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In the deep down stone where the darkness dwelt lived Gulp and the world.  He took up quite a lot of it. 
The world was very wet, slightly more than one Gulp-length in length, around two Gulp-lengths in width, and approximately six Gulp-lengths deep.  The population of the world consisted of Gulp, the Things That Wiggled, and the Things That Wiggled On Rocks.  They got along tolerably well with one another, though relations became strained every once in a while when Gulp had to eat, making his mealtimes something of a guilty (though thankfully rare) pleasure.  The guilt vanished with sleep, which was good because that was easily the thing Gulp did the most.  The world was small, but Gulp could imagine things much bigger, particularly when asleep.  Once he’d imagined a pool three times deeper than all the world and twice as wide, a feat he’d never replicated since.  
Most of his time that wasn’t spent dozing was spent not thinking.  It was very difficult, but he managed.  Too much time in your own head could make you go strange and odd, like the occasional one of the Things That Wiggled that would crawl right up into Gulp’s mouth as he was sleeping and cast itself inside.  He never was sure why they did that, but it troubled him a little.  They had so much that he didn’t (someone to talk to and live with, their strange business of scraping the Slimy Stuff from the rocks and eating it, their desperate avoidance of the Things That Wiggled On Rocks and their sharp needlebits), and seeing it all go to waste just didn’t seem right.  All the same, it was nice to eat a meal that didn’t require any effort on his part. 
Gulp wondered about dying sometimes, and how he would go about it.  It didn’t seem too difficult for the Things, but there was nothing big enough to eat him in all the world and try as he might he just couldn’t see any other way. 

The world was dark and cold, but Gulp didn’t really have anything to contrast those feelings against, so he didn’t mind all that much.  Not only had he never seen light, he didn’t even know what it was, until that one strange moment (no days, no nights, only a long chain of moments stretching back on and on to Gulp’s origin, so far back that he couldn’t remember it at all) when a new and odd vibration came trembling from the place outside the world. 
At first he thought it was a bit of rock falling. Sometimes that happened, outside the world.  Four times it had even fallen into the world, and the second time it had clipped his frail and translucent back, giving him a nasty jolt and leaving a bruise that had taken far too long to fade away.  But this was different; it kept going.  Scrapes, shuffles, crunches, bumps, all rippling through the stone, into the world.  All irregular, erratic, but with an underlying pattern and getting stronger by the moment.  Something was happening up there, outside the world, far above Gulp where he rested at the bottom of six Gulp-lengths of wet world.  He decided that he would have to go and investigate. 
And so Gulp rose up from the depths on the strokes of his fins, slow and sure, past the colonies of the Things That Wiggled On Rocks and their prey, the Things That Wiggled, and their prey, the Slimy Stuff, and on and on and up and up, all the way up to the edge of the world, where the wet stopped and the strange place outside the world, the “dry” began.  It made his skin prickle as he broke its surface, and he felt the unfamiliar chill of strange currents swimming across his back. 

Something was there, that was for sure.  He could feel deep, steady vibrations.  There was a thing up there where no things should ever be, beyond the world itself; a moving thing, something so large that he could feel its very insides lurching forwards with organic implacability, something that made even the very largest of the Things That Wiggled on Rocks seem small.  It moved again, and he felt the outside of the world vibrate with its motions in harmony, a presence so massive that the world itself responded to it…
…just like Gulp. 

Thinking back on it all, that was probably the moment It happened.  It was very mild at the start, of course, but there was no question needed: that was the origin, and It sprang from a very simple and startling thought that launched its way through Gulp’s man for parts unknown: there’s something else out there, outside the world, that’s like me.  The shock came over him so strongly that it nearly stopped his swimming, leaving him wallowing uncertainly in midwater.  So great was his surprise that he almost missed the next thing, as the vibrations neared and then halted, the tremors pausing as whatever-was-outside paused above the world, leaning over from who knew where. 
There was something strange up there.  Something new that Gulp…knew of, he didn’t know how.  It was like feeling without feeling, touching without touching.  It hurt a little, and made unfamiliar bits of his skull tingle and ache in strange ways, hitherto useless organs finding their footing at long last.  He needed a word for it, the strange sensation that made murky shapes appear inside his mind, a mind that didn’t know what they were. 
Light.
Yes, that would do. 
The thing outside moved closer still, and Gulp flinched as he felt something break the surface of the world.  The light was too harsh, too hard against his… eyes, and he feared that if it got any closer it would hurt.  Perhaps that was what would kill him, or could kill him.  But the pain stayed in his eyes, and the thing outside drew no closer.  There was something it was holding inside the world that wasn’t part of itself, he saw.  It didn’t feel like rock, but it definitely wasn’t flesh.  Some small odd object that filled itself up with the world and was removed, then carried away on the echoes of fading rumblings, the sounds of the departing thing from outside the world. 

No sooner had it left than Gulp broke his startled, wary inaction.  He berated himself thoroughly inside his head as he sank downwards back towards his rest, tail twitching in agitation.  For the first time in the ever-ongoing chain of moments that he was he’d met another thing like him, felt it appear on the edge of the world…and done nothing.  He should’ve done something, shown himself at least – unmoving like that, there must’ve been no way for it to feel him.  Gulp’s life had been all the same so far; the same perils, same guilt, the same pleasures, the same silence and pauses.  Now he had a brand new regret: he’d seen the first exception from normality he’d ever known, and he’d wasted it.  The despair and depression nearly overwhelmed him, and so he went to sleep, hoping that it would bring some respite. 
It didn’t.  He awoke still sorrowful and slightly hungry, and managed to eat an entire three of the Things That Wiggled without noticing before he stopped, which made him feel worse.  Altogether Gulp was wallowing as much in self-pity as the world when he heard the same traces and tremors of movement again. 
For a moment he thought it was his (very small and quiet) imagination again, but there it was: the shifting, the rumbling, the strangely predictable irregularity of the movement.  The presence.  And as he hurried to the surface, setting the world all a-froth in his churning wake, the first faint…glows… of that strange thing, light.  The thing from outside was back. 

Many things went through Gulp’s mind as he watched, all very quickly but without haste, in a sort of dreamy haze.  There was all the time he wanted somehow, as he felt the thing from outside feel about with a pair of peculiar gripping things that weren’t quite part of it and snare a couple of the Things That Wiggled On Rocks and the Things That Wiggled, as well as a sizable scraping of the Slimy Stuff.  He supposed that it was only fair to share the world with the only other thing like him, but he was a little distressed at how much it seemed to want to eat, and hoped that there would be enough left over for him to keep eating.  He wasn’t sure what would happen then, but his stomach had always felt very odd after large gaps between meals, and the thought of a long series of moments all like that stretching onwards maybe forever made him balk. 
Gulp examined his visitor more closely this time, the thing that was like him.  Well, not quite like him.  Outside the world dried his skin and when he poked his head out it made him grow dizzy and weak, and it didn’t seem to want to entire the world proper itself, only gingerly inserting its farther extremities and going about its matters businesslike.  It was indeed around his own size, or a little smaller.  The female Things That Wiggled were a little smaller than the males, did that mean it was female?  Gulp didn’t think he was female himself, but he’d never had a chance or reason to wonder, alone as he was.  Maybe it was female, maybe it was male.  Did it matter?  He didn’t think that the world had room in it for any more Gulps or things, and perhaps it was better that it was just the two of them. 
The thing took her meals and left, but this time Gulp didn’t scold himself.  She would be back, he was sure.  Of course she would.  Definitely.  She had to.  After all, how big was outside the world?  Twice as large?  Three times?  She came from far enough away that he couldn’t feel it…perhaps even ten times larger?  It must be awfully large and empty up there; Gulp felt sorry for her, and spent some whiles carefully herding Things That Wiggled upwards towards what had seemed to be the limits of her reach, bumping them with his snout.  Perhaps she wasn’t after food, just company.  She must be very lonely.  Gulp knew the feeling.  And began to again, very deeply. 

After a long pause (in which Gulp remembered very little at all), a third time she came, a third time Gulp rose from the bottom of the world to rest at its very margins, slowly and surely using his strange eyes to see the light. 
The thing from outside found his relocated Things That Wiggled very quickly, and began to pluck them from the world as surely and swiftly as before, holding them close to her bright light.  They looked very odd in its strange illumination, quite unlike they felt to Gulp’s touch, and he peered as closely as he was able, lifting his head ever so slightly clear of the world, feeling the cold dry touch of outside on his skin once more, prickling his freshly-sensitive eyes.  He twitched in discomfort, causing the world to splash around him, echoing sharply, and hr realized his mistake exactly too late. 
The light spun to glare straight at him, he flinched backwards, sloshing even more loudly, and then thing outside lurched, slipped, made a strange cry (the loudest sound he’d ever heard, he realized through the shock), and smacked backwards onto the rock, rolling down the steep slope at the world’s edge and dropping down into it with a mighty splash.  She nearly hit Gulp as she sank by him. 
The thing was not attempting to swim, he saw, preferring instead to drop straight to the bottom of the world.  He followed anxiously, questions filling his head and stumbling around in a panic, searching for any sign of movement.  Her body still seemed to be working, but she wasn’t so much as twitching.  Was she asleep?  Why would she fall asleep like that?  Little bubbles were coming out of her mouth – why were they doing that?  How could she breathe with bits of outside the world inside her like that?  Had she moved?  No, that was the current. 
The thing hit the rock at the bottom of the world, but gently.  Gulp hovered over her anxiously, mind racing against itself.  Her body was getting quieter, the bubbles were getting fewer.  Was she going to die?  If she was like him (but not quite like him at all, not at all, now that he could feel her closely – she was shaped wrong, shaped wrong in so many odd ways but she was the right size), was this how he could die?  Was it that easy? To just stop moving, stop breathing, and shut down?  Why was she doing this?
It was at that moment that Gulp’s head cleared and in a single brilliantly, harmfully bright moment realized It had happened, what It was, and what It wanted him to do. 
First, he’d fallen in love. 
Second, this was a shorter way to say that he cared about the thing from outside more than anything else he’d known about in all his chain of moments. 
Third, sometimes love demands sacrifice. 
The thoughts were discretely herded back into his mind as the revelations faded, now calm, orderly, and filled with absolute certainty.  The thing didn’t mind the cold dry of the world above, the place he couldn’t go.  The thing had never come down into the world before, and had seemed to avoid it, so maybe she couldn’t go there either.  Maybe it was killing her.  So she had to go up. 
Gulp’s teeth were large and cruel, and his thoughts were vivid with the memories of those strange sad Things That Wiggled and how they threw themselves into it to die.  He didn’t want the thing to die, so he couldn’t carry her that way.  It took some quick and vicious wriggling, and the thing from outside flopped around alarmingly against the bottom of the world, but he managed to squirm his way underneath her as she half-floated.  Gulp’s back was frail, but it was broad and flat and just large enough to hold her and all her weight as it pressed down on him, anxious to return to the bottom even as he strove to rise again, up to the edge of the world.  The Things That Wiggled On Rocks squirmed in alarm at the turbulence his ascension left, each Gulp-length gained in height a thrashing, heaving, bone-bruising motion that left his fins aching. 
Dryness prickled his back, the brightness of the fallen light filled his eyes and he knew he’d made it.  Above him, the weight of the thing nearly doubled, buckling him low into the world and nearly submerging her again as he thrashed his flukes mightily, barely holding ground.  The roar and tumult of his efforts filled his ears to bursting; it sounded as though the whole world was trying to upend itself. 
The thing wasn’t awake, he could tell.  There was no movement on his back, although he felt a jerking, heaving life within her still as she ejected bits of the world from her mouth, hacking loudly.  She couldn’t move yet, and he was running out of both strength and the body to hold it in.  Thin bones had snapped, and muscles that had never had to face strain were stretching past their limits.  If he sank, she died, but he would sink, even if only as his frame crumpled under her mass.  How could she be smaller than him and yet so heavy?  The light winked at him from the shore, adding further pain to his efforts, and it was at that precise moment that it all fell together for him.  Gulp gathered the last of his strength, turned to face the light, and shoved with all the force he could muster. 
The rock touched his chin, his jaw, scraped along his belly painfully, and lurched its way along his body down to the very tip of his tail.  The light bounced off one of his flippers, breaking it, and the thing from above rolled off alongside him, landing square on the stone outside the world.
 There was still no respite from the weight: dry was all around him, burying him, weighing him down under his own flesh.  Even his newfound vision was blurring with strain, and the sounds and feelings around him were strange, blunted by the dry, bereft of currents to carry him.  It was because of this that he didn’t feel the other things until they were standing right next to him, over him.  One came beside Gulp, light shining from its hand, and touched his side, a surprisingly light sensation amongst so much crushing pain.  Another was at the side of the thing from outside, raising her up, helping her to wake.  More of those strange loud sounds from them, from all three.  More strange sounds, but Gulp was too tired to hear them.  His eyes were wandering, and for the first time he felt and saw and heard the world from outside.  It looked very small, over rock, under rock, surrounded by rock, and he could feel so much around him, even in the small soft bundle of sensations that were all that he had the energy to perceive. 
It was then that Gulp learned his fourth and last thing about It, as he felt the thing from outside move on her own, to crouch besides him and look at him, eye to fading, half-blind eye.  In the end, it’s worth it. 

In the deep down stone where the darkness dwelt lived light and a very small world.  It was wet, cold, and there was no truly proper way to measure it now, but she would make her best try at it. 

“What You Are in the Dark,” Copyright Jamie Proctor, 2010. 

Once upon a time (quite an old time, at least compared to now), there was a spider.  She was not a particularly strong spider, not a particularly fast spider, not a particularly practiced weaver of webs, nor was she notably bad at any of these things either.  Still, this spider did have something special about her: she was a dreamer.  And like all small things, her dreams were very large.  She would dream for hours and sometimes days, shaking off her fantasies and fancies to find that her prey had been and gone, shaking her web half to pieces in the process.  It irritated her, but only mildly, even if it did leave her a little hungry.  Still, she disliked the work.  It took time away from her dreaming. 
It was a nice warm day when the trouble started.  The spider was waking up one sleepy summer morning when she heard the funny calls from the humans.  Most things humans did was funny, but this was funnier than most.  They were going into a strange building, almost all of them, filing in one after another.  The spider was curious, and her web had just been destroyed again, so she decided to put off her work and investigate. 
It was a long trip, for a little spider.  But not too long to make.  She got there just in time to hear the man in the special outfit talking.  He was talking an awful lot, but no one else was talking back – just listening very carefully.  The spider thought this was unusual, and so she listened too. 
He was talking an awful lot about something he called a “god.”  He thought it was very important, and so did the others humans from the look of it.  Whatever it was, it seemed to be very complicated to need so much explanation, but the spider was bored and had time and made a game try at it.  As far as she could guess, god was very big and very strong, and she wondered how it’d gotten that way.   
“Excuse me,” said the spider to the talking man, as the people filed out of the building beneath her, “what does your god eat?”
The man was a little surprised.  Most spiders don’t express any sort of theological interest, even something so relatively down-to-earth as theorizing the dietary habits of deities.  “It doesn’t need to,” he explained, “but I suspect whatever it feels like.”
“Hmm.”  The spider thought it over, legs tapping in thought (spiders have the most marvellous and complex fidgeting of any animal besides the octopus).  “But what made it get so big then?”
“Prayers,” said the man, realizing the spider’s motives and looking for a way to excuse himself so he could go have his post-ceremonial drink.  “Lots and lots of prayers.”
“What are prayers?”
“You were watching us, yes?  We were praying.”
“Oh.  Thank you.” 
The talking man left to find his drink, and the spider reeled herself back to the roof, where she thought.  Prayers must be fine food indeed, to let something grow as big as a god.  Perhaps she should try to catch some herself the next time the humans came into the prayer-building.  Best to be discreet then; she doubted they’d be happy with her taking any for herself, even if it was just a little, enough for a meal or two, or three.  She just wanted to see how good prayer tasted, that was all.  Nothing more. 
 
So she built a big fine web.  It took her days to prepare, stretching from one corner of the ceiling to another, fine and yet thorough, unseeable from below and strong enough to catch the wriggliest, canniest prayer and wrap it up tightly.  Then she waited as the humans filed in again, exhausted and filled with fierce impatience.  She watched as they listened, and watched as they murmured, and watched as they left again and her web remained empty. She was tired, she was hungry, and her spinnerets were aching and sore. 
“Hey!” she yelled at the talking man, too irritated to care if he knew her plans or not.  “Where were your prayers?  I couldn’t catch any of them!”
“Prayers are invisible, untouchable,” the talking man told her.  “Only gods can feel them, and the people who make them.” 
The spider gnashed her mandibles at this.  “That’s silly!  How do they do it?”
The talking man just laughed and walked away.  That was the moment when the spider decided she’d take more than just a few prayers.  She’d take them all, then see how much the talking man would laugh at her. 

First, though, she had to think up a new way to catch prayers.  She puzzled and thought at it for hours, but got nowhere.  Her ideas were getting too hot and thick, clouding each other out and clustering up.  So she stopped thinking and started working on her web again, doubling and redoubling its strength, mind wandering, dreaming awake.  Her ideas floated away to toy with things unconscious, bouncing away from reality…where they stuck.  Stuck fast.  And with them dangling there, potential cocooned and on display, thought hit again like a wasp-sting. 
“Dreams,” said the spider. 
It took many hours of aimless, dreaming spinning and uncoiling and repairing, but at last her web was re-completed, laced with hours of meandering daydreams.  It was exactly the wrong sort of web – it was inexact, wandering, imprecise, and would snap apart under the weight of even the least determined and most suicidally-inclined fly ever to live.  But prayers were invisible, untouchable.  How much weight could they have?

She found out when the people came back.  The talking man talked, the people murmured, and the web bulged, strained, and snapped.  The spider barely had time to catch herself before she fell, and watched helplessly from midair as her web unravelled in front of her eyes, spidery dreams sprinkling across the people below (a few of them had odd flights of fancy concerning aphids and beetles, but otherwise thought little of it). 
The spider cursed old spider curses about the big clumsy stupidness of mammals and other such things, and it took her a little while to calm down and think.  They were too big, that was the problem.  Her dreams were too small, too differently-shaped to net and snare human prayers; it was like trying to scoop up a lake using a net the size of a thimble.  She needed human dreams, and well, look who was walking right underneath her…. 
Talking man’s home was not far away, and she hid under his bed until his breathing slowed and softened.  Then she crept out, quietly as only a spider can move (eight silent little legs, quick and soft as kitten feet), and she spun nets of dreams and silk, dreams to catch dreams, silk to hold form.  By morning she was exhausted, but she also had several little silk bags hanging from her abdomen crammed full of the talking man’s nighttime visions, and she was able to hitch a ride back on talking man’s coat with him none the wiser. 

