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The grand old redwood had not been ten minutes felled when Janice almost stepped on its seedling. Nearly ended the whole thing right there without even noticing, a shift on the left leg, a glance directed a few centimeters to the side, a mind wandering a little farther.

But Janice saw it by her bootheel, quivering a little with each thunderous HOCK of the chain-cleaver on its foremother’s flesh, and it was so small, so small even for a bare sprig, and she thought a few things with the speed and ease of an old hand in the redwoods.

First, that to harvest, harbour, or hand-raise any form of redwood unsupervised was prohibited under the long list of company regulations.

Second, that almost every company regulation existed because the alternative was losing a preposterous amount of money, and occasionally also because someone had died.

Third, that most of the people violating those regulations either did it because they were too young and stupid to know they existed or too old and complacent to think they applied to them.

Fourth, she’d turned forty-eight two weeks ago and could still taste the hangover in the back of her spine.

So what the hell.

***

For the first three months, she kept it in plain sight: a pot among the pre-potted thyme, the chives, and the garlic on her windowsill. Nobody caught on except for Marco when he stopped by for Friday poker, who just barely had the discipline to yell “what the shit” in a politely restrained indoor voice when he went to blow smoke outdoors.

“God bless you?” asked Albrecht, and Marco, bless him, made eye contact with Janice across seven feet of murky, sweaty inebriation and read her loud and clear.

“Stubbed my toe in the dark. Jan, how do you live like this?”
“I’m not paying for a new bulb to fix the problem of your old glasses,” said Janice, and everything was fine and everyone moved on until Marco was the last one out the door and she could snake a friendly arm around his neck and mutter “stay quiet” in his ear. And it was still pretty fine and friendly after that, because he didn’t scream for help and he turned and spoke real quiet when he said “fuck you playing at?”

“Nothing.”
“That’s not NOTHING, that’s-”

“Even less than that. Shush.”
“You-”

If she were younger and stupider, she’d have threatened him. But instead she said “spot you a smoke?”

“Fuck the smokes, I just HAD a smoke, a smoke is what started this.”
“Homerolled.”
His eyebrows pinched and she knew she’d already won. “Bullshit.”
“Truth. Ash passed on the last of her crop before she got busted. Take one.”
“It’ll be dried up by now.”
“It won’t.”
“It will. And fuck the smokes, what are you DOING? That thing’s already big enough to eat a finger!”

“I’m not doing anything and I’ll put it back next week. And the smokes are good.”
“You’re so full of it your hair’s turning brown again.”

“Marco. Look me in the eye and tell me I would lie to you about this shit.”

He looked and saw the truth: she absolutely would and he would never ever in a million years be able to call her on it. Thus shackled by common courtesy and history, the night came to an end.

And so did the seedling’s days in the little pot. Runt or not, it had just about bulged over the sides – its stem stood too proud; its leaves bloomed too ruddy to be permitted in even the periphery of the public eye. And Janice didn’t ever let her friends into her bedroom these days anyhow, and she couldn’t remember the last time she actually used that old wastebasket, so in the end the only sacrifice she had to make for the relocation was the necessity of keeping her windows open in the daytime to let the slow-thick-stench of a growing redwood leak away and drown in the muggy vapours of Westplank afternoons.

***

The food became an issue.

It was turning into a proper sapling now, that runty seed. It slowly filled up Janice’s old wastebasket and grew straight and strong. And to grow strong, it needed fuel.

Cannibalism was of no concern to redwoods – the thousand thousand seeds spread out by an adult had just enough packaged energy to get them to sprout, and following that the bulk of their first meals would be an unfortunate just-a-little-smaller-or-slower sibling, strangled inexpertly with their fresh roots, ripped open, and drained down.

So it was perfectly natural and usual and normal that Janice was bringing home pieces of work with her, raw and dripping in her deepest pockets. Shaved bark, meat chips, even small limb segments made their way into her hands and vanished when nobody was looking – plucked from the very jaws of the mill. Once when she was on driver duty she uprooted a whole sapling, walked it off to the woodchipper, and stashed it in the cabin. She had no idea how nobody caught on to that, but it lasted her and the sapling combined a good few weeks.

