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It was to be expected that the Visitors would ask for it. There was no meat to be had (the bird was two pounds and all of it feathers), nor prize (the bird’s brilliance faded on death and its plumage became nothing more than sheening drabness), nor glory (the Visitors were fat footed and slow and poor of eyes, and would never hunt it alone).
But it was an amusement, and therefore it was no shock at all that after they had landed their craft and drank their spirits and found their guns that they would embark upon a hunt for the balaganoosh bird.
And since they were fat footed and slow and poor of eyes, they fetched Ilmo and his cousins and their cousins and their cousins from the cave and spoke to them in slow and simple and childish words and ushered them into the pines and swatted at them affectionately until they ran and leaped and chased and hurried after the flittering glimmer in the tree that was that balaganoosh bird.

Oh it was a fine chase, for all the lack of a point. No single hand could have grasped that bird alone! It hid in the high boughs when they looked low and flitted into the dense shrubs when they scaled high. It tucked itself in a flock of hoary old grottles – a star camouflaged amongst dirt – and it fled down into ravines. Behind every step and every trick swarmed Ilmo and his kin and each time it almost had them, almost lost them. But they were many and they were keen and a single eye would always catch it at the last instant, a single mouth call the alarm-word, and every hand and foot and limb would chase it through the branches at the fastest speed once more, aching to make up for lost ground.
Every hour they threw themselves to the ground to pant and drink water and sweat and breathe and then they would begin to chase again.
The sun was low in the sky when the balaganoosh finally began to flag, and as it began to flag it dropped its wings and sank like a stone and sped itself into the deep caves, where Ilmo and his kin hastily lit their quick torches and sped along and along and up, up, up the old shafts and the old beams and the old props where the Visitors had first found them in their mindless delving, swinging from the rafters and heaving themselves higher and higher and higher until they could nearly see the first glimmer of the sky again.
Then there was a creak and a wrench and a sigh and a prop came loose and fell, and with it fell six of Ilmo’s family, right past his face, hands frozen in surprise, faces blank.
The fall was so far the impact barely made a sound.
The chase halted, but they received no punishment. From the high tunnels above came the shout of triumph: the Visitors had taken their flying craft on high to the top of the plateau at the mine’s end, and they had shot their balaganoosh bird.

They sang as they fell, dropping down the shaft two at a time and swinging from the (now fewer, but stabler) supports. All the aches and sores and bruises of the day were finally here, and now stronger tenfold with sorrow.
Six times to sing the song, and all for the sake of one balaganoosh bird.
And to make matters worst of all, at Ilmo’s right elbow he heard the nasal hum of fat lungs, and he turned his head and saw a Visitor. It had come down into the mine and was leaning against the tunnel, big slow face alight with interest, and it was humming along to the mourning song.
Ilmo hadn’t ever really hated the Visitors before, in spite of their tiny number of fingers and their hideous faces and their odious manners and their smelly devices and their fondness for mindless violence and their tiny watery eyes and their stench and their heat.
But in that moment, when one of them tried to put its clumsy ass in the middle of a funeral it had caused and express its sympathetic manner, he thought he pretty much got it.

So that night he talked around a bit, and talked around a bit, and a bit more. And Ilmo and his cousins and their cousins and their cousins left their caves in the very early morning when it was darkest and pulled the Visitors from their beds in their cottage and took them all the way to the top of the plateau, where they let them chase the rising sun.

They flew much less ably than the balaganoosh bird.

