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A star fell.

It started up high – so high it was just another little white dot in the sky, shimmering from yellow to blue to red back to white again at the fancy of a viewer’s strained eyeballs – and then it came low, and it came low so fast and so furious that it tore the shrieking air in half and came to earth with the power of a very small and intense volcano, sending fountaining earth miles into the sky and shrouding the land in particulate that would linger for days no matter the sweepings and dustings and scrubbings that would be visited upon it all.

It also made Lord Batheley-Tweedlington, Baron of Coopmont and Yorklette-Upon-The-River and a Peerage of the Realm, spit out his pipe into his lap, spoiling his third-favourite Wednesday evening bathrobe. 

“Zounds!” he said.  “What the devil was that by jove?  Why, I say, I should go investigate.  Mrs. Biscuits!  Round up my carriage.”
“The stablehands just went abed,” said Mrs. Biscuits, who was fifty-six years old and looked a hundred and felt six times that some days.  She did not mask the contempt in her voice, as her employer was colourblind to it. 

“Well fire the insolent blighters and get me new ones, toodley pip toot sweet!  We’ve a sight to see!”

***

The sight was a smoulder glass-walled pit some hundred feet deep covered in burning ejecta that smelled like dying rocks and slaughtered dust.  Occasionally it went ‘ping’ and something exploded in a small and sulky manner.

“Astounding, marvelous, miraculous, wondrous, amazing, magical, why, downright providential!” gushed Lord Batheley-Tweedlington, popping his monocle in and out of each eye socket in excitement.  “A real-life fallen meteor, exactly as I’ve heard tale of in the Royal Society papers!  Why, I reckon they’ll come begging hat-in-hand to me to see such a sight, eh?”
“Sounds liable, sir,” agreed the backup coach driver.

“Strip off your uniform and return to the gutter, you verminous skittering wretch,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  “How DARE you speak to me without permission?”

“Sorry, sir.”
“CLUB HIM!”

“It’s just me, sir.  Should I club myself?”
Lord Batheley-Tweedlington ate his own tweed in anger. 

“I say I say I say what what what what what what what what what what’s afoot here, what?” interjected a most gormless voice.

Oh.  The horror.  Lord Batheley-Tweedlington realized, to his mounting loathing, that he had failed to notice the precise location of the fallen star in relation to his lands.  This was just outside No’thuperton (the Lesser), on the Sou’we’st’er’n’ side, which meant it was almost in the Duchy of Bucoolyptus, which meant it was adjourning the lands of…

“Woolthering,” he said coolly.  His worst enemy and second cousin waved cheerily back in reply, one long, thin arm jutting loose from a stagecoach that he realized was slightly nicer than his own. 

“Oh it’s BASIL, old boy old chum old sock old foot old fish old bass, you know it eh what what what?  Lovely to see you oh I do say what’s up have you come along to look at the ol’ thingamabob too?  Beautiful thing, beautiful, just beautiful, pity it landed on my half of the land but tell you what my old crown my old crock my old crumpet my old shoe you can take a piece free of charge not one groat nor ha-crown nor not a farthing nor penny nor ha’-penny upon my word as a gentlemen eh?”

While Lord Batheley-Tweedlington took his deepest breath and began to marshall his defenses against such an onslaught, the crater coughed.

“Pardon?” he asked, reflexively.

“Eh what what?” asked Woolthering, vacantly. 

“Hrrk,” explained the crater, strenuously.

Then the bottom of the buried pit heaved and roiled and disgorged a body into the mild Wednesday night, wreathed in the smell of burning chemicals and hot metal, and subsided its rotting self deeper into the earth. 

***

“Here, hold still you blasted thing!  Woolthering!  Woolthering!  Make the silly blighter hold still, would you – oh, step lively now, come off it, step lively!  How am I meant to get nice measurements with his bloody great numpty head swinging about like this?!”
“I say I say I say now hold on hold up hold on now my old tea and pudding my old china my old bean sprout the lad’s got a fierce hunger on him and you see how he growls when I step too close to his pudding, look at the face he makes, bless him!”
The visitor snarled at them over his eighth bowl of Mrs. Biscuit’s best what-I’ve-got-in-the-pantry soup.  Lord Batheley-Tweedlington was indeed unable to avoid looking at that face he made: it was almost magnetic.  Or at least he supposed it was; the teeth drew the eye so magnificently they seemed to swallow the attention whole.  For the first time in his life he was in the same room as Rufus Hibbleghorst Woolthering III without having his entire mind body and soul bent to contemplating his mortal destruction.  Instead his being was suffused with intoxicating words like CANINES and INCISORS and FANGS and SHARP to a degree that made him feel quite giddy.  Was this terror?  He’d never been terrified before.  What a peculiar emotion; he couldn’t say that he cared for it.  No wonder all the little people seemed so deuced upset to experience it all the time. 

