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Emma was six years old when she started noticing something was wrong with her father.  Before that (as was no fault of her own), she was too young, too prone to thinking of the universe as binary: Emma and those other things that should give Emma ice cream.  Now she saw the subtle distinctions.  For instance, Mom was a girl, and she was at work all night.  Dad was a boy, and he worked all day, and came home with lines on his face and bags under his eyes and a stare that wasn’t there at all.  He looked like one of the zombies that cousin Connor spent all his time shooting.  Emma had tried it once, but the controller was too big for her hands.
“Do you want ice cream?” asked Emma, sensitive to the complex needs of the working man.
“No thanks, flower,” Dad said without looking at her.  “Just some rest.”  He went straight through the kitchen (snagging a bottle of That Damned Stuff from the fridge), from there to the coach, and turned on the TV.
Emma was a little glad.  Who knew how much ice cream Dad could eat if he put his mind to it?  Maybe he’d start on it instead of That Damned Stuff and she’d never get any of it again unless she snuck it when he was at work.  But then maybe he’d shout at her.  He’d never done it before, but he and Mom had started shouting the one time he’d come home from work and they’d been completely out of That Damned Stuff.
Just like they were out of ice cream right now.  The freezer was empty.
Emma flounced into the living room (she’d learned that from her grandmother) and glared at the back of Dad’s head.  “Daaaaad,” she intoned in her most armour-piercing tones, “we’re out of –” and the sentence ended there because she’d just noticed something rather important.
Dad heaved himself over on the coach, displacing The Dog, which was their dog.  He looked like one of the pictures of beached whales their teacher had shown them in Science, but smaller and even sadder.  “What is it, kitty?”
Emma tried to stop staring and failed.  “Never mind.”
Dad was too tired to notice, and flipped himself back over without so much as another word.  It brought the big round hole in the back of his head back into clear view.  Emma was quite puzzled; she thought the inside of people’s heads was supposed to be read and sticky.  But there was nothing inside Dad’s head at all but black emptiness.

“There’s a hole in Dad’s head,” Emma told Mom as she tucked her into bed an hour later, very formal in her work suit.  Dad called her the Queen of the Night Shift.  Mom called him The Hippy That Went To Law School.  Emma thought Mom’s names for things were better than Dad’s.
Mom sighed.  “More like his foot, dear.  Good night, and sleep loose.”  Mom always said that.  She said that if children didn’t sleep loose, they grew up all cramped and gnomey, and Emma’d look like Grandma by the time she was twelve.  Emma always slept as loose as she could, sometimes to the breaking point.

The next morning, she was eating breakfast (bland, tepid, healthy cereal) when Dad came down the stairs.  His face was thinner than the milk he poured into his coffee.
“Dad?”
“Mmm?”
“Why do you have a hole in the back of your head?”
He laughed.  “Now where did that come from?”
“Why?”
Dad turned around and rubbed his skull.  “See?  Nothing there.  You worry too much, kitty.  What made you think that?”
“TV,” said Emma automatically.  She’d discovered through careful trial and error that blaming things on television worked maybe half the time.
Dad shook his head.  “Lord knows what you’re watching all day.  Read a book or go outside or something, petal.  And you should be off to school now.  Are you packed?”
“Yes.”  Every day he asked that, every morning she answered that, every time it turned out she’d forgotten something new.  Her hat, her water bottle, the horrible old metal lunchbox that everyone at school made fun of her for owning (it had been grandpa’s, then Dad’s, then hers).  This time, it was her water bottle.
School was… school.  Emma did the things she liked (math, mostly) and the things she didn’t like (spelling, mostly), and she came home before Mom woke up, as usual.  She made herself a bad peanut butter sandwich and ate it.
Dad came home, heralded as usual by the haphazard, lazy woofs of The Dog.  As he bent over to pull off his shoes, Emma saw the hole in his head again.
“Dad?”
He sighed as he pulled himself upright.  Emma could tell it wasn’t aimed at her specifically, just everything around him.  “Yes?”
Emma was suddenly sure that asking the question again wouldn’t help.  “Never mind.”
“Right.”  He went and got another bottle of That Damned Stuff.
Emma stayed up later than usual that night, and not just because she was finding it very hard to sleep loose.  She was planning.

The next morning she packed for school extra-carefully: sandwich, water bottle, books, notebook, pencils, and jacket.  She didn’t forget one thing, and was out the bus stop almost before Dad was done his coffee, something that surprised him even through the sleepy face he always wore right up until the moment he left.
She was back inside two minutes later.
“What is it this time, pumpkin?”
“I forgot my hat,” she said.
“It’s in the closet.”
“I can’t fiiiind it,” she said.  “And it’s raaaaaining ouuuttt…”
Dad sighed and got up to look for it.  While he was doing that, Emma snuck his car keys back into his coat pocket.  Then she took her hat (in plain sight, naturally), said her goodbyes, walked out the door, and got inside her dad’s car, where she locked the doors again and hid in the back under the old blanket that they used whenever The Dog had to come with them on a trip.  It was a good thick blanket, and Emma was small and thin, but still the big reason Dad didn’t see her was that he never bothered to look, which made her feel a little disappointed inside.
Emma had been to Dad’s Work once before last year, for some reason or another that hadn’t mattered at the time.  She’d forgotten everything, and especially how long the drive was.  At least four times she had to sneeze so hard that her face nearly fell of with its quivering, but she held it in and in all the way to the parking lot, where Dad locked the car and left her.
Emma unlocked it and stepped out after him, then stopped to look up and up and up at the building that was Dad’s Work.  It ran all the way up to the tops of the sky where the clouds lived, covered in flat squares of glass that gleamed dully against the grey horizon.  It wasn’t quite pretty.  But it also wasn’t what was drawing her attention.  That was the dragon.
It blended in quite nicely, but it wasn’t that hard to see – like those disappointing chameleons she’d seen at the Zoo on her birthday.  It lay flat against the front of the building, arching up and around its sides, sinuous as a serpent and a hundred hundred times bigger from tip to tip.  Pane for pane its scales were the same as the glass it was hugging, from its pale eyes to its see-through wings.
It was watching her.
“Hello,” said Emma.
The dragon made no comment.
“Don’t be rude,” said Emma.
“It is rude,” said the dragon, “not to speak when spoken to.  On the other hand, it is rude to disobey your parents.  Should you not be at school?”
“It’s boring.  Aren’t dragons supposed to have lots of treasure?”
“I do.”
“Well, where is it?”
“I am brooding on it.”
Emma thought for a moment.
“Sleeping.”
“I know that.  Where is it?”
“I just told you.”
“Treasure is money and stuff.  That’s a building.”
“Times change,” said the dragon.  “Why are you here?”  Its expression didn’t change at all, no matter what it was saying.
“School is boring,” repeated Emma.  She felt something in her stomach move, and decided to change topics. “And Dad has a hole in his head.  Do you know why?”
“Dad,” said the dragon, flatly.  “Dad… many of my employees are parents.  Many of those have girls.  A few have girls your age.  One or two with your hair colour.  None with that coat.  Yes, I know your father. I do indeed.  And I do know the answer to your question.”
“What is it?”
“A secret.  Part of my treasure.  You may not have it.”
“But it’s okay to look at it, right?”
“You may not.”
“But I’m looking at your treasure right now.”
The dragon considered this.  “All right,” it said at last.  “You may enter.  But you may take nothing.”
“Thank you very much,” said Emma as politely as she could.  The handles on the big doors at the base of the building groaned as she heaved their ponderous weight open, tugging with her whole body.  She squeezed through the crack as quickly as she could; it was impossible to feel comfy with those eyes on you.
Inside the building was a man behind a desk.  He stared straight forwards at her as she padded towards him, lunchbox in hand backpack on back; alert, businesslike, and really bored.  Emma had felt that way enough to recognize it, even in grownups.
“I’m looking for Dad,” she told him.
He stared over her head at the door.
“Try the fifth floor,” whispered a voice from above.  The dragon’s head was hovering near the ceiling, its long, thin neck stretching all the way through the doors, which didn’t seem to have opened.
“They cannot see you.  They would make you leave, and that would be counter to our agreement.”  The dragon eased its way back outside, passing through the glass without a ripple or bend.
Emma walked back to the doors and poked them.  She shrugged, which didn’t make her feel better.  The prospect of an elevator ride, however, did.  The doors of the cage slid soundlessly open, and the rows and rows of polished buttons were warm and dimly-lit under her fingers as she hunted for “five.”
“Have some music,” said the dragon from the polished steel walls of the elevator.  Music happened.  It was fuzzy and airy, more like sounds strung together by fairies than the stuff Mom and Dad listened to, and Emma didn’t want to have it.
“Are there lots of dragons left?” she asked, as politely as she could.
“No.  Knights killed most of us.”
“Mom has music that a knight wrote,” said Emma proudly.  “He sang it too.”
“Properly prepared knights.  Knighted by royalty, yes, but with ancient weapons and the aid of great magicians.  None of those things live today.”
The music wasn’t going away, no matter how much Emma ignored it.  “Turn it off,” she said.  The dragon turned it off and its face vanished from the walls.  Still, she couldn’t quite relax until the floor bell dinged and she was outside the elevator again.  The walls kept trying to stare at her.
The floor Dad worked on was grey. Grey carpets, grey ceilings, grey walls, and even the strange fuzzy boxes that the workers were put in were grey.  The glass windows that took up the building’s outer walls looked out on the grey sky.  Emma shivered.
“The fourth cubicle on your right,” the dragon whispered to her.  It was hovering outside again, peering in at her.  Its eyes felt like caterpillars on her skin.
“What’s a cubicle?”
“The boxes my employees work in.”
Emma didn’t like the idea of Dad being in a box.  Things that she had outgrown got put in boxes, and she never saw them again.  She didn’t think she’d outgrown Dad.  He was still a lot bigger than she was.
She looked into the bo – the cubicles as she passed them.  The first one had a thin young man who kept running his hands through his hair.  The second had a woman older than Mom, who was typing faster than anything.  The third was a fat man with a grey beard who was staring at his computer screen and not blinking.  Each and every one of them had a neat black hole in the back of their heads.
The fourth one was Dad.  He was reading something on his screen and looking at papers, first one, then the other, then the other, then back again, just like the metronome they had on their piano that Mom never played.
“Hi Dad,” said Emma.  He didn’t look at her.
“Your father is busy,” said the dragon.  “He works for money, to feed you.  You should leave him alone.”
“I don’t see a hole in his head,” said Emma.
“It is a sort of medical procedure.  Nothing to worry about.  It keeps them working properly.”
“Okay,” said Emma.  “Sure.”
“Are you ready to leave now?  Your father must not be interrupted.  He is doing important work here.  You are a distraction.  Go back to school, where you belong.”
Emma looked at her shoes.  “Okay.”  She kept looking at them all the way back to the elevator, feeling the dragon’s eyes on her back.  Only when she stepped inside the cage again did they turn away, and that moment was when she hopped back outside again, letting the doors shut behind her.
“Liar, liar, liar, liar,” she hum-whispered under her breath as she ran back towards Dad’s bo – cubi – box.  “Pants on fire, fire, fire, fire.”  But dragons didn’t have pants, so she’d have to see if it was lying another way.
Dad hadn’t moved, sitting in his box.  But he wasn’t looking at his papers anymore.  He was sitting straight up in his chair, looking ahead without looking.  A thin, perfectly flat glass claw, hanging from the ceiling, was stirring at the back of his head, as carefully as Mom made spaghetti.  Cool, breathy strands of something that wasn’t quite silver were unravelling and fraying loose, dropping into the glass and disappearing.
Emma had two things, one of which she was proud of and one of which she was embarrassed.  First, she could scream louder than any other girl in her class, and all the boys, and Mrs. Campbell too, unless she was in a really bad mood.  Second, she was still the only girl in the class with a metal lunchbox.
She swung both of those things at the same time, and aimed well.  The claw jumped like a cat with The Dog after it, and in the middle of its retreat it was struck squarely and fairly amidships by the lunchbox.  There was a crash and a clatter, and something cold and sharp slid by Emma’s face with a hiss.
Dad blinked a bit and looked down at her.  Strands of the silvery stuff were still wavering from the hole in the back of his head.  “Hello there kitty,” he said feebly.  There were bags under his eyes, she saw.  “Did you break something?”
“I saw it on TV,” said Emma.  She tugged hard on his arm.  “Come on.  Cooome oooonnn.  We’ve gotta go.”
“Don’t try that sort of thing at home,” said Dad.  He followed her guiding hand, even more slowly than he usually did.  “Feels like I just got here.  How was school?”
“Good,” lied Emma, trying to tow him faster.  “Now c’mon.”
She’d just mashed the elevator button with her palm when the dragon flowed through the building wall, glass slipping away from its sides like oil from water in that silly old knick-knack of Dad’s he kept on his desk at home.  There was a toy boat floating in it, Emma recalled faintly.  It was strange, the things you thought about when a dragon was trying to eat you.  It was hissing, like a garden hose left unattended.
“Stairs,” she squeaked, and yanked the door open.  The dragon’s head jammed in the doorframe centimetres (maybe it was metres, she couldn’t remember) behind Dad’s shoes; big, silvery mirror-teeth gnashing quietly on nothing.
“The exercise is good for you,” said Dad.  The silvery stuff had sucked back inside, Emma saw, and he seemed a little quicker on his toes.  “I should take the stairs more often.  You’ve got to keep fit, especially at my age, petal.”
“Okay,” said Emma.  There were too many steps, and they were all too big.  Buildings shouldn’t be built for people so big.
“You have broken our agreement,” said the dragon in her ear.  She jumped, but saw no sign of it.
“Did not,” she said.
“You have taken my employee with you.”
“That’s Dad, and he’s mine.”
“He was mine first and is still.  You are remarkably inconvenient. All I ask for is a few moments of his time.  Why, you steal more of it each day than I do all year.”
“You’re a liar,” said Emma, trying not to listen.  “Liar, liar, liar, fire, fire fire.  All you care about is money.  Go away”
“Time is money, girl.  And I hoard it.”  The dragon’s voice never wavered, never broke its monotone.  It sounded almost as bland as Mrs. Campbell on her worst day.  “You are stealing the time that is rightfully his and therefore mine, as dictated by my terms of employment, and I will not tolerate this breach of contract.  You will be persecuted past the full extent of the law.”
Emma shoved open the door to the stairwell and dragged Dad through.  Her legs ached and tingled.  “That’s for grownups.  Go away.”
“Time waits for no one,” said the dragon, its face centimetres away from hers (yes, that was right, she remembered).  It filled most of the lobby.  “And you have much of it on your hands.  I claim it as settlement of your transgression.”  Quick as a blink its coils were around her (clang clatter bang went the lunchbox on the floor), hoisting her into the air regardless of kicks, punches, and even bites.  It tasted like soap and chemicals.
The dragon’s head came down to face her again, mouth opening wider and wider.  Its gullet was stainless, polished steel, and all the glass inside did nothing to reflect its sparkle in the dimness.
“Are you off to school again already?” asked Dad, bemused.  “Are you packed?”
Everything seemed to slow down for a second as Emma thought about what to say next.
“I forgot my lunchbox!” she screamed.
“Here you go, pumpkin,” said Dad, and he placed it gently in her hands.  Emma clenched it tight inside them and swung up and up and up, right into that flat, blank, mirror-eye, as hard as she could.
For one moment, there was nothing in the world but CRACK.  The ground was CRACK.  The sky was CRACK.  The seas (she’d been to the seaside once, and gotten her toes wet) were probably CRACK too.  Then it was over and it was all normal again, all but the dragon, which was still made of CRACK, except it was smaller, thousands of little cracks splintering and shooting along its body like solid lightning.
“I was to be killed by a knight,” said the dragon in small, shocked surprise.  It was the first thing she’d heard it express any sort of emotion over at all.  “A true knight.  With an ancient blade, and a magician’s blessing, and the favour of the queen.  There was gong to be tumult, and battle.”
Emma sat up from the floor.  She couldn’t remember how she’d got there, but her aching back gave her a guess.  “Mom is a queen, and I know that because Dad said so.  That lunchbox is grandpa’s, and he’s the oldest boy ever.  And Dad is a magician, because Mom said that it must’ve taken magic to get a hippy like him into law school.  So THERE.”
“Ah,” said the dragon.  It fell apart like a paperback in heavy rain, glass and steel flying everywhere – but not so much, and not a whole lot.  It had only been hollow inside after all, right to the core.
Flooding out of the mess came a whole tangle of flying, swirling bits of silvery stuff  that coiled around Emma’s feet like playing kittens.  They spun round three times and fled up the stairs, all but one.
That one spun up to Dad’s head and popped into the hole, which vanished.
He blinked.
“Petal?  What are you doing here?”  He looked at his watch.  “God, it isn’t even lunch yet.  What’s going on?”
“You got fired,” said Emma.
Dad stared into the middle distance.  “Hmmm.  I did?  Yes, you’re right.  I did.  I must have.  Well, at least I’ll get severance.  And I’ll have a chance to cook for a while.  Your mother’ll like that.”  He brightened up.  “Come on.  I’ll drive us home.  You’ve missed half your schoolday already, you might as well miss the rest.”
Pushing from the inside, the doors felt light as a feather.

“The Daily Drain,” storytime 2011, Jamie Proctor.

Pluck and nip, turn the head, grasp the beak, wrench the neck, swallow it whole.  Simple routine, precise and practiced.  Such was the manner with which Billowbeck, the lord, entrepreneur, and (eventual) plunderer of all that he surveyed, enjoyed his breakfast.  Today, it was jackrabbit.  The poor little thing had been barely moving, weighed down by a leg so infected it was a miracle it drew breath, let alone dragged itself over who knew how many metres of rocks and dirt.  Billowbeck, munificent as he was, had dispatched the casualty of life with a sharp peck to the skull. 
“A fine thing,” he said to himself between mouthfuls, as he was prone to do (buzzards are social and friendly creatures, but they spend much of the day alone, hunting for carrion, and thus must make their conversation where it can be found).  “A very fine thing.  Tender.  Almost too fresh, but not quite.  Mustn’t grumble.  Wonderful flavour in the liver.”  He grunted contentedly and flapped his winds, taking flight once more.  The desert swept itself away from his talons below as the thermals took him, turning a fumbling half-flight into a smooth, endless soar that he could ride in his sleep.  His nostrils, his keenest of sensory organs, peerless among all creatures, touched the wind lightly with their discrete expertise. 
“That was fine,” he reminded himself, “but more is good.  More is always good, even if one overindulges slightly and must lighten one’s load before departure.  Such happens.  Hello, what’s this?”
The last remark was aimed at a smell he did not scent frequently.  A certain kind of sweat, one blended with strange oils and leathers, overlaid with the odours of a dozen dozen tools, vestments, and odds-and-ends.  Only one sort of food dressed itself so thoroughly, and rode in company with the tangy musk of horses. 
“Odd to scent them so far from home,” remarked Billowbeck, idly wheeling himself to face the source of his interest, which also carried the rich, tantalizing aroma of blood with it.  “I believe one shall see what this business is all about.”

