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Kenneth was a big, beautiful scorpion – six hundred tons if he was a gram, with a lovely red carapace that made the haemolymph of his opponents splash most attractively against it. Jarleen had ridden him to victory in six races and two grand championships and the noise he made as his mouth foamed and his legs folded under him and his brain shut off was a very small and disappointed ‘thhht,’ more fitting of a distressed dockyard guard-spider than a mighty steed.

“Fuck,” said Jarleen in her trademark manner, which seventeen articles in seventeen periodicals had described as classy-yet-efficient. “Fuck fuck.” Half a league from the finishing line and down a mount with no backups. “Fuck fuck fuck.”  And the trap had been poison, which had needed time to work its way through Kenneth’s system, which had needed to be timed during a pit stop, which meant the race officials were compromised. “FUCK.”
“Why do you swear as you assault that dead beast so?”
Jarleen looked at her hands and looked at what was in them and looked at the stranger (stocky, squinty, strange) and discovered that she was correct, as entirely without planning to she had seized up her goad and begun thwacking Kenneth in what had formerly been the tenderest section of his exoskeleton.

“I’m a half-hour ahead on a sixteen hour race and some scumfuckering bribetaking pissshitting fuckbitchassmotherwhore killed my mount with doped food,” she explained primly. “Now please stay back because I can’t guarantee my aim at the moment.”

“Oh, you need a new ride?” asked the stranger. She scratched aimlessly at the sun—boils on her arm, which were the ripe round red of someone who’d spent too much time on the old hiways where the sun rolled off the rotted metal roofs of the motorcars. “I sell rides.”
“The Southern Eldland Grand Loop is only open to skyscraper-class scorpions,” said Jarleen.

“And hey, that’s what I sell,” said the stranger, offering her scratching hand – still flaked with dead skin under the nails. “My name’s Moth. Let’s talk titanturkey, shall we?”

***

Moth’s Used Scorpions was a scrap of worn cloth serving as both tent and banner stretched between a pair of Eld-age streetlamps. Underneath it was a rock (her chair) a cooler (her lunch and her safe) and a telescope (for spotting clients).

Moth offered Jarleen half her lunch. It had been a long time since her last meal and a random stranger was at this point less likely to poison her than any of the professionals at the pit stops, so Jarleen took the bottle and drank stale fermented grain as she was shown the first scorpion, lurking patiently in the shadowed and empty-eyed bulk of an Eld building that very nearly stood taller than he did.

“This is Billy. Good shape, gently used, young enough to have tons of energy and not so young as to be thin in the carapace. A bit plain in his patterning, but a working jockey’ll care less about that than results, right?”
“The ‘casters don’t shut up about it, but yes.”

Billy rustled gently beneath them, mandibles flexing, and Jarleen sighed. “Close. Very close. But absolutely not. He’s got no right pincher.”
“And he makes good use of his left!”
“Nine times out of ten that’s the side you get passed on in the last league. He’s as useless to me as if he had no legs. Pass.”
“C’mon, you’re in no position to be choosey,” protested Moth.

“Unless you’ve only got the one scorpion, I suspect I am. Who’s next?”

Next was Newman. He brooded low in the shade of a collapsed overpass, the skeletal remains of his meals delicately picked-dry around his den-mouth.

“Two pinchers, see, that’ll do you,” said Moth, accepting her lunch back and shotgunning the dregs of the bottle with a loud crunching sound. “And believe you me, he’s fierce enough with them. Almost got my leg two days ago.”

“I can deal with feisty,” said Jarleen. “Call him out.”
“Pardon?”
“Let’s see his pace.”
Moth sighed and put her fingers to her teeth and shrieked a harsh note that shook the dust from the deadest windows of the Eld buildings, and Newman bestirred and slowly, gently eeled his way loose to investigate.

Jarleen sighed.

