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The phone rang while Marley was in the shower, and it was a relief.  She’d been unable to sleep until past four in the morning, woken up twice before oversleeping, and run out of cereal.  Now that she was fumbling her way out of the nice warm water into the freezing air of the bathroom and dripping all over everywhere things couldn’t get much worse, so the rest of the day had to be pretty good. 

“Marley,” she said cheerfully. 

“Hello there, it’s your aunt Tina.  The peter piper pepper pickers are percolating puppies.”

Marley felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.  “And the kittens are kleaning Kleenex?” she inquired. 

“The dogs are dancing dachshunds in Deutschland.”

“Is the cleaner clapping clutches of the cargo coops?”
“Baseball bats are breaking beef bat batches.”

“SHIT!” said Marley, and hung up.  Her worst fears had been confirmed: she’d have to come in to work today.

That was the problem with working for the Department of Prognostication: your work was so secret that even you never knew what would happen next.

***

Work was a hundred meters underneath a mountain after passing through six separate false entrances inside what looked like an abandoned and triple-condemned mineshaft, each of which was set to collapse and murder you if you put your foot in the wrong place.  It used to be seven but Hodges had forgotten to zig instead of zag a few years back. 

Past the sixth false entrance was a little keypad, which Marley pushed four buttons on to deactivate and then flipped up to reveal the REAL keypad, which needed twenty-six digits forwards and backwards.  At the end of all this the door to work opened up and she went through it and immediately had coffee spilled on her.

“JESUS.”
“Sorry, sorry, shit, sorry, sorry, shit,” said Bruce, as he haplessly watched her wipe scalding caffeine off her arm.  “We’re all a bit nervous right now.”
“And I’m sure cup number six there is helping with that?”
“Eleven.  Things are BAD.”
Marley spoke one of the four forbidden swears.  The air shivered. 

“And now I’m gonna have to report that!”
“Sorry.  They slip out.”
Bruce emitted a kettlelike whine and Marley knew there’d be no speaking to him for the rest of the morning so she left it at that and proceeded into the high security area past the cyberbotomied loborgs. 

High security was a different world.  The walls were bare stone and carefully etched with little things that weren’t words, traced in secretions.  The guards here were blind deaf-mutes who navigated by smell and nodded politely to her as she proceeded past them all into the very depths of the place, past two more secret doors and a deathtrap.

Under the deathtrap was Cell One.  She walked into it, beheld the deep-fields with their careful mushroom farms, breathed deep the fetid air of the sprawling church-settlement, and was barely missed by a hammer. 

“JESUS AGAIN.”

“Hello and good fortune,” said the woman with the hammer, who was a web of crude casts and crooked bones.  “Would you please step aside?  I am trying to break the wall you came through.”

“Escape attempts are prohibited in your contract,” said Marley, seeking comfort in bureaucracy.

“Yes, but there’s nothing wrong with breaking the wall WITHOUT escaping.  One grows hungry for more, you know.  Always more to know from the insides that the outsides keep hidden away.”
“You almost hit me!”
“And that would’ve been very tragic!  Believe me, I’ve broke into enough human insides to see all there is; nothing new would be learned in the slightest.  What good is a breaking without newness to bring?  The candle of the shatterer must be ever-hungry for fresh ruins, for in those remains may be found-”

“I’ve been told you have something to prognosticate,” said Marley, who’d never been much good at dealing with Jehovah’s Witnesses either.

“Oh, yes.  Yes indeed.  We broke open the ceiling and it shattered inwards and broke open all of dorm sixteen, and in the fractures we found something most interesting.  Doom!  Great and powerful and all-encompassing!  Inescapable!  All-encompassing!  The likes of which have not been seen in millions of years!  Why, its cracks run through every crook and cranny of what is to come: not one living thing on this globe will be spared the force of its destruction!  Am I drooling?  You’re giving me that look.”
“Yes.”
The woman with the hammer wiped her mouth.  “Sorry.  But my, the DOOM!  Such a fine doom!  Never heard tell of its like.  It’ll crack the whole WORLD open and spill its knowledge out into every waiting palm.  We’ll all be dead, but we’ll die enlightened as nobody has ever been.  Would you like to know more?  We can start with just a single metatarsal and it’ll all be so much clearer to you, and-”

“Thank you, goodbye,” said Marley, and she locked the door a little faster than necessary. 

