jamieproctor.ca

It was a house designed for soothing worn senses.  The chairs were overstuffed and worn; the lights were soft and homely; the floors creaked in only the quietest and most reassuring ways.  Even the timbers that made up the walls seemed to have been softened by time and care, turned into something battered and buttery that couldn’t so much as hurt a fly.  After half an hour of exposure the cruelest scoundrel would feel their heart soften and melt like chocolate in a microwave, and the everyday cares and woes of the universe would shrivel up and vanish without a word.  It was a place for rest and calm and love, and nobody had been so much as cross in it for decades.

Lauren was beginning to get a bit cross. 

Honestly, what was the POINT of grandchildren?  Children she could understand – you went to the effort to make the damned things, so you might as well keep working on them so it wasn’t a total waste of time – but grandchildren just sort of appeared, and half the work put into them wasn’t even something you were personally responsible for.  And then they grow up immediately and you go to all the effort of making them their favourite crab cakes and the little shitheads don’t even bother to let you know they aren’t going to show up so now you have two plates of goddamned crab cakes and you can barely finish half a plate now because you’re old and tired and your stomach hates being fed so much you’ll hear about it half the night if you actually let yourself eat as much as you like for CHRIST’S sake. 

“Piss,” she said aloud.  And it almost made the day much worse, because she said it at the same time as there was a tiny little knock on the door, and nearly missed it. 

There was nobody outside in the little salt-scoured excuse for a seaside garden, not even the usual tired snails.  But there was a letter jammed half-under the humorous ‘GO AWAY’ mat that Laurel had given her for Christmas a few years ago. 

Well, nothing better to do.  Lauren dragged it back inside, opened it with a kitchen knife, and read it over the sink while eating a crab cake. 

we have the kID.  BrING the B O T T L E to the DEAD PIEr by evENing

It wasn’t signed. 

Well.  That made things better.  As things stood she had been going to go from cross to worried in about an hour, but now she could focus on being fucking furious instead, which was much less stressful and more fun. 

***

Evening was a nice long ways away, which meant Lauren had time to pack even if she was early, which she was going to be.  Nobody wanted to be late to a hostage exchange, even if it was just family and you didn’t have to impress them.  It was just embarrassing. 

So she took her old rucksack and she put some crab cakes in it for the trip, and some more for Laurel, and some odds and ends and her big knick knack and of course two bottles from the big shelf in her cellar, wrapped carefully in . 

Then she left.  The wind was salty and fresh and the gulls were loud and crude and the sun was fighting the clouds and it all was so wonderful and bright that she found herself whistling, which was a terribly inappropriate thing to do on your way to a hostage exchange. 

She didn’t stop though.  She was in a santy anna sort of mood. 

“Do you have grandkids?” she asked one of the larger gulls, which was sitting on a rock glowering at her.  It warked at her hatefully.  “I do.  I have three and counting and this one’s the second one and she is a right pain in the asshole.”
It warked at her again. 

“Cloaca, for you.”
Wark. 
“Oh go away.”

She started up santy anna again.  Someone was getting Molino del Rey’d today. 

***

The Dead Pier was dead.  It was in the name. 

Once upon a time people had brought in nets and lobster traps and swore and cut themselves and fallen off it while drunk and yelled hellos and goodbyes and occasionally pissed off it.  But then the shoals had gotten all overfished and the boats had gone farther afield and now it was empty except for the occasional necking teenage couple.  Not many of those either, since there were many more romantic places to lose your virginity that also didn’t smell as badly of antique fish guts. 

Lauren had worked the Dead Pier, back when it was Shipley’s Pier.  And she’d never fallen off it.  This would be like going home, except home was holding your family hostage and making demands of you, so almost exactly like going home except smelling badly of antique fish guts. 

She breathed deep as she stepped onto it.  Tasted like the old days.  She could almost feel the terrible little sandwiches Charley had made her dissolving in her mouth on a cloud of stale wonderbread. 

“Hey,” someone said from right in front of her, where they were inconsiderately blocking all the light. 

