jamieproctor.ca

Under the last, shuttered rays of the sun, a night was being born.  It was so quick it seized the eye true and strong; one moment, splintered light fading into greyness under the aegis of evening; the next, true blackness filled the air. 
For a moment after it was birthed, it didn’t know anything.  Just dark, flowing over the world.  But then it blinked, it stretched, it laughed, and then its mind began. 

The first thing the newborn night saw was that the world was big, and it was big in it.  A more pleasing combination of wonderment and vanity could not be found anywhere under the moon, and it gloried mightily in it, roiling happily against hills and sliding into dales with the cheer of a sporting otter.  It wriggled with delight as the treetops stroked its soft, velvety underbelly, squirmed its way over crags and jags and a great, battered horn to stare down all over the land all around it, like a toddler perched on a runty tree stump. 
Hello! it called to the world around it, challenge and greeting most jovial.  Hello hello! it called to the quiet that clung to itself.  Wolves sang at its introduction, owls nodded curtly, the impertinent little lights that shone in big cities flickered uneasily with the defiant stupidity of a child caught in the wrong and refusing to admit it.  Hello!
The night paid them all no need as it journeyed on, examining and discarding them all, an endless curiosity confronted with an endless basket of wonders.  Here – there was water flowing over a cliff!  Who could imagine that?  There – here is a lake filled with surly, slovenly, brown-bellied sharks that snap at anything that dares intrude on their prickly sense of personal space.  Who could’ve dreamed of that?  The night did and more, peering at the strangeness that greeted its every step forwards. 
There!  A little opening under a hill, a nook that widened farther and farther where the night could not see, where a deeper darkness pooled from.  It was old, and ignored its cheery introduction with stone-cold resolution.
Here!  A little tree on a sheer mountainside, growing not up so much as out.  It was older than some of the rock around it, fancied the night, and its needles were thinner than a pixie’s dreams, its roots great, bulging muscles that clung to the rock with strength unmatched on the earth. 
Look!  A glittering wonderland hiding inches under the waves, a breadbasket of corals that stretched for hundreds of miles.  Its fishy inhabitants glittered and shone under the slightest speck of light, their tumultuous little lives never pausing, not even for the night’s touch. 
See!  A rainstorm, a thunderstorm, a cauldron of bubbling lightning that rumbled in approval as the darkness wrapped around it and filled its heart with deeper chill. 
All this and more spread itself beneath the freshly-budded wings of the night as it flexed and tested and flapped them.  It slowed to watch, it sped to prove it could, it rolled and flipped its way over the horizon, eating the air.  It was perfectly happy and nothing troubled its mind but for a faint worry and a memory of sharp bright fear, and they were nothing, only premonitions, which you couldn’t trust, the night was sure.  It was sure. 

It began to turn its gaze above.  There was so much above. 
For one thing, there was the moon.  It was so close and yet so far, bobbing just within the night’s domain yet separated from its grasp by a space that shocked even the night’s mind.  It was a pity, to see something so far-away and beautiful remain untouchable, yet strangely thrilling.  For the first time, the night felt smaller.  It hallooed to the lunar sphere, a big bobbing gibbous demiscircle that winked down at it with old ease, the poise of a high lady mixed with the familiarity of an auntie. 
For another, the stars caught its gaze, even as it removed it from the moon.  There were so many!  The first glance saw hundreds, the second thousands, then more, and more, and still more millions, endless numbers clotting the empty skies thick and sweeter, smeared deliciously from near to far, the nearest oh so far.  The night was in awe at them, and a little bit frightened (though it didn’t know it).  Something about their twinkle brought on strange memories-that-weren’t, and left it uncertain.  It had the feeling it was being chased. 
It called up in pressed happiness to the stars, a forced self-reassurance, and they smiled back sadly.  Soon, soon, they whispered where they hung, near to the eye and farther from the hand than anything that was ever dreamed of.  Always so soon.

The talk of the stars unnerved the night, as did their continued quietude, and its eyes were (if not quick) eager to fall back down from the dizzying heights and depths that adorned its above-space and rest once more on the spinning display beneath it.  It watched with detachment unwanted as a moose stumbled loose from a thicket, clumsy even in grace, and that helped a little.  It cheered up still more as the moose’s calf followed it, twice the leg and half the presence of mind-in-body, barely able to walk but masterful in wobbling.  Then it was gone again, swirling away in the night’s long wake as it sped through the hours and miles.  It alit upon a crooked fencepost, and for a moment it was quite pleased to see eye-to-eye with a cowled old corbie that huddled itself on its tip, cynical old bird rendered speechless, but then it was off and away, dragging itself low over the land with reluctant haste. 
Perhaps speed should be embraced then, decided the night, if only because it was so persistent.  So it did, it sped.  Up came its haste, down and away flew its patience, and it was off like a shot from the gun that spun the planet, whirling with the force and might of a thousand dervishes.  It barely saw the passing sights, spinning mountains dark within an instance’s worth of note.  It felt the tickle and tremble of long landscapes against itself fade into a soothing, strikingly homogenous hum that filled its soul.  The sky streaked with white on black, dots in a seascape, and under its hands oceans bled away nearly as fast as the continents, passing from blue to black and blacker still.  It was the purest speed in the world, and no other thing knew it but the night.  It knew this deeply, drank it in heartily; it laughed loud and long as the haste soused its mind, sending it into crazy cartwheels that would’ve dashed any other thing’s brains apart just from thinking them.  Whatever it was that chased at its heels was beyond sight of mind, far away and never there, and it was free of all worry. 
And then, cresting a valley’s rim, it looked down and made a mistake, the same mistake anyone might make, anywhere, and it saw what it was doing. 
Boys going lost in the fields, sent out to call in cattle and caught by the sudden dark.  Fawns seized with sudden cold that huddled to their mothers for warmth as their time to browse was cut short and replaced with the hours of the predators, muzzles pressed into sides and flank to fur. 
Owls seized by instinct’s awakening before they could so much as wake, gliding out of their homes still wishing sleep. 
Sun-baked crags forced fast from weathering the heat to the chilly grip of the darkness, cracking before their time, splintering to gravel. 
All these things were small, and as such, all the more notable, and for each of them there were a thousand more so alike that the night could barely look for seeing them.  All around it, little troubles, small pains, and each an accusation by dint of its lack of accusation.  No blame fell on the night, not for the harm that it caused in innocent speed, not so much as a disapproving look or a plaintive plea, and for that it cut all the deeper. 
So it slowed.  It idled.  It took its time, took it all back, and meandered its way through the skies it had galloped against so furiously mere moments before.  It watched anxiously what it had so free-and-easily ignored in favour of the call of the rush and thrill – it hurt more, it did, responsibility.  To be carefree was to be painfree, but somehow, the night felt a little proud of itself as it saw the world shape itself right again under its cloaked depths (though not too proud, of course, because that made it feel bad again). 
Also, something was nagging it, those not-recollections again that the stars had whispered of to it.  Soon, soon.  Whatever it was, it would come all the sooner now.  Yet still, though the feeling of pursuit grew ever stronger, not a single hint nor scent of whatever that was chasing it appeared at its rear.

