jamieproctor.ca

It’s another beautiful summer on this beautiful planet, and even after almost half a billion years somehow we all still aren’t tired of it. I know most of you are ready to get out there and ‘dive into things,’ as it were, but first we need to go over some crucial safety information to ensure your fun in the sun doesn’t turn dark: how to prevent human attacks.

First off, we’re going to explain what a human is – many of you may already think you know this, but the truth is, humans are widely misrepresented in our media. The public image of the human is a friendly, sociable creature that is largely hapless outside its curated environment and is totally useless when exposed to water. In reality, humans are mindless eating machines,, honed by evolution into a mindless swarm of omnivorous ape-locusts that will exterminate anything they encounter. They can’t swim – praise Cladoselache – but they love to play in shallow water, and even if you’re safely miles away from shore you might encounter one of their longlines, or their boats, or god knows what.

Some of you are thinking ‘gosh, that can’t be right; I have a friend who saw a human once and nothing bad happened to him, maybe all this is just overblown panic?’ I will remind you all that the plural of ‘anecdote’ is NOT ‘data,’ and the data do not in fact agree with your naivety: much fewer than a hundred humans a year are attacked unprovoked by sharks; the other way around, that number’s about thirty million. For your own safety and your own good you should stay the hell away from these things. The following will be some practical advice to help you do just that. Remember, preventing unwanted encounters with humans entirely is impossible, but by following these guidelines you will be able to reduce your chances of experiencing such an unpleasant surprise.

Firstly, observe all posted beach signs. If you see a beach with signs on it, who do you think put them there? Humans. Stay away from those places. Sometimes they even put signs up with pictures of sharks on them, just to fool you into thinking this is a nice place to hang out. This is a trap. Any sign on a beach is a warning and should be treated as such: don’t swim on beaches with signs.

Second, be careful when swimming at dusk and dawn. Everyone knows humans are diurnal, with terrible night vision and a pitiful count of other senses that verge on utter uselessness, so most of you think that dusk and dawn are safe times to go down to the beach. Wrong. Many humans are ‘early birds’ or ‘night owls’, and these para-avian freaks can be found in the water even when the sun’s barely detectable. I’m aware many of you are crepuscular by nature and habit, but for your own safety, I recommend absolute caution when approaching the shore during those hours, lest your daily foraging bite off far more than you can chew.

Matters of vision bring me to our third item, murky water is not safe water. It’s excellent to feed in, yes – low-visibility environments are wonderful tools for any elasmobranch with more tricks in your toolbox than just eyeballs – but it can also conceal the precise nature of what you’re trying to feed on. One moment you’re chasing a shoal of fish, the next moment you’ve smacked into the legs of some human wearing rubber pants and holding a fishing line. Restricted vision goes both ways.

Fourth, there’s one place in particular where murky water will be not just common but expected as a matter of course: avoid river mouths if you aren’t prepared to be hyperaware. Yes, this is a low blow: not only do rivers provide the tempting low-visibility ease-of-foraging we just covered, but they’re a rich source of nutrient outflow that lures little organisms which lure bigger organisms which lure bigger yet organisms, any and all of which are excellent eating. But you know who else uses rivers? Humans. A river is the ideal tool for an ape that can barely get itself to float; they just push their business into the water and let it sail downstream on its own. Humans and fresh water are like hammerheads and stingrays: they just can’t leave the damned things alone. Ask a bull shark. Fresh water means humans.

Speaking of humans doing their business and waste outlets, number five: beware sewage discharge outlets. They’re wonderful little things – like little compressed rivers, injecting vast quantities of filth and debris that are fed on by little things that are fed on by bigger things that we can then eat – but they’re too good to be true: it is a matter of confirmed scientific fact (not speculation, not allegation, cold hard fact) that sewage discharge outlets are made by humans. That’s right. Sewers are made by humans, for humans, and they are tended by humans. If you don’t want to encounter humans, stay away from sewage outlets.

Now, if you’ve followed all of the above advice, you may think that you’re safe. No. You aren’t. Even if they aren’t hiding, a human in plain sight has many tricks to fool the unsuspecting into coming close enough to be enmeshed in its opposable grip. Number six: not all that shines is scales. Bright, clean sunlight can make a fish shine in the water, but it can also lend glitter to all many of human gewgaws, gadgets, and flibbertigibbets that they inexplicable entangle themselves in. ‘Watches.’ ‘Jewelry.’ The meaning behind these objects is greatly obscured, but their effects are stone cold clear: with a bit of sunshine, they can sparkle like any clean healthy fish scale, luring you in for lunch and giving you nothing but a mouthful of betrayal and regret. Don’t rely on your eyes alone to tell you what’s food, and don’t be hasty!

