jamieproctor.ca

May woke up and was a homeowner. She fumbled around inside her head and put on her homeowner face – cheerful, but empty.
This was normal.
She brushed her teeth and ate a breakfast and got dressed and had a shower and made a list of things to do in some order or another and had the closest thing to a morning she’d get.
Then she went down to the curb, to the bus.
“Morning,” she said.
“Morning,” she answered.
May got onto the bus and was bus driver. She put on the bus driver cap. She put on the bus driver face – stoic, yet aching underneath.
This was also normal.
There were twelve stops between Mary and her destination. More of her got on and off at each one. Faces, faces, going to places, places. Each with their own little problems and their own little profits.
At nine o’clock she stepped out at the bookstore and put on her homeowner face again.
It was a little grim and dusty inside, but she showed no sympathy to her book clerk. She wanted something, and the customer was always right.
So she toiled for herself, and found it buried in a dark corner where the roof’s collapse had shredded four bookcases and shielded another.
A newspaper.
“Excellent,” she told herself as she paid. She would read this as she drove herself to work in her taxi.

The stocks were up. The sports were down. Someone had scandal’d, but a speck of water damage had saved their name from besmirchment for all time.
“Hmmrph, hmorph. Hlarph,” proclaimed May authoritatively. “How much longer?”
“Almost there, ma’am,” said May. “Traffic’s bad.”
It always was on this street. King had been left clogged and she’d never got around to calling herself to clear out the breakdowns. But there was a path, if you were willing to violently ram a car into a few bumpers every day for years, and so there was.
May punched out the meter, paid herself her fare, and disembarked. As she took off her taxi driver face and put on her important mayor face she vowed once more to never use such a shoddy service again, as was her custom. It had almost made her late to work. This was improper and abhorrent.
Indoors, May threw her briefcase into the council chamber, sat down at the secretarial desk, and put on her receptionist face – friendly and open yet utterly unyielding. She scheduled up the day, dealt with three rude and unseemly incidents where she didn’t have an appointment, and had lunch. When she was through she wandered into the chamber, put on her councillor face, and pushed through a little light gerrymandering, though it took some convincing her to do it.
A good day’s work.
To treat herself, on the way home she stopped off at a greasy and delicious little place, put on her fry cook face – dead serious, laser-focused, jaw slightly agape with furious concentration that could boil oil – and got takeout. Onion rings, thick and so crumb-larded that they were almost donuts.
She opened her mouth to take a bite and something swooped down, took the bite for her, from her, and shot up to a nearby roof before she could even flinch.
“Fuck!” she said. It was the third time her homeowner face had ever swore.
“AiiiieeEEK, AiiiiiEEEEEYK, YARK YARK YARK YARK YARK YARK!” replied the thief.
It was a vulgar thing, a white and grey bird with a yellow bill and hateful little yellowed eyes. It shredded her food and gulped it down greedily.
May glared at it with genuine hate, then forced it down. No, no no. This was not part of things, not right now.
So she put on her pest control face when she got home that night, and left a few onion rings on the porch, laced with rat poison and ketchup.

Tuesday came, and it was time to refuel. The onion rings were missing, a fine omen as May’s bus driver face unloaded her at the gas station, where she put on her mechanic’s face – earnest and firm – and began untangling the mess of rotting pipes that led to the fresher tanks fit for siphoning.
At noon she took off her hat, put on her manager’s face – red and exasperated – and was busy berating herself for taking so long with her coffee when the bird shat in it.
It went ‘ploorp.’
“FUCK OFF!” she yelled at the sky – a shocking breach of professionalism, decorum, and civility – and threw her coffee at it. Immediately she put on her retail management face and berated herself for littering, but this only inflamed her temper further.
“AiiiiiiiieeeEEEEYUkkk, aiiiiiiEEEYUk, YAK YAK YAK YAK” chimed in the bird.
“FUCK OFF!” she instructed it again. It did not listen.
That night her homeowner’s sleep was poor and troubled, and not by her traditional fantasies of market irregularities and mortgages. Things with wings were watching her, mocking her, and when she woke up her pillow was gone.

