jamieproctor.ca

The nest wasn’t much. A clump of down and some pebbles, crammed in the crutch of what must’ve been a nice tree a hundred years ago, and had probably had leaves up until the last decade.
No twigs. Hadn’t been any twigs for ages.
Still, a nest was a nest, and that’s why its occupant slammed beak-first into Alistair’s eyeball, popping it like an overripe grape.
“Fuck!” said Alistair. And he fell over backwards, nest in hand, grasping, flailing, wailing, and he bumped down ten feet head over heels and somehow missed landing on his neck, which was quite a feat.
“Fuck,” concluded Alistair. His eye throbbed. His back ached. The wad of feathers and tiny frail broken things that had been a bird was mashed against his collarbone, and that hurt too. “Fuck.”

The bunker wasn’t much either. Concrete, steel, earthworks. And a lot of forethought and hope. It had been camouflaged at one point, back when that might’ve served a purpose. Time had scraped that smug look off its face.
Inside was a light, surly and shrunken in the face of the incoming dawn. It was a big day. They could afford to use the last matches.
At the light was a fire, and beside the fire was Barbara, and under Barbara was a chair, which was placed at a table, which was covered in objects.
“This is way too complicated,” said Alistair.
“Tell me about it,” she said. “Hey, what’s up with your eye?”
“Bird,” said Alistair.
Barbara raised an eyebrow.
“A fucking bird,” corrected Alistair. “But I got the eggs. One of them. It’s a little cracked. But it’s an egg.”
“Oh that’s nice. Should we boil it or fry it?”
“I thought you said you’d scramble it.”
“You need milk for that, properly.”
“You need water to boil it.”
“Well, that’s for the drinks. We’d better fry it.”
“We need butter for that.”
“Maybe if we boil it with the bad water and get rid of the shell?”
“That sounds dangerous. Oh well.”
The bad water took a while to boil, thick and truculent as it was. Alistair poured the good water into the two glasses. Barbara rooted through the metal box that had been a refrigerator when it had power, and a coldbox when it had insulation, and was now basically a cupboard with odd smells and creaks.
“Where’d you put the rat?”
“I minced it up and put it in the old butter container.”
“The becel?”
“That’s margarine. I put it in the old BUTTER container.”
“Margarine’s basically butter.”
“No it isn’t. Vegetable oils. Very different.”
“Tasted the same.”
“No it didn’t.”
“Oh yeah? Prove it.”
The argument ended there. Most of them did. Barbara found the minced rat inside an old tuna tin.

They sat down. The plates were ready. The dishes were ready. The water was still clear, untouched by the faint haze of the air.
Forks up. Dish uncovered.
“Oh lovely,” said Barbara. “Where’d you find them?”
“Under an old shed. Must’ve been used to store fertilizer and seed.”
“Is it crabweed? Looks like crabweed.”
“I don’t know. What’s crabweed look like?”
“I’m not sure. My mother used to call anything that she didn’t want in her garden crabweed.”
“Huh.” Barbara put some of it in her mouth and chewed. “Tastes like crab.”
“Huh. Really?”
“No, I’m fooling you. It tastes like weeds.”
“Gosh.”
And it did.
“What’s the dressing?”
“Oil.”
“What kind?”
“I squeezed whatever I saw lying around.”
“Oh. What’re the little gritty black flakes?”
“What little gritty black flakes? I can’t see with this eye.”
“They’re little. And gritty.”
“Well –”
“Oh, and they’re black. Almost forgot.”
“Could be anything. Maybe they were part of the crabweeds.”
“Eh.”

Salad was finished. The plates were flipped over, for cleanliness’s sake.
“Minced rat. What’d you do to it?” asked Alistair.
“I browned it over the lamp. Then I seared it over the lamp. Then I fricasseed it over the lamp. Then I sautéed it over the lamp. Then I roasted it over the lamp. Then I pan-fried it over the lamp. When I couldn’t see any more red bits I figured it was done. Deglazed the pan with water to produce the sauce.”
“So it’s a sort of rat sausage, is it?”
“Those are stuffed into the intestines. The intestines are part of this. I think it’s more of a haggis, maybe. Maybe?”
“That needs oats. And it uses sheep.”
“Salads don’t use crabweeds. Beggars can’t be choosers. There’s not many more fish in the sea.”
“None at all, I think. Couldn’t find one last week. Just jellies.”
“Not bad for rat though, is it? At all, I mean.”
“I’ve had better rats. But this is the best rat I’ve had since I haven’t seen any in months.”

