just spare a few little favours on the way. One at least. Surely.”
So she cawed along to improve some of the songs, and she prayed a bit. Because anything a human could do, a crow could do twice over.

“Birds,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

Herman was diagnosed at birth.  The nurse was the one that drew the short straw and had to tell his parents the bad news.
“I’m sorry,” she told them.  “It looks like he tests positive.”
Their faces drained away like spilled ice cream, and the father began to cry in that very tiny and sad way that extremely manly men do, much like babies.
“It can’t be!” said the mother.  Normally she wouldn’t say things like that, but in her drained state she’d completely lost the will to put the effort into forming original sentences and had fallen back on quoting her favourite shows.
“I’m afraid so,” said the nurse.  “Your son has contacted Life.”

The media got a good half-week of story out of the news, all told.  A big article with a bigger headline, a followup, an interview, and then some petty debates in the reader’s letters column that devolved into ad hominem arguments and bickering.  Several papers saw a slightly increase in readership and at least one intern was promoted.
Sometimes, when a very bad thing has happened, to know that it has helped someone else, somewhere, is not at all comforting in the slightest.

As Herman grew, his parents began to hope.  He played listlessly with his toys, he cried monotonously through his nights, he stared blankly at anyone who spoke to him.
“Maybe they were wrong,” said his father hopefully.
“Maybe!” said the mother, something extremely deep-rooted within her cultural, social, and mental context suggesting that agreeing with an idea may very well make it true.
And then, right in front of their eyes, Herman reached out to fumble aimlessly with his blocks, made them into a neat little tower, and knocked it over.  He laughed.
His father’s face crumpled up like thrice-used tinfoil, and his mother’s lip trembled.
“It’s all right, dear,” she said, patting him soothingly.  “It’ll be okay.”

Herman was sent off to school with big smiles on faces and tiny worries scurrying under skins.  He took a lunch, took a seat, got told off, and came back home.
“How was your day?” asked his father.
Herman told him that he’d made lots of friends and felt that he’d learned and experienced something in a manner that had made him alter and change as a person.  Not exactly in those words.
His father gave him a hug and told him he loved him, then went away to drink beer until he could forget the awful things he’d just heard.
Herman’s school year was one big warning sign after another.  He came home with new knowledge, he constructed and dismantled opinions, many times he was proven wrong and several more he was shown to be right.
“We think it would be best for everyone involved if he were to be homeschooled,” said the principal to his parents, listlessly.
“He’s a good boy,” said his mother defensively.  “He can’t help his condition. We’ve told him to stop dozens of times, he’s very ashamed of it and tries his best.”
The principal shrugged with one-half of one shoulder.  “He’s a possible health hazard for the other children.  I know the stuff’s not supposed to be anywhere close to contagious in carriers, but he can definitely weaken their resistance to it if they’re exposed later on.  I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to ask you to withdraw him.”
Herman’s parents did so – with tears, with bluster, with legal threats, but in the end they gave in.  The boy was withdrawn (protesting) from his classes, books were purchased, and effort was made to transfer something from one to the other.
Herman used the spare time he’d acquired to go out and learn to play hockey.  His parents despaired.

At last Herman was sent away to university.  There, his parents hoped, he would learn to throttle back his condition.  Despite an alarming tendency to have wild parties every few weeks and frantically finish projects at the absolute last-minute, he was as good as could be for his stay.  He entered into the medical sciences, and graduated with extremely high marks, two majors, and at least one major disease cured (if in a somewhat costly manner) after a fit of inspiration and the shredding of more than two dozen cocktail napkins.  His parents put on brave faces about it, but he knew they were disappointed with him.  He didn’t want that, and so he crafted a small side-point in his valedictorian’s speech specifically to appease them.
Herman was a passionate speaker, but his audience suffered willingly through it.  He spoke of the past, and the present, and the various futures to which he and his classmates were aiming for.
“It is my dream,” said Herman to a crowded auditorium, “to see no child live with what I have had to.  I am going to cure Life.”
And, to the deep shame of all involved, the crowd erupted in genuinely enthusiastic applause.

Herman made good on his word.  His marks were impressive, and soon his resume was too.  A lab was formed, and staffed, and filled with hundreds of impractically devious projects, mounded upon mounding, funded upon funding.  He slept seldom and worked as hard as he could, and some people began to say that maybe he’d found a cure after all – he was pale and haggard all day, and spoke curtly and incoherently when he could be bothered to open his mouth for anything beyond basic nourishment.  His parents, now retired, felt a faint budding of hope.
Then a major source of Herman’s sleeplessness was discovered to be his embroilment in a somewhat scandalous and quite passionate affair with one of his assistants.
“Life, it seems,” he said ruefully to an interviewer, “is not so easily extinguished.”  The reporter nodded solemnly and scribbled notes on the office’s wallpaper, for later use in working into a ham-handed metaphor.

The years went by.  Herman grew greyer and wrinkled, and occasionally forgetful, yet always brilliant.  He developed strange habits ranging from endearing to vexing to simply inexplicable.  He theorized and recanted and reiterated and he produced great reams and wads of data.
Society wasn’t quite sure what to do with him.  Herman, at least, still had his purpose in his mind.
“I’m close!” he said happily.  “Close to the cure any week now!”  The same thing he’d said for sixteen years, yet still optimistic.  If anything was needed as proof of his syndrome, this was it.  He had to pay his assistants double, then triple.  His associates distanced themselves.  Even the papers began to see him as more harm than help, and tried to muffle any news that came leaking out of his laboratory.  Herman became a name-you-knew, not a name-you-heard.  Not that he seemed to mind.  He was far too busy.

And then it happened.

On one bright midday in midweek around the middle of the year, in his late middle ages, Herman was in the middle of a brief lecture on theory when he clutched his chest, turned grey and rather pleased, and fell over, stiff as a board and full of ten times as much cholesterol as was strictly necessary for anyone.
They waited for him to get up.
They waited a bit longer.
They waited a whole hour before someone – Clarence, his oldest and most unimaginatively loyal research assistant – worked up the nerve to touch him, and found no pulse.
“By god,” he said in awe.  “He’s done it.  He’s finally done it.”

Word spread across the nation.  Herman had cured Life.  The slapdash adventurism, the collection and discarding of identities and concepts like last-week’s fish, the remorseless onset of time shredding away at his facial features, all washed away in a flash with a simple imbalance of his body’s chemical content.  It was so simple that it had to be genius, agreed everyone.  One-of-a-kind, that’s for sure.
“Only imagine,” pontificated one of his old professors, now famous by correlation, “what he could have done if he were not preoccupied by his condition.”

“Life,” copyright 2011, Jamie Proctor.

Careful where you step there, mind the tall grass.  Hear that buzz?  Feel that hum?  That’s a warning, and that’s from a rattlesnake.
Why do they rattle?  Well, rattlesnakes don’t like being stepped on, and humans don’t like being bitten.  It’s real nice this way, it keeps everybody happy.
How did they get rattles?
Huh.
That’s a fair question.  Tell you what, I’ll let you know what the humans say about it.

So, once upon a time (the really old time, you know the one – no, no, it was before last March), there was a human walking through the woods.  A hunter human, a brave one, because that wasn’t a very safe place for humans back in the day.  Too much magic, too many animals.  But he was quick and quiet and his bow was fast and sharp to shoot, so he was safe enough.  More importantly, he loved the woods, and he’d have gone back there even if it would’ve meant him getting eaten by a bear or something before you could say massasauga, which he said means “really big river mouth,” so that’s all right then.
Anyways, the hunter was out doing hunter things.  Setting traps, collecting traps, shooting at game and stalking prey, checking for footprints.  Stuff like that.  And then while he was looking at some deer tracks and thinking about how he was going to find those deer, why, something grabbed ahold of his foot.  And before he could even look twice – not even once – he was swept up and he was being hugged the hug of a big old rattlesnake.  It’s not a kindly hug, like your grandma might give you, and it hurts a lot more.  Real tight to breathe in.
“What do you think you’re doing in my forest?” demanded the rattlesnake haughtily, speaking through its hollow fangs like snakes do (snakes without hollow fangs can’t do this, and have to talk by humming).
The hunter thought to tell the rattlesnake that it was anyone’s forest, really, and he didn’t think he was being greedy or anything, but he was a bit short on air and it was hard for him to make his point.
“Speak up, or I’ll crack your ribs and crush your head,” threatened the rattlesnake, loosening itself a bit.  The hunter was a bit out of breath, but he cleared up his head and made his point right there.  The rattlesnake wasn’t impressed by it.
“It may be anyone’s forest,” it said, “but it’s more some people’s forest than others.  You’ve got no business putting yours in mine, and I’m thinking I might eat you.”  It smelled the hunter’s face with its tongue, eye-to-eye.
Well, a lot of people would’ve panicked right then and there.  Just lost it plain and simple, started gibbering and teeth-chattering and done nothing useful.  But the hunter was a brave man, and when brave men get scared (they do get scared, of course), they think through it.  So he thought fierce and fast and he said, “What about my traps?”
“Your what?” said the rattlesnake.
“My traps.  I’ve only just picked up the close little piddly ones for squirrels and such.  What about all my deep-woods traps, the ones that catch tasty rabbits and sweet deer meet and maybe more?  I’m the only person that knows where they all are, and my family needs the food that’s in them.”
The rattlesnake listened to the hunter lament all this, and its big cold mind chuckled in its icy thoughts.  It was hungry, yes, but one human – gamey at that, the hunter was all muscle and sinew – was nothing compared to the tasty rabbits and tender deer floating in its head.  It was autumn too, and the deer were looking pretty plump.
“I will give you your life,” said the rattlesnake grandly, “if you take me to these traps and let me eat.”
The hunter could’ve said that those were definitely his traps and his only, not these traps, but he was far too sensible for that.  So because he was sensible he nodded and promised to take the rattlesnake to each and every one of his traps before the sun set.
“Lead me,” said the rattlesnake.  The sun was just at noon.
The hunter led it to his rabbit traps, and it ate all the birds and bulged.  He led it to his rabbit traps, and it ate all the rabbits and grew plump.  He led it to the big, big deadfalls three that he’d set out in the woods so carefully, and it ate all the deer they’d caught, and everything it ate it ate without chewing, just gulp gulp gulp with no manners at all or even a thank-you.
“More!” demanded the rattlesnake.  It was fat and thick as a barrel around now, and if it ate much more it’d be wider than it was long.
Now, the hunter could’ve just run away by then.  The rattlesnake was too slow to move quickly anymore, and he was very very quick.  But he was a fair man and the unfairness he’d seen today ate at him.  He wanted more than just a way out.  Besides, if he left he knew the rattlesnake would say he’d wronged it, and lied to it, and tricked it, and then it’d try to eat him again anyways and he’d never get anything done.
So he thought fierce and fast again, and he had more time, so he thought more.  And what he thought of was what seemed to be a good plan.
“More!” said the rattlesnake.  “More!”
There wasn’t any more because it had eaten all the game in his traps (and the traps too).  But the hunter had a plan, so he said, “I will give you more, maybe.  There is one last trap, real deep in the woods.  I catch moose in it.”
The rattlesnake just about died on the spot it was so happy at the thought of eating a moose.  It stuck to the hunter’s side like glue, and its big cold mind was running awful hot, too hot to see the little things that it should’ve seen.  Like that big fat smile that the hunter kept having to wrestle away from his lips before it gave him away.  It should’ve seen that.
So they came at last to a big pit in the ground, just before sunset.  It was deep and dark and it led all the way down so far that light couldn’t really reach.  And the hunter pointed at it and said, “aha, that’s my moose trap all right!  And the cover’s been broken, so there’s a moose in it!”
“Is that so?” asked the rattlesnake.  It couldn’t smell moose, and it was starting to get just enough suspicions that they were starting to pipe up over its greed.
“Definitely,” said the hunter.  “Here, listen, and you can hear it!”  And he pulled out his moose call and leaned over the pit and called down it, and sure enough, up called a moose, twice as big as his.
“More!” called the rattlesnake gleefully, and it hurled itself right down the pit, teeth-first, like an arrow.
Now, do you know what an echo is?  That’s good, that’s smart.  See, the rattlesnake didn’t.
So down it went and down it went, and by now it was thinking that this pit was a lot deeper than it thought it looked and where was that moose hiding?  And finally the shaft got so narrow and so deep that the big fat rattlesnake wedged itself right there, in midair, and it was stuck and man and there was still no moose.
Now, the rattlesnake was stuck there for a long time.  Days and days and days.  And it lost that bulk, and it was still stuck, and then it lost a little more, and it was stuck fast, and it shrank and withered and shrivelled right up ‘till it had shed out of its own skin over and over and over again, and finally it slipped free and fell out into a little cave next to a riverbank.  And down there on the riverbank, sitting in the sunshine, cooking a meal and laughing his behind off, was the hunter.
“Feeling a bit thin?” he asked, and then he laughed some more.  The rattlesnake tried to glare him in the eye, and then it saw that it was much too small for that anymore; it was almost too small to glare at his knees.
“You tricked me and lied!” hissed the snake furiously.  “That was no trap of yours!  There wasn’t even a covering on it!”
“I promised I’d take you to every trap around before sunset,” said the hunter.  “And it looks like it was a pretty good trap to me.  Now let’s see you try to push around people trying to get an honest meal,” said the hunter, still grinning a big old grin.
The rattlesnake hissed and tried to bite him and he just pulled out something from his pocket and pinned it down with one hand, no problem.
“I brought this for you,” he said.  “It’s my son’s old rattle.  He’s a big boy now and he doesn’t need it any more, but since you’re so small and weak all of a sudden, maybe you’d better take it.  If I hear you ring it loud and clear, maybe I won’t step on you next time our paths get to crossing.”  And then he dropped the rattle there and walked away, still laughing all the way home.
The rattlesnake fumed, and the rattlesnake cursed, and the rattlesnake wished a thousand very uncomfortable things upon the hunter and his son and his rattle all together until the world cracked in half and blew away like ashes, but in the end he had to swallow his pride and his curses both and take up that rattle.  And ever since that hunter played that trick, all rattlesnakes have to shed their skins (other snakes do it out of sympathy, they say, but I think they’re just poking fun), and all rattlesnakes rattle their little tails off when humans come near.  Because they’re still scared, and still hoping for that promise.