Wednesday, Wednesday, humpday, humpday. A day for cubicles, and her weary, coffee-smudged, sigh-heavy white-collar face. “Working hard, or hardly working?” she asked herself.
“Get back to work,” her manager’s face told her, stern and crisp and tie-knotted.
She drank some more coffee, looked at some more newspapers – they should’ve been websites, but her electrical engineering face hadn’t managed to pull that together again just yet – and was just starting to get down to a nice productive morning when something came tapping and rapping at the window by the door.
“Who’s there?” she called.
Quoth the seagull, “AYIIIIIIIIKKKKK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK” and a whole lot more, just like that.
May cursed so foully that she was forced to fire herself on the spot and do the rest of the day’s work alone, wishing for competent help from the depths of her heart.
She set out more bait that night. A little bit of everything in the kitchen, mixed with a little bit pf everything from the paint shed and cleaning supplies.

On Thursday, everything was quiet. Too quiet.
May worked at the studio all day, but found herself drawn into doing nothing but weather reports all afternoon, and all of them ominous.
She went home, put out everything else in the kitchen with everything from ground glass to sharp pebbles mixed in, then went to bed staring at the wall and imagining little yellow beaks.

On Friday May harvested the crops, trucked them to the wholesale supplier, shipped them to the supermarket, bought the freshest-looking ones, drove home, and had just finished cooking them when the power went out.
She walked onto her porch, looked up at the wires, and saw the smouldering carcass of the gull, lodged in the transformer.
“It’s GONE,” she screamed at the bird. “Don’t you get it!? It’s GONE and it WON’T COME BACK. NOTHING’S HERE! Give it up, you’ve LOST! GET GOING!”
And with a small, truculent grunt the roof caved in on her.

If there was a moral to any of this, it was wasted on the bird. It just would’ve eaten it anyways.

At eleven thirty my flashlight went out, which woke me up. And my first thought on waking was, of all things, ‘did I win the bet?’
And really, I think I should’ve. Why spend all night in a spooky house to prove you’re not scared once you’ve already fallen asleep in it? Seems pretty not scared to me. Seems pretty relaxed. Casual. I fell asleep on a half-folded sleeping bag on a linoleum floor that pre-dated the Canadian Shield, would a scared person do that?
No. Nor would a scared person calmly and methodically replace the batteries in the flashlight. I brought backups. I’d tested the first set of batteries, then brought batteries anyways because you need to be thorough about these things. For safety.
Not safety from ghosts. Ghosts aren’t real and if they were real they wouldn’t care about lights. Safety from real things, like fugitive serial killers or SWAT teams or hordes of rabid raccoons or some shit.
So as I replaced the batteries my hands were steady, my breathing was moderate, and my pulse was even. It was only when I flicked the switch and illuminated the decaying, translucent skull in front of me that I started – which I assure you was purely an act of reflex.
“Woah!” I said. Not very helpful, but most people don’t do helpful when startled.
The skull opened its jaws and hissed. It reminded me more of a tarantula than a snake: the noise I was hearing wasn’t coming from a mouth, wasn’t fuelled by lungs, but my mind was reading it as that because of hopeless anthropomorphism. Or in this case, vitalomorphism? Not sure.
THE GRAVE IS DISRESPECTED, it said. And then it opened its jaws even wider, flew through my head, and vanished.
I waited ten minutes, then went back to bed. Whatever it had wanted to say, it had said it.

The next morning I woke up with the ghost hissing in my ear in broad daylight.
RESPECT MUST BE RETURNED. IT MUST BE TENDED.
Then it vanished.
I sighed, got up, walked over to Grace’s place, and paid her ten bucks.
“But you stayed overnight?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I explained. “But it was haunted anyways.”
She shrugged and left it at that and I went home where the ghost was hiding in my fridge behind the milk, screaming spectrally about CLEARING THE COBWEBS.
“Fine,” I said. “Fine. Fine fine fine. Where?”
It didn’t say more, just eddied menacingly behind the cheese and vanished.

For three days I lived ghost-free. Then on my way back from McDonalds it uncoiled itself from my bag of salted deep fried matter with the speed of a striking snake – a little slower than an average human punch – and pointed dramatically across the road.
THERE.
“Huh?” I said. Again, startled people are not helpful animals.
IT MUST BE RESTORED.
And then it vanished inside my chicken mcnuggets.
Across the road was a little field.
In the field was a little old cemetery.
In the cemetery was a little overgrown tuft of grass.
Lodged inside the grass was a tiny and malformed gravestone that appeared to have started life as a randomly-selected boulder.
“This could take some work,” I said.
It didn’t answer.