A splash shook him out of his reverie; the visitor had inserted his entire brain-pan into the soup-pot.  Lord Batheley-Tweedlington seized the opportunity and – with a level of care he had hitherto reserved only for his own personage – placed the set of measuring-tongs about its skull and rattled off the numbers whip-smart. 

“Lovely!” cried Woolthering, and he began scribbling away on HIS (Batheley-Tweedlington’s) charts without so much as a by-your-leave or please-and-thank-you, which was NOT cricket at all and – “Done!”

“What?” burst out Lord Batheley-Tweedlington. 

“I say I say I said it’s done, my old trumpet my old coronet my old stocking my old grout!  Always had a head for figures, I did I say I say I say!  Here, take a gander!”

Lord Batheley-Tweedlington snatched the document from his cousin’s hands with ill grace and perused it with his typical fierce intelligence. 

“Upside down, old chap old chum old –”

“Oh DO shut up!” snapped Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  “Says here he’s an……”

“I say I say I say what?  Is it still upside down?”
“SHUT UP!  No, no, no, this is all wrong, you must’ve measured wrong!”
“But you wouldn’t let me touch the instruments, my old fiddle my old faddle!”
“Then you mathed them wrong!”
“I’m a maths expert, me, always am,” said Woolthering.  “I’ve never unmathsed a mathsing.  Mathsers are my bread and butter, I’ve never misundermathstimated a thing!”

“Well you’ve mathsed him as a bloody saint of the highest order, you have!  I’ve been an expert and fully-qualified phrenologist my entire adult life and in all my years I’ve never seen this low a highwayman-quotient; his nose is a roman as Great Caesar’s Ghost himself –”

“More of a snout, really-“

“-and his brow is noble!  High!  True!  Not the slightest trace of furrowing, of sloping, of, of, of COMMON BLOOD!  Why, he’s more anglo-saxon than my Uncle Percivius, and HE perished from exsanguination after chopping his own hand off when a beggar of irish-iberian stock brushed their fingers together while panhandling!”

“I say, he’s the one my mother disowned!  Terrible brother he was she said she did to me what what”
“He disowned her first.”
“He said she was ‘a blight on the blood of her highest and holiest house!’”
“Only when she disobeyed him!”
“He wanted her to marry him, what what what!”
“And she should’ve listened!  Purity, that’s the ticket!”
The visitor hissed through his beyond-roman snout, expelling a few last droplets of Mrs. Biscuit broth, and then curled himself into a small compact ball on his throne, where he began emitting the most aristocratic of snores.
“Well,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington loudly, in the tone of one who is putting an argument behind them BUT NOT BECAUSE THEY WERE LOSING IT, “I suppose it falls on us to civilize this man before he falls prey to the errancy and debauchery of this fallen, polluted, soiled world.  Amongst men such as I”
“-I say, I say, men such as WE-”

“-he may learn how to acquit himself in the manner of a man of his stature.”
“Speaking of which I say old chum are we sure he isn’t a lady?”
“My dear Woolthering,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington in the tones of one speaking to an unusually-thick clot, “this fellow travelled from a far star in a locomotive of fire and metal.  A woman’s bloodflow would collapse under such pressures and her brain-pan would explode from anxiety.  Obviously.”

“Oh no doubt my word my soul my sakes my word no doubt at all yes indeed indeed well then well!”
The visitor twitched and snarled nobly in his sleep, claws extended and retracting askew.

“Obviously yes let’s be about it,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  A few strands of antique French embroidery began to drip gently from between its grasping fingers.  “Urgently.”

***

“No, no, no, you are NOT to pay ANY ATTENTION to that end of the Great Chain of Being, that is where dogs and horses and Irishmen and other useful lower creatures abide, no no no you must look up here!  Here!  Just above-or-below the angels, under God, and….perhaps a LITTLE BIT above Englishmen?  Confound it, LOOK UP HERE damn you- AAAAGH!”
“I say!”
“It BIT me!”

“I say I say I say I saw you, you put your finger in his mouth!”
“That’s no bloody call for him to go and bloody well bite it!”

“I say, language!”
“Go to the blazes you darned harridan!”
“I say!”

The visitor snarled. 

“Now look at what you’ve let him do!  He’s chewed up the Great Chain of Being!   And NOT from the bottom-up as is right and proper!  He’s CHEWED UP GOD THE FATHER THE SON AND THE HOLY SPIRIT!”

“Don’t shout!”

“I WILL SHOUT WHEN I PLEASE AND ulk”

“I say!”

“uh”

“Please do let him go sir, I promise he shall stop shouting!”