*

“Nice day for it, eh?”
It was. A good grey day with a good grey sky and no rain. For a funeral it couldn’t have been planned better.
“He was a good guy,” said the man at my elbow, who was short and wore a baseball hat and an enormously disproportionate beer gut that stuck out below his scrawny ribs like a tumour. “A good guy.”
“A little weird, though,” I said. Down at the base of the hill, the priest was finishing up the grave, saying the good words and throwing around consecrated soil like it was mud.
“Eh?” Oh great, he was hard of hearing too. Why was I stuck next to this guy instead of Lauren? The seating arrangements for this thing made no sense even given everyone was spread across a steep hillside.
“I mean, how often do you see a slab funeral nowadays?”
“Aw, young people. They were dead common back in the day. Why, you check out the east side of this place? Nothing but slabs, the bigger the better!”
“Yeah, but Hugh wasn’t that old.” At the top of the hill, the slab – bigger than a sports car – was being heaved into position: four people at the back to steer and one broad-shouldered bastard at the front to take the weight.
“He was an old soul! Old at heart! You wouldn’t know, your heart’s all young. Soft! Squishy!”
“Funny, they always called Hugh a bleeding heart.”
“Oh?” The man was squinting now, and that had the uncanny effect of squishing every single wrinkle on his face into a sort of leathery black hole. “Whyzat?”
“Well-” and then the man in front of the slab slipped and it shot over his head and ploughed through the entire funeral, grinding most of the seated guests underneath it and passing so near by to me that the wind brushed my elbows.
“Holy SHIT!” I screamed.
“Ow buddy,” breathed the man.
“Lauren!”
“Hey, buddy?”
I looked down. Insofar as you could be lucky when being hit with a six-ton slab, he’d been lucky. It had carved open his gut, but all that was spilling out was red blood and a fat band of yellow fat. All the other colours and organs had stayed inside.
“Yeah?”
“Y’mind calling an ambulance? I don’t feel so hot.”
I looked upslope, where two of the slab-pushers had done just that and the other two were shrieking and wringing their hands. “Already on it, man.”
“Oh that’s good buddy, that’s good. Hey, can you keep me distracted?”
“Sure.”
“Whyzat you call ol’ Hugh a bleeding heart?”
“Well, he was a little bit of a radical, and we always used to joke that-”
“Hi,” said Lauren. She was more rumpled and even shorter than usual, and her coat was coated in various juicy substances. “Don’t worry, it’s not mine.”
“It went right over your seats!”
“Yeah, wasn’t that bad luck? Good thing you were over here and I was just getting up to use the washroom.” She glanced down at the guy. “You get his health card?”
“Got peeled off with my shirt front,” he said.
“You got the number?”
“Uhh…six four nine seven two eight three one nine zero.”
Lauren’s smile was tight and firm: emergency expressions. “Funny. That’s just what the last guy they sent said.”
The man’s face fell. I’d never seen that before, but it literally dropped, like someone had shoved it off a cliff. “Aw hell.”
“Yep. Hey Jeff, didn’t you think it was funny how that accident hit every single seat except for you and bozo here?”
“What are you talking about?”
“They paid off the front slabman.”
“Oh. They?”
“Later. Though not too much later. You’ve got a lot to catch up on.”
“Now buddy, this is all just-” and Lauren’s foot reached out and poked him and the guy went rolling down the slope, gut unfurling behind him like a banner.
“Jesus!”
“Yeah, they’ll take some time cleaning him up. In the meantime that’s a head start for us. How fast’s your car?”

*

It had been prophesized that no man would kill him, no woman could harm him, and no arrow could bring him low, and that was probably why in the end the Dread Barklord Mossbeard was shot with a thermal missile.
He had arisen in the west, in the dreadful Endwood, where he had last fallen. Ten thousand lives had been given to overthrow his army of branchlings, ten thousand more had tied down his strong swordarm, and ten thousand more had died of exhaustion after building the great cairn that had been meant to pin him for all time. It hadn’t been enough, which was a key deciding factor in why the Dread Barklord Mossbeard was shot with a thermal missile.
When he breached soil, the land roiled. When he stood, the trees bowed. When he spoke, the grass rose up and the birds died. No brave soul remained to stand against him, no army was rallied to defy him, no hero was prophesized to end him, and that was why the Dread Barklord Mossbeard was shot with a thermal missile.
The army of the root and leaf that arose behind him was the largest yet – the whole Endwood and all of the little groves and scattered plantings that had arisen in its wake since the long sleep had begun. Its rotten seeds had spread far and wide on the wind, each recruiting, each biding its time, and teaching its own saplings in turn, so by the end of his wakening bellow perhaps half the woods in all the land rose up bright and willing under his call by lineage or by tutor. They outnumbered the foe by trunkcount and by mass they tripled, quadrupled, quintupled onwards him, at least up until the Dread Barklord Mossbeard was shot with a thermal missile.
They waded forwards through the fields and into villages, the farmers and herders and shepherds and ranchers and jack of all trades and idle boys and friendly dogs and pompous mayors and plucky farmgirls all fleeing from them on horses, cows, pickup trucks, etc. Fear filled the air with the stink of emptied bowels and filled trousers. At the head of the host he marched, which made for an easy target when they shot the Dread Barklord Mossbeard with a thermal missile.
Six thousand years ago his seed had germinated, a five thousand since he reached his full height. He had seen that there were places in the world that did not live in his shade; he had learned that there was life that did not wither and die for want of sunlight, and he had been disgusted by those things and yearned to teach them proper behaviour before his feet. So he had uprooted them, and made strides with them, and terrorized so many and many more for millennia before they shot the Dread Barklord Mossbeard with a thermal missile.
No rivers could halt him, no mountains could stall him, even the oceans were forded over on rafts made of their fallen brethren’s wooden bones. Fire did not daunt them, slings and arrows could not harm them, axes were toys to them, and in the end all that could be done was to die. Up until they shot the Dread Barklord Mossbeard with a thermal missile.
Twelve crusades he led of the green and growing against the red wet flesh. Eleven thunderous victories, halted only temporarily. And on the twelfth he was poised for his largest yet, up until they shot the Dread Barklord Mossbeard with a thermal missile.

