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On the morning after the day Barnister’s spouse left him, he went down to the inland sea and saw the sun rise over it and it shone blue, blue, blue, blue until he felt as calm and clear as the water itself.

“Ah!  If only I could bottle this up and keep it with me,” he sighed.

Then he recalled that he was a wizard, and so he pulled a small and secret flask from his pocket and performed some large and obvious gestures and spoke some words that weren’t and he did just that, and Barnister the wizard went home with a vial full of blue.

The sea itself was left blank.  This induced surprise. By the next week it caused concern.  By the week after that it sparked anger.  By the week after that it spurred action. 

***

The representatives of the inland sea had made much fuss of their concerns among their own people, but the first joint summit for the formation of a special task force to solve their problem was also their first chance to complain about it to strangers. 

“The water discomforts and disconcerts the fish, and they seek to hide so deep from the sun that we can’t see them,” lamented Hebb, seniormost Angler and Master Netsmith of the shoreline villagers, dangling his feet in the cool transparency of the water’s edge.  High above him brooded the stony headland.. “And if we cannot eat fish, we’ll starve. No offense.”
“None taken,’ said K, the largest and therefore the most important of the predatory sharks, whose mouth could historically swallow a human whole without stretching.  She nosed the Angler’s toes out of the waves with her snout-tip, the idle fidgeting of a presently-sated predator.  “We eat them too, and now we can’t. A dark back is no camouflage when the water has no colour.  We take longer to starve than you, but we’ll still get there.”

certain refracted wavelengths = unavailable – blue water, spoke the most low-bound tendril of cloudbank 43814-2, hovering above the empty waves and the solid stone and just below the sky, which was having to pull double time to make up for the lack of blue elsewhere.  we + you = agreement.

“Then as all our people are suffering…mostly equally,” said Hebb, “I propose that we send an expedition to return the blue to our sea from the wizard’s grasp and punish him to the fullest extent.”

“Eat him.”

wizard –life = +greater good

A gull landed atop Hebb’s skull and introduced herself at fullest volume. 

After K had fished the Master Netsmith from the waves and 43814-2 had spared a small gust to dry the water from his lungs and a raven had been found to translate, they had word from their scoutgull. 

“I have found the lair of the wizard Barnister, who has made our food source so confusing and vexing and reduced the amounts of secondhand fish guts we can steal from you useless gadabouts,” said the raven.  “I have omitted the swearing,” she added to the gull.  “Forgive me.  It was very good.”

“Master Fisher Sepp will go, quickest with the spear and strongest-puller of the net,” said Hebb.

+mightiest thunderheads, pledged 43814-2.    time x distance x hail = +wizard pulverization

“A shoal of hammerheads could help,” said K.  “A few hundred are passing through.”
“His dwelling is in the low hills of the Blue Marbles, amongst the rubble and rock and through many twisted tunnels and caves, under the earth and out of sight,” continued the scout.

“Oh,” said Hebb.

“Great,” said K.

~, said 43814-2.

The meeting continued after some time, but the spark of eagerness had flown from it. 

***

The next day, Master Fisher Sepp set forth to the base of the Blue Marbles.  In her hand was her walking stick (that was also her spear); in her pack were supplies and her casting-net; at her belt were a glass lightning-spun bottle containing a small and helpful fog patch designated 52-947173-68, and a small waterskin holding c, the youngest pup of K, twelve hours old and already possessing an uncountable number of teeth.  The sky was bright blue and clear and beautiful, and this irked Sepp almost as much as her traveling companions did.

“If you’re just a baby, why are you this heavy?” she demanded, shaking the waterskin.

+, said 52-947173-68.

“Don’t you start.  She can speak for herself.”

But alas, c would not speak, as she was too young.  So Sepp walked the long trek to the Blue Marbles with only herself and a bad mood and a blue, painful reminder of a sky as company, but when the scoutgull swooped down to show her the way, she saw no tunnel, no cave, no passage into the stone: only a pool of drably blueless water, from which loomed a great and mucky mass of snarled vegetation. 

“In there?” she asked the scoutgull.

It glared disdainfully at her in the manner of gulls, then said something impossibly rude and mercifully unspecific.  Then it jabbed its beak empathetically. 

“How far down?  Even I can’t hold my breath all the way.”

+, said 52-947173-68. 

“Right,” said Sepp.  “Fine.  Does the shark want to chip in too?”
-, said 52-947173-68.

“Correct.  But let her say it herself next time.  Well, guess there’s another way.”
So Sepp took her casting-net from her pack and spent some time weaving particular strands this way and that way in it, and she set aside her boots and waited until the occupant of the sludge-lodge came forth to shore: a beaver with the head and shell of a snapping turtle, large as a horse and surly ashore.  It sheared down three trees in short order, then took them in its mouth and made to dive – and as it did so Sepp cast her net and seized its tail firmly, drawn down into the depths of the pool and then into a crevice, and from that crevice into a channel, and from that channel into a long, rough-cut tunnel, and from that tunnel slowly, slowly upwards into a light that was almost lost in the sparks flashing in the Master Fisher’s eyes. 

She breached the surface and rolled aside as the snapping beaver departed the way it had come, having spat out its load of harvested timber into a roaring fireplace that was the centerpiece of what seemed to be Barnister’s mudroom.  Soft torches lit chiseled walls dabbed with murals that moved and whispered to each other; the ceiling was draped with hides from terrible beasts and strings of beads made from ancient vertebrae; and on the floor sat a single giant, terrible set of muddied boots: the right for a five-toed foot, and the left for a single massive uncloven hoof.

“These won’t fit me that well,” said Sepp.  But she put them on anyways, because she didn’t care if she was tracking mud through the wizard’s halls and she didn’t trust the flooring. 

=, said 52-947173-68.

“Hush you.  Be more like c.”

-, said 52-947173-68.

“Hush hush.”  So saying, Sepp took her own advice and kicked in the front door, which was wrought of cold iron and boiling ghosts.  They vanished without a fuss under the heel of her boot, and she was in the laboratories of Barnister the Wizard.

There was a lot of it.  The following is an incomplete list

An observatory, containing a magnetic telescope for examining the stars through the ceiling; an eggusscope for examining the hidden stars located beneath the earth; and a teloscope for examining the inbuilt purpose of anything you aimed it at (a tiny reminder was pinned to it: DO NOT USE THIS AT YOURSELF)

An alchemical workbench, for transmuting lead into gold and gold into lead and life into death and death into life and, in the process, turning lungs into wheezing wrecks. 

A jeweler’s bench, with a beautiful red ruby still bleeding from a half-stitched cut in its side and weeping quietly; a necklace made entirely of impossibly sharp needles; and a half-disassembled wedding ring held in suspension by sixteen small wooden homunculi, unraveled and waiting to be analyzed. 

A forge with three-quarters of a metal shark assembled in it, still missing the steering controls and the roof.

A vault heaped with golden coins, each and every one bearing eight tiny spider legs, a monocular glare, and a pair of eagerly scissoring little mandibles.

A mushroom garden with mushroom redwoods, fungal ferns, and mycelial pines, all six inches tall.

A noisome workbench with a slumbering snapping beaver strapped to it, half the table’s restraints already clutched and chewed messily in its maw.

A pit with no bottom and a voice that called ‘wait.  stop.  come here.  come down.’

And a locked door with a single beast set at guard before it that had seven arms and six legs and ten claws on each limb.  Out of a spirit of fairness and compromise, Barnister appeared to not have given it a head. 

Sepp waited patiently until it scratched itself, then hurled her spear with silent grace.  It bounced off its skin as if it were plate iron and clattered noisily to the floor, whereupon the beast reached out its limbs and began to systemically search the room by touch. 

! said 52-947173-68. 

“That’s not helping,” retorted Sepp, who was balanced atop a crystal ball filled with ephemeral vapours.  She dove and rolled as a hand groped towards her, sliding underneath a table laden with a lithographic rune-press and dishevelled stacks of magical brochures, which creaked in feeble, long-suffering protest.  “Can you do something that helps?”
+, said 52-947173-68.

“Oh really?” said Sepp, crawling inside an overturned cauldron that had recently been the home of seven hundred luminescent slugs, all of which were now breaking for freedom, or at least the ceiling.  “What, want me to just pop the bottle and let you at it then?”

+, said 52-947173-68.

“Sure,” said Sepp, as the cauldron was yanked loose and she dangled above a hydra’s-pit of pointed limbs.  “Go on.”  And she popped loose the cork of 52-947173-68’s glass bottle, which permitted the fog patch to spit loose a single token into her palm: a tiny assemblage of fused sand and metal, as delicate as a spider web and as innocuous as a smear of red in the morning sky. 

Sepp squeezed it experimentally.  The railgun crackled with a short, sharp spark of lightning and discharged a tiny metallic pellet a little smaller than a fishhook through the monster’s body with a sharp crack of explosive heat and violence, leaving a sizzling hole and a rapidly-self-disassembling fireball. 

“Ah,” said Sepp, and then “ow!” and following that (redundantly): “hot!”

=, said 52-947173-68, who remained in its bottle.

“Smartass.  Want me to put the cork back in?”

+, said 52-947173-68. And so it was done. 

The door behind the monster’s corpse was closed tightly with six locks and two bolts and a gigantic adamant clasp, all inscrutably inscribed with insidious symbols, but the hinges were plain iron and on the wrong side, so it took only a bit of tedious shaving with some of the more recognizable tools from Barnister’s forge before the whole gigantic edifice collapsed to the ground with a deafening SLAM.

Before the sound could began to echo Sepp was through the door, spear in one hand and railgun in the other. 

Through the door was a grotto. 

In the grotto was Barnister the wizard. 

And there, everywhere, on everything, in everything, of everything, was Blue.  True Blue, the kind reflected in the waves on a bright morning, the kind that shines and turns ripples into shadow-play art, the kind that almost hurts to look at harder than the sun it reflects. 

Sepp had caught fish in that.  She’d grown up in that.  She aimed, and she threw her spear into that blue as she had a thousand thousand times from first juvenile misses to adolescent overconfidence to adult mastery and she knew even before the spear left her hand that she’d miscalculated, because this was the first time she’d thrown this spear into that blue without having to account for refraction. 

This meant that the spear went into Barnister’s side instead of his heart.

Much like the seagull, the words he spoke after that were unknown, but unkind. Unlike the seagull, they made the air crawl and fill with what felt like invisible thread.  Sepp’s dive towards him turned as sluggish as fluttering paper dropped from a second-story window, and before she could touch ground again Barnister’s hand whipped out and he tapped her on the brow with his index finger, which bore a great and gem’d ring, and she was immediately transformed into a fish of large size and great inability to do anything but flap and gasp. 

“You cannot have it back,” said Barnister to Sepp, as he removed the spear from his side and tapped the wound with his index finger – gone, vanished.  “It is mine.  It reminds me of the good times, before the bad times, before everything was sad.  As long as it is here, I don’t have to think.  I can just be.  You intrude upon my thoughtlessness so thoughtlessly.”  He sighed like a mother whose children had avoided a simple chore.  “Now I will have to kill you, even though you never could have killed me with such small and simple tools.  A fishing-spear?  And I heard (and smell) the shot of a railgun.”  He held the glass bottle in his hand and shook it gently.

-, said 52-947173-68.

“Electromagnetism and ferric devices?  Your physics are inadequate.  Surely you brought a real weapon.  Surely you were not sent here to die without cause.  Speak, fish.”

Sepp gasped and flapped and Barnister sighed and tapped her once with his index finger, so that she was now a fish of large size and great inability to do anything but flap and gasp and talk and lie there.

“It’s, in, the, skin.”

“A mighty weapon it must be,” marvelled Barnister with a sarcasm nearly happy, and he opened the waterskin and reached inside and immediately lost three of his fingers from pointer to ring.  c, by contrast, gained her first real meal, except for the nasty hard part that she spat onto the floor.  The ring landed atop Sepp with a tap, so that she was now a Master Fisher of typical size and ability to use spears and nets. 

Barnister was presently a wizard with the inability to do anything but shake his bleeding hand and howl. 

Even inadequate physics were enough to do something about that.  And later, after half an hour of Sepp playing hot-and-cold with 52-947173-68, they heaped a pile of delicate wizardly objects in Barnister’s blast furnace that created a metaphysical enough blaze to do a little something more.  His heart threatened and cursed them, his liver cried and pleaded with them, and his brain tried to escape into his gallbladder, but all of that went away in the wet-sounded flames with the rest of him, leaving just a stain and a smooth, still-cool metal vial. 

Sepp opened it.  Blue went in. 

It was really hard to make herself plug in the stopper.  It was harder still to leave it in for the whole trip back, through the flooded tunnel clinging to the snapping beaver’s heel, through hill and dale, bush and thicket.  Sepp took her mind off it by stopping to catch small game, the best of which she put whole into the waterskin.  Heroism might be its own reward, but gratitude could add a little more to that, and doing it kept her fingers from itching to pull loose the cork for just a little peak, to make sure it hadn’t leaked, that it was really in there, that it really looked like she remembered it did when she was three years old and her grandmother first let her hold a line and thread a hook. 

But on the last hill, the last mile, the last leg, c was finally full and Sepp could see the inland sea, flat and ephemeral and empty against the vibrant sunset, and she stopped and felt her hands outright shake.

-, said 52-947173-68.

“It’s only a little early.”
-, said 52-947173-68.

“What’s the worst that could happen?”
-, said 52-947173-68.

“But I really, really, really want to.”
~, said 52-947173-68.

Sepp sighed.  “You’re no fun.  You’re going to be a real big front someday, you know that?”

+, said 52-947173-68. 

So they walked the last horrible mile as Sepp’s feet ached in their misshapen boots, as her brain itched and burned, as c finally grew more restless than not in her waterskin and began to poke and nudge and kick like Sepp’s own children had (impressive, without feet), all the way down to the headland.

It was too late.  Nobody was up.  Nobody would see this but them.

“Hell with it,” said Sepp.  And she held the vial under the glassy-gone surface and popped the cork. 

It was a rare thing, to see a colour come into full force like that all at once.  The closest most could imagine would be leaves in autumn, or a dying reef of coral.

This was more like a bomb, but for your eyes.  It hurt, it made Sepp shout a swear worse than anything a seagull could muster, it made her laugh and cry and cover her eyes, and it made her whoop as she poured her waterskin into the blue, blue, blue and laugh even harder as c flicked her fins and dove down into a kind of water she’d never known to exist before this very moment, as happy and homed as any fish ever was or would be.  It made her do a stupid little dance as she let out 52-947173-68, who lingered and swirled over the new blue waves and shimmered with glee around her before scudding out across the bay to find its masters across the horizon, wispy form growing thicker and fatter and flecked with spray. 

Only then, when her breathing finally slowed down and she lay at peace with the sand, when the dark was finally turning the blue to purple, when she really was so tired she could just about drop, she took the vial and tapped it with Barnister’s ring.

They both turned to sand and ran through her fingers.

And she went home and slept, and dreamed of blue, and woke to find it true. 

Once upon a time there were three sisters, oldest, middlest, and youngest, and they did inherit their parent’s food truck.  But alas, the kingdom was in an economic slump, and few purchased complete meals for lunch when instead they might buy their own bread.  So the fortunes of the sisters dwindled, and although they refused to compromise on the freshness of their ingredients there came the day when they soon would no longer be able to afford rent for their apartment, and the oldest sister proclaimed that she would seek out the sand witch.