“h”

“See, he agrees!”
“-ah.  Ah.  Thank.  You.”
“You’re welcome old friend old chum!”
“Please, Woolthering, I beg of you, in – ah, my god – the name of our many years of bitter, spiteful enmity, do not mention it.  Ever.  To anyone.”

“Lips sealed and solemnly sworn to oath eh what what what what what what what what what what!”

“What,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington mechanically.  He dabbed at the marks on his neck.  It was the worst he’d had since his dear old father had passed away of the dropsy.  “What.  Do we do now?”
“Well,” said Woolthering thoughtfully, “we might try-”

“Rhetorical!” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington loudly and a little too quickly.  “Rhetorical!  Come now!  We must correct his notions, and I know just the place.”

***

The Chapel of St. Burleston-Helpmeet-By-The-Starry-Shore-King-Of-Peace-And-Love had served Anglicanism proudly and with distinction since the first days after Henry the Eighth had his little difficulties with the pope, and before that it had been a Catholic shrine, and before that a roman temple, and before THAT some druids had done interesting things in its neck of the woods with knives and mistletoe and a consistent supply of about one and a half galloons of blood in mobile form. 

It had been burning most beautifully for five minutes, which was long enough for the panic to die down and the blame to go around. 

“You did this!” shouted Lord Batheley-Tweedlington. 

“I say!”
“You DID!  You said this was a good idea!”
“I say, I say, you said that!”
“No!  It was my idea but YOU said it was a good one!”
“I say!  I say that I said that it was a bad one!”
“WELL YOU SHOULD’VE SAID LOUDER!”
The visitor growled truculently. 

“Shut it,” snapped Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  “And drop that piece of the vicar!  The poor man only had one leg after waterloo, and now you’ve gone and robbed him of two of his longest and best fingers!” 

The visitor obligingly spat them out, covered in a peculiar secretion that dissolved the flagstones at their feet.

“Right!  Woolthering, you take them.”
“What?”
“What what?”
“What is what I said, what what!”
“What ‘what’ did you mean by saying what?!”

“What!”

“WHAT!”

A star descended from the heavens as smoothly and as softly as a baby’s sleeping smile.  It drifted from bottomless heights to the lowly earth in a single heartbeat and yet never rushed; its mass flattened the smouldering rubble of St. Burleston-Helpmeet-By-The-Starry-Shore-King-Of-Peace-And-Love without a whisper of effort or a creak of protest, and when its passenger disembarked even it seemed to move with grace despite having sixteen legs four faces and an entirely unbelievable number of arms. 

“There you are, my sweet baboo,” it sighed in an entire choir’s whispers. 

The visitor spat out the third finger it had secreted in its cheek pouches and scampered with a bound to the passenger’s skirts, which it pawed at most pleadingly.  It was picked up, and adorned with a crown of writhing appendages and sensors that soothed and fussed over it, and it was loved. 

Then the star swallowed them again and was gone.  A second later, it had never even existed. 

The two men stood there and stared at the empty sky, listened to the creak and crisp of more centuries of pews going up in cinder-spouts. 

“Bit of a pity one didn’t remember to bring his phrenological calipers with us, what what?  I should’ve liked to see her skull circumference.”
“She had a skull?” asked Lord Batheley-Tweedlington, distantly.  And then, “wait, she?  You think that…THAT… was a lady?”
“Why not what?”
Lord Batheley-Tweedlington closed his eyes.  “I’m going home.  I fear I have become ill.”

“Laudanum’ll do the trick, I say!  Swear on it for a dicky stomach!”

“Oh shut it,” snapped Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  “What do you know about scientific procedure?  If it weren’t for men like me we wouldn’t know anything about these beings from the phlogiston vapours of the luminous ether!”

“What do we know then eh, my old turnip, my old carrot, my old root cellar?”
Lord Batheley-Tweedlington looked to the skies again.  They were darkening and dimming; the smog from London town was rolling in with the winds.  He wished he had his pipe. 

“They clearly aren’t civilized enough to appreciate the power of Victorian scientific thought,” he said stiffly. 

Then he went home and drank half his bar as a medicine cabinet. 

We moved to space.  It seemed like a good idea at the time. 

So we made rockets and launch segments and fuel tanks and engines and we moved ourselves up into space, piece by piece, part by part, spanner by spanner, bolt by bolt, then finally body by body.

And we were in space.  Because space was completely empty, and it was the future. 

***

We moved to space.  It was full of nothing, but that just meant it was full of possibility.

So we made factories and parts and pieces and special tools.  It took forever and ever and ever because every single module and gear and bolt had to be lifted up out of the bottom of a planet’s entire gravity well. 

So we built a space elevator.  This took even more factories and parts and pieces and special tools.  It took forever and ever and ever and ever because it required ultratensile materials that were only theoretically possible in the same way that there was no rule saying your molecules COULDN’T line up just right to let you walk through a wall if you kept trying for the entirety of the universe’s lifespan times infinity, but that was just an insult to our can-do spirit and heroic goals so we tried anyways. 

It fucked up and split in half and in half again and again and again, which was actually really good because it prevented it from whipping around the planet repeatedly and instead flung a lot of it out into space.  The rest slammed violently into the planet hard enough to leave giant holes everywhere and killed a lot of people and destroyed a lot of people’s homes and made life harder for a lot of people. 

Their sacrifices were just and noble.  Because we were going to move to space. 

Cleaning it all up took forever and ever and ever and ever and ever, though. 

***

We moved to space.  It took a lot of work, and we mean a LOT of work, but that just made it heroic. 

There was an obvious problem, in that although there was infinite amounts of space and finite amounts of us, getting any of us into space was still sort of hard.  So we compromised and sent those of us into space to work that were brave and hardy and courageous and also didn’t mind the tiny tiny tiny tiny chance of being decompressed or suffocating or suffering an embolism and also the complete and total certainty of undergoing rapid skeletomuscular degeneration and quickly accumulating life-changing amounts of radiation exposure. 

They were happy to do it.  We HAD selected them for that, after all.  And most of them even stayed happy after they withered up and shriveled up and had bits snap or drop off.  Because they got to move to space, albeit to help other people move to space, and they floated around until they couldn’t anymore and we buried them by launching them at their home planet below and or out into the empty universe as per their request. 

Most of them wanted to be shot into space.  This wasn’t totally surprising. 

***

We moved to space.  At last.

Things started breaking right away, of course.  Maintenance is tricky and tough enough when you can breathe and wear gloves instead of giant insulated mitts attached to rigid full-body casketsuits.  And sometimes you’re tired or you’re bored or you’re hungry or you’re thirsty or a thought crossed your mind at just the right moment and you maybe miss a little something that doesn’t mean anything, so you don’t care and then you do it again and again and maybe someday it’s a BIG something and other days all the little somethings turned into a huge something and someone may or may not or maybe gets sucked out an airlock or maybe suffocates or finds out that the entire tank of #6 Spicy Sou’wester Barbecue Sauce got a leak and they don’t have any more and they maybe start a maybe completely justified riot. 

There are many hardships in space.  Which is like being an adult, which is inevitable, so of course we had to move there.  Where else would we be?

***

We moved to space.  This meant we didn’t have to care about a lot of things.

In places that weren’t space, people were dying and suffering and starving and screaming and so on.  There’s no sound in space so we didn’t have to hear it, and you’re too far away to see anyone or anything.  No countries or borders and no armies and no famines and no people and no forests or mountains and no life and nothing, just a big smeary blue ball. 

We didn’t look out the viewports on that side anyways.  It wasn’t space. 

And we didn’t have many viewports.  They were structural weaknesses.  Additional structural weaknesses. 

It was pretty annoying when the deliveries got more erratic.  And more expensive.  And more and more and more people started complaining about us being in space, asking what the hell we were doing up there.  But they were busy with problems that weren’t in space, so sooner or later they would be distracted or dead due to something that wasn’t about space. 

We’d moved to space.  What the hell did they think it meant?

***

We’d moved to space.  Now we could get to work on the important things. 

So we made stuff, from things we had to haul to space, and we either used it to fix the problems we had in space or we launched it back down to earth and they used it to make things to haul stuff back to space so we could make stuff. 

It would’ve been easier if we had the space elevator but there had been totally unforeseeable problems with that.  So instead we complained about the gravity well.  Bad enough that our skeletons missed the planet so much they kept crumbling into bacon bits; everything that needed to be moved into space was very reluctant about it and kept wanting to dive back down until it was properly heaved shoved pushed and launched on a column of carbonized fire. 

Why was everything so stubborn?  Why did it want to stay where it was, rather than moving to space?  There was so much space in space.  There wasn’t much else, but that was the appeal: imagine, having as much room as you needed to do things and nothing in your way and nothing with you and nothing being you and all around you nothing but nothing but nothing but nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing

nothing.                

***

We moved out of space. 

It was not a decision lightly made, and many of us protested it at the time.  But it wasn’t our call.  Bits and parts and people fell off and seized up and powered down and passed away until there wasn’t much there. 

Just space. 

***

We moved to space.  It seemed like a good idea at the time. 

Turns out the only stuff in space is what you put in it. 

Who knew?

At ten minutes to noon Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, stood on her chanting verandah and murmured the last syllables of a twenty-five minute spell precisely on time. 

“Go,” she said, and with a flick of her fingers the verandah’s voice fell silent and the words echoed and with a fat sucking sound that was almost exactly the opposite of any language she was ripped free from the earth and fell into the sky. 

