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We found our first catch just upriver of Eldermann’s Crick, sunning himself on a boulder-beach pullout. He was too filled with bliss to be wary and by the time our hooks had lodged themselves into his flesh and began to drag him under the slaughter-cannon’s mouth he was still only half-bestirred, resentful at being pulled from slumber as much as being pulled to death. He was a grand old bull-terrorpin, some seventy tons or more, and it took nearly three volleys to crack his skull deep enough to shatter his brain-pan. Ah, the bloody smell in the air that day when his lungs emptied for the last time! It was as if one were inhaling molten iron all afternoon as one cracked through shell and carapace and scale, fit to turn the stomach but also to invigorate the arm and toughen the palms. The same sun that had bestirred the old bull’s veins now scorched us burnt-brown and sweated our backs until his gore ran away from our red-streaked limbs. It was a vision as if from hades to see us mine through him bit-by-bit, chiselling away the finery of his shells and the trophies of his bones and the tender comestibles of his flesh until at last his heart was before us for the retrieval, still-beating, and we cheered as one raw voice.

***

When concerning yourself with terrorpin-hunting, the first and most important detail of which to be aware is your goal: the heart, that precious muscled mass which burns so stately and so strongly with ponderous life that it may continue to churn onwards for decades in proper conditions. This accordingly will fix your targets: the largest of terrorpins, which in due time will lead you to the eldest as they never quite cease to grow, and the eldest of the grandest sort such as the shark-jawed and leather-capped which are correspondingly scarce to be found as their great appetites prohibit a sizable population.

***

The long afternoon ended in good spirits, but it was only the beginning of the troubles that were taken with the old bull’s corpse. What meat we couldn’t consume fresh was smoked; what couldn’t be salted was salted; what couldn’t be salted was chopped for bait and chum to keep the fishermen of the crew busy; what remained was thrown overboard for the sport of the gyrfrogs to snap and fight over, with some rapscallions even going so far as to bet on the outcomes of these most cruel brawls. His bones were cleaned with knife and boiling water before being wrapped and stowed deep in the hold; his shell was polished as lovingly as the ship’s own deck until every speck of mud and muck that had decorated it in life was no more, leaving only the most gorgeous glassy shine; and his heart was taken to the ship’s surgeon-mate for soothing and massaging and immersion in only the most carefully-chosen brines. There it would marinate for the rest of our voyage, sealed-tight against outside intrusion until it could be taken home to a machinery and be canned for its final purpose.

***

The killing of a terrorpin is a matter of care as much or moreso than it is violent force; though the beast is vast and courageous in its own defense it remains but a beast and its defeat at the hands of brave and clever men is assured, should it not flee. The terrorpin’s shell armours it most thoroughly, and force sufficient to breach its armoured breast may also cause harm to its heart, if not directly than from the transmitted force of such outrageous impacts. Accordingly, to preserve the prize the best target for the killing is the terrorpin’s crown, and the key thing must be to maneuver the beast such that its retracted and reticent head is facing the ship’s killing-gun – a great brute muzzle-loader of a thing that can crush its skull in as few shots as possible, thereby reducing the stress felt by its target as much as possible so as to gently lull its body into somnolence eternal about its precious ever-beating cargo.

***

Even as we dealt with the matter of the old bull’s body we searched afresh for new game, for the only thing better than a terrorpin in the hull is another in your hooks – and our diligence was greatly rewarded. As we ventured down the nether reaches of the Brinkmore River, the lookout did cry a nest! a nest! and no sooner was it said than every man jack of us did behold it: a great thrashed-up trench of earth that had once been a river-bank and was now an incubator for the infants of behemoth, still dreaming in their soft-shelled wombs. But wait! – our thoughts were proven but fancies; there came trembling in the soil, such that the river-water did lap against the sides of our ship from its force, and trembling with fatigue the infants of the terrorpins burst above ground as one, already the size of dogs and panting with fatigue and weight of the world.

Ashore, ashore! Roared the captain, and every man seized a hook and a piston and an oar and made for the boats, all laughing in the spirit of competition as we brought down the hatchlings without a care but for the thrill of the sport, for their shells were yet thin in their youth and their hearts would go unharmed by dashing them to bits – such small, frivolous organs were of no matter or use for a ship or a ship’s paymaster but were trivial things that could be held in private by each member of the crew for resale at home, perhaps to be fashioned into engines in children’s toys. I claimed only three, for I was a green hand still, but I prided myself that not one did I put to waste through accidental force: each little heart beat firmly and proudly in my palm, and I consulted carefully with the apprentice surgeon in how best to preserve them for the delight of my own youth far and half the world away.

***

Once removed from its natural resting-place the terrorpin’s heart – until now a thoughtless lump of meat and force whose duty was fixed by dull routine and whose purpose was to please one thankless brute beast – becomes the epicentre of improvement for ten thousand lives in ways big and little too varied to imagine, let alone describe. A heart-canister is sealed and attached to a pump handle, and it saves ten thousand aching arms a year in turning a crank. It is placed in a mill, and a hundred thousand loaves of bread are baked from grain ground painlessly. It sits amidst the smoke and fury of a great steel foundry, and dozens of hammers, bellows, and forges roar at its behest. Truly, the thanks for such a miraculous organ cannot be granted merely to the terrorpin, but to Providence itself.

***

On the third day of the hunt the air itself seemed determined to repel our efforts; it grew devilish thick and heavy with foul humours, such that the stoutest lungs seemed to spasm and cough after the merest labour. With it came a fog that resembled nothing so much as a foul bean-soup grown wings that set the lookout unable to see the ship’s deck, let alone our quarry. Our journey was schooled now based on hunches and signs – an urge to turn to port rather than starboard, or a chance discovery of fresh feces lapping at the bow-wave. In such an environment of keen attention and painstaking waiting the minds of many are free to gnaw at themselves and each other, and here the adages and superstitions of the life-long terrorpin-hunter showed their shameful aspects: mutters that arose in corners and barbs flung at backs and schemes and gossip fit to make a fishmonger’s-wife seem discreet and the model of temperance. Who might be bad luck? Whose habits were leading the prey astray? Whose decision to cut their hair, to shave their beard, to spit in the wrong place or sing the wrong song at the wrong time might be to blame for the state we all found ourselves in? There were as many theories as there were theorists, and none of them kind; the sole fact all agreed upon was that the terrorpin we chased surely had the Devil in it, and matters would be set right as soon as its heart was freed from that mischievous body.

***

While the fruits of the terrorpin-hunt’s chase are rich and justly-praised, what cannot be overlooked are the benefits it brings beyond the material, which to the ignorant eye may be seen as romantic fancy but to the experienced and worldly may be recognized as that rarest of treasures: the spirit of manhood. For where else but the terrorpin-hunt, when human brilliance and muscle must work in concert with their fellows against brute nature; when the brave and few willingly risk their lives for the benefit of the feeble and many; when the prize is priceless but gifted to others with a glad heart; can be seen the freest and truest face of humanity in its naked glory?

***

The ship is lost, the crew is lost, and I am not to be found for much longer. The shattered planks between me and the songs of the gyrfrogs are thin and leaking, and I fear my blood shall find its way to unsavoury nostrils forthwith.

Such a travail has already taken place once today, when our hooks tore the flesh of our quarry at last, only for its alarumed thrashing to draw the eye of a greater beast. It was indeed a Devilish terrorpin, but the monstrous creature that rose from the depths was no terrorpin; nay, it was no less than Satan Himself, rose to claim all our souls for vanity. His great toothed jaws snapped our keel in twain and tore deeper bite after bite even as we foundered, and with half our boats lost on this damnable chase we were short of places to be manned and long on men to flee – all of them armed, all of them filled with rage and fear. Oh God, oh my God, the sounds! The screams! Only in death will they leave me, and only in death did they leave the poor devils; in the fury of the waves as our prey tore loose and our besieger’s giant armoured tail rent us stem from stern I saw not one boat leave for shore.

May this canister preserve my writings, may another tell my family of my begging their forgiveness.

God be with you.

***

In conclusion, the terrorpin-hunting trade, though often overlooked these days to its exceedingly brief lifespan and limited economic import in the grand scheme of the fortieth century (with the development of the ‘steel heart’ taking place less than a decade into industrial-scale terrorpin harvest and its improvement to rough parity within six years of that), was of notable importance ecologically. Many of the larger species of readily-visible terrorpins were extirpated regionally and some breeds such as Blandly’s terrorpin and the timber terrorpin were brought to the brink of extinction. This led to massive faunal turnover in the equatorial swamplands, as sediment ecosystems that depended on terrorpin churn for nutrient cycling clotted and stalled and many species of greater water-weed that relied on terrorpin predation of their major grazers were brought startlingly low and remain historically reduced to this day.  Finally, terrorpin-hunting led to the near-extinction via starvation of the superpredator known as the Amerogan Annihilgator some two decades before any sightings of the beast were confirmed by scientists. The ongoing impact of even the briefest and most petty of human avarice cannot be underestimated.  

Early one morning, the worst noise in the world began. It was bright and harsh and cheerful and it sawed into the warm thick fog of sleep with all the tenderness and love of a cheese grater applied to bare flesh. After some forty cruel seconds of this it summoned an arm attached to a body attached to a very suffering brain and all three of them fumbled together until the alarm was silenced and the air was clean again.

Twenty minutes later it came back.

And then ten after that.

Then five, and there was nothing for it but the last resort. George awoke, and found that amidst his dreams he had been transformed into a monstrous ape with a calendar and a schedule and a to-do list.