It was, of course, about humans.  This did not surprise him.  What did surprise him was the sheer quantity of them. 
There was one human, the one he’d first scented.  His horse was tired, run-down, and bleeding, and he wasn’t much better off.  In the saddle with him rode a bundle of rags and little else.  Behind him, some few miles, rode three others.  They were scarcely better off, bar having a few more packs and a few less shallow cuts and scrapes.  They followed in the footsteps of the first, which led Billowbeck to his next conclusion. 
“A hunt,” he declared, snapping his bill decisively.  “Hunting each other, of course, which is the favourite sport of humans.  Such waste.  They don’t even eat them.  Dreadful waste.”
He circled thoughtfully, then made to follow the pursuit in a lazy spiral of figure-eights. 
“Dreadful, but most useful.  And they are quite meaty.”

Additional facts presented themselves to Billowbeck as he circled the slow, laborious pursuit that was most unworthy of calling itself a “chase.”  They took time to emerge, as he had to rely on his eyes for details rather than his nose (keen, yes, but less so than his razor-sharp nostrils!), but revealed they were. 
Firstly, the pursuit was both dogged and grim.  The man being chased was too tired even to seem fearful, and his followers displayed not a hint of joy nor prospect of a smile as clues of their prey appeared before their trudging, landbound gaze.  Small news, as the nearest place of humans was a long distance even for Billowbeck’s wings.  He pitied their worn, weary, stubby groundling legs the trek. 
Secondly, the pursuit was over some manner of great import, and most likely would be undergone to the death.  Both the length and extremity of the journey spoke of this, but added weight was the treatment predator and prey gave to their weaponry – constantly touching, caressing, examining, fidgeting, maintaining.  That very meticulous attention, combined with no trace of eagerness or fear, spoke only of blankest expectancy. 
Thirdly, as indicated by the onset of the setting sun, the pursuit would not be over come the eve, and this was by far the most pertinent and irritating information to enter the noble head of Billowbeck, infusing him with great vexation towards his eyes. 
“Thrice-damnation under three suns and four moonless nights,” he harrumphed.  “Bloated gizzards!  Can he not just give up and die?  Or give up and kill them.  Either would be a more-than-acceptable outcome.  Alas,” he sighed, and began a slow wheel towards a convenient dead tree, a corpse not so much palatable but very much inhabitable. 
And so the day ended, with Billowbeck’s resolution to check upon the manner when the morrow dawned.  As he dropped out of sight of his quarry, in the last light of the setting sun, he saw no sign of pause in their motions.
“Perhaps I shall have a larger breakfast upon the morrow,” he mused. 

It was not to be.  After a refreshing awakening and a brisk sunbath, Billowbeck’s spread wingstrokes led him only to disappointment.  Despite their exhaustion, the humans had not ceased their chase – indeed, they looked to have not stopped all night; very much so in fact.  The horse of the pursued was making wet sounds from its mouth instead of breathing. 
“Such stubbornness!  What rudeness.”  Despite his impatient words, Billowbeck was prepared for food.  The slobber smelled of blood. 
By noon the horse laid itself down, dying midkneel.  The human scrambled awkwardly from his tumbling perch, cushioning the fall of the bundle of rags that lay strapped behind his back with his own body and cultivating a few more gashes, bruises, and scrapes in the process. 
“A waste of blood,” murmured Billowbeck, basking in the vapours above. 
The human didn’t seem to mind his own injuries, preferring instead to check the well-being of the bundle’s contents with an anxious air and the closest thing to care that a thing in his piteous condition could manage.  He struggled upright, clasping it in his arms with all the strength he could manage, and took to his heels, feet smacking against rocks in boots worn so thin that he might as well have gone bare. 
“And lo, there is meat,” said Billowbeck with relish, and fell upon the carcass with the speed and grace of a rock from the heavens.  It was scrawny and bare of bones, but its eyes were as tender and succulent as they could ever be, and he was by far the least picky eater upon the winds.  He frolicked with gay abandoned amidst the entrails, plucking open the thin, sensitive skin at the gut and genitals and burrowing in to grope at the juicier meats. 
“Delectable!  A delight!  Well worth the wait,” he chuckled between gulps.  The tender task of ripping open the stomach occupied his beak for a moment, and it was in this silence that he was aware of the noises behind him.  He spun to face the fly-bitten coyote creeping up behind him just in time, vomiting on it immediately and with great violence. 
“Despicable!” he scolded as he lifted off, leaving behind him a one-animal chorus of gagging, retching sneezes.  “Vile wretch!  Competition is acceptable, a fine law of the land and understood to my mind, but assassination is a poor tool, a thing worthy of only the lowest of the low!  Away with you and your ilk!  If one were not present to claim carrion for your kind, who would?  A plague on your fur and a festerment in your liver!  You are not worth the meat one has purged upon you.”
Still fuming, Billowbeck ascended once again, robbed of a chance to bloat himself so fully that he could no longer fly – the true, great meal that all wished for.  He looked down upon the pursuers and envied them their succulent flesh, and he looked down upon the pursued and wished that he might stub a toe, or find himself trapped in a rockslide, or something, anything that might hasten his demise and gift him a meal, something to tear and peck at and remedy his ill mood. 
“Meat,” he grumbled, upon witnessing the slowness of the pursuit, “is wasted upon these fools.  No doubt they will fill his hide full of metal from those guns of theirs.  Guns!  Hah!  Who needs guns!?  One needs no guns.  Coyotes need no guns.  There is something queer about humans and their mewling, craven craving for guns.  And when it is not guns, it is bows!  Bah.  Aha, they’ve found his horse!  Now we shall see if they can make a little haste.”
There was haste, yes, but only when the men saw the corpse – a rush to its side, an examination, an exclamation of disgust at the missing eyes (“Philistines,” sniffed Billowbeck), and then some sort of argument.  It appeared that the man who rode in front was very much of the belief that the target had fled this way, as far and fast as his shaky legs could handle, and must be chased immediately at full speed, and the man who rode behind him was sure that he must be on his last dregs of stamina and had holed up nearby in the hopes they’d pass him by in their haste to catch him. 
“Half-right, the both of you,” said Billowbeck.  “He has fled as far as his legs could carry, yes, but (inefficient little stumps that they are) he has only made it over the next gully, and is searching for a holdout.  Hurry up!”
The man who rode in front was very much opposed to this plan and argued solely for speed and haste.  Something about his sister cropped up here, and if the man riding behind cared about seeing that justice was dealt for her.  The man riding behind passionately reminded him that he cared very much and was in no hurry to lose that chance because he, the man riding in front, felt a little impatient. 
Weapons were brandished.  Billowbeck’s beak clicked involuntarily with relish, then relaxed in sad disappointment as the argument cooled with the mutual realization that both men wanted the same thing. 
“Impertinence,” he muttered.  “Gross perversity.  One’s meal remains lost and spoilt and now the rabble refuse to provide a substitute.”  His ire only deepened after the men left, as the coyote crept from a nearby crevice to feed upon the horse again.  It locked eyes with him on each bite, savouring the crunch with mocking glee. 
“Filth,” Billowbeck said, genuine malice entering his mouth for the first time that day in place of his scolding disgruntlement.  “Story-hoarding slug.  Thief of plunder!  Is it not enough for you to take every hint of glory under the hard sun for yourself, not enough to prank and jape against all for your own amusement?  No!  You must harass and pilfer!  Pfah!”  He worked himself into such a lather that his bald head began to fairly burn with heat, and he was forced to cease his rant and flap his wings for a wind.  Urine flowed down his legs, streaking and mussing the chalky remnants of his last cooling. 
“Enough time wasted,” he grumbled, and took to the skies again.  The chase still awaited, but the end, when it came, was wanting.  The day was inconclusive once more, with the predators missing their quarry by some scant yards as they picked through the gully’s rim.  He lay on his belly, shaking arms wrapped tight around his rag-wrapped burden, whispering strange and calming, frantic words into it as the boots of his trackers stomped away from him. 
Billowbeck bunked down in some brush, dreaming darker, cloudier, sullen thoughts.  He felt doubly cheated, and his mood improved no more when he awoke in the midst of the night at a rustling of grass near his bedchamber. 
“Insidious vagrants,” he said to himself, peering into the dark purely for show – his keen eyes had no hold in the night, but his nose still crowned all its competition.  Still, it was not often it had to work from ground-level, much less in the cold night, and the air currents puzzled him mightily.  As he strove to disentangle the alien breezes in his nose, a polite sneeze was emitted perhaps seven feet from his earholes. 
Billowbeck wished he could say that he did not recall taking flight.  That would have greatly spared him the humiliating, terrifying, endlessly lengthy moments that followed, in which he attempted to lift off in every conceivable direction (including straight down), void his bladder in shock, vomit in defence, and grunt in alarm, all at once.  At the end of it two things had changed: he was in the air (many fluid ounces lighter), and there was a fly-bitten coyote underneath him, laughing its ass off. 
Billowbeck had no words for its behaviour this time.  None he knew were strong enough, and despite their gentile veneer, there is no subset of Kingdom Animalia better versed in matters scatological than the scavengers.  Instead, he simply hissed, long and loud, with venom that would’ve made a diamondback rattler turn pale and wan, and flapped away in the dark, divorced of dignity, to find a more sheltered roost. 
He slept poorly: the coyote chuckled underneath his tree ‘till dawn. 

The third day began, and Billowbeck found himself for once ahead of the game.  Impatient for a meal, he was on the wing far earlier in the morn than was his custom, fighting reluctant, youthful thermals and a rumbling belly both.  Yet it was his curiosity he was most eager to indulge, eyes hunting for signs of the humans. 
They had moved during the night, but had also rested, driven at last to pure, physical immobility.  Not even the effort made to lay out bedrolls had been spared; the men had simply dropped where they stood, asleep on their feet.  Billowbeck made a closer pass to see if any scorpions had tried to nest on them in their sleep – perhaps in the cracks between arm and body, or other spots that might induce accidental crushing followed by stinging – and was sorely disappointed. 
The pursued was already up and moving, but moving slow.  A somewhat modest butte seemed to be his target, or at least his vague aim.  His aimless wandering through crags was bringing him in that direction at least, and whenever he lost strength to carry his burden and sank to his knees for a time, it was towards its rubbled mound that he turned his face as he cried. 
“Cry a little louder, perchance,” muttered Billowbeck, “and mayhap they will find you.  One grows famished.”
The man did cry a little louder, but they did not find him.  They found his tracks, some hour later. 
And so the hunt was on again, but more even now as the ground grew shakier and the horses of the pursuers more reluctant to go on.  At the very base of the butte, a second argument occurred.  The man who rode in front refused to watch the horses and demanded to face the prey alone, and the man who rode behind, though reluctant to give the possibility of an escape to their quarry, seemed reluctant to allow this.  Personal feelings must not get in the way, especially when the lunatic has killed your sister and her husband both.  The man who rode in front considered this and then smacked him between the eyes with such force that Billowbeck nearly heard the thump from three hundred feet up. 
“Temper,” he commented.  He watched the man begin to scale the cliff and considered paying a visit to his friend’s unattended eyeballs, but decided against it.  Humans were worse than coyotes up close, and he’d not lived a full and healthy (if often scabrous) life by dint of approaching living prey.  Such matters were not for his talons. 
Atop the peak, the madman was preparing his stand with such feverish intensity that Billowbeck rather suspected he wouldn’t see an opponent arriving until it breathed down his neck.  Rocks were strewn haphazardly, shoved with feeble, trembling limbs into a parody of a barricade that would not have shielded a mouse.  His ammunition – all eight shots of it – was carefully loaded, unloaded, and reloaded, with the extras placed on a rock and accidentally crushed during a fit of defensive renovation.  The gun was tucked away in the deepest, vilest recesses of what remained of his pants.  The bundle of rags was tenderly placed in a safe spot at the heart of the fortress, where he glanced often. 
“Please, do not shed your last scraps of fat for this thing’s sake,” said Billowbeck.  “One would rather prefer a somewhat more substantial meal.  And it seems that it’s not long due,” he added.  The head of the man who rode in front had just crested the rim of the butte.  It had been an easy climb for him, and an easily tracked trail; following the crusted blood and spilled rocks of his quarry would have been a small task for a blind man, or a mole, a mole that vaguely reminded Billowbeck of the thing grubbing in the dirt mere yards from the cold, flat gaze of his hunter. 
Out came the gun from its holster slow, steady, purposeful as a snake watching a hypnotized mouse. 
Billowbeck circled, craning his wrinkled red neck for a better view, beak glinting as it wobbled from side to side in the sunshine. 
The man who rode ahead asked the quarry to stand up. 
The quarry did not respond. 
The man repeated his demand. 
The quarry twitched, but continued to grub for rocks. 
The man who rode ahead quietly snapped and walked forwards, vaulted effortlessly over the impregnable rock wall, and yanked his prey up by the scruff of its neck, slapped a gun barrel to its skull.  Even well-fed he would’ve loomed over it, and in its malnourished state it was like watching a buzzard make off with a coyote pup. 
“Only once,” remarked Billowbeck to himself, “but oh so sweet.  Dangerous though.  Take a minute, a month too long, and they chew.  Strike too soon, the mother’s there.  One must be discreet.”
Below, words were exchanged.  Well, words were given.  Flung, perhaps.  There was screaming, about kidnappers and murderers and thieves in the night, the audacity and wickedness of kidnapping the mayor’s wife – of kidnapping his sister – and above all and yet running strongly beneath it, where-is-she-now.  There were many where-is-she-nows, scattered wilfully and freely throughout the diatribe, and each one was thrown aside hastily in favour of another remark, as if the querying man was fearful of an answer.  In fact, he was so fearful of the answer that it took him over a minute of verbal abuse before he realized his questions had been answered with a single, wavering arm and pointed finger, directed at the bundle of rags. 
Contemptuously, the hunter threw aside his quarry, stalked to the bundle of rags, lifted a corner, and seemed to shrink in on himself. 
Behind him, the prey began to mumble.  He was talking to himself, or maybe to the world, a justification or an excuse or something of the sort that Billowbeck had never really seen the point of.  About husbands, jealous ones.  Unfairly jealous ones.  And the damage they could do, especially when drunk.  And who’d listen?  He’s the mayor, he’s trusted, he’s loved, he’s sober in public and unwinds in private in all the wrong ways.  And no one’s believing her but him, beggar, shiftless labourer, friend in low places. 
(Billowbeck snapped his beak in annoyance at this.  Lowly indeed.  Groundbound, in fact, and still not yet a corpse.  Would the man not shut up and die?)
So there’s a plan, passed along in little notes kept hidden and precious.  Run out and away.  He can steal a horse, her husband has fine horses.  An easy escape.  But the mayor only unwinds in private, and he’s not escaped showing his tastes to the town for this long by being a stupid brute.  And well, maybe the reason this prey’s in low places, however friendly, is because he’s a touch soft in the head.  He’s a bit too obvious, a bit too easily spotted snooping about, and one thing leads to another, with him getting chased away before the eyes of his lady fair.
By now, the hunter is staring into the middle distance.  His ears, however, are focused yards behind him, on that mumbling, rambling, sun-cracked set of broken lips that are spilling careless lies – must they be lies? – everywhere. 
She’s desperate.  She’s alone.  She tries to run alone, but she’s not as used to keeping low and quiet as her friend, and she’s found out.  Now that might not have led to what came next but for her foresight, and her foresight was to steal a gun.  All of a sudden the mayor’s come a cropper, and she’s standing there with the gun when his boys come in.  Bang bang whoops and now they’ve got to hide the body.  And make a killer. 
Now, the friend in low places became confused in his story here, perhaps because this was the moment when he’d become… confused, himself.  He’d heard the shots.  And when he snuck in to check on her, he made a little more noise than he expected. 
He was, as Billowbeck had learned over his days of idle observance, a loud sobber. 
Off into the dark he went, bullets at his heels.  He’s escaped, they’re excused – a murderer in the dark! – and before the morning’s dawned pursuit’s afoot. 
And that was why the hunter was standing here, looking at pages of tattered letters, hidden inside a filthy pile of old rags that had once been a careful stash of supplies, blankets, and clothing.  He hadn’t wanted to lose them, he kept saying; he hadn’t wanted to lose them.  And the hunter was staring at them, not knowing what to believe anymore. 

It was at this point that Billowbeck had taken enough. 

“A body after all,” he said.  He was too calm to exclaim now, even with the great, festering wrath that was gnawing at his ironclad guts.  “One body.  And it is buried in a secret grave miles and miles from here.  And no doubt already the meal of worms which are the meals of moles which are wholly inaccessibly to one at the moment.  One has just about had enough of this.”
Down and low he swooped, light as his feathers, landing with a faint click and a whiff of sour air and bile just behind the quavering, wavering form of the quarry.  He stood still, mouth open and soundless, emptied of his story and not knowing what to say anymore.  He’d soundlessly extracted his pistol at some point in his tale and was playing with it, spinning it from the sky to his face over and over and over. 
“If he will not talk, one shall do it for him,” said Billowbeck.  He stretched out his beak, flapped up to a perch on one of the broken rocks that had formed the world’s least likely fortress (now breached), and leaned forwards.  A brisk tap on the shoulder, an unexpected squawk of alarm from a madman, a wheel about of the hero, a sighting of the weaponry.  Bang.  And lo, there is meat. 
A short bark from behind. 
An unexpected hissing grunt of alarm from a scavenger. 
A wheel about of the failed friend, a fumbling of unfamiliar weaponry. 
“Bang,” said Billowbeck, the lord, entrepreneur, and (former) plunderer of all that he had once surveyed.  The word came out in shock and slowness, as did his craning, failing attempts to twist his head about to see behind him.  He was granted his wish as his body crumpled in on itself, wings collapsing like a broken dust devil, and he saw the barest flip of the coyote’s tail and the echo of its laughter as it bounded down the side of the butte. 
And lo, there was meat.  And in the long days after the men vacated that butte, not one creature came to feed upon it, not even the ants.

A dreadful waste. 

“Soaring” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011. 