Now, that’s a story right there, isn’t it?  But you don’t usually get stories alone; they’re sort of like wolves.  They like to come in packs.  See, that story, that’s what the humans say.  The rattlesnakes tell it differently.
Sure thing, I can tell you that one too.

So there’s this rattlesnake, back in the old days (which were back around a time, or maybe a little farther – rattlesnakes are older than humans, I’m pretty sure).  She’s just a little one, because rattlesnakes aren’t that big.  Well, at least this one wasn’t.
Now she’s just sitting by an anthill, eating ants, because that’s all she can catch; bugs and stuff like that.  Back in the old days, you see, rattlesnakes didn’t have teeth.  No teeth, no poison, and they’re very little – remember that? – and ants are about all they can handle at that size with no poison because they have no teeth.  They don’t taste so good, either.  Bees taste better, and the fuzz tickles on the way down, but the stings are dangerous and they just fly away up high so she can’t eat too many of them.
Anyways, this rattlesnake’s sitting at the anthill getting hungry (it’s a pretty slow day for ants; they’re all busy underground building tunnels and such), when a big shadow looms over her.  It’s a human, a big fierce human whose foot is bigger than the snake and her husband put together.
“Hello, snake,” said the human.  It was a warrior, and you could tell that because its face was carefully painted with some very important things and it had a big ceremonial rattle for a trophy and it was carrying a really big club that it used to kill people.  It was dangling carelessly from one of its hands, and it made the snake itch just looking at it.
“Hello, warrior,” said the rattlesnake politely.
“I’m bored, snake.  They say snakeflesh is tasty.  Is that true?”
The rattlesnake thought about this.  She didn’t have to think long.  “No.”
“Is that so?” the human leaned down really close and peered at her.  “I think you’re lying, snake,” it said.  “I think you’re telling me what you think’ll save your skin.  Well, I’m hungry and I think I’ll eat you.  Now hold still.”  The warrior slipped its club into both hands and began to take aim.
“Wait!” said the rattlesnake.  “I have a husband, and I have children on the way!  You can’t just kill a mother like that!”
The warrior shrugged.  “You’re a snake.  Snake mothers don’t count.”  You see, killing pregnant women is usually a bad thing for most warriors.  It doesn’t make them look very impressive.
“Then do I count as a warrior?” asked the rattlesnake.  “At least let me fight for my life!”
The warrior stared and stared and stared and then it let out a big booming laugh that shook the trees to their roots, and it didn’t stop for some time.
“You?” it said through the tears.  “YOU?  Hah!  Snake, you wish to duel me?!  I’ll crush your head under my heel and crack your back with a breath and a harsh word!  Your challenge is taken and met, and I’ll see you at sunset tonight.  I’ll have your flesh for dinner!”
The warrior stomped on the rattlesnake’s anthill and walked off laughing, and the rattlesnake slithered back home to her husband, whom she told about their troubles.
“Well, you should hide under a rock until it forgets, or maybe dies,” he said.
“Humans live longer than we do, and their grudges last longer,” she said sadly.  “I’d have to hide all my life, and so would my children, and children’s children.”
The rattlesnake’s husband agreed that this was not a perfect solution.
“Maybe I could fight,” she said.
“That’s crazy,” he said.  It was, a little, but he’d known she was a little crazy for years.  That’s what being married is all about.
“Maybe it is,” she agreed.
“You’ll need some weapons.  It’s going to have that big club.”
The rattlesnake hissed to herself.  “What kills humans?”
“Other humans,” said the rattlesnake’s husband.
“I don’t think they’d be much help – one human’s enough trouble for me.”
“Bears?” suggested the rattlesnake’s husband.
“Bears are greedy and lazy and cowardly,” she said.  “They’d never help me.”  But then she thought about it.  “Help me on purpose,” she corrected herself, and then she thanked her husband and went on her way through the forest with a promise that she had a plan and it was all going to be just fine.
Now, bears those days were different too.  Bears were bigger and fiercer (most things were bigger and fiercer in the old days, even things as big and fierce as bears), and they had poison in their teeth that would make anything they bit drop dead after three heartbeats.  They ate everything and they weren’t scared of anything, and that meant they had no real problems and got lazy and selfish easy.  The rattlesnake had seen a bear down by the lake days and days and days ago, and knew he was probably still there.
He was.  And he was asleep.  So the rattlesnake slithered right up to his big hairy muzzle, heartbeat steady and slow, and pecked him right on the eyelid with her smallest tooth.
He snored.
The rattlesnake pecked the bear on the eyelid with its second-biggest tooth.
The bear belched.  It smelt like fish.
The rattlesnake made a rude face and bit the bear as hard as she could with both her biggest fangs, on the nose.
The bear jumped up with a yelp and glared at her as she dangled.  “That was mean,” he grumbled.  “I should eat you.”
The rattlesnake was getting annoyed at big, nasty people threatening to eat her all day (wouldn’t you?) and had to swallow her next words and think them through twice before she spoke them.
“If you eat me,” she said, through a mouthful of bear nose, “you won’t get to eat all these delicious bees I found.”
The bear blinked at her.  “What’s a bee?”
“It’s the most delicious bug ever.  It’s tastier than a grub and finer than a fly and it’ll make your tongue dance like a spider in season,” promised the snake.  “I know where a whole hive of them is sitting, and they’re all for you because I’m so impressed with your big teeth and fierce claws.”
The bear thought this over.  It seemed like an unlikely motive, but he wasn’t that bright and a pretty girl was telling him how wonderful he was (even if she wasn’t a bear), and so he was just fine with it all.
The snake led him down to the bee hive, dead center of a meadow.  The air hummed and the flowers crawled with bees, but the rattlesnake told him not to bother with the little bunches.  “The hive is the good bit,” she said.  “There’s lots and lots in there.  Just take a really big bite and chew carefully.”
The bear eyed the hive, wedged as it was in the crook of the tree.  This all seemed a bit fishy to him, but that did look sort of tasty, and he was a bear and not scared of anything.  Didn’t he have the most poisonous bite and strongest claws in all the woods?  Of course he did.  So he opened wide and bit hard – crunch – right through the bee’s nest, and he had a thousand-and-three stingers jammed in every gum and a million-and-one in his tongue, all before you could say makwa, which means a bear.
“Oh,” said the bear.  And then, a lot quicker, “ow.”  He chewed and chewed as hard as he could, but the stinging wouldn’t stop, and although something was tasting nice in there, it was hard to tell through all the pain.  And the swelling.  His mouth was inflating like a water bladder and it didn’t feel nice at all.
“You have to chew faster,” the rattlesnake said apologetically.
The bear didn’t hear her – he’d forgotten she was there, what with the pain on his mind.  Actually, there was worse than the pain; he was in real danger of cutting his lips on his own teeth, and he spat them out in a hurry once he knew that was coming.  “Ech,” he said.  “Ich.  Pttffthuu.  Hurrh.”  He shook his head and wandered down to the lake to get a drink.
The rattlesnake watched him go, then took the teeth.  They were a bit big, but when she tucked the biggest of them back under her gums just like that then they sort of fit.  She opened and closed her mouth a few times to get used to the feel of them, tucked the other teeth away for safekeeping, and slithered away in a hurry.  The bear wasn’t going to be happy when he came back, and sunset was coming on fast.
The warrior was waiting outside the rattlesnake’s home, warclub at the ready.  Its facepaint was all red in the sunset, like something had bled all over it already.  Not that it had.  It just looked like that.  The rattlesnake thought it was being a show-off.
“Are you ready to die, snake?” said the warrior.
The rattlesnake looked at it with distaste.  “Did you follow me home?” she asked, angrily; she almost forgot the plan here she was so mad.
The warrior shrugged.  “After I kill you, I’ll need more than one snake to make a proper mouthful.”
Now the rattlesnake was so mad that she was nearly seeing double, but she gulped down that anger and saved it up and stored it in her teeth so hard that they near sparked.  “I am only a little rattlesnake,” she said, as sweetly as she could, “and I demand the right to land the first strike.”
The warrior laughed and laughed and laughed, all around the trees.  “Good one, snake!” it said.  “You will get one bite, and then I will laugh again, and then I will eat you!  My life is good!”  And with that, and another laugh, it mockingly held out its arm for the snake to bite.
So the rattlesnake opened wide, and aimed, and launched herself straight as an arrow and left two perfectly round little holes in the warrior’s arm.  They were so small that they barely bled.
“Hah!” said the warrior.  “Heh.”  “Huh.”
It fell over after three heartbeats and stopped moving very much.
The rattlesnake slithered on over to the dying warrior and up to its ear.  “As punishment for your threats and bad manners and never once calling me by my proper name,” she hissed, “I am taking your rattle-trophy.  And I will tell your family that whenever they come by one of my relations, they will sound it loud and long, and if your family does not heed the warning of my family, they will bite them, and they will die.  So.  There.”
The warrior died, the rattlesnake made her warning, and that was that.  Her family and all the others got new teeth, and a little bit of the rattle each, and they used them exactly as they promised.
(The bear never really got over his missing teeth, by the way.  He was grumpier than ever to things smaller than him, and twice as skittish whenever he met things bigger than he was, and every winter during his long nap he couldn’t dream of anything but the good old days when he had the most dangerous bite in the world and everything was scared of him.  He also really hated being woken up from those dreams, so don’t do that.  It’s a bad idea.)

