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“Can I have the eggs?” Tyrrel asked his mother.

She looked up at him from her computer; distracted in that way that meant she was very very busy but could wait for just a second. “What for?”

“Science fair project. I want to try and hatch them.”

His mother nodded. “Sure. They’re almost expired anyways. Just be careful not to break any.” The second over, she turned her eyes and mind away and inwards and Tyrrel was on his own again.

This would have been perfectly fine in most respects at most times. She trusted him, and he understood that, and she loved that. She would have approved to see the little nest he made from the egg carton and a few old dishrags – not the newer, nicer ones that were still in use. She would have been happy to see the place he chose to incubate the clutch – off the floor, in the shed, in an emptied and decluttered drawer that the cat couldn’t get at and where smells couldn’t reach the house if things went wrong. And she would have been proud to see the carefully-large-printed label he affixed to the drawer itself: CAUTION: EGG PROJECT INSIDE.

She might, however, have cautioned him against using his grandmother’s old electric blanket as a warming pad. Even if he was very very careful about reading the instructions and following the safety directions.

***

“They hatched!” Tyrrel told his mother at great speed and greater volume at a very very small hour of the morning.

“What?” she asked, with the sort of articulateness at that hour that only raising children can grant you.

“The eggs!”

“Really?”
“Yes! And they’re precocial!”

“Yes yes very precious.”
“Precocial! And they’re HUNGRY. Can I-”

“You can feed them,” said his mother. And he left and she slept and there was no more consequence from that until breakfast, when she found what she couldn’t find.

“Tyrrel? Have you seen the bacon anywhere?”
“I fed it to the chicks, yousaidicould” said Tyrrel with the velocity and sincerity of a lawyer or any other eight-year-old.

“You fed it to them? They could get sick!”

“It was what they wanted!” he protested. “And they aren’t sick! They’re fine! And they’re still hungry; can we get more bacon?”
“Birdseed,” she said firmly. “Take the bag and come with me and I’ll show you how to feed them.”

Tyrrel’s protests were only somewhat muted by seven kilograms of birdseed, and they continued all the way to the shed.

“They don’t like it!”
“They need more bacon!”
“They liked the bacon!”
“This is too heavy!”
“Why aren’t you listening?”
Tyrrel’s mother brushed them away like an elephant walking through a cobweb, found the drawer, approved of the labelling, opened it, and saw the egg clutch.

The egg clutch saw her, at the top of its lungs.

“Tyrrel,” she said. “These are dinosaurs.”
“Birds are dinosaurs!”
“All birds are dinosaurs,” she said, “but not all dinosaurs are birds. And these aren’t birds. They have teeth.”
“Geese have teeth!”
“That’s cartilage. These are teeth. And they have arms, not wings, and they have little hands, and those little hands have little claws. Tyrrel, you are raising non-avian dinosaurs in the shed for a science project.”
“Okay,” said Tyrrel, giving up. “But I’ll take good care of them!”
“Only until the science fair,” she said firmly. “After that, they’re going to the museum – no, the zoo. You can’t raise…one, two, three four five, six….six carnivorous dinosaurs in the shed. We don’t know how big they’ll get, or what they’ll end up eating.”
“They want more bacon.”
“Chicken,” she said. “We’re going to feed them some chicken breast. Not too fatty. And we’ll probably need some calcium powder.”
“But they liked bacon!”
“They’re hungry, they’ll like anything. Hatching is hard work. And you’re using tongs to feed them from now on.”

“I was careful.”
“This is even more careful. I want you to grow up with as many fingers as you can. And we’ll need to move them into a bigger pen. What are you using to keep them warm?”
“An electric blanket,” said Tyrrel, his enthusiasm dimming somewhat under the onslaught of realistic concerns and their solutions.

“What KIND of electric blanket?”
“…grandma’s electric blanket.”

“Well,” said his mother, with that particular sort of accent on the word that meant more than any curse, “that certainly explains everything. No dessert for a week and no arguing – you know better than to touch any of your grandma’s things. Now go get me the tongs and let’s get it out of there right now before anything else happens. We’re lucky they didn’t hatch with six legs.”

***

The hatchlings outgrew the drawer and the first chickenwire enclosure and – subsequently – the shed itself, one after another. By the time they were sleeping outside their plumage had grown thicker and sleeker, trapping more heat – but even so Tyrrel’s mother prompted him to leave them wood shavings, blankets, boxes, windbreaks. They enjoyed all of them and slept curled into feathery heaps all night and much of the day. Mealtimes brought them wide awake, and making sure everyone got enough to eat was an act of profoundly confusing tong-work. This would be followed by a midafternoon meal coma, broken by fits of spectacularly high-speed recreational squabbling, then demands for more food.

“I thought I’d have to wait longer to be a grandmother,” Tyrrel’s mother mused as he dragged himself indoors nursing a headache from loud and insistent little voices and trying to keep six lightning-quick scuttlers. “And I guess I’ll still have to. But this is a good preview of it.”

“They’re so NOISY,” groaned Tyrrel.

“You were louder. Are louder.”
He glared at her, defeated and refusing to acknowledge it without one last push. “But there’s SIX of them!”

“Yeah, and they’re a lot less useless than you were – all you have to do is chop some chicken and give it over, then use the poop-scooper. We had to feed you, burp you, change you…”
“That’s not my fault! They’re just precocial.”
“Precarious my left foot; they’re THRIVING at the top of their lungs. If you want to survive it? Try earplugs. I’ve got some in the outside pocket of my guitar case.”

Tyrrel got the earplugs.

Tyrrel also got grandma’s electric blanket back from the bottom of the drawer, because he noticed the hatchlings slept better on it. And it wasn’t like he was doing anything wrong, because he only kept it in there for them overnight and took it out again before anything else happened, which was all his mother had asked for, wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it?

***

Baking soda volcanoes. Clay-and-stick model beaver dams on pondwater- blue construction paper. Solar system mobiles. And a little pen filled with a half-dozen clicking, hopping, feathered maniacs.

Tyrrel was feeling pretty good about his chances, not least because two of the judges had been parked by his exhibit for the last ten minutes. Even if they weren’t very good at listening to him.

“My, aren’t they bright-eyed and bushy-tailed!” observed the judge with glasses a little too loudly. His sweaty pale pink hands kept twitching back and forth, like he was perpetually stopping himself from scooping the hatchlings up. “Are you sure they’re babies? Look at them jump!”

“They’re babies,” said Tyrrel with the slight hesitance coming from telling a slight lie, “they’re just precocial.” Probably. Toddlers were babies, right?

“I certainly HOPE you’re taking precautions; if they got out I reckon we’d all be lunchmeat. Look at the fangs on the little fellas!”
“I feed them with tongs.” Long tongs. They’d REALLY started growing faster since he’d given them more use of the electric blanket. Gone was the baby fuzz, gone was the sleepiness; present was the leaping and snapping and relentless interrogation of everything for food at all times.

“Wonderful, wonderful. Don’t you think that’s wonderful, Jules?”

The judge without glasses was busy taking more pictures on his phone.

“I said don’t you think that’s wonderful, Jules? I said don’t you think that’s wonderful, J-”

“Yes,” said the judge without glasses. He took six more pictures and one video and walked off.

“I THOUGHT so,” said the judge with glasses with terrible satisfaction. His hands twitched violently one last time as he swooped away after his colleague.

Something else swooped after him. And that was when Tyrrel realized, with an awful slowness that paralyzed him from the scalp down, body and soul, that not having actual wings didn’t mean you couldn’t use your little feathery arms to combine the best features of leaping and fluttering and clambering.

He also realized – several minutes later than he should’ve – that the sweaty pale pink hands of the judge with glasses looked just a little like raw chicken.

And finally at the moment of impact, he realized that he wished he had his earplugs in.

***

It was decided that it wasn’t the judge with glasses’ fault because he had no idea that he looked like delicious raw chicken.

It was decided that it wasn’t Tyrrel’s fault because the judge with glasses flailing around had been what knocked over the displays and, subsequently, the pen.

It was also decided that it wasn’t the school’s fault because there was no strict legal requirement to lock all entrances and exits during a science fair.

And finally it wasn’t the egg company’s fault because they insisted they only raised perfectly ordinary domestic egg-laying chickens and they didn’t know anything about any of this.

Tyrrel’s mother, however, blamed his grandmother.

“I can’t believe it’s been twenty years and we’re still finding garbage she messed with,” she grumbled as she locked the electric blanket away inside the family safe, next to the kettle, the lamp, the glasses, the scarf, the pen, and six extremely large and devastatingly-scribbled notebooks. “You tell me the moment you find anything of hers and don’t mess with it, alright? We got off lucky this time.”
“But I didn’t win the science fair,” complained Tyrrel.

“No, but the judge didn’t lose his fingers. Call it even. And no dessert for the rest of the month.”

“But nobody got hurt!”

“So far.  We don’t know how big those little guys will get.”

***

They never did know in the end, because  the hatchlings were never seen again.  Tyrrel lived in hope nonetheless, a hope buoyed by an unexplained historic low in  local deer populations that began several years later. 

And that was the first and last time that any trouble came from Tyrrel at the elementary school science fair.

The great sabre-toothed bacon escape happened in grade nine.

It was an innocuous thing at the start. Spare change went missing.

Then pets.

Then livestock.

And then particularly adventurous hikers.

Still, that could have been any number of pieces of bad luck, if it weren’t for the smoke rising from the top of the hill-without-a-trail.

So at last the whispers started and the heads were put together and the name was spoken aloud: dragon.

“Surely it’s not a dragon,” said Tea down at the bar, the optimist. “It’s probably just a hungry bear or somesuch eating the animals, we don’t KNOW the hikers were eaten – maybe they just eloped? – and as for the smoke, well, it’s forest fire season, or nearly enough, almost.”
“We’re not so lucky as for it to be a dragon,” said Bowl on his porch, the pessimist. “Some moron’s clearly been smoking up in the woods and they’ve set a blaze that will consume the town. The other victims, man and beast alike, were clearly devoured by a horde of rabid wolves.”

“I don’t know what’s going on,” said Dip at the docks, the defeated. “But I’m sure it’s none of my business or concern. Besides, dragons are self-made and hard-working, unlike some other folks around here I could name. It’ll bring some class to this place.”

Two days after that the dragon came roaring down from the hillside in a fabulous avalanche of shining scales and flashing teeth and alarming heat that made the air shimmer and dance. It sang and spun itself in the air nine times above the town, and with each long, beautiful call all the valuables and money slid into the air and followed it in its joyous gyre. Then it burned down the hospital and sailed home to the hill-without-a-trail.

***

Now that the dragon’s existence was confirmed, there were disputes on how best to proceed.

“Obviously we just need to send word out for a hero,” said Tea down at the bar, the optimist. “You kill a dragon and you get its treasure and maybe someone wants to marry you and you get that warm feeling in your tummy that comes from doing the right thing. They’ll be knocking the hinges off our doors, just you see!”

“Nobody can hope to stop a dragon of that size without being powerful enough to not care about this place,” said Bowl on his porch, the pessimist. “We should all give up and leave, but I suspect we wouldn’t escape. It’s going to eat us all by next week; might as well lie down in the dirt and wait to be consumed.”

“I guess if we give the dragon enough nice things, it’ll be nice to us and maybe some of its wealth will trickle back down out of its hoard to us,” said Dip at the docks, the defeated. “Don’t see why that wouldn’t work.”

A week passed, and so too – presumably- did the brave trio of Spoon, Pot, and Varnish, who had ascended the hill-without-a-trail armed with sharp tools and gumption and vanished forever.

The dragon did not come down from the hillside again that month. It did not devour them all. But the little piles of expensive things left in the woods at the base of its cliffs (furtively, without announcement) vanished in the night when no one was looking, and they were reassured.

***

Time slouched on, and with it, the vast majority of the valuables in the town. Coins and bills and cards and cheques, all stacked up high in heaps, weighed down with rocks, left in hope.

The dragon largely slept, or at least wasn’t ostentatious about itself. But it did burn down half the downtown one fine summer evening, and there was some consternation as to how and why that had happened.

“It seems like some sort of misunderstanding,” said Tea down by the smouldering rubble of the bar, the optimist. “I guess the dragon just woke up on the wrong side of the bed last night, and that’s something that happens to the best of us and there’s no sense dwelling on what’s already been done. Besides, it’s actually amazing how few of us died. Imagine if it’d burned down the whole town!”

“I suppose it’ll come back tonight and finish the job,” said Bowl on his porch, the pessimist. “I bet it only went home to refuel. I’m going to sit in my chair and wait to be blown up with a fireball now.”

“Did you notice how it only burned down PART of town?” said Dip at the ruin of the docks, the defeated. “I bet it’s because we weren’t giving it enough nice things. I bet that’s because some OTHER people in the rest of town were stealing our nice things from the woods, probably because they were poor and greedy moochers. We should leave THEM in the woods. Then it’ll look on us as worthy peers and the wealth will begin to flow back to us all.”

So the people from the burned downtown got together with the people who were frightened of being burned up and they went around town and picked up everyone who they thought was the kind of person who’d steal things from the woods and they tied them up and left them in the woods. And the people they’d left there didn’t come back, and the dragon didn’t descend from the hill-without-a-trail, and they were reassured.

***

There was very little left in town to give to the dragon at this point. No money, no credit, no goods, and fewer and fewer people that were obviously the sort of person that would steal tribute left for the dragon.

Also the dragon burned down the other half of the town the night of the harvest festival. What few jack-o-lanterns that had been salvaged from the fields burned brightly that eve, filling the air with pumpkin smoke and blazing eyes that would’ve done the headless horseman proud.

“Oh, we’ll scrape along,” said Tea in the half-burned basement of the bar, the optimist. “We always manage, you know! And it’s really nice how this whole situation has brought us all together. When you think about it, this dragon’s been the best thing to ever happen to this town. It’s really put us on the map!”

Bowl said nothing because he had been part of the first collection of tribute after the summer burning of the downtown. His porch had been blown up with a fireball during the harvest burnings.

“The dragon is still angry because clearly some of us aren’t trying hard enough for it,” said Dip in the rocks by the harbour. “We need to ferret them out and feed them to it, to win its admiration. Surely then the good times will come back.”

The ferreting began in great enthusiasm, but hit a stumbling block when one of Dip’s neighbours pointed out he was hiding a gift card in his shoe. The argument escalated to the point of sides being taken. Then lines being drawn. Then crossed. Then. Then. Then.

***

The dragon went for a brief tour. A great circle above town, tightening slowly around objects of interest. Here a big mound of debris; there a makeshift dwelling.

No, no, no. Cinders and ashes and emptiness. It was pretty much done here.

So it soared back to the hill-without-a-trail, in the hole in the ground that nobody knew about, and it laid down on its wealth, and it went back to sleep to wait and dream until everyone forgot about it and came back and would be ready for the next harvest.

Its sleep was troubled, and it squirmed and kicked at the itch in its hind foot. Then it awoke and realized it had forgotten to take the gift card out of its shoe, removed it carefully, added it to the pile, and ebbed into the truly blissful slumber of the deserving rich.

Something was inside the chimney, and it wasn’t a squirrel.

That was what woke her up in the end. Squirrels in the chimney were a sound her hindbrain would remember until its dying day, and this just barely almost insignificantly nigh-undetectably wasn’t that.

Maybe it was a racoon, suggested her darkest thoughts as she crawled out of her bed and into her clothes. Or a bird. That’d be a pleasant surprise to have to drag out of a chimney in the middle of the night after the last real snowstorm of the season. That’d be just the bee’s knees.

So she put on her thickest work gloves and opened up the hearth and before she could look, or shout, or do anything at all there was a quick rattle-snap-crack of activity from above and a tiny ball of concentrated and very frightened cold, wet particles shot into her lap and began frantically crawling around her shoulders and hiding in her hair.

No fur.

No feathers.

Just snow.

“Ah, shit.”
The last storm of the season had left an orphan.