The sky was a dangerous place to be a human.  The breezes were vicious and the air was harsh and around her she could feel the ill will and tremendous force that was the will of the birds, tugging on her limbs, draining from her heart, adding lead to her bones and gasps to her breath.  Upstart mammal, they hissed into her brain.  Wretched offspring of synapsids, thick-limbed, clumsy-footed, gut-brooding hairy rat.  Know your place below. 

Ar-klazion ignored them, and when that didn’t work anymore she sang to them, a long and mocking song whose simple melodies and blunt noises were offensive to their longminds and crude to their oldest souls, and they reeled away in disgust that overcame their hatred.  She chuckled smugly and banked through a cloud of grudges and seething spite; most of the attitude for dealing with the very old worked across species quite nicely, if not the precise words.  But now her sky was clear and her purpose was sharp and she had work to do.

She had a night to catch. 

***

The night lay far in advance from her, fleeing as it was wont to, and an inexperienced sorcerer or cunningman or witch – flush in their powers and giddy with success – might have hurled themselves pell-mell after it in gleeful haste.  They would scoff at restraint and mock the notion of a challenge greater than that they had already conquered to come here; the defiance of an entire planet’s heavy-handed grasp; the evasion of its ancient and crabbed-taloned rulers; the precisely correct pronunciation of twenty-five minutes of ancient words created by a species that had no actual mouths humans would recognize.  This would be what would get them killed, if not in the next few hours then the next time they did something else significant.  Ambition was a spice; arrogance was a poison. 

So Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, crossed her legs and sat upon an icy scrap of cirrus fibratus, where she began, very intently and very thoroughly, to look at her hands. 

Finger.  Thumb.  Finger.  Finger.  Finger.  Times two. 

She pulled them in and out, tugged on that heartbeat, rolled them back and forth and checked the palms and the knuckles and the tendons and the little scars and the bumps and the hangnails and itchy bits that were part of having a body, and she reached out and gently cupped a handful of ozone and brought it down to her.  It hissed and spat most angrily at being brought low thusly, and she soothed its murmurs with one hand even as her other began to remove its skin before the lowly air could strip it loose. 

Her anvil was her palm; her hammer was her thumb; her tongs were her fingers; her forge was her breath. 

It lay gilded and glowing in her grip, a small knife exactly one inch long and one horizon wide, and she picked it up and swung it and it cut the lesser, lower, rarified air in half with the vicious callousness of an aristocrat overdue for the guillotine.  Where it slashed, the sky bled apart, and where it did, Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, followed. 

***

On the vacuum-path she spun forwards, lungs empty, heart frozen, brain alive with sparkling plans.  Behind her she left a brutish contrail of puzzled oxygen molecules, peeled freshly from both the atmosphere and her ozone-blade and left to quarrel in confusion as oxygen molecules always do.  Far beneath and below rust fell like rain and humans grew light-headed and giddy; cats burst into laughter and dogs wandered in dazes.  A contrail of sparkling, dying metals marked the edges of her passing, and as her speed reached its zenith Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, saw the air begin to dye itself from passionate ocean blue to royal purple bruising. 

She was catching up to the night.  It was arrogant and old and it was used to being the fastest thing in the sky, and she would get very close to it indeed before it bothered to notice her. 

When it did, she knew it.  The moon had been following her for some time now, and when it veered sharply in her direction she was ready.  Bodyguard of the night, wanderer of the late summer skies, it dove at her like a stooping hawk, but it was inelegant in its rush and overconfident in its surprise and she simply banked to one side and let the moon slide by, laughing in disdain as it shaved itself down to a crescent on the sharp edge of her passage.  It gained her some seven high-leagues towards the target before the night even noticed its failure, the eld fool, and still, oh still, oh yet the miserable thing didn’t understand the position it was in.  Stars twinkled in her path and rose in her face to bar her way, but she was ready and carefully cut herself into dimensions that slid between their light like water through a streambed, slipping past the shine and squirming closer, ever closer to that inky black that lay beyond. 

The night was still not alarmed.  Why would it be?  Fail though its guardians may, it was still the earthbound finger of the infinite dark on this world, the touch of the universe running down the spine of the planet to bring it shivering relief from the smothering love of its upstart star-parent. 

It must be remembered, of course, that fingers are very delicate in more than one sense. 

So it was both no surprise that the night itself allowed Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, to come so close to it without much caring, and that when she subsequently brought out a small potted plant and turned its chlorophyll inside-out, dumping a lifetime’s-worth of sunshine out in a very sharp railroad-spike of pure photons, it was immediately, unceremoniously, and painfully nailed to the sky. 

***

The heavens did not scream. 

