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The Old Times were simple times. The world was big and its inhabitants were small; you found things to eat or something bigger ate you; and the biggest thing was Gronnkkt.

Gronnkkt knew this intimately, and took care to ensure it by battering to death anything It found that was nearly as big as Itself. And the small creatures down below witnessed this every day, and every evening, and sometimes heard it every night, and they worshipped Gronnkkt The Pummeler with great regularity – even more diligently than they did Spoolp, The One Who Collects Berries or Breeeez Who Finds Interesting Mushrooms, albeit for very different reasons.

They were not complicated forms of worship. A silent moment with brows lowered (a hard trick to pull off in the Old Times, when brows were at their lowest) and a soothing pat-pat gesture with the left hand gingerly extended; the forceful crushing of a small, harmless creature with a nearby hand axe; and of course – most common of all – the deep, satisfied grunt of exhaled air mixed with something rough in the back of the throat, done just after beating something to death.

Those were the manner and the custom with Gronnkkt The Pummeler, The One Who Grunts was treated with in the Old Times before the Times After That, also called the New Times.

Their precise beginning is hard to pin down, but scholarly consensus is that it probably started with the sneeze.

***

It was a good big one. It tore the leaves off the trees and the trees off the ground; it deafened birds and killed small animals. It was a sneeze nearly worthy of emitting from the maw of Gronnkkt The Pummeler, The One Who Grunts, but instead it came from the maw of some big bear It was wrestling and it went right into Gronnkkt’s mouth and back out again through Its four nostrils.

Gronnkkt responded to this by beating the bear to death with greater force than was necessary or usual. And the small creatures saw this and they worshipped, and the day was normal again.

So was the day after that.

So was the day after that.

The day after THAT was when Gronnkkt The Pummeler, The One Who Grunts, let out a small sneeze of Its own that morning, and then by mid-afternoon Its four nostrils were a flood of mucus, and come sunset It couldn’t spare a limb to pummel because all of them were clutching at Its aching skull, and all night long all the small creatures couldn’t sleep a wink for the thunderous force of Its coughing: a deep harsh bark that made the pebbles dance and sent moles scurrying from their burrows.

“Will It be okay?” asked some of the younger and stupider of the small creatures.

“Don’t ask stupid questions,” said their older and wiser forebears. “Gronnkkt The Pummeler, The One Who Grunts, is an inescapable and inevitable fulcrum of the natural state of the world. You might as well ask if the seasons will be okay.”

The next morning Gronnkkt The Pummeler, The One Who Grunts, was found lying dead next to the big lake near the two hillsides by the morning water-carriers of the small creatures. This was a surprise to them, because they could still hear Its coughing. And it was an even greater surprise to them when the Cough of Gronnkkt came out of the trees and ran at them and began to violently pummel them until their lungs popped out. Some of the quicker ones got away and ran all the way uphill back home, crying out nonsense that their older and wiser forebears laughed at until the morning hunters of the small creatures returned and told a terrible tale of their own: they had been ready to capture a deer, when the crippling, inescapable Headache of Gronnkkt had come down at them all from above and laid half their number low so totally that their skulls had blown up. And while this tragic news had just been delivered, in came the fiber-pickers, who had only woven one and a half lengths of rope that day because the Runny Nose of Gronnkkt had sloshed through the forest and dissolved every scrap of low-hanging vegetative matter, along with half of the fiber-pickers.

“Gronnkkt The Pummeler, The One Who Grunts, is dead, but Its afflictions are not,” said some of the small creatures. “Should we do something about this?”
“We couldn’t do anything about Gronnkkt The Pummeler, The One Who Grunts, so we can’t do anything about this either,” said the old and wise small creatures. “That’s just how it is.” And it was indeed how it was, because the Cough and the Headache and the Runny Nose of Gronnkkt all did indeed remain, meaning ‘how it is’ now included many more small creatures having their lungs pop out, heads blow up, or bodies dissolved in mucus. Some of them were resentful of this, and some of them were consoled by this being the way it was, and some of the ones that weren’t consoled were resigned, and some of the ones that were neither consoled or resigned didn’t want to make a fuss.

This left a total of about three small creatures who were both young and stupid enough to think anything could be changed, which also made them young and stupid enough to think they should bother Grandma about it.

***

Grandma was not to be prayed to as Gronnkkt The Pummeler, The One Who Grunts, or Spoolp, The One Who Collects Berries, or Breeeez Who Finds Interesting Mushrooms, or even Brbit, The Really Big Hoppy One. Grandma was brought things that were left at the mouth of the cave she lurked inside – soft foods, water, the occasional interesting rock – and not prayed to or looked at or talked about or talked to. Otherwise there was a grave danger that she might speak to you.

“Grandma,” said the three smallest youngest stupidest creatures, “how do we make the afflictions of Gronnkkt The Pummeler, The One Who Grunts, go away?”
Grandma looked at them, probably. Her eyes were so deep in her skull’s sockets that they were almost invisible: just a hint of moisture at the bottom of a pit.

“You must say the words first,” she said in a voice as coarse and harsh as the Cough of Gronnkkt itself.

“What are the words?” asked the most exceptionally young and stupid of all three small creatures.

“’Please, Grandma,’” said Grandma.

“Please, Grandma,” chanted the three young and stupid small creatures in unison.

“Good. I will help you defeat all of these afflictions,” said Grandma. “But only if you do exactly as I say and don’t talk. Now go down to your family and friends and tell them to collect soft fresh leaves until the entire camp is knee-deep in them.”
“Whose knees?” asked the youngest and stupidest.

Grandma looked at them.

“Sorry,” said the youngest and stupidest.

Grandma didn’t stop looking at them.

The youngest and stupidest opened their mouth again, only to find it immediately covered by both hands of both their companions.

“Better,” said Grandma.

***

It was surprisingly simple for the three youngest and stupidest of all the small creatures to convince their older and wiser friends and family to spend all day picking soft, useless leaves in vast numbers. This was because nobody could go down to the lake or into the woods or do anything that wasn’t scampering up into the safety of the rocky hillside without being killed unexpectedly by the afflictions of Gronnkkt, and so they were almost all bored enough to do anything even if there wasn’t a good reason for it.

“Why should we do this?” demanded the few oldest and wisest.

“Grandma said we had to,” said the youngest and stupidest. And so everyone helped, and the day sped by until the leaves were at knee height of most of – if not quite all – the small creatures and the terrible, sniffling slurp of the Runny Nose of Gronnkkt echoed damply against the setting sun.

The small creatures ran to the rocks and watched with baited breath as the sludge dribbled through their home, sniffing up small pretty rocks, slurping down dried food, and slowly, inevitably, totally blotting itself into oblivion on the soft and absorbent surfaces of hundreds and hundreds of a day’s-worth of leaves until not even a smear was left on the ground.

The leaves, however, remained. It took until nearly the sunrise to change that, and the filling of two filth-pits.

“We may now sleep in peace without being washed away by the fearsome Runny Nose of Gronnkkt,” said the wiser and older small creatures. “However, the rest of them are definitely undefeatable and inalterable and we shouldn’t bother trying.”