Finally, the main course. The egg. Pale, off-white-blue. Creased and folded even before it cracked. Twisted on both sides. With the sludge of the bad water wiped away.
Inside, it was deep brown.
“Is that normal?” asked Alistair.
“I can’t remember,” mused Barbara. “Actually, I’m not sure I’ve ever had an egg that looked like this before. What kind of bird was it?”
“Here it is,” said Alistair. He peeled the bird out of his collarbone and held it up for inspection.
“Flatbird. Not very informative. Could be a redwing blackbird no no those aren’t wings, that’s its insides. Nasty.”
“Good egg, though.”
“Yes. Surprisingly sweet.”

The daytime fog was coming in, thick and rancid-hot.
“Dessert?” said Alistair, raising his glass.
“Dessert,” confirmed Barbara.
“Have you got your pill?”
“Always do, for twenty years.”
“Well then. Bottoms up.”
“Here’s to the future.”
Gulp. Chug. Chug. Clink.
Ahh.

At the chime of the town clock – helpfully provided by an earnest youth with a big mallet – they gathered for Sunday council, the aldermen and the mayor.
“I have an important announcement,” said the mayor. “I’m about to bite it.”
“Oh nooooo,” said the aldermen.
“Oh yeah,” said the mayor. “I’m going to bite it big time. It’s been a good life, or I think so, but it’s almost over. I’ll croak before the week is out.”
“Oh nooooooooooooooooooooooooo,” said the aldermen.
“I have just one, tiny, simple, eensy-weensy, microscopic dying wish,” said the mayor. “I’d like a burger, the way I had when I was a boy, back before the bombs fell and the streets cracked and the grass grew. I have in my possession an ancient map dating back to the old days, showing the path to a fabled McDonald’s, and I entrust this most sacred and holy of tasks – my last burgin’ before my next life – to two carefully-selected individuals. One is my good for nothing, scheming, malevolent, capricious, selfish, backstabbing, good-for-nothing, atrocious, abominable, wretched, snivelling, gormless, heartless son, Jason.”
“Meheehehhehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe,” said Jason, as his fingers tango’d wildly.
“Right on, my boy. The other is Brad, our neighborhood’s most wholesome and obvious protagonist in twenty years.”
“Gosh!” said Brad, manfully.
“And they can each bring along as many nameless sidekicks as they need. This could be dangerous.”
“Jeepers!” said Brad, eagerly.
“And some food. Lots of it. It’s hard travel.”
“Golly!”
“Save it for the road, Brad.”

The valiant duo (and a few dozen nameless sidekicks) departed from The Neighborhood that very afternoon, under the august blessing of the mayor, the frenetic, off-kilter chiming of the town clock, and a fat red haze in the sky.
“Farewell!” called the mayor, aldermen, and townsfolk.
“Bye folks!” said Brad, in passing.
“Hehehehheheheheheheh,” said Jason.
The sidekicks probably said something too, but whatever. The important things were the banners and the cheers and the tears and the sobs of joy. An adventure as big as this hadn’t happened in years! They couldn’t wait to sit at home until someone told them how it’d gone.

Six minutes out of the Neighborhood, Jason tripped Brad into a lawn of quicksod, where he immediately sank.
“Nuts!” said Brad, in a bubbly manner.
“BWA-hahahahahhahahahahhahahaha,” said Jason.
The sidekicks rolled with it.
They had a lot more to roll with by the time that day was out. First came the heat waves, sweeping across the trail in scorching white sheets as the cloud cover thinned, pan-frying flesh and crisping hair. Those who couldn’t reach shade withered in the open, left to stagger home as sunburnt cadavers.
Jason shielded himself under the charred surfaces of three of his more expendable sidekicks, while giggling.
Then after that came the great haze – the seeping morass of mist and leftover ground-sludge that coated everything with a fine orange ooze, rusted skin and burned metal. Into the trees they went, and the laggards were turned unceremoniously to gloop.
Jason climbed up on top of two of his tallest sidekick’s shoulders and waited until the mist was passed, upon which they fell over.
There were also large feral dogs, but those only made a fuss for a few seconds before Jason threw the meatiest sidekick at them and the rest of them all ran away.
Finally, that evening the expedition came upon the Valley of the Highway, and even from that great distance, in that dim light, they could see the gap in the tree-cover, where the corpse of the road lay. And glittering in the distance – half-visible between leaf and leaf – was it? Truly?
“An arch,” proclaimed the head flunky of the sidekicks. “A golden arch.”
“Meheheheheheheh!” cheered Jason. And he pushed the head flunky over the embankment.