Regrettably, no sooner have we warned you of your eyes than we must also caution you against several of your other senses – seventh, be careful when investigating splashing. Yes, most every time in your life you follow the sensation and the sound of struggling, flailing, uncoordinated writhing life in the water it will lead you to nothing more harmful than a nice snack. But if you’re doing it nearshore – and ESPECIALLY near a beach – be warned: there’s nothing less elegant or coordinated than a human in the water except two humans in the water. I know we just cautioned you against them, but use your eyes to confirm: is this really a flailing fish, or is it a thrashing human?

We’re moving towards the end of our lecture, but there’s a connected problem here that we haven’t brought up yet: number eight: human-associated animals; nonhuman lifeforms whose presence may signpost their presence. Most prominent in this are canines, the so-called ‘dogs’ you may have heard described as being sort of like sea lions with defective flippers. Like humans, they are terrible swimmers, producing incredible amounts of splashing and noise. Unlike humans, they aren’t dangerous in and of themselves. But they are almost universally encountered WITH humans, and if you think you’re doing nothing more dangerous than investigating some odd shaggy thing that might be edible? That’s when you’ll encounter a human when you least suspect it. Stay away from canines.

There is one more animal you may unexpectedly find in the company of humans, and it’s one you already know: dolphins. Yes, as unimaginable as it may be, humans may willingly seek out the company of dolphins, without apparent coercion. ‘Well, who cares?’ I can see you thinking. ‘I would never go near dolphins anyways!’ That’s what you think. Say you’re out cruising near the surface and you find a nice big fish shoal, big enough for everyone to get some. It’s you, a few swordfish, a half-dozen of your peers…. and a small pod of dolphins. Do you run? No, there’s plenty for everyone so long as you keep a weather eye out for danger. Right? Right. But sometimes – and megalodon herself could not tell us why – the danger can come unexpectedly, in the form of humans hopping right into the shoal to consort with the horrible creatures. So that’s number nine: be careful when feeding with dolphins, and not just careful of the dolphins themselves.

We’re about to wrap up, but first one final, tenth piece of advice, which is principally for any Carcharodon in our audience today: examine any oddly-shaped seal you see motionless at the surface of the water very carefully. Sometimes that’s a human lying on a plank with its arms and legs dangling off the sides. We don’t know why they do it, sometimes they just do it, remember it, identify it, avoid it. And we have it on reliable record that besides the danger involved, they taste awful.

Be safe, be careful, and remember: they’re way, way, WAY more scared of you than you’re scared of them.

That’s why they’re so dangerous.

Five AM, and too damned dark even on daylight savings time. A bad breakfast in the stomach and a worse coffee in your hand. Red eyes and a brain that’s happy to be here because it means you didn’t have time left to think about life at home or life at all. Ears full of roaring, wheezing, groaning machines and in the distance that one long whining call of Jerry getting his arm extracted from an industrial icing extruder again. There’s ten thousand dollars’-worth of Granny-Style #14 (choc. ic.) in the back of your truck and an emptiness inside your stomach.

Another shift at the local cake depot.

***

The foundational deliveries are what start the day, of course. The places that can’t go without cake – your hospitals, city halls, megastores, and port authorities, all of whom take a lot of the fast-spoiling stuff like parfaits in addition to their monthly emergency stock lay-in of things like Pound (0-ic.). Later in the day you’ll hit up secondary high-flow areas like nursing homes, malls, and apartment complexes with more traditional mainstays like Baker’s Choc (choc. ic). In the evening you’ll go by the schools and offload some of the extra byproduct from the day’s travels; the stuff that got crimped by a forklift or smeared against the walls or smushed in a corner.

There are bills being considered to prohibit schools getting discounted cake. That’s cake that could go to retirees.

So your morning’s a lot of driving and a lot of signing delivery forms and a bit of sitting there and nodding and listening to someone telling you a long list of problems that you can’t help them with and aren’t interested in until they let you get a word in edgewise and that word is ‘talk to your boss’ and they won’t do that.

Makes you want to smash a pie into their faces. Can’t do that. Pies were trimmed out in the cutback frenzies of the ‘80s. If you want pie you’ll have to provide your own materials and labour, and you don’t have any time for that. You’re working on depot time, doing the depot tour, keeping the cake coming and breaking yourself down one vertebrae, one neuron, one nodding-along at a time.

You don’t deserve a medal for your service but you probably deserve one for not punching anyone while executing it.

***

Lunch is consumed in a greasy little box you set up yesterday if you had the energy; in a roadside box with a big bright logo on it if you didn’t. You didn’t, and you usually don’t. It’s thirty minutes long and you make sure to make those minutes last without running into that terrible, terrible moment where you have nothing to do but sit and watch the clock move and feel that aching hollow inside you get bigger and bigger, a void that no cake will fill.

When that happens you usually go to the truck and take a slice of Pineapple Upside-Down (Glz) and mark it down as spillage incurred at your least-favourite dropoff site (it’s a Walmart, it’s always a Walmart). It still doesn’t fill the void but it DOES quiet it down a bit.

***

When the deliveries are all done and the forms are all filled and that little ache in your spine is getting worse and worse and the sunlight is fading and the dark is getting too much to bear you return to your depot and hand over all your papers and you start the hardest part of the day, which is the small talk.

You are working hard, unless you’re hardly working. The coffee is bad, but at least it’s free. Hey, did you hear that Jerry got his arm stuck in a cake extruder and spoiled an entire batch of Boxed Vanilla (van. ic.)? Only the sixteenth time this month. How’s your day going? How ya been? How ya doin’?

The trick is to grunt a lot and say ‘can’t complain, nobody’ll listen’ and then grunt a lot more. And then the hard part’s over, and it’s almost time for you to be almost ready to get almost ready to go home.

***

Got to do the materials checklist before the night shift starts up, to make sure everything’s set for the midnight runs – the cake that moves out under cover of darkness, to go to places where cakes shouldn’t be noticed. Devil’s Food (ex. choc. ic.) and other even deadlier secrets. And of course beyond those there’s the emergency standby crews, forever ready to pounce the moment a fire breaks out or a kid falls through the ice or a shooting happens and there’s an urgent need for a rapid-response truck with one ton of pre-sliced Sturdy Pound (van. ic.) ten minutes ago. You’ve never driven one and you’ve never wanted to because frankly you already spend too much of your life drinking coffee and talking about coffee and wanting coffee and one more hour of that injected into your daily cycle might make you die from abstract causes. And you don’t like Sturdy Pound with icing; you’ll only eat it plain.

Once the materials checklist is done, there’s just the safety checklist (with its persistent entry on Jerry), and the cleaning checklist, and the sign-out sheet, and the office secret santa signup sheet, and that one form you forgot to sign this morning that you’re technically violating the law by signing in the evening but that’s the easiest way to deal with the whole thing as long as you never ever tell anyone that you did it, since then they’d have to either admit they do it too or get you arrested and fired in that order.

***

After that you leave, realize you forgot your wallet, go back, and leave again.

Then you can go home.

Just another day at the local cake depot. A hard day, a long day, a grinding day, an essential day.

Nobody ever said it’d be a piece of cake.

It was five in the morning and Roggles had gone to bed just two hours prior when the first knock – a polite, solid, firm, socially-acceptable-yet-unshy knock – came at the door. ‘You can rest when you’re dead,” her master had told her the previous day; and indeed, almost every day.

This was something that Roggles conceded may have been true, but was still too damned on-the-nose for a coffin-maker to say.

The second knock arrived as she hobbled her way to the workshop door, and was exactly as unyieldingly businesslike as the first. She opened it and came face to face with the most authoritative knuckles she’d ever seen, on the most dutiful arms she’d ever known, attached to the most boring man she’d ever met.

“Greetings, salutations, and obeisance to your renowned and beloved master, the coffin-maker Uul,” proclaim the boring man in a voice so controlled and competent that Roggles nearly fell asleep again on the spot. “I come on behalf of my own master, whose name may in fact be known to you, whose time of departure from this world draws nigh, whose title demands respect: the Princess C-I. She would like to commission a coffin fit to stand among her ancestors in their burial city and command the respect and admiration that she is due from her peers of the past, and she would like it done by tomorrow morning, lest it be late for her death. If you should deliver this commission on time, riches shall be yours.”

Roggles looked at him and felt whole universes of thought and motion slide like glass sheets across her mind, obscuring every inch of him for beautiful amounts of time that had no name.

“Sure,” she said. “Thanks. Great. It would be my master’s happiness. Pleasure. Yes. Thanks.”
So perfected was the messenger that this was accepted with a slight and completely-sincere nod, and commission thus delivered, he departed and left Roggles standing there with several multi-faceted concepts floating in her head.

“Bed,” she decided. “No. Bed, then Uul. No no no, Uul then bed. Yes.”

“Is this the workplace of the coffin-maker Uul?” asked someone four inches away from her face.

