jamieproctor.ca

I watch the cars. Someone has to.
See, that one is an angry car. Look at the angle of its headlights, the set of its grill. Observe the truculent set of its tires and the grudging grumble of its brakes. That car must be owned by a ninny or a nincompoop, the sort to really grind your gears. Oh, poor car.
That one is a happy car. Its antenna is at a jaunty angle; its engine whines with the excitement of a dog with a leash in its mouth. Wind is whistling over its windshield. How pleasant!
I never get tired of this.

***

When I was very little some relative whose name I don’t recall and whose funeral I probably attended gave me a little set of toy cars whose wheels didn’t work and whose roofs were crumbled and whose innards were clotted up with sand from a thousand ancient sandboxes.
They were easily the best thing I’d ever seen in my life, and I cared for them diligently until the dog ate them and died. It was a great shame, but it taught me a valuable lesson: if you must care for cars, you should care for ones that are too big for someone to eat. I have lived by that every day since, and it has served me very, truly, really well.
Every day on my way on the highway I put my knowledge to good use and great pleasure.

***

I watch the cars.
That is a very puzzling car indeed – quite old to be out and about on the road in this heat. Its lights are glassy and shiny, its cab is bunched up in a sort of confused box. There is a powerful sensation of befuddlement and uncertainty about it, but it moves spryly and in good order. A reassuring reminder that even the oldest of us can learn and move and grow! Good going, car! Good show!

***

The key thing about a car, of course, is its reliability. I have known many people and many cars and let me tell you, the people were FAR less reliable creatures, which I put down entirely to locomotion.
Every car I have known has kept all four of its tires in contact with the ground at all times, low-slung and ready to roll.
Every person I have known has tottered about balanced on two wobbly and unsettlingly-jointed legs, and has spent much of their time with only one of them planted on the ground. It is deeply disconcerting and a sure sign of an indecisive and weak-kneed personality.
No, no, no to people, I say. It is the cars for me!
And besides, I can actually read their expressions. Never quite managed that with people. The eyebrows get in the way.

***

I watch the cars.
This car has something to say, and it’s trying so hard to say it that it’s impossible to even say for sure what ‘it’ is.
Its other car is a Mercedes. It is the proud parent of an honour student. There is a little family of stickmen on its rear windshield and a little happy face on its trunk. It encourages you to honk if you love Jesus, cinnamon buns, and dogs, and its bumper boasts the fading names and logos of half a dozen politicians, one half-atop of the other.
I have never seen a more scatterbrained and incoherent vehicle, and I feel a sort of pity at its wild disarrayment. It needs a firm hand in guidance, and I wish that I could provide but alas, my trailer is full of cars and there is no room for one more. I will simply hope for my cargo and my co-traveller here: for them, a life of hope and purpose; for it, a car wash that will remove these unsightly snarls from its mind and body.

***

The big bay stretches out alongside us, and my horizon fills with a dubious material.
Water. Hmm. No land for cars, that’s for sure. But out there prowl the boats, pointy and slow, and I feel my brow furrow in apprehension.
Now, I’m no bigot. I don’t hate boats – god no!
I just don’t quite trust them. I can’t read them. Their faces… they all just look sort of the same to me. Funny old world, right? But I like a vehicle I can look in the face. And I can’t. Not these ones.
Not that I’ve got anything against them of course. I’ve been on a boat – hell, one of my best friends had a boat back in the day. I just like them where I can see them, not where I can drive with them.
But I’ve got no problem with that. As long as they’re in their place.

***

I watch the cars.
This car is huffing and puffing. It’s hauling a little trailer – a tiny mockery of the huge transport trailer at my heels – and its cargo is one (1) boat.
It’s a pretty big boat, I guess. Does that make it a ship? Not sure.
The car’s doing very well for itself under the circumstances. It’s not complaining, it’s not blubbering. Its sun roof is down and its mirrors are flipped and it’s ploughing forward with the determined badger-bulling air of something that can do this all day because it knows it damned well will whether it wants to or not.
I tip my hat as it passes. Good going, car. Good going.