The night at the valley’s edge was quiet, deep quiet. The kind of quiet that makes neighbours nervous. Not a raccoon at the garbage pail; not a noisy stupid dog; not even a neighbour and her husband engaging in ritualistic murder or sex or both.
It was….TOO quiet.
Until the rogue ultrafox circling the camp’s perimeter picked up its third victim by their leg instead of their neck, at which point all hell broke loose.
“Get it!” yelled an unnamed hero, who it savaged.
“Run for it!” screamed an unnamed coward, who tripped over the embankment and fell forty feet onto old cracked asphalt.
“HAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAH!” commanded Jason, and the rest followed him down, down, down the swirling madness of the on-ramp into the night and the rust-choked debris of the Valley of the Highway, where tetanus scurried underfoot with the rats.
And where the rats scurried, so too did their predators. You could fit a lot of feral cats comfortably inside a single broken car, and here there were hundreds. They’d grown fat and wild and even crazier than usual, and to add to their consternation they’d been invaded by a host of what smelled like squeaking extra-large rats.
It got so ugly it shouldn’t be mentioned.

Dawn found a reduced expedition, fortified atop the rotten hull of an old transport truck. They breakfasted; the sidekicks upon old beans, Jason upon chortles and the sidekick with the weakest heart, who’d stopped moving during the night.
“The arches,” pointed the new head flunky.
Indeed, there they were, just across the way. Dawn had put the cats to bed, and the rest of the crossing was without incident until they had reached the deserted temple of the McDonald’s, brown-walled, red-roofed, vine-choked and silent.
The doors were locked. Someone had crashed a car through the larger windows.
“Hehehehehheheehhehehehe,” commanded Jason, who knew much of the old world through the tales of his father, the mayor. And he was correct: the drive-in window was still unblocked, although very small. The largest sidekick had to come in, after a lot of tugging, as three separate pieces.
Inside was dark and heavy dead. Not a rat’s-breath had moved the air inside since the days before. Vats had idled. Griddles curdled. Fryers fizzled.
“Heh-heh. A-hah. A-heh, hah, HAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHA!” said Jason. And so it was.
By his word, the sidekicks searched what had been a freezer, for what had once been meat.
By his word, the sidekicks assembled what could be a bun, burned against the surface of what could be a pan.
By his word, the sidekicks minced, chopped, ground and pummelled the meatiest of the three separate pieces of the largest sidekick, inserted it into an ancient meat-forge, then turned it on and discovered it was a half-working furnace.
The second-meatiest piece of the largest sidekick went onto the actual griddle, and it worked much better, which was a good thing because after it was finished the furnace’s gas leak finally found a spark.

Out of the inferno they rose, the last five of the expedition, Jason bearing the burger from the temple’s depths in a gory fist. Across the dread Highway they fled, Jason cackling them onwards, too scared to sleep or pause lest he put his lips to their ears and chuckle them awake. Through the fetid parklands they ran in the dead of night on dying legs, two falling, never rising, until at last in the eyeblink of dawn they stumbled, more-or-less-corpses, past the gates of The Neighbourhood.
“Ahahahahahhahahahahahah!” roared Jason, and all the neighbours came out into the streets and marvelled at what they saw. So did all the neighbours. \
“They return!” cried the neighbours.
“They return!” replied the neighbours. And the cheers rang high.
“To the mayor!” cried the neighbours.
“To the mayor!” replied the neighbours. And through the happy throng the expedition was led.
“Here they are, mayor!” cried the neighbours.
“Here they are, mayor!” replied the neighbours. “And by mayor, we mean Brad, who returned heroically two days ago after you were all eaten by wild and dangerous beasts and the old mayor died in his sleep of a heart attack!”
The neighborhood politely put the cheering on hold for a moment to let everyone figure out what was going on.
Brad was indeed the mayor. He waved at the expedition.
“Heh?” said Jason.
“Hi sport! Stake them all out in the sun for the buzzard-flies!” said Brad, warmly.
And it was done, and so for many, many more happy years, The Neighborhood remained a safe, clean and wholesome place to raise your 2.5 children and dog.
Bit light on burgers though.