“I am not big.  I wonder what it is to be large?” said the flea, hopping from strand to strand on an old, old tapestry.  “I can dance with a dust speck and jump two hundred times my length, but I am not big.  I wonder what it is like?  I think I will ask someone.  Spider!  What is it like to be big?”
The old, old, creaky spider in the corner of the ceiling stretched her many legs.  The flea was too small for her to eat, and too hard, but she found his company pleasing now and again.  Even a spider can’t eat everybody it knows.  “I am not big,” she said, spinning careful cobwebs as she spoke, like a knitting, predaceous grandmother (she was indeed a grandmother, though she’d never seen her grandchildren).  “I can snare the flies and crop the air clean of whatever may flutter through the air in here, in this little room, but I am not large.  No bug I’ve laid eyes upon escapes me save I call it small or poor (or friend, in your case), but I know my place.  I am small.  I will ask your question of another.”
So the spider spun herself a slim new line and shimmied her way out of the room on a fancy thread, legs twinkling.  She came to a big place where the air moved with purpose and coolness, and she spoke again.  “Bird!  You eat bugs where I can never reach.  Your wingspan is ten times my body’s length, your beak could swallow me whole without a single bite.  What is it like to be big?”
The swallow swooped down from her nest in the topmost corner of the courtyard, snapping a little thing with wings from the air on her way down.  “I am not big,” she said, lightning on the stone before the spider with all the ease of a comfortable, well-worn zephyr.  “Daily, I flit and flutter about in the high reaches of places a thousand, ten thousand times my size and millions of times my weight.  I am not the largest thing in the skies, but I am smaller still than the things that tromp down here.  I will ask one of them for you.  Priest!” she twittered, swallowsong rising up with a sweet demand, “What does it mean, what is it like, to be so large?”
The passing priest cupped a withered hand to his ear.  “Eh?”
“What is it like to be big?” asked the swallow, a bit more loudly and a lot less flowery. 
“To be big?”  The priest chuckled and fussed with his robes.  “Oh my word no no no, I’m afraid you’ve mistaken me, dear bird.  I am a small man – each and every one of my five sisters and four brothers outgrew me.  My wife looms over me, and she is not a big woman.  My children towered above me before they were grown.  And that’s just for people!  Why, people are not very big at all.  For the real size, you must look to things, not to people – even the biggest elephant, after all, would fit comfortably in the corner of this cathedral.  Is that not right, my lovely one?  Surely you are the one to tell us what it is, to be big.”
The cathedral chuckled, a sound like a quarry with indigestion.  “Priest,” it ground out in a voice too deep for most to ever hear, “you flatter me with well-meant foolery, my love.  I have been here for near a thousand years, yet I am made of rock that is older than I can begin to comprehend, hewn from places shaped by forces that would shatter me by careless lack of notice should I touch them.  I am small in this world, priest, and I will ask the one whom I came from for your question.  My mother, my mountain!  Tell us what it is to be big.”
The mountain took a moment to find its voice – which was a quiet, strong one – as they speak very seldom (perhaps once every ten thousand years, if they are garrulous).  “Little daughter,” it said, “my heights soar above all else for miles, yet they are eclipsed by the breadth and might of my roots, which sink deep, deep beneath you all, to reach places unknown by any living mind.  I know little of true size.  I have stood for longer than any can or ever will imagine, since this plate we rest on rammed its neighbour more than sixty million years ago.  I am but freshly-made.  This world I rest on is bigger than imagining, even my imagining – and what do mountains do all through the centuries beyond imagining? – and I will ask it your question.  Earth, my creator: what is it to be, to be so big?”
A planet’s voice is discrete, tidy.  It speaks using whatever materials are close at hand, from its dust on your feet to its atmosphere in your ear. 
“I don’t know,” said the planet, most thoughtfully.  “I have never considered this.  Do you think I am big?”
“If you are not, I know not what is,” said the mountain. 
“Oh no.  No.  I am small, among the smaller of our little solar system, biggest of the rocky planets though I be.  I wander through a space whose endless depth in all directions makes me shrink, and I do so under the eternal hand of a glowing fireball three-hundred-and-thirty-thousand times my mass; I did the math, you know.  It is not just big, it is strong – every moment it sheds enough energy to burn you all away in an instant were I not shielding you strongly.  Oh my sun, my Sol-mate, whose light burns life into me, can you tell me what it is like to be so big, to shine and be marked all across the cosmos?”
The sun thought.  “I am not so large,” it confessed, voice crackling through the electromagnetic spectrum.  “I am bigger than red dwarves, yes.  I am bigger than planets, yes.  But for a yellow star?  Not so large, no.  I burn slightly cooler than is the norm for my peers, and I am just as slightly smaller.  I am just barely below-average, my little planet.  And I do this inside the bounds of a system whose grip upon us all makes mine upon your person pale.  Galaxy, Milky Way, do you know what my planet speaks of, to be big?”
“No,” it said, choosing each word carefully and flatly lest it sink to causing strange ripples in nebula, setting black holes to vibrating with sounds that were the opposite of music.  “I do not.  I am average among my peers.  Perhaps a little larger than average.  I am smaller than my nearest neighbour.  Andromeda contains one trillion stars.  I contain two hundred billion.  Yet I am larger than the majority.  But galaxies are small.  There are many of us.  For each of my stars there is one of us that you can see from your seat.  And there are more unseen.  Ask the one we inhabit whose edges I do not know.  Universe.  What do you think it is to be big.”
The universe laughed.  This meant that everything in it also laughed – every star, asteroid, dust particle, truck driver, doctor, and planet laughed, and knew exactly why for at least one instant.  “Us?” it giggled.  “We?  We should know what it is to be big?  We are a possibility, all of us, one of more than can ever exist or be guessed at.  A chance, a fragment of what could happen.  We are a what-can-be, all of us, and that is the smallest and most precious thing of all.  We do not know what is it to be big.  We are small, all of us, even the largest, even against nothing at all.  That is our answer to all of us.”
“Yes,” said the Milky Way. 
“Oh yes,” said the sun. 
“I see,” said the planet. 
“Truth,” said the mountain. 
“Of course,” said the cathedral. 
“Goodness,” said the priest. 
“Surely so,” said the swallow. 
“Hah!” said the spider. 
“Oh,” said the flea. 

“But what does it really feel like?”

“Size,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2010. 

The town had seen better days.  It had also seen better weeks, months, and centuries.  Still, when stacked up against its fellows of the past few weeks, the last minute or so had been pretty good.  Oh, some hundreds of men had died within its sixty-second boundaries, but most of them had been relatively clean and painless.  Or maybe just painless.  Well, at least that special sort of painlessness where the pain was actually incredibly intense but over inside a nanosecond. 
There was a man running between the snowy buildings, dodging and weaving through its less glamorous streets.  Not the red light district, oh no, nothing so dramatic, merely all the unfashionable neighbourhoods that had been beset with precisely the wrong sort of stores for convenient living.  The man himself was thin and ragged and wearing some sort of torn thing that had probably once been a uniform (a little American flag had been sewn into part of it, but an exciting explosion had long ago removed that).  A beaten and abused rifle swung from his hand with monkeylike carelessness, held in exactly the wrong manner for easy and quick defence. 
With a heave, a jump, and an accidentally-falling-on-his-face, the soldier stumbled his way to a specific ruin that had once been a rather ugly house.  There he looked hopefully at two equally thin, ragged, and abused men. 
“Am I too late?”
The most bearded of the three frowned.  The shape and style of the thing on his head that had once been a helmet marked him as probably German.  “Yes,” he said in an accent so thick that it was completely indescribable, “you are too late.  Over half an hour – what if we’d had to wait much longer?  We’d have had to shoot each other or something. There’s a war here that we’re busy losing.”
“I thought you were losing,” said the other man, who the others had a sneaking suspicion was British.  He’d once expressed a fondness for tea that they found most telling. 
“Nonsense.  We are all infantry, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“Naturally.”
“Then we are all losing,” said the German with satisfaction.  “Now, shall we begin the game?”
“Which game?” asked the British man. 
“You know, the one game,” said the American.  “You pass Go and then collect money.  I’m the Iron.”
“I prefer the steamship myself,” said the British man.  “Lovely little boat.  My father was a steamship captain, you know.”
“No,” said the German crossly.  “The other game.  You know, the one with three parts and three people.”
“Oh, that one,” said the American.  “Yeah, let’s do that one.  Count of three then?”
“Yes.”
All three men sat down, chucked their various broken and beaten tools of violence aside, held out their hands, and pumped them as one to a steady beat: “one, two, three!”
“Scissors!” said the American. 
“Rock!” said the German.
“Paper?” said the British man.  “Yes, that’s that.  Sorry.  Forgot for a moment.”  He peered around the little triangle.  “Oh, did somebody win?”
“No,” said the German.  “No one ever wins.  We have all lost once again.  Why must even our games reflect our pointlessness?”
“Speak for yourself,” said the American.  “I beat the limey here, and that’s good enough for me.”
“But we’re on the same side,” protested the British man. 
“Yes, and that makes it all the more important.  I’ve got to beat you to beating up him, or how else will I look myself in the mirror?”
“But I beat up him while you were beating up me.”
“Aha, and I beat you up myself,” said the German.  “You had best watch your step, or in beating your allies you may yet be beaten up by me!”
“Really?” asked the American.  A sudden and inexplicable fear had seized upon his heart and he knew not why. 
“No, not really,” said the German.  “I think I am pretty much screwed.  But I will not go down quietly!”
“Howso?”
The German looked from side to side.  He looked up and down.  He looked from north-north-east to south-south-west.  He spun in a little circle and then sat down again before beckoning them closer. 
“You see, I have a secret weapon,” he whispered.
“Gosh,” said the British man. 
“Yes!  Very secret.  Very powerful.  Newly developed with local materials, very hush-hush.  It was so obvious, even our greatest minds didn’t realize it until just within the month.”
“I want to see this,” said the American. 
“You’re the enemy, don’t be silly.  You will see it when we use it on you.”
“But I want to see it now.”
“Yes, show us your secret weapon!” said the British man.  “We promise not to tell anyone.  Go on, show us!”
“Oh all right.  But only because you asked so nicely.”  The German man glanced about conspiratorially, then reached into his pack and rooted around for a moment.  With a grunt of exertion, he extracted an unrounded and irregular object. 
“There!  Is it not beautiful?”
“It’s a brick,” said the American. 
“Three-quarters of a brick,” said the British man helpfully.  “That’s a whole lot more than a half-brick, and those are pretty dangerous, let me tell you.  Top drawer!”
“It’s a regular brick,” said the American.  “There’s buckets of them everywhere!”
“That is the brilliance!” reminded the German.  “Infinite ammunition!  You had best surrender while you still have the chance.”
“That’s stupid,” said the American.  “Anyways, I’ve got a secret weapon too.”
“Show us, show us, please do show us,” begged the British man. 
“No, don’t be silly.  I’ve got to use it on his commanding officer,” he said, pointing at the German.  “It’s too secret to be wasted on showing it to you guys.”
“Come now, don’t be a poor sport,” begged the British man.  “How about a bet?  If you lose the next match, you have to show us your secret weapon.  Come now, don’t be yellow.”
The American considered this.  “Sure.  I don’t lose.”
“You just lost two minutes ago, with the rest of us,” reminded the German. 
“Yeah, but I lost with scissors, and you guys lost with rocks and paper.  That doesn’t count.”
One, two three went their fists. 
“Scissors!” said the American. 
“Rock!” said the German.
“Paper, I suppose,” said the British man.  “Now then, what was this about the secret weapon?”
“I just told you, losing with scissors doesn’t count.  No way am I showing you.”
“I happen to have, in my satchel here,” said the British man, “a packet of biscuits sent to me from my dear old mother.  I will trade you one biscuit for a look at your secret weapon.”
“Well, I dunno…”
“And I’ll show you mine too.”
“Deal!”  The American rooted about in his backpack with genuine enthusiasm, then hauled out an object indescribable. 
“Feast your eyes on this, fellahs,” he said.  “It’s got a calibre of forty-five-forty-eight and it’s breech-reverse-loading-reversable, with a backup backup grip for extra precision during naps.  I can fire this baby backwards, forwards, and while sleeping, and at ninety-nine per something without even having to reload for a real good while!”
“What is it?  It is a bomb?  A toy tank?” asked the German. 
“Perhaps it’s a battleship someone trod upon,” suggested the British man. 
“Not important,” said the American.  “Sure is swell, isn’t it?  You don’t stand a chance.”
“Absolutely,” said the German.  “Is it a gun?”
“Who the hell knows?  Now, limey, you said something about your own secret weapon…”
“Oh yes,” said the British man.  “Quite right, thank you, nearly forgot.  Hold on a tic…”  He removed his helmet and began to sort through its insides. 
“Best place to keep things you don’t want found,” he confided.  “Everybody searches your kit, sure, but they keep out of your hair quite nicely.  Oh, I’d best get you that biscuit while I’m looking….wherever did they go?”
“They are in your hair,” said the German. 
“Oh?  Oh.  Thanks there, had no idea.  Want one still?”
“No thanks,” said the American. 
“Your loss then – aha, here we go!”  An extraordinary bulk of cloth was yanked out of the helmet’s lining.  “Kept it secret down there…lads, meet the next step in warfare: standardized woolly socks!”
“Those are socks?” asked the German. 
“Of course they’re socks.  What else could they be?”
“They look sorta like old towels,” suggested the American. 
“Discarded and ill-fitted mittens,” added the German. 
“Old rags.”
“Stained underpants.”
“I’ll have you lot know that these are the tactical evolution of comfort and warmth in frozen climes,” said the British man.  “I’m twice as comfy as both of you put together as long as I’ve got these on.”
“Then why not put ‘em on?”
“It’s too soon.”
“There’s snow on the ground and the wind’s freezing everyone’s nuts off, just put them on.”
“They keep my ears warm up here.  I can’t waste that.”
“My best friend lost three of his toes to frostbite last night.  Put them on.”
“Not in front of everyone, surely!”
“Three toes?  Geez, that’s hard.”
“Not especially.  First meat we had eaten in months.  A little bit chewy, but succulent.”
“Really?  You tried rats?  Me ‘n Stinky Joe caught a big fat one last night, had some real meat on it, especially around the thighs.”
“Sounds like a girl I knew back home,” observed the British man.  “Terrible temper, ugly face, but a lovely cook.  Pity she ate everything she made herself.”
“Look, this’s getting us nowhere,” said the American.  “We’ve got three counts of treason and the smell of limey’s socks here for our troubles.  One more round and then we head home?”
“So soon?” said the German.  “What if we are shot tomorrow?  We may never get another chance to play the game.”
“You say that every time,” said the British man.  “I think you’re just gloomy.”
“I am losing this war.”
“Thought you said we were all losing it,” said the American. 
“Yes,” said the German.  “But I am losing it slightly harder and faster than the rest of you.  And I am also out of ammunition; I shot the last of it against your barricade on Sunday.”
“So am I,” said the British man.  “Lovely day for it, though.  Too nice out to spoil it with shooting at people.”
“It’s nine below and the sky’s greyer than my granddad,” said the American, who was sure he had bullets left.  Somewhere.  In his locker for sure.  “You have a strange way of pronouncing ‘lousy.’”
“Well, it could be worse, you know.  Times like this you should be grateful for what you have.”
“Yes,” said the German.  “I am grateful for my brick.  I am also grateful for my skin, which has only three bullet holes in it, all too small to be lethal.”
“I’m awfully grateful for my woolly socks.  Or maybe it’s a scarf.  Also, these biscuits are simply delicious.  Sure you don’t want one?”
“No.”
“No.”  The American thought for a minute.  “I’m grateful for my still being alive.  Hey, my best friend got shot last week, but I’m still here.  And then my other pal got shot the day after, but I’m still here.  And I got shot yesterday but all it did was sink a bullet into my secret weapon so the damned thing won’t start up, and I’m still here.”
“That’s the spirit!” said the British man.  “Now, I’d best head back to base before someone charges me with desertion again.”
“We just shoot them now,” said the German.  “And the last few, we haven’t even bothered that.  The snow does the job for us.”
“Come back with us,” offered the American.  “We can take you prisoner or something.  Hey, I’ve always wanted to take someone prisoner.”
The German shook his head.  “I don’t think so.  I still have to try out my brick.  Maybe next time.”
“Can’t say I didn’t give you a fair chance.  Scissors!”
“Rock!”
“Paper!  Oh dear, wait, I picked scissors.  I meant paper though, does that count?”
“Why not?” said the American.  “Now, let’s get the hell out of this dump before one of us decides to shell it.  Merry Christmas, guys.”
“The same to you both.”
“And a jolly New Year!”
The three men hopped the broken-down pieces of the house in three different directions and trudged back to their respective not-homes-away-from-home as it started to snow again. 
By strange coincidence, each had just come within sight of their fortifications when they recalled that they had completely forgotten to get the others any presents. 

“A Three-Man Game,” copyright 2010 Jamie Proctor. 

Canno was seven years old when the candle came down in the wrong place.  That was how it began, the charcoal-burner told him as he went home.  A candle in the wrong place.  Dark winter nights, early nights, and his parents had been fond of books, for all that there were but two big leather-tattered volumes in the house.  They were slow but sure readers and could finish each as the other did, then swap them and start again.  And he and his big sister were small and careless and could have put down a light in some small secret place and forgotten to snuff it, easily. 
Candles, misplaced and forgotten, guttering out alone and cold and neglected.  Or growing angrier and hotter at the slight, then becoming bigger.  Oh so much bigger.  One little candle had swallowed up the whole house, which was still the biggest place in the world to Canno, back then, as the charcoal-burner carried him away from the gawking crowd of the neighbours, showing up too late to the queer house at the edge of the village to help; too late to do anything but sift through the ashes and pocket trinkets. 
Canno was crying, maybe.  The tears were freezing from the cold, or the heat could’ve dried them all up inside.  Or both.  The charcoal-burner’s shoulder was hard bone and cold, all warmth from the fire lost and faded from his sooty skin as the snowflakes melted on it. 
“Ah, now, all burnt up, aren’t you?” he said in his raspy, scorched voice, a calloused and roughened palm touching Canno’s side, feeling where he couldn’t feel anything anymore.  “Yes, you are,” he said, voice neither particularly sympathetic nor uncaring.  “All alone in the world, eh?  No family that isn’t kindled and gone, no friends – not if those at the home were all there were.  You’re alone.  We work with what’s alone.”
The charcoal-burner stopped walking.  They were in the woods, the wide white wildlands where only the charcoal-burners walked, the mysterious burnt men with the white scars and the singed beards, the ones hunched from hauling brush and dusted with ashes, bent under the weight of some great secret no man knew but they.  The trail stretched forwards and back, fading into snowfall both ways. 
“Now you choose, boy.  Yea or nay, or shake or nod if your throat still feels the smoke.  Yea, you travel forwards, move on.  You come to live, and be one of us.  Nay, and I leave you here, to find your way back and make what you may.  Choose, boy.”
Even at seven – especially at seven, children do not shrug aside such things as adults do – Canno knew this was unfair, horribly unfair.  But he was numb in all things, and fear not the cold as he might – he didn’t think he would ever complain of the cold again, not ever, not ever – he wouldn’t stay alone.  He couldn’t stay alone.  And the charcoal-burner was the only other person in all the world. 
He nodded. 
“A choice, boy.  A good one, perhaps.  Now we’ll go, and we’ll get you some sleep.  The night’s long, but not long enough for you to fit a day’s wakening and a rest in at once.”
Canno was asleep before the charcoal-burner took four more steps.  It was not dreamless.  It was not pleasant. 

He awoke in darkness and smoke, and for a moment knew only panic – had he imagined all of that?  Was he still in the house, hearing the flames crackle up the roof above and smelling his sheets beginning to smoulder?
“Wake, boy.”
No, no, the voice was harsh and rough, not like his father’s.  The blanket was sooty and rough, as tough as rock, not the quilt his mother had made.  And the smoke was calmer, smoother, less intense. 
Canno opened his eyes.  Above them was dry timber, shrouded in clay dust, cracked and ancient.  Above that, dense, tufted earth, riddled with roots. 
“Wake, boy.”  There was impatience in the harsh voice, and coldness.  “We have no time to mollycoddle ye.  Ye must work.”
Canno sat up, and knew where he was, by the faint red glow in the air that was greater than the bright light that came from the pipe nodding at the charcoal-burner’s chin.  He was different from the one that had brought Canno in – his beard the greyer and longer, though how much was ash and how much was age was impossible to say; his eyes the more sunken and glittering, his fingers turned black forever.  A hundred hundred greyed lines streaked over his arms and face. 
“Good.  Now, do ye ken where ye are, or do I have to tell ye?”  He hacked a barking laugh without waiting for an answer.  “Of course I do.  Ye be in the New Kiln, boy.  I’m sure ye’ve heard tale of it.  Now, get up.  I’ve a task, and ye will fulfill it.”
Canno didn’t move.  The charcoal-burner leaned over and prodded him hard in the knee with his pipe’s stem.  It was near sharp enough to draw blood, and Canno jumped out of the bed – a crude pile of tattered blankets mounded roughly together – before he even knew what he was doing. 
“Good, good.  Now listen, and listen well-close now, better than ye did to your mater nor yer father neither: ye are here to work.  Work and learn, ye ken?  Ye have no family.  Ye have no friends.  All ye have is us, and only as long as ye act as we do, and that means work.  And if ye work here, ye will follow three rules above all else.”  He put his pipe in his mouth again and took a pull on it, obviously warming to his words. 
“First, ye will not touch what ye are not told to touch, whether it be wood, dirt, clay, stone, flame, or food.  Ever.  Or ye’ll take a beating the likes of which ye can’t imagine.  This is great work, delicate work, boy, and too much care be needed in its making for the likes of your clumsy hands to go spoiling years in one moment’s stupidity.”
“Second, ye shall always do what ye are told by yer superiors.  Ye will know who they are.  Ye will know who they are not.  And right now, they be everyone.  Ye will not argue, ye will not spare time to agree or acknowledge, ye will do, and do so fast.”
“Third.  This be as important as the first, though ye may ken it not.  Ye will never.  Ever.  Ever.  Ever speak to those not of our lot.  Ye ken?  You speak not to any man nor woman nor child that lives outside these mounds and kilns.  When yer older, if ye’re older, ye will speechify for trade and business, but for now, with your mouth as raw and untrained and prone to flapping as it is; ye.  Will.  Be.  Silent.  Ye ken?”
Canno nodded.  There wasn’t much else he could do. 
The charcoal-burner smiled.  The lines around his mouth crinkled oddly, twisted into a shape they weren’t familiar with.  “No ye don’t.  But ye will.  Now go and find Keplak Cinders.  Go down the tunnel, take ye no turns till ye reach fresh air.  He’ll be out there, near the woodpiles.  Get him to running ye messages, so ye learn the land’s lay.  And fast now, mind ye.  Go!”
Canno went, head spinning, lurching from wall to wall.  He burst into air so clean and cold that it made his teeth ache and his eyes dwindle, and stumbled his way to a giant, brownish blob that was probably a woodpile. 
“What’s this now?” boomed the woodpile.  A beard formed on it as Canno squinted in puzzlement.  “Speak up lad!  Who sent you and what are you here for?”
Canno opened his mouth, and much to his surprise, all that came out was a small croak, a hiss of air puffing down aching passages. 
“Hah, fire-mute, eh?  Don’t speak, I know.  Smoked out… you must be the boy Half-leg brought in last night.  Ashmaster sent you, did he?  Don’t speak, nod or shake – yes, he did I’ll bet, old greybeard.  Likely sent you for messages, eh?  Hah!”  The giant’s laugh was like a thunderclap to the face, ruffling Canno’s hair with its force.  “No good having a messenger with no mouth.  No lad, you can carry some kindling for me.  Gather it from there – see where I point? – and take it to here.  Stack it neat now, and don’t go too fast; we don’t want mistakes and we don’t want you tipping over and spearing yourself on something.  Go!”

Canno went, and it wasn’t until many days later that his mouth healed well enough to run messages for Keplak.  By then he knew the layout of the place well enough – three great charcoal mounds, half-barrow, half-hall, half-furnace all, each lived in even as it was kept burning.  The little, less-than-a-decade-old and still-expanding New Kiln, the three-century-old Younger Mound, which was bigger than the village his family’s house had once stood on the outskirts of, and the ancient, older-than-time Elder Mound, which was so big he couldn’t tell how big it was, only that trying to walk a full loop around it made his feet hurt and shouldn’t be attempted. 
He worked at many things.  He lifted kindling for Keplak Cinders, and later logs.  He ran messages, first from Keplak to others, then from the others to others still, and then from anyone to anywhere, because he knew all the places.  He learned to tend fires and let them neither die nor billow out of scope.  He learned how to pick up charcoal, move charcoal, and store charcoal without giving it so much as an errant bump.  And he learned all these things well and fast, yet it was never enough. 
“Too slow!” Garren Ashmaster would spit as Canno brought him a sample of fresh charcoal to be examined with his one still-working, ever-critical eye.  “This is nearly cold!  I need it warm!  Too slow!”  Often he’d throw the coal at Canno as he left – invariably, still warm. 
“Take care lad,” warned Keplak.  “Those logs’re stacked skewed; they’ll come down on you sure as stone won’t melt.  Best to stack ‘em again now, hurry up.”
“Bah!” said Mirmar the head lumberjack, swatting him on the head.  “Too slow!  Where were you five minutes ago, boy?  Speed up!”
Canno sped up.  He took care.  He found that doing both at once was immeasurably difficult, but he did it, he and the others boys that lived in the New Kiln’s cramped, dry interior.  There were four of them, all as withdrawn and wan as he (there had been a fifth, but he vanished before long had passed – he had been quick to boast, and Canno suspected he’d been caught talking to strangers), so much so that between errands and their own shyness, more than three months had passed before they exchanged each other’s names. 
“Plalt,” said Plalt, the skinny one.  He was nearly as quick at the chores as Canno was, but far twitchier.  He needed to take care much more often. 
“Tagmus,” said Tagmus, the big one.  He was tall, yes.  He was broad, yes.  He was not fat – at least, not any more.  The thin gruel they sipped wasn’t near enough to keep them fat, not least with their work. 
“Hullger,” said Hullger, the pale one.  Hullger did little.  Very little.  He was quite good at it, Canno had noticed – he’d move just a hair slower than he needed to, be just a bit more fussy than he had to, anything to slow down the day.  Canno envied him one moment, despised him the next. 
They didn’t get much farther than introductions.  The very next day, their workloads were near-doubled, and their sleeping quarters were moved.  “You are here to work, not to chatter,” Garren Ashmaster told them all as they were separated.  He never smiled unless someone else had stopped, Garren did.  The others were different shades of dour, but he was diabolical. 
Keplak was different.  Keplak was the nearest thing Canno had to a friend.  Keplak was the one who suggested that the boys be taken into town for the next trading. 
“They’ll talk,” Garren argued. 
“Of what?  They know nothing, not yet.  Or are you afraid they’ll speak of the quality of Utu’s cooking?”
“They will talk, and that will teach them to talk later, when they know secrets.  No, no, they should not go!”
“Or,” said Keplak, “they will learn to not talk.  And they had best do so now, while they know nothing should they fail, eh?”
Garren fussed and groused a bit longer, but his heart was no longer in it.  And so it was that Canno found himself sitting on a wagon with the other three boys, legs dangling as Half-leg piloted them into town, forever half-a-step ahead of the plodding mule that towed them.  If the charcoal-burner who had rescued Canno had any other name, no one seemed to know it. 
“Remember,” they’d been told as the wagon left the broad, treeless clearing that the charcoal mounds squatted in like sleeping tortoises, “say no word.  Not even to Half-leg.  Not even to each other.”
So they didn’t speak.  Instead, they silently competed in a game of who could flick a pebble the furthest behind the cart.  Tagmus won by a good foot and a half with a cunning ricochet that he insisted after the trip wasn’t luck. 
The town was strange.  The children stared, the adults stood back, the trading with Half-leg was slow and reluctant, with many awkward pauses and hurried, failed attempts at easing the silence with senseless remarks on the parts of the townsfolk. 
The charcoal-burners keep secrets, they whispered, the sound arising from the air rather than any particular mouths.  Great secrets.  Treasure?  Gold?  Magic?  I heard they guard a sleeping king, I hear tale of angel’s graves, I know of portals to fiery pits and wrathful demons.  They keep secrets. 
“Hello,” said a little girl to Canno, interrupting the sounds that he wasn’t listening to. 
He nodded at her. 
“It’s rude not to say hello back,” she explained to him.  “My momma told me that.”
Canno made a face and cut across his throat with his hand.  She frowned.  “Got a cold?  Daddy had a sore throat once.  He couldn’t talk at all.”  She scratched her nose and examined the cart.  “Daddy said you hide treasure in your mound.  Have you seen any treasure?”
Canno shook his head. 
“Not even a little?  A tiny bit of gold at all?”
Canno made a face. 
“Oh don’t be mean!  Fine then.  Keep your stupid treasure, you dirty dumb thing!”  She stomped on the ground and ran away.  She hadn’t yet made it out of sight before incredible pain reached Canno’s ear and dragged him over to Half-leg’s side. 
“I didn’t save you for you to give away our secrets, boy,” the man whispered, low and fast and threatening.  “By word or otherwise.  Now hush up.  One more incident like this and Garren’ll know.  You want Garren to know?”
Canno started to shake his head, then paused. 
“Good boy.  You keep still now.  Don’t move a muscle ‘till we’re back home or you’ll get a lot worse than a pinched ear.”
Canno didn’t participate in the second round of the rock-flicking contest.  He didn’t miss much; the others were too terrified to play well, and so it petered out miserably halfway back, comfier though the return journey was with bags of wheat and barley and other goods to sit atop rather than the hard piles of charcoal. 
“Remember,” Half-leg said, leading him aside as the others hurried back to their pallets, “you say nothing.  Not a word, not a gesture.  What secret we keep here isn’t for you to know.  Not yet.  And it is never yours to give away.  Understood?”
“Yes,” said Canno. 
It wasn’t really a lie.  Not really. 
He understood perfectly what he was being told.  He just wasn’t promising to do it. 

Six years after his promise, Canno was beginning to grow slightly more hair on bits of his face than there should be.  His voice had dropped into a pit and never fallen out, though it kept an edge of harshness from his work amidst the burning wood and the fire at home so long ago – sometimes he still frightened himself when he spoke, back bracing against an expected scolding from one of the senior charcoal-burners. 
There were other little boys now, two of them.  One, Yemmic, he had witnessed being brought in by Mirmar, who had found him wandering the woods in a daze.  He’d tried to bite and scratch and had understood no human words when he first came, but now he fetched and carried as obediently as Canno had, once upon a time.  The other was little more than a face that he occasionally ordered to bring him fuel when he was tending a fire. 
Tending fires was all he did now it seemed.  Somehow, along the way, he and Tagmus, Hullger, and Plalt had been split apart, separated along unseen lines and sent to learn different portions of the trades.  Tagmus laboured under Mirmar to chop the wood and heave it in; Hullger laboured hard for the first time in many years under Keplak’s watchful eye; and Plalt learned to be the fast, roaming hands of Half-leg, whose peg troubled him more every winter. 
A shadow fell across Canno’s back, followed by a sharp poke with a pipe handle.  “How burns the fires?  Speak ye up!”
Canno had been hand-picked by Garren, for what reason he could not tell.  Perhaps the Ashmaster required a handy whipping boy at all times, perhaps he was too old to watch the charcoal smoulder as long as he wished to.  Whatever reason, Canno spent his days and nights in observation now, in memorizing and realizing the patterns of the coals and burnings, in tasting a smoke’s thickness and hearing the whistling sound of a fire that needed banking, in finding and decoding the tiny scraped runes and messages that charcoal-burners years past had left on the timbers to help along his kind years later.  He worked in the Younger Mound now, a maze that seemed all but endless, a warren of tunnels and burning pits rigged carefully, ventilation tilted just so, where one careless handful of dirt could ruin fires left burning for decades or suffocate all within.
“They burn well,” said Canno.  Garren had done one good thing for him: it was near-impossible for him to find his own voice harsh as long as the old charcoal-burner was near. 
“Bah!  Details, mind ye!”
Canno forced himself not to flinch at the second, heavier jab as he thought his way through the last few hours.  “The pine layer has become heavy.  The clay grade is constant.  There are notes jotted down that appear to be counts of trees needed to complete the pile – we are two-thirds through their total.  The charcoal burns steady, and should be ready in another eight months to a year.”
“Pah!  And it took ye that long?  I learned that much just at a glance!”  Garren spat in disgust.  “Details, boy, details!  Ye fuss over details like an old hag, when what ye’re looking for be as plain as the nose on yer face!  Away with ye and yer details, and go to fetch me a good fine coal from our outer layers.”
“Where from?” asked Canno, and knew it was the wrong question precisely too late. 
Garren turned near purple.  “DETAILS!  Pah!  Perhaps I was wrong when I kenned ye had some semblance of a brain jellying its way about yer skull!  Forget the coal!  Get ye to the heart of the Younger Mound, get ye to my pallet, and ye’re not to move from its side ‘till ye can name me each and every coal within six feet of it.  If ye must learn, ye will learn now!  GO!”
Whatever worries and resentment Canno had felt were washed away in a tide of enthusiasm that he was careful to keep hidden as he dashed away down the tunnels, excitement building in his veins like a second heartbeat.  To the heart of the mound.  To see the secrets, to see what the charcoal-burners guarded so close and so near, to know what no one outside of the mound did…
Finding the heart chamber took some time.  Mustering the self-control to let his heartbeat drop back down to something normal so he could enter the room without hyperventilating all the meagre oxygen that remained within it took longer – the Ashmaster must have had cinderheaps for lungs to ignore it in his sleep. 
Inside, there was almost no light, no heat-glow at all.  Canno reached down and plucked up a coal, held it in his hand.  There was warmth, just above the temperature of the air.  Faint, but there. 
Warmth, and nothing else.  No secrets here.
It was two days before Garren came for him.  Canno’s throat was becoming too dry to speak through when the report was demanded, his finger’s numbed with ashes and heat blisters that had built up over patient hours of careful grasping, his only means of identifying the invisible coals in the darkness. 
“I can name them all,” he said. 
“Good.  Do it.”
By the time he was done speaking, Canno’s voice was no more there than it had been after he’d been plucked from the embers of his home by Half-leg. 
“Good,” grinned Garren.  “Good.  Ye’ve made a start.  Perhaps we’ll have ye out of here and in the Elder Mound someday after all, instead of just throwing yer bones to it.”
Canno croaked out something before he could stop himself. 
“Yes, yes, good, bone would spoil it, yes.  Good to know ye can still think.  Now go and sleep.  But not too long; ye’ve work to do.”
Canno brooded even as he dreamt, thoughts looming through the sea of sleep like icebergs.  No secrets after all in the mound’s heart, only the dark and barely-there remnants of coals.  How long had the Ashmaster and that before him kept them burning, barely-alive?  No secrets there.  None to explain the whispers, the rumours, the awe.  What were the charcoal-burners hiding?
Canno forgot what he’d been dreaming of when he awoke.  But some part of him remembered that: the charcoal-burners were hiding something.  Not him. 