For a time it became (if not routine) calm.  There were fewer sights now for that night that took its breath away, fewer wonders.  The world was big and full of uniqueness, but even that grew mellow with experience, if never tedious.  Living and land alike passed by its mind and sight, and it noted them with care.  It was nearly a challenge in itself now, to see how many things it could see as they came under its shroud before they were whisked away into its wake.  What had once frustrated it became a sport, a counting of many tallies that was made all the more challenging by the night not having any numbers to count with.  It found an abandoned textbook of maths lying on a park-bench, but it was closed and unhelpful, so it passed on carefree and ignorant.  Numbers were easier when you didn’t know them, anyways.  And sooner or later the counting wore thin too, and by now the night was old enough that it could simply appreciate the calm, coasting on a hemisphere’s-worth of momentum that wouldn’t end.  It was soothing, letting it all roll by at its own pace, hearing the slow running down of life and matter underfoot as it calmed under its touch. 
But there was something stronger warning it now, an alarm bell ringing inside the night’s mind.  Something touching old not-memories and stiffening what could’ve been hairs along a possible-spine.  There was something chasing it, yes, yes, but it wasn’t coming closer from behind.  The night had left it far away, that way, no matter its chosen speed (from swift to sloth, it was all the same, it seemed), but there was still something there. 
Then the night looked forwards, and it saw something, on the edge of perception.  It was strange and flat and it looked something like starlight, but harsher, stronger. 
The memory was real, and it had a name: daylight.  It chased from ahead. 

For a passing moment the night knew no fear, only surprise.  The first sharp slivers of the bright were still blinking into existence, slow but sure, implacable.  It saw the tatterings of twilight beginning to appear at its outermost edges; it was shocking to see the raiments of its birth returned this way, at this moment. 
Past the shock came terror.  The night stalled desperately, snatching at its surroundings, grasping at obstacles with panic in its soul.  All slid away from it in a gentle caress, the same frictionless ease that had felt so pleasing and now seemed devilish.  It tore and snatched and smashed for something, anything that could touch it besides that growing glow on the horizon, the herald of something new, the star that smouldered too close and too strong for it. 
Things stirred in the land beneath, thousands upon thousands of things, far more than had wandered quietly in its depths (all abed now; the owls a-roost, the bats be-caved, the hunters and predators a-rest), awakening at the stroke of shine.  The night was more grey than black now, rent through with smouldering rays.  It balked at their touch, impaling itself on them even as it struggled, fading apart.  And up ahead, where the balelight glared, it could hear the nightmare yammer of the endless swarms of things that screamed and grunted and stank under the burning pyre of the skies, a cacophony of billions that knew no rest and no concord, the antithesis of its calm. 
The night quailed.  If it could, it would have wept.  It stretched from the heavens to the soil, it girthed from pole to pole, and all of its breadth and majesty was about to be cut up and swept away by the glare.  It almost averted itself, sought to become lost in the details of that it washed over (thinly now!), to distract itself from the end.  But something spoke to it in the last bits of its truedark, whispered to look its fate soundly face-to-face. 
Slowly, the night looked up.  Past the brightness, the new colours that cut its eyes with their loud sharpness, up and up to the hint of a handful of pure light that was touching it from just above the trees, the edge of the near-star.  And there, watching it back, was the hint of something shining and small.  So small.  So very bright and so very full of pain, but so small. 
And there was a worry in it that the night knew as its own. 
The night gazed back at it and at itself.  It was crumbling, but it was still impressive.  Pole-to-pole, heavens-to-soil.  It reached to the moon that it could not reach (was it gone now?) and saw even the stars so far.  What must it look like now, to this little stranger that was kin, watching it anxiously now, seeing if this groaning ancient would lurch forwards at last and swallow it up?
The night remembered very little of its childhood now.  There had been twilight, swallowing light.  There had been a terrible light, but it had stopped chasing it, had faded away as the night fled, crumbled into its trail and left it running free and wild across the skies. 
The night thought.  It had time for that much, even as it wore thin.  And then it reached out (surely, slow but swift!) and touched the dawn. 

