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Charles Escargot Bustle was a businesslike and no-nonsense man, and accordingly so he married Clarice Abseil Clemency at the time and place most convenient and straightforward for them both, and they immediately set about producing a rightful and correct number of dutiful and hardworking offspring. This they succeeded in six times over before producing a single failure (through no fault of their own), and having thus secured their lineage, the next step of their work was to build a fortune.

“We’re going to the least useful place in the world, my children,” Charles told his family. “The wilderness. It’s wild and savage and above all else – here he shuddered – “useless.”

And all the children shuddered too, except for the seventh and youngest, Louise Mendicant Bustle, who was busy playing with knucklebones.

“Oh Lousy Louise!” cried Charles. “Look here, children – here once again is uselessness in its purest form!” And he thrashed her with great love and sternness and then they all packed up and left with many tools and supplies, made lighthearted by their heavy loads.

***

The first order of business in the wilderness was to clear the land. It was benighted and blighted and burdened with many trees and weeds and other insolently useless vegetation, all of which were set about with sturdy axes carried by willing hands attached to strong backs.

Except for Louise, whose back carried her hands to some twine, and that twine to some leaves, and then spent her time flying kites.

“Lousy Louise!” cried her siblings as they chopped and carved and carried – here for the building of the house, there to be burnt as fuel, there to be burnt immediately for ash, there to be cast into the river, there to be stamped flat and spat upon and ritually desecrated as a Thing Lacking Purpose – “you never do anything useful!”

But there were eight useful bodies and only one useless one, so soon the Bustle’s labours were at an end and they were the proud owners of a wide tract of cleared soil and a mighty log home, all helpfully located right next to a broad river.

“Behold the fruits of our labours!” announced Charles triumphantly. And then, with a sardonic crack, the sky broke upon and spilled water everywhere.

This was a little frustrating at first, for the laundry was out and had to be gathered in a hurry by the Bustles. And while this was happening, the true extent of the problem became visible: the water in the river was rising, thick and muddy and fast – the bare and sun-baked soil, unshaded by leaf or limb and unclutched by root, was simply sluicing directly downslope into it.

This was observed only by Louise, who was not busy. So once her family was done gathering laundry and had begun boarding windows, digging ditches, and battening hatches, she took her kite and gathered up as much cloth as she could and very carefully cut-and-sewed –and-sewed-and-sewed until her kite was as wide as anything and as thin as a soap-bubble. Then she took it out in the rain and the fuss and the wind and threw it into the sky, where it spread itself wide and far like a bat and covered the barren field from the rain, starving the river’s gullet of its watery feast. She flew it all day and all night until the rain stopped the next morning.

“Remarkable work, Louise,” praised Clarice. “For once you’ve nearly pulled your weight, although you did skip out on all the day’s other chores while you did so. But half-praise is far better than none! Tell me, what did you use to make such a large kite?”
“Our laundry,” said Louise.

“Oh lousy Louise!” cried Clarice. “You have rendered your whole family as shiftless as you!” And she thrashed her with great love and sternness.

***

The second order of business was to till the soil. The Bustles plowed and planted and watered and spent much sweat and blood and tears on this with utmost diligence and great pain. Particular care was spent on removing the local pests that might graze upon them – every potential plant-eating bird and beast bigger than a gnat that dared stray from the beaten-back woods was culled with weaponry and cat and dog, cooked into pies and smoked into hams and used to build strong, productive muscles for the whole family except for Louise, who was spending her time sneaking off into the woods and doing bird calls.

“Lousy Louise!” cried her siblings as they went by with braces of blackbirds in their left hands and crow corpses in their right while slinging deer carcasses over their shoulders. “You never help!”

But since Louise was just one small useless body and there were eight busy and productive Bustles they begrudged her little, and did their jobs exceedingly well. Soon the crops were approaching the peak of their growth, and from green shoots came tender niblings, which was probably what attracted the attention of what initially looked like a big grey cloud but which resolved itself into a mass of millions of giant and voracious locusts.

“Get the guns!” shouted Clarice, then cursed as a locust slapped itself into her face like a fat chitinous palm. She examined the carcass, then quickly threw it away and corrected herself: “get the nets! Get the carpet-beaters! Get sticks! We battle for the fruits of our labours!”

While the family warred with the locusts in the center of the field, Louise went on a long, meandering walk in the woods, where she twittered and trilled and cawed and coughed to herself. And as she did this, the trees filled with curious little bright eyes attached to round little feathered bodies with long hungry beaks, until the branches creaked under their weight. Then she turned and walked back to her family’s fields, and when her audience saw the feast of locusts before them they fell on them like hungry dogs on stray lambs until they could eat no more – and by then Louise was coming back with her next flock. She walked into the woods and called for birds twelve times over twelve hours and at the day’s end the locusts were all gone and the crops were bedraggled but still alive.

