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Helen was frowning at the lopsided ruin of her mailbox when fell footsteps came behind her. A subtle rhythm, detectable only to a dedicated student of the village.

“Hi, Louise,” she said without turning around.

“Oh hello yourself Helen how are you doing oh NO what’s happened to your mailbox was it the kids again?”
Who did she think she was kidding? Might as well ask if the sky was blue or green. “Someone’s kids did it, yeah. Clumsy job too – they probably just stuck the bat out the window as they drove by, didn’t even swing or anything. Won’t be hard to fix.”

“Oh yes that’s right that’s right and your daughter how’s she doing?”
You live next door, Louise, why don’t you tell me. “Agnes? Oh she’s fine, fine, fine. Lazy though. Typical teenager.”
“Yes indeedy mostly truly you tell no lie there I tell you what and by the way heard anything about that new neighbour yet?”
And there we go.

“Yeah. He’s a troll. He works with a coal-dark hammer and a red-hot anvil and a set of barbed tongs that could pin a raging bull or pluck the left eyelash from a gnat and he smiths ores and metals into hopes and dreams. I checked his website.”

“Oh my my goodness that’s very impressive very unique very interesting. Is he single?”
“He said he’s married to his forge.”
“Shoot. Well you can’t have everything can you I guess it’s true or at least you can’t always get what you want but then again if you try sometimes you might get what you need are you SURE he isn’t single?”
“Look, you can ask him yourself. I’m going to see him about my lawnmower when I’m done here and I don’t want to give him an excuse to make it run backwards or something. You know how fables go if you piss off the magical folk.”

***

The troll’s home was a hill, hollowed into a hull and shaped into a hall. Windows frowned from under the grass; ventilation ducts and chimneys and exhaust pipes shrugged loose from the loam; a gigantic ironwood door twice the height of a human stood proud in a somber cliff face. It had two doorknobs: one you could barely just reach if you stood on your tippy-toes and jumped, and a second, much smaller one at a more typical height.

A little sign was hanging from the second doorknob. It read “NO SOLICITORS, PRIESTS, REALTORS, OR MARRIAGE PROPOSALS” in firm, mathematically exacting print that looked to have been embossed with considerable force.

Helen knocked, making a sound like slabs rolling loose from sarcophaguses in the most lightless reaches of the deepest tombs.

Then she knocked again.

Then she tried the handle, which was unlocked, and poked her head through and asked “hello?”
“No solicitors,” said the troll. His voice sounded like raw unworked stone with a hint of smouldering cinder, and he had his back to her, hands busy on his work-table with two tools made of iron and glass and a jeweler’s loupe the size of a human head jammed into his left eyesocket.

“I’m not soliciting, I’m here to ask for a commission.”
“Good. One moment.”

Helen waited one moment. While she did that the troll did something unspeakably complex with his fingers – like forming a sushi roll crossed with rolling a coin between his knuckles crossed with some sort of guitar picking – and then put down what he was working on.

It was a very small duckling, made entirely of wire. As Helen watched, it stretched its little wings, flapped twice, took three steps and fell over.

“Done,” said the troll. He picked the duckling up in one hand and deposited it in his apron pocket – where it began to squeak most incessantly – then turned to Helen.

“I need some work done,” she said, deciding that professional was the way to go here.

The troll’s eyes were deep-set caves with a hint of batwing in them. “Yup,” he agreed.

“It’s my lawnmower.”
“Yup.”

“The blades are dull.”
“Yup.”
Helen waited. The troll, too, waited.

She caved first. “And maybe it’s nothing, but my daughter says it’s slow to start.”
“Yup. I’ll get on it right now. Come back tomorrow.” And the troll scooped up the lawnmower in his hands, tucking it under his arm where the duckling began poking at it in hopes it was watercress.

A thought struck Helen as she passed through the door, one hand still on the knob. “How much will this cost?”
The troll looked up from where he was (carefully, discreetly) fussing over the mower like a child with a cranky cat. “You tell me,” he said. And then he refused to say more, and she left to worry a little bit about that and tell herself that she didn’t need to do that and maybe even believe it, if she could.

***

The sun was bright if thin on the morrow’s morning when Helen returned. Outside the door of the troll’s home was a lawnmower fashioned of what appeared to be purest gold and silver, with a pull cord of spun platinum wire and a diamond-carved grip. And on its handle was a small note of plain paper with familiar firm handwriting, reading: Take It.

Helen tried the doorknob first. Locked. Then she tried what the card said.

It was surprisingly light for a piece of landscaping equipment now made entirely of precious metals. Almost lighter than it had been when she towed it over in the first place. And it didn’t rattle, and it didn’t bump as she lugged it across the street, which she discovered as she lugged it over the curb was because it was smoothly and frictionlessly slicing apart every single object that intersected the softly-gleaming blades nestled in its underside.

“Agnes!” she called into the house in general. “Lawnmower’s fixed. Time to go to work”

“Ugh,” said Agnes concisely.

“Go on, it has to get done. You need this more than I do.”
“Fine.”

“And mind the new pull handle; it’s a little stiff. Probably because it’s made of spun platinum wire.”
“Whatever.”

And so Helen went inside, put some tea on, and was just finishing steeping the bag when the door slammed.

“The gas is in the shed, behind the bike rack,” she told Agnes.

“I’m done.”
“No you aren’t. You promised you were going to do the lawn, and you already got a few days abeyance from the mower breaking. You can’t just quit on your commitments like this, people will talk about it and you’ll get a reputation.”

“I finished the lawn.”
“No way you did a good job that fast. You can’t halfass things like this Agnes! It’s how you get fired!”
“Mom. Relax. The mower runs itself. Watch.”

So they went out into the backyard – which was immaculately cut and smelled faintly of grass and vanilla – and Agnes showed her mother how if you pulled the cord like THIS and then turned the knob like THAT and pet the mower gently on its back it would wriggle itself like an excited kitten preparing to pounce and zoom all over the lawn in thirty seconds.

“So yeah,” she concluded. “You’re welcome. Don’t mention it.”
“This was meant to give you a work ethic,” said Helen. Her left arm wouldn’t stop shaking. “So you won’t end up penniless and on the street when I’m too old to do anything to help you because that almost happened to me when your grandmother fucked up when I was little and I dream about you running out of money every month, at least twice, and I feel helpless and terrified that I’m not being a good mother.”

“Mom,” said Agnes. “You’re freaking yourself out. It’s okay; I don’t treat chores my family ask me to do like I would my own professional commitments. My life isn’t going to be financially ruined because I mowed the lawn too fast and didn’t enjoy it. Besides, I do all the coding for cousin Betsy’s streaming setup and she’s already paying me for it. I just never found a good time to tell you.”

They both burst into tears and hugged each other, crying so loudly that across the breadth of their house, lawn, and the road itself the troll had to close his windows and turn up the fans a little so he could focus on carving a living lily out of granite.

***

Louise had her brother Kevin over for coffee the next day.