***

In theory, that first night was about emergency preparations. In practice, it was a learning experience. How quickly she could walk with the little flurry wrapped around her neck without jostling it; how safe it felt with her there; how safe SHE felt going numb from the chin down; whether or not it was okay to wear a scarf underneath it, and so on and on and on, a hundred thousand tedious vitally necessary facts she didn’t know she needed until she discovered them.

It was good she had them though because the only other thing she managed to get done was to make a little baby box from an empty orange crate, an old sleeping bag, and every icepack in the fridge, and by the time morning came it wasn’t sleeping in it. It had returned to her head – not her neck, blessed be her iron-fisted grip on the blankets – and had frosted her hair and haloed her with a tiny swamp of slush. The water was clear and pure and ice, ice, ice cold and she woke up when her pillow finally overflowed and trickled down her shirt.

That was the last lesson left over from the night before: the flurry didn’t mind it if she shrieked and jumped.

In the morning she called Joanie Boxwood in her summer home who told her yes, there would be no more snow this spring; she called Malcolm Crisp out by his observation post who told her no, flurries didn’t venture off on their own so small and couldn’t migrate without their parents; and she called Theresa Boch down at the weather station who told her that no they didn’t raise—and-release orphaned or abandoned weather effects and didn’t recommend she try that either but unrelatedly if she was interested Theresa had a few totally useless books on that lying around she’d been meaning to get rid of that she could leave at her house if she liked.

She thanked them all and actually meant it a little more than she’d expected.

The books were newer than she’d feared and less rigid than she’d worried and not as hippy-dippy as she hoped. Blizzards are fragile and threatened on the climatic scale, not the personal, it told her. They’re flexible enough to unlearn odd habits from unusual childhoods and survive in the wild, within reason. Don’t coddle them, but don’t starve them of affection – they grow up surrounded by thousands and thousands of siblings and enveloped within the greater stormscape of their kind. Give them a variety of moist and dry environments to move between freely and experiment with. Don’t over-parent them. Don’t try to do this with pets in the house, unless they’re very, very brave or senile.

And don’t get too attached, because this shouldn’t last forever.

***

One thing the books spent a lot of time on was engineering the house for comfort. Spring would be an uncertain time, but summer would be the greatest test. Get it outside while you can so it can stretch a little, but don’t forget to prepare for the hardships to come.

Luckily she’d done her insulation last fall. Perfect timing. But she bought a new air conditioner just in case, and then a second, sturdier one because it turned out the little flurry could fit inside it and was curious about all the little bits of metal and wire.

She covered all the electrical outlets after that and kept a close eye on her appliances. There’d been no permanent damage done to the thing and she never saw it express interest in anything that wasn’t producing cold when running, but she went by mom’s old rule: better safe than extremely sorry and possibly dead in a house fire.

The walks were less stressful. By the time she felt ready enough to leave the house it was firmly battened on to her, and even when it roved down the street she never felt its icy root leave her shoulder. It knew it wasn’t big enough to survive on its own as surely as she did.

That didn’t mean it was a little angel though. On that first trip it crawled into her gutters and refused to come out for twenty minutes before she could get out of her driveway; he neighbour’s cat hissed at it and it chased him up a tree in sheer excitement before she could blink twice; and it was so fascinated with every puddle in the road that it nearly iced her boots to the ground six times.

But what was most troublesome was something she didn’t even notice until a full week later, when she made a trip down to the store for groceries. She prepared for days to train it to (temporary) full independence; deliberately leaving it alone in different rooms of the house, placing its climate trays at the other end of the house from her; building up its independence as far as such a thing could be stretched. It seemed happy enough when she left and she hurried off on her errands so quickly that she didn’t realize anything was wrong until she was standing on her front step and feeling for which pocket her keys were in.

Spring, the birds had sung the whole walk there and back. Spring, spring has sprung, spring, spring.

But right around her house – and on every walk she’d taken with the little flurry – there’d been nothing but silence.