“Quite unprecedented, Louise!” marvelled Charles. “You may have ignored my wise instructions and abandoned your assigned duties, but you did help out in your own odd way. When will the birds leave?”
“When they’re done eating, I expect,” said Louise with a shrug.

“Oh lousy Louise!” cried Charles. “They may have eaten the locusts, but they’re already eyeing our crops as dessert! You’ve sent our field to the birds!” And he thrashed her with great love and sternness.

***

After some years of great industry and hard work by the Bustles, their lands were prosperous. There was a field with sheep in it. There were fields with crops in them. The house was bigger and less made of logs. And Charles Bustle was on death’s door, dying of Cubes.

“My dutiful children and wife,” he wheezed between breaths, “how I shall miss all your tender, hard-working faces. How I appreciate that you have spared five minutes from your chores to come and laboriously tend to my sickness by punching large holes in my arms for bloodletting, so the foulness shall rush away from my body. Except for Louise. Where is she, anyways?”

“Playing with garbage or something, goodness knows,” said Clarice, hefting a sixteen-pound hand-drill with a grunt. “Shall we try trepanning again, my dear? Your brain-pan still seems quite inflamed.”

“Crack away, my good wife,” said Charles. “I would assist, but I lack the strength to raise my hands high enough – curse this enforced idleness, the true sickness!”
Louise walked in the door with a big mouldy fruit in her hands.

“Eat this,” she said. “You’ll get better.”

“That’s disgusting,” said Clarice. “But waste not want not, I suppose.”

So Charles ate the mouldy fruit, and began to feel a little better, and after three days of Louise bringing him mouldy fruit he was upright and out and about again.

“Thank you, Louise, for sparing our father from a slothful and unproductive death, if in a gross way,” praised her siblings. “But tell us, how did you find this miracle cure?”
 “I looked around the garbage for mould that killed other growths near it, then rubbed fruit on it ‘till it spread to them,” said Louise.

“Oh lousy Louise!” cried the other six Bustle children. “That fruit was purchased from the market with hard-earned coin; you took that which was not yours and spoiled it!” And they thrashed her with great love and sternness.

***

The seasons came and went, and the Bustles laboured mightily. They built the house higher; they spread the fields farther; they hauled bigger buckets of water longer distances from the river; they herded more sheep and worked longer and longer and longer days.

The one thing they had less of were crops.

“The fields are dying, my good toilbugs,” mourned Charles to his attentive family as they spent their evening polishing the floorboards and performing the weekly repainting of the walls. “They are weak and lackadaisical, shiftless things that earn their keep no more. Our crops grow feebly and with unstout stems and limp and listless leaves, starved of nutrients by the sulky, wretched soil. They have failed us! Our fortunes diminish, our money is low, our good work has been betrayed and as matters stand soon we shall be destitute.”
“What shall we do, what shall we do?!” wailed six of the seven Bustle children as they dusted the corners, swept the ceiling, and renovated the kitchen.

“What we always do,” said Clarice, raising her chin like a war banner. “We will try HARDER. Plowing the fields twice as deep should do it.”
Charles scratched his head with one hand as he hammered nails with the other and ran a saw using his armpit. “No,” he decided. “THRICE as deep, and with three  times the force. A Bustle never doubles down when they can triple down. Our prosperity shall be assured!”

“Hurrah!” cheered six of the seven Bustle children, as the back door swung open and the seventh stepped inside.

“Hey,” she said. “I-”

“Louise!” scolded her mother. “We’ve almost finished cleaning and rebuilding and refurbishing the house for the evening; we already tilled the fields and weeded the fields and harvested the fields and planted the fields in the afternoon; and goodness knows we long ago milked the sheep and slaughtered the sheep and butchered the sheep and cured the mutton in the morning. Ten more minutes and you’d be late for sitting up all night carding and spinning! Where have you BEEN all day?”
“Looking at rocks,” said Louise. “Listen, I-”

“I AM listening,” said her father, the gravest grief settling over his face like a mask. “I am listening and for once I am comprehending. Louise Mendicant Bustle, the youngest daughter of my family, has shirked every act of productivity and work all day from dawn to dusk and beyond, in order to amuse herself with frippery and childishness. And this is not the first day thus spent, nor the last! Oh lousy Louise, what have you DONE with yourself? What have you earned?”
“I found this by the west outcrop, and if you look at it in the light, it-”

Overcome with grief and horror, Candice snatched the stone from her daughter’s hand and cast it through the nearest window, which she immediately began to mend with glue.