“Fuck off,” Lauren said reasonably.  “I’m reminiscing.”
The interchangeable man scowled.  God she was embarrassed just looking at him.  Even if you were nothing more than a two-bit hired thug that didn’t have the grace to not look the part, at least you could get an impressive tattoo or something.  This asshole looked like he’d been printed off a production line and stocked in a Walmart under ‘goon.’  “Shut up or-”

Lauren was very very bored, so she took her hands out of her pockets and one of them was holding odds and the other was holding ends and she put them together and threw them gently underhand into the interchangeable man’s face, where they latched on and began taking out their frustration.  Crabs warrant their name, even baby ones, and being kept in pockets doesn’t improve their mood any. 

The interchangeable man screamed and clutched at his face so Lauren kicked him where he wasn’t covered and went on her way as the noises died down a bit into whimpers.  Two more interchangeable men kept a wary distance from her at the end of the pier, and between them was Laurel, looking VERY annoyed (good girl) and in front of them was Gus.

“Hey, Gus.”
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t dump both of you off this pier.”
“You only have to pay two guys now.”
Gus thought about that.  She could tell because his whole brow furrowed.  The interchangeable men thought about it too.  She could tell because they looked at each other, then at Gus, then at what their odds were.  They didn’t appear to enjoy them. 

“Take your hands where I can see them,” said Gus.

“They’re already doing that.  Quit stalling to show off and let’s get this done.  What do you want?”
“The bottle.  Take off your coat.  Hands in plain sight.  Drop the bag.  Move slowly.  Put it on the pier.  Stop DOING that!”
“But my hands are in plain sight.”
“Put your fingers back you old shithawk or your grandkid gets it.”
Lauren rolled her eyes (Laurel did too – good girl) and put her fingers back.  Gus was the sort to do something stupid if she pushed a little too hard, which wasn’t good, but he was also the sort to do something stupid if she made him a little angry, which was good. 

She put the bottle on the pier. 

“That’s it?”
“That’s the bottle, yeah.”
Gus pointed at the left interchangeable man over his shoulder.  “Check it.”
The interchangeable man did so, at considerably slow pace and with many changes in his expression.  Lauren gave him a big smile that showed off all eight of her teeth as he picked up the bottle and held it up to the evening sunshine.

“It’s heavy!” he said in surprise. 

“Not for what’s in there,” said Lauren. 

“And it’s glowing!”

“Well, you’re holding it up to the light.”

“And it says ‘retirement’ on the cork.”

Gus relaxed.  She could see it in the way his lips moved into a large smile and his jowls relaxed into a calm set of folds to make a boarhound jealous and his shoulders slumped into their stooped state and his toes unclenched in his gumboots and his guard was down, which was why Lauren chose that moment to step on the interchangeable man’s toe. 
He yelped and flinched two feet in the air and down went the bottle onto the pier, where it presumably broke.  Lauren didn’t really check, because by then she was ten feet away and latching herself to a mooring post with her belt, and just barely in time. 

***

Some of the older sailors Lauren had met back in the day had made ships in bottles, putting tiny replicas of their whole lives in glass cases.  She’d always thought that lacked ambition. 

The ocean was VERY glad to be let out of its cage though, so the appeal to safety made sense.  And fuck knows it had been two and a half jobs to cram it in there in the first place. 

When the tide went out to sea Lauren took the time for a deep breath.  She couldn’t take an angry sea to the gut like she used to, even with forewarning. 

“BITCH.” 

Gus, on the other hand, was all gut.  Even the fist coming for her face had a spare tire or three wrapped around its knuckles.

“FUCKIN’ CHEAT.”
The other fist was a little faster.  Right, Gus was a lefty.  God she was forgetful in her old age. 

“GONNA” and Lauren pulled her knick knack knife from her sleeve and  she never found out what he was gonna. 

God that was going to need a good cleaning later.  He even smelled like stale sweat and beer on the inside.  But first things first.

Lauren hobbled up to the edge of the pier and looked over the side.  “Hello.”
“Hi granny.”
“You’re still a good swimmer.”
“Yep.”
“Counted on it.  Want me to throw you a line or…?
“Nah, there’s a ladder.”
“Good.  Get up here and let’s go home.  You can have your crab cakes on the way.”
“Extra-greasy?”
“As always.”

“Good.”

And she was right.  It WAS good. 

Do not even talk to me without my coffee.

It was earliest morning and the sun was still sleeping in behind the very last and longest of the hills.  Everything looked like ink blots, especially the eyes of the few shambling zombies that roamed the streets, grunting and moaning and gurgling at the just-lost moon. 

“Caffeine,” they whined.  “Caffeeeeeeine.”  And their feet took them down the worn grooves in the sidewalk that their bodies had walked ten thousand times before, never once with the brain in charge, never once with a soul to guide them, to Long Noodle John’s Cigar and Coffee Shack.

***

Don’t even talk to me without my coffee. 

Long Noodle John didn’t sell cigars, but it had been called that since Short Noodle Hoover had set up the place a century back and he didn’t want to push his luck.  You messed with the rituals and omens of the decaffeinated at grave peril, of both your business and of your person. 

So you kept the name of the business and changed your own to match it, and you kept the specials on the menu, and you gave everyone the same damned thing they’d asked for the first day you met them, and you never stopped smiling, and behind the counter you kept that ancient creaking sign that said:

Don’t even talk to me without my coffee.

And you followed its advice as you served them one and all. 

The long, slouching man with a welder’s fingers: red hot black coffee, with no napkin to keep his fingers from burning. 

The single father with eyes buried in many-folded-flesh-flaps in his face: tea, three bags, no sugar, no milk, a squirt of lemon juice from the bright yellow bottle. 

The ragged college person with the thrice-crushed nose: the cheapest, coldest coffee legally saleable. 

The woman in the suit: a triple-quadruple with a stale cookie from the stale cookie box that had, fifty years ago, held cigars. 

The three teenagers with their three backpacks and their three bad haircuts: two coffees and a tea, all of them with one milk and one sugar and honey in the tea.  The tea went to the second-worst haircut. 

And Long Noodle John did it all without a word, without a cleared through, or a cough, or an acknowledging ‘hmm!’ or a ‘have a good one’ or having to say ‘workin’ hard or hardly workin’??!’ or anything.  Because of the sign. 

Good money came from this, since you were dealing with people that weren’t actually awake or even really alive.  You took bills and coins and cards and cheques and small polished bird skulls and shark-tooth necklaces and car keys and land deeds and stocks and bonds and gift certificates and in one case a complete set of flawless dentures made from real ivory, only barely used and still warm from the old man’s first sip of coffee. 

It made good money at the pawn shops and the banks and the so ons and so forths, legal or not.  Ten more years of this and Long Noodle John would be free to spend the rest of his life without seeing a single bean. 

If they didn’t get him first. 

***

Don’t even talk to me without my coffee.

The first rays of gold breached the treeline, crawled down the sides of the buildings.  Long Noodle John’s customers hissed and recoiled and snarled at the sun, eyes averted into the safety of their own shadows as they scurried to him like rats boarding a ship sinking straight into hell.  They tripped, they crawled, they ran to him with trembling hands and buckling backs, limping and wheezing as the awful truth of the morning began to beat down on them in full. 

Chamomiles and chamomiles of leaves and grounds and cups, disposable and indispensable. 

Long Noodle John smiled, and poured, and gave no change. 

Orange Peckle, double-steeped. 

It was almost time for the rush to be over.  Almost time for the relaxing part of his day, where he could start counting his gains and thinking about what island he’d spend his retirement on and whether he should live on martinis or margaritas.  He would smile for real, and laugh, and talk with his voice, using words.  And until the next morning he wouldn’t have to think about caffeine. 

English Breakfest with two sugars. 

Unlike most of his customer base, Long Noodle John believed in early to bed, early to rise, and so he woke up with working eyes, an uncreased face, and a healthy, regular appetite.  He had never revealed this to anyone, for fear of death. 

Early Grey with milk. 

And that.

Dark roast

Was.

Mocha

That.

And a latte.

Done. 

“Oh man, one more thing!”

But not actually.

***

Don’t even talk to me without my coffee.