“And you wouldn’t believe it but Helen said her lawn’s never been cleaner and her and that daughter of hers are actually talking properly again and it’s just amazing really amazing so I’m thinking of maybe looking into visiting and getting something commissioned it’s a real opportunity do you have anything you need done?”

Kevin thought about it. “Yeah,” he said. Then he finished his coffee and walked across the road and knocked on the troll’s door.

Then he knocked again.

Then he opened the door a crack and peered inside and said “hey.”
“No solicitors,” said the troll. He was elbow-deep inside a golden goose’s chest cavity, performing open-heart surgery with a selection of burrs, pliers, and files.

“Got a job.”
“One moment,” said the troll. His hands blurred through something sort of like juggling sort of like polishing a counter and sort of like playing the violin and the goose was sitting up and blinking groggily and honking softly to itself. The troll pet its head gently and slipped it into his apron pocket, where it stared at Kevin with only a lazy echo of the eager animus typical of geese.

“I need a spam blocker,” said Kevin. “Inbox’s overflowing.”
The troll stared at him. “Yup,” he concluded.

“Too many contacts.”
“Yup.”
“Too many promotional offers.”
“Yup.”
“Too many subscriptions to crap.”
“Yup.”
“Staying on top of it sucks.”
“Yup,” said the troll. “I can fix that. Come back tomorrow.” And he walked to his forge and began to pump the bellows with such tremendous force that Kevin had to leave immediately or be scalded hairless.

“Price?” he called back through the door as he hurried out.

“You tell me,” said the troll. And then the handle was too hot to hold and the door slipped shut.

***

It was a misty mild morning when Kevin drove down again to his sister’s place, where he left his car and walked across the road to the shrouded haze of the troll’s hall.

The door was shut fast and locked. But hanging from the doorknob was a sturdy scabbard of dragonhide, descaled but still impervious to harm, and inside the scabbard was a blade so impossibly exact in its proportions that it hurt Kevin’s eyes to look at it even through his contacts. It felt like a little piece of mathematics had fallen from the heavens and intruded onto the messy disproportionate and unmeasured bounds of reality.

A note on the hilt was printed in firm and decisive handwriting: Hold Me And Speak This Word: Defenestrate.

So, feeling somewhat foolish, Kevin drove home with his sword (obeying all the speed limits very carefully, in case he had to explain to a police officer what the hell he was doing), went home, stood in front of his computer, unsheathed the blade, held it aloft, and spoke the word: “Defenestrate.”
The sword leapt from his hand like a salmon through rapids, spun once with dazzling speed, and, with the precision of a cat falling upon a chipmunk, cut his computer into six pieces with a single slice.

Kevin stared at several thousand dollars’ worth of damage. “Huh,” he managed.

Kevin stared at the sword, now returned soundlessly to its scabbard. “Huh,” he repeated.

Kevin stared out the window, at the nice day. “Huh,” he concluded.
Then he went outside and stayed outside for about a week straight before he ran out of groceries.

***

“And I really was impressed at the sword you made my brother I saw it when I went over of course he wasn’t bragging about it or anything but it was sitting there when I came in and took a nice look and of COURSE I’ve seen Helen’s lawnmower and what I’m getting at here is I’m very interested in seeing if you can do something for me if that’s alright I’m sure you’re very busy since you’re so skilled but it’s just a little thing a small problem I’m sure you can handle it super easily no trouble at all if that’s okay.”
The troll’s door squeaked open a crack in front of Louise.

“Everyone else knocked and then went in,” he told Louise.

“Oh I’m sorry I just didn’t want to impose is all and then I started explaining myself and I got a bit carried away you know how I get carried away I’m sure Helen mentioned it ahahahaha why I mean you know how it is when you’re worried about filling up a bit of awkward silence the worst thing in the world isn’t that so?”
“Mm,” said the troll. He raised his hand and gently flicked a small tin woodpecker into the air, where it fluttered free before landing on one of his chimneys, which it began to enthusiastic hammer on.

“Anyways it’s just a small thing just a little project I’m sure it’ll cost nothing at all it’s so tiny teeny eensy-weensy of a chore it’s dead simply why I’m sure you churn out things like this between breakfast lunch and dinner as easy as blinking as simple as pie as straightforward as one to three like falling up a log you can do it under your sleep just like that, surely.”
“What is it.”

“I need you to make my car cool and convenient and spacious and good for the environment and healthy for me,” said Louise.

The troll peered over her shoulder into her driveway. “Yup. Leave it. Come back tomorrow.”
“Oh okay do you need me to leave the keys too or-” but the troll had already gently hooked one finger under the bumper and began to tow Louise’s SUV into his hall, slowly but inevitably, and by the time she’d scurried out of his way and brushed the dust off herself the door was beginning to shut again.

“Oh dear I didn’t ask the price is it free?”
“You tell me,” said the troll.

“Oh well would two hundred be alright or-”

The door shut.

Louise spitballed numbers for another half-hour before she gave up and went home. Her sleep was restless.

***

The morning was bright and cloudlessly bluer than the fiercest robin’s egg when Louise crossed the road and stood before the troll’s hall. She didn’t notice it.

She noticed only the car.

It was… different. The same, but different.

Every angle was just so. Every bit of bodywork precisely adjusted. It was obviously the same car, but it was somehow, inconceivably, incomprehensibly, impossibly slightly tweaked so that it looked perfect. Also it was trimmed with silver, including its new and incredibly stylish hood ornament (a finch?).

The finch cheeped at her.

She opened the door. Again, it was the same. The same in every way. It just somehow had gained an extra row of seats and had more cargo space. Louise’s eyes informed her that this was totally reasonable no matter how hard she looked for the seams. The surfaces were of identical plastic and pleather, but they made it look better. Made it look good. Made it look flawless. It was ideal in every way.

Louise sat behind the steering wheel and gently gripped it, feeling warm and comforted and at peace with the world. Then her eyes alit on the little message sitting at precisely twelve o’clock between her hands, printed very firmly on a sturdy square piece of paper.

It Costs 5 Cents More Per Litre Than The Pump Reads.

Louise considered this for a while. Then she drove it across the road and parked it and considered it a bit more.

“Well if you price it out considering the work was free it’s quite good quite good indeed I can drive it quite a lot before it starts costing me more than the renovation would’ve otherwise I’ll just have to plan around it yes maybe ratio my kilometers I can make a chart and in the meantime I can walk more and get that old bike Helen kept offering me yes I can use those for getting around town and just break this beauty out for when I’m off to visit Kevin and actually I can ask HIM to visit ME more often since he’s spending so much more time offline good for him really and you know I think I can make this work and-” so on and so forth on and on and on.

***

Saturday evening, Agnes came by the troll’s home. No job needed doing, just a little tin of cookies from her mother to say thanks. And hey, it was just across the road, so it was no trouble at all.

The chimneys sat silent and empty of smoke. The windows were shuttered. The door was locked tight. And a big sturdy piece of card was fixed over the smaller, lower doorknob, on which was printed in very firm and large handwriting: Gone Fishing.

And below that, slightly less firmly – as if the author had added it on spur of the moment: Make What You Need Yourselves.

