jamieproctor.ca

The sun is high as I approach, a boiling clot in the midday haze that makes the inside of my highway mask damp with sweat as I take the last turns down the old roads.  I’m three hours out of the core, three from the compaction when I finally spot it: a red smudge rising up to touch the sky.  From there it grew and grew until it ate the horizon, then the road; crawled in through the cracks in my windshield to smear over my goggles and itch my skin in the gap between my gloves and jacket; put the taste of blood and lighter fluid in the back of my throat.  And then, through the mist, its source: a house-tall tractor, armoured in rust and caked residue, dragging a billowing hive of belching pipes and chugging diesel.  Red liquid foundtained into the air, poured hissing down on the twisted and towering stalks of nuclear hogweed that filled the lawn and tore at the sidewalk with hungry roots, dripping sizzling poisonous sap as they cracked and crumpled at the seams under the acrid red weight of the pesticides.  The roar ended, the tractor stilled, a hulking, gas-suited figure leaned from its open cab and waved a paw in greeting.

The last of the suburbanites had invited me to lunch.  I’d just arrived a little early. 

***

My roadhopper has never lived so luxuriously: half of a six-car garage, all its own.  The tractor scrapes the ceiling a little, but otherwise even that monster couldn’t have a happier home.  An older way of parking. 

The lunch Kaylee Hawthorn serves me is just as antique: antibiotic Jello apertif; tuna salad and dreadelion sandwichettes lunch brushed gently with ground gigagarlic mustard; a dessert of whipped headache pills meringue on multigrain meal-loaf. A real microwave does the cooking; actual plastic is the surface the meal graces, dyed soft blue and worn with age. 

“It’s hard to get this far from the distribution centers,” Kaylee explains as I finish eating, “but really, what isn’t?  I’m not out here for convenience.”

Many people don’t know Kaylee’s out here at all.  To them, the suburban way of life has been gone for decades, a long-fallen victim of rising fuel prices, the civic tidal retreat, and the groundwater annihilations.  Even those stragglers that limped through the gauntlet of the 21^st century are assumed to have withered away with the final stake through the heart that was the complete and irreversible erasure of Facebook during the global electromagnetic pulses set off during the Third Limited Exchange. Unable to detect, communicate, or like and friend one another across the countryside, the isolation claimed those few remaining surbanites one by one, sending them home to relatives in corebound groundscraper apartments or into shallow graves scraped in the soil by passing waste-roamers.

Kaylee never used Facebook. “More of a Myspace girl,” she says.  “I liked to make playlists.  And when that went down, I just sort of kept doing my thing.  I noticed the downturn, of course – fewer neighbors, fewer holiday cookouts, less of a need to buy a full two-four for a party when a six-pack would do – but I think it was all so gradual that I didn’t realize I was alone until the super coyotes took Brendan Clarke, and I didn’t even notice THAT until I went by to ask him why he’d stopped spraying my lawn for the nukehoggies – now, as you can see, I have to do it.  We used to trade off: I’d uproot the dreadelion colonies for him because he hated getting his hands dirty.  I know it’s really awful of me to say this, but the first thing I thought when I found him lying there all tied to the roof of his garage with his liver in his mouth and EAT YOUR’RE SELF, APESES written on his chest with his small intestines was ‘well, maybe if you’d done more weeding you’d have had the muscles to put up more of a fight.’  I swear, that man had no work ethic.  But he DID know his way around the insides of a toxitractor mister setup; I sweat every five years I have to hike to Lonesville to get someone to come out here and fix that damn thing because I just do NOT understand machinery.  How’d you like your sandwichettes?”

I tell her I loved them.  It’s the truth.

“Good,” she says.  “That was my second-to-last tuna.  I haven’t been able to find any for the last while, do you know why that is?”
“The last tuna sighting was just before the Second Limited Exchange,” I explain. 

“Oh,” she says.  “I’d better save that one for Christmost.”  She looks at the can for a moment, wiped clean and put in the recycling compactor.  What year is it?”

I tell her.

“The tin wasn’t punctured,” she draws out, carefully.  “I’m sure it’s fine.  Besides, I put plenty of rootcohol in the dressing.”  

***

After lunch we walk the most important feature of the suburbs: the lawn.  The redmist has settled now and the nuclear hogweed lies subdued and sullen, shriveled down to nothing.  Kaylee gives me her backup scythe and together we lop off any surviving limbs, now bereft of their virulent inner fluids.  They’re piled in a heap out back atop a scorchmark, a lone barbecue standing sentinel among the scanty remaining bricks that once outlined a mighty patio. 

“It was so easy to have cookouts back in the day once they moved in,” she tells me.  “Can’t really do it without guests, but I do it every couple days anyways.  Got to do SOMETHING with the stuff, and if you pile it up sometimes it comes back.  That’s what happened to the Hendersons down on Third Avenue.”  She wrinkles her nose.  “Take a look on your way back.  But from a distance.”

Once the weeds have been limbed, the rest of the yard work comes quickly.  A wind generator powers a pump that brings up septiwater from the waste tank, sprays it over the field of sheltered brown blades that cling to existence beneath the weed-corpses – glowing them a healthy green, for now.  The dreadelion patch’s perimeter is inspected for holes or flaws, all eight feet of chainlink topped by a live wire.  And as the shadows grow long, the barbecue is loaded: three skewers, strung heavy with members of the local rodent clade and spare crapapples.  I carry the briquettes to fill its maw, stand well back as it steams and growls to itself, sit back in an ancient deck chair and stare up at the clouds and marvel how so much of this place is expressed in burnt offerings.  Charred oil, steamed gasoline, seared vegetation, and charbroiled flesh.  A sacrifice in an empty temple to a god long forgotten by humanity at large.  I pay the price of philosophy and nearly burn the skewers, scramble in haste to put the meal in order and my mind back on the ground. 

Kaylee stands up suddenly, plates my work, and gently motions me to stay put as she walks out to the far side of the bonfire-to-be.  She comes back without the food, strikes a match, starts the conflagration, and together we listen to it crackle and fume.  The gas masks keep out the smoke, the smoke keeps out the malarial swarmers of the evening that swarm in waves from the creaking eavestroughs, the bugs keep the unseeable, unavoidably audible flapping wings of the mushbats fed and fruiting, showers us in tiny wisp-winged batlings that glow in the dark and die in thousands so that dozens might one decades-hence day sporulate on their own.  I finish my mojoitoid and try not to make an analogy out of it. 

The fire dies quicker than you’d think, fueled by the pesticides and the dried weeds.  Behind it, the skewers are gone. 

“The HOA isn’t as bitchy anymore,” she admits.  “But it’s a lot stricter on the deadlines.”
“Super coyotes,” I guess. 

“Mostly,” she says.  Her smile is complicated.  “I think maybe Brendan Junior is out there sometimes.  Can never actually prove it, just never found the body, and he never did like his old man.”  The sigh that comes out rattles a little through a loose hinge on her mask.  “Too bad, either way.  He was the best paperboy our neighborhood ever had, back when we had a paper.”

The conversation wasn’t lively to begin with, but that kills it outright.  Kaylee’s had practice not saying much, and I’m feeling the strain of a more complex cocktail – drink, air enviroquality, take your pick and pick both – than I’ve inhaled in years.  She tells me to stop by again whenever I want to, and we both know I don’t, and we’re both relieved.  The lights go out before I’ve even left the driveway; the six-car garage gaping black as I back out of its maw.  Something that sounds like six somethings yips behind me as I shift gears, and I try not to accelerate.  I can’t outrun them, but I CAN provoke them.

***

On the way out of the suburbs, back to the compaction, back home, I stop and follow the old signs for a bit.  Just for a while. 

It’s not hard to find the Hendersons’ street, but it’s impossible to see their house.  The nukehoggies have it in their grip now, swaying tall and invincible, barbed rachises swaying in the breeze until they scrape the undersides of the smouldering night fog. 

I watch them, unsettled by the lack of city light reflected in the sky.  Then I drive home, back to the compaction, back to the core, back to all two hundred million remaining civicilians in North Amerigo, away from the last suburbanite.    

In a place too big for the human brain to realize how empty it was, there was an untidy heap of sorted scalded and assembled elements, moving from one of infinite unremarkable point As to one of a few very specific point Bs.

Inside, carbon things moved, surrounded by tens of thousands of times their weight in silicon, titanium, copper, lithium, and so much more that was meant to keep them alive. They turned in their sleep, they ingested organic molecules, they signaled each other in light, in the vibration of air molecules, in the emission of chemicals, in the smack of an appendage across the broadside of a central body mass. They idled.

The Patient, despite his name, despite his shared genetic code (give or take a few bespoke modifications), had not. He had planned. Then he had waited.

Now, sixteen light years out, he was about to act. It felt like stretching. It felt like exhaling. It felt like floating.

It felt like telling Canary on monitor duty ‘goodnight’ as he had done sixty times before (in a place where night and day were as carefully constructed as their shared atmosphere), walking past the terminal and trailing his fingers as he had done sixty times before, flicking a switch to act on an autoextract pack he’d placed there before the ship left, and taking one turn different halfway to the sleeper deck.

To the inner hold. Atmosphere-preserved. Not comfortable for life, but comfortable enough. Just enough. A seedling, a human, a vertiginous space cow (common names lied), or an unnamed hypercarnivorous organism as of yet undocumented by science whose only formally recorded information was its weight: a little less than six hundred kilograms.

The Patient drew up the inner hold’s manifest, spun it down to a container holding extremely innocuous dried foodstuffs.

Alright, a little more than a little less than six hundred kilograms. Rationing had not been kind to it. It would be ravenous.

Oh, ideal.

The Patient didn’t draw up the rest of the ship from his hand terminal. It was already in his head. All the gaping arteries and veins and venules of traffic that oozed humanity through the tight-packed-to-the-brim body of the ship, all at their smallest just big enough. All cut just the right way at just the wrong moment, turning into funnels, cutting off escape, cutting off weaponry, cutting off alarms.

A cut reversable and retractable. Hidden. Oh, the alien did it. Ah, how tragic, how unforeseeable. Who can say what was damaged, or lost, or spaced in the chaos. What a tragic accident – it seems a crewmember became careless. Thank goodness for the insurance. Thank goodness. Thank goodness.

Thank the foresight of the company in setting up a branch devoted to Patient solutions to expensive problems, like the cost of mothballing and retiring antique ships and the agitation of would-be-unionizing crews. A little cost up front (augmented assassins) saved a lot of cost in the end (paying other people money).

The Patient opened up the second cargo container, which also held innocuous dried foodstuffs, engaged all the locks and plugged into the clean-control-center. He breathed in and out one more time to savor their lungs, then turned over autonomic function to the command software. Other things would need as much of his attention as possible.

The ship inside his head became the ship inside his grasp. He stretched without matter, then squeezed.

The first cargo container clicked open and a little more than a little less than six hundred kilograms of liquid muscled death did not pour out.

The Patient waited.

After three minutes, the Patient maneuvered a freestanding hold drone into position to glimpse inside the first cargo container.

The unnamed hypercarnivorous organism as of yet undocumented by science was lurking at its far end, back to the wall, both its praying forelimbs and all four of its preying forelimbs held tense and at the ready, its antennae twitching, its eyes unsheathed and flickering. Its primary spinal column was a rigid pole; its secondary brace bulged in time with its deep, quick breaths.

The Patient waited.

And waited.

And waited.

After six hours, the Patient closed the first cargo container, unsealed his control center, and hurried back to the sleeper deck, where he told the shift lead he’d gotten distracted catching up on old second-screen dramas.

“They’ll rot your brain,” she said disapprovingly.