“Sorry about your shirt!” called the woman as the seal kicked in. 

***

Cell Two was on another level, past the snakepits and through the caltrops and the deadly mirrorballs whose light brought blindness and sickness and deathness.  Marley could walk it with her eyes shut, which she did out of necessity. 

“Goodbye,” said the man waiting for her inside the door.  His voice was a little muffled due to him wearing his long, tattered set of hooded robes entirely backwards, and facing away from her.  The room he was in was very small, very tidy, and entirely made of simple mirrors.  Opening your eyes was a nice way to nauseate yourself fatally.  They’d lost more than one careless janitor that way. 

“Hello,” said Marley.

“This is incorrect,” said the man.  “I am Hindsight.  You are Marley.   Goodbye to you.”

“I was told you have something to prognosticate,” said Marley, not bothering to hide her irritation. 

“We prognosticate nothing, merely look back upon the inevitable,” said Hindsight with the obnoxious placidity of a lapdog on a pillow. 

“Right.  Yes.  Okay.  What’s inevitable?”
“Everything that has been.”
“What.  Have you.  Learned.”
“Doom.  Its arrival was to be, and its arrival has passed, and it is already upon us.  There can be no stopping it for it is already here and has been for much time.”
“That isn’t helpful.”
“There is nothing to help.  The stakes were set long ago and given up well before our time.  Watch it and you watch what has come before.”

“A little proof you’ve done anything at all might be appreciated.”

A hand was waved, and not for the first time Marley noticed that the palm seemed to be on backwards.  “Your arm was stained and this endorses our accuracy.  We can see its cause by this effect.”
“Predicting things that have already happened isn’t prophecy,” said Marley, who’d thought this many times but not been cross enough to say it aloud.

Hindsight shrugged.  “Who cares about what might happen?  More things have been than will be, and what has, will be.  Or, as you’ve said someone has spoken, ‘those who forget the past are condemned.’”
“’To repeat it.’”

“I spoke correctly and fully.”

Marley wished she could slam the door in his face, but settled for the back of his head.

“Hello,” he called after her affably.  “Hello, hello.”

***

There was no door to Cell Three.  Its inhabitants didn’t believe in them.  Instead a small section of the otherwise solid stone wall was sealed with cheap unpainted drywall, which Marley broke through using the handily provided sledgehammer. 

“So,” she said to the box in the middle of the room.  “You’ve had some prophecies.”
“Yes,” said the box.  It was four feet tall and not very wide.  There was a window filled with unpleasantly sharp barbed wire.  “I looked Inside and saw.”
“Please describe them to me.”
The padlocks festooning the box shook in ecstasy.  “Inside there is disaster already arisen and the shackles are on every neck and in every mind and in every pocket and in every gas tank.  The doom came from within and it ensnared from within and soon we will all be trapped together, gloriously trapped, tied in our carbon chains to a writhing, steaming atmosphere that heaves and pants for air as we all roast in our planetary cell.  This is already here, Inside.”

Marley looked up from taking notes.  “I’m sorry…the doom you forecast is anthropogenic climate change?”
“Not ‘fore.’  Foundcast.  It is with us Inside.”

“Oh.”  She chewed on a nail.  “And the odds that one of the others were prophesizing something different are…”

“Not.”

“Oh.”

“Please reseal me properly next time.  I could feel a draft from….out there.  And take care of that shirt.  It needs to be part of you.”

Marley put up fresh drywall as carefully as she could when she left.  She needed the time to think. 

***

“Report’s done,” she told Bruce tiredly as she got out of the industrial shower.  “Pass it along.”

“Sure thing.  Was it good?”

“You know I’m not allowed to tell you that.”
“All good, just joshin’ yo-“

“And no, it wasn’t.  Just the same old crap.  And you’d better pay me for a new shirt.”

“Right.  Right!  Keep on keeping on, eh?”
Bruce fidgeted with a stapler until about ten minutes after Marley had left, then sighed a long slow wheeze as he fed the report into a fax, which would be picked up in a dropbox in a condemned building. 

That was the trouble with working in the Department of Prognostication: your work was so secret nobody really cared about it. 

The woods were dark at night, but daytime was no slouch either.  There was enough timber between the children and the sun to build a spruce goose ten times over and have leftovers for a good midsummer bonfire. 

“I’m hungry,” said Henry.