It just wasn’t enough. Your shift got paid by weight of harvest, and you got paid just enough to keep the company store stock flowing, and anything taking chunks out of that meant not enough to live on, which meant worse work performance, which meant lower weight of harvest, which meant a long, slow, spiralling slide down into the metaphorical toilet bowl that was Westplank. Plenty of time to know what was happening to you, plenty of opportunity to try everything you could to escape, plenty of time to claw your nails bloody to no use at all.

So when the first week came that Janice had to stock low on toilet paper, she knew the writing was on the wall, and she looked into alternative sources.

Buying more groceries would be a different path to the same destination – the meat the company fed them was rehabilitated offworld slush, but it wasn’t cheap.

Pirate-logging redwoods would be a good way to get herself noticed – the company might not have cared if they lived or died, but they cared if they costed them money, and that meant consequences that could make starving to death seem kind and fast.

There weren’t many restaurants in town, and there were fewer that didn’t keep their dumpsters under lock and key, and fewer still that she’d be able to scrape more than tendon and bone out of. Westplank didn’t cater to the non-desperate.

But there was an aid site. A big, busy company aid site. And it was full to the brim every week with some new disaster. Someone young that tried to do a stupid trick with a chaincleaver. Someone old that didn’t look when they heard TIMBER because they knew what was happening and so didn’t feel the need to look. Someone who got drunk and dropped their phone in a chipper and tried to catch it and missed.

There were a lot of ways to get hurt out in the redwood forests. A lot of them were permanent, and a lot of those permanent consequences left debris. A severed arm; a crushed leg; a mangled hand… it was amazing what the company would throw away while fitting you with your almost-shiny new prosthetic (pay in installments).

And unlike the restaurants, nobody kept a close eye on the bio waste bins. Janice didn’t even need to pick the lock: someone had left it open the first time she looked.

She did it anyways, just to be sure she could if it mattered. She could.

It never came up.

***

Autumn came, and the storms locked everyone inside away from the power tools and the redwoods for a solid month.

That was when Janice learned the morgue’s lock was only a little harder.

Even if people weren’t losing as many limbs they were still drinking too much, or saying things they shouldn’t to people they shouldn’t have, or just walking outside to watch the lightning from not quite far enough away.

It was learning to crack the bones – first for the marrow, then further, down into tiny pebbles it could gnaw away at inside its trunk. The grinding soothed her at night, like childhood memories of listening to a dishwasher in the restaurant downstairs. The teeth were harder – it worked on them for whole days at a time even, like chewtoys.

Then the winter parch settled in, and everyone was back in the fields, but well, it was so much more effective this way, wasn’t it? Why scrounge for fingers when you could heft a bodybag? And it wasn’t as if it was more noticeable. Bodies were waste product. Expensive to get rid of. If anyone noticed what was going on, it was because it was making their life easier. You didn’t question that.

***

The sapling was growing faster than ever. It had practically filled Janice’s room by then; it clawed at the windows in slow soft ripples; it spilled from the wastebasket to sink tendrils into the ragged carpet; it brushed its buds against the ceiling to leave sticky red marks and reached out to cradle her bed in its still-spindly limbs. It was cramping, creeping, crawling for space, and she had no more left to give it.

So, late on a moonless Friday night Janice cancelled poker for the fourth week running, put on her heavy logging gear and mask, gloved every part of her exposed body, and slowly and carefully began to uproot a redwood without killing it for the first time in her life.

It was sticky, it was slow, and it was surreal. The vesicles gripped and gummed at her gloves like nursing kittens as she tucked them into loose sacking filled with ripened offal; the roots tried to crawl into her boots while she heaved it into her arms; the trunk leaned into her warmth and made the soft pulsation it did that was neither hunger or fear or anything else Janice could identify.

She made it down the hall. She made it out of the building. She was just getting into the cab of her truck when she heard a very, very familiar “what the shit” and looked up and oh, Marco. So considerate to check in on her after she cancelled poker four weeks in a row. Or so worried he might have permanently lost the chance to take Albrecht and Beatrice’s spare change. Or both.

“Shush,” she said, setting down her burden. It clutched at her heel, recoiling up and away from the cracked pavement.