The headstone cost me a good chunk of money, even if the stonecutter was a friend of Grace’s mom and it was a junk piece.
The clipping I did by hand with dad’s old shears.
I bummed some flowers off’ve Auntie Toby and some little pottery pigs from the kiln down the street that Ryan worked at.
Finally I topped the whole pile off with a little purple umbrella to keep the rain off.
It looked really nice, I thought. Not expensive, but nice. Tasteful, and cared-for, even if it was just a little corny.
“There,” I said to the grave. Then again, a little harder, trying to press in the finality of it: “There.”
The wind blew.
Finally, tempting fate, I said “are you happy NOW?”
One of the little ceramic pigs grew a skull.
WHERE ARE MY OFFERINGS?
“What?” I asked. “They’re right there. You’re IN one.”
I CANNOT FEED OFF CLAY FLESH
“I didn’t sign on for sacrifice. What d’you want, a fresh-bled ox? A human heart? Tears from grieving mothers? This sort of thing isn’t that easy to find, and it’s not cheap!”
THE MC NUGGETS WILL SUFFICE.
“What.”
BRING THEM TO ME. BRING ME THE MC NUGGETS.
I stared.
AND A SHAKE TOO.
NO FRIES THOUGH.
I left, its last ghastly words echoing through my mind.
ONION RINGS.

It was a hungry thing. Three meals a week, then a day, then a night. It cut into my sleep schedule faster and harder than my wallet, and I started missing classes.
“What’s got into you?” Grace asked me at the start of algebra, or might have.
“Flnrorp,” I told her. And then I returned to dreaming or maybe imagining that I was dreaming about imagining dreaming. My head was full of spectral demands for food and comfort.
When I woke up I was home and Grace was talking with my father.
“He says you’ve been getting no sleep, been out all night, and been jumping at everything that moves,” she reported.
“I have to give the ghost food and offerings or it can’t rest,” I said.
“Uh?”
“And back rubs. It wants me to rub its back. It possesses the tomb stone and makes me scratch it with my fingers.”
“Ah.”
“It’s really hard on my nails.”
“Eh?”
“And I guess it’s getting bored too because it wanted me to buy it a phone but I don’t have enough money so it asked me to bring it my credit card so it can order for me” and I realized the words that were coming out of my mouth and stopped so I could consider them.
“Colleen,” Grace said, very carefully, “are you absolutely SURE this… person… you’re dealing with is a ghost?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Because it sounds to me like you’re being scammed.”
“Yes,” I said. “By a ghost. That sonuvabitch must’ve pulled this ‘put me to rest’ con a dozen times.”
“Well, jig’s up. He can sit by that headstone until the end of time.”
“No,” I said. “He bummed a ride out of the house on me, he can bum a ride out of that cemetery on some other sucker passing by. I need to put him somewhere he’ll never meet another mark.”

WHERE IS MY PHONE
“No time, no time,” I said to it, nearly stumbling over the gravestone. “Gonna go get it. C’mon with. Will get you food. C’mon.”
I could tell when it was with me by now. A little cold mist bobbing near, invisible but making your hairs stand up and your breath catch. It hovered impatiently with me the whole way down to the Starbucks, switching from shoulder to shoulder as I bought a coffee and cookie. A big, ugly, crumbly cookie that nearly came apart in my fingers just from me grabbing it.
I DEMAND OFFERINGS, it complained as I drank my coffee and stumbled down the road. I CAN’T REST WITHOUT OFFERINGS. GIVE ME OFFERINGS, WHERE ARE MY NUGGETS.
“Got ‘none, got none,” I mumbled, staggering in the caffeine haze. “Wanna cookie? I got a cookie?”
IT WILL DO.
I held up the cookie between two fingers and whoops the whole thing fell apart into my cup.
“Oh noooo.”
OH NO.
“Better go in after it fast!” I said. “They melt in there! It’s still warm!”
I waited until my coffee cup turned to ice in my fingers, then tripped over my own feet and faceplanted on the sidewalk, one arm flailing right over the sewer grating.
“Whooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooops,” I said until I was sure that the coldness in the air had followed the coffee down the drain.
Then I did a little dance most of the way home.

Best of all, Grace had paid for the coffee and cookie. Took almost exactly ten bucks. So THAT worked out.