So they shot the Dread Barklord Mossbeard with a thermal missile. And boy howdy did he burn.

*

The evil tower crumpled, the evil magic was broken, and the evil king’s evil soul let out an evil shriek as it passed its way into the shadows of oblivion.
And oh, and oh, and oh how all the land did cheer, and none harder than the good little folk, who had led the way with their bustling fortitude.
So they all went home, and they feasted long into the night.
To goodness!
To littleness!
To knowing your proper place!
And to victory!
TO VICTORY! Forever!

Far far away in the evil remnants of the evil kingdom’s evil mountain of evil doom, an evil egg hatched in an evil nest’s evil rubble.
It disgorged one evil dragon, who was also extremely adorable in an evil way.

On and on the feasts marched. The land bloomed, the fields flourished, the sky was peerless blue with gorgeous fluffy white clouds broken only by brief and warm rains that invigorated the soul and heartened the crops and nourished the spirit. Every day the produce was heaped high and brought to the tables for the feast that would never end, for the victory that would never be overturned, for the heroes who would never be challenged again. The good little folk cheered and banged their tables and quaffed their drinks and feasted until they grew round as balls, round as apples, round as their happy little cheeks and their twinkling little eyes and their good solid little souls. Perfect spheres, unchanging, unbreakable, flawless and forever bobbling in place.

By and large the evil dragon grew up alright amongst the evil wasteland’s evil ruins. There was still plenty of lingering evil carrion from the last stand of the evil armies against the many and goody peoples, and so it managed to stay if not well-fed, then just fed. It grew serpentine, then sinuous, and finally scaled and rather majestic.

In the land of the good little folk the happiness only grew. Every day the sun shone harder, every day the plates grew fuller, every day their delight burst more rhapsodically. Farmers wept in joy as they tilled their fields; servants beamed at their master’s boots as if they were their own children; gentlemen of leisure smoked their pipes as if they were embracing their wives in passionate lust. And every day and every night and every hour the feasts grew and spread. Fresh tables were thrown down on new ground; new plates were brought out; young children were weaned off milk as fast as possible so they too could laugh and cheer and consume, for the victory that would never end.

The evil dragon’s eyes were perhaps its most evil feature – abnormal in their intensity and their acuity, which of course was quite evil. And one particularly evil day of evil-looking weather – dark, evil clouds with evil, foul-smelling rain, which left the evil dragon a little miserable – it was staring down the sides of its evil mountain looking for something to do when it saw a faint glimmer on the horizon.
“Huh,” it said. “Well now.”
And it spread its evil wings and left to investigate.