“This is – fuck, this is, this is bigger than a windowsill, this is life sentence territory-”

If she was younger and stupider, she’d have thought of threatening him. “It’s okay, listen. I got a plan.”
“A PLAN? A plan for what, to-”

Janice was faster than she looked, and she was less drunk than a Friday demanded, and Marco had a soft skull. And there was space in the cab enough, if she wedged him half over her lap.

The sapling wriggled in its casing, trying to get at him.

“No,” she told the thing without auditory organs. And also herself.

A witness was dangerous, a missing acquaintance was a little suspicious, but a disgruntled and unwilling accomplice? That was just a friend with more words.

***

The uncleared tracts were temporary and doomed. The cleared tracts had been chopped down to the epidermal layer. The fallow tracts were a hypothetical investment in some sort of future, and therefore nobody thought of them or looked at them, and it was there that Janice crept, and dug, and chopped, and planted, and finally ensconced her sapling in a little dell that would hide the vascular plume of its canopy from casual observation, in the riot of churning rot and fast-burn fungals and eczemal undergrowths that still dominated the landscape. Poor but ample fare, and plenty of room to grow, and a long head start. She’d done everything she could to set it up for success.

Janice hadn’t thought about it in years, but she did vaguely recall wanting kids at least once. She guessed that was what this was like. You were meant to give them everything, right? You were meant to do anything for them, right?

What were you meant to say when you were done?

‘Bye’? ‘Love you bunches’? ‘Good luck’? ‘Don’t forget to write’?

So instead she hugged it awkwardly, and it found where her mask had slipped a bit and took a little piece of it with her.

And that was also what it was like.

The machine people noticed it first; the satellite people, the radar people. They saw it coming from miles of miles away with their pings and ms and humidity percentages and fractional chances of precipitations. And from them word spread on down to the personnel – flight staff, ground crew; maintenance; cleaners; that guy in a kiosk selling you discount toblerones at ruinous rates – and then at last the word came down into the terminal from on high in soothing tones over crackly speaker.

“All flights will be delayed presently; please see the boards for estimated times of departure. The sky isn’t right.”

And that was all.

***

The sky not being right was a clear issue. Its cause was somewhat less discernable. Processes of elimination had to be followed; hypotheses had to be tested.

First the airport phoned more machine people and sent them emails, in hopes that maybe theirs were fibbing or somehow silly. Maybe the sky was actually right after all and this was just a big misunderstanding that they could all look back on and laugh.

But they received nothing but polite confirmations and condolences. The sky was indeed not right. The easiest way out of the problem had been shot down.

Second came the obvious solution: they went down into the big metal shed next to the control tower and opened sixteen different locks of increasingly angry sizes until they found The Plug, which was twelve feet tall and weighed six tons. It was eased out of its socket on the strainer backs of dozens of baggage handlers, held awkwardly, then reinserted.

But despite being unplugged and replugged, the sky still wasn’t right.

The third solution was even simpler in its elegance. A little truck went a little ways out onto the tarmac, carrying a little lad of little people wearing little safety vests and holding little glowing paddles. They were unloaded and began making waving their tools in the air, staring upwards with contorted brows and half-bared teeth.

“There, there!” they shouted over their mouthpieces and into their headsets. “Move, move! There, there! Farther, farther! Keep going, keep going!”

But no matter how hard they shouted and waved and directed the problem did not correct itself, and so the idea that the sky wasn’t right because it was too far left was discarded.

For the fourth solution they went up the chain of command. A great complimentary gift of duty-free alcohol and twenty-dollar hamburgers was piled high in the center of the lobby and burned with the fuel from dozens of novelty souvenir lighters. Polite complaints to the sky were uttered in every tongue available at hand to every entity that might have dwelt within it or controlled it or fought it or slept with it.

But the sky neither affirmed nor denied nor made any comment in the slightest, and so there was nothing left to do but call for the janitors and custodians and mopfolk – who had, of course, expected this and were already standing on hand with extremely careful and sober expressions.

At the fifth, serious material resources were being tapped. The security checkpoints were packed up and wheeled outside; the sky’s shoes were removed and its pockets emptied; its backpack and purse were placed in little plastic tubs and the whole lot were examined with every kind of radiation and the other ones too; its documentation was ruthlessly scrutinized and it was taken aside for a polite, professional and detached conversation on the nature of its business (being above the seas and the earth) and its planned destination (the same).