“I’m tired,” said Gertie. 

“I’m cold,” said Henry. 

“We’re both cold.”
“And hungry.”
“You already said hungry.”
“Well it’s worth saying twice.”
Gertie could not argue with that, for she had not the energy to spare.  As a matter of fact she had so little energy to spare that she took a root to the toe and fell down and just kept falling, down a slope and over some more (very bumpy) roots and down a small hillock and into a clearing with sun so bright that she squinted and couldn’t have seen which way was up even if she hadn’t just taken a forest to the cranium. 

“Gertie?” called Henry. 

“Guh,” she replied. 

“Gertie, Gertie sister, are you alright?” her brother inquired anxiously as he slid down to her side. 
“I smell bread,” she said faintly.  “That’s a stroke, right?”
“No, I think it’s typhoid,” said Henry.  “Can you feel your arm?  I think your arm hurts when you have a stroke.”
“My arm is fine,” said Gertie, wincing her way upright.  “But I’m seeing a cottage made of baked bread, so that’s not good.”

“Oh no,” said Henry.  “So am I.  Well at least we’re going mad together.”
“Yes,” said Gertie.  “Let’s go mad together with some of that cottage in our stomachs too.”
So they did, handful by delicious handful, dug out with speed that only increased as the nourishing crumbs made their way down from mouth to stomachs that had only taken in stream-water and a few berries, and once they started they couldn’t stop. 

“A bit plain,” said Gertie, chewing carefully.

“A bit crunchy,” said Henry, flicking a flax seed loose from his incisors.

“A bit cheeky,” said the witch, “to go chewing up someone’s doorframe without so much as a word of ‘please.’”

She was most definitely a witch, crone from curly boot-toe and bandy legs to tattered head-shawl and snaggled teeth.  In one hand she held a frog, in the other she held a broom that still smelled of ozone and clouds.  Her eyes were fiercely young for her wrinkled face and her hands were clawed and powerful. 

“Sorry?” tried Henry.

“May we?” offered Gertie.  “We haven’t eaten in days.”

The witch shook her head slowly, tiny bones in her hair clattering like windchimes in a hurricane.  “No, no, no.  You’re doing this all wrong.  My twelve-grain cottage provides many essential nutrients, but you’ll need some protein too.  I’ve butter inside, that’ll help.  And for pity’s sake get some water in you too: the well’s out back and unlike whatever cholera-laden pond you may have found in your wanderings I can promise it’s clear and clean.  Stretch out on the lawn for a minute; I’ll bring out some blankets.”

And so Henry and Gertie spent some time in the woods being looked after while the witch called child support to investigate their stepmother and father. 

In the meantime, she had other projects. 

***

The nearby pond was not fit for drinking water.  Henry and Gertie had been most thoroughly warned off from it many times during their few weeks at the twelve-grain cottage. 

It was, however, rich in many other virtues.  Chief among them were frogs.

“Mine’s biggest,” said Henry.  

“Shh,” said Gertie, who was up to her ankles and poised with a pure and powerful focus that would have made a heron gawp. 

“Hey are you looking?” said Henry, waving his frog.  It blinked with the amphibian lack of fear and forethought typical of its clan. 

“Shhh,” hissed Gertie, snakelike, one hand poised like the viper’s very tooth. 

“You aren’t looking,” said Henry, and threw his frog to her, which she caught with her face. Much water and turmoil followed. 

“You weren’t looking,” Henry defended himself with as they toweled themselves. 

“You weren’t listening,” said Gertie.  “I said ‘shh’ and then ‘shhh’ and you didn’t listen.”
“Have you found it?” asked the witch. 

“This is the biggest frog in the pond!” said Henry, presenting his (recaptured, somewhat ruffled) frog proudly. 
“I saw a bigger one,” said Gertie.  “He screwed it up, though.”
“It wasn’t bigger.  That was just the water.  It was doing refrection.”
“Refraction, Henry,” said the witch.
“Yeah.”
“It looked bigger,” said Gertie, but there was a hint of hesitation in her voice.  “I mean, I think it did.  Sort of.”
“Biggest frog in the pond,” said Henry triumphantly.

“Fine.  Whatever.”
The witch (who was an only child) looked between them.  “Are you both sure?”
“Yeah!”
“Okay.”
“All right then.  Now, watch carefully.”
And the witch put the frog in her cauldron and snapped her fingers and clicked her heels and clucked her tongue and squinted her youthful eyes into the brew. 