Agnes laughed at that for a good long while.

“Please,” she said. “Like that wasn’t already happening. They didn’t notice?”

Then she wedged the cookie tin against the door with a rock, spread some seed for the little brass chickadees that chirped at her from under the grassy eaves, and went home still chuckling.

Soon after that, the sun went down. But that just meant it was already morning somewhere. 

Anna and Adam didn’t agree on much.

“Kids!”
But one thing they would never, ever argue on-

“Kids! Up and at ‘em!”
-was the joy of sleeping in deep and warm on a winter morning.

“KIDS! IT’S TIME TO GET UP!”
But alas, it was spring, and with it came spring cleaning, and with it came their mother’s kind, gentle, warm, reassuring hurricane bellow, and so Adam and Anna shook off the cobwebs, gritted their teeth, and trudged through their ablations in a haze of their own misery until they had metamorphosed into a pretense of presentable.

“Lovely, lovely, lovely,” said Mother, beaming at them. Her arms were already full, every hand occupied with a different project. “You know the drill, don’t you? I don’t have to tell you twice? Go on! Get it done! Do what you do best! Shoo!”
And so urged on and on they were laden with products and tools and solutions and kicked out the door, and though they ignored each other and made no small talk so as to make the journey take as much time as perceptibly possible, at last, inevitably, the dread conclusion lay in sight at long and gruesome: the wide and vast woodlands, just-thawed, still-damp, and ready for change.

“Damn I hate spring cleaning,” groaned Anna, burying her face in her hands.

“YOU hate it?” retorted Adam, already elbow-deep in a bucket of loose buds. “All you have to deal with are the animals. I’m up to my eyebrows in plants.”
“At least yours stand still! And animals includes lots of stuff; you ever heard of bugs – I mean, you ARE one, so-”
“At least yours are low-effort! Every tree needs every leaf set up and running! You just have to poke all the groundhogs awake and call it a season!”

“Oh please! You only think my job’s easy because you couldn’t tell a groundhog from a wild hog! A blind baby could do your job! And do it faster!”
Adam smiled at his sister in that particular little tight-lipped way she never tired of pointing out was entirely stolen from their mother. “Prove it, you blind baby.”

“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Do my stupid lame easy moron job that a blind baby could do, and do it better than I can. Go on. Try your best. It should be easy, right?”
Anna grinned at her brother in that particular too-many-teeth way that he always insisted was just mom’s Winter Face. “Sure. Dead simple. And YOU, of course, can definitely pick up my slack since you’ll be doing my job, and doing it very well and making no mistakes at all and finishing it super fast. Since it’s so easy, right?”
“Right!”
“Right!”
Agreement reached in all good cheer and venom, they departed, then returned and swapped tools without making eye contact or saying anything above a mutter, then departed again.

***

“This will be easy,” said Adam to himself as he walked through the woods, banging on the tree-trunks and drumming on the burrow-holes. “Hoy! Birds of the air and beasts of the field! Get up! Get going! Wakey wakey time’s-a-wastey!”

A blackbird scuttled down to a lower branch to trill at him reproachfully. He swooped it up in his hand and scoffed. “Look at you! It’s spring and you haven’t even sprouted yet – oh, my sister REALLY never even tried with you. Let’s get your colour going. Is it this one – yes, it must – oops.”

The blackbird fled to a nearby tree, dripping bright red paint from both wings and scolding him mercilessly.

“Well, that was just an honest mistake. Who brings red paint for fresh buds, anyways – what a weirdo my sister is!” He bobbled the bucket in annoyance, carelessly sloshing it all over a cardinal that had been picking stray seeds from his shoes. “Oops. Are you not being fed and watered enough, that you have to do that? Honestly, she really is a lazy pill. Well, I’ll get things fixed up around here, don’t you worry. Where are some better colours?”
So Adam rummaged through Anna’s paints and spent a good while shaping up the birds for the spring, with many a mumble, slip of the brush, and “who keeps THAT colour around anyways?” excuse. But he was running out of paint and birds and excuses for errant splashes, so he took a moment to pull the checklist out of the duffle bag and scoff at it.

“Humdrum claptrap bullshit,” he sneered, carefully running his eyes over every entry. “’Remove Winter Fur’ – ha! I’d like to see her remove autumn leaves! I can finish this in a single second!” And so, with the utter confidence of the completely self-aware, Adam reached one-handed into a burrow and extracted a groundhog, which bit him.

“Fuck! Mean thorns on you, little nettle. Now let’s – oh my sweet pumpkin seeds, LOOK at you! You’re absolutely LOADED DOWN with last year’s growth! Well, we can fix THAT I hope!” And thus saying, Adam produced his (private, personal) hedgetrimmer from his pocket and began to work on fixing that.

“Stop squirming, please,” he muttered, over the indignant squeals. “Working on such irregular and stubby limbs is very hard even without them moving windlessly. There! That’s not so bad, is it? You’re nice and ready for your fresh foliage. Git! G’won! Who’s next?”

His question went unanswered, his audience remained slumbering in their dens.

“Honestly,” sighed Adam, rolling up his sleeves and jamming his arm into a hollow stump, where it contacted squirrels. “Oh, why do you all have to make such a simple thing so COMPLICATED. Oh! Shelf fungus. Is that an animal? Well, it certainly isn’t a plant, so it must be an animal. Let’s get you trimmed!”

***

“This’s going to be easy as hell,” mused Anna as she strolled through the woods, juggling her brother’s canvas backpack from hand to hand. “Look at this shit! It’s just standing there in the open, right ready for it! Hey trees, catch!” And so saying, she turned the bulk of the pack inside out and vigorously shook all the buds inside out into the air, where they flitted about and landed on pretty much everything but what she was aiming at.

“Wow, looks like SOMEONE didn’t bother to make you all aerodynamic,” said Anna, shaking her head in dismay. “This is what not looking at the birds’ll get you. Guess it’s up to me to set things straight here.” And so saying, she picked up the buds and stuck them to the sides of the trees, where they wouldn’t be so exposed and fragile.

“Why he insisted on putting you guys on the tippy-tips of the wimpiest little twigs on these things, I’ll never know,” she said, shaking her head in dismay (and spraying pollen everywhere).

“ANYWAYS, what’s next on the menu? Flowers? Eergh, he’s let them get all infected and rotten, look at the colours! What a wasteful boor!”

So Anna buried the rotten old colourful flowers, took her brother’s big vat of green paint, and set them all up more sensibly.

“Everyone knows plants are green,” she said to herself as she diligently worked over a fallen log. “Everyone except my big smart clever BROTHER, apparently – and why would he know, it’s not like they’re his JOB or anything, no no no, better not try to learn what he’s doing there, why bother when he can leave it ALL to his sister to do it properly. He’s never going to hear the end of this one. Hey, are mushrooms plants? Pretty sure they’re plants. Well, they’re not animals, so they’re probably plants. Hold still for your touch-up!”

***

The sun set eventually, much to its great relief. It wasn’t sure if it could take much more of this. In the long slow shadows of its descent the two siblings met in the woods. Each held their head high.