But the sky refused to say anything without a lawyer and none qualified to practice in its field could be found. The entire process became entangled in red tape and so ensconced, proceeded to return to the warmth of the inner terminal, where it slipped into a dreamy hibernation.

By the sixth, unorthodox solutions were being entertained. Every ladder across all four terminals was found, wrangled, and fastened together to permit the ascension of a single staff member – chosen by lot – to the sky, who could adjust it manually until it was no longer right and instead was correct.

But the winning lottery ticket went to Jess, who had a bad leg; and the runner-up went to Paul, who didn’t want to; and the runner-up-runner-up went missing, and finally the runner-up-runner-up-runner-up was Doreen, who refused to climb any ladder she hadn’t given a good kick to, and it transpired that Doreen’s kick was more good than the ladder.

By the seventh ultradisunorthodox solutions were on the deck, which was why the combining of every available 787 on the airfield into a single ‘man-plane’ to destroy the sky and thereby render its nonrightfulness moot got as far as the blueprinting phase before the individual responsible was exposed, chased down, and fished out of the air vents with a long-armed squeegee pole before being imprisoned in the baggage carousel.

The eighth solution was to shout angrily at the sky. It did not help.

The ninth solution was under proposal and involved the key placement of four refreshment carts, three especially athletic and ruthless flight attendants, and a strategically overfilled water bottle, but it was interrupted immediately before its execution by the tenth solution, which occurred when an anonymous traveler tried to hit the lights in the washroom, flicked a likely-looking switch, and turned the sky back on, immediately rendering it right.

“Someone must’ve hit it with their shoulder by mistake,” was the verdict. And so, with admirable speed and precision, the schedules were adjusted one last time and service resumed with nothing but the greatest of caution, care, and professional courtesy.

***

Everyone involved was gifted a voucher.

Except the sky. It had been very unhelpful.

Jim picks the cans.

He walks the roads and the sidewalks with his plastic barrow, one wheel grinding a little, and he picks the cans from the ground, and he picks the cans from the bins, and he puts them in the barrow. He picks the cans rain or shine; the rain doesn’t bother him; he knocked a little hole in the bottom of the barrow to let the water out. He picks the cans every day of the year, on every holiday; no denomination or cause forestalls him. He picks the cans all over town.

He picks the cans from the downtown, from the bins by the restaurants and the clothing shops and the apartment blocks. Some of the places lock their bins; some don’t. Jim makes do.

He picks the cans from the baskets in the parks and by the beach. In the summer he gets a lot; on summer holidays he gets a LOT; in winter he’s lucky to get anything.

He picks the cans from the side of town where the windows are covered up and missing. He walks a little quicker down his old street, so he doesn’t have to make conversation. Jim’s busy, and awkwardness takes time.

He picks the cans from the side streets with the two-story homes built fifty years ago and last renovated twenty years ago. Some of those houses are going missing one by one, torn down and replaced with something worthy of the million-dollar-land they’re sitting on. Jim can get some good cans when that happens; housewarming parties have that manic enthusiasm around them.

He picks the cans from the side of town where the driveways are long and the waterfront is in everyone’s backyard, and that one’s tough because if Jim goes in daytime he gets the cops called on him for vagrancy and if he goes at night he gets the cops called on him for prowling. He goes anyways, but he walks faster here than he does in the rest of town, and once he had to hide the barrow in a hedge and his body in a culvert. It wasn’t a good time.

He even picks the cans from the godawful suburban sprawl out by the ridgeline on the verge of town, which means he has to walk down roads with no sidewalks for hours just to get there while traffic zips by him at sixty kilometers an hour. Jim accepts that, even if he doesn’t enjoy it. That’s how it is.

That’s how it all is, really.

Jim picks the cans all week, and then he picks through them one more time and separates them in half. Then he takes the barrow and he redeems the deposit on one half of it, the lesser half of it, a dime a can. It gives him food and a new shirt now and then and a little bit put towards whatever else he needs, according to priorities. And it gets him one new, full can.

The other half Jim picked he keeps with him in the barrow, and then Jim and the barrow and the new can take one more walk, all the way down to the park by the water, to a bench where the city lawnmowers don’t attend properly because it’s practically in the lake when the waves get too big and the waterweeds are trying to eat it alive from the legs up.