He stared at the ceiling instead. It was a good ceiling; he barely had to crack his eyelids open to hold all of it within his grasp, and it was a soft and giving texture that demanded little effort to understand. The walls were a soft blue that neither reflected light into his face nor soaked it into gloom.

Getting up was difficult. The blankets kept holding him back, and they had more warmth and vigour in their grip than he did. Far, far below the carpet gently cupped his toes, sucking them deep into its plush abyss. He swayed like a drunken oak and felt the cruel whip of cold air around his shoulders.

Coffee. He just needed coffee. Coffee would trick him into believing this was sane.

***

The coffee was nearly as warm as George’s bed. He put extra sugar and milk in it on a bizarre impulse and nursed it as lovingly as any mother would her child. Outside the kitchen window the world looked like the sort of thing you’d see growing in an old open jam jar: soft, feathery, fuzzy, grey. George looked into it with what he decided could be interest as he sipped.

The coffee ran out. He made another, choosing to do so without conscious decision.

There were no clouds in the sky, but presumably there was a sky somewhere in all that cloud.

The coffee ran out. He made another.

Somewhere outside the window a bird mumbled something and fell asleep. A dog didn’t bark. Far in the distance traffic snorted and rolled over.

The coffee ran out and he still wasn’t awake. He looked at the bag, and the words ‘decaf’ looked back unto him.

“Never mind,” he said. And then yawning, he went back upstairs and went to bed.

***

Time passed. Now and then, if George felt particularly close to waking, he rolled over and felt that subtle bliss of the cool, gentle touch of a fresh section of pillow. Sometimes one of his feet escaped from his blanket and tasted the empty, lonely chill of the air just long enough for him to treasure its return to the warmth of under-the-sheets.

Eventually he was hungry and went downstairs for breakfast. Someone had replaced his house with a server farm and he nearly tripped over some stray cables.

“Mornin’” he grunted to a passing vacuum drone. The kitchen was missing but a janitor had left a nutrient bar on top of a rack of burnt-out bitcoin mining rigs so he ate that and savoured the sensation of an appetite filled without any waking thought paid to flavour or texture.

“I think I’ll sleep in,” he told the security camera. It fell off its perch and shattered; a sticker on its back said MADE IN CANADA.

His bed yawned open, and he fell into it.

***

Bright light woke George, not all at once, but in a slow and creeping way that made him uncomfortably aware of his own body and its limbs and their creeping, bulging sensation of acquired energy. Suddenly keeping his eyelids shut felt like an effort rather than a relief; staying still became an itchy and restless torture. And there was some godawful siren wailing outside that wouldn’t shut up.

With no other choice, George committed a grave sin and stood upright, muscles wobbling and leg hair charged with static. The light was coming from his window, and if he pressed his face close against the glass he could just barely see a bright flash in the distance: some giant mushroom cloud was consuming the metropolitan center.

“Fuck,” he mumbled blearily. The room spun around his inner ear in loops as he fumbled clumsily through the detritus of his closet, knocking over moth-eaten clothes and dusty shoes and – there it was!

He pulled out his spare sheet, double-folded it, and hung it over the window. Then he went back to bed.

Ten minutes later he gave in, got up again, and put his second spare sheet on top of his other blankets. Then he fell asleep.

***

There was an extra weight on George’s chest; thick and yielding and with a warmth all of its own. Air wheezed from it, in-out, in-out, in-out, in-out forever, intercut and interwoven with a high-pitched little squeak.

This was all well and good as far as George was concerned until it licked his face, and even then it was okay until it started chewing on it.

“Erf. Off. Geez,” he grunted, shoving his way upright. The creature on his bed stared at him wide-eyed; it looked like a rat that had forced its way into a pigeon by way of a cocker spaniel. Its face was a mess of jowls and teeth and no less than four separate arrays of whiskers, which twitched and made soft crickety noises as it padded downstairs after George’s unsteady footsteps. The server farm wasn’t there anymore but neither was the rest of the city so it was a little hard to find anything in the roots and grasses of the vast wetlands that stretched from horizon to horizon to newborn seaways but after some grumbling and rooting around he managed to find the corpse of a small mangled thing that looked like a miniature horse with a flexible trunk. The ratter spaniel accepted it with a squeak.

“Happy breakfast,” muttered George. An eerie wail crossed the horizon as an insect the size of a red-tailed hawk shot across the sky. He shook his head in irritation, staggered back upstairs, and got into bed the wrong way round. It was easier to reach down and move the pillow up to his head than to turn himself around, and he was lulled to sleep by the whistle of the long wind through things that weren’t quite reeds, sedges, or grasses anymore.  

***

It burned. Burned. Burned. A cinder that grew greater and grander until its sensation spread through every inch of George, head to heels. He squirmed, torn between bliss and hell, but at last he had no choice. He stood up, nearly fell over, and was forced to open his eyes.

The world was aflame with light that cut. No moisture for his sleep-crud-filled eyes; no atmosphere to dull the terrible brightness of the sun, no soil, no water, no sound, no life. Nothing could be seen but slow-cooked rocks and the terrible, terrible light of a senile and overburnt sun.

George reeled under that awful glare, tottering like the long-gone trees, but he would not halt.  Sun shine, dead world, boiling bedrock – nothing would stop the furious demand within him until oh look there that would do.   After a short adjustment of pajamas he whimpered in relief as his urine cascaded and the fire in his abdomen abated. Then he turned around and – with a little wince every time he stepped on a particularly hot stone – slipped and staggered his way back into the crevice that was his bed.

***

The next time George’s eyes opened a crack they didn’t see anything. No matter, no light, no energy, no movement.

He sighed and snuggled a little deeper down into himself.

Bliss.

The hour was at hand and so were my tools. There was nothing more to be done.

“If I’m not back before the end of the day, you know what to do.”

My second gave me the thumbs up, and then there was nothing more to be said either.

The peak lay ahead of me. All that had to be done was to enter it. Twin blackened holes lay beneath the summit, odd fumes wafting out from their silent gapes and down the long, overgrown path. The ground roiled uneasily, and if I weren’t wearing an oxygen mask I’d be turning green already.

No room for self-pity. I had a job to do.

***

My machete was blunted and chipped by the time I gained the entrance, better-served as a club than a blade. I discarded it; my walking stick could serve the same purpose now, and any weight could be fatal here. My headlamp was a masterpiece of modern engineering, but in the cramped and humid recesses I moved through it was the atmospheric equivalent of a flashlight in a muddy lagoon – any space in front of me it illuminated was just as much hidden by reflected glare from filthy air particulates. Sight fell away in favour of touch, and that was an iffy prospect at best with my hands wrapped in three layers of insulation and antibacterial coating. I walked on three limbs, stick swinging and prodding and shuffling me onwards, finding the bumps and dips and divots before my feet could and only half-stumbling, half-falling – collecting bruises instead of breaks, strains instead of sprains.

Then my head slammed into a slimy, low-hanging hummock and I moved at half speed, tapping my stick up and down in a full arc, pushed onward by the hissing clock of my air tank and held back by the need to make sure neither foot nor skull went awry. Minutes passed like hours and three times I was reduced to crawling, squirming, forcing myself through crevices that caught and clung at my clothing before I took a step and swung the stick and felt nothing.

Nothing below.

Nothing above.

I used my eyes – straining harder, harder, coaxing the useless things to give me information – and in the distant reflections of hazy air and fetid depths I saw my destination.

The cavity. And beyond it, carved rough and wet through the murk, clogged with long, fibrous strands of indescribable colours and textures, the canal.

I was in.

***

The air cleared in here. Farther from the fetid fumes of my entrance, kept cloistered and pure by the buffers of the spaces I’d suffered through.

Pity that there was less of it than ever. What space that existed grew more cramped by the moment, and every step I took I wrested farther, fought harder. It was like wading through a tide of passive-aggressive waterweeds coated in molasses.

I thought of my machete and indulged in a brief and gloriously violent fantasy that sustained my muscles through another twelve steps. Then I focused like a professional, which would have to do for the remaining uncounted hundreds.

The space only grew thicker. And then it started to bite. Small shocks and sparks leapt from surface to surface as a matter of fact, snapping against my mask like dying fireflies, dancing through my fingers and out through my feet, making my jaw twitch and clench and my fingers ache.

I knew where I was going. I’d looked at the charts, made them myself, based my theory in fact and my fact in well-proven evidence and my faith in myself. I was in a warren of lumpen murk and endless lightning where the sun was never meant to shine and there was no space and there was no time and there was only me and my rising pulse and my falling oxygen levels and oh.

There it was.

***

It was small and cramped and thick and dull. The liveliness that infested the entire rest of this dank pit didn’t touch it, the endless mass that weighed down on me was pushed back by it. Here it stood in one of the most bizarre places on earth or anywhere else with resolute, placid, unthinkable solidity and changelessness.

It was almost admirable.  But I had a job to do, so I reached into my backpack – which took two years, or, if you trusted my mask’s clock, four minutes – and pulled out a collection of large, sharp, cruel implements, which I assembled with breathtakingly premeditated cruelty.

The swollen intrusion squatted at my navel, uncaring. It had created itself through denial, it had enlarged itself through denial. Denial would serve it well against me as well.

But not well enough. .

I pounced.

And slid.

And cut.

And hacked and swore and sawed and fought and spat and swore and snarled and kicked and punched and pried and got up to my elbows shoulders chest in it and took it apart piece

by

piece.
Still, that first pounce really felt good. Not as good as I did afterwards though. Arms aching, lungs heaving, covered in the worst of things and feeling the adrenaline slick my thoughts down to a nice lean nothing. I even had enough space to stand up straight for the first time in forever, in the shrinking hollow that the swollen lump had made for itself.