The one thing that had shrunk about the good little folk’s feast had been the dancing, which had grown impossible as the good little folk became less little and more spherical. Instead they rocked in place at their tables, at their plates, at the world in general, eyes shut and mouths open in purest bliss. Oh the joy! Oh the glee! Oh the humanity and the terror and the shock when right in the middle of their biggest fireworks celebration yet one of the fireworks came to earth and revealed itself NOT to be a riot of colours and sparks but a glistening, awful thing of scales and teeth and flame and maw and death and smoke and horror and gloom and piercing, EVIL eyes.
“Hello,” said the evil dragon. “What is all this about?”

Never, ever, ever had there been such a calamity and a fear, and never again would there be. The good little folk had known final and ultimate victory, and what could be more fearsome following that than any trace of triumph made undone? They gibbered, they cried, they screamed, and they fled.
But perhaps it had been too long, and too many years of feasting. For the good little folk’s legs, you see, were somewhat littler than the rest of them, and their bodies more spherical. So they rolled rather than ran, and in that tumbling, stumbling, fumbling chaos, every single one of them rolled downhill and into the river, where they floated out to and across the sea to Other, Faraway Places.

The evil dragon was left very alone and very puzzled, but it soon cheered up. The good little folk had left their feasts behind, and it hadn’t had a good meal in forever.

The hallway smelled like mouldering dampness and decaying deposits. The apartment’s door smelled like all that plus wet marsupial fur.
Knock knock knock thump bump knock knock.
The door opened a crack.
“Hey. It’s me.”
A soft growl came from the apartment, like a puppy crossed with a cat.
“I brought some Kleenex like you asked.”
Another growl, lilting upwards, and the door opened a little wider.
“Oh c’mon, just take it. It’s not catching by now.”
Some of the sounds were very pointed.
“’Symptomatic.’ God, listen to yourself. Fancy-pants. Fine. Take your stupid tissues and let me go, I’ve got shit to do.”
Growl?
“Yeah, I’m probably going to fail the course. Which probably means I’ll lose the scholarship. Which probably means aw fuckit I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. Whichever. See you ‘round, ‘kay? Keep us posted.”
Tina shook her head as she walked down the staircase. She hadn’t seen Dean look that tired in years. But then again, it was a pretty bad case of the platypus.

*

“Let me in.”
The sound that came through was ambiguous and inarticulate but distinctly a denial.
“You know I’m immune, dumbass – my best friend caught the platypus in third grade and I didn’t so much as get fuzzy off’ve it. Let me in.”
The door opened a crack and a suspicious and profoundly beady little eye poked through.
“Let me in, damnit. I got you eats. Homecooked.”
The door swung wider, slowly, and Jill jumped through with the powerful striking instinct of a bored housecat.
“Ta-dah!” she said.
Dean harrumphed at her. He was smaller and furrier than she’d last seen him and had developed a sort of bill, but that was to be expected.
“Yeah, yeah, quit your bitching. Like we’d leave you to starve to death on your own cooking. Chicken soup with enough heat in it to boil off your tastebuds: family cure for distracting you from whatever ails ya.”
Dean clopped his bill at her.
“WHAT?! When the HELL did you become a vegetarian?!”
Gurgling noises.
“Oh that isn’t funny. That isn’t funny at all. Stop-stop, ahaha, stop laughing. You prick! You know, I honestly believed you.”
Trilling sounds.
Jill dropped the resealed margarine container on the kitchen counter. “Yeah, yeah. You know, if it really IS easier to bluff through a bill, that’s one upside of the whole mess. Any silver lining in a stormcloud, right?”
Flat growl.
“Well, yeah, guess it’s more like bronze. I’d settle for copper, myself.”
Inquisitive grunts?
“Oh, the shop’s going down the tubes. Barely made rent last month, probably’ll start autocannibalism this month, and after that, well. I mean, we’ll see what happens, won’t we?”
Yeah.
“Yeah. Look, I’ve got to go try to pretend I’m earning a living. Don’t be a stranger, right?”
Dean waved a distinctly flippery hand in acknowledgement and showed her out.
He didn’t look great, really. But it could always be worse.