Jim sits on the bench. His barrow sits next to the bench. The full can sits in his pocket. And he waits.

Some weeks he waits a long time. Some weeks it’s fast. This is a long week, and it’s a long wait, and that’s a little mercy. He watches the sunset bloom and fade and the clouds blend into ink along with the sky before it starts, which is enough time for a rest and to take off his shoes and rub his feet and listen to the birds singing good-night, good-night, see-you-tomorrow. It’s the longest he’s been off his feet without sleeping all week.

It comes after the birds stop singing, and it goes for the throat. Right there, WHAM, a lump like your stomach’s sprinted up your esophagus and gone bungee-jumping on your uvula. By the time you’ve registered it your heart’s already pitter-patting like you’ve been on a run, your limbs feel like you’ve been doused in ice water, and your hair’s prickled from the tug and flinch of your skin as it tries to shrink back from the world in general.

It’s in the water. The same thing that makes people scared of sharks and crocodiles is awake, and it’s loud, and it’s telling anyone nearby to pay attention and freak out properly and productively because This Is How It Happens. There’s nothing visible, no fin, no eyeball-laden dead log, nothing at all, until there is, and it’s the worst kind of thing to see because it’s been there all along. It looks like a muddy spot on the bottom, dark with weeds.

Those aren’t weeds. They never were. And the thing they’re swirling in isn’t a current.

And then, something breaks. And it doesn’t stop.

It breaks free of the bottom, comes boiling up like the contents of a burst kettle. It breaks into the ultraviolet, turns into something just out of the reach of sunlight’s illumination for a poor trichromatic primate. It breaks the surface, and just as the whorl begins to pile up on itself and reach for something above the waterline is when Jim picks a can and hucks it.

The can nails it dead amidships – the aluminum fizzling out into vapor on impact – and the noise that comes out is indescribable because it isn’t noise, it’s that sort of sound elephants make to talk to each other from very far away that the human ear can’t register, except using a medium that isn’t vibrations. Jim ignores it, and picks another can. And hucks it.

He picks a can from the street he used to live on.

He picks a can from the park by the high school where the kids hang out and make trouble.

He picks a can from the recycling bin next to the longest driveway in town, next to a sign that said TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED ACCORDING TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW.

He picks a tire-flattened can he pulled out of a ditch by the highway, and nearly cuts his fingers on its jagged edge

He picks a can, and picks a can, and picks a can, and with every can Jim throws it’s beaten lower, lower, deeper into the water, and when all that’s left is that seething, anxious fear in the air and the water’s calm Jim pulls out the new, still-unopened can and hucks that too. It unwinds into nothing but a spray of sour booze and with that last blow the whole thing falls apart, dread by dread, until there’s nothing left in the air but mosquitos.

Jim sits there for a little while yet, despite the mosquitos, since he wants to make sure. Then he sighs, and he stretches, and he tucks himself under his jacket for a blanket and twists his arm for a pillow and goes to bed.

It’s been a busy week, and the next one starts tomorrow.

The sign was – used to be – bright yellow, with black print. It read DO NOT FEED THE DINOSAURS, beneath a slashed circle containing an abstract piece of candy and a triceratops skull.

Terry got in trouble again last week because of it. They brought her into my office, oven-hot with the dead air conditioner clotting my window, and they told me “she’s doing it again,” and she hunched her tiny head towards her all-ribs chest and glowered so fiercely that I understood why two big, strong summer workers didn’t want to be in the same room as her, let alone be the ones to do the job of reprimanding her. Leave it to the contract manager: she’s only going to be around long enough to fix things up; we might have to look Terry in the eye next summer.

“Terry,” I told her (again), “the sign refers to the animatronics.”
“That’s stupid,” she told me.

“They’re just pigeons, Terry. It’s okay if people feed the pigeons, as long as it’s nothing bad for them. It’s not like they’re seagulls.”

“The sign says ‘do not feed the dinosaurs.’ They’re feeding the dinosaurs.”
My back was sweating against the worn fabric of my chair, not from exertion, but its anticipation. “Most people don’t think of birds when they think of dinosaurs, Terry.”
“Well they should because they are.”
“Right, but they don’t quite look-”

“Whales don’t quite look like most mammals, does that make them something else?”
“Terry,” I said, trying to bring it out of natural facts and into practical execution, “can you just enforce the sign as it is meant rather than as it is written?”
“Why not change it to ‘do not feed the animatronics?’ Then I could do both.”
“It’s meant to be whimsical. Light-hearted.”
“Feeding robots is whimsical and light-hearted.”
“Yes, but it acknowledges that they aren’t real. People want to pretend, Terry.”
My shirt was stuck to everything, but I saw the sadness in her eyes that meant I was coming towards the closest I’d get to victory. “Fine. I get it. Can I go now?”

“You’ll stop telling people not to feed the pigeons?”

“As long as they don’t feed the pigeons.”
“Please stop telling people not to feed the pigeons.”

“I’ll try,” she said, and the words sounded as hollow as anything but that was the best I was going to get.

“Thank you, Terry. You can return to your duties.”

And she did, and I watched her go and gazed past my air conditioner down at the ridiculous sauropod fountain in front of the office – long-necked, long-tailed, long-suffering – and thought that if there were one other person in the country who cleaned bird poop and gum from the surface of animatronic dinosaurs with one-half her dedication she would’ve been fired ten years ago. Niche protection wasn’t just for ecologists.

Oh no. I’d thought about ecology, which meant I’d thought about food webs, which meant I thought about plants, which meant I’d remembered that the gardener was late this week again, which meant I had to try and find their contact information, which was somewhere inside a hard drive, or a filing cabinet, or someone’s head.

The afternoon turned bleak and thick in my mind, like syrup from a fly. I sighed, and I swore, and I descended once more into the depths.

***

Morty was baking.

He sat in his lifeguard’s chair, limbs dangling, eyes shut, leathery hide hardening in the pitiless sun, and he simmered under the cloudless sky. I’d never seen him use suntan lotion. I’d never seen him put on glasses or use a hat.

“Or at least a visor?” I pled. “So you don’t need to shut your eyes.” The pool was a mirror of the afternoon sky: every patch of water that wasn’t currently being chopped, splashed, or slopped by milling bodies had been turned into a molten lens that left spots on your eyelids just glancing at it. Cartoon fish and ammonites and plesiosaurs speckled the bottom; figures worn thin and choppy by actual time and artificial tide.

“S’fine,” he grunted. “No worries.”
“You’re the lifeguard. How will you tell if someone’s in trouble?”
“Oh, I can always tell that,” he said, and he smiled at that – oh, his teeth, the one thing not suncooked on his body, big and beautiful. “I’ve got lots of practice, y’know.”
“Right,” I said. “Right. Listen, are you SURE that kid’s okay? Look, he’s waving and-”

“He’s faking it,” said Morty placidly. “His friend’s going to try to pull him out of the water and he’ll yank her in and dunk her.”
I watched. The kid’s friend tried to pull him out of the water and he yanked her in and dunked her.

“I told you,” said Morty. “Lots of practice.”
“Great, you’re paying attention, I get it. But if you don’t at least LOOK like you’re paying attention, the parents get nervous. And nobody’s twitchier and more dangerous than a nervous parent.”

He burst out laughing, or as close as he could come without moving – heh heh heh heh heh, bubbling up from the ribs outward. “True! But they’re just like the kids, you know? If you look upset, they think they should be upset. If you look relaxed, they don’t make a fuss. If I don’t worry about this, they don’t worry about this, and that means you don’t worry about this. Trust me. Lots. Of. Practice.”

Oh. That was something else. “You’re senior staff, yes. Can you help me with something? I’m looking for our gardener; they still haven’t shown up on time this week and the contact information is shot. Nothing in the computers, nothing in the filing cabinets. Gone. Any chance you remember them?”

“Huh,” said Morty. Not words, an expulsion of air; a breath turned thick. “Huh. Which one?”
“The name’s missing too. But they’ve been under contract here for ages. Practically since the park opened.”

“Huh. Hmm. Big one, weren’t they?”

“It wasn’t a firm, it was just one contractor.” Which was itself cause for surprise: this place wasn’t the biggest attraction on the planet, but it had a lot of plants.