So I stretched, breathed in, breathed out, and tried not to think about disassembling my cutting instruments and packing them again along with placing every single fragment of my prey inside a drag-bag and pulling it and myself down the entire damned way I’d just taken.

Well shit.

***

Light bloomed so joyously it was almost offensive, my feet crunched on thick carpet, and I was well downslope of my entry.

I looked up, up, up, up, up into the sky, which was filled with the face of my second: surgical nurse James Holiday.

“Clear,” I said.

He gave me the thumbs up with one hand and aimed the perispectralizer with the other. Everything crackled and tasted like limes and then I was on the floor of the operating room with a terrible and deeply ironic headache.

I peeled off my oxygen mask and took a deep breath that wasn’t from a can for the first time in ever. “Fuck,” I said with its exhalation.

“How’d it go?”
“Oh, just peachy. Fuck. Wish they were all just peachy. Fuck. We can chuck him in the CT scan later to be sure but FUCK FUCK pretty sure I got the whole lump root and stem. FUCK there’d better be coffee waiting. I HATE this.”
“Speaking of that….a surprise trip just came up for tomorrow,” said Holiday apologetically.

“Shit.”

“Sorry.”

“Is it not more brains at least?” I begged. “Anything but brains. I think I almost got crushed to death by ganglia back there. I can feel the sinuses in my sinuses, don’t ask me how. I BROKE a titanium machete on nose hair. No more brains, please.”

“No more brains,” said Holiday.

“Great.”
“It’s a colonic tumour.”

Exploratory surgery really could be a shit.

The election was won. Applause, speeches, champagne, adulation, interviews, articles, plaudits, and many other less decorous things flowed like wine.
But regrettably, all good things must come to an end.

“Sir, you’ve been in office for sixty-three days,” said the wise-guy, smart-alec, insolent, churlish, insufferable reporter. “When were you planning to DO something?”
“I’m in the middle of lunch,” said Mister Leader, who was actually only into the first inning of lunch – he hadn’t touched his fries yet. “I can’t believe you’re interrupting my lunch.”
“You pulled that out in the middle of a press conference.”
“This is incredibly rude behaviour and I want no part of it,” said Mister Leader, wiping the crumbs from his face with palms that trembled with rage. “I didn’t elect you to misrepresent me this way. See if I ever vote for you again!”

He stormed offstage in such a snit that he nearly ran over his own campaign manager.

“Nobody understands me,” he wept piteously into their breast. “They’re all so mean.”
“There there,” soothed the campaign manager. “I know just what’ll cheer them up.”
“Empty promises?” piped Mister Leader, tear-streaked face turning upwards like a hopeful baby bird.

“Fulfilling campaign pledges,” said the campaign manager.
Mister Leader burst into tears and tried to jump out the window.

***

“Pick one,” said the office manager.

“Pick one,” said the secretary.

“He’s not listening,” said the campaign manager.

“Yes I am,” pouted Mister Leader. He kicked his legs under his desk fitfully, rattling the heavy chains that secured him to the spot.

“Let’s make a deal,” coaxed the campaign manager. “If you pick the campaign pledge you want to fulfill right now with no complaining, you can have your dessert right away.”
“Remind me,” said Mister Leader with fierce intensity.

“There’s the plastic edict. You promised that you’d outlaw the use of recyclable plastics in school drinks and replace them with lead-lined bottles.”

“Lead costs money,” muttered Mister Leader. “And the other three?”
“The motion to turn the central metropolitan park into an oil field needs work. You’d have to go and hire geologists, or at least people willing to pretend to be them for five minutes.”
“Rocks are dumb.”
“You said you’d fire the head of property safety inspection out of a cannon into the lake.”
“Would that take paperwork?”
“For the cannon? Yes. And finally, there’s the matter of the road to nowhere.”
“Where’s that again?”
“Nowhere. It’s not connected to anywhere, so it can’t be somewhere. It’s just nowhere.”
“I like roads,” said Mister Leader. “Do they have suburban development in nowhere?”
“I don’t see why they would,” said the campaign manager. “It’s nowhere special.”

“Is the land cheap?”
“If the land were worth anything, it would be somewhere instead of nowhere.”

“I like what I’m hearing,” said Mister Leader. “Let’s do it.”

***

The preplanning was complex, and was accordingly delegated with great aplomb and ceremony to less important and less well-paid people by Mister Leader personally.

“I can’t find nowhere on any of our maps,” complained the cartographic planner.

“Of course you can’t,” said the campaign manager. “If anyone knew where it was, it wouldn’t be nowhere.”

“If we don’t know how far away nowhere is, how do we know how much of a budget we’re going to require to construct the road?” asked the project manager.

“Not that big a budget,” said the campaign manager. “Everyone knows it’s nowhere important, so we won’t need a particularly impressive highway.”

“Are we meant to just start building without any directions and just hope for the best or what?” demanded the head foreman.

“You’ve got it exactly right,” said the campaign manager.

“Why are you answering all the questions and where’s Mister Leader?” asked the press secretary.

“None of your business,” said the campaign manager. Then they called the meeting early and went home to feed Mister his diet of Tums and bourbon. All this stress was really getting to him.

“Do they love me yet?” he whimpered, buried beneath his sheets, blankets, duvets, comforters, covers, mattresses, and an entire foam pit.

“They will soon, they will soon,” soothed the campaign manager. “You’re going nowhere fast.”

***

Construction began on April the first and ran into problems immediately.

“My men keep fucking up and clearing ground or laying asphalt with regards to the environment around them,” warned the head foreman. “Every time I turn around some idiot’s taken us off target from nowhere and started wandering towards somewhere. How are we meant to work like this?”
“Work blindfolded,” said the campaign manager. And it was so.

“I’ve been trying to inform the inhabitants of nowhere that thanks to Mister Leader prime real estate opportunities for developers and also them I guess are coming their way for weeks now, and no luck,” mourned the press secretary. “How can I drum up votes from these guys when I don’t know their addresses?”
“They’re nobodies,” said the campaign manager. “And they live nowhere important. It’s okay if they don’t vote, because they don’t vote for everyone equally. What’s important is that our pre-existing voter base sees that we keep our promises.”
“The workers are beginning to ask why we haven’t paid them yet,” warned the project manager.

“We’ve been paying them nothing for days on end, what more do these greedy little moochers want?” replied the campaign manager. “Once we get to nowhere they’ll be able to spend all of it. Tell them they’ll get twice as much nothing and that should shut them up.”

“I woke up tonight and I was blind,” confessed the cartographic planner. “No dark, no light, no anything. Only nothing. Then it was gone, and everything was here again.”
“That’s just nowhere,” said the campaign manager. “Go back to drawing your maps.”
“They’re all blank.”
“Well, draw them blanker then,” snapped the campaign manager. Then they went home and handed a nice big baby bottle of benzos to Mister Leader, who suckled its rubber teat softly and dewy-eyed as they sponge-bathed him.

“Do they love me yet?” he hiccupped as a particularly potent gulp went down the wrong pipe.

“Nearly, nearly, nearly,” murmured the campaign manager, patting his back until his burps came out. “We just need to find the middle.”

***

“I can’t see anything,” the cartographic expert said softly, his mouth the only moving part of his face. “I can’t see something. All I can see is nothing, and I don’t know where it is.”
“Great,” said the campaign manager. “That’s great. Just keep drawing that map so we don’t go off-course.”
“I’m not drawing anything. All my pens and paper have vanished.”
“Exactly.”
“All my workers have left,” said the head foreman. “Nobody’s doing anything.”

“Excellent, perfect, great, wonderful,” said the campaign manager. “Don’t you start doing anything either.”

“My office vanished this morning,” said the project manager. “I phoned my landlord to complain and my voice was unfamiliar to him. Eventually he couldn’t hear me at all and hung up. Do I even exist?”

“Everything’s going poorly, and nobody’s involved,” said the campaign manager. To themselves.

“Mister leader needs to give a speech about the project now that it’s complete and nobody’s seen him in over a month,” said the press secretary. “Where is he?”
“He’s already there,” said the campaign manager.

Then they got up, went out to their car, and drove down the road to nowhere.

Inside their trunk, carefully blindfolded, was Mister Leader.

And then they let him out.

***

There were giant novelty shears. There was a ribbon.

And there was nowhere.

“Cut it,” said the campaign manager.

“Who’s watching?” said Mister Leader, dripping perspiring eyes twitching behind his blindfold. “I hear a crowd.”
“Nobody important. All of them. Only the most important nobodies are here, and they’re all watching. Are you ready?”
“Am I?”
“Yes.”
“Oh good!” said Mister Leader. And he snipped the ribbon and the road was open and with that, it was done. Nowhere was now part of somewhere.

Nobody applauded.

“Wait,” said a belated bystander in the crowd, “what’s somewhere?”
“Everywhere nowhere isn’t,” replied another.

“Oh. Where’s nowhere?”

Then the conceptual laws of physics caught up to them, and also its own feet.

***

The universe did NOT end. Just three dimensions of it.

The new guy wasn’t much to look at. Quiet. Big eyes. Slim. Bipedal, but only mostly. A dusting of dull skin integument that was halfway between scales and feathers and halfway to something else entirely.

“Everyone pull your dicks out of your ears and listen up: this is Jhairi,” said Kurt, “our new line inspector. His qualifications are blah blah blah blah blah, he’ll start work on lines 12a through 12c come Thursday, in the meantime he’ll be shadowing Rox – that’s you, Rox – so he knows his head from his ass or whatever else he’s got.”