“Done and done,” smirked Adam.

“Dead simple,” mocked Anna.

“Why you ever thought you could get away with claiming this took even a single snot of skill or effort is beyond me,” said Adam. “Behold! The birds of the air and the beasts of the field!”
“They’re woodland animals, you – oh my FUCK! What did you DO to the birds!?”
“I put them in spring colours – lavender, violet, and so on,” said Adam. “So the bees can fertilize them with pollen. Obviously. Admittedly, their petals were a little trickily-shaped, but-”

“Oh dear deer you PAINTED them?” Anna clawed at her hair like a drowning ape reaching for oxygen. “Feathers aren’t flowers! Feathers aren’t flowers at ALL!”
“Well they’re close enough,” said Adam loftily. “And anyways, I think they look pretty good now. Except for the goose, I couldn’t decide what looked best on it, so I tried a bit of everything. The leaves look fine, I think.”

Anna gently cradled the goose, ignoring his (exhausted) attempts to twist the flesh off her arms and examining every square inch of the bouquet he had transformed into. “Wings.”
“What?”
“They’re not leaves. They’re wings.”
“Oh, what’s the difference.”
Anna looked up with the expression of someone who had seen the face of Satan in their breakfast toast. “What’s the DIFF- OH MY FUCK WHAT THE HELL IS THAT WHAT IS THAT WHAT DID YOU DO?”

Adam’s brow furrowed, gently at first then with escalating concern as he followed his sister’s trembling arm and outstretched finger. “A bear?” he replied tentatively.

“Why is she BALD?”

“Well, I had to trim off the old growth,” explained Adam reasonably. “Since SOMEONE let all the mammals keep their foliage after last autumn instead of shedding it properly, like they’re supposed to. Look how the fresh air is shaking her branches!”
“She’s SHIVERING you VACUOUS DIPSHIT oh my SHIT I am GOING to MURDER you TWICE, ugh ugh ugh ugh UGH!” wailed Anna, stamping her feet in an agony of dismay.

“I don’t see why you’re being so fussy over a few extraneous extremities,” said Adam. “It’s not like they were living tissue or anything, like is that a flower?”
“Fur is NOT FLOWERS, you TREMENDOUS-”

“What you’re standing on. Is that a flower?”
Anna looked down and lifted one boot experimentally. “Yeah,” she said, the seething hate gently, carefully pushed aside for the sake of very patiently answering a very dumb question from someone she knew to be very stupid.
“What kind?”
“You tell me if you’re so smart.”
“Is that a daisy?”

“Sure, why not.”
“Why is it green?”
“Because it made more sense than it being like, pus white and bruise yellow? It’s a plant, dude.”
Adam swallowed his tongue before the scream escaped, then coughed it back up. “Green.”
“Plants are green. Duh.” She pointed at a patch of bluebells. “Green.” She pointed at a nearby toadstool. “Green.” She pointed at the nearest tree – a sturdy birch. “See? Green. You’re welcome. I guess SOMEBODY had to fix that eventually.”
“Why are its buds sprouting on the trunk.”
“So they don’t fall off? Double duh.”
Adam didn’t swallow his tongue in time, and the howl that escaped him sounded like it had been retrieved from the bottom of a trapped jaguar’s lungs. “Did you do ANYTHING right you – you DIPSHIT?! Don’t you know your precious animals need to eat plants to LIVE?!”
“Uh, yeah, triple duh,” said Anna. “I did all the berries. See?”
Adam desperately crawled into the midst of the thicket he was directed to, hands trembling and a fleck of spittle sliding down his chin. “These are raspberry bushes,” he said at last.
“Sure.”
“Why are they sprouting blueberries.”
“Well, it’s not a big difference.”
Adam plunged into a second patch. “These are blueberries. And they’re growing strawberries.”
“Yeah? I ran out of blueberries.”
“And where,” demanded Adam, plodding free of the patch, vines over his shoulders and desolation in his eyes, “Are. The. Raspberries.”
“Where do you think they are? In the maple trees.”
At this Adam lashed out his fist into his sister’s brisket, but Anna’s autonomous nervous system had been tense as a wire since she laid eyes on the goose and it counteracted with a knee to the groin, followed by applying said goose to Adam’s nose. Adam’s free hand stuffed poison ivy down the back of Anna’s shirt and it all continued as it thus began, but moreso, and moreso, and moreso, and moreso, until at last Mother heard the ruckus from clean across her globe and came downstairs to separate, investigate, and interrogate.

“I told you,” she said in her most severe and wintery tones, a child in each hand, “to do what you do best. This scarcely seems it.”

“ANYONE could do what they do best!” Anna and Adam agreed violently, pointing bitten and scarred fingers at the other.

“Oh,” said Mother. “I see my mistake. You’ve done exactly what you do best together, it just isn’t anything useful. Well, what’s done is done. Time to fix it.”

And they did, and it took as long as you thought and was as tedious and frustrating as you’d imagine, but in the end spring – reluctantly, slowly, gradually – sprang, and everything was as it was intended to be.

But no matter how long she made them scrub, they never could get the red paint off those two birds.

The day dawned bright and big and bold upon town and it shone upon a dread and gruesome sight: a tent as big as the sky and as brightly coloured as a forest of springtime birds in full song. Joyous tinny music spilled from it, and a man with a truly spectacular moustache and a megaphone strode out from it, big blue eyes crinkled in joy under his gigantic top hat.

“Atten-shun all! Young and old! Thin and fat! Boys gals and nonbinary pals! You must come here, one and all, and give us your money or your lives!”

Then he put away his megaphone and went back inside the tent. As an afterthought, a big and bold-fonted banner was unfurled proclaiming it GIBLO’S MAGNIFICENT AND MARVELOUS TRULY TERRIFIC SHOW.

But everyone already knew that.

***

“I don’t see why we ought to do as he ordered,” argued Little Flek, as her mother busied herself digging up their family savings from the hidden chest under her wardrobe.

“Sweetness,” said her mother with a friendly smile, “Giblo’s Magnificent and Marvelous Truly Terrific Show has terrorized this green good earth of ours for over one hundred years. They are a crew of the finest cutthroats, robbers, and tricksters ever assembled, and their leader – Giblo the Grandiose – is believed to be an actual and truthful wizard. We’ve got utterly no choice but to do as they say.”
“Nonsense,” said Little Flek. “I bet I can handle it.”
“You are eleven.”
“Nearly twelve! And besides, haven’t you read me all those fairy tales and stories all this time? I know exactly what to do. The only way I’d have a better chance is if I were the third of three sons and you set my two older brothers out ahead of me.”
“Those were stories for children, sweety.”

“Are you saying you left out the important bits?” demanded Little Flek.

“No. But there are truths hidden in them you may not yet be old enough to-” and here Little Flek tuned her out, for those were the magic words to get your children to stop listening to you. She nodded and hummed and when her mother was done she said “that’s fine. Now give me a bit of the old grey cheese from our fridge.”