“Grandma said we were going to get rid of them all,” said the small and stupid creatures. And so they were sent back to her, and they showed her one of the leaves as proof.

“Disgusting,” she said. “Good. Now go into the woods and chop down all the willow saplings you can find. Leave their bark on and take them down to the lakeshore, then go for a swim.”

***

This took longer, because even a sapling willow tree is a fierce opponent to a stone hand axe, but ‘Grandma said to” remained a great motivator, and so it was done and the lakeshore where the water was drawn and the fish were caught was so choked with fallen timber that even the very youngest and stupidest of the small creatures – who were also the smallest – could barely pick their way down to the water to splash and wade and swim. But they managed, and they did, and as time passed and nothing happened their boredom made them loud and careless and so onward came the Headache of Gronnkkt from the woods, armoured and spined and thorned and barbed and inexorable, taller than the trees of the forest and more implacable than the stones of the hills, dead-eyed and invincible.

It slipped on the logs and hurtled helplessly into the lake along with the majority of the willow saplings, which drummed it on the head every time it rose for breath until it rose no more.

The three youngest and stupidest of the small creatures were retrieved from the far side of the lake after some searching, coated in algae and small, dead fish, and were thus presented to Grandma without further persuading required – from a safe distance.

“Take these leaves,” said Grandma, holding out a handful of very dry and very small and very broken fragments of things that may have once been attached to trees. “Then take as much water as you can and fill the big pit in the rock in front of my cave with it. Put the leaves in that. Warm round solid stones in your fires until they’re hot, then put them in the pit too. Then wait.”

It was a long way to bring water. The stones took all day to warm, and carrying them was even trickier than the water and burned several fingers. The leaves made the steaming water stink and fume.

But just before sunset the harsh bark came from the woods, and as the sky turned red the Cough of Gronnkkt crawled its long, scale-coated belly up the scree to the mouth of Grandma’s home and dipped its narrow, wheezing mouth into the vapors of the vat of tea to inhale and wheeze and sip. Slowly. Very slowly. And as it sipped, it coughed less, and moved less, and relaxed, and at last it lay down to sleep right where it stood without so much as a cleared throat. It didn’t make a sound when Grandma walked up to it and shoved its whole head under the surface until the  bubbles stopped, not once.

“This is how you deal with the afflictions of Gronnkkt,” said Grandma, “although I expect they will be smaller and less bold if they ever come back. Remember how it was done. And now you must speak the other words.”

“What are the other words?” asked the oldest and wisest remaining small creature.

“’Thank you, Grandma,’” said Grandma.

They chanted the words together and went to bed. And maybe it was the fumes from the tea, and maybe it was knowing the worst was behind them, but none of those small creatures had ever felt so happy to have a single, normal, restful night’s sleep ever before, and they vowed never to take it for granted again.

They were lying, of course. But wasn’t that just human of them?

“The Cape, the Cape! They saw her at the Cape, at the Cape!”
The call started in the mouth of a ragged man on the docks, and it sped from there to the streets and from there to the pubs and from there to everywhere, quicker than a blink. “The Cape! They saw her at the Cape! Red-eyed, saw-backed, coiled high on the rocks! Dame Brute – in solitude – hunts at the Cape of Sharp Stones!”

“My leg!” bellowed up from the depths of a half-flotsam pub, screamed by a whaler with the body of jerky and the lungs of an opera singer and – indeed – the leg of a pogo stick. “At last, the price for my leg will be paid to me! Up now with you all, down with your cups! Today we take back my leg! Today we take back our pride! Today we avenge our lost shipmates! Hurry, hurry, hurry!”

“My bounty!” hooted a pirate as he held an erstwhile news-spreader up in one hand and her wallet in the other. “Hear that, kids? Ol’ Lum is going to pay off his debts to the state and Mend His Ways! You all are going to be Legitimate Persons Of Fortune once more, like in the days before the Unfortunate Moment which we will not be talking about at this time. We’ll be able to get drunk in public again! Hurry, hurry, hurry!”
“My place!” whispered a trembling aristocrat to her aide. “Perchance, Pestersnipe, this shalt forsooth salve the wounds of mine unjust exile from paternal and maternal care and render unto me the fiscal and notional acclaim necessary to achieve the heights of society denied my most unjustly due to my unfortunate placement as the third-born heir in a second-rank family among the third-most-esteemed cadet branch of the fourth-grandest-and-most-fashionable-province of the Lesser Buulyeans.”

“Her ladyship commands the crew to put to sea to murder a waterborne snake – hurry, hurry, and hurry, and so on” said Pestersnipe to the marines, and they said ‘sir’ and nodded and it was so.

Thusly did three ships leave the harbour in such furious speed that they were barely able to raise sails and figure out north from west. Horns were sounded, signals were misinterpreted, six small local fishing craft were sent to the bottom, six large and irate local fisherman were press-ganged into service, and by the time the rest of the city caught wise to what was up and began to send feet to decks, the chase had already begun and there were only three real contestants, strung out along the horizon from each other like beads on a very cheap necklace.

The last sea monster was being hunted.

***

Pertinence was afore the first week, her crew driven by a dangerous combination of monomania and experience. Every hand on that boat thirsted for the flesh of the foe, every eye was keen with the knowing of wind and current – that many of the bodies aboard were shy a hand eye or elsewise meant little to such fierce determination. They slept what little they must, they ate in between heaves and pulls, they sang no shanties but hissed angry breaths between hard-bitten teeth, they squinted at the horizon like it was Dame Brute’s ally, a hostile wall between them and their goal.

Fancy Lee sauntered after her, lean and quick in trim and sail, if somewhat flabbier in crew. A dark cloud of lingering hangovers weighed them where their vessel did not, and though they were keen to be unwanted men and women once more they weren’t so sharp as to cut themselves.

Prince Gigantic brought up the rear at a respectable pace, one enforced by the stoutness of her hull and the request of her captain, who was sea-sick.

“I can’t sleep, I won’t blink, I won’t stop to smile or spit or sup until the Cape is before us and the beast is beneath us and the past is behind us,” vowed Jordan Hopp, who was nailing a blasphemous pact to Pertinence’s mainmast with such force that the deck creaked beneath their feet. “Open a vein and draw your mark if you can say the same!” And lo, the crew did as such to an able hand.

“Rough times afloat have the same cure as rough times ashore have the same cure as a hangover,” said Ol’ Lum in an unnecessarily loud voice. “The Good Shit is on the middeck today and it is first come first served, but no double dipping before everyone else has had their shot or else there will be Consequences.” And lo, the crew did as such to an able hand.

“Plorgh,” addressed Captain Ditherpunt-twixt-Mannhurdle through the window of her cabin to the sea. “Fffbbbltppphurk.”

“Her ladyship commands that you speed up,” said Pestersnipe. “Also, bring up the cask of medicinal brandy.” And lo, the crew did as such to an able hand.

All hands being able did not mean all plans went as made, and as such by the week’s end matters lay as thus, this:

Pertinence had spent two days dead in the water with her sails aimless due to an inexplicable outbreak of anemia and exhaustion among the crew. “The devil!” seethed Captain Hopp. “The devil and god themselves conspire against me! Well, to hell and deeper with them both!” And then they burned the blasphemous pact along with Pertinence’s mainmast, which cost the Pertinence a little more trouble.