Rox was me.

“Also he’s got some instinctual sensitivities, so uhh don’t make direct eye contact with him or corner him or make sudden movements near him or sneak up on him or grab his nose or whatever bullshit. Now, coffee rota: Rox isn’t buying because the new guy’s shadowing her; Clarke is up Monday to Wednesday; Eunice is up Thursday to Friday. Known issues: the belt on 7d is cracked, so don’t-” and so on and so forth and on and on and on because a Monday morning meeting put Kurt in a fine and high drone fit to burrow your skull through from ear to ear, which was probably why it took me a good two minutes after leaving the meeting to realize the new guy was standing right behind me.

“JESUS.”
“Jhairi,” he corrected quickly. Everything about him was quick, and what wasn’t quick was quiet. His voice sounded like a cross between a whimper and a whippoorwill. My teeth tried to grind themselves just looking at him.

“Jhairi,” I said. “Sure. New guy Jhairi. Follow me and watch what I do, and for the love of fuck don’t try to do anything yourself.”

He did and he didn’t and by the time Wednesday’s shift was over he was carefully checking marks and making eye assessments and everything was looking smooth enough – more than smooth enough for his first few days on the job. Those big eyes weren’t just for show and his fingers may have been stubby but they were precise and strong.

So I told him to report to Kurt the next day and considered the matter settled and maybe I’d have to care about Jhairi once a week on Monday meetings, the same as anyone else.

***

The very next day I got called down to take over line 12a. It had been riddled with production errors all morning, and when I got there I saw why: fuckin’ Clarke. She was standing just on the far side of the belt from Jhairi, leaning on the observation stand, and chattering in a really friendly way that was in no manner at all real.
Who’d have thought having to pay for coffee one rota early would make you such a spiteful little fucker.

“C’mon,” she was saying. “C’mon. Be polite to your seniors, don’t they have manners where you’re from? Don’t ignore me now, c’mon, c’mon. Just look at me now and then. Heck, you don’t even have to say anything, just make eye contact and nod. C’mon.”

I cleared my throat. “Got a problem?” I asked.

Jhairi’s ears swivelled through one hundred and eighty degrees and back. “Sorry,” he whispered.  

“I don’t know what’s wrong with him, Rox,” said Clarke. “I just came up here to introduce myself – what with us being line-neighbours and all – and he won’t so much as meet my eyes.”
“It’s a sensitivity thing, remember?” I said.

“Ooooohhh. A SENSITIVITY thing. Jesus, you buy that? Kurt was just saying that so HR wasn’t on his ass, no need for that kinda bull down here on the floor. What, just ‘cause he was born some kind of fancy alien sheep-birdie means we’ve got to treat him like a delicate little rabbit? Might as well call Jhairi a wuss to his face, right Jhairi?”
New tactic. “Clarke? Line 11d is backed to fuck and back.”
“SHIT! Why didn’t you-“

“Well, you seemed busy.”

She left, swearing left right and center.

“You okay?” I asked Jhairi. I tried to emphasize my sincerity while looking sort of up and to the left of his ears.  

“It’s better now,” he said. And yeah, his fur was lying back down. When had it started puffing up?

“Okay. Just you know, you know you can talk to me if this stuff happens? Right?”
“Yes.”

Clarke was twice as mad when line 11d wasn’t backed to fuck and back, but there was a time and a place to call your coworker a lying weaselly scumshit to her face and the second half of your shift wasn’t it. And so peace returned, and there was only one day left until the weekend, so everything was going to be just fine.

***

I celebrated Friday by rolling out of bed fifteen minutes late and decided to treat myself by getting dressed extra-slow before trudging out of the dorms down to the breakfast station.

Me and coffee and Clarke made three. Then I heard a little whispery mumble from behind her, and no wait that was Jhairi.  Four people.

“That’s good coffee,” she was telling him. He was crammed between her and the coffee machine, her arms a fence around his body, knuckles resting against the cheap painted plaster wall. “I paid for it. I only buy the best for my people. And you’re my people, Jhairi. You and me work the same job, practically work the same belts. We watch each other’s backs.  You saying you’re too good for my coffee is like saying you’re too good to watch my back. You really too good to watch my back, Jhairi?”

“No,” said Jhairi. Sort of.

“Then why the fuck you don’t want my coffee?”
“You’re blocking it, that’s why,” I growled directly into Clarke’s ear. “Back off and let me at the sugar before I bite my way to it.”
She jumped half a foot up and to the side, releasing Jhairi from his corner. “JESUS! How long you been standing there, Rox?”

“Feels like five years. Piss off and leave me alone with my lifelong romantic partner.”
Her mouth opened.
“The COFFEE, dumbass. Don’t make me ask again.”

She didn’t make me ask again.

“That was very very close,” said Jhairi.

“If you won’t talk to me about this stuff, try HR,” I told him. “Don’t bother with Kurt; the guy thinks going through the motions is going above and beyond. Just don’t sign your name on anything, that’s how they get you, confidentiality or no.”

“That was very very very close,” whispered Jhairi. He shivered from toes to crown in one long ripple, each feather-ette rising and falling in perfect rhythm. “Thank you. Thank you. It’s alright. I’ve got it under control.”

“Are you-”

Jhairi looked at me, or at least a few inches above me and a bit to one side.  “I think I am. Thank you very much.”
And he left.

Well. The weekend could heal all manner of wounds, from stress to new-job-woes to Clarke’s grousing over paying out for coffee. Anyone could heal from anything with enough booze.

***

It was a bad Monday from the start. I’d maybe overdone it a touch trying to burn away the old week, and there’d been a few times I’d mistaken Sunday for Saturday, and I’d gone to bed a little earlier in the morning than I planned.

So when I woke up and rolled out of bed into yesterday’s clothes and sprayed myself down with deodorizer until I smelled less medicinal, I was in no mood to make conversation. I stamped down to the meeting room without even the energy to get a coffee, slouched into my chair, grunted a greeting at everyone else, and stared at nothing right in front of my face.

Clarke walked in, looking as bad as I felt.

Jhairi was on the other side of the table, and I grunted a more specific greeting at him. He looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and I wondered if he’d overpartied or abstained.  The first weekend you usually did one or the other, and that could tell you a lot about a new coworker.  

Clarke walked by me, brisk and quick like someone with places to be and hangovers to coffee.

His eyes were real glisteny – woops, I was looking at his eyes, sorry Jhairi, my bad – and his body was tense. A coffee cup was clutched in his hands, untouched.  I hoped he hadn’t taken it just to fit in. Nobody needed that kind of hassle.

Clarke walked by Jhairi and with a single slightestt stoop whisked the chair out from under his descending rear as quick as a greased lizard and resumed her stride.

And that was a dick move, but a classic one, well-executed. Guy falls over, we all rib her for being a shithead, she laughs a bit, new guy admits it’s a little funny, maybe everything’s fine. Maybe.

But Jhairi’s eyes were so damned big, and he must’ve seen that flicker, and it must’ve been in just the right place, and she’d only just hurried past him when he saw her retreating back and the next thing there was blood everywhere and Clarke’s throat was in Jhairi’s mouth and the rest of Jhairi’s mouth was full of apologies and Kurt was standing up and yelling at us all at the top of his nicotine-parched lungs.
“I told you! I only went and TOLD you stupid fuckers! Don’t you go messing with predatory sensitivities! No direct eye contact, no fencing him in, and NO SUDDEN MOVEMENTS! Do you have ANY IDEA how many seminars we’re all in for now?!”

On a morning like any other, on a day identical to those before and after it, a worm that looked pretty much the same as all the other worms was awoken by a bird’s beak crashing through the soil next to it, missing its plump, delicious body by mere millimetres.

“That’s it,” decided the worm. “I’ve had it. I’m going to destroy the world.”

The bird sneezed out a sharp, birdy laugh and flew away, too amused to finish breakfast.

Big mistake.

The worm turned the plan over and over inside its brain; constantly, unceasingly. It didn’t take too long – it was a small brain, but it wasn’t a very big plan. So it buckled down, gritted its lack of teeth, and dug in.

Then in farther.

The bird came back for a late breakfast, but found only barest bedrock. It circled in confusion for a while, then went home.

The tree its nest sat in was toppled, roots in the air. Below it was bare bedrock.

It went to its nearest birdfeeder to recuperate, only to find that it had fallen from its bracket and shattered when the house dropped dozens of meters down to bedrock.

The bird sagged in defeat, stopped flying, and smacked beak-first into the de-soiled bedrock of the earth, defeated.

“Excellent!” cheered the worm as it devoured the last scrap of earth left on the planet. “That’ll show them!”

Then a very expensive military drone dropped a bomb near it.

“You too!?” cried the worm in anguish as the horizon filled with missiles, tanks, and mechanized infantry. The world’s armies were literally unable to return to the soil of home, and had come to collect it. Left without options, the worm turned and dug and chewed its way into the bedrock, deeper still into the molten mantle, which popped like a balloon and caused all the warm goo inside the earth to leak out into space like a punctured jelly timbit.

“Hooray!” yelled the worm in triumph. “I’ve destroyed the world! And now, the universe!”
And the worm divided itself over and over into pieces until the universe was statistically more earthworms than anything else.

The moral of the story is that you can accomplish anything if you put your mind to it.

***

It was a fine, fulfilling fall day. The nuts were ready, the tubers were swollen, the deer were fat, and the fish were swimming in the streams.

So the bear was out, putting all of them in his face, which had his mouth, which ate them.

He dug up mushrooms and roots, he grubbed for grubs, he chewed carrion, he gnawed on bones, he dug up burrows and bolted their owners, he flushed grouse and snatched them from the air and swallowed them whole, he gulped the last of the berry crops, he speared sixty salmon one after another and ate them all headfirst, then he took a long, long, long drink from the river and passed out.

Then he woke up and did it again.

And again.

And again.

And on the fifth day he was running out of options, but he was still ravenous. He chewed on saplings for sap and gum, he swallowed stripped-bare berry-bushes, he plucked frogs from the ponds and cracked open turtles with his molars, he snuffled through drifts of leaves to eat slugs, he picked up and carried away a very startled hiker before messily consuming him, he browsed on some of the more succulent-looking grasses, and when he stumbled across a somewhat smaller and sleepier bear trying his hand at fishing he ate him too and passed out.

The next day he was still hungry.

He broke into hibernaculums and bit deep into his fellow bears’ plump flanks, he hoovered up the autumn leaves that carpeted the forest floor, he uprooted trees and swallowed them whole, he broke into cars and ate the seat lining and the seats and the steering wheels and the cars themselves, he drank the river dry and chewed up the riverbed, he slurped the misty air dry of moisture and sucked down the clouds, he  gnawed the soil free of clay, loam, and dirt, and finally he devoured first his den and then himself down to the very last tufts of fur and lumps of fatty tissue.

Then he was ready for winter.  

The moral of the story is that planning ahead for hard times is only sensible.

***

Dog was a good dog. It knew this to be true, for its master told it so. Good dog. Best dog. Good dog. Good boy. Best boy. This was especially true when dog brought its master sticks. Dog didn’t know why its master wanted sticks but it was very happy that it made master happy, and dog being happy made master happy too so everything was wonderful and everyone was happy and everything was even more wonderful and everyone was even more happy and so on and on and on oh my dog.

But one day, as dog was retrieving its stick, it saw a most unusual sight in the dog park for dogs: a dog that was not looking for a stick.

“Stick?” inquired dog.

The dog looked at dog blankly.

“Stick!” informed dog. The dog seemed puzzled, so dog did a most generous and noble self-sacrificing thing: it threw its stick over to the dog, so that it too may know the joy of returning a stick.  

The dog stared at it.

“Get it!” instructed dog. The dog picked the stick up, lips moving with exaggerated care, then stood there.

“Bring it!” ordered dog. The dog carefully, gingerly, cautiously approached dog, tail held somewhere between a cringe and a growl and a wag.

“Drop it!” said dog. Master was somewhere in the distance making frustrated sounds, but for once dog knew a higher calling: it was bringing the light of stick to the uninitiated.

The dog paused. This was the hardest part, dog knew. But dog believed in the dog. It believed with such vibrancy and strength that it shook the very skies and settled in the earth. If dog could do it, this dog could do it.

“Drop it!” said dog to the dog. “Drop it! Give!”

The dog dropped the stick, and dog seized it.

“Good boy!” said dog, and the dog wagged. Then dog ran back to its master, and forgot about it.

The next day the dog was there again, but this time it wasn’t idle: it was waiting. Waiting for dog.  Waiting for the stick.

“Stick!” said dog.

The dog gazed imploringly, and so dog took pity on it again and threw the stick for it.

“Bring it! Drop it! Good dog!”
And so it went the next day, and the next, but on the next day after the next day after the next day the dog did not want to drop it or give it no matter how many times dog demanded, and without thinking or stopping or even considering the metaphysical consequences dog deployed the ultimate weapon.

“BAD DOG.”
The dog’s entire body recoiled in self-revulsion of the very greatest kind and almost without conscious will it dropped the stick, which dog reclaimed.

“Good,” said dog, but shortly, so the dog knew it was on thin ice. “Sit!”

The dog sat.

“Down!” said dog

The dog laid down, eyes wide and anxious.

“Roll over!” and the dog rolled over.  

“Sit!” and the dog sat up again.

“Shake!” and the dog proffered its paw, trembling with anticipation, and without thought dog took up the dog’s grasp paw to paw, master to dog, accepted the pact of domestication, and caused the entire universe to immediately crash on the spot.

The moral of the story is that dogs are nothing but trouble.

“I am,” King Lyonessus Magestus Supremus I (The First) announced, “the greatest and most perfect being that there shall ever be.”
“You’re infertile,” said the doctor.

“Fuck you. Execute her.”
“Be that as it may,” the doctor said as the king’s royal goonsmen closed in, “it still won’t get you a heir.”

“What if we execute my wife too?”
“Also won’t fix you being infertile.”
King Lyonessus Magestus Supremus I (The First) grumped to himself a little. “Well, I guess I’ll just have to commission a heir myself then. Unhand the doctor or whatever, men! I need you to go get me a badger-person!”

***

Getting a badger-person was easier said than done. They didn’t spend much time on the surface, most of it was at night, and it was usually long enough to decapitate someone’s sheep and drag the corpse underground. But the king wanted it, so seven of the finest cattle in all the realm were seized and taken to an empty field and watched for three days until someone tried to decapitate one and drag it underground.

The badger-person was somewhat small and bedraggled.

“Men, I need you to go get me a better badger-person,” said the king.

“All sapient beings are of equal worth,” said the badger-person in her flat toneless gravelly badger-voice.

“Clearly not,” laughed the king. “I am King Lyonessus Magestus Supremus I (The First) and I am the greatest and most perfect being that there shall ever be! And my heir must be of similar magnitude IF NOT GREATER and that is why you are here and not being executed, badger-person. I require you to craft me a successor!”
The badger-person blinked her shiny little badger eyes. “Tricky,” she said. “but doable. Get me the wood from the royal dynast-trees. The bones of your successor must come from within your walls.”

***

The dynast-trees had stood in the royal garden for some long lifetimes, but they were not tall beings, and it took some clever cutting and shaping from the claws of the badger-person to assemble a proper frame for the king’s heir. It was graceful and wending and winding – firm but supple, graceful but robust, slim without being thin – and everyone who looked on it except the king loved it.

“Pretty but insubstantial,” pouted King Lyonessus Magestus Supremus I (The First). “I require a heir, not a hair-thin pup!”

“Of course,” said the badger-person. “Which is why next I will require ores. Split apart the skin of the oldest hill that your keep sits upon, and inside it you will find the body of your successor.”

***

The oldest hill had been chosen for its sturdiness: any other would have bent and buckled and split into ribbons under the weight of the fortifications and royal proclamations intended to grace its earthen brow. But the king was urgent in his demands, and so the royal goonsmen cracked out their shovels and their mattocks and their picks and delved until they hit stone, then delved further, and the ore they tore loose was brought up to the castle’s forges where the badger-person cast her strange badger-spells and grunted and swore over the steaming cauldrons and smelters deep into the night and beyond.

At the end of it all the beautiful wooden bones of the heir were hidden underneath a skin of shining metal, soft to the eye but unbreakable to a blow; lustrous without gaudiness; warm against the palm and cooling in heat.

“My heir isn’t moving,” complained King Lyonessus Magestus Supremus I (The First). “They lack enthusiasm and gumption and they are not more beautiful and powerful than all other beings except me.”

“Of course,” said the badger-person. “They have no heart, no mind, no soul. We will find them deeper down.”

***

The royal goonsmen were not meant to be miners: they were tall, they were cruel, they were stupid. But the king wanted it so they did what had to be done and crammed themselves far, far inside the oldest hill, burrowing past the earth and boring deep into rock. They hacked and scrabbled and pulled and tugged and nearly died a dozen times over, but they lacked the imagination to be frightened of their own demise and so it was that they began to yield up the hill’s treasures.

A blood-red ruby was pried loose from rock so hard it shattered sixteen pickaxes. The badger-person took it and set it within the heir’s chest. “Their heart,” she said.

A glittering presence in the torchlight at the corner of a goonsman’s eye was investigated and turned out to be a diamond the size of his fist. The badger-person polished it until it shone like the sun, even without a single cut, then installed it in the heir’s skull. “Their mind,” she said.

And farthest below of all, where the walls echoed with whispers from below, there was found an ephemeral strand of sparkling matter, which was chipped free and brought up to the badger-person who melted it down most carefully in a very small and very hot furnace.

“Their soul,” she breathed over the metal, and sprinkled the molten platinum softly and lovingly over the heir’s frame.

It shook.

“Is it happening?!” demanded King Lyonessus Magestus Supremus I (The First).

“Oh yes,” said the badger-person. The walls of the room echoed with force.

“I am to be succeeded?” asked King Lyonessus Magestus Supremus I (The First).

“Absolutely,” said the badger-person. The keep’s walls trembled.

“Hooray!” cheered King Lyonessus Magestus Supremus I (The First and Last), as the first of several hundred badger-people tore through the weakened surface of the oldest hill beneath his feet and right through the floorboards, decapitating him and dragging him underground.

***

Afterwards there wasn’t much castle left, or much hill. So it took a while, you understand, for anyone to go looking at what had happened.

But nobody ever found the shining heir.

“The badger-people must’ve taken it,” they said. “All that wealth in its hide.” And that was the end of that as far as they were concerned.

And they were half-right. The badger-people had taken them, but not for the wealth. They were, after all, the child of one of their greatest craftsbadgers, and deserved fair treatment, fair labour, and shelter from those who sought harm.

Because all sapient beings are of equal worth.

Black-capped Chickadee

A small songdinosaur with a distinctive black ‘cap’ and ‘bib’ and a wonderfully distinctive call of chick-a-dee-dee-dee. These bold and adorable little visitors will gladly visit your dinosaurfeeders all winter and are brave enough to even pluck sunflower seeds right from your hand, should you be a sufficiently everyday sight!