“Sisters,” she proclaimed, “I would seek out the sand witch.” 

“That’s a terrible idea,” said the middlest sister.  “She’s capricious and cruel and vexatious and she refuses to share tips.”

“Nonetheless,” said the oldest sister, “she is wise in the ways of food service, and it is said that whosoever does bring her a sandwich the likes of which she has ne’er before seen shalt be rewarded beyond measure, for she is both old and rich.”

“You’re going to get absolutely cooked,” said the youngest sister.

“Fear not for me, my sisters!” cried the oldest sister.  “For I have a weapon most secret and cunning!  I go now to bring us our fortunes!”  And she departed, weep and whinge though her siblings might – which they did, a lot. 

The oldest sister travelled down the  lone and level sands of the beach upon which the three had plied their trade long into the evening, and as night fell she hid underneath an umbrella painted black and made no sound, and so she was witness to the rising of the sand witch’s castle from the depths of the waterfront, grit and froth spraying and wheezing from its silica parapets and cold dark water streaming from its dim and damp windows, empty of pane and emitting odours most tempting and disturbing.  Ten thousand gulls orbited it in ten thousand ways, and when the oldest sister doffed her umbrella they gave ten thousand screams and flew down at her with fierce speed – but she had brought some fries from the food truck, and threw them into the air, and so it was that each gull fought every other gull ten thousand different ways and she was permitted to approach the little bell affixed to a pillar at the edge of the castle’s great fisherman’s-itch-filled moat.

This bell she did ring four times, with a little pause before the third, and only then did she announce herself.  “Sand witch!  Sand witch!  Sand witch!  I am here, I am here!  I am come to bring you that which you seek!”

And the great drawbridge fell open, which was made of a thousand broken and shattered and long-lost little toy plastic shovels, and the oldest sister passed over it safely for she had worn her sandals rather than gone barefoot.

Within was the sand witch’s lair.  And within was the sand witch. Her legs were caked knee-deep in damp sand; her eyes were thick with crusted salt; her body was wrapped in a sodden and worn beach towel; there was sea-weed in her hair and her skin glowed red-hot with sunstroke. 

She was baking bread. 

“You have come to offer me that which I have not seen, and for that your rudeness and presumptuousness in besting my castle’s defenses are forgiven for the moment,” said the sand witch.  “Now show me what I seek.  Show me what I demand.  Show me a sandwich the likes of which I have never before imagined.”

“Lo!” shouted the oldest sister.  And she reached into her delivery satchel and brought out a bag, and brought out a wrapped foodstuff, and brought out a single, immaculately grilled hot dog with mustard and relish and onion.

“A hot dog is meat and condiments placed betwixt a bun,” said the sand witch.  “It is both obviously and trivially a sandwich.  Now come here, for you have kept me from my baking and now you shall speed it along its way!”  And with a snap of her flour-coated fingers and a dash of salt the oldest sister was no more, but was instead made into bread, and the dawn found her sister’s food truck one staff member short. 

***

It was a hard thing to run a food truck short a set of hands (especially when those hands were the quickest and surest at the griddle), and although the two remaining sisters did their best and held their tears inside and never once compromised on the freshness of their ingredients, their fortunes continued to dwindle and there came the day when they soon would no longer be able to afford gas for their truck.

“I hate to say it, but I think I need to go and visit that sand witch,” said the middlest sister.  “We need an actual miracle to get us out of this hole.”
“You’re going to get utterly creamed,” said the youngest sister.

“Well, I’ve got a plan,” said the middlest sister.  “Just take care of yourself, okay?  And if I don’t come back, don’t call the police because you KNOW they still remember what happened in tenth grade.  Love you.”  And she left, not looking back so as not to see her sister’s grumbling tears. 

The middlest sister walked on the sand in a particular way; her left foot dragged, then it jumped, then it skipped, then it hopped, then her right did the same, then her left did the same, then her right, and as she did this she turned and spun and wound until she had treaded a particular sort of thing into the beach and from that particular sort of thing the cool evening air of the empty beach slid aside and there!  Standing as if it had been there all along, towering and grim, bannered and ribboned, it was the sand witch’s castle.

Immediately after doing this a million crabs arose from the sands and clicked their pinchers with rhythmic and menacing intent.  But the middlest sister knew this trick, and she threw to the beach a handful of chicken bones left over from the day’s cooking, and each crab took one end of one bone in one claw and the end of another in the second claw, only to find that some other crab was holding the far end of each bone, and the resulting fight had three million sides and a million losers, which left the middlest sister clear to walk up to the great barred gate of the sand witch’s castle. 

“Sand witch!” she called, knocking four times with a little pause before the third.  “I’ve got what you’re looking for!”

There was no reply, but the gate slid open and upward into the ceiling.  The middlest sister walked into the dripping shade and the noxious droppings of the ten thousand seagulls from the day before oozed and showered and splattered from the ceiling high above, but she had worn a big sunhat and so it troubled her little. 

Beyond the foul vapours lay the sand witch’s lair.  And within was the sand witch.  She was wearing a slightly torn one-piece and two sandals mismatched in size and shade alike, and in her free hand she clutched a plastic tumbler filled with ice and cocktails. 

She was stirring sauces.

“You have come to offer me that which I have not seen, and for that your rudeness and presumptuousness in besting my castle’s defenses are forgiven for the moment,” said the sand witch, without looking up from the swirling motions of her spoon.  “Now show me what I seek.  Show me what I demand.  Show me a sandwich the likes of which I have never before imagined.”

“Alright, here goes,” said the middle sister.  And she pulled a paper bag from her backpack, and pulled out a foil wrapper, and pulled out a tortilla, freshly-baked and filled with finely-seasoned beef, salsa, and guac.

“Although this is a single piece of folded flatbread, it still clearly contains a filling of various other ingredients and sauces, and is thus easily and readily identifiable as a sandwich, the likes of which I have seen many times before,” said the sand witch.  “Now come – you have nearly paused me from stirring my sauce, and now you’ll prevent it from breaking!”  And with a wave of her spoon and a shake of her salt, the middlest sister was emulsified into the sand witch’s saucepan, and the next day’s sun rose upon a food truck manned only by one.

***

The youngest sister was fast, the very fastest of her family.  She was not the most careful cook, or the most skilled, yet she could put together three chores before her sisters finished one each.

But even she could not run a whole food truck with a menu intended to be prepared by three all by herself.

So shockingly quickly, despite everything the youngest sister did, and everything she could do, and all her speed and skill and threatening anonymous letters to the police, and her utter and TOTAL refusal to compromise on the freshness of her ingredients, there came the day when she soon would no longer be able to afford the truck’s license

She stared at the pile of bills (charges) and pile of bills (tips) and she stared at the beach and she stared at the bills (of the nearby seagulls) and she thought to herself and she said “the hell with it.”

So she put up the ‘CLOSED’ sign and she left.  She did look back though, and more than once.  The truck looked so lonely. 

The sun was setting, leaving a golden trail over the quiet water.  The youngest sister walked that golden trail until she met the horizon, where the sand witch’s castle rose up from the water high into the air, earth-toned and smug.  Under the water’s surface boiled a trillion angry little fish with angry little mouths, but the youngest sister was in a vicious mood and personally kicked each of them to death one after another very very quickly.  Then she stamped up to the door of the castle and kicked it four times really fast without pausing.

“Hey fuck-o!” she shouted.  “Open up!”  And this caught the door by surprise, and it did so.  The youngest sister passed beyond it, through deep earthenware tunnels still glowing with the hot red-and-pink burn of the setting sun, and if she hadn’t put on sunscreen she would’ve been in for a real pickle but she had, so she wasn’t.

Beyond lay the sand witch’s lair.  And within was the sand witch.  She wore sunglasses (cracked) and a bikini top (faded) and some short shorts (ripped, both intentionally and otherwise). 

She was slicing meats.

“You have come to offer me that which I have not seen, and for that your rudeness and presumptuousness in besting my castle’s defenses are forgiven for the moment,” said the sand witch, without looking up from the quick and decisive cuts of her knife.  “Now show me what I seek.  Show me what I demand.  Show me a sandwich the likes of which I have never before imagined.”

“Here,” said the youngest sister.  And she held out her hand.

The sand witch looked up.  Then she looked on.  Then she raised her sunglasses.  Then she raised her eyebrow.

“It’s an open face sandwich,” said the youngest sister.  “So it only has one slice of bread.”
“Huh.”
“And it’s gluten-free, so it doesn’t have that slice of bread.”

“Ah.”
“It’s vegetarian, so I held the meat.”
“Oh.”
“And it’s low-fat, so no sauce or condiments.”
“Hmm.”

The sand witch’s claws tapped thoughtfully on the handle of her knife.

“Where’s the vegetables and other toppings?” she asked, voice curious and entirely unhostile. 

“Shortages.  End of the season and we don’t want to overstock when we have to close down tomorrow.”

“Reasonable,” said the sand witch.  “Now THAT is clever.”

“Thank you, sand witch,” said the youngest sister.

“Weaselly, too.  I like weaselly.”

“Thank you, sand witch.”

“If only this exact argument hadn’t been the principal topic of my crone’s thesis,” sighed the sand witch.  “Now, I think I’ll carve-”

“I believe that the freshness of tomatoes is irrelevant to their worth as an ingredient,” blurted out the youngest sister, and this lie brought upon the sand witch a fury so immediate and all-consuming that it ate her out of existence before she had time to stop. 

The youngest sister searched the sand witch’s castle top to bottom, and she found three things: a throne of sand, a hoard of lost wallets and watches, and a big cooler.

She sat on the throne and commanded the gulls and the crabs and the fish to take the castle to the food truck.  She raided the hoard and paid for the apartments’ rent and the gas and the food truck’s license.  And she opened the cooler and pulled out some fresh bread and bottled sauces, and when they touched the air outside the castle’s walls they were her sisters again, and after that everything was all right until the next summer. 

Zoos In Reviews, by Hermant Munchler

Zormoloch Armageddon’s Zoo of DOOM

This is a shameful column for me to write, for it is an admission that I, dear readers, have become a victim of mine own success: after ten years and over five hundred artful critiques of local animal entertainment facilities, I have finally run so short of grist for my pen that I am forced to stoop to visiting locations for their novelty value. So alas and alack, I hereby present you – my loving and diligent readership – with this, my review of a zoological garden brought to my attention by an anonymous and unposted letter slipped under my front door in the dead of a moonless night that promised me ‘the experience of my lifetime.’ I expected little, and my friends, I was not disappointed in my judgement this day.

HISTORY

Finding myself in the odd position of possessing no personal prior knowledge of Zormoloch Armageddon’s Zoo of DOOM (hitherto referred to as ZAZD for the duration of this missive, so as to avoid sensationalism, save wear and tear on my keyboard, and valiantly defend the shrinking boundaries of the edge of good taste), I turned to my personal library, then the community archives, and finally to that great devilry, the internet. None turned up anything, and so I find myself only able to offer what little information was to be scraped from my letter and the complimentary zoo map and brochure given with my ticket at the gate.

ZAZD was founded ‘in a time before man’s slimy steps befouled the sweet soil of this elder earth,’ by ‘the great singular, the cease’d one, the heedless annihilator, Zormoloch,’ as ‘prison and mansion,’ so as to ‘keep the world secluded from them and all that they represent.’ Invitation is ‘for only those who must.’

I decline to comment on the accuracy of any of these claims. If ZAZD’s marketing is its source, I would scarce be surprised – it certainly fits the intellectual profile of the same individual who advertised their establishment by anonymous midnight post.

SIGNAGE     

ZAZD is, it must be admitted, thoroughly riddled with signposting; one cannot so much as walk down a trail without coming across placards saying this-way-this or that-way-that. However this meticulousness is most thoroughly counterbalanced by the tawdry carnival atmosphere of it all – there is no such thing as a ‘restroom’ when it can be instead announced as an “ETERNAL RESTROOM” and rather than surveying a simple ‘no exit’ posting on a given path you will find yourself perusing ‘DEAD END’ or “NO ESCAPE BEYOND THIS POINT” or “ABANDON HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” It may be October but such tawdry trappings are over the top even for this benightedly commercial month, and it speaks ill of the financial sensibilities of the management who permitted such reckless abuse of the facility’s paint budget (not to mention manpower) on something so useless in the other eleven-twelfths of the year. Finally, I personally noted several glaring typos present on exhibits both throughout the grounds and on the brochure map – the most egregious being the persistent misnaming of the giant panda exhibition as ‘Giant Painda.’ Most unprofessional.

FACILITY CONVENIENCES

As wretched as the naming of the zoo café, restrooms, and rest stops may be, their presentation is even worse. A gnarled and rotted hollow tree with a single antique stool placed inside may appeal to the goth set a la Addams, but it is dreadfully tedious to the rest of us, to say nothing of our weary hams and shanks (and to say LESS than nothing of the splinters). Similarly, the notion that being served your ‘eye scream soda’ from an iron cauldron over a blue flame by a cackling hag is appealing can only be tolerated by one who has never seen the amount of warts, loose drool, and leaking pus coming from what was clearly a laughably made-up high schooler with far too much wart budget in her makeup kit (and may I add, the eyes were far too realistic for my appetite’s sake – there’s kitsch and then there’s shlock and then there’s outright gore).

Also, nobody wants to buy an overpriced, foul-tasting, too-small hot dog in a building named ‘The Bottomless Gullet of Humanity.’ It is not cute, it is not philosophical, it does not make me think or smile, it makes me bored. I am sick of this nudge-and-wink anticapitalism guerilla-marketing hypocritical nonsense, as I was not shy of telling the man in the toad costume when I refused to leave a tip.

THE EXHIBITS
Of course, many minor transgressions in presentation can be forgiven if a zoological garden possesses good exhibits. But what defines a ‘good’ exhibit? An expensive enclosure, or an exciting resident? Both are necessary, but there is a certain I don’t know what (as the tiresome French say, a certain je ne sais quoi) that is unmistakable in its presence or absence. Happily, ZAZD fails at all of the above in numerous ways.

Firstly, the animals are dull and disappointing. The ‘Komodo Drake’ is clearly a komodo dragon that some idiotic prankster had glued a pair of wings to. The ‘megarilla’ is nothing but a perfectly ordinary gorilla that has been heavily overfed (and probably given steroids). The ‘medusa’ is nothing more than seventy-six (or seventy-seven; I lost count) slightly larger than average king cobras that have been painted different colours and just happen to enjoy spending much of their time compacted close together in a large ball. And the so-called ‘werewolf’ exhibit was clearly the work of a delinquent but devious keeper who has trained a perfectly ordinary wolf to do things like ‘answer’ questions and math problems with barks, urinate through the fence on guests who speak critically of him, and smoke cigarettes (offensive not only in odour and the potential for harm to the guests through secondhand smoke, but also in the cheapness of the brands provided). All these beasts acted healthy and happy but the sheer scale of flim-flammery and Barnumism on display makes it impossible for a serious onlooker to feel anything towards them other than a disdainful and deserved superiority.