“Hey, he still has two pinchers! I told you!”
“You told me. He also has no legs. You didn’t tell me that.”
“He gets around pretty good for someone with no legs, I’d like to see you do any better.”
“I wouldn’t do worse. And I wouldn’t win this race. Do you have any others?”

Moth shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m a bit light on stock.”
“Anything. Anything at all.”
“Alright, alright.” Moth shrugged once more – a great heave of flexion from shoulder to wrist – and pulled her hand from her pocket.

“That’s a beetle.”
“So it is.”
“That is NOT a scorpion.”
“You said anything at all, what the hell more do you want?”
“A scorpion!” screamed Jarleen. “An honest to god skyscraper-class scorpion that can run a race and defend itself and beyond that I don’t care if it’s on the verge of death or a barely-hatched skitterling with wobbly legs! Hell, at this point I don’t care if all you’ve got is a female – I’d take her so long as she had the restraint to not eat me or the officials until the race is over!”

Moth drew her palm across her brow, smearing fresh dust on old grease. “Alright, alright, alright. Fine. I didn’t want to do this, but fine. I’ve got a personal favourite, see. His name is Tyler and he’s been with me through thick and thin and helped capture half my stock. But you’re in a hurry, and you’re in need, and you know what? The old boy deserves one last moment of glory.”

“We’ll see,” said Jarleen.

***

Tyler stood twenty-two meters at the apex.

Tyler’s pinchers were meticulously honed to razors.

Tyler’s tail was the pleasantly-plump sheen you got when a scorpion was flush with venom.

Tyler’s carapace was a lovely thick black without even so much as flecks or mottles of light – no wonder Moth had caught others with him; on a moonless night, he would be invisible despite all his majesty.

Tyler was also stone dead.

“He was happy as a clam an hour ago,” said Moth in tears. “Ate his cow like a good boy and everything. Oh Tyler! You were old, but I thought we’d have more time together! Oh Tyler! Why?! Anyways that’s the lot, who’ll it be?”
Jarleen swallowed the primal words at the back of her throat. “What?”
“Who’ll you take?”
“Between them all, you have one barely-functioning scorpion.”

“So why not just ride ‘em in turns?” said Moth in that infuriating tone of voice that dared suggest she thought she was being very reasonable.

“One mount per racer,” said Jarleen, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth with perfect care. “Just one at a time. Wait. Wait wait wait.”
“Yeah?”

“Hold on a moment.”
“Yeah?”
“Have you fed your stock today besides Tyler?”
“Yeah?”
“FUCK-“
“No wait no I mean no, sorry. Was just fixing to when you showed up and I got distracted.”

Jarleen stared at Tyler’s big dead body.

“I’ll take all three of them.”

“Which three?”
“The SCORPIONS, YOU-” and then Jarleen thought about it. “All of them. All four of them. Give me that beetle this second; I need to chew on something.”

***

“A beautiful beast,” said the ‘caster into his microphone. “Lovely black carapace on him, quite glorious. And a real bruiser – look at the strain on his skin from all that packed-in muscle and mass; god, he must be about fit to shed soon! You said you found him at a roadside used-scorpion shop?”
“Yes,” said Jarleen in her trademark manner, which seventeen articles in seventeen periodicals had described as classy-yet-efficient and which she now found herself wishing was more focused on pure bullshitting.

“Quite a lucky find. I wasn’t aware there were any along the Southern Eldland Loop!”
“There aren’t any more,” said Jarleen. “It was a closing-out sale. Just barely made it for exchanging the cost of my old mount.”

“You know,” said the ‘caster thoughtfully into the long, smooth silence, “I’ve never seen a three-pinchered scorpion before.”
“He’s an exotic,” said Jarleeen. “Common in his species.”
“What species?”
“Western Mojave Turrduken.”
The ‘caster waited for an explanation. 

