It was six in the morning when Lunk the Large received her visitor.
“Just stopping by to pay my respects to my favourite niece,” said Trickster, with a winning smile. They did everything with a winning smile. Life could turn up heads or tails for them, but that grin would call it good-enough every time.
“Unh-huh,” said Lunk, who had made enough coffee for three people and wasn’t about to share any of it, even with relatives. “And what do you want?”
“Just a little thing, just a little thing,” said Trickster. “You see, my back is aching and sore today-”
“Someone beat you up for being a tricky jerk, huh?”
“-from all the injustices and ingratitude that the world heaps upon me-”
“More than one someone.”
“-and I was wondering if I could ask you, my most favourite niece, to do me a solid and take up my burdens for the day. All you have to do is wander around and look out for troubles and be tricky. Just one day!”
Lunk glared at her relative over the rim of her coffee pot/mug. “There’s a catch. I’m not agreeing to anything until you tell me what the catch is. Tell me what the catch is now or I’m not buying it.”
“I’ve packed you a lunch and I’ll give you my nice hat.”
“Sure, what the hell, might as well.”
***
So Lunk put on Trickster’s hat (which was very nice) and took Trickster’s satisfyingly-hefty bag of lunch and set herself on the road, stomping along with the force and fury of a bad mood poorly expressed. So it was unsurprising that when she came across a small, hapless doll lying in the road, she kicked it.
It stuck to her foot.
“Geddouttahere,” Lunk snarled, and kicked again.
It remained stuck.
Lunk said some uninventive and universally competent curses and pulled the doll free from her foot. It immediately stuck to her hand, which made sense since it was covered in pine resin.
“Get OFF,” said Lunk, and she punched it with her other hand. Which then stuck to it.
“Aha!” cried the two large, hulking thugs lurking in a nearby ditch, as they leapt free of their hiding place. “You’re caught! That nice hat can’t save you from revenge this time, you tricky jerk!”
“Wasn’t me,” said Lunk. “That was my relative – I’m filling in for them.”
“Close enough for vengeance’s sake. Now we’re gonna kill you slowly and gruesomely in the way you despise most! Any suggestions for how we can put an end to your life in the way you’d least prefer?”
Lunk blinked slowly and looked around her.
“Huh?” she requested.
“Tell us how you don’t want to die, so we can kill you that way,” the slightly smaller of the two men explained.
“Yeah,” the slightly larger of the two men agreed. “Just pick something. Like being eaten by sharks.”
“Or devoured by ants.”
“Or being thrown in that briar patch over there.”
“Yeah, that’d be awful. I hate briars. I can’t stand going anywhere near ‘em.”
“Me either. I’d do anything before I’d set foot in that briar patch, even if the person I hated most in the whole world was in the middle of it. Say, by being thrown in there by a pair of gullible rubes.”
“Yeah. So anyways, tell us how to kill you. And no tricky business!”
Lunk’s eyes shifted between the men, her hands, and the briar patch with the care of tweezers and the speed of a continental plate. Then a slow smile spread across her face.
“I got it!” she announced proudly. And she reached out with both gluey hands, ripped the briar patch out of the ground, and smashed it directly into the faces of the two men.
***
Anyways after that Lunk found herself hungry. And tired, and thirsty, and gluey, and covered in briar-scratches (especially on her hands, which were as much rosebush as they were flesh by this point), but she couldn’t do anything about any of that stuff, whereas she DID have a packed lunch.
She opened it. Inside was a large plain-grey stone, and a stewpot.
Lunk nearly succumbed to her first instinct, which was to throw the stone away, but as her arm reached its apex, she hesitated (and luckily, her hands were still gluey).
“Wait,” she said, and a slow clever smile crept over her from face to feet. “I remember them telling me about this trick. I can do this.”
So she stamped into the next village she saw and walked up to the first home she saw and slammed her knuckles into the first door she came across until someone peered out of the window and asked “why are you knocking on our cellar door?”
“Never mind that,” said Lunk, holding up the stewpot. “I’m making stone soup. You want in on this?”
“Stone soup?” said the villager, peering into the pot. “Doesn’t sound very tasty. Or nourishing. Are you trying to trick me into feeding you? No, I think I’ll pass.”
“Nah, it’s great,” said Lunk. “Really filling, really tasty. It just needs some ingredients to bring out the flavour a little. Got a spare carrot?”