Making the new web was hard.  The human dreams were strange and complex and often blindingly obtuse.  If the spider were a human artist, she would have likened it to a potter trying to sculpt a model using limestone.  It took her more than three times as long as her first web, and by completion she was sick and tired of it all.  And very hungry.  But mostly tired; so very, very, very tired that it outweighed even her hunger and frustrated impatience.  She fell asleep while waiting for the people to finish entering the building again, before talking man could even begin his speechifying. 
The tugs and jerks of movement, of twitching prey woke her.  For a moment she thought that another lazy fly had mistakenly blundered into her web – they had delayed its construction for entire hours at a time, pesky nuisances – but it was too strange, too unfamiliar.  It was a prayer, wriggling blindly in its snare, invisible but snagged by dreams. 
Quick as lightning she dashed to it, trussed it up firmly, and set about draining it dry.  It tasted better than liquid moonlight, riper than a cut of prime aged sedimentary rock, finer than atomic dust, and the spider couldn’t drink enough of it.  She gulped it down and all her aches and pains and sore tired legs vanished.  It felt like she was strong enough to snare eagles, and that… that was just the first.  Already her web was tingling, plunking, twitching under the strain of dozens of prayers, wafting up from below, intercepted before they could reach the god. 

After that, it was as smooth as dancing (spiders are as elegant as eels on the ballroom floor).  The prayers came up fast and went down fast, and the spider grew and grew.  She was fat and happy on prayers, and she no longer wondered how the god had gotten so big – she herself was swelling up and up, to the point where she could no longer hide on the ceiling of the prayer-building any longer, not without being seen.  She specially reinforced the web, backing it with the power of her stolen prayers, and it grew strong as steel and nearly invisible.  The prayers could squirm all they liked; they would remain safe there until the last human left and she could descend from the attic to snack freely, leaving the spider happy and lazy, free to dream all day and feast all night.  Each week there were more and more prayers and the prayers themselves were more confused and easily caught, as the humans bemoaned the apparent silence of their god.  Prayers for rain for the crops, prayers for the ill to grow well, prayers that the neighbour might slip in dung and fly head over heels in front of the whole village; children’s prayers, elder’s prayers, all had their own savoury, sweet, or sour flavours to the palate spider’s mind and body. 
As for the god, it was wondering exactly why the one prayer-place was so silent.  It had always been a good village; not overflowing with prayers, but it was not a large community.  It resolved to discover this mystery for itself, and it descended down into the place of prayer quietly, without fuss.  It was not a showy god, and did not wish to cause unnecessary disturbance.  How vexed it was then, when it found itself bound in a web of prayer and dreams!

The spider knew right away, of course.  She’d drawn strings of her webs up into the attic, where she could keep a running tally of how many prayers she might expect to suck up that eve.  Such a large and strange twisting in it gave her much concern, and she skittered down immediately, a great crawling thing much bigger than any other spider that walked the earth, big as a plate and more. 
“Who are you and what are you doing on my web?” she demanded.  “You’ll rip it up if you’re not careful, blundering into it like that!”  The spider had never met a god before, and had no idea what the strange not-there-but-there thing taking up valuable prayer-space was. 
“No-one important,” said the god.  It was as curious about this strange thing as she was about it.  After all, it had never met a spider quite so large before.  “What is your web for?”
“Prayers,” boasted the spider.  “They’re invisible, and they’re untouchable, but I can touch them, touch them and eat them!  They’ve made me big, just like a god.”
“I see,” said the god, who was a little worried and wanted to keep her talking.  The web was very strong, it was rather stuck (not so much as a finger could budge), and though the spider seemed conversational, it fretted that that without distraction she might remember it had damaged her web and grow angry.  “That is very clever indeed.  How did you touch them then?”
“Dreams,” she said.  “The prayers tangle up in them, and then I can suck them dry.  They’re the most delicious thing in all the world, even better than mayflies.”
“Come now.  That’s impossible,” scoffed the god.
The spider danced a little tantrum.  “Are you calling me a liar?  I say they’re the most delicious things there ever have been or will be, and I will prove it!  Wait awhile, they’re coming in mere minutes – then I’ll show you!”  And with that she turned about, ready to skitter back upstairs in a sulk. 
“Wait,” said the god, hastily.  “Please, can you loosen my bonds?  They’re too tight, and I can’t scratch my nose.”
The spider looked doubtfully at it.  “Do you even have a nose?” she asked.  “Well, no matter.  I will loosen one thread.  That will let you scratch, and still keep you out of mischief.”  So she reached out with her sharp fangs and carefully nipped one silken thread loose, then she turned on her heels and scuttled away. 
The dangling god smiled to itself, and when the people walked in it chuckled, and it began to laugh out loud, very quietly, as the desperate, confused prayers began to bob upwards in innumerable quantities and tangled themselves in the web.  It could barely move one finger, but when you’re a god, one finger is all that’s needed.  It stretched itself as mightily as it could, and soon a prayer landed on its finger and soaked in, like water in sand.  It flexed away more strands and reached further, and they soon flocked to it, vanishing softly into its core. 
They were indeed good prayers, the finest the god had seen in many a year, and it began to sing with appreciation as it took them, a quiet, happy tune that the humans heard in the very backmost corners of their brains and fell silent at without quite knowing why, happy and at peace.  They left the church in good humour and springs in their steps, and that was when the spider came down, confused at the odd music. 
“Where are my prayers?” she demanded, staring at the empty web. 
“My prayers,” corrected the god, and the spider’s heart sank as she saw it sitting there in midair quite peacefully, free of the strands. 
“It was just a few little prayers!” she protested.  “What harm did I do?”
“Very little,” said the god.  “But a little was enough.  Why did you do this?”
“To be big,” said the spider.  “To have time to dream, to be strong and not have to fix my web every day and night.”
“You had time to dream on your web in the first place,” said the god.  “You are lazy, and I will punish you for the harm you have done, as laziness is no excuse.  But as it is small harm, and you are unhappy, I will also reward you.”
The spider did another little fidget dance at this, but before she could so much as protest, it was done.  Her webs were wiped from the ceiling, and try as she might she didn’t have the faintest idea of how to remake them; her silk yet flowed, her spinnerettes were whole, but the memories of her great elaborately woven webs were gone. 
“Now go,” said the god.  “Go and hunt for your food.  In the trees, on the ground.  Make a nest if you must, but your webs will do your work for you no more, and you will search for your prey on foot.  But I promise you this: you will be big, the biggest of them all, and you will remain strong.  You will not need your webs.”

And so the spider (who the god named Tarantula) went into the forest, as she was so large now that the humans shrieked at her and tried to strike her.  She wove nests in the trees, she wove nests in the dirt, in burrows, and she hunted (although she preferred to wait and bite things as they came near her dens, that did not always work).  She was a little sad that she had no time for dreaming.  She was a little angry that she had to spend her time hunting. 
But she was the biggest one of all the spiders, and her many children too, and for that she was very thankful. 

“On a Web and a Prayer” copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor. 

All four of the survivors entered the shelter at almost the same time, weary, scraped, battered, and bruised beyond measure.  Each instinctively grasped at his hip, shoulder, or side for a weapon that was no longer there, makeshift or finely tooled, then relaxed as they saw the others were similarly disarmed. 
There were seats, convenient yet uncomfortable, arranged around a small, generic table with some nondescript food atop it.  They used them wordlessly. 
At last, when the plate was down to the final scraps, one of them spoke through his last mouthful.  “Helluva thing out there, wasn’t it?”
There were nods, slow and solemn, weary. 
“I was in the country when it hit, missed the brunt of it.  Any of you guys from the cities?  Was it as bad as it seemed?”
“Worse,” said a second man, one hand fidgeting with his baseball cap, brim slipping side-to-side once every five seconds like clockwork.  His eyes swept around the room rapid-fire, scanning exits, entries, points of defence.  “Panic, riots, gas main explosions, power failures, traffic jams mixed with overturned trucks.  Cops vanishing, fire department in shambles.  Was a goddamned shitstorm.”
The third stared at the empty table with the blank expression of a cow regarding a barn wall.  “There were so many missing lights,” he said, voice a dreamy monotone.  “There should have been lights, and there weren’t any.  They put out all the lights.  They don’t like it when you can see them coming.  Really pisses them off.”  His gaze lifted up to the ceiling, leaving behind his voice. 
The other two looked to the last man, the biggest in the room.  He appeared to be trying to curl himself into as small a position as possible in his chair, humming a quick and nervous tune.  His eyes met theirs, and he steadied for a moment.  “They killed all the cows,” he said, then giggled and redoubled his humming. 
The first and second man looked to each other and shrugged. 
“I would like to tell a story,” announced the third man, making the others jump a little.  “It’s how I got here.” 

“I was working,” said the third man, who was now looking directly at and through them, “at my job.  It was in a store.  A bookstore, I think.  And it was very boring, so I was on an evening smoke break.  A very long smoke break, a smoke break that would last until my manager found me, because it was so boring, you see.  And that’s why I am still alive, because they came in fast and hard through the front door.  I heard the screams, pushed the door open, and I saw what was happening.  They were all dying by then.  Lots of red, but other, funny colours too.  Like a boxful of dirty crayons.  Very ugly.”
He shrugged, the pudginess of his shoulders rippling.  “So I ran.  I am not good at running, but I forced it, and I think I overtook the worst of them.  They were fast, but they had to stop to hunt and kill and put out the lights, so they could use the dark properly.  I didn’t have to stop until I couldn’t run anymore, and that took time.  More time than I thought.  When I stopped, I was out of the city, heading off the road.  The highway was burning, full of broken cars and dead people, you see, so I could not walk on it.” 
There was a long, slow silence as he stared at his fingers, something behind that pudding-formed face thinking everything over as carefully as it could.  The slight whispery sound of the second man’s fidgeting was too loud, overlapping oddly with the fourth man’s humming, which incorporated it quickly into its own nervous leitmotif. 
“Then,” he continued, “I walked.  And after a few days, I ran out of food.  And as I was walking through the forest, I saw a barn.  I’d been avoiding buildings and roads, but I was so hungry, you see.  I went up to it, and everyone was dead, and one of them too.  The farmer had a hunting rifle, you see, and he had aimed very carefully.  But he and his family had been dead and ruined by its comrades, but it hadn’t been, and I was so hungry.  It was one of them, and they aren’t like us, so it wasn’t really cannibalism, you see.  Besides, I used their oven because it was still working, and it’s all right because I cooked it.  You see how it is.”
The silence was shorter, but quieter this time.  Even the fourth man had stopped humming and was listening with cautious care. 
“After that I walked some more.  And then I saw signs of people, so I followed them.  And they found me, and showed me to this place.  There aren’t many of them, and I am very thankful.  I was so hungry again, you see.” 
The second man spoke first.  “Hell of a story.  You got damned lucky out there.  Right near the city limits, eh?  I wasn’t so lucky.  Let me tell you what happened in there.”  He searched his pockets, then pulled a face.  “Fuck.  Outta smokes.  Had to trade my pack to the guys here for these new clothes.”  He sighed.  “Ah well, my nerves’ll just have to take it.”
“So,” he began, “I got off my shift, I get in my truck, and I pull onto the street.  There’s too much traffic, but that’s normal, and I should be used to it but I’ve just had the most miserable fucking day.  We’ve all been there, right?”  A beat, during which only the first man nodded confirmation – the fourth was back to his humming, and the third was staring at the second man’s baseball cap. 
“Yeah, we have.  So when some clown tries to cut me off almost to the exact second that it looks like we’re moving again, I didn’t take it kindly.  As a matter of fact, I jumped out of the truck, ran up to him, and started chewing the little shithead out through the window.  Well, he got out of the car and surprise, he wasn’t such a little shithead anymore.  Must’ve been six foot eight, and, well you guys can see I’m not exactly up there.  But there’s no way in hell I’m backing down.”
“So we get into a fight.  Just yelling at first, but then he tries looming over me, and I poke him in the gut, and then the shoving starts.  We’re about five seconds from a genuine goddamned fistfight in the middle of a rush hour traffic jam, and we’re yelling so loud we can’t even hear the screams from up ahead.  The first one of them I saw took the shithead from behind.  Popped his head like a cork mid-cuss.  The only reason I made it out of that was that I didn’t stick around to gawp – I was tensed for a fist fight, and I just redirected that focus a little.  Ran straight for the car, yanked my handgun out, and killed it when it couldn’t have been more than half a foot from me.  One shot, clean kill.  It was a closer talker than shithead’d been.”
“Now unlike you,” he said, grinning toothily at the third man, who remained blank, “I couldn’t run.  Bad knee, but more importantly, I had nowhere to run.  Bumper-to-bumper traffic, and just me, my Glock, and about a million fewer cartridges than I’d have liked.  Tough luck.  But I didn’t really have time to complain, and it wasn’t like it could’ve fixed anything.”
“My first thought was to get home.  I’ve got other guns there, and there was no way I was getting out of the city armed like I was, with traffic a mess and my knee.  So I headed for the subways.  There was bloody hell breaking loose everywhere on the streets, explosions, crashes, fires, and they were all over it like a dog on its own shit.  I figured so long as I was careful where I stepped and made sure to get out of the way before I heard a train coming, everything’d be fine.”
“Well, as lucky would have it, they prefer the dark – like you said pal, they keep out of the lights, and break ‘em.  But I didn’t know that until I was half a mile down the tunnel and hearing them out there, just past where I could see.  They’d taken out a subway car.  Bodies everywhere.  I hid in it while they checked around, and when they moved on, I followed real nice and slow.  Found another gun on one of the passengers too, so no big deal.  More ammo’s nice.  Then I guess they had a guy run rear guard – maybe they heard me earlier on and thought I was some sort of tail – and I almost walked into him when I pulled into the next station.  Surprised both of us, but I was more frightened than he was.  Gave me the advantage, landed him a sound pistol-whip in the teeth, and gave me the chance for a quick show of marksmanship.  Three rounds to be sure, all of ‘em dead centre.  Bastards die hard.  I didn’t care how bad my knee was then; I ran.  I only made it about a block away, but I ran, and I guess they thought I went back down the tunnel, either that or they just didn’t think I was worth following.  Sure as hell didn’t go back below, though.  Gives me the shakes just thinking about it.”
“After that?  It got blurry.  I tried sticking to the streets, keeping low in the chaos.  Didn’t work too well, almost got killed four times in as many minutes.  Tried moving inside.  They were prepared for that too; inside all the buildings, like termites invading an anthill.  Bloody slaughterhouses, every one.  Didn’t have as many near-death experiences there though – I was just one of a morass of targets.  Plus, I got smart and left right away.”
“At some point I ditched the idea of heading home.  Too far, and it was too dangerous.  I think I was probably expecting to die, I just hadn’t realized it yet.  So I started marching for the highway, taking down anything that looked at me funny.  I killed one other guy by accident – thought he was one of them.  Poor bastard.  I felt bad about it, but only for a moment, because then I’d gotten someone else’s attention with the shot.  That happened a lot.  One of them spots you?  Fire at it, maybe you get him, maybe you don’t.  But that doesn’t matter, because you’ve just alerted three or four more.  The best you can do is pray that either you move faster than they do or that they find someone else and pick on him instead.  Heard that happen a few times.  Poor bastards.  By then I didn’t feel sorry, just glad.  They were going to die anyways, might as well die saving my ass.”
“When I hit the highway?  Exactly as bad as we’ve said it was.  Nothing but hell on a neat little eight-lane asphalt line.  Swarming with them everywhere.”
“From then on, I basically did the same thing as the zen master here just told, except I had a gun.  Picked off the odd lone one of ‘em I ran into, shot game when I could find it – they don’t seem to think much of anything of most animals, weird when you think of how thorough they were on all of us, you’d think they lived for blood – and ate it raw.  No smoke that way, and no scent.  Keeping that last one made me swear off that last packet, but it kept me nicely tetchy.  Got a mite delirious a few times after drinking from a bad stream, but pulled through until I found this place.  Not too shabby, and they were happy to take me in.  Shame they wouldn’t let me bring my gun inside, but they’ve got a strongbox for it and they’ve got decent security.  Should be safe.  Probably.”
He sat back, grunting in satisfaction.  “And that’s my story told.  Who’s up next?”
Surprisingly, the fourth man uncoiled himself.  It was slow and odd, but not cumbersome – the sort of regally contorted movements that a python uses to unwrap itself from its prey. 
“Me,” he said.  “Me me me.  Definitely ME.”  His eye was odd; resting on them, then flicking wildly about, then staring flat and stable again, daring the viewer to believe that it had moved in the first place.  “Is that all right?”
“Sure,” said the second man.  “Yes,” said the first man.  The third man said nothing, but bobbed his head gently, bouncing his chin on his blubbery neck.
“Right.  Right.”  He giggled a little.  “I’m sorry.  I’m just a little on EDGE.  A little nervous.  A little.  But yes, what happened.” 

“I owned a ranch, a big ranch, a fine ranch, I made a lot of money oh a lot of lovely money.  Because I was good and my cows were good and I was good at the business it was all so GOOD.  And I’d eaten breakfast and was just going out the back door and I went out to look at the herd and the cows were all dead all my beautiful COWS.”  He broke into heaving sobs, and before the others had time to blink he was back to grinning happily.
“But anyways I saw they were dead because they had no faces anymore and I knew they were dead because they had no insides anymore they’d pulled out all the cows’ insides oh my beautiful cow INSIDES see mister sir mister you see they care about SOME animals right DON’T YOU?”  The stare that he directed at the second man was hard and flat, a near-threat backed up by clenching fists that made him reach to his side for that invisible weapon again.  And again, that smile melted back in faster than lightning. 
“And they were there, so many of them, all about the insides and I shouted at them shouldn’t have done that because they saw me and chased me and I had to run get my gun locked myself in my house fired at them stupid slow things thought I was helpless but they set FIRE to it oh my house my worn comfortable house, all gone, all the money all the wood all the books and records and beds and tables and BURNT.”  He coughed out a laughing sob.  “But it didn’t matter, got away, lost the eye to a falling timber because I had to blow out a wall with the gas main but I got away and cleaned out the socket good and I walked off because I was all that was left because the cows were all dead and the ranch was gone oh me oh my oh me.”
He curled up again, and was quiet but for the humming. 
“And what happened then?” asked the first man. 
The humming paused.  “I came here, and they put me here and now you’re here and they wanted me to meet you.  Good to see faces on faces and no insides at all, all hidden inside.  Good, oh my.”  It resumed, twice as fast and three times as heated. 