Secondly, the enclosures were as overdone and overacted as the rest of ZAZD’s affect – whether it was the ‘vampire cavern’ (laughable – we’re on granite bedrock out here, and we’re expected to believe this ‘limestone karst’ topography is plausible? paper-mache no doubt!) with its conveniently-shadow-obscured beast (a fruitbat with some perspective tricks, faux blood on its chest, and a strobelight attached to its head); the ‘pool of bottomless depths’ (a pond filled with mirrors and floodlights to create the illusion of being over a foot deep, inhabited by a simple everyday alligator someone had fitted with fins, a crest, a fluked tail, and glowing contact lenses); or the ‘behemoth’ of ‘the burning plains’ (a meadow someone set on ‘fire’ with red lighting and fluttering red streamers and dry ice smoke, inhabited by what I’m absolutely certain was just a regular elephant or an animatronic dinosaur or CGI or something else like that), you are sure to be surprised and appalled at the absolute lack of shame with which these hucksters will take even the simplest piece of showmanship and utterly bungle it to the point of unbelievability through their own delusional inability to grasp the brute unreality of what they’ve created. It really looks real to them I expect, the poor humbugs.

Thirdly, the staff were insolent when I threw peanuts at the animals to see if they did anything interesting. This remains my bellweather test of an institution’s quality, and as expected ZAZD failed it. If you MUST have your minimum-wage upstart-carnies speak to those who have paid you money, they should do so quietly and respectfully with downturned eyes and grateful words, and not use phrases like ‘stop that’ or ‘not permitted,’ no matter how sweetly they precede them with please-and-thank-yous.

VERDICT: Zero out of five peanuts.

Well readers, this is sure to be of no shock to you, but I cannot recommend you visit ZAZD. You should stay at home. I surely wish I could, for when I made to depart the premises I found that not only was there no exit depicted on the brochure, there were no paths leading to any exit at all. I went to the ticket booth to complain only to find that it had vanished; looked for a staff member to complain to and realized that they’d all gone home; and was only alerted by the faintest scraping sound of metal-on-metal to the realization that all the exhibit doors and gates had been opened for the night. Having been forced to barricade myself inside the nearest ‘ETERNAL RESTROOM’ for the rest of the evening, I have spent my time composing this – my final Zoo In Review – on the (low-quality single-ply) toilet paper and preparing to hide it in one of the toilet tanks, in the hopes it shall be discovered by a kindly janitor and taken to my employers for publication, thereby sparing others from my fate. I believe it is safe to say that this is my last will and testament, as the megarilla has at last removed the outer door and now all that stands between me and being cast into ‘the palace-pit of Zormoloch’ that the werewolf has been howling of for the past hour is a single shoddy toilet stall doo

The car stopped with a wet squelch six minutes away from the docks, no house in sight.

“There he is,” said Curtis, pointing with a quick jut of his chin.

“Sorry?” The third thing Sue had said to him after ‘hello’ and ‘sure, let me get my bag,’ and it was an apology. Overconfidence was an unattractive thing in a student, but neither was anxiety. Oh well, too late now. One word too late now. One word and a flight and a ferry and a three minute car ride too late now.

Then part of the marsh raised itself higher to look at them through the drizzle, chewing, and like a reflex she started a checklist like she was looking through a reference book again the night before an exam.

Long, shaggy coat of feathers. Broad, thick bill. Short, monoclawed front limbs, useless for flight. Consumption of both water and land plants. Six feet tall at the shoulder. Either the shorewalker wren or Nicollette’s wren. The pale nictating membrane fluttering over his eyes as he watched them suggested Nicollette’s wren. Anyways, the shorewalker wren was extinct.

The membrane slid away clean again, white peeling off the deep-red like bone from muscles. The beak never stopped moving, internal shearing structures slicing up cellulose and fiber with an efficiency a blender manufacturer would weep at.

“Can we get out? My camera is waterproof.”

“You don’t want to. It’s four pm.”

“Oh?”
Curtis took his foot off the brakes by way of answering. The car lurched onwards with a little spittle of gravel, tiny splashes landing in the puddles on the road.

Sue turned in her seat to watch the last living Nicollette’s wren until they went around a bend. He didn’t return the favour, already face-deep in a fresh shrub.

***

The apartment was small and cramped and felt damper than the air outside somehow, but the couch was the kind where the lumps didn’t prevent it from being soft and there were reams of notes, volumes of notes, binders of notes, and she was on the same island as the last living Nicollette’s wren, and all of those things combined made up for the fact that Curtis still hadn’t spoken more words to her in person than he’d written in their three preliminary emails, two of which were single-sentence confirmations of time and date.

Still, some people were like that, and the sort of person who’d spend thirty years studying the same animal – the same INDIVIDUAL animal – was probably the most like that of all. Just a hermit, that’s all, a hermit alone in his cave with his notebooks and his journals and an apparently endless supply of cheap oversteeped tea.

“You need it during winter,” he told her as she sorted through her sixth bookcase. “Can’t keep out the damp, but it’ll do for the chill.”

“Thanks.”

A grunt.

The mention of the damp reminds her of something she noticed in the first few volumes, the oldest and most yellowed collections. “Have you digitized this?”
“Not worth the trouble. If you want to, more power to you.”

“I mean, I can definitely start making a dent in the oldest stuff and I don’t mind long hours, but with the timeline we’ve got I don’t know if I can get it all and keep the fieldwork going at the same-”

He laughed at that, and it almost made her flinch – it was humorless, but entirely unaffected and unplanned for, an involuntary cough created by a tickle of bleakness in the lungs. “Oh, it’ll be easy, you’ll see. Dead easy. Do the first journal and you won’t need to do the rest.” He dropped his mug in the sink with unnecessary and unnoticed force, and left for the bedroom without bothering to raise his voice or speak over his shoulder. “Hell, do the first journal and you won’t need the fieldwork. You’ll see.”

Sue sat there, one hand clutching a cheap notebook older than she was. The cover was loose. The ink was faded. It was still legible

So in lieu of thinking she got out her laptop and started typing.

Five minutes later, in lieu of pretending to be useful she fell asleep on the couch.

***

Curtis drove her out in the morning after a breakfast of granola bars (hers) and resteeped tea (his), parking the car on the elbow of the road.

“Here you are,” he said. The wipers were waving like little signal flags, powerless against the fog smearing the windshield into illegibility from the inside out.

“You’re not coming?”

“Don’t need to.”

“Is there anything I need to know?”
“You know not to get under its feet, right?”

Of the two things most people who’d heard of Nicollette’s wren knew about them, the (admittedly spectacular) outcome of what Dr. Vanard had termed the ‘trample reflex’ was probably one of them. “Yes.”

“Good. See you in the evening. It’s in the grove over there. Town’s back that-away if you need beer.”

The door slammed. The car groaned. The tires gave Sue a light shower. And, with the realization that she had never been given a phone number, she was alone.

Well. Not quite. Crunching came from the trees, distant and with woodier undertones than the gravel under her shoes. Twigs snapped under feet the size of snowshoes.

She ran. Then she walked. Then she snuck. Then, at last, she stopped and stared.

The last living Nicollette’s wren stood waist-deep in the understory, eating like a patient man submerged in an all-you-can-eat buffet. Snip, snip, snap goes the beak; chop chop crunch goes the mouth; gulp, and on to the next-best mouthful that you’ve spotted while you were busy with the last one.

Sue put her fist in her mouth and screamed a little inside her head, teeth in her knuckles keeping her respectably quiet. Something must have leaked anyways; the wren turned his head and looked directly at her.

She didn’t hold her breath, but that was because she spontaneously hiccupped instead.

His gaze held hers, then slid from her to the next branch. His mouth opened, his mouth shut. Crunch.

Sue sighed. Humans had lived on the island for centuries. The wren had been watched by surreptitious biologists in the bushes for years even before Curtis Brock had begun his career. She was probably making him as anxious as atmospheric oxygen, or leaves on greens, or (she twitched and slapped at her neck) mosquitos.

Not that he ever had much occasion to care about mosquitos, with a coat like that. Thick feather-shag-rug, shedding water off his back and down to the forest floor, presenting a stout barrier to heat, cold, and

Slap. “Fuck!”
biting insects.

No bites from anything else besides humans, though. The biggest predators on the islands before the first ships had been monitor lizards, the biggest of which were extinct now, and even at their largest they’d almost certainly never have risked tangling with an adult, preferring instead to make off with juveniles, hatchlings, and eggs.

Then had come humans, with rats and dogs and pigs. Now there were barely any monitors. No more juveniles, no more hatchlings. No more eggs.

In the extensive historical literature covering Nicollette’s wren was a lengthy letter by a mayor describing the taste of their eggs. “Disappointingly mediocre, despite their prodigious size,” apparently. Sue had been overcome by the desire to punch that long-dead correspondent at the time. Sometimes that urge resurfaced, like right now, watching the shaggy bison of an animal crunch his way through the thicket as serene and untroubled as a newly-crowned prince. It made the fresh red tooth-chewed dents on her knuckles itch.

Another crunch, a crack, and then he was up and moving, legs too big to be real for the small noise he made, drifting through the trees at a speed that left her half-jogging to keep up, stopping and starting as he did to inspect overturned logs for moss, to crunch up a delicious succulent, to sniff at an abandoned rat’s nest. She followed him deeper into the thickets, where she nearly lost a boot to a truculent boglet (part of the marsh she’d seen him wallowing in that first evening, if she was any judge); she followed him into the light open air of a fallowed field (nobody was there to ask permission, which she felt guilty about until she remembered the sum total of advice Curtis had given her) and saw him prowl and poke among the weeds for still-soft young prickle-stemmed plants; she followed him until the woods grew thick again and then dropped away and she almost ran into him, bent double at the edge of a deep, fern-ringed pool.

The noise he made as he drank was indescribable. Sue tried anyways, for her notes. ‘Drunken cat purring through a tuba and its own saliva’ was her third draft before she gave up and moved on to more important matters, like things she’d actually been trained to do.

Environmental observations. Well, she’d found his favorite watering hole; even through the steady flow of what must have been a half-week of solid drizzle over the muddy water’s edge, she saw more gigantic, deep, three-toed footprints than just this visit alone could have left. The wren was a regular here. The foliage at the water’s edge was surprisingly sparse, as if regularly pruned by someone with a pair of giant shears, possibly attached to their face. And if the small splash she just heard meant anything, there was a healthy population of local fish, which.

Splik, splik, splik splik-splik-splash.

“That’s how you do it!”

“Showoff.”

“Loser.”

Oh. If that small SERIES of splashes she just heard meant anything, this was where some of the local kids came to skip rocks. Something the wren seemed as implacable about as he was her own presence. She wondered how many of the two-or-three-ish vaguely adolescent blobs had parents who’d grown up doing just this, or grandparents. She wondered who the last person in town had been who’d known a world where for absolute certain there was more than one Nicollette’s wren, and then she wondered if she had something more useful and less depressing to think about, and by then the wren had turned himself about, head tucked back into his neck tucked back into his great hummock of a back tucked into a giant shaggy ball, and had begun to snore with great and majestic sonorousness.

She watched him until the sun went down, then walked in increasingly large circles tripping over things until she saw headlights. Curtis was waiting for her.

“How’d you know where to find me?” she asked.

“Easy,” he told her. He popped the car out of park before she had a chance to put her seatbelt on. “Read the first journal.”

***

Sue was too busy trying and failing to find a way to reformat her notes to get around to the first journal that evening. Curtis drank three mugs of tea for dinner, two teabags a mug, then went to bed without saying a word. She fell asleep on her notes and woke up feeling worse than he did, although probably not looking it. Breakfast was twice as many granola bars as yesterday, plus some oversteeped tea she made herself while Curtis nursed his own mug and stared out the smeared window at the rain.

“See you later if you aren’t back early,” he said as she left the car.

“Why would I come back early?” she asked, but he was already gone and her boots were already filling with water so she dismissed it and trudged from where he’d dropped her, back into the grove.

This time Sue was a little less nervous and she felt she got more done. Canvassed the plants of the grove thoroughly (with samples, in case she got her field IDs wrong), got some good footage of the wren eating, was less bothered by the mosquitos. She even got a little closer, cursing herself for being an excitable idiot as she did. Close enough to see the wear and chips and stains on his bill, to see the old scars on his right leg. She watched the limb flex and turn as he walked, followed him as he departed – into the deep thicket, then the fields, beelining once again for the pond. She did inventory on the pond vegetation too. Took note of what had been eaten, what hadn’t been eaten, what had been eaten only a little, took samples. It all kept her busy until the sun went down again, though this time she didn’t get as lost finding the car headlights.

“Sorry,” she said as she got back into the car.  “Lost track of time – so much to do.”

“I’m telling you that you wouldn’t have to worry about it,” said Curtis, “if you read the first journal.”

Which she was going to do, of course. Just maybe tomorrow night. She had a LOT of samples to sort.

***

Day three Sue finished the last of her granola bars for what she was starting to realize was the only meal she’d been letting herself have, went into the field, and worked ahead a little – half an eye on the wren, half an eye on where he was going, hoping and hoping and hoping she was smart enough to notice if he got up and started on his daily routine before he walked on top of her and set off the trample reflex by mistake. She set up some trail cams on the paths he had beaten through the foliage, made a start on a survey of the vegetation of the fields and the thickets, left a final camera up a tree at the pond where the kids wouldn’t see it, and was still in time to catch his commute down to the water hole.

“I think I’ve got the basics set up now,” she said to Curtis that evening.

He didn’t say anything, but his mug entered the sink with exceptional force.

She meant to get farther into the first journal, but fell asleep watching the trail cams for night traffic.

***

On day four Sue got up early and spent the morning buying something that wasn’t granola bars that she still knew how to cook, which narrowed her options a lot but hey, noodles were cheap the whole world over.

By the time she got home, Curtis was gone. No note, no car, no biologist.

Well, fine. She’d picked up a bunch of data, half-sorted it, and left it. She could get that all tidied up to see where it started leading her next and monitor the trail cams and maybe finally crack open that first journal.

So she did. She checked the plants the wren had been eating and the plants he hadn’t been eating and the animals around him and what they’d been eating and she looked them up and thought about seed distribution and discerning the ecological disturbance caused by megafaunal extinction on an already centuries-disturbed ecology (the island had never been THICKLY populated, but agriculture never didn’t make a mess), and when she was done that she looked at the trail cams.

They told her what the wren had been doing all day. He’d woken up by the pond in the early morning, walked to the grove, eaten, walked through the thickets into the fields (as the crow flies, she realized – not much need to alter the path of your desire when you were a walking bulldozer), had a nice drink, and fallen asleep for the night.

Well, he had a routine and he liked sticking to it. Normal behaviour. For instance, Sue had been putting off looking at Curtis’s first journal for more than half a week by now. Alas, she was sapient, and therefore could only blame so much of her behaviour on instinct and habit.

So she popped it open and started taking notes.

Familiar ones.

Her brow furrowed.

Very, very familiar ones.

“About time,” Curtis said when he came back late, six-pack in hand, and saw her bent over the book, pen working furiously in her other hand.

“Took a data day,” she muttered as she flipped the page. “Listen, is-”

The door shut. Chance gone.

She took a deep breath (mildew, damp, inescapable odour of tea and dust), held it (against every urge her lungs could send her), exhaled.

Then she kept writing. And reading.

***

On day five Sue woke up – face half-stuck to the journal – to the jingle of Curtis’s car keys as he walked out the door and had to sprint to catch up with him before he left without her. He didn’t say anything, didn’t raise an eyebrow, didn’t cluck his tongue. She was almost impressed; up until now the most passive-aggressive human being she’d ever known had been her grandfather. Well, she’d learned from him. The best defense against being pointedly ignored was to ignore right back, but be casual about it. She sat with her half-packed backpack in her lap as if she were in her computer chair at home, projected an air of casual confidence that insisted that she’d long-planned on skipping breakfast today, and dismounted to the roadside with the unspoken implication that she hadn’t wanted to wear a jacket because it would spoil the nice weather.