It burned, but only for a moment.  The day shrank, but only for a moment.  And for a moment, just for a moment, the night realized that this wasn’t so bad. 
Then it was over, splintering into a thousand quarrelsome little shadows and shades, slipping into trees and under stones, diving into the bottoms of ponds to wait for the sun to pass again. 
For now, it shone true, and the new day blinked to itself in confusion, surrounded by folding darkness and watching the hills dawn rosy. It didn’t know anything, and all that was, was light.  There had been something chasing it, but there was something about the way it had looked that wasn’t quite right, not quite like that, a memory that wasn’t there. 
Then it blinked, shook itself, and sang, and its mind began. 

“Nightfall” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011. 

Jacob was the life, soul, and limbs of the party that took up the whole street; a big dark man with an even bigger (and much sunnier) voice.  His laugh was the jolliest, his appetites the biggest, his newfound friends the most numerous, and he sang all the songs too sweetly for the volume he was stuck at.  Which was pretty good for a man who was asleep in his bed twelve hundred miles away, dreaming about his childhood toast that no one but his mother had ever known how to butter properly.  It was a fitful dream, the last twitchings and cartwheels of eyeballs and psyche blending in a confused blur of growing consciousness that would lead to wakefulness within the minute. 
There in the party, Jacob felt this coming, the roil and turmoil of his own dreams falling, and he knew he had to go.  He said his goodbyes, hugged his friends (everyone within arm’s reach, all at once), and was gone in a twinkling before anyone had missed his face.  That was the important bit: no-one must miss his face.  Especially Jacob, who had it carefully slipped back on just before his eyelids fluttered open,  the face reattaching itself with all the delicate immovability of a limpet to a stone. 
The face-thief watched as Jacob blinked and yawned his way out of bed, suffered a moment’s anxiety as he rubbed at his features, then relaxed again as nothing came of it and he wandered towards the bathroom.  A thousand thousand thousand times the face-thief had done this, and each time he worried at that moment, though it never went wrong.  If someone’s face should come off, why, they might see themselves, and such a thing could be very shocking. 
The face-thief did not want to upset anyone, least of all his friends and victims.  He knew them all so well. 
There was Jacob (always made his folded-neatly sheets messy, snored a lot, wrote novels), who lived in the city with so few lights.  The face-thief took him dancing in a hundred towns, and he made them all brighter. 
There was Daisy (deep sleeper, short sleeper, had loved all four of her childhood dogs and cried on their birthdays), with her four children that kept her too busy to think all day, let alone rest.  The face-thief brought her to fancy dinners with fancier men, who never went home with quite what they’d wanted but somehow were never displeased. 
There was Evan (enjoyed sweets, slept with mouth open, had a pet spider he doted on), who lived behind eight sets of locked doors and was guarded by three big, serious men in sleek, serious suits whenever he went outside.  The face-thief ran along the back alleys with him and over the rooftops, prancing from building to building armed with cans of spray paint and headfuls of ideas. 
And there were hundreds more that he danced to each night on his night that never ended, thousands, millions and millions over the years and the days, all the way back to before the face-thief’s memory could possibly remember, or those of his victims. 
For now, though, he was between them, and faceless.  Naked like this, he couldn’t walk the wide ways and long avenues of the world, the streets and forest trails.  He could only just fit down the Shortcuts, sliding neatly and fusslessly between scenes and ecosystems; sets, stages, and layers of sediment.  He bent himself around a beam of light and slipped from Rio to Tokyo on the breath of a whale’s-spout by way of  Kamchatka’s mountains; nimbly plucking free the face of Jun (a good boy, always happy and an uncomplaining helper of the home, collected leaves) as he slept in his room while his parents spoke downstairs.  His fever was hard and hot but soon to break, they said. 
As was his purpose and habit, the face-thief took Jun far away before he put him on, far from anywhere his face might wander in the daylit hours.  It stopped confusion, which could make people upset.  He squirmed down the Shortcuts for a microsecond longer, taking his time, weighing his options, and at last he set upon a brush thicket in Africa that he hadn’t visited in a while.  He refracted off the headlight of an expensive car, caromed through the pupils of a president and a panther, and popped out of the world’s largest termite mound, where he put on Jun. 