“Well, the job’ll do that anyways,” he said. And she didn’t laugh, but she sighed in a way that wasn’t entirely unfriendly, and so he skated by for the day, which he spent reconsidering his options.

***

The Patient minded their fingers as they told Canary ‘goodnight’ for the sixty-second time. The switch was already flicked. The pack was already in play. The sensors in the inner hold were already his. All he had to do was run the habit as if nothing had changed.

Funny how the little things got to you. Less funny when the big things did too.

Seal. Plug in. Patience. Unseal.

And this time, the hold wasn’t empty. A slab of fresh protein. Still warm. Waiting at the hall entrance.

There. Go on. It’s safe out here. There’s food, right? Have a bite. Have another. Look for more. Smell the sweat and blood and flesh all waiting for you. Go on. You’re starving, aren’t you? Don’t you want to hunt? To kill? They’re slower than you, they’re smaller than you, they’ve got no claws or teeth and I can take all their weapons away. Go. GO!

After an hour, the unnamed hypercarnivorous organism as of yet undocumented by science darted out between flickers of the eyelid, grabbed the protein slab, and scrambled back into its container as if the hold’s floor were lava.

The Patient closed the container and hissed until his teeth hurt.

Fine.

***

Seventy-five goodnights, now each delivered a little earlier – a dire sin, but the Patient needed the extra setup time. Protein delivered in its own fluids, served rarer and rawer and farther and farther each time. A trail of juices dribbling farther afield. A schedule set up.

The organism yet left its container with wary tread, but it moved with less panic now. Its steps were still careful, but sure… at least within the perimeter of the hold.

The halls were a different store. While its eyes followed the bloodtrail, its antennae remained high and alert.

Well, it was about to get an interesting surprise.

One little tweak, that’s all it had taken. One little tweak on a schedule sheet.

As it rounded the final corner, quiet as a mouse, its meal finally in sight, new footsteps echoed down the hall. In the distance a janitor was moving. Loud. Careless. Certain of her own safety. Directly towards its promised meal.

It stared out into the beyond. Its antennae swiveled. The edge of its mouth curled tighter, baring an inch of something that was too complex to be a tooth.

The Patient watched.

The organism shot back to the crate so quickly it skidded around the corners and clipped its fifth hindleg badly, limping the last stretch until it could take a flying leap into its container.

The Patient punched the control panel and swore so loudly he bit his own tongue.

***

“Three-quarters there!” said Canary in response to the ninety-first goodnight.

“Yes,” said the Patient, through a smile a less professional and excellent infiltrator, assassin, and corporate cost-saver wouldn’t have managed at all.

So what if it was a little glassy? It was plausible! Anyone would be frustrated in his position! Anyone would be cross in his position! Anyone would be upset and frustrated and maybe a little imp

            no not that never that ever

RUDENT, to discover that their job was being obstructed because a rank AMATEUR wouldn’t do the VERY SIMPLE JOB they were literally BORN TO DO.

So! Maybe it was time for something more drastic.

For the first time in weeks, the protein slab was left inside the boundaries of the inner hold – just barely inside – which meant that for the first time in weeks, the unnamed hypercarnivorous organism as of yet undocumented by science was actually going to retrieve it. The Patient had marched the juice trail backwards day by reluctant day, hallway by hallway.

Last night it had lain in plain sight five metres beyond the hallway entrance. A bodylength or two, maybe. The organism had regarded it with solemn contemplation, then slunk home.

Fine. Fine!

Two of them could be perverse.

The jaws shut. His immaterial hand moved.

Click.

It didn’t realize anything was wrong until it was face to face with the closed container door. Then…

The Patient waited.

The Patient waited through five minutes of anxious pawing, ten minutes of frantic clawing, thirty minutes of low-frequency rumbles, and an hour of sleepless pacing in front of the container.

Then the organism began to sleep. Fitfully.

The Patient seized direct and ostentatious control of half the subroutines of the ship and started to adjust inner hold life-compatibility systems.

***

Light. Drop to nothing – initial startlement? No, no response – increase to blinding, until it shuts every eye and begins to rely on ear and antennae alone.

It huddles at the container.

Temperature. Increase, then decrease, then wildly oscillate.

It pants through mouth and spiracles both. It shivers convulsively from head to toe. It does not move.

Chase it with the camera drone. Flash readouts in its face. Transmit his vocals in direct defiance of all operational security so he can finally say what he’s thinking.

“YOU-”

It spins on the spot, scurries away to claw at the container again, and a lashing hindclaw catches the drone and catapults it into uselessness.

Put yourself on full audio broadcast.

“STUPID, STUPID THING! IDIOT ANIMAL! YOU ARE MADE TO KILL! WHY WON’T YOU KILL!? KILL! KILL! GO!”

The emergency siren goes on – surely someone’s going to hear it somewhere. Someone who should’ve been dead THIRTY-ONE GOODNIGHTS AGO.

He engages the cargo hoists. Swings containers like children’s build-a-chipsets, chases it from corner to corner like a fly with a swatter.

It cowers. It expels noxious substances. It shrinks and dodges and begins to whine and whine in pitches audible even to the Patient’s biological ears.

It won’t go out the door. It won’t leave the room.

The Patient loses himself for a moment. When he finds himself again, he is standing outside his container, outside his control center, in front of the organism. He is screaming and shouting and kicking at it and it is huddled in a little more than a little less than six hundred kilogram-heap, waving its praying limbs helplessly at him. He can’t hear what he’s saying over the emergency siren, or over the red roar in his head.

Why? He’s pretty sure he’s asking why. He was built to be good at what he does. So was it. He loves doing what he does. Why won’t it?
What’s wrong with it?

He kicks again, watches as an apex predator shrinks back and makes inaudible noises. He screams again, walks back to his control center, kicks it, hits it, hears doors open and shut at random, precision-engineered hand-sculpted code created with a chemically-managed coolness executed with the precision and planning of his big toe snapping in half against a metal casing.

He kicks it again with his other foot, veers drunkenly out of the container, screams – oh he can hear that, the siren is off – runs up to the organism, screams again, runs away, kicks something else, back into the container.

It isn’t his. It stinks of alien urine and dead-meat predator sweat, and in the back is a cluttered mess of hairy fibres that appear to be fashioned of loose skin integument.

“That’s IT?” he asks. His throat is raw, he would be yelling if he still could but something feels scraped loose. “THIS is what’s been keeping you distracted? A SECURITY BLANKET?”

The security blanket shrinks back from him.

The Patient loses himself again for a moment. When he finds himself, he’s torn half the mass apart and is looking down at an unnamed hypercarnivorous organism as of yet undocumented by science.

No information has of yet been formally recorded from it. He estimates its weight at six kilos.

It warbles at him. Little praying limbs wave in a familiar motion.

The Patient was lost for words, physically and mentally. But if he had, he might have said “ah.” He could’ve said “uh.” He definitely would’ve said “oh.”

The light behind him vanished.

He would never, ever, not in a million years, have had the time to say “no.”

***

Working out why half the bulkheads had shut, then released, was a big job. So was figuring out why the emergency warning systems had refused to fire when it happened. High priority. Then after that the janitors had to ask why they’d received sixteen schedule change prompts, and then evidence came in that some sort of mass data-grip program had hijacked half the ship’s systems to do all of that, and well.

It was the sort of thing that took time to work out. So by the time Canary went and realized that they’d worked through three full emergency shifts without hearing a single new goodnight, it wasn’t much later than the moment everyone else realized the inner hold had been the focal point of half the hijacking.

It was calm down there. Silent. There was an unnamed hypercarnivorous organism as of yet undocumented by science sitting in one of two opened cargo containers, and it made threatening noises until someone triggered the door and left it in peace and quiet.

The manifest said there were two of them. Six hundred and six kilos. And apparently they were well-fed.

David Wurston Quarters – son of Gnorman Wurston Quarters, son of Baobab Wurston Quarters, heir to the ‘donut throne,’ multibillionaire, and master of ten thousand terrible little outlets – slouched in a chair that wasn’t as comfortable as it looked and listened to someone who’d paid real money for a real degree they had to do real work to really earn tried to explain how he could make more money.

“So you put a burger between the donuts, is that it?” he interrupted. Manners were a sign of respect. David had last said ‘please’ at age four, and the memory was not a fond one. “We don’t sell burgers. How the hell is this supposed to work? It’s stupid. You’re stupid.”
“The ‘burger,’” said the bedraggled dweeb standing at the far end of the table, lost and alone before a slideshow, “is comprised of the same sausage patties we sell inside breakfast wraps.” She took a deep breath, the way people who are repeating themselves must. “Putting it inside the donuts creates a unique variant on the so-called ‘Luther burger,’ and-”

“Wait, some guy called Luther already came up with this idea? God, I hate lawsuits. They’re boring. Make this bozo go away and ruin her career a little, I don’t care how.”
David sank further back into his chair and picked at his eyelid. He hated product pitch sessions as much as lawsuits, but there was no escaping this one. Holey Donuts was in big, big, big trouble: it was only making the same amount of money it had before, which was as good as losing all its money immediately. More gimmicks. More ads. More eyeballs. More to make more, that’s what made things safe. “Send in the next chump,” he mumbled to the large, unpleasant men in sunglasses he employed.

They sent in the next chump, who was slim and smiling and moved like a greased snake and walked right up to him – not the projector! To him! The hell! – and said, confident and unstressed: “donut holes.”
“Huh?” said David, who was still trying to figure out how this had happened. “We already do those.”
“Nah,” said the chump, flicking his fingers as if shedding water. “You sell little round lumps of dough. You need to sell the REAL donut holes. Sell the hole from a donut’s center. Its soul. Its essence. Fry them. Box them. Bag them. Bill them. ‘True Donut Holes.’ Never been imagined, never been done, never been dreamed. And only sold at Holey Donuts.” His smile slid a few degrees west. “’For A Limited Time.’”

David’s own mouth was open, he realized. Wide. Round. Holy.

“Damn,” he said. “Make it happen.”
“Absolutely.”

“Not you. Someone I can pay less. Thanks for your time see you later.”

The smile moved around a little farther. “I’ll leave my card at the door,” it said. And was gone.

***

David called the number on the back of the card at nine AM the next day.

“What can I do for you, mister David?”
“How do you sever the hole from the center of a donut?” he demanded.

“Why, that’s simple,” said the chump through the soft static of his smile. “Simply make a donut, pop out the center like usual, then immediately pop out everything else. Catch it off guard. Do it in a temperature around eh….one hundred fifty kelvin. That should keep it stable.”

“Good,” said David. And hung up.

He called back six hours later. “Hey, how do you fry these?”
“Something with a very high smoke point. Refined safflower, I’d say. Immediately after separation from the everything else.”
“Great.” Click.

Ten minutes after that: “how do you put them in a box?”
“Tongs, made from alloys resistant to thermal shock – tungsten, maybe. Ask your engineers. And it should be done blindfolded.”

“Bye.” Click.

At ten PM: “Hey. What did you call these?”
“True Donut Holes. Tagline – ‘Only Sold at Holey Donuts: For A Limited Time.’”

“Great. Hey. I’m not paying you.”
“Mister David,” smiled the phone, “I’m not in this for the money.”

David Wurston Quarters grimaced and dropped the phone. “Throw it in the trash,” he told a nearby large unpleasant man in sunglasses. “That stuff’s contagious.”

***

The factories had been built; the kitchens had been stocked, the math had been graphed, and – above all else – the ad copy was finally almost finished.

Now there sat before the chair of David Wurston Quarters a humble bag of lowest-possibly-bidder paper byproducts and resins, holding a logo-stamped box, holding six True Donut Holes. The first to be sampled in all the world. Cameras were pointed at the occasion, which made David irritated because they belonged to people he had to pay money to.