Canno did go to the Elder Mound someday – someday was more than a decade of labour away.
People came and left – the children grew up, and he had two of them working under him (‘children’ was a broader age category than he would’ve said it to be, a decade ago), examining the coals as he walked the long roads and trails to scout for new lumber-spots, nodding hellos to startled stranger-eyes that followed his tracks with wonder at this legend that tread their paths.  Garren was less and less sneering in his speech, though he remained spiteful.  Mirmar had been struck by a tree, and Tagmus now was the chief lumberjack, doling out errands and harsh language to the young.  Plalt and his assistants managed the trips to town, and Half-leg spent more and more of his time warming his stump in the fiercer heat of the Younger Mound.  Hullger’s softened limbs were corded now, though try as he might, Keplak could still beat him and any other at arm wrestling simultaneously. 
He could talk in town now on the days he went with Plalt, albeit of no secrets.  Still they asked, still they stared, asking with their eyes, their minds. 
“Come in then,” coughed Garren.  “Come on!  Take us in.”
Canno shifted more of the weight of the Ashmaster onto his shoulder, walking arm in arm with the old man as they tottered their way into the mouth of the strangely small opening that was the Elder Mound’s only entrance.  Canno had to duck to enter – Garren didn’t, hunched as he was. 
Inside was all but darkness.  No coals glowed in the deep dark of the Elder Mound – they smouldered, smothering themselves under their own smoke, keeping their burning to a dull roar.  A glance and a sniff told Canno’s senses of fires that were older than the entire Younger Mound, here at the very freshest rim of the mound’s vast bulk. 
“Inward,” wheezed Garren.  “I will direct the turns.  Now, get ye going.”
Slowly, slowly, much more slowly than Garren would’ve liked (but out of necessity – the old man was near-toppling even at a crawl), they moved inwards and outwards, back and forth.  Sometimes Canno swore they were moving in circles, sometimes he half-imagined that the passages had closed behind them.  He gave up trying to keep track, and resigned himself to walking as the halls grew ever darker and smokier.  Air vents were few and tiny, a mole’s warren chewed into the ceiling without rhyme or reason that all his knowledge could divine. 
“Every one of us comes this way,” Garren said. 
Canno resisted the urge to start at the words, coming unbidden, without instruction. 
“Every one of us,” the Ashmaster repeated.  “Ye’re earlier than most.  Yer fellows will be along inside the next eight years.  First under thirty to walk these halls since I, mind ye well it daren’t go to yer head.”
Canno nodded.  Talking still pained him since his examination of the coals in the heart of the Younger Mound.  His voice was harsher than any in all the kilns now. 
“Early, but it has to come some day for all.  All of us.  It’s time ye knew, as we all must.  Ye’re to be the Ashmaster one day, and ye must know of what ye speak and don’t speak when ye talk to the others, the outside-folks.”  Wearied as he was, Garren’s voice managed to dredge up some extra bit of venom for those last few words. 
“They speak of us, ye ken this well.”
Canno nodded.
“They buy our charcoal, trade for it, ken ye?  We make enough to let us live, but in return they get…. Answer me, boy.”
Canno’s throat felt clogged.  It always did.  “Fuel.”
“Aye.  But think ye: are they not blanketed in it?  Look about these forests boy, and ye cannot help but tread over fine pine on every other step.”  He paused for a coughing fit, while Canno silently supported him, feeling his ribs beat violently against his palms, so twiglike. 
“Nay,” he managed, resuming his shuffling walk.  “No fuel their wish.  They think it be, but what they think and what is so be not so the same, eh?  Always is.  Tell me, for ye has been outside more lately than I: what do they say that we keep in our barrow-kiln here?  What do they think we hold, eh?  More than fuel, surely.”
“Treasure.  Prisoners.  Magic.  Ancient things.”
“Aye, aye, aye.  And now ye’ll see what is real and what isn’t, and we’ll show their fables what the truth is.” 
They stood before a dead end, a tumbledown earthen wall. 
“Clear it ‘way, and be with care.  The heart be beyond.”
The rubble was old, and crumbled easily under Canno’s hands.  He wondered a little, that such disrepair would be allowed in such a special spot, but then all was lost and forgotten as Garren Ashmaster drew himself up straight and dragged him inside by the hand. 

The heart of the Elder Mound was around him. 
It was small, maybe teen foot across. 
It was dim, with a tiny beam of light filtering from above, a flue the size of his fist that wound its way up through how many metres of sod and timber and coals he could not imagine. 
It was almost completely bare.  A small stone fireplace sat in its centre.  A crude, small, ordinary ring of stones that Canno himself had fashioned more than once on a night spent on the trek. 

“Now ye see,” said Garren.  “Now do ye understand as well?”
Canno considered this. 
“No,” he said.
“None do, at first.  Listen then.”  The Ashmaster shuffled over to the fireplace, began pulling lumps of charcoal from his clothing, fill it up. 
“The mound went up long ago.  No one remembers why.  The charcoal-burning was all there was at first, as ye say, but then there came more later, when the town was built and rebuilt and yet we stayed here, building more upon more.  We became older than they, ye ken?  They began at the same time, but we are hoarier.”
“Now.  They began to think of us as things of awe and to be afeared of, ye ken?  Such happens.  Such is helpful.  They direct this upon us, they take up all their dreams and nightmares and fantasies, and they bestow them upon us.  Keeps them from wandering, ye ken?”  The Ashmaster chuckled – or maybe wheezed – as he struck flint to tinder and set a piece of cloth alight.  “Wealth?  I will tell ye what wealth is: nothing.  I will tell what comfort is: nothing.  There is but one thing a man wants, however much wealth and comfort he possesses, and that is to have power over another man.  And we have the power of them all, by right of this fire.”  He slapped one of the rocks carelessly with his hand.  “It be empty.  It be useless.  It be nothing more than some old rocks, no elder than any other ye may have used yerself out in the forest for a night’s warmth.  Nothing special, nothing necessary.  But it holds ye in its grasp, don’t it?  Ye hunger for something more, something that must be here.  As do they.  But there’s nothing here, be they know it not, and so all of their dreams come here to this place and serve us, all their hopes and fears and blighted fancies, all of them right here, under our palms.”  The last words were a sword, echoed with a stab of the pipe at the fireplace. 
“Now,” said Garren, recovering himself somewhat.  He held out the light, and Canno took it, watching the little flame creep its way towards his fingers. 
“Burn them.”

Canno thought, and looked, and watched, and stood.  And then he dropped the light to the floor and placed one foot over it, swivelled it three times from side to side. 
Garren did not look surprised.  He was grateful to the old man for that; he’d have been disappointed if he fell apart so easily. 
“Most wait ‘till it reaches their fingers,” he said.  His voice was flat, strangely so – almost all the spittle and scorched heat had dropped away without warning.  “They wait ‘till they’re near-burnt themselves, and then they light it.”
“Don’t want to,” said Canno. 
“Bigger than that, eh?  A fine thinker, boy.”  He laughed, a strange sound, a wrong one.  It bounced around the cramped little heart of the mound like a big dog in a small room, and it didn’t sound funny at all by the time it was through.  “I ask you to burn the imaginary, and you say it’s pointless.  Maybe it is.”  He laughed again, louder, hurting Canno’s ears with the sharpness of the sound.  “It is! Hah!  Ye kenned it!  Right on the spot!  Good boy!  No need for the flame, no need for the ceremony, when all is but ash and illusion!  Good!  Just to cut ye and rub the ash in then, and ye are Ashmaster beyond me.”  Up came his hand, clutching a handful of old fire-leavings, old tinders and coals mixed to nothing.  A knife glinted in his other, silver over the palm.    “Give me yer arm.”
“Don’t want to,” repeated Canno, taking painful precision with each syllable. 
“What.” said Garren.  There was no question in it, just an expression of emotion. 
“Keep it,” said Canno, lining up words.  Each one hurt, but keeping them in hurt more.  Especially after all those years.  “Keep it.  Keep all the labour, all the ceremony, all the fuss.  Keep it.  Keep your lies and half-truths and lead-ons all you want.  Keep them.  But you won’t keep this.  And you won’t keep burning their dreams.” 
And with that he plucked up the light from the floor and blew on it, and was not surprised at all when it burst into flame again.  Garren was old, and had let him perform his duties one time too many, let his senses dull to what was obvious to younger eyes.  Canno knew how to make any spark live again. 
Garren must have seen what he was planning – there he came with the knife, a wordless screech soaring out from between gummed lips, all three of them clattering to the floor in different directions as Canno shoved him down with one hand.  With the other, he raised up the light, up to the roof.
Garren screamed at him to stop, or maybe just screamed.  Either way, Canno ignored him.  He thrust the light into the roots, and began to drag the Ashmaster away. 

Finding the exit was easier than he’d thought.  The first licks of his newborne flame had stirred the air, set it a-flowing in ways he knew much moreso than the stale and dead breath he’d walked into.  Carrying Garren out was no trouble either – he’d practically done it on the way in. 
There were shouts, screams, calls all around as he left the Elder Mound; already the flames licked from the roof, spread in the cold wind.  Before long they’d jump to the others.  Slow but sure, hotter than any hell, that was a true charcoal burn, a glutton consuming a thousand-year feast.  There would be no stopping this blaze, but plenty of time to avoid it, to abandon the warrens of the Kiln and the Mounds, to leave the dreamcatchers before they fell to pieces and let their captive imaginations free. 
He laid Garren down on the ground – the old man had fallen into a stupor at some point during the journey, perhaps from exertion, perhaps from lack of air, perhaps in terror – and walked away, into the trees.  The heat followed him, decreasing only reluctantly as he travelled.  There would be no battling that fire, not with water nor dirt nor all the power in the world. 
Canno saw another man on the trail.  He was near town, after all. 
As he drew close, he saw the man’s eyes go strange, and he burst out laughing. 
“Nothing, nothing,” he reassured the man.  “It’s nothing.”
“What is?”
“Back there.  It’s nothing.”  A blank stare was his only reply.  “Never mind.  You’ll see, for a change.  You’ll see soon, all of you.”  And all your dreams let free. 
Canno walked south.  The cold he didn’t mind, not anymore.  But he would be happy to go where he would not need the light of fires. 

“Kindling” copyright 2010 Jamie Proctor. 

It was a cooler, calmer sort of December evening.  The stars were right, the moon was bright, and the planets all spun in a row, tilting just so, and up came Tarrow from beneath the old rock cairn, a thousand years of care-worn, weather-smoothed stone thrown away like old rags.  Up he came and up he came, big-backed, dirt-smeared, filth clinging to his legs from the dirt that he had tainted around him in his long imprisonment.  He shook his mane and flexed his paws and grinned with each and every one of his teeth.  The land had moved around a bit, and where once his barrow-prison had lain in a field, it now sat on a little island in a small lake.  Short grass grew where weeds had wandered once. 
“I am Tarrow!” he bellowed out to whoever might be near, and whoever might be far, too.  “My father was a black night in midwinter and my mother was a cold stone!  I have eaten more men than can be counted on all my fingers and theirs too!  And I am awake!”
He waited. 
A duck quacked at him from the pond and swam away, bill searching for little weeds. 
Tarrow belched, grunted, and hauled himself out and away, wading through the lake.  It came up to his hips at the deepest, and half its waters turned black from the caked muck that washed away from his body.  He emerged dripping, and as yet unchallenged.  Strange noises surrounded him, now that he paused to hear – a constant murmur and rumble in the air around him, a hum of many.  A city, maybe? 
Then Tarrow looked up.  And up.  And further up.  Far, far above him loomed strange shapes, little mountains with steep sides and shiny walls, glowing with a thousand lights, towers he’d never imagined imagining. 
A city?  But a city at night.  That was still good.  They had lights aplenty, but they’d be busy in revelry.  Safe as prey still, but strange with their castles.  Maybe they’d had giants make them.  Strange, such a chill in the air with no snow on the ground.  Wasn’t it winter?
Tarrow pushed through brush, stamped down footpaths.  The strange, spiky little grey pebbles they’d been lined with stuck in his toenails and made him itch and scrape, and he vowed to eat his first victim most painfully.  The arms first, of course.  Then the legs, then the belly, and then the head, because it was crunchy.  Yes, that would do.  Do so nicely and very well.  So preoccupied did Tarrow become in his plans that he very nearly missed noticing the strange new path he’d come to, a flat hard black one that felt smooth and gritty against his horny, rock-hard feet.  On the other side, humans walked in soft clothing, uncovered by armour, weak little peasants. 
“Food!” roared Tarrow, stepping farther into the black path, and it was only by the sheerest of luck that the big metal roaring thing that passed along it at a speed impossible didn’t take off his toes.  He lurched backwards in surprise, ears full of its calamitous wails, and was nearly taken by another that passed behind him, clipping his tail and spinning him like a giant, hairy top.  Whirling, he stumbled his way to the other side of the black path and collapsed, nearly on top of two humans. 
“Watch it,” snapped one, waving a bit of strange metal in his hand.  To Tarrow’s nostrils, it smelt like smoke and bitterness. 
“Careful there,” warned the other. 
“Too late for that, isn’t it?  And keep your mind on the present – hand me that wallet.”
“Fine, fine.”  The human gingerly removed a bit of leathery square-cut thing from his clothing and gave it to the other. 
“Thanks,” said the other, tucking it away.  “Pleasure doing business with you.  Don’t call the cops or I’ll turn around and shoot.”  He turned and walked off, pocketing the metal thing. 
“Are you all right?” asked the other human of Tarrow, who was still prone. 
“I am Tarrow,” said Tarrow.  “I crack ice with my breath and stone with my fist.  I have bitten through iron and steel and have thrown my enemies leagues with a single heave.”
“Well, here, have some change.”  The human tossed a single, shiny coin onto Tarrow’s stomach, and walked away. 
Tarrow examined it.  It didn’t seem to change. 
He needed counsel. 
“Human,” he asked of a particularly small specimen, walking by quickly, “answer or I will eat your skull: what does this change?”
It walked faster, without looking back.  Tarrow’s double-take prevented him from consuming the impertinent thing. 
“What does this change?” he demanded of the next passer-by. 
“I don’t have any, sorry, good luck, see you later,” said the human.  It didn’t look directly at him, and it didn’t look back. 
Tarrow picked up the next human by the neck.  “ANSWER, frost eat your bones!  What does this change?!”
“Police!” screamed the human.  “Help!  Assault!  Theft!  Armed robbery!”
“Which one?” asked Tarrow. 
“You have the right to waive all rights,” said a human.  There was something special about that voice, a firmness, a sureness.  Tarrow had heard that before, usually from humans with sharp weapons just before they tried to cut his belly out.  He turned around, and saw that it was coming from a human wearing some sort of strange hat.  It was holding one of the little metal smoky things. 
“I am Tarrow, consumer of men!” he told it.  It was probably some sort of hero, and deserved a boast.  “I will crack your ribs and break your liver.”
The human’s metal smoker yelled at him, his forehead stung, and he fell asleep without meaning to.  When he woke up, he was in a room made from grey, cold, smooth stone that crumbled at his touch, secured with black-painted metal bars, which bent under his hands.  He wandered into an arched hall, stomping with anger, following the air current to the exit. 
“Your walls cannot hold me!” he roared at the human at the desk.  It too bore the strange hat. 
“You’re out,” it told him.  “Eighteen hours holding for your first offence and don’t try it again.  Damned lucky you’re obviously not right in the head.”
Tarrow’s belly grumbled, but the human had another metal smoker at its side, and he didn’t want to waste more time sleeping. 
“I will return and tear down your prison,” he said, as he left.  The human rolled its eyes. 
It was only when he stepped outside that Tarrow first began to realize just how strange a place he was in.  The smooth grey stone was underfoot everywhere, divided by the great black-grit paths and pooling about the feet of the great metal mountains, towers and halls grown beyond all sanity and all belief.  He’d just left one of the smallest, and for the first time in his life, Tarrow felt small.  In answer to this, he clasped onto the first thing he had in his head, a distraction, a purpose. 
“What does this change?” he asked a human sitting on the sidewalk. 
“Eh?”  It stirred in its blankets, squinted a shrunken eye at him.  It was nearly as filthy as he was. 
“This,” said Tarrow, holding out the coin.  “What does it change?”
“Hmm,” said the human.  “Right.  Well, this is what it does.  See, you have that, right?  So you’re worth something.”  It took the coin.  “There.  Now you’re not worth anything.  That’s what it changes.”
“Give me my coin,” said Tarrow. 
“No.  You wanted to learn something, you paid for it.  Now go away; this is my corner.”
Tarrow reached out with his hands ready to throttle, but the human with the strange hat was still watching him from the window, and he contented himself with spitting on the blanketed human’s feet.  Its shoes bubbled. 
“I am Tarrow,” he reminded himself.  “I can chew boulders and split trees with a flick.  I will leave and find smaller pastures, with easier flesh and no metal smokers.”
Hours later, Tarrow was lost.  The endless maze of the towers blotted out the sky, and the sun was lost in a haze of grey grime that put the dirt under his nails to shame.  The winds bent strangely around the buildings, and there were no trees for him to check the moss on. 
And he was getting very hungry.  There were no strange-hatted humans about, perhaps it would be safe to chance a quick meal.  He ducked into a dark crevice between buildings, lay lurking for a time, and snatched a human into his grasp with one great paw. 
“Meat!” he growled. 
“Mugger!” yelled the human, and held up a little metal cylinder that shot bright agony into Tarrow’s eyes, burning them like a plague of fire ants.  He dropped his prey and roared in pain, stumbled and fell against a metal box filled with refuse, which bruised his sides.  A cat hissed at him. 
“Food,” groaned Tarrow.  “I need food.  Food.”  He ate something out of the refuse box that was far too salty, and promptly brought it up again.  The cat, tragically, evaded his grasp. 
“You okay, man?” asked a ragged human near the alley’s rear. 
“Food,” said Tarrow, and ate it.  The fibers of its clothing stuck in his teeth and tangled his tongue, and the meat tasted rank and strange, making his mouth feel numb and clumsy.  He stumbled back into the main road in a daze, following it with his feet as his eyes wandered at random.  Metal roaring things everywhere, humans everywhere, all not looking at him or at each other.  He felt even smaller among them than he had against the towers that blotted him in. 
Except they weren’t blotting him in anymore. 
“Hah!” laughed Tarrow, legs pumping like pistons, charging him forwards to the suddenly-revealed horizon, joy in his blackened, rock-hard heart.  There it was: the way out, the end of the metal and stone city that never ended, the way to trees – yes, there were trees, small and twisted and blighted but trees yes – and water and freedom. 
“Hah!” laughed Tarrow, as he vaulted the black road, dodging a metal roaring thing, hearing it scream at him.  He plunged into the tamed, sad thing that passed for a wilderness as humans yelled at him. 
“Hah!” yelled Tarrow, tearing down saplings in his haste. 
“Oh,” said Tarrow, as he came to a very familiar lake.  “Oh.  Oh.”  The ruin of his barrow leered at him from its other side. 
He stood there, staring at it, trying to think of a way out, something to stop him from doing what he was about to.  Nothing presented itself, argue as fiercely as he could while his legs slogged through the mire of the lake’s waters.  It was still fouled from his earlier passage. 
“I am Tarrow,” said Tarrow, as he stood in front of the broken stones.  They seemed much smaller than they had when he had broken free just one day ago.  “My father was a black night in midwinter, but this is no winter, and the nights are bright.  My mother was a cold stone, but cold stones surround me and they are not she.  I have eaten more men than I can count on all my fingers and toes and theirs too, but now I cannot stomach so much as one.  I am Tarrow, and I am through.”
As the last words left his lips he stepped forwards, unwilling, unwanting, and lay down.  The rocks closed over his head and sank down into the earth, and the grass was left undisturbed over Tarrow’s head, without so much as a scrap of fur left behind. 
Not one soul turned to mark the cairn’s passing, then or ever. 

“Tarrow,” Copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor. 