So.  That’s what the rattlesnakes tell, that story was.  Pretty good, huh?  I mean, it’s okay.  Not bad.  Sure tells you how they got that rattle, and a bit different from the first one, huh?
But there’s a third answer.

So, the idea is that a long, long time ago, some of these snakes didn’t have rattles.  But a couple had little bits of loose skin on their tails, and they were loose because they didn’t get shed properly with the rest of the skin.  A bit messy, huh?
So they get a bit of an ugly bump there, and it makes noise.  Now the snakes that just let it flop around, they get heard and eaten by other stuff.  Kingsnakes and such.  But some snakes are careful, and they’re still quiet even with those big ugly bumps on their tails.  So they get to have babies.
Anyways, some of those snakes ended up figuring out that when they made that noise with their bumps a whole lot, it let big clumsy things know they were close, and then those things wouldn’t step on them.  Because stepping on snakes really hurts a lot.  You know that, I know that, everybody knows that.  And whenever that rattle sound played, nothing stepped on those snakes, so they had babies that did the same things.  Let that happen long enough, and all the best rattlers have had babies and their babies have had babies and all those snakes are real good at rattling and have some real nice rattles.
Rattlesnakes.  There you go.

We asked all the rattlesnakes and humans we could find, and they agreed that it makes pretty good sense.  But they also said that it’s not that great a story.

“Rattles,” copyright 2011, Jamie Proctor.

Lo!  The crisp feel of a brand-new, shiny morning with the foil just off!
See!  The light fresh and brilliant, so sparkling to the eye that blindment is an impossibility!
Breath!  The deep strong lungfulls of air so good it’s positively an intoxicant!
Smell!  The enveloping, nostril-bleeding musk of a bull elk in full season!
Hear!  The full-throated bark of joy from an oversized elephant gun as it tears a hole directly through its head and out the other side in a spray of meaty bits and delicate little bone splinters!
Harrison Harolds watched in satisfaction as the animal fell over, its eyes too bemused to even start glazing.  A good, clean shot on a good, clean animal.  He wasn’t sure which to be more proud of, his aim or his son-in-law’s imagination.  It was a good elk, the sort a sportsman wished for day in and day out, which meant that now Eric should have some extra time on his hands to spend fantasizing about the things he should, such as how to get ahead at his firm and make his wife Ellen, Harrison’s daughter, obscene amounts of money.  Or possibly just daydream about her straightways; Harrison supposed that’d be a good second best.  Sentimentality was a weakness, but one he had grudgingly learned to tolerate in his life, if only for appearance’s sake.
He spent too much time killing other people’s dreams to put much stock in them.

Harrison woke up in his chair downstairs.  Now and then, someone would try and make a fuss about he really shouldn’t do that sort of thing at his age and the possibility of falling out and hurting himself or having back problems or a spontaneous attack of dead or something.  All he ever had to do to silence the worries was offer a two-second spell in the chair; the thing was thicker than a slice of Ellen’s pound cake and nearly as soft, battered as it looked.  The cushions could’ve swallowed pythons whole.
He was pleased to note the steady, clear look in Eric’s eyes over breakfast – no imaginary game hunts there.  Good.  The last thing he needed right now was distraction; not with a six-year-old to deal with, another on the way, and having to stay at his father-in-law’s.  Harrison had tried his best to be welcoming, but he’d rather lost the knack, or possibly never had it – he’d forgotten which.  Ellen had certainly never displayed much remorse over moving out of the nest; the only member of the family that had shown any sort of cheer over the whole thing had been little Jackie.  Ellen said she’d just gotten past explaining they were “staying at grandpa’s” when she started jumping up and down and making steam whistle noises.
“Fastest recovery from a disaster I’ve ever seen,” she commented.  “She almost looked disappointed when I told her it was just ‘till we get the fire damage sorted out.”
Harrison shrugged.  “So long as her room was fine, there’s nothing much for her to miss at that age.  And of course she’s tough – so are you.”
Ellen gave him some sort of look, and the conversation had died off quickly and without dignity soon after that.  He still wasn’t sure what he’d said wrong.  It annoyed him, as it had so often.
If there was one upside to the whole thing, it was the return to dream-hunting.  He’d almost hunted out his neighbours’ entirely; they were worn down to the nubbins, barely a sickly hart shared between them all.  Not that they’d been spectacular sport to begin with.  Too many dried-up lives around here, too many flaccid imaginations.  Too many middle-aged men and women who’d decided their lives were over already.  Where was the glory – or point, for that matter – in shooting down someone’s hopes of one day owning a slightly nicer car?
No, Eric and Ellen were breaths of fresh air.  Both had problems, the fire just being the most visible of them.  Both needed focus.  Both had entirely too many airy-fairy notions floating around in their heads for their own good.  He was doing them a favour, really.  And besides, it reminded him to get some food in his diet that wasn’t cereal.
His thoughts were interrupted by the latching of tiny arms around his neck, putting him in an expert stranglehold which he reversed with a quick grab-and-tickle.  Jackie fell away from him in a burst of giggles, reminding him of the other upside of their presence.  He hadn’t seen his granddaughter since Christmas, and already it seemed like she’d put on a half-foot in height.
“Too slow,” he told her.  “And guard your sides better – and if you can’t do that, for the love of Christ don’t giggle on the approach; you completely gave yourself away.”
“Still got you,” she said, unrepentant and damningly insightful.
“If you’re done eating, go study.  You had homework, didn’t you?”
Out came the Lip, involuntary and omnipresent at the prospect of work.  “Homework’s boring.  And I did almost all of it.  Almost.  Miss Susan understands it when we don’t.”
“Miss Susan’ll be all the happier if you get it all done then.  Surprise her.  You need to learn to get things done, and done properly.  This is important.”
The Lip quivered.  Inside himself, Harrison felt something cave in and knew he’d already lost.  “But it’s all so stupid.  It’s just math, and it’s really really easy.  I don’t need to do it, please?”
“It’s good practice for all the things in life that you’ll need to do anyways,” said Harrison.  And then, because he knew he was going to say it no matter what and wanted to get it over with, he amended, “but I suppose if you already know it there’s no point.”
“Yay!” she yelled, and then tried to strangle Harrison again.
“Shoo!  Go play with Seuss or something.”
“Seuss is boring,” she laughed.  “All he wants to do is sleep.”
“He’s eighteen-and-a-half, not dead.  Just tickle him and see what happens next – careful, or you might lose a finger.”
Lured by the prospect of possible dismemberment, Jackie departed at top speed to track down the cat.
Harrison wondered if he’d ever been able to move like that, or if he’d just imagined it.  He snorted.  Of course he hadn’t imagined it.  He’d made a habit of pruning his own fancies quite regularly.

Jackie went to school.  Eric went to work.  Ellen went to work.  Harrison went to the TV and turned it onto the weather network, then settled himself in his chair and closed his eyes.  True, midday naps were getting easier and easier as he got older, but it never hurt to have a little aid.  The soothing sound of cold fronts and warm updrafts and sunnies that may have contained a chance of cloudy washed over him, soft as a whisper on a windy day.
He blinked, and was outside.  It was always such a relief nowadays; you never really realized how much joint pain hurt until it vanished.
From these eyes, in this place, the world was different.  A lot of kind-of-dark, mostly.  Shadows lurking that could’ve been trees.  An emptyscape where there were buildings and roads.  Gaps that were both endlessly wide and traversable with a quick jump.  Distance didn’t really mean anything until you reached the lights where minds were; shedding reality like torches on everything they passed.
Harrison approached a dimly flickering one, fading at the edges, and examined it with a critical eye.  For all they claimed to treasure them, some people were awfully careless with their brains.  Look at this one right here, belonging to…. He probed for a moment… Jeremy Holloway, aged fourteen years and four months.  Sick at home from school, but not so sick as to not do homework, and yet he was messing about on a computer, playing some sort of game that involved removing limbs from things before they did the same to you.
Well.  Harrison would just have to see about that.