“Yeah, one big contractor. Nice kid, I think. Yeah, I think I remember them. Huh. Not the name though, sorry. Nice, but distant. Always busy. And me, I stick to my pool. Nope, sorry, can’t remember anything more.”
“Are you-?”

Morty hoisted himself out of the chair and vanished into the pool like a bullet. “Bloody nose!” he called. “Out of the pool! C’mon, tilt your head up, that’s it-” and so my question went unanswered.

Fine. I still had half a water bottle. I still had a few hours left in the day. I still had one last stop to make. And I still had one avenue of inquiry.

***

It took almost till shutdown to find him. He had no cell phone. His walkie talkie was out of batteries. He was nearly stone deaf.

But in the end I caught up to his trail near the bathrooms, where he’d been cleaning up an overturned garbage can that had spread wrappers and paper bags and empty pop cans all over the base of one of the gingkoes. He was hunched even lower and more crablike than usual; nose only an inch above the trash as he slipped it back into the half-deflated bag it had slid loose from.

“Herman,” I said to him, “we need to talk for a minute.”
“The leaves aren’t ready yet,” he said. “They won’t come down ‘till it’s colder, and then they’ll come down all at once. Gingkoes are like that. Very convenient, you know. I saw some of the other trees, those…maples” – he said it may-pull, sourly – “…they just dribbled them out over weeks. Sloppy, sloppy. No end of a chore.”
“It’s not about the leaves, Herman-”

“I’m nearly done here. Just got to tip this up. I can do that, you know. I’m not an invalid. Watch. See how I hold the broom? See? See?”
“I see, I see.”
“And see how I put it under the can? See? See?”

“I see, I see, but-”

The thin arms bent, the bent back braced, the bin was in place.

“You didn’t see,” said Herman reproachfully.

“I was looking right at-”

“Oh, that’s not at all what I’m talking about! Now, what have you got to ask me?”

“Herman, don’t you think it’s about time you retired?”
“Bite your tongue!”
“It’s mandatory, not a suggestion. You’ve been here since day one, and you’re not a little tired? You’re not a little worried about labour laws?”
“I don’t not know about what you’re telling me,” said Herman with all the warmth and flexibility of a day-old pizza crust.

I threw up my arms. “Double negatives are not cunning misdirection! Come ON Herman, can’t you be reasonable? Can ANYONE here be reasonable? There’s no traffic and there’s no budget and there’s no plan and there’s no records and the employees are either ignoring the guests or picking fights with them and one of them is outright MISSING!”

“Nonsense, nobody’s missing,” said Herman, and maybe it was just me being paranoid but I felt like I’d said a lot more for him to argue with than just that.

“The gardener,” I said. “Don’t you remember them? They haven’t been in this week at all.”

“Oh, them. No, that’s normal. Nothing to be worried about. It’s very normal for that to happen. They’re good, but they’re a little slow. Hard-working young thing like that, bit prone to sleeping in on a nice summer day. But when they’re on the job, woof, things get moved. See? See?” The broom jabbed up at the gingko. “Look at that, see, see? They did that. Planted it and nurtured it from sapling on up, I saw. Not bad at all. Don’t worry about it, they’ll be by soon enough. Now go away. I have to visit the children’s center.” And no matter what I said then he treated me as if I weren’t there and set off, cart clattering with dustpans and brooms askew and ajar at every angle like distended limbs.

***

I went back to my office. I checked the filing cabinets. I checked the computer. I checked the inside of my head. Overstuffed, undercategorized, overcooked. Ugh, ugh, and ugh.

The air conditioner, sensing that the sun was about to go down, turned itself on for one second and died with a short, sharp grunt. I put my head in my hands and stared from the desk to the ceiling and then worked my way back down again, and on the sixth or seventh go-round of this my hindbrain grabbed my attention by the nose and slammed it into the wall.

Old, worn paint, and a small placard beneath a modest photograph. Paleo-Park, founding staff May 1984. And a list of names, helpfully left to right for back, middle, and front rows. All of  them, lined up in front of that  stupid sauropod fountain outside, stretching  from its long neck to  its long tail.