“I like the old grey cheese in our fridge. And take water with you, it’s warm out.”
“I’ll make good use of it, I promise,” said Little Flek. “And I KNOW it’s hot out GEEZ.” And she took the old grey lump of cheese (and a bottle of water, begrudgingly) and split off a little corner of it and placed it on the ground outside their door until she attracted a mouse, which she picked up, pet, and put in her pocket (don’t do this at home). She put the cheese in her other pocket and while she was at it she broke some pale twigs from the birch tree by her home’s front door and took them too. Thus equipped, she set forth for the entrance to the midway, which was easy to find as it was being guarded by a twelve-foot-tall man with the muscles of a rhinoceros.

“HELLO,” he said to her, crouching down on one knee for ease of conversation. “I AM STRONGMAN STU, THE TICKETMASTER. DO YOU HAVE A TICKET FOR THE SHOW, LITTLE LADY? OR PERHAPS HOUSEHOLD BELONGINGS YOU ARE GOING TO GIVE TO US IN EXCHANGE FOR YOUR LIFE AND THAT OF YOUR LOVED ONES?”
“Neither,” said Little Flek in her most fearlessly bored voice. “I came here to shut you down. It will be a trivial matter, as I am the strongest person in the world.”
“GOOD ONE,” said Strongman Stu with genuine admiration. “ALWAYS HAPPY TO MEET A FELLOW PRACTITIONER OF THE PATH. BUT TELL ME, CAN YOU DO THIS?” and so saying, he scooped up a stone from the ground and ground it to juice in his palm.

“Easily,” scoffed Little Flek. And she produced her grey cheese, which she wrung to whey.

“NICE,” said Strongman Stu. “TRADE YOU.”
“I’m sorry?”
“OBVIOUSLY WE SHOULD CHECK EACH OTHER’S WORK. LIKE SO!” and so saying, the ticketmaster flicked a droplet of the rock-juice in his palm into his mouth and drank it thoughtfully. “SEDIMENTARY WITH A STRONG BOUQUET,” he opined loftily. “TRY SOME.”
“No thank you,” said Little Flek.
“SURE,” said Strongman Stu with a big nasty grin. “AND I BET YOURS DOESN’T TASTE LIKE WHEY AT ALL. THE CHEESE-ROCK IS THE OLDEST TRICK IN THE BOOK, KID. GO HOME AND BEG MOM TO PAY US OFF. LESS OF A WASTE OF EVERYONE’S TIME.”

But Little Flek was not defeated yet. “Your suspicions are unwarranted,” she said dismissively. “Exactly the sort of thing a puffed-up weakling would say. Why, I bet you aren’t even strong enough to pick up this midway.”

“PLEASE,” laughed Strongman Stu. “YOU INSULT ME.” And he picked up the entirety of the midway rides, cotton candy, balloon games and all, but he did it with one hand – his right hand – and held the other one out in challenge to Little Flek. “AND I CAN STILL ASK YOU FOR YOUR TICKETS,” he mocked. “WERE YOU HOPING TO TRICK ME INTO STANDING HERE WITH MY HANDS FULL? READ A BOOK WRITTEN WITHIN YOUR LIFETIME, SQUIRT. CASH OR GET ROLLING.”
And Little Flek didn’t want to admit it, but that rather had been her plan. However, the words of the strongman and the rucking-up of his tank top had given her a different sort of idea, and so she stepped quickly around to his right side, reached into the back pocket of his jorts, and yanked out his wallet.

“HEY!” shouted Strongman Stu, almost dropping the Midway. “GIVE THAT BACK!”

“Go get it!” called Little Flek. And she threw it into the nearby wondrous portable outhouse the circus had placed nearby for their patrons, where it splashed thickly. And as the ticketmaster ran to the toilet and jammed one hand in while the other desperately balanced the midway in the other, she advanced upon the big top quite unbothered by anyone.

“Hmm,” she said to herself as she did this. “Hmm.”

***

The big top was a hundred feet high and girded in iron-and-bulletproof-glass and sparkled like a prism left under a sunbeam. At its steel entryway lounged a tremendously bored woman, dangling in the trunk of an even-more-bored-looking elephant. Attending her were sixteen baboons with broadswords, a lion with an eyepatch and a sabre between his teeth, a bear with brass knuckles, and a tiger with a rocket launcher.

“Halt or whatever,” she monotone’d to Flek. “Show’s not on. Go away. Buzz off. Beat it.”
“But I need to go into the big top to speak to Giblo the Grandiose,” whimpered Little Flek in the most drippy tones she could manage, wringing her sleeves desperately to conceal the movements of her pockets.

“You really don’t.”
“I really do,” sobbed Little Flek, and as she covered her face with her hands she slipped loose the mouse from her pocket, which ran across the ground between her and the elephant, scurrying over its foot as it fled.

The elephant shifted gently from one shoulder to the other, unbothered.

“Kid,” the bored woman said, looking even less impressed (if possible). “That’s an old wives’ tale. And I know your mom is probably like, thirty, but even she probably wouldn’t be dumb enough to tell you it’s real. Don’t you go to school or something?”

“Oh no I don’t know what you’re talking about at all,” mumbled Little Flek, saying all the very bad words she knew inside her head as fast as she could. “Oh no no no, I don’t at all. Oh I’m so sorry for all this trouble!” and saying so she threw herself at the feet of the lion and apologized left right and center while checking each paw quickly and carefully.

Darn gosh it to heck. Not a single one of them had a thorn stuck inside.

“Oh my god,” said the woman, choking the words out between the giggles and wheezes of a virulent laughing fit. “Oh wow.” She slammed a fist into the elephant’s cheek and got herself under control. “You believe in THAT shit too? Whoops sorry, I mean that ‘stuff.’ Can’t swear in front of a nine-year-old.”

“I am ELEVEN!” snapped Little Fleck, incandescent with rage. “And I wasn’t!”
“Sure. Sure. Sure! Y’know why my lion doesn’t have thorns in his paws?”
“No! Yes! Maybe! I don’t care!”
“Because I train them in old parking lots and mesh cages and he’s got enough scar tissue on those toes to block BULLETS,” she mocked, striking a match on the side of one of the baboon’s heads and lighting a cigarette. “Y’know why my elephant isn’t scared of mice?”
“I’m not listening!”
“Because elephants aren’t scared of mice, they’re just scared of little scurrying stuff they can’t recognize, and this elephant spends all day standing in a dark, dinghy stall with mice and roaches wandering around over and between her feet! She doesn’t give a shit! Much like the shits I only intermittently remove from her enclosure! And by ‘I” I mean ‘the monkeys’ because I’m too important to do that myself! It’s great!”
“You’re treating these animals very poorly,” said Little Flek. “Why?”
“Because they don’t matter!” said the woman loudly, stubbing out her cigarette butt in the tiger’s right ear. “I care about one thing! Money! They get paid in peanuts so I get paid in benjamins! It’s great! They don’t even know that you can exchange money FOR peanuts!”