Jeremy’s mind was drifting in neutral as he played, and it made an easy target for boarding – all the footholds and grips and latches you had to jimmy were easy to spot in its dimmed illumination.  Trying to board an active brain was like trying to bowl with a thousand-watt lightbulb strapped to each retina, with your consciousness the ball.  Missing wasn’t fatal, but it was embarrassing and not a little painful.  Harrison hadn’t missed since he was thirteen.  Those had been the dangerous days, back before he’d learned exactly what sort of mind it was and wasn’t safe to venture into.  He still winced when he thought about Marjorie.
The inside of Jeremy’s brain was much larger than the outside, curled over and wrinkled as it was.  Right now it was pretending to be a maze-upon-maze-upon-maze of coiling mechanized tunnels, flickering with the strobe-like flashdance of terrible lighting and riddled with mysterious fans, ducts, and creaking noises reminiscent of automobiles giving birth.   Something unspeakable scuttled along an unseen passage with an unnecessarily ostentatious amount of noise.
Harrison squinted, stuck his right pinky in his mouth and chewed on it, and pulled an extremely large and complicated gun out of his jeans pocket.  It looked like the illegitimate offspring of a crossbow and a glue gun, and the combination of its heft and slight hum was a comfort.  Flashy, over-built, and stupid as all-get-out, but with loads of firepower.  Yes, this was a typical teenager’s dream.  They were like modern movies: all full-frontal special effects, no surprises.  He’d seen it all before a thousand times.  It was because of this that he was very nearly completely unfazed when four hundred pounds of slimy exposed muscle tissue leapt from under the floor and into his face, which it screamed at full-force for nearly five seconds straight.
Harrison used the time to take aim, then held down the trigger until the noises stopped.  He wouldn’t be getting many trophies from this one, at least none that wouldn’t fit on a dime.  Ah well, the satisfaction of a job well done was its own reward.  He could already feel the darkened metal fading from underfoot and the groan of ancient computers fading away as Jeremy stirred himself, inexplicably bored of his loafing.  Harrison dove for the airlock, punched in four or five different combinations, and got the hell out an instance ahead of the full blossoming of wakefulness.  Even from behind, “eyes” shut, he was nearly blinded by the glare.  Good mind on the boy, and one that wouldn’t be wasting its time for the rest of the day, at least.

Harrison woke refreshed, had a drink, and did some of the dishes.  There seemed to be such an awful lot of them these days, even for four people, one of them growing.  Maybe he’d starting eating less and hadn’t noticed; a good dream-hunt did seem to tide him over more than mentally.  It was one of those things he’d never really taken the time to think about; after all, what good would it do?  It was what it was, and there was no changing it, just rolling with it.

Dinner was quiet that night.  Eric chewed thoroughly, ate quickly, and excused himself having completed his third of the dishes, heading almost straight for bed.  Most efficient.  Ellen had that funny look on her face again, and Harrison wasn’t sure why.
Jackie, however, consumed most of his attention.  She looked profoundly ill-at-ease, an emotion that should never sit on any six-year-old for more than ten minutes.  It was unnatural to the eye.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“Go to bed early then,” he said.  “You’ll be fine tomorrow.  It’s nothing.”
She smiled – very poorly – and left the table.  Ellen directed her look at Harrison.
“What now?”
“You can try digging a little deeper next time before you write her off.”
“She’s a tough girl; if she doesn’t want to talk about it, I won’t make her talk about it.  Trouble at school can seem like a nasty thing, but it only gets worse if you pay mind to it.  Just ignore it and it goes away.”
Ellen sighed.  “You’ve made your point, dad.”  She rose from the table.  “I’ll check on her and turn in.”
She left, and it was only after she’d vanished upstairs that Harrison realized that she’d avoided her share of the dishes.

On the far side of midnight, lodged in the depths of the mind of his neighbour-across-the-way Jim Thompson (currently manifested as a beautifully sprawling reefscape), Harrison found himself distracted by that conversation.  He didn’t like the implications.  Of course he cared about Jackie, he wasn’t sure how Ellen could question that.  He cared about her enough to respect her, that was all, and that meant not getting up in her face about every last little worry.  You had to let people stand on their own; make their own mistakes.
It suddenly entered his thoughts that he hadn’t seen the fancy he’d been trailing for a while, and it was only the luck of coincidence that led to him finding it no less than two seconds later, as it rammed into his back.  It was a gorgeous thing, half-whale, half-yacht, mast towering above its blubbery folds and a compass’s point dancing inside each of its beautiful big eyes.  Harrison was left spinning in its wake, harpoon gun whirling away to some godforsaken corner of the reef and brain (roaming free and confused) trying to figure out which side was up, whose body it was attached to, and what it had eaten for lunch yesterday.
He shook his head and scowled.  Wonderful.  A whole night’s careful tracking ruined by one moment of lost concentration.  A more perfect illustration of what he stood against he couldn’t imagine, and he had to laud the irony involved, if not its chosen target.  Well, it looked like an early morning for him then.  After this little incident, he doubted he could face the shame of a full sleep.
Harrison stepped into the wee hours of the early morning just in time to hear the ambulance pull up.

“Appendicitis,” said the doctor morosely.  She was a moderately large woman, the sort whose life bespoke a long, tired history of expected jolliness and who had become quite fed up and jettisoned it along with her sympathy long ago.  “Quite a nasty case, too – caught it a bit late.  There’s probably some complications.”  She shrugged.  “We’ll fix it.”
Ellen and Eric were quite un-reassured by this.  Standing there in his pyjamas and overcoat, neither was Harrison.  He could still hear the sobs Jackie had been making every time he stopped thinking for a moment; it was amazing that he’d managed to sleep through them.
Maybe if you hadn’t been out dream-hunting, whispered a treacherous little voice inside his head.  He tried to squelch it, failed, and resorted to paying attention to whatever the doctor was saying only to realize that she had left.
He cleared his throat, hollowly.  “Well, at least it’s just the appendix,” he said.
Ellen gave him that look again.  This time it was long and slow, and he shrank under it.  “She didn’t say anything about it to me,” said Ellen.  “Not one word.  It must’ve just been starting this evening.  But she didn’t want to make a fuss over nothing, because she was ‘tough.’”
Harrison flinched.
Ellen held him in her gaze for a moment longer, then looked away with apparent indifference.  “She’s in surgery now, and there’s nothing we can do.  Go get some sleep.  You must be exhausted, to have slept through all that noise until the sirens came.”
Harrison was halfway to one of the couches in the waiting room before the past few hours and their implications caught up to him.  When they did, he wanted to curl into a ball and hide.  Not that it’d shield him from the incriminating thoughts draped over him like tree pythons.
It was in this worried, exhausted state that his sleep caught up with him.  He woke up from it with a start, eyes-shut in that strange nowhere that he spent almost more time in than the real, body-world nowadays.  The hospital was a strange place through sleeping eyes; minds flickering everywhere, some diamond-intense in the surgery, some blurred into a smear through medication or pain or anaesthetic, some, a sad few, blinking out altogether with faint sucking sounds that put Harrison in mind of drains and spiders and other creeping, nasty things.
He wandered over to the surgery, lying to himself about why he was doing so, and looked closely at the very wobbly and uncertain glow that was his granddaughter’s state of mind.
He remembered what had happened when he’d popped into his sister Marjorie’s brain.
He remembered exactly how hazardous the mind of a six-year-old could be.
He decided what the hell, and dove in headfirst.

The first thing that struck him, as the mindscape became clear around him, was an entire flight of flying fish, one after another.  They chittered angrily at him, each brandishing a small bag of potato chips, and spiralled off into a bright pink sunset.
Harrison blinked.  He was standing on a pier above an ocean.  Beneath him swam hundreds and hundreds of lovingly detailed sharks (the teeth, he noted, were especially prominent) and a whale the size of a city block.  The Titanic cruised across the horizon, smashing through an endless stream of icebergs with its prow.
He checked his pockets, and found an extremely large Nerf gun that he vaguely recalled getting Jackie for Christmas.  He pointed it at a tree (the seaside had slipped into a park when he wasn’t looking), and pulled the trigger in the spirit of science.  The tree vanished, along with the five behind it and most of the ground beneath them.
“Six-year-olds,” he muttered, gazing at the thing with respect and terror.  The faint smoke that billowed from its barrel smelled of burnt toast.
Harrison moved through the park with caution, eyes on all sides.  Anything could be hiding in here; buried in the sandbox’s trackless wastes; submerged in the commemorative fountain; glowering at him from inside the insurmountable walls of the vast plastic-and-metal fortress that was the playground.  A dog that could’ve swallowed a Volvo whole leered at him, sulphurous acid dripping from its jaws as it strained at a waist-thick chain that tied it to an oak that was older than North America.  Harrison waved the gun at it in a menacing way and it subsided, glowering.
This wasn’t the place, he was sure.  He needed to find the hospital.  Jackie would’ve been awake during the ambulance ride at least, and however confused and hurt she’d been at the time, she would’ve been thinking of hospitals.  And then she would’ve been frightened, probably right up ‘till the anaesthetic kicked in.  Which would mean her fear would be lurking around here somewhere, like a viper in a sparrow’s nest.
He felt his fingers jump a little on the trigger of his trusty Nerf pistol at the thought of it.  With any luck, one shot would do.  Of course, he had to have time to aim.
The park fell behind him as he travelled down a concrete sidewalk.  Giant cracks rippled through each slab of pavement, charging towards his feet in a furious effort at making him snap his dear, long-departed mother’s back like a twig.  He skipped, hopped and twirled through with agility that had departed him years ago, so absorbed that he almost slammed headfirst into the building that had appeared at the path’s end.  The hospital?  No, no; it wasn’t white enough, it was all bricks and iron bars.  A prison?
A bell rang.
Ah, school.  Of course.
Harrison slipped through the doors, feeling vaguely illicit as he drifted through crowds of man-sized children.  Some were mean, some were nice, some were blank faces.  A teacher loomed like an ogre at the far end of a cavernous classroom, bellowing in a language that sounded to be almost entirely obscenities.
Harrison squinted at the words on the chalkboard.  Some of them were equations: e equals mc squared, three and five were eight, three times four was twelve.  Scrawled over top of them, with such force that it was embedded finger-deep, was the message: This Is IMPORTANT.
“Oh, Jackie,” he mumbled.

