jamieproctor.ca

Once upon a time (exactly once, this never happened again, and you will learn why) there was a fishing village. This was not unique, but one of its inhabitants was so, and his name was Tuckett. Old Man Tuckett. He was called that so as not to confuse him with Big Douglas Tuckett the miller’s son, or Little Tommy Tuckett who cried the Sunday papers up at Noonan Hill.
Old Man Tuckett was distinct in at least two other major ways besides his name.
First, he was tremendously fat. Spherical be damned, he was ellipsoid. He was the fattest person in the village – even fatter than Granny Maggs. It was impossible to grow used to it; at close range your eyes would be tugged across his gut, dragged by gravity. This was very embarrassing, and so was never commented on.
Second, he had five wives, all nearly as fat as he himself. People found this very unusual in those parts, but none of them did, so they largely ignored it.
Oh, and there was one more little thing, just a tiny little thing, a little thing that didn’t matter at all: it was how he never joined the Big Haul every year.
In fact, he never fished at all.
And that was the most important thing about Old Man Tuckett.

He’d stand at the brink of the surf, he’d watch the boats go by. He’d wave his pipe at his wives as they pushed the boat out. He’d cheer and applaud and ballyhoo until the sun came dim and the tide came back – with a lot of nets with a lot of fish – but he’d never
ever
ever take toe off the beach.

This would annoy people less (‘man’s probably too fat to fish,’ was a common theory) if Old Man Tuckett did anything at home, either. Many folk had asked Granny Magg about him, and after heroically calling upon the casual gossip of a lifetime, she had told them everything that Old Man Tuckett did.
“Well, he sells that paper up by Noonan Hill.”
“Granny, that’s Little Tommy Tuckett.”
“Oh. That’s my ear again. Try my other ear.”
“OLD MAN Tuckett.”
She shrugged. “Oh, him. He eats and farts and sits on his beach and shouts.”

It would’ve been less annoying if he shouted helpful things. Sixteen years before there had been Gerry Wickerham, who sat his last decade-and-change on the shore in a rocking chair yelling people to stay off the shoals. That was good, it saved time and effort putting buoys up. But Old Man Tuckett yelled other things, and none of them were very helpful.
They were things like.
“CLEAR OFF!”
And
“DON’T YOU COME ANY CLOSER!”
or
“I SAW YOU LOOKING, NOW YOU KEEP MOVING!”
and frequently
“MINE. MINE. MINE. MINE. MINE.”
It was a constant rumour for thirty years or more among the town’s children that he’d once bitten off the foot of a careless youth that put a toe onto his beach. Every six years the imagined toll mounted, and before long it would’ve been removed at the hip.
But if Old Man Tuckett’s endless obsession over ‘his’ beach had been infuriating most times, it grew to full vexation in the Big Haul, when the sea was running silver and everyone brought in the biggest nets to be judged the heaviest of all.
As the boats went out, and just as they’d come back, they’d find Old Man Tuckett there before them, and furious. He ran up and down the beach – actual running, his feet not touching the sands for whole yards at a time – and bellowed like a speared whale, waving his floppy little arms and puffing himself up even fatter than usual. Not even words could escape him at those times – not swears, not slurs, not threats, not even snarls. Just a long four-hour roar, and one more for the evening. It made things wearisome, and took a fearful toll on the fishermen’s nerves.

One of those fisherman in particular (his name doesn’t matter at all, but it was Julian) had nerves to spare, which you’d think would help but didn’t. His face grew thin and haunted every morning, and he started wearing earmuffs that were bigger than any cold warranted, particularly in midsummer. He also took to spending most of his launches with his back to the shore and whistling a lot, while twitching. This was not wise behaviour, and one day when the waves were particularly surly he bent over, stumbled, straightened up, put his skull directly in the path of a swinging boom, and was thoroughly clobbered.
Six months he sat ashore, insensible, tended to carefully if clumsily by his small and bored children. Six months his wife took his seat on the boat. And after six months he woke up and said “garellifump. Twiddle. Chalk,” and then died.
It was a most trying thing for a young family. And it made his wife (whose name didn’t matter much, but it was Stacy) exceptionally cross every morning, to look out and see and hear Old Man Tuckett howl on his beach.

So she went and talked to Granny Maggs, and she asked her about Old Man Tuckett and got pretty much the same gist of him everyone already knew. And she went and talked to Old Man Tuckett’s five wives, and she got nothing at all because they didn’t talk much beyond shrugs and burps. And finally she got fed up with all of that and went and rapped and banged on Old Man Tuckett’s door herself, and when he opened it up she gave him a little gift – some pickled perch – and told him how sad it must be, to never get to be the one to go out on the water.
“Whur?” said Old Man Tuckett, who was halfway through the jar of perch.
“Well, that’s where we get the good catch.”
“Hah!” said Old Man Tuckett, spraying fishbones and moustache sauce from underneath his extraordinarily honking great nose. “We? You mean my wives!” And this was true, because they were the best damned hands with a line and net in town.
“Oh, yes. All of us, and especially them. But the real good stuff usually gets downed before we come back, y’see. It’s so hungry out there, and we’ve got to keep up our strength. I tell you, you’ve never had a fish ‘till you’ve had a fresh one from the far reaches. Like swimming sunshine.”
Old Man Tuckett harrumphed over this and closed the door without thankyous.
But his bellows got a little hoarser, and (especially in the evening) a little sparser. His eyes darted and hunted for something he wasn’t sure was there, and he spoke to his wives – whenever he did bother to – with shorter and meaner grunts.

This got worse for a month, and then it came to the Big Haul, where it ended.

The Big Haul came in on a good day. It did de facto; it was the first good clear morn of the season. The fish seemed to wait for it as much as the fisherfolk.
Down by the docks they coiled ropes and adjusted rigging and checked motors and kissed and hugged, but Old Man Tuckett’s boat, down by the shore, sat aside. His five wives were scrubbing it out, busy as anything. It was all very normal, until you looked at Old Man Tuckett himself. He hadn’t said a word.
The bell rang, one by one the boats took leave of shore. And Old Man Tuckett watched, but for once he watched with longing. The most miserable expression was on his face: slack-cheeked and damp-eyed, pipe clutched in a hand too slack to light it, let alone smoke.
Stacy was last off the dock, and as she kicked off the pier, she spun around and to the whole watching town and to the beach and to him in particular, she said this:
“Hey! Old Man! I bet you a broken old hook from Julian’s grandpa that you won’t ever see the biggest catch from today, and that’s even if you get off your ass and come looking!”
It was a hell of a thing to say. Well, it was something everyone in town had thought for years, but there’s a world of difference between thinking and saying, particularly the way the former’s less likely to get your teeth knocked out. It made everyone in earshot – and it was a pretty wide earshot at that volume – flinch and wait for a scream.
Old Man Tuckett stood there, poleaxed. And then he did something much worse than snarling.
He grinned.
He grinned ear to ear and back to the other ear again, and if there was ever a more fearsome thing to see than that, not one of them knew it.
Old Man Tuckett’s teeth were four in number, and all fishhooks. Sharp, shiny, curved and barbed fishhooks the size of bananas. It was a wonder his pipe had a stem left.
“Bet’s on,” he said. And he spat out his pipe, stamped on it once, and slid into his boat like he was greased, shoving all five of his wives out willy-nilly without even a by-your-leave.
“I’ll be back!” he shouted. “And you’ll eat those words and more besides!”
Then Old Man Tuckett unstepped his mast, broke it over his knee, jammed it in the water, and began to row, heaving his fat arms with a fury that made them look large.

The wind was against him.
He cut directly into the current.
At one point he rocketed directly over the Poker, a quiet and murderous shoal that had eaten a dozen or more hulls in recent memory.
But somehow, when the other boats came to the shoals, Old Man Tuckett was already there.
Fishing.
With his teeth.