***

I stop for lunch. Gas for my truck, and a burger for me, and an extra burger which I ceremoniously unwrap and place on my truck’s hood for it to contemplate and sacrifice to the gulls above us all.
It may not be able to eat it, but respect is priceless. Without respect you haven’t got anything.
That had been the problem with my family. They hadn’t respected their cars. I had told them so over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and somehow they’d never learned, not even a little. Some of them had even gotten worse.
I’d warned them about rust, and about the proper tires for the proper seasons, and about windshield wiper fluids and wiper blades and windshield cracks and body work and oil changes and all the components of the rainbow, one after another. I’d even made up little rhymes for them to help remember the important parts.
None of it had helped. Disowning them had been the best day of my life. It was as if a great weight had been removed from my trunk.
The burger was gone, the gulls had taken it quickly and decisively and silently, with no squabbling. A good omen.
This was to be a portentous day.

***

I watch the cars.
Oh, there are so many of them now. We’re near a town, we’re near the end of the workday, we’re in the zone and the hour and the time and the place and the space.
See them bustle and chuff and jockey for room! More on the other side of the highway than mine – folks heading home to the exurbs – but that just makes those fleeting glimpses of my fellow-travellers all the more striking.
Ah, this one is fierce, with his bumper tucked high and tight and his blazing-red roof!
Oho, this one is jaunty, with her convertible top down and the breeze in her teeth!
Well now, that’s a little one, but sturdy and fast – electric engine roaring invisibly as he takes up the space of half-a-car. Suffer no mockery for this! Children like this are our future.
And there is…
Oh.
Oh no.

***

The police car is professional, sitting at the side of the road as if this were its own parking space, traffic whizzing by two feet away totally and profoundly ignored. Its staid power is blameless to me.
The tow truck is gentle yet uncaring. Its job is at work here, and so is it. Up you go, up you go. Not even a flicker of uncertainty in its crane, the mechanisms and the engine smooth as butter. Seen this all before.
But the car, oh the car, oh my god the car. The poor little thing is as tremulous and lost as a dove or a busted bicycle. Ah! Ah! How has this happened? Its tire is gone, its windshield is cracked, its bumper is all but gone. Oh god! How has this happened?
And there is a man, a dirty little big man beside it, sweating and bellowing and cursing at the police and the tow truck and the world at large, swearing up a storm no doubt that this was everyone’s fault but his own.
The rust on the car’s body belies otherwise.
Oh. Oh you. This isn’t even the first time you’ve done this, is it? IS it?

Well well well. A portentous day indeed.

The red-hot rage of the truly righteous grips me like a steel gauntlet and my wheel smokes through my hands and the median barrier is a tiny wisp of an obstacle before me and then….
There I go. Flying onwards to justice.

***

I watch the cars. So many expressions!
All of my cars are planes now, sailing through the air, free of the earthly bonds of my trailer! See their hoods flap open in joy and disbelief! Ah, what wonders we live to see.
But my eyes are not for them, they are for the lonely little lost car that corkscrews towards my windshield. It looks surprised to me – its grill a big round O – but I think I see the glitter of hope in its dented headlights.
Have no fear, car! I am coming to hel

Damnit it all. Such a ruckus I could barely hear myself think. All I had to do was apply three layers of paint to my snout but the whispering and scheming and plotting out there was fit to wake the dead and send them over to complain.
It was the Sun-days. These days, it was always the Sun-days. At my age I should be sprawled out wide in the morning bask, guzzling heat out of the air like it was dead cattle, but no, no, no, no – I had to be a priest. Had to be all respectable, a pillar of the community; the same community that insisted on waking me up at the crack of dawn with four sacrifices and a pleading look and absolutely no offer of help whatsoever.
Oh no priest, we wouldn’t dare intrude upon the sacred pool.
Oh no priest, we wouldn’t insult you by offering help.
Oh no priest, we’ll just slink off and start basking without you. It’s Sun-day, after all.
Jackasses.
At least the pool always looked nice. Water glistening on the jagged, bloodstained rocks. Barely a ripple to mark the water, a hundred feet below us. Clear and cool and filled with bones gleaming in the early yellow light. Very lovely.