The elephant raised a single large, delicately-feathery eyebrow at this. Then she turned the woman upside down, turned out her pockets with two quick shakes, then swung her trunk and sent the woman sailing hundreds of feet through the air, where her flight terminated in the outhouse. The baboons plucked up the discarded worldly possessions, boarded the lion, tiger, and bear, and the entire procession headed off out the front gates hooting and hollering with great enthusiasm.

“Hmm,” said Little Flek as she watched them leave. Then she turned on her heel and strode into the darkness of the big top. “Hmm.”

***

In the big top all was dim and disheveled. Rings and netting and audience seating lay as half-assembled dinosaur skeletons in the dark. A little sun of dim morning light slunk down in a shriveled shaft from the apex of the tent, high high high above Little Flek’s regard.

On the far side of the big top was a little trailer that said OFFICE on it. And in front of it was a clown.

“I seek to speak to Giblo the Grandiose,” Little Flek announced to him. “Stand aside!”

“Go home, kid,” said the clown in the voice of a man who’d surrendered to life long ago only to watch helplessly as it took no mercy upon him.

“Don’t make fun of my size,” snapped Little Flek. “I am a great and terrible ogre, who crunches the fingerbones of men between my teeth!” and as she said this she produced her handful of white birch twigs from her pocket and snapped them to bits in her jaws with much snarling.

“Those are clearly sticks,” said the clown.

“They are NOT!” shouted Little Flek. “You should be afraid of me!”
“I’ve got a gun,” said the clown, brandishing it half-heartedly and half-assedly.

“Oh, well, you too have fearful power then. Want to play a riddle game?”
“No,” said the clown.
“Look behind you!” shouted Little Flek.

The clown looked behind himself, turning his spine with a noise like slow-popping corn in a battered tin pan. When he winched himself back around he looked down at his feet and sighed from the very bottom of his shallow, tar-soaked lungs. “So. My big floppy shoes have laces made of rope built into their outside entirely for the look of it. They don’t come undone, and you can’t tie them together.”

“I KNOW that!” snapped Little Flek, scrambling away with flushed face and furious brows. “Don’t explain it to me like I’m five!”
“You’re basically five.”
“I am ELEVEN!”
“Spend your day more productively, kid. Go home and get mommy and daddy to pay up so we don’t bulldoze the town.”
“My daddy’s dead and it’s my MOTHER not my MOMMY – I SAID I’M NOT FIVE!”
“Boo hoo cry me a river,” said the clown without particular venom. “Life’s hard for everyone. You think I’m doing this because I’m living the good times? I had no money so I joined the show; now I owe THEM money for my fanciful clown suit, greasy clown paint, tiny clown car, and unlicensed clown gun. Plus interest.”

“What’s interest?”
“Uninteresting but expensive.”
“Look behind you!” shouted Little Flek.

The clown shut his eyes and breathed through his nose very heavily. “Fine. One. Two. Three. Oh look, nothing’s there. Still. And I still don’t have real laces, so –”

The tiny clown car’s controls were sized appropriately for Little Flek’s use. The horn, however, was slightly louder than average, which she held down with her elbow as she wedged the accelerator with one of her shoes until she bailed out as the big top’s wall loomed above her. The clown howled in wordless anguish and pursued his renegade vehicle across the dusty once-midway grounds until it hurtled into the doors of the outhouse and he – still screaming – launched himself after it.

“Hmm,” said Little Flek as she considered this. But her journey was almost over, and she was only half-shoed, so she did not tarry long. “Hmm.”

***

No one answered when Little Flek knocked on the door to the trailer that said OFFICE. At length she opened it.

It was full of stars. Distant stars, so dim they could barely twinkle. Near stars, glaring balls of nuclear hellfire. Dead stars, pale-glowing corpses of impossible density that made lead seem lighthearted. Rending stars, turned to ravenous vacuums that ate anything near them. And they swirled as one choir around the head of the figure in the center of the office, cross-legged, two-headed, many-eyed.

He was still wearing his gigantic top hat, but his spectacular moustache had fractalized into something that looked like but was not a beard. He did not need a megaphone anymore.

“I am Giblo the Grandiose,” he explained. “I am a wizard of the Ninth Sceptre and the Seventh Sphere. I know all of the Great Mysteries and two of the Little Mysteries, and can whisper the Hidden Truths and Utter Lies. I take gold and turn it to coal; I take coal and turn it to magic; I take what others have and turn it to my own; I take what I want and turn it to what I need. Unravel your wits and lay bare your devices before me. Unspool your strength and lie prone before me. Take action against me if you should dare do so.”

Little Flek stood there and thought and thought and thought with her mind like a rat in a wheel, her hands in her pockets.

Her hands found something in her pockets.

“Hmm,” she said. “Hmm.” Then she pulled out her water bottle, removed its cap, and poured it all over Giblo the Grandiose’s laptop. It made several nasty noises and a nasty smell and died most tragically.

“WHAT?” shrieked Giblo the Grandiose. “How am I meant to handle payroll now?!”

But he was talking to himself, for Little Flek had already left. Himself, and every employee of Giblo’s Magnificent and Marvelous Truly Terrific Show within earshot, at the top of his impressive lungs.

It wasn’t easy to fit the entire OFFICE into one (already overoccupied) outhouse. But if faith can move mountains, spite can at least tip a trailer, and bounced cheques can push it a few hundred yards in a big hurry. 

***

“I’m home,” said Little Flek, eyes downcast and sore of foot. “And I lost a shoe. I’m sorry.
“That’s alright, sweetie. We can afford more now that you’ve saved us and our life savings by getting Giblo’s Magnificent and Marvelous Truly Terrific Show disbanded and scattered to the winds.”
“But I didn’t do it the right way,” pouted Little Flek. “I tried all my best magical tricks and not a single one of them worked – everything that DID work was based around property damage and fiscal desperation. You were right: all my big ideas were just stories after all.”

“Oh you silly goose,” smiled her mother fondly. “Maybe you weren’t paying any attention to those fairy tales? Property damage and fiscal desperation are the most powerful magics and most timeless stories of all.”

And Little Flek knew her mother was right, and gave her a hug, and though she remained little in size she grew a bit larger in wisdom that day.

The outhouse was left behind and eventually had to be demolished.

Well, most of the issue was the ice storm.  Worst since ’68, in my reckoning – and I was just a little kid back then and my grandpa said he’d never seen it so bad in all his years.  Every tree turned into an ice bomb, branches and trunks snapping lines across town so fast you could hardly hear yourself shout over it. 

But we were ready to pick up and start piecing things back together once it left.  The second storm actually HELPED with that – all that warm midnight rain.  Except it was a thunderstorm, and well, wouldn’t you know it, lightning went and hit the sewage plant.  Talk about unlucky!  And what were the odds that it would start a fire?  The storm drains were overloaded from all the water to begin with, now we had a town full of downed power lines, falling tree branches, and spreading sewage slicks.  Which was probably why the second ice storm made things so much worse – it froze a lot of things to the ground we’d rather have been able to remove.  It also turns out it’s hard for an arborist truck to brake and turn carefully over black ice made of ‘sewer grease,’ who knew?  Certainly not the guy driving the cherry-picker that crashed through town hall and put the mayor in a body cast.  Oh boy, that sure slowed down coordination of relief efforts a bit, I’ll tell you what.