“Well, I suppose I could spare a carrot,” fretted the villager. “But no more. And I’ll bet my neighbour could spare an onion, and her neighbour could spare a potato, and their neighbour could spare a rabbit, and –”
“Great!” said Lunk happily. And she pulled the stone out of the pot and clonked the villager over the head with it. Then she went inside, knocked everything around until she found the bag of carrots, slung it over her shoulder, and walked next door with a whistle on her lips and a carefree heart.
“Hey, wanna get in on some stone soup?” she asked. “I heard you got onions.”
“Stone what?”
CLONK.
***
Lunk sat in the village square, stone soup sat on the ground before her, stone at her side (now lightly scratched from contact with many skulls of varying sturdiness), flint and tinder in hand, and a long, monotonous list of curses in her mouth.
“LIGHT,” she snapped for the hundredth time, and for the hundredth time the flint did not spark. “Why won’t you light!”
“Nice of you to ask that question!” croaked a passerby, half-propped-up in his doorway to cradle his throbbing head. “Because it’s your fault! You and that fancy hat of yours! Last week you talked us into tricking the gods into accepting hide and bone as offerings while we got to keep the meat, and you cheesed them off so much they’ve rescinded fire! Now NOBODY can have a warm meal, or a light at night, or anything to keep away the chill of winter.”
“That wasn’t me,” said Lunk. “That was my relative – I’m filling in for them.”
“Then it is your family duty to mend what your kin’s rashness has broken and trick the gods to bring fire back to the world!”
Lunk stared blankly at him.
“Or you can’t cook your stone soup either,” he added.
“Which way’d they go?” asked Lunk.
“Up yonder mountain, tallest around. The manses of the gods are at its peak, and in the grandest manse of their ruler lies fire, held in a brazier, and –” but Lunk had already departed, stamping along faster than ever, her foul mood made worse by her scraped hands and growling stomach and the way that the mountain insolently rose ever-higher underfoot and overhand until at last she was heaving and crawling and lurching her way above precipice after precipice and then she was above the cold, above the snow, and in the golden glorious vineyards and palaces of the gods, rising up in tier after tier like demented wedding cakes until they reached their culmination in the grandest, goldenest, gaudiest manse of them all, which was that of the ruler of the gods. Behind its silver gates lay a sealed vault, within that sealed vault grew a garden of stones, among that garden of stones was dangled a bronze chain, inside that bronze chain was cradled a brass brazier, and inside that brass brazier was a glowing ember of fire, the last in all the world, which danced and smouldered quite prettily when Lunk smashed through the brazier with her fist and clasped it tight.
“Gotcha!” she shouted in triumph. Then “gah, hot!” and then “ow, hey!” and “OUCH” and similar things with much less politeness. The harder she swore the faster she swung her hand; the faster she swung her hand the hotter the fire burned; the hotter the fire burned the harder she swore.
“DAMNIT!” she shouted, and tried to put it out by slapping her other hand atop the blaze. The gummy pine resin caught aflame. “DOUBLE DAMNIT!” she said, and tried to slap her burning hands against the walls of the stone garden, the sealed vault, the mansion, and its silver gates. They caught fire too. “TRIPLE DAMNIT.”
Lunk ran through the mansions of the gods, waving her burning arms and shouting and slapping beauteous architecture that transformed itself piece by piece into new burning things for her to shout and slap at. Many of the gods followed her lead, and soon the mountain was in such a commotion that one could scarcely hear or see anything, which Lunk claimed justified why she accidentally ran off a cliff and slid down the entire mountain, still shouting and waving her arms. This rush of wind also stimulated the blaze on her arms to cover her whole body. “QUADRUPLE DAMNIT!” she screamed as she ran through the village, setting alight her stone soup, the houses that had donated to it, the gardens that had been raided for it, the briar patch she had used as a flail, half the fields, half the woods, and the shallower part of the lake before she could wade out into the deep end, where she sat underwater until the sun went down and she was tired enough to go back to bed.
Still hungry, too.
***
Trickster stopped by the next day. Not so early; nine AM.
“I burned up your hat and lost your stone soup,” said Lunk, who was halfway through enough coffee for sixteen people (and enough burn cream and antibiotics for thirty-two, plus six sets of tweezers). “Sorry about that, but your job sucks and nobody likes you.”
“Oh, that’s alright,” said Trickster. “I have other hats, and I have other stones. And now that they’ve had a bit of a break from me, I have a hunch everyone’ll be a lot more forgiving of my tricks for a good, long while.”