***

The problem went away on its own, regardless of how she felt about it (though she did damn well miss the chickadees). When the first heat waves start to roll in the flurry hid from doors and windows like a shy dog. She moved its bed and its trays down to the basement and added more pans of cool water, which it lapped at like a dog. Then July arrived and the sun came down like a hammer and even that wasn’t enough, but – mercy of mercies – the old freezer still worked, and so it was that the hardest months for the little blizzard to survive in were paradoxically the simplest for her to deal with. In the morning she tucked it into the freezer; she went about her day; and in the evening she brought it out to play in the darkened basement amidst the melting ice cubes she froze anew with it every afternoon. It made shapes with them on the floor, and it made shapes with them as they froze with it during the long hot days – ice cubes in only the most nominal sense. Some were pyramids, some were spirals, some were shapes she felt barely able to understand, let alone describe, let alone look up.

It wasn’t suffering, for her or it. And that was good enough, for that summer, just barely, just almost, just enough, at least until the days began to shorten and the air started to turn crisp overnight and she tried to shut the freezer lid and it couldn’t fit.

“Well, someone’s growing up,” she said, and it billowed out of its container and whisked around her and the basement six times in enthusiasm.

***

The books said that was a little small, but for a freezer-raised flurry that had lived through a hot summer too far south she’d take a little small over just about anything else. And ‘a little small’ was profoundly relative and constantly changing; it was a little small when it couldn’t fit in the freezer in September; and a little small when it had to squish itself down to a howling blast to fit down the basement stairwell in October; and a little small when it couldn’t help but fill any room in the house to overflowing by November.

She prepared for it, for all of it. She covered the furniture, she wore her jacket indoors, she didn’t shy from it, she didn’t encourage it. It was big enough to hurt now, to bite at her fingers and nip at her toes and turn her cheeks red-then-pale. It was big enough to spend time outdoors again; then big enough to spend time outdoors for a little while unattended; then big enough that by the dawn of December it spent almost all day outside, peeking through the windows when it wanted to check on her or beg her for ice cubes or curl a little piece of itself next to the freezer and flap at the loose rubber lip of its lid’s seal.

The first real snowstorms arrived soon after.

***

She left a window or two open the first time; let it watch from indoors and tentatively waft a little gust or two of itself outside, flinching at the touch of strange snowflakes and icy winds that weren’t its own.

The second time she left the front door open and it eddied in and out of the house, growing and learning and warily jostling for space, learning to grow and assert and bluster.

The third time she shut it outdoors for the day, and all the rest of the month into January and through February oh how it played and roiled every time the sky clotted with fresh cold. Sometimes she’d sit outside with a hot drink and watch it cavort with its kin and wonder just how it was that she still could tell it apart so instantly.

She called Joanie Boxwood every other day.

No, not this time. No, not this one. No, there’ll be another. No. No. No, stop fussing. No and leave me alone. No. No. No. Hell no. No. No.

Yes, that’s it. That’s the last big one.

So in early march when the walls shook with the wail of the wind and the sky was furrowed white from horizon to horizon and you couldn’t even see that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face she let it sleep in her hair one last time (hard not to; it filled the house entire by now) and left the freezer lid open for it and put out ice cubes everywhere and opened the door and ushered it out to play and closed it behind it and shut it and didn’t open it again. Not that evening, not next morning.

***

It circled her house slowly; three revolutions in three days, filling the driveway and caking the windows past eye-height, howling and whining at the door like it hadn’t since it was a newborn. But when the fourth day came and with it the warm sunlight, it backed up into the sky, tucked its gales away inside itself, and drifted north with the rest of the clouds – gradually, oh so reluctantly, oh so achingly, but inevitably.

It wasn’t a little small anymore – you couldn’t tell it apart from any of the other blizzards.

Generally.

She could.

And that was why she still cried a bit over the sink afterwards. Not giving it a name could only do so much.

It’s going to be a long trip. Not as cold as the alternatives, of course, of course, but you’ll still need to prepare, to plan, to think ahead. To draw up maps and doodle on them and shuffle little markers around the table and make lists. Oh I love lists. I love them so much. Can we make this a list?

Can we?

Can we?

Can we?