“Too much widdershins,” she muttered.  “Can you two whistle three times and dance a little?”
“What kind of dance?”
“Oh, anything will do.”
Gertie did the hokey pokey.  Henry did the Macarena.  The witch reached into the cauldron and felt around. 

“Aha!” she exclaimed in triumph, and then extracted a slightly larger frog.  “Oho?  Uhm.”

“You said it would be a prince,” said Gertie.

“Maybe it was the Hokey Pokey,” suggested Henry.  “That’s not a real dance.”
“And this wasn’t the real biggest frog.  I told you it wasn’t.”
“Jerk.”
“Moron.”
“Children, please,” said the witch.

“Twit.”

“Dolt.”
“Children, PLEASE,” said the witch, clasping both hands over the frog. 

“Dumbass!”
“Shit-for-brains!”

“Children, please please PLEASE step outside for a moment,” said the witch, whose hands were now shining through with an eerie translucent glow that made their teeth ache.  “I think he’s going supercritical.  Jump in the well and use the water as a shield for a little until I say it’s safe, alright?  You can breathe through reeds.”

The two children did as they were told; although Henry did get made fun of by Gertie for how much shorter his reed was than her reed and that he would turn into a frog because of it.   When the witch finally called them back in there was still no prince, but the slightly larger frog had become dog-sized. 

“He’s stable now,” said the witch, “but I don’t think we can release him back into the pond.  You two okay with keeping track of him?”
The frog attempted to eat Henry’s foot.

“I love him,” said Gertie. 

And so it was.

***

Henry and Gertie had never been to a real castle before.  Of course, they’d never lived with a witch before either, but this was almost as interesting.  They’d never seen so many crenellations.  Or a princess, for that matter. 

“Now Henry, you can only help with this if you do exactly as I say, alright?” said the witch. 
Henry nodded. 

“Good boy.  Now, pass me the tincture.”
Henry passed the witch the little jar of tincture, a single tiny drop of which made the princess’s leg as soft and woolly and fuzzy-feeling as a sheep.

“Now pass me the scissors.”

Henry passed the witch her shears, which gently slid through the flesh of the princess without spilling a drop of blood.

“Now pass me my awl.”
Henry passed the witch her awl, which bored a neat little hole into the marrow of the princess’s leg.
“Now pass me the grub.”
Henry passed the witch her little bone-grub, which would crawl inside the leg and eat away all the foulness and leave the healthy marrow and let the princess’s blood run sweet and clear again.”
“Now pass me my thread and needle.”
Henry picked up the thread and picked up the needle and pricked his finger and then fell asleep.  He woke up to a noseful of smelling salts and a lot of sneezing.

“Sorry, Henry – I meant the OTHER needle.  That one’s a sedative,” said the witch sheepishly. 

“Actually, do you have a spare?” asked the princess, who had been taking notes on her operation.  “I’ve had awful insomnia for years.”
“Not this one; it’s too powerful,” said the witch.  “But do you have anything to hand?  I could whip up a little overnighter.”

And so it was that the princess’s sewing machine was bewitched and every evening she pricked her finger upon it and she and the whole castle had a nice refreshing eight hours of deep comfortable sleep with gentle dreams. 

Henry was smug about helping with it, but Gertie was not to be taunted.  She’d had the best time of her life counting battlements. 

***

Gertie opened the door and met the mob. 
“Hello,” she said to the mob. 

“Hello,” said the mob.  They were wielding torches.  Someone had rigged up a little model of a witch and was waving it around on a stick.  “Is the witch home?  We’ve got a bonfire rigged up.”
“Let me ask,” said Gertie.  And she shut the door bit her knuckles a little and then went off to find the witch. 

“Oh yes,” she said, putting down the loaf of twelve-grain bread that Henry had (mostly) not burned at all.  “It’s about that time of year.  Well, let’s get a move on.  You don’t want to feel left out, do you?”

So Henry and Gertie had a lovely midsummer bonfire with marshmallows and suspicious meat products in buns and lots and lots of cold cider.  The witch did the fireworks.  And if nobody involved lived happily EVER after, they at least spent most of their time pretty cheerful and content, which is good enough for anybody. 