“So,” he said at last, “can we expect to see more of…”

“Tylerbillyman.”
“…Tylerbillyman?”
“Absolutely not.  They- HE – is.  Are.  Very tired.   Elderly and a bit overfed.  HE deserves retirement.”

“Sad to see a dark horse like that leave, but it only adds to the mystique I suppose.  You know, he did the work of three mounts out there today.”
“Yes,” said Jarleen.  And she left, before she admitted anything else. 

There’s a lake out back.

It wasn’t there last week.  We had a puddle last week.  Big ol’ puddle in the backyard, something about the way the ground settled when mom and dad finished building the house years and years back.  It always appeared there every spring and smeared itself between the backyard and the little porch steps like a swampy fence.  Just big enough to do a running jump over if you were eight and ambitious and if you aren’t ambitious you aren’t eight. 

Anyways, we had that puddle last week, just like every other last week for every other April.  But now it’s not there, and neither is the backyard, and the little porch steps lead straight down into four feet of water.  Because there’s a lake out back. 

Not quite sure how that’s happened.

***

It’s not a bad lake, really. 

A bit small and VERY strange, but what there is has all the essentials.  Got a little stretch of beach to wade in from (mud, mostly – no sand, no pebbles, and we’re not close enough to the Shield for a solid rock lakebed).  Got a little cliff near a deepwater dropoff for jumping in from.  Got weeds for pike to hide in; got reeds and marsh nearby for swans to nest in; got a beaver lodge; got a creek coming in on Mr. Morton’s side of the property and a stream running out through Mrs. Jaxton’s herb garden and down the block; got a few small islands in the center with stubborn conifers and a few brave and doomed shrubs that we’ve seen a few idle turtles sunning themselves next to; got a lot of blackflies around its edges in the daytime and a lot mosquitoes around its edges in the evenings and a big ol snapping turtle whose size is impossible to estimate from the enigmatic distance we’ve always sighted them at. 

It’s got just about everything, which is really weird since it’s only about twenty feet across.  We took out the tape measure and everything.  Twenty-three feet four inches, or around seven metres if you’re feeling more sensible.  And yet it – and its contents – remain perfectly proportionate.  The most obvious sign is that the bug bites (and there are a LOT of them) are completely normal-sized, but the next would be that you can dive right in and have a proper swim-around and wade out and swim to one of the islands and back and it’s all a good time instead of you wallowing in a half-inch of muddied water as you wash out the banks from shore to shore. 

Not quite sure how that works. 

***

The lake has attracted visitors. 

Yesterday Mrs. Jaxton and her family had a picnic on the north shore; today Mr. Morton brought some friends and beer and their friends and their beer to fish and drink beer.  They left wrappers and beer cans everywhere until we complained, and then they threw the beer cans into the lake when they thought we weren’t looking.  The cans have become new islands, and I can see turtles sunning themselves on them.  It’s hard to pull them out because they’ve sunk right into the lakebed and also it’s real tiring to swim all the way out there to pull them back into shore.  Guess we’re stuck with Isla Budweiser out there. 

Someone knocked at the door after all that went down.  It’s a surveyor from the city, here to map and chart the lake.  She says to expect a visit from some hydrologists soon too.  There may need to be a study on how the lake and the municipal sewer systems interact.  There are developers out there that need to know more.  There are ecological trusts that require alerting.  A farming conglomerate has demanded that the lake be drained for the growth of corn.  There are many disparate and intricate interests involved. 

Not quite sure how to handle this. 

***

The lake has been purchased by a consortium of developers. 

Waterfront condos are planned which will produce many many many millions of dollars of economic investments and fund at least twelve construction jobs for about a year or so.  The beavers will need to be evicted because they won’t stop stealing the surveying equipment and using it to plug holes in the shoreline.  The turtles are now sunning themselves on the construction equipment.  One of the backhoes backed up too far while hoeing and dropped off the diving cliff and is now buried under thirty feet of water.  Six different firms sent us six different emails and seven different phone calls and thirty different veiled and incomprehensible messages with a thousand different meanings, any of which could be bribes, threats, or both.  We’ve been invited to join a property-owner’s-association and barred from membership for life. 

Not quite sure how this is going to end up. 

***

The lake is gone. 

There doesn’t seem to be any consensus on how it happened, or even when.  We woke up today and we’ve got no lake, just a puddle – not even a big puddle, it’s tapered off a bit because it’s mid-April now and we’ve lost all the snowmelt to erratic evaporation.  A puddle with some Budweiser cans and a backhoe and what appears to be a lot of shed beaver fur and a single really big really really dead pike jammed in it. 

The developers threatened to sue us for breach of contract; the turtles have vanished without a trace; and the surveyor came back to let us know that since the lake’s gone we’re not going to be fined for conducting landscaping without a permit. 

A swan beat the living shit out of Mr. Morton last night.  He’s in the hospital with four broken fingers and a nose that’s been flattened like a tomato on a highway.  He’s said he wants to sue us but there’s no sign of a swan and we don’t have a lake the swan could have been living in so we’re pretty sure he’s got no case. 

Not quite sure about the emotional or fiscal ramifications of any of this in the long-term, but I mean, what else is new?

It was Sunday at Our Deity of the Waters.  Thoom, dum, doom went the church bell, sonorous and fat.  Thoom, doom, duuum.  Its clapper hung loose, its cord swung wildly in the sweaty skinny grasp of Jerry, who always rang it thirty seconds late and panicked every second of it.  Thoom, dum, doooooom. 

Luckily for him nobody had ever noticed or cared, unluckily for him he’d never realized it and never would in a million years; they were too busy chatting and gossiping and lying and mingling amidst the pews and he was too busy filling himself with horror and despair.  Thoom, dum, doooom.  Thoom, boom, dooooooooooooooooom. 

Done. 

Jerry finished panicking and settled back into his normal abyss of desperate self-loathing, while beyond him in the sanctuary – open to the wind and the reeds and the sky – the people shut up and the choir assembled and the organist rolled up her sleeves and the song got cooking, and it went like this:

Oh my God, my gosh, my God

That sure is a lot of God, my gosh, my God.

That’s a hell of a big God, my God, my gosh

Holy shit, holy God, holy fuck

The organist flailed her arms with a last flourish and veryone bowed their heads very solemnly and bubbled ‘amen.’  The minister stood up and adjusted his speedo-robes and cleared his throat of the blockage induced by the ceremonial Coors and spoke, and this is what he spoke:

“AGH!” he spoke.  “Argh, aiee, ow, ow ow, nrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRUUUUhhhhh, uhr hur hur hur hur hur, aaaaaaaaaaagh.  Aaaaaaamen.”
“Amen,” bubbled the congregation. 

“Friends,” said the minister, “it is good to see you all here once again, on this most joyous occasion, to celebrate the day of death and rebirth and redeath of our once-lord and once-saviour, whose name must not be spoken.  Shush that name now and forever hold your piece!”
“Amen,” they bubbled, and raising their left hands, made a simple zipping motion across their firmly-shut lips. 

“My friends, it has been a long and harrowing year,” intoned the minister, face now graven in graveness and gravity.  “We have seen the deaths of several of our flock – some by illness, some by accident, several by acts of God.  Death is a normal part of life, but it is always a pity to see it come so soon and to some so beloved.  Any money placed in the offering plate today will go towards the provision of comfort and succor to the bereaved, and any money they refuse will go directly to our lamb carcass fund so that God’s maw will be stayed from any further wrathful judgments upon our band of fellows.  Amen!”
“Amen,” they bubbled, one hand raised apiece in helpless cowering defense, wobbling irresolutely between fending off wrath from above or teeth from below and settling on neither. 