It was a new customer, and this one was wearing clothing, real clothing, that a person might wear, not whatever cloth could be placed on a barely-animate scarecrow.  It was wide-eyed.  It was bright-eyed.  It was bushy of tail and mint of breath and it was striding up to the counter and putting down exact change and asking for a herbal blend WITH ITS MOUTH and Long Noodle John couldn’t close his mouth or believe his eyes or stop the horrible droning sound of rushing blood from filling his ears.

“Well gosh I didn’t know that this place was here hahahaha joke’s on me well now there I was jogging and good thing I’ve got this wallet on me and hey no rush now man yeah can’t go too fast in the morning  you know or else well you know it’s no fun at all, gotta ease into it, y’know?”
Long Noodle John nodded mutely.  He felt the weight of a great and powerful embarrassment on his neck, trying to snap it.  His fingers moved without guidance and put bags and water and heat together, hoping this would save him. 

“Here y’go!”

He took the change. 

“So, working hard or hardly workin’?” inquired the stranger, voice loud and happy and echoing from one side of the street to another.

Long Noodle John shrugged and almost lost a shoulderblade. 

“I bet you get LOTS of traffic this time of day!”
His smile was cracking.
“Well, see you tomorrow!  I’ll bring photos of my cat, you can have them as a tip!”

Nod.  Smile.  Cry inside. 

“G’bye!” said the stranger.  “And really you should stop selling cigars, y’know?  Bad for you!”
“It’s historical,” said Long Noodle John. 

Every eye turned to him, sunken and cold and dead over their warm beverages. 

“Oh shit.”

***

Don’t even talk to me without my coffee.

That’s what it says on the sign of Medium Noodle Davy’s Cigar and Coffee Shack.  He got it embossed for good measure. 

And just to be safe, he works with his jaw wired shut. 

The doorbell was a dreary little dead thing – cracked and chipped and worn from too many fingers too long ago – but it might as well have been a venomous snake the way it looked to Janet. 

She pushed it anyways.  There were some dares you didn’t back down from, even if it was your best friend who’d made them.  Especially if it was your best friend that made them. 

There was no footsteps, no oncoming shuffle, no creak of the floorboards.  First the door was shut and the house was empty and then they weren’t and there he was in front of her, shortish and squatish and with a crease to his brows that made him look like you’d interrupted him at all times from some very important thought.  His skin was all over rough and chapped and ridged and his eyes were a murky puddle. 

The Lizard Man. 

He didn’t say a single thing to her, just waited patiently.  Probably had this sort of thing happen to him all the time.  If she was lucky he’d just slam the door in her face. 

He waited.  And just like it had when Yasmine made her dare, Janet’s nerve cracked. 

“Can I see your basement?” she asked. 

The Lizard Man’s brow furrowed a little more deeply. 

“It’s for a dare,” she caved, and then because oh what the hell might as well spill everything: “my friends all think you keep bodies down there.”

A snort came through the Lizard Man’s nose, a distant cousin to a giggle.  But he opened the door wider and turned on his heel and damnit there was a dare to live up to. 

Hopefully. 

***

The Lizard Man’s house was dry and dusty.  Everything was in its place, had been put in its place decades ago, and had never been moved again.  It made Janet think of her grandmother’s house, especially her grandfather’s room.  His shaving razor was still set on the counter where he’d left it, and when she put it back in the wrong place – just to take a look, that was all – the next time they’d visited it’d been right back where it came from. 

The Lizard Man wasn’t as old as her grandmother.  But his eyes were.  Funny, that. 

Unsurprisingly, there were lizards – none of them caged, all of them free to do as they pleased, which was mostly sit there and not move, like most lizards and most people.  Thin little elegant ones stuck on the walls blinking with reproachful eyes at the noisy new intruder (somehow Janet’s feet weren’t capable of the same noiselessness as the Lizard Man’s).  A couple big fat ones on the kitchen table eating carefully from a bowl of chopped plants and plant byproducts.  A small bug-eyed one atop the refrigerator, which the Lizard Man gently took down and placed on his head.  It seemed satisfied with this, although it kept a wary gaze on Janet with one rotating eyeball.  She’d have returned the favour if she could have. 