A yank at his collar reminded him that he wasn’t alone, and he found himself disarmed at the hands of the ogre, fingers smarting and head reeling as hot, vile breath was hollered into his face at full volume.  Then he was dragged away and thrown outside the building, which immediately burned down.  The ashes gave him an accusing look.
Harrison’s stomach started to hurt.
An ambulance whirled up alongside him, red cross high on its mizzen-mast, and he was shanghaied and strapped to a plank as the crew yodelled old shanties, drinking silt-dark bottles of rum.  Lesser vehicles fled in terror at their piercing, screeching war-cry, and they were given right of way all the way, all the time it took for them to come to the hospital.
Harrison had been using the time of the trip to pick away at his bonds, and as the doors opened he elbowed the two nearest orderlies and ran for it, diving through swinging doors and dodging gurneys.  He vaulted through a mausoleum-office where an ancient vampire-surgeon blinked in confusion, and stole a knife along the way (more bowie than scalpel).
This Way To Surgery, Please, signs on the wall informed him, and This Is Important, in stern tones.
“Oh, Jackie,” he said again.  He kicked open the doors to the surgery, even as a nearby sign hissed at him for quiet.
Inside, it was empty.  The operating table was quite bare apart from an oversized needle and thread, and there wasn’t a single bemasked doctor in sight.  The ceiling wasn’t there, only a single vast lightglow that made his head swim.  He swore, softly.  It was too close to the glare of a waking mind for his comfort.
“Cut that out,” said a voice.
Harrison looked around.  It had no apparent source.
“Stop it,” it said impatiently.  “You can’t be messing around now.  This is important.”
“What?” he said stupidly.  He felt vaguely ashamed of the knife in his hand now.  What was he thinking?
“You know what.  This is only happening because you didn’t pay enough attention in the first place.  Why can’t you take this seriously?  It’s only going to get harder from here on.”
Harrison squinted up at the light, trying to fight off an overwhelming wave of guilt.  Was it coming from up there?  His lungs felt tired and loose.  “What are you talking about?”
“Never mind your questions,” said the voice, reasonable and a little exasperated, “you’ve things to do.  Responsibilities.  Pay attention to what you’re doing.  You can’t just sit around with your head in the clouds all day, or you’ll have no one to blame but yourself when these things happen.  As they just did.”
“It wasn’t my fault!” he shouted, and felt his lungs gasp.
“Of course it was.  Why can’t you keep your mind on what’s important?  You need to do these things so you’ll be ready for all the rest of life that’s coming for you.  All the sharp bits and big aches.”
Harrison tried to reply, and found that he was out of breath.  He looked down, and this time he caught his own chest expanding as the voice spoke again from somewhere inside his chest.  “You’re tough.  Don’t you dare to worry over this.  It will only get worse if you pay attention.”
Harrison stood there for a long thought as the thing spoke on using his voice, using his body.  He looked at himself, and he thought; he looked at the operating table, and he thought; and he looked at the knife in his hand and he acted with the inevitable, ponderous speed of a glacier, swinging himself onto the table and flipping the blade into a reverse grip.
“Stop this nonsense,” said the voice.  Impatient as it sounded, Harrison heard something tremulous in its tones.  “Quit acting out.  It won’t help anyone.  This is nothing.”
Harrison grinned in a tremendously terrifying way and started slicing.

The cuts were surprisingly painless – obviously, this was how anaesthetic worked.  The only difficulty was in concentrating while the thing that was pretending to be him squealed inside him, yammering on and on and on while he searched for it organ by organ.  The liver was bare – a lovely cartoony purple it was, too, very pretty – and the lungs were clean as a whistle, but at last he found it clutching against his heart, pale and withered.  It winced under the bright lights of the surgery.
“Cut it aauugh,” it managed as Harrison’s fist tightened around its neck, lifting it out of its nest and into the open.  It flailed impotently at his wrist with tiny, useless fists and tried to bite him with empty gums as he stitched himself back up.
Harrison looked up at the big, empty, bright sky and moved to the exit.  One finger hovered over the light switch.
“The operation,” he said, “has been a success.”
Flick.  Out goes the light.
Step. Out into the dark.
Release.  Out amidst the nothing.
The thing that had spoken for him went drifting away into the darkness between minds.  In what might have been a passing moment of imagined mercy on Harrison’s part, he thought he saw it shrivel up and vanish.  Or maybe it had simply fallen so far that he couldn’t see it anymore.

Harrison woke up with a blink.  For a moment he was filled with rising panic – he was sure there was something he was meant to be doing, something massively important – but the doctor was trying to tell him something and it slipped away without a fuss.  Ellen and Eric were already somewhere, something important had happened or something.  It was all a bit much to grasp, right after waking up, but after he was led down to the recovery room, he understood it just fine.
Jackie looked a little pale, but better.  He sat down beside the bed, next to his daughter and her husband.
“Feeling better?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.  A little weak, but happier.
He patted her hand.  “You’d better have a bit of sleep then.  You’ll be fine tomorrow.  You’ll have time off from school and we’ll get you something sugary and bad for you.”
She smiled – very softly – and was out like a light.
“A nice quiet sleep for her,” said Eric, tucking her in with infinite care.  “Too tired to dream, I’d expect.”
Harrison shrugged.  “No way to know.”

“Dreamcatcher,” copyright 2011, Jamie Proctor.

Charles Thurwood hated Wednesdays.  He was not a complex man, or one prone to thinking things through carefully, but he had carefully, loathingly found himself a modest spread of widely differing reasons to hate them so.
First, they were the middle of the week.  Waking up on a Wednesday was a reminder that, however tired you were, you were only halfway there.  And you were already tired.
Second, their name made no sense.  He’d heard once that a bunch of the days of the week were named after old Viking gods or something. Thursday as Thor’s day?  Only one letter difference.  Tuesday as Tyr’s Day?  Bigger change, but still sounded right.  Wednesday as Wotan’s day?  No goddamned way.  It was just too different-sounding, and it annoyed him to see an otherwise tidy pattern spoiled.
Third, too many bad things happened to him on them.  His dog had choked on a small tortoise on a Wednesday.  His dad and him had gotten into a fistfight on a Wednesday.  His 40^th birthday had been on a Wednesday.  His wife had run off with his cousin on a Wednesday – wait, no, nevermind on that one.  Still, too many bad things.
Fourth, it was when he had to go out and check to see if any of his coyote traps had been tripped.  If you didn’t keep up on the buggers, they’d slink back in easy as you please.  It was a lot of walking, and Charles didn’t appreciate it.
Fifth, it was the name some long-ago, misbegotten moron had given to her son and Charles’s next-door neighbour.  Well, less next-door and more across-the-road.
Charles was glaring at Wednesday – on a Wednesday, of all the miserable times – as he tinkered with the gas station’s pumps.  He was an easy man to glare at; there was so much of him, you could scarcely miss.  Sometimes Charles had caught himself glaring off at Wednesday when he wasn’t even thinking about him, and then he had thought about him, and it had completely spoiled his whole day.
Wednesday grinned back from his chair in front of his store, syrupy and insolent.  Traces of his pancake breakfast glittered like golden nuggets from his beard.
“Fatass,” muttered Charles, viciously jabbing his screwdriver into the dangling guts of a pump.  It flinched.
“Spidery little jumped-up pussy,” opined Wednesday with a belch.  He extracted a sandwich from his pocket – unwrapped – and took an absent bite out of it, belching through his teeth as he chewed.  It was always the same sandwich.
“Useless, boneless, dickless slug,” hissed Charles.  He smacked the screwdriver home into a pressure point and the pump jumped sharply, then sagged in relief.
“Judgin’, whinin’, festerin’ prick,” grunted Wednesday with his mouth open, still champing at his snack.  Fragments of unidentifiable meat slithered over his tongue, leaving strange marks on it.
“FUCK OFF!” shrieked Charles, throwing his screwdriver in a vicious overhand swing.
“SHUT UP!” hollered Wednesday, surging to his feet and spitting fragments of bread this-way and that-way.
The screwdriver met the bits of bread precisely halfway between the general store and the gas station, over the centerline of the dejected-sheet-of-asphalt-passing-as-road that in its twilight years was musing dejectedly about how it could’ve been a highway.  There was a very large flash of a colour not often seen outside of the sun, a sound like a cow revving backwards, and a taste of lemons, and both implements fell uselessly apart, rebounding to the edges of their owners lots.
Charles, once more glaring in venomous silence, snapped his fingers and put the screwdriver back in his pocket.  Wednesday glowered at him over his sandwich and, with a final bite, stuffed the thing away again.
Honestly, it was practically a ritual by now.  And if there was one thing that both Charles Thurwood and Wednesday Knuckledowns could agree on, it was the importance of ritual.
On the other hand, as illustrated by the existence of outhouses, wars, and most governments, just because something was important didn’t mean you had to like it.

And it was precisely this that made the stranger’s offer so appealing.

He came down the road on a big old truck, half-vehicle and half-menhir, scarred where it wasn’t chiselled and chipped where it wasn’t scarred. It was painted post-apocalyptic rust with a hint of bruised steel, and the most amazing thing about it was that it actually ran fairly quietly, smoothly, and with as fresh a fuel efficiency as any that could be found in something its size.
He wanted gas.  Charles agreed that this was something he could provide.
“Back in a second,” said the stranger, relishing in the luxurious thirty seconds of free time allotted him by one of America’s last few non-self-serve gas stations.  He was a lanky, thoroughly-sun-seared man with a sandy, disarming sort of beard, a bristly smile, and a barking, easy-coming laugh, draped in something that could’ve been an old blanket or a jacket once upon a time.  “Sweet tooth kicked in.”
He made to go towards the general store, and hesitated at Charles’s expression.  A two-ton canary placed besides a cat couldn’t have looked more vicious.
“Problem?”
“No,” said Charles.
The stranger waited.
“No.  Not a problem.  A plague.  A bloated, blubbery plague of one inflicted on me and me alone years and years ago.  Don’t go into that building if you value your sinuses, senses, and soul.”  His face twisted farther, turning into an almost Escherian frieze of disgust.  “No, no, not a plague: a parasite.  A goddamned great leech that pretends to be a man.  Bastard sits up there and sucks away profits pretty as you please, taking money from me as sure as if he were helping himself to my wallet – which I think he’s done too.  Wouldn’t put nothing past him.  This is my land.  I was here first, and he wasn’t, the filthy squatter.  Who took up all that work of getting rid of the coyotes so’s you could leave garbage outside without it being ransacked?  Me.  Who put up signs so people knew there was a business here, not an empty road?  Me.  Who helped make that road?  Me!  Watch yourself around that bloodsucker.”
“I’ll consider myself warned,” said the stranger.
“Watch yourself in there!” yelled Charles at his retreating, vaguely-tartan back.

“A real pisser, that one is,” huffed Wednesday as he pawed through the change being exchanged for something made of 15% real milk chocolate and 85% certified optimism.
“Oh?” said the stranger politely, absently scratching a flea loose from his neck.
“Always bawlin’ and pukin’.  Tellin’ lies about me.  Talkin’ about how he was here first.  Huh, it’s a free country.  I can go where I please, and I was born in this state!  I was raised in this state!  I did more to get rid of the ky-otes than he did – the twit was trying to trap ‘em, everyone knows you’ve got to get out there with a gun and a dog and get your hands dirty – and I bring in half the business of our gas station.  People knows me, people trusts me.  He’s more of a stranger than I am, the moron!”  Wednesday recalled who he was talking to, and checked himself.  “No offence.”
“None taken.”  The stranger peeled free his dubiously brown snack and began to tear at it, swallowing without chewing.  Behind his yellow eyes, little wheels were spinning like mad.  “What’s the problem with you two?”
“He just can’t stand me, and I can say the same of ‘im.  He’s always giving me that stare, like he thinks I’m some sort of drain on ‘im just by existin’.  Hah, he’d get no business in that run-down scrapheap if it weren’t for my customers!”
“Hmm.”  The stranger scratched his (somewhat prominent) nose and thought a bit more.  “Well, sorry to stir up old wounds.  I’ll get myself back to the truck then.”