It was a hell of a sight, everyone agreed afterwards. Whatever else, it was a hell of a sight.
The nets went overboard clumsy, as if he’d never used them.
The knots were tied sloppy, as if he’d barely got fingers (he barely did, truth be told).
But then just as the whole mess touched water Old Man Tuckett went in after it, snorting and roaring like a foghorn, and then there’d be bubbles and splashes and up he’d come again, weighed down by a wriggling net filled with desperate flesh, dragging it up not with his hands but with his shining, murderous mouth.
Over and over, in and again, into the water that was cold enough to snip your fingers. Hour in, hour out, Old Man Tuckett fished the way he lived: teeth-first.

It was a good day for the Big Haul. Everyone took their time. But Stacy was first back in to town, and she tied up there after unloading and just waited. Chuckling.
Then came in the rest. One by one by two three four five six up until all, all of them home but one.
There it was, floundering, churning, flummoxing through the waves. The oars moved like the limbs on an upturned turtle, the thing wallowed like a depressed hippo.
It was Old Man Tuckett. But when he stepped out of that boat onto his beach, everyone had to check three or nine times. He was as thin as a rake, and shaking like a leaf.
“Not bad!” he croaked. “Not bad! Not…so bad. Still better than you! Still better than you all, and it’s my beach now, y’hear, and”
“No,” said Old Man Tuckett’s first wife, right in his face with uncommon clarity and force.
“Skinny,” said Old Man Tuckett’s second wife, shoving him in the chest and sending him staggering.
“Blaggard,” said Old Man Tuckett’s third wife, running a hand over their semidemolished boat.
“Wimp,” said Old Man Tuckett’s fourth wife, with a roll of her eyes at his catch.
“Divorce,” concluded Old Man Tuckett’s fifth wife. And she grabbed his moustache and pulled and pulled and threw it in the water with the skin attached.
And they all walked off on him, leaving the most shrunken, impotent, and downright bewildered elephant seal in all the world alone on his beach.

Old Man Tuckett tried vanishing forever after that, but couldn’t take the solitude. He showed up again four years later – still smaller, but a lot meeker, more respectful, and willing to spend more time helping people with nets.
He also walked pretty fast whenever Stacy’s eye landed on him.

Old Man Tuckett’s five ex-wives didn’t even go as far as that. They waddled up the road, knocked on Granny Magg’s door, and informed her that as the newly fattest person in town they were now marrying her. Granny said that’s fine as long as she got the good stuff for her pickles, so everyone seemed happy.

The beach is still empty. And a lot quieter.

The human ambassador was pale in the face, but had restrained herself from disgorging.
Two of her entirely ceremonial and useless guards had failed to do so. Not helpful behaviour.
“This concludes the examination,” I told them. “Do you have any further inquiries of We?”
“No,” said the ambassador. “Wait. Maybe. Yes.”
So indecisive. I’d gotten used to that.
“Are they…volunteers? All of them?”
“Please describe this word,” I asked.
“They requested this. Of their own will.”
I looked down into the recycling plant floor, where the vats ran slick and clear with hemolymph and the hoppers were piled high with flesh.
“Of course,” I said. “We would accept nothing less.”

I was assigned to reciprocate diplomacy after the fledgling human embassy of Ours was established. We reasoned that I had some small personal experience with their psychology that might prove useful.
Every little bit helped. If We could’ve afford another war, We would’ve had it.
They had been very shocked when We ceased fire. As if they had expected worse.

Earth bobbed beneath our feet. I was the first of We to see it with the naked eye, and so was immediately struck by the incongruity of it.
“Breathtaking, isn’t it?” inquired the human as the lift began to descend.
“Surprising, yes,” I acknowledged. “I was under the impression that we halted our advance before any bombardment was conducted, yet the surface appears heavily scarred.”
“Pardon?”
“There, there and there,” I said, pointing. “This appears to be recent defoliation married with heavy erosion, highly rapid and not yet concluded. Has your climate-shaping run awry, or did our war distract you from conducting an ecopurge? Your technology appears to be sufficient to accomplish global domestication.”
“Those are pre-contact damages,” he admitted. “The mistakes of youth. Work on repairing our planet’s ecosystem is ongoing. Ideally, as much of the original will be restored as is possible.”
I nodded. Sentimental, but also practical. Sometimes you could learn even more putting something back together than you could in taking it apart.