Dawn was behind him, coffee was in front of him, the shadows were slowly shrinking from the street and the blood under his nails had finally washed out. 

And then everything was ruined when someone walked into the building. 

“Hey there, Trevor!” said Steven Beecher, or at least the bright shiny smile attached to Steven Beecher’s face that he’d appointed to do all the talking for him. 
“Hello,” said Trevor, and he meant it, but mostly the first syllable. 

“Boy, it’s a cold one out there, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Trevor, who’d spent half an hour unloading a truck in it, after spending half an hour shovelling out the truck in the first place. 
“Gosh!  Geez.  Good thing you’ve got the new hire to help out, eh?  Anyways I was just getting up for a nice Saturday breakfast and hahahaha would you look at me silly clunch I am I didn’t have anything for the eggs and toast and I was wondering if-”

Trevor hefted up a nice big pack of bacon.

“Oh there you have it, got it before I even ask for it!  Thank you!  Oh, and it’s nice and streaky too.”
“Had to trim a lot of fat from it,” grumbled Trevor. 

“Ah, that’s no great problem – heck, I’d take more if you’d left it on.  Nothing wrong with a bit of fat, as long as it isn’t where you sit eh hahahahaha?”

“Haha,” said Trevor. 

“Haha!”
“Haha.”
“Hah!” concluded Steven, and he paid his money and walked out the door and left Trevor to do more of the real work, which he was grateful for because his cleaver hand was itchy. 

***

The coffee was gone too soon, as it always was, and soon Trevor was busy skinning, jointing, gutting, chopping, and – when there was nothing better to do (which wasn’t often, mercifully, given the size of this particular carcass) – measuring and weighing and labelling. 

It always made his fingers itch.  He preferred to work with his hands, and he preferred those hands be dismantling something.  It was soothing. 

What WASN’T soothing was the doorbell.  He had thought to change that for something less jarring, but then the first thing to disturb him would be a customer loudly clearing their throat at the counter like this one was, and that was an even worse shock to the system. 

“Hexcuse me,” harrumphed the customer in question, and oh no, oh dear, it was far too damned early in the day to deal with Esmeralda, both for Trevor’s sanity and for the universe.  Why was she out of her home before noon?  “There happens to be a paying customher heah.”
Trevor grunted, which must have come out servile enough because she didn’t comment.

“Two prime rib steaks, if you hwould be so kind.”
And as luck would have it, those had been the last two things he’d removed, fresh and red and beautiful, shining from their fleshy prison.  He gave them a wipe and a weigh and a wrapping of brown paper that hid all their glory from the world, and then they were handed over into the care of Mrs. Esmeralda Platterton, who held them as if they were raw roadkill. 

“Perhaps, if one might give a hword of hadvice, you might consider hasking your staff to hassist you by minding the front counter.  Good day,” she said in the least sincere voice imaginable, and then she was gone.

And those had been the only good steaks he’d gotten from that damned animal too. 

***

Lunch was cold and clammy and hauntingly immobile and halfway through it Trevor was interrupted by Matthew Gunderson and his sixteen thousand pictures of his grandson, Stewie, who was staying with them while his parents were out doing something Trevor wasn’t interested in.

“-And here’s Stewie coming off the bus, and getting on the bus – oh sorry, those two were backwards – and here he is eating dinner, and oh right I was going to get some dinner for him.  Do you have something for that?”

“What do you want?” said Trevor, and if they were the first words he’d managed in twenty minutes they probably should’ve come out more practiced and less like a bear growling. 

“Oh, I’m not really sure, you know.  Maybe some liver?  It’d be good for Stewie.  Or no, we should really get tongue; he likes it in his sandwiches.  Or a steak – no, too pricey; he’ll make a fuss.  I haven’t done kidney pie in a while but-”

“A bit of everything,” said Trevor rudely, and dumped some sausages on the scale in front of them. 

“Oh yes!  How clever!  My, you always were the smartest boy in town, weren’t you?  Yes, a bit of everything.  My word, Stewie’ll like that.  A good chuckle!  Thank you, thank you!  Have a nice day!”
Trevor bit through his tongue and managed something that sounded like ‘you’re welcome’ and then put away his knife before it went somewhere impolite again. 