I applied the last layer of paint with a little more force than necessary and stepped out of my meditation chamber and recognized every single one of the faces looking at me. Not the individuals, no – the squishy ape-things all looked the same to me – but the faces.
I sighed. Why did they always have to be like this? If horrible little sacrilegious murdering looting ape-things were going to ruin every single Sun-day for the rest of my life, couldn’t they at least be varied about it?? But no.
Might as well get this over with.
I approached the one that was trying and failing to look frightened. A wiry thing with a permanent quirk to its eyebrows (god how those things nauseated me; they looked like caterpillars) and a smirk waiting behind every twitch of its freakishly mobile lips.
“Oh please, sir,” it said in a voice it probably assumed I wouldn’t recognize as sarcastic, “spare me, spare me.”
Ah. This chestnut. “No,” I said. Damn, their language grated on me even coming from my own maw. It was so high pitched everything sounded like whining.
“If I can’t be spared, sir, then may I make one request?”
Heeeere it comes. “Request?” I asked.
“Please, please, please, please sir, on behalf of all that is kind and merciful, don’t throw me in that sucker-vine clump halfway down your sacrificial pit. A quick death please, sir, not a slow one. Please don’t throw me there.”
I glanced into the sacred pool. “Okay.”
“Wait, wh-”
I added a little spin to the throw, which was unnecessary but made me feel better. He had good reflexes – still managed to scream most of the way down before it cut off in that messy way that suggested sharp rocks.
“Request granted,” I said.

***

The silence after the first always was a little louder than any other, and of course that’s when my stomach decided to rumble.
Oh c’mon. I’d practically eaten last week; surely I didn’t need more now?
Well, a little wouldn’t hurt. In a bit. A day or two.
Hell with it, I was famished. As soon as I was done with these chumps I was going to swallow a damned cow.
The holy man was next. I had to admire his composure; you’d have thought he was perched at home in his own little heathen temple from the expression on his face. The smell of urine did spoil the effect a bit, but he was doing a great job of pretending it wasn’t there.
“Why do you do this, lizard-creature?” he asked as I picked him up by the front of his robes.
“Prayers,” I said.
“Prayers to what wickedness? Surely this is not the will of the Glowing King.”
Oh good, one of those. “Explain.”
“The Glowing King is all that is bright and good and great and powerful and wonderful and admirable and worthy of care in this world,” said the priest, who was clearly warming to his subject and probably eager to take his mind off the dampness in his clothing. “He is the most spiritually and physically vast of all gods, existing wherever there is light or life. Your barbaric actions here will win you no favour with him, and can only consign you to an eternity in the glowless pits of-”
“Request granted. Not interested. Bye.”
The priest didn’t scream on the way down, possibly because he was out of breath. But I still heard the bonk.

***

I paused to work out a kink in my shoulder. Oh hell, had I pulled something? Not exactly as young as I used to be; maybe I’m bigger now but I don’t heal any faster and there’s a lot more of me to muck up without warning. Could even swear I lose more teeth now than I used to.
The third one was…oh hell. He was wearing even more elaborate robes than the priest. Gaudier, too – spirals and runes and etchings and who knew what kind of claptrap. Most of it was probably for show, just like him.
Wizards. Ugh.
(sorcerers, warlocks, witches, whatever they were called they were all bad news)
“My request,” he said, “is much less tedious than that oaf’s.”
“Explain,” I said.
“Simple. I challenge you to a game of chess.”
“Chess?”
“I win and you release us. You win and you may throw us into your holy hole or whatever it is. I’m sure a mighty priest such as yourself can easily best-”
“Request denied.”
“What?!”
“Don’t know chess. You’re up to something. Bye.”
“You can’t just-”
The one pleasant thing about wizards: you can get a pretty good distance on them. The man couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred ten under that robe, and even all the flailing didn’t spoil the aerodynamics. He skipped three times before sinking.

***

And at last, there was one. Glaring at me with generic stoicism. Chin jutting out in what I was pretty sure was meant to be defiance, (I wouldn’t laugh, I wouldn’t laugh, I wouldn’t laugh….DAMN human chins looked funny), eyes smouldering with generic justice and rightful fury.
“Request,” I said.
“Untie me,” he demanded. “I’ll throw myself in.”
Ah. One of THOSE, and right on schedule.
Heroes. Ugh.
I bent over, mouth agape, and shredded his restraints. Much to my surprise he didn’t bother jumping me – not that any weapon he could’ve hidden would’ve penetrated my scales – and instead stood slowly and deliberately, rubbing his wrists and ankles and pacing slowly at the edge of the sacred pool. Calculating. Weighing.
Oh, this could be good.
At last he straightened up to his full (deeply unimpressive) height, looked me in the eye, and spoke.
“I will return.”
“Bye.”
A beautiful dive for a land mammal, arced like an arrow. He hit the water with barely a splash, and no red flowed forth – every rock had been missed.
Astounding. I broke into applause as he surfaced, gasping for air, and I think he must’ve impressed the sacred crocodile too because it didn’t attack until he was halfway out of the water.