Jun was short and slight, even for a ten-year-old, but he was agile and monkey-like, even for a ten-year-old.  The world around him was a jungle gym, and now he had lifetimes of experience to go climbing and clambering in the treetops.  He nearly bowled over the chattering colobus monkeys in the canopy with his speed before they scattered in fright, sending him into fits of giggles as he brachiated that nearly ruined his grip. 
“Hello!” he yelled at the distrustful face of a pangolin, as the scaly little anteater blinked at him from its hollowed-tree dwelling.  It gave him a surly, smouldering look, then alarm overcame it and it vanished deeper into its lair. 
Jun shrugged.  “Hello!” he said to the leopard hovering one branch over his head, breath like pine needles smoking. 
It shifted without so much a rustle, and he ran laughing on his way, leading it a merry chase through the branches that sent birds squawking for miles.  At last it caught him as he tripped on a stone, and just as its fangs were singing towards the nape of his neck the face-thief took off Jun’s face and went laughing away, hopping off its ear and landing on a dumpster in a big city.  It was probably someplace in Europe; the face-thief hadn’t checked his descent, too caught up in the moment.  He slapped on Jun’s face and chuckled. 
“That was peculiar,” said a voice behind Jun’s elbow.  He glanced down and saw a face peering at him from under a grate in the alley, all eyebrows and elbows. 
“Was it?” asked Jun. 
“Yes.  Boys appearing out of the air is peculiar, and I’ve seen many peculiar things.  Do you have a moment to talk, boy?”
“About what?” asked Jun.  “I can talk about lots of things.  I’ve been nearly anywhere and done nearly anything.  Ask me about it all!”
“Very well,” said the man in the grate.  “What are you?”
“I’m a face-thief,” said Jun.  “What are you?”
“A thief, eh?” said the man in the grate.  “How peculiar.  What do you do then?”
“I steal their faces in the night,” said Jun.  “I put them on and run all around, everywhere, without a care.  I climb the tall places and sink through the low places and I always put them back when I’m through with them, so quick they never miss them.”
“Why ever do you do that?  A thief that puts back what he’s stolen is no thief at all.”
“Oh, but that would most shocking,” said Jun.  “It doesn’t hurt this way, you see.  And what would I do with all the faces?”
“I wouldn’t know, I suppose,” said the man in the grate.  “Tell me, in your travels, have you seen the Grand Canyon?”
“All of them,” said Jun proudly.
“But there’s only one.”
“There’s loads of grand canyons, and each grander than the last.  I’ve seen them all twice over and twice again.”
“Hmm.  Have you glimpsed the Mona Lisa?”
“I drew it!” laughed Jun.  “Or at least, I drew a sketch of it once.  Maybe.  I’ve drawn so many pretty people I can’t keep them straight.”
“Fascinating.  Have you ever danced the Tango when the night runs boiling over?”
“Oh yes!”
“With the rose between your teeth?”
“Many times!  And once with a sprig of poison ivy.”
“My word,” said the man in the grate.  He seemed to mull it over for a minute.  “I simply must accompany you,” he said at last. 
“If you’d like,” said Jun.  “I can’t remember if anyone’s ever followed me before.”
“I’m sure I could, if only you could lend a hand,” said the man.  “It’s these bars, these confounded bars.  I’ve been stuck down here for four hundred years and four months and forty-four days, with only a crust of bread and a quarter-jug of stale water.  It’s monstrous, it’s inhumane, it’s cruel beyond measure.  Whatever did I do to deserve this fate?”
“I don’t know,” said Jun, fascinated.  “What did you do?”
“Well, I can’t get out,” said the man, filled with misery.  “If only you could help me move, I could come with you.  I could be a friend for you, if you’d like.  It must be hard to have friends with no face of your own, eh?”
“I don’t know…” said the face-thief, thoughts uncurling and rewinding.  “I’ve had friends all over the world.  I had two hundred not an hour ago.”
“Pshaw!  Here one moment and gone the next.  No, true friendship is lasting, not any such fairweather cockamamie!  I implore you, face-thief, rid me of this imprisonment and I will follow you ‘till the end of your wanderings.”
“Surely!” said Jun.  He reached down and grabbed the man’s hand and yanked him up and out of his little cell under the grating; he was whisper-thin and couldn’t have weighed more than his slender, eggshell-frail bones; his skin could have been used to pattern china.  As he gasped in the cold night air, the alleyway sighed and heaved under their feet, smashing his little chamber into a grinding shambles of stone. 
“Free!” he hollered at the sky.  “Free as the deep blue sea and fresh as a lark in the morning breeze!  Aha, world, I love thee!  Garbage, I would embrace thee!  Here, friend, let me kiss your feet and shake your hand.”
“No need,” said Jun.  “Was it really so terrible down there?”
“To be imprisoned is the worst of all worlds,” said the man.  “You have no agency, no energy, no will of your own!  All is inertia, and stillness, and the death of the thoughts.  Ah friend, but you know nothing of this.  You are quicksilver, lightning unbottled!”  He stooped to the dirt and seized up a crumbling speck of mortar and stone.  “Here, a piece of my prison.  Take this, my friend, and forevermore know what is to be avoided!”
Jun reached out, and then froze.  He’d been distracted, he’d been talking, he’d almost missed Jun’s sleepy murmurings getting louder as his fever heightened.  In a second and four he’d be wide awake, talking himself out of night-time until his mother came to soothe him to sleep again. 
“Come on, away!” he said as he hastily put Jun away, and, grasping the hand of the man, he swept them away through a crack in the wall and over the aurora borealis, pinwheeling them along the edge of Jun’s alarm clock and into his room.  A quick slap and smoothing of the face-thief’s small, delicate hands secured it tight, and then they hid behind the wall as the boy awoke. 
“Such speed… magnificent,” declared the man.  “You really must show me how you do this.”
“You take Shortcuts,” said the face-thief.  “It’s easier when you’ve gotten the hang of it.”
“I must insist on lessons,” said the man.  “Go on, take me to your next victim!  I’ll pay attention most closely.”  He peered at the face-thief for a moment.  “Strange.  Where are you?  I can see you most clearly, good friend, but your features elude my grasp.”
“You can’t go stealing faces with a face,” said the face-thief.  “It’s bad manners, and it’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous?”
“They stick together, you know – you could end up being all those people at once, and they’d never come off, not forever, ever.”
“My word,” said the man.  He stared at Jun’s room thoughtfully – inside, his mother had begun singing him back to sleep.  “Where to next then, good friend?  Come now, set me a course that I might learn.”
“Let’s go to Polynesia,” said the face-thief.  “I have friends there.”