*

Knoc.

noc.

no-
“Oh gosh hi I’m sorry to make so much noise oh no were you sleeping I’m so so sorry augh I fucked up I fucked up I fucked up never mind I’ll just leave wait can I at least leave this with you by way of apology oh no I’m making this all about me oh no no no no no no.”
Dean raised a single webbed digit to David’s mouth. It was possible he also raised an eyebrow, but it was hard to tell any given patch of fur apart on his skull.
“Oh. Right. Sorry. Look, I’ve brought you some more Tylenol. It’s the kids brand but I think if you take like half again the dose it’ll be fine? Sorry, it was all they had left. Sorry. I shouldn’t have bought it. Sorry.”
Dean took the little bottle and put it on the kitchen counter, then took three of the pills out and ate them.
“Hope they don’t taste too lousy – chewables, and all they had was grape. God I hate grape. Nothing worse than artificial grape.”
Dean nodded.
“Are you doing okay? You look okay. Well, shorter. Furrier. Billier. More like a platypus. But okay. For a platypus.”
Dean made a series of short sneezes.
“Aww, shoot. Don’t worry they’ll kick in soon. I think. Listen, aw I feel terrible asking this but before I forget do you have Jessie’s phone number at all I really need her phone number and I lost it when my battery died.”
Agreement and inquisitive snorting.
“It’s Josh. He came out and uhh had to leave home and he’s sort of staying on our couch but it’s not a big couch and we don’t have a big apartment and we figured after she helped out with-”
Dean scribbled down some platypus scrawls on the back of a pizza receipt and passed them over.
“Thanks. Really, thanks so much. Sorry to bother you like this. Thank you, and uh, I’ll see you later if we can possibly help more don’t hesitate to ask if it’s not a problem for”
Dean very gently pushed David out the door and closed it as politely as possible.
“Um,” said David to the door. “Um. Um um um. Bye? Bye. See you later. Get well soon.”
Well. That had gone pretty good.
Dean looked way better than he’d expected.

*

Click.
“Hey coming in hope you’re not naked ahahahahahahhahahaooooh man. Well, guess it doesn’t matter, huh?”
Dean glared from a vantage point of four inches off the floor.
“I mean, I’ve seen it before in any case, but uh. Not like this. Hahahah. Wow. You’ve really got it bad, huh?”
Dean bit Holly on the shoe. Unfortunately, they were sandals.
“Ah! Jesus! Mind the…do you have teeth? Ridges? Shit, that stings.”
Unapologetic growling.
“Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine. Fuck. Good thing I’m not bleeding or you might miss out on the very special thing I’m delivering.”
Cautiously wary gurgle.
“Ta-daaah! Found a two-for-one coupon in my neighbour’s mailbox! Two shitty pizzas – pepperoni only – and you get one! Now siddown and enjoy some grease-cheese.”
Dean clopped his bill at her.
“You? Likely story; if you couldn’t eat shitty tuna melts once a month you’d go blind. Who the hell’d believe that?”
Growl.
“Oh yeah Jill would absolutely. Now eat it before it solidifies.”
Trilling sounds.
“Sure, sure. I’ll stick around for a while. Not like I’m missing out on anything tonight – just got fired. I mean, I still have the table gig and the weekend cashier work, but that’s what, three-quarters of next week’s bills paid?”
Commiserative growling.
“Well, something might come up. Y’think they need another body to deep-fry pizzas?”
Snort.
“Yeah. Don’t think so.”

One and a half shitty pizzas later Holly left with a better mood and a fuller stomach and a vague sense that she’d done the right thing leaving Dean two years ago. He was a nice guy but he had the dumbest sense of humour, and he had no appreciation for junk food.
Seemed to be doing better than he had last time she’d seen him, though.

*

On Wednesday, the door to the apartment opened and Dean emerged into the slightly broken lights of the hallway, blinking tiny eyes. Sensitive electroreceptors in his bill muttered in the drafty air, and his adorable little furry tail wobbled as he slid clumsily down the staircase and out the door into the rush and yell of the city.
Well. First things first he’d have to go beg extra shifts. After that many sick days in a row he was running on empty, and
HONK HONK THUNK HOOOOONK
Dean didn’t fly quite like a rag doll; it was more like a football. He smashed into something hard and something firm and then something that was someone’s lap. If only the lap had been less bony, then maybe there wouldn’t be a terrible grinding sensation in his hip.
“CRUD!”
“Jesus!”
“You got the plates?”
“I got the plates!”
“Hey buddy, you okay? You okay?”
Dean was too busy making various distressed noises to reply, which was its own kind of answer.
Someone had opened up his wallet. “Aw fuck. He’s got no insurance.”