The second man turned back to the first.  “Well, you’re up, buddy.  What happened to you?”
The first man smiled bleakly.  “Nothing as exciting as any of yours, I’m afraid.  I was on a working vacation in the country.  Telecommuted; very nice, very cushy, pretty little cottage in a nice little village.  Me and my wife both.  One evening the lights started going out back in town, and before we know it something’s breaking down our back door.  They had the house almost surrounded, and barricade as fast as we could – and we, well, my wife was fast, quick on her feet and a cool head – they were coming in and we couldn’t stop them.  So we ran for the car.  And because my legs were longer, and my wife’s feet aren’t as fast as her hands, I got there first.  And because I’m not as cool a head in a crisis, I locked the doors before she got in, then panicked and didn’t unlock them.  They were too close by then, there was nothing I could’ve done, and I couldn’t have known she’d have been able to run for as far as she did after the car before they got her.  It wasn’t my fault.  Really.  Absolutely.  I was upset about it, but you get over these things.  I was suicidal and self-destructive in the car, but I think I’m over it now.  The people here have helped a lot, telling me to be calm and giving me some pills for it.  You can forgive a man a little lapse.”  He grinned, thin muscles crawling on his face.  “I mean, how often does he find himself be forced to watch his wife get killed by the walking dead?” 

The other lulls in the conversation, uncomfortable or strange as they had been, had felt natural, part of the ebb and flow of a discourse, bizarre as it was.  This one was a lurching, grinding, heaving halt.  All three of the others stared at him, even the fourth man, even the third man. 
“You’re fucking crazy,” said the second man, flatly.  “Fucking crazy.  Zombies?  You’re babbling shit about zombies?  They put me in here with a fucking headcase who believes in zombies?”
The first man’s grin had faded away into bemused umbrage.  “What?  But you said yourself – you said that –”
“Zombies?  I didn’t say shit about zombies.  Magic?  Voodoo?  None of it.  It was fuckin’ crazy for the government to declare war on its own damned citizens, but some of us saw it coming, and there weren’t any fucking living corpses involved.!”  He laughed raucously, and spat at the first man’s foot.  “Were you always nuts, or did the black ops doing in your wife do that to you?  You’re crazy.”
“What?!”  demanded the second man. “You think I’m crazy?  Listen to yourself!  How would the government convince the army to shoot up its own – no, there’s no point!  That’s crazy!  YOU’RE the crazy one!  How can you even imagine that, and how the hell did you miss seeing the damned zombies?!”
“There were no men,” interrupted the calm voice of the third man.  “There were no dead men, no living men.  They weren’t men at all; they were too tall, too thin, too lean and cold.  They had come so far to get here, spent so much effort and used so many machines.  Their machines spat beautiful red lights that stood out so nicely, with the lights they broke.  I do not think they appreciate our world’s light.  You are both crazy.”
“No no no NO!” insisted the fourth man.  “They were tall yes, but thick thick THICK with teeth and claws and blades and eyes where you can’t look and can’t unsee because they like to bite and tear, cut off the faces and yank out the INSIDES that should stay on the INSIDE don’t you UNDERSTAND are you all CRAZY?!” he screeched. 
“Nutcases,” swore the second man.  “I’m surrounded by goddamned nutcases!  Why would they put me in a room with three fucking shit-for-brains nutcases!?”  He strode to the door, slamming each step down furiously, rattled at the knob with ire, then desperation.  “Locked?  What the fucking hell?  Why’d they lock me in with two lights-in-the-sky dingalings and a nutjob who’s seen too many Romero flicks?!”
“At least aliens are scientifically plausible,” sneered the first man.  “There’s no way to prove they don’t exist.  And what about all the paranormal activity over the years that no sceptics have ever disproven?  You’re the craziest one here, crazier than these guys.  At least they aren’t pretending they’re sane.”
“I saw what I saw,” said the third man.  “And what I saw was right, even if what it was was so wrong.  You are all crazy.”
“Crazy,” giggled the fourth.  “Crazy crazy crazy CRAZY!”  All of YOU!  Because you didn’t see them properly, because you didn’t see the FACES!”  He laughed long and loud and ran to the wall, beating it with his head so hard it seemed his teeth would crack right out of his gleefully clenched jaw.  “Crazy crazy crazy on the INSIDE!”
The thuds were loud enough to echo right through the one-way mirror, and the observing medical staff found themselves wincing as the treatment session broke down.  Patient number two was yelling at the others about how they couldn’t claim going mad was an excuse for voting the apocalypse into office, patient three was trying to explain how the thin men were probably vulnerable to music because “they can’t see music either,” and patient one was repeating “oh really?” in an increasingly mocking and obnoxious voice at everything anyone else said.  Patient four’s forehead was becoming bruised. 
“Intervene now?” inquired an intern to the psychiatrist on monitor duty. 
The psychiatrist sighed, then cut himself off with a wince as the first patient said something unforgivable about the second through fourth patient’s mothers.  “I suppose so.  Send security in.  I really thought we had something there, you know, a breakthrough just around the corner, a mutual realization of shared delusions that could make all four of them wake up to reality, break that “last-sane-person” complex.  For just a few moments… oh well.  More traditional methods should see them all through this, I hope.  Send in security, and let’s get them away from each other before it gets any worse.  We don’t want this to turn violent.”

“The End of the World as They Know It,” Copyright Jamie Proctor, 2010. 

“Directions, eh?  Are you sure?  Bit of a hike, that is.  Might get a little complicated.  You want to write them down?  No?  Suit yourself.  Now, let me think…”

“Right, got it!”

“First off, keep going down Main Street.  Take a right at the first junction onto Bailey Avenue.  That’s a RIGHT, understood?  Not a left, it’s a RIGHT.  You don’t want to mess this up!  Next up, stop at the third manhole cover you find.  Bailey’s busy this time of day, so you might have to dodge traffic.  Or maybe it’ll be really busy, and you’ll have to redirect it entirely.  That okay?  Okay?  Good.”
“Anyways, once you open the manhole cover, go down into the sewers.  Head north for five minutes at a jog and you’ll find a big, circular grate blocking your path.  Now, if you look very closely and rub off the muck, you’ll see there’s about seven hundred different runes inscribed around the perimeter of the grate.  Taking it from the north centre, you want to touch the eighty-ninth, four-hundredth-and-forty, and seven-hundred-and-ninety-first of them, in that order.  Do that seven times, and it’ll open.  Or was it six?  No, it was seven.  I’m sure of it, don’t worry.  Anyways, it’ll open up and start draining the sewers.  Jump in fast, because it closes after seven seconds and it can only open once per week.  And be careful that the crocodiles don’t bite you, because the water gets sucked in fast and they tend to come with it.  What?  Yes, crocodiles, not alligators.  Alligators have broader snouts and their lower teeth don’t show when their mouths shut.  These are definitely crocodiles – oh, I didn’t mention them?  Well, I have now.”
“All right.  Once you’re through you’ll fall into the Bowl Sea and be swept into the very centre of its dish.  It might seem impossible to swim up the curved slopes of its watery sides and out of its trap, but don’t be fooled; it’s very simple when you know the trick.  You’ll need something round and pale – a melon would do.  Do you have a melon?  No?  Better get one before you reach Bailey Avenue then.  So, you take your melon, or maybe a baseball – oh, you have a baseball?  Good, then you won’t need to buy anything.  Groceries are too pricy here.  So, you take your pale round thing and chuck it as hard as you can into the sky.  It’s very important that you throw it as far and high as you can, you want to get good hang time.  Do this towards the late afternoon at least, but NOT at night.  That’s important.  Then stick your head in the Bowl Sea and yell as loud as you can: “HEY, LOOK AT THAT FULL MOON.”  That’ll get its attention (see, you can’t do this at night or it’ll see the REAL moon instead).  When it sees that pale round thing in the sky (seas have poor eyesight, did you know?) it’ll think it’s time for a big spring tide, and it’ll puff itself up, transforming from the Bowl Sea into the Dome Sea.  If you were sitting at its bottom (which you probably were), you should end up at its very peak, balancing high above the land.  Better start sliding down fast, because once it catches ahold of that ball it’ll realize it’s been tricked and splash back down again.  With a good, clean throw you’ll be sitting on the shore laughing before it can finish settling down again.  Got a strong enough arm?  You sure?  Hope so, but I guess I believe you.”

“Set in front of you from the shores of the Bowl Sea should be the Hjallit plains.  Nothing for miles and miles and miles but knee-high grass and cacti the size of skyscrapers.  I hope you didn’t leave getting out of the sea TOO late in the afternoon, or it’ll be night-time and that’s when the thousands and thousands of giant, blood-sucking bats come out of their fortresses in the cacti to feast on the thousands of insects and war against one another.  Did I mention the insects?  There’s lots, and they’re big – grasshoppers that can cross a street in a single leap and praying mantises that could take on a wolfhound and walk away half the time.  The bats eat them, but they prefer nice warm blood, which is why they battle one another for captives to drink dry.  And travellers.”
“Now, getting out of the plains consists of two parts.  First of all, you’ll want to start running, and run as far and long as you can.  You want to get deep into them before sundown, because the grass thickens and you won’t stick out as much.  Head northwest – no no no, wait, northeast.  I’m sorry, terribly thick of me.  Right, so you’re heading northeast, and as soon as evening comes in, the cicadas will start singing.  Stop up your ears with dried grass if you have nothing else at hand, because this next bit’ll need it.  Run towards the cicadas as fast as you can (they’re always a long ways away, farther than they sound).  When the sound is almost unbearably loud even through the blockage, you’ll see them.  Now, grab one – the size of a daschund, they are – and tie it up or wrap it up, just something so it won’t bite or run.  Now you can walk away through the plains all night without fear of bat, thanks to the roaring of that cicada in your grasp, bamboozling their sonar.  Which is a pity, because you’re just using it to wait out the night.  Get close to one of the really big cactus-forts and hide out there till dawn, when the bats are asleep and you can let the cicada go.  Then, shinny up the sides (you can use the spines as handholds).  This’ll probably take about until evening, okay?  That’s why you’ve got to put it off until after the first night’s through.”
“Once you’re up the cactus, head to the very peak and tip.  There you’ll find the lair of its bat-lord, its biggest, toughest, canniest leader.  He’ll sleep, but sleep lightly, so you must walk very quietly.  Get really close to him, then grab ahold of his ears and jump on his back.  Start twisting them right away, because a moment he can think clearly in is the moment you’re dead.  He’ll roar, beg, threaten, wheedle, but keep his ears hurting until he says “I submit.”  Those words, and no others, mean that you can let go, because he’s admitting you beat him, and through him, all the bats in that fortress.  Order him to take you to the northmost corner of the plains.  Should take you all night, but you’ll make it on his back just fine.  When he asks permission to leave, make sure you say “I permit this, thank you, and bid you goodnight” because it’s a formal declaration of peaceful farewell.  Anything else might set him off with a bruised ego like he’ll have by then.  You got that?  Say, you sure you have enough paper to keep track of all this?  Okay then.”

“So, that was probably a bit tiring.  Feel free to kick back for a nap before you go on, because you’ve got quite a barrier ahead of you.  The forest of Fjoi may be beautiful beyond all belief and just one kilometre long, but it’s so thick and tangly that the only animals that live in it are snakes, and it’s over a mile tall!  I hope you’re still limber from climbing the cacti, because the only way past that thicket bar pureeing yourself and seeping through is climbing.  A lot of climbing.  On the way up, be sure you don’t mistake any vines for snakes or vice versa.  Remember, the vines are safe if they’re striped green-black-green, in that order.  Or was that brown-black-green?  No, I think it was green-black-green.  “If green touches black, you’re okay, jack/if brown touches green, bid farewell to yer spleen,” those were the rules.  Right, so green-black-green is safe.  Got it?  Good.  And remember, if you get bitten, chew the seeds of the big yellow trapezoid-shaped fruits.  They’re called pam-pams, and they really are delicious.  Good disinfectant, too.”
“At the top, you’ll have a nice long view of what’s ahead: the Tumbling Hills, with their endless canyons, gulfs, gullies, and gulches, and their enormous ever-rolling stones.  Memorize as much of it as you can, but don’t stay too long – the upper reaches of Fjoi are the home of the Trunksnake.  Or at least, the Trunksnake’s head.  Its tail is coiled down deep in the earth and its body stretches up from the soil as thick and strong as any tree trunk, while its head browses the canopy for snacks.  If you see the treetops shaking near you, run for it and don’t look back.”
“There’s two ways down.  One of them, you climb.  Might be tricky, particularly if the Trunksnake’s seen you.  The other, much better.  Be sure to gather as many flower petals as you can, especially the big white sturdy ones from the Salapak vine; they’re nice and tough.  Stitch ‘em together using the jaws of ants you can pick up on your way, and you’ll have a good makeshift parachute.  Just get to the top, memorize your landing zone, aim, and hop away!”

“What happens then?  Hmm.  Give me a second, I’ve got to think.”

“Got it.”

“Okay, so you’re at the Tumbling Hills.  Whether you’ve gotten in there through airdrop or climbing, you’re in the midst of the mess now and it doesn’t really matter anymore.  The absolute most-necessary first thing you need to do is find a pebble.  A good one, about the size of my thumb, yes?  Got that?  It’s very important.  Then climb up to a good high spot, right above where one of the boulders rocks back and forth.  Watch it careful for a good time – ten minutes, half an hour maybe, depending on your attention span – and then kick it as hard as you can.  Try to nudge it towards another one of the boulders.  Bonk!  Like pool with balls that can crush you.  Just lather, rinse and repeat.  It really accelerates after maybe the fifth or six one.  After that you’ve got a nice wave of canyon-clearing, rock-slamming, hurtling missiles charging ahead of you and mopping up anything that might get in your way.  The downside is that it’s probably awakened the mole people.  Wait, no, that isn’t right.  Who ever heard of moles in rock?  No, no……yes!  I remember!  The rock giants!  How could I forget the rock giants?  They’re about a hundred feet tall and very strong.  Well, one of your rocks will probably have smacked into one or two napping ones along the way, so they’ll be really angry.  Do I have any advice?  Actually, no, not beyond “try not to get squashed.”  Look, it’s either piss off the giants or spend a month or two trying to carefully navigate your way through here.  The latter has much greater odds of squashing you and takes longer, so take your giant-induced lumps and suck it up, all right?  Don’t get all squeamish on me now.”

“All right.  Past Tumbling Hills you’ll come to the foot of Chals canyon.  Its walls are so high you wouldn’t believe, and nothing lives inside its narrow walls but one creature.  It’s the home of the Foust-dragon, and its sulphurous breath has polished the walls as brilliantly as mirrors.  If you don’t want to lose your lungs, you’d better eat some of the garlic plants growing just outside the canyon’s mouth.  Eat as many as you can, until your tongue feels blue and your stomach has stopped caring.  Then head into the canyon.  You still have the pebble, right?  Good.”
“The Foust-dragon has pretty good hearing, so it should be awake by the time you reach the midpoint of Chals canyon.  It folds up its long, gangly legs when it naps, and it takes up the whole width of the canyon when it lies on its belly like that.  Walk up to it, bold as you please (it despises cowards), and demand passage.  Be firm, but not insolent or mocking – you want it impressed, not irritated.  If you’ve adopted the right tone, it will challenge you to withstand the death of its breath before standing up to let you pass.  I hope you’ve eaten enough garlic, because unless your own breath is as powerful as you can make it, nothing will prevent your face from dissolving from the nostrils on.  Just exhale as the Foust-dragon breathes in your face, and though the wind may knock you over and bleach your hair, you’ll live and be free to go.  One last thing here: do not, under any circumstances, touch the Foust-dragon’s belly as you walk underneath it.  It’s very ticklish, and one laughing wriggle attack would be enough to smash you into raspberry jam.”
“Oops, nearly forgot!  Right, well, be sure to keep your eyes squinted nearly shut the whole time you’re walking through the canyon.  Not only is the dragon so ugly that you’d scream and make him eat you as a coward, but the walls are so blindingly reflective that a simple sunbeam would sear out your eyeballs.  Not a fan of that, let me say.”

“At the end of Chals canyon is the entrance to the deep dank dwelling pits of Chas caverns.  The Foust-dragon’s family live down there in their rotting hundreds, dead and alive, riddled with stink and gnawing hatred.  It left because it was too small and weak to thrive down there, where you’re forever being eaten as you eat, an ouroboros made out of more than a thousand separate serpents.  Light blinds and binds them, so before you enter (with the pebble, you didn’t forget the pebble, did you?), break off a piece of stone from the very end of Chas canyon and take it with you.  You’ll also need a little bit of light – just a match will do.  Reflected into the mirror, it will shine like midday light, but be careful and don’t look too hard at anything around you.  You won’t like what you see, and anything that shines back at you – lakes of fungal slime, the glistening pupils of ancient dragons, the glowering grim glimmer of darkened crystals – is especially to be avoided.  Do you understand me?  Especially.”
“Towards the very deepest of the caverns will be the Hole to the Sky, a shaft of rock almost ten miles in height.  Its exit is Mount Drabbis’s peak, but that won’t concern you as much as its root, where the city of Erakida is cradled.  It’s big, it’s thriving, and there’s lots and lots of tough customers down there, so mind you don’t let any of them get too close or too angry at you.  All the peoples of the sky and the deeps meet in Erakida, because the thermals are so clean and convenient to flap down and the tunnels so broad and accommodating to creep up.  The founder is Great Gram Drakkal, and he – ah, that’s a long story and it doesn’t matter.  Just don’t bother him if you see him – easy to identify, he’s about twenty feet tall, drab grey, and has horns where his eyes should be.”
“So!  Once in Erakida, see if you can find someone who’s about to take a trip topside.  A Cliff Amyioch might be good – they have the bodies of gorillas and the heads of crows.  They’re quite clever, so they get bored easily and cherish interesting things.  For payment in trade, offer the mirror first.  If that doesn’t work, tell them the story of how you got there.  Failing that, try a riddle.  Past that…anything you can think of, as long as it ISN’T THE PEBBLE.  If you must, try another Amyioch.  Some are greedier than others.”
“Once you’ve passed through the Hole to the Sky, you’ll be cold and exposed on Mount Drabbis’s summit.  Take a good look around, because this is the greatest height you’ll attain on this trip, and your last chance to see where you’ve been before.  Make any promises you must to yourself or others, then start walking north, downslope into the lost and forgotten lands.  There aren’t any roads, since most of the people arriving at this end can fly.”

“The Lost and Forgotten Lands aren’t going to be pretty.  They’re beautiful, but BIG.  The most powerfully exhuberant jungles, the biggest trees, the largest, most hungriest monsters, the strongest rivers with the roughest currents.  Everything in the Lost and Forgotten Lands is big and fierce, but your best bet is to find the tracks of the biggest, fiercest thing you can and follow it.  Why?  It makes perfect sense, just let me get to it.  Right, so you follow the steps until you find a kill it made.  Hopefully, it’s left.  Now you must cover yourself in the bones of the carcass.  Sheath yourself so perfectly and completely that not a scrap of flesh shows – use river mud as a glue if you must.  When you’re done. the lost beasts will see what they fear most: empty bones, barren of food.  They must eat and eat always, fiercely, to the death, and they shun the sight of bones.  Unless, that is, you meet a bonecrusher.  They’re about a hundred feet long and eat only bones (sometimes they kill prey and suck the skeleton out through the stomach), so be careful, all right?  If one goes for you, use a sharpened rib or something, lash it onto a tree branch, and go for its eyes.  They say they have the foulest-smelling and tastiest meat of any beast ever to walk the rocks.”
“When you reach the very centre of the Lost and Forgotten Lands, you’ll find an old, old shrine, the oldest shrine ever made.  It’s nothing more than a ring of rocks (not very big rocks), and a little pit in its center.  In that pit is a shiny rock (speaking of which, you still have the pebble, right?).  Touch it, and you’ll get three million years of screaming terrified monkeys gibbering in fear of the darkness and light shoved into your head, so don’t.  It hurts a lot, trust me.  Instead, wait there until high noon.  That’s when the sun’ll shine straight down on it, and that shiny stone’ll get a helluvalot shinier.  Stay in the circle until half-past-noon, then take one step out of it.  You should not have eaten anything before you do this.  It gets messy.”