The face-thief’s friend was named Ema (she slept with her eyes open, listened carefully to her grandmother, and could out-eat all her brothers), and soon she was off making friends enough islands away that none of them would ever run into her in the day-time and ask awkward questions.  The man followed her close all night, but no one ever seemed to notice him, not even when he held her hand (it passed through her arm) and glared righteously at the boys that stared at her so. 
“Shamefulness,” he said scornfully.  “To be there and not at all.  Bah!  Are you sure I cannot try on a face?  Just a little one, maybe one whose owner wouldn’t miss it.”
Ema drank something interesting from a glass.  “No, no, no.  It’s dangerous and shocking, and there could be all sorts of problems and no solutions in sight for miles.  You’re free now, be happy!  They can’t see you, but I can.”
“Ah, well,” said the man.  “Turning my words of friendship back upon me, eh?  A hard blow, a cruel one, but well dealt and spoken.  I shall say no more…” but he hesitated. 
“What is it?” asked Ema.  It wasn’t her first interesting glass of the evening, and she wasn’t tactful at the best of times. 
“I forgot,” said the man most slowly, “to give you my token of thanks.  You had to go and put back your face –”
“Not mine,” reminded Ema.
“- your face,” continued the man blithely, “and I completely forgot it.  How insensitive of me.  Set aside your face for a moment more, friend, so that I can touch you once more, to gift you as you are justly deserved.”
“Thank you very much,” said Ema, who was blushing thoroughly.  Compliments and curses alike had been thrown to her times uncounted, but never past her face.  It felt tingly.  “But give me a moment first, to say goodbye to my friends – my other friends.”
“Friends, friends, friends, and friends,” rattled off the man.  “Come now, have I not spoken of the difference between a friend and friends?  A friend in need is a friend indeed, but friends are not even accorded the closeness with which enemies are kept.”
“I suppose,” said Ema, and made her farewells a mite quicker than usual, spurred on by excitement and the disapproving frown of the man.
Stepping back to the island where Ema slept soundly was the work of a moment’s beat in a butterfly’s wings.  The man barely needed her help at all this time. 
“A new thing,” he said, “should be seized immediately and with as much force as possible, lest it glide away and you be left dreary.  Tell me, am I not an apt pupil?”
“You are,” said the face-thief, hopping nimbly from Ema’s bedside. 
“Thank you,” said the man.  “Here then, is a token of my esteem, a favour to be bestowed upon you!  Take this fragment of mine prison, oh friend of deliverance, and be reminded of what freedom is!”
With those words he lightly tossed the rude chunk of masonry that he had seized from his grating high, and the face-thief caught it with surety.  The moment his fingers touched it, it all went wrong.  The bottom and top dropped out of the world and the sides spun, the Shortcuts stretched so far that they bled out of sight, and the face-thief was solid now, solid as a rock, and heavier than sin.  He was shocked, and sank to the floor too quickly even to call out. 
“I am your friend ‘till the end of your wanderings,” said the man, with the bright and earnest smile that he favoured.  “And so I was.”
“Why?” squeaked the face-thief, breath all gone. 
“You have taught me all I wish,” said the man.  “I have spent many a word on soothing your mind to me, and I have scant patience for motives and morals.  Suffice to say it that free is as free does, and I will be freest of all – free with whatever face I choose, as whoever I choose, as all of them if need be!  Whom first will it be?  Who knows!”  He chuckled so hard that his eyebrows burrowed together like a marriage of caterpillars. 
“And you, my poor, poor old friend – you may make your way here.  Most likely straight downwards; my prison added some manner of weight to the stone that I fancy is most unnatural.”  And with a laugh and a jig he was off and away, dancing on the moonlight. 

The face-thief didn’t cry.  He laughed, and screamed, and yelled, and now and then he yapped, but he didn’t cry.  So what he started to do there on the floor must not have been that. 
“Who’s there?” said a sleepy voice, and now the face-thief’s little sobs grew that much sadder, because he knew that he’d woken up Ema, poor Ema whose face might even now have been stolen right off her head as she slept.  Maybe the man wouldn’t put it back.  Maybe he wouldn’t care.  Maybe, although the face-thief’s imagination could only begin to hint at such things in the darkest corners of his soul, he wouldn’t even wait ‘till she was asleep.  Her or anyone else. 
“Oh, a ghost,” Ema said.  “What do you want, little ghost?  Why are you crying?”
The face-thief tried to say something, tried to explain what he was doing, but he was too out of breath to say anything, and too worried, and a little fearful too.  Who knew what she’d do if he told her everything and anything, or what she’d even do to just a ghost.  He curled up in a still smaller ball around the cruel weight of the stone, and tried to muffle himself. 
“Well, that’s no good at all,” said Ema.  She swung herself out of bed and stood over the face-thief, stroked his quivering back and said soothing nonsense-babytalk to him, and bit by bit she got him to uncurl and saw the stone clutched against his chest. 
“Bad stone there,” she said, shaking her head.  “Really bad.  Who did that to you, little ghost?  You say the word, and I’ll put out the anger on them, from the whole damned town.  We’ll take care of you.”
The face-thief flinched harder.  He didn’t want to shock people. 
Ema laughed, long and rich, fuller and thicker than the quick chuckle of the man.  “You don’t worry, little ghost.  You haven’t been a secret here since you dressed up as my grandmother’s mother and got in a fistfight with her cousin-in-law while she was sound asleep in her bed.  You’re not as careful as you could be, but you’ve got friends because of it.  Nobody’s perfect.”  She reached down and plucked out the stone from the little divot that it’d drilled into the face-thief’s chest, then spat on it and hurled it out the window.  There was a clack and a click and it burst into a thousand bits of everyday dust, and the face-thief was on its feet again, if it had any, which it now didn’t.
Ema laughed as she felt something clench her waist for a fraction of a second, then vanish.  “Take care of it yourself then, will you?  Good for you, little ghost.”