The last, at least, was surprisingly close to reality. It wasn’t exactly dry out, but to Sue’s slowly-dawning shock she realized that a seemingly-eternal background noise was missing: this was the first day she’d spent on the island without rainfall.

Crunch. Crack.

She shook it off. Time to dive back into the field. Check the trail cams, check the behaviour, check and check and check. Grove, thickets, fields, pond.

Yes, then yes, then yes, then yes.

“Figure it out yet?” asked Curtis when he picked her up.

“Mmm,” she said, flipping wildly through camera archives, and this kept her unbothered until they got back to the apartment, when she hit a little over the halfway point on the first journal and saw it and said, entirely against her will, “what the fuck?”
“Oh good,” said Curtis, halfway through his dinner tea. “About time.”
She held up the journal and pointed to it, rendered wordless.

“Yeah. That’s a timesaving device.”
Ditto marks. The same daily format, the same data fields, but all of it filled with nothing but ditto marks. On that page, and the next page, and the next page, and the next page.

Sue flipped the book. All of it, to the very end. “What,” she repeated herself involuntarily once more, “the fuck.”

Curtis shrugged. Oversold it too, like he’d been practicing the conversation in his head for a while. “It’s not that complicated.”

“What, you just don’t want to-”

“No, the wren. It’s not that complicated. Every day it does the same thing in the same order for the same amount of time, seasonally permitting. Food, water, sleep. Everything. Took me months to realize it, months to admit it.” He was smiling now, actually smiling, the expression cutting stiffly against the grain of his face. “Took me years after that to stop bothering to buy new journals. Took me a decade to stop looking.”

Apparently there was a point where disbelief overcame anger and flooded out all other emotions. “You haven’t bothered studying the last living Nicollette’s wren in years because he bored you?”

The smile vanished, retreating into that drawn-back blankness. “No. I stopped studying the last living Nicollette’s wren because I’d finished studying it. There’s nothing more to learn because there’s nothing more that it does. I discovered that, I tested that, I confirmed that. I’m here for the funeral autopsy, whenever it finally gets around to letting it happen.” He chuckled, the fakest sound she’d ever heard. “Got to tie the ribbon on top, you know.”

“This is what you call biology?”
“This is thirty years of my life. I call it expertise. And you could thank me for saving you some time figuring it out.”

“What happened to his right leg?” The question bubbled out of her without warning, an eruption of pressure as she tried to keep every other thought filling her head from coming out of her mouth at full volume.

“Got caught in a fence once and panicked. Before my time.”

He went to bed.

She stayed up for ten minutes sitting there, thinking. Then she went through the rest of the room, journal by journal.

Just as he’d said. Nothing but ditto marks. Then nothing but dates. Then nothing. Then no more journals.

***

The next morning Sue got up an hour before sunrise and headed out ten minutes after that with fresh tea in a decrepit thermos, leaving behind as polite a note as terseness permitted. The walk would help her focus, help her think. Help her resist the unprofessional thoughts she was having trouble keeping down even after the first night’s sleep she’d had that came closer to (physically) comfortable than not. Amazing what twenty hours and counting of no rainfall would do to perk you up if you weren’t amphibious.

For once she was at the grove early enough to catch the wren entering it. He looked as tired as she felt, feathers matted and disheveled from sleep, but he still ate hearty. She spent some time keeping a running log of his breakfast. The pattern was clear, and predictable, and more or less in line with what she’d pieced together out of the first journal. A very consistent animal, which was fine by any standards as long as you weren’t a disgrace to your profession. Apparently.

She put it out of her mind. She put it so thoroughly out of her mind that she nigh-sleepwalked through the entire rest of the morning into the afternoon migration and nearly stepped straight into the pond without looking.

“Watchit!” called a piping, piercing voice. “You looking for a soaker?”

Sue shook off her thoughts on her colleague, which were now nearing monograph length. More kids were hanging around at the pond, presumably because it wasn’t raining for once and they had to find other ways to get recreationally drenched than walking home. Half of them were in swim trunks, none of them were in the water.

“Thanks,” she called across the pond.

“Ya, no problem.”

The wren snorted; she looked back at him and no, nothing new. Just blowing water out of his nose. Nothing she hadn’t seen before in less than a week. Nothing Curtis hadn’t seen for decades before he gave up looking. But… she had observers, right here. They’d been around longer than her and unlike Curtis they seemed to actually use their eyeballs.

She started wading through the shallows. They watched her approach with the sort of even-handed boredom children treated the universe with, from frogs to textbooks to movies. “Do you kids hang around here a lot?” You kids. God, she wasn’t even thirty and already she opened her mouth and her dad fell out.

The kid who answered (the same kid? No, taller and longer hair) looked unimpressed, probably because he had to deal with a dad already. “Ya.”

“See the wren a lot?”
“The what?”
She pointed at him. “The wren. Nicollette’s wren.”
“Oh, the bigguy. Ya. Every day.”
“Do you ever watch what he does?”
“All the time, real easy to get close to it, it doesn’t give a damn about anything.”
“You shouldn’t do that.”
“Reese says he touched it once.”
“Have you kids ever heard of the trample reflex?”
“Ya. Reese is totally full of it.”

“Good.” This was harder work than she remembered; what was she trying to do again?
Oh.

Right.
“Ever see what he’s doing when no one else is around?”

“Same as usual. It’s old, old people always do the same things.”

She grinned and didn’t ask if she was included in that (she was; she’d been this age once, she knew for a fact that she was). “Sure. But what does he always do when it’s just you guys?”
“Don’t you know? You put that camera up the tree.”
“You know about that?”
“Ya. Bill found it when he went up for pickleberries.”

“I didn’t touch it,” piped up Bill, who was small and made entirely of arms.

“Ya, she didn’t touch it.” The kid looked less like he was defensive and more like he was irritated. “None of us touched it, that’s pricey stuff. We’re not made of money to go paying to fix it if you say we broke it, so we didn’t.”

“Thanks.”
A shrug, the movement of both scrawny adolescent shoulders over-exaggerated almost like the wren himself.

“But the camera’s only been up for a couple days and you guys must’ve been coming here for years. You’re the experts, not me. Anything he does that I won’t have seen yet?”

The kid shrugged. “Well, it’s prolly going fishing in a minute? Doesn’t do that when it’s raining.”
“Fishing?”

“Ya. Oh, here it comes. Look out.”

Sue looked out, and oh, the wren was moving, clotted feathers swaying ponderously as he lurched his way into the pond over his ankles, his chest and thighs. There he stood like a matted little island, head tucked back, eyes shut. Not asleep, but resting.

“This is pretty much how my aunt fishes,” she commented.

“Ya, my uncle too.”
“Suckup,”” said Bill. The kid smacked her without looking; she scowled and kicked his leg.

“Still… where are the fish?”

“There. Watch this.”
“Watch what wait wait-” But too late, the skipped stone had already spun loose from the kid’s hand, bounced once twice thrice splik splik-splak thwak, skimming and sinking just past the starboard side of the dozing wren.

The recipient of the thwak bobbed at the water’s surface gently.

“Careful!” said Sue.

“What – we’re over here, it’s over there, how is that supposed to be in the trample reflex? It doesn’t care. Tammy hit it with a rock like six times last week and it didn’t even wake up.”
“It was an ACCIDENT,” insisted Tammy, who had very beautiful eyes that were currently screwed up in a begrudged glare.

“Ya whatever, seven accidents, your aim is just that bad.”

Tammy picked up a rock.

“What,” interrupted Sue, holding aloft the (still, still-dripping) form of the thwak-recipient, “is this?”
“Fish,” said the kid.

“Fish,” said Bill.

“Fish,” said Tammy, throwing the rock to the mud perilously close to her own feet. “Duh.”

“So the wren eats them? He didn’t seem interested in this one.”
“Na, doesn’t eat them. It just likes the company. It goes and sits in the water and the fish come and swim around it. Fishing.”
“Duh,” added Tammy, clearly still smarting from the slurring of her name.

Sue put down the fish on a rock and took off her backpack. “Hey, kids-”

“I’m not a kid, I’m Clair.”
“I’m Bill!”
“I’m not a kid either, I’m Tammy, are you dumb?”

“I’m Eddie,” said Eddie.
“Hey guys! Want to see a dissection?”

The kid – Clair – eyed her backpack with artificial casualness. “How big’s your knife?”
Sue unfolded it. Her audience nodded.

“Cool,” said Tammy.

“Ya.”

***

She walked home under her own power and didn’t regret a second of it because all of it was spent mentally preparing for the moment when she swung the door to the apartment open and Curtis asked her “had enough yet?” and she didn’t punch him in the face but instead smiled (sweetly, serenely, with the pure and authentic joy of discovery untrammeled by visible spite) and answered “nope! Found something though.”
He raised an eyebrow. It fought against his face the whole way. “Really.”
“Yep! Strong suspicion of cleaning symbiosis between Nicollette’s wren and some of the local freshwater fish.” She pulled the sample free from her backpack with a jerk. “GI tract was loaded with feather parasites. I guess when it’s not raining he needs to take baths for more than just cleaning off the mud. I’m not an ichthyologist, but I’m pretty sure this species’ range has shrunk over the last century or so, and I’d be willing to guess there’s now a hypothesis for why that happened.”

Curtis stared at her.

“Not bad for the first week,” she said. The smile, although authentic, was beginning to hurt.

“How the hell did you make all of that up?” he asked.

“Well, I had the fish brought to my attention by some of the local kids-” (sorry Clair, Bill, Tammy, and Eddie) “-and then I did a field dissection, which-”

“Kids? That’s your source?” He snorted. “Please. Kids make things up for fun even when they’re not bored, and the kids around here are nothing BUT bored. Hard not to be, when their parents can’t even be assed to pay attention to them. They lied to your face to see if you’d fall for it and you did, is that all you’ve got for evidence?”

She stared at him. The smile wasn’t shrinking, and it still wasn’t fake, but there was a very different force behind it and the edges were turning sharp. “That, and the dissection, and the recordings from the pond trail cam. One of the kids went up the tree and tweaked the angle for me, and the resolution’s good enough that you can see the fish tugging at his sides.” Sorry, Bill. Thank you, Bill.

The air was still. Even the mildew seemed to stop thickening for a minute.

“This wasn’t in the first journal, was it?”

He flinched. Not inward, but away from her.

“Did you ever interview the locals?”

He stood up, threw the mug in the sink, and slammed the door to his room.

Sue had never treasured cleaning up broken ceramic so much before.

***

She had to walk again the next day. The bedroom door was shut. The keys were on the rack, but like hell she’d borrow the car without asking, even if last night hadn’t happened.

Fine by her. She had to do some other stuff before she went into the field anyways. Everyone was allowed a slow day after advancing science, right?

So she prowled the classifieds until she found an apartment half the size of Curtis’s, paid her fist and lasts, got groceries, put away everything all nice and tidy, ate the greasiest late lunch someone was willing to sell her, and was happy as a clam until she remembered that she’d left her dissection sample in the fridge as a stopgap since last night.

Fine. It was fine. They were mature adults. Or could pretend to be. And when he refused to let her in, she could just write it into the monograph and find another goddamned fish. That thought sustained her buoyancy all the way back to the old apartment right to the second she knocked on the door and it swung open inwards, unlocked and unlatched.

“Curtis?”

Dead silent except for the creak of the dying hinges. No lights on. No kettle sulkily boiling.

“Curtis?”

Still no answer. No keys on the rack. No coat. No Curtis. A mug of tea on the counter and a mess in the kitchen, cupboards flapping open and gaping. The garbage was tipped over.

Sue credited her long-standing irritation with the uncleanliness of the space for making her pick up the trash. She blamed her ever-escalating lack of regard for Curtis as a person for letting her read the grocery receipts as she stuffed them back into the container.

Tea. A single six-pack of beer. A more expensive and worst-tasting brand of noodles than the kind she bought. A barrel of pesticide.

She reread the item, then read the price, then re-reread the item.

A very large barrel of very unsafe pesticide.

She didn’t even stop to grab her backpack.

***

The roads were alien to her in a way the wren’s backwoods paths weren’t – too flat, too straight, too fast under her feet. She would’ve run right past the pond if she hadn’t seen Curtis’s car pulled over on the shoulder, one wheel nearly in the ditch and the lights still complaining about the keys in the ignition. But the worn little footpath created by bare little feet was obvious once you looked for it, and once you were on it you were in earshot of the shouting. Lots of it high-pitched and squealing.

“-mind your business!”
“It’s our swimming spot!”
“You’re littering!”

“I’ll tell!”

“Stop it! Stop it! STOP it!”

A hoarse yell, a thump, and Sue burst through the treeline and into some sort of abstract illustration, maybe a political cartoon. An angry old man defending a barrel of toxic waste from a bunch of angry kids. The allegorical meaning of all the swim trunks was a little harder to parse.

Curtis looked up at her like a hunted animal, one hand resting protectively on the big grey drum. He looked more ragged than usual; wrestling that thing down the footpath couldn’t have been fun for him. “Stay out of this.”
“It’s my research subject. You know it, you signed the forms saying I was coming here to study it. I’m as in this is as it gets.”

“Right. Right. I can give you coauthor on the autopsy. You know? The kids did it. They’re always throwing rocks at it, yelling at it, one of them fed it something from their parents’ farm.” His eyes were wider than she’d ever seen them, white and desperate. “The paper of my lifetime and I’m letting you in on it damnit, you can even do the fucking cutting, just let it end. Let it END. Its species ALREADY ended, I’ve just had to sit here and watch and wait and rot while this thing zombies along, already extinct and just not dying, wasting time and eating up my career never changing never living never learning-”

He spun midsentence and grabbed Clair’s hand just as it seized the rim of the barrel, which made Tammy jump onto his leg with both hands and feet. He kicked her – crunch, that was her nose – and just as he was pulling Clair up by the boy’s wrist Sue seized Curtis’s arm in one hand and his shirt in her other and moved him away from the barrel and the kids and everyone else as quickly as humanly possible, which made quite a splash.

It also didn’t QUITE move him away from everyone else. All the noise had masked the footsteps, right up until Curtis rolled right underneath their source and three giant scaly toes were hovering an inch above his face.

The last living Nicollette’s wren froze. A single blunt-tipped talon twitched.

“ohfuck,” said Bill.

And then in that all-powerful silence the gigantic claw twitched downwards, prodded the frozen mask of Curtis’s agonized gape, and slid over and away from him. One foot, then the other. Descending with cautious joy into the pond, step by step.

He splashed gently, fanning the water with his small, useless forelimbs. The fish came to him.

“Trample reflex, schmample reflex,” sulked Tammy indecipherably through a facefull of blood and her own clasped palm.

“Eddie, go get your parents and tell them to call the police,” said Sue, wading in the wren’s footsteps. “Clair, help your friend with her nose. Bill, don’t touch that barrel.” She deviated from her course by six inches to place one boot on Curtis’s chest with a little more force than was strictly necessary. “And don’t worry, Tammy, disproving old ideas is just how science works. It looks like the wren WAS changing all those years you were watching him, doesn’t it Curtis?” Her heel sunk a half-centimeter farther, producing a wheeze. “He’s decided you’re part of the scenery. Harmless. A constant. He recognized you, and learned from you, and changed because of you, and this is how you thanked him for that.”