“Yes,” said Roggles’s mouth while the rest of her disentangled itself from the burning wreckage of her brain. Her eyes reported back first: there was a warrior in front of her; unnecessarily large and unnecessarily filthy and openly wearing at least six different weapons in town, all of which were suspiciously well-cared-for and worn. She was picking her teeth with a sliver of bone.

“Good. Open up your ears and listen carefully: Caul, the bandit-lord, just died. Little Caul wants a box for his dad, a respectable one. Get it done by tomorrow and we don’t come back and cut your ears and noses off. Got it?”

“Yes,” said Roggles’s mouth, now guided by her survival instinct while the rest of her brain organized a riot.

“Good. Remember: tomorrow night, ears and noses. See you soon.”

And then she finished picking her teeth, flicked the bone-sliver into Roggles’s eye, and left.

“Aaaugh,” said Roggles.

“Pardon me, but do you think you could do me a favour?” asked a very small and washed-out man. His face looked like old clothes.

“Urgh,” said Roggles.

“It’s just that I need a coffin.”
“By tomorrow, right?” managed Roggles, rubbing at her streaming eye. “Why not. Everyone else does. What’s the big rush?”
“I am cold and miserable and alone and have nowhere to go or be or do, and I would like to not leave my remains in a mess for someone else to tidy up,” said the man. “I’m sorry to say this, but I cannot pay you.”

Roggles’s brain froze, her mouth tried to apologize, and her conscience jammed them both, resulting in a blank stare fit to age milk. Luckily the overwhelming awkwardness of the moment caused her back to seize up in such a way that made her chin nod, and so reassured, the man went on his way.

***

“Quite a racket out there this morning,” said Uul as she and roggles took their morning hot drinks. Uul sipped sparingly. Uul did everything sparingly. Uul was less extravagant than most people’s skeletons. “Have we work to do?”

“Yes,” said Roggles. “Little Caul wants us to make a coffin for his father by tomorrow or he’ll cut off our ears and noses.”
“Mmm,” said Uul. She took another sip. “Was there more? I heard more than one visitor.”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“Enough is when you’ve done everything you can.”
“Princess C-I is dying. She wants the most opulent coffin you can imagine by tomorrow so she can show off to her dead relatives in their dead city.”

“Please be quiet when you’re treasonous,” said Uul, carefully adding a single pinch of aromatic pollen to her mug. “Well. That’s quite a set of commissions.”
“There’s one more.”
“Really? I didn’t hear anything.”
“The quiet little man from down the way is going to die and wants a coffin by tomorrow. He said he didn’t want to make a mess for anyone.”

Uul put down her mug.

“Then that is what we will do first,” she said.
“He can’t pay,” Roggles said.
“Oh, we all do that eventually. He just doesn’t have any money, and that’s less important. Now bring me my tools.”

***

The small man’s coffin was made from the same timber that was set aside for the Princess and the bandit-lord. Uul was very specific about that.

“The outside may show what it pleases,” she said, “but the essence must be the same. You know this by now.”

The outside in question was kept modest. In the end, the coffin was perfectly measured, perfectly trimmed, and perfectly unadorned and undecorated. It was a coffin, absolutely nothing less and infinitely nothing more.

“Good,” said Uul, whose sleeves had begun the day rolled-up and had someone migrated farther north from there. “Now that the hard one’s over, we can do the simple things. The Princess wanted luxury, yes? Open the safe and bring me everything that’s inside it. The big one in the basement that’s sealed into the wall.”

Roggles did this and in the deep dank dark and crumbled, mildewing brick of the basement was confronted with enough wealth to blind a less groggy human. So overwhelmed was she by the luxury of the jewels and the precious metals on display that the notion of stealing any of them didn’t enter her head until half the day had passed and she was just fitting the last of the cut diamonds into a beautiful spiralling pattern in the center of the enormous coffin’s lid that had been fashioned to reflect the light of the setting sun in such a way – when combined with the gold inlay – as to make it seem aflame with inner light.

“You know, I could have stolen one of these – just one, a very small one – and left,” she said aloud, because the hot drinks had been a very long time ago and the line between dreams and reality was getting fuzzy again.

“Yes, but you wouldn’t,” said Uul. “And besides, you’d miss out on the fun part: now we’re going to build the coffin of Caul.”

This caused Roggles to remember her ears and nose, and she was at once more awake than she’d been in years.

“The thing about this coffin,” said Uul, “is that it must contain burial wealth. A bandit-lord left destitute in death will never bribe his way past the walls of forever, and a bandit-lord without a very secure coffin is a bandit-lord that will be left destitute in death in very, very short order. We will build it thick, and we will build it strong, and we will build it to be as greedy and grasping as Caul himself.”

And so they did; constructing a mighty and sturdy frame that was nigh-impermeable to blade, blow, or burning, and inside that frame Uul did things with wood and metal that turned the entire thing into a giant finger-trap that would accept a single big, bulky band-lord body eagerly into its depths but would never permit it – or its gilded wealth – to leave again.

“Now, I think that’s a good day’s work,” said Uul, stretching her arms out with an alarming series of pops snaps and crackles. “I’m going to bed. You know I’m a little slow-footed, so would you be kind and answer the door when the callers come? It’d be a shame to lose our ears and noses after we did such fine work to preserve them.” And of course Roggles didn’t say no, being an apprentice, and so she went to bed with a brain made of fizzing nerves and a soul made of lunk-lead-weariness and an honour guard of three carefully-shrouded coffins.

The last, at least, did not bother her. She’d met plenty of those, and slept as peacefully among them as a babe in a basket until someone hammered on the door less than a half-second after she’d finally begun to rest.

“AWAKE,” shouted a large voice, as a large boot kicked the door. “Caul’s getting cold and Little Caul’s getting impatient. You got the damned body-box yet?”

“Yes,” said Roggles as she surged upright and fell over and scrabbled and got up and almost fell over and caught herself on a coffin and staggered to the door and opened it and said ‘yes’ sixteen more times. “Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.”

“You’re hilarious,” said the warrior, who’d brought a small and obnoxious pony and two slightly dirtier warriors and a sturdy cart to carry the load. “That plus the box ears you your nose and ears back, lucky girl! See you next time.”
And with this cheerful threat Roggles was left standing in the doorway with a bladder full of melting icewater and a heart in her throat and a great and incredible amount of relief pouring out of her skull and running over her shoulders like liquid sunshine.

“Pardon me,” said a very small voice at her elbow, one million miles away, “but did you manage to spare a coffin for me? Even a very old or broken one would do.”
“Yes,” said Roggles beatifically. “Yes we did. Do you have, uh, anyone else to –”

“Oh no,” said the quiet small man, who had brought only an old half-broken wheelbarrow that groaned under the coffin’s weight like a dying cow. “No, no. Nobody at all.”

And he left, and with him left Roggles’s good mood, and so it was with a pensive and solemn and vaguely furrowed face that she was discovered by the officers and ministers of Princess C-I, which they complimented her for greatly.

“It is an expression worthy of a coffin-maker,” the under-official’s assistant conveyed to her as he handed over a little box containing some slips of waxed paper that were more valuable than every bit of wealth that had gone aboard the coffin itself. “Keep that up and more people will come to you than your master, someday. Uul’s craft is admirable, but her manner is light.”
“Thanks,” said Roggles, and so tired was she that she managed not to laugh while she said it, and it made her bow exceptionally deep besides. This raised her esteem in their eyes and in her own, so when Uul finally made it downstairs she found Roggles and their hot drinks in an unusually content mood for being barely-alive.

“Payment’s here,” she said, passing the exquisite little casket and its priceless cargo to her master.

“Oh, it can go downstairs later; I’m not sure I’d trust either of us on that staircase right now. I overheard our visitors, but not much of what they said in specific; I take it there were no problems?”

“No problems at all,” said Roggles, mouth full of warm brew and mind full of beautiful, slothful clouds. “One-two-three, out the door. Right in a row.”
“Two-one-three,” corrected Uul. “We lined them up at the door in order of size from smallest to largest, remember?”

“Oh fuck,” said Roggles’s mouth. Then her brain, which was a bit slower on the uptake, threw up.

***

They took the rest of the day off – or at least Roggles did, at Uul’s urging. She was no use with the shakes and she needed the rest, or so she was told.

So she slept by the doorway in her cot and slept well and truly and infinitely until she was woken in the evening by cheering and yelling and someone playing an instrument very badly and then someone stuck their head in the door and yelled “CAUL IS DEAD!” directly into her ear, to which she reacted with incredibly politeness.

“Mmmnrfuck!”
“CAUL IS DEAD!” the visitor – who was the local street-meat-maker, she hazily recognized – called again into her face. “AND HIS HEIRS, TOO! HIS COFFIN WAS SO AFLOAT WITH GOLD AND GEMS THAT HIS MEN FOUGHT ONE ANOTHER TO THE DEATH OVER IT, AND THE FEW SURVIVORS TOOK WHAT THEY COULD AND FLED! CAUL IS DEAD AND GONE, HOORAY!” And having said this he threw a meat pastry onto Roggles’s lap and left to yell at someone else.

Roggles tried to comprehend the significance of this and gave up to focus on pastry. This brought her meager success until the door opened a crack and hit her toe.

“SFHGIT!”

“Pardon the intrusion,” said the under-official’s assistant, a bit louder than he’d been that morning due to the necessity of speaking over a small war’s-worth of celebration, “but I come bearing word of Departed Princess C-I’s estate, by commission of Princess C-U.” And so saying so, he produced a small box, identical to the one Roggles had received that morning, and bowed with incredibly depth and skill, managing to tip himself almost but not quite to the point of simply falling over. “No other tomb in all the burial city boasts a work of craft as perfected as her coffin; in lacking adornment, it has granted her dignity that sets it apart from her peers past and present. There will be no mistaking her resting place for any other, nor can it be outshone by splendour, nor can it be matched in craftsmanship. Please take this paltry reward, and with it the gratitude and esteem of the Departed Princess’s estate.”

And having made this speech and having made note of Roggles’s state of comprehension and having been possessed of ears in the vicinity of the ongoing festivities, the under-official’s assistant made himself very scarce as quickly as was politely possible.

Roggles sat at the door and stared. Then she finished her meat pastry, because that was about what she could manage right now.

“Oh lovely,” said Uul, who was sneakily quiet even when she wasn’t trying to be. “Did you get a second one?”
“No,” said Roggles, emerging from somewhere deep inside herself to feel like a heel.

“Ah, that’s alright, that’s alright. Accept the treats life hands you, don’t go complaining they weren’t big enough. I take it things have worked out?”
“Somehow. Mostly. Probably?”
“Excuse me,” said a very small voice from the doorway – which the under-official’s assistant had neglected, perhaps, to close quite as diligently as he might have. “But might I have a moment of your attention, if it’s no trouble please?”

The quiet man was there.

“What can I do for you?” said Uul.

“Well,” said the small quiet man, “I regret to say that I must return your coffin.”
“Oh damn. Was it not good enough?”
“Oh no no no! Far from it! It was beautiful. Is beautiful. I’ve brought it back, if you can reclaim it. The thing is, it was too kind. I took it and myself out to a lonely place where I wouldn’t be any trouble to anyone, and I dug a small grave, and I put the coffin in the grave, and I put myself in it, and that coffin gave me the snuggest, gentlest hug I’ve ever felt since my mother passed, and it moved me to tears and made me think of the love that can be given freely even to strangers by a person of sufficient kindness. And so I have come to ask, O Uul, master-maker of coffins, if you might perhaps have the time and space to spare to train an apprentice.”

Roggles felt as though the world had very carefully moved away from under her feet and left her standing above a tiny but infinitely deep hole whose contents were entirely unknown to her.

“You know,” said Uul thoughtfully. “I believe I don’t, for I already have a very fine apprentice here who – just now – taught me a few things either of us ever considered about customer satisfaction. But small spaces to spare are part of the coffin-maker’s trade, and as for time… well, as I have said before, I can rest when I’m dead. I already can’t manage myself, let alone one apprentice; why not two? Roggles, go get us something warm from the market. More filling than fancy, please – and more grease than grace. It’s been a long day.”

***

It wasn’t until they were done eating that Roggles realized that every piece of living space she occupied was now cut in half. But it had been a long day, so that didn’t matter.

Can you keep a secret? Look, look down here, look under this little loose board. Yes, at the back of the closet, under the old photo album box.

It’s where I keep all my magic tricks. Let me show them to you.

See, I have a weighted coin – a little weight, but where it helps. And a deck of cards that will let you hold them all, even when it looks like you don’t. And some tricky dice, and some handkerchiefs, and a little marble that used to be the eye of a great-great-great-grandmother worm. Don’t put it in your mouth; too much wisdom is deadly poisonous. Curse and cure is all in the dose and all that! If you put it down and watch it’ll follow you around the room.

Here is a hat. It looks ordinary, but there’s a little fold here and a little tuck there and with the right placement you can pull a rabbit or a dove or a ribbon from it out of nowhere. Here’s a sword you can swallow. And here’s a sword you shouldn’t swallow, because it’s cursed; its bearer can never die. Trust me, there’s so many ways for that to go wrong you don’t even want to start listing them.

Oh no, there’s much more, you need to keep digging. It’s a deeper box than it looks. Sturdy too. They don’t make them like this anymore – profit margins. An algorithm objected to it.

Here is a box inside the box; it’s full of jewels. These here are costume jewelry made from glass; and these here are costume jewelry made from non-precious minerals; and these here are faerie gems that will melt into dew if you bring them out under the light of a new dawn. You can use these to make someone’s wedding ring disappear and then destroy it in front of them and then return it.