“For community announcements: Brother Marley has suffered the loss of additional mobility after her stroke last week.  We ask that you gift unto her your thoughts and your prayers and also and more importantly your meat.  Please give brother Marley your meat as she is currently unable to procure her own and will suffer horribly and unspeakably unless assistance is rendered with stark promptness.  Please do it right now, before I finish this service or this sentence – for the love and apathy of God, do it now, now – NOW!”
“Amen,” they bubbled, slimy red tissue grasped in trembling palms over collection vats.  And for good measure, they said it again.  “Amen,” they bubbled, tremendous fear in their hearts. 

“Secondly and less urgently, Brother Tim and Brother Hasham’s child we baptised last week is with us today during this service!  In respect for this, please keep the happy family at the rear of the crowd and do NOT encourage them to approach the God-sump, because we don’t want an accident and we all remember what happened to Brother Wooster’s infant back in ’93, don’t we?”

“Amen,” they bubbled, cringing to an individual, shoulders hunched and faces puckered.

“Excellent, excellent, excellent,” murmured the minister, baritone and soothing, like someone talking to an injured dog.  “You know, every year this season brings me to joyous contemplation.  It’s a time for righting wrongs, a time for the retrieval of hope from the greatest pits of despair, and a time to clearly illuminate the path that lies before you and find true purpose  And accordingly it’s also a time for learning which wrongs are immutable facts, which hopes are idle foolishness, and discovering which paths are loops that lead back unto true realities.  We speak at a time of rebirth and redeath, of promises made and failed and kept.  My fellow congregants,” he enunciated most solemnly, casting back his robes to reveal his fingerless hands and missing leg, “none is more humble of their position than I, whose mortality is most stark and heavy, whose position is closest to God, as was my father, as was his father whose noble unknowing sacrifice during the Holy Riverside Enlightenment sermon of the Easter of ‘72 did reveal unto us the necessities of this world and the greater cosmos surrounding and enfolding it.  Is it not right that on the day when we are most grateful to Him that God would reveal His presence and our purpose in it?  Was it not right that this purpose be revealed to us most viscerally and with much viscera?  And was it not right that the man who spoke for him should speak loudest and truest of all as he departed from this mortal coil on a day when he lied of rebirth and was corrected into a most appropriate and irreversible death?  I beg of you all to ask of God to forgive my grandfather, for in his foolishness he granted us all a great and powerful insight into the world and all its beauty.  Amen.”

“Amen,” they bubbled, eyes and feet scuttling in place like trapped rats. 

“And now, forthwith, without further ado, with all the joyousness and rapture that is His right, the Lord God Omnipotent!  And yeah, he reigneth as the king of kings, the lord of lords-“

“Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, halleluuuuuuuuuuu-jah” screamed the choir rhapsodically. 

“-And he shall reign forever and ever!”

And so speaking, mouth yet agape with the force of his exhalations, the minister was seized abruptly from behind by the great scaled snout of god, who dragged him back with eye-blinking speed into the watery and palm-shrouded pit of the godsump where he was whirled about rapidly into shreds and devoured in spine-shudderingly vast gulps that dyed the ripples violent red. 

“Amen?” bubbled the congregation. 

***

The meat offerings were unwanted that day thanks to the minister, so they took them home instead for an Easter supper.  It was most pleasant and filling and really reminded them of what the season was about and what it all really meant, deep down, right in the marrow and the bone and the flesh and the teeth and the teeth and the teeth and the teeth and the teeth.  For many of them, it reminded them about 2 AM with sudden sweats and screams. 

And wasn’t that just right and proper?

It was a beautiful bright day outside, good for sunning, bad for hunting.  The sort of day where you could spend sixteen hours straight doing nothing useful and feel good about it too. 

So it was a bit surprising to Slump that she was spending it all on her own.  Not that it was an UNPLEASANT surprise – it meant she had all of the best sunbathing rock to herself, instead of half of it plus whatever she could steal off’ve Grumble’s tail – but it was peculiar.  And maybe just a little insulting. She was gravid right now and wanted a little attention.

So she dragged herself off the big warm sunny slab of concrete that had once been part of what the ancient world had called a ‘bank’ and sidled slowly and comfortably down the wild and boiling way, content in her knowledge that it was too early in the day for the buffalo to be out and that the massacranes were still north for the season, so as to prevent their delicate feathers from burning up at high noon. 

At this time of day, at this time of year, Heloderma Spectacular – the Greater Western Gila Monstrosity – was the apex predator of the land.  For a little while, and that was more than most got. 

Slump found Grumble taking full advantage of his passing time in the sun hiding out of the sun underneath a crude lean-to of boulders, cement, and rusty rebar.  An awful little machine buzzed insolently at her from its place atop a level bed of asphalt, and she hated it immediately. 

“What are you doing and why isn’t it paying attention to me?” she asked Grumble. 

“Learning,” said Grumble distractedly.  He held a small and ridiculous piece of plastic with twiddles and fiddles on it in one massive claw, digits oscillating wildly.  “It’s to help.”
“How?”
“Remember how you found all those old books on motherhood from the old days?”
“Yes,” said Slump.  That had been a rare find; her mother, Mulch, had been adamant that books were for nerds and had personally eaten the bulk of them her family had discovered over her sixteen decades of life before dying of hyperrhea. 

“Well, you know what we didn’t find?  Any books on fatherhood.  And then I found THESE, and they’re full of advice on it.  We’re going to be parents before the acid rains come again, and I don’t want to be unprepared.  You remember what happened to my dad?”
“No, I never met him.”
“Yeah, that’s because my older sister Junk bit off his snout and he bled to death.  If he’d known to feed her more often that wouldn’t have happened.  This sort of information is vital and important, and I need access to it if I want to do the best for our clutch.  Also I don’t want to have my snout bitten off or bleed to death.”

“Wuss.”
“Look, watch.  And be quiet: I can’t learn if you’re talking over the dialogue.”

***

A bearded bear-shaped human stood in a cold storm without a shirt and picked up a sharp stick and hit another human with it over and over until its face was a red smear and wet bone splattered over the snow. 

“Offspring,” he muttered as he paused to change arms, “don’t do this.”
“But you say that about everything!” said the human’s offspring in feeble piping protest.

“That is because you must never be like me,” said the bear-human, who was now using his foot to stomp on the other human’s neck over and over.  “Since your mother, who was good and kind and better than I deserved, is dead, I cannot show you how to be a good person because I’m awful and tragic and doomed and can only do my miserable best against my nature.  So instead I’m showing you all the things I do so you won’t do them.  Now stop talking and pay attention, I need to show you how to not draw and quarter those who oppose you.”

***

“I don’t get it,” said Slump.

“It’s simple: I’m the father, and it is my job to commit war on any who threaten my child.”
“You only have ONE?  Wow, he wasn’t kidding when he said he wasn’t a good father; what happened to the other thirty-six?”
“That’s where the pathos comes from,” argued Grumble.  “Being a father is about being sad because your spouse is dead or gone and your kids are in danger of being dead or gone or they are dead and gone and you find another kid to be sad at about them.

Wait, wait, wait; I don’t understand this,” said Slump.  “How is this father still alive if the mother is dead or gone?  He is clearly frailer and smaller than she is.”

“She left.  That’s part of why he’s sad.”

“If he pissed her off that much, why not eat him?”

“Humans don’t eat each other unless they’re bad people.”

Slump’s tongue rolled around her mouth in shock.  “Oh my god.  No WONDER they all died if they were that wasteful.  Are you sure you didn’t misunderstand it?”
“No, no, no, it’s all here in this other educational game.  I’ll load it.”

***

A bearded, rangy human being stood in a destroyed human city with a ragged shirt and shot another human with a gun and then pistol-whipped them with it over and over until its face was a red smear and puddles of every fluid in the rainbow were seeping into the overgrown dirt that had once been an asphalt highway. 

“Adopted offspring,” he grunted as he paused to kick the other human in the groin, “don’t look at this.”
“But you told me I need to pay attention to learn how to stay alive!” said the human’s adoptive offspring.

“That’s because I’m a liar who refuses to admit I’ve conflated you in my head with my dead prior offspring and it’s my fault she died and I’m a bad person who can’t find meaning in anything anymore but raw survival but now you’ve reawakened my moral impulses and I’m torn between my desire to protect you and my need to see you avoid becoming like me because I’m awful and tragic and doomed and can only do my miserable best against my nature,” said the human, all in one breath.  His beard fluttered in the wind of a ruined world.  “Now c’mere and I’ll show you how to scavenge a corpse.”

***

“Wait, what was that about?” demanded Slump.
“The thing that killed all the humans just happened, I’m the last of dad, and it’s my duty to protect the last of daughter.  Mostly I kill people and weird mushrooms and then I-”
“No, no, no, the ‘scavenging’ thing.  Why were they slapping their hands all over the body and not swallowing it?”
“Humans kept their valuables on their outsides in fake skins instead of storing them in their gular pouches.”
“That’s disgusting,” said Slump.  “These games are going to be a bad influence on our children.”
“They’re not for kids,” said Grumble.  “They’re full of important truths and lessons about being a father.  We can show it to them when they’re planning on being fathers.”
“Important truths and lessons about what?  Whining?”

“It’s really hard, being a father, okay?  You wouldn’t get it.”

“You’re not a father either.  Not yet.”
“You won’t get it.”
“If you mouth off any longer you won’t get a chance to get it either,” said Slump, baring her teeth from her gumline just enough to make her saliva run bright red. 

“Right, right, I’m really sorry please don’t eat my snout PLEASE.”
“Fine.”  Slump’s dorsal scutes settled down to a semblance of calmness.  “I’m surprised at how quickly you folded, even for being stuck in a confined space with me.  Usually you’re less sensible than that.”

“I’m telling you, it’s these fatherhood games.  See, the secret of being a good dad is to admit that you’re the entire problem in every way.  Like this!”

***

A gigantic firearm shot seventeen times, sending massive explosions through a balloon full of armed humans each of who spilled a galloon of blood everywhere as a first-person human bludgeoned them each in the face with a sort of arm-mounted pinwheel hook, opening throats and tearing off jaws and cratering faces. 

“You’re my father,” said the human’s surprise offspring.  “And you’re killing all the people in this awful floating city so horribly.  Also you’re the same person as the evil man who built this awful floating city and who raised me in a tower all by myself.”
“All I do is kill,” said the human.  “I’m a monster who hates myself and if I forgave myself I’d be even worse.”
“I’ll help,” said the human’s surprise offspring, grabbing him by the head and holding him underwater until the bubbles stopped.

***

“I can’t help but notice,” said Slump, “that all of these fathers don’t seem to have partners.  Where are the other parents?  Are they ALWAYS dead or gone?”
“Dead or gone because being a father is very sad.  That’s what biological dad infinite is about.  Fathers are the worst people who ruin everyone’s lives with their mistakes and they show their kids how to not be them so the kids can take their place and feel sad about them.”
“What if you try not being a terrible father anymore?”
“No, it’s just how it works,” said Grumble sadly.  “If you’re a dad, you ruin everything and your partner vanishes or dies and maybe your kids die and then you show them or someone else that you’re very sad, and then you die and they’re very sad.  There’s no escaping it.”
“I can think of one,” said Slump. 

“Oh?” said Grumble, and then she ate the console and the television and the generator and left. 

“Oh,” said Grumble. 

Two minutes later Slump came back and ate him too, just to be safe. 

***

She really didn’t mind having all of the sunning rock to herself all of the time, anyways.