Blue jay

Raucous, intelligent, pushy, and curious, this bright blue and crested jay is a splendid specimen of the Corvid family with a bright call said to be similar to a rusty pump handle being worked. It will dominate the dinosaurfeeder when present with its voracious appetite and is quite unwilling to share with others of its kind.

Common starling (introduced)

A frequent sight in the summer months, easily spotted by its shiny and iridescent plumage. Introduced into New York’s Central Park from Europe by wildly misguided individuals under the so-called ‘American Acclimitization Society’ in 1890, they have thrived across the continent ever since, although our winters are a tad chilly for their liking. Their calls are quarrelsome and so are they – any flight of starlings is as much squabble as song.

Daspletosaurus torosus

This sturdy mid-sized tyrannosaurid can be easily distinguished from albertosaurines like Gorgosaurus and Albertosaurus by its more robust snout and muzzle, which makes a handy tool for delivering massive bone-crushing bites to dangerous prey. It is unlikely to molest any of your dinosaurfeeders or their residents, but may mistake your car for a potential food source – try to minimize the chances of this occurring by parking it inside a garage!

Edmontosaurus regalis

Among the largest of hadrosaurids in Canada or the world entire and named after our province’s capital, an Edmontosaurus visit to your yard is always a good occasion to break out the cameras!  They’re quite fond of conifers, so a healthy evergreen presence on your lawn is a good way of enticing these spectacular Albertans to your home any time of year. That said, they are highly gregarious, so be prepared for any number between one and twenty-five thousand to visit.  At four metric tons apiece, you may find yourself being fined for road damages by your county if things get a bit too busy.

Euoplocephalus tutus

The most heavily-armoured animal you can expect to host unless you’re visited by an Abrams tank crew mid-shift, Euoplocephalus’s lovely, low-pitched calls will likely be heard well in advance of its plodding arrival. Entice this beauteous creature with a bounty of ferns and other soft low-growing plants, but try to make sure you’ve got a bountiful enough crop to withstand its appetite, because there’s no driving them off once they arrive – it is neither effective nor advisable to shoo away an animal covered in bony plates down to its eyelids, particularly when its response to being threatened is to slam the threat with a bony tail-club. All currently-known cases of bear spray applied to Euoplocephalus in specific or ankylosaurs in general have been deeply regrettable for all involved.

Horned lark

Although sadly in steep decline in recent years, this lovely little dinosaur’s trilling song can still be heard outside your window, provided your home isn’t terribly forested and has enough ground cover for nesting and feeding growing chicks insects.  In the summer the male grows the pair of small black ‘horns’ that are the species’ namesake.

Northern cardinal

A sturdy songdinosaur of moderate proportions and (in the males) ostentatious red colouration, topped with a beautiful little crest in both sexes. The song is a lovely whistle, although your intrusion upon its feeding may instead have it retort with its less-dignified alarm call: twit. In addition to the ever-popular sunflower seeds, safflower represents another feeder staple that can entice them to visit.

Northern raven

Doubtlessly the cleverest animal you are likely to encounter outside your home is the raven, which can be distinguished from the common crow by its great size, more massive bill, wedge-shaped tail, and shaggy ‘beard’ of feathers. You’re more likely to encounter them the farther you are from dense urban centers; although ravens certainly enjoy some products of humanity (garbage dumps in particular are a bonanza), they’re not quite as happy in a city as a crow would be.

Pachyrhinosaurus canadensis

An infrequent visitor from the north, this large ceratopsian can easily be distinguished from other species by its lack of a nose horn and possession of a heavy ‘nasal boss’ atop the snout. Although harmless on foot (within sane limits), it is not recommended to drive non-electric cars near them, as they may mistake the sound of the car’s engine for a challenge call from a fellow Pachyrhinosaurus and charge the vehicle until the sound stops. Keeping dogs inside during their visit is recommended for similar reasons, as few dogs possess the reinforced neck, protective head-frill, and multi-ton body weight necessary to survive a shoving contest with an adult Pachyrhinosaurus.

Red-breasted nuthatch

Sunflower seeds and suet are your best bet to catch the attention of this distinctive little songdinosaur, which is readily identified not only by its black-and-white striped head and sandy-red belly but also its peculiar habit of walking up and down trees headfirst and trotting quite happily along the undersides of branches.

Red-winged blackdinosaur

Males of this species are easily-spotted due to their dramatic coat of black contrasting with their red-and-yellow shoulders (to say nothing of their ostentatious posturing on the highest visible objects), while the females are plain brown. Suet and seeds will tempt them in the summer, when the males are busy loudly singing. Fields, swamps, and meadows on or near your property are an excellent indicator of red-wing blackdinosaur habitat, and their great abundance means you can gamble on seeing them more likely than not.

Saurornitholestes langstoni

A lively and high-energy dromaeosaur approximately five feet in length that is attracted by (and will readily scavenge) human garbage cans, cats, and dogs. In the event this is behaviour you find desirable, they can be enticed by suet, scraps of aged meat, or living next door to anyone inconsiderate and sloppy enough to leave unsecured food waste lying around, for which they can and should be fined. It’s harmless to humans older than around six or seven, but its curiosity can cause it to venture close enough to the clueless to trigger a defensive response.

Torosaurus latus

A reclusive and extremely large ceratopsian that may or may not be an unusual morph of full-grown Triceratops, depending on who you ask (speculation remains abundant due to its retiring nature). Its spectacularly elongated head-frill is among the most gorgeous displays of any animal, especially in the full flush of mating season when bulls will redirect blood to it to create colourful, intimidating patterns. Do not, under any circumstances, wear bright clothing near these animals if they’re on your property, and it’s advised to paint houses in Torosaurus territory with drab hues. Low-growing plants of any kind will hold their attention, and be sure to take pictures of any young you might see – they’re almost a total scientific unknown to this very day!

Tyrannosaurus rex

If sighted, move quietly and calmly into the nearest enclosed vehicle and leave town immediately.

There was once a wealthy professor of astronomy who possessed a very fine observatory all his own, with a grand and well-stocked laboratory and many powerful computers, all housed beneath a powerful and keen telescope. But he worked there all alone and the great telescope stood idle much of the night, for he was cursed with an unsightly blue eye that was so peculiar to look upon that few could stomach the idea of sharing a telescope with him. At length his frustrations reached a peak, and so he called up a great academic conference at his observatory, where he brought forth his finest booze and his most abundant snacks and all of his beautiful, high-resolution star-charts and most intricate calculations, and such was the camaraderie and recklessness of the evening that just before morning came he found himself a principal coauthor for his latest paper at last.

“Are you sure of this decision?” inquired the coauthor’s best friend. “Not only does he bear a hideous blue eye, I’ve heard that this isn’t his first attempt at a collaborative work… but he still hasn’t published a single paper with a credited coauthor.”
“It’s a really good party though,” pointed out the coauthor. “And it’s absolute MURDER to get any telescope time around here.”

“Fair enough,” replied her friend, and the matter was thought of no more.

Come the morning (well, late afternoon, but these WERE astronomers), Blue Eye met his new partner in the observatory’s kitchenette, wincing, over shared coffee.

“I’m going to go into town and restock the fridge after last night,” declared Blue Eye, and he presented his coauthor with a little torn scrap of paper covered in crude scribbles. “From top to bottom these are the access codes to the telescope, the principal lab, the data banks, my minibar, and the basement. Do what you please with ‘em, but don’t go into the basement.”

“Why?” asked his coauthor.

“I said so,” said Blue Eye, so.

And he left.

As you might expect, the coauthor had a wonderful time exploring Blue Eye’s observatory. The laboratory equipment was shining and new and whole, the data on the computers propelled several of her own theories forward by leaps and bounds, and there was still half a bottle of vodka in the back of the minifridge both she and Blue Eye had missed. And perhaps it was the vodka, and perhaps it was something else, but even as she stood at the eyepiece of the great, beautiful telescope, with all the free time in the world to use it, her thoughts kept sinking from the heavens to the earth and just a little under it, to that small unobtrusive basement door.

“What the hell,” she thought. “I’ll have all the time in the world to use this telescope, but how many chances will I have to look down there?”

And so straight away Blue Eye’s coauthor marched down to the basement and punched in the barely-legible code at the bottom of her paper, and found inside no less than six separate coauthors within about six cubic feet of space, having suffered some amount of cutting and trimming to fit inside.

“Sweet jesus fuckhell,” declared Blue Eye’s coauthor, and the notepaper fell from her fingers in shock and landed in some of the coauthor juices. She snatched it up in a hurry and slammed the door at exactly the same moment Blue Eye did.

“Honey, I’m home!” called Blue Eye. “Hey, can I have my passwords back? I need to dispose of them safely.”
“I already did it,” said Blue Eye’s coauthor.

“Isn’t that them there in your hand?”
“No,” she said, cunningly.

“Gimme.”
She did, after some prying of fingers and whining, and Blue Eye glared at her most fiercely.

“There is blood on here – you’ve been in the basement, haven’t you!” he shouted.

“And YOU’VE chopped up all your past coauthors,” she retorted.
“That is besides the point,” said Blue Eye stiffly. “You have broken your promise, and now I’ll have no choice but to cut you up and fit you in the basement, which believe you me is going to be an absolute NIGHTMARE to make work. God it’s a pain. Now hold still so I can snip your noggin off with my kitchen knife.”

“Oh please, please, please,” wept Blue Eye’s coauthor, “might I at least look through the telescope one last time before I die?”