“You sure this’ll only take a minute?” he demanded of the nearest small unpleasant man in a suit. He looked like he could be a secretary or something.

“Just one bite for one photo for each of us,” he said. His smile was profound and warm and loving and David knew this guy had been working for him too long to give it. He should probably pin something on him later. “Fine,” he said. He tore open the bag, wrenched open the box, fumbled around inside until his fingers were in a shape that felt right, put it in his mouth, and shoved the box to the next suited man down the line.

He bit. Chewed. Swallowed.

“I can’t feel a damn thing,” he said. “Wow. People are going to pay us money for this. What a bunch of….”

“Sir?” asked the maybe-secretary. The nearest large unpleasant man in sunglasses unzipped the cardiac event bag.

“I remember the day I realized my mother would never love me for she could see both my father and herself in my face and she could never forgive either of them for what they had done,” said David. “I will never experience genuine love in my life and wouldn’t know what to do if it happened. It’s too late for me to change and too hard for me to bear not changing. I should’ve eaten one more time at the club down the road and it’s been out of business for thirty-seven years. I don’t like this chair and if I change it people’ll think I’m going crazy. I hate the pills I take but if I don’t take them I wake up at four AM to pee and I can’t fall back asleep without remembering my younger brother and what I did to him and so I take the pills and sleep through the night and I piss myself and I pretend it isn’t happening and when that doesn’t work I pretend I like it, I pretend I like to wake up stinking and chafed, and I hire people to change my laundry every day but I can still smell it as I go to bed and drift to sleep. I miss my dog.”

David reached up to his cheek and touched the wetness he felt there. “I regret all of it,” he said, with a little surprise.

Then he crumpled into a small vortex.

The large unpleasant men in sunglasses stood there, rendered smaller and more vulnerable absent their center of gravity. The one with the cardiac event bag looked at it, zipped it up again, then open, then up again.

“Who’s in charge now?” he asked.

The small man who wasn’t a secretary raised a slightly-shaking hand. “I remember my cat Mittens,” he mumbled.

In the ensuring series of events, the box went missing. It was probably empty by then.

***

Billiam Pat McKrubbler laid his head on the table on the thick lush piles of double-sided coloured graphs and groaned. “No, that’s dumb. You’re dumb! We already MADE an inside-out chicken burger. Go away! Doesn’t anyone have any new ideas?”

A slim, smiling hand was raised halfway down the table.

“Go ahead,” he grunted.

“Mister Billiam,” said the man through a smile that tweaked gently as he wore it, ”you ever thought of selling REAL Buffalo Wings?”

Well, it’s the busiest time of the year again! March was a little disappointing, but historically that’s meant a big April so let’s all hope for the best on this liveblog!

American kestrel

Direct sighting of a couple in a tree down by the edge of Oreweald Park. Quiet and wary but well-fed. Good for them!

American robin

So many of them out and about I lost count just on the way down to the lakefront; the flooding’s been lousy for worms but good for them.

Black-capped chickadee

Only saw twelve but heard a lot more, especially in the thickets by cooling tower three. If these are returning nesters rather than naïve newcomers, we could be looking at a significant shift in the local toxicology! Still, best not count our chickadees before they’ve hatched!

Blue Jay

Found a loose feather on the old trail by the exclusion fence, caught on the barbed wire. Hope they’re doing okay – we need more corvids! Not sure why they’re still so standoffish, if they’re smart enough to be wary, they should be smart enough to read the papers. It’s safer than it’s been in years!

Canada goose

Sixteen nesting on the old breakwater down by the outflow. Poor things.

Common raven

Old Toby still perched above the head manager’s office, clean as clockwork. Asked him my name and he said ‘Doom.’ Never change, Old Toby!

Great RE:gret

Performed my annual check-in on our nesting pair and can report that they are still resetting every sixteen minutes forty-nine seconds seventy-eight milliseconds on the dot, pushing back any hypothesized ‘half-life’ for the site 53-D chronodegeneration another century. A warm round of applause for Jackie and Dion – spending fifty years fetching sticks for a nest that will never be completed is a powerful metaphor for parenthood!

Herring gall

Saw four down by the old park boat launch, but there are definitely more around somewhere, because the ooze patches on the concrete have six distinct shades! We could be looking at a case of fresh mitosis here, and the new galls are hiding somewhere out of sight until they decide on how many limbs they want.

Mallard

Three off the overgrown beach, enjoying all the high water from the late melt. More to come, hopefully – the duckling survival rate has really gone up since the gnarlpike went extinct three summers back (RIP Lousie McKenny, Dougie Jimson, Stewart Brinkles, and ‘Wedge’ O’Connor).

Megadee

‘Granny Greycap’ is back! After going MIA for almost a decade, the great lady of North-Oreweald has returned to her sentinel post atop the easternmost pylon – and lest anyone doubt her identity, she still bears control rod #59 clutched in the remains of her left talon! All hail the return of the Sceptre’d Queen – but please, disable your flashes when recording her (newcomers: look up the ‘daylight bombings of ’98’).

Militant nuthatch

As I peered cautiously over the ragged and rust-corroded lip of what had once been the central radar dome and beheld the gnarled and twisted form of that infamous spruce, my heart crawled up my throat by inches: the palisade had been breached, but from WITHIN – no squirrel’s work this. They had survived, and now they have made their opening play. The war will resume. Beware!

Mourning dove

Found three torn open in a little circle with their hearts missing – yikes! Pretty sure it’s not golden gorefinches (contents of the stomachs weren’t eaten, no sign of egg-shrapnel in chest cavities from the ejection of larval hatchlings) or bakerbirds (no evidence of ‘oven’ construction), but drawing a blank otherwise and gladly seeking input. Maybe a third case of dove psychomorphism?

Northern cardinal

No sign of the couple I saw in March up in the New Grove. The whole tree’s missing so it’s possible either the ground’s gotten unstable there or the quadrasloth is coming out of hibernation. Going to have to apply for permission to view the seismograph again to solve this one!

Prophetic loon

Heard a splash but no direct sighting. The scrawling on the beach looks like the Second Magus’s footwriting though – she’s a southpaw. If anyone wants to take a crack at decoding it, better you than me is all I’ll say! I don’t believe in that sort of thing (no offense).

Red-everything’d hawk

At least one has moved in judging by the state of the band stand’s rooftop and the pines on the hill. I know they’re not big fans of humans, but still, nobody put anything outside they don’t want dyed – no sense ‘painting the town red’!

Red-winged blackbird

Filling the trees by the old boardwalk and whistling their hearts out, bless them.

Sandputter

One’s already set up the green and the rough by the sandbox at the worker’s daycare, but only nine holes are planted so far, and just three (!) have actual fissile material in them. Quick construction and poor planning suggest a young male. You’ll get there buddy!

Tubist swan

No sighting but the filings in my teeth buzzed at just that right ultra-low frequency, you know? That and the sonically-liquified golden doodle I found are evidence enough for me! Best steer clear of the southern edge of the Point if you’re walking a dog or not in rigorous physical condition and wearing at least twenty+ kilos of extra flesh!

Venus flycatcher

Checked inside the old ‘hot labs’ and yep, ‘big snappy’ is still growing strong as ever! Their roots are well-nourished, their newest clutch of eggs (at least twelve!) is glossy, and the sap drooling out of their beaks to attract prey smells as sweet as maple syrup! They tried to bite my index finger off when I checked their reflexes, bless them.

Xenoraptor colossus aka ‘Barbara’s Dreadnought’

Almost fell into the nest while skirting around the exposed foundations of the central mess hall and by the curvature of the eggshell, violet edging of the featherings, and dismembered cow skeletons I am certain beyond a doubt it is BACK! No sign of the parents but it looks like there’s at least two hatchlings and they’re what you’ve really got to watf ghiuyuyuyuyuyuyuyuyuyuyuyuydsoaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Four months and three days before his thirteenth birthday, Thimas was appointed the Maker of Fish for the long long Lanky River and all its tributaries and streams and rills.

He was of unprecedented age, questionable tutelage, and unknown enthusiasm, but there were none more qualified, principally because four months and four days before his thirteenth birthday the previous Maker of Fish had gotten drunk, stayed out late, and fallen headfirst into the Lanky, where a crawfish-catcher had found most of him the next morning.

So Thimas was woken up early by his aunt and uncle, dressed in ceremonial robes intended for someone who’d suffered at least two more growth spurts, handshaken by the mayor and the priestess and the hermit, and feasted on all the available forage of the season before he was taken to the dwelling of the Maker of Fish and – with many blessings, and much cheering, and great and generous hope – thrown inside.

The door clicked.

It was just a little after noon and he was all alone inside a house inhabited by the same old man for fifty years running, surrounded by half labeled jars and jugs and barrels of things to make fish with, half-shucked-free of ceremonial robes, and overfed on (by word of his guts) half-ripened roozberries. And it sounded like he’d just been locked inside.

First, Thimas permitted himself some small swearing. Second, he found an empty barrel and liberated a sleeve from his discarded robes. Third, he began inventory.

Jars of ink, for squid to fill their ink sacs with.

Iron files, for sharks to sharpen their teeth upon.

Dog tongues, for cods to speak cod latin with.

Wiring, for electric eels to run electric current through.

And more, and more, and more, and more, stacked in the crates on the shelves dangling from the ceiling in jars wrapped up in paper and stashed under the bed lashed together with twine and leaned against the walls and sealed in the big metal safe that said DO NOT EVER OPEN UNLESS YOU HAVE TO that the old Maker of Fish had pinched Thimas’s ear until it was throbbing red for asking about.

It took a lot to make fish.

Thimas rattled at the big metal safe’s handle for a bit. It was locked, and when he gave up the rattling continued.

“It’s locked,” he called out.
“Oh, sorry,” said the visitor in the insincere and hesitant voice of one who’d said those words too often and too lightly. “I’ll come back later.”
“No, I mean it’s locked on your side.”

“Oh sorry oh no oh dear,” click click, and in stooped Windy, six and a half foot of Windy, fisherman Windy, always first to the weirs and last to come home with a bag half full, with a bear’s face and a bear’s hair and the fishing ability of a limbless chicken.

He tried, Windy. He really did. But sometimes, the old Maker of Fish had muttered, trying meant trying something else.

“I’m very sorry, but I heard you are the Maker of Fish now, if that’s okay,” said Windy, shoulders visibly cringing inwards at the audacity of this statement.

“Yes,” said Thimas, who was hoping he’d tucked the (not quite empty anymore) barrel far enough into the corner that nothing would be said of it.

“Oh well, if it’s no trouble, I was wondering if it wouldn’t be too rude if I asked – no pressure – if it’d be alright if you could maybe consider possibly, if you feel like it, and not just for politeness’s sake, potentially… making some fish for me? I’m sorry it’s stupid I’ll go away sorry for bothering you never mind don’t worry about i-”

“What kind of fish?” asked Thimas, and caught by surprise mid-apology Windy said “trout” and became mortified.

“Trout,” said Thimas to himself. And he hunted through the creaking bookcase by the door where the handiest fish were kept close to hand, and in a truly huge tub that was unlabeled because its contents were so omnipresent and obvious he pulled out four handfuls

(the old Maker of Fish had used two, but his hands had been bigger)

of many-hued little painted clay-fired pellets, which he jammed into the pockets of his (slightly depleted) ceremonial robes and slung over his shoulder like a backpack because he already had perfectly good shorts on and thought it would be silly for the Lanky’s Maker of Fish to fall over and drown twice in two days.

Nobody paid any attention as Thimas walked down to the weirs. Everybody very definitely paid no attention. Nobody looked with their eyes one little bit.

Four handfuls, one after another at the edge of the pier. A deep breath before the first, a terrible urge to scratch your nose shoved away, and WHOOSH, high into the air, a spray, a swirl, an arc of glittering colours in the sun.

A rainbow plunged into the water, and it churned and lashed with the onset of many curious fins and Thimas could breath again, which he did. Wheezily.

“The trout are provisioned,” he said.

“Sorry,” said Windy, which was almost like thanks.

So Thimas went back to the dwelling of the Maker of Fish and found some chalk and a slate, which he used to make a diagram, which said:

TROUT I

with plenty of space for more.

***

Three months and nine days before Thimas’s thirteenth birthday, he sat up in bed and looked at the slate, which he had placed on the wall, and it read:

TROUT IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
SALMON IIIIIII

There was still plenty of space for more. Honestly, it seemed roomier ever time he looked at it. He wished he could stop looking at it.

The Lanky’s waters ran clear and wild. The fishermen’s baskets were heaped high. Everyone was pleased. Everyone said he was doing a wonderful job.

Rap rap rap, came the door.

“Come in,” said Thimas, who was starting to suspect why the old Maker of Fish had grown a beard large enough to hide his face and everything it could possibly indicate.

He was already up and walking to the trout tub before the door opened.

“Hello, Maker of Fish, it’s my wedding tomorrow and-”

“Trout,” agreed Thimas.

“What? No, I-”

“Salmon,” concluded Thimas.

“I’m sorry, but no, Maker of Fish” – and this was so outlandish that Thimas found himself paying attention to his visitor for the first time in days: it was Ottough, a friend of his oldest sister’s, spindly and embarrassed to be speaking to him in a very different way than he’d ever seen before – “it’s my wife. She has a very specific favorite, you see, and I VERY much want her to be happy, and-”

“What?” asked Thimas. No, that sounded too unenthusiastic. “What?!” No, that sounded too angry. “What? What? What? WHAT?”
“Shark, if it would be acceptable, Maker of Fish,” said Ottough.

Thimas hugged him. But only briefly. There were so many shelves to dig through.

“What kind of shark?” he asked. Hammerhead, mako, bonnethead, lemon, scoophead, blacktip reef, shovelbill, sleeper…

“Oh. Err. I didn’t ask? Maybe I could-”

“No,” said Thimas. No. No stopping to ask questions. No opening a chance to wait, and second-guess, and return to the trout tub. “We can do a bit of everything. Here, hold this bag open.”

And into the wide-mouth triple-stitched remains of ceremonial robes went iron files to sharpen teeth, and sandpaper to burnish and smoothen tough shagreen, and toothpaste to shine an eternally-regrowing maw, and all the essentials of every kind of shark from great white (white polish for their white bellies) to dwarf lanternshark (matches for their lanterns) to blue (books of sad poems). All of it went into the water, a thick slosh that less churned than seethed, and already as Thimas watched the ripples spread up and down stream he saw the fins begin to circle.

“There,” he said. “Good luck.”
And he went home and added line after line after line to his slate until his hand cramped from the tiny letters he was forced to use, and he was filled with great and endless joy until his brain turned off.

***

Thimas woke and the sun was already setting. He had slept the sleep of the deeply, profoundly peaceful, slumped drooling over his slate, and this stayed with him for five perfect, deep, slow breaths until he realized that not only had no one woken him yet, but the village was quiet outside his window. No songs. No laughter. No arguments. Even the chickens were keeping it to a bare chuckle.

Thimas got out of bed. Thimas put on a new shirt. And Thimas, for the first time in almost a month, left the dwelling of the Maker of Fish of his own accord.

Everyone was easy to find. They were down at the weir. Watching.

Once again, nobody was looking at Thimas. But they didn’t have to try that hard this time. The Lanky was a sea of fins, the water seethed with long, hungry bodies, muscled jaws, and a million-million teeth of a thousand kinds.

“It would seem,” said a very calm and polite and considered voice from somewhere in the crowd, “that we are somewhat overblessed with fish.” It might have been his aunt.

Thimas nodded. Not too quickly, he hoped.

“This will not be a problem,” said an even calmer and more polite and over-considered voice from within the crowd. “Because we are blessed to have the assistance of the Maker of Fish. If fish caused this, fish can fix this.”
“Yes,” said the first voice.

“Yes,” said the second voice right back. It could have been his uncle.

“Yes,” said someone else.

“Yes,” said everyone else, not all at once, not all the same way, not all as polite and calm and considered and one or two really close to being muttered.

So Thimas walked home until he was out of sight, then he ran home, and he hunted from top to bottom until he found the chest buried in the dolphin bin that was filled with black-and-white beachballs and blood, which he combined, lugged down to the weir, and poured into the Lanky.

Then he added a little more, just to be sure.

And a little extra, just in case. It was just ONE kind of fish he was using, after all, so they’d be very outnumbered. Best to give them plenty to work with.

The water roared and surged. The many dorsal fins that darted up and down the Lanky wobbled in a hundred hundred different salutes, flags of undersea nations.

The crowd watched. And when the water began to settle, they went home, in dribs and drabs.

Thimas didn’t. He waited, and watched, and waited, and worried, and waited, and worked his way bit by bit into the fretful and unpleasantly stretched dreams of the deeply, profoundly guilty.

***

He woke up in the dark before dawn to something wet and flapping slapping him in the face, which he yelled about, which got it in his mouth, which cut his tongue – sharp rough skin. Denticles.

Thimas spat out his mouthful of shark meat and rolled out of bed, which was the weir, and out from under his covers, which was the severed and disemboweled corpse of a four-meter great white shark, and landed on the floor, which was the face of a watching orca.

“Hleef,” he explained.

It grinned at him. It was probably a grin. The teeth were showing, and it seemed to be happy. Then there was a flip and a twist and a nudge and Thimas was upside down and backwards and on the weir’s edge again, nose to nose with the carcass he had been gifted.

The black eyes were unreadable. The angle of the slackened mouth was reproachful.

The river looked full, and at least half red, and the flags that marched within its borders were tall-ships now, great towering black fins that bobbed cheerily as their owners flipped their prey onto the backs, tore their fins off, pummeled their organs into jelly, chattered enthusiastically among themselves and played catch and keep-away with the bodies once they had eaten their fill.

Thimas threw up. This did not Make any Fish, but it DID attract a curious snapping turtle from beneath a rock, which was immediately whisked away and swallowed by a titanic black-and-white set of jaws.

This was not an improvement. There was still an overblessing of fish. He still had to fix this.

If fish had caused this, fish could fix this. Yes. Yes. Yes.

So Thimas went home, opened every container he could – which was all of them, save for the big metal safe – and when he found the one that was full of gigantic steak knives and a big bottle of whale oil he took it down to the weir – using the ceremonial robe-sack as a sling – and tipped in with its entirety.

The dorsal fins circled, curious.

Then there was a cacophony – almost like gunshots. CLICK CLICK CLICK and splash, splash, splash, the beating of flukes on the water. The river churned and reeled.

The waterline slid upwards. Little wavelets slid over Thimas’s toes.

Then it surged, and splashed, and an orca came free of the waves, clutched in a mouthful of serrated triangles at the far end of a twenty-meter lawn dart.

The water closed up.

Thimas was on the shore. He had no memory of getting there.

Farther downstream, there was another splash. And another.

And a crash, as a shark larger than most of the buildings in the village misaimed a lunge and landed in the middle of cousin Burct’s unoccupied chip stand. It squirmed back towards the water, slowed by the six terrified whales clinging to its flanks and removing pieces of meat bigger than Thimas with every bite. One of the last rowboats in the village that hadn’t become a plaything got between two of the combatants, briefly.

There was a grinding noise as an entire pod escaped over the top of the weir, taking half of it with them. The remainder scraped the pursuing megalodon’s belly clean of remoras.

Thimas went back to the dwelling of the Maker of Fish. He wasn’t looking at anything, but he was listening, and it was very hard to think with all that noise. Even after he shut and barred the door it was very hard to think with the memory of all that noise. Even after he shouted and threw the ceremonial robe-sack-sling to the ground and stamped as hard as he could it was hard to think through the memory of all that noise, until he stamped a little too hard and fell over with his foot in his hands and a squeal in his throat and a drab, pointy little metal key skittering loose over the floorboards, torn free at last from some hidden pocket.

Thimas looked at the key, which was much better than listening or thinking. Then he held the key.

Then he dragged out the big metal safe that said DO NOT EVER OPEN UNLESS YOU HAVE TO and put the key in and opened it.

There was a garbage bag in there, double-knotted and surprisingly light. On the basis of speed and desperation, Thimas did not open it.

Instead, he walked down to the shores where the weir had been – now thinly populated by early risers, who were hollering and encouraging others to come stand there and help holler over the ongoing mutual-massacre – and poured out a seemingly endless flood of…meat scraps? They reeked of the pub, of too-high prices and high-capsaicin hot sauce that was all heat and no flavour. They plunged into the water and the grease and the peppery spice cut through the smell of blood that Thimas hadn’t realized was drowning him nose-first until it was broken.

He held the garbage bag in his shaking hands, and something was jabbing his palm – splintery, not like the key. He unfurled it, uncreased it, took one million years to pull it loose.

A stripped-clean chicken wing.

The water broke without boiling, the banks overflowed, and into the sky they rose, one chasing another. The orca breached, fins spread wide, body corkscrewing frantically for height, and behind it the shark, tail beating side to side with enough force to generate power for all of main street, jaws just a little open, eyes twitching and ready to roll back at the first chance to strike, both of them up, and up, and up, and away into the sky, their little fluffy white wings beating with the fury of an ascending grouse from beneath the hunter’s foot.

Everyone stopped hollering at that.

They started again right quick though, when the second-through-five-hundredth followed.

“He never liked eating fish much,” said Thimas as his aunt and uncle picked him up, torn between every emotion at once, watching the flock whirl away over the treeline and into the sun. A straggling carp – survivor of endless warfare – fluttered by them, loop-de-looping for the sheer thrill of it as it headed inland. “Never said why. I thought it was ritual bullshit.”

***

There are fewer fish these days in the great Lanky. But the fishing villages don’t complain, and they take only what they need, and they wish for nothing more than what’s already there. Only what’s already there.

Focus on what’s in front of you, they say. Don’t get carried away with wishing for what could be. You hear the folk from the Runny? Overland? Six leagues away? They believe in flying fish these days.

Honestly.

MEGA MARVIN LIFE FULL WALKTHROUGH

A guide by xxxSparrowAxexxx

COPYRIGHT 2003 DO NOT REUSE WITHOUT PERMISSION!

****TABLE OF CONTENTS****

• Introduction

1.0 Hospital

2.0 Playground

3.0 Middle School

4.0 Retail

5.0 Night School

6.0 Mega Marvin

7.0 Management

8.0 The Snap

9.0 Drifting

10.0 Patience

11.0 Reckoning

• INTRODUCTION

Mega Marvin Life is my favourite game in the series and has been unfairly overlooked for years.  In this guide I will show you how to beat it fairly and have a good time.

1. HOSPITAL

After the introduction cutscene with God you have to escape the baby ward.  Easy to do: this is just the game introducing you to keycards and locked doors.  Take the janitor’s keycard and get through the halls to the elevator, bounce down the shaft, and find your way to the parking lot – just follow the signs.  There’s a time limit until your parents’ car leaves but it’ll basically never matter unless you get way too into exploring the level, and there’s nothing much to see.  The janitors are too slow to catch you and the nurses just ignore you.  Hop into your parent’s car and the level’s over.

1.1 SECRETS: there’s only one secret in this level, and it’s only useful if you’re trying to speedrun the game: if you crawl into the crib with the golden spoon on it push the other baby out of it and wait five minutes Marvin becomes Wealthy Marvin and you go to the credits.  Boring.

2.0 PLAYGROUND

This is the first proper level, and it’s a real open-ended sandbox. You have thirty minutes to do whatever you want, and it’s the tutorial to another big mechanic which is the Boredom meter. Do whatever you can to keep it up – throw pebbles at squirrels, build sand castles, bonk the other kids on the heads, whatever. Don’t overdo the last one though because every kid you take out makes the boss harder.

2.1 BOSS – AUNT MANDY: Aunt Mandy shows up at the end of the timer and again she’s basically a tutorial. Dodge the bottles she throws and use the Ignore function when she starts talking.  If you’ve ko’d at least three other kids she gets REALLY hard and basically never shuts up so watch out!  Kick the bottles back at her until she falls over and you win the level.

2.2 SECRETS: The bird in the skybox is an actual model, not just background art, and if you hit it with a pebble (I was aiming at a squirrel) it’ll poop on Marvin’s head and your controls are scrambled for the rest of the level because he won’t stop crying. 

3.0 MIDDLE SCHOOL

This is the last ‘tutorial’ level of the game, and it’s where the gloves come off. You need to keep your Boredom low AND not get the teachers to notice what you’re up to, AND collect enough points. If the teachers spot you, expect a tough chase – and all the desks and other kids make getting away difficult, AND they’re one-hit ko’s. 

3.1 BOSS: SCIENCE FAIR: Like the school itself this is a test of your multi-tasking. You need to keep the other kids from messing up your project AND show it off to the parents AND keep the judge distracted by messing up the other kid’s projects. All of these are easy – the other kids back off if you give ‘em one good thwack, the parents will nod and walk away if you pretty much do anything at all, and the other projects will fall apart if you give them one quick shove in the right place – but they’re all constantly right up in your face about it. You really can’t afford to sit still at all. 

3.2 SECRETS: You can beat the boss super fast if you let your project get knocked over and then just hold down the Scream command. You don’t get as many points, but it’s faster – especially if you knock your project over yourself. 

4.0 RETAIL

Probably the first really hard level. You can’t move at all, but the enemies just don’t stop coming at you. You need to perfectly avoid every single one of them, which is totally impossible but the good news is you don’t have to do it forever, just until your Bucks score gets high enough – it ticks up a little bit every minute.  Once you screw up and too many customers hit you, the boss fight starts.

4.1 BOSS: BOSS: You want to finish this as quick as possible because every time he hits you you lose Bucks.  If you grab his hair and yank it comes off and he can’t move for a minute, that helps a lot. 

4.2 SECRETS: If you attack the first customer he has a credit card in his wallet that maxxes out your Bucks but the boss gets a duplicate in a security guard outfit so the fight’s real hard.

5.0 NIGHT SCHOOL

This is like Middle School on steroids – your Bucks score is back from Retail and if it hits 0 before you finish the level you lose and your save file gets deleted, which sucks. 

5.1 BOSS: FRIDAY NIGHT: Dodge the cans, glasses, and bottles or lose your Bucks. REALLY avoid the whiskey, that’s a one-hit KO. 

5.2 SECRETS: If you hit the bartender the level ends without you losing any Bucks, but you start the next level at half health.

6.0 MEGA MARVIN

Here is where the game lost 50% of its playerbase and I think it’s weird because having the chance to customize your character from scratch is cool, even if it’s a little weird that it happens halfway through the game.  You can make Marvin look like anything so go as crazy as you want. Then you play through a sort of mashup highlight reel of levels from Mega Marvin, Mega Marvin 2: Marvin’s Domain, Mega Marvin Planet, and Mega Marvin Planet 2: Marvin’s Inferno.  The trick is you have to play through them backwards and upside down and the music is replaced with screaming which I think a lot of people were unable to appreciate.

6.1 SECRETS: If you try to name Marvin anything that isn’t Marvin your save file deletes itself.  I think a lot of people weren’t smart enough to know why that happened and really missed out on the rest of the game for no good reason. 

7.0 MANAGEMENT

Just like Night School was Middle School but harder, this is the Science Fair but way way tougher. Now you need to guard your Marvin projects from other managers, beat up your employees whenever they try to work on it, suck up to the CEO whenever he’s near, AND on top of that your relatives keep phoning you and draining your Bucks.  If you don’t answer the phone they show up in person and you have to dodge them while doing everything else, so unless you’re REALLY attached to your bucks don’t even bother.

7.1 BOSS: CFO: This one’s either really hard or really easy depending on how hard you think outside the boss.  If you try and counter his arguments you WILL eventually lose, if you try and beat him up he gets infinite Security and you lose. But you can move around while you talk and if you look in the bottom drawer of your desk you will find a gun. If you fire it at the boss you lose, but if you hold it while you make your arguments you win no matter which ones you pick. I like to pick the ones about Estonia because they’re interesting but if you’re in a hurry you can just yell “my COCK” over and over and it ends the fight really quickly. 

7.2 SECRETS: If you fire the gun at yourself instead the game goes to credits and tells you you won just like if you beat it normally. 

8.0 THE SNAP

This is sort of a breather level?  You don’t actually do anything – stuff happens around you.  None of the noises people make are words, they just sound like them. You can try and move, but it doesn’t change anything. Sometimes Marvin walks around the screen and yells at you.  It lasts anywhere between seven seconds and six hours; I checked like five times.

9.0 DRIFTING

This is a race: you have to make it to the far side of the bay with the money before the cops catch up to you.  It’s really hard until you figure out you can switch cars partway through by pointing your gun at them and screaming.

9.1 BOSS: META-MARVIN: This fight is hard the first time because you don’t expect him to jump out of the briefcase after you shoot him the first time. The whole fight’s like that: you need to have quick reflexes because it’s totally random where he’ll jump out of next and he’s super fast.  Under the car, out of the surf, up from behind a beached seal, beneath rocks, inside a discarded beer can, parachuting out of the sun…Marvin can be anywhere. If you run out of ammo you lose so you can’t just spray and pray either. Make every shot count.

9.2 SECRETS: If you make it to the checkpoint in the convertible you started in Meta-Marvin just spawns in the passenger’s seat every time and stares at you, covered in blood and holding a wedding ring up so you can see it.

10.0 PATIENCE

This is the last new mechanic in the game: your Sentence goes down a little bit every minute and goes back up if you hit any buttons. Just put the controller on the table and go to bed and you’re usually out of prison by the next morning.

10.1: BOSS: ??: Not sure if there is one, I never saw it just the clear screen.

11.0 RECKONING

So you have to get Marvin all the way from the top of the last will & testament to the bottom and it’s pretty hard if you try to take it one line at a time but pretty easy if you just blindly jump from paragraph to paragraph. You CAN jump on the ink smears, but the blood smears are INSTANT DEATH so don’t confuse them; some of the really dried rusty ones can be mistaken for each other.

11.1 BOSS: MEGA MARVIN LIFE: Jump over the logo when it appears at the end of the document and it’ll explode and then the credits start.

11.2 SECRETS: If you have more Bucks left at the end the last will & testament gets longer. If you finish the game with zero Bucks it just says ‘fuck you’ so if you want an easy level try and get rid of them in Management by letting your relatives phone you a lot or something.

Thank you for reading my guide I hope you enjoyed Mega Marvin Life as much as I do. It’s my favorite game and I hope I can make one as good as it someday.

The old apple tree was dead.

It was older than Ann, older than her mother, older than her grandmother, and it had almost died more times that she could count – ice storms, droughts, infestations, a fat raccoon on a thin branch – and now it was dead, truly dead and gone, and she had no time to think about it because Beatrice’s birthday was coming up and Arthur’s mother was sick and she had so many times and places she had to feel the right feeling that spending her time thinking of a dead old apple tree was unthinkable and she felt a little sick just imagining it.

Besides, the lawn was overrun with cogblins. She’d already spent all morning oiling them out, spraying down the screaming hordes with the thin mist that coated their eggs and robbed the friction from their gears that let them walk and fight and breath, leaving paralyzed hordes silent in their thousand homes and thousand knee-high skyscrapers, hapless as the ants and the cats and the birds swooped in. 

Ann polished the oiler until it gleamed and watched longer than an adult should have. It was acceptable for a child to be fascinated by mass death; in an adult it was some sort of bigger, stronger cousin of gauche that was unmentionable by the polite.

Her phone rang.  It was her sister, Clarice.  It was the first time she’d called in six years, since the thing with grandpa’s fish.  Ann answered it too fast for hesitation, a reflex operating without practice or instruction.

“Hey.”
“Hello.”

The world sat between them, its gravity drawing their conversation into faltering orbit.

“How have you been?” asked Ann, which wasn’t ‘I’m sorry.’
“I’m doing okay,” said Clarice, which wasn’t ‘I forgive you.’

“How’s Patrick?”
“Third grade.”
“They grow up so fast.  How’s Stacy?”
“The Cellar People got her.”
“Oh,” said Ann.

“I need to voyage into the Land Behind The Furnace for four days and four nights with a human-wax candle. Do you have one?”
“I could manage the house for you,” Ann didn’t say.

“I could watch Patrick for you,” Ann didn’t say.

“I’m sorry,” Ann didn’t say.

“Yeah, it’s in Arthur’s old school stuff,” Ann said.  “I can dig it out in a couple minutes and bring it over.”
“Thanks.  Just drop it in the mailbox.  I’m out late tonight and Patrick has karate after school.”

Ann didn’t say a lot of things.  She said “that’s okay” and “goodbye.”

Then she got in the car, drove twenty minutes to her sister’s house, did the no-odds double-evens skip-the-red-stones dance up the walk that kept the Cellar People from noticing you, left the candle in the mailbox, and told herself that she was a good person and a good sister.

Traffic was miserable on the way back.  Bumper to bumper and shot through with anger.  A cyberhinoceros screamed in agony at his career, his marriage, and his lost childhood and turned left on a right turn signal, totalling a semi and its cargo of twelve fresh-minted million-dollar uniceratosaurus juveniles.  Ann saw the uncreased and flattened brow on the mechanized lifter’s readout as he sat against the rubble of the traffic light and waited to be arrested and sent to the debt-mountain, just as she saw the glassy eyes of the crushed theropods waiting for virginal jockies that would go mountless, just as she saw the frozen cheeks and unsmiling mouth of the traffic copstable operating on an off-the-shelf job-app plugged into his official hat, and they were all different pieces of the same expression and she couldn’t recognize it because she was in it.

She stopped at the ice-walled superiormarket on the way home to get her mind off it.  Bought a Death Conger from the fish counter for a song two whistles and a secret. Took it home still-cursing, still-fighting inside its box of regrets, just like grandmother used to when she was little, twenty years retired from the Electricitsea but still living on it every night, gnarled hands twisting cables in the air, hoarse voice shouting to wake the neighbourhood with the call to man the lines and tend the insulation. 

Ann and Clarice had been fond of the eels but feared their grandmother, and that had gone both ways.  She flinched when she saw them, not just from the perpetual tic that had been shocked into her left hemisphere from a Humboldt Volctopus.  They were too small, not slimy enough, not trying to kill her, and that all hurt in places she didn’t like to explain or consider. 

The kitchen was quiet when she got home.  Beatrice took her time coming back, meeting with her friends in the places teenagers met with their friends. Park benches, parking lots, convenience stores, toadthrone circles, vantablack webrings, and the Last Bleacher where Cindy MacDougal’s skeleton still did her final cheerleading routine every Wednesday evening and the bats refused to roost.  Some of them Ann knew too well, others she knew too little, and she worried that she was mixing them up.

The eel was straightforward. She loved that fish, loved the way it snapped at her and fiercely offered her wishes three, loved the way its curses bounced off her grandmother’s shining silvered cleaver, loved the secrets that it whispered loose in the steam as its skull defleshed in the pressure cooker, loved it as fiercely and uncomplicatedly as she’d loved anything, loved it so she didn’t have to hear the thump and clunk of Arthur coming home or smell the traces of the outside world on his skin and sweat and clothing, loved it so much that she missed the soft scuttle of the ventipede as it swung down from the kitchen ceiling and wrapped itself six times around her throat, fangs bared to strike.

Ann snapped, but inside, where it mattered. She swung the cleaver wildly with her right hand, but it was with her left that she killed it, acrylics tearing through armour and fat and into deeper, more private flesh, turning insides out and popping open soft organs like party balloons, grinding with the heel and stabbing with the nails and ripping and gnashing with the thumb until she wore the whole of the beast on her arm like a puppet from a children’s show.

It screamed at her. She hissed in its face and bit its head off, swallowed its adrenaline and cortisol and dopamine like candy and spat out the mandibles, then sat down in a corner of the kitchen and did nothing but rock gently, so gently, without tears or thoughts or blinking, just a spreading numbness from toe to finger to scalp.

Then she scrubbed the ventipede innards away with her bare hands, vomited into the sink to purge the criotoxins, washed her hands with the red, white and infrared soaps, then exited the secret passage from her lair and walked down the hall to the dining room where her husband sat, waiting.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I wanted dinner to be special.”

“Let’s get divorced,” he told her.

Ann nodded.  Yes, that made sense. 

What a day.

What a typical goddamned day.

The alarm went off and the clipboard was already scratching.

“7 AM, Brian.” Tsk tsk tsk, half cluck and half near-articulated word, scratch scratch scratch, pen on paper. “You fucked up. You could’ve gone to bed earlier. You could’ve woken up earlier. You could’ve gotten some cleaning done. You could’ve gone for a run before work to stay healthy. You’re too old to pretend you’ll stay in shape no matter how you treat yourself”
“Yes,” agree Brian, whose eyes were open and who was sitting up but remained wholly unready to find the alarm.

“You didn’t go to bed until 2 AM because you’re a dumb little kid. Just scrolling away, just reading crap that wouldn’t improve you. You didn’t want tomorrow to start, did you?”
“Yes.”
“Thought you’d get away with it, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s a fuckup squared then because making a mistake you know to avoid is worse than making it because you don’t know better. Now get your ass out of bed and let’s go.”

So Brian got out of bed too slowly and made breakfast.

“Cereal? Well well well, looks like someone doesn’t want to put any effort in AND wants to run out of energy before lunch. Eat a piece of fruit at least.”
“I’m not that hungry,” said Brian, chewing each mouthful too many times each.

“That’s because you had an unhealthy snack late last night.” Scratch scratch. “Good going, at this rate we’ll be in double digits before we leave home.”

Brian rinsed the bowl without soap.

Scratch scratch.

***

“Well, you fucked up. Didn’t do that last room carefully enough at ALL.”
Brian took his time with the next set of windows and got all the corners with the broom and the mop. He wiped down the lights and the lightswitches to spotlessness. He desmeared the sink until his reflection was in the taps, wide-eyed and bulging.

“Good job, you just took twice as long as you needed to. If they were paying you for a sixteen-hour shift you’d be right on target.”

Brian sped up. He scrubbed and flushed and sprayed and mopped and wheezed.

“Good job, you just forgot to check the lights. Are you being paid to clean or go home early? And you forgot to take down the slippery surface sign. You should return your paycheck.”

Brian returned to pick up the sign, grabbed it, backed out of the way of oncoming traffic, smiled and nodded and said ‘sorry.’
“You mumbled that. He doesn’t understand what you said and your expression was disconcerting. Good going, his day’s a little worse now.” Scratch scratch scratch. “Hey, stop making that face or the next person to come by will get freaked out.”

Brian stopped making that face. He wiped down tables and vacuumed under desks and emptied trash bins.

“You still don’t know what to do when the fan makes that noise? Jesus, what are you even doing in this job.”

He left a note for the technician.

“Wow, you made it someone else’s problem. Good going. Might as well have lunch now, you’ll need it early since you had cereal for breakfast. Remember?”

Lunch was a sandwich and an apple.

“Jesus, this won’t be nearly enough. You’ll be lucky to fall asleep on the trip home instead of mid-shift.”

Lunch was a sandwich and an apple and a bag of chips from a vending machine.

“Wasting money? Good job. And learn how to make something more impressive than slapping some slices of prepackaged gunk between bread. And you’re five minutes late. Oh, were you looking at your phone again? Right, because you can’t wait for another three hours to read trivia you don’t need coming from idiots you shouldn’t listen to.”

***

Brian was home. His boots were off.

“You fucked up and forgot to buy milk. Guess that means either you try harder with breakfast tomorrow or you don’t get it, isn’t that helpful. What’s dinner? Oh, precooked glop frozen and reheated in the microwave – you can’t muster the patience to use the oven even if you don’t have to cut things?”

“Yep,” said Brian. “Shower time.”
“You should clean the shower. You should’ve cleaned the shower a week ago.”
“Yep.”
The scratching continued throughout the shower, throughout the meal.

“Forgot to get more hot sauce.”
“Yep.”
“Now what? Going to catch up with your friends – you should have more of those – or your family – so they don’t have to do it for you – or maybe read a book? Sign up for a course? Learn something? Talk to anyone?”
“No.”
“Gonna sit on the internet until you’re forced to go to bed again?”
Brian shut his eyes and sighed.

“Ignoring your problems. That’s helpful.”

***

It was 2 AM. Brian turned off his phone and waited for the list.

“Eighty-four-and-a-half. Up from yesterday, but only a little. You even half-ass halfassing.” Tap went the pen, dropped onto the clipboard with weary disgust. “Honestly, I don’t know why I’m still here. You’re wasting my time. You’re wasting your time. Eighty-six-and-a-half. Now, you know the drill.”
Brian looked at the list. Clean, legible, precise. Everything his handwriting wasn’t (item thirty-seven).

He pointed at item fifty-three.

“Oh, when you said ‘thanks’ too loudly at the checkout, ruining the clerk’s day. Classic Brian move. Right.” The brisk sharp rip of a sheet of paper being tugged clear from a pad. “I’ll put it in the eternal loop with the others – make the prompt looking at the supermarket, talking to other people, and just sitting in the dark at 3 AM with your eyes shut. Remember: you can’t trust yourself, which means you can’t trust either of us. Now go to sleep already. Tomorrow’s another day and another chance.”

Bailey was halfway dressed for work when the call came, and halfway frustrated with that before she saw the number.

It was from the shop. That didn’t happen, not unsecured. So she answered the impossible call with an awkward compromise between appropriate formality and appropriate security, which consisted of saying “yes?” but in a very deferential way.

“You’re off shift,” said the shop. Terse, but not aggressive.  Urgent.  “Come on down and bring a change of clothes or two; this could get messy.”

“Alright.”
“Talk to you in an hour.”
Click.

Bailey got fully undressed for work, halfway dressed for casual, completely mentally undone at the seams, and all the way down to the shop – (behind two false fronts and never you mind the details) – before she dared consider what was going on, which was at the same moment she was bowing politely before Chandelier. 

“Esteemed,” she said.

“Not a lot of time,” Chandelier told Bailey, ignoring both of their manners with similar ease.  Her grey hair looked greyer, her big tired brown eyes looked heavier, her rumpled suit was verging on crumpled – crumpling farther, as she bent over and began to dig through the bottom drawers of her desk.  “The ‘keep is going to be out of town for the weekend. We need someone to housesit. You’re up. Know it’s in here someplace…”

“What, esteemed?” asked Bailey, in a terrible compromise between saying what was on her mind and maintaining operational professionalism.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get a detailed list and we’re fitting you with a nictitating meninx,” said Chandelier, effortlessly introducing several new things for Bailey to worry about. She gave a small grunt in small triumph and swayed back to desk height, a little grey cardboard box in her palm.  “Here it is. Take this and get it to Candlemaker, the third door on the right down the pink hall. She’ll set you up.”
“Esteemed,” said Bailey, hands shaking, brain shocked, mouth unwisely let off the leash. “Why me?  I’m not even third watt.”
Chandelier actually looked at Bailey for the first time since she’d entered the shop, and it was terrible. Sympathy, weary jealousy, irritation, a little contempt that stuck out like the red spot on Jupiter.

“Because the rest of us will be going with the shopkeep and doing a lot worse than housesitting this weekend,” she said, each word heat-sterilized before it entered the world. “So take your new meninx and your self down to Candlemaker and be happy for the time off. Now.”

“Yes, esteemed,” said Bailey. And fled to somewhere safer, to the office of Candlemaker with his wild shock of hair and his inappropriately big smile and his complicated and overwrought razorblades, who laughed in her face at her delivery and shook his head at her meek request for more information.

“The list’ll set you up,” he said, picking up and putting down things somewhere between scalpels and dental floss.  “Honestly? The less you know outside of it the better. The meninx will do its job, no fear, but if it has to face pressure from you AND the environment?  It might strain, a little. And if you strain it a little, it might stretch. And if it might stretch it might snap. And then you’re in trouble. So stop asking questions and do as you’re told, alright?”
“Yes, esteemed,” said Bailey.

“God, you sound like you’re up against a firing squad. Hey, look at my chin.”
Bailey looked at Candlemaker’s chin and fell asleep. When she woke up her head hurt, her leg was asleep, and she was sitting in a wooden lounge chair on a nice deck attached to a polite little two-story house that would’ve been middle-class twenty years ago and now was the height of unfeasible luxury.

The world was wrong.

She blinked.

No, that wasn’t it. The world was fine, but…

She remembered when she was six years old and she’d finally gotten a magic eye picture to work. How it had felt when her eyes had unfocused just right, her brow had furrowed just so, her brain had slid loose just enough, and then the sailboat popped out of nowhere, floating off the page.

Right now she felt like the whole world was a magic eye picture, she couldn’t stop seeing it, and her head was already as creased as Chendelier’s suit.

There was a list in her hand. Big, bold handwriting, easy to soak up even in her state.

A little bird sang its heart out in a tree altogether too close to her ears.

Autostereograms, that was what those pictures were called.

Well.

Thank God it’s Friday indeed.

***

Besides the little knot tied between Bailey’s eyes and her brain, the house was nice. Clean. Furnished. It was a little over-populated with knickknacks in the way that reminded her of her great-grandmother’s place when she was a small child: half the accumulation of a long life, half the relics of a style of decoration long-since passed-by. The fridge was almost overflowing. There was a tank of goldfish in the living room, and a birdfeeder in the backyard. There was a small almost-grove of tall, sober trees that didn’t seem to be able to decide if they had needles or leaves.

There was a big and not necessarily overwhelming sofa, which Bailey sat on as she read the list.

It was divided into a DO section, which was long, and DON’T section, which was short.

DO

-Water the plants. Half-a-can of water per day per plant, two in the living room, one on the shelf in the kitchen.

-Fill the birdfeeder with a cup of the black birdseed and a pinch of the purple birdseed every day.

-Shovel the front and back steps with the big blue shovel resting on the front porch.

-Feed the goldfish in the living room. One spoonful of feed per goldfish per day.

-Make polite conversation with the spider above the stair in the morning. The weather is best.