“You are no daughter of mine,” she said with love and sternness, “and never will darken this place’s door again. We will crush that outcrop to little bitty pieces and cast it into the river, and through that dusty and tiring labour we will free ourselves from it and from our memories of all the worthlessness you have brought us. Now leave, Lousy Louise, for that is your only name now and this is no pace for anyone not yclept Bustle.”

“Listen-” attempted Louise, but she was confronted with six angered siblings armed with construction, cleaning, farming, and butchering tools and acquiesced with no more word than a sigh. So she left the house, picked up her stone, and walked down the long, winding way to the nearest road to town, examining it with a weary eye.

“S’pose it’s no big difference in the end,” she said, watching the sunset glisten on the rich yellow freckles that studded the rock. “It looks like it’s only a half-ounce-per-ton or so.”

The shark is seventy-three feet long and more than a hundred tons and it looks like a sausage crossed with a subway car crossed with a steakhouse knife cabinet. It is moving with great force and purpose and joy in the bay, just below the water’s surface, fin and back standing proud and tall in the midday sun like some sort of denticle-coated sailboat, the heft and force of it tipping jauntily as its mouth slides gently towards the surface and shatters another yacht at the keel, sending screaming weekenders into the bay. They thrash in fear and desperation, which attracts its interest, followed by its teeth, and some screams stop and some screams start and oh, oh, there is the ferry, crammed with tourists, and there it goes – bam! Right amidships! Look at the list, look at the tilt, see how such a small change in angle and degree makes such a big difference for so many people! Look at how simple and tidy it all looks from here, like a little paper boat sinking on a pond!

Oh, the military are here now. The drones are spotting for the helicopters, the helicopters are spotting for the missile cruisers. Oh, it leaps – a breach fit for a mako, on a body more than a hundred times a mako’s size! It’s in midair, above the deck, mouth open, the bullets all sliding harmlessly past it or tickling across steely skin, mouth open, all the fire and screams in the air, mouth open, the waves are red and churned by its wake, mouth open and Harold woke up in bed with sixteen minutes before the alarm went off. Again.

***

Since he was up early he spent a little more time on the toilet and a little more time brushing his teeth and put together they almost balanced out the a lot more time he spent trying not to remember what he’d been thinking about, and the a lot a lot more time he spent trying to forget about trying not to remember what he’d been thinking about.

Traffic helped. The streets were clogged with the third day of just enough rain to make everyone just a little upset but unable to avoid errands any longer – sorry about your weekend, cheer up, the week’s going to suck too. The bus was a cauldron of angry, damp, uncomfortable humans. Harold’s leg cramped; his shirt was sweatstained; a baby was screaming and someone was screaming at the baby. He was in nirvana.

Then his stop arrived, he walked two blocks in the drizzle, and he went into a building to sit down at a computer and go over the backlog of KRUNCHI data to make sure it wasn’t falling apart in the hands of the tools that were meant to make sure it wasn’t falling apart by checking it against the algorithms that were supposed to inform you if it was falling apart as long as the base code running them hadn’t fallen apart.

Harold’s monitor had a little sticker with a cartoony shark fin on it. Everyone on the team had gotten a pack and been strongly encouraged to use them. It got a little bigger every time he looked at it, which was never, or thought about it, which was every second he was sitting in front of it.

His inbox exploded in fanfares about a quarter of the way into a truly incomprehensible bug report: priority message from the Big Guy. All hands on deck, no slowing down because the weather’s bad and half the city is clogged and the other half is leaking, shape up or ship out, We Get Results or We Go Home, No Excuses, Remember How Badass Your Job Is.

Harold remembered how badass his job was and his arms started shaking a little until he went to the bathroom. Then he finished three-quarters of the next one-quarter of the bug report, took an early lunch, and on the way back – microwaved meal filling his stomach with watery grease – he took the walk by the Pool. Like a kid picking the scab, or poking the bruise.

The Pool was still there, and so was the shark. Encased in glass, swimming its endless, patient laps. Waiting for the Thursday feeding. They fed it variety on Thursdays, pre-vetted for safety but selected for unfamiliarity. To keep it interested.

Harold looked at the glass and wondered how interested it was in testing its thickness. He wondered how much variety it would get from shattering the walls, bursting into the lobby, sliding down the rain-slicked streets all the way to the waterfront. He wondered if the ferry would be there. He wondered if he’d be able to avoid biting his nails all the way back to his monitor and its sticker.

He didn’t, but only because he ground his teeth instead.