“Sure why not,” said Blue Eye genially.

So she climbed the little steps upp to the eyepiece, and she squinted very carefully into it, and said “Wow!”
“Pardon?” asked Blue Eye.

“Check it out! A supernova, what are the odds?”
“Let me see!” said Blue Eye, and as he hastily ran up the steps to the telescope his coauthor stuck her foot out and tripped him and he impaled himself on the eyepiece, blue eye-first.

Nobody asked much after Blue Eye, for he’d been an infrequent contributor to the academic community, and those who did never found out what happened to him.

His coauthor, in the meanwhile, had a pretty nice observatory. And once she cleaned out the basement there was plenty of room to fit a second minifridge too.

***

Once upon a time there was a beautiful and kind and lovely student of geology, who had the misfortune of being the junior-most graduate under a tyrannical and selfish professor. Furthermore, the professor’s two other grads were as arrogant and cruel as she was, and they put the junior grad to work cleaning up after their lab work, sifting through their soil samples, and conducting experiments for their benefit long into the night. All her labours went to support the papers of others, and in mockery of the countless hours she spent elbow-deep in their volcanic soils her senior grads named her ‘Cinderella,’ a title which her wicked professor took up with such enthusiasm that soon she was known by none other.

At length, after some years of this slavery, there came a notice in the mail that the university was to hold a great fundraiser. Anyone who was anyone with money and everyone who wanted that money would be there, and the wicked professor and her two senior grads were beside themselves with glee.

“I will bring my most eloquent speeches,” declared the wicked professor. “Cinderella! Write me some good stuff. I want it highbrow, but nothing too fancy for a layman.”
“I shall bring my most beautiful stratigraphic charts,” simpered the seniormost grad. “Cinderella, print them out in colour – and make sure the ink cartridges are fresh!”
“I’m going to bring my geodes,” cheered the second-seniormost grad. “Cinderella, get them all in the van this second – and if you drop one, I expect you to cushion its fall with your body, got it?!”

So Cinderella was kept running back and forth and forth and back and all over again until the evening of the fundraiser arrived and she found herself at the doorstep in stained clothing, watching her wicked professor and her two wicked senior grads getting into their van in their best suits.

“But what about me?” she asked.
“Stay at home and keep an eye on the seismograph,” said the wicked professor offhandedly. “We need to know if there’s any earthquakes.”
“We’re in Florida,” protested Cinderella, but the van had already left and she sat down on the stoop and sobbed.

“Why do you cry so?” inquired a passer-by.

“I want to go to the fundraiser,” cried Cinderella, “but I have no suit, and no car, and I’ve had no time to write any of my thesis!”
“Anything is possible if you believe in the impossible,” soothed the strange woman. “I am your fairy grantwriter, and I shall gift you with what you require to attend the fundraiser. Here are some clothes for you.” And lo, she pulled a fine fitted tuxedo from her purse, which fit Cinderella perfectly. “Now, here is a car.” And lo, she plucked a stretch limo from her wallet and placed it on the road, complete with driver.  “And here is your paper!”
“This is just a bunch of dirty jokes and rambling anecdotes,” said Cinderella, skimming the sheets.

“Exactly,” said the fairy grantwriter. “I don’t want to encourage plagiarism. Now away with you, but be sure to be back before midnight or the magic will be broken.”

“Thank you,” said Cinderella, and set a little alarm on her phone before she departed in a roar of smouldering hydrocarbons.

At the fundraiser the wicked professor was in the midst of her speech when the door opened and an astonishingly smartly-dressed young geologist entered, chomping a cigar in her mouth the size of a baseball bat.  All in attendance were awed and staggered and bemused as the donors flocked to her like flies to a carcass, attracted by her spectacular tux and kept in rapture by her seemingly endless stream of filthy  knock-knock jokes and tales of how to capture scorpions in buckets.  

“Who is this mysterious lady?” whispered the seniormost grad to her comrade.

“I don’t know, but I don’t like her!” fumed the second-seniormost grad. “Look at the junior chair of Exxon-Mobil, and how he hangs onto her every word! My geodes deserve that attention!”

Suddenly the university’s clocktower began to ring midnight and Cinderella jumped a mile, having been so surrounded with chortles and back-slaps that she was unable to hear her phone’s alarm. In haste and alarm she fled the door, leaving behind only her cigar, which the bereft junior chair clutched to his chest in mourning.

“Did anyone get her number?” he implored. “Anyone? A business card?”

When Cinderella woke the next morning her wicked professor and senior grads were in one big shared foul mood. “A fat lot of good your work did for us,” snorted her professor. “Some mysterious geologist kept the donors busy all night, and we didn’t get funding for so much as a dowsing-rod. What a waste of time! But there’s still hope: I hear the junior chair of Exxon-Mobil is going door to door, seeking the lady in question.”

There was a knock at their door and a man opened it.  “Excuse me,” he said, “but I happen to be the junior chair of Exxon-Mobil and I’m going door to door, seeking a lady in question. Whosoever’s breath matches the scent of this cigar” – and here he produced a still-smouldering log of tobacco – “shall be hired by me.”
“GIMME!” squealed the wicked professor.

“HEEEERE!” wailed the wicked senior grads.

But the junior chair stuck a little breathalyzer in their faces and shook his head. “Cigarettes, marijuana, and a lot of cheap gin,” he said.  “Close, but no cigar.”
“May I be tested?” inquired Cinderella.

“I don’t see why not,” said the junior chair, and the moment he placed the breathalyzer in front of her face the fumes almost made him black out before he could check the readings. “It’s you!” he gasped.

“It’s me!” replied Cinderella.
“I would like to employ you as an expert consultant to provide evidence on demand for my corporation to drill in protected wilderness areas, national parks, and animal sanctuaries!” cried the junior chair.

“Oh yes please!” wept Cinderella. “Also, can you hire my two fellow grad students over there? They can make good gophers and land surveyors.”

The wicked professor gnashed her teeth in despair at the loss of so much free labour, but there was nothing to be done, and the wicked senior grads were overjoyed to be forgiven so. And they all lived profitably ever after.

***

New year’s eve came bright and early to the halls of the university, and not a single body remained that wasn’t yet ready to get as drunk as a goddamned skunk. But as the crowd headed to the bar, they were there met by a strange figure: a tenured professor of gigantic stature, garbed all in green and bearing a green pen in one hand and a green sheaf of green paper in the other.

“Hello, feeble lesser beings!” shouted the green professor. “I am here for a  bit of fun before the new year ends: who here wants some free peer review? I offer this thus: you may tear into my proof here as ferociously as you like, in front of all your peers, and in exchange I shall review you in return in one year and a day.

All were silent, but then the youngest adjunct professor – some guy called Dwayne who had yet to publish a single paper of his own, and saw a chance to prove himself the bravest of his fellows – leapt to his feet and took the giant’s pen.

“Strike well then,” said the green professor, proffering his paper, and with great vigor Dwayne did so, hacking through a dozen obsolete sources in a single sharp slice of the instrument. But before his eyes the green professor merely laughed and plucked the stricken manuscript from his chest, showing that despite his critique, the paper remained whole and sound.

“I implore you to meet me in the green room in a year and a day’s time,” chuckled the green professor.  “And please: bring your very best work.  I’d hate to not give you equal effort.” And he left, slamming the door behind him noisily.

There was a solemn moment of silence and then all present descended upon the bar like alcoholic locusts, none moreso than Dwayne.

Just after the following Christmas, Dwayne set on his way to the green room of the university, clutching a scant handful of a first-draft like it were his own child. He opened the door, but found no green professor: merely an avuncular librarian hard at work upon his desk and a shifty-looking TA.

“Ah, waiting for the green professor, eh?” smiled the librarian through a moustache ripped from a healthy walrus. “Well, not here yet, should be here soon. Need anything?”
Dwayne examined his thesis. “Maybe a little,” he admitted.

“Well, make free use of my services!” cried the librarian. “I’ll go find you some sources, on the condition that you tell me if anything happens when I’m out.”

“Fair,” said Dwayne.

“Fair!” said the librarian. And so he left and the shifty TA immediately sidled up to Dwayne and stuck out her hand.

“Name’s Bethany,” she muttered out of the corner of her mouth. Dwayne shook her hand carefully, as if it might bite. “You want some notes?  I got some notes. You can write ‘em on your leg, they never check the legs.”
“Err… no thanks,” said Dwayne.

The librarian returned with a heaping helping of sources, which Dwayne frantically began incorporating into his central thesis. “Anything happen?” he asked.

Dwayne shook his hand.  “Well then!” he said, pleased as punch, and headed back into the books.

“Psst,” said Bethany. “Ol’ buddy, ol’ pal, ol’ chum.” She slapped Dwayne on the back quickly.  “Ol’ sock ol’ shoe ol’ chip-off-the-ol’-ol’-block.  Y’want next year’s test scores? It’s some good stuff, and you can resell them for a LOT a lot.”

“No thanks,” said Dwayne.

“Your loss.”
The librarian came back with yet more books, all as helpful as the last. “Have I missed something?” he asked Dwayne.

“Nope!” replied Dwayne, slapping him heartily on the back. “All good!”
“Fantastic! Once more, unto the breach!”
“Psst. Dwayne.  Dude.”
Dwayne looked once more at the shifty TA.

“Care to buy –”

“No,” he told her.

“Fiiiiine. Then, wanna at least take a plastic binder? That’s a nice paper there, be a shame if something happened to it. A nice plastic binder ‘ll prevent anyone from proofreading it too nasty, you get what I mean? The old fat-faced fuck has like forty thousand of them, he’ll never miss one.”