Curtis’s mouth was open but words weren’t coming out. Eddie was yelling in the distance, overlaid with the crash and thrash of adult feet descending down the footpath.

The wren didn’t pay any of them any more heed. Eyes closed, bath attendants nibbling at his fringes, he looked and lived just like everyone else on any other day: as best as he could, until the time came that he couldn’t.

Like everything else that ever lived.

One bright and sunny morning everyone woke up and got ready for their days and they were all so preoccupied with all the little things that needed to be done that it took them almost half an hour to realize that the sun had gone out. This caused some concern.

The first order of business was clear: establish confusion. So every human awake and aware on the planet that could see the sky turned to the nearest other human they could see and had the following conversation:

“Hey, do you see that?”
“Do YOU see that?”

“I think I do, do you?”
“Yeah.”
“Woah.”
“Woah.”

“Know what’s going on?”
“I’ve got no idea – do YOU know what’s going on?”
“No.”
“Actually, wait – I bet I know what’s happening!”

And then began the second order of business, which was much more complicated and delivered with a lot of certainty and had a LOT more permutations all around: declaring why the sun had gone out.

The conspiracy theorists said the sun going out was a hoax to keep everyone’s minds off the truth, which was being hushed up by the FBI.

The cults declared the sun going out was a sign that the end was upon humanity, and that it could be forestalled if people gave them all their worldly possessions and maybe did something horny for them, just like every other day sun or no sun. 

The FBI said the sun going out was the CIA’s fault.

The philosophers said SOMETHING about the sun going out but nobody understood except for other philosophers and they all said they were talking complete horseshit.

The CIA said the sun going out was probably the fault of that wily bastard Fidel Castro.

The physicists, astronomers, and astrophysicists said that the sun going out was all very exciting and changed everything but they didn’t know how or why because they had no funding and could they please have some.

Fidel Castro didn’t confirm or deny his responsibility in the sun going out.

Many of the great religions of the world said something about the sun going out, but most of their adherents couldn’t agree on what they said and got very upset with each other figuring out the fine details.

The government of the United States of America said the sun going out was the fault of China.

The government of China said the sun going out was the fault of the United States of America.

The government of the United Kingdom said the sun going out was definitely the fault of the European Union, or so reported the people who were paying attention to them.

The government of Canada presumably said something about the sun going out. The Canadians weren’t sure exactly WHAT they might have said, but were pretty sure the USA had said it was China’s fault.

Meanwhile, the citizens of each nation were pretty sure the sun going out was the government’s fault, what a bunch of goddamned clowns, can’t do anything right.

The elderly wisely informed their youthful peers that back in their days the sun went out twice as hard as this and they didn’t complain because they were busy doing real work because that was how you got ahead in life, and maybe the sun wouldn’t have gone out if they had more work ethic.

The youth rudely informed their elderly peers that the sun going out wasn’t a big deal and they were busy doing more important things like peer pressure and internet and the sun had probably gone out because it was sick of hearing old people talk.

The staff of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology said that the sun going out was something they could not comment on as it had very little to do with the Campanian fossil beds of Dinosaur Provincial Park or the science of paleontology in general.

The wealthy said that the sun going out was caused by too many goddamned handouts to the greedy and undeserving parasitic masses of the poor.

The middle class said that the cause of the sun going out was none of their business but they hoped it wouldn’t make their taxes go up because they barely had enough to go on vacation twice a year as it was. 

The poor asked if they could have a spare dollar to buy a thicker blanket so they wouldn’t freeze to death between their shifts, since the sun had gone out.

This request was broadly not heeded, but it DID raise a till-then-unspoken concern: by this point things were becoming a bit chillier. People began to wonder if perhaps there should be a third order of business where they did something about the problem of the sun going out.

The president of the USA suggested firing nuclear missiles into the sky and using them instead of a sun. ‘The sun will never set on our country as long as I’m in power,” he told the press.

The billionaires suggested giving them more money so they could try fixing the sun with ideas they saw in science fiction novels when they were twelve.  “Maybe we could take apart the solar system and use the bits to build a ringworld around Alpha Centauri,” said one exceptionally tedious wealthy dipshit. “It’s very feasible with current technology.”

The preachers and the pastors and the hellraisers and the prophets suggested listening to them, but couldn’t agree on who should be listened to, or what they were saying. But they WERE absolutely sure everyone else was incorrect.

The oil companies said that the sun was always a waste of time and money since it was solar powered AND nuclear powered and the real solution was always to burn twice as much oil twice as hard twice as often, leaving the globe warm and comfortably gaslit.

The political hard right said the sun was unnecessary as long as you exterminated all social outgroups and underclasses, which would make a perfect society that would definitely NOT immediately designate new outgroups for persecution and extermination.

The political hard left said the sun was unnecessary as long as you exterminated the moderates, who were undoubtedly responsible for the sun going out in the first place.

The political moderates said that maybe the sun would come back so long as you let everyone exterminate everyone else a little bit but not too much or too hard. Maybe they could all take turns?

The farmers said the sun would come back if it had the spine to get up at the crack of dawn and do a real job that society couldn’t survive without.

The artists said maybe the sun would come back when it had some new inspiration for fresh ideas and pushing it would just ensure you got sloppy and derivative work.

The economists said the sun would come back if everyone did something about something something index something something consumer confidence something something inflate the stagflation whatever who cares.

The sober and cool-headed policy wonk realists who advised the leaders of nations said the sun wasn’t coming back anytime soon so the only reasonable and rational decision was to annex everyone you felt like and anyone who argued otherwise was just being a silly billy polyanna numpty-neener-hoo.

The beleaguered penguins of Antarctica said little that was intelligible.

The management said that if the sun didn’t come back before its sick days were up it would be let go.

The internet said whatever would sell advertisements.

But after that, during that, before that could finish, last of all came the fourth order of business, and it came when the Sun sheepishly staggered in to work a whole day late, disheveled and pale and looking like death warmed over.

“I went out for drinks and lost track of time,” it said. “It won’t happen again.”

Nobody believed this.

Once upon a time there were two small sisters, thinking about the future.

“I’m going to get bigger,” said one to the other.

“I’m going to get bigger than you,” retorted the other to one.

“Nuh-uh!”

“Yuh-nuh!”

And then one bit the other and one and the other’s mother got involved, and the matter was left behind but not forgotten.

***

Twice upon a time there were two medium-sized women.

“I’m still too small,” said one. “I’m going to get out of here and move to the big city, get into big business, make it big. I’ll be…” and here she paused to stare into the sky, not out of dramatic impulse but to look into the closest thing to the infinite she had to hand, to search for inspiration, to find a piece of language that could possibly encapsulate the meaning she felt so clumsily struggling to tear free from her mind.

Her sister waited with a smooth and patient face.

She shuddered as it came to her, a piece of inspiration dropping from the sky and plummeting into her marrow.

“I’ll be…a huge deal.”

“Cool,” said her sister. “Cool, cool, cool. I’ll be huger.”

“Oh yeah? How?”
“I’ll make it bigger. I’ll get into bigger things. I’ll make myself enormous. You’ll see. You won’t be able to get away from me.”
“Listen up, you little goober,” said one, “I’m going to be so big they’ll put my name everywhere. I’m going to be ginormous. I’m going to live in a sky scraper so tall they’ll have to put up fences to keep the clouds out; its foundations will be so deep we’ll have to heatproof them against magma, and I’ll be so damned big I’ll have every floor to myself. I’ve got big dreams. You? You’re small time.”
“Nuh-uh!”
“Yuh-nuh!”

And then one bit the other and their mother screamed at them to knock it off, she was listening to her podcasts, and one left to become big and the other was just left.

At home.

Plotting.

“Mother,” she said at last. “I must become bigger than my sister. I am going to go to school to learn how to Make It Big.”

“Go to hell and let me listen to my misinformation and propaganda in peace,” grumbled her mother.

And so the other sister, the underplanned sister, the sister who felt small inside, took a short walk down to the bus stop for a quick trip. She had a few little plans.

***

First of them was academia. Architecture. Buildings were big.

“And I need to know how to make a bigger one than any other,” she explained to her professor as she graduated. “So my sister will be smaller than me, with just an itty-bitty skyscraper to keep her miniscule eensy-weensy body inside all puny and pathetic.”
“I don’t think you actually took any classes here,” said her professor, “but I feel compelled to tell you this anyways: there is more to size than size alone. The great pyramids of Giza are shorter than many a high-rise, but they loom large in historic value.”

“I see, I see, I see, I see,” she said thoughtfully.

“Please put away the gun. I have children.”
“Am I officially an architect now?”
“The moment you remove the duct tape from my arms, yes.”
“That’s a small-time play,” she said dismissively, and then she rolled out the window as the campus police busted down the door, degree flapping wildly behind her, hands vibrating with excitement as she scaled the juddering, windblown ladder into the riot helicopter.

“Take me to Giza!” she shouted at the cowering, sweaty woman at the controls. “No, wait – take me to Paris! No, wait, take me to London! No, wait – take me to London, then to Paris, then Giza! I’ve got to MAKE IT BIG!”

***

Second was corporate work.

“I can’t believe that it didn’t work,” she seethed, stamping her feet with a crunch-cranch of broken glass on expensive carpet. “I balanced the Pyramid of Khafre on the Eiffel Tower and then I balanced THAT on top of Big Ben! Don’t they know how much harder that was than going from heaviest to smallest?! They stayed up for almost six whole seconds but NOBODY CARED!” She fired her gun into the ceiling. “It’s not fair!” She shoved her bloodied stapler into the carpet and kicked it viciously. “It’s not right!” She turned beet red, shook her fists, and burst into tears. “It’s everyone else’s fault but mine that I haven’t made it big!”

“Your attitude is perfect, and your skillset is on-point,” marvelled the receptionist. “But I must repeat – regretfully – that we already have a CEO.”
“I know THAT, that’s why I stapled him. I’m a go-getter. Promote me.”

“Sure. You’re the CEO.”
“As CEO, I order you to put me into space.”
“Why?”
“I want to live there. It’s huge. It’s ginormous. It’s the biggest. I need to be biggest, or at least bigger than big. For spite.”

“You’re overqualified for this job,” said the receptionist, relaxing and removing her hand from the alarm switch. “The next rocket’s taking off in six minutes. It’s unmanned but if you tuck yourself in a maintenance panel with an oxygen mask and a water bottle you’ll probably be okay.”
“Thanks, wish me luck. You’re acting CEO while I’m out.”

So she ran, ran, ran across the launch pad, crowbarred open a metal panel on a howling giant of steel and poorly-conceived trajectories, and slipped herself inside its skin like a bad Christmas card in a pre-packaged envelope.

“Here I come!” she shouted over the rising scream of engines that statistically were expected to explode in twenty minutes. “Here I am, heading for the BIG TIME!”

***

Third was practical experience and cultivation of growth mindset.

“Space is so dull,” she sulked from ground level, dirt sliding between her restless fingers.

“Agreed.”
She worried five little pits in the earth, one for each digit. “It’s not BIG, it’s just empty.”
“Yes.”
A sweep of the palm, all the quarries eliminated. “Who’d want to live there? Nobody. Losers. Small-timers. Not me, I’m all about hitting the big time. Only the most time for me.”

“Absolutely.”

She looked up and around herself at the boundless and bare lone and level sands. “So. You are big. And you have time. Can you teach me how to be big?”

“Sure,” said the desert. “Are you ready?”

“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah!”
“Alrighty.”
“YEAH!”

“Remove all your bodily hair and clothing.”
She blinked.

“We need to denude your surface so wind and sun can tear your substrate into tiny little pieces.”

“Okay!” she said. “I’ll go ask the ocean.”

She went and asked the ocean.

“There’s only room for one body of water covering seventy percent of this planet,” it told her flatly, wetly, evenly distributed everywhere across the globe that the vagaries of plate tectonics permitted it, “and that’s me.”
“Come onnnnn, let me try just a little. You’re so BIG, surely you can spare a little space for a big deal! I can do that. I can be your big deal.”
“Fine. Lie on your back.”
She laid on her back..

“Now be denser and less buoyant than the crust of the continent surrounding you, plunging yourself to the floor of the world’s surface and becoming covered with water.”
“To become big I have to go DOWN?” she asked incredulously.
“And let everything else trample all over you. And get soaked.”
“I’ll ask a mountain,” she said.

So she asked a mountain.

“Sure,” said the mountain. “You can be big by being a mountain. It’s easy.”

“Oh GOOD,” she said. “And you’re big where everyone can see you, right?”
“Yeah! Go it alone, go with a range, either way there’s no missing you on the skyline.”
“And you don’t have to strip naked?”
“Hell no. See my treeline? See my glaciation? Well, what’s left of it.”
“And I don’t have to start by sinking down below ground level?”
“Nah – it’s the complete opposite of that, right from the start.”
“How do I start then?”
“Are you standing there?”
“I’m standing there.”
“Now stand up REAL TALL.”
She stood up real tall.

“Now wait.”

She waited.

And waited.

For a while.

“Okay, cool. Now just keep doing that until you get ground away by time and weather.”

The wind whistled.

“Hello? You still listening?”

The hinterlands aged a little further.
“Wow, she already eroded flatter than a foothill? I only left her alone for like, a thousand years or two. Three tops. Best mountaineering I’ve ever seen – now THAT’S a bigshot.”

***

Her sister, by contrast, worked in a call center for ten years, then did retail for the rest of her life. It was okay.

No need to make a big deal out of it, really.

Three men with three drinks and three opinions sat at one table, arguing at every volume at once.

“You’re asking me what motivates a human being?” shouted General Duck Noggin, pounding his long, fleshless hands on the table like a pair of macabre drumsticks. “I’ll tell you! Anyone can tell you! FEAR! Fear of death! Fear of pain! Fear of the unknown! Fear of your mother being disappointed in you! And then you ask me how to direct a soldier?! Are you stupid AND deaf?!”

“Stupid and deaf, stupid and deaf, stupid and deaf, stupid, and, also, deaf,” mocked Admiral Loaford Schlap from somewhere inside the depths of his moustache, his monocle glaring fearsomely above his jowls like the cherry on an human sundae. “Must you describe yourself in every sentence through projection mental AND vocal, idiot boy? Anyone can tell you that, anyone can feel that, and THAT is why it is not special. Fear is old and worn and by the time childhood is behind you everyone has gotten used to avoiding it. What never wears out? Hate. A hate acquired at age two can be bright and shining when you die in bed at a hundred; even gold can’t age as gracefully. Teach a citizen hate and point them at the foe and they will fight until their body is dust, then sweep themselves into the enemy’s lungs!”

“Both of you are tragically astray,” said the third officer, shaking his head in sadness. “Fear and hate are negative emotions. You can harness them, but not tame them – they’ll smash your plow, run rampant over your fields and destroy your crops. You need to think positive. You need to think of foundations, of unshakability and steadfastness. Everyone needs something to love, don’t they? Make that your cause.”
“Shut up, Bob,” snapped Duck Noggin.

“Yes, shut up Roberts,” agreed Loaford Schlap.

“I’ve told you before, you can call me ‘Bob Robs’; we’re all friends here,” said Chief Military Advisor Bob Roberts, or ‘Bob Robs’ to his friends. “And as we’re such good friends, we should test our ideas fairly and equitably. I believe we will be starting a war with our neighbours soon, won’t we? Why don’t we each motivate our troops in the manner we think best and see who has set the best record at the end of the day? A good, clean yardstick.”
“That’s stupid,” said Duck Noggin.