This is a magician’s coat; which is just fancy enough to look impressive at a crowd’s-distance and just scruffy enough to hide all the extra pockets as slight fraying. This is a magician’s ring, which is made from cold-forged iron and can hold any one demon of moderate size as long as you aren’t damn-fool enough to release it. This is a magician’s wand; it’s made from plain scrap wood and a bit of varnish to make it glisten in the light. It does absolutely nothing but moving it around directs the audience’s attention, which is what all magic tricks rely on.

Those are gloves. You don’t need those for most shows, but putting them on is one more thing to get people’s attention and give you something to do while you stall for time, like if you need to wait while your assistant moves a rabbit or a dove around or for the odour of the hemlock you crushed under your heel inside your shoe to drive away the Hidden Folk that were making a plate levitate. Speaking of which, this is a little bag of dried hemlock. Don’t eat it because it will kill you. Stop fussing and keep listening; isn’t this all fun?

This little velvet bag is where I keep my small mirror. This big velvet bag is where I keep my large mirror. You DO NOT want them scratched or harmed; there are so many things that you can do with a perfect reflection that most people have no idea of. Make strings vanish; make ghosts appear; stand between two of them on a moonless night and converse with your truest shadow – the sky’s the limit and that’s no limit at all. And that’s not even getting into what you can pull off if you get into concaves and convexes

And over here, in this little lead-lined box, is my smoke. The little round balls are smoke bombs to confuse and conceal; the little slim sticks are incense to convoke and clarify; the rugged chunk of melted carbon is a piece of a coal forest that pre-dates bacteria that can consume lignin in plant matter, and if you ever expose it to an electrical current it will unleash a three-hundred-and-thirty-million-year-old wildfire that can devour a continent. So that’s only for emergencies.

This egg carton contains the eggs. Turkey, chicken, quail, hummingbird, tiny insubstantial and ineffable forest being, in descending order of size. If you crack them open just right they make doves come out; if you crack them open just wrong they make a mess; if you crack them open just wrong but just right they say things. If you do that, use the sealing wax in this tube to clog your ears the moment your lips start to feel numb. Nothing good comes from hearing too many might-have-been words.

Pay attention. I’ve told you before, you’ve got to pay attention. I won’t say it again; if you keep bugging me I’ll put the box away and you’ll never get to see it again.

See? Look. Look at this wonderful little collection of locks. You can use them with this chain to restrain yourself with a volunteer (a friend) and then you just twist them here and here and there and there and you’re free again, without anyone knowing differently. And here’s a lockpick, for when you need to do it the ugly way when nobody’s looking. And here’s a second chain, for when you’re chaining something you’ve called up that needs to not go back down again. And here’s a second lockpick, for when you’ve paid a price too dear and need to void whatever bargain you’ve made.

These are balloons if you’d like to make balloon animals.

A bottle, unlabeled – good if your memory is (and you hate prying peeping toms); bad if it isn’t. This one is stage blood, which is important if you need to disgust someone enough that they don’t look too closely. A dribble inside a hollow needle, and it pierces ‘through your arm;’ a dab on a sword and it ‘slices off your fingers;’ a razor that can be ‘swallowed’ and coughed up again. And this other bottle is real blood, and THIS one is unreal blood.

This triplet of coconut shells is your best friend. Combine them with some pebbles or coins or anything, anything at all, and you have the most fundamental in slight-of-hand. An amount of something under one, spin the shells about, and look how they change! Magic, pure magic, is about doing things where someone isn’t looking.

That isn’t a coconut shell; that’s a hermit-crab’s shell, and yes, it was someone’s skull. The crab learned a lot from him and if you ask it politely it will share answers. Bring it little bits of dead fish. It like those. You want it to like you. Trust me.

Stop whining. This is important. If you quit now it’s all for nothing. Look. Look in the box. Now.

Under the newspapers from the 1920s that can rearrange their headlines to predict today’s show…

Under the sleeping rabbits that don’t breathe or dream…

Under the black weighted tablecloth that conceals everything beneath it…

Under the SECOND deck of cards – which you can never hold all of, and nobody ever has…
Under the little bent flap of the box that’s gone a bit dogeared….
Under the bag of doves….

Under the coil of stage wires, so thin that no light makes them visible…

Under the bag holding the four winds…

Underneath my last assistant…

And atop the bare scuffed brown cardboard of the box’s bottom.

Here.

Yes, there.
Here’s your place. Alright?

Alright.

Yes, I think you’re ready.

Climb in and I’ll shut the lid.

And you won’t speak of this later, will you? That’s important. A good magician never lets anyone know how the magic works.