On exiting the elevator I was forced to deny both forms of learning; the former to the loud and aggressive crowds and the latter to the embassy doctors.
“It’s a mere scratch,” I explained. “Clotting will fix it within the hour.”
“Please, ambassador,” said the human. “Please. Earth micro-organisms could cause a fatal reaction.”
“Unlikely,” I replied. “I received a full autoimmune treatment before debarking, using banked earth samples.”
The human’s face did that little jump it did when he was upset. “May I ask where you obtained these…samples?”
“Probes, mostly” I said.
He laughed.
“I apologize, but I do not understand your humour.”
“Sorry, sorry. Old earth cultural touchstone. You’re serious?”
“Yes. And I find your lack of information odd. Several thousand probes were launched through this planet’s atmosphere to gather information, and you destroyed two hundred and sixteen of them. Three you even managed to capture intact.”
I almost said more, but was arrested most thoroughly by the expression of utter confusion in the human’s face.
“The crowds,” I mentioned. “They object to the peace?””
“Uh, yes.”
“Sentiment, I presume?”
“They believe we should have pushed for harsher terms.”
“Terms?”
“When you agreed to our demand for a cease fire.”
I could have corrected him.
I could have explained that we voluntarily ceased hostilities of our own accord, absent of any request from his species. That there was no worthwhile gain to be had from their eradication.
I could have pointed out that there had been no terms decided upon, and that these were only now being considered in scope and scale as we performed an embassy exchange.
But I didn’t do any of those things, because I knew that all of those facts were common, open, freely-available knowledge and for some reason he didn’t seem to understand any of them. This was worth exploring, but perhaps without his informed assistance.
I brushed aside the thought and the last specks of hemolymph from my skull. “Clotting will fix it within the hour,” I repeated, as if to reset our conversation to its beginning. “Nutrient would assist in this.”
“There will be lunch,” he said. And there was.

Lunch was a soup based in a beef broth, followed by sesame-encrusted tuna steak (with a small cranberry and walnut salad dressed with blue cheese) and finished with a berry sorbet.
It was the most sumptuous meal I’d ever tasted, the first that had not come from a rendering vat – beyond anything I’d ever imagined food could be.
And with every mouthful, I thought of the drying brown surface of the globe, and of the human’s earnest, entirely assured statement that they were doing their best to fix their mess.
I stared at the ambassador as I chewed, with my proximal eyes. He was busy chasing some dried cranberries with his fork, and his expression as he did this – faintly concentrating, slightly frowning, mind earnestly bent – was as frank and open as it had been since the beginning.
This was not a creature made for lying. I was beginning to suspect him of something far more dreadful.
“That was tremendously satisfying, and highly educational,” I said to him. And I meant every word. “Where to next?”
“Some people.”

They were some people, all right.
I was impressed despite myself. The human embassy I had overseen on Ours had largely been granted access to the most immediate and practical arms of government, the blunt, brutal executors of policy and the database attendants.
Here, I spoke with the makers and takers of policy. The minds that aimed the hands of billions of bodies.
In this corner, the overlord of energy. They still relied heavily upon fossil fuels, yet he swore they were already devoting too much time and energy to carbon trapping, that it was hokum.
In this other corner, a master of agriculture, who explained to me why it was biologically necessary to devote so much land to monocultured maize rather than mixed genetically-tailored crops to reduce soil wear.
Here, in the center of the chamber, I exchanged words with a mighty voice in social structuring, who explained to me the great problems his domain faced with ‘worthless’ humans that lived without housing. Curiously, when I suggested reprocessing them (if they were as functionless as he described) he insisted that their labour would be useful if they ever applied themselves and that the problem lay in their own hands.
“I thank you, sir,” I told the human. “I had not expected to be placed so quickly and so closely to the top ranks of your government.”
The human looked at me with as much shock as he had when the protester’s stone had cracked my face. “Ambassador, you are gravely mistaken, and I caution you to avoid speaking in such a manner – you could cause great offense with those words. These men and women are merely advisors and specialists, not rulers. They do not craft policy.”
I looked at the human again, this time not even trying to hide my strutiny. Primary, secondary, and tertiary eyes, across all spectrums. I looked at every muscle twitch, at every drop of perspiration, at the movements of his pupils, at the heat from his brow.
He was entirely, wholly, achingly, agonizingly sincere.
They all were.
None of them really were lying to me, not one bit, not to my face.
But they were lying much harder to someone else behind their own.

Afterwards, we had dinner. It was twice as enjoyable as lunch, and it was what gave me the last push towards the final decision of my life when I sat in my bedroom full of spyware and luxury, at the desk, clutching the very pretty and important and entirely decorative computer I had brought with me.
I placed all my hands and my tongue in the specific places they should go and hummed at the right pitch and the terminal disgorged itself, its battery splitting apart and vomiting out a very small and dangerous machine, simple in design and in purpose.
On use, it would produce a small, meaningless signal without coding or intent that would, on being received by the masters of We, produce immediate and full-scale war.
It would not be a beneficial war. It would not be a tidy war. There was a chance – a very slim chance, a very small chance, but an almost-unacceptable-on-its-face chance nonetheless – that it might be a war that We might lose.
But the odds were much better than anything, anything, anything at all that might happen from attempting to live alongside these lunatics.
The transmitter clicked, clucked, and melted into a puddle of ashes, which I threw out the window.
In forty minutes the war would start.
In forty-five minutes they would likely come for me.
If I was very good, I might string them along for hours and hours before they would begin irreparably damaging me out of frustration and spite.
They would never do so deliberately, of course.  Never in a million years would they imagine themselves doing so.
But they would. They most assuredly would.

It was a good sandwich.
Turkey, on rye, with a hint of something else. Cranberries in there, with their jelly. Some sort of mustard.
Sam wasn’t a chef, but he knew what he liked. He knew he liked this sandwich. He knew he liked its taste, he knew he liked that it was at the place half a block from his work, and he DEFINITELY knew he liked that it was under five bucks.
Which is what puzzled him so very much the next day, the next lunch, when he walked up to the menu and saw that the sandwich that he knew he liked wasn’t there.
“Turkey,” Sam asked the cashier.
“Chicken?” he cautiously replied.
“Turkey,” clarified Sam.
“Chicken?” questioned the cashier, pointing at the menu.
“Turkey!” insisted Sam, waving his arm at the menu.
“Chicken,” reiterated the cashier, indicating the line which showed there was only one type of fowl available.
All reasonable discourse exhausted, Sam threw up his hands to the sky. “Chicken,” he admitted in abject defeat.
And it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the same. He knew what he liked, and this wasn’t quite it. Not quite.

Sam experimented with lunch.
He tried lunch a little earlier, he tried lunch a little later. A little faster, a little slower. A littler higher, a little lower.
He never found anything he liked as much. He never found his sandwich.
But he did find out something interesting, on the fourteenth day of his stake-out.
At one oh one, he came in and ordered a small salad. At one oh nine, he left. And on the firmly blackbackboard-backed-white-chalkings of the menu, a faintish wisp of something smeared.
Something had been erased. Quickly. Desperately.
And right in the exact spot, down to the millimetre, where once he had read the words ‘turkey on rye.’