“So, you’ll spin around and around and around.  After what feels like forever but’ll probably be something like two minutes, you’ll wash up on a sandy beach.  On a hill in front of you, surrounded by pine trees, will be a stone home.  Walk in through the door, and don’t look up, because the five gargoyles around the entrance will attack if you meet their gaze, and there’s nothing their claws can’t tear and snap.”
“Inside, it’ll look more like a quarry than a house.  Plus, there’ll be no roof.  Very nice, clear blue view above though; the bluest of anything anywhere that’s ever been.  Only one thin wisp of a cloud, forever orbiting the centre of the sky.”
“In the bottom of the quarry will be an old man, staring at a field of very carefully placed pebbles, grown into the rock.  Most of him is rock by now, actually.  His name is Zeff, and he won’t talk to you, nor you to him, if you know what’s good for you.  He’s busy thinking, as that furrowed brow and frozen, tapping finger should let you know.  He started a million years ago, seven million more should see him through, by his last estimate.  You’re going to change that estimate.”
“You still have the pebble, right?  Good.”
“Now, take that pebble, and place it between (counting from the bottom right upwards and to the left) pebble number seven thousand, seven hundred and seventy-six, and pebbly seven thousand, seven hundred and seventy-eight.  That’s what he’s been looking for, I think.  If I’m wrong, well, you won’t have to worry about anything ever again.  None of us will.  If I’m right, and you did it right, he’ll probably arch that immovable eyebrow of his, finish his thought, and then everything that’s ever been should get very interesting.”

“After that, you’ll get where you need to right away, easy as falling asleep.  Just take the right step in the right direction, and there it’ll be.  That good?  Good.  Got all that?  Excellent.  Nice talking to you, and good luck!”

“…Or was that a LEFT on Bailey Avenue?”

“Directions” Copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor.

I knew it was a big case the second she walked in my door.  A typically atypical dame: sensible, thick continental plates that teasingly hinted at dynamic vulcanism underneath.  And past that, a heart of freshly-carbonized diamond that peeked out through a gaze that could warm you over or trigger an ice age. 
I didn’t chance it, and kept the handshake strictly professional.  No lingering, no fondling, no surreptitious examination of her mineral assets – nice though they were.  Wasn’t in the mood for trouble, and she looked it. 
“Mr. Chix?”
“Yeah, that’s me.  And you, oh darling of the solar system?” I inquired. 
“That’s terrible.  And I’m Lithia.  They say you’re the best.  In your price range.”  She smiled a little smile that made her look a lot less attractive in my eyes.  “I’ve got quite a case for you.  Do you know the dinosaurs?”
“Sure, who doesn’t?  We’ve palled around a bit, but nothing close.  Passed them by a few times, that’s all.  What happened?”
“They’re dead.”  That little smile got a bit littler.  “Yesterday afternoon.  And we don’t know who did it.” 

It was obvious in retrospect.  The dinosaurs had been big, the biggest players in town for a long time.  They’d had plenty of time to marshal fame, fortune, success, and enemies.  But they’d never met any they couldn’t quash, until now. 
I figured I’d check with the usual suspect first.  Stratus was closest to home; he almost never left my favourite pub.  He was tipping back what looked like his twelfth million gallon when I got there.  Those bleary nimbus eyes grasped onto my face, then narrowed. 
“Chix?  Whassafuck you doin’?  Go ‘way.  Busy.”
“I’ll bet.”  I would’ve seated myself without asking, but I liked my face clean-shaven and free of glass shards.  “Hey, you seen the dinosaurs recently?”
The glare deepened.  “Yeah, last mornin’.  Looouusy stinkin’ birdies.  Wouldn’t give me, give me so much as a cent, and me with the billlss comin’ in tomorrow and needing to relax up a bit, you know?”
“They’re dead.  That afternoon.”  I watched the reaction, such as it was.  Stratus was too far gone to hide anything, and the most he did was look confused.  “Whuur?  Reeally?”  His hands tensed on his glass.  “Shit, man.  I mean, really?  Who did it?”
“You tell me.”
I could practically see the fear washing into him, bringing with it cruellest sobriety.  “No way.  Not me.  I don’t know nothing, I didn’t do nothing.  Those stingy assholes were my best friends, Chix, no way did I fry ‘em, freeze ‘em out!  My weather patterns are stable, man, I’ve been clean and holding fast for at least two hundred millennia!  You gotta believe me!”
I did.  At least, a little.  “Fine.  But if I see so much as a hint of glaciation, I’m going to want to see you again.  Maybe with some other people, who won’t be as friendly and charming and considerate as I am.  Got that?”
Defiance and submission in one surly nod.  “Yeah.  Got it.”  He stared back into his drink.  “Man.  All the dinosaurs.”  He shot a glance at me.  “All of them?”
“Just some of the birds left over.”
“Fuck.”  The drink was consumed.  “Get the fucker for me, will ya?”

So much for the first shot.  But then again, I’d expected little more.  The next one would be more promising. 
Lithia was pretty when she was annoyed, especially cross-armed and sarcastic, a volcano pinched in one hand between finger and thumb.  “I just hired you, and you’re already accusing me of murder?  That’s a bit far to go on the second meeting, Chix.”
“Calm down.  You’d be surprised how often it happens.  Good way to cover your ass, being the first one to be helpful on the scene.”  I waved away faint wisps of sulphuric ash.  “Now, how did you know the dinosaurs anyways?”
“I run the Sphere.”  Fanciest condominiums in the solar system.  My client was a lady of the upper crust.  “They were tenants of mine.  Good ones, too.  They were in it for the long haul, paid their rent regular, kept the noise down.  They were a bit hard on some of their neighbours, true, but they were good guys.  Self-made, pull-yourself-up-on-your-boostraps kind, but not as bullshitty as some of them get.  I know it sounds cold, but losing them is going to put a dent in the rent for me.  I have no motive, Chix.”
I made some notes, a couple of which were actually real, the rest for filler and to give me time to ponder.  “Right.  Thanks, Lithia.”  I put on my hat, then paused halfway out the door.  “The dinosaurs conduct any business at your place?”
She nodded.  “Lots.  High-level meetings and such.”
“Any newcomers?”
She tapped her chin as she thought, making her volcano wobble and shed magma on the carpet.  “Yeah.  This one guy, showed about a week ago.  A mister Bolide.  Big shot, always in a hurry.  Never seen him before, but acted like I should’ve.  You know the type.” 
“Right.  If it’s yours, can I be it?”
She sighed.  “Please.  Don’t even try next time if that’s your best.”
“Not by a long shot, sweetheart.” 

Bolide was harder to find.  Just like Lithia’d said, he couldn’t stay still.  I traced a dozen hotel rooms across town before I caught him coming out his door, clothing rumpled and hat at an odd angle that was decidedly unrakish atop his pock-marked silicate-and-oxide surface.  He’d seen some hard living out in space, that was for sure. 
“What is it?  Who are you?  What do you want?  I have somewhere to be in five minutes!”  All at once, all still walking.  I had to follow him, nearly jogging to keep up.  Bolide’s legs weren’t exceptionally long, but they were whirling along at a terrific clip. 
“Word has it you’ve been doing deals with the dinosaurs, Mr. Bolide,” I said through the huffs and puffs of unwanted exercise.
Bolide stopped dead so fast I nearly ran into him.  His eyes were a little wild, but angry, not guilty.  “Yes.  Yes I did.  Did.  Those greedy little amniotic bastards are on my shitlist as of the day before yesterday, Mr….?”
“Chix.  I’m a PI.”
A sharp, fast nod.  Everything was fast about Bolide.  “They cut me out, that’s the long and short of it.  I was negotiating for space on the Sphere, and they had the strings to pull to get me in there.  They wanted more than I was asking, said they were planning to rent the space themselves, and in the end they gouged too hard.  Told them enough’s enough, good riddance.  Happy to see the last of them.”
“You certainly have.  They were murdered last afternoon.”
Bolide didn’t panic, like Stratus, but he certainly didn’t keep as cool as Lithia.  He started glowing like he’d just entered atmosphere.  “Hah!  They were, were they?  Figures!  How else would they die but in a manner guaranteed to fill me with profound inconvenience!  How else?  Now you – and soon the police, and every busy-body within seven thousand light-years – are going to come and poke and prod at me!  Bah!”  Stratus was a solid man, and his hands looked to be making to throttle his briefcase straight into nonfunctionality. 
“Got an alibi?”
He sighed, the heat leaking out of him with a wheeze.  “Certainly.  I wasn’t even intending to stay at the sphere when I arrived in this dead-end town a month ago on business, and I certainly hadn’t heard of the dinosaurs before then.  I am not accustomed to murdering strangers, Mr. Chix.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m late.  Later.”  He took off towards a cab, climbed in, and was gone in an instant.
I thought to myself.  Yes, that was probably it.  I’d need to play it safe, keep it cool, but the path ahead was clear and obvious.  First things first: I went to the hotel desk. 
“He’ll be back around six to check out,” I was informed by a boring young man at the desk. 
“Leave this note for him,” I said, thrusting a crumpled page from my notebook at him.  “It’s urgent.” 
He regarded it as if it were freshly decayed carrion, but relented under my firm glare.  “Right, sir.” 

Stratus was asleep in his booth.  I tucked his note inside his cup, where he’d have time to read it while still sober.  Two down.  

Lithia picked up the phone on the fifth call.  “Stubbornness.  I admire that in a businessman.”
“Cute.  Listen, I’ve got a lead on the case, and I think the thing’s about to fold up and shut itself before this evening’s out.  Meet me at the dinosaur’s condo at seven-thirty.”
“You do fast work.”
“I can take it slower if requested.”  Yes, it was lame, but I had to keep my hand in. 
A small and undelicate snort trickled through the line.  “I’ll pass.  You’re a bit of a little man, too little for my liking, Chix.”  She hung up before I could protest. 
The phone was returned to its cradle.  The dinosaur’s former condo was a nice place, although some of the furniture was a bit old and beaten.  Had a sign on the door that said “Apartment Yucatan.” 
I spent the two hours remaining ‘till the meeting thinking and checking my backup plan.  Just in case.  

Bolide was there at seven-twenty, naturally.  Lithia fashionably late at seven-forty.   And Stratus stumbled in five minutes after her, scared and sober. 
“I didn’t do it, man!” he moaned. 
“Yeah, I know, I heard you.  Shut up and sit down.”
He took his place.  I’d arranged some chairs in a loose semicircle facing me, at a table.  They were creaky things, spindly in the leg and sagging in the seat.  I’ve known a lot of people like that. 
“Right.  Thanks for coming, everyone.”  I lit a cigarette; I don’t often smoke, but it’s good for effect and gives me something to do with my hands when I talk.  “You guys are my suspects, and I’m telling you this second, I know which of you did in the dinosaurs.  And make no mistake, one of you DID do in the dinosaurs.  Okay?  Just so we’re clear on that, there’s a killer in this room blinking at us and looking shocked and appalled at the very thought of something so awful and nasty.  Now, let’s do the rundown.”
I looked the atmosphere straight in the eye.  “Stratus.  You have no real reason to kill beyond getting stinking drunk and pissed off, and you’d be caught on-scene instantly.  But you could do it.  You could’ve screwed with their climate, caught ‘em offguard with glaciation or global warming.  And you sober up fast when you’re scared shitless; you could’ve killed them, panicked, and gotten the hell out.” 
Without stopping to watch his face, I turned to Lithia.  “Lithia.  The dinosaurs were good tenants, but they hogged space and got pushy, turned away other potential customers just to preserve their space.  Maybe a little long-term gain would be worth the short-term pain?  Word is you vulcanize pretty heavily when you’re angry.  Enough to kill the dinosaurs?  Maybe.”
I whirled about and pointed at Bolide.  “Bolide.  You’re the unknown, or you’d like to be, but I think you’re a boring-ass known.  You turn up in town about a week ago on “business,” make pals with the dinosaurs, move around a lot so you’re hard to find, and then they die.  That smells of hitman to me, and not a very good one either.  Sloppy, Bolide, sloppy.  And I checked the scene, too.  There’s traces of iridium and tektite glass all over the damned place.   Almost as if someone slammed into them at a high velocity/”
Only now did I examine them.  Lithia fidgeting with her volcano, Stratus quivering with stress, both staring at the man I’d pointed out.  Bolide was staring at me, unmoving, flat-faced. 
I stubbed out the cigarette.  “So, Bolide’s guilty.  But you know what?  He isn’t the only one.  I can guess who hired him.  Lithia?  You have cash to burn.  Speaking of burn, awful lot of sulphurous gasses and volcanic ash you’ve been putting out.  Could make a mess of the Sphere, maybe cripple a few bothersome tenants, am I right?  Soften them up for a kill?  Speaking of which, Stratus, I went over this place while I was waiting for you.  Low sea levels.  Sounds an awful lot like glaciation, wouldn’t you say?  Altered climates?  I thought you said you were stable, Stratus; is there something you haven’t been telling me?  You’ve got some good drinking money for someone who was begging for a loan a day ago.  Did anyone slip you a little something to cut loose on somebody?  Some dinosaurs, maybe?”
Now all of them had that blank, flat face.  Not friendly. 
“Chix,” said Lithia, breaking the silence.  “You’re right.”
I smiled, but kept my hand ready under the table.  “I do that.”
“Don’t get snotty with me, asshole, I haven’t finished.  You’re right, but there’s one thing you left out.”
“Yeah?”
“You hired me to do it.”
All of a sudden, there were four flat faces.  It really was hard to change expression after hearing something like that.  “What?”
“You’re terrible at voices, Chix.  And not just for pick-up lines.”  She was smiling now.  Very grimly.  “I only just recognized it after that smug little rant of yours; all the rhetorical questions and oozing self-satisfaction.  You put up the cash anonymously, over the phone.  I hired Bolide and bribed Stratus.  And you knew I’d come to you.  And then presto!  The cunning and brave Mr. Chix invites the suspects over to the Sphere and reveals….they’re all guilty!  Ta-dah!  Amazing, spectacular!  You’d be the talk of the town and fat in the pocketbook.  Not least because you wouldn’t have to deal with that hush money you pay the dinosaurs every month.”
That last sentence was all I needed to break my silence.  “You knew?”
She smirked.  “Of course I knew.  I make it a habit of reading my tenant’s mail, if they’re worth the time.  Quite a neat little rap sheet they weren’t releasing to the cops at the low, low price of…quite a lot.  Assumed names don’t count if they’re just shortened versions of the original, Mister Chicxulub.”  All three of them stood up. 
I did too, and pulled out the shotgun.  “Resisting arrest,” I said calmly.  “A terrible thing.  Self-defence, all of it.  Yes, officer, they had me outnumbered and lethal force was the only recourse.”  I pointed it at Bolide first.  He stared along the barrel at me. 
“Go on.  Try to make –“  

The police force is barely wasting half an officer on me; there isn’t much I can do, not now that half of my land area is a sunken crater.  God that hurt.  Bolide wasn’t fast when I met him; I know that now.  When he’s fast, he means it.  Or meant it, seeing as he’s now several million very small fragments on the floor of the Apartment Yucatan.  I guess he couldn’t outrun the bullets, but damned if they slowed him down until after I’d dropped and half the Sphere had detonated from the impact. 
At least I have company.  The hospital put me, Lithia, and Stratus in the same ward.  They got off light compared to me – Lithia’s dented and she’ll be coughing smoke for months, and Stratus is hazed and overcast, shot through with ashes and debris – but they’ll recover.  I’ll be stuck like this for life.  Which is what I got, incidentally.  The court was firm on that, even as they struck those other bastards off with reduced sentences for testimony.  A goddamned injustice. 
And the birds are still pressing charges. 

Copyright Jamie Proctor, 2010. 

The spiders had reached their five-hundred-and-sixty-seventh generation by the time TBI-943’s tomb cracked and he felt the stirrings of unfamiliarly un-musty air. 
It was just as well; recessive traits that he’d been fearing since his entrapment had begun to finally wreck their toll upon the arachnids.  Seven-and-a-half legs were becoming fearfully common, as were missing eyes, extra pedipalps, and an alarming tendency to build webs willy-nilly across his optical receptors.  He’d thought he’d carefully bred that out of the original stock through diligent and meticulous squishing, and its return brought him much dismay.  His biannual powerups to check on his situation and update his stock records tightened his energy supply’s proverbial belt quite enough as it was, and sparing the extra power to clear his view always made him wince. 
So all in all, TBI-943 was even more pleased than he would’ve been normally to feel a faint eddy of a breeze’s shadow wisp its way across his chassis.  Two hundred and eighty-three-and-a-half years was quite enough time for him to stay underground and crammed into a heap of rubble without explanation.  The flowerpots would’ve been unwatered, the furniture gone dusty, and no doubt Terry’s meals would have been served cold.  His former master had been a creature of many virtues, but ability as a chef had not been one in the slightest.  Terry had, on one occasion, managed to burn every item in his (large) breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, cereal, and orange juice, along with half the kitchen.  TBI-943 had placed a lock on the microwave-stove and kept the combination to himself after that. 
Work awaited him.  He powered up – it was so strange to feel his legs again – and began to gingerly slide his way through the rubble, dust drifting and flapping from him like a raggedy blanket.  A strange sense of abandoning his duties followed him until he flagged his spider-farming subroutine as a completed task.  Then he felt a bit better.  In any case, his freshly vacated space would allow them plenty of room to web uninterrupted and breed themselves into a hideously tangled and gnarled genetic Gordian knot. 
It took some time to work his way through the rubble and clutter of the debris that had pinned him.  Whatever had loosened it in the last six months of his imprisonment remained unknown, but it must have been fairly major.  Perhaps an earthquake, or a tornado?  He couldn’t imagine it would’ve been reconstruction work – anyone that would’ve left this much broken junk sitting around uncleared in the world’s largest and most wealthy city for over two centuries wouldn’t exactly decide to start fixing it up now.  Nobody could procrastinate that badly.  Except for plumbers, and Terry when it came to returning calls. 
And so it was, two hours after TBI-943 had begun his trek from his concrete prison, that he gently shoved aside some creaking masonry and emerged into the daylight.  If he were a human, he would’ve blinked a lot.  Instead, he noticed that he needed to adjust his light sensitivity settings, and did so. 
Things were different.  The imposing building he’d been in was missing entirely rather than exploding, the condominium complex across the street was worn down to a nubbin, and… yes, so was the rest of the street.  For as far as he could see, there was nothing taller than a single story’s worth of broken walls.  He wasn’t equipped with the most sophisticated sensors – far from it – but he was able to discern no visible signs of civilization.  The healthy forest that’d sprung up where he recalled the street being didn’t help, although the riot of blossoms and vines that’d overgrown much of the lumpish remnants was quite pretty in a depressing way.  The trees were very large, but he’d never downloaded any botany libraries and there was a conspicuous void when he delicately probed the air for an internet node.  Whatever species they may have been, they were quite pretty.  Deciduous, he knew that much.  

The next few hours were spent searching through the rubble for Terry’s flowerpots, which he found smashed into quite small pieces.  He gathered them up very carefully and placed them inside his head for safekeeping.  He hadn’t found any of the furniture, so dusting was out, mercifully.  And there was very much no sign of food to prepare.  Or Terry to feed.
TBI-943 thought for a moment – a very short moment as humans would’ve measured it.  His master was presumably deceased.  He had no further business to follow.  Therefore, he was purposed to locate his master’s next of kin (or next of next of next of etcetera of kin) and offer his services.  For that, he’d need a power supply.  And for that, he would need to find someplace sunny.  Seventy-three percent of his solar panels still seemed to be functioning properly; the only difficulty would be finding a nice sunny open patch in the middle of the forest. 
Terry had taken him rock climbing once or twice.  He hadn’t particularly enjoyed it, but  he’d been good at not falling; his fingers could grip a tea tray so firmly that a bowling ball placed upon it wouldn’t have caused his arms to so much as wiggle.  Compared to that, simple handholds in stone or bark were child’s play, as easy as falling off a log or sorting out a year’s worth of appointments before serving the waffles.  Or at least, so he reminded himself with each servo-straining heave upwards, with increasing insincerity.  He felt like he’d brought all that dust from his imprisonment right back up alongside him. 
The view from near the top of the tree was splendid, if desolate.  Not a landmark remained standing, nor a building untoppled.  There was a surprising amount of birdsong trailing after brightly coloured wads of feathers flitting through the trees, which led him to again instinctively reach for the internet.  Not a trace. 
The city appeared to be mostly forested, but there were signs of thinning out far to the west, miles away.  Too far a walk from late afternoon.  TBI-943 methodically thinned out the branches about him, then fashioned them into a crude and nearly-workable platform that might just barely prevent him from toppling down over eighty feet.  He thought it over, then discarded them and simply wedged himself in the crotch of a branch.  Already his half-awakened batteries were nearing drainage, and there were better things to do with them than flail about.  He adjusted his sleep cycle from six months to two days and shut himself down. 

When TBI-943 awoke, he found that something had built a nest on his shoulder, attracted by the warmth.  It twittered vengefully and fled, leaving him to brush away the twigs and thank nothing in particular that it hadn’t begun to lay eggs before it departed.  He would’ve felt very guilty. 
The way down the tree was easier.  That was bad.  He had time to think ahead. 
Well, the human race was presumably a lost cause.  Either that or it had degenerated so far back that it wouldn’t even recognize the significance of the city.  In either case, finding his new master would be a bit of a problem.  Yes, quite a large one.  He didn’t fancy running off half-cocked into who knew what sort of business.  Perhaps it would be better to revive one of the older goals, mull it over for a bit, get himself properly on his feet before he tried to run.  He analyzed the ceramic shards inside his forehead compartment, then thought over the numbers. 
Yes, that’d do it nicely.  Just some glue first. 

Making himself a crude bow took most of the day.  Finding a water source took the rest, and he was forced to deactivate at ground level to save power.  He awoke to find a dog gnawing on his leg, worrying ineffectually at the plastic with its rotting teeth.  It was of no breed he recognized. 
“Heel,” said TBI-943.  It jumped at his head. 
TBI-943 had been programmed to be kind to animals, and he felt a great deal of shame when he was done skinning the dog.  But he was also programmed for self-defence, as an expensive piece of property should be, and so he got over it and busied himself with preparing the hide, removing and cleaning all available bones, and feeding the meat into his digestive unit.  Every little bit of surplus energy counted, and he silently thanked Terry’s odd tendency to insist that they breakfast together.  The gimmicky little machine in his throat that broke down organic matter was expensive and inefficient, but right now he was most grateful for it.  He stayed up all night fashioning a primitive sort of concrete axe and chipping away at some of the smaller saplings with it. 
It took several more days, dogs, and a few failed tries before he successfully tanned the first dog’s hide and fashioned it into a sort of makeshift cauldron.  It was just as well; the others had started to realize it wasn’t smart to go near him.  Which, although an excellent display of learned behaviour, did very little to deter his freshly sinew-stringed bow.  On his dog diet he often found himself working full twenty-four hour days, preparing himself for the labour with efficiency that he kept as polished as possible. 
Finally, he was ready.  The bones and spare hides had been broiled together in his makeshift cauldron, treated with a makeshift lime-like mishmash of chemicals he’d scraped out of tins in the ruined basements of broad factories.  Now he had a reasonable amount of gooey, gluey gunk, which smelled faintly of wet dog.  With impeccable care, TBI-943 pulled the flowerpot shards from his head and began to work. 
The end results were quite functional, if not as pretty as they were originally.  Soundness was his interest rather than elegance, and he thought that the final shape of the flowerpots, though lumpish, was charming in a crude way.  It was certainly more than sound enough to hold the handfuls of precious soil he scraped from beneath the roots of trees, and the clusters of bright little yellow flowers plucked from their shallow beds. 
He sat up, cradling his pair of newfound burdens, fixing them to his sides with dried sinews looped delicately around his plasticized breastplate. 
“Well,” said TBI-943, for the first time in two hundred and eighty-three-and-a-half years, or five-hundred-and-seventy-six generations of little brown spiders, “I suppose that’s that.”  He left the city before evening fell, and the dogs hid from him as he walked out the lengths of the streets into the far wild west.

Travelling by night, flowerpots swaying from his sides, TBI-943 saw many strange things as he walked the miles and miles along the half-missing and overgrown remnants of the highways.  A pyramid made of the decaying forms of hundreds of almost-unrecognizable cars and trucks, transformed into rust-skeletons.  Huge herds of things that were probably the ragged descendants of the hardiest cattle left standing surged across plains that had reverted from mild-mannered cornfields to neck-high, surly grasses.  He came across a pack of wolves, creatures which he had only seen before in zoos, and hid up a tree for safety’s sake.  His chances of victory against them would probably have been adequate, but he refrained from combat, both from caution and out of admiration for their presence.  Terry had been a conservationist, whenever someone reminded him about it, particularly if they were female and expressed admiration towards an ecological mindset. 
There was rain now and then.  TBI-943 slept under trees for safety’s sake – his chassis wasn’t as impervious as it once had been, and determined dampness could get in despite his best efforts and give him the jitters.  He pressed on nevertheless. 
Now and then, in secluded towns that were now knee-high debris, he found cellars still uncollapsed.  And in those cellars, he found bodies.  They were all mostly intact but for a few gnawings of rats, and many bore injuries, ranging from small neat holes bored through their craniums to missing limbs. He checked all of them for Terry’s genetic markers, and found nothing close enough to count as family.  The levels of destruction were really quite thorough.  Even the sturdiest stone farmhouses, buildings he would’ve expected to last for centuries, had been broken and crushed, seemingly with explosive force. 
TBI-943’s job did not require a great deal of imagination, and he often ran himself at low capacity while walking to conserve power.  Still, even in that sleepy-slow mindset, speculation as to what had brought the world of humans to such a sorry state ran deep and fast throughout his circuits.  After he ran across a mass graveyard in what he thought was probably Illinois, with plenty of neat little holes bored through the hapless skeletons within, was probably the moment he decided on “extraterrestrial invasion.”  The land had been conquered, then left, the gardens purged and then abandoned.  There was no sign of the reclamation attempts that even the barest stub end of humanity would’ve attempted by now, and if they’d simply fought each other to the death at last the inevitable nuclear holocaust sufficient to purge them from the globe would’ve scarcely let the whole place recover so soon.  So, presumably something had come upon them, killed them all very unexpectedly (he certainly hadn’t heard anything of it before the building had fallen over and trapped him), and then… just left?  Had they taken anything?  Had there been a reason?  Had it even happened outside his quite possibly malfunctioning nanochips?  Perhaps.  He wasn’t quite sure. 
Still, this was not his concern.  There was no furniture to polish, no meals to cook, and he had watered the flowers (and kept watering them, careful not to overdo it so they wouldn’t leak down his sides).  He had to find Terry’s family.  California was his goal, step by step.  TBI-943 shot small animals now and then and consumed them down to their very bones, fretting over every expended speck of energy.  He stood in empty fields and on the tops of trees for days when the weather grew sunny, storing up his strength for desolate and cloudy stretches.  His real worry was that he’d be trapped in the dark, with no prey, left to slowly drain of motion until he either was forced to shut himself down for days or fell over and broke. 

Happily, such things were averted.  The flowers bloomed, faded under snowflakes, then rose again with tiny, fierce determination as the snows melted, the spring flood of the Mississippi flood no greater an obstacle than the smothering snowdrifts that transformed the plains from a high-standing thicket to an icy quagmire of frozen stalks – crude rafts and snowshoes served him well, spending hours of travel time to gain days. 
His closest call was a four-day thunderstorm somewhere in the Rockies, where he came within a hair’s-breadth of being crushed underneath an avalanche.  A bit of quick thinking and moving sent him tumbling safely down a slope that would’ve taken hours to transit, and before long he left their stony glares behind him, along with a brief, nearly unpleasant encounter with a grizzly bear while pushing through a thicket.  It hadn’t quite known what to make of him, and he’d left in haste before its startlement had become something less benign.  He glanced over his shoulders for days after that, even as the land flattened itself underneath his feet and the sea began to peep at him more and more over the horizon.  .
The coast was a nice change when he reached it.  He went south, and before long he was standing before a large, clear-blue bay that he was moderately sure contained San Francisco.  He tucked the flowers away for safekeeping while he explored, lashed a little ways up the trunk of an elderly redwood that likely hadn’t even been a seed when he was left alone with the spiders.  That thought triggered a mild moment of something that he might’ve called nostalgia.  Maybe the exposure to the outside world had triggered an exodus to new grounds, or a surge of inbound virile young spiders with strapping genes untainted by the icy fangs of inbreeding.  So much, so far away, and he would miss out on it all.  Nothing he shouldn’t be used to. 
A combination of rising sea levels and fault lines that had finally had enough seemed to have been the final straw for the city, as far as TBI-943 could guess.  The water was pleasingly bright and translucent, exposing streets patrolled only by sharks and seals.  The former were too large for his liking, as well as interested in his clumsy raft well beyond the standards of what he would consider polite curiosity. 
As he kept a wary photoreceptor on an exceptionally large specimen, which had poked its head out of the water to examine him with a cool, dark eye, something very large hit him from below.  For a brief, alarming time he was suspended in midair, arching free and far over the fins beneath him, and then he was surrounded on all sides by dark wetness and sinking fast.  The sharks barely had time to nose at him before he landed feet-first on the broken boulevards of San Francisco, with several dozen small leaks gushing company at him. 
The walk back to shore was unpleasant, to say the least.  His exterior systems kept flickering on and off with every step, and the seafloor was scarcely even.  An hour was lost trying to find his way through the wreckage of what had probably been some sort of mall, and more than once he lay low and quiet, unmoving against broken concrete and cement while he waited for the shadow of a shark to pass from above him.  He found skeletons in a few out-of-the-way places, dark corners and nooks where nothing had molested them before their city drowned.  More injuries, more neat little holes drilled through them, more no-matches for DNA.  Silt-filled craters nearly trapped him several times, ranging in size from ones he could’ve dropped Terry’s limousine into to a yawning depression that took up most of what had probably been a city block once.  If he fell into it, he didn’t think he’d have stopped falling until he had twenty feet of accumulated grime over his head and jamming his limbs rigid. 
Well, he concluded as he strode back onto the beach, sloshing, he’d seen San Francisco.  And judging from what he’d seen, he doubted there’d been many survivors.  The bodies were scattered and few outside sheltered places, but he’d have expected that with scavengers afoot before the sinking.  It’d be simple enough to consider Terry’s family dead, write himself off as property. 
But then, what would there be left for him to do?  Deactivate himself?  A butler without a master wasn’t much of a butler, and all he was meant to do was be a butler.  If only he’d been a construction model.  He’d have no shortage of things to do then.  As it was, all he could do was walk around and look for his master, or his master’s relatives, or descendants.  Not that Terry had ever had any legal offspring… oh. 
Was it really that simple and obvious? he thought as he retrieved the flowerpots from their hiding place.  That right-in-front-of-his-nose?  He filed through his discrete, alphabeticalized list of Terry’s mistresses.  Yes, in the name of all things conductive, it would be, it was.  One in Belgium.  Two in China.  One in the Philippines.  Two in North America, one in Quebec, one in Nevada.  Now, the odds of any of their birth control failing was less than one in several tens of thousands.  The odds of this occurring within the narrow timeframe just before the disaster, before it could be noticed, were lower still.  And yet they existed, somewhere out there in the millions-to-one of odds.  It just might be enough, and that was good enough for him. 
China first, TBI-943 decided, as he strode with newfound determination northwards.  He had time.  He could afford to maximize backtracking, to piece together a working boat and cross some colder seas.  And by the time all his leads were exhausted, well, he’d probably be sick of walking by then. 
It was still much better than dusting the furniture.

(Since we have an entire year before it’s time for Easter, obviously this is a great time to put up an Easter story!  Stick around for our next exciting holiday-themed tale, “Christmas in February”!)

It seemed like such a good idea at the time.  Get killed, lie low for a while, then pop up again to spread the Good News.  The best results for all involved and I got a bit of a rest for once while everything cooled down.  A week’d be enough, I thought.  I’d been busy for thirtysomething years, I could afford to take a week off. 
The tomb was surprisingly comfy.  It was dark, and quiet, and the air was cool and not particularly stale, thanks to the overall roughness of the blocked entrance.  Nice to be out of the sun, particularly after the crucifixion.  Six hours long, but believe you me, it felt longer. 
So there I was, underground, wrapped in a linen cloth, cosy and very, very, very tired and sore like you wouldn’t believe.  A week off, possibly the most well-earned one in history.  Yes, Dad was on my case about it with the old “When-I-was-your-age-I-made-everything-and-only-rested-for-one-day-out-of-seven-and-get-a-haircut” line, but last I heard, no one nailed him to anything when he did it.  Anyways, he was just grumbling.  I was getting my rest, and there wasn’t a thing he could do to change my mind.  

The first twenty hours were the best I’d had in my life, the most restful sleep I’d had since Bethlehem.  The apocalypse could’ve gone off four feet from my head, with Death running directly over my torso, and I could’ve slept through it.  At least, that was what I thought.  That illusion went flying out the window with the first muffled thud. 
It made no impression at first.  There were a lot of things it could’ve been, all here-and-gone interruptions that made no difference.  Then came the sounds of crumbling dirt and rustling, followed by the soft pit-a-pat of feet across the floor. 
If I ignore it, it’ll go away, I told myself, as a soft and furry nose sniffed my feet.  That’s what I kept telling Paul when he came to me crying about “boo-boos.”  Then it bit me. 
I hopped bolt upright, took my own name in vain, and was confronted with the retreating backside of a rabbit as it darted back down its new burrow.  I’m not sure if you’ve ever been bitten by a rabbit, but those teeth hurt – it’d broken the skin and stained the linen.  Anyways, I found a few loose rocks and piled them up in front of the hole, then drifted back to sleep, somewhat less carefree than before.  My toe still hurt. 
Maybe I was half-expecting it, maybe the pain in my foot was keeping me from my peacefully innocent slumber, likely both, but soon I was awake again and listening to the sound of little rabbit paws scuffling at my barricade.  I smiled, rolled up in the linen, and drifted smugly towards sleep, then heard the crash and rattle of dirt.  I stopped smiling as I heard the muffled and furry thuds of the rabbit – no, rabbits.  Multiple rabbits.  There was an entire world out there for those things to burrow into, and they had to go for my tomb? 
“Leave me alone,” I said as I swung myself upright.  The rabbits twitched their noses at me.  There were four or five of them, scrawny and lean.  One of them was defecating in the corner, with an amazing lack of shame or fear.  “Out!  Out!  Go tunnel elsewhere!  Shoo!”  The rabbits were unmoved until I chucked a few pebbles near them, which startled them a little.  They hopped back down their new tunnel, which I blocked off.  With each stone I moved, I thought on how useless this had been last time, and my mind started to wander to solutions.  Surely a little miracle wouldn’t hurt, would it?  It was my week off.  I was going to take my first and possibly only real break.  It wasn’t going to be done to show off, just to make sure everyone didn’t have to deal with me being grumpy afterwards.  When I put it like that, it was like doing everyone else a favour. 
So I did it.  I passed my hand carefully over the tomb’s walls, and wherever my fingers touched solid, uncracked stone appeared.  A very thin granite shell, about as thick as someone’s little finger, but hopefully enough to keep out a few determined rabbits.  While I was at it, I turned the rabbit feces into dried figs and ate them.  I get hungry when I wake up in the middle of the night, and I believe in cleanliness. 
So I went back to bed – the slab – to dream the sleep of angels wrapped in linen, or something very much like it.  And so it was for twelve beautiful, wondrously dreamless hours right up until the moment what seemed like eighteen cubic cubits of dirt fell directly onto my face.  I was snoring a little too, and about half of it ended up in my mouth, including several novel and interesting insects.  Of course I woke up immediately (with coughing and spitting everywhere), and what did I see when I looked up above but a rabbit looking down at me from a neat little hole in the ceiling.  Leering.  It’s all in the way they wiggle their noses. 
I yelled at it and it turned tail, heading back down whatever dank little warren it had painstakingly engineered for the express purpose of tormenting me.  Cursing my lack of foresight at leaving the ceiling unprotected, I stone’d it too, and the floor for good measure.  This time my attempts at sleep were light and tense, and I practically flew off the slab twice at nothing, ears sharpened for the pitter-patter of enormous hoppy feet.  I could practically smell them.  When I did manage to succumb to exhaustion over nerves, dreams were waiting for me – especially that unpleasant one about when I was twelve and didn’t look where I was swinging the hammer while building a bench.  My left thumb is still crooked.  I was pretty sure the hammer hadn’t been bigger than I was, or covered in rusty spikes and glowing white-hot.  But there it was, sliding down from above towards my soft, unsuspecting fingers, one hand unable to release it, the other unable to move.  And when it hit, it hit with a bang so loud that I woke up in a flash, yelling.  And the first thing that met my eyes was the hammer, which was lying on the floor from where it had fallen partway up the wall, where a crude hole had been chiselled.  A pair of rabbits were in it, watching me with avaricious glee. 
“Go AWAY!” I yelled at them, and they did.  The hammer, on examination, appeared to have been made by crudely shaping a cobblestone and binding it to a branch with a leather thong taken from an elderly pair of sandals.  I sighed. 
There were exactly two people out there that would do this.  One of them had complained about my wanting to sleep in before.  Still, I supposed I could give dad credit; a plague of rabbits was a good step down from the old days.  In modern times, smiting just wouldn’t cut it, I’d told him over and over, and despite all the complaining I thought he’d been making real progress.  Unless this was a pointed way of informing me exactly what he thought of my opinions on that matter. 
“The frogs weren’t much better, dad” I told the world at large – and by extension, him.  “Frogs?  Really? I mean, there were a lot of them, but they were frogs.  Bunnies aren’t much less silly.”  Dad declined to comment on this. 
This time I didn’t even try to sleep, declining both the futility of it and the likelihood of further, more horrible dreams.  I just sat down and waited.  They came to me within the next hour or four, chiselling new holes in the walls as they arrived, filing in silent rows and moving out of the way for new arrivals with ordered precision.  By the time they finished pouring in, the entire tomb bar my slab was covered in a furry carpet of rabbits. 
What I said next was not my best moment, but please, give me a little charity here.  I’d been woken up three times, bitten, had dirt dumped in my mouth, and suffered through the vivid re-imagining of childhood trauma, and all on my one week off before it could even get started.  I was a little grumpy and very tired and my back, feet, and palms all still hurt from the crucifixion, so I was very much uninclined to smile peacefully, speak in parables, or do any preaching. 
“Would you lot kindly knock it off, please?” I asked.  “I’m trying to sleep.”
My audience twitched their tiny little rabbit noses as one, two, three times in perfect harmony.  Then they rose up in a clotted horde and swarmed over my slab, a writhing, hopping morass of kicking legs and wobbling ears.  