Simon sat down in his office and moved paperwork with his hands and a putter with his mind. The shot was perfect and immaculate and he could just about see the ball go PLUNK if it weren’t for these damned files in his hands plotting out the green green green grass. That, and the distant bitching of the morons one hole behind him, who were clearly impatient because they were too impatient to take their damned time and ENJOY themselves enough to do the job properly.

“Doctor?”
Ah, the bitching hadn’t been from inside his head. Dr. Simon Crabb opened his eyes and looked upon the tremulous, milky-pasty face of his patient, his responsibility, his charge, and sighed deeply.

“Yes?”
“What is it?”
Simon gazed dispiritedly upon his files. How to go about fitting so much information inside such a small head? Then a thought struck him, and so jarring was the blow that it escaped through his mouth before he had time to consider it further: “you have scabies,” he said, and no more.
“I’m sorry?”
“Scabies.”
“What abo-”
“You have scabies. Go home and drink some orange juice or whatever and they’ll be gone by Monday. Talk to the nurse about it.” And he picked up the paperwork again and began to shuffle it with such determination and focus that he was soon left alone with his thoughts and his thoughts were left alone with his 4-iron.

***

The odd brilliance that seemed to have suffused Simon since the gentle prodding of his fairway muse did not desert him. As each patient entered the office, he had but to consider their stupid, vacant, cowlike faces and then turn his mind to finer things like wedges, woods, and links and – quite without his input or design – the most miraculously conclusions would leap forth from his mouth, each scrupulously-crafted to remove the patient’s presence from his domain immediately.

“You have liverwort,” he informed a teenager sternly. “Stop eating so much liver.”
“Bu-”

“Next! You, what are you even here for?”
“My –”

“You have false pregnancy. Next!”

“Wha-”

“Is that supposed to be necrotizing fasciitis? You were misdiagnosed, it’s just wrinkles. Perfectly normal age related issue. Next”

“Hello, Simon!”
“Hell?” managed Simon, whose brain suddenly had to sprint several kilometers to catch up with his mouth. “Reggie?”
“Yes indeedie!” chirped Reggie. “Just a little checkup before the fairway, you know how it is ahahaha. Lovely day today, the club’ll be PACKED this afternoon I reckon ahahahaha. See you there?”
Simon’s mind had dropped into a very dark and deep place, full of inane chatter spoiling his shot, and so it was without the intervention nor instruction of conscious thought that his mouth opened and said “I’m afraid not, Reg.”
“Oh?”
“You have gigaherpes. You’ll need to stay indoors for the next three days and avoid all contact with grass or you’ll explode.”
“Oh NO!”
“Yes, terrible timing. You’d better send in the other club members right away; it’s highly transmissible.”
“But I haven’t been to the club since last Sunday!”
“It’s a retrovirus,” said Simon’s id, “it can spread retroactively. Call them right now and confess or I’ll do it for you. My ethics as a practitioner demand it.”
“Oh dear,” said Reggie, pulling out his phone with shaking hands. “But what about you, poor Simon, and the rest of the clinic?”
“I’m immune. But you’re right about the clinic – I’ll cancel the rest of the day’s appointments. It’s too dangerous for them right now.” Simon stood and grabbed his jacket. “Well, nice seeing you, Reggie. Be sure to make those calls and tell them not to leave the house for the next week.”
“Weren’t you going to?”
“It’s a retrovirus, remember? I retroactively diagnosed it. Keep up.” Simon strode confidently from the office, haltingly only briefly as a groaning man on a stretcher blocked the doorway.

“Doctor, if you would –” began the nurse.

“Yes, yes, yes” sighed Simon. He bent over and inspected the patient. “Perfectly healthy, just hypochondria, send her home,” he announced.

“Bu-”

“She’s a shark, Jessie. Sharks are healthy animals. Just detach her from this bozo, send her home, bill her later. I’ve got to go. See you next Monday.”

And he was gone.

***

Gone to the green.

Simon stood on the middle of the greenway at hole 3 of the Bunder’s Scupp course, gloriously, truly, beautifully alone. Every sign of life was gone; no clouds spoiled the blue sk; no nagging voices spoiled the silence; nothing was there but he, his voice, and the green, glossy grain of the grass.

He swung, and it hit or missed and it didn’t matter because the score was his alone to tally and the numbers didn’t matter and rules weren’t real. He laughed and sang and swung and chortled and coughed and tapped and wheezed and lunged and staggered and felt a lot of his arm stab him with violent pain all at once.

“My imagination,” said his mouth as he fell over, “nothing more.” And because he wished it to be so he trusted in it, and as the green turned grey and the cropped blades began to fuzz he knew very confidently that he was just going to take a quick nap now and get right back to the game.