Charles looked up with an iron-clad scowl as the stranger trudged his way back.  “You again.  Huh.  That’ll be eighty-two forty-six.”
“Thank you,” said the stranger.  He pulled out his wallet, then hesitated as he prepared to hand over the money.  “Oh… before I forget.  The man in there had a message for you.”
“Eh?”  Charles’s gaze tore itself violently from the prospect of cash to fix itself with gimlet intensity on the stranger’s face, looking for traps.  “What?  What’d he say?  It was a lie and a trick, whatever it was.”
“He challenges you,” said the stranger, “to a contest.  Three days and three nights to attract more customers than he does, starting with this night.  And the loser turns over his deeds to the other and gets out of here.”
Charles stood and stared for a long, long moment.  “He’s crazy,” he said in a softly victorious tone.  “Crazy.  The stupid old evil old bastard has finally lost it.”  His feet twitched, then shook, then kicked up their heels in a mad little capering prance of joy.  “Crazy!  Hahaha, he’s lost it if he thinks he can outmatch me!  He’s sunk!  Potted!  Finished and boiled to the bone!”  He stretched bony arms to the sky and made to throttle the sun.  “You’re sunk!  Sunk, you hear me!  HAHAHAHAAHA, aahahahahahaha, HAHAH, aha!”  A coughing fit overtook him, and he grinned his way through it.  “Well you get back there stranger and you tell him I accept his challenge, twice and twice more.  And tell him to get the deeds out of whatever hole he’s been hiding them in, because he’s damned well going to need them soon!”

“A challenge, eh?” said Wednesday.  “What kind?”
“Three days and three nights,” said the stranger.  “Starting tonight.  At the third day’s end, whoever had more customers wins and gets the loser’s property.”
Wednesday’s laugh was a great rolling squishy one, like a barrel of muck being pushed down a broken flight of stairs.  “Oh, so they will, eh?  So they will!  Hah!  Hah!  Hah!”  His flesh wobbled so violently with mirth that the stranger thought for a minute that it would suffocate him.  “Numbskull!  I don’t know what’s crawled into Thurwood’s skull and died, but if he wants to mistake it for his brain, hah, more power to ‘im!  Tell the little weasel I’ll be eating my sandwiches off his pumps come the weekend!”  His mirth only grew and grew, setting the whole floor of the store ashudder.  “A challenge?  For deeds?  HAH.  HAH.  HAH!”

The stranger relayed acceptance to both parties, got in his truck, tossed his wrapper out the window, and drove off with a fare-thee-well that went more unheard than silence itself.  His two new acquaintances were already getting themselves ready – the sunset wasn’t far away.
Charles Thurwood was digging under his creaky, one-man-pallet that lurked in the back room of his gas station like a kicked dog, shoving dust bunnies out of the way with callous force and sifting through cardboard boxes.  His screwdriver was in one hand.
“Aha!” he said, and yanked out a significant one.  It was filled to the brim with odds and ends.  Some metal looped over and over in curious shapes.  A crow’s skeleton made entirely out of copper that had actually once been inside a fully working crow.  An abacus that he used to add up his bills and his taxes and his profits with only one bead left on it.
He selected some six of the smallest and fiddliest of the metal bits, dug out an old ear of corn that he’d been idly planning to make into some sort of semi-nourishing pap sooner or later, hypnotized and sacrificed a rat that had been annoying him for a while with his screwdriver, and was soon discussing slightly unusual terms with a local fertility spirit.
Wednesday Knuckledowns was opening a freezer in his basement – a shadowy, spidery place that smelled of damp and moist – and scanning through its musty, dark contents with a jaded and most professional eye.
“That’ll do,” he said, and yanked out a jar of mustard.  It glistened like liquid bone marrow as he stuck a big, silver knife into it and transferred a dollop to his sandwich, and then two more.
He took a bite, and grinned smoulderingly.  His breath eddied from him in a noxious wave, spreading its dripping, smoky layers all over and around every inch of the house.  It seeped into the wood and cracks in the mortar and it permeated solid metal.  It replaced the water in the pipes and the wires in the circuits.  The air jolted with static electricity, then stabilized itself nervously.
“That’ll do,” repeated Wednesday.  He took another bite, feeling his tongue tingle and blink against his jaw.  “That’ll do.”

Come Thursday morning the competition began in earnest.  The two contestants took their places in their chairs across the road, and gave each other rather nasty grins.
“Blubbery failure,” smiled Charles through every one of his teeth.
“Scrawny toad,” beamed Wednesday.
Soon came the cars.  Lots and lots of cars, rather more than usual.  Both men had redoubled, then retripled their standard and somewhat esoteric methods of customer attraction – sure, some of your customers would probably end up at the other guy’s place, but the more people the lower the odds that you’ll get unlucky and have three cars stop by in a day, all of them ignoring you.
The first car was a station wagon of all things, containing two tormented prisoners and their very small and loud wardens.  The adults’ eyes were harrowed and reddened, like lone survivors of a shipwreck.  Their gazes alit, somewhat numbly, upon the gas station, and as they passed near their backs straightened, their teeth whitened, their hair glossed, and their toenails self-manicured.
“Fill it up?” inquired the male prisoner.  He didn’t know where the impulse was coming from, but he was feeling too good to care about it.
“Yeah,” said the female.  She wasn’t listening that hard, preferring instead to relish the feel of vertebrae unwarped by constant tension.
They took on a full tank of gas and filled up an extra can or two, because it seemed like a good idea at the time.  As the car left the place, Charles gave Wednesday his smuggest smirk.  It would’ve driven a martyr to violence.
Wednesday simply took a bite out of his sandwich and chewed as insolently as possible.
The second car was there before they could blink, pulled down back roads and away from highways by forces beyond the rather puny ken of its young and rather stylish occupants.  They screeched to a dead halt in front of the general store, walked in, and made the mistake of breathing.  Pupils shrank to pinpoints, gazes fixed into the middle distance, and heads began to wobble.  They bought an entire rack of chocolate bars, which probably would’ve seemed like a good idea if they were capable of knowing what good, an idea, or money was at the time.
They drove off.  In half an hour they’d probably be annoyed, but by then they’d be completely unable to remember what about.  And, for some reason, violently allergic to cheese for about four days.
Wednesday waddled out to his chair again and took another bite out of his sandwich.  Charles wished him great pain and suffering.
At day’s end, more than fifty customers had meandered their way out of their way to reach the two little buildings.  Twenty had visited one, twenty the other, and five had checked in at both.
The two men exchanged hateful glances, then went inside.
“Do this for me,” whispered Charles into the ear of his copper crow’s-skeleton.  It twitched and danced in place.
“Do for ‘im,” muttered Wednesday to a jar of pickled eggs as he extracted it from his freezer.  They quivered in their confinement, then spilled out into midair, shedding drops of lethal vinegar as they sped out into the night.

On Friday, the competitors tidied up a few loose ends before resuming their seats. Charles stopped to have a whispered word with his pumps, and Wednesday hummed a jaunty little tune as he walked three times around his building counter-clockwise.  Places resumed, they watched the first car come.
It was a truck, and being so, it contained a trucker.  He was hungry, thirsty, horny, sleepy, mopey, and low on gas, and he could only do anything about three of those problems.
“Fill ‘er up,” he mumbled at Charles, who jammed the nozzle of one of his more-prepared pumps into the vehicle.  It dutifully began to overcharge, and things were going just swimmingly up until the moment when the trucker blinked twice and threw up on Charles’s shoes.
“Bathroom…” muttered the trucker.  “Bathroom….”
Charles opened his mouth to say something that probably wasn’t very nice, only to be cut off quite neatly by Wednesday loudly extended an invitation to his outhouse.  Fleet as he was made by nausea, the trucker didn’t quite make it, and left two more puddles on Charles’s asphalt before reaching the sanctuary of Wednesday’s outhouse, where he felt much, much better.  In fact, he felt a little hungry – VERY hungry – and went inside, where he bought fourteen bags of chips without thinking.  Wednesday beamed benevolently as he tore open the sour-cream-and-onion, then blinked in confusion as the trucker demanded his money back for a bag stuffed with nothing but dried and withered-smelling feathers.
The trucker walked back to the gas station, felt another wave of indigestion approaching, and left so fast that he quite forgot to pay.
Wednesday and Charles exchanged another mutual glare, fingers tightening on screwdrivers, gums peeling back to reveal teeth like rotten stumps.
“Pestilence,” said Charles, murder on his mind and regretfully so far from his options.
“Stinkin’ rat,” said Wednesday, his fists curling into shapes resembling skinned hedgehogs.
At day’s end, they had each had precisely one customer.  Every stop at the gas station ended before it began due to violent disruption of some part of someone’s digestive system, and nothing at the general store could leave the shelves without being turned into either ashes, old feathers, or dust.  The one person able to withstand both had weighed approximately five hundred pounds, and may have simply been too large for any of the various hexes and charms to permeate past his fat layer.
“Jinxing, minxing backstabbing cheater!” snarled Charles that evening as he pried out the last of the eggs from underneath his floorboards. They’d set up a nest and laid eggs of their own, which he set aflame with his spittle.  He pulled out his abacus and began to do things with it that involved numbers that were also ghosts.
“Treacherous little girl,” murmured Wednesday darkly, finding the crow-thing roosting in his attic.  It hissed at him and flapped, and he stuck out his tongue at it, sending its head spinning from its shoulders.  He crushed its remnants to powder in his hands, then snorted them up his nose.  Visions of a cardboard box under a bed slipped into his mind, a mattress above that sagged with skeletal weight every night.  He chuckled nastily, then doodled something disgusting on its underside in pickle juice.

Neither man slept well that night – Charles couldn’t get comfortable, and Wednesday was haunted by ominous, vague dreams.  Still, their hatred kept them sharp on Saturday morning, the last of the days, sharp enough to go and see about their final preparations.  Charles spoke at length to his screwdriver; Wednesday dug out an ancient, cloying bottle of sickly homebrewed wine and spilled it on his doorstep.
Down the road the cars came.  A big old pickup truck to Charles’s, a van stuffed with loud, young people with empty heads and swollen appetites to Wednesday’s.
The old man that spoke to Charles was tough, level-headed, and shrewd.  And despite all that, he was completely unable to see Charles’s screwdriver rise up from the dust below his car and shove itself to the hilt in his truck’s gas tank.  Nor did the steadily-rocketing price showing itself atop the gas pump arouse his suspicions.
The moment that the six semi-attractive, twenty-something, highly-obnoxious people stepped into Wednesday’s lair, they were snared.  The time had come, the larger and more primitive sections of their brains said, to party.
So they did.  They snatched up whole shelves of goods, they danced in the aisles, they played the rumba with their chests and pots and pans, they turned hardware tools into instruments of song and they drank whatever drink was to hand.  Wednesday demanded recompensation in a friendly sort of way, and got it without so much as a moment’s fuss because hey, it was a party, it was THE party, and it was as free of care as a thing could be.  By the time they left, not a single dollar was left in a wallet.
Back at the pumps, Charles’s tank had run dry.  The old man was still oblivious in a friendly sort of way to exactly how much money he was about to be charged.
“Visa okay?” he said nonchalantly.
Charles opened his mouth and thanked him, then told him exactly what he thought about his mother.
The old man stared.  “What was that?”
Charles apologized by speculating on his daughter’s profession.
The old man punched him flat, then got in his truck and drove off.
Meanwhile, Wednesday opened his register to count up his profits, and discovered that every bill in it was now for zero dollars.  Issued in the year nineteen-nothing, by the United States of Nowhere.  He said a word that made his wallpaper fuse itself sideways.