Thank you; I knew you’d understand

Preparations To Be Made On An Expedition To The Northeast Pole

-list of lists to be made

-list of reasons to go

-list of foods to pack

-list of problems to prepare for

-list of directions to take

List Of Lists To Be Made

-list of preparations to be made

-list of lists to be made

-list of reasons to go

-list of foods to pack

-list of problems to prepare for

-list of directions to take

List Of Reasons To Go

-nobody’s done it yet

-relatively close-by

-you want to

List Of Foods To Pack

-canned spam

-canned salad

-canned jello

-canned sardines

-canned tongue

-canned pickles

-canned peaches

-can opener

-backup can opener

-emergency backup can opener

-big sharp rock

List Of Problems To Prepare For

-unbergs

-guardian dwelvers

-unextreme temperatures

-syncopation

-suffocation

-consternation

-the hole with the eyes

List Of Directions To Take

Go to the end of the block and take the first left, the first left, the first left, the first left, the first left, the first left, and the second left. Then take the first left back and the second left again, then the third left, the third left, the third left, and the third left. This should scramble your corkscrew enough to pop the membrane and put you in basic syncopation.

You will now need to be at the end of your block. Follow your block forwards until you reach its corner, then bring it with you by dragging your heels – you do NOT want to leave your block. You want to stretch your block with you until it smooths out into everything else. This is important.

The environment may begin to scheme as you proceed, such as trees lurking, animals prevaricating, and/or water slinking. Ignore this. The important part is that you keep moving in a diagonal line – moving straight up or down or side to side will divert you towards the cardinal poles and away from the northeast, which is where you’re aiming. If you want to go to the southwest pole instead, just follow these directions backwards; if you want to go to the southeast pole instead, just follow these directions backwards and inside-out; if you want to go to the northwest pole instead, just play Stan Rogers records backwards and inside-out.

Once you’re far enough, you’ll need to hold your breath since there’s nothing to breathe. Stop and eat before you do this; it’s easier to have full lungs when you have a full stomach. Don’t forget to hold your breath; if you begin to forget, simply don’t and you’ll be okay.

As a result of there being nothing to breathe, there also won’t be anything to transmit hot or cold. You will encounter radically unextreme temperatures. You can deal with this by adjusting your clothing or not. Don’t wear extra layers, don’t apply sunscreen, don’t wear light, breathable fabrics, and don’t wear a hat. Unless you normally would, then do.

After you’ve adjusted to your new uncircumstances you’ll rise above the last remnants of the regular, which should begin to consternate around you into unbergs as you exceed their expectations. Do not fuss or fret; their only power lies in looming. As long as you remain syncopated they cannot obstruct or annihilate you, but as long as you remain unruffled you will not slip from your state. Absolute collection is required for that, which should be very easy as long as you don’t try.

You’ll have skipped all the formal gates and checkpoints but you’re still liable to encounter some personal obstacles. They are NOT dwarves or elves and they AREN’T dwellers or elvers, but they’re something alright. They are guardian dwelvers. They dwelve. They dwelvelop. They dwelvliver. You will have to pass them and you will have to punish them and you will have to thwart them. Do this with your fiercest fists and the can opener and the backup can opener and the emergency backup can opener and the big sharp rock and if you use all of those at once you can almost certain triumph as long as they like the food you brought. They should. They like cans. They like putting things in them. Do not let them put you in a can, no matter how hard they beg or cry.

Having passed the final circumference, you’ll now be inside the pole. The hard part now begins: finding it.

This is where things might begin to seem counterintuitive.

The key is the pole and the pole is the key and the hard part is that you need to get out from inside it. This means you’ll need to leave your basic syncopation WITHOUT abandoning your beat entirely. This is very, very, very, very important. To do this properly reread the very first set of directions, then undo them all, then unread them all. Do NOT turn right; that’s NOT undoing left. If this works correctly (CORRECTLY, not RIGHT) you should be just outside the northeast pole and can take pictures raise flags leave memorial plaques etc etc etc.

If you did all that right, you shouldn’t have met the hole with the eyes. If you didn’t, you did, which means you didn’t did didn’t do that. If you did instead, I’m sorry.

Once you’re done, turn around and walk home. Since you brought your block with you and never left it, it shouldn’t take more than a couple minutes.

Try to forget as much of this afterwards as safely possible or you will become as unsafe as impossible. Put your pictures and souvenirs in a lead-lined box and don’t ever open them again.