The next few hours were a bit of a confused blur.  The rabbits didn’t seem to have a solid goal beyond “go berserk.” Even though they’d had me pinned at the very start they abandoned their apparent plan immediately in favour of leaping about the tomb at random, vaulting over and around each other like a basketful of spilled pomegranates.  Rabbits piled up in towering stacks that reached near to the ceiling, toppling over onto rabbits below in slow motion.  Rabbits frenziedly tore at the walls to reveal waiting tunnels filled with more rabbits.  Rabbits were everywhere – rabbits copulating, rabbits defecating, rabbits hopping up and down on the spot with manic energy, and rabbits sitting quietly and twitching their noses.  The last ones were the most worrying, because you could never tell when they’d decide to be one of the other kinds, as I discovered when one squatting directly on my head suddenly wanted to burrow. 
Of course, I wasn’t exactly sitting there and taking this lying down, beyond the first couple of minutes when I was pinned directly to the slab by the sheer monstrous weight of furry little bodies.  But the moment I had my hands free, I was up and moving, grabbing rabbit after rabbit and shooing them out.  All I had to do was make them want to go back home, which was fine and easy and just took one hand and one second per rabbit, but there was the little niggling issue of grabbing ahold of them in the first place.  Also, there were rather a lot of them and more streaming in at every moment.  So I had to seal off the tunnels, which now took up more of the walls than the walls themselves, and that was no picnic either. 
By the time I sent the last rabbit on its way and sealed its burrow, I was more exhausted than I’d been when I got into the tomb in the first place.  I collapsed onto that slab and my well-tattered linen shroud as though it were the comfiest mattress in an emperor’s palace, which didn’t serve me well, seeing as more rabbits had undermined it and it promptly collapsed in on itself and dumped me into the floor, where they mobbed me.  

Getting out of that took a lot more time, swamped as I was with furry little creatures whose evil outstripped the adversary himself.  Repairing my slab took even longer.  By this point, I’d decided that I’d be able to sleep through anything, and resolved that no matter what happened, I’d just ignore it. 
I woke up some time later to ominous silence, and, risking the opening of a single eye a half-crack, came eyeball-to-eyeball with a solitary rabbit, which stared right back.  Two mutually unblinking minutes passed, and then I’m sad to say that I lost my temper.  There was wailing and gnashing of teeth and frantic attempts to grab ahold of it to do some sort of violence.  I’m eternally thankful that the little furry bugger was fast enough to get away; I wouldn’t have wanted that on my conscience.  At the time, however, this was nothing but the last straw in a haystack made entirely of last straws, each laster than its predecessor. 
“Fine,” I told dad.  “Fine!  You win!  You always win!  I’m up!  I’m awake!  I couldn’t be any more awake if I tried and I swear I’ll never be able to sleep again!”  I kicked the slab as hard as I could, ignored the crippling pain in my toes, then shoved the rock out of the tomb’s mouth.  “One week!  Just one week, was that so much?  Was it too much?  Fine! Three days, most of them spent wide-awake and battling endless streams of bunnies?  All right then!  Three days it is!”

Despite all this, I got the last laugh in the end.  The Easter rabbit was his idea, but I was the one who suggested making them edible.  Every year, I receive a beautiful serenade of crunching chocolate heads, and it almost makes up for the whole affair. 

Almost.

The weather on Sunday, March 21^st, was sunny, with a cool breeze, a chance of light showers overnight, and punctual.  All of which were things that Simon Beadley considered fine indeed, particularly the last.  Adjusting the timing was so difficult, particular for the clouds.  It never failed to blindside or annoy Simon that what was effectively a very large plume of water vapour was so difficult to point and place properly. 
Still, he could see them, and he could steer them.  It wasn’t easy, but if it were easy everybody would be doing it, and there would be a thousand thousand glistening and factory-fresh copies of the dented and complex contraption that sat across from his bed, where it was currently watching him engage in fierce battle against his sheets in an attempt to get up and make some coffee.  “What are you looking at?” snapped Simon, wresting clinging fabric away from his neck even as it latched onto his legs like an affectionate limpet.  The machine, sensibly, didn’t answer.  It never stooped to the point of open mockery; that privilege was reserved for Simon’s cat, which was a smug observer to his every moment of downfall.  He could practically feel the warm regard of its condescension upon his spine.  Simon dealt with this the only way he could: making coffee and deliberately ignoring it.  The first took time he no longer possessed, the latter self-control and acting skills he’d never had. 
Besides, he was out of milk. 

And so, with the lack of milk, the silent stares of his two companions, and the generally satisfactory state of the weather outside as his motivators, Simon Beadley decided that it was time for a walk.  Surely everything would be all right if he left for just a short time.  He got dressed, put on his less-faded pair of pants and his thick coat that could withstand anything up to and including showers of boiling oil or plagues of frogs, slung his noble and decayed rucksack upon his back, and set off down the ladder, all sixty-two feet of it, dangling from underneath the belly of what had once been a rather small water tower like a silken spider’s thread.  Simon reached the ground without incident, with a care born of nonchalant habit rather than worry or stress.  His knees may have creaked as a concession to his age, but only in the manner that sequoias did in a heavy breeze. 
Finding his way to town was a bit harder than he remembered.  The trail that led to the water tower had become a little overgrown, and what should’ve been a ten-minute stroll turned into a half-hour meander through thickets, but with no worse casualties than his patience and a few new spotty holes to adorn his pants at the malicious paws of some briars.  “Damnit,” said Simon, and some other words he liked to use at the cat when it was judging him.  It was possible they’d grow wild and mutated over the years, a far cry from whatever swearing stock they’d originated from, but he was attached to them quite firmly. 
Town itself was a surprise.  Some of the buildings had changed, and there was a new street with no stoplights that took him five minutes of indecisive wavering to build up the courage to dash across.  At least the store was how he remembered it, although the cashier was new. 
“Do you know Laurel?” he asked the girl at the register, as he awkwardly heaved his groceries onto the counter – while looking for the milk, he’d discovered that he’d run short of several other rather important things, like crackers. 
“Who?”
“She was here last time – has she gone away?  I’m not here often.  Very nice hair, very purple.  We talked about the weather, I believe.”
The girl’s expression was almost exactly too flat to be called blank.  “The weather?”  Her hair was brown, not purple. 
“Yes, she was very pleasant about it.  Said she liked my clouds.” Simon smiled.  “Quite nice of her, really, I didn’t think that was my best week – far from it, there were overcast afternoons and a few cloudbursts too many – but she said she liked it.  Shook things up or somesuch.  I can’t say I believe the same, but it cheered me up some, let me tell you.  Could you make some change of this five?  I prefer the coins.”
The expression did not change noticeably as the change was given, although part of the girl’s cheek twitched with alarming speed for a split second.  Simon was busy accepting his coins at the moment, and didn’t quite catch it. 
“Thank you.  You know, I’m quite proud of today’s sunshine – it took quite a bit to pull it off, what with it drizzling on and off and on and off all week.  You should go out after your shift and have a nice look; it’s going to be clear skies until this evening.  Then I’m going to have to let a little shower fall in.  I’d give you the excuse of “it’s good for the crops” and all but frankly I’m amazed they haven’t flooded out with all the water they’re getting.  It’s just too much to keep pushed away.”
An eyebrow raised.  “Is that so?”
Simon hadn’t heard sarcasm aloud since that awful dream three years ago where the cat could speak, and he was fairly sure that deadpan was a sort of Victorian kitchen implement.  Besides, he was talking about his favourite thing. 
“Yes indeed, I’m sorry to say.  I hope it won’t be too much bother, but I’ve been putting it off for a while.  With all the drizzle I know one more day of it must be frustrating, but better a bit of sunshine than none at all, eh?”
“Yeah, sure.”  It was to her great credit that she managed to keep her eyes from rolling until Simon was well on his way out the door, but somewhat less so was her unstifled laughter, which sounded like a firecracker trapped in a tin can being dropped down a steel staircase. 
For a moment Simon’s pace swayed and his face frowned, but then he shook his back like a dog, rucksack a-juddering, and it all washed away from him like rain down a waterspout.  Still, his walk quickened step by step, and by the time he’d crossed the new and alarming road again he was nearly running, although he wasn’t quite sure from what.  He came to the bottom of the staircase all out of breath, and he had to take a moment to pause and rest. 
“Just like the old days, which were the new days, which weren’t as good as the old old days,” he told the water tower, in between coughs.  “They listened to me then, remember?  Hundreds of them, maybe even thousands!  Lots, anyways.  Every morning, all of them.”  He paused to rub the sweat from his forehead, disparate strands of hair swept into their proper misplacement.  “And that was when I wasn’t even important.  Hah, now I do the real work and no-one cares – it’s ignorance, plain and simple!  Inexcusable and understandable on every level!”
The cat was happy to see him, or at least see his milk.  He put some in a dish for it, even though it never touched the stuff and he’d end up having to throw it out when it started to smell funny.  It was something they had to do.  In the meantime, there was coffee to be made, and once he held brew in hand, milk-laced, it was time to work at the machine. 
It began poorly, with him pulling the wrong lever.  It creaked and clanked inside in a deep and mournful tone, and in his wincing hurry to correct his error Simon’s elbow embedded itself in a tray of buttons, where it nearly stuck, giving him a nasty bruise and the machine a case of the fits, hiccoughing and galumphing inside so hard that it sounded like a rhinoceros that’d sprung a leak. 
“Damnit!” said Simon.  “Fludge it!  Helpernockel!  Shits and shams!”  It took him until well into the afternoon to get things fixed so that the machine’s big metal insides were in an agreeable state, and only then could he get down to the really nitty-gritty teensy-tiny details.  It was with a hard-worn and heavy heart that he turned the wheel and spun the ticker that would undo his careful, hour-long session of yesterday eve that had kept today so sunny, unleashing the dam of pent-up iresome rain that had spent the hours of clear skies rumbling ‘round the mountains and grumbling to itself. 
“Pity,” he said, looking out of the makeshift window he’d cut into the side of the water tower, a great slit that eeled its way around a third of its bulk.  The sunshine gleamed no less, but he could already tell what he’d sent its way.  “Such a pity.”  The cat leered at him, and he threw his sock at it.  

The remaining task of the afternoon, of course, was the report. 
Simon’s suit was worn and thin and his tie looked like it had been ravaged by vengeful locusts, but he could still stand straight and tall, and he stood straight as a ramrod in front of the machine, staring firmly into its flat, glassy eye. 
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.  This is Simon Beadley, with an update for the rest of the week.  I hope you’ve enjoyed your sunshine, because that’s all we’re getting for a good time.  We’re going to have showers before breakfast, downpours by midmorning, and drizzle throughout the evening, with overcast skies and possibly some lightning overnight and continuing on through ‘till Wednesday.  If I can manage it, we should probably get clearer skies by the end of Friday, but I can’t promise anything.  Sorry.”
Simon went through the motions of double-checking the machine, then took off his suit, ate a can of cold beans, and went to bed, the vague stirrings of guilt wrapped around him like a second blanket.  He drifted into an uneasy, tossing, turning sleep, which melted into a series of confusing dreams.  The last was the clearest – he was back at the studio, in front of the bluescreen, presenting everything quite normally, except he was naked.  Strangely enough he didn’t mind this, and was trying to continue his forecast without being distracted by the shocked and startled expressions of everyone else in the room.  Some of them were making sharp hissing sounds and hand gestures, ordering him off the stage, gesturing to turn off the cameras, stop the broadcast, just like it’d been back when the old old days ended and the old days that were new days began, but for different reasons.  The cat laughed at him from its perch astride the camera.  One of the crewmen started to drag him bodily off the stage, and then someone dumped a bucket of water on his head.  He woke up sputtering with his eyes at the ceiling, where a broad but hitherto unnotable rust patch had given up the ghost and caved in, funnelling rainwater directly above his pillow. 
“That is that, and that is THAT!” declared Simon, as he heaved his bed out of the way and examined the sopping frame in disgust.  His sheets were ruined.  “I try to make a little concession,” he complained to the ceiling, “and this is how you repay me?  Just a little break, one little day of sunshine, and then I let you back in personally, and you treat me like this?  There are lines and you’ve just crossed all of them!”  He marched over to the machine and began yanking levers and twirling dials.  “And not a word out of you!” he snapped at the cat over his shoulder.  An inaudible snigger was its only reply. 
Readjusting the machine took all night and well past dawn, but Simon was too vexed to feel tired.  In the end, the only thing that stopped his toil was a button that refused to depress itself, stuck fast in its metal casing. 
“Oil, oil, oil” said Simon to himself, impatience seething within him.  “And I have none, and I’ve just been to town!  Damnit and spannit!”  He didn’t climb down the ladder so much as stomp, and although he got lost on his way to town again he was so irked that it didn’t much impede his way, despite the on-and-off showers that pelted him incessantly. 
“Just you wait,” he grumbled, as he stepped into the store.  He took some time to find the oil, and that calmed him down a little, enough that he only felt a slight twinge of an ill omen brush him by when he recognized the cashier of yesterday. 
“I thought you said you weren’t here often,” she commented as she scanned the oil canister. 
“It’s urgent,” said Simon.  “The weather, you see.”
“Oh,” she said.  “What about it?”  The total flashed up, and Simon began to hunt for his change. 
“The rain.  I told you I’d let it in and it simply took it too far – where’s that dollar?  I gave it what it wanted after asking it to hold off for one little day – aha, there you are! – and it came down like it owned the place.  Well, I won’t take that sort of thing.  No more rain!  Not forever, but none this week, and only a little the next if I forgive it, which I very well may not!  Yes, sunshine for the week, into the weekend, and damn the rain where it stands!”
The girl nodded absently, counting the change on the counter.  “Right.  You’re short twenty-two cents.”
Simon resumed his search for money, patting pockets, popping buttons, rummaging the inside of his coat like a small dog beset with large fleas, but all it revealed was nothing, acres and acres of nothing and lint.  He checked his pant’s pockets, and then at last, in desperation, the breast pocket of his shirt.  There was nothing. 
“I’m awfully sorry,” he said in a small voice, all the righteous resolve quite gone from him.  “I seem to be out of change.”
The cashier sighed.  There were several things that affected what she said next.  First, she wasn’t here to make a fuss over small coins, second, she’d already waited for at least two minutes for the greyed man in front of her to finish paying and the customers behind him were getting fidgety, and third, in a very tiny way that she probably wouldn’t have admitted to any of her friends, she felt sorry for him. 
“Let it go,” she said.  “You can pay back with that week of sunshine of yours, if it’s all right with you.”
Hope rose up through Simon’s face like an alarmed meerkat on sentry duty.  “Thank you – you have my word on it as a weatherman.  This mess will be over and done with by noon!  You hear that?” he said, turning to the (increasingly impatient) customers behind him.  “By noon!  Go home and get ready to get out the tanning lotion!”  He swept up the oil and left, his footsteps so light and fast that he seemed to hover through the doors. 
“What’s his problem?” she asked the next woman in line, who was buying some beer. 
She shrugged.  “Search me.  One day at the news station, the next out in the woods, that’s all I heard.  Nuts, but friendly nuts, and he can still take care of himself fine.”
“Where’s he get the money?”
“Not sure.  I heard he turns in beer bottles for some of it, but that’s all I know.  Maybe he panhandles now and then.” 