***

Another early night, another picture-play of his daytime thoughts. This time the shark is on land; he’d failed to check the bug reports in time and it’s sprouted legs through some kind of godawful reverse-neotenic nonsense, sending it scuttling through the skyscrapers like a centipede through a box of crickets. It flips the streetcars, it tramples the cart vendors, it wades through emergency response teams and tanks and it climbs an old cathedral downtown and heaves air through its gill slits in a deep, booming grunt that sounds like it’s coming from a hog too big for the deepest hells to hold.

Then Harold woke up again, twelve minutes early. So he had a little less time to sit on the toilet.

Fourth day of rain. A little more intense, with occasional pauses for hope. It lashed the windows now and then, to be sure you were paying attention.
He wondered if the shark noticed. It probably could. Megalodon^(™) was mostly C. carcharias in stock, scaled up beyond even the wildest fish-tales or the most Peter Benchley-inspired nightmares, and they had pretty good eyes and liked to check out stuff above water. It probably still had those instincts and abilities. KRUNCHI had added size. Added a ‘more dramatic’ paler colouration; reducing the effectiveness of the fish’s countershading in the process. Made the teeth bigger. Other than that it had mostly contributed a steady flow of bug reports. O. megalodon probably wouldn’t have looked like anything like this, wouldn’t have acted anything like this; but it was what you saw when you looked it up on the internet, and that was always what the Big Guy wanted, so it was what he got.

He wondered if the shark cared. He had no idea. It probably didn’t.

He wondered if he was thinking about the rain or not.

***

Its fins elongate into wings. It soars through the air (that it can’t breathe) and breathes fire (that it really can’t breathe) and it tears the jets from the sky and jukes and dives and rends asunder missiles and fighter-planes alike, a dogfish in a dogfight. It defecates a contrail across the sky; it topples the radio antennas of the tallest towers; it dips its tail in mocking salute as it buzzes the bay one last time and soars away across the water to menace the globe. And twenty minutes before Harold’s alarm was going to go off.  Enough time for toilet and toothbrush AND staring at the ceiling.  Beautiful.

Day five. No raindrops, just eternal mist in coagulated globules that tried to seep into your clothing from the inside out, like alien sweat. The gutters remained full and sullen from yesterday.

Harold finished the bug report. He was informed it was late, and had it explained to him in an automated sort of way that this was bad, and he was also on thin ice because if he wasn’t badass he had no place here, that was just the way evolution and ecology worked.

Harold’s body demanded energy input. Early lunch again, but he dawdled by the Pool until it was merely on time.

Down below, the shark swam. Watching, waiting, whirling.

He ate underdressed salad, for his health, and he worked on a new bug report, for his career, and just as an experiment he filled it with autogenerated genetic lorem ipsum and labelled it complete and then did that three times over and set them up to be handed in one at a time for the next three days and though this was the first time he’d done this since he was a child and stole a jelly bean from a corner store sweet bin he knew in his heart and soul this would not be noticed or caught.

So he worked on a bug report some more, for real, and didn’t look at the shark fin sticker.

And he went home, and he dreamed.

***

It is nuclear powered. It will destroy the world. It is radio-active and cybernetic and genetically modified and powered by generative AI. It is the ultimate organism and it is a big fat fluxing mess squatting on the city, a derivative blob of threatening biological urges. Big hairy body! Big scaly nose! Fangs! Claws! Jaws!

It’s the big bear outside the cave and he doesn’t have a spear there’s no spear big enough.

But then come the jets, pum pum pum go the missiles, and oh they’ve shot it, they’ve shot it and it’s leaking data tables and shoddy algorithms and fabricated bug reports everywhere. It’s leaking, it’s failing, it has so much blood needed to fuel so many organs inside it, it’s just mortal. It’s just an organism. Outnumbered, frail, enmeshed in a reality so much bigger than it is that it can’t even imagine it, let alone defy it, isolated by systems and systemically isolated, a prisoner in a puddle.

So he falls off the city – vulnerable to crude physics, empty, dead – and he woke up in bed with the alarm in his ears.

The rain had stopped. The dawn was soft and yellow. It was a beautiful day, and soon the sun would be shining down into the Pool. By noon it would be the perfect photo op.

So Harold didn’t pack a lunch, but he did pack his best jacket, and he sent his three bug reports early, and went for lunch right on time, in his best jacket. He walked firmly and decisively like he hadn’t since he was six, and he walked past the security on the Pool’s scenic bridge like he paid them, and he walked into the photoshoot, and up to the Big Guy, and he gave him a firm, strong handshake, then a hug, then a hop, then a fall.

Then a splash.

It was a very curious creature, and Thursday WAS variety day. So it moved with great force and purpose and joy

***

The board was divided on the subject.

On the one hand, the project was a money sink. And sunk cost fallacy was a danger.

On the other, to euthanize your advertising campaign seemed a self-inflicted blow. And really, it wasn’t so hard a swerve to sell, was it? Marketing had done more with worse for longer, for less reason.
Sharks were badass. The company was for badasses. And it wasn’t like ‘anti-corpro punk’ was a difficult aesthetic to commercialize, especially when you gave it teeth.

They could put it on stickers.

“Isn’t the sky beautiful today, Bart?”
“Check the fuses.”
“Ah, I did that, I did it – but when I did, well, I looked up and you know what I saw?”
“Check them again.”
“I did, I did – I saw the most beautifully blue sky from horizon to horizon, with just enough wind to keep the grass rustling and the bugs out of our noses, and leave the barest RIPPLES ghosting across the water-”

“Recheck them again. The frogs won’t wait on you.”
“-they’re still there, they’re fine – and I thought what a beautiful place we were standing in, and what a shame it is that we’re going to –”

“Direct order from your corporal: recheck them again.”

“-oh FINE – that we’re going to blow it up, but that really just makes it almost more beautiful doesn’t it? The fragility of it all, the briefness of the lifespan, adds poignancy in depth proportionate to its shortness-”

“Nobody draws portraits of mayflies. Talk less, work more.”
Anthony frowned, which did less than pleasant things to his less than impressive moustache. “Honestly Bart, you never ride Clark like this.”
“Clark does what I ask and doesn’t talk when he does it. Clark, anything to report?”
Clark lowered his binoculars. “Nope.”
“There.”

“Really, am I that unbearable?”
“Private Anthony, you are not the worst case scenario.”

“Oh, you needn’t mince words, Bart – I know I’m the last sort you’d want on your post, but-”

“No you aren’t.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You aren’t the last person I’d want on my post. A romanticist is almost last person I want on explosives duty, but I’d rather have you there than a damned true believer anywhere.”

“Whyever so?”

“You’d only ever get us blown up by mistake. A true believer would do it on purpose and expect a medal. Recheck the fuses again, again.”

“I just did that, I did-”

“Good. Hand them over.  Time for  frog fishing.”
Anthony did so. The little dull grey depth charges sat in Bart’s palm like river rocks, but in the spring sun they shone like diamonds as they arced through the dappled cover of the blooming trees that surrounded the pond, entering the surface with a gentle plop plip plunk, followed by a brief and loud thud and a trio of drearily grey geysers mixed with milky bubbles.

“Pass one complete. Clark, mark time. Anthony, check the next fuses.”

“Already on it, already on it.”
And another handful of unprecious stones went aloft, and landed quietly, and ended loudly.

“It’s just, how can you two not see the poetry in all of this? The emotional qualities? Here we are, in a battle for our future-”

“Next fuses.”

“-and we’re throwing depth charges into a future tailings pond.”
“We don’t question orders, we execute them. Recheck fuses.”
“Yes, and that just adds another layer to the, the futility of the thing-”

“Private Anthony Hastings, you had better not be expressing treason on my watch. That’s a lot of extra work to deal with.”
“What? No! I like the futility. If you think of this entire war as a sandwich – a really BIG sandwich – then our task here is like a spring of thyme. Nobody wants it on its own, but it adds that little bit of something that rounds out the flavour of it all.”
“Have you lost anyone yet, Private Anthony?”
“Half a brother, might lose the other in a month. And of course my aunt’s house was demolished when the Old County got flooded.”
“Well, that gives you the right to your thoughts, but I don’t recommend you share them with others. Could get you in trouble.” Bart straightened up and cricked his back. “Anthony, hand out the wading gear. Clark, mark time.”

***

The wading gear was a thing of contrasts: clammy and yet starched against the skin; keeping all the unpleasant warm sweatiness of the body close and yet forcing a prolonged full-body hug with the chilly depths of the pondwater. It reeked of petrochemicals and rotting plant matter, and it went up just under your armpits, which meant when you got a soaker over the side it went all down your side all the way for good.

Bart put it on, took an entrenching tool, and began probing the shallows.

“Section one, clear. Anthony, check the map.”
“Yes, Section one is clear. Was that a muskrat lodge? We had one of those in the creek near us at home, and-”

“Section two, clear. Mark it.”
“-the juxtaposition of the common word-of-mouth factuality of that lodge’s location among the children against this surveyor’s chart we’re using here is truly astounding, I mean, who’s to say which is actually more true-to-life and representative of the fetid reality of this pond than-”

“Section three – ow! Fuck!”
“I’m sorry?”
“Stabbed my knee on a tree branch,” said Corporal Bart, immediately before the torpedo embedded against his left kneecap detonated, spraying red-hot chunks of tin, rubber, cartilage and bone across the surface of the pond to create a surprisingly delicate series of ripples and a lot of aerosolized red mist.

Bart was screaming. Clark was lowering his binoculars. Anthony, to his surprise, was running down to the water’s edge, reaching for Bart, grabbing his arm, slowing his collapse.

“Hold on it’s all good by god I’ve got you eh don’t worry it’s not your good leg it’ll be-” which was when the acorn-sized incandescent shell landed atop Anthony’s helmet, cracked open like an egg over a frying-pan, and covered much of his (armoured) skull and (unarmoured) face in ‘frog jelly’ incendiaries. This transformed the fatty tissues of Anthony’s features into a grease fire, which he thankfully experienced for only a moment as he inhaled to scream and sucked some of it into his windpipe, choking him and sending him into the pond, which accepted him with the same apathetic lack of prejudice as it had the depth charges.

Bart lay on the bank, wheezing in the foul-smelling air, arms clawing at the reeds for traction. The sun was blocked, an arm reached down. Private Clark’s calm, careful face was over his.

“Hurry,” said Bart.

Clark nodded, reached down, and very gently but firmly turned Bart around and held his face in the pond with one arm until the bubbles stopped. The other arm made a series of careful gestures in the air, a bit like a semaphore, which was what induced the frog subriverine to break cover and rise from the pond’s surface.

It was a little over three feet long, and in profile resembled a pike for purposes of hydrodynamics and camouflage.

“Sub pen’s cleared out of essential personnel,” said the captain from her conning tower, a particularly grizzled amphibian missing an eye and half her jaw (but you didn’t need those to use a periscope anyways). “Should be dismantled within an hour, and we can leave some debris to sell the story of a tough-won fight. But we could’ve done that without you finishing the corporal. Sole survivors are suspicious.”
“Bart was competent,” said Clark. “The cause is safer with him gone. Should I become lost in action? I am prepared to martyr myself, if Frog wills it.”

“Uh. No. That’d give them too many dots to connect in your service history. Just… lay low for a while, alright? More dead drops, less dead bodies. Use the stream point. And hold still for a minute.”

Clark did so as the crew readied the deck gun, then endured a short fusillade to his left arm, riddling it with a light dose of subcutaneous shrapnel.

“There. You escaped under heavy fire after a failed attempt to retrieve the body of your corporal, you are a hero. Now be boring for six months minimum or else.”

Clark saluted and left. The captain stared for a moment – methodically scanning blue sky, retreating spy, blooded pond, and calming water – before retreating belowdecks.

And as the subriverine sunk back below the surface of the pond, the captain – once more shrouded in the comforting brownish blanket of particulate and lukewarm water – shook her head in irritation.

“Damned true believers,” she told Frog, the universe in general, and her first mate. “Always so eager to die and get a medal for it.”

Once upon a time and place there were three brothers. By mean, they were three perfectly moderate men. Unaveraged, they were a little less so.

“My brothers!” cried Fantasist Frank, “I have heard such tales today! Three dragons menace three kingdoms near here! ‘Tis providence! We should go forth and seek our fortunes.”

“Crises mean money,” said Pragmatist Pete. “If it works, it works.”

“Three places claiming to have the same problem?” questioned Realist Ron. “It’s probably one dragon being spotted in three places. If there even is a dragon. What are we working with, eyewitness accounts? Transmitted orally by gossips? Seems unlikely.”

“Farewell!”
“See ya.”
“Goodbye.”

And so the three brothers set forth, with joyous heart, full stomach, and slight headache divided equally unevenly between them.

***

Fantasist Frank took the high road through the dark woods, singing as he strode, and thereby he proceeded to the nearest kingdom with sure steps until he found a dying knight by the roadside.

“Beware the dragon’s venomous breath,” said the knight, “but takes my arms and armour to battle it.”

“Why, ‘tis providence!” cried Frank, and did so with confidence and haste before returning to the road, which became rougher and rockier as it ventured closer to the wild places. There he heard a faint wicker and lo and behold, there was a horse bearing terrible wounds from sharp teeth and claws, and as he watched it ate the fruit of a lone peach-tree and those wounds were closed.

“Why, ‘tis providence!” cried Frank, and he saddled and mounted the horse and took a pouch of the fresh peaches with him before returning to the road, which soon ceased to be a road at all and turned into a hellish canyon, and at the base of that canyon was a foul and noxious pool, and in that pool, spouting poison from its maw, wallowed the dragon.

“Aha, ‘tis providence!” cried Frank, and he charged the dragon three times. Three times it breathed venomous vapors upon him and he nearly died, but was saved from staggering backwards in retreat to sneak a bite of a peach, and on the third he put the peach in his mouth between his teeth when he charged so that when his body weakened he bit down and was refreshed, held his breath, struggled through the mist of death and cut loose the beast’s head.