The night itself screamed.  It was much bigger and older and softer and more arrogant, and so it reacted as shrilly and angrily as any such person does when pain is visited upon them, especially minor, inconvenient, meaningless pain.  Actual agony would freeze them stiff. 

The heavens did not scream.  But at hearing that, they did cower and shrink away.  And so Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries was alone in the gap where the sky had been, with the immense vastness of the pinned night and a fraying splinter of purest harvested sunlight. 

There was little time to waste.  She brought out her spade and bucket and alit upon the night’s shores, and there she braced herself, and put her hat between her teeth, and bit down so that when her shovel breached the flesh of the night itself the tremendous and all-consuming nauseated pain and roiling horror wouldn’t make her bite off her tongue because she needed that to get back home alive very very much. 

The night was now coherent enough to get over its shock and stop screaming and begin cursing, so Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries stopped up her ears with small scraps of rags and began to hum as loudly and off-kilter as she could, drowning out swearwords and damnable blasphemies with lullabies and nonsense verse and filthy limericks, watering down the infinite with the ultra-finite until it could not wound or touch her.  Her fingers itched with the temptation to reach out and snag a flailing tendril of one of the smaller curses, but no, her self-control won the day.  Some things aren’t meant to be taken, but more common are the things that are up for grabs by anyone but with a nasty tendency to remove the hand that receives them. 

She had a bucket full of something like those now, lighter than air and heavy with portent.  Her arm was buoyed and her soul was weighted, and as she threw aside the dissolving remains of what used to be the idea of her shovel and the little sunlight sliver dissolved and the night began to bloom in hideous wrath all around her, she clicked her tongue three times, coughed, and from memory, yelled a loud and perfect “cock-a-roo-roo!”

And Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries slid vastly, perfectly, endlessly down the slope of above and around and into the small comfortable spaces crowded all around with matter, with ordinary matter, with ordinary things that mattered, and slammed into her chanting verandah with such force that every bone in her body came within a single degree of dislocation. 

She lay there for a few hours trying to work up the energy to scream or cry.  The potted plant comforted her, but greater still was the comfort of the little bucket in her left hand.  It was full of the closest thing anyone on a gravity well can get to the actual universe, and it weighed a stupid amount because weight was a stupid concept to apply to it, like size, like shape, like age. 

“Got you,” she said, a few minutes before dinner. 

Then she screamed for a while until she felt better. 

***

“That’s very nice, dear,” said Hanna, mother of Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries.  She gently turned the bucket in her palms, giving it friendly little pats to soothe its noises.  “But this isn’t what I meant when I asked if you could go get me some nightsoil for my garden.”

“Well what the hell else would you mean?” 

Hanna told her.

“Shitting EUPHEMISMS?!” erupted Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries. 
“Exactly,” said Hanna. 

Twenty-six days, that was how long it took.  Wendell felt that was very reasonable of him.

Twenty-six days since they found the mould in the apartment beneath him (and ONLY that apartment: apparently it had originated from an ambitious fridge slime that had gotten too big for its britches and had made it as far as the microwave before being caught).  Twenty-six days of antiseptics and antibacterial and antimicrobial soaps.  Twenty-six days of feeling like someone had placed a can of ethanol inside one nostril and a bar of soap in the other. 

That was how long it took before Wendell went to see the leprechaun in the building’s basement.

“I’m a brownie,” said the leprechaun. 

“Yeah,” agreed Wendell.  “A leprechaun.”

“I’m closer to a hobgoblin than anything.”
“A leprechaun.”
“Are you even listening to me?”
“I’ll make you a deal, leprechaun,” said Wendell.  “Can you please, please, please, please, PLEASE take away my sense of smell?  Because it’s worse than death having it.”
The leprechaun scratched his nose in perplexity at this.  There was a lot of nose to scratch, both inside and out – it was not long, but it was broad and possessed a staggering depth to it, emotional and physical.  “Look, leprechauns don’t cut deals.  But brownies can, I s’pose.  Stop calling me a leprechaun and I’ll have that nose off you.”
“Not the nose, just the smell.”
“Why do you care?”
“I like my nose.”
The brownie looked at it critically.

“What?”
“Nothing.  Nothing.”
“That wasn’t nothing.”
“It’s a fine nose, I mean.  Just.  I’ve seen better, that’s all.”
“Take the damn smell,” said Wendell.

“Fine,” said the brownie.  And he did.

***

That night Wendell went to bed early and fell into the true sleep of the blissfully exhausted and drifted too deeply for dreams, until the exact moment someone rear-ended someone else on Queen Street and the sirens and the howling and roaring and mangling and screaming grabbed his hindbrain and hurled it back into the universe in blinking terror. 

“Jesus,” he muttered, and rolled over.

Ten minutes later a couple outside had a proposal turn into a breakup. 

Ten minutes after THAT the tow-truck for the rear-ender got rear-ended. 