A job well done and noon still not here. Might be just enough time to eat a cow and bully my way into a decent basking spot.
Maybe Sun-days weren’t so bad after all.

The well was deep, dark and smelled like clean old moss. There was a sound about it that reminded Jesse of ripples.
“Now, throw in the pebble and shut your eyes,” said his grandmother.
He did.
“Now concentrate.”
He did.
“And breathe out-”
He
“-and in.”
did.

“Nothing happened,” he said.
“Look.”
He looked, jumped, and dropped the top six scoops of the ice cream cone down the well. Then he said a few words that he normally pretended he didn’t know.
“Oh, poor little Jesse. Well, at least you still have half the cone!”
“Wow.”
“Eat it slow, love. Only one wish per customer – more would make a mess. If wishes were fishes… well, you’d eat more fishsticks. Than you already do, that is.”
“Wow,” said Jesse, but now it was filler, just a verbal tic while his brain rolled around. “Wow.”

***

Jesse’s brain kept rolling. He grew up and up and it rolled on and on as he got older and older and finally it stopped on a conclusion right around the time he received his MBA.
“So,” asked Ben, “you got a plan?”
“As of five seconds ago,” said Jesse. He looked at Ben – his best friend or probably something close to it – and he looked at the number of glasses in front of him and he decided this was just about right. “Hey, want to invest in something?”
“Huh?”
“Real estate.”
“What kind?”
“I’m gonna buy the farm.”
Ben’s brows furrowed, taking most of his head with them. “Woah. That should be your LAST plan, not your first.”
“My grandparent’s farm.”
“Oh. Why? Condos?”
“Not quite.”

***

Inconveniently enough, Jesse’s grandmother had gone and gotten herself buried on the lot next to his grandfather. He had to pay quite a lot of money to have them moved, and he hoped they hadn’t seeped into the water table. Grandfather had certainly had enough time to percolate.
So they were overbudget already, which made Ben nervous. But that was fine, that was fine, that was fine. The main thing was the hydrology, and the charts and the maps and the funny little man with the fussy little ruler were all in accord on that.
It was a fine day for cautious optimism, but Jesse indulged himself and speculated recklessly for half an hour.
What with the land deal, the survey, the permits, and the contractors, a new pair of pants could squeak onto the company ledger without anyone noticing.

***

The test bore was shallow, shone under the flashlight’s beam, and smelled like freshly turned soil.
The pebble was tiny and irregular and as deeply, thoroughly dull as Jesse could find.
He flicked it in.
“Holy shit!” said Ben.
Jesse’s triumph was undimmed by the toppling of very nearly all the ice cream cone down the well. Twenty scoops had been a bit much, but he’d been guesstimating.
“So… what are we thinking? We’ve got to keep this exclusive or else whackaloons might get at it.”
“Agreed.”
“Got to keep it among the hands of those who wouldn’t abuse it.”
“Of course.”
“There’s at least one way to ensure that, I’d wager.”
“I know exactly what you’re thinking.”
“So then…a million a shot? Two million?”
“Ten,” said Jesse. “But if you buy a shot at each well, you get the second one at half price.”
“Nice.”
“Nice.”
Their fists bumped together lightly.

***

Fads rippled through the wealthy. Some now flew without the need of private jets. Some stopped aging. Some owned castles made of candy that never spoiled.
There was an art to one-upsmanship, especially of the kind you only ever got two (at a great price!) chances to exercise.
Around a year in they started to run into problems with repeat clients.
“No, you can’t pay someone else to make your wish for you. Doesn’t work.”
“No, you can’t make a selfless wish and get it to happen anyways. Doesn’t work.”
“No, you can’t wish for more wishes. Doesn’t work.”
“No, you can’t wish super hard and get half a wish out of the same well. Doesn’t work.”
“No you can’t.”
After that last one Ben and Jesse knew they’d reached the tipping point.
So they let the great and powerful and obscenely, fabulously, gloriously profligate squirm and writhe and twist in the wind for six months more, and then they unveiled the all-new Third Well.
Ben unexpectedly died while testing it of completely natural causes that nobody was even a little suspicious of, after signing over all of his worldly possessions to Jesse in a manner that everyone agreed was completely normal.