People like trees.
They like them for their shade, they like them for their timber. They like them for the refreshing way their leaves wibble in the wind. They like them for their sap, their bark, their firewood, and their ability to form thickets and windbreaks, as shelter and as excellent places to go make out.
The people of the village of Small Rock were fond of trees for all of these reasons, which is why they were most sorely vexed when they started disappearing.
Sometimes during the night, sometimes during the day, sometimes just when you turned your back for a minute. There’d be a grunt, a wrench, an earthy thud and some crackling branches. There was never anything left behind besides a big dirty pit and a pile of sticks. This was obviously a problem, especially for woodcutters and teenagers, and many people took to tethering their trees with rope, sinew, and in one case large chains. None of it helped.
At length the problem came to be a matter of governance.
“People of Small Rock,” said the Big Man, “this sucks. Our trees are growing fewer, our lumberjacks are growing grumpier, and our teenagers are going to explode from pent-up and inept lust. What do we do?”
“We figure out what we know,” volunteered Tog, the loudest person.
“Okay,” said the Big Man. “Okay. Okay okay okay. Hey, what do we know again?”
Get, the oldest person, held up his hand. “It’s big enough to uproot trees and take them away.”
“Okay,” said the Big Man. “Okay. What do we do?”
“We send our greatest warriors and leaders to confront it,” said Tog.
The Big Man looked at her.
“Okay,” he said. “Hey everyone, I’ve got a great idea!”

And that was why Tog, the loudest person, was camped out under a raspberry bush in the damp and the rain watching an innocuous strand of cedars like a wet and crabby hawk.
“Shit,” she told the world and everyone in it. Again.
“Shit,” she reiterated. It made sense, and was expressive besides.
Gronch, replied the tree.
“Shit,” she said, really getting into the rhythm of it. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
Then her ears caught up with her and she stopped talking.
Thud, thud thud. Gronch.
Tog, the loudest person, deeply resented her title, and prided herself on her ability to be quite quiet when necessary. She just often disagreed with other people on when exactly that was.
This felt important, and so she tiptoed with great diligence.
Not that it was necessary. Every ten seconds or so a great and powerful GRONCH would tear apart the night and make her very much unhearable. She would use this time to say something like ‘shit’ and do a little run, which eventually put her inside a different bush at the edge of the extremely diminishing grove.
GRONCH, said the tree right above her as it went into the sky.
It was a giant, and a pretty good one, very respectably massive. Stood taller than a hill and just as broad, with burly arms and strong fingers, which were hard at work picking all the branches off the tree-trunk, which she swallowed whole.
“Belch,” she said.
“Excuse you,” said Tog, the loudest person.
“Hello down there!” said the giant, looking around. “You are there, aren’t you? It’s very hard to tell.”
“Yep,” said Tog. “Hey, why are you doing that?”
“I just like eating trees,” said the giant. “Hey, why are you asking that?”
“I just like asking questions,” said Tog.
“Fair enough. Got any others?”
“Yeah,” said Tog. “Why are you doing it wrong?”
The giant’s brow furrowed, which was a pretty spectacular sight since it was over half her face – proud, wild and vigorous. “Huh?”
“You’re wasting all the good parts. All the nutrition’s in the fresh shoots and leaves at the tips of the branches, and you’re just eating the trunk. That’s just wood. You just in this for the roughage or what?”
“But the branches stick in my throat,” complained the giant. “It’s scratchy.”
“I can fix that for you, no problem at all,” said Tog. “You ever heard of rope?”

The giant hadn’t heard of rope, but was very excited by it once Tog liberated most of it from the Big Man’s house. He slept over-sound, and he’d never miss it.
“Right, so take this end, and tie it to the top of the tree.”
“Do what to the top of the tree?”
“Oh, right. Just do what I’m doing with my hands.”
The giant frowned. “I can hardly see you, let alone your little wiggly bits. Here, this is faster.”
And the giant picked up Tog and rubbed her against the crown of the tree until a knot happened.
“Arrgh,” said Tog. “Ow.”
“Did it work?”
“Yes. Now take the rope, and wrap it around the tree. Squish and squash those branches until they’re pressed tight as a drum.”
“As a what?”
“Never mind.”
The giant may not have known knots, but she damned well knew how to squeeze. The tree was trussed tighter than a spider’s lunch before two minutes were out, and then Tog tied the knot on its stump with all due haste.
“There,” she said. “All done. Now you can double your nutrtition.”
“I can eat twice as many trees?” said the giant.
“Sure, why not. Go for it. I’ll just hold this end of the rope so you don’t get it caught in your teeth.”
“Great!” said the giant. “Thanks, buddy!”
And she stuffed the whole tree in her mouth without chewing, just like Tog knew she would, which meant that the whole tree was still in one piece when Tog pulled the slipknot loose and every single branch sprang out sideways.

“I demand three cheers,” said Tog, the loudest person.
“We’ll need to scrub the village for weeks,” said the Big Man.
“But you still have the trees to make scrubbing-brushes from,” said Tog. “Three of ‘em. Good ones. I want to hear plenty of heart, and stomach and lungs too.”
“Shut up and do it,” said Get, the oldest person.
The cheers were a little sarcastic, but very loud, and that was good enough.
That, and the fact that Tog’s house had been on the other side of the village. It had avoided most of the spray pretty nicely.

And normally at this point everyone would’ve lived happily ever after, but life complicated things. A month later there was a powerful stomping sound and into town came another giant.
“Hey,” it asked them. “Have you seen my sister?”
The Big Man looked at Tog and looked at Get and looked at everyone and finally, against all his will, looked at the giant.
“Uhh. No?” he said.
“Pity,” said the giant. “She used to live around here. I heard some smartass little folks tricked her into eating her lunch the wrong way. Warned her not to trust anyone under thirty foot, but she was always a hungry one. I’m pretty famished myself. You folks got anything to eat?”
The Big Man looked at Tog and then looked at the giant and then looked at Tog and then looked at the giant and then looked at Tog and sighed and nodded.
“Hey!” said Tog. “How do you feel about trees?”
“Eh,” said the giant. “I prefer rocks.”
“Oh,” said Tog. “What kind?”
“This kind,” said the giant.
And she dislocated her jaw, sank it into the soil, ate the rock out from underneath the village in one bite, and stomped off laughing.

The event was never terribly well-publicized in the folklore of either people. Giants, as a rule, don’t enjoy stories more complicated than stepping on evil little things, and most humans get cross when one good trick doesn’t solve everything.
Also, when you’re stuck in a hole three miles below sea level, it’s pretty hard for you to tell anyone about anything. Tog’s great-grandkids had long beards before they saw sunlight again, which they were mighty pleased to witness, let me tell you.
Nobody was that eager to see the trees again though. They’d had quite enough of that shit.

When Carl was one, his mother sang ‘twinkle twinkle little star.’
When Carl was two, his father told him ‘star light, star bright.’
When Carl was three, his aunt showed him the big dipper.
When Carl was four, his uncle watched ‘Pinocchio’ with him.
And so in retrospect it was all very unavoidable and unsurprising that when Carl turned eight he would make the reckless and impulsive decision to wish upon a star.

It was a good clear night and more importantly an enormous windstorm had utterly crushed the local power grid, giving several million people a good view of the night sky for the first time in about five years. You could see Orion and also his belt. You could see the squiggly blobby thing that could be Draco or maybe Cassiopeia. You could see the North Star and also everything south of it.
Carl considered his options, then picked out a little glowing dot on the farther edge of the horizon.
“That one,” he said. And it was done.
He didn’t wish for anything in particular. Nobody had told him otherwise.

For a good while, very little happened. Wishes travel faster than light, but stars are still very far away. There’s so much nothing between them and us.
Then it hit the star. And it paid attention. All of it.
This star was a flaming ball of gas and fusion two million miles across and of virulent and explosive intensity. When it felt pensive, it was not quiet. Where it looked, the universe cooked.
“Hmm!” said the star. It was intrigued by this.
So then it moved.

The earth reeled. The planets lurched like drunk men. The sun, suddenly eclipsed in its own backyard, did a triple-take.
Carl was shocked and appalled, but in this he was scarcely alone. Earth’s atmosphere was suddenly trying to figure out if it should boil, stew, roast, or just vanish. Everyone was very perturbed about this.
“Hello Carl,” said the star, outside his window.
Carl was surprised. Normally when people called him at work they used the phone, or maybe stuck their head in his office door. Once someone had faxed him something, which had been VERY disconcerting at the time. In the face of a twenty-thousand-septillion-ton fireball whispering into his ear, this suddenly seemed much less exotic.
“You wished on me, Carl,” said the star. “For the first time in billions of years, someone has given a single shit about my existence. This pleases me. I will never leave your side now, Carl.”
“Oh no,” said Carl, as the heat chewed at his vocal cords like angry piranha.
“Oh yes,” said the star. “You’ve moved me. You’ve moved me deeply and so I’ve moved me greatly, moved me across a distance that is impossible to imagine. Just you and me from here on out, Carl, from now to forever. I will watch your tiny life as it expires. I will absorb your trace elements as they inevitably get sucked into my gravitational pull and then my greater mass. When I finally explode for good several billion years from now, I’m taking your atoms with me and spraying them as a fine dust across all of infinity, to trickle into an infinitely spread nothingness along with the rest of the universe for the rest of time until even that joins space in becoming an utterly meaningless concept. It’ll be good clean fun, Carl.”
Carl’s office was in flames, but they were so intense that they ate all the oxygen and died instantly, and the resulting vacuum blew his walls in.
“Gork,” said Carl.
“By your side, Carl,” said the star. “Always.”