Ten minutes after THAT the police showed up.

Wendell walked downstairs to the basement and nearly died sixteen times on the way due to forgetting to open his eyes until the third floor. 

“What’s up?” asked the brownie, who was reading an old magazine of dentist’s-office age and stateliness. 

“Can you do ears too?” asked Wendell. 

The brownie’s eyebrows crinkled into highly disgusted shapes. 

“Hearing.  I mean, can you take my hearing?”
“I only do trades,” said the brownie.  “And thank fuck because listen pal, those ears?  Those are fixer-uppers.  You got wax in there or is that tar?”

Wendell pulled off his right slipper and threw it at him, then went to bed and slept through his alarm clock by six hours. 

***

Wendell’s sheets were tacky.  Not as a matter of taste, but as a matter of sensation. 

Sweat, mostly.  Some dust.  And the thread was bare and coarse enough that it trapped them easily. Now that he was getting a solid eight (minimum) a night, he woke irked from it.  And breakfast wasn’t helping.  Breakfast was oatmeal, same as always.  And it tasted like nothing at all, but a little bit worse. Air tasted like nothing.  Oatmeal tasted like lumps. 

“Hey,” said Wendell to the brownie. 

“Hey,” said the brownie. 

“How can I still hear YOU?”

“You’re not,” said the brownie dismissively.  “Don’t overthink it.  Now what the hell’s your problem this time?”
“I hate my breakfast and I hate my fabrics,” said Wendell.

“Want new sheets?  Some recipe ideas?”
“Can you just take my senses of touch and taste?”
The brownie sighed.  “Sure.  Why not.  What’re you offering?”
“I’ll trade you my sense of touch for taking my sense of taste,” said Wendell, who had thought about this very carefully on the way down sixteen flights of stairs. 

The brownie squinted at him.  “Clever.  Very clever.  Too clever.  Don’t try that shit again.”

Breakfast was peaceful then, aside from when Wendell almost bit his tongue off by mistake and only noticed when the spoon came out of his mouth bright red. 

***

The wall to the left side of Wendell’s computer monitor was his worst enemy. 

It was painted teal, but not really.  It was grey, but not quite.  It was almost the colour of a sullen sky, or maybe some sluggish water.  It was rough from the wall’s texture, or maybe that was because it had been applied slapdashedly.  There was a hole that might have been from hanging a picture or from a careless bump with furniture moving.  A spider was living high up on it, unless that was a smear from something. 

Data entry crawled along so slowly, so slowly because of it.  Hours went by in which Wendell had nothing to do but sit and consider that stupid, stupid, stupid wall. 

“Take my sight, please,” he told the brownie. 

“Why don’t I just paint your wall?” the brownie asked. 

“Take it,” said Wendell firmly, “and I’ll be happy.”

“Oh thank FUCK,” said the brownie.  And although Wendell took some two hours to get back to his apartment and could no longer enter data at all, he felt great relief and comfort. 

***

The next day he went down to the basement, which took only one hour but probably almost wasn’t very safe. 

“You’re a ripoff,” he pouted.  “I gave you my sight and we agreed I’d be happy and I’m not!  I’m miserable!”
“That’s because you’ve been avoiding your problems by ignoring them instead of doing anything to fix them,” said the brownie.  “Did you buy ear plugs?  Do your laundry?  Get a poster?  Visit a friend?  Do anything, ever?  TRY something?”
“This is much easier,” said Wendell.

“Beyond the personal moral implications on your character, it’s also pretty rude to the blind and deaf communities.”

“This is all making me even LESS happy,” complained Wendell.  “Fix it!”
The brownie shut his eyes, counted to six on one hand, and opened his eyes again.

“Alright,” he said. “You want me to fix you being unhappy?”
“Yes!”
“And you’re sure about this?”
“Yes!”
“And-”

“We had a deal and I demand you uphold it.”
“Fine,” said the brownie.

***

Wendell’s hospital bed was coarse, his meals rough, his roommate noisy, his neighbours loud, and his walls painted a dreadful vomit—orange. 

But his brain was in a little jar in a basement in a brownie’s burrow, and so he smiled, and was not troubled. 

Barboringgravvixtoner’cha’tirlishmecklestonmorrigor woke up. 

It was a sudden sharp surprise to her.  It only took a few weeks. 

The sudden flood of returning senses was the same rush it always was – pitch blackness resolving at her pupils; tingling air on her hide; distant odours eddying through her sinuses – but it arrived without the usual easy comfort.  She felt groggy.  She felt heavy.  She felt tired.  She felt like she wasn’t done sleeping.

And then, after a discombobulated month or so, her brain realized why. 

“Oh,” she said (aloud: there was no WAY she was coherent enough for thought).  “I’m hungry.”