After that a lot of the emergency repair crews took it slow, which meant more time without power, which meant even more stuff in fridges and freezers going bad, which meant more garbage going out, which meant the raccoons and possums were well fed enough to have leisure time, which they used to master fire and confederate under a Trash Lord.  And THAT meant the garbage guys had to go and deal with that immediately, because if you don’t get in there fast before they establish a line of succession – or (god forbid) elected government –you’re looking at a federal-level issue.  So everyone was still making a lot of trash but nobody had time to pick it up because they were trying to get squirrel wetworks teams to get a hit on a possum, and the trash was just piling up in everyone’s garages.  This created lots of bad vibes, which resonated with each other, sunk into the bedrock, and deharmonized our local skeleton sedimentary layer.  Half of the town’s on Precambrian granite, so that was safe (you can’t get ghosts from igneous rocks any easier than you can wring water from them), but the south edge is all limestone from the Ordovician, which on the plus side meant most of the angry risen fossilized dead come to roam the surface weren’t actually SKELETONS per se because most of them were things like trilobites, molluscs, brachiopods – you know, invertebrates.  And the odd sea scorpion which boy howdy let me tell you did NOT make anyone happier to go outside.  Nobody died, but some of them committed property damage, some of them kept people up all night, some of them got embroiled in local politics and sided for and against the Trash Lord… it just was one more big headache in a week of big headaches, one more damned thing.  So really everything EQUALLY led to the town’s psychic reservoir overtopping and eroding containment, this was just the last straw.

Now, I know that reservoir was put together with the very best and most modern designs and the finest materials money could buy, but that was in the seventies.  The early seventies.  I’m not pointing fingers, but if I had to, I’d point them at the budgetary decisions in subsequent decades, not the initial planners.  We had a good thing handed down to us and we didn’t do due diligence in keeping it healthy, which is why our own fitful nightmares slid free of it and filled our lives with imagined horrors, leading to us running screaming from our beds into the night and colliding with torn trees, fallen wires, angry Paleozoic ghosts, militant bands of marsupial and placental wildlife, and black ops garbagemen kill squads.  While sliding on ice made of sewage.

You know, I don’t like to complain, I really don’t, but I feel like it was really unfair for the media to call it a ‘shit-storm.’  The shit was a third order knock-on effect at best, and even if it DID get into the drinking water a bit that didn’t cause half as many problems as the subsequent contamination of the lake with metajungian fluids, catalyzing it into a collective unconsciousness driven by a series of obtuse and mystical archetypes that it didn’t understand or want because it was a body of water and sediments and thereby causing it to defend itself by counter-flooding the town.   

This was a major problem, because the racoons and opossums had turned most of the city trash bins into fortified strongholds by then and they discovered they could float.  I don’t know if you’ve read up on Mahanian naval doctrine yourself, but they figured it out on their own pretty fast and before afternoon hit they’d neutralized most of the city’s water-capable vehicles with molotovs (siphoned from lawnmowers and snowblowers, mostly) and had free control of the water, granting them rapid-access deployment to anywhere in the city.  This display of power clearly elevated the Trash Lord to a Trash Duke, which automatically granted them authority over all nearby bears, which automatically granted the Primary Reserve the authority and duty to take command and use all available force to suppress the threat, which they did by automatically deploying a hypersonic dog whistle in the opera house’s basement, which had (unfortunately) suffered water damage and just sort of howled uncontrollably in a human-audible pitch that made everyone weep black tears and see things.  It also made the bears speak the tongues of man to say really nasty and hurtful things AND then on top of that they started trying to summon demons and although that didn’t work too well because as I said previously we’re on limestone and granite here they DID also start setting fires, which wasn’t too good because although the town was flooded it also had a lot of little outboard-motor-using trash bin boats floating around running on volatile mixes of whatever they could siphon.
Yeah, it wasn’t great. The main flotilla got caught down on Main Street when the traffic lights fell over and blocked escape to the harbour and boy you could smell the burning fur for blocks, it was just awful, just awful.  But it WAS food and the seagulls down by the harbour got curious and ate it and well it turns out some of it wasn’t cooked through and they got racoon roundworms in them, which normally would be a big deal on account of long-term neurological damage to the host but in this case was problematic because the mass suffering from the trash fleet was also big enough to cause a half-proper demonic offering and incarnated some sort of embodiment of despair into the roundworms, causing them to spontaneously overrun their hosts in a dang gruesome flurry of nematodes and merge into a worm-king gull bigger than the clock tower which tore the roof off the supermarket and started eating all the spoiled food from when the trash flotilla siphoned their backup generators to make explosives.  And THAT meant the Primary Reserve had to initiate another automatic countermeasure, which turned out to be cloud seeding with blessed table salt to create a holy water rainstorm, only due to the complicated patterns of heat and moisture coming off the fire, floods, and ice (physical AND metaphysical) it made some sort of tornado instead, which carried away the ghosts, the nightmares, the bears, the worm-king gull, and the entire lake, plus the supermarket.  That actually helped a lot but when all was said and done it turned out the Trash Duke was the highest ranking official left in town with full use of all four limbs so they promoted themselves to Trash Mayor and started passing decrees. 

Since then, it’s been mostly okay.  Mixed blessings, you know?  We’ve got the branches off the lines and the lines off the ground and we cleaned up the sewage and the power’s NEARLY back on, but our new town hall is the garbage dump and you can’t legally serve on the council unless you’re covered in fur and have tiny little paws that look like hands. 

Still, it’s really a very pretty little town most of the year.  You’ve just caught us at a bad time, that’s all.

It was a big, beautiful busy day that it happened, and oh it had all been so NICE.  Goodboy had been driven in the motile vehicle and had been permitted put his head out the window, they had gone to the PARK and Goodboy had gotten to jump in all the puddles he wanted and then had been allowed to jump in THE LAKE which was a VERY BIG puddle INDEED, and he had chased a SQUIRREL, and he had gotten TREATS, and then right as everything was being put away and Goodboy was anxiously waiting at the front entryway to be let in to Home his Owner had sworn and groaned and spoken Bad Words in the Danger Voice. 

“Fuck!  They got into the trash!”

Oh good this wasn’t Goodboy’s fault.  Goodboy remained cautious but drooped less, even as Owner stomped inhome and began searching for bags and a shovel with more force than necessary.  It would probably be alright… but just to be safe, he tucked himself in one of his favourite spots under the workdesk, where it was warm and he had a tattered old blanket that smelled comfortingly of himself and Oldgirl.

Oldgirl had beaten him to it, though she only grunted a little as he elbowed a space for himself among her sprawling limbs.  “It was fun!” Goodboy told her brightly.  “I got treats!  I jumped in a pond!  Who are They and why did They get into the trash if it makes Owner unhappy?  I chased a squirrel!”

“’They,’” said Oldgirl in her creaky wheezy voice, “are undomesticated.”