There was a man who almost had everything.

He was almost the richest person of all.
He was almost the most famous person of all.
He was almost – ALMOST almost, but not quite – the meanest person of all. But not quite.
And his most famous, treasured, and coveted almost was his house, his mansion, his tower, his eyesore, which had almost a thousand rooms. Nine-hundred and ninety-nine rooms. Of almost every kind you could ever imagine.
He had a stone room, where every surface was cold and sun-warmed and gray and red and sandy and sooty and solid as eternity.
He had a wood room, with paneling, and floorboards, and rafters, and branches, and roots.
He had a song room, whose walls were speakers and whose roof was scrolling sheet music and whose walls were insulated triple-thick.
He even had a sun room, where ten hundred hundred gems reflected and trapped and cajoled the light from dozens of windows, keeping it aglow no matter what the hour.
But there was one room that was missing, one room that wasn’t there.
He didn’t have a rain room.

Almost anyone else would’ve decided nine-hundred and ninety-nine rooms was enough. Certainly enough for one person. Especially enough for one person who only ever slept in one room and did business in another three or four ninety-nine days of a hundred. But not this man. His house had been under construction for decades, his hair had turned grey and fallen out, his teeth were loose and yellow, and his eyes were watering. He almost knew exactly what people thought of him, and it made him half-mad to think of what they’d say when he was gone.
No, he had to have one thing wholly. He had to have his house complete. He had to have his rain room.

He asked sages, scientists, philosophers, pundits, and plesiosaurs.
“You can’t put rain in a room,” they told him. “It’s the most fickle and fluid of all things. If you let it stand, it’s a puddle. If you let it flow, it’s a stream. If you let it boil, it’s vapor. It’s out of everyone’s grasp and yours too.”
The man cursed them all roundly and threw them out of his nine-hundred and ninety-nine room house, where he spent the night trying to think and falling asleep, in that eerie zone where an hour is a second and a minute lasts five months. It’s a strange place to be in. Things can find you there. Like you.
Whatever it was that bumped him in the night, it left a mark. The man woke up sore-backed, stiff-necked, and bright-eyed. A spark had found him, and it leapt into his fingers, his keyboard, his commands.
People with iron rods and beards were set to work. People with sunglasses and carefully-chosen suits were told to walk. Money moved soundlessly under the world like a fat-bellied, dainty-toed rat.
Construction resumed on the man’s home for the first time in twenty years. Some of the blueprints hurt your eyes, some of them hurt your head, and all of them made a little knot twist behind your backbone, like something invisible and important was being pinched, or maybe filched.
But enough money can make someone do almost anything.

On May 23rd – a Thursday – the rain stopped.
It was in the sky, and then POP it was gone and the sky was empty. Bleeding a little, but empty.
It didn’t actually go POP but it looked like it should have.
When the sky went POP, the man was standing in his home, in his thousandth room, and he was waiting. He’d been waiting for hours. If he hadn’t fallen asleep ten minutes ago, he would’ve been able to see the first drops fall, as opposed to feeling them run down his nose. It made him cough and run down the hall for a tissue.

/In the rain room there are ten trillion droplets a thousand thunderheads and one billion gentle showers. There is nothing underfoot but ripples and there is nothing overhead but grey./

It didn’t take long for somebody to panic, and that’s the sort of mood that always attracts hanger-ons. People need crops. Mists. Clouds. Downpours. They’re the bread and butter of a good sky.
So the people came to the thousand-room house of the man, and they asked, demanded, begged, and requested that they receive rain, that they see rain, that maybe one person shouldn’t have all the rain in the world in one room.
And the man answered their pleas with the carefully-chosen proverb, aphorism, koan and keystone of the oldest philosophy of all, which was “I don’t care about you.”