The door to the basement was bigger than she’d have assumed.  Most old houses hid them in narrow little doors that looked like they’d open up cupboards or closets; this was nearly a front door itself.  But it opened with a special little key in the Lizard Man’s hand and the stairs led down, so she followed. 

The door shut itself after her, and it was only when they reached the bottom of the stairs that Janet asked herself why anyone would need a key to their own basement. 

***

The basement was less dusty, in defiance of natural law.  Soft red light seeped from the lamps overhead, and around them were many more lizards.  Some of them hung from the rafters; some of them squatted on the floor.  A big pile of them were piled up in a big pile.

A VERY big pile.  Some of the lizards were bigger than Janet.  As a matter of fact, they looked like something she’d seen at the zoo.  Dragons?  Komodo Dragons.  She wanted to ask, but was worried about the answer, so she didn’t.

The Lizard Man ignored the dragons.  The dragons ignored the Lizard Man.  They did eye up Janet some, but in a very disinterested way, which suited her fine.  Their tour group had come by the dragons enclosure during feeding time, and she knew those shut-tight mouths had awfully big teeth.  Was this legal?  She was sure this couldn’t be legal.  Even if the Lizard Man had a permit somewhere for breeding – Ten?  Twenty?  More? – Komodo dragons in his house, surely they’d get him for his basement.  This had to be bigger than the house. 

There was another staircase, which was confusing because Janet’s house only had one basement and it still flooded every spring because the water table was high, or so her mom cursed.  The Lizard Man’s staircase was cool and a little damp but not flooded.

The second basement, however, was. 

***

Actually, maybe it wasn’t a basement.  Janet was pretty sure that even if basements could have cut-stone walls, they didn’t have stalactites.  A little line of lights marched away down the center of the ceiling into the far-away night, out of sight. 

There was a boat, which the Lizard Man got into.  Then he waited. 

Yasmine really, really couldn’t claim Janet had chickened out by now.  She really couldn’t. 

But Janet’s grandmother had told her many times about the importance of not doing things by halves, so she got into the boat too. 

There were no oars, which was odd.  Then the Lizard Man tugged gently on the anchor, and it tugged back, and a lizard head the size of the boat breached the water and blew gently over them through its nose, washing them both in cold spray and mosasaur snot. 

It tasted like salt, and while Janet was spitting and coughing the boat was taken up by the anchor and gently but speedily towed away until the dock at the entrance of the second not-basement was out of sight and mind. 

Other mosasaurs followed them alongside, just as big, smaller, bigger than the one hauling their boat.  They were green and black and blue and white-bellied and striped and spotted and stippled, all very faint and very soft in the faint brightness from the cavern’s ceiling.  Then they grew brilliant and beautiful and gorgeous, and Janet turned her eyes up from the water and saw the city. 

***

There was a special dock for the Lizard Man’s boat in the harbour, and an emissary was waiting for him.  It consisted of lizard-men. 

These ones were a lot more lizard and a lot less men, but they seemed friendly enough – moreso than the Lizard Man, if Janet were being honest and just a little cruel.  They bowed to him and shook his hand, and they waited politely to greet her with nods and hisses as the Lizard Man introduced them with his silent manners.  Some of them were bigger than her and some of them weren’t, and that and the beautiful shining coats they wore were all that Janet had time to notice before they were off through the city, the beautiful stony city. 

It was high and bright and there were lights on every corner, little cages filled with lively-glowing bugs tended to by the careful hands of lizard-men.  They shone down upon houses and causeways and aqueducts and halls and wells and even stables where the lizard-men tended and fed giant rainbow-scaled snakes and made bright clothing from their shed skins.  Little gliding lizards swooped from tower to tower, filling the giant empty space above their heads where the cavern climbed out of sight, and the torchlight shone off their white bellies.  Beautiful and complicated carvings of lizards decorated every surface, doing much the same thing as the living ones around them.

There was a grand hall, but there was no throne, only a wide amphitheatre.  Lizard-men of all kinds and sizes and demeanors filled it and Janet and the Lizard Man stood in the center of it and they called and chirruped and croaked their cases one after another, voting and deliberating and making the odd inquiry. 