Carl phoned the police.
“This is out of our solar system,” they told him. “Pretty sure our jurisdiction ends at least there, if not sooner. Sorry.”
Carl phoned the army.
“We fight other countries, maybe other planets,” they told him. “Nobody fights suns. You’d just singe yourself. Can’t help you.”
Carl phoned his legislative representatives.
“Does this star vote?” they asked.
“No. Maybe. No. Maybe. Do you vote?”
“No,” said the star.
“No,” confirmed Carl.
“Great,” they told him. “We’ll try and fix that. Maybe later. Listen, you got any lobbyists?”
“Sorry?” asked Carl.
Then they hung up.

He phoned his uncle.
“Phone your aunt,” he said.
He phoned his aunt.
“Phone the observatory,” she said.
He phoned the nearest observatory.
“C’mon over,” they said.
So Carl did, although he was slowed down by his car’s tires being melted to the sucking, gasping asphalt of the highways.
The star hitchhiked.

Carl introduced himself to the astronomers, who were identical twins.
“Greetings and hello,” said the first astronomer. “I’m Doctor Tabitha Stewart and this is my idiot colleague, Doctor Mathilda Stewart.”
“Hi,” said the second astronomer. “I’m Mathilda and this is my uptight idiot of a sister, Tabby. Used to call her ‘Tubby Tabby’ and she never got over it. Where’s your star?”
Carl pointed at the Star, which was clinging to his car’s roof and also the entire sky.
“Wow,” said Mathilda. “Pretty mediocre.”
“Hey!” said the star.
“I mean, no offense, but you’re barely bigger than our sun. Jeez. Put some weight on.”
“Shut up,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart. “Now you’d both better come inside.”

Inside was smaller and more cramped than Carl would have imagined. Astronomy was concerned with big things far away, which meant spending a lot of time with tiny fiddly things close to hand.
“Right,” said Mathilda. “Let’s run some tests.”
“Mass spectrometers,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart.
“Particle accelerators,” said Mathilda.
“Control groups,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart.
“Punnett squares,” said Mathilda.
“I thought those were for fruit flies and irises?” asked Carl.
The astronomers shared something for a moment, and it was a look of fiery hatred directed entirely at Carl’s mouth.
“Here,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart. “Put your star in this spectrometer.”
Carl held out the odd little metal doodad and the star clambered into it.
“So…do I push this lever?” he asked. And then immediately did so.
“No,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart and Mathilda.
“Ow!” said the star as two dime-sized pieces of its matter were pierced from it.
“Hey, this looks like a hole punch,” said Carl.
Mathilda leaned over to Carl’s ear, opened her mouth a quarter-millimeter, and poured eighteen seconds of “shhhhh!” into it.
“ANYWAYS results are inconclusive,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart, a bit too loudly. “Now, if you’ll just step over here to the pocket hadron collider, we can-”
“This is fake,” said the star, as flatly as an enormous sphere could manage. “You’re pulling something. Tell me what.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart.
“Perish the thought,” said Mathilda.
The star pulsed casually, and the sky was filled with beautiful auroras as the planet’s magnetosphere took an even more brutal pounding than normal. The observatory melted down into very expensive slag around their feet.
“I’m here for Carl,” said the star. “And I’m not going anywhere. Now, tell me what you’re up to.”

There was a knock at the door. By default, since it was the only piece of the wall left standing.
“Carl, you get it,” said the star. “Nobody else moves.”
Carl looked at the star, huge and impassive. He looked at the astronomers, who were looking quite innocent. And he walked over to the free-standing door, breathed deep (not too deep, the air was still superheated) and yanked it open.
On the other side was another star.