Simon wasn’t panhandling now, and he never did, although for some strange reason little donations of canned goods and such would appear at the base of his water tower now and then.  No, Simon was working, and working hard.  Oil aplenty was let flow, not just on the stuck button but all the various rusted points and parts of the machine, and there were many, many, many of them.  The levers were especially bad, and he had to break out his old and gnarled, club-like wrench to provide necessary leverage, which was rustier than the machine itself.  When Simon set the oil can down at last it sloshed hollowly, emptied to maybe a third of what it had held before, its contents spread thin and glistening across the machine’s hide and semi-exposed innards, which he decided were more properly outards. 
“In or out, they turn and spin and slide and push properly now, at least,” he told the cat, “so stop your smirking!”  As usual, it didn’t even dignify him with a response. 
After the oiling and wrenching came the work, which also contained wrenching, as the oil had made some of the parts difficult to get a good grip on.  Simon used his second-most-worn shirt as an oil rag.  The most-worn was part of his suit, which was its elder by some six years at least and had escaped its levels of decay only through his care to only don it for the report. 
It was at least eleven o’clock by his reckoning (and a very good reckoning it was) when he felt he was able to get a good, solid start on the work itself, with nothing to distract him.  Even the cat’s gleeful grimace simply rolled off the back of his coat as he spun and pressed and manoeuvred and wheedled the machine towards his plan, bit by bit, whir by whirl, adjusting forwards and backwards and (but just once) sideways, which was very tricky and required judicious use of his wrench. 
“Done!” he said at last, with warm triumph filling his face as he pressed the button.  “Done and done, and just before noon, as promised!  You hear that?” he said out the window at the drizzle, which he fancied already looked thinner.  “You’re done!  Go home!  Go away and don’t come back ‘till Sunday’s past again, you hear me?”  He chuckled and guffawed and broke into a long gleeful laugh, stamping his feet and shaking his arms in what was very nearly some sort of dance.  Already he could see the sunbeams in his mind, bright and happy.  His lunch beans tasted friendly and soft in his mouth as he ate with his back to the wall, and his ears told him what his eyes didn’t need to see: the drip and drop and silence of the fading-away rainclouds. 
The report was a special one, and he stood straighter than ever as he addressed the machine. 
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.  This is, as ever, Simon Beadley, with a very special forecast for you.  This week shall be bright and sunny, viewers, without so much as a speck or droplet to trouble your days.  I can promise, and I promise you this by everything above you and on my word as a weatherman: the skies will be sunny and clear!  That is all, and good day!” 
With those words he fell over backwards straight into bed, not even bothering to take off his suit first, so quickly did his pent-up exhaustion take him. 
There were dreams again, but gentle and queer rather than raw and aged.  He was in the studio, and he was waving his arms over the bluescreen again, like a magician, with the cat watching him quietly.  The weather followed his hands, clouds tracing from fingertips and sunshine blossoming from his palm.  Winds washed down his wrists and bled their way across a map that he could see clearer in his head than anyone could on a screen, twisting over and into each other like a puzzle-knot of steel, only stronger and nobler.  It was the old old days at their best, when they were the good old days, with all the hundreds that were maybe thousands watching him and listening to what their weather was going to be. 

 The next morning Simon woke up much refreshed, made some coffee, threw out the cat’s leftover milk, and smiled at the perfect day outside his window.  The only dampness left lay on the ground, gently melting away into the air.  It was a sight fit to make him whistle, if only he knew how.  He gamely gave it another try as he worked on the machine, still in his suit, sleeves carefully rolled up, with the usual disastrous results; something between spitting and humming with the appeal of neither.  It touched his mood not at all, and he was even more pleased to see that the machine had weathered its efforts overnight with no trouble at all.  “It must be the oil,” he told the cat knowingly.  “It wanted a tune-up.  I should’ve done this last year at least, poor thing.”  It merely smiled, but for once it seemed friendly rather than all-too-knowing.  In the spirit of friendship, he poured it another dish of milk. 
After his work was done – and in half the time it should’ve taken, the thing just seemed to spin by under his hands – Simon found himself bereft of tasks.  There was only one thing to be done for it, especially given the state of the machine.  “I am going for a walk,” he informed the cat.  “It’s simply too fine a day to sit on my rear and grow slobbish.”  The cat, of course, didn’t agree, but it didn’t seem to mind either, and watched Simon go down the ladder with tolerant bemusement. 
Off through the woods went Simon, on a trail that had already started to become more solid and true than it had on Sunday morning.  What water that was left was little and damp, and even the thistles and briars seemed less prone to touch and claw Simon.  By the time he reached the roadside he’d taken off his coat and was enjoying the light breeze as it tickled the tie of his suit, which seemed fairly surprised to be out in the fresh air.  And such freshness! thought Simon.  Filled with the calm and even vapours of rain-gone-by, thawed and warmed out into a smooth balm by steady sunshine.  It was enough to make you breath deep just standing there, the sort of diet you weaned Olympic swimmers on. 
“Hello!” he called to the people in cars as he waited to pass at the street without stoplights.  “Lovely weather, isn’t it?”  Some of them ignored him, some of them stared, but he didn’t mind.  “Beautiful to see some sun,” he said to passer-bys on the downtown sidewalk, out and about doing shopping.  When he came near the park and saw the children on the playground, he didn’t say anything, only laughed and laughed as he walked by.  Some of them laughed back. 
His walk took up almost the whole day, and his last stop on the way home was the store.  The brown-haired girl, he was told by the boy at the counter, worked morning shifts and was named Teresa.  “Let her know I’ve started paying you back,” said Simon.  “I expect she knows already!  Go on, go out and get some air!” he encouraged the store at large, which stared at him.  “I didn’t make this for you to stay indoors in!”  He left the store laughing again, and didn’t stop ‘till he was halfway home, leaving him winded after the climb but still quite happy. 
“A good day!” he told the cat as he worked on the machine.  “A very good day!  And all still ticking along smooth and careful, too!  You haven’t been keeping it fixed while I’m out, have you?” he joked.  The cat only smiled.  

“Good to see you, ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the machine.  “This is Simon Beadley and the forecast has not changed and shall not change.  Sunny and clear!  That is all, and good day!” 

Simon Beadley said that five more times, or at least something like it.  The week went on, the machine ran smooth, the clouds were at bay and his walks grew longer.  His suit saw more use that week than it had in all the rest of its life at once, parading with him through forests and parks and alongside roads and highways, blinking at dust and brushing aside dew, while his great and solid coat rested peacefully in the water tower.  On Wednesday he made the store his first stop on his walk and left early, so as to catch Teresa and make sure she knew he was paying her back. 
“Conner told me,” she informed him. 
“Just wanted to be sure,” he said.  “I’d hate for you to think I was trying to cheat my way out of the bill.”
“Sure.  Got it,” she said in a dulcet monotone.  He was pleased to note that she’d acquired something of a light tan. 
If his days were spent with the long blissful walks, his nights were spent with the old old days, dreams following dreams in endless and cosily enfolding loops.  The bluescreen that wasn’t for him, he and the suit together before the wear of the years, and the things that followed his touch, the wind chill factor, the humidity, the warm and cold fronts, the chance for fog or rain.  It was like singing a rainbow with his fingers.  And in the dreams and the mornings the cat seemed to care about him, even if it still refused the milk. 
Sunny and clear.  

Things changed a little over the weekend.  For one thing, the oiling finally started to run thin.  Luckily, Simon had the rest of the can available, and redid the job immediately after he spotted a dial pause in its spinning.  When it was over it the canister was dry as a buried bone, but once again the machine was smooth and happy.  He reminded himself to save up and buy more once he’d finished paying it off.  “Perhaps it’d be a bit much to purchase it the same way,” he admitted.  “I’d need months of nothing but sunshine for that, and that wouldn’t be good for the plants and things.  But surely I can save a little better and use it sparingly, just to keep the machine from sticking up badly, can’t I?”
For another, people started to recognize him.  The children on the playground began to wave at him, and he would wave back.  The averted gazes and downcast eyes transformed to nods and quick smiles at his greetings.  Even Teresa, whom he made sure to keep up-to-date on his promise, was a little more friendly. 
“Sunny and clear!” he told her on Saturday.
“For two more days,” she said, and he nodded as he went home to his cat and the machine.  He was careful to tune it up with painstaking exactness now that the oil was gone, before and after his walks.  A promise was a promise, and one that he’d repeated all week was a very large one by now.  

On Sunday, he saw the flickering flashes far off in the distance.  “Heat lightning,” he reassured people on the streets, pointing at the dark faraway blots on the horizon.  “A hundred miles off at least, and five times too far for us to even catch wind of the thunder.  Don’t worry – sunny and clear!”  They shrugged, smiled a little, and went on.  “Just showboating,” he told Conner at the store.  “It’s all a big nothing.  Tell Teresa there’s no problem.”  Conner nodded a little and shrugged. 
“It’s nothing,” he informed the cat, which he thought looked doubtful.  “It’s all working properly, and I said it would be, so I’m sure.  Sunny and clear.”  Then he threw out yesterday’s milk and lay down to sleep in his rumpled suit. 
It was the old old days again, he saw.  In front of the bluescreen, wearing his suit, the cat and its camera on him and his hand on the weather, his eyes on the reports and his mind in the sky… and then the reports were gone.  Halfway through the typed-out forecasts the air pressures and local temperatures and wind speeds simply stopped dead, printing errors rendering the rest of the sheet a blank mess with a slight, artistic smear of ink the only remaining marking. 
What he did next was the right thing, the thing that made sense, and it was all wrong.  He kept talking on calmly, kept pointing at the bluescreen that he couldn’t see that was there, and he said what the weather was where it was.  The useless non-reports sat there on his desk and it was only when he gently brushed them off, still-talking, that they realized what he was doing.  The cut-off gestures, the stop-the-broadcasts, the cameras stopped moving (but the cat didn’t stop smiling from them), the cameramen grabbed him, they all took him offstage and asked him why didn’t you stop, why didn’t you say, what did you think you were doing.  And then he told them, told them that he’d told the weather what it was going to be, but it was what he did and they heard him say it and before he knew it he was out on the curb, besides the street, suit and tie and final notice and out hanging in the breeze, just him and the old days, which were the new days then, and were the bad days. 
Then he woke up to the sound of the thunder.  

“Oh no,” said Simon to the cat, fumbling blindly upright in the deep dark of the late night.  At least, he thought he said it.  The rumbling was too loud.  “This isn’t right.  This makes no sense.”  The cat leered at him in the lightning-flash. 
“This isn’t proper!” he insisted, overridden by the roar.  “I said that it was clear!  Clear and sunny, sunny and clear!”  He darted to the machine, eyes blinking and worrying at controls that gloomed like gargoyles in the dark, their meanings and intent deeply inscrutable.  He yanked at levers and pushed a whole row of buttons, and stared in horror as they worked perfectly, without making an ounce of difference to what was overhead.  The oil was still there, the controls were still smooth, the machine was ready to perform and nothing was happening.  He picked up the wrench and wrenched, wrangling and wrestling with the innar – with the outards, and nothing happened.  There was a ping above him as a globe of hail sparked its way off the dome of the water tower, followed by others. 
“This isn’t right or proper!” he repeated, talking not to the sniggering cat or to the machine but to the world at large.  “I told you what to be and you aren’t it!  Why aren’t you sunny and clear!”  He hammered on the machine in a fury, wrench bashing in surfaces and slipping off dents in a tiny cacophony lost in the wail of the wind outside.  “Why aren’t you working when you’re working!” he yelled, flinging the wrench to the ground, a useless, rusty club.  The sky rumbled at him, and he thought it sounded like the cat laughing.
“SHUT UP!” he yelled at it, and he swung his way up onto the ladder, the other half of it that he never used, up and up to the curved roof where he slammed his balled fist into the stuck and rusty ceiling-hatch. 
“Good night” *pound* “ladies and gentlemen.” *thud*  “This is Simon” *slam* “Beadley!”  Clang!  Smash!  The door was open, and he was scrambling free into the night air, the wind blowing at him so that his shoes skidded on the slick roof and his tie flapped in the gale. 
He stared into the sickly bruise-dark clouds that glared back down at him, full of outrage.  “The forecast has not changed and shall not change!” he yelled as he struggled to the stubby little peak of the tower, trembling with fury.  “Sunny and clear!  I order you, sunny and clear!  You listen to me!”  The sky snarled at this as it spat lightning, and he snarled back even as a tree a hundred yards away went up in flames.  The hail was bone-chillingly cold and half-sleet, and his suit was being plastered and frayed against his skin, flayed thread by thread.  “You do listen to me and you will listen to me!  I made a promise!” 
Simon took a deep breath, and the air around him seemed to thicken like toffee even as he waved his arm unsteadily over the sky.  It followed his fingers, didn’t it?  Didn’t it?  “Sunny.  And.  Clear!  That is all, and good night!”
There was a great flash of light that seared through the curtains on every house in town, a clap of thunder that woke hundreds, maybe thousands for miles around, the tower shook from root to tip, and Simon Beadley held the lightning in his hands. 

They came looking for him the next day, the people that had left him food and other things, that had checked in on him.  The sound and fury of the night had damaged power lines for miles around and toppled telephone poles here and there like tinker toys; heavens knew what it could’ve done to one old and creaky water tower.  No one answered to their calls, and so they went upstairs, into the small and creaky den that Simon Beadley had lived his life in. 
There weren’t many things.  A careful store of food, of course – much of which they recognized.  A makeshift bed crafted from a thin mattress and several dishevelled sheets.  An elderly stuffed animal, shaped as a smiling cat with half-lidded eyes, set in a strange sort of place of pride atop a rudimentary shelf.  One of the people said she recognized it from television somewhere, some sort of old logo.  And strangest of all, a great creaking thing, a long, low oblong of machinery and knick-knackery, gears and widgets shaped into a bulky and oversized console with more controls than an aircraft carrier.  All its moving parts connected to nothing – those that still worked.  It was severely damaged and dented, and it appeared to have never had any sort of power source. 
What worried them more was the open hatch in the roof, but search as they might they could find no body on the ground below.  A very small scorch mark marred the tip of the tower, the size of a dollar coin, but they missed that, and went home puzzled. 
All in all, they said, it was a strange night, and they said that for years to come.  All that sound and fury, all that roaring and booming, the flash and the bang, the gales that shrieked – and all of that howling on for so slight a time before it faded so quickly, leaving scarcely enough rainwater to make the gutters swirl, let alone overflow.  

The weather on Sunday, March 28^th, was sunny, with a cool breeze, a chance of light showers overnight, and punctual.  As promised. 

Copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor.

This story is from the far long before, back when the world was hard and solid and rough as a ragged shale around its rim.  The greatfathers and the greatmothers were all gone, and the wound left over from the ending of the first times was still sore and raw and bleeding.  All things bled from that ruinous hurt, and many bled all the way down, but a few still lived.  The peoples scraped their way back bit by bite and belly by claw and the world began to heal a little, and perhaps even to soften at their touch.  The green came back from its smouldering ruins and crawled farther still, spreading life for life to feed on wherever it went.  The peoples grew stronger and larger and began to recover a bit of their old place, and that was when the troubles began again. 

The first sign of warning came from near the water, where people that went to fish would start slipping away and vanishing.  Oh well, said the others.  Should be more careful.  But when it happened more often, and sometimes to the others that talked about being careful, well, that was just puzzling and worrying. 

The next signs were from farther inland, in the murkier forests and bogs.  There it was even less noticeable – a bog could suck you down right quick and you had to be fast to stop getting eaten there – but by now everyone was nervous, and the people there took note of when they started vanishing, and they were worried too. 

The last sign came when Grandmother Cru was out hunting for some meat, and she heard a rustling down in the forest.  Out she flew and caught something, and it was only after she wrestled it down and it wasn’t moving that she saw that it was one of the scuttling people, the ones with the many eyes.  She was surprised deeply with that, since all the scuttling people had died under the wounding that ended the first times. 

That’s strange, she told the peoples.  That is strange, they agreed.  And why are they hunting us?  Scuttling people didn’t do that. 

Well, scuttling people do now, said Grandmother Cru.  And she was right.  They were angry and bold now that they’d been discovered, and they came swarming out of the shallow pools and bogs they’d been hiding in, lots and lots of them.  Scuttling people were everywhere, and they were angry, too angry to talk, too angry to think.  The peoples fought, but they were weary instead of angry and worried instead of warlike, and soon there were no more left but the children and the grandmothers and grandfathers. 

This is bad, they said.  What’re we going to do?

Grandfather No had an idea.  He always had ideas.  We can’t fight them this way, he said.  So let’s find new ways.  We’re old, too old to fight fair.  Let’s go and learn and take what we need until we can fight. 

Good plan, said the others, and so the grandmothers and the grandfathers went their separate ways, all around and out and far.  They didn’t want to leave the children unprotected, so they dug a dark pit in the ground and stuffed them into it, then locked it with a fallen tree.  Stay put, they said, and stay quiet.  Now remember, don’t make any noise, for any reason, or the scuttling people will hear you.  The children were good children, and they did as they were told. 

Grandmother Cru journeyed far to the east, off into the sea.   The water looked oh so good and tempting, but she knew that she would drown if she walked in, so she looked along the beach.  It was covered in little mud droplets, all hiding bright-coloured, vain little sea-shells. 

Who here can swim? she called. 

Me!  Me!  Me! clamoured all the sea shells, shrill with importance.  Me!  Me!  I can do it!  They dug themselves to the surface and tumbled over each other in their haste to prove their claim.  Grandmother Cru just laughed and gathered them all up, and had a fine meal, cooking them all in the fire.  When it was through she took the charred-burnt shells and slapped them all over her body, and she had a fine suit of armour that made her stiff and sturdy and slow.  She took to the water and swam along, a bit portly and bumpy but altogether pleasant, and then she ran into a shark. 

What are you? asked the shark.  He was young and brave and very foolish. 

I’m me, replied Grandmother Cru sensibly. 

The shark was hot-tempered, and this annoyed him.  Don’t be rude, he yelled, or I’ll bite you clean in half.  My teeth are strong and sharp enough that no armour can stop them, not even that clanking coat of yours. 

My, my, they are sharp indeed, said Cru.  But I’ll bet they can’t bite me. 

If I can’t bite you in half, said the shark, then I’m as flat and toothless as a sea slug.  I’ll show you.  And the shark plucked up Grandmother Cru in his jaws and shook her all around like a little fish, teeth gnashing and clashing and jaws squeezing and biting.  He seized her so hard that she squished in the middle and stretched out both sides, until she was long and lean, but Grandmother Cru just laughed at him no matter how hard he tried.  He wriggled and shook and thrashed until every tooth fell out of his head, his mouth withered up, and he’d beaten himself flat against the water.  Finally he gave up in exhaustion, and Grandmother Cru took his teeth.  You aren’t a shark, but you aren’t quite a sea slug, she said.  I think you are something new, and I will call you a ray.  It is a good word. 

Grandmother Cru popped her new teeth into her toothless old maw and snapped them tight.  They were good strong teeth still, built for gnashing, and her new thin firm body was as muscled as anything.  She laughed and clacked and roared her way along the coast and into the rivers and swamps, and the scuttling people fled from her in fear, those that she did not tear apart and swallow. 

Grandfather Ter went wandering north.  There were many tall trees there, so tall that his old, old neck creaked to look up at them, and he walked so long and far that his feet hurt and he had to stop to rub them besides a creek.  There were dragonflies about the creek, just the thing to eat, but he had nothing to catch them with.  So he sat and thought and rubbed his arms and legs, cursing his old, brittle bones, and then he had a cunning idea.  He walked over to one of the tall trees and picked off as many branches as he could carry, and then he covered himself with them very carefully.  He held those branches up all day, arms straining, legs bowing close to the dirt with the effort, and at nightfall the dragonflies came to perch.  Grandfather Ter waited until they were asleep, then quick as lightning bit out at them one after another, swallowing the plump bodies and spitting out the gummy wings, which fluttered all over him.  Their legs were sharp as anything and stuck to the roof of his mouth, which hurt badly, and Grandfather Ter swore and jumped up and down, spitting and cursing as loud as he could until the moon nearly blanched.  He swore and hawked and cursed and jumped and as he did so more and more of the wings and branches were glued all over his stretched and strained thin old arms by his own spittle.  His bowed legs were stomped down to nubbins by the time he collapsed in exhaustion at dawn, and although the spikes in his mouth no longer pained him, they were stuck firm and never moving again, his yelling and their prodding turning his voice into a squawking croak. 