/In the rain room there are places where you can wait and fill yourself up again. Stand there and let the cold and warm and wet beat into you and slide through the skin and sluice the sludge out of every vein and let it run clean and calm again./

In the weeks that followed, the world did a lot of things. It strained seawater, filled bathtubs, drained reservoirs, and a lot of other things. It almost did a lot of other things too.
The man didn’t notice any of it. He was too busy walking through his house, his thousand-room house. Opening every door. Checking every room. Some of them hadn’t seen anything but cleaning staff since he was a young man. It was very peculiar for him to have something, instead of almost having something, but he didn’t feel any different at all. That made him a little nervous.
He was saving his rain room for last. In case that helped.

/In the rain room there are no taps or faucets. Nothing can be turned off or closed. Open-ended only./

On the first of June – a Saturday – the man dressed himself in a waterproof grey coat. He picked up a black, ivory-hilted umbrella. He put on rubber boots.
And then the man stepped into the rain room, which was bigger than he expected. And damper, too. He sneezed.
He looked around in every direction he could name, and he heard the endless pit-a-pat and felt it on his clothing.
“Dull,” he said. And he reached for the doorknob.
It wasn’t there. This is the sort of thing that happens when you try to fit a closed system in a close space.
The man shouted for a bit, but the rain drowned him out.

/In the rain room there is no talk of chance. There is no risk. It is, and it is, and it continues to is. No tenses permitted beyond the present./

For a while the rest of the world looked pretty dire, and it almost seemed like things were going to get bad. The rain was wedged pretty tight into that house, and it wasn’t coming out.
Then the obvious solution presented itself: why not bring the world in after it?
It took a lot of shovels, and a lot of boxes, but by August 4th – a Sunday – the world had moved in to the Rain Room, and the rainwater puddled and streamed and vaporized as it should again, where it should again, when it should again.

The rest of the house fell down but almost nobody noticed.

In the beginning, there was the beat.
And it went
Bam-bippity-bam-bam-BAM bippity band so on and so on. It spun, it dove, it ducked, it dipped, it danced to and fro and back and forth. It made the rocks shake, it made the earth quake, and the entire planet exploded like an old grapefruit thrown at a new wall. Chunks of accreted cosmic dust blown back into the roaring gale of the solar wind.
Shit, They said. Better try that one again.

So this time They calmed it down a little. Made it sedate. A little less syncopation and a little more consideration. Something you couldn’t help but tap your toe to, but wouldn’t snap a finger. Just a bit of fun.
The planet bobbed and nodded and twisted out of orbit and spun out of the solar system, sailing through into the empty forever.
Oh come ON, They said.

In the end They considered their goals and options, wanted something, tried for more, and settled for less.
So They went
Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.
And the planet drifted aimlessly in its ellipse, safe and snug and dulled into sleep. Like a brainless baby in the biggest crib.

*

Now, that was the tempo sold. But there was something else missing. Something for the humming.
So They placed Themselves as the lotus.
Metaphorically.
And They took a deep breathe, in through the nose.
Metaphorically.
And They sang.
Really.
They sang of Wonder. They sang of Beauty. They sung of Glory. They sung of Majesty.
They sang so damned hard that the world in its grind couldn’t help but quiver a tear from its surface, and it gushed blue over itself until it was damp as old coffee grinds. And in that seep, brewed LIFE, boldly seizing the days, racing up and out and up and ONWARD on top of itself until the atmosphere curdled under the pressure of an infinite number of respiring lungs and the whole thing collapsed like a bad soufflé.

This time They sang of regular old wonder, beauty, glory, and majesty. And for a little while it looked like it was working – things cooked down there, but slower. Eyes raised to on high. Seeds sown in gusto. Flagella moving with purpose.
Then everything knew itself, looked upon its neighbours, knew they weren’t good enough to measure up, and shut down.
Fuck Me, They complained. What do You have to do to get this working?

So They sat down, cleared Their throat, and sort of hummed through Their nose really hard and kept going, and going, and wavering, and the pitch went up and the pitch went down and sometimes it went back to front to reverse to yellow to Sunday. In fact, it went just about everywhere imaginable, and so, nowhere understandable.
And hey, so did everything down there. And it kind of worked!
Kind of.
I mean, there was stuff. That was good.

*

Melody needs harmony.
They drew Their palms down the strands of the world, cupped it, caressed it, plucked it, blew on it. And it danced and whirled and churned in warmth and joy, rich in texture, bright in emotion, and its atmosphere expanded four times over and dispersed into space.
This time They just sighed.