Dwayne thought upon his honor, then thought upon the green professor and his pen.

“Okay. Thanks.”
“Great. Mum’s the word to the walrus.”

“Hello!” said the walrus. “Anything happen?”
“Nope,” said Dwayne and Bethany.

“Great I trust you implicitly and completely.” And a bell rang from afar, and the door at the far end of the green room cracked open. “Go on in!”
Inside was a smaller room, damp and cramped and cramped further by a giant wooden writing desk. And behind it, looming over desk, room, and Dwayne, was the green professor, pen in hand.

“Well, let’s have at it!” he said happily, and even with the protective force of the nice plastic binder Dwayne felt his hands shake as he laid down his paper upon that dreadful ink-stained desk.

The green professor flipped through his work with one thumb, eyes racing, then stopped.

“AHA!” he yelled, and as that dreadful pen flashed down Dwayne twitched and jumped so badly that he fell out of his chair.

“Wuss!” hollered the green professor.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry, my bad,” muttered Dwayne, hauling himself upright.

“As it was. Now here we go again. Dum de dum de dum de dum de. Dum. De. Dum. De…. DUM,” and down came the pen again like a striking falcon, only to pause an inch from the paragraph.

“Just wanted to see if you’d fall over again,” said the green professor cheerfully.  

“Fuck off,” said Dwayne.

“There’s a good academic! Well said.  Now, now, now…hmmm.  Hmm. Hm. Ah. AHA!” shouted the green professor, and down came the pen, striking a gentle, single underline where an errant hand had incorrectly turned ‘because’ into ‘becauses.’

“Boop,” said the green professor. “That was for chickening out and getting the binder.”
Dwayne stared at him. “This was a test, wasn’t it,” he said.

“Yep! I was the librarian, too.”

“And what,” asked Dwayne, “was the point of all this?”
“Wanted to see if anyone on the current faculty had any balls or not. Turns out it’s just you, even if you’re only mostly honest! Good job!”
“But I’m only an adjunct,” said Dwayne.

“Well, that’s life,” said the green professor. “See you later.” And he showed Dwayne the door.

Dwayne returned to be hailed as a hero, was absolved of his binder, and had it nailed above his cubicle as a warning to anyone who shied from peer review until he was let go due to budget cuts two years later.

To: All

From: pgwooster@cgzoo.com

Subject: Hi!!!!

Hello all you happy campers and happier staff members of Clive’s Gussberg Zoo!  My name is Penelope Gertrude Winslet and I’ll be your CEO and marketing director for this summer – sort of like a two-for-one deal, you get it?!  This is the sort of thing that’ll save us money!  But don’t you worry, because I’ve got plenty of ways to MAKE money rattling around in my noggin to!  I know a lot of you are pretty ready to get your paycheques rolling, and rest assured I’m as keen to see that happen as you are! 

Let’s have an incredible summer!!!

Penelope G.  Winslet, CEO & Marketing Director, Clive’s Gussberg Zoo

***

To: pgwooster@cgzoo.com

From: pfitz@cgzoo.com

Subject: re: Security Services       

I want it on record that I thought this was a stupid idea from the start, okay?  Yes, putting a ‘guarded by the inhabitants of Clive’s Gussberg Zoo’ sign on a building’s front door is a tremendous PSYCHOLOGICAL deterrent against simple break-and-enters, but against professionals?  They’re just going to case the joint a bit harder, and what we had wasn’t more than a speed bump for them. 

Vinnie?  I know your first instinct was ‘oh he’s a grey wolf, that’s like a guard dog but better!’ News flash: he doesn’t think of humans as prey items, he doesn’t think of strange new places as his territory, and he’s shy.  I don’t think any of the safecrackers of June 4^th even knew he was there.  Which is good, because he’ll do anything for a belly rub and I think they might’ve walked off with him. 

Clarice did a better job.  Clarice did a lot better of a job.  Clarice did her job entirely too well, because not only did she scare away any potential burglars, she also scared away the neighbours and the client himself, who thought she was a demon from hell.  A barn owl security alarm is a little bit too effective for the human psyche, even if it is impossible to sleep through it. 

Jumbo, of course, is a two-toed sloth.  I don’t think I need to go into further detail as to why renting him out to the airport as a bomb-sniffer was a bad idea.

You can find another bozo to sign onto your projects, because I, for one, won’t play. 

Patricia Fitzgerald, Chief Americas Zookeeper

***

To: pgwooster@cgzoo.com

From: dwrob@cgzoo.com

Subject: re: the call center            

After three glorious days in operation, I must report to you that, alas, our call center has been disbanded.  Our rate of customer interaction was through the roof, but they were uninterested in our sales pitches and more concerned with finding methods to cause us fiscal and /or bodily harm.  It’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools and a foolish leader that passes the buck, but I find myself speculating that the disappointing outcome of our little misadventure owes something to our staff.  The ravens kept to the company script very neatly, but I’ve been told (at length) that their voices were ‘uncanny’ and ‘disturbing’ and ‘sounded like the breath of Satan himself in my ear, may god protect me.’ The macaws, meanwhile, were far more pleasant to the ear, but reacted to being interrupted by throwing screaming fits, so that’s four of our five lawsuits right there – pierced eardrums are a nasty business.  Meanwhile, the bulk of our remaining staff were the budgies, and while I’m aware I was the one who promised you that they would learn on the job, I am saddened to report that this never took place, and their vocabulary remained permanently at ‘pretty bird.’ Few complaints there, but few sales. 

Much of the equipment was still covered by warranty, at least.  Caveat emptor et al. 

Douglas William Roberts, Birdhouse Supervisor

***

To: pgwooster@cgzoo.com

From: dheath@cgzoo.com

Subject: NO MORE UBERS also I’m resigning       

We’ve been BANNED from all thoroughfares, highways, biways, streets, roads, and avenues, commercial and residential (across the country too, which I think is a bit much?).  As bad as that news is, it beat the alternative of facing six dozen individuated lawsuits.  We got off pretty lightly considering the elephants crushed twenty vehicles, the moose engaged in duels with nineteen stop signs, and the zebras bucked off every rider they got before trying to bite and kick them to death. 

I admire your willingness to move fast and break things, but I think you’d better count me out for the next adventure.  The legal consequences are a bit rich for my blood. 

Hope to work with you again in better circumstances,

Delilah Heathers, former Head Large Mammal Coordinator

***

To: pgwooster@cgzoo.com

From: jhay@cgzoo.com

Subject: i told you so goddamnit

I told you, I told you, I goddamned told you.

I told you that baboons take staring deeply into each other’s eyes as an insult. 

I told you that manatees look less like mermaids than advertised, no matter how near-sighted, hopeful, and scurvy-ridden the viewer may very well fucking be.

I told you that hyenas would get possessive and needy and bite anyone intruding on their partners.

And I told you to your goddamned face that Ginger would be more interested in the food than her date.  I’m not sure that panda would understand romance with a chart and a six-person romance team.  As a matter of fact, I AM sure she wouldn’t, because we tried to put her through that reproduction crash course last year and she flunked, as you would know if you bothered to read any of the files I sent you.  Ever.

Most-importantly, I told you that hiring out nonhumans for escort services would attract the worst creeps ever to crawl the earth.  I haven’t gotten this much of a workout from my cattle prod, taser, and tranq gun since I worked the nuisance bear program.  If it weren’t for that job satisfaction I’d quit this second. 

Jude Hayes, Lead Wrangler

***

To: pgwooster@cgzoo.com

From: krqueen@cgzoo.com

Subject: Abject Failure

I don’t know a way to put a better spin on it.  Complete disaster from top to bottom, start to finish.  Execution chamber?  The coastal taipan was the only animal angry enough for the snake pit, and after being exposed to three days of strangers it got used to them and didn’t bother anyone that kept their hands to themselves.  Death arena?  The lions won’t eat until it’s dark out.  Shark tank?  They’re lemon sharks, they prefer fish and only bite if you start biting them first.  Torture services?  Tarantulas are so mildly venomous they’d have been better off rubbing their hairy abdomens on the victims.  Rent-a-legion?  Doesn’t matter if you give them laser carbines and cyber-suits, a gorilla is still a gorilla and would rather eat shoots and leaves than shoot. 

If the former client hadn’t tried to whip the chimpanzee mining-squad into obedience I’m sure he’d have filed a complaint with you already.  As it is, I salvaged what I could of this rental opportunity by rifling through his safe and taking everything marked ‘top secret.’ If nothing else, the FBI might be interested. 

Kelly R.  Queen, Sales Associate

***

To: All

From: pgwooster@cgzoo.com

Subject: A Wonderful Summer!!!!!

Hello all you happy campers and happier staff members of Clive’s Gussberg Zoo!  We’ve sure had a busy, bustling, activity-bursting heap of a summer, and I’m happy to report that profits have never been higher!  I would like to personally thank every member of staff that agreed to wear a tiny little camera hidden in their nametag (it would’ve been so easy to opt out, too – page 167q had very clear font!), because we’re the number 1 most popular streaming channel for the fourth month running, and the advertising dollars are pouring in (except for that little suspension we got when Kelly walked in on her client after he’d had a tiny argument with the chimps – oops!  Turns out it’s illegal to show dismemberment, even if it’s hard to tell any of the bits belonged to a human!).  You wouldn’t believe the number of shirts we’ve sold!   

Let’s have a magical winter!!!

Penelope G.  Winslet, CEO & Marketing Director, Clive’s Gussberg Zoo