“Ah, ‘tis providence in truth,” he cried, as he took the beast’s head and heart as a proof to show the king of the land. But the heart was such a tasty-looking thing that he instead roasted and ate it, and no sooner had it passed his lips than he understood all the languages of the birds and beasts, and he overheard the two birds in a tree watching him.

“He knows the king’s going to try to kill him at the wedding, right?” asked one bird.

“Nope,” said the other. “And it’s not like knowing that would do him any good. The king’s a tricky dicky – if the poison in the wine won’t do it, the poison in the meat will; and if the poison in the meat won’t do it, the poison needle in the wedding ring will; and if none of those work he’ll probably ask him to fetch water from the witch-well to clean the church’s steps before the service, which would make god smite him.”

“Wow,” said the first bird. “He’s fucked.”
“Why, ‘tis providence!” cried Frank, and so saying he rode to the king’s castle and presented the dragon’s head, and perceived that the birds had told him no lie: the king was indeed a very crafty and malicious man.

“You shall marry my daughter on the morrow,” said the king. “But first let us toast your heroism!” And so they did, but Frank put a slice of the magical peaches into his cup, and so the poison did nothing to him.

“Now let us feast your bravery!” said the king. And so they did, but Frank ate a bite of meat and then a bite of peach all evening, and so the poison did nothing to him.

“Here is your wedding ring, wear it proudly!” said the king. And Frank thanked him so but begged politely that it would be bad luck to don it before the ceremony, then spent half the evening in his bedroom removing the needle.

The next day the bells at the church were just ringing when the king came running up to Frank in a terrible hurry.

“Oh no oh dear oh no alack alas!” he blurted out all at once. “The steps of the church you are to be wed in are dirty, and will soil my beautiful and kind and true daughter’s feet! You’d better get so water to wash them. Take this bucket and fill it from the well wrought of pure white stone and rinse them quickly!” And Frank took the bucket, but filled it from the common well made of grey stone, which rinsed the steps clean without a single problem. Then he got married and the moment he put the ring on the princess’s finger a bell rang twice, the evil king turned into three ferrets in a crown, and three black birds flew out of the witch-well and pecked out all three of the ferret’s eyes until they were dead.
“Why, ‘tis providence!” cried Frank. And so he was king in that land.

***

Pragmatist Pete took the middle road, which was safest and clearest, and as he did so he kept an eye out until he found a very long and sturdy sapling. He took it with him all the way to the next kingdom, asked around the pubs and taverns where the dragon was, then spent some of the little money he had on paying a blacksmith to make him a very sharp and long and barbed fishing spearhead (which he had fixed on the sapling) and a good tough shovel.

“They’re not pretty, but they’re good tools,” the smith told him.

“Good,” said Pete. “If it works, it works.”

Then he walked to the desolate hillside where the dragon’s cave lurked, found the path the dragon walked (its scaled belly and heavy tread made such a thing no secret to anyone with the slightest eyes), dug a pit, covered it with brush, and sat in there for two days, and at the end of the second day Pete heard footfalls.

He waited. The brush shook overhead.

He waited. A shadow passed between him and the light.

He waited. Something rustled long and low and scaly against the branches, and Pete stopped waiting and slammed the spear upwards with both hands as hard as he could, then let go and retreated to the far end of the pit.

It took an hour of screaming, thrashing, spraying of boiling blood, and wheezing before the dragon tired. When that was done, Pete pried himself loose and looked it in the eye.

“You have won my hoard, murderer,” it wheezed, “but be warned: my gold is cursed, and none may touch it who will not be consumed by it.”
“Okay,” said Pete. And the dragon died.

Pete cut off its head as proof, sliced free its largest and most impressive claws, fangs, and scales, then took them to the blacksmith and asked for some arms and armour and the names of a few clean-nosed local laborers. Then he brought them and some wheelbarrows and a bunch of extremely long-hafted shovels up to the dragons’ den and lo, he brought the wealth back into town, which he only handled to exchange for other coin, and that only with his arms clad in impenetrable dragonmail.

In this way, Pete bought himself a horse, and a retinue, and plenty of armed soldiers. And a good job too, because the kingdom was inexplicably beset with madness and greed, with all the moneychangers Pete had visited coiling their coin in their beds and growing scales and spitting fire from their mouths. He and his men went house to house, saving the townsfolk, killing the infected, confiscating their cursed coins (and the noncursed coins, to be safe), then visiting the next town and very mysteriously finding it suffering from the same sort of outbreak.