The Fancy Lee made good if slightly wobbly time. Consequences had left her holster several times, but she did not need to be fired. Which was good, because Consequences never missed but what she hit wasn’t necessarily what she was aimed at.

While all the while Prince Gigantic churned gamely onwards, though her wake was oddly odoured and coloured and more expensive than most seawater. And so, in some difficulty, the pursuit for the most fierce – if now solitary – creature of the seas continued.

***

A whale was a free-swimming fountain of resources with a wily will to survive. A sea monster was a step above in that those resources would come looking for you and a step down in that they would then try to eat you.

That was an old puzzle, one that had in recent centuries found increasingly accurate answers. And now, it was almost completed.

***

In the second week the weather turned mellow – too mellow. All sails turned slack; the sun burned hot, and the string of three stagnated in their current order. Fancy Lee held the leading place, and by a healthy distance.

“I told you kids we would all see this through and I told you that what Ol’ Lum tells you is true Is That Not Fact?” asked Old Lum. “It’s okay, that was Rhetorical it means you don’t need to answer and Do Not Think About It. We’ve got this one In The Bag, and the harder you worry the harder it’ll get. Don’t sweat anything. Don’t think about how we’ve completely run out of places it’s legal to for any of us to Take A Load Off or get a drink or maybe breathe. Don’t think about what happens if we Screw This Pooch. Don’t think about how many times we have all Screwed That Pooch. Don’t think about it. And if you do, just imagine Consequences. But don’t. So do that. And don’t do that.” And lo, the crew did as such to an able hand except for what they didn’t do as such to an able hand except for when they did. Or didn’t.

Prince Gigantic wallowed the space between, her many decks turned to ovens. Pestersnipe stood valiant guard in his ladyship’s cabin, bent low with a mirror to check for breath.

“Bless thee, good Pestersnipe,” whispered Captain Ditherpunt-twixt-Mannhurdle in the faintest of voices, “for thy service in my darkest hour. From sea-sickness to heat-sickness – alas! Alack! I fear mine hour has nigh-come, forsooth forthwith forthright. I know the rabble and roustabouts of the crew shalt seek to shirk their duty in this time of my decrepitude, it falls to thee, wise and kind and true Pestersnipe, to take up the sword in my darkest hour. Flog them, flay them, skin them if you must, but make those wretches break us free of this damnable heat if you need to use half the crew’s bones as oars!”

“Her ladyship says you should take the day off and enjoy a double grog ration while we wait for improved weather,” said Pestersnipe. “Also bring up the reserve medicinal brandy cask.” And lo, the crew did as such to an able hand.

Pertinence had limped along on two masts, fore and aft. Now she lay with the stillness of a corpse. But one germ remained active on that body; one finger yet twitched at the end of its last nerve, and it was Captain Hopp, who climbed to the tallest remaining perch of the ship – missing leg and all – to describe to every supernatural being in all their extensive knowledge of time and tide and its creators exactly what they thought of them and their obstruction of their noble quest.

“Fuck you!” they screamed. “Eat shit!”

That night the calm broke and a hard wind blew.

Fancy Lee tacked into the wind, then headed off the wind, then downed sails on one side and tacked up to full on the other, then tried a secret fourth thing whose purpose and point was inscrutable. Consequences flowed freely, though lessons learned were elusive.

Prince Gigantic rose to the occasion and sped ahead on great wings raised with nimble speed; all its lumbering weight turned into a nimble dart in the hands of such a gigantic force. The complexity of its wake only increased in scope and scale, as did its smell.

And Pertinence was struck by lightning three times but each time found the fires extinguished by the force of the blowing gale, which put such spectacular fear into the crew’s souls as to lend them their own kind of wings, which thereby sped them onwards in due time. Thus, in grim determination, did the search for the murderous – if now solitary – reptile continue onwards.

***

Dame Brute had been given her name for her daintiness. Other sea monsters made sloppy messes out of ships; tore them open stem to stern and left them to founder slowly; carrying away screaming morsels from the deck as they left.

By contrast, although she was a scar-seared knuckle-nosed battering-ram of a creature that had once bisected a whaler in a single breach, she was a proper lady. She didn’t depart until her plate was picked clean, and she seldom left any garbage floating to mark her messes.

***

By third week’s time the Prince Gigantic held the horizon, a moving mountain – but one rendered almost invisible. The wind and rain had returned, then redoubled, then resounded. A full storm grasped all the flotilla in common, each an island unto itself more than ever, shrouded and set apart by the rage of the heavens.

“It is not all sorrows and tears in this tragedy, my dearest Pestersnipe,” pondered Captain Ditherpunt-twixt-Mannhurdle, who was feeling well enough to limp up above decks and goggle at the struggle for survival, like a child with a magnifying glass peeping a likely anthill. “For instance, dost thou know’st that I have had the liberty of observing many a sea-dog in our wake these passing weeks? They lap most fearfully at my vomitus that drags behind our keel. Not past this tenth bell, I did behold a wretched scavenger whose size was nigh half our vessel’s length! What a thing that would be, to give such a monstrous beast a taste for the rich and fine things in life beyond that of its station, eh?”

Above even the roar of the wind rose a dreadful thunking, chewing sound at the keel.

“Her ladyship asks you all to grab boarding pikes and head to the vessel’s stern to kill a giant drunk shark,” said Pestersnipe. And lo, the crew did as such to an able hand.

Pertinence travelled with one mast now and half a sail, hellbent forwards on momentum more than the wind.

“Jettison it all,” howled Captain Hopp into the wind, eyes bugged, teeth bared. “Food, water, bedding – all dead weight now. We want but for irons for our task! All else goes to the deep!” And lo, the crew did as such to an able hand.

The Fancy Lee was running a little light on crew in the wake of manifest Consequences, and though the notion of what to do with her sails was strong the ability to manifest it was less trivial.

“Pull, my kids, pull!” said Old Lum, who was himself heaving on the steering wheel like it owed him money and was lying facedown on its wallet. “There have been rough times and hard times but right now we are owed a good size of Good Times and we are almost there you Bet Your Ass. Every sail goes on! Every hand pulls! Almost there, and then We’ve Made It!” And lo, the crew did as such to an able hand.

With so many hands at such furious work in such thorough ignorance as to all outside their business, perhaps the outcome, although invisible to all concerned, was dully obvious to any uninvolved. Thus, the ramming of the Pertinence at full-force into the stern of the Prince Gigantic – where it skewered a very large, drunk, and angry shark that had chewed off half the latter vessel’s keel – was in an absolute sense very unsurprising despite coming as a great shock to a large number of people. Likewise, the slow, showy swirl of a corkscrew that took the Fancy Lee to drift broadside into the two of them, where it stuck firm.

Some screams, some shouts, some smoke and splinters. And above it all, a storm turned to a sputter, and light shining on a sea filled with sharp, splintered stones

And thus, at the fourth week and all at once, altogether, they reached the Cape, and ruined the solemn solitude of that place.