It reminded Janet of the videos they’d seen on parliamentary procedure in civics class, except she was actually interested. 

Then the Lizard Man spoke. 

***

It was impossible for her to describe the sounds that came out of him.  They were big, and he didn’t open his mouth to make them, and they made the floor shiver and her hair stand on end.  They filled the air and the stone and the flesh and they coddled and rocked and warmed them safely until everything was right and proper and done and sensible, and by the time they were done Janet was asleep, and who wouldn’t be?

She woke up in her bed.  Yasmine insisted she’d made the whole thing up. 

Ten years later, the Lizard Man died. 

***

His will was a little unusual, but anyone who’d have wanted to make a fuss didn’t dare, cowed by the surprisingly wealthy and intense gazes of his lawyers and their very large and beautifully rainbow-patterned briefcases.  And Janet certainly wasn’t about to.  Housing was hard to come by these days, and the old building was in good condition. 

She did dust, though.  Her grandmother had always been very insistent on dusting. 

The foot-sound was the first thing that caught their attention: the big sucking slorp of a giant foot yanking itself out of ankle-deep mud.  Their heads jerked up and their mouths opened to yell warnings – spilling lovely fresh foliage everywhere, barely cropped – but it was all too late to even start, let alone make it in time, and so the last sound was the inevitable big meaty THUNK of her mouth driving directly through scale, skin, meat, muscles, and finally a good chunk of bone. 

It was a good sound and it tasted like sweet salty red. 

The rest of the meaties ran away from the lakeside waving their long tails and worbling their fat floppy alarms and it was good, so very good, that with the adrenaline in her veins and the red in her mouth and the tingle in her teeth she reared upright and sang the murder-song, which sounded like this:

I.  AM.  HERE!
I.  AM.  HAPPY!
I DID A MURDER!

ME!  I DID!
THIS MADE ME HAPPY!
MURDER!  MURDER!  MURDER MURDER YAAAAAAAAY MURDER!
DON’T MESS WITH ME!

A lot of it was subsonic and rumbly and was done with her mouth closed, hiding her six-inch banana-teeth behind her gums while her saliva wiped off the spicy red from them.  It built up her appetite to excruciating levels and she made short, sharp work of the meaty’s body when she was done. 

Nothing like the murder-song to make your appetite surge.

After that she went for a nap, and she dreamed, and her dreams, like her, were big.   Forty foot long (not her feet: her feet were bigger), fifteen foot high, with a head like a refrigerator filled with teeth and a pair of eagle eyes backed to a turkey vulture’s nose for trouble.  A lovely set of equipment for any tyrant lizard king, awake or asleep. 

Her dream was simple and powerful and it went like so:

***

There were a bunch of meaties by a lakeside and she ran up to them but her feet stuck in the mud and they slid away from her without using their legs.  She tried singing the murder-song and they all fell over dead but kept sliding and then she fell over and into the lake and the lake was upside-down and inside-out, so she was in the middle of a dry hill while everything else was swimming in the water and she was by herself until  

***

she woke up. 

Well.  What the heck did THAT mean?

It was raining now, and she wondered if she’d woken up because the water was trickling into her nose.  She snorted phlegm in a little yellow flume and shook her head free of dampness and doubt. 

Why must her head be full of odd ideas when she slept?  Something must be bringing them into her body when she wasn’t looking; maybe the meaty had been full of bad ideas.  It hadn’t been able to hear her when she was creeping up on it so clearly its head wasn’t a sensible one.  Best not to dwell on it but to simply move through it. 

After she had a little more of it for breakfast. 

A big full belly refilled, a nap taken, a rain ended, a drink at the lake (she checked to make sure it wasn’t inside-out OR upside-down first: it was neither), and she was fit as a fiddlehead fern and taking a stroll through the woods, peeing on things so nobody else got clever ideas about hunting ‘round these parts.  Little things sang in the trees and bushes; big things sang in the blue sky; the air smelled like urine and promise, and she realized that since she was happy as a clam she too should sing the happy-song, which sounded like this:
I AM HAPPY.
OH SO HAPPY.
OH SO HAPPY AND RUMBLY AND FULL.
I MURDERED YESTERDAY AND ATE TODAY AND SLEPT AND NOW I’M HAVING A NICE SLOW WALK