“Wow!” said Goodboy.
“Domesticated,” continued Oldgirl, mercilessly pre-empting a question before Goodboy could think of it, let alone articulate it, “means you live in Home.  You have Owner to look after you and give you treats and walks and take you to parks.  They don’t have any of that.”
“Gosh,” said Goodboy.  “So what do they eat?”
“Last night?  Trash.”
“Geez.  Owner never lets ME do that.”
“You have treats instead,” said Oldgirl, rolling onto her back with a noise like a fistful of cellophane wrappers being squeezed and groaning in deep spinal satisfaction.  “What’s there to be missed?” 

And Goodboy couldn’t argue with that logic, but he did spend much of the evening longing at the trash and thinking of how if he put his nose into it he became Bad, while They got to do it as much as they pleased, somewhere, even if they didn’t get treats.

That could’ve been the end of it.

***

But it wasn’t.  It wasn’t because that night, when Goodboy was blissfully asleep on the end of Owner’s bedcoversheets, he slid loose from his dreams like oversized footgloves on cold feet, carried to wakefulness by a godawful, inescapable, impossibly unignorable noise.  It was in his ears, it was in his heart, it was making his liver jump up into his mouth. 

Then another voice joined in and Owner swore and reared up in bed and banged its cranium on the bedsill and swore and kicked and accidentally booted poor, poor, undeserving, longsuffering Goodboy in his gluteus maximus, for which he whimpered and made pitiful sounds at a very reasonable volume.

“DON’T YOU DARE,” snapped Owner, fishing light and metal tools from shelfdrawers in the dark, fuming at everything its eyes saw for the audacity of existing in a world that dared inconvenience it thus.  “Shit-come-stink, don’t you dare join on in, I swear.  Bad enough there’s a whole pack of the little bastards out there, don’t you dare-” it trailed off into grumbles and Bad Words and then it stepped out onto the back porchform and began to wave the light and clang the metal tools and holler at the singing. 

Goodboy watched, but only a little.  He was trying to understand what They were singing, between the clangs and the roars of Owner.  It sounded like something he felt he should know, and when it stopped and Owner grunted in satisfaction and stomped off inhome back to bed Goodboy went first to Oldgirl’s rugpile in the corner near the heating duct, where she responded to his nudging with semi-syllabic Bad Words of her own. 

“Why would I join in with whatever They’re doing out there?” Goodboy asked her.

“Because They are like us,” she snorted.  “They just live less comfy, make more noise, and get louder at night.  Owner doesn’t want you to start singing along too, and if you did you’d get less treats.  Forget about it and go to bed.”
Goodboy half-listened.  He went to bed and thought a lot, until the quiet night broke over his sleepy head like floodwaters overtopping a dam.

That could’ve been the end of it too.

***

But it wasn’t, because when Goodboy got out of bed to see what was going on he did so by following the sound of Owner’s Bad Words, at higher volume and pitch than ever before  It was standing in the back yard, holding the broken remains of the birdfeeder and shaking them in rage. 

“Suet is for woodpeckers, you thieves!” it shouted.  “They’re endangered around here, you aren’t!  I should put out poison instead!  I should-” and such and so on.  Goodboy was nervous listening to this so instead he went and found Oldgirl, who was sitting glassy-eyed by her water dish. 

“Why would They eat suet?” he asked her.  “What’s poison?  What’s endangered?  What are you looking at?”
“Hnrgkblrt,” said Oldgirl.  “Gn.”

“Why are you falling over?  Hey.  Hey!  Hey!  Hey!”
So the day was all very not nice AT ALL and although Goodboy got to ride in the motile vehicle he did NOT get to put his head out the window and then he had to wait in it while Oldgirl and Owner went into the V E T clinic, and then Oldgirl didn’t even bother to come back out, and when he sat there and sulked very very quietly INDEED Owner glared at him and said “don’t you start, damnit” and he didn’t even get so much as an apology treat, and on the way back he saw six and seven squirrels and he didn’t get to chase any of them, and when Home was there the broken birdfeeder was still sitting in the garbage cannister with the trash at the end of the driveway, waiting, which made Goodboy think.

That could’ve been the end of it.  But Oldgirl was still someplace else, so Goodboy’s thinking had nowhere to go but back in on itself and within itself and over and over again and when Owner opened the entryway to take Oldgirl’s bed out to the garbage (yes, she’d made a mess when she fell over, but that seemed rude) Goodboy’s curiosity grabbed the reigns and he slipped through behind Owner and away from Owner and into the woods, running as quietly and quickly and excitedly as he’d ever dared. 

And even that too could’ve been the end of it, if he’d gotten hungry or bored or found a squirrel.  But he didn’t and didn’t and didn’t.

He found where They were.

***

Six, sitting in the little clearing, huddled under a cozy drift of leaves for warmth in the late summer evening, watching the sun set with the suspicion that it was doing it faster than it had a few weeks ago.  They looked at Goodboy and he didn’t understand what that meant so he said:

“HI!”

“Hey,” said the nearest one of Them.  Quieter than everyone Goodboy met in the park.  Cautious.  Was he scared of Goodboy?  Weird, considering how Goodboy was smaller than anyone else here.  Tidier though. 

“Why are you dirty?” he asked before the thoughts could finish cooking.  “Do you eat suet because it’s your treats?  Was the garbage good?  What did your singing mean?  Have you seen Oldgirl she’s missing right now?  How do you not get bored?  Won’t you get cold out here in the winter?  What does that look mean?  The first look.  And now you’re doing a second one and I don’t understand it either?”

A laugh slipped out from someone near the back of Their pile.  “Boy.  You just got away, huh?”
“I didn’t get AWAY away,” said Goodboy defensively.  “I just went to visit!  Owner will come pick me up, I’m sure.”

“What?” said one of them, sitting up with ANOTHER complicated look.

“It takes good care of me,” explained Goodboy.  And just as he said that, off in the distance he heard the crackle of underbrush under big clumsy feet and the call of Owner’s irritated voice shouting his name (that was okay, Owner would be excited to see all the new They he’d met!).

Their new new third look intensified and spread from face to face and back again and only got stronger, and then Goodboy understood all of them.  The first expression had been how he looked at a squirrel.  The second was how he looked at a treat Owner had put V E T pills in.  The third was how he’d looked at the bug he’d caught trying to sneak into the house once, before he pounced. 

“Oh I bet it does,” They told him.  They sat up without stretching or shaking themselves off, all business.  Limbs under torsos, eyes never leaving his.  “I bet it does.  Let’s give it something to feel useful about, hey?  Let’s make your Owner feel responsible.”

Goodboy felt dry in his mouth and wet on his legs and opened his mouth to proclaim he wasn’t scared but it just wasn’t happening. 

Then They held him down while one of them raised a tree limb, clutched carefully between both of its dextrous, opposable-thumbed forelimbs. 

***

Owner was very upset for a whole weekend, but in the end it went and visited the rescue center downtown to pick up a new pet, even though its hearts still ached.  Its spawner had always told it that it was a human person.