***

Her fridge was empty.  The deep-cave’s ice was bare and slick, not even a bloodstain remaining.  Pure cold ice, satisfying to crunch and utterly useless save to build up emergency steam in the absence of liquid water. 

Damnit.  Sure she’d hunted before torpor?  The memories were surly and slow to arrive, begrudging with details and short-tempered when prodded: yes, she’d hunted; no, she hadn’t bothered to save leftovers; yes, she’d eaten the whole thing, claws, paws, fur and all.  It had only been a young bear, she’d told herself; it wouldn’t even make for a decent midslumber snack; she’d only be angry with herself if she woke up and all she had was a half-consumed half-grown half a bear ass. 

Well, here she was: half-ass-less and exactly as angry as she was worried about anyways.  Maybe she could go get another one?  Was it winter?  Finding hibernaculums was a pain and any inhabitants she could dig out would be half-withered from their own naps.  It smelt like winter.  Damnit. 

Her wings cramped.  Her forelegs burned with the ache of comfiness turned sour with stiffness.  There was an itch precisely between her hips that no amount of twisting would ever let her scratch. 

“Fuck it,” she spoke, slipping into eldwords in her liminal consciousness, intent writing itself into her brain and settling just above the surface of her soul.  “I’ll just make a salad.”

And lo, it was sworn. 

***

The mountain stream was too fast to freeze.  That, combined with its delicious traces of heavy metals, was part of what had led her to select this cavern complex in the first place.  It was nice to not have to play whack-a-mole to find the least-stagnant patch of water underneath the crust and then worry about trying not to inhale too many turtles when half asleep.  That big snapper had sent her into chronic coughing for the rest of the year. 

Steam built up.  Her heart roared into second gear, her body temperature in a few select places skyrocketed, and she creaked and hissed her way downslope; half-flying, half-pouring herself, letting gravity take the wheel.  She eeled her way down to her favourite mineral field and oh!  Oh!  The gall!  Some horrible little pests had gone and nibbled away at it while she was abed, snipping away at the exposed edges and chewing on all the richest veins!  It was practically swiss cheese by now. 

“Fuck,” she said aloud – again, in eldwords, and so bilious emotion slopped out of her mouth and poured across the ground, eating away the scrap rock and slag like soft dirt.  But wait, but wait, there was still a smell of metal, a hint – a more-than-hint, an intoxicating whiff – of appetite.  She tidied away the leavings of the pests and as she cleared the slope of stacked stones and chewed timbers (sending a few stragglers flying in the process, hideous little tetrapodal bodies flailing and squealing) there was a little exposed nest, and in that nest, wonder of wonders, of all the pleasant surprises, against all she knew and hoped, in spite of everything, was a few dozen pounds of near 24-karat gold. 

“Holy shit,” she blurted out, blighting the ground around her with irrecoverable poison, which it looked to be used to.  “Jackpot!”  Who knew the little four-limbed bastards had it in them?

Hmm. 

She looked downslope.  Yes, there were more down there.  They usually preferred the valleys to her peaks, and she could smell the rising cinders from their half-baked little fires, feel the fuzzy and linty edges of their small dreams. 

So she lurched, slipped, and jumped and landed amongst them. 

***

The big nests were the real prizes.  They’d taken the gold and silver and purified it so beautifully, then frustratingly fashioned it into tiny little flat circular fecal pellets.  She stuffed them into her crop as she sifted through the detritus, then alit on something even nicer: a tiny wooden husk holding something that, but for its sparkle, almost looked like diamonds.  Then she sniffed and licked and bit and felt that crunch and grit and knew they WERE diamonds, only the little pests had nibbled away the edges of the gems to make them sparkle.  Magpies they were.  Still, even reduced they were a nice treat. 

Yes, it was all coming together nicely.  And oh, and oh, what was this that she smelt, that she smelt smelting?  On the edge of town a fire that roared sullen-dark, almost like a very sad and tiny version of her own gut.  She upended it and spilled molten goo across the ground – sad tin, dull iron, but mixed within the slag and the slurry was something that hummed JUST right. 

At last.  Perfect. 

***

The gold lay heaped; topped with silver.  The gems blazed.  And threaded throughout it as dressing and binding, the small tickling buzz of a light undertone of molten radium. 

Barboringgravvixtoner’cha’tirlishmecklestonmorrigor wrapped herself around it three times, coiled tightly as she could, and inhaled the rising fumes from the whole glowing glorious mess in three shuddering breathes. 

Damn, she loved salad. 

And so she went to bed, body aching pleasantly instead of stiffly; stomach full; soul soothed; and she slept there quite content and very happy and ready to awake late in the decade.

Then some little FUCKER rode up to her door on a horse, snuck into her bedroom, and stabbed her side.