***

Well Four was a big splash.
Well the Fifth did big trade.
Six Wells was many little pipes and faucets linked together in a way that gave the illusion of hundreds of wells and hundreds of wishes, a haunting sight indeed.
“Lucky” Well Seven had one of the longest reservation lists in their history.

Really, it was only at Wellty-One that they ran into problems. Big problems to go with the big money – Forty Well and Seven Gulps To Go had cost ninety billion a shot; this one was due to stand at an even trillion. Of course, it all wished the same, but at this point the exclusivity was the real draw.
Anyone who was worth anything had taken a shot at the Wishing Well. But how many had taken the queue all the way?
“It’s dry.”
Jesse fidgeted with a perfect, golden fountain pen that beautifully matched his perfect, golden, unaging fingers. He liked the pen; it had been his tenth wish as a little present to himself. “So? Drill deeper. The water table’s still there.”
“Oh no, sir. The water’s fine. It’s the wishes that are missing.”
Jesse broke his pen in half quarters eighths sixteenths and stopped halfway through thirty-seconds to scream himself hoarse entirely in swearwords.

Doubling the depth worked, especially once Jesse wished himself a few tons of brandy.

***

The subsequent project – Well, the Universe, and Everything had to be drilled half again as deep.
Then half again.
Then double that twice.
In lieu of expensive mining drills, Jesse began to wish for deeper wells. That lasted him up until Well Five Zero.

Well Five Zero was so deep you couldn’t imagine it as real. Well Five Zero was blacker than the inside of a cave cricket’s innards. Well Five Zero smelled like the secrets that Earth itself had forgotten.
Jesse dropped a pebble down Well Five Zero and wished for Well Over Halfway and got nothing but an itchy nose a sneeze and a feeling of grave and terrible remorse.
“Personal appointment only, no listed price,” Jesse muttered. And he ran into his office and began sweating his way through his carpet, which he’d managed to get a good head start on before someone knocked at his door and told him that Forty Nine: The Well seemed to be having some sort of problem.

***

Wells forty-eight to thirty fell apart in the course of a few days, causing a corresponding riot in the news, stocks, and private lives of thousands of excessively to obscenely wealthy individuals and societies.
It held stable for a week at well sixteen, and that was enough time for hope to get nice and big before it was crushed in the loss of everything down to well three.
Two.
One.

Jesse’s email pinged.
He stared at it.
The Wishing Well was now dry.
“Wow,” he said.
He sat there in the office, sixty stories above the spot where his grandparent’s farmhouse had once stood, vaguely but powerfully sure that he was meant to say something else.
“Wow,” he said.
Nope. Nothing else came to mind.
“Wow.”
Maybe there was something else he was meant to feel?
“Wow.”
Not particularly.
“Wow.”
Come to think of it, he didn’t feel like he wanted to say ‘wow’ anymore either.
Or wanted anything else at all.

***

Sixteen rescue efforts at the Wishing Well Center failed due to instantaneous and overpowering apathy before attempts were called off indefinitely and the entire complex was condemned on account of total depletion of the local wanter table. Trespassers were prevented by sign, barricade, and a little life preserver attached to a rope that could be used to retrieve the aimless, listless bodies of anyone that made it three feet past the fence.

It wasn’t all bad. Much like Chernobyl, nature took over where humans feared to tread. Vines climbed; trees grew; shrubs ran riot. Topiaries and potted plants seized their days, their time in the sun.
The wells overflowed and trickled everywhere. Little ponds and streams came and went.
In those fleeting waters swam fishes, so many fishes. And not one of them wanted for a thing.