***

The Cape of Sharp Stones had been a seasonal haunt for sea monsters for who knew how long. Then it had been a refuge, since nobody that wasn’t extremely desperate enjoyed navigating waters filled with constantly splintering, constantly changing mazes of giant jagged rocks.

And now, it was a ghost house you could lose several provinces in.

***

The waves had calmed enough for a civil discussion above decks involving all. As befitted such an occasion, every jack involved was armed to the teeth. The marines fixed bayonets to long-guns; the pirates put cutlasses on every remaining limb and a few that weren’t; and the whalers simply clutched the most unpleasant and visceral devices every conceived of by man like they were their own dear children.

“How doing there my Good Fellow Travellers,” said Old Lum through his megaphone and a big smile. “If you wouldn’t mind Making Right Of Way for some Gentlefolk Of Free Will And Fancy we can all go home safe and sound and Settled Of Mind.”

“Dame Brute is ours, by right of pain and hatred,” said Captain Hopp, who was braced on an entire handful of hideously barbed and gigantically elongated pieces of metal – and more thoroughly, on a well of unyielding spite. “Ours is the expertise required and the justice demanded.”

“Such lowly bequests must bide their good time in turn when the right of birth and expedience is called to its proper place in the nature and order of the world as demanded, by decree of kingdom, country, and common law – in our favour, no less, for a matter of most esteemed and most imperative honour is at stake, in which I bear the most pertinent interest – ah, my fortune!  Such Providence is granted to me in matters of the material, if not, alas, the heart,” explained Ditherpunt-twixt-Mannhurdle.

“We’ve got the most guns,” said Pestersnipe.

“And we’ve got the most folks that know how to use them to make The Big Money. But ah now my fellow Gentlefolks Of The Sea, there is no reason for this to come to Unpleasantness,” said Old Lum, hands raised to display both conciliatoriness and Consequences. “If we all stay Cool Headed, I’m sure we-”

Captain Hopp flung a fierce harpoon full-force, whereupon it lodged in Old Lum’s brisket. He sagged and loosed Consequences, which struck Pestersnipe athwart the bows of his noggin, beheading him.

“Unleash the full-fouled bowels of Hades upon every one of them, child and grown, without discrimination nor kindness nor hesitation!” screamed Captain Ditherpunt-twixt-Mannhurdle, pale palms grasping her fallen manservant in mortified sorrow.

The marines looked at her, hands flexed and waiting.

She closed her eyes, breathed in and out once, a great shaking sob, then peeked them open again with utmost care.

“Kill everybody?” she said.

And lo, all the crews did as such to the last able hand, then the least able, and to the end.

***

As the timber creaked and the water gurgled the great spired sentinels of the Cape of Sharp Stones grew ever higher and higher to the few remaining witnesses until they lost sight and slipped below, still entangled – bow to stern, blade to ribcage – and began that last, lonely dive down, down, down down, where they landed with crushing force atop silt and stone amid many other older wrecks and one more thing.

It was the skeleton of a great old sea monster, newly laid to bone by busy scavengers, not more than a month picked clean, gnarled by age and killed by nothing more than time.

And now, no longer solitary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what the hell.

***

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

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

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

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

“Even less than that. Shush.”
“You-”

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

The food became an issue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It never came up.

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

What were you meant to say when you were done?

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

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

And that was also what it was like.

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

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

And that was all.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Everyone involved was gifted a voucher.

Except the sky. It had been very unhelpful.

Jim picks the cans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s how it all is, really.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Morty was baking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Huh. Hmm. Big one, weren’t they?”

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

“I see, I see, but-”

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

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

“I was looking right at-”

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

She had been pasted into the photo.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I looked at Terri.

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

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

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

And it was just me.

Once again, it was just me.

“Bring in the first one,” said the tall, polite policeman with the boring voice.

The first one was brought in. He too was tall, if not so much. He too was polite, if somewhat nervous. But his voice when he spoke ruined all resemblance, because it was too obnoxiously erratic and pitchy to be boring, and what he said was “I’m, well, I’m not in trouble am I?”
“Oh you’re in trouble, alright,” said the other member of the police. She had the attitude of brass knuckles and steel-toed shoes. “Neck-deep and sinking fast. How long can you hold your breath, creep?”
“Constable Leslie, please shush,” said the tall, polite policeman. “Sir, this is a complex matter, and your testimony would be of great assistance in resolving it. May I ask what you did last night?”

“Well, I, you know, I went home. From work, yes, I did that. I went home from work. I took the long way along the shore because you know, well, that there’s the construction, and it’s taking so much time, and I, I can’t believe how difficult it can be to pour asphalt, what’s the, what’s the deal with that, and well…”
“Continue, please.”
“Well, I thought I saw something. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

The tall, polite policeman folded his hands in the attitude of a conciliatory praying mantis. “Sir, if you wouldn’t mind elaborating on that, we would greatly appreciate it. No judgment will be made. No word will be spread. Your testimony is anonymous, safe, and profoundly welcome.”
“Right, well, it’s just, you know, sort of, a bit, well, kind of, a tad, uh, you see, somewhat, I know it’s, well, oh dear, really, it’s that-”

“Unshush,” sighed the tall, polite policeman.

“Pardon?”
“LISTEN UP, YOU PREENING PRINCESS PUNK!” howled Constable Leslie, surging forward like a wave through a borehole. “If you don’t START TALKING I’m going to START TWISTING! Fingers! Nipples! EYES! EVERYTHING! WHAT DID YOU SEE!? WHAT DID YOU SEE!? WHAT DID YOU SEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!??”

“A beast!” gasped the first one. “A great and terrifying beast, like a a a gigantic tadpole or somewhat like! It slithered ‘cross the road! I only saw its tail as it crossed before my car, but it stretched from curb to curb and more! Please don’t touch me!”
“Please don’t STOP TALKING! “ sneered the constable, jaws gnashing at an invisible, infuriating bit. “You’ve seen more, you little slime-balled snotwedge! SPILL YOUR GUTS OR I’LL SEW THEM UP SIDEWAYS AND LET THE STITCHES ROT IN YOUR SPLEEN!”

“It descended to the water, left nary a ripple! And then as I watched, transfixed, it breached the surface! ‘pon my word, I saw its gigantic skull – whale-like, monstrous! It reared its head back and swallowed a deer it had clutched in its mouth, antlers, hooves, and all! Then it sank below, and it was all as if it had never been!”
“Your cooperation has been of great use and your conduct impeccable,” said the tall, polite policeman, both hands now white-knuckle gripped at the collar of Constable Leslie as she strained towards the far side of the table, eyes wide and pupils narrowed. “Please, take the coffee-coloured seat in the next room and we’ll be with you shortly.”

***

“Bring in the second one.”

The second one was brought in. He had the sort of eyes that didn’t look at anything in particular because they were watching everything through the filter of his own head.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” said the tall, polite policeman.

“Shut up and talk!” screamed Constable Leslie. “Talk – TALK or I’ll have your nails, b’god! – The pliers! The needles! The blades! – I’ll have them!”

“Jeez.”

“Constable Leslie, please shush,” repeated the tall, polite policeman in a somewhat strained (if still boring) voice, tendons throbbing wires against his forearms as they pulled desperately at her shoulders.