It was red, bright red, searing hot. It was big, seven hundred times bigger than Carl’s star. It was Betelgeuse. If it was a bipedal ape it would have cleared its throat with the rumblings of atomic thunder, but it wasn’t, and so it simply spoke, and spoke thus:
“Fuck Is This Shit?”
in clearly enunciated syllables each larger than the entire planet.
“ ” said Carl.
“Oh no,” said the star.
“Stalking charge,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart. “Inappropriate contact with minor matter, too.”
“Sicko,” said Mathilda. “Lock him up and throw away the stellar debris.”
“Oh no no no,” said the star. It tried to run, but Betelgeuse’s gravitational pull was already on its shoulder, inevitable and inescapable.
“You Have The Right To Be Neither Created Nor Destroyed,” said Betelgeuse. “You Have The Right To Approach Entropy Until Equillibrium. You Have The Right To-”
The Star screamed and tried to sprint, but it only squished itself harder. In fact, it squished itself down into a tiny ball a little more than ten miles across.
“Neutroning Is Too Good For You,” growled Betelgeuse, “But Rules Are Rules. I Am Too Old For This Shit. Just One Million Years Until Retirement. Stay Safe, Kids.”
It left, and it took a lot of the atmosphere with it.

Carl was placed into a support group by Doctor Tabitha Stewart and Mathilda. He spent most of his time confused, but he did learn a little more about astronomy than he’d expected.
Not that he planned on using much of it in person. He’d never been so happy for light pollution in his life.

The bell rang.
The crowd surged.
The voice called.
And against all odds and historical evidence, the children actually paid attention.
The tour of the fire exhibit had begun.

“Come on, come on,” said the museum guide.
“Come on, come on,” said the teacher, out of educational camaraderie and the desire not to be left out.
“Hurry up, hurry up,” said the guide.
“Hurry up, hurry up,” said the teacher, really getting into the spirit of things now. Then he realized that he was falling behind and ran after the group, pants flapping.
“Shh!” the guide told the teacher and his pants.
“Shh!” the children told the teacher, delighting in the turning of tables.
“Shh!” the guide told the children, and they growled and raised their hackles at him, but not too sharply. The first exhibit was at hand.

It was a little building in a little box, made of little things – smears of clay, matchstick twigs, slivers of stone. It had a red roof and a blue door.
“Whose house does this look like?” asked the guide.
“Mine!” said one child.
“Hers!” said another child.
“Theirs!” volunteered a third.
“Wrong!” said the guide. “It looks like the first house built in this city that wasn’t a shack or a cabin or a hovel or a lean-to or a shanty. It looks like the grand manor of Mayor Brickabrack.
Does anyone here know about Mayor Brickabrack?”
A hand shot up at the back of the pack, lonely in the crowd.
“Yes. You. Speak.”
“hewasthefirstmayorofthetownandhebuiltthedamandthequarryandthemainroadandthenhebuilthishouseand”
“That will do,” said the guide with the kind and welcoming air of a corpse. “Yes. He built all those things that still stand today, and then he built this house. Now, why do you think they still stand and this house doesn’t?”
“FIRE!” concluded the entire class at the top of its lungs.
“Yes,” said the guide. “Now, look at the building. See the cross-section? See all that dry hay in the walls to act as insulation? See all those candleholders in the hall? See that staircase set too close, and see how it was (against all sense and reason) insulated as well? See what happens when you press this button?”
It wasn’t a big button, and it wasn’t a big fire. But then again, it wasn’t a big building.
It went ‘fwooMP.’
The children cheered.
“Shh!” said the guide.
“Shh!” said the teacher, hungry for validation.
“Shh!” said the children. And the teacher hungered for his belt and the harsh days of his forefathers, but he knew they were behind him and he had no recourse.

The next exhibit was much larger – the glass case it was sealed away in could have housed a motorboat of respectable size. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of extremely small trees, all of them very cunningly faked with cotton balls, twigs, birchbark, bird’s nests, and other powerful techniques. Scattered through it were mud roads, crude sheds, and tiny specks that could’ve be either people or fleas.
“Now, what is this?” asked the guide.
“Trees!’ hollered a child.
“FOOREST,” insisted another.
“Incorrect” snapped the guide. “Deeply incorrect. This is the Smittely Wood. It was right off the highway heading north. Do any of you know why this place was important?”
There was a deep and abiding stillness and silence, broken only by the wave of a single hand in the crowd. A high-pitched and excited tittering followed its every move.
“Speak.”
“itwasalloldgrowthtimberandcoudlbeusedforship’smastsandlongbeamsandandnandandand”
“Fine,” said the guide. “True enough. Mayor Brickabrack oversaw the building of the sawmills and the carving of the logging roads. Those roads do not exist today, and there is no trace of the mills. Why? What happened here?”
“FIRE!” hollered the class diligently.
“Yes,” said the guide. “Examine the lean of the trees, see the habitual direction of the wind. Look at the lay of the land. Check where the cuts were freshest and the dry timber was stacked. Now, see those men here and think of one of them smoking and tapping out a pipe or stubbing out a cigarette or just dropping a match. Then watch this.”
This button wasn’t any bigger, but the effect was. Incandescent light blistered up in a noise like ‘FWAshhhhhh,’ and then the box was filled with thick, ashy smoke.
“Yay!” said everyone.
“Shh!” said the guide.
“Shh,” whispered the teacher, quietly, to himself. And he looked at his charges and wished for matches.