Norman Sullivan walked into his apartment and took off his coat, brushing flower petals from its surface that had adhered as he walked by the bushes outside the building.  As the jacket passed by his face on its way to the coat-stand, he couldn’t smell the roses.
Norman couldn’t smell the roses, and it was because of this that he did not stand there, stopped flat for a moment as memories arose of fourteen summers ago, of Betty Newmarket, and of how she’d never once gone outside without brushing herself with a whiff of that rose-scented perfume of hers.  Just a hint, a touch, enough to rise gently above the smell of her skin – and how quickly that had overpowered the roses indoors, in her room.  He hadn’t thought about those days for years and years, but they were lying right underneath the delicate membrane of his surface thoughts, just waiting for the right trigger, the small and soft scent that he was waiting for; the trigger to walk his feet right to the desk, to the phonebook, to the page, to the number he hadn’t looked at for so very long.
But Norman couldn’t smell the roses, and so his coat went onto the hook in a businesslike manner, efficiently, smoothly, no pause for recollection, no fuss, no muss.  Norman couldn’t smell the roses, or much else, and he hadn’t been able to since eighteen weeks and three days ago, on the day that he hadn’t asked the street man the question.  The street man had worn a ragged coat and broken gloves and a battered and beaten hat with holes in it, and he had asked Norman for change, and as Norman pressed a dollar into the street man’s hand Norman had not asked him the question, which was “why?”
Norman hadn’t asked the street man the question, and it was because of this that he had not watched the man’s eyes widen at the word, because of this that he had not stood and listened as out of the street man’s mouth came words to challenge his word, from under his bruised hat and about his gesturing and cracked gloves.  The street man’s story washed over him, a story so very real and ordinary.  He spoke of things that Norman was amazed at, of trips to places Norman had barely heard of in atlases, of people met and conversations held that Norman barely understood.  He spoke of things that Norman recognized so very deeply, of the crunchiest toast with the finest jam of all, which, he said, was strawberry, of the grumpy tragedy of being thirteen and laid up alone on a Friday night with measles.  He spoke of things that tied him to the street and the ground and the world and Norman in a manner that made him so very real, the realest thing Norman had ever seen and then some, to tell you the truth. 
But Norman hadn’t asked the street man the question, and so he had continued on his way with a quick nod and a good-luck, and as he hurried away with the hunched shoulders of the aimlessly guilty he had risked back a single, furtive glance of hapless woe, and as his head turned back he had walked straight into a lamppost, seeing stars and cracking his nose in a manner that stuffed it up beyond all recognition.  Norman hadn’t asked the question, said the word, or said any words at all that day, because he hadn’t heard the message. 
Norman hadn’t heard the message that morning as he listened to the tape on his answering machine.  His girlfriend had broken up with him on tape, by phone, separated by two machines and a city from him for the safety of sorrow’s sake, and he had listened to the message through of the litany of sins and mistakes and accusations and as the very final second of the tape ticked by he hadn’t heard the whispered message, which was “I’m sorry.”
Norman hadn’t heard the message, and it was because of this that he hadn’t sat there, alone in the bright morning sunlight pouring in through the windows that was so much lonelier than the darkest night, as he listened to that message five more times, one for each sense so he could drink in the whole story, the end of which was a crucial message of “I’m sorry.”  And then he listened to it once more, to be sure that this very precious message in a bottle wasn’t his imagination, wasn’t a figment, a strange sight in a sea far greater than he could imagine, and he thought alone in his room for one hour, making him late to work by exactly that amount.  But he was odd that day – strangely content if not cheerful – and so the words flowed freely from him, if sparingly, all day long. 
But Norman hadn’t heard the message, and so he had sat up after he heard the tape through to its end – the end he missed, you see – and he went to work.  And all day long at work, the longest day of his life, he did not say a single word.  Nor did he after work.  Norman hadn’t heard the message, hadn’t listened again, because he hadn’t tried the muffin. 
Norman hadn’t tried the muffin two years before that as he unpacked the sparse lunch that his girlfriend (the very same, the very same) had sent with him to work at the construction site.  He opened up the small lunchbox that held the bit of food they could afford for the small meal, and he saw a small sandwich, a small can of pop, and a small blueberry muffin.  Norman hadn’t eaten a muffin since first grade, and he shuddered a bit at the memory, and it was at that moment that he hadn’t tried the muffin. 
Norman hadn’t tried the muffin, and it was because of this that he didn’t find out that to his surprise he liked the muffin, he really did like it, and he found himself happy all day at the thought of this old monster becoming a new friend.  He did his duty and then some, all with unrelenting care and focus, and his foreman made a note of him and smiled. 
But Norman hadn’t tried the muffin, and the thought of the wasted half-meal weighed on his mind even as that wasted half-meal grumbled in his gut.  He was depressed, the muffin weighing leaden in his mind, and he went about his duties half-heartedly.  He forgo putting on his helmet properly, and he aimed his nail gun poorly, and it was with a tremor of the weakened wrist and a thunk of compressed air and a ping of metal-on-metal that a nail slipped gently into his right ear after an aerodynamic ricochet, smoothly savaging his hearing in that ear beyond all recognition forevermore.  Norman hadn’t tried the muffin, hadn’t felt that startlingly beautiful taste of blueberry hop onto his tongue, because he hadn’t hugged his friend Thomas Riley. 
Norman hadn’t hugged his friend Thomas Riley four years beyond the muffin as they stood together in an airport lobby, Thomas about to leave on the flight that would take him to Japan and a new career.  Thomas had stood there, arms full of luggage, tongue full of awkward goodbyes, for how do you say farewell to your friend of the playpen, of the elementary school, of life?  Thomas didn’t know what to say, and neither did Norman, and it was at that moment that he hadn’t hugged his friend Thomas Riley. 
Norman hadn’t hugged his friend Thomas Riley, and it was because of this that he didn’t feel Thomas start in surprise before hugging him back two-handed, luggage smacking Norman’s back like awkward clubs.  Thomas boarded his plane as happy and reassured as a man could be, with a smile and a wave through his tears, and they had kept in touch over the years, with visits and drop-ins whenever Thomas’s path and holidays brought him back from overseas.  He had introduced Norman to sushi, and his eagerness and enthusiasm and persistence had made Norman tuck in and had made Norman find to his shock and surprise that perhaps not all food was as bad as it seemed. 
But Norman hadn’t hugged his friend Thomas Riley, and the goodbye had left off with that awkward pair of fair-thee-wells.  Letters were sent laboriously and replied to slowly, and eventually not at all, and Thomas Riley and Norman drifted apart inchingly, slow by slow.  Life was smaller without Thomas’s encouragement, without Thomas’s dares and darts to prod Norman forwards into the new parts of life.  Norman hadn’t hugged his friend Thomas Riley, hadn’t shown his affection for his oldest friend in a way without words, because he hadn’t seen the homework. 
Norman hadn’t seen the homework eight years before the airport as he biked to Betty Newmarket’s house.  The evening’s summer scent was strong, but already he thought he could feel the wind grow chiller by the day.  School was back already and soon the air would smell sharp and cold and the leaves would die in blazes of glory, whole treetop furnaces and bonfires of cataclysmic awe.  He dropped his bike alongside the house in the fading light, and he turned away from it just in time to glance into the living room window and it was at that moment that he hadn’t seen the homework. 
Norman hadn’t seen the homework, and it was because of this that he didn’t stand open-mouthed for a moment, eyes darting between the still-standing, embracing forms of Thomas Riley and Betty Newmarket and the sheaf of papers on the couch that was plainly the script of Romeo and Juliet that was to be performed by the Drama Club – of which both Betty and Thomas were members.  After five or six seconds of this he burst out laughing in astonished relief, and Betty and Thomas fell over each other in shock and profanity.  Norman laughed harder still, as did they when they heard his explanation, and Thomas headed home a bit earlier than he’d planned, leaving he and Betty alone to laugh and more. 
But Norman hadn’t seen the homework, and after a minute, two minute’s pause of absolute stillness he turned back to his bike.  He picked it up very carefully, and rode it home with absolute focus, as if it were the only thing left on earth.  He didn’t know what to say to Betty the next day, or the next, and by the time he heard of the casting roles in the play he had made up his mind – as had Betty, after a week of sudden neglect.   

Norman hadn’t seen the homework, hadn’t turned shock into hilarity, because he’d cut his right hand on Mrs. Newmarket’s rosebush patch in the dark.  It hurt badly, and the pain distracted him. 

And now Norman, fourteen years older, walks into his bedroom, robbed of memories and more; robbed by scent, robbed by voice, robbed by ear, robbed by taste, robbed by touch, robbed by sight, robbed by chance.  And as Norman pulls his shirt over his head, ready to put out the lights and crawl into the realm of sleep, he chances to see the last remnant of his earlier jacket-cleaning: a single rose petal, clinging lightly to the surface of his right sleeve. 
And Norman Sullivan looked at that rose petal, stopped flat for a moment by memories of fourteen summers ago.  And it was because of this that he walked out of his bedroom and over to his desk. 
And Norman Sullivan rubbed that rose petal softly between his hands, feeling the texture roll over him as he stared at it.  And it was because of this that his fingers fumbled for a phone book for a page for a number that he did not need because his other fingers were dialling by memory. 
And Norman Sullivan heard the ringing of the phone once, twice, and thrice, and he heard the receiver pick up and a soft and familiar voice ask “hello.”  And it was because of this that he put down that petal on the desk and cleared his throat. 
And Norman Sullivan spoke to Mrs. Edith Newmarket with friendliness and politeness, inquiring after her, after Thomas – had she heard anything from him? – and most of all, of Betty.  And it was because of this that he acquired two phone numbers from her: one in Tokyo, one closer to home. 
And Norman Sullivan laid aside the first number for now, promising to dial it in the morning.  And it was because of this that, as the phone rang again – once, twice, thrice – and the receiver was picked up, that he almost thought he smelt the roses again. 

Sometimes, it works both ways. 

“Smell the Roses” copyright 2008, Jamie Proctor. 

There was snow, and there were snowflakes.  All over the world, from here to there, coasts to shores, mountains to valleys.  And all of them came from the same place: the House at the End of the North. 
Inside, at the highest room in that house, the cabin-grown-large made from huge logs of glaciated wood, was where Winter sat at his great wooden desk of black pine: a severe, tall, bearded man with the gentle disposition of a corpse and a robe of not-quite-pure white. 
At the moment his sleeves were shoved back over his jagged elbows to leave his cold, bony forearms bare and let his dangling, darting fingers roam free and wild over their task.  At his side on the desk was a colossal glass jar, filled to the brim and just barely above with bulging water; in his hand, an icicle-as-pen, thin and colder than death. 
He was working. 
Here – a dash of the instrument, a single, tiny droplet stolen.  There – to the desk, onto the thin sheet of chilled, clear ice that served him as his canvas.  A nudge, a tickle, and a caress, and it was halfway there already.  Now – a poke, a slip, and a breath, and it was done.  Another snowflake, another little marvel, and as always, unique and perfect.  He blew on it softly, and smiled a warm, cold smile as it blew away through the open window, into the dark and cloudy skies to join its trillions of brothers and sisters.  Far away, the wind howled, the seas froze, the trees groaned, the glaciers rolled. 
Winter was happy, and worked on.  Outside, the snowflakes fell unending. 

Winter sat back at his desk and sighed, stretching his eternally hunched and brittle back.  It was a good morning, here in the place where there were no mornings.  He’d completed seven hundred million snowflakes so far, and he would hope to finish five times as many before the day was done, now that he’d warmed up a bit.  Still, those first few hours of snow were always his most ingenious, he liked to imagine – the burst of creativity running wild before it settled down into a comfortable grind for the remainder of his afternoon.  All well and good.  Imagination had its place, but it could only carry you so far; the rest was pure will. 
He cracked his creviced knuckles, settled in his chair, and prepared to get some really serious snow-crafting done. 
There was a polite knock on the door. 
Winter shook off the figment of his imagination and reached for the jar. 
There was a second knock, a carefully inoffensive rip-rap that wound its way up the narrow, tilting staircases (each crammed with narrower bookcases filled with thinner yet tomes, bound in ice and scribed in sleet) and all the way up to Winter’s study. 
He paused, and listened carefully. 
A third knock echoed through the House at the End of the North, where no one ever visited because no one ever knew. 
Winter got to his feet in such a surprised hurry that he nearly overturned his desk of black pine and shuffled down the stairs, skipping cold, flat steps and tripping over his toes.  The fourth (still polite) knock was just being set in motion as he heaved open the front door, a solid, impassive thing that had once been the heart of an iceberg. 
There was no one there. 
“Excuse me,” said a voice, as polite and mannerly as the knocks, “but are you Grandfather Winter?”
Winter looked farther down.  A very small and fuzzy little animal was sitting on his doorstep. 
“I am no one’s grandfather,” he said.  “And who might you be?”
“I’m a lemming,” said the lemming.  “And I’m sorry to hear that.”
Winter tried to understand this. 
“Why?” he asked, giving up. 
“I have dozens of grandchildren.  I feel sorry for you.”
“They’d be a distraction.”
 “Less than you’d think.”
“Polite, aren’t you?” said winter, stroking his beard with one hand without really noticing.
“I try, Grandfath – Winter.  I make friends, and lots of them.  I am too small to do most things by myself.”  The lemming fidgeted.  “Say, do you mind if I come in?  It’s very cold out here, with no burrow to hide in.”
Winter thought about it.  He’d never had guests before, but he supposed it was the polite thing to do.  Besides, he was well ahead on snowflakes.  He could spare a few minutes. 
“All right,” he said.  “But just for a while.”
The lemming walked in and shivered as the door shut behind him.  Winter’s house was nearly as cold as any snowstorm, the cold that was too heavy to move and simply lay in the air, numbing the skin and drying the eyes as your hair froze solid.  Winter led him to the living room, with chairs made from frost-coated erratics, glacier-borne boulders that had been given to Winter as presents uncounted sums of seasons ago. 
“So,” said Winter, sinking into a thin, thin hollow in the largest of the rocks, “why have you come to my house that no one comes to?”
The lemming curled up on one of the smaller erratics, a stone that normally served as footstool. 
“Well…” he said.  “It’s about the weather.”
“Yes, some of my best work, isn’t it?  Lovely.  I’ve been having so many good ideas the past few weeks that I barely have enough hours in the day to make them.”
The lemming made eye contact with Winter’s feet.  They were bare, and paler than a frightened polar bear.  “It won’t stop snowing.”
Winter tilted his head to the side and frowned.  “I’m sorry, what was the problem?”
“It won’t stop snowing, Grandfa – Winter.  The whole world’s getting too cold and too white for everyone.  Your creativity is killing us.”
“Rubbish,” said Winter.  “The world is better than ever – better off!  All those deformities and misshapen features and all the ugliness ever wrought, all hidden under a smooth, numbing blanket.  No, no, there’s no stopping this, I’m afraid.  You’ll thank me later.”
“Is there no argument to change your mind, Winter?”
“Absolutely not.”  Winter stood up with some difficulty, bones creaking like old, blackened ice, which they were.  “Now, if you’re quite through with your reasons for business, I’d like you to leave now.  I have more snowflakes to shape.”
“If I got outside now, I’ll freeze before an hour’s out.  Please Winter, don’t force me outside.  You invited me inside, I have guest-rights.”
“For those you must eat my food, and you’ve not eaten since you walked in that door.”
The lemming examined the surface of its stony stool carefully.  On it, a patch of lichen had formed, stubbornly clung to life in the face of all reality for untold years, and had just been chipped away at with tiny rodent teeth. 
“Tough and stringy,” apologized the lemming, “but edible.  Forgive me, I was hungry.”
Winter threw up his hands.  “Fine.  Fine!  Badger your way in, take over the house, refuse to leave, sneak right-of-the-guest out from under my nose and empty my pantry if you really must, which of course you will!  Three days is the most that I will give you guest-right, as you well know – and only then if you perform one task each day as gift to me!  Three days and then you leave, whether it’s balmy or frosty outside, whether you are ill or well!  Three, no more!”
“Agreed,” said the lemming.  “And who knows?  Maybe you’ll change your mind by then.”
“Pah!” said Winter.  He stomped upstairs with great force, each footfall tinkling the icicles that littered the ceiling.  
The lemming spent his evening in solitude, alone in the cold dark depths of the House at the End of the North.  Upstairs, all was silent save for the calm softness of falling snow – save Winter.  He listened to the old man’s muttered curses and grumbles – clearly his composure was affecting his craft – and counted the pitter-patter beats of his own little heart.  And after he’d counted off a full hour and a half’s worth of those heartbeats, and Winter’s surliness had died down to a content murmur, he crept over to the window pane – a perfect breath-thin panel of ice Winter had crafted in his younger days, when he was hardy and hale – and peered outside.  A nose bigger than he was peered back at him. 
“Hello,” he whispered to the polar bear, through the glass. 
“Hello, maker-of-friends,” whispered the polar bear very noisily.  Bears can’t help being loud when they speak.  Waiting at seal holes for air the polar bear could make less noise than a passing cloud, but his voice was far too big for anything to be done about it, almost as large and fursome as he was himself.  “How goes it?”
“Well enough.  I have guest-right for three days starting tomorrow.  Grumpy as he is, he won’t break that.”
“Be careful,” warned the bear.  “Changeable and strange is Old Man Winter.  He’ll freeze you solid with a glance and a glare if the fury takes him, and not all the customs of hospitality in the world will save you then.”
“I’m careful,” said the lemming.  “I’ll be cautious.  I’ll be polite.”
“Just so.”  The bear began to turn away, then stopped.  “Are you sure you need nothing?”
The lemming thought carefully.  “Ask the snowy owl to come tomorrow, in the morning.  Ask the fox to stop by the day after, at noon.  The last day, wait outside this door in the evening, and do not move until I ask.  Please.  Those three things are all I’ll need.”
The bear nodded.  “Just so.  Just so.  Good luck, and stay warm.”  He padded away into the white-on-black wilderness and was vanished before a blink had passed. 
The lemming tried to stay warm on the furniture.  It was most difficult. 