Sam came in at twelve thirty the next day. He laughed, chatted, ordered a casual soup, took an egregiously appropriate amount of time consuming it, then left at an extremely casual and normal pace.
After that he circled around the block, picked up the drop package he’d secreted overnight inside a nearby storm drain, and hid in the bushes opposite the shop with a camo jacket, high powered binoculars, and a stopwatch.
At one oh one, his gaze became intense.
At one oh three, a pigeon shat in front of the shop’s window, and Sam nearly jumped out of his shoes.
At one oh six, a man with particularly interesting shoes wandered out of the kitchen, exchanged a casual wave with the cashier, and strolled by the menu. As he did so, his hand flicked through a quick little scribble against the blackboard.
Sam erupted from the bushes like Venus from the waves, launched himself across the street, tripped over the curb, saw lots of pretty colours, staggered to his feet and lurched inside.
“TurkOWy sandjesuswhich pleasefuck,” he said to the cashier.
The cashier looked confused. “Chicken?” he inquired tentatively.
Sam pointed at the menu after three tries.
There was nothing there but a quiet smudge…. And the rapidly retreating back of the man with particularly interesting shoes.
“Nevermindouchdamnit,” said Sam, and heaved himself after the shoes, which he cornered outside the men’s washroom and slammed against the wall.
“Turkey!” he shouted into the man’s face.
The man opened his mouth and got as far as “chi-“ before seeing the especially descriptive glint in Sam’s eyes and giving up. “Oh fine. Yes, there’s turkey. For thirty-three seconds on the third minute of one o’clock.”
“What? Why?”
“Same answer to both of those,” said the man with particularly interesting shoes. “But there’s a question you’ve got to answer first: you want in?”
“For that sandwich?” asked Sam. “Yes.”
The man with particularly interesting shoes nodded.
Sam nodded.
The man with particularly interesting shoes nodded again, somewhat more pointedly, and Sam realized he was holding him three inches off the floor and dropped him, embarrassed and sore-armed.
“Thank you. Now, this way.”

This way was past the kitchen, behind the sinks, down the stair, into the basement, through the grate, and terminated in a ragged chamber scraped out of raw earth, where there were seven people in baggy bathrobes and a single aimlessly confused turkey and a very shiny-and-well-polished-but-impractical knife.
“He wanted in,” explained the man with particularly interesting shoes to one of the other people, who Sam realized was the mayor.
“Fair enough,” said the mayor. “Okay, you’ve got to take the knife and-”
“This is a cult, isn’t it,” said Sam.
The mayor looked a little hurt. “Not really. It’s-”
“I know what I like, and I know what I don’t like, and cults aren’t it. You’re wearing robes and asking me to sacrifice a turkey,” said Sam, filled with leaden exhaustion and also still aching in the skull. “You know what? I’m very disappointed. I thought this was just an unusually secret menu – I’ve tracked down four of those before – but you’ve gone and brought religion into it. Food is personal enough without that sort of attitude. I’m going home and microwaving a corn dog.”
Which he did. He slammed the grate on his way out, too.

Alone in the preparatory chamber, the mayor, the man with the particularly interesting shoes, and everyone else shook their heads and went back to doing the turkey’s cuticles. The new mascot had to look perfect by the time they launched the autumn menu.

The ground trembled. The skies quaked. Forty-one calves were born with three heads and no legs. Whispers floated on the wind.
Gurg was coming.
Puddles reflected leaves on other trees from stranger places. Rabbits attacked wolves. The salmon swam upstream, then downstream, then slid into the riverbed and sank into the bedrock.
The great and powerful Gurg was there.
The clouds cracked, the dogs went silent, and a hundred cities were no more. Lands roiled and turned and boiled and died, and the world was a stranger.
The great and powerful Gurg the Blasphemous Apocalypse had arrived some time ago.
But nobody seemed to notice.

***

At seven in the morning everyone woke up, got dressed, ate a thing, got in their cars.
At eight in the morning they were stuck in traffic.
At eight fifteen, the great and powerful Gurg the Blasphemous Apocalypse strode overhead, legs a league long, nine mouths screaming, ten nostrils flaring, and its endless eyes drowning in many flames. Four condos were drawn into its body to sate its bottomless urges; fourteen billion dollars in property damage done in its wake, and the foul stench that billowed at its heels drove thousands to the emergency room, or the early grave.
“It’s been a lousy morning,” admitted the mayor. “But we’ve put it behind us. We can adapt to this, and we’re tough people here.”