The sunlight dried Grandfather Ter as he dozed, and by midday he stood up and found it was too hard to walk, his legs had got so short and his wings-and-branches arms so heavy.  More dragonflies were above the stream, and when he hopped and leaped at them, hoping against hope, that was when Grandfather Ter found that he could fly. 

Up and up he flapped, needle-filled mouth snatching at food, and he cackled so hard he nearly choked.  His old thin bones floated on the winds and troubled him no more as he circled in the sky.  The scuttling people heard his voice from on high, and the sound where there had been silence filled them with worry.  He cackled and dived down at them, pecking with his needles, and they did not stay in his lands. 

Grandmother Cth took to the west, and she came to the sea as well, all around the other side, in different waters.  It seemed so very large that her knees shook to look at it, and they shook so hard that they nearly came loose.  Now don’t do that, she told them, and they hushed up some, which let her wander the beach in peace and quiet.  It was a big, broad sea out there, and she sat and thought on what to do for a long time.  A plan popped into her head at last, and she began to gather up pebbles and throw them into the water, splashing them about and making a dreadful noise.  Soon up came a big angry fish.  What are you meaning throwing those stones onto my reef? he asked angrily.  It’s brand-new as it is, thanks to the wounding, and now you go and throw stones on it.  What do you want anyways? 

Awfully sorry, said Grandmother Cth, but I can make it up to you.  How would you like to trade?  I’ve got a set of good legs here, and I’ll let you give them a try if you’ll let me see your thick hide. 

The big fish was still a bit angry, but he thought it over.  He’d always wanted to see the land above the seas for a bit, even a little bit, but the thought of leaving his precious water made him leery.  All right, he said, but only for a short time.  I’ll try your legs, and you can try my hide, but we’ll trade back after I’m finished, is that clear?

Yes indeed, said Grandmother Cth, and she was so eager to take off her legs that it made the big fish suspicious.  One more thing then, he said.  To make sure no one cheats and runs away, we’ll each keep ahold of something important.  I’ll keep my eggs, and you can keep your lungs. 

I’ll be fairer still, said Grandmother Cth.  We can share my lungs.  That way I can’t run away, and you don’t have to hold your breath while you walk.  This generosity put the big fish off his guard, and as he walked onto the land he did so in utter good faith.  However, after his fifth step in Grandmother Cth’s wobbling old knees, he knew something was wrong. 

Old woman, what have you done? he cried, but his only answer was a laugh as Grandmother Cth sped away over the waves.  She didn’t have eggs, but she would think of something, and she didn’t have lungs, but she could hold her breath.  The big fish hopped up and down the shore in a fury all night before limping inland to find somewhere wet where his skinless body wouldn’t dry out.  It was small comfort to find himself able to breath above and below the water, for his old worn-out kneecaps were too feeble to bear walking, and he had to hop everywhere he went.  He was bitterly unhappy, and called himself a frog, which he thought was a foolish person. 

Grandmother Cth had not a care in the world for it, and she swam the ocean main, boldly, far out into the warm and shallow expanses that the scuttling ones had called home.  Her snapping bill and gnashing teeth drove them away in fear, and she had little care for her missing legs – she had hands and feet to paddle with, as well as her strong long tail. 

Grandfather No walked south, and he walked farthest.  Off into the deep desert he marched, old grandfather No, and he thought as he walked, bolt upright, muscles firmed.  The sun baked his skin firm and painted it strange hues, the walking stiffened his legs so that they were warped straight as a line, his body itself wavered and shrank to almost tiny size under the sky’s gaze, but on Grandfather No marched.  He ate young lizards as they basked on rocks and caught them as they slipped under rocks, his bleached and firmed tendons and muscles growing snap-fast to grab and long and delicate to probe.  The energy and warmth of his prey entered him, and he grew younger and more vigorous with each life he stole, a quick and lithe predator.  His movements grew jerky and darting, and he walked until one day he stood alone in the desert, mouth empty of flesh, and surveyed the horizon from atop a single broken rock. 

I am what I am meant to be, said Grandfather No.  All of this will be mine one day, I think. 

He walked home then, and ate little on the trip, yet remained as lively and rapid as ever.  The scuttling people never heard his three-toed footsteps coming pit-a-pat upon the red dirt towards them, never saw his fanged snout approaching their delicate eyes, but they knew those places he roamed were not theirs, and they left in great fear. 

All of this took quite some time, and the defeat of the scuttling people with many eyes took longer still.  By the time the last of them had vanished the grandmothers and grandfathers had nearly forgotten where the children had been left, and had had many new children of their own.  They called and called and called, so loudly that it rang across all the world and deep into the burrow of the children, but their voices had grown strange and unfamiliar to their ears, and they were good children, and made not a sound in replay. 

I can’t find them, wailed Grandmother Cth, splashing in the seas.  I traded my legs for flippers, land for sea. 

I can’t find them, rumbled Grandmother Cru, drifting through the swamps, I am not meant for such long walks, armoured as I am. 

I can’t find them, squawked Grandfather Ter, flitting through the trees, I cannot sit upon the ground again, and I am too high up to see them. 

I will find them, hissed Grandfather No, padding across the land. 

That is good, the others said. 

Grandfather No took many more steps before he found the children’s place, some on top of each other, but he did find them, following his snout.  He opened it up with his delicate hands and found that the children were many now.  Alone in the cold they’d made strange soft stuff from their skins to keep the warmth, and they had had their own children long, long ago, feeding them on milk.  They did not recognize him, and hissed and snapped, and Grandfather No felt a coldness arise in his warm-beating heart as he looked upon them. 

If you will not know your elders as such, he said, you will know them as your betters.  I and my children, and their children beyond will teach you this lesson until you know us again.  He fell upon the children and drove them deep into their burrows, and killed and ate several before he returned. 

The children are not our children any longer, he told the grandmothers and grandfathers.  They have gone from our sight.  And the others mourned for the loss, but not for too long, for they had children of their own to look after now, and Grandfather No the most.  

Copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor. 

Back in the Good Old Days, in the woods, there was a poor woodcutter.  There was nothing noteworthy or unique about this, and he died of old age a poor woodcutter. 
This story isn’t about him. 

 His brother was also a poor woodcutter, because when you’re living in a shack in the middle of a forest there’s very little else you can do.  All of his possessions in the world were an old, battered axe, a cupboard (typically bare), and a dented tin water jug.  He would’ve added his little daughter and wife to the list (this WAS about six hundred years ago), but his wife would’ve objected, and very few things in his life that she objected to lasted long.  It was largely because of this that he spent most of his time out in the woods, where there was lots of fresh air that was untainted by the voice of someone yelling at him.  He would make up dull songs to pass the time as he chopped, sing them very badly, then become miserable each new day when he realized he’d forgotten his song and would have to compose a new one, which would take just as much time and give him the sneaking suspicion that he’d managed to copy all the worst bits of the last.  It was not ideal. 
Then, one day when he was mid-verse, mid-swing, and trying to think of something that rhymed with “forsooth,” the woodcutter heard a strange sound: someone crying.  More specifically, someone that wasn’t him – he’d long ago developed a soft, stifled sob.  Pushing through a nearby thicket, curiosity, overtaking his mopiness, he found the source of the crying: an old woman standing in her garden with her back to him, cradling something. 
“Is there something wrong, old woman?” asked the woodcutter. 
The woman faced him without turning around, and that was when he knew he was dealing with a witch.  She didn’t look sad either, just furious, and it was then that the woodcutter noticed that she was cutting up an onion.  Whoops. 
“You’re trampling my garden!” she shrieked, and she was right; there the woodcutter was, up to his knees in the beans, his thighs in the peas, and his buttocks in the lettuce.  Those were some mighty big lettuces. 
“I’m sorry,” he said, the paralytic fear rendering him insincere.  “I didn’t mean it!  I’ll pay you back, I promise!”
“What does a poor woodcutter like you have besides your life?” demanded the witch, fixing him with the most evil of her eyes (the left one – it had a slightly misshapen cornea, and she squinted a lot with it). 
The woodcutter’s mind raced faster than it had in his life, and as most things tend to do when this happens, it sprung a gasket.  “My wife!” he said. 
“Nice try.  I’m doing you no favours for the ills you’ve just given me.  What do you have that I’d want?”
“My axe!”
“A battered piece of junk!”
“My cupboard!”
“Made out of sticks and branches!”
“My jug!”
“Not worthy to water weeds with!”
“My home!”
The witch jerked her thumb over her back, at the rather tall, ominous, and altogether splendid tower behind her.  The woodcutter’s heart sank.
“Your life or nothing is all you’ve given me.  Anything else, or do I take your heart here and now?”
The woodcutter realized he had one thing he hadn’t named.  “My daughter!” he said, skin shrivelling in shame at the lengths its owner would go to save it. 
“Ahh, there’s a good coward.  Yes, your daughter would do nicely.  A girl around to fetch and mend and carry is worth more than a coward’s heart, I think.  Best go fetch her now, before I grow impatient.”
The woodcutter left for home, feeling miserable and impotent.  “Woe is me.  And us,” he said to his wife, “for I have promised our daughter to a witch’s service in exchange for my life.  Hand her over.”
His wife looked at him like he was the world’s biggest idiot.  “What are you, the world’s biggest idiot?” she demanded.  “We don’t have anything we can’t take with us except the cupboard, and witches are frail old ladies.  Let’s just leave.”
So they did.  The witch was grumpy about it, but they were younger and faster than she was and before the day was done they were far away from her tower.  They’d got away scot-free and never saw that witch or any other ever again. 
This story isn’t about any of them either. 

 The woodcutter and his wife and daughter found a nicer, less witch-inhabited chunk of forest that was within spitting distance of a cool, clear river whose brook was so pretty and pristine that the woodcutter found himself describing it as “babbling” without intending to every time he mentioned it.  Also, they were near a small village full of people that rather didn’t mind having someone cut wood for them, which was a great improvement on the woodcutter’s old business model, which was doing it to get away from his wife and make the odd crude cupboard. 
Anyways, the daughter grew up.  And as she grew, she grew beautiful, which mystified both her parents because neither of them were exactly handsome, to put it lightly.  “Must be your mother’s side of the family,” opined the woodcutter, which earned him a smack.  She wasn’t just a pretty face, either – she wasn’t a stranger to hard work, and besides all the chores she did at home she also handled sewing and laundry for a few people in the village in exchange for favours, food, and the odd bit of knicknackery. 
It all was going so well when the dragon showed up.  The first thing the daughter knew of it was when her father came back from the village tavern in a frightful tizzy.  “It burned down all the crops and its breath blighted the soil,” he wailed.  “It ate up four of Cooper’s oxen and one of Smith’s horses, and it’s napping on the road out of town right now!  Our only hope is to keep it happy until someone can make it to the king and tell him to send help.”
“How do you do that?” asked the daughter, who was interested in all this. 
“Virgin sacrifices,” the woodcutter explained, moodiness wandering over his face as though it had lost the map. 
“Why?”
“It works, don’t ask me why.  We drew lots and Fletcher’s sending his daughter out tonight.  I just hope the messenger’s fast – we aren’t exactly rolling in young womenfolk around here.”
“What about boys?” asked the daughter.
“They don’t count,” explained the woodcutter, lamely, and he took up his axe and left as soon as possible.  Although the daughter felt vaguely pleased at seeing the opposite gender dismissed entirely for once, she somehow felt that in this case it wasn’t as convenient as it could’ve been. 
Fletcher’s daughter, it transpired, had sharper ears than her father had known, and by the time he’d gone to find her she was secluded in a barn with Tanner’s eldest son, busily removing her qualifications.  There was a good deal of shouting and shaming all around when they were discovered, but as she pointed out (rather smugly), there was just nothing to be done of it.  By the time the men of the village had got around to drawing lots again (this time it was old Miller’s youngest), the dragon had woken up, eaten Smith’s other horse and all of Shepherd’s sheep, and passed out again on the road. 
Fletcher’s daughter wasn’t shy about spreading the word, and by next evening old Miller’s youngest was also disqualified and rather smug about it.  The men of the village cursed her and youth today in general, drew lots, and cursed again the next eve, when Tanner’s daughter followed suit. 
And so it went, day by day.  A (female) virgin was chosen, a (female) virgin abused the rather obvious loophole, the men of the village cursed their daughters and lack of pattern recognition jointly, the dragon ate more livestock, and the lots were drawn again.  By the tenth day and night there were no more candidates of either sex readily available, except for one.  The woodcutter’s daughter’s lot was chosen, and this time the men of the village didn’t tell her until the evening had come.  Or rather, the woodcutter didn’t, and it was less because of sadistic cunning and more a matter of working up the nerve to inform her in front of her mother. 
“I’m awfully sorry, sweet-pea,” he explained as he was menaced with his own axe, “but it’s you or nice Mr. Shepherd’s last sheep, and he would be very upset about that.”
At this the woodcutter’s wife moved to inconvenience him, but she was stopped by her daughter.  “Don’t worry, mum,” she said.  “I’ll be fine.”
The woodcutter’s wife examined her daughter carefully, face expressionless.  “You sure about this, pumpkin?” she asked, dead serious.
“Yes.”
A forthright nod.  “Good girl then.  You go do what you can.”
So the woodcutter’s daughter did.  She took her father’s dented tin jug and his battered old axe, and she stopped at the home of the woman who was interested in herbs, and she took herself and her jug over to Mr. Shepherd’s house and strongarmed him into giving her his last sheep in exchange for three years of owed payment for doing his filthy laundry.  There was much gnashing of teeth as she left on her way down to the road out of town. 
The dragon was still sleeping, burping gently now and then, and the area was foul-smelling from its breath and feces.  Resolutely ignoring this, the woodcutter’s daughter killed the sheep with the axe, clumsily hacked its gut open (cursing her father’s reluctance to replace the old implement), dumped the contents of the tin can inside, and walked away to hide behind a nearby thicket. 
The noises the dragon made over the next half hour weren’t pretty, but few things are in the initial onset of the ingestion of several pounds of concentrated wolfsbane.  It wheezed and gurgled and moaned, and when the woodcutter’s daughter wandered out to check it was lying on its side, spewing inflammatory toxins from both ends and filling the ditches with foul-smelling embers. 
It was about then that the prince rode up on his horse, lance in hand, shield ready, and found them both.  He was quite confused when the dragon didn’t fight back as he speared its heart, but sorted it all out quickly by deciding that he’d done everything.  He’d even rescued a beautiful damsel, who protested a bit when he scooped her up onto the horse, but not too much after he agreed to meet her parents first before talking over the marriage question. 
This story probably isn’t about them either. 

Some years passed, and the woodcutter’s daughter was technically a queen and the prince a king.  They had three sons, one after another, and they were pretty good on the whole.  None of them that good-looking, which puzzled the parents a little since they were both considered such. 
“Must be your side of the family,” said the prince, who got swatted for it. 
Anyways, that didn’t matter.  The boys were healthy, happy, strong, and exceedingly boisterous and loud.  Their ages were twenty, nineteen, and eighteen when the trouble came.  One late summer day the king was out on horseback, inspecting the countryside, when a crow landed on his shoulder.  The king nearly shot out of the saddle in surprise, the horse bucked, and he went flying, waking up with a babbling mouth and addled mind.  This irked and alarmed the woodcutter’s daughter greatly, because she knew something that was more than bad luck when she saw it.  She called for the palace magician, and with a lot of talking and thinking they worked it out between them where to look for a cure. 
“Boys,” she said, addressing her three sons, “you’re going to go cure your father.  Try to make it back before winter sets in.  And head south-south-east.”
They promised they’d be back as soon as they could, took the best horses from the stable, some armour, a sword apiece, and plenty of supplies, and were off down the road by noon. 
“Let’s split up,” suggested the youngest.  “We can cover more ground that way.”  They all agreed on this, and the eldest brother headed down the first fork in the road they came across with a fare-thee-well.  His trip was very uneventful for the most part (the king had been pretty good at his job, and the lands were quiet), and sadly found himself unable to locate anything more than a few women who were interested in herbs, all of whom told him that scrambled brains needed something a bit stronger than herbs.  He did get to enjoy some excellent cups of tea, though. 
At the next fork in the road the middle brother turned away with a wave.  His path took him right up to the edge of the kingdom, and after venturing a bit farther he was accosted by a large band of knights and unceremoniously booted out of the domain by a king with an ill temper and a long memory, who distinctly recalled who had hidden frogs in his privy when he was on a diplomatic visit twelve years ago. 
The youngest brother had a bit of a shorter trip than his siblings – the road ended in a very small and very dull village not far from the fork where his elder brother had left him alone.  The only thing that was interesting about it was that it had a very large and cracked dragon skull above the door to the tavern (missing most of its teeth), which he inquired about. 
“The king did that,” said the woodcutter, who had never seen any of his grandchildren before and was welcoming the opportunity to have a pint or two on someone else’s expense.  “Back in the day.  Nice of him to let us keep the skull.”  His voice grew conspiratorial and quiet.  “And I think it’s still got a mite of magic in it.  Old Smith rubbed it for luck one day and the very next day he bought himself a new horse on the cheap.  Bit of a windfall, that.  And I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve had a close call with my axe that could’ve turned nasty if it weren’t for the tooth I’ve got.”
The youngest son examined the tooth, which the woodcutter wore as a sort of crude necklace, and conceded that it was very impressive.  “Can I borrow it?” he asked. 
“What for?” asked the woodcutter, and he listened to the story.  “Ill tidings,” he said when the tale was done, secretly relishing the opportunity to say the words in context.  “Anything to give my daughter’s husband a hand.”  The woodcutter thought for a moment.  “Ten golden coins.”
The youngest son had to pawn his horse (Old Smith was happy to have a full team again, even if one was fourteen years older than the other) and walk all the way home on foot, but he was proud.  His brothers had come home before he did, and together they walked in to speak with the woodcutter’s daughter. 
“I have failed,” said the eldest son, remorsefully. 
“I have also failed,” said the middle son, bitterly. 
“I’ve got this,” said the youngest son, helpfully, and gave his mother the dragon-tooth pendant. 
The woodcutter’s daughter examined it closely.  “Thank you,” she said.  “You’ve all succeeded.”
The sons were slightly nonplussed, and then the woodcutter’s daughter explained that the king had been under a lot of stress for a while now, and a bit of a break with someone else running the kingdom and no loud children underfoot had done him a world of good.  In fact, he’d agreed to take ruling duty in shifts with her, and was currently out back playing a happy game of lawn bowls with several of the more energetic dukes.  The princes were a little annoyed, but consoled themselves with the knowledge that at least they’d gotten some fresh air and their father might have a bit more time to spend with them. 

There wasn’t a story about any of them.  But they were well-off enough without it.

Copyright 2009, Jamie Proctor.