“If he doesn’t like it, I’m in,” said Loaford Schlap.

“Oh no you don’t! I’m in too.”
And so it was, and so they separated in haste, for the war was soon to arrive and the bill even sooner than that.

***

General Duck Noggin addressed his new recruits in the parade grounds, so raw they barely knew how to salute, pacing in front of them like a restless mantis before a parade of ladybugs.

“Listen up, you maggots!” he told them at great volume. “You are going to die! We all are! And if you listen to me and do as I say, I will ensure that is later than if you DON’T listen to me! Now drop and give me twenty!”

The soldiers stared, then awkwardly and nervously descended to all fours and began to do push-ups.

“Too slow!” said Duck Noggin. He pulled out his pistol and shot the slowest soldier in eyesight with it, bang! “Now get back up!”

Limbs shaking, eyes wide, they scrambled back up.

“Too fast!”

Bang!

“Now climb the hill!”
Panting, sweating, shaking, they climbed the hill.

“Use your hands, scum! Scramble like you mean it!” Bang!

They used their hands.

“DON’T DROP YOUR WEAPONS, IDIOTS!” Bang! “Now GO BACK DOWN!”

They went back down.

“To the barracks! Go to sleep! A soldier must sleep when they can and wake when they are needed! YOU! SLEEP FASTER!”

Bang!

And so it went for weeks, with not a second of the day not devoted to training, and not a second of that training taking place without General Duck Noggin and his always-smoking, always-loaded, always-brandished sidearm. The bodies were left to rot where they fell, and each became a lesson that was repeated aloud each time they marched past them.

“Make eye contact when you speak to a superior! Be confident!”
“Lower your gaze in deference when I’m addressing you! Be humble!”
“Don’t stow your pack sloppily! Take your time!”
“Don’t take so long stowing your pack! Hurry up!”
“Stop staring at the bodies, the battlefield will be full of them!”
“Don’t ignore the bodies, they’re there to teach you a lesson!”
On and on and on and on and on and on the lessons in fear went, ever-shifting, ever-rising, until at last not one soul under the general’s command could sleep, or walk, or stand without a terrible black hole inside them clawing at their skin, demanding they sacrifice anything and everything to be free of its tug against their nerves. Their eyes belonged to dying dogs, not humans, and they whimpered in their sleep – soundlessly, because that was one of the corpse-lessons.

Then came war. Then came the march. And then, atop a small hill before the battle, came the speech. Duck Noggin stood tall – not merely for his height, which was great, but because he had so thoroughly bent the army beneath him.

“The enemy is upon us!” he shouted. “They are heartless and dangerous and seek to kill you! But I can do so much worse! I will pull your soul free from your eyes and floss with it! I will pull the trigger at your skull should you flinch for an instant from duty! I am the inescapable doom that awaits you if you fail, and you WILL NOT FAIL! AM I UNDERSTOOD?”

No one answered. He pulled his gun free and shot the nearest silent face. “SPEAK WHEN SPOKEN TO!” he roared.

“Yes, sir!” called the soldiers all together and all at once, high and quivering.

So General Duck Noggin held his gun high, turned his back to his army with absolute and supreme confidence, and commanded “CHARGE!”

The battle was a confused rout even by the standards of war (seldom does an army flee in terror before the foe fires upon them) and afterwards it was very difficult to determine if General Duck Noggin had truly perished. The only corpse that theoretically could be his had been so utterly obliterated from behind by massed musket fire that it could have belonged to anyone.

***

Admiral Loaford Schlap harrumphed at the marines of his captains as they went through their paces. “Sloppy! Very sloppy.”
“Their marksmenship is more than adequate,” protested one of the officers.

“Not the guns, no, not the guns – their mindset! They fight to hit the little dot in the center of the target; who’s going to care about THAT when the fire hits the field? They need motivation. They crave fuel, fuel for the flame we shall alight in their bellies! Attend to me! Here are the facts that must be conveyed.” Loaford snorted, hawked, cleared his throat, and beckoned his secretary – a wizened beast of tendons and hair. “’The Enemy,’” he spake with great enunciation, “’is very nearly, but not quite, entirely human.’”

The secretary waited, hand poised.

“That’s it,” clarified Loaford. “We don’t want to rush to put all our cards on the table at once, eh? All of you, take a copy of that each, give it a shot on your lot – then when they ask you what that means, elaborate on it in your own words and tell me what words work best! We’re in this for the long-haul, we’ve got to let the marinade penetrate deep into their guts before they’re all tender and ripe for the battle. And to do that, we’ve got to find the right ingredients.”

So the admiral’s seventy captains saluted and took his notes and that evening they spoke to their soldiery of their enemies, and of how they were very nearly (but not quite) entirely human, and the next dawn they came back with their own notes, which were pooled and sorted through into a comprehensible and criticisable form by Loaford Schlap.

“Not bad,” he admitted, puffing away on his overpipe. “Not bad at all. We will need to condense this, drill it down to the red-hot bedrock and then hammer that until it cracks open and the blazing magma of bloodlust spills forth to carry us to the eruptive violence that is glorious victory!” He coughed triumphantly, then removed his underpipe to jab it at his secretary. “Write that one down. Yes, write it down. And while you’re writing it down…let’s see what’s been bubbling brightest in the stewpot…. Yes, this one. This works. Yes. Yes.”

So the notes of what gave the marines most ire were taken and written and sent out to be tested again, and the captains spoke their new words that night.

“The enemy,” said Captain Hovard Slenk, “have smaller brains than you.”

“The enemy,” warned Captain Mercy Pottery, “have smaller hearts than yours, and their genitals are malformed.”
“The enemy,” instructed Captain Cluny Clobbbers, “do not eat animals you consider it appropriate to eat, and eat animals you consider inappropriate to eat. They enjoy this.”

“The enemy,” elucidated Captain Mothsplatter Prentice, “have been cut up in every way by a scientific study and that study did not find a single organ corresponding to a soul.”

And that too was gathered, and studied, and improved upon, and that was the first two day’s work with weeks yet to come.

“Good job,” said Loaford Schlap. “Next fact: ‘the Enemy hates you.’ Get cracking so we can get delving!”

So it went, and so they learned, and so they proceeded.

“The enemy despise our beautiful, bounteous, and gorgeous homeland,” said Captain Hovard Slenk in a tight, angry voice. “They want to burn our orchards and ravage our fields and piss on the ashes and shit on the piss.”

“The enemy can’t stand how amazing and powerful and dangerous our strong and perfect military is,” said Captain Mercy Pottery in a low, warning voice. “They’re sneakily forcing us to attack them before we make them look like the miserable and pathetic failures they are and they have no choice but to give up and commit suicide before our majestic radiance.”

“The enemy covet our great wealth,” said Captain Cluny Clobbers in a loud, outraged voice. “They want to take your money and spend it all on things they don’t need or like that won’t work anyways.”

“The enemy are jealous of how beautiful and perfect your spouses and families are,” said Captain Mothsplatter Prentice in a contemplative, aloof voice. “They want to kiss them on the mouth mwah mwah mwah.”

“Almost there,” said Admiral Loaford Schlap with satisfaction when they had processed all of this. “But now we need the final step to set the path straight: ‘the enemy is inferior.’ Get it off these notes and into their heads – hurry!”
“The enemy are lazy and indolent and they lack the strength and will to fight you!” said Captain Hovard Slenk.

“The enemy are feeble and limp of every body part from wrist to foot and they lack the strength and will to fight you!” said Captain Mercy Pottery.

“The enemy are idiotic drooling chumps that don’t know warfare from cookware and they lack the strength and will to fight you!” said Captain Cluny Clobbers.

“The enemy believe in the incorrect gods and are actually minions of small and worthless devils and they lack the strength and will to fight you!” said Captain Mothsplatter Prentice.

And then there was no more time, but that was enough. Loaford Schlap stood on the deck of the greatest vessel his country had ever commissioned and looked down upon the grandest fleet his people had ever constructed and every eye he met looked right through his and out the other side, fixated with bloodlust on the foe.

“B’god we’ve done it,” he marvelled to his captains, mesopipe drooping from his incisors in admiration and joy.

“Yes, sir,” said Captain Hovard Slenk, teeth gritted.

“And on the eve of battle no less – hah, the timing couldn’t be more perfect. They lie anchored – unable to press us, unwilling to retreat, awaiting the day-wind that shall convey us to their destruction.”

“Aye, sir,” said Captain Mercy Pottery, eyes smouldering.

“Come the dawn we will press the attack and leave this sea awash in corpses.”

“Surely, sir,” said Captain Cluny Clobbers, face contorted.

“So sound the bell for night’s watch and tell the men to dream violent dreams – on the morrow, those dreams shall come true!”

“It can’t wait,” said Captain Mothsplatter Prentice, foaming at the mouth. “ALL HANDS TO THE BOATS!”

“What?” asked the admiral.

“TO THE BOATS!” screamed the other captains.

“YES, SIR!” called the soldiers all together and all at once, shrill and cracking to pieces

And the admiral asked ‘what?’ again, but such noise and such emotion are not found in places where questions are tolerated, so he was swept aside as every soul in the fleet set sails, dropped boats, seized weaponry, and very slowly poured out across the midnight sea into the surprised but grateful jaws of their foes, who found that enemies attacking with the wind against them, no plan, and complete disregard for their own existence were a pleasant surprise. The next day dawned on a single fleet and a wide array of splinters, some of which may have once been a deck an admiral could have stood upon, or a selection of gradated pipes he might have smoked, but they all looked much alike by that time.

***

Chief Military Advisor Bob Roberts received the news of the disaster at sea without much thought as to its impact on his bet. He was concerned with the speech he was drafting. He was concerned with the guard he would be addressing.

He was also concerned if he had a poppy seed stuck in his teeth. His mirror fixed that much for him. Then he straightened his collar, stepped to the balcony, and raised his voice to an appropriate level for the benefit of the ranks of those who waited upon his word.

“I know that we are in a dangerous and strange place right now,” he spoke. “But have you considered that it is also a fine and beautiful and great one? Look at how perfect this building is. Look at how wonderful the people who made it are. Look at each other: aren’t you beautiful? And not just physically: each and every one of you has lived the very best life you could have because of the tremendous wisdom and excellent emotional care you have shown to all others for all your lives, as instilled in you by the loving and irreproachably tender guidance of your parents, all of whom believe – as do we all! – in the sanctity and everlasting joy available to every human being that dares call this place home. Truly we live in a place of heaven come to earth, and in so coming, it has proven itself greater than its original home – that which dwells in purity and glory unseen is by far lesser than that which descends to mundanity so as to shine brightly amidst the ashes and thereby inspire all us weary souls to rise up in glorious ascension from the mud and dirt to the aethereal cloudscape of sublimity. The absolute, ultimate, final, terminal, concluding end-state of this land is not yet reached; its message is as of yet unaccepted, as can be seen by how all humanity has not yet joined together in harmonious and humble supplication and love before our unimaginable glory. Therefore our defeat is not possible, for losing before that happy day is also impossible. You will win us victory because you are very good and we are very great. I love you. I’d wish you good luck but you don’t need it.”

The citizen’s militia, national guard, reserve battalions, and assorted conscripts blinked greatly and stared.

“Now go forth and win, for love of all that we are!” cheered Bob Roberts,

“Yes, sir!” called the soldiers all together and all at once, loud and proud. And they marched out in their serried ranks and, to the world’s considerable surprise, did just that. At the very gates of their capital the foe was scorned and turned aside – driven not just from their walls, but from the country entire, then further still – and they were heroes.

Then they returned home and used their newfound heroic status to advocate for putting up a large fence around the land – legal and literal – so that they might cultivate their power and perfection and work towards their ultimate destiny as the greatest country to ever exist untroubled by the demands, threats, and feeble pawings of the lesser-and-less-glorious nations that surrounded them. Some disputed this and were immediately set upon as traitors.

Twelve years later the country – starving, undersupplied, depopulated, and torn apart by four successive civil wars (hyperpatriots vs the disloyal; hyperpatriots vs the irresolute; hyperpatriots vs patriots; and finally hyperpatriots vs hyperpatriots) – was annexed jointly by its neighbours in an act of coordinated international pity. Chief Military Advisor Bob Roberts was not available for legal commentary, having been executed in a show trial for insufficient love of country some ten years earlier.

***

The fate of the bar where the bet was made is unknown. If it was burned, it was probably rebuilt. Drinks, like armed conflict, are a timeless necessity.

Though the precise manner in which both are executed can vary.

It was still dewy out – just – when he woke up.  The sun was moving fast, the air was still lightly cool, there were excited animals losing their minds that the sun had come up, can you believe it the sun came up, there’s a ball of fire in the sky again, holy heck, and noon was closer than it wasn’t but not as close as it could be.

So he skipped breakfast for the hundredth time in a row and stepped outside, throwing a folded piece of paper in the air to check the breezes. 

It fluttered, dipped, and dropped nose-first.  He took the measure of its angle and started walking. 

He had a lot to catch up on. 

***

Down to the waters first.  A long walk – and worryingly exposed, without much cover – but bearable in the absence of both midday heat and mid-morning travellers.  He slipped through the crust of thickets and down into the cedars, hopped the stream, and under two trees and atop a stone and just barely above the waves he sat, looking out under the boughs into the long, wide water, quite invisible. 

A good place for a cache.  He checked his stash: ancient shells that whispered hidden secrets; wave-polished jewels that glowed without light; and a piece of wood turned into something more complicated by the will and whim of the waves.  He gripped it in his palm, drew something out of it that stood in place of his breakfast, and he slid back up out of his undertree hollow and hopped the stream again and strode down to the pebbled beach.  He found nothing, but that was alright.  Most days that was true.  The waves were rising higher and higher on the shoreline, pushing up the gravel – the last gasps of white-caps from out in the deeps, where the monster may or may not be lurking nearby.  A fish jumped – escaping something, hunting something?  Who knew. 

A strange call, long and hooting, from the ancient pier that serenely rotted in the waves nearby.  The locals were gathering.  He shivered and moved farther down the beach, away from the shadows looming down through the trees above the shore, splashing into the noisy burble and bubble of the river where it spilled into the broader body of the lake, cold and fast pooling and slowing and spreading into warm and lazy.

 ***

The sun was higher now, farther up in the sky and closer to the back of his neck, sizzling away.  The river kept him from sweating; ankle deep, thigh-high, waist, knee, back down to ankle as he moved upstream, clinging to branches and taking each step with care.  Some rocks were unsteady; some rocks were slippery; some rocks were dwelling-places of crustaceans with crushing claws, and the best way to tell the difference was to place your foot and carefully roll and nudge and swirl before your full weight bore down upon it. 

That was the slow, constant danger.  The fast, unsteady danger was the rapids.  The churn and bubble and froth over the stones was easy to spot, but when the bed dipped deeper the fast-moving current sometimes hid itself below, ready to shove and grab and yank you down, closer to the spiny fish and the clutching claws of the things that scuttled under rock and maybe even the ponderous, primevally knobbled skull of an ancient reptile. 

So the going was slow, and the going was long, and there was a break to be had along the way where the dense thicket pulled back and slumped over the ruins of an ancient building, stones strewn and foundations slowly sinking into the dirt.  He sat on what had been a finely-cut keystone for some decrepit archway and pondered the history of the place: a mill?  A tower?  A power station?  Laboratory, fortress, dungeon… whatever it had been, whoever it had been for, now it was rubble.  