The last person into the room moved hard and fast, but not as much so as their words.
“Alright. This job can’t wait, so introductions are fast. We’re in the parking lot in three, at the scene in ten. Ready? Steady. Go.”
A finger snapped out, pointed at a wall of meat with a man’s head on it. “This is Lenn. He’s our backup. If something goes wrong, Lenn deals with it. If one of you gets cold feet, Lenn deals with it.”
“Heh,” enunciated Lenn. He picked his nose with calculated menace and discarded the results with calculated indifference.
A second finger, aimed at what appeared to be a twelve-year-old. “This is Jenny. Jenny’s our electronics expert. No alarms, no problems.”
Jenny waved.
“Now, since our regular locksmith got busted for drunk and disorderly last night, this is our backup plan. Yugopogo. His mother was an earwig, his father was a whale, got a little bit of head and hardly any tail. And he gets us through the door.”
“Hello,” I said. Jenny waved again; I bobbled a flipper politely.
“And my name’s Your Boss and I’m your getaway driver tonight. Now let’s get out there and make some money.”

The drive over was tense, although Jenny and I got in a couple rounds of rock-paper-scissors to shake out some of the worst jitters. But then we were there, and we were parked, and Your Boss slammed the door open and whispered something very urgent and we were out and up and at the employee side door of the city’s finest chain pizza outlet, established 1992.
“Ready?” asked Jenny.
“Steady,” I replied.
“Go,” said Lenn, bopping me on the back.
I flinched, nodded, pulled out a finely-braided strand of dampened seaweed, and pushed it into the lock, which it bonelessly glided off of and fell apart.
“Uh,” I said.
Lenn cracked his knuckles.
“Maybe try again?” Jenny suggested.
“Sure. Sure. One second.”
This time I used my backup seaweed. No good.
“Shoot,” I said. I sagged against the door in sorrow, popping it off its hinges and sending it flying into the building, where every single alarm went off at once. Half a second later the twenty-nine cop cars filling the parking lot turned on their lights.
“Oh no,” I said.
“Oh YES,” said Lenn. He raised his hands above his head, hollered, shaped them into fists, and ran towards the ruckus making whooping noises.
I looked to Jenny for moral support, but she was already inside and accelerating.

“Red wire or blue wire?”
“There are no wires.”
“Oh. What do we do then?”
Jenny looked under the desk next to the safe, said “it’s two-five-six-seven-nine-four,” and entered that. It popped open, revealing it to be completely empty.
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Didn’t expect that.”
“How’d you know?”
“Well, people write down their passwords in the worst places. But I what I MEANT was that I thought there was supposed to be money in here.”
“So did I.”
Someone kicked down a door (unnecessary) and shouted something very authoritative (maybe necessary?).
“Hide!”
We ducked back into the corridor, spun through two doors, ran into the employee washroom and crammed ourselves into the single stall – Jenny on the toilet, myself inside it. Exactly two seconds later six cops crowded in with us.
“Freeze,” said the smallest cop.
“Already done,” said Jenny. “Muscle cramps.”
“Yeah, you gotta stretch first. C’mon with us.”
One of the larger cops looked down at me. “Hey, you seeing this?”
“Just a shoal of fish,” said the smallest cop dismissively. “Now let’s do that c’monning. We’ve got an early night ahead of us.”
They left, and six minutes later so did I, trailing shame and toilet water all the way out into the now-deserted parking lot.
“Hi,” I said, sticking my head into the car.
Your Boss wasn’t there.

As a matter of fact, Your Boss was standing four feet behind me with a taser in one hand and a cellphone in the other.
“Hi,” I said again.
“Shut up,” she growled at me. “Last time I bring a damned lake monster on a job. Do you know how fast you screwed this up?”
“Gosh I’m real sorry.”
“Not sorry enough. There was barely enough time for me to clear out the safe while you three kicked up a fuss! I almost got caught! I almost got nabbed! Do you know how depressing that is?”
“Sort of,” I said. “But I pretended to be fish.”
The parking lot filled with flashing light again; a lone cop car with five unalone cops. They spread out in an elaborate series of showy poses.
“Officers!” said Your Boss. “I have apprehended the mastermind behind tonight’s events.”
The cops looked at me.
“Well, you can’t prove that,” one said.
“Security footage will show otherwise,” she said.
“We already checked that, lady. Two perps showed up.”
“What!? There were THREE.”
“Nah, nah. A big guy, a little girl, and a suspicious floating log. Nothing strange about it. You should go have a lie down.”
Your Boss shot me with the taser, which failed to penetrate my blubber. In the confusion of the arrest I slunk away across the road, through the culvert, down the creek, and back into the lake.
Why did this sort of thing always happen to me? Next time I was going to try retail.