Well. It wasn’t the worst week of his life yet.

An impulse buy, that’s all it was. Rule number one in the almost-antique-or-at-least-collectible business is to follow your brains, not your gut (that gets you into trouble), but rule number two is to at least give it the occasional consult.
Old lady Crane had gone off to heaven, leaving behind grieving children, confused lawyers, and finally one hell of a garage sale.
And I got first dibs. Woke up bright and early, and brought the whole truck with me as I swept from table to table to table.
Books. Sure.
Knick knacks. Why not.
A whole tea set, almost matched. Definitely.
And then I was eye to mouth with something and reeled back, snorting.
“Shoo!”
The cat blinked at me, sneezed twice, and dropped away to find a better napping spot.
The mouth stayed behind. Good lord, what was this thing doing in here?
“Oh god, she kept that thing,” groaned Teddy Crane. Sweat was beading on his receding hairline; casualties of an unseasonably warm autumn morning.
“You familiar?”
“How could I not be? The kids loved it, but that was years ago. Amazed it isn’t a rat’s-nest by now.”
I looked at it.
Where in the hell’s name had old Linda Crane picked up a ten—foot T. rex statue?
Well, I mean, beyond the obvious answer of ‘pre-80s’. The posture was all wrong: bolt-upright, tail-dragging, pot-bellied. And it had been no expert work even by the standards of the day – the jaw was loose; the legs were too fat and too scrawny all at once; the feet were lumpen clubs that looked like they’d been planted drumstick-side-down. .
“You want it?”
I looked at it again. Even the eyes were amateurish; no eyeballs here, just smeared paint over empty sockets: a swatch of yellow and a quick swipe of slit-pupiled black. A teenager would’ve done a better job.
“Sure,” I said. “Why the hell not. It’s a lot more noticeable than the sign.”

I got enough rubbernecking on the highway just carting the thing back, which told me my gut had given me a proper nod for once. Not bad for a Thursday.
Finding the proper place for it was a bit harder. Right beside the sandwich board overshadowed it a bit; the parking lot was for customers not statuary; and the roof… well. Even if I had the time and energy to do that, there was no way I’d be comfortable with the amount of guywires needed to keep it happy in a fall gale. To say nothing of the fun it could offer if it filled with ice in the winter – I’d already had to deal with the roof once this decade, thank you.
But well. There was the old hitching post I’d kept around, wasn’t there? And I had some theatrically raggedy old ropes that weren’t much use, and that was how it ended up. Just outside the door, mouth open, tied neatly in place. Looking for all the world like it wanted to take a drink of water out of the flowerbed trough.
And still visible from the road!

Esther Alder’s Antiques and Collectibles. Now sponsored by ‘70s paleontological paraphernalia. You never know what a lucky break looks like until it happens, do you?

*

The kids loved it.
The adults were bemused by it.
The teenagers didn’t care about it but teenagers didn’t care about anything and didn’t have any money so who cared what the hell they thought? Besides other teenagers.
The important thing was that it brought eyes, and eyes were usually attached to wallets, and sometimes those wallets were agreeable to being lightened by taking something off my hands – a stack of dusty old comics; a tattered paperback about rippling thews and so on; a hideous lamp; a tuckered-out table.
More money, less junk. A win-win, but hey if other people were crazy who was I to tell them?
About the only person that wasn’t happy was the dog. Senile old bitch walked around like she’d had a tazer up her far end for a week, the shock of something new was that crippling to her. No amount of pissing on it seemed to satisfy her hostility, and every morning I got to wake up to a morning solo aria as the idiot remembered that the ugly thing still existed.
“Shut up,” I informed her, hiding under the biggest pillow. “Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.”
It never worked.

*

“That’s not a real dinosaur.”
I frowned at the kid as her dad fussed with his wallet. “Looks real to me.”
“They don’t look like that. It’s fake.”
“’Course it’s fake. Real dinosaurs are dead.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Yeah. You know Jurassic Park was fiction, right?”
The kid rolled her eