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Ludlow County is a smear on the edge of the map made when a cartographer’s attention slipped. It has a population of about two or three hundred, give or take a hundred. It doesn’t even have a post office.

Someone wanted to change that.

***

The postman rolled into town early in the morning after a long night’s journey and bought a breakfast of candy bars and coffee at the general store.

“No sense trying to get any sleep now,” he said to Truly Shirley at the counter. “Might as well get started, right?”
Truly eyed him flatly, and nosed him and eared him flatly for good measure. There were lugworms less flat than the once-over he was receiving.

“So, that’ll be what?”
“Best if you’re on your way,” she said, with a voice like crumbling hopes and dreams.

“Sorry now?”

“Get back to your big city, where you belong.”

The postman frowned. “I’m from Milton County, a buck forty east of here. About two thousand people.”
“We don’t like big city people around here,” said Truly. “Bringing in ideas from far away.”

“It’s mail.”
“High-faluting nonsense. Better watch your back.”

“Can I get my change?”
“Not around here you can’t. Folks will stop it.”
“I mean my coins.”
Truly Shirley dumped a handful of bronze and copper tokens on the counter in a variety of shapes and sizes and levels of corrosion. The postman sorted through them until he found something that he was pretty sure had Latin written on it, pocketed it, and left.

“They’ll find you, you know!” she called after him as he stepped back into the sun. “They can smell the big city on you! It’s in your blood! In your boots! IN YOUR PANTS!”
The postman considered this and his pants, but they were nothing but worn and slightly dusty denim, and so he was left none the wiser. His musings were then interrupted by Truly Shirley throwing her call bell at him, and he departed in some haste and tumult while she fumbled in her purse for a reload, curses following him out of the parking lot and up the street.

***

The post office wasn’t what he’d expected. A building had been rented on the edge of town – small, two stories, enough space in the back to cram a postman in. Instead, there was a small pile of smouldering charcoal and soft ash that the breeze stirred aimlessly.

“Looks like it happened pretty recent,” he told the officer. “I mean, it’s still warm, and nobody saw anything last night.”
“Damn right they didn’t,” said the officer, whose name was Euphonious Harper. “I made sure of it.”
“I’m sorry, what do you mean?”
“This was the old Murgatroyd place, back far as anyone can remember, until that spineless, shiftless, faithless son of a bitch Maurice sold it to you and your sort for his miserable thirty pieces of silver. There’s been more done here under the new moon than could be imagined by anyone anywhere, and those who know about that sort of thing would never stand to see the ancient ways disrespected and defiled by the scent of a soft-souled outlander who doesn’t know the handshakes or the hand signals or the hand-binding of Holmsome Hrrrg.”
“The what of wholesome who?”
Euphonious Harper spit in the dirt at the postman’s feet. “Exactly. You’d better be out of town before Bile Tuesday’s waxing half-moon, that’s all I’m saying. Fhtagn cordynk.”

Thus speaking, the officer hissed three sibilant syllables between his teeth, twisted his fingers like a wire puzzle gone rogue, stepped into the shadow of a thin and sickly sapling, and vanished without a trace.

The postman wandered around the burning remnants of the building, poked at the tree’s shadow for a bit, and elected to work out of his truck.

***

When the postman returned to his truck he was surprised and marginally pleased to find a letter already wedged under his windshield wiper. It appeared to have been written in blood, but the stamp was legitimate (if rumpled and old) and the writing was readable (if shaky and misshapen) so he did his duty and delivered it, hampered only slightly by the address being as follows:

Behind the big rock

The biggest rock

Under it      

Near the grove of dead pines

The postman saw the dead pine grove from the road after spending half the afternoon cruising up and down the backwoods of Ludlow County. Each tree was brittle and dryer than a bone, and each tree had nails driven into its sides, and each pair of nails had a jawbone dangling from them in an empty soundless shriek, with colour from flesh-fresh white to tea-stained brown.

Behind the big rock near the pine grove (which was splashed with rusty stains that seemed as old as the stone surface itself), there was the biggest rock (which was painted with odd symbols and figures that made the postman’s eyes twist), and under the biggest rock was a hole just wide enough for a big man’s shoulders that was dark out of proportion to its apparent depth. A moonless night had taken up permanent residence in it.

There was no mailbox, so the postman knocked on the stone. Something shifted underground – a rabbit, or maybe a fox, or a badger? – but came no closer.

“Mail,” he spoke into the still air.

A fly buzzed. There were a lot of them around, and the stink of death was heavy, but no meat was to be seen. The sky was hopelessly blue.

“Mail,” repeated the postman, and knocked again.

After an hour of waiting, he bent regulations just a little and left the mail at the mouth of the hole by pinning it under a gnawed human skull he found sitting in the crotch of one of the pines. By the way the skin of his neck crawled, something watched him all the way back to his truck, but it didn’t speak up about it so he didn’t try to start a conversation.

***

The day was wearing thin, and so too was the postman’s wakefulness. He ventured to the outer rim of town, found the county’s three-room motel, and requested a room.

“You can’t have room four,” said the proprietor, who was a whip-thin and wide-eyed man named Harry Bacon.

“I thought there were only three rooms?”
“There are,” said Harry, making unflinching eye contact with someone hypothetically standing three inches to the left of the postman. “You can’t have room four. Don’t ask about room four. There’s no hidden money under room four. You got it? I’m clean. You got it? I’ve been in town for years. You got it? There’s nothing suspicious going on. You got it? You got it? You got it?”
“Yes?” hedged the postman.

“FUCK!” screamed Harry. “They found me!” And with a wail of despair, he pulled out a sawn-off lug of a shotgun from under the desk, fired it into the ceiling, and hurled himself through the window.

The postman left money on the counter (and after a moment’s thought, the odd coins he’d received from Truly Shirley too) and took the key for room three, which was already unlocked. The bed was dusty and there was a kilogram of soft white powder wrapped in plastic hidden in the toilet tank that messed with the flush a little, but other than that it was pretty alright.

***

At three PM the postman woke to the sounds of voices raised in anger. Strange flashes of colour etched their way past his windowsill, illuminating a standoff between robed locals chanting words not meant for human mouths, slick-haired men in nice suits with desperate eyes and expensive firearms, something with too little hair and too many teeth, and Truly Shirley.

He gazed at the tableau for a moment, watching it flicker like bad stop-motion-animation between the flashes of lightning striking from a dim and rainless sky. Then he brushed his teeth, combed his hair, and took a good, long look at himself in the mirror.

“I like my job,” he asked himself.  “But do I like it THAT much?”

There was no reply save for a wordless wail from outside the door, immediately followed by gunfire, explosions, screaming, and the wet, leaden thudding of flesh against the motel’s siding. 

“I’ll sleep on it,” he decided. And he did, though it took him some time and a pair of earplugs. 

In the morning he found the bodies missing, but also his answer: several cars left lonely in the  parking lot with keys still inside and wallets tucked under the dashboard. 

***

Ludlow County was a smear on the edge of the map made when a cartographer’s attention slipped. It had a population of about two or three hundred, give or take a hundred.

It used to have a post office, but now it doesn’t.

The Bay of Blenth was not a bad place to live altogether. The river was wide and gentle; the fields were wide and watered well by its floods; the woods were thick and shaded; the winters weren’t too much to bear; the seas were sheltered and rich.

No, the Bay of Blenth was an excellent place for a human to live. The tragedy was that it was an even BETTER place to live if you were a mosquito. The slow river and the shallow puddles in the fields were their nurseries; the shaded woods their havens; the light winters their modest off-season; the rich bounty of the bay an inducement for lovely blood-rich humans to congregate. Thus the mosquitoes of the Bay of Blenth were the largest, fattest, and smuggest to be found anywhere, and its people were accordingly blessed with a rich variety of itchy red lumps all over their exposed skin, particularly in the summer months.

The particular summer month that finally broke this age-old harmony was a notably humid and windless one, where the clouds clotted everything from horizon to horizon for weeks on end and the swarms grew so thick that the cows returned from pasture weighing less than they had going out, and anyone out for a walk had to tie a scarf over their mouth or risk inhaling an entire meal of crunchy protein. The biweekly meeting of the town hall was filled with complaints and the occasional anguished whimper.

“Mosquitoes have bitten my sheep-guard dog’s nose so thoroughly that he can no longer smell a fox from a frog!” screamed a man in a frenzy of despair.

“Peace, peace, we are all suffering,” soothed the head of the town council, a limpid man who had seen three score summers like this come and go.

“Mosquitos have barred my two-year-old triplets from leaving the house,” droned a haunted shell of a woman. “I spin wool all day while they break things and attempt to eat them. I lament life.”
“Peace, peace, let us not succumb to despair; this too shall pass,” repeated the head of the town council, exuding a calm that very nearly overpowered the thick choking smoke the building had been filled with in futile hope of keeping out the bugs.

“As of two hours ago, mosquitos have filled every outhouse across the Bay from the bottom up in a solid mass,” said a mournful-looking man. “It’s like dipping a pig trotter in a pool of sharks.”

“My good kin and neighbours, something must be done IMMEDIATELY,” said the head of the town council, voice firm with indignation and legs rigidly crossed. “The time has come for action, no matter the cost or the risk. We shall draw straws, and whosoever draws the shortest of the straws will venture to the tower of the wizard Wulwreath, and shall beseech him for aid in our darkest hour.”

So speaking, a large handful of straw was fetched, broken, shuffled, distributed, measured, and judged, and a lone luckless lumberjack named Leen was sent out in quest of the wizard Wulwreath; whose tower, she discovered after scant minutes of questioning, was most recently sighted and sited in the Bay itself, some half-mile offshore on a small shoal. He was studying sharks.

The voyage was simple, but finding someone willing to lend a boat to it was not. At length Leen resorted to the ancient technique of lying about what she was doing, and thus armed, was able to row to the squat and malformed shape of the tower unhindered by anything more than mosquitos and the rippling waves of dread spilling off the structure’s sides and gushing deep into the sea.

The door to the tower of the wizard Wulwreath opened before it could be knocked upon, recoiling from the lumberjack’s scarred knuckles like her mother-in-law from her dinner table.

“Enter!” it shouted portentously. And so she did, and found herself in a dark and troubled space. Each wall was a ceiling, and from each of them sprouted four more walls, each adroitly avoiding intersecting with each other, their parents, or themselves. There were no floors. All the stairs weren’t. The contents were scarcely less troubling than their confines: unshelved books and unbooked shelves that somehow shared space; the skeletons of giant insects; a stuffed and mounted jellyfish; and a giant set of glass jars containing miniaturized terrariums of hopes, dreams, and despairs. Through it all flowed a mighty river of time, sucking up all the spare moments and idle hours and centralizing them for recapture, reuse, and repurposing.

“Who disturbs my contemplations?” demanded an even yet more portentous voice. It was the wizard Wulwreath. He was squatted on top of a crystal orb, on top of a platinum spire, on top of a burning brazier of crackling dragon-eggs, and he was smoking an indecipherable substance from a cyclops’s skull.

“Leen, the lumberjack. From town.”
“I’ve never heard of you.”
“You get a lot of trees that need cutting?”
“What are trees?”
“Then there you go.”
The wizard Wulwreath nodded solemnly, causing plumes of smoke to erupt from his eyeballs and shatter. “So it does go. And what do you seek me for?”
“The Bay of Blenth is under mosquito siege, worse than anyone can ever remember happening before. Can you help us?”

“Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps,” muttered the wizard, sucking down another lungful of materials. “Sure. Yes. Absolutely. Of course!”

“One last thing. Aren’t you studying sharks?”
“Of course I am.”
“Then where are they?”
“What a silly question,” said the wizard. He opened the skull’s jaws, and lo, inside it, there was a shark.

“Oh,” said Leen. And she departed fully informed and told the town council that there would be help, and everyone rejoiced.

***

One day later, a great smoke and fire rose from the peak of the tower of the wizard Wulwreath and vanished.

One week later, the dragonflies hatched. They were bigger than before, and in greater numbers, and with greater appetite, speed, and ferocity. Each of them had a tiny dragon’s head in place of their own head, and a tiny dragon’s head in place of each of their own legs, and a tiny dragon’s head in place of their own tails. Each of those heads could eject poisonous acid when it breathed, and each of those heads wanted to eat mosquitoes, and each of those dragonflies wanted all the mosquitoes to be eaten.

At first the people rejoiced – finally you could breathe freely again; could see across a field in broad daylight; could expose skin for longer than a second without it being perforated – but then the first tiny poisonous fires began to catch in the hay and the wheat and the grass and matters became somewhat more tense.

“It isn’t TERRIBLY poisonous acid,” pondered the head of the town council wisely, “since it only gives you a rash. So the problem is solved.”
“The rash takes all your skin with it when it comes off,” said a half-exsanguinated fisherman, whose entire body was swaddled in smelly bandages.

“Well, we’re already used to bundling up a bit to avoid the mosquitoes, so this is nothing but an improvement, and the problem is solved,” asserted the head of the town council regally.

“The flames grow and threaten despite the dampness and the lack of sunlight for the past month and more,” said Leen, who was coated with soot and marginally scalded around the gills.

“The rains shall arrive any day now, so the problem is solved,” explained the head of the town council fondly.

“The dragonflies have learned to fear not humanity, and they find our livestock toothsome,” said a rancher. “I lost six head of cattle this morning.”
“My good kin and neighbours, this crisis shall be averted at ONCE,” shouted the head of the town council with the absolute conviction of one who owned a small herd of prized dairy cows. “As we are beset by the foul and unjust magicks of the wicked wizard Wulwreath, we must reach out to the one force that can counterbalance and counteract his sorceries: we shall draw straws, and whosoever draws the shortest of the straws will venture deep into the woods and find and secure the aid of the witch Wezelynn.”

This time the lucky winner was a cooper called Colm, who was in a bad mood to begin with and was not best pleased by being told to venture deep into the shaded woods while his livelihood burned down behind him. But there was no putting it off, and so with a walking stick and a bellyful of bellyaching and a head full of thunder he stomped off through the smoke and the fire and the (still present!) mosquitoes and spent a day hiking and a night hiding in a tree and a day walking and stumbled and tripped and when he got up he was face to face with the cottage of the witch Wezelynn, tucked under a tree root.

Colm knocked on the door with his pinky finger’s knuckle.

“Enter,” it croaked in the voice of a mummified toad. So he pushed it open, and pushed his pinky finger inside, and the rest of him followed into a dank and rotted pit, like the heart of a peach gone rancid and prised open by little clicking chitin jaws. Splinters and ashes and tatters abounded. In the center of the clutter and the rot was the firepit, in which burned the indescribable, and atop that was the cauldron, in which simmered the unthinkable, and within that curdled the witch Wezelynn.

“What do you want,” she said, eyes shut. “And make it quick. I’m bathing.”

Colm found that the roof of his mouth was trying to stick to his tongue was trying to stick to his teeth which were trying to stick to each other.

“I don’t bite,” said the witch Wezelynn. “Slice and stew and slurp, yes. But I don’t bite. Now open that fly-trap before I seal it shut proper for wasting my bathtime.”
“The wizard Wulwreath has covered us with dragonflies after we begged him to save us from mosquitos,” said Colm. “We are poisoned and singed and bitten, and beg you to drive away his pests.”
The witch laughed at that, which sounded like a mudslide drowning a rabbit burrow. “Oh! Oh I see how it is! You tried to solve all your problems with a wizard, and now that THAT’S backfired on you – unexpected, I’m sure! – you finally have it in you to come beg aid from the wicked, cruel, capricious witch Wezelynn. Such a brave boy you are! I bet you’re only here because you picked the short straw.”
“Please,” begged Colm. “I had half my boots burned off walking here.”

“Hah! I bet you did. Well, I can fix that. I can fix the mosquitoes too. I can fix it all up so well you’ll never dare bother me during bathtime again!” And the laugh came again, but longer, and thicker, and it wouldn’t end, wouldn’t end, wouldn’t end, wouldn’t end, wouldn’t end, wouldn’t ever ever ever end until Colm shut his eyes to escape it and when he opened them again he was on the edge of the forest.

***

The next day the rains didn’t come. Indeed, the clouds finally vanished and the sun shone brightly, so although the fires continued, the mosquitoes at least suffered another blow.

The next day the rains didn’t come, and it was spotlessly blue from east to west. The air felt thin and glassy, like a lens.

The day after that the rains didn’t come.

And the day after.

And the day.

And the

And

Until the standing water evaporated and the river shrivelled and the fields crumpled and the world itself felt crisped and the dragonflies all died and the mosquitoes all died and there was no place for their eggs to brew and simmer and the who world seemed to be curling up into a desiccated husk, and still the sun shone and the air was clear even as people dug wells deeper, resorted to complicated schemes with panes of glass and trays of saltwater from the bay, ate their meat near-raw for the juices.

So it was explained why the mood at the next meeting in the town hall was somewhat less than ideal.

“We roast!”

“We burn!”
“We wither!”
“We thirst!”
“Your concerns are well-founded and urgent and we should not waste our time asking why they may or may not have arisen and who may or may not have caused them,” decreed the head of the town council with immaculate decorum. “But we have one last play to make, one last hope for salvation, though perilous it be! Once more, the straws! And once more, draw! And behold, the short straw is oh dear.”

So the head of the town council took himself – reluctantly – to his feet and walked up the winding road – slowly – to the keep where he – begrudgingly – requested audience – humbly – with the Prince of the Bay of Blenth, whereupon he was taken to the court and placed on his hands and knees while the prince finished watching his jester.

“Excellent,” said the prince. “Now more wine. Oh, who’s that?”
“I am a humble and unnoteworthy messenger,” said the head of the town council, “who has but come to beseech thee, milord, on behalf of the people of your fair lands, who are suffering most terribly through no fault of anyone at all besides the mosquitoes, milord, and the dragonflies sent by the wizard Wulwreath, milord, and the drought plaguing the land which has eradicated the mosquitoes and the dragonflies that is believed to have been sent out by the wicked witch Wezelynn, milord. Please, milord, may you spare us and succour us, your undeserving and everloyal and unquestioning subjects?”

The prince stood up. Grave was his face and keen were his eyes. “Your pleas move me, oh lowly creature,” he spake solemnly. “Lo! I shall make ever permitting stagnant or standing water on your property or your fields (such as might permit the breeding of dragonflies or mosquitoes) an offence punishable by death!”
“And the drought, milord?” ventured the head of the town council.

“Oh, yes, right,” said the prince. “Double the tributary requirements: I will need to make a second, larger keep to show the other princes that these hardships haven’t shrunken my sword. Someone execute this man for interrupting me.”

The head of the town council would have protested, but was interrupted and foreshortened to merely the * of the town council, and so missed his chance.

***

The next summer the mosquitoes were thick and furious as usual across the Bay of Blenth.

Everybody suffered, but nobody complained. They knew better.

And besides, it wasn’t as if NOTHING good had come of it. Town council meetings were much faster now.

In a small hilly daley kingdom the people were blessed by a king, and blessed was that king from all the proper and respectable authorities of the heavens and earth. He was huge, and strong, and fast, and keen with his blade, and fierce with his fist, and under his protection they feared nothing from no other. In all manner of respects was he perfect, save for one small manner: he believed that the sun was his cousin, and a shiftless one to boot.

“Why does he shirk my lands so?” he complained to his court on a beautiful summer afternoon. “Look! See how he slowly begins to slink into the west! What’s so wonderful over there that he should quit my kingdom so eagerly! Is not the cathedral’s steeple so high and grand? Are not my fields ripe and full? Are not the trees so thick and lustrous? Whyfor have you, my advisors, permitted some secret shame to thus rob me of his kinship?! Whence did this wound against his pride occur?! Woe!”
“I’m sure we can remedy this matter,” implored the eldest and closest of the king’s counselors, who could see his swording hand clawing restlessly at his pommel. “We shall consult the court polymath, wise Gum, who knows all manner of truths of earth and water and beyond. In her hands we may place a matter of this import, as it lies beyond our humble means.”

“Wonderful,” said the king. “And if this fails, I will know you have all only managed to further insult my cousin and will chop you all up.”

***

Wise Gum did not appreciate being dragged from her study, nor did she enjoy being introduced into a category of court personnel liable to be chopped up, and she was a little less than pleased when she was informed that it was laid upon her efforts and skills to prevent them all from being chopped up.

“A little notice would have made this matter easier,” she told the king, with a distinctly unwise amount of peevishness.

“Fear not,” said the king, whose mood at the moment was too expansive and buoyant to notice little things like other people. “As long as my cousin tarries tonight at my table, I shall be content. That leaves you at least three hours to entire him, does it not?”

“So it does,” said wise Gum. “I will go now to prepare my arguments and arts.”
“Excellent,” said the king. “I look forwards to not having to chop you all up.”

So wise Gum left the company of the cheerful king and left the anxious court and strode into the town below the king’s estate and made very fast friends with several very fast woodcutters and lo! The king was halfway through his evening meal before he realized something strange had happened.

“Ho!” he called at the glow through the banquet hall’s western windows. “Why do we still not need candles lit at this late an hour? Has my cousin decided to stay for the meal?”
“Indeed,” said wise Gum. “And overnight, if it pleases you.”
“Greatly!” said the king, shedding many familial tears. “So greatly! I have half a mind to run outside and embrace him myself!”
“A bit too much too quickly,” cautioned wise Gum. “Give your cousin his space and privacy while he visits outside the standard hours of the day, please.”
“Of course, of course, of course,” sniffled the king, pulling himself together. “At least for three days, I think. At least. And if he remains distant after that time I will know you have all told him foul lies about me and will chop you all up.”

Wise Gum bowed as low as was diplomatically necessary and excused herself from the meal. She hurried out the manor doors, passed by an exhausted and sweaty crowd of deeply overworked loggers, charcoal-burners, and woodcutters making a very large and beautiful bonfire of all the tallest and oldest trees in the area, and headed back down into the town, where she began knocking on the doors of every sail-stitcher, tailor, paper-miller, tent-maker, painter, and muralist in sight, and a few that weren’t. And they were just the start.

***

The sun continued to grace the king’s estate with his presence at all hours, and so enraptured was he rendered by this that he went very nearly the full three days without complaining. But in the evening of the final day his attention span began to wane, his lip grew a pout, and he chopped off the littlest fingers on both the hands of his steward for clinking a mug too loudly when serving him.

“Does something trouble you, your majesty?” asked wise Gum, who’d taken to sitting in at evening mealtimes and loudly asking the king complicated questions whenever he got too close to any of the windows.

“Three days is too long,” said the king, standing up with the full authority of his station and knocking over the dinner table. “I’m going to go see my cousin now.”

“Certainly,” said wise Gum. “But first you’ll need to shave. You don’t want to meet your cousin with an unshaven face.”
“True!” said the king.

“And before you shave, you must bathe.”
“Right!”
“And after you bathe, you must dress grandly.”
“Certainly!”
“And after you dress grandly, you should walk in stately procession to meet your cousin. Don’t rush! Don’t hurry! Don’t fumble!”
“You are indeed very wise, Gum,” marvelled the king. “I will do just that.”
“Haste is the enemy of dignity,” said wise Gum. And so speaking this she sipped her soup slowly until the king departed for his chambers, whereupon she leapt from her seat and ran out of the manor so quickly her shoes nearly caught flame.

The procession was indeed stately. It was indeed grandly-dressed. And it was indeed in no rush, at least until the king became bored halfway there and broke into a little rush, forcing the rest of his court to hurry after him and getting three of his older counselors trampled.

“My cousin!” the king shouted grandly as he flung wide the estate doors. “I am here!”
And lo! Though it was far after hours, there was yet light! A soft, cloudy late afternoon, lit by a gentle glow concealed behind beautiful and nigh-motionless haze that filled the sky from horizon to horizon. It was ethereal and beautiful, even if the perspective was a little funny where it reached the edges of town and the shade of the light perhaps suggested that someone had run low on the right shade of red at the last minute.

“Ah cousin, what poor luck, for such an overcast moment to herald our proper introductions,” lamented the king. “But you remain here, and wish to remain with me! It is a blessing forsooth for me to see you guest so gladly, and in proper manner rather than nesting outside my window! Why, I could be satisfied with this sight all my days.”
And all the court breathed a sigh of relief.

“Let us go together on a midnight hunt in one week,” said the king brightly, and so all their hearts shattered together.

***

The king was too pleased with chatting with his cousin as he roamed his estate to notice half his treasury had been paid out to the town’s artisans, and very nearly too pleased to comment on the remarkably static nature of the sky, but he was not QUITE pleased enough to fail to notice that the beautiful golden fields that surrounded his estate were somewhat withered.

“Ah, the crops suffer,” he said. “A sorry sight to show my cousin.”

“Droughts are not unseasonable this time of year, your majesty,” noted wise Gum, who was hastily shoving rocks and loose brush in front of an odd texture in apparent midair that one might have called a rip or a crease.

“It is true, it is true. Would that we had some rain!”
“Hopefully not for a week,” said wise Gum, dropped the last of her armful of bracken and twigs atop a scraped-bare patch of what appeared to be canvas.

“What? Why?”
“Omens,” she said with a mysterious gesture.

“Ah. Of course. But in a week I shall ride through the woods with my cousin at my side on a midnight hunt in the light of midday, and there will be peace and goodwill between us, and if this does not happen I will know that he is displeased with the advice you have given me about him and will chop you up.”

“Quite so,” said wise Gum. “Quite so.”

***

The rains came overnight at the week’s end, and in a moment of merciful timing it was when the king was abed, blissfully slumbering in the warm light of two am. It took half the town to take down the great wooden framework of poles and stilts that had held the boxed sky aloft, and the other half to clean up the acres of soaked paper and runny-painted canvas scraps, and a THIRD half to collect up all the melted-down-to-the-nubbin candles and lamp-wicks that had burned out every evening for the past week, and between all of that there was absolutely no help left to lend a hand to wise Gum in her chambers, which was how she liked it because if someone had said something or sneezed or twitched or breathed in the wrong way while she was mixing the last of her ingredients the manor might have exploded or maybe just stopped existing.

Instead, she got precisely what she wanted: a little piece of transparent waxy substance the size of her thumbnail, which she put in a glass globe, which she dangled from a wire, which she gently suspended from the corner of the king’s crown as he dozed upon his throne.

And into that globe she added three tiny drops of oil, plink plink plunk, and from that globe came a bright and terrible light.

“Wuzzat?” said the king, who was a terribly light sleeper.
“It’s your cousin,” said wise Gum, gesturing just above and between the king’s eyes. “He so wished to go on the hunt with you that he arrived early, and he’ll go with you wherever you wish.”
“MAGNFICENT” yelled the king. “Oh my cousin, I would hug you if not for your likelihood of burning my arms. Come! To the horses! To the hounds! To the woods! Wake up my lazybones servants; there is no need for sleep for there is no longer night in my lands! My cousin has well and truly come home!”

And so good was his mood that he didn’t spare a single glance for the shreds of paper and paint that his horses waded through as they charged past the once-parched and formerly-light-starved fields on their way into the woods in search of animals to kill.

***

There were four principal downsides to the king’s cousin.

First, he made speaking to the king very difficult – the light shone just above and between the king’s eyes, which did made it easy to modestly avert your gaze in deference but was problematic when attempting to look him straight in the face with firm and clear-eyed sincerity. This led to the execution of approximately one courtier a week for ‘treasonous squinting.’

Second through third were the little drops of oil every week, plink plink plunk. The king had already been a terribly light sleeper and an insomniac, but now he was a man possessed by such joy that he fought sleep with every huge and robust sinew and bone in his body. He dozed fitfully and without plan, so that wise Gum had to follow him almost everywhere with a droplet-dispenser and an oil-skin, ever ready for an opening.

The easy part was convincing him to never take the crown off. “Your cousin finds it most regal,” she had told him, and that had been that; it would never leave his brow again. In the fields, in the woods, at the high table, at court, in bed, in the bath. Never, ever, ever.

After two months of this the royal jeweler was in tears at the state of the thing. “Dust!” he cried. “Cobwebs! Ruin!”

“Chopping,” reminded wise Gum, and he subsisted into despair and whimpers. But he was right.

***

On the second week of the third month of the king’s endless and personal accompaniment by his cousin the sun who graced his lands with his unending and glorious light, the king rolled over in his sleep and pressed the globe to his crown briefly, triggering a small but intense dust fire and causing the thin glass to explode with a tiny ‘pff.’

The king yawned, stretched, smelled smoke, scratched out the flames attempting to take root in his chest hair, rolled over again, and was blissful as a babe until the precise moment he awoke at ten am.

“BETRAYAL!” he screamed as he hurled himself out from his bedclothes. “ALARM!” he howled as he descended the stairways to the rooms of wise Gum, sword in hand. “TREASON!” he shrieked as he hauled her from her workbench by her scruff. “My cousin has abandoned me!”

“No, no, no,” said wise Gum, whose brain was still half in the mathematical proof she’d been working on and half on thoughts of lunch and was refusing to budge in the same way a rabbit might when stalked by a wildcat.
“YES YES YES!”
“No, no, no,” tried wise Gum again.
“YES YES YES!”

“Your cousin probably had to go back to the sky to attend to matters for a moment,” said wise Gum, whose gut had seized control from her brain in extremis. “I’m sure everything’s fine.”
“Without a WORD to ME?” hollered the king, waving his sword through a candle, a desk, and a stool forwards and backwards.
“He’s very very busy.”
“TOO BUSY for his OWN COUSIN?” bellowed the king, biting off one of his own incisors in fury.
“Ask him, I’m sure he’ll-”

“I WILL!” roared the king, and he threw wise Gum carelessly through her bed and ran from the room, from the manor, to the cathedral, up the belltower, and onto the rim of the lip of the edge of the highest window under the very tip of the steeple.

“GET BACK HERE, YOU SHIRKER!” he called. And with that he jumped, and with that he seized, and for one glorious moment the sunlight was covered by his hands and he could almost see it shining between his fingers.

His heart rose. The rest of him, inevitably, didn’t.

***

The next king was a very distant cousin. He was smaller, and older, and slower, and he didn’t like spending much time in town or at court or with his family or with anybody in particular.

This was considered a blessing. There are worse things to have in slight deficit than a fondness for the company one’s associates and relations. Particularly when astronomy is involved.

When Lever Blake woke up and smelled the air deep in his chest and tasted the humidity in the curl of his eyelashes and saw the joy and genuine delight in the way the blackflies danced over the shrubs, he knew what kind of day it was.

“The fish are biting,” he said with happy delight. And so he took up his rod and his line and his tackle box and his good hat and he took Little Tim too, and all of them stepped out into the spring and shunned the roads and asphalt, turned away from the gravelled paths, left the sound of automobile and air conditioning to be muffled by the trees and went down the small ways and half-trials down to the lakeside together.

***

There was exactly the right shape and force of wind, and Lever knew the exact whip and slice of line for it. Eye, hand, motion. No thought needed or desired.

Plunk!

He sat on a stone, back alarmingly slouched, and he watched the insects swarm over the water and abruptly vanish to threats below and he knew life was good and true and real and everything was as it should be.

“Lever!”

And there was one more thing as it should be.

“Lever!” again, because Wedge Tyler never took silence for an answer.

“Wedge!” replied Lever. “I was just sitting here and thinking on how life was good and true and real and everything is as it should be.”
“Ah, that’s just fine, that’s just fine. How’s it going?”
“The fish are biting.”
Wedge whistled. His pitch was poor in sound but powerful in volume of air moved. “Fine, fine, that’s just fine. I’ll join you, if you don’t dispute it.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
So Wedge rolled up his pantlegs and stuck his legs in the lake and leaned back and considered clouds. “In my consideration,” he said, “those are some nice clouds.”
“They are, they are.”
“That one there looks like a bunny.”
“What kind of bunny?”
“White and wispy.”
“As long as it isn’t red.”
“Why so?”
“Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning. Remember?”

“Nah, nah, nah,” said Wedge, shaking his head like a wet golden retriever. “You were always the one for the weather stuff. You know when the fish are biting, you know when it’s time to make hay, you know when the rain is coming in.”
“You knew the fish were biting just now yourself or you wouldn’t have come down here.”
“It was optimism, that’s all. And besides, I’ve been coming down to check for the past week.”

“Better too much than not enough,” said Lever. He cast his line again, the arc, the hand, the eye, and something fell over behind him and he swore and the line splashed in an unseemly way.

“Fuck,” said the something. “’Zat you , Lever?”
“It is,” said Lever. “Be careful. You put me off my cast.”
“Sorry,” said the something, who was clearly and obviously Fulcrum Thomas. “Can’t see a damned thing in these glasses.”

“You still need those?” asked Wedge.
“Another few weeks minimum. But the surgery was worth it, so they say.”
“So they say,” said Wedge. “Should be fine.”
“Whatever.” Fulcrum had already begun to remove his jacket and whatever else he had to hand. “Lever, are the fish biting?”
“The fish are biting,” confirmed Lever.

“Damn straight,” agreed Wedge. “Ah!”
“Ah what?”
“One just took a toe,” said Wedge, holding up the leg who claimed toe ownership for approval. “See? There? Clean hit too. A muskey, y’think?”
“Could be, could be,” said Lever.
“Well that’s great,” said Fulcrum. He finished shucking off the last of his pants and immediately trundled into the lake and fell over with a godawful explosion of water and noise.

“Oh come ON,” said Wedge as he surfaced, swearing.

“I’m alright, I’m alright. Got my legs under me now. I’m alright.”
“You’ll scare the fish!”
“No I damn won’t! Ask Lever and he’ll tell you: if the fish are biting, they’ll bite. Argh! There’s one right now!”
“It’s true,” said Lever. “Just mind the spray, will you? This is my good hat.”

“Sure!” called Fulcrum. And furthermore, “ARGH!”

There was a clattering from up the path; Pulley Stevens was coming down the way with three head of fine cattle, their eyes rolling and their heads balking.

“Ah!” he called. “The fish?”
“Biting,” confirmed Lever. He cast his line again, but with less care; the time for craftsmanship had passed, now it was for the sake of the love of the experience of the emotion of the motion.

“Good, good,” said Pulley. Behind him the woods were alive with crackling branches; the rest of town was nearly here now, stragglers all. Hinge Thomas and Plane Rupert and Knob Wilson and all the others and all the rest, all dressed up, all ready to go, all here for those words.

 “G’wan!” he called and tugged and cajoled. “Get in there! You heard the man!” And they did, with reluctance, which matched how Fulcrum received them.

“Keep on my lee side,” he bellowed. “I was here first! I’ve got the right of the fish! ARGH!”
“You can’t own the lake, Fulcrum,” said Wedge.

“And you can’t own everyone else’s business! Butt out!”
“Your butt’s in the way – YOU butt out!”
“The fish are biting,” reminded Lever, and he baited the hook with the very last of Little Tim and sent it on its glorious geometrically exquisite trip to the lake and everyone saw it and knew it was good.

 “So they are,” said Wedge, the ripples growing red around his legs.

“Blessed be,” said Pulley, shoving a particularly recalcitrant and mournful snout away from the shoreline.

“Frog willing,” said Fulcrum. And then “ARGH!” and his whole mountainous body quivered. “THEY COME!” he screamed.

And so they did. The water boiled, the air shimmered with the splash and pop of their bodies and jaws. From ashore came the call, the echo of Lever’s early premonition.

“THE FISH ARE BITING!” and so they leapt and jumped and waded and foundered into the shallows, tripping and sliding on rocks, on branches, on each other. People fell and got up and fell and got up and fell and never rose again or were sucked down, screaming in joy and terror.

“THE FISH ARE BITING!” roared Fulcrum, as he melted away in the center of a bass vortex. “THE FISH ARE BITING! THE FISH ARE BITING!” and at the last even his lips were gone below and out of it all and no more sign or splash was made.

“THE FISH ARE BITING!” called Wedge as inch by inch he was tugged down and on and on and in towards the water, knee by thigh.

“THE FISH ARE BITING!” called Pulley in terrible rhapsody as he took a running dive and landed amidst the screams and bleats of his fading livestock, a thunderous burst amidst their ebbing struggles.

“THE FISH ARE BITING!” went up from a hundred and more sets of tetrapod lungs, emptied of air and filled with water and vacating chest cavities and more and more and more, all together, all united, all going, going, going, going, gone.

***

By noon the fuss was over and the wind was beginning to pick up, so Lever packed up his tackle box. The clouds weren’t the right shape anymore. The bugs weren’t dancing properly. The humidity was unhappy. The mood was gone.

But you didn’t judge a day by how it ended, but what was in it. It had been good. It had been right. It had been done.

The fish had bitten. And so in extrapolation the fish would bite. It had been ensured.

So when Lever put away his rod and his line and his tackle box and his good hat, he didn’t pack them too deep in his closet. You could never quite figure when those sorts of days WOULD come, but you could be ready for when they did.

The spring stood on top of a peak, on top of a mountain, on top of everything, and in the spring swam the very small fish, and they spoke of what they would do and who they would be.

“I’m going to be a shark,” said the first fish. “I’ll swim all over the world, and I’ll eat anything I want.”
“I’m going to be a gulper eel,” said the second fish. “I’ll live at the bottom of the world and I’ll eat anything I want.”
“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish.

“I’m going to be a flying fish,” said the fourth fish. “I’ll swim through the air, not just the water.”
“I’ll be a leaping salmon,” said the fifth fish, and so on and on and on for the spring was full from one side to the other, as big as it was, as small as they all were.

But small things grow ever bigger, and one Now not too far from Then when the sun shone particularly brightly a little fish swam uncommonly close to the very edge of the spring, and – as much by design as accident – it slipped into the whirling current of one of the ten thousand streams that shot forth from the spring, and it was gone.

The first fish to follow it took about four minutes. The first fish to follow THAT fish took about four seconds. And on, and on, and on, until it was a flood, a tide of little flesh with big dreams and wild hope and fierce fear all pouring out of the spring at every turn, descending down into the world on the ten thousand streams that fed into a hundred thousand rivers that drained into the oceans.

The first, second, and fourth fish were gone before then – seized on by hungry and long-bodied and long-toothed river predators. The fifth fish was plucked by a small but determined bird.

The third fish didn’t know what to do.

***

Some of the fish remained in the rivers, found their ways into lakes, stopped to tarry in pools and ponds. They grew up, put down roots, stayed as lampreys, as trout, as bass, as sunfish and cichlids and pike and every colour and form and imagining of the oxbow, from murky thousand-mile meanders to cold clear crisp mountain craters that seemed just a little bit like the echo of the spring they had spent their childhoods in, the spring that they had forgotten.

The remainder found their way out into the rest of the world, the bulk of the planet’s surface, the conquering of topography by hydrology. They flooded the estuaries, clotted the corals, meandered into the great pelagic deserts, sank down to the abyssal plains and into the hadal trenches, moved up and down the water column like dust in sunbeams, grew white-bellied and black-backed, shaded the colours of the rainbow, turned thin and long and stout and strong and bright-eyed and blind and beautiful in every way.

The third fish didn’t know where to go.

***

Of the billions, so few were left to grow all the way up. One in thousands, hundreds, millions, who could count them? Most of those lucky few were small, discreet, quiet and quick and worried and a little bit more like their childhood than they might have thought they’d be. Some were larger, some were larger still, a few were largest of all – great sharks that cruised through vast clouds of tiny life and swallowed them whole; or knife-toothed predators that swallowed seals and dolphins. They too found themselves not quite who they thought they’d be; wary, hungry, eternally restless and fretful and just a little wistful for a childhood in a high and safe place that they could not recall.

The third fish didn’t know who to be.

***

The spring filled again. Every year, every revolution of the sun, every passing cloud and empty breeze and idle hour poured more into it, until at last it was overflowing with very small fish, still fresh, still amorphous, still eager and still unknown.

And when the hastiest of that year’s young swam too far from the spring’s center, too close to the current tugging at its fins, too close to the stream – it found the oddest thing. A little lump in the riverbed, a spot of piled sediment, an obstruction forming itself into a stone. The new fish didn’t know what it was but that was normal, and natural, and fine, and so it put it out of its head and soon it pressed on.

Every year more debris piled; every year it packed in more tightly; every year the stone grew in size and scope until the waterway was cut in half by its mass and the number of streams that flowed out from the spring was ten thousand and one.

The very small fish followed the streams to the rivers and lakes and the ocean, and they did not know what the stone was. But some stayed longer than their friends every year, just a moment. And the fish that lingered there swam more slowly for a time, with more worries to weigh them down.

***

The ages passed, and the stone grew. It grew and grew and grew until it forced streams to merge, then to stop, then finally half the spring was obstructed, clogged tight by its bulk. The very small fish slid unevenly from the mountaintop now, and the rivers and seas of the world were unevenly filled save for in places where the base of the stone cracked and permitted small tunnels and trickles to worm underneath its bulk and funnel down the mountainside in sharp short leaks.

In one such crevice on one such day of one such year swam a little fish, sooner than it had planned – it was not yet time for the rush down the seven thousand streams, but the stone had swollen so that it was impossible to avoid it even before the time to leave came, and a small bit of curiosity led it down a passage it couldn’t possibly back out of. But it was far too little a fish to understand or fear this, and so it went down, down, down into the depths of the stone, through passages bigger fish had never swum, and at the very heart of the stone, so far in that the rush and spray of the streams was inaudible for the first time in that little fish’s life, it heard the voice of the third fish.

“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish. It said this in the terrible sort of way that comes with having thought it endless times before, until the thought wears away and the words mean nothing and all that’s left is raw and red.

“Would you like to come outside?” asked the little fish.

“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish.

“Would you like to not be in here?” asked the little fish.

“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish. And, “yes.”

The little fish swam and slammed and shoved with all its small force against the walls around it, but it was only a very little fish and so it was unable to do much at all.

“I’m going to go away now,” said the little fish at last, “but I’ll come back. And when I come back, I’ll help you. Is that alright?”
“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish. And, “okay.”

***

The little fish was very excited to speak with its friends after that.

“I am going to be an enormous shark,” said the little fish. “So that I can come back to the spring and break the stone wide open.”
“A shark can’t swim all the way back up the seven thousand streams!” said its little fish friends. “You’re nuts.”
“Well then, I’ll be a mighty salmon,” said the little fish. “So that I can leap upstream from the ocean all the way here and break the stone wide open.”
“A salmon isn’t nearly big enough to break that stone open,” said its little fish friends. “You’re weird.”
“Well then,” said the little fish, “I’ll figure it out myself. Just you wait.”
“That’s really strange,” said its little fish friends. And then near the edge of the spring one of the boldest very small fish was caught by the current and swam down, down, down the mountainside, and so the conversation was, unbeknownst to its participants, already almost over.

***

The little fish was so fiercely intent upon its mission that it was too distracted to notice all the danger of its journey, and so made it all the way to the sea without so much as a scratch. And only then did it realize – so fiercely intent, again, on its mission – that it had precisely no idea as to what its mission was.

“I could be a shark, and split the stone wide open” it said, but then it remembered its friends’ objections to that, and hesitated. “Or maybe a salmon, so I could reach the stone again?” it thought, and it recalled its friends’ objections to that too. “Maybe if I were half shark and half salmon,” it thought daringly, but then it realized that was not a good idea, and it despaired for a moment in a half-hearted little fishy way.

“Oh!” it thought then, so hard that it said it aloud. “I can simply ask a shark and a salmon for help!”

This took longer than the little fish had thought it would, and during the course of this it learned several new things, such as that many sharks were hungry or busy and salmon weren’t much less so. “Excuse me-” and “Would you mind-” and “Please, if you have a moment-” were all fine enough ways to begin a conversation, but the conclusions of those conversations always seemed to converge in headlong flight.

So instead the little fish thought to itself for a while, and it thought of how it had gotten an answer from the third fish, and it began with a very different sort of question to the next shark it found – a handsome sort of oceanic whitetip, with the customary dour mouth and mournful attitude of its type.

“Are you alright?” the little fish asked.

The whitetip didn’t blink, because it couldn’t. But if it could’ve, it would’ve. “What do you mean?” it asked. It didn’t lunge at the little fish; oceanic whitetips don’t lunge. They just stubbornly come at you over and over again until you’re food. But the little fish didn’t know this, and took the lacking lunge as a good omen.

“Do you need any assistance?”
“My back has parasites on it. Can you fix that?”
“I can try,” said the small fish. And indeed, over the course of many days, it did just that. It was a funny sort of way to get food, but consistent, and when the shark began to be mostly-clean (“cleaner than I’ve felt in years”) it was gracious enough to share the scraps of its food, since crumbs for an oceanic white-tip were pretty good meals for a little fish. By the time the shark was clean it was quite reluctant to part from the little fish.

“I will come back,” it promised the shark, “but I would like some help from you first, if that’s alright. I need to destroy the stone at the spring. Can you do that?”
“Not me,” said the white-tip. “And I have no idea of what this spring you’re talking about is. But I know a few friends of my friends. I’ll send them to the nearest river-mouth come spring, if you can give them direction.”
“Oh good,” said the little fish. And it left, and it was so pleased with itself that it immediately introduced itself to another shark, who asked much the same of it, and before it was done cleaning THAT shark it was beset with requests from a third, and so on, and on, and on.

***

Spring found many decidedly clean sharks lurking at the river mouths, along with a number of curious salmon who might not have been particularly keen to listen to the little fish but were cautiously interested in doing so when a shark was lurking behind its request. The sharks were bull shark: grumpy, blunt, and as fond of river water as the white-tips were of the open waves.

“Follow me,” said the little fish, and they did – all the way down the rivers, whose greatest inhabitants hid in astonishment at the force of fish they travelled in; all the way to the edge of the seven thousand streams at the mountain’s base, where the sharks had to sit and wait; all the way past the rocks and the spray and the bright froth of the birthing edge of the spring, up into the very cauldron where they’d been born and gone and forgotten it, except for the little fish, who had a very specific thing to remember.

The stone still sat there, brooding and omnipresent, and although it certainly startled the salmon and the little fish to see it again the real attention of all the OTHER little fish – the very little fish, the very small fish – was on the newcomers, for they had never seen other fish before that were not themselves.

“Who are you?” they asked.

“Some salmon and someone looking for a friend,” replied the little fish, and it moved to the base of the stone and began to inspect it for weaknesses. There were none; the stone was perfect and untouched.

“Where are you going?” they asked.

“We’re going back to the rest of the world, once we’re done,” said the little fish as the salmon began to nudge and budge and thrash their powerful bodies against the stone. Mud churned into the gravel of the spring; it was moving, but only barely. “And we’re bringing the stone with us.”

“What are you doing?” they asked.

“We’re letting my oldest friend out,” said the little fish. “Because they’ve been trapped in there for a very long time, and I promised I would do that, and I’ve asked for help so they would do that, and I’ve given help to others so they would help me. Can you help me?”
The very small fishes of the spring were not old enough to know that was a ridiculous thing to ask, and so agreed immediately. And although every one of them was smaller than a human’s littlest fingernail, in sum and totality, they could move at least one (small, sad) mountain.

The stone slid. Not surely, not safely, not smoothly, but it slid. And when it slid, it spun, and as it spun it began to tumble, and then the water took it and everything around it – salmon, little fish, the spring’s yearly crop of very small newborns (blessedly close to leaving anyways) and all.

***

The sharks found them at the base of the mountain in the birthplace of the rivers, and found something else too: pulverized by the fall and the rush, the stone was frailer than it seemed. It crumbled away in their jaws, bite by bite, and when the last piece was gone it took the little fish a moment to even realize that the third fish was there now, naked and revealed, floating in some sort of shock.

“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish. But the words meant something different now.

“That’s alright,” said the little fish, the pilot fish. “I’ve gone to some trouble to bring you this far; it would be rude to leave you alone now. Do you mind following me for a little while, though? I owe some sharks some cleaning.”

***

Ten thousand streams ran from the spring again – messy, uncoordinated, squabbling down the side of the mountain. Above them, above the world, the next year waited.

They didn’t know to miss the stone. They didn’t know the odd pits and grooves in the spring’s bed were unusual. They didn’t know anything at all.

But they were happy, in the way of very small fishes. Even if they didn’t know it yet.