A croak, a rustle in the rushes.  He left for the water again in a hurry.  He didn’t know this terrain as well as he’d like. 

***

Like any ambush predator, the trees came up slowly, skulkingly, never moving when he looked directly at them.  They crept into his peripheral vision, lulled it into a false sense of security, then slowly rose overhead to join hands until the whole river was swathed from the sun by a canopy of green and gold.  

A distant call made him freeze in the water and scan his surroundings: he was fully in the domain of the dinosaurs now, and their eyes were sharper than his.  Only by paying careful attention would he catch sight of one before it saw him, and so he lurked low in the water and moved quickly in short bursts, watching and listening and holding his breath between each surge until finally the rapids rose up into an aggressive roar not even his most careful footing could manage and he was forced inshore under the cedars, beneath the dead branches and above a thick layer of shed needles and dry twigs. 

It was a strange place to be; a thicket of bare, undead limbs.  You could hardly walk two feet without getting your eyes poked loose by clawing twigs, but without so much as a single leaf left alive in the understory to block your view you could see almost to the other end of the woods.  He detoured, he ducked, he swerved, and when at last he was hemmed in he took up the largest weapon he could find and chopped his way through the zombie foliage, wincing at each crack and stopping to look for any sign of sudden movement. 

But he was lucky, and he was close, and soon he emerged onto the edge of the sunlight and crossed over once more into the blinding breadth of the world.

***

The trees were above him.  The sky was above them.  And all around, sloping down, were the reeds and the rushes and the scream of the cicadas and the (still present, still too near) call of dinosaurs and the occasional deep, guttural grunt of the lions of the pond. 

It was those that he was hunting now. 

He walked down into the basin – a quarry of fathomless age, now a seasonal funnel that turned rainwater into something beautiful – like a stubby-necked heron, and waded amongst the slimy and sucking ooze of the marsh with caution and with care as great as that he had expressed when he was picking his way through the rocky stones of the creek, each footfall as slow and gentle as the settling of a fallen tree into a bog. 

Until at last it was within arm’s reach, at which he struck without thinking or blinking. 

Splash!  Grab!  Squeeze!  The pond-lion thrashed in his hands, legs kicking, toothless maw gaping in defiance.  Its beady eyes glared defiance and promised sure death if he were foolish enough to come a little bit closer, just a little bit closer please, only a tiny bit closer. 

He held his wriggling prize for just one more moment of glory, in which its struggles slowed and halted.  Gathering strength?  Detecting his intent? Accepting its fate?  Who could say, who could see, who could know what flirted through its brain.  The pond-lion was far more alien to him than the dinosaurs. 

A cloud passed above, shading the sun.  His grip released.  Its form impacted the surface.  And it was gone. 

So should he be, if he had sense.  The roar of metal came from nearby – up the hill, from the cindered trail.  A growling, gas-breathed predator was coming close, no doubt helmed by another of the locals.  He retreated away – skirted the edge of the water as mechanical heels and hands dug into its muddy edge and spat tepid water into the air, fleeing into the far brush.

And farther than that. 

***

Here was riotous growth and death all at once.  The trees had been slashed, then levelled, then finally crushed and piled high  in unimaginable corpse-welters of oozing trunk and shredded canopy, churned through with the very earth that their roots had clutched and pinned and kept solid and safe. 

Now that earth was exposed, raw, bleeding away into gravel with every rainfall.  Ponds had formed that no water-lion would dwell in, barren of green and shade.  Vulcanized footprints big enough to swallow him three times over shaped their bounds and the paths between them, a moment’s errant pause-and-reverse determining where water would flow and where it wouldn’t. 

One trench had been dug with deeper intent.  It stretched wide and far, waters clear and bright and only slightly tinted by floating dust.  Nothing lived in it.  It was deep enough to swim and drown and float in.  He would not set foot in it.

Instead he turned farther in, away from the greater display of devastation, and followed the tracks of its makers back into the wood proper – cedar again, but older and taller and greater by far.  There was greater room too between the trees, where much work with much effort had trimmed loose the tangle of dead and dying branches, and there between three conjoined trunks he found his cache, where he kept the tools that had done this.  Branches had been woven and raised and used as wall and fortress, creating a cranny that hid its contents from the dinosaurs and the locals and all other life that might casually pass by, and in this hidden niche were tools and weapons of varying sizes. 

He selected a new (if blunt) machete – of greater size and more sophisticated shape than that which he had used near the stream – and he swung it once or twice, checking it for rot or damage before putting it back at last.  The day was wearing on, and he had long ago cleared this place for his own uses.  It was safe.  It was close.  And he had to hurry, if what he heard was true. 

He had no need for stealth here so close to his goal, so he ran free and fast and uncaring of the snap and twist of twigs or the distant scream of the dinosaurs or the gasp and pound of his vital organs and then ahead was the light, and ahead of the light was the backyard of his house, and out the window was his mother’s voice calling him, telling him he was late for lunch. 

Henry Fairfield Osborn, head curator of the Vertebrate Paleontology Department of the American Museum of Natural History, soon to be elected President of the Board of Trustees of the same institution, sat at his desk and considered the world as he saw it.

“I’m real,” he announced. “I’m a real person that really existed. Whoo-eee, I am. I didn’t say this though – or that, did I? I’m also a big ol’ racist and an eager advocate of eugenics. Yessir. Yessir.”

“Mister Osborn,” said Barnum Brown with the sort of patience only available to a man who stared at rocks for a living, “you said you were done with showing instead of telling. That’s why you paid me, remember?”
“Oh! I DO remember!” said Osborn, nodding eagerly. “I paid you a lot of money to go find something we could show the public instead of telling them. I did, I did. ‘Go out there, Mr. Brown, and find me a big beautiful skeleton that we can exhibit to the public and charge them five cents a head to gawk at!’ That’s what I said, didn’t I? Anyways, you’re telling me instead of showing me your own self! Didn’t you find anything?”
“Well, we found something alright, but it wasn’t quite a skeleton,” said Brown. “Nothing like, say, that set of Miocene peccary molars sticking out from under your carpet.”

“Under my wha – ah.”

“Yes, right there. Just give me a moment with a trowel and we’ll have him out in a jiffy.”

“Well done, Brown! Your knack clearly hasn’t faded. So anyways, what’s all this fuss about what you found that wasn’t a skeleton?”

“We found a living, breathing, drinking, eating, defecating, aging, healthy-and-robust living specimen, Mr. Osborn. She’s parked outside.”

Henry Fairfield Osborn, who in a little over ten years would eagerly write multiple prefaces for a book Adolf Hitler called ‘his Bible,’ ran to the window and squinted outdoors. “Ah! So it is, so it is. Good god, Brown, is that thing fifty feet long? She’s taking up a LOT of parking space.”
“Forty at least. We stopped trying to measure her with tape when she kept eating it. That costs money.”

“Sensible, sensible, sensible,” mused Osborn. “And fifteen feet at the shoulder?”

“Twelve foot or so at the hip. Same problem.”
“Remarkable. Well, I’d better describe it then. Fetch me a pen.”

“Sure thing,” said Brown, who had just dropped a lit stick of dynamite into the drawer of Osborn’s desk. A loud BANG emitted, and from the smoke and rubble the paleontologist excavated a pen, some paper, and a perfectly preserved Triceratops skull. “Apologies for the smoke, Mr. Osborn. Had a hunch.”
“Yes, well, these sorts of things happen,” muttered Osborn, scribbling frantically. “HEY, WHOEVER’S LISTENING TO ME AT THIS MOMENT – PUT A STAGE TOGETHER IN THE MAIN HALL, WON’T YOU? Skeletal sketch….eh, that’ll do it for now. Size…..big…bigger than that… sex…. No thank you – hah, remember that one, Brown? Cope taught me that one…. and name. Name. Name, name, name, name. Hmm. Needs something big. Something mighty. Something stupendous in a headline and on a plaque and on a mural. Something that’ll make an artist’s pen shake, that’ll really slice the brisket, if you know what I mean.”
“We fed her fifty pounds of brisket a day to make it home alive, I know exactly what you mean. Swallowed it nigh-whole.”

“Wow, now THERE’S an expense. She ate like a king, eh? Like a king. Oh. Hmm. Hmmmmmm. Yes, I have a name now. RIGHT THAT STAGE UP YET? IT’D BETTER BE, I’M GOING TO BE ON IT IN THREE MINUTES.” Osborn stood up and dusted off his jacket. “Well then, Mr. Brown, how do I look?”
“Like the cofounder of the American Eugenics Society,” said Brown truthfully, now elbow-deep in the wainscoting, hammering away with a pick at the freshly-exposed vertebrae of a pantodont.

“Well yes OBVIOUSLY, but what about right now, at this very moment?”

“Like the cofounder of the American Eugenics society heading downstairs to unveil the greatest and most sensational wonder the world has ever seen?”

“Excellent. Oh and SOMEONE GET ME A CROWD WE NEED AN AUDIENCE JUST PULL ‘EM IN OFF THE STREET alright let’s go.”

***

By the time the two men were downstairs a stage had been hastily assembled along with a crowd – the former by the latter, judging from the audience’s unusually high concentration of burly men with overalls, newsboy hats, steel lunchboxes, and big steel girders slung over their arms. Still, there were more than enough mobsters, molls, dames, wise guys, jabronis, palookas, mooks, hard cases, bad apples, chumps, goons, schmucks, shmendriks, paper boys, shoeshine kids, and guys selling hot dogs out of carts to fill out all the necessary elements of a proper cross section of New York. Already they grew restive.

“’Ey, what’s the holdup?”
“Fuggadabouddit!”

“Hey asshole! I’m talkin’ to YOU!”

“Siddown and shaddup!”

Henry Fairfield Osborn mounted the stage. Behind him, squinting and baring its teeth a little in the spotlights, anchored by comically large chains, stood a forty-foot-plus carnivorous reptile.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” he called. “I am Henry Fairfield Osborn! I am an expert on vertebrate paleontology! I am a head curator at this institution! I am capable of extremely advanced and esoteric pseudoscientific racism and someday very soon, god willing, I will send men to labour under the sun of the Gobi desert in service of those beliefs! And I stand before you now to ask you the most pressing question imaginable: did all of you pay five cents to be in here?!”

Barnum Brown coughed.

“Right yes and also I have named the beast behind you – the great and magnificent creature that you all have better have paid five cents to see today – the titan of terror – the fossil that walks – the king of the cretaceous – the monster from Hell Creek – the sultan of the saurian – an animal so powerful and outstanding that I had to use both Greek AND Latin to name it…… Ultimateosauris láktismaclunes!”

Absolute silence reigned.

“’Láktismaclunes’ translates to ‘kicks butt,’ I believe,” said Osborn cheerfully. “Why aren’t you clapping?”

“You misspelled ‘saurus,’” said Brown. He scratched at his hat awkwardly and six opalescent trilobites fell out.

“Youse mugs cans’t even use no dictionary!” shouted someone from the crowd. “It should be ‘κλοτσιάclunes!”

“They’s using the ancient form, ya moron!”

“Aw, blow it out your kazoo!”

“Please!” called Henry Fairfield Osborn, now grown vexed. “Order, people! Despite my firm belief that many if not all of you are intellectually lesser than me by your descent from what I have predecided to be inherently inferior ethnic groups, we are still all Americans and you still all have five cents and because of that we all now can come together in this moment and celebrate my naming of-”

But it was too late. Concealed until now by the cover of the growing hubbub, a rogue construction crew jumped into action, demolished the dinosaur’s comically large chains, and began building the Empire State Building nearly three decades ahead of schedule.

“Stop! Stop!” screamed Osborn, scrabbling ineffectually at the burgeoning foundations with his bare hands. “Brown! Do something!”

Barnum Brown shrugged on his fur coat (sending three Diplodocus skeletons stuffed in its pockets clattering to the ground), lit a cigarette, used that cigarette to light every stick of dynamite in his fur coat, then hurled them all in the air and hid behind his hat.

“You did say ‘do something,’” he said later, when the smoke had cleared and the ceiling had finished caving in. He inserted a toothpick into his mouth and wiggled it with great care and precision.

“Yes,” mourned Osborn, now draped despondently over the ruins of the stage and mopping the dust from his brow with a pocket-sized klan hood, “but something less expensive would’ve been nice. Now we’re all out of anything to show. What will we exhibit, Brown?”
“Well, how would this do?” asked Brown, pulling loose the toothpick, along with two reasonably-complete skeletons of a forty-foot-long hypercarnivorous Cretaceous theropod dinosaur.
“Barnum, you devil – what on earth were those doing in there?”
“Leftover from when we were digging at Hell Creek, I bet,” said Brown, who was gently probing the joint of his jaw for any stray teeth that didn’t belong to him. “I’m a real rockhound, and sometimes I get more than a taste for my work, you know? A dog with a bone, a paleontologist with a mineralized skeleton.”

“Fair enough, fair enough, all is forgiven,” mused Osborn, running his fingers lovingly over the railroad-spike teeth (oh, if his railroad-owning father could see them!). “Yes, and I’ll not misspell the name on this one, oh no no no. Still, it’s a pity to lose the original beast. Did you see where it went in all the hullabaloo?”
“No, said Brown, idly plaster-jacketing and cataloguing the single gigantic footprint that was all the evidence remaining of their brief guest, “but I suspect she’s gone to do the same thing the audience has: build a new life in a new century.”

“But it’s a giant animal loose in the greatest city on earth!” protested Osborn as he kicked the twisted remnants of the chains out the door onto the sidewalk. “It’ll stick out like a sore thumb. No, Barnum, I’m afraid your romantic fantasy is false: it’s simply too unrealistic to be true.”

“Hey pal,” said an irritable pedestrian, the head of a procession of dozens carrying a twenty-foot gorillia in a reinforced steel cage, “We’re walkin’ here!”

“Blow it out your clunes, gentlemen!”

“Only if you yank your head outta yours first, creep!”

“Shaddup! And don’t touch that chain or you owe me five cents!”

***

Regina Clunes (?-1949) was a New York hot dog vendor famous for serving the patrons of the American Museum of Natural History.[1][2] She married Heinrich Adelman in 1909, and the two had six children.[1] Although she was a forty-three-foot-long carnivorous theropod dinosaur from the late Maastrichtian of Hell Creek, it is a matter of taxonomic debate as to whether or not she should be classified under Tyrannosaurus rex or under the nomen dubium of Ultimateosauris láktismaclunes (sic).[2][3][4][5][6]

Anguilliform Bing, maester of Galliform’s Great Gorehouse, the Stabbiest Show on Slerth, stood before the wagonwoman and examined her paperwork once again in service of the escalatingly cheery hope that this would show her that everything was fine.

“-and so if you look right here,” she explained, helpfully pointing with her longest and most fearsome finger, “you’ll see that the name on the paperwork is Galliform, not Anguilliform.”
“Huh,” said the wagonwoman, tilting her head back and forth and squinting. “But it says ‘Galliform’s Great Gorehouse’ on the gate.”
“Galliform was my great-grandmother.”
“Huh.”
“So you can see how this mistake happened?”
“Yuh.”
“And it won’t happen again?”
“Yah.”
“And you can fix it now?”
“Nope, no way. The poliprisoner wagons go out first thing in the morning and it’s nigh-noon; no way they haven’t disembarked already. You’ve got what you’ve got.”
Anguilliform felt a smile she hadn’t used since she was seven (and begging her mother to whip her sister instead) crawling across her face entirely without her permission. “And the fact that ‘what I’ve got’ is sixteen metric gronnes of vegetables, which do not possess arms, legs, blood, or the ability to feel and express pain and fear?”
“Plants can feel pain, insofar as they register damage to their persons and react to it,” argued the wagonwoman. “And they aren’t vegetables. They’re fruit. They’re berries. They’re scabberries.”