The face-thief didn’t hear her, he was halfway to the moon at the moment, running on the moonbeams and dodging orbital debris – bits of old space shuttles and scraps of rock left over from the beginning of the world.  He still had time, the man loved to talk, to pontificate, to relish the sound of his voice unconstrained.  The face-thief perched on the rim of the Mare Vaporum, and stared down at the planet as hard as he could see, as quick as he could think. 
He saw everything.  Bees fluttered and he saw the dew flick from their wingtips.  Elephants tussled and he saw the dust specks on their eyelashes.  Whales warbled and he saw the microbes in their guts vibrate.  The continents ground together and he counted their atoms using numbers too quick to be real.
And there, there, there – moving fast as only he could – he saw a treacherous man standing in a bedroom. 
The face-thief didn’t dodge, or jump, or dash, or even sprint.  He fell, and he fell so fast it was near flying.  He landed in the bedroom of Jun, and he landed on Jun’s bed, on his covers, on his chest, right in front of the reaching hand of the man. 
“…oh,” said the man, as whatever grand speech that had been brewing in his mouth slid away.
The face-thief leap, speedy with fury, but the man was quick with fear.  He dashed down the mousehole, spun down a mineshaft in brazil, and wafted on the smell of broccoli in a Californian kitchen, all in a dead sprint.  He was an apt pupil indeed, the most apt of all the face-thief had ever taken, which was one. 
But he had no practice.  He had no skill.  He was flashy, yes, he was dashing, yes, he even had a spark of that rare, rare imagination that was needed, hoarded out oh-so-carefully over his long years alone.  But it was nothing but style, and as the man quickly realized as the face-thief tore at his heels, style without substance meant nothing, even when you had no substance. 
A final slide along the rim of a French teacup and they were in Polynesia again, on a very small island.  Ema had gone back to bed, sound and secure, and there was no pause to savour the moment in the man’s mind this time, only greed born of fear that turned his hands to near-talons as he darted to the bedside.  He looked behind him, he looked afore him, he looked at all sides and dimensions, and for that split second he knew he was safe.  His hands grasped either side of the face, felt for the hidden hinges he’d oh-so-carefully watched the face-thief grasp and lock earlier.  There was something about the open eyes.  They were green, with a peculiar glint.
The face-thief popped out of one. 
The man’s mouth opened, maybe to say “oh,” again, maybe to scream, to deny, to roar and fight.  But none of it mattered, because the face-thief was furious beyond all reasoning, and he had done what the man dared try far more often than he dreamed, often enough to do it without even thinking.  His hands darted out, seized on the corners of the man’s jaws and the furrow of his forehead (crushing eyebrows flat under angry palms), and he yanked free the man’s face in one thunder-bolt moment, holding it high between them both. 
There was another endless moment, when the man looked at the man and saw just what was there. 
There might have been a scream in it, but there was nothing for the man to scream with. 
There might have been wide-eyed shock, but there were no eyes for him to widen. 
Instead, he shuddered all over at once, shrank in on himself, and vanished inside-out with a strange high cry and the gritty rattle of a crushed chain.  The Shortcuts trembled tight, then relaxed once more. 

By next morning, things were different.
A publisher woke up to find a copy of Jacob’s latest draft sitting on his desk. 
Jun’s fever broke, and the first thing he saw when he woke up was a potted plant in his room.  His big book that had belonged to his grandfather said it was from Southeast Asia, and was probably extinct. 
Ema’s grandmother had acquired a rocking chair sometime in the night, which was a strange coincidence because the department store that Daisy worked at had one go missing that very night. 
Daisy was fired on the spot, and as she trudged up her driveway she found that someone had left a lottery ticket stapled to the front door.  One month later, she owned a newer, much nicer door that was attached to an entirely different house.  The driveway was a lot longer too. 
Evan found a canister of spray paint left under his pillow, along with a small set of lock picks.  The rest was up to him, and he was quite eager for it. 

Friends in need are friends indeed, and, if circumstances dictate that they be often less close than enemies, they are all the more warming to visit. 

“Faces” copyright 2011, Jamie Proctor. 

July 15th
3:00 PM.
Finally got on-site after eight false starts, two last-minute sign-ups, and five cancellations.  Ground here looks promising – just weathered enough to begin to expose bones, hopefully not so much that they’ll have been eaten away by storms.  Tents are going up and soo
4:25 PM.
Just got back from talk with short, irritated man with shotgun.  Had to persuade him we were not FBI agents or tourists.    Have permission to dig, trip duration cut by one week.  License plate is LB-97318.
Will open bottle earlier than planned.

July 16th
7:15 AM.
Woke up, ate, dispersed black widow from left shoe, spent twenty minutes ousting students from beds.  Equipment was divided quickly after lunch.  Had to separate Patterson and Young after Patterson gestured improperly with shovel handle in attempt to attract interest.  Digging begins imminently.
12:30 PM.
Alarmingly large rainstorm with no forewarning.  Impossible to dig and possibly dangerous.  Much complaining from Donaldson and Kim, admonished them on pitching tent in depression.  Urged students to use time to plan ahead for tomorrow’s excavations.  Communication likely hindered by surreptitious iPods.

July 17th
7:45 AM.
Rain.
3:45 PM.
More rain.
11:50 PM.
Rain.  Again.
Getting good use out of bottle.

July 18th
7:55 AM.
Rain stopped.  Students stayed up much too late last night, efforts at rising from bed hampered by hangovers, laziness.  Patterson claimed incapability of movement.  Young induced movement via water bottle.
1:35 PM.
Rain did us a favour – slope has been stripped apart thoroughly.  Many intriguing possibilities much easier to see without topsoil coverage.  Already found numerous bone fragments.  Possibly something quite large in here.
Dig teams: Patterson-Young, Kelly (solo by request), Donaldson-Kim-Schmidt.
9:20 PM.
Mood over dinner positive.  Many finds, minor but not so small as to be disappointing.  Genuine enthusiasm present for the first time.
11:25 PM.
Horrifying screech.
11:30 PM.
Patterson unanimously mocked by peers for screaming like child upon discovering black widow on pillow.