The third exhibit took up an entire room.
“By eighteen eighty nine Mayor Brickabrack was bent towards civil infrastructure. More bodies were needed to lend the town prosperity, and they needed comforts and staples to tempt them. The fields had been cleared, the orchards planted, and in midsummer the rail line was completed, and was bringing in its first passengers.” With each statement the guide’s finger poked and thrusted and jabbed, spelling out HERE and THERE and THERE.
It was a breathtaking thing. A whole town – a little town maybe, but a town – locked in a single glass case. Someone had spent entirely too much time and effort on it.
“The summer was dry, and the fields were too. The train was an older model, and its smokestack was dirty and improperly cleaned. It caught ablaze, and can anyone tell me what happened next?”
A long dead lull. And then, a hesitant wave and a tremulous giggle.
“Explain yourself,” said the guide.
“theyputthedepottoocloseandthecoalcaughtalightandthewindtookitandspreaditintothefieldsanditallwentupin”
“Flames, yes, yes, YES,” said the guide. “Like so.”
The button went click. There was a long dead moment of nothing until the students realized that the fire was already there, burning eternally in the mouth of the little toy train.
Then it slid out – gently buoyed on some invisible jet of air – and alit on some buildings, which exploded.
It went very quickly after that.
“Hooray!” said the class.
“Shh!’ hissed the guide.
“Shh!” said the teacher alongside him, regaining his nerve. He was ignored, and this both pleased and irritated him.
“Come,” said the guide. And they followed him from the rooms and down the halls and into the stairways and passages that turned.

When they stopped turning, it was in a very small room. Its walls were blackened, not black.
And in its center was a thing that wasn’t quite a furnace.
“This was nearly the turn of the century,” said the guide. “The town was choked on its own ashes, and Mayor Brickabrack had leadership of almost nobody and little life let in any of his body. Gangrenous slough had consumed three of his limbs and black veins were coursing towards his heart. He had made many mistakes.”
“Fire!” shouted a student.
“Fwoosh!” enunciated another.
“Crispy!” giggled a third.
“Silence!” said the guide.
“Silence!” agreed the teacher.
The guide turned to him and gave him a smile that froze his heart in his chest even in the swelter of the little basement, then spoke to the class.
“Now. Here is the important question. What did Mayor Brickabrack do to save this town? Your town. My town. His town.”
The students rustled and murmured. One or two almost waved their arms, but held them low at the last minute.
And then that little giggle started again, hesitantly.
“Speak,” said the guide.
“ohnoi’mnotsure”
“Speak,” said the guide. “Now.”
“oooooohokayheknewthatitwasallhisfaultandsohedecidedto”
“Yes,” said the guide. And he smiled so wonderfully that the class was in awe. “Yes. He saw that he had never given fire the respect it deserved. So he explained this to the town, and they held one last vote, and into this very iron kettle went Mayor Brickabrack.”
The guide pulled the door of the chamber open. It was very well-oiled, and made no noise whatsoever.
Then he left it open.
Then he turned to the class and said one word.
“Choose.”
“Choose,” said the teacher, a little too loudly. And then he realized what he’d just said and went pale as a sheet as three dozen glittering little eyes devoid of pity or remorse turned upon him and studied his face with great care. His legs skittered inside his pants like anxious beetles, and he almost fell over.
They laughed at him. And one of the laughs was a high-pitched little titter, and every one of their faces turned towards it.
Grinning.
“ohnonononono,” said the student with the hasty hand. And they might’ve said more, but it was lost in the cheers.

They just made the last bus out of the museum. The teacher was first on, elbowing his students left and right to make it to his seat, and whatever he said to the bus driver was enough to make him scream out of the parking lot on a strip of rubber thick enough to make a new tire.
The guide watched them go, smiling mirthlessly. Then he sighed, and took off his name tag and took out his matches.
“My term is complete,” he said to anyone who might be listening, which was no one.
And then the mayor descended into the depths of the ghostly, char-bricked museum, to press a particularly well-worn button.

Nobody heard what happened next.
But it sounded like ‘fwooosh.’