“The dragon-slaying hero!” they cheered.

“If it works, it works,” he shrugged. And hired more soldiers.

After Pete had visited every town in the kingdom, taken every coin in the kingdom, and hired every eager –beaver with a spear and a shield and a lust for fighting, he went to visit the king, with the dragon’s head hoist high upon the barbed spear he had killed it with, and the sword carved from the dragon’s peerless and searing fang at his hip, and his army at his back, and bedecked in the armour shaped from the dragon’s impenetrable blade-turning carapace (it hadn’t possessed a plastron, more was the pity for it).

“Hello,” said Pete as he thus stood before the castle gates.

“You know,” said the king, “I was JUST SAYING how I so very badly wanted you to marry my daughter and rule over my lands with my blessings while I spent the rest of my life hunting and not making trouble.”

“If it works, it works,” said Pete. And so he was king in that land.

***

Realist Ron took the low road, since it was the one he actually knew and therefore was least likely to get waylaid on or suffer great accident. There he walked, suffering many blisters in his shoddy shoes from the poorly-laid cobbles and occasionally having to wade through mud, before at last coming to the edges of the kingdom he had lived in, where people quailed and trembled of the dragon.

“It eats maidens,” muttered a drunk in the pub.

“How the hell’s it supposed to know the difference?” said Ron. “Seems unlikely.” And he got a punch in the mouth for his trouble.

“It lurks in the hills beyond a lake of fire, where it spakes blasphemy daily in unholy sermons against the will of god,” warned the priest of the small chapel.

“The only bird I even knew that could talk was one-legged Jim’s pet raven, and it never mentioned the church once,” said Ron. “Seems unlikely.” And so he was chased out of town for his opinion.

“It ate my entire flock last week – wool, bones, hooves and all,” wept a mourning shepherd.

“A whole flock? The size of the one you have right now?” asked Ron incredulously. “Just last week? Seems unlikely. I think it ate your best one and you’re angling for extra sympathy to show off.” And he received a shepherd’s crook to the groin for his hypothesis.

After receiving another half-dozen similar gifts and gratuities, Ron came at last to the village where the dragon had been most recently sighted, where he spent the last of his coin to buy all the rat poison in town and a cheap cow on its last legs, which he took out to the pond where the dragon slumbered and killed humanely by bashing its head in with the sharpest rock he could find.

Then he waited three days, and after the dragon – which resembled nothing more than a big, scaly lizard with a broad snout and a powerful bite – came out and dragged the poisoned cow into the water he waited one more, and then he fished its floating corpse ashore and very, very, very slowly dragged it back into town.

“That’s not the dragon,” everyone told him. “It’s not big enough. And you just poisoned it like a wild dog. That’s not brave enough.”
“Critics, critics, critics,” muttered Ron. “I don’t suppose there’s a reward?  Seems unlikely.”

“Your reward,” said the captain of the king’s guard most grandly, as he and his men picked up the dragon, “is that if you don’t ask for the hand of the king’s daughter in marriage, you can stay for the victory feast tonight and leave with your head attached to your shoulders, even though you are clearly a stranger and a peasant.”

“Seems unlikely,” said Ron, and left in a hurry before anyone could get ahold of him. He travelled home throughout the night without stopping and with many stubbed toes, got home, slept in for three days, and married someone for purely socioeconomic reasons. And so he was not king in that land.

***

And so the three brothers lived, happily, kind of, but not until ever after because there never is an after ever.

Fantasist Frank lived until the age of forty, when his beautiful and kind and true daughter came of age, whereupon he was cursed by a witch, his wife was burned by a dragon, his kingdom was looted by giants, and the day was saved by a hero. He staggered bleary-eyed from his curse’d sickbed and gazed out upon the approaching gallant youth as he crossed his drawbridge, sunshine breaking through the  clouds in his wake.

“Ah fuck me,” he creaked, “‘tis providence.” And lo, he died.

Pragmatist Pete lived until the age of forty-five after many decades of rule by abject terror, profligate bribes, occasional murder, and remorseless executions, when his youngest daughter (age ten), after witnessing her six older siblings perish one after another in failed assassination attempts, snapped and spontaneously shoved him off his castle while they were inspecting the battlements, without a single ounce of forethought or planning. The impact of the fall drove the unbreakable scales of his dragonmail armour (which he never took off, even asleep) through his body and out the other side.

“If it works, it works,” he bubbled absently to himself before he expired.

Realist Ron died in bed age fifty of cancer of the bowels exacerbated by the long-term effects of a life of hard and unforgiving labour with little adequate nutrition, following a decline of statistically reasonable length.

“Yeah,” he whispered to his spouse with his last exhalation. “This seems likely.”