***

Scarce three minutes afterwards the door rang while Trevor was packaging up the last of the soup bones.  He looked up and for the first time that day he didn’t feel his lips want to roll back over his teeth.  Trevor didn’t mind Shannon nearly as much as some of his other customers, even if she made him nervous now and then.  Her eyes moved like flies, and her brain was like a quick cold chisel. 
“Saw Gunderson walk away with a bagful and it looked like he was happy,” she explained.  “Fresh meat on the weekend?  Lucky, lucky, lucky.  Got any chops left?”

“One or two,” he said.  “A bit too much fat.”
“I can deal.  I know you’re a perfectionist, but man, trust people when they tell you that’s no great crime.  And I won’t look a gift butchering in the mouth.”
Trevor grunted agreement in a way that was sincere and pulled out his brown paper and string.  As he worked she looked around the shop with that quick, critical gaze of hers. “Where’s your help?”
“My what?”
“Your help, the guy who started last week.  Big hefty lad, but I’d reckon some of that would turn to muscle if he kept at it, eh?”

She was probably right, if Trevor was any judge of meat and bone.  “Gone for good.”
“What?  He’s quit already?  When’d he leave?”
“Just missed him.”
“Wow, quit already, huh?  And here I thought you’d have finally found someone that could make the cut.  You can’t find good help anywhere these days, can you?”
Trevor shrugged.  “If you work at it hard enough, I think just about everyone’s got something useful in them.”

***

Except for the soup bones.  Nobody bought the damned things, even as dog treats. 

Hold up, hold on, give me a second!  Wait up!  Stop, drop, and listen!  You’ve got to listen to me, you just GOTTA.  You’ve got to listen to my idea for a video game!

Okay, so the thing about this game is, it’s a role-playing-game.  It’s fully immersive, and it’s really comprehensive, and it’s happening at this moment, this very moment.  You roll your start randomly, and everything you do determines what happens next.  There is so much RNG and so many huge overarching factors but the moment to moment decision-making is always down to you, and the stats are so complex they’re impossible to figure out, and and and

Oh.  Are you sure?
Oh.  Okay.  I guess yeah, we’re already doing that. 

I’m sorry for wasting your time, I’m going to think this over. 

***

Hello again, my friend my pal my buddy my chum my friend!  You’ll be pleased to know and happy to hear and delighted to find out that I’ve come up with an idea for another video game!
It’s a real-time-strategy thing.  Rare these days I know, but nonetheless – and there’s even some basic automation built in, so you can set up a schedule that happen almost every day to perfect your build order.   There’s limitless depth for micromanagement down to the twitch of a finger or you can zone out to see the big picture and let the whole day drop away without oversight and suffer only non-permanent setbacks.  And the best part is: it’s free-to-play, so you can spend all your time playing it and getting addicted and spending way too much money.  I even set it up so you can combine random experiences from the day’s play overnight and reroll them into new strategies-

Really?  Really really? 
Oh right.  Yes.  I understand.  I guess that’s true. 

Piss in a cup, I was so sure I hadn’t invented real life this time.  Thanks.  Gonna have to work on this. 

***

Alrighty you got a second sure you do now just give me a moment of your time and I promise that if you’ve heard of THIS idea for a video game before I’ll eat my hat to shut myself up and never darken your dork again, this I swear. 

It’s PvP, total free-for-all, all teammates permitted and all backstabs possible.  Everyone can hurt everyone and everyone can’t work alone so you need to learn to trust to get anything done but the possibility is there.  It’s sort of balanced because you’re all playing almost the same character type, but sort of imbalanced because of the uncontrollable start seed.  Every weapon you can think of is usable, but consequences for just opening up on everyone are huge, and-

Wait THAT’S real too, AND it’s only the way total psychopaths think of the world? 

I’m sorry, so sorry, so damned sorry.  I won’t bother you again, I swear. 

***

Hey listen I know I said I wouldn’t bother you again but WOW you wouldn’t believe this idea I had, listen, you’ve got to listen, it’s revolutionary, it’s impossible, it’s the best thing you’ve ever imagined or heard or dreamt. 

It’s an idea for a video game, and it’s a platformer.  An old genre, but a goody: and the best part is, it’s totally customizable in difficulty because it’s all about BALANCE.  Very little jumping, not much parkour, but an infinite number of burdens you can take on that make just moving an exercise in groin-clenching teeth-gritting brow-sweating risk and frustration.  The more you pile up the greater the rewards, but the rewards need you to keep up that weight, and the longer you sweat it the heavier and more tippy and burdensome the responsibilities get, and which will break first your will or your back or will you finally break free and reach the next level?  It’s a bit rpg-elementy in that you get more powerful if you’re higher level so it’s easier but-

Oh come on, surely THAT can’t be real life too!  Well, if you say so, you say so, and you’re right.  Shoot. 

See you later.

***

I know you’re busy these days, but this is too good to not share.  You deserve to be in at the ground floor. 

It’s a puzzle-solver, an absolutely diabolical puzzle-solver.  Anything is a problem, anything is a solution, there’s a gradient to how well you perform – and this is the good bit: you’ll never know precisely how well you did!  You’ll be left to piece together feedback gradually over time to find out if you’ve been getting the right answers or not, and even then you’ll never quite know if you found an optimal route or just stumbled along into a dead-end means-nothing conclusion.  The big secret that we can’t let anyone in on is that everyone gets the same ending, so it’s more about the journey than the destination and it teaches you a valuable lesson about treating arbitrary goals as more important than the satisfaction of the moment which is pretty cool if-

…no dice, huh?

No dice. 

Well.  Easy come easy go.  Thanks for the help, you’ve been a real huge assist here.  As usual. 

***

Okay, okay, okay, I’ve finally got it: this idea is so simple, so brilliant, so straightforward that it almost isn’t a game at all: an idle game.

You sit around, and you can try to do things, but those produce the same results by and by as hoarding your slowly accumulating points and using them to buy things that should make it easier to do things, and you do it all to make an arbitrary score value go up – which is diabolically determined by the same points you must spend to make it go up in the first place.  When it goes up there’s always a new goal.  It chews up your day and makes it slip out of your hands and you go to bed unsatisfied and craving more, always more, sure that there’s something you missed, some trick or complex strategy that could’ve sped up your progression and finally brought you to the top of the pinnacle of-

ARGH!

COME ON!
FOR THE LOVE OF PEAT AND BOGS!

Is there NO video game idea that some MORON hasn’t already made into REAL LIFE already!?

At eight thirty, Alexandria Nichols West woke up with a bad hangover and a worse case of bedhead. 

At ten thirty, it ate her neighbour. 

And this was what happened afterwards.  Later.

***

By midnight the last of the fires had gone out, but the smell remained: burnt and stale and acridly thick around the nostrils.  It was a smell with teeth, that could chew at you as it went down your esophagus. 

Which was very merciful because the smell took your mind off the sights.  If you put enough mind into gagging you could pretend the thick, tangled locks spilling from every window, doorway, and ventilation duct were mould or something normal you’d condemn an apartment building for. 

One of the thicker snarls writhed insolently at Marjorie as she sat outside the front stoop.  She flicked a pebble at it, and it ate it. 

“Another six inches in the last half-hour,” she said.  And scooted backwards a few more feet.  “Still not slowing down.”

The snarl, its meal complete, sidled closer.  She threw the nearest clump of burning hair at it and watched in satisfaction as it receded to sulk. 

“Goddamnit.”
Marjorie looked over her shoulder to see Bruce throwing his new cell phone at the crumbled remains of the sidewalk, where it became his old phone.  Perspiration streaked his face and combed the soot from his white moustache. 