-Sleep in each bed once.

-Keep the thermostat at 17 degrees.

-Check the pump in the basement before going to bed.

-Pick up the phone and put it down again twice a day.

-Eat the food on the bottom shelf of the fridge.

DON’T

-Use the little yellow-handled shovel.

-Sleep in any bed more than once.

-Be rude to the spider.

-Eat food from anywhere other than the bottom shelf of the fridge.

-Feed anything the red birdseed.

At the very bottom of the list Candlemaker had written ‘Have Fun!!!!’ 

Bailey stared at this and wondered if it was technically attached to the DON’T section by placement, then decided she had better things to do and started from the top.

It didn’t take too long. The plants were odd and unrecognizable; the spider didn’t talk back; the goldfish were pleasantly rounded and healthy. The birds were not quite chickadees, but even though Bailey and her birdwatching app couldn’t identify their song it was quite pleasant. The phoneline sounded quite normal when she gave into curiosity and listened before putting it back down. The first container she found in the bottom of the fridge was humble takeout poutine of average quality (i.e., bad and therefore excellent), and the grey salt-studded slush on the steps peeled away easily under the big clumsy blade of the blue shovel. The only odd thing was the thermostat: someone had set it to 19 degrees.

Bailey fixed that and spent the afternoon reading, which had been neither DO or DON’T. She tried the books from the overstuffed study first, but abandoned that plan quickly – each of them were filled with lorum ipsum that made her eyes water on contact – and retreated to her phone.

The pump in the basement was innocuous and unmoving.

The one disconcerting thing was the master bed. Bailey sank into it like a pebble dropped over the Mariana Trench and woke at 4 AM Saturday after indiscernible, troubling dreams to find herself deeper still.  She decided an early morning was a safer bet than switching beds.

Breakfast came in the same takeout container as the poutine: an immaculate beef wellington. She microwaved it and felt a sense of inevitable, righteous doom overtake her until the first bite.

The thermometer was at 15 degrees. She fixed that.  The steps were covered in (still salty, oddly) slush again. She shoveled that.

“I’m not sure where it came from,” she told the spider honestly, “there’s no snow anywhere else. Not on the branches, not on the roof, nothing. I guess I’d better not think about it.”
The spider did not reply, no more than the goldfish did, and the birds still sang. Long trills and clicks, like Morse code set to music.

Dinner was what appeared to be plain scraped-from-a-can beans in molasses, and this Bailey felt far less guilty about microwaving. It tasted like university desperation and retail overtime, and raising her spoon felt like work. She read a paragraph for every bite, and the meal ran so late into the evening that at first she almost mistook her visitor for a flicker of the shadows in the old half-buzzing lights, or even one of the little twitches in her field of view she’d almost gotten used to by now.

A roach. Not too big, but unpleasant to even look at.

“Guh!” said Bailey articulately, and – thanks to her quick reflexes – this became the insect’s epitaph. It thrashed and died and one leg twitched and clawed at the air and her and the universe and oh.

Oh, that was a sensation.

Despite what migraines might advertise, Bailey knew that the human brain was famously devoid of pain receptors.

So, what she was feeling right then, that tearing, scraping, rending….thing?  Inside her skull.  That was very specifically not pain.  It was completely not like pain.  Pain and bright pink and strawberry-scent and velvet-soft and salty-taste were all much closer cousins to each other than this was.

But Bailey still felt very strongly that the correct response to it was to scream. Not a lot, or for long, but definitely to scream. Short and sharp and shattering like glass, with a hand slapped over her right eye.

Her right eye.  Very specifically her right eye. Quicker than thought, like a hand snatched from a burning stovetop.

She looked at the dead cockroach with her left eye. A dead, mashed cockroach.  No twitch left in the legs. Gross.

She looked at the dead cockroach with her closed right eye. She thought about opening it. She thought about what she would see.

She thought about how the pressure in her head had let up. About how the furrow in her brow was gone.

So instead of opening her right eye Bailey made an eyepatch out of one of her socks and some duct tape and she threw the cockroach out in the garbage, and then she went downstairs to check the pump in the basement.

It was innocuous and unmoving but it was also at the far end of the basement from where it had started.

Bailey’s right eye itched.

She ran up the stairs to bed in such a hurry that she nearly forgot herself and took the master bedroom again, but when she set foot in the room she looked at its deep, soft folds and felt its dusty breath and saw it wriggle – just a little – and remembered herself so fast she backed out without even turning around.

The guestroom bed, by contrast, was firm.  Immobile. Hard as a rock.

Baily didn’t fall asleep on it. But she did SOMETHING, because the dreams started before she’d even finished getting comfortable.

The birds sat in the window and watched her. The plants moved downstairs and talked in damp, dark voices. The books merged and split and recombined like microbes, filled the downstairs, the upstairs, to the ceiling, past the roof. The shovels marched into the mass and carved it away and slipped back downstairs to report to the pump and the pump couldn’t stop messing with the thermostat.

And all the while the birds watched her.

***

As she hadn’t slept, Bailey didn’t wake up.  But she did start moving around again.

Her phone said it was Sunday. She hoped it was right. She also hoped she was reading it right; part of her field of view was…odd… right now. Swollen, like a bruise. Despite the eyepatch, despite a firmly-clamped-shut right eyelid, she could see things on the right side of her nose. Somehow.

She swallowed the lump in her throat and her thoughts in one gulp and went downstairs to water the plants. She didn’t enjoy it. They kept making contact, brushing her wrists, and no matter how often she pushed their hands away they wouldn’t listen. No ears.

The goldfish were better. Their little hands only moved to cup the bones from the water and drink them down, their mouths murmured in gratitude and blessings. They reminded her of her grandfather after gramma died, all prayers and no thoughts.

The birds weren’t watching her. The birds were making eye contact. The birds were making eye contact with her right side. She was making it right back.

Her eyepatch was still on.  Her eyes were both shut.

Bailey screamed a little and ran back inside and slammed the door and shook herself for a few minutes, then went to talk to the spider.

“I’m really sorry, esteemed,” she mumbled. “But this is going very badly.”
The nictitating meninx was torn, the spider explained. She was seeing things that were there.

“That’s not good.”
The spider agreed. It suggested a solution, if she could go to the kitchen and find the sharpest knife. It would help.

Bailey did that.

The spider told her to point the knife at her right eyeball.

Bailey didn’t do that.

She really should, explained the spider.

“Maybe later,” said Baily.

She went to check the thermostat. It was at eleventeen. She spun the dial, spun the dial, spun the dial, then saw seventeen at last and twisted it home true only to realize she was looking at it with her left eye shut and her right eye wide and the sock eyepatch had burned its way into dust.

She looked behind her and caught the pump in the middle of moving from one end of the basement to the other. 

It hissed.

Bailey went back upstairs, picked up the knife again, and did as the spider instructed.

Leave it with me as payment, it told her.

“Take my eye. Please,” said Bailey. And giggled, but in relief. Her left eye was twitching again in that offset rhythm, her brain’s brow was furrowed and aching once more. How did that even work? Surely autostereograms need stereo vision, that was just common sense.

Hee hee who cared.  Not her!  Not Bailey! She was seeing single now, and one thing at a time was enough for her. She had mapo tofu for brunch from the fridge (and boy was she glad she hadn’t looked in it earlier), she checked the phone, she went down to the basement and gave the (now-relocated) pump a quick look and a middle finger, and she went out to the porch and boldly reached out and picked up the little yellow-handled shovel.

Oh wow, she thought.  Missed by six inches.  Depth perception DOES matter.

***

Bailey woke back up with a face against hers and a set of fingers in her right eyesocket.

“This is alright,” said the face. It was a very ordinary face, so ordinary that it was extraordinary that it remained ordinary. A face that ordinary should be memorable.

She agreed with it. Compared to what had happened after she touched the little yellow-handled shovel, this was perfect. 

“You have done nothing wrong.”

Arguable.

“The pest should not have been there. Killing it was good. Your suffering was a narrow escape. The spider gave good advice.”  The face clucked its tongue. “You should not have touched the little yellow-handled shovel. That wasn’t wrong and that wasn’t right. It was entropy, it was statistical decay. I came home early. Statistical decay.”

Oh alright then.

“You are going home now.”  The face moved away. The fingers went deeper. “And you will return with two eyes. You orphaned this one, and it will help you.”

***

Bailey saw everything.

She saw the look of disgust and shock and hidden envy travelling from Chandelier’s brain to her glands to her face and back.

She saw the experiments Candlemaker ran on the tatters of the nictitating meninx she’d carried home in her coat pocket, staining the fabric with cerebrospinal fluid.

She saw that she wasn’t a third watt anymore, whether or not anyone had said it aloud or not.

She saw that the pest had not been a cockroach.

She saw forwards and backwards and side to side and up and down and all around and beyond.

And she saw that standing there with her hand on the door to the shop wasn’t going to stop any of those things from happening.

So Bailey sighed deep, blinked with the eye that could still blink – the one that fit inside her eyesocket – and turned the doorknob, and stepped into a life that popped loose and floated above the page.

It was twenty seconds past nine o’clock when the customer arrived for his bar fight.

Unforgivable if he were a regular, but he was a tourist, and one with that combination of embarrassment and eagerness in his apologies that was all clumsily earnest. There was traffic, he’d lost reception on his navigation app, he’d hit five red lights in a row and he hadn’t checked the weather last night so the messy half-snowfall had caught him off-guard Doug forgave people like that, deserved or not.

“There’s no harm done,” he said, which was a lie but only on a very small scale. A little sloppiness and corrosion to the sense of timing and precision he’d be trying to maintain today, this year, this decade, this life. Life was full of those, one more or less was as harmful as any other. That was how they got you. “Now please, take your seat.”

Tourist, embarrassed, cursed by traffic or more, the customer was only so ignorant or slow on the uptake. He followed Doug’s cue perfectly and took the quiet-type seat at the bar, just near the far end, spaced double from its neighbours. A good position for an amateur, which meant he was one of the sorts with self-awareness. “The seat is comfortable?”
The customer shimmied quickly, rocked it sharply forwards once, twice. “Yep. All set and secured.”
“Then we shall begin.”

So speaking, Doug reached below the bar – a carefully pre-pitted and ancient slab of cheap wood – and withdraw a spray bottle. His arm moved in a broad, sure sweep, spritzing everything across the countertop with a thin shimmer of stale beer and sour sweat. The customer twitched, but only slightly, trusting in Doug’s aim to avoid his eyes as he donned the present from Doug’s other hand: a battered baseball cap, tattered from front to back. You couldn’t help but slouch under a hat like that, and so he did, back naturally relaxing into a shallow slump in the tireless fist of gravity. He took the third gift offered almost by reflex: the tall, smeared glass mug, brimming with half-drained yellow dregs and the last foam of the pour.

Doug slipped beneath the hidden cut-out of the bar, hinges in perfect oiled silence, and interrupted this moment by stepping beside the Fella and slapping one palm down on the counter.

“You lookin’ at me?” he demanded.

The Fella looked up. Slow on the uptake, but that was expected, and that it was accidental made it better to any except the most refined witnesses. “Huh?”

“I SAID, you lookin’ at me?”

The Fella shook his head. “Don’t want any trouble, bub.”

“Then why you lookin’ at me like that?”
“Like what?”

“Like you got a PROBLEM. You the kinda fella that’s got a problem with me?”

“No.” Short and surely, only a hint of eagerness expressed in the speed it came out at. Acceptable, could also be read as nerves.