OH SO HAPPY THAT I CAN HARDLY BELIEVE IT’S REAL

And as she walked and sang the low deep quivering notes of the happy-song her mind left her body to do its own things and it made up its own story and it went like so:

***

She was walking through the forest and all the trees were made of meat but then they blew away and standing there was a very pretty man and they bobbed their heads and wiggled their tails at each other and sang the happy-song and made many romantic memories.  Then they built a little nest and they raised a little clutch and they all lived together a very little much until she was lying starved and expiring in a pile of smouldering rubble somewhere which really jolted her

***

out of her daydream. 

That surely wasn’t what she’d been planning to fantasize of.  At least, not the last bit.  Meeting a very pretty man sounded nice.  Expiring in a pile of smouldering rubble sounded not at all pleasant and VERY unfitting of the happy-song.

Which she had stopped singing at some point, she realized. 

Well.  That was unhappying in and of itself, and now the day was ruined.  The small things in the trees and bushes seemed whiny; the sky was empty and smirking, and even the urine in the air no longer filled her with pride.  The absence of the happy-song was merely the last straw, and so she sulked her way along the remainder of this stretch of her border, peeing with duty rather than joy.  Stay out of my way, it said.  I’m in a bad mood and I’ve got big sharp teeth.  Don’t mess with me.  Unless you’re meaties in which case please please please come in; there’s a nice lake here and I’ll only eat some of you a little lot. 

She was tired early.  Not even proper-tired in her muscles after a nice day with lots of fun that ended in lots of food; weighty-tired, inside herself, like she’d eaten a rock even though she’d never tried doing that again after the one experiment with a pebble when she was a baby.  It dragged her down and made her eyes close and the world shrink and she found the nearest little thicket that offered some protection from the nighttime rains she could smell on the horizon and as she pulled herself towards it she curled her tongue and arced her neck and uttered the first notes of her lonely-song, which sounded like this:

I AM ALL BY MYSELF
ALONE
THAT SUCKS
PLEASE IF YOU’RE NICE COME SEE ME AND WE CAN HANG OUT
FOR A WHILE
IF YOU’RE INTO THAT AND I LIKE YOU

I PROMISE I’M LONELY BUT NOT IN A SAD WAY JUST A TRAGIC ONE
THESE ARE DISTINCT THINGS
I AM VERY VERY LONELY

She sang the lonely-song a lot these days.  Those days too, come to think of it.  After she was done she laid down and set her jawbone to the ground to listen for the vibration of someone else. 

Then she fell asleep and pretended she’d meant to do that, although she surely hadn’t meant to have a nightmare.  It was a very direct and unsubtle nightmare, and it went like so:

***

She dropped dead in a burning gulch and fell asleep and a cliff fell on her and jumped up and down for ever and ever and ever and ever until the wind blew it away and let her nose stick out.  Then a passing stubby little meaty with two legs and no tail at all waddled by and pulled her out and dragged her away for other meaties to look at and even though she was terribly, terribly thin they made her stand straight up and show her thin bones to them and made silly, sloppy meaty calls that let their mouths fall open and their tongues slap around – ridiculous!  Grotesque!  Grossssss! 

They had no decency at all, they had no fear at all, they had no SONGS at all, and they wouldn’t stop, they just went on and on and on and on and on and

***

she woke up with a start and a snort and a little blurt of a song-stub that wasn’t very friendly AT ALL. 

Her dreams were awful these days.  That was the sixth time she’d had the same one, and if she were capable of counting she would be even more peeved. 

But it was a new dawn, a new day, and she could see a little herd of meaties grazing on the lovely fresh foliage down at the lakeside, unaware of her presence. 

She’d go and have breakfast.  And if she felt like sleeping after this and found herself dreaming again, maybe this time she could try and see what would happen if she got up and ate the little two-legged meaties. 

Maybe then they’d stop making all those stupid noises. 

It was a good, comforting, comfortable thought, and as she prowled down towards the lakeside she could already feel the happy tingle of the murder-song warming itself in the back of her throat.

She wished this moment could last forever.