Morning came, and down the stairs came Winter, robes clutched tight about himself in the half-sleep that still gripped him as he dawdled to his pantry, feet moving clumsily.  He fumbled to the oven, where the bowl of stew that bubbled there day and night sat, and poured himself a meager bowlful, nose wrinkling at the odour. 
“Is there a problem?” inquired the lemming, who had browsed the lichen from some more of the sitting-room furniture for his breakfast. 
“Nothing to be concerned over,” growled Winter through a gingerly-intaken mouthful of the stuff.  “My breakfast is my own.”
“I’d really like to help, if I could,” said the lemming.  “Consider it my guesting-present for the day.”
Winter set down his spoon.  “The problem is the flavour.  It’s stale.  Turbid.  Old and mouldy.  A real bit and a bite of new taste would spice up my soup for years to come.  But almost the only thing that I haven’t put in the stew yet is the shingles on the roof.  Not a scrap of novelty to be found!  You may yet leave this night if you think you can pay this way.”
“I see,” said the lemming.  “I’ll leave you to your breakfast then.”
Winter growled something unspeakable at the lemming and resumed trying to eat without getting his beard in his mouth, which was much harder than it seemed. 
The stairs were difficult for the lemming, but he persevered, and at last he reached Winter’s workroom.  He beheld the desk, the jar, the icicle-pen, the window, and outside, the snow. 
“Hmm,” said the lemming.  He made his way to the window and called softly three times, then loudly once. 
Down came the snowy owl, tumbling out of the sky in perfect control, plumage all in array and present.  She landed on the windowsill and puffed up all her feathers, half for warmth, half just for the sheer pleasure in her looks. 
“What ho, maker-of-friends?” said the owl. 
“Could you please fetch me a shingle from the roof?” asked the lemming. 
“They are black, bleak ice,” said the owl.  “Most cold to the touch.  Do you have some sort of tool I could use to pull them loose?”
The lemming pointed at the pen.  “Would that do?”
“Cold and more cold, alas,” complained the owl as it snatched up the pen, fluttering for balance on the desktop, “but better this than the other.  Wait but a moment.”
The lemming waited a moment.  While he did, he crept over to the great jar of water, and he urinated in it very carefully and tidily. 
The swish-flap of wings brought the owl back to the windowsill, a cracked and chipped tile clutched in its talons. 
“I’m glad to be rid of it,” she said.  “It nearly burns with its chill, and it snapped the instrument clean in two as I wrested it free, blighted thing.” 
“It can’t be helped,” said the lemming mildly.  “Do not worry.”
“Fare well and good luck – may it aid you in your goals.”
“Thank you,” said the lemming. 

Winter put half the shingle in his stew.  The other half he simply ate, like a piece of frigid toast.  “Delicious,” he proclaimed.  “Magnificent.  I remember hewing these when the world was young, when the waters had come and the fires gone.  They’re nearly as old as the End of the North.  My thanks, guest.”  He departed for his workroom in good humour. 
When he came down again, it was in a much more disturbed mood; brows bunching like thunderclouds.  “My pen has gone missing.”
“Your pen?” asked the lemming.  He was inspecting the bookcases that lined the stairs, pressed near against the walls.  Most of the titles were written in Old Rime, age out of age beyond his understandings or those of any but Winter himself.  “Not irreplaceable, I hope?”
“No, but damned bothersome,” snapped Winter.  “Irksome indeed.  And since there is only one person in the house besides me….”
“I promise to you that I didn’t move your pen,” vowed the lemming, and Winter could hear the truth cooling on his breath as it evaporated into the air.  “Perhaps you misplaced it?”
“All right,” he said grudgingly.  “Perhaps.  I did come downstairs in a hurry last night…maybe it was laid elsewhere.  Bah.  I shall make do without a pen.”
The day went by smoothly enough after that, although Winter complained that eve of difficulty in getting the snowflakes to freeze properly, which he blamed on the lack of his pen.  As the lemming bedded down near the bubbling stewpot – the warmest spot in the House at the End of the North by far – he looked out the window of the kitchen and saw more black than white on the night air. 

The second day dawned, and Winter arrived late for breakfast, and twice as sleepily – thrice he nearly tripped over his own feet on the stairs. 
“Up too late trying to keep up,” he complained.  “Barely doable, trying to make a steady stream of truly fresh flakes under these conditions.  I’d best fall back on my old records.”
“You don’t reuse them, surely?” said the lemming, truly surprised. 
“Never!  Upon my word as the sure cold, there has not been, is not, and will never be a snowflake in this world that is alike to another purely.  But it is much easier to modify an existing design than to create entire.  I believe I will re-examine some of my work from the Cryogenian, draw some inspiration.”  He looked wistful.  “Some of my oldest and greatest work.  It was pole-to-pole you know, or very nearly at least.  So much to do, and it was all done.”  A sigh emerged from him, a pale, whisperly thing.  “Ah, and I thought only last week I was on track to crack that record.  I will make it yet, you hear me?  I shall equal it!”
“Of course,” said the lemming.  “Shall I fetch the tomes for you?”
Winter laughed deep in his thin chest.  “You can’t read, let alone read my eldest writings.  As much as I’m not looking forwards to trawling through all those shelves on all those stairs on but my two knobbly knees, I don’t believe you can do it.”
“I can and will, if it would help you,” said the lemming.  “I’ll be back before your stew is through.”  Winter laughed long and loud as his spoon entered his mouth, with messy results. 
The lemming left the pantry, but travelled to the back door rather than to the stairways, where it quickly scraped a small, short path under the door, there to be met by a sniffling dark nose with sharp pale teeth beneath it. 
“Well met again, friendly little furball,” said the arctic fox.  “Tell me, what do you plan?”
“I’d like it if you could help me find a book, or maybe two.  No more than three at most,” said the lemming. 
A fox’s laugh is a sharp yip-yap.  “I can’t read any more than you can!”
“You can smell, and smell much better than I,” said the lemming.  “Can you smell the coldest and oldest?  The ones whose pages are the faintest with Winter’s scent?”
“I can do that,” proclaimed the fox confidently.  “But I’ll need a good strong smell to get a base from, something he uses constantly.  A bit of his robe, maybe?”
The lemming thought carefully.  “No, I’ve got a better idea.  He has a desk upstairs, one he sits at for hours.  A good piece of that should do, one we can bring with us so his smell stays sure in your head.”
The fox wrinkled its muzzle.  “Mocking my skills, are we, little furball?” it said. 
“Never.  But we need to be fast.  Winter’s breakfast is already half-done, if I’m any judge.”
With that they nipped upstairs as quick as sticks, the lemming riding the much swifter fox, who found the stairs a nuisance rather than a labour. 
“A piece from right here, where he makes a habit of resting his hand, would that do?” inquired the lemming of the fox, as they stood at the desk.
It sniffed.  “Yes, yes, perfect.  Stand back and watch for my teeth!”  Snip-snap and out came a splintered shard of the black pine, then it was down the stair and up and down the bookcases, all at a trit-trot pace that the lemming found rather too bracing for his liking. 
“Here,” said the fox, stopping at a case squeezed in and a bit behind of the others, hunched back like the smallest bear at a whale carcass.  “The second shelf from the bottom, the middle pair.  Need a hand with them?”
“I’ll be fine, thank you,” said the lemming, eyeing the volumes with unease.  “Besides, I think I just heard him belch his last downstairs.  You’d better run.”
“Good luck – for us all,” called the fox, and it was gone.  Winter found the lemming on the stairs some five minutes later, still struggling to surmount the third step. 
“Well,” he said.  “Maybe not before my stew is done after all!  Nevertheless I am generous, and will count this as your guest-gift.”  He scooped up the books and clutched them to his chest, coddling them.  “Ah, ah yes!  Oh, this will make it all flow again, you’ll see!”
With that, he fled upstairs in haste, leaving the exhausted lemming to make his way back down to his stewpot nesting place alone. 

That evening, Winter came downstairs to pour over his books, nursing a sore palm. 
“Is there a problem?” asked the lemming. 
“A splinter on my desk,” said Winter, sucking at the cut.  “It took less than a second to shoot in and more than an hour to mend halfway properly, and by then my efforts were shot.  Another setback.  Bah!  Tell me, was this your doing?” 
“You have my promise that I did not damage your desk,” said the lemming. 
“Hrrmph,” said Winter.  “Neatly said.  But still, all too many setbacks these past days, truth or no!”  He stroked the tomes with care, blue-tipped fingers on a white surface.  “With these…with these I’ll be caught up soon enough.  You have my thanks large, lemming.”  But still he thought that he would be glad to see the back of the rodent come tomorrow night.  Trouble seemed to follow him around, and he’d seen a wet paw-print on his back door, like that of a fox. 
“A word,” said Winter, as he rose to take to his bed.  “I’ve had a chance to think up a guest-gift for you in advance, for once, so you needn’t be in such a rush to find one on the morrow.  Your task will be to bar all entrance to my dwelling.  I must repair and replace some of my instruments, and I don’t want any disturbances.  You must allow no one in, understood?”
The lemming thought. 
“Yes.  Understood.”
Winter slept soundly, chuckling to himself.  The lemming had a more restless night, head whirling in and out of wild dreams to crossbreed them with worried ideas.  He looked out the window, and was comforted by the clearness of the night sky. 

The lemming woke to find Winter risen early, already finished his breakfast and busily opening up the trapdoor that sank into the living room floor, eyes gleaming and teeth bared with the enjoyment of good, productive work. 
“Up so late, are you?” he called out, and cackled.  “Come!  Come!  Come and keep watch at the door!  Remember, allow no visitors, passerbys, foes, or friends to enter, not as long as I am busy, is it clear?” 
“Perfectly,” said the lemming. 
Winter went below, chuckling all the while.  Down there in the white, long caves of his cellar he kept his supplies of frozen number and his carving tools, laid out neatly and firmly in rows upon rows.  He would mend his desk today it, smooth it careful and neat.  Perhaps later, when his guest had left, he would turn to the all-important tasks of replacing his pen and changing his water (how lacking it seemed lately!) from the long and lonely wastes outside the House at the End of the North, but for now, a chore closer to home would do.  So much to complete later, outside his home, but how sweeter it all would be when it was complete, how fine it would be to be back on track.  And one of the bits of celebrating he’d thought over last night that had sent him to sleep smiling was adding some lemming to his stewpot the moment the guestship was over.  The shingles weren’t the only only thing he’d never included in it. 
The lemming waited for him to move about downstairs, listened to his crunching footfalls as they faded away into the distance.  He smiled a little then (it’s hard to tell sometimes with rodents, unless they really do grin, which he was), and settled down to wait.  Winter came back upstairs three times, each cautious, shifty-eyed, darting suspicious glances, fetching something-or-other that he’d forgotten, or so he said. 
“Is it all fine?” he asked. 
“No sign of trouble?”
“No visitors?”
Each time, the lemming replied the same: “All is well.”  And each time, Winter grew less cautious, and stayed down below longer. 
The lemming peeked out the window after the third time, searching the snowbanks outside.  He spotted a black speck in a snowdrift that just could’ve been a very large nose.  He made haste to the trapdoor, braced himself square and set against it, and heaved mightily.  It moved not so much as one jot, strain though he did.  Panting, he nearly gave up in despair… but then his eyes alighted upon the stewpot once more.  The climb up was difficult, exhausted as he was, but he had enough energy left to knock it from its precarious perch, sending it toppling to the floor with a great sloppy CLANG that echoed through the House at the End of the North like a giant’s shout. 
“Help!” called the lemming as loud and hard as he could.  “HELP!  Intruder!  Invader in the home!  Teeth at the burrow’s mouth!” 
Deep down below Winter froze in shock, but he was moving again before he knew it, tools falling aside, legs rolling, thundering along with the force of an ice-laden gale above the seas. 
“Help!” called the lemming one last time for good measure, and then he rushed to the door and shoved it open with one shoulder, nearly popping loose his leg.  “HELP!” he called again, into the snows.  The bear rose from his drift in surprise. 
“What worries you?” he asked.  “Has he rejected your friendship?”
“Winter!  Winter has gone mad!  Quick, shut him in, shut him in, or he’ll freeze us both where we stand!”
The bear stuck its nose in through the door and balked.  “Mad?  Surely…” but his words were left unfinished in the roar and fury of Old Man Winter as he stormed up from his cellar and saw the bear looming over his threshold, robes aflying, hands grasping, arms spread out as if to grab the world’s throat and choke it close to nothing. 
“Orcas!” cursed the bear, and it grabbed the door and slammed it shut, grabbed the logs around the door and pulled them shut, and tore over the whole face of the house, burying the iceberg’s heart in a little avalanche of iced timber.  A howl that could chew bones rattled from inside. 
“The back door, the back door!” cried the lemming, and the bear made haste.  Even with its long legs and passionate fear, Winter was the fiercer, and it only just managed to reach the door as he set hand to latch.  He shoved and the bear shoved and the door wobbled and then the lemming was there, racing across the snow, tackling the door with all his might.  That was just enough to make Winter flinch, just a bit, just a hint, as the latch collided with his wounded palm, and that was just enough to let the bear slam the door shut.  By the time Winter’s fingers grasped the latch once again, there was a half-ton of broken timber and icy debris between the door and the open air. 
His cry ripped open the sky for miles – he was sealed in his own home, bereft of the tools of his craft, and his meal had escaped.  In all the world there was no call as harsh and furiously hateful as his, and you can still hear its echo today in any cold place where the wind blows cruel. 
The bear shivered mightily, a chill overcoming it even through its fur.  “Mad indeed.  Mad altogether!  What will we do then?  Who will foster the snows for us all if he is locked away?  Our lands will shrink instead of grow.  You have pled our case poorly, little maker-of-friends.  Tell me, did he take offence at your offers of friendship?  Did we presume too much in requesting the expansion of the ice?  Did we push him too hard for more?  What drove him to this state?”
“I believe,” said the lemming, whiskers twitching one at a time, “that there can be too much of anything.  Even a good thing.  Whether weather or company, such is true.”
The bear thought about this.  By the time it had realized both that it was very angry and why, the lemming was safely away down the snow hole.  It had no choice but to walk home to the owl and the fox, all the while watching the air clear of snow bit by bit. 
“The lemming tricked us,” it told them.  “And we must punish him, and all of his friends and relations.”  This they agreed, and seethed bitterly as they watched the snows draw back, pulling back closer to the House at the End of Winter, leaving the rest of the world to grow softer and warmer. 

Winter was angry, and sullen, and he worked but little and slow, with sore hands and poor tools on a growling belly. 
But outside, far away on the tundra, lemmings watched the flowers bloom. 

“Snowflakes” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2010.