***

At noon, the beachfront was calm.
As everyone finished lunch, the great and powerful Gurg the Blasphemous Apocalypse strode into the sea and turned it to churning death. Boats sank, gulls cried, the world became a hellscape of water and tortured wind.
“There are allegations,” announced the second-wisest news channel host, “that this event could be connected to the alleged giant ravenous monster, Gurg, which reports claim is also known as the ‘blasphemous apocalypse.”
The wisest news channel host furrowed their brow at this and considered it with deep insight.
“No,” they said. “What if that wasn’t actually a thing?”
“Hmm,” said the second-wisest news channel host. “That’s a good point. I guess we need to consider that as well. After all, there’s a lot of different sides to this debate.”

At two-thirty the great and powerful Gurg the Blasphemous Apocalypse uprooted the entire news station and shoved it into its most fearsome orifice, shredding it instantly. The third-and-fourth-wisest news channel hosts maintained an attitude of cautious yet healthy skepticism, and warned against the dangers of alarmism.

***

By that evening, people in search of informed facts had trawled the entire internet. Much of what they had found was, according to standards, useless, but there was a sizeable slew of interesting photos and videos from Micronesia several weeks ago, where many citizens had recorded the great and powerful Gurg the Blasphemous Apocalypse annihilating the homes and businesses of their friends and relatives. In fact, several alleged that the monster had been steadily awakening there for over thirty years in an increasingly obvious state of agitation, its limbs gathering speed and strength as it clawed its way out from under the seafloor and into a waking nightmare of reality. The past six months were particularly dense with these allegations, which appeared to be growing increasingly annoyed that nobody was paying any attention to them.
“This seems like it could be true, or possibly bad, someday, if it were to happen to us,” pondered a few people, here and there. But their friends and neighbours weren’t so sure, and some of their in-laws were positive it was nonsense, so in the end everyone agreed to disagree.

***

By the following morning everyone had remembered that they probably had someone who could do something about anything that might happen or maybe not, and so word was dispatched to the presidential golf course to see if he knew anyone who could help.
“Help with what?” asked the President.
The President was informed that the great and powerful Gurg, also titled the Blasphemous Apocalypse, could very well be growing in strength at this moment in time, unless it wasn’t.
“I don’t know,” said the President. “That doesn’t seem real to me. I think you’re making this up.”
On the far side of the presidential golf course the great and powerful Gurg the Blasphemous Apocalypse leaned down and violently shat out six tornadoes from its primary anus, eradicating all greenery within forty miles for all time.
“Bit breezy out here today,” said the President. “Go away.”

***

By week’s end, some people were, against their own will, common sense, and apathy, becoming slightly perturbed. The great and powerful Gurg the Blasphemous Apocalypse, if it actually existed – which it might not, after all – was acting like a real nuisance. The fields lay fallow and full of live infant mice; the factories were a riot of burning ectoplasm; the lakes were a-boil and the cities were a-buzz and there was a very real and present danger that some of the things that were happening might actually matter and/or exist. This was troubling, particularly to the younger people who had envisioned a whole life of doing something or other that wasn’t being squashed and eaten or transported into horrifying beings of flesh and pine.
“Best not to dwell on it,” was the general advice. “It can’t help and will only trouble you. Ignore Gurg the Blasphmeous Apocalypse – who may take decades to get around to impacting you – and focus on being happy.”
It wasn’t the advice anyone would have chosen, but it was the advice they’d got, and so it was taken and followed with diligence, and prudence, and indolence, and a hint – just the tiniest, the most ephemeral smidge – of existential fear.

***

A relatively short while later, the great and powerful Gurg, the Blasphemous Apocalypse, having swollen all out of insanity, eradicated the notion of notions, forcing all creatures on the planet to make prolonged and uncomfortable eye contact with it and thereby instantly destroying half of humanity utterly. Very little changed.