July 18th
4:05 PM.
Donaldson, Kim, and Schmidt called my attention.  Had unearthed small skull.  Seems some sort of little crocodile.  Good work on their part.  Directed their attention to likely spots for its other bones.  Others working harder, motivated by their success.
7:00 PM.
Young located tooth, which on closer examination proved to be pebble.  Patterson attempted mockery and was threatened with waterbottle.

July 19th
9:05 AM.
Patterson and Young remain univocally antagonistic during breakfast.  Searching sites too close together, not helping situation – each persists in pointing out things the other “just missed” on his/her side.  Violence will hopefully remain verbal.
5:30 PM.
Just past noon, Young punched Patterson directly in gut, resulting in a roll some ten feet downhill.  Fortunately, no injuries.  More fortunately, Patterson’s face landed in a patch of rock that contained actual fossilized tooth rather than stunted cactus two feet distant.  Both claim exclusive credit for discovery.  Have urged them to explore patch together, hoping either acknowledgement of cooperation or elimination of the louder, whichever comes first.
10:15 PM.
Six quite large teeth unearthed by Young and Patterson today, marking them to be envied.  Too busy arguing over who keeps them safe to bask in it though; almost were too distracted to even mark the locations found.  Willing to let them bicker if it means more finds like this – teeth not recognizable to my eye.  Will pore over books, see if I’m missing something.

July 20th
7:10 PM.
Patterson, Young remain surly and quiet – even more so.  Each accuses other of staying up all night picking at nails, each calls other liar.  Maybe joint dig isn’t working.  Donaldson, Kim, Schmidt have found vertebrae, possibly from same crocodile originally excavated.  Encouraging.  That and very nice fern leaf from Kelly make a good day.
9:35 PM.
Young cornered me before bed, insisted I take teeth for safekeeping.  Claims they’re “rattling” at her all night, blames Patterson nudging them with his boot to irritate her.  Anything to make them cut it out.

July 21st
3:00 AM.
Was woken continually by rattling noises several times in the past few hours before source of sound discovered.  Teeth appear to be shaking slightly independent of any outer force, reduced markedly in severity when exposed to light.  When in dark, escalates gradually to the scale of a small set of maracas.  Not sure if I should tell students.
9:30 AM.
Raining again; drizzle, not enough to keep dry inside.  Morale dips.  Patterson, Young more civil.  Kelly accuses Schmidt of trying to “sneak around” his site, calls him “greedy bastard,” Schmidt takes offence, Kelly assures it was meant in jest, Schmidt not convinced, perhaps sensibly.  Perhaps pre-trip briefings should have encouraged use of iPods and discouraged discussion rather than vice versa.
2:00 PM.
Teeth appear mobile when placed on reasonably flat surface (used laptop); toddle about at slow pace when watched out of corner of eyes, attempt (poorly) to freeze when viewed boldly.  Smallest one seems prone to fidgeting during this.
2:15 PM.
Had to stuff teeth hurriedly into box as Schmidt approached to complain about Kelly’s “paranoia.”  Told him to keep his distance and let Kelly cool off.  Schmidt claims impossibility, told him to let Donaldson and Kim do searching for a while.
3:20 PM.
Largest, smallest, and second-largest tooth sharply jabbed right palm as I extracted them from box after Schmidt left.  “Bite” was delivered without great force (no skin break), but clear warning gesture and not acquired wariness – no agitation post-“bite,” apparent docility upon replacement within box and lack of hand-shyness.  Presence of ethologist would be useful.  Philosophy major too.

July 22nd
11:20 AM.
Trip’s halfway done, should be a third.  Must remember license plate.  Donaldson and Kim less inclined to hunt than Schmidt, remain to search for further crocodile traces.  Schmidt sulking, Kelly smug.  Patterson and Young turned up nothing so far, are spending more time arguing than hunting.  Teeth nearly only reliable companions in camp.
12:55 PM.
Reaction to hamburger is immediate and enthusiastic embedment.  Smallest one became stuck, had to assist in egress.
11:55 PM.
Woke up with small, cold, hard object on pillow.  Smallest tooth was attempting to sneak body warmth from back via snuggles.  After careful consideration, went back to sleep.  Too blunt to penetrate skin without greater force.

July 23rd
4:00 PM.
Schmidt left Donaldson, Kim, attempted to join Patterson, Young.  Patterson received offer with guffaw, said if he wanted to take their teeth he’d have to open their mouths because there weren’t any more.  Young was more diplomatic.  Schmidt complained about Donaldson.  Young was less diplomatic.  I intervened.  Didn’t know Young-Donaldson former childhood friends, learn something every day.
Dig teams: Patterson-Young (now in better temper), Kelly (solo by request), Schmidt (solo by self-inflicted choice), Donaldson-Kim (remarkably tranquil).
7:25 PM.
Teeth remain steadfast and unidentifiable (beyond obvious reptilian origin) due to extreme wear; could be herbivore, carnivore, omnivore, fast food junkie, vegan.  Smallest one still clingy and attention-demanding.  Reminded of childhood basset hound, Halibut, but without unpleasant smell.  Am possibly the only wholly content person in camp.  Should remedy this.

July 24th
11:50 AM.
Schmidt seeks attention again, claims he left Donaldson-Kim because they were “holding out on him,” with something big.  When asked for proof, becomes uncomfortable discussing source.  Pressure causes lack of eye contact, fidgeting, verbal stammering, request to withdraw.  Will press issue later.
10:15 PM.
Teeth spent day insistently attempting escape towards NW corner of tent, where they attempted to rip through canvas.  When placed back in box, made efforts to reach NW corner no matter which way it was turned.  Appear highly agitated and difficult to keep still.