Constable Leslie receded in reluctant inches, her nails leaving visible scratches in the surface of the table. Her eyes, by contrast, grew to roaring infernos.

“Sir,” said the tall, polite policeman. “There are certain events of the last twenty-four hours that we would like your total and full cooperation in uncovering, as we believe you may have been witness to them.”
“Oh yeah, absolutely. I saw the angel.”

“Pardon?”
“The angel,” said the second one. His voice was neither boring nor obnoxious, merely forthright. “It was in the water. Long, long neck, head like a horse. It reared up out of the water and looked me in the eye and it sang to me.”

“Sang?”

“Without words. Full of meaning, though. Everything made so much sense when it sang. It told me that I was not alone, and that I was not unloved, and that the same was true for all of us that lived on this little dot in the stars. It told me that it would return three times before its people came to greet us as equals, and then it dove into the air and vanished.”

“Dove into the air? Could you please describe that?”
“It dove up – out of the water – and into the air – as if it were water – and then it vanished – as if it had gone underwater. But in the air.”

Constable Leslie had begun at some point during this to make a very slight – almost inaudible – song of her own, which sounded a bit like a tea kettle and a bit like someone mumbling ‘blood’ very very fast over and over. Her arms were flexing; her palms were leaving damp spots on her sleeves.

“Did the angel’s song tell you anything of its people?”
“They were made of light, but wore bodies to try and see us. We’re too dark for them to see without bodies. They visited this world long before, when the dinosaurs were around, before the floods and meteor and the garden and the K-Pg boundary. They left their bones in the stones and we called them plesiosaurs. They fought demons too, and those we called pterosaurs.” He shrugged at this. “It was a lot to take in, you know? One moment I was standing by the beach, the next I was being sung to by an angel.”

“I see,” said the tall, polite policeman. “And what were you doing down at the beach that night?”
“A whole lot of acid.”

“Your forthrightness and candour are appreciated greatly, citizen,” said the tall policeman. He gently elbowed Constable Leslie, whose fingers were beginning to crawl forwards across the desk again. “Please, take the liver-coloured seat in the next room and we’ll be with you shortly.”

***

“Bring in the third one.”

The third one was tired. He looked like he needed a coffee and he needed to not be there.

“I need a coffee, and I need to not be here,” he groaned. “Look at you guys: you look like Abbot and Costello doing good cop/bad cop.”

“I prefer the three stooges,” said the tall, polite policeman.

“Charlie Chaplin fuckin’ BURIES all of them, you morons don’t know a damned thing,” sneered Constable Leslie.

“Well, there is at least one thing one of us knows,” said the tall, polite policeman. “Sir? Would you mind sharing it with us?”
“Sharing what?”

“The experience you claim to have had yesterday afternoon.”
He looked blank. “I had lunch?”
“Something a little more unusual.”
“I skipped breakfast? The room service was lousy.”
“If you were staying at the Lord’s Arms, that’s very usual.”
“I saw a deer in the woods?”
“The WATER, you perfidious, procrastinating clown,” snarled Constable Leslie. “Tell us about what you saw in the WATER, or I’ll -” and here the tall, polite policeman slid his hand over her mouth so smoothly and neatly that it did not appear to be hostile at all, but merely the comforting shoulder-pat of one colleague to another.

“What about the water?” asked the third one, rubbing his eyes.

“What did you see in it?” replied the tall, polite policeman.

“Nothing? Nothing worth noting. A log hit my kayak.”

“A log?” inquired the tall, polite policeman. His fingers moved, almost as if someone was trying to chew her way through them.
“Yeah. A big, bumpy log. Floating just barely below the surface; not fully waterlogged yet is my guess.”
“And you’re certain this is what you saw?” said the tall, polite policeman, face twitching on the edge of agony.
“I saw the bark floating off it; I saw broken branches dangling from it; I poked it with my paddle and watched it roll over and counted the knots on its side, so yeah. I’m absolutely certain what I saw. Is that what’s unusual around here?”

“A little bit,” said the tall, polite policeman. “Oh DAMN,” he amended, and yanked his hand free from Constable Leslie’s face, who gave him a look that no amount of soap could have cleaned.

“So, are we done or what?” inquired the third one.

“Very nearly. Please, come with us into the next room.”

***

The first and second ones looked up from the terrible old magazines they’d been reading as the police walked the third one into the room with them. They were garbage, real dentist-quality stuff. Ten years at youngest.

“Citizens, you have all been of great and profound use to our investigations this day,” said the tall, polite policeman. “Your testimony has brought us to a singular and concise conclusion. Commissioner Leslie will explain.” And so saying, as always unsmiling, he reached out and grasped the third one’s neck and snapped it on the spot, catching the body like the lumpy sack of bones it had become.

“That’s right,” said Commissioner Leslie, showing every fang in her face at once. “There’s going to be another unidentified creature floating in the water tonight! And you two are going to encounter it in passing, by chance, just a little bit! And it’s going to be MYSTERIOUS, and STRANGE, and EXCITING, and you’re going to tell everyone you know about it or SO HELP ME GOD TOMORROW THERE WILL BE THREE SIGHTINGS INSTEAD OF ONE, AM I UNDERSTOOD?”

The first one nodded so hard his neck nearly snapped of its own accord. The second one, by contrast, frowned. “Is this because of the acid?”
“The what?”
“Because you asked for my total and full cooperation and I gave that. It’d be a real asshole move to go after me because I told you about the-”

“NO!” screamed Commissioner Leslie, snatching up one of the magazines and biting it into four. “NOW GO ENCOUNTER THE DEEPEST MYSTERIES THE WORLD HAS YET TO UNCOVER AND TELL THE WORLD OF WHAT STRANGE BEINGS MAY YET LIE HIDDEN WITHIN THE BOUNDARIES OF OUR TOWNSHIP! YRRRREEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!”
“Oh. Okay. Ohkay.”

And they left.

The tall, polite policeman coughed gently until his commissioner made eye contact and gave a grudging nod, then reached out with his free hand and helped resocket her jaw.

“Owfuck,” she grunted. “There. Reckon that did it?”
“Three witnesses would have been a sure thing,” he said.

“And two?”
“Almost a sure thing.”
“Good enough. ‘We need a tourism board’ my left tit; looks like budget’s back on the menu, constable! GOD I’m going to rub this in Jodie’s face on Friday.”

Tammy was five years old when she met the werewolf. Five exactly. Having just walked out of your birthday party before something happens really helps to put a time and a date to it.

There had been a lot of talking, and then some yelling, and then some cake (which spilled EVERYWHERE) and then mom wiping her off (ugh) and then everyone milled around and she said she wanted to play tag but Josh yelled YOU’RE IT and shoved her and ran into the bathroom and wouldn’t open the door so she went to play catch in the backyard but Ben threw like his hands were his feet and WHOOSH went the ball way off to one side and slip-slide-swish through the crack in the backyard gate.

And Tammy knew she shouldn’t wander out of the backyard, but it was okay because she wasn’t. Just her arm.

So she slipped the gate open just a little inch – ker-chack, ker-chuck – which was much easier than she’d always thought it’d be, and she reached down for the ball, and as she did that something large and furry bolted upright from the shade of the fence, where it had been napping.

She knew it wasn’t a dog. If it were a dog it would be a puppy, with those big feet and big eyes. And if it were a puppy it wouldn’t have quite as many teeth to show at her when it growled.

“Waa-AAH!” said Tammy, and she jumped back and the thing jumped forwards and it was lucky her other hand was still holding the gate because that shut it without even trying, ker-chack, and then it locked solid when something heavy and furry hit it from the other side, ker-chuck. It growled at her one last time – high-pitched and squealy – and then its ears pricked up and it ran away. It didn’t run like a dog; its legs were too long; its ankles weren’t in the right places. It ran like Ben when he was pretending to be a lion.

Tammy thought about it, then remembered she was upset and burst into tears, and that distracted her again until that evening when she was supposed to be going to bed.

“Mom?” she asked. “Can people have wolf faces?”
“Baboons are called dog-faced monkeys, bug,” said Mom. “But they aren’t people.”

“Oh,” said Tammy. And she asked to look up pictures of baboons, wolves, and dogs, which was how she decided based on the available evidence that it had been a werewolf. Or a very ugly baboon, but Mom said the zoos would say something if an animal escaped. Then she told her it could be a school project so Tammy remembered it was time for bed again.
She forgot about all of it until the next morning, when she got out up and looked out the window and saw a shadow lurking by the mailbox. It ducked when she jumped.

It was there the next day too.

***

Tammy was twelve years old when it tried to get into the house for the first time. Twelve-and-a-half, maybe? It had been winter, she was sure. A bad time of year for her werewolf; the sun went down earlier and the shadows grew so much longer and there was so much more room for a growing monster to hide in. Tammy never walked home from school without a friend; she never stayed out late; and she never snuck out. The only complaint her mother ever had was that she insisted on leaving all the lights on, especially when she was alone in the house.

Which she was sure she was, because she had definitely imagined the sounds of someone walking up the front step.

And the sounds of someone scuffling at the key.

And the deep, irritated wuff of someone without opposable thumbs.

Yes, she had imagined all of it. And she was going to make sure of that right now. So she took a deep breath and marched to the front door with her eyes shut and looked onto the deck and couldn’t see it because it was blocked by a big, hairy set of shoulders and some shockingly bright yellow eyes.

“Nine-one-one isn’t a toy, bug,” said her mother much, much later that night.

“I could call animal control instead,” said Tammy. “What’s animal control? Can I have their number?”

Her mother ruffled her hair with condescending love. “See, what am I meant to do about you, bug? I can’t even ground you; you do that to yourself. So how about this: as punishment, you’re doing my half of the snow shovelling too.”

“Not after dark.”

“The snow doesn’t wait for our convenience, my tiny horror.”
“Can I have a big shovel?”
“Sure.”
“And an axe?”
Tammy had to settle for a VERY big shovel and very fast shovelling, which was what got her into weights.

***

Tammy was twenty when it finally happened. She was in the car and she was done for the day and she had both hands on the wheel at precisely nine and three o’clock and was focusing her full attention on driving, exactly as she was meant to. It was therefore completely unfair for the werewolf to leap from a streetlight directly onto her hood and crash through the windshield, spinning the car into the ditch and flipping it what was probably once and felt like sixteen times.

Her eyes were full of fur. Her mouth was full of fur. Her nose, much to its regret, was full of fur. Also blood, judging by the fluid sliding down her throat.

“Fuck,” she said into the fur. And like magic, it moved away, turned, rolled – with a slight whimper – upright, and, with one long, gangled, mangy arm, began to feel around for her like her mother looking for her glasses at three AM.

It was much less endearing from the perspective of the glasses. The palm was thick and hairy and gigantic; it fit over her face like she was a baseball, and in accordance with ancient instincts honed by several playground fights, she licked it. Then she nearly choked on fur and reverted to older instincts and bit hard.

It shrieked. There were no other words for that; it wasn’t a howl; it wasn’t a yelp; it wasn’t even a bark. This was a noise made by a human being in distress filtered through a throat incapable of enunciating anything less threatening than a snarl, and it was at full volume. It was also – partway through – fading rapidly into the distance.

Lights probed the inside of the car.

“That makes sense,” Tammy told the friendly man telling her something about ambulances. “It only comes after me when nobody else is around.”

Hair was still stuck on her tongue. She passed out hoping she wouldn’t choke on it; that’d be embarrassing.

***

Tammy was thirty-seven when she made it happen. It had taken no small amount of effort.

Spending a decade looking over her shoulder? Hard. Mastering half a dozen forms of self-defence and buying an arsenal of technically-legal cutting-edge animal control weaponry? Also hard. Admitting it wasn’t following her anymore? Harder. Figuring out what she wanted to do about that? Harder still. Spending nearly ANOTHER decade looking for clues as to where the thing had gone? Hardest.

After all that had been said and done, setting up the kill zone had been easy. Except for her glasses. Even under her scarf her breath was steaming them off her face; how the hell had mom survived with these things for so long?

“Anything to say?” she asked the werewolf.

It gurgled at her, two-meter legs and arms thrashing. The electricity pumping through the net turned the escape attempts into the skittering limbs of a spider-trapped fly. Its claws groped at nothing, gripped their own palms. Foam was leaking from its mouth – maybe an aftereffect of the six darts clustered in its chest. Something else was leaking out too; squeaks, whines, whimpers, something guttural. Nothing decipherable.

“Good enough,” she said, and kicked it overboard.

Great Bear Lake was nice and clear this time of year, the tail-end of the little window where the ice didn’t coat it. Tammy got to watch it sink all the way down.

It never quite stopped squirming.

Then she returned the boat, paid everyone she’d contacted in the last six months a two-hundred-percent bonus to shut up, went home, and slept the whole night through for the first time since she turned five.

***

Tammy was sixty-eight and in the hospital. Again.

It didn’t seem quite fair. She’d managed to deal with such a larger monster for so much longer. But at least this one didn’t hide outside her door, or try to grab her when she took the long way home too late on a Friday, or climb the tree outside her new room’s window until she convinced her mother it was too close to the power lines to stay standing, or make her break up with her first girlfriend because she refused to go anywhere after sundown, or shine its reflective eyes from behind every bush she swore had been empty a minute ago, or stick its nose under her bedroom door the single time her mother forgot to lock the front hall, or anything else.

The door opened for her evening medication, which she was pretty sure she remembered already taking.

Slow, slow, slow reflexes. She looked up and it should’ve already been too late.

It filled the doorway, but not as grandly as it once might have. Its back was hunched; its fur was grey – where it still existed: something had burned thin bald lines into its skin in a criss-crosshatch that covered it from gnarled head to long-nailed toe. Its eyes were a cloud yellow that didn’t shine in the gloom.

Its nose twitched, and its legs unfurled and it took three quivering, unsteady steps, half-dragging at its own distorted heels. The left arm held it upright against Tammy’s bed; the right extended, fingers quivering, and with a gradual and horribly familiar effort, grabbed her by the head as it leaned down close, muzzle dripping something warm and nauseating as its teeth parted.

“agg. yurrit.”

Then it let go, lurched to the window, and slid through it.