“No luck?”
“No.  The landlord says it’s a matter for the health inspectors, the health inspectors say it’s a matter for the cops, the cops say the fire department needs to come in and check the building before they’ll do anything about it, and the fire department said we should consult with pest control.”
“And pest control?”
“I can’t phone them; my son-in-law works there.”
“Oh.  I could do it.”
“Not anymore you can’t.  Unless you want to go back in there for your phone.”
Marjorie looked back in there, but not very far: the knotted coils and curls obstructed all light and dark leaving only hair.  “No, I don’t think so.  Probably eaten by now anyways.”
“Good.  He wouldn’t be any help, trust me.  Little snot-nosed creep.  Don’t know what Donovan saw in him anyways.  ‘Oh dad, we’re in love and we don’t care what you say’ yeah well your husband doesn’t know a glue trap from a humane trap from a trapdoor damnit.  He couldn’t catch this thing if we paid him.”
“If he’s in the city’s pest control we are doing that.”
“And he never listens, either.  We’d tell him it’s a giant hairball and he’d just ask us to make sure it isn’t rats either or a rat king or some other nonsense.”
“How horrible that would be.  Imagine.”
“And I’ll tell you what: he always gets me a sweater at Christmas.  A sweater!  Do I look like I’m going to freeze to death without a sweater?  Do I look that old to you?”
“Mind your foot.”
“Because I don’t care when I turned sixty or not; I’m still wearing t-shirts when I go on my runs.  And I like that!  I like it that way!  None of this fuddy-duddyizing hint-hint bullshit!”
“There’s hair on your leg.”
“He tried to buy me a spa kit for that too,” said Bruce offhandedly.  “Hah!  That’s insulation, that is.  Trying to freeze me out so I’ll wear his damned sweaters and sweatpants and headbands.  The gall.”
“Bruce.” 
“I don’t need him making judgments about my lifestyle like that.  Sure, Donovan gets more done now that they’re married, but that’s no call to meddle in the personal affairs and personal attire of your eld-”
“BRUCE.  The hair’s got you.”
Bruce looked down at the creeping strands slowly engulfing him.  “Eh?  Whatever.  Now in MY opinion, Jordan’s problem was that his parents were-”

The hair took Bruce and led him away.  Marjorie checked his phone, but it was indeed broken. 

No phone.  No neighbours.  No house.  Nothing much. 

The building shook and shuddered and disgorged a collection of bones and one bedraggled straggler. 

“Hey Angie.”
“Hey Margie.  So, how’s everything doing out here?”
“Nobody cares, really.  How’s everything in there?”
“Awful.  The hair ate everyone except me.”
“Why not you?”
“It doesn’t like my shampoo.”
Marjorie sniffed Angie’s hair.  “Yeah, can’t blame it.  What is this?”
“Expensive.”
“Well, that’s your problem.”
“Not a problem today, is it?”
“Right.”  Marjorie prodded the bones.  “So…is this everyone?”
“Just about.  See?  There’s Clive’s titanium hip.  And Janice’s braces.  And I think this must be Holly’s scapula – see the deep muscle scarring?”
“Yeah.  Wow, all those weights really did a number.”
“No fooling.  Did anyone else come out?”
“Just me and Bruce.  It just got Bruce because he was too busy complaining.”
“It’s what he wanted.”
“It really, really was.”  Marjorie squinted into the squirming depths of the apartment building.  “Hang on – didn’t you say everyone else got eaten?”
“Yeah.”
“Then who’s that?  Did they hide in there somehow?”

“No, that’s Alex.  Hey, Alex!”
The twitching, contorting figure jerked one arm outwards and slapped it twice at the air, serpent-quick. 

“Doing alright in there?”
A violent spasm shook her shoulders, her skull immobilized by the crawling nightmare that filled the building. 

“Think that’s no.  That a no, Alex?”
What could have been a chin wobbled.

“Okay I think that’s yes.  Yes, it was no.  Sorry, it’s a little hard right now.

Chinwobble.

“Want anything?  Food?”
Chinwobble.

“Alright.  Should we bring it in, or-“
HeadspasmheadspasmHEADSPASM

“Okay we’ll just leave it out here.  You should be up to it within an hour or two, right?  The rats shouldn’t get it; I think it ate ‘em all.”
Chinwobble.

Angie turned back to Marjorie to find that she was deluged in mail.  “What’s happened?”
“Bills,” said Marjorie.  “Cell phone, internet, electricity, insurance, rent, so on and so forth.  I think we’re probably getting penalized for this too somehow.”
“Hmm.  Think they’ll accept the building being eaten by hair as a reason to not charge us?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, if we’re paying we might as well get something out of it.  Hey, Alex!”
In the distance, the skeletonized form jerked. 

“Can we crash in your place for now until we get on our feet again?”
A pause for thought, then chinwobble. 

“Cool.  Should we come in, or-“

Headspasmheadspasmheadspa-

“Okay okay point made.  Well, can you just dump some of the bigger debris outside then?  We’ll make a little hut or something.”

“See if you can find a working laptop,” urged Marjorie, “I’ve got sixteen hours of data entry due by tomorrow night or I won’t be able to make rent on this little hut.”
“Sure thing.  Hey Alex!”

***

At seven-thirty-five PM the hair consumed the rest of the city.

Marjorie did not receive her paycheque, and as such, missed rent.  This reflected poorly on her finances.