July 25th
1:30 AM.
Schmidt and Kelly came near to fistfight as both discovered fossil at same time, Kelly claiming Schmidt intruded on his dig, Schmidt claiming he was free-roaming at the time.  Fossil is lovely little fish quite well preserved.  Split them up, was rounded upon by both for lack of interaction and accused of “sitting on your ass” in tent all day.  May be time to reveal teeth, hopefully restore harmony.  Will do so after dinner.
4:30 AM.
Donaldson, Kim have found something, yet attempt to hide it.  Obvious about it, no guile, too guilty-looking.  Will ask tonight.
6:30 AM.
Patterson, Young show no results on bone hunt and no dig markers yet are covered with dirt and dust; possible fraternization via unification against Schmidt re July 23rd.  Will remind group entire of focusing efforts on studies later.

July 26th
12:25 AM.
Three days left.
Revelation of teeth post-meal rather surprising in range of reactions.  Patterson, Young stupefied (Patterson triumphantly proclaims that he never picked his nails, Young induces cranial bruising); Kelly surprised mildly yet smug; Schmidt shocked then irate; Donaldson-Kim jumpy yet attempt to remain calm while pretending surprise, poorly.  Appears only Patterson-Young have been in dark due to lack of further finds past teeth entire (Kelly’s smugness vanishes rapidly at this revelation, possibly believed himself unique).  Kelly’s fern wavers when held in wind and absorbs water, grows more lustrous in sunlight; Schmidt claims he spotted fish due to its “swimming” against the stone and suspected since Donaldson-Kim attempted to isolate him from crocodile skull + vertebrae, was root cause of departure from dig team.  Initial denial by Donaldson-Kim gives way rapidly under pressure, followed by admission of guilt: hoped to keep secret and reveal more publicly following trip for greater sensationalism.  Admonished both, learned crocodile skull has been hissing, grunting, and clacking to itself since night of excavation, though at tiny volume only audible when held near ear (prone to snapping, evidence: bandaged earlobes of Donaldson-Kim.  Must not write off such things as fashion statements in future).
Total pool of animate fossils:
Fern leaf (demi-living, absorbs nutrients).
Small crocodile skull + vertebrae (vocalistic, capable of biting; rattle against one another)
Fish (swims against surrounding rock).
Unidentifiable teeth (rambunctious)
Characteristic shared by all: increased desire to travel NW direction, noted by all fossil holders.
Reluctantly proposed returning teeth to Patterson-Young, was rebuffed.  Young claims smallest tooth’s habit of hugging close to nape of neck in unguarded moments was “adorable,” Patterson claims my role as surrogate mother too important to disrupt.  Too grateful to reprimand.
6:45 AM.
All excited to leave beds for once as full impact of trip is realized.  Divided between wish to excavate more fossils (Schmidt, Kelly), wish to see why current ones desire NW relocation (Donaldson, Kim, Patterson, Young).  Excavation placed on hold after vote.
6:00 PM.
Direction of desire tilts rapidly away from NW after one-kilometre walk from camp.  Divided group, triangulated with difficulty, approximate location was determined and reached: relatively modest butte nevertheless prominent above landscape, throne-like.  Fossils deliriously intense, agitated above centre.  Will excavate tomorrow; full day job at least.  Sleep for all will prove difficult.

July 27th
Two days left.
6:00 AM.
Even greater eagerness to leave beds, to the point of singing as march to dig is undertaken.  Patterson attempts to sing ribald marching tune taught by elder brother, is mocked roundly yet affectionately.  Best spirits yet.
7:55 PM.
Morale still undaunted despite difficulty of excavation; “Throne” butte near uppermost end of sandstone durability.  Schmidt in better humour post-apology of Donaldson-Kim, team now includes him again.  Kelly working closely with Patterson-Young, dual effect of keeping them busy and reminding him of benefits of teamwork.  Importance of mutual goal as unifying force impressed deeply, will attempt to artificially impose one more thoroughly on future digs, act more decisively to crush factionalism.  Blaming teeth as distraction from professorial duties futile, childish.
Excavation made real progress.  Teeth almost frantic with energy near pit.  Tomorrow, we breach.  Smallest tooth extra-snuggly tonight, attempting to burrow into shoulder to within small fraction of drawing blood.

July 28th
Tomorrow, we pack and leave.
5:45 AM.
For first time, ready almost immediately post-sunup.  Sleep filled with profound and fantastical dreams.  All vibrating with excitement.  Today we unearth it.
12:15 AM.
Discovery!  Fossil is corner of jawbone, extremely large, reptilian, probably theropod.  Excellent condition, will remove from seat soon.

July 29th
Home again.
11:45 PM.
Excavation did not quite go as planned.  Upon exposure of much of skull fossil emerged forcefully from rock, worryingly near complete (missing half tail, large middle portion of left leg – erratic walk to say the least).  Teeth entered skull, other fossils removed forcefully from persons and sucked directly onto surface of “King” fossil’s (Patterson’s terminology) superstructure, followed immediately with forceful emergence of others from all points of Throne and similar attachment.  End result attained within thirty seconds: King is covered with carapace composed of smaller fossils.  King bowed deeply (grace hampered by tail incompleteness), sighted on north(?) star, and departed across badlands at over estimations of fifty mph, unverified (lack of tissues appears to overcome muscle-mass ratio limitations).
Field trip net success, if ultimately with no real physical evidence.  Students initially depressed, perked up on home trip with reminder of next year.
Must remember to check license plate.

“Nothing But the Tooth,” Copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.

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.