“Then why. You. Lookin’. At. Me.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You callin’ me a liar?”
“I’m not calling you anything. Got wax in your ears?”
The Bub grabbed the mug. “Say WHAT there bigmouth?”
“Got glass in your ears?”
“Wh-” and just like magic, up came the Fella’s hand, right on cue, clenched and on target to the thickest part of the Bub’s chin, where impacted dead-on the target pad.

The squib in his mouth gushed red. The tonguebite was flawless; visible without gushing messily over them both. The Fella was slowing down though, almost too lost in admiration, and so the Bub slurred out (hand retreating to his mouth): “guh.”

The Fella took the cue, took the mug, and smashed it over the Bub’s face. He swore, spun, tripped over his own feet, and did a grasp-down kneecracker against the Fella’s chair.

The chair came up. The chair came down over his back. He went limp.

Good timing. Some slightly uncontrolled splinter spray from the chair’s legs, but that was the reason the Fella took the quiet-type seat: if you mishandled your setpiece, there wasn’t much else around you to suffer the consequences.

He held his breath. He released it.

“The moment is over,” said Doug.

The customer exhaled too, shakily. “God damn,” he said, blowing out his cheeks with the force of his sigh. He took off the cap and handed it back double-gripped to Doug, hands shaking just a little. “God DAMN. How do you do it? I know how, I’ve seen the interviews, but seeing it in action…”
“Practice,” said Doug, same as he’d said in every interview. And then, offhandedly, same as he’d said every time in-person: “and a metronome helps. Keep one in as much of your life as you can until you ignore it, then start paying attention. Timing is everything, and if you get that under control, the rest follows.”
“And maybe the red lights too,” the customer said – but a little sheepishly already, balking at the gulf that separated them. He paid in awe and left with a smile.

Doug stopped smiling when the man left, and wasn’t pleased with himself for it. Faking a good mood was for retail employees; his job was his art and his art was a pleasure, and expressing that pleasure was expected only insofar as he was doing this because he enjoyed it.

That had taken a while to figure out, when dad was going over the charts with him. Patiently, slowly, explaining every barstool, every step, every angle of approach, every usable tool and its substitutes.

“This is insane,” Doug had told him. “Half of these don’t do anything. Half of them are functional equivalents. All of them have two names each, and there’s six naming schemes that don’t agree with each other. Why make it so hard?”

“Dougie,” his father said – a little irritably, because dad had saved his patience for his craft – “Squabbling being hard is the whole reason I do it.”

It had taken him years to reason that out intellectually. But he’d had the time to think about it because he’d accepted it on a lower level a long time earlier, in the way his limbic system sang and his nerves fizzed.

(At the time. Familiarity didn’t breed contempt, it didn’t, it couldn’t, not this kind. But he was old now, and it was more humming and twitching)

Jenny had never gotten it. Maybe she would’ve, if she hadn’t been a little more like dad than Doug was, a little less willing to speak sharp.

***

The second person to walk into the Squabble studio was not a customer. They were a peer, and this was their sixth year visiting.

“Sorry for the weather,” they told Doug. “I know it’s not ideal for the plan.”

“It’s nothing,” he said, and he meant it. “I’ve done this knee-deep in plow backwash before. Hard on the knees, but what isn’t? The human body isn’t built very well.”
“You got that right,” said the peer, rubbing their back. And so they talked about aging as they walked outside, as they visited the shed and selected the bike (a fine middle-of-the-lane priced device, worn but adequately-if-erratically cared-for, the sort of thing he’d nod at and call good inside his own head as well as outside it), as they went out to the curb installation out back and swept back just enough slush to chain the bike to the post with a lock the peer had brought themselves.

“Buddy, I think,” they opined.

“Asshole,” he replied.

A brow raised, but only a little, and followed by a firm nod before they turned on their heel and marched back to the rear entrance. They were good enough to know just how good he was.

He didn’t make the count before he approached the bicycle in numbers. Nothing he counted in the studio happened in numbers anymore, or even biorhythms – heartbeats, breathes, the clench and unclench of muscle groups of any size. He just knew when to scuttle up to the bike, knew how long to fiddle at the padlock, knew when to pick it up and start smacking it against the post, knew the words a half-breath before they arrived.

“Hey asshole!”
He jerked his head upright, schooled the surprise on and off his features. “Who, me?”
They stamped over – the slush fountaining a bit with every angry step, no sign of slippage (good traction they’d worn for this weather). “See any other sticky-fingered shitheads out here with their hands. On. My. Bike?!”
“Buddy, I wasn’t touching your bike,” said the Asshole. “I was just looking at the lock.”
“Why the fuck you looking at my lock?”
“Some shithead’s broken it! Take a peek, see if I’m lying!”

Good mix of fury and bewilderment and curiosity, near-marred by a half-step short – a lunge would be tricky from this distance, ankle-deep in the drift.

But tricky wasn’t, so the Asshole not only cleared the drift but made it look natural – his legs felt longer, and acted the part, and the lock in his hand slapped into Buddy’s middrift with a sharp flat THWAK, distributed as evenly as anything while sounding like a cannonball being fired into a beef warehouse.

“Gwurk!” choked Buddy, doubled over, nose almost brushing their boots, and as the Asshole reared back and raised a doubled-fisted blow Buddy reached out, grasped the Asshole’s just-barely-shaky leg, and yanked.

“SHIT!” he shrieked on the way down, and as he fell he flailed, and as he flailed his grip shook loose, and so the lock and chain swung wildly, popping him one right in the eye and smeared a fat black bruise from the dye he’d palmed onto the mechanism’s base. He choked, flopped, rolled around clutching at his face, curled up around two boots to the midsection from the rallying, half-stooped form of Buddy, and then, one hand swinging wildly, he pulled in the bike by the spokes with his foot and ran it straight into Buddy’s backside.
Over went Buddy, a full two-twist somersault (a little showy, but why not shoot for your best?), and over went Asshole’s leg, and down the curb and the road he went, peddling hellbent until the moment was right and he was around the corner.

He held his breath. He released it.

“The moment is over,” said Doug. “And good work on the somersault.”

“Thanks,” said the peer, who’d come over to check the tires. “Sorry,” he said, “but my assplate shifted a bit when I dropped the first time and I want to be sure… yep. Nothing’s dented.” He patted the bike affectionately. “Apologies. Metal shrank in the cold.”
“If it takes a few knocks too many I can always shift the whole panoply down by one and get a new Brand New,” Doug said with a wave of his hand. “Not like I’m in the poorhouse just yet.”
“Yes, but the guilt.”
“You’ve told me twenty times you can’t feel that because you have no conscience.”
“Yes, but my husband does, and he’ll nag me ‘till past death’s door until I’ve bought you two bikes a bike shed and a snowblower.”
Doug laughed, and found himself startled by his own startlement at its genuineness. He accepted thanks, and he made promises, and he said goodbyes, and he still felt he was one step off. Just one piece of himself not quite there.

It had been like that, when Jenny left. If dad hadn’t skipped breakfast. If she’d not had a sleepless double-shift from the other mechanic running sick. If Doug had been a little firmer on asking them to back off.

Just one little thing off and nothing went right. And once it went wrong, it stayed wrong.

***

The third person to walk into the studio was a long-booker, someone with the patience to wait a full year for his schedule to settle and sift and solidify and another six months for their appointment to arrive.

She was also his niece.

For the first time in forty-three years, Doug wasn’t sure what expression he was making. “Ally,” he said instead. Like an idiot.

“Uncle Dougie,” she said. Like a smartass.

“You’ve gotten older.”
“Not as much as you have. You still doing this? Because I’m here for Look At My Fender, in case you’ve forgotten that.”

His brain snapped off his current course of action and onto one where it still knew what was going on. “Right. We can move it indoors, switch the fender to the shoe –”

“The hell we will. You going to let the weather tell you what to do?”
Nobody had spoken to Doug like that inside his studio in twenty years.

None of his family had spoken to Doug inside his studio in twenty years.

They went outside.

“I’ll bring my car around,” said Ally. And the problem with letting himself operate in professional mode was that it short-circuited the part of his brain that said things like “fucking hell are you insane?” so by the time he’d sorted his mouth from his ass she’d already turned on the – less-than-a-year-old, reasonably-nice, perfectly-undented sedan to the back of the building and parked it on the curb right next to where he’d shoveled the snow for the bicycle five milliseconds ago.

“Waiting,” she said, voice flat and humourless as dad’s pancakes. Doug shook himself off and let his gut pick his own car – went for the Clunker. Pulled on the coke-bottle-thick spectacles and the greasy wig, stopped to check and – oh god, she was already reaching to put the blinkers on.

He could stop and ask her questions she seemed to already have answers to. Or he could keep his timing.

So he fired up the engine, edged forwards, and – by reflex and feel – slammed bumper-first into the fender.

Which shrieked in a tone of metal that was NOT setpiece and went from one pole of his spine to another. Had she really-?

“What the FUCK!” screamed Ally, already outside his window. “Are you BLIND, you dense motherfucker?”
Those weren’t the words he’d expected. Not from whoever drove that car.

Dense Motherfucker peered out the window, goggling with entirely too-close-to-real bewilderment, and saw…

Downer. She was going full Downer. She must’ve had the outfit in the car and done a quickchange, because it was straight from halfway through the fall of the ‘90s, white shirt and tie, sweaty jacket, desperate and strung out and bug-eyed so you could almost see the cubicles reflected in the glaze in the back of her eyes.

“Say something, asshole!”

He smacked his lips and ran his tongue excessively and mumbled a string of syllables that would’ve made a kindergarten teacher disappointed.

“Speak WORDS!”

“Ididn’tseeanything,” he slurred out.

She yanked his door open.

Wait. That wasn’t Downer at all. That was Crazy.

A hand fisted his jacket, the other crunched into his nose. Red spurted extravagantly – she must’ve held at least two squibs and she’d squeezed them like a four-year-old with their first ketchup packet. It was warpaint as she screamed in his face about driving back home and coming back with her shotgun (crazy) and blowing his whole dense motherfucker (downer) family to hell and back (crazy).

And the outfit didn’t fit any of it, but it didn’t fit RIGHT. If she’d worn a good businesssuit or gone High Karen maybe it would’ve been laughable, it would’ve been parodic, but coming from her marooned-out-of-time Dilbert-on-my-wall Clinton-and-Bush burnout it was right, it was correct, and god above she’d braced her back and stabled her stance, legs wide.

That wasn’t Dense Motherfucker’s cue. It was from Fuckin’ Moron’s part.

It wasn’t called for, but it was correct. He took the groinshot – one knee, then the other. She hit a high C then took it higher still, pitched forwards, her skull dusted his gut and they went down in a mutual tangle, legs flailing, heads bouncing once at the very center of the asphalt pitch. His heel jerked. Her mouth gasped once. Stillness.

He’d held his breath. He released it.

“I’m retiring,” he said.

“What?” said Ally. She scrambled up on one elbow, genuinely appalled and concerned. “I go to all this time and effort to show up and make you take me seriously, and the second I do-”

“-you show me what I’m missing,” Doug finished. “Everything I can do I can do perfectly, the timing’s precise. Just now you showed me something I hadn’t done before, and I nearly screwed it up sixteen ways in sixteen seconds. I AM taking you seriously, and what that means is admitting I can’t show you anything you don’t already know.”

“I’m sorry I made you bust my fender for real,” said Ally miserably, retreating to less troubling ground. “It’s just, mom was sure you wouldn’t talk, and then when I was almost ready the first time grandpa was gone, and then I had that SHITTER of a year, and I wanted to be sure you’d get it, you’d really get it, and…”
“…and I got it,” said Doug. He patted her arm once, firmly. “But not the studio. You’re getting that.”

And everything was just where it had to be.