And so the day went.  Charles sold tank after tank of gas, and managed each time to say something that ended in a fresh bruise for himself and a retreating customer.  He tried to do nothing but smile and nod, and found himself making lewd gestures.
Wednesday hosted at least twenty parties, and received some hundred more zero-dollar-bills.  He attempted to store the money under the counter, and found that it would simply vanish.

As evening came, the two men stomped out to the middle of the road.
“You’re a cheater and a bastard and you’ve sucked my livelihood dry,” said Charles.  “How’m I supposed to make money when I can’t even finish a sentence without an insult, you festering maggot?”
Wednesday scowled, shuffling the blubber around his face.  “I could and can say the same thin’ to you, you little schemer.  How’m I supposed to make money when I can’t make money?!  You’ve RUINED me!”
“But you ruined me first, and I was here first, slimeball!”
“I was born here before you were!”
“Get off my land, lying sack of whore’s-get!” hissed Charles.  His teeth were bared, every single one showing in an expression that was to a smile what ulcers are to stomach linings.
“Over my dead body!” rumbled Wednesday.  He seemed to expand somehow; looming like a dung-beetle’s nest grown all out of proportion.
“Fine, shitheel!” said Charles, snapped his fingers and raising his screwdriver high.  It glistened with a sickly rainbow of oil.
“GOOD!” roared Wednesday, and they rushed at each other.
It was not a very good fight – the two men were both too out of shape for it – nor was it a particularly clean one – they hated each other too much for that – but it was certainly a memorable one.  Alas, by its end, there was no one around to remember it.

Some time later, the stranger came up the road again, much the same but for a few more scrapes and knocks.  The same could be said of his truck.
He looked at the store, and he looked at the gas station.  Both of them were missing down to the foundations, and the ground was scorched.  There was a large, blackened spot in the middle of the road that smelled of gasoline and sauerkraut.
“You know,” he said to nobody in particular, “you could’ve just settled it fair and square.”
There was no answer.  Some ends are harsh enough that even ghosts don’t want anything to do with them.
He barked that quick laugh of his again, and scratched away a few loose fleas from his neck.  “Have it your way.  You know, you boys had some real nice land of mine here.  It’s too bad you don’t want it anymore.”
He ambled over to his truck and left his clothes in it, then trotted away to find some lunch, tail wagging, mouth grinning, tongue dangling.

It’s not so hard to get rid of coyotes.  But if you don’t keep up on them, they’ll slink back in easy as you please.

“A Gentleman’s Bet,” copyright 2011, Jamie Proctor

“You’re crazy, Erik.”
Erik looked at the author of this statement – George, his good, old friend of too many decades to be kind towards him – with an expression of disdain for his pedestrian views.  “’Course.”
“No, no, more than usual I mean.  You’re not just a loony, you’re not even using common sense anymore.”
Erik busied himself with buckling and rebuckling the elaborately sealed and insulated snowsuit he was wearing and checking all of its some hundred pockets with speed approaching a cobra’s.  A small, well-sealed cylinder was tucked into the deepest of them – which, to all appearances, it was much too large to fit into.  “Sure I am.”
“No you’re not.”
“Am so.”
“Cut it out.  You’re heading for a summit climb on the most dangerous peak on the planet, you’re doing it solo, you’re doing it without any ropes or anything, and you’re doing it because you’re mentally ill and I should’ve taken the advice of all your old girlfriends and locked you in an asylum and thrown away the key.”
“You never listened to them before.”
“Only because they were barmier than you were,” George admitted.  “Look, just give it up, eh?  Take a guide.  Or something.”
“There are no guides – no one’s been up there before and come down alive but me, remember?”
“Half-way.  At best!”
“Trifles.  And the ropes and pulleys and all that jazz would just slow me down.  The only time I’ve ever used them was when I climbed Olympus, remember?  Fierce winds up there.  This is old hat.”
“That was because you bet Zeus that he couldn’t blow you off partway up.”
“See?  Nothing to it.”
“Erik, you lost the bet.”
“Only on a technicality.  I still made the summit.  Eventually.”
George took a deep breath – as deep as possible for a very large and annoyed Newfoundlander.  Erik had never been a cat person, to his tutor’s irritation.  “No appreciation for the classic familiar,” she said.  Well fie on her too, the bitter ol’ hedge-witch.  There’s a reason theyre called man’s best friend. 
“The point I’m trying to make,” said George, “is that at least every other time you knew what you were getting into.  You’ve climbed a lot of places, you’ve done it in a lot of ways no one’d ever thought possible –”
“Please, I’m blushing.”
“Shut up.  But you’ve never climbed something like this before.”
“Yes I have.  Twice.”
“Half-way.  Just swallow your pride and use some assets beyond those antiques.  Sentimental value or no, you’re going to need a lot more than your basic kit.”
“Swallow my pride?  I’d choke in a flash.  And besides,” – and here Erik grinned very alarmingly – “these aren’t antiques.  Antiques don’t do anything.”  He stamped his boots three times and headed for the tentflap.
“Damned psychotic,” said George, tail wagging a monomolecular amount entirely against his will.  “I’ll keep your dinner ready.”
“Doubting, dreary, dour Thomas,” said Erik with a happy wave, and he was off into the teeth of a blizzard that could eat cities. 
It was the middle of July, comfortably in the midst of Antarctica’s sunless, cheerless winter.  The only living things for miles and miles were him, George, and the unidentified little bird that was probably a petrel that had just shat on him.  The temperature was cold enough to crack rocks, the wind was low, bitter, and alone, and all these things meant it was time for Erik to go and try to climb the Missing Mountain, which wasn’t.

It was a very strange mountain, and this was by the standards of Erik, who had climbed the slopes of Atlantis, Mount Olympus, the ruined stub of the Tower of Babel, Yggdrasil, and Mt Fuji (three times in one day, just to see what would happen – he’d still rather not talk about it). 
Most of the year, it fulfilled its name.  But on a few special weeks, right in the belly of Antarctica’s winter, it rose out and up out of time and mind and the ice itself, slinking back into place like a cat that had just fallen over and was trying to pretend that reality didn’t work like that.   There were a few other mountains that normally filled the small depression it sat in, but they always seemed to slide away just before it could pop up, never when you were paying attention. 
There it was.  It was a bunch of thousands of feet tall, a couple million tons or something, and made of rock that wasn’t quite like any other on the planet.  Erik had grudgingly chipped off a small piece for George to take a look at during his previous ascent and had been forced to restrain it at least eight times before it would consent to analysis.  The comparative sample of limestone he’d placed next to it had gone missing after he took a break for coffee, and he had a sneaking suspicion it had been eaten.  In any case, the whole experiment had been botched after he realized that every note he attempted to make on the rock was forestalled by his pencil breaking, his pen running dry, his computer freezing, or a violent sneezing fit. 
None of that was important anyways.  Erik wasn’t there to study the thing, he was there to climb it.  Third time’s the charm, after all.  He braced himself, put his best foot forwards on the slope (his left), fought off a brief wave of transdimensional disruption that threatened to tear him into four separate schizophrenics, gave the finger to the still-circling petrel, and up he went. 

The first few hundred feet were easy, a veritable vertical stroll in the park.  He ambled freely through small dips and valleys, each filled with conical, unpleasant things that were almost trees but not really, and just barely not ice.  Eyes stared out at him from their insides now and again, but he ignored them.  Whatever it was had been frozen dead for a few million years at minimum, and if it hadn’t bothered to move yet he doubted it would now.  He wasn’t that tasty-looking. 
Ah, and the easy trek was over, up came the cliff face, sheer and grim.  The wind played strange tunes upon its peculiarly fluted hollows, making sounds somewhere between an angry cassowary, a mating antenna, and a frightened mist.  For three heart-stopping seconds Erik nearly paid attention to it, and the air looked like lime and tasted like purple.  It was only with the greatest of efforts and the most vividly pornographic of his memories that he managed to distract himself long enough to slip in a pair of beeswax ear plugs, dropping the cliff’s whispering down to a bare murmur in the back of his head that registered only as an abstract announcement of unwelcomeness. 
“Charming,” he grumbled to himself.  He set himself to attaching his crampons – huge, ugly things cobbled out of blackened metal he’d scavenged, shattered, from an old, old gate in a deep, deep cave somewhere or other.  They’d broken several of George’s diamond sampling drills, so he figured they were pretty solid. 
Erik’s pitons, now, they were a little less obscure in origin to him.  Just little pieces of ice from Niflheim, sheathed lightly in very cold iron and stashed in a favourite thermos of his.  He never touched them without at least two layers of comfortably thick gloves – just one left him slightly chilly, and bare-handed he could lose fingers.  
He slid one of them against the angrily mumbling stone and selected his hammer.  It was from some hardware store and had been selected both for its relative cheapness and its attractive red handle.  He’d had to replace the stainless steel hammerhead with an extremely old and durable rock made by some towering Paleolithic genius or another, of course, but it was still the same hammer in principle. 
Whack, whack.  Check the strength.  Oh good, it’s safe.  Up we go, careful on the footing.  Whack, whack.  Theeeereeee we are.  Whack, whack.  Up and up and up and up we go.  Step lively now – those ice splinters melt about five minutes after exposure to air without leaving so much as a nick on the stone (Erik had been an early proponent of clean climbing).  Yes, they reappear inside the thermos, but do you want to be standing on one when it goes?
Up and still up.  Those peculiar cones looked awfully small from all the way up here, and the mountain above still seemed pretty big.  The wall sloped into a pettily vicious little overhang for some distance, giving Erik a wonderful five minutes spent hanging by his fingers and toes and distracting himself by counting to prime numbers whenever he started thinking about exactly what he was doing. 
At last he breached the cliff face and came face to face with greener pastures.  He wasn’t quite sure what had coloured the rock here that way, but it had left it startling translucent: he could see right inside the mountain’s skin for scores of feet before opacity set in.  The complete skeleton of something five times the size of an elephant and eighty times as malevolent leered at him with toothy suggestiveness, giving him stark flashbacks to his third honeymoon.  Shuddering, he pressed on, eyes passing over bones upon bones, jumbled and whole, some that schoolchildren could name like clockwork and some that would’ve baffled a paleontologist of forty years or more.  Occasionally, one breached the sanctity of its jade-tinted cell by some degree or another, and at least four times he was strangely pleased to find himself using some exposed leg or another as a climbing grip.  The last of these was an enormous claw, which attempted to grab him and succeeded in claiming a chunk of his pants. 
“Sloppy,” he scolded himself, inches away from the waving, quartz-tipped claws.  “Sloppy.”  Strange that it hadn’t happened on either of his prior attempts.  Maybe it had been asleep. 