Tammy didn’t move. She didn’t move when the ruckus came visiting over the sound of the glass. She didn’t move when they checked her pulse, called the police, asked her if she saw anything.

She was busy thinking.

***

The gravestone was a last-minute addition to the will, on behalf of a woman whose funeral arrangements had been ‘just recycle me and don’t bother with a plot’ since she was forty. But the money was there for it, and the lawyers and family vouched for it, and so it was bequeathed.

‘YOU WIN’ wasn’t the oddest thing to have put on a tombstone anyways. That was the bimonthly graveside bouquet of venison – which was also quite clearly specified, although the graveyard management objected strenuously.

They never had a leg to stand on, anyways. It always vanished overnight, without leaving so much as a drop of fat.

There is a very small and exactly round hole in the precise center of the main street, too small to bump a wheel and too deep to be from wear and tear. This is why.

***

The construction companies made their bids. They wrangled terms. They argued. They wheedled.

Frank Thomas bid low – very low – and he kept his bid very low, and he never said a word after that, or moved after that, or did anything other than sit there and smile, smile, smile. He had a smile stuck on his face, Frank did. It made you want to carve him on a statue, or punch him, or something like that.

Tortoise Construction won the bid. On their trucks, it said: Slow and Steady Wins the Race.

***

The roadwork was meant to start in mid spring, as soon as the snows left. Frank got the trucks in a row with uncommon haste: by the end of May his crews were hard at work, measuring and cutting and digging and standing around asking where the hell the asphalt was, that truck should’ve been here last week, we’ve already dug up half the road, this is a total shitshow, I need a cigarette, and so on.

“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank when the foreman called him for the sixth time that morning asking why they had barely any gravel left with half a day remaining. And he said nothing more.

***

Come late June the holidays were creeping closer and the town was growing concerned about traffic, since Tortoise Construction had now removed the surface of every single stretch of asphalt they were meant to be working on while replacing exactly none of it with a drivable substrate, temporary or otherwise. This included the town’s largest parking lot.

“Frank,” the mayor begged him over the phone. “Frank. Frankie man. You’re killing me here, and that’s because you’re killing the fair, and that’s because there’s no way they can get the trucks down to the park because of you. My youngest grandchild is finally old enough to eat a hot dog. You are depriving my youngest grandchild of her first giant outdoor overpriced hot dog, AND her first fireworks show all at once. I’m crying, Frankie. Can you hear my tears hitting the receiver? Can you? Please, Frank. For the love of god. For the love of god, and country, and really godawful hot dogs with too much mustard.”

“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank, untroubled. And he stayed on the line the entire two hours, and that was all he would say.

***

The thunderstorms came in July when Frank was on site to inspect their progress; torrential sheets of water that sucked on the half-packed road like a six-year-old on a popsicle. Lightning strikes and high winds had their pick of the treeline, and some of it just happened to be over the construction – an oak was felled on Wednesday, and one of its branches took out a good-sized maple and both their efforts combined did something unspeakable to a pickup truck on the curb and its collapsing roof did something VERY speakable to its driver, who was speaking about it at the top of his voice. Oh and there were multiple live wires flailing around on the road.

“Call 911!” screamed the foreman, whose own phone had been drowned in her pocket while plucking her crew from the floods. “Call a repair crew! Call a tow truck! Call the arborists!”

“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank, tranquil as a calm pond on a moonlit evening. And then he took sixteen minutes to enter his password, for he had forgotten it and did not want to rush himself.

***

August had never been easy, but this one was like someone had taken a magnifying glass and nailed it to the sun. The trees withered; the grass spontaneously reverted to dirt; the ponds dried up; the elderly roamed the streets at midday cheerily greeting one another in long pants. And the very first new layer of asphalt poured by Tortoise Construction just the previous day refused to set in any manner other than goopily.

“We’ll need to remove it and start again,” said the foreman. “And quickly: it’s only getting worse the longer it sits there, and we’ve taken so much time already. We need the machines back ASAP.”
“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank, who did not perspire and who did not give any signal as to the whereabouts of the machinery in question. His smile did not waver, his remorse was not visible.

***

The leaves came down fast that year: September’s end just barely in sight when they sighed and slipped free, withered and crinkled. They clotted the ground in their millions, they stuck to the new road, they became sodden with morning dew and formed thick fat blankets that carpeted the whole town in a slippery film that could send anything from a toddler to a full-sized construction rig skidding merrily across the road and into an adult’s leg or a senior living home.

“Frank,” begged his business partner. “Frank. This is not a good look. We need to make a statement. Please for the love of god, just apologize or look contrite or do anything, anything at all. We need to fix this. Please. PLEASE.”
“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank. His teeth never showed, his lips never unsealed, his gums were not visible. Legal proceedings filled his inbox and simply slipped around him, like running water.

***

October came and went, and with its end came an early snap frost. The ground chilled and so did the asphalt, the last of its first layer only just now being laid down. It cracked, it crumbled, it shuddered, it broke apart under the wheels of the trucks, and in one case it broke off the wheels of one of the largest, heaviest, and most expensive trucks.

“Please,” said the foreman. “Please. Please Frank. Please get it fixed quickly. Please. For the love of everything. Please please please.”
“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank.

The foreman was taken away by some of the older and more sympathetic members of the road crew, who chipped in to get her just drunk enough to make it through the week.

***

It was November. The first snow was forecast for next week. The first of the second layer of asphalt was to be laid down this very day. Everyone was on site and ready to go.

Everyone.

“Frank,” said the foreman, desperately using this opportunity to look him directly in the eye. “Where’s our paychecks?”

Frank’s eye contact did not waver, but he did not look back. “Slow and steady wins the race.”

The asphalt was pouring, the weather was fine, the shovels and the rollers and the rakes were all there. Everyone looked at Frank.

He gazed blissfully at the asphalt as it puddled by his feet.

“Frank. We need to get paid.”
“Slow and steady wins the race,” said Frank.
“It can do by itself,” said the oldest crewman present. Then they all spat on the ground, one at a time, and walked off.

Frank watched this with unfurrowed brow and light heart, and was not moved.

This mattered, because that was why the asphalt engulfed his right leg.

Nobody was there to see what happened next, but judging by the very small and exactly round hole left in the middle of the road Frank got out at some point – not that anyone checked too hard. The rest of Tortoise Construction went to work somewhere else, and some of them came back in and finished the roads that spring. And they did it properly, which was pretty slow and steady, and the funny thing was that it didn’t take long at all.

Because slow and steady may win the race; but doing nothing’s just stuck in place.

Serena had been a basically okay person. She was the model of filial piety on her good days; raised two more or less functional adults whose defects were considered par for the course among their peers; helped contribute nominally to her parents’ funerals; produced a socially normative amount of waste carbon; and occasionally always had time for her friends.