Anguilliform’s smile retracted into her skull. “Why are they called scabberries?”
“Well, they’re red and they ooze everywhere if you knock ‘em around too much. Sixteen metric gronnes of them, as delivered. Sign here. In the box that says ‘this shipment was in error,’ please.”

Anguilliform signed it. Then, because there was less than two hours between her and the end of her family’s business, she sat down on the curb, gave her scutes a good scratch, and had three smokes, one after another. They went by too quickly and gave her no ideas. She was contemplating a fourth when her beast handler found her.

“Mom. You’d quit.”
“Don’t tell me you still believe me when I said that, Protanguilla – you’re a grown woman, with the mandibular scarring to prove it.”

“Yeah but you told me you’d quit last night, and it usually lasts a full day. Something wrong with the prison wagon and it’s going to be late? Warping Cough running rampant through the cellblocks and none of the poliprisoners are going to be fit enough to run and hide and fight? City council got coup’d last night and they had to spend all morning reversing who’s on which side of the bars again?”
“No poliprisoners.”
“What?”
“They already got delivered somewhere else. Maybe a farm somewhere. We got sixteen metric gronnes of scabberries.”
“Why are they called sc-”

“I asked that, the answer wasn’t interesting. We have no prisoners for the games and we have sixteen metric gronnes of produce instead. The tickets have been sold out for a month. The stadium is already filling. I think you should change your name and leave town; maybe if I draw the mob to me you can take your kids and your boy and get the hell out of dodge.” She squinted into the sky. “Shit, and it’s so nice out. What a waste of a perfectly good Sunsday.”

Protanguilla’s whole body went limp, but in the relived kind of way. “Oh, that’s good. I was afraid it wouldn’t be a disaster.”
“What now?”
“Y’see, it’s about Roarbald – the rippopotamus, you remember?”
“I spent half our yearly profit buying that thing off the Whippomorphia expedition, you’re damned right I remember. And it’s worth about as much as a toothless bare if we have no poliprisoners for it to eat.”

“Well, good news on that. It’s herbivorous.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Nope. Turned up its nose at every limb and steak we’ve offered it, but there was some moss growing in its cage and it’s licked the bricks clean.”

“Whippomorphia swore to her mother’s soul that thing killed half her porters before she wore it out. Said it was the most brutal woman-eater she’d ever dared imagine, with a poet’s hunger for blood and the limbic system of a serial murderer.”
“Well, it seems like it’s just an asshole who starts fights for fun. I made one of the feeders stick his hand into the enclosure and it stamped it flat and left it. It’s got to be ravenous by now and that juicy little pile of fingers might as well have been made of dirt and dung.”

“Huh,” said Anguilliform. She realized she was almost done her fourth smoke, and was holding her fifth in her free hand. “So it won’t eat anyone. And we don’t have anyone for it to eat. Yeah. That’s all pretty bad. Not as bad as my thing, but pretty bad.”

A polite cough; a politer tug at her elbow-braid; a plaintive, sorrowful face of a messenger-boy in cook’s colours.

“Beg pardon maester, but Cook says the first lunch orders are coming in and he’s not got a drop of blood or flesh for the crowds yet, and could you please send the meat upstairs before they eat him instead? And he said to say they’ll eat you next.”

“Huh,” said Anguilliform. “Yeah. Yeah, we do usually get the steaks on the poliprisoner wagon, don’t we? Yeah. Yeah.” She nodded, smokes five and six wobbling in her mouth like the useless-ass tusks on her overpriced rippopotamus. “Yeah. Right. Okay, okay, okay. Boy, go tell Cook he can go to hell and ask them to keep my seat warm for me. Protanguilla, you can start running now and get the rest of the family to safety. And THIS fucking thing –” she kicked the wagonload of scabberries, which creaked and dropped one in front of her like an overripe turd “– can stay. Right. Here!”

Her foot came down. The world went red. The world stayed red.

“Mom?”
“Gimme a, a,” Anguilliform smacked her lips to clear the splatter from her words, “a handkerchief or something.”

“I’m fresh from the beast pens, mom.”
“’Or something.’”

A damp mass was placed into her palm. She rubbed it over her face until the world wasn’t red anymore.
“Crisp and crunchy craphouses,” she said, looking at the wad in her palm. “What the hell was this?”
“’Or something.’ Look, it was the cleanest cloth I had on me at work, so if you want to complain, then yo-”

“Not the rag – wait, is that a rag, what the hell is this, wha NEVER MIND, look at it!”
Protanguilla squinted. “What am I looking at? It’s hard to see what it could be under all that juice, it’s goddamned everywhere. You couldn’t have made a bigger mess if you’d torn out your heart in front of oh.”

Anguilliform was smiling without conscious control again. It dripped red at the corners. “Get every strong back you can out here five minutes ago. You got anyone on staff that knows how to fight?”

“Hell no, me and Elopomorpha are the best you’ve got.”
“Fuck, never mind, never mind, you got anyone on staff that knows how to LOOK like they know how to fight?”
“Monotremata, Soricidae, and Pygoscelis,” said Protanguilla promptly. “They’re the cheap hires for the summer – lot of disappointed theatrists in this batch.”

“Same as it was every year,” said Anguilliform. “Get ‘em. And get all your safety equipment. All of it. And some paint.” She slapped her palms together.

The world went red again.

“Fuck.”
“I don’t know if I have another or-something on me.”
“No, no, that’s great. This is good. This is perfect.” She spat, then licked her lips thoughtfully. “And hey – boy! Send the kitchen staff down here on the double. Cancel my previous message and tell Cook he’s got an hour to make a miracle.”

***

By one o’crock the crowd had slipped past rowdy and plunged into the depths of restiveness. That hushed murmur that hinted of eager anticipation turning sourly impatient, teetering towards the first angry shout.

Anguilliform walked out into the ring with the swagger of a woman who was absolutely definitely positively one hundred percent certain she was not about to die horribly and wasn’t bluffing in the slightest.

“Gentleladies and men!” she roared over her megaphone from the bottom of all of her lungs. “Happy Sunsday! Happy Games! And in this moment, we have something a little – no, VERY – special for you! Remember this-” (because one way or another they definitely would, so why not embellish) “-and remember that you saw it here first at Galliform’s Great Gorehouse!”

Then she left through the announcer’s door without running, which took a lot of effort. And as she walked she heard the crowd murmur, then hush, then murmur again louder, louder, into a confused jumble…

Then CLANG.

Dead silence for three seconds, then

CLANG

CLANG

SPLASH

And then the roar came and Anguilliform realized she’d been holding her breath for almost a full minute and started hyperventilating, which made her run up the staircase a bit slower and clumsier than usual. She needed to see what was happening, probably, as long as it wasn’t going to be the last thing she saw in her life.

She got to the announcer’s peephole at the top of the staircase just in time for the end. In the center of the arena, where four dozen swarming, starved, desperate poliprisoners should have been clawing each other to death with blunted knives to see who got to be readmitted to the community, two figures – made giant by their solitude and their bizarre and ornate armour, spiked and fluted and helmed – lunged and swung at each other with impossible, desperate force, each wielding weapons that – even at their ludicrous size – shouldn’t have weighed as much as they made them look, heaving and throwing their whole body weight into every blow. They stabbed and roared and parried and it was the worst fighting Anguilliform had ever seen in her life, just godawful telegraphed showy bullshit and every time a blow was glancing it went

CLANG

like a big clear bell, and when it struck true there was a sudden

SPLASH

of bright red liquid spraying like a hydrant from the wounded belligerent, delivered by one of the ten grillograms of scabberries Monotremata and Pygoscelis were wearing underneath their beast-trainer-suit-with-pans-attached armour. It gushed, it poured, it bubbled arteriously, and it covered up all the smears from the half-dry paintjob on the armour.

The crowd had stopped yelling now except for every time a particularly ‘devastating’ blow landed, at which point they went nuts and threw things. Anguilliform was nervous until she realized it was mostly money, rather than snacks or rocks. She’d have to make sure the cleaning boys didn’t pocket too much of it tonight.

Look at that. Pull a tentative miracle out of a manureheap and at the first sign of it actually working what do you do? Start thinking about the money. Well, that was slumanity for you.

“Maester, you okay?”

It was Elopomorpha, the beast secondhandler. “Yeah. Just, making notes. They rehearsed this?”
“Sort of. A lot of the summer hires said they could do it; they were two of the three that were lying the least; and they hate each other. They’ve probably imagined this a lot.”
A particularly surprising and furious punch crumpled the breastplate of one of the warriors like a food wrapper, soaking her opponent in scabberry fluids. “So, how’s it meant to end?”
“Either one of them stops being able to sell a victory and gives up with style for the love of the show, or she goes nuts at the prospect of defeat and gets herself killed forcing the issue.”

A particularly wild swing slammed into the dirt, spraying both warriors in mud and juice.

“Those aren’t sharpened, right?”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean they do nothing.”

“Right. Right. Right.” Anguilliform exhaled. “Hey, you got any smokes? I’m out of smokes.”
“No, sorry maester.”
“Then what the hell am I paying you for?”
“The second act, maester. It’s ready.”
“Is it any good?”
“Only one way to find out.”
CLANG

SPLASH

THUD

The crowd was screaming. One warrior was kneeling. The other was splayed with incredibly pettily beautiful lifelessness over the berry-drenched sands. She saluted three times, stood, and strode away with the weight of the world on her shoulders as six shrouded figures – janitor boys wrapped in dark tablecloths – bore away her fallen opponent.

“Did someone just throw underwear? No, nevermind. If it isn’t good, is it at least ready?”

“Oh yes.” The crowd was already starting to mutter again. Trying to figure out if what had happened was good or bad. That wouldn’t do.

“Then here I go. Don’t wish me luck, we just broke the budget on that. Anything that happens next is entirely our fault one way or the other.”

So Anguilliform walked out into the arena with her head held high like it made sense and she wasn’t a fraud and she stood in the circle of sand that smelled like sweet and sour lies and she said “Gentleladies and men! Did I not promise you something special?”

The crowd called back, which was good. It was cautiously enthusiastic, which was better. “Well, you haven’t seen it yet! For our second act, our animal feature – one never seen before outside the wasted woodlands of the far west! A creature so deadly, it crushed no less than seventy-nine porters, armswomen, and hunters underfoot before being laid low through exhaustion! The bane of the bog, the beast that craves death – the rippopotamus!”
Then she turned and left, and although she had to be sure not to walk faster even as the beast gate began to raise as her own door was opened, that was a more normal and appropriate sort of fear, a regular kind of fear she’d long ago shrunken down from a sharp sword in her brain into a little tickling sliver.

Then she shut the door and burst into a sprint up the stairs and shoved Elopomorpha loose from the peephole at a flying (sliding) tackle, because she really, really, wanted to see this.

She was just in time. The rippopotamus had stepped into the ring, lured by the promise of sunlight and the relief from vicious stabbing by long iron spears at its most tender (relatively) haunches. It stood there, and for the crowd, for a moment, that would be enough. Ten metric gronnes of flesh and bone and hide and tusk blinked as it made eye contact with several thousand confused but cautiously enthusiastic slumans.

And then, right at the moment of uncertainty, the squeak-squeak-squeak of another gate being raised. Unoiled, uncouth, unused, unasked for.

The service entrance. High and wide and big enough to bring in a dung cart and a flesh wagon and a cleaning squad, shoulder-to-shoulder or stacked one atop another, all at once.

Or, in this case, an entire covered delivery wagon. The sort poliprisoners were kept in.

It trundled into the arena under the power of two teams of shorses that were blinkered and earstopped and probably had been doing this job long enough that they wouldn’t care even if they weren’t, and the sight was just ridiculous enough that a little nervous shudder of laughter flicked through the crowd like a snake fleeing through the grass. The driver did not share in it. Anguilliform would’ve berated her daughter for her lack of showmanship if she didn’t know that there wasn’t anyone else that could pull this off. It was a very, very, very stupid idea that could go wrong in many ways, only one of which would be entertaining.

Protanguilla’s cheeks puffed. It didn’t mean much to anyone sharp-eyed enough to spot it, but Anguilliform knew her daughter and knew her trade and knew her tools and knew the plan, which was that she’d just blown the whistle she’d stuffed into her cheek before the show began. Silent to slumans, but audible to some.

The rippopotamus reacted in the one way it knew home.

The resulting chase started out terrifying – the speed on that thing was a shock if you hadn’t seen it move before – descended into farce – the sheer number of hairpin turns you could execute in a delivery wagon before it got too ridiculous to be funny was higher than most people would’ve guessed – and concluded in a precisely aimed tragedy, when Protanguilla ‘accidentally’ let the wheel of the cart clip the wall during a wide turn.

She leapt. The shorses shrieked. The wood splintered. The rippopotamus did not stop. And oh, but oh, but oh the spray and the splash of red when it opened that cart, tearing into the bright, bright red blood and seizing and raising high the helpless form of a big wooden barrel, full of oozing scabberries.

Its jaws tensed, bulged, clamped, and crunched – and berries exploded everywhere. And although Anguilliform hated to interrupt this moment, it was come clean then or not at all.

“That’s right, folks!” she screamed, megaphone slapped against the peephole. “Just because the cart was short on poliprisoners doesn’t mean it has to be short on violence – and just because it eats fruit doesn’t mean it can’t crush with the best of them! And you too can take a crush of your own – lunch is open! Hit the stands and grab a cruncher of FRUIT BLOOD!”

Then she dropped her instrument and doubled over, wheezing so hard for so long that she couldn’t hear anything but her heartbeat. Then a gentle tip-tap on her arm.

“S’good?” she croaked up at the slightly perturbed face of Protanguilla.

“Yeah. Jammed my arm and one of the shorses got its foot peeled off by a wheel. Expected we’d lose all four.”
“How’s Cook?”
“Selling crushed scabberries and juice in a mug filled with ice,” she said flatly. “If it works, I’m amazed.”

“Good.”
“Yeah. You should quit.”
“Maybe six was a lot. Before all the yelling.” Anguilliform wheezed. “But you know. What I think?”

“We didn’t blow the biggest day of the year entirely?”

“I think we learned. A lot today. Death is scary. Death is amazing. Death is addicting… but you know what? It’s too realistic to be entertaining forever. Fake is sexier, and sex sells.” She took a deep breath. Her lungs were working again. Back to normal. “Proty, run down the address of the farm that grew these things. We’re going to be keeping them in business for the rest of our lives. And cancel our poliprison contract. If this works out, we just quadrupled our net.”

***

The Planetary Museum of Sluman Rights is hereby dedicated to the memory of ANGUILLIFORM BING, an early advocate for the compassionate and humane treatment of prisoners. Centuries ahead of her time, we look upon her brave and selfless efforts to reform the bloodthirsty entertainments of her era in favour of peaceful stuntsmanship as among the first steps leading to what we know as the Sluman Rights Revolution.

“There is no day so dark that there are none who may dream of light.”