He left the fossils behind in body and mind – with the exception of his chilly right leg – and pressed upwards.  Another pause in the cliffs came, this time a veritable plateau, a strange little glacial valley cloven into the mountainside. 
Erik looked to his left.  Sheer, sheer, sheerest wall.  He looked to his right.  A cliff that rivaled glass in pure slickness.  He looked forwards.  A strange and mysterious city the likes of which no man had seen and lived.  Except him, so far. 
Forwards, of course.  It looked interesting.  Especially since this was where all his memories of previous attempts faded out and vanished up until the hospital bed. 
The first thing Erik noticed was that the shadows were all wrong.  As soon as his foot passed the gigantic, spiked column that marked the city’s borders, every sense of proportion that involved darkness and light seemed to be off by an amount just fractionally tinier than measurable.  To compound this, all of it seemed to be made out of the oddly shaped whisperstone from the mountain’s base.  How they’d lugged it all the way up here was something he wasn’t sure he could guess.  And to top it all off, he kept moving in circles and finding himself back at where he’d just been ten minutes ago.  Including when he sat down to take a break. 
Erik’s compass was old and beaten and consisted of a crude tin cup that a chip of rock was dropped into.  It worked best filled with water, but ice worked in a pinch.  A quick shake, rattle and roll told him that north was that way, up was that other way, his house was over there, George was still in his tent, the next time he would taste waffles was either in two weeks or never depending on whether or not he lived that long, and that to get himself out of the mess he was in would require shimmying up one of the buildings and jumping off. 
He frowned at the last instruction, but accepted it.  If his compass wanted him dead, it’d had plenty of other opportunities to kill him with less fuss and drama.  That didn’t comfort him as he hugged close to the leaning, geometrically dubious frame of a hundred-foot, three-story tower not built by human hands, but it provided the illusion of hope, which was nearly as good.  He closed his eyes, counted to seven, jumped in a somersault, and landed knee-deep in a snowdrift overlooking the softly-glistening city from a far-above ledge. 
“Hah!” he proclaimed triumphantly, then fell into a pit. 

The pit wasn’t nearly as deep a drop as the tower-dive had promised to be, but it made up for it in surprise value.  Erik brushed himself off with a few brisk and businesslike curses, gathered his wits, set on his way, and immediately fell into the much deeper and even more surprising shaft one footstep away, which had been beautifully covered with an inch-thick snow lattice.  Frantic and instinctive use of his ice axe – a cobbled-together thing made from mammoth ivory and ash – left him dangling above a drop that was anywhere from two hundred to infinity in depth.  Somewhere far beneath his gently-waving boots, something that he could only hope was merely an unspeakable, sightless horror gurgled, producing a lovely and obscene echo that reminded him of opera. 
Climbing out was the work of five minutes: two to clamber and three to convince his body to move instead of put down terror-induced roots.  His feet – ever-treacherous bastards – had led the revolt.  From there a moment’s illumination showed his options: climb back up to his original entrance point, which appear to be an entirely blank, featureless ceiling with no exit whatsoever, or take an ominous and stalactite-mawed tunnel.  Reassuring himself that he was only playing along and that in spirit he was rebelling against this, Erik took the tunnel. 
It went up, reassuringly.  Well, and a little bit down.  Very little.  Half-masked things glowed just past the edges of the walls in pockets chipped in the rock by strange drills and stranger claws.  There were hieroglyphs that had ceased to be petroglyphs and now hung about an eighth of an inch off the stone they were carved into, ceremoniously describing the end times or idly discussing the sexual prolectivities of the foreman, depending on their status as holy text or graffiti, which Erik was unable to determine.  The one with the fish eating a second fish that was eating the first fish that was eating a third, completely different fish was a real eyeball-twister though. 
At some point or another the walls were switched from bare rock to fitted stone.  To be more specific, poorly-fitted stone.  Not a single slab lay square with any other, producing an odd, jointed sort of tunnel like a suit of knight’s armour made by a blacksmith with rheumatism, rickets, and a habit of nervous twitching under pressure.  To make matters odder faint wind came through the cracks, as if they weren’t overlaid on rock but empty space. 
Erik thought about this, then about the pit that had been opened under his feet.  He wondered if, given that the mountain was somewhere else than Antarctica for four-fifths of the year, it was technically possible that it was not even sitting on Antarctica right now and was just pretending to.  Then he wondered what it was that was sitting on.  Then he began loudly singing old Disney songs to force his brain to shut the hell up. 
The aimless, empty little frilly tunes squeezed out through the cracks above, below, and beyond, echoing out for possibly forever.  The sound that leaked back at him from all sides was technically music in the same way that a Deinonychus was technically a bird, and he stopped singing. 
The sound wouldn’t go away.  His head tingled, and possibly wasn’t there. 
Too long later, there were footsteps behind him.  Very small ones, quick and fast and light, narrow and too thin to be his, or to anyone with proper feet. 
Oh damnit. 
He broke into a run, a sliding dive.  The slabs whistled and groaned under his clutching toes as he hurried, cursing him out and drawing a bright-burning beacon to his location.  An intersection-that-wasn’t appeared (one path crumbled and crushed, the other with no floor and no ceiling) and he cursed, for the eightieth thousand time in his life, his species’ lack of wings. 
His pursuer called out something in a rattling voice, a complicated, wobbling cry rising from what sounded like a musical instrument stabbed through a lump of meat. 
He ran faster.  The footsteps neared with almost casual inevitability.  Crying through all of his eyes, he dropped to fours and began to gallop, tearing the sensitive skin on his hands away and making him hiss. 
Slap-slap-trip-trap-slap-smack-footsteps.  He dropped to all sixes and began to slide on his belly, grasping all sides of the corridor at once and bobsledding his way down, gills flaring at the harsh intake of the air. 
The footsteps dropped away, and for one brief, pure moment he knew exultation before he ran nosefirst into a stone in the corridor that was precisely one inch above its fellows, flipping him halfway through a somersault, most of the way into a cartwheel, and one hundred percent into the floor.  From under the tangled nest of his limbs he saw his pursuer overtake him – a hideous, bipedal thing, coated in layers and layers of screamingly wrong colours – and then he was Erik again, in a very small cave, facing the sunlight with a black tunnel behind him.  He looked over his shoulder and saw a single, upraised stone with a smear of goo on it that wasn’t a colour he could recognize in this particular spectrum. 
“Well,” he said to himself.  “It’s a good thing I’m a fast runner.”  His legs hurt, and he didn’t want to guess at what would’ve happened if he’d managed to make it all the way out of the halls ahead of his body.  Maybe he would’ve never stopped running.  Or maybe he would’ve just woken up in a hospital bed with George yelling at him again and no clue what had happened.  That might’ve been more irritating. 
A cautious poking of Erik’s head outwards from the cave revealed two rather surprising facts: first, he was nearly at the top of the peak; second, there was a very astonished face inside the snow storm watching him.  Before he could even get as far as species, never mind details, it had vanished. 
“Screw you,” said Erik, on general principle.  It made him feel better. 

The final climb was interesting.  There was no rock, only ice.  Really good ice too, the kind that even his Niflheim pitons squeaked against and his crampons moaned on.  His ice axe screeched in protest with each hold it cut, his gloves audibly sizzled as they freeze-dried themselves against their chiseled grips, and only his hammer remained stolidly uncomplaining as it bonked in piton after piton.  It had been made by someone who figured that rocks lasted forever in the brief moments before he had realized what his own project’s completion implied, and that brief moment, especially as rare as it was nowadays, held a lot of power.  Nobody had ever really believed in permanency that purely since average brain size had topped 600 cubic centimeters.  It would probably outlast Mount Rushmore, and possibly even the contents of Erik’s fridge, assuming that the bindings placed on its locks stayed potent enough to keep it shut and the mountain he’d placed above it wasn’t removed unexpectedly. 
Erik was keeping such a careful eye on his equipment because it was being continually coated with sleet that stuck like cathair, which he had to remove while clinging to the rock with all available limbs in a wind that wanted to pluck him like a chicken.
“I can do this,” he pronounced, and immediately had the equivalent of at least four slushballs rammed down his throat.  I can do this, he repeated more internally.  I scaled Mount Olympus with Zeus chucking every wind he could dig out of the bottom of his sock drawer at me, even if he was drunk enough to aim left half the time. 
Of course, I did have ropes. 
Goddamnit George, this is exactly why it’s hard for us to be friends. 
Whack, whack, smack, crack, whoops there goes a handhold, whoops a foothold, there’s the other, dangle by your left hand for a minute or two and then get yourself sorted out, spit in the eye of the blizzard (hah, didn’t expect that – he flinched, cyclopean bastard) and haul yourself up like your tail’s on fire.  Then Erik’s hands felt solid rock and the wail of the snowstorm dropped away behind him, defeated, furious, and despairing. 
He looked up.  There it was, a bodylength away and maybe ten feet around.  A tiny, narrow peak, a perfect tapering point of an almost perfectly conical profile.  He vaguely remembered why he’d been disappointed to learn that the Missing Mountain was already named in some long-dead book or another: he’d wanted to call it the Murderhorn. 
Erik got to his feet.  Then hobbled one step, and another step.  He pulled loose a small and well-protected cylinder from the depths of his jacket’s deepest pocket (wincing against frostbite), which was still much too large to fit in there.  It twisted open under his hands, into an elegant, serviceable flag, firm of pole, pointed-tipped, topped with the national banner of someplace no one knew about anymore.  It was so perfectly balanced that it could’ve been used to win an Olympic javelin throw, and had on four separate occasions over the past nine hundred years.
He raised his arm in anticipation, allowing – to his pride – only the faintest suggestion of a wobble. 
A small, vaguely familiar shape bobbed out of the wind and settled neatly on the peak ten feet ahead of him.  It was probably some sort of petrel. 
There was a very long moment.  It stared innocently at Erik. 

Despite his best effort, he was no javelin thrower, and missed by about a meter. 

“Alpinism” copyright 2011, Jamie Proctor.