No, thought Eleanor. She didn’t deserve this. Nobody deserved this. Nobody deserved to have this happen at their funeral. Nobody deserved their cousin Beatrice sitting at their funeral, sobbing slightly into a cloth, with a single, devastating whorl of clotted hairs dangling directly in the center of her back like a bloated tick on a chimpanzee’s spine. Nobody deserved to have that nightmarish snarl detach from the scalp of its host and dangle from their chair and slowly pendulum in the gentle breeze of the air conditioning at their funeral, doubtlessly drawing the eye and mind and overwhelming horror of every friend, relation, and staff member present, distracting them from the (heartfelt, touching, reassuring) eulogies being spoken at that very moment, Eleanor was sure of it, if only she could bring herself to look away from the oh my god was that dandruff or lice or just desiccated conditioner WHAT TH

For the good of cousin Beatrice, for the good of dear departed Serena, for the good of everyone present, for the good of society itself, something had to be done. Stealthily. Quickly. Carefully. The sort of thing one needed a particular set of skills to do, such as those gained by a lifetime spent producing tiny model ships inside bottles.

Since it was Eleanor that had that, it was Eleanor that did that. A swift, sure pluck. And lo, a little light and warmth was returned to the world, and the angels crept back into the room, and the eulogy concluded and was received with the care and attention that would have been denied it in a time and a place where such things were left to gallivant on the backs of chairs unseen and unheard.

“Hey.”
Eleanor was at peace. Eleanor was fine. Eleanor was thinking of ships in bottles, of tweezers manipulating threads; of hooks pulling masts upright.

“Hey.”
Eleanor was not thinking about what was curled inside the palm of her right hand like a tiny encrusted nightmare larva.

“Hey, get up. It’s almost your turn to say goodbye.”

Oh no. Eleanor had no pockets.

A gentle hand on her arm, deeply respectful of her bereavement. She shot upright, fist clenched for fight and flight, and found neither: oh god she was being sent down the aisle, oh god the coffin was in front of her, oh god she was going to be holding this travesty of a hank of a lock of keratinous waste until the service ended, oh god she could feel the oils and unguents coating and coagulating it seeping through her pores into her precious, vulnerable internal environment, oh god, oh god, oh god help her now, could any sign or symbol or power that be – good or evil or apathetic – send something at this moment to spare the life and mind of poor, poor Eleanor, so recently troubled by the death of her cousin?

And in precise response to that exact train of thought, Eleanor stood at Serena’s coffin, in which lay Serena, and a nice dress, and a small bouquet, and not much else. A well-fitted coffin, but a spacious one.

Lots and lots of room.

***

If she didn’t think about it as she did it, it was like she wasn’t doing it, right? It was just a thing that happened.

And Serena didn’t say anything at all.

There was no dinner afterwards – too many polite tears would water down the plates – but there was a small buffet, which Eleanor attended. She was careful to only eat with her left hand.

“It’ll come back to haunt us.”
“No it won’t there’s no proof,” said Eleanor reflexively. She’d just put a ship in a bottle, that was all.

“Oh but this all IS proof,” said the speaker, who she realized belatedly was not her conscience but a family friend(?) named Angus and about three glasses of red wine in excess. “She’s the first of our generation to go, you know, and in days to come, the pattern that began here will” and so on and on he went and Eleanor was once again able to re-enter the peaceful and confined space inside her head, as long as she didn’t look into the crowd and see the expanse of cousin Beatrice’s back.

Which was silly, because cousin Beatrice’s back was now fine, because someone had done something about that and everything was fine now. Finding this logic impeccable, Eleanor fastened and secured its latch with an extra glass, and then another, and then a bigger glass of something else. Then she found Angus again and got into an argument with him about municipal politics so she had a better reason to remember hating him for.

There was nothing else to remember hating him for, because nothing he said had reminded her of anything else she hadn’t not done.

***

It had rained all the following week, which Eleanor felt was unthematic (surely it should rain DURING a funeral), a stroke of good luck (even if it SHOULD rain during a funeral, few funeral attendees want to be the ones getting rained on), and a blessing.

She did her best work when it was miserable out. The low light, the tapping of raindrops, and the cool air all kept her brain comfortably filled with softly-grained static except for the parts moving her hands around, which could expand to fill her entire skull, body, and room in that order.

Tip tap tip, tick tick, tup tup on the roof. Tip tip tip tap tap tap on the worktable. Plink plank plunk plonk between them both. Wet and explosive above, dry and hard below. Perfect symmetry, perfect absence of harmony, all-encompassing and infinite and thus an excellent explanation for why she had carefully avoided noticing the other sound all morning.

It was not wet or dry or hard or explosive or anything else. It was soft and scuttling and it sounded like someone saying shhh, shh, shh-shh, shush-shuff, or maybe like an elder dog – one that looked like a mop – rustling in its bed to get comfortable. It was very difficult for Eleanor to completely ignore all of those things, especially since this was the second day in a row they’d been happening without stopping and her morning papers were probably slowly being melted into pulpy ink on her front doorstep.

She wondered if the paper delivery guy had seen anything. Then she wondered how she’d failed to avoid wondering that. Then she started wondering and didn’t stop and her hands started thinking about what they were doing and a needle-fine instrument swayed when it should’ve swung and took out a tiny little smokestack.

“Fuck,” she said. And with that – the first word spoken in days – everything snapped into focus: she was awake, and sapient, and an adult, and she was imprisoned in her own house because somehow she’d been so badly driven to anxiety by a mildly awkward moment at a funeral that she’d rather gaslight herself into reclusedom than look out her window to see what was making the funny noise outdoors, when it was almost certainly the stupid branches on the stupid tree in the stupid front yard getting waterlogged and snapping low enough to scrape at her door.

So Eleanor stood up (stumbling a bit – numb knees), and strode with (limping) purpose to her front door, where she looked out the window and saw a tangled lump of filthy hair, caked with dirt and clawing at her doorknob while trailing the (somewhat worse-for-wear) corpse of Serena, dress, withered flowers, and all.

“Fuck,” she repeated herself.

Then she went and got a glass and an extra glass and a bigger glass and thought things over until she passed out.

When she woke up, the bottle was empty and things made sense.

***

Eleanor looked at the door. Eleanor looked through the door. Eleanor stood before the door and took a deep, deep breath.

Then she opened the door – interrupting the hair mid-scratch – and held up the bottle.

“Hey. I’m sorry. Want a better place?”

***

It took a long time to brush and comb out the dirt and the grunge, strand by strand.

It took care and squinting and many lenses to rinse away the worst of the rot without washing the hairs down the drain.

It took tremendous, painstaking effort to fill the bottle without cramping or wadding, millimetre by millimetre.

It took deep and passionate focus to do this without inhaling too hard and gagging on the smell and letting your hands shake everywhere and ruin everything forever.

These were the sort of things one needed a particular set of skills to do, such as those gained by a lifetime spent producing tiny model ships inside bottles.

Since it was Eleanor that had that, it was Eleanor that did that. And it was Eleanor that held in her hands an empty and unlabelled wine bottle, one now filled to the brim with long, lustrous, full-bodied hair that looked as clean and fresh as anything a barbershop could bake.

“This will do for a long time yet,” she told it, as the cork went in. “And I’ll work out something with the will so it won’t happen twice. Okay?”

The light shone on the bottle when she turned it. She wasn’t sure if that meant anything, but her head hurt and her eyes itched and she was willing to let it be for now.

***

The funeral home helped with Serena’s return, not to mention with keeping it quiet. Nobody solicits business from people who let ships out of bottles.