There was Herman, looking almost as old as he did a few hours ago. There was Morty, still leathery even at the start of a sunny season. There was someone who looked a lot like Terri, if taller and not quite as thin and with a ferociously toothy smile that I’d never once seen her show, to me or anyone or anything else.

And sitting in the center of them all, possibly the largest person I’d ever seen in my life. Height, width, breadth, the picture of grace at a scale unreasonable in all dimensions. She was smiling, a little, and she was named Louise. No last name given.

She had been pasted into the photo.

***

I locked the office behind me. It stuck. I kicked it.

“A little much,” said Herman. I nearly jumped, then remembered I wasn’t the one who had anything to be ashamed of.

“So what? It’s not like it’s going to matter in a week. This place is going under.”
“Going where, when?” demanded Terri. When had she shown up? I should’ve seen that, should’ve seen her sitting there on the bench. Had she been waiting for me, hoping to argue about the signage again? “Why?”
Honesty was one thing. Full disclosure was another. “Because it’s run-down and doesn’t make any money and some of the employees have never existed without anyone ever telling anyone differently.” And apparently my bad mood was quite another.

“Never existed?” said Morty, and oh I DID jump that time, a full on half-hop, half-start to a run. He was leaning on the edge of the half-drizzling little fountain, right in front of me in plain sight; how had I missed him that completely? Maybe it was because he was wearing a shirt. God, he could barely wear a shirt at all; the tank-top hung from him like a scrap of cloth dangling from a tree branch, stretched and thin. His teeth were brilliant. “What makes you say that?”
“I found Louise.”

Oh, they went. All of them, at the same time, wordlessly. A flinch, a squint, a twitch. Oh.

“And then I looked her up. She never worked here. Not in ’84, not after. She’s never been late. She’s never even existed – you stole the name from the damned STATUE! Right there! In the fountain! Apatosaurus louisae! And you know, when I started pulling on threads after that, a lot of other things didn’t add up either – Herman, Morty, did you know your birthdates have changed every year for the last three decades? I don’t know exactly what kind of scam was going on here, but now it’s out of my hands and in someone else’s.” So please don’t look at me like that, because there’s three of you and shutting me up wouldn’t do anything and why am I thinking like that right now?

“Louise was real,” said Morty. “She never worked here, but she was real. Call it a, oh I don’t know, a dedication in her name. Most of the place was, really.” His teeth were still showing: not a grimace, not a smile. He looked tired; maybe shutting his mouth would take too much effort. “Just a place for some old fossils to remember those who went before us. You already made the call?”
“Yes.”
“Huh. I guess that’s it then.” He looked at me – really looked at me, with his eyes wide open in the evening dim. They glowed a little, slit-pupiled in the dark. “You know, I’ll miss this dump. It wasn’t my idea, but it was nice while it lasted.” The grin again, bigger than ever, and far, far sharper. “Well, I’ll see you all later. I’m not going anywhere.”

And with that he slipped into the murk of the fountain, rugged-backed and rippleless, and became indistinguishable from the floating sticks.

I don’t know what I said. I must have said something, because Herman told me “be quiet!” very sternly, and at such force that I had no choice but to actually listen to him.

“There,” he said. “See, see, don’t make such a fuss. You went and pushed it over, you have no right to whine about the mess it made. She was a nice girl, Louise – so young, such a tragedy – and you know, she really did plant gingkoes back in the day. I’ll miss the ones here. But ah, it was only a little while anyways. See, see.” He scuffed at the drainage grate in the path, levered it up with his broom – stiffly, carefully – and slid inside with a short scrape of carapace-on-stone, long sharp dagger-tail the last to sink out of sight. Up from the long rough pipe I briefly heard the echo of his many legs, then it was drowned by the distant surf: sea, sea.

I looked at Terri.

Terri looked at me. She seemed very thin. She did not blink.

“She was a friend of my grandmother,” she told me. Her voice were flat, her eyes were flat, but her hackles were raised – her feathers all on end. “I never knew her. But she told me about her, and so did they. And now you’ve ruined it.” Her head jerked, one sharp bob. “But that’s nothing new. What else have you and yours ever done since we left you everything? Well, you can do it by yourself now.”

She flitted around the fountain three times in as many seconds, a quick, colourful little blur, then flew away into the darkening sky.

And it was just me.

Once again, it was just me.