Next (after cramming the damned thing back together), They tried, with the utmost care, rubbing the atmosphere gently.
The whole world sang out gladly, true as a bell, and then the Van Allen belts broke with a SPRANG sound and showered the whole place with radioactive particles.
And a new pack cost you ten, minimum. Pre-tax.

Finally They just put the planet up to Their lips and raspberry’d it. And from that fine spray, lo, did aimless restlessness emerge, and instill itself in the plates and crust and atmosphere and magnetosphere and all that was. And it was Good, or at least Functional, which was Good by this point.

*

After the initial recording session, They began playback. Then They threw the damned thing in the garbage, hung up Their hat, put on Their coat, and went to go get blitzed.

“Feed’s clear. On your mark.”
“Right. Right. One second. The pole was crooked. Right. Ready. You ready?”
“We’re ready.”
“I claim this planetesimal, Pluto, this once-planet, in the august and democratic name of…of. Earth? Earth. Earth!”
“Wonderful job. Alright, mission over.”
“Can I take samples?”
“If you feel like it.”
“Are we done?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Did I do it properly?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“If I didn’t do it properly, I could take the flag down and put it up again. I could get it to wave. There’s wind here. I think it would wave very nicely.”
“No, that’s fine.”
“Are you mad that I forgot what country I’m from? I’ve been practicing my words for the last year, you know. I had to remembered most of them from scratch, from the tapes! It’s been a while, and I think you’ve got to admit I salvaged the speech very smoothly. Undetectable.”
“We can edit out the stammer.”
“Oh no. I stammered?”
“Yes. It doesn’t matter. We can inject the proper country into your speech, too.”
“Wow. That’s impressive. Did you need me to say anything at all?”
“Yes. Saying something here is more important than anything you say.”
“Do you think you could be a little more expressive? I know there’s hours and hours between every transmission we make, but I make the effort to remember how annoyed I am between them. I try very hard to remain angry for hours, because I presume you’ve put a lot of effort into making me very angry for other hours. It’d be the least you could do to try and be a good sport and reciprocate.”
“What do you want from us, Pluto? You’re the first woman to ever voyage this far from Earth. Shouldn’t you be proud? Elated? Expansive? Enlightened? Humbled?”
“I’m very cold and a little agoraphobic because I spent years and years in a little metal box and now I’m all alone in a very big space on a very small rock. You can see the horizon here! Wow!”
“You already knew that, Pluto. There’s a lot of things you already knew that you seem to have forgotten.”
“I remember everything very clearly! Just not why I did it. Why am I out here again?”
“To show off.”
“Aha! Should I do jumping-jacks?”
“If you feel like it. It’s more about us than you.”
“What d’you mean?”
“We’ve proven we can throw a human in a metal box a very long ways indeed. About as far as a good bit of money can take us. About as far as, well, humanly possible. We’re probably going to stop after this.”
“You make me sound very extraneous.”
“No more or less than you were back here. What you did was very important. It’s just not important at all that you did it.”
“I’m very suicidal now. I’ll jump, I swear it. I’ll jump off this cliff or into space or cut my oxygen, that’ll show you.”
“No you won’t. We checked before you left.”
“Well, then I’ll pout.”
“You will do that.”
“I suppose. When do I go back?”
“You don’t. We told you that before.”
“Slipped my mind. Oh well. At least I have my flag to keep me warm.”
“You can’t take it down. It’s historic.”
“Oh? What am I?”
“Part of history. It’s different.”
“Close enough. Blankey, here I come!”
“Don’t touch it.”
“Or what?”
“You’ll have violated the spirit of history and achievement that is what has motivated humankind since it first bashed a rock against another rock and made a sharper rock which it used to kill an animal.”
“I thought the bulk of humanity’s nutrition since before its existence was from foraged vegetable matter, and that by and large both an obsession with snowballing technological prowess was a recent development that was largely portrayed as inevitable and innate human nature, as is the case with all traits of a given society when said society cares to reflect upon them. Which they never do.”
“Very stirring.”
“I came up with that on year six.”
“Don’t touch the flag.”
“Oh, fine. Is there anywhere in particular you’d like me to die?”
“Either in the lander in bed, so we don’t have to look at you in the textbooks, or heroically posed next to the flag, so we can feel stirring pride.”
“Sure. Salute or wave?”
“Salute.”
“I’m waving and you can’t stop me.”