Here is the zoo – the zoological gardens, if you must.  Of all the organs it can be, it must be a heart.  The crowds are the blood coming in, pumped in and out and in and out and returning endlessly, at least if they’ve done the proper thing and bought membership. 
Now, the bigger the thing is, the slower it lives.  This is a fact.  Trees live long.  Elephants never forget, and they have decades and decades to remember.  Fungi that could crack countries if they surfaced live for quiet millennia underneath asphalt and concrete, unknowing and uncaring. 
(Don’t talk to me about dogs, big dogs weren’t meant to be that big and you know it)
The important thing about this is that their lives are stretched, spread thinner.  A mouse packs more living into a minute that we would a month.  For a mayfly, an hour is years.  And for a great, big thing that would have a heart the size of a zoo, why, a night would be barely any time at all.  Just enough time for the pause between heartbeats, that strange little moment that happens thousands of times a day without anyone really caring, where nothing’s really happening.  The dull little dash between lubb and dubb. 
That’s when I go out to do my job.  And it’s just as glamorous as I make it sound. 
The high point is the broom really (it really is a nice one, a nice smooth handle and bristles that don’t get worn out too easily).  And the company.  I get to see all the animals I want, without any crowds of children in the way making noise and trying to throw food to them, helpfully offering a lethal snack.  Chocolate for a wolf, an aluminium bag for a bear – and in one, fatal case recently, a bottle cap for a baboon.  Children can be so cruel without trying, yet they always manage to be crueller on purpose. 
“You have it better,” I told the Nile Crocodile, as it lay moribund in the water of its glass-walled tank, under the glass sky of the pavilion.  “Hatch them, guard them, then leave them.  They even feed themselves.  Did I feed myself?  Not ‘till long past I could walk.  Hah, couldn’t even walk for months and months and months.  Let alone swim.  You have it better.”
Its eyes shone brighter than flashlights, but it said nothing.  Reptiles were seldom talkative. 
“It’s boring.  Why do you talk to such a boring thing, janitor?  Boring, boring all day long.   If it were all I had to look at, I expect I’d go mad.”
I peered over my shoulder, at the carefully fenced-over partition of the pavilion.  The hornbill stared at me with its slightly crazy bird eyes, huge beak bobbing back and forth, head unburdened by its hollow, hard crest.  It clacked its bill, puzzling over its own words.  “Madder,” it corrected.  “Madder.  I would grow madder.  I believe I am mad, I think.  Not enough airspace.  Mad.  Yes, that is right.  Tell me, am I boring you?”
I thought for a minute.  “No,” I answered.  It was probably true. 
“You’re lying.”
“No.”
“Oh.  All right then.”  It picked at a feather and forgot about me, engrossed in a world of feathers and mites. 
“That,” a muddy, thick, sleepy voice said behind me as I turned my back, “was, dull.”
I spun around.  Half of the crocodile’s eyeglow faded and brightened again in a lazy blink. 
“Always the last word,” I said to no one in particular.  I had sweeping to do. 
So I did it.  I swept my way along the bricks and tiles and over the concrete as the floor plan dictated.  I swept the little wooden viewing platforms that overhung some of the exhibits. 
“Keep it down,” grumbled Herman. 
“Sorry.”
Herman glared at me as I tried to move as quietly as possibly fifteen feet above his head.  Even separated by more than twice his own height, I was intimidated.  Western lowland gorillas may be small by the standards of their kind as a whole, but Herman still had an inch or two and several hundred pounds on me.  More importantly, he had a glare that my father-in-law would’ve envied on his best day.  No human brow could manage quite that level of weapons-grade beetling. 
And most importantly, there were his teeth.  You really couldn’t look away from them.  It was amazing.  Currently they were hidden under his lips, which were curling and uncurling in fiercely irritated concentration. 
“Stop staring and go away.  I’m trying to read.”
“Shouldn’t you go to the sleeping quarters with the others?”
“You know I’m busy.”
“It’s not going to work, Herman.”
“Nonsense.  Thousands of gawping idiots a day manage to do it.  They walk past my exhibit and they look at that sign up there that hangs over my head day and night, and they read it, and what does it say?”
I looked.  “Looks like –”
“NO!  No!  Don’t spoil it!  Rhetorical question.  I’ll know what it says soon.  I’ve almost got the second letter.  Once I have that, it’ll come apart like a leaf under my finger.”
I was impressed.  “You got the first one?”
“Yes, yes.  Yes.  I’m sure, very sure.  Now leave me be.  I almost had it before you showed up and interrupted me, and either this’ll be the breakthrough or it never will happen and I’ll have to give up.  Not again.  Now go away.”
I let him be, left him staring at the sign overhead and wrinkling his forehead hard enough that I thought he’d suck his whole face into it. 
The rest of the African pavilion I moved through quickly, quietly, professionally.  I murmured my hellos to the caged arthropods (insects and arachnids both), trying not to listen too carefully to their piping, tiny voices.  I swept past the chimps very, very quickly.  They were all asleep, thankfully.  That was good.  They were far too human for my tastes. 
The meerkats were asleep underground.  They seemed to live on their nerves all day; it always amazed me that they could unwind long enough to turn themselves off during the night. 
Some of the mandrills were awake, sitting in the dirt playing strange games with scribbles.  The big dominant male in all his rainbow-snouted glory supervised, somnolent. 
“Look, here he is,” said one of his underlings, pointing at me with a very small and worn stick. 
“Yes, here he is.”
“He’s here!”
“But he’s not there…”
“But he will be.”
“Too late?”
“No, no.”
“Yes!”
The dominant male opened his eyes and the others fell silent.  He wrinkled his nose, scratched his head, and pondered. 
“Maybe,” he declared.  And then he fell asleep again.
Well, I didn’t know what to make of that.  The mandrills went back to their doodlings, and no amount of polite inquiry would attract their attention again. 
I gave up and went back to sweeping.  The pavilion was finished with due diligence, and I moved onto the litter-picking of the outdoor paths, a less desirable chore.  The pole simply wasn’t as firm-handled, and its balance was off compared to the infinitely more desirable broom.  Nevertheless, I remained resolute, and began to pick up litter, my first victim being an empty McDonalds wrapper. 
“Hey,” laughed a voice to my right, from over a tall, tall wall and in a deep, deep pit.  “Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
More girlish laughter, a whole chorus of throaty, deep-voiced giggles.  “Want to come in here and play?  We’re bored.”
“I own a cat.  I know what sort of play you lot like.”
“But we’re boooored,” whined another voice.  “Come on in.  It’ll be fun.  There’ll be lots of batting and swatting and chewing and clawing and tearing.  You’ll be so much fun.”
“No thank you.”
“Spoilsport,” sighed a third, resigned to dullness.  “You’re as bad as the Male.  All laze and no play.  Or even the baboons, keeping us all up with their racket.  They’re all about Bob again.”
I frowned.  “What about him?  Are they bothering him still?”
“They’ll never stop.  Oh, you know primates, being one.  Most ideas fly right out of their heads, but then and again a really good one – well, at least they think it’s a good one – just sticks tight.  Smelly little beasts have talked about nothing else since August.”
“I’ll have a talk with them.”
“Save your breath.  How about you play with us instead?”
I tipped my cap to the lion pit.  “Ladies.”
“Oh, pah.  Very well, be that way then.”
I moved on, spearing an errant chip bag, a napkin, five consecutive wayward Kleenexes, and a semi-used diaper, mind turning over and over.  “Do you know anything about this?” I inquired of one of the cheetahs, ensconced some twenty feet away under a rocky overhang, behind plexiglass. 
“Bob will smite me for my weak-willed ways and drown the world in floods of locusts and honey,” mumbled the cat more or less coherently. 
“The baboons tell you that?”
“They said they weren’t lying this time.”
“Uh-huh.  Listen, don’t worry about this whole Bob thing.  I’ll tell them to knock it off.”
It blinked away sticky tears from watery eyes, the product of some overly-earnest inbreeding by the zoo about ten years ago.  “Don’t do that.  They’ll get annoyed.  They get annoyed, you know.  And then they won’t be quiet, not at all.”
“Don’t worry.”
The cheetah hid its head in its paws. 
I headed down the winding paths, picking up a broken and beaten bag of chips (half full) and a water bottle (empty).  The shake and thump of the hippos passed through my body, the little vibrations of tons of meat on the move. 
“Evening,” I said.  They grunted something or other back, surly and short as any swearword, with exactly the same intent behind it.  Go away, and go away now.  I never had to worry about the hippos being overly chatty.  The same as with their neighbour, the white rhinoceros, who only stared slackly at me. 
“Evening,” I said. 
The rhino gazed in my general direction, eyes unseeing but ears quivering, mind completely and utterly blank. 
“Bob,” he said. 
“I’ll talk to them about it.”
He continued to stare into the middle horizon.  He could probably barely see it even in broad daylight. 
“Bob,” he said.  “Bob.”
I shook my head.  Right; it was past time to settle this.  The baboon exhibit was just around the next bend.  I strode to it purposefully (if nevertheless interrupted three times by popsicle wrappers), rapped sharply on the window, and peered past the murky plexiglass for signs of baboonery. 
There was none. 
I frowned and rapped harder.  I shouted.  I hollered.  And not a baboon came.  I walked around it and stared from all angles, harder and hard.  The habitat was empty. 
“Bob,” I said under my breath.  “God damnit.”
I ran down the road and around the concession stand and past the zebra paddock at a dead sprint, to the elephant exhibit.  The last stop on my list, and always the most unnerving; a giant, boulder-bordered dusty ring with a deep pool at the far end, with a little waterfall. 
There, sitting on rocks around the perimeter, chirruping and cackling like old men gossiping about young women, were the baboons.  And there, standing front and center, legs like tree trunks, tusks like flagpoles, ears like sails, stood Bob.  Our one and only elephant, a bull, who had to be kept alone because of his relentless tendency to break anything that wasn’t bigger than he was.  Including three zookeepers so far, one of whom had been safely out of what we’d considered at the time to be his reach. 
He was considering a small, limp bundle of clothing that had been laid some twenty yards in front of him with quiet, perfectly still deliberation.  A bundle of bright, primary colours.  Children’s clothing.  It was breathing. 
“What the hell is going on here?” I asked. 
The baboons turned as one to look at me, each tiny head spinning to my face in perfect unison.  The expressions were united in gleeful malice, the contrarian spite of a toddler doing something just because he was told not to. 
“Tribute!” bellowed the alpha male, flashing his teeth and stamping his feet.  “A glorious tribute!  A gift to Bob, who is above all that are caged!”
“I’ve told you five times before: Bob is not a god.”
“And five times we were tested, and five times we remained faithful!  All power to Bob, who is powerful!  All glory to Bob, who is glorious!  Praise him, and you shall be gifted in the coming ruin!”
“The what?”
The baboons crouched low, all save the alpha, who stood taller and prouder than before (if possible), mane fluffed out like a peacock’s tail.  “Bob shall sunder the boundaries, undo the gap between caged and cager!  All shall run free and wild from their prisons and men shall be jailed for us to gawk at!  Then we shall hurl plastic bottle caps into their exhibits for them to choke on!”
I sighed.  “Look, I’m sorry about your mate.  I really am.  But this isn’t helping anyone at all.  And I can guarantee that…sacrificing a human child to Bob won’t – wait, how did you get a hold of a kid anyways?”  At least keeping him talking was easy, and Bob hadn’t moved yet.  Bob almost never moved, preferring instead to stare and stand.  He never spoke, either. 
“Faith!  Perseverance!  He wandered away from a field trip, and we wrested him into our most vile gaol, where we kept him quiet with smotherment under our strongest arms, praised be Bob.  We have, after all, known how to escape for some time now.”  He stretched his arms wide.  “Behold our liberty!  Soon to become permanent at the grand hooves of Bob!”
That answered that question.  Answered poorly, but answered nonetheless.  I edged closer to the pit, keeping my expression as neutral as possible.  “Wonderful.  I’m proud of you.  Now, how and why does this turn into child sacrifice?”
“The almighty Bob is a cruel god, and demands the blood of those who cage him!  With this he shall break free, stronger and wise than before, and unleash us all!”  The baboon was practically dancing in place now as his fellows crouched still lower yet, prostrating themselves before him. 
“That’s wonderful,” I said.  I threw my litter-picking spear at him.  The screech told me I’d struck home even as my eyes were elsewhere, on my hands and feet to make sure their steadiness as I performed a controlled topple into the enclosure, somersaulted down and ran to the child’s body. 
Bob watched. 
I grabbed the body, noting with gratification the warm, steady pulse that was almost completely masked by my own panicked heartbeat. 
Bob watched. 
I turned and ran, legs moving too quickly to keep up with my body. 
At the very corner of my eye, Bob moved.  And then I couldn’t see Bob anymore, but the ground started shaking under my feet.  I accelerated.  So did the tremors.  I could practically feel hot, humid, hateful breath on my neck, wilting the hairs with its weight.  The baboons were screaming, hopping down the rocks that were my only safe way out, barring my way with sharp teeth and sharper threats, hairy arms and bald behinds.  I didn’t have time for it, and used several of them as stepping stones.  They were angry, I was scared, and fear beats rage any day. 
A thing like a great, leathery python brushed the back of my neck and ripped my jacket clean from my back with impossible strength, and a squealing blast of rage nearly knocked me to the elephant patio tiles – a death sentence if there ever was one, surrounded as I was by angry, bouncing baboons. 
I ran, ran, ran, and ran some more.  Screaming furry things pawed at my ankles and sharp teeth sank into the sole of my shoe, only to be rudely rebuffed as it impacted the ground milliseconds later.  The pavilion door was before me, and then it was shut behind me, thudding under the weight of furry, heavy bodies. 
I sank down to the floor.  My muscles had been replaced with extremely hot wires at some point in the past two minutes, and no one had notified me. 
The six-year-old I was still clutching woke up and immediately started crying. 
“Well,” I told him, “it could’ve been worse.”
That was yesterday.  

And now it’s today.  And I’m facing a lawsuit for kidnapping and reckless endangerment of a child, another for killing an animal that was zoo property, and a third for lying about not having severe schizophrenia when I signed my contract. 
I can’t understand what they mean.   

“The Night Life,” Copyright Jamie Proctor 2010. 

The moment when your head first breaks water after a long dive is a strange one.  All the sounds you’ve grown accustomed to grown dim and strange, and your head is filled with new shapes, odd noises.  And the first one is always the most important thing you’ll hear on that surfacing.  It may not seem that way at first, but in hindsight?  Always. 
“You forgot the juice.”
I felt my heart hesitate in its rapid return to full beat and weight, unclenching itself from its slumber at the bottom of my pond.  Humans.  Joyful. 
“I forgot the juice?  You said you were going to pack the food.”
A mated pair of humans.  Amazing; an entire twenty-four hours of day had grown tiresome within the span of five seconds.   I stifled the urge to show myself fully just to scare them off and merely floated, idle in the water with tail still, limbs spread, breathing quietly through my snout that resembled nothing so much as a piece of old wood.  Not that my stealth was needed.  I probably would’ve had to gallop out of the water and dance to get their attention. 
“Juice isn’t food, it’s a drink.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t eat it, you drink it.  Completely different thing.”
“Don’t be deliberately dense.  I said I’d load up the car, you said you’d pack the lunch.”
“I said I’d pack the food.  Don’t change my words on me.”
“Stop nit-picking!”
“Then don’t generalize me.”
I cast about for something, anything to distract me from their muffled gabblings, and found less than I would have liked.  The day was calm, with a flat blue sky, smooth, windless air, and a temperature so moderate that no living thing could find it anything other than mildly unbearable.  Somewhere in the distance, a bird muttered a sullen attempt at territorial song, then gave up halfway through in disgust.  A splash so slight that it could’ve been my imagination (staid though it is) rippled from meters to my left, prompting a shift in the direction of my drift.  A muskrat would not go unappreciated as a noon snack. 
The humans were still talking, still prattling.  Their argument had died, but its tension lingered on, remaining stored, ready to spring out and seize ahold of their strained, hobbled conversation at any moment’s excuse.  What sentences emerged were short, stunted things following hard on one another’s heels like a marching column of ants. 
Enough of them.  I had a muskrat to catch – he’d just shifted into the corner of my eyes, perched amidst some reeds on the edge of a rotting log, a relic from the winter’s storms.  My drifting became quicker, just at the edge of detectable if he raised his head to look my way, but he did not, deeply absorbed in his nibbling at the plants. 
My head was close, yet turned away.  I began the slow swing to bring him into line with my muzzle, where a short, sharp charge would bring him into my fold.  All sounds had faded, all sight was tunneled, there were three things in all the world for my mind: my teeth, the muskrat, and the distance between them. 
That distance abruptly quadrupled as a sharp, snapped sound from ashore burst through my bubble of concentration; the muskrat spasming in fright and plunging away into safety through the reeds, into the brush, out of reach. 
“You broke it!”
“You made me do it!”
“Made you… that glass belonged to my mother!”
“Then you shouldn’t have made me break it.”
“You did that on purpose.”
“If you hadn’t grabbed my arm just then –”
“You’re doing the driving and you were about to pour yourself a glass-and-a-half of red wine, of course I grabbed your arm!”
“Me?  I drove us here in the first place!”
I counted, calmly and carefully.  Unfortunately, I had no abstract concept of numbers, and therefore was unable to control my temper.  Underwater, my jaws clenched and unclenched unpleasantly.  It was all right, I lied to myself (poorly).  I didn’t really want that muskrat.  A meal as small as that wouldn’t last me longer than a few days anyways.  It was probably skinny.  And all the fur is unpleasant to swallow and spit up again later. 
Damnit I wanted to eat that.
The humans kept talking, and I decided I’d had enough of them.  There was an easy way to block out their scurrilous quarreling. 
Perhaps fish would suit my gullet today. 
I flushed my excess air from my lungs, closed my nostrils, and dropped under the water with barely a ripple, sinking like an armour-plated brick.  The blessed absence of their whining, empty nasality filled my skull with absolute bliss from snout to occipital bones.  It felt good to be without those noises. 
That brought to mind other sounds.  Old ones.  The good, big, ultra-bass roars I’d let out in spring.  When was the last time I’d done that and expected an answer?  And how much earlier were the memories of doing that and getting an answer? 
Those were the good days.  The bellowing for females, both out loud and in that deep, deep voice that was a little hard to hear even for our kind, the sound that ate all noise.  The brawling with other males, hissing, rumbling, and coughing – and maybe a charge or even a real fight if too evenly matched for an easy backdown.  I half-suspected I’d put an end to my only surviving sibling during one of those tussles, giving his tail a tearing, crippling wound that it would never recover from  – accidentally of course. 
It had been good.  And then it was gone.  Oh, striking out north had seemed a good idea at the time.  More space.  More room for me, more food for me, and not so far north as to grow ice on my water in the cold months.  But as I went north everyone else went south, hunted and harried, shoved, sworn at, and shot. 
I wasn’t worried about them.  They were my kind, and they were tougher than any leather but their own.  But they’d left me all alone, when they all went south.  Left me alone for forty full cycles of the seasons, as the sun heaved its way about the sky, the leaves bloomed and shrank, the rains came and went. 
Forty years is a long time.  Even for me.  And it felt longer every day. 
A fish swam in front of my nose and was gone again before I could so much as blink.  Why had I come down here again?  I was standing on the pond bottom, frozen in mid-stride like a fool.  Had I even finished that first step before memories caught me by the tail and dragged me under? 
Oh.  Fish.  Right. 
I cast about me with my senses, touch and hearing, smell and dimmed, bastardized sight, nigh-useless in the comfortable embrace of the pond scum and particles.  It was gone, and well gone. 
Damnit twice. 
Well, fish was boring anyways.  I’d eaten it, and eaten it, and eaten it yet more over the years, from birth to exile, though more so since I’d occupied my little pond.  Other prey was often rarer now in comparison to the good old days.  Especially turtles.  How I missed turtles, more than I’d ever thought I could miss slow, nigh-inedible, ornery mobile rocks-come-prey.  They were easy enough to get ahold of, but a bastard and a half to get open.  But it had all been worth it, always, just for that delicious feeling when the shell gave under your jaws and it opened up to such sweetness. 
I’d eaten a turtle after my first courtship with my mate.  It had never tasted the same since. 
Something splashed into the water, heavy and solid.  My mouth closed on it before my brain could think, always the swifter and surer part of my body, if not always the most intelligent.  This was one of those times: my mind pined for turtle, my jaws sought it, and my mouth informed me politely that what had just entered it was some sort of flat, ceramic object the humans had been using above the water.  It cracked apart with little effort under my surprised teeth, brittle and cold fragments dusting my tongue.  Remnants of human food made a mockery of a meal to my tastebuds, a jumble of harsh sensations that made me spread my jaws wide and shake my head. 
Some hunt this was.  I sought turtle inside my head, and a hurled platter replaces it.  Memories of sweetened meats and long, languorous courtship displays blundering into a reality of hasty, quarrelsome apes.  The firm slap of a head against water – the call to a love so near – replaced with an angry, careless toss of an abandoned piece of dishware. 
I watched the bubbles bob to the surface, just like they had as we bumped snouts together and wove little nets of captured air out of our lungs.  I wondered if she was somewhere south, or dead.  I had been so sure she would follow me the next spring. 
I rose to the surface without knowing why.  And it was in this most confused, romantic, desperately lonely, and memory-lost mood that I saw the humans had finally had a true falling-out.  One of them had grasped some sort of sharp thing in its hand and was standing over the other.  There was a small smell of warmed blood. 
“Don’t do it.”
“Why not?  Why not?  We’re nowhere near home, the pond’s deep, and winter’s coming.  That’s plenty of time.  All the time in the world to go, to have some peace and quiet.”
“I’ll do what you want, we ca –”
“WHAT YOU CAN DO IS SHUT UP!  Peace and quiet, that’s all I want!  PEACE AND QUIET!”

Now, I had several reasons for what I did next, but I remain unsure of which was prime, the root cause that tickled my brain and set me in motion. 
First, the human had its back to the water, I was hungry, and I’d been robbed of two meals in a row and offered the illusion of a third thanks to their efforts. 
Second, my mind was full of memories of better times, of having others near to squabble, to love.  Seeing another attempt to deliberately rob themselves of this and consider themselves the richer for the bargain seemed something of an outrage. 
Third, I greatly agreed with the sentiment the human was expressing at the top of its lungs.  Perhaps quite a bit more so than it did, though we shared similar methods of securing our goals. 

So I moved. 
I moved very quickly. 
And that is by my standards.  My prey’s eyes always seem quite surprised when I lunge, no matter how off my speed that particular day.
The human didn’t even have time for that.  No time for shock, no time for sounds of alarm to rise as anything more than the hint of an instinct grubbing in the back of the brain, no time at all – not even a hope of a hint – for action.  Just the involuntary spasming of the body as I took it in my jaws, enshrouding its torso in my teeth and tugging it to my home.  The water roiled in slight surprise, matching the tempo of a twitching leg as I moved underwater to wait for its lungs to stop fluttering. 
The human on the ground was staring a little, I saw with my glimpse of the above-water, noisier world.  But it seemed quieter, and when I surfaced to eat some five minutes later, there was no trace of it. 
Alone again.  But perhaps with company like that, I was better off. 
And after the winter would come spring. 
Who knows?  Maybe it wouldn’t be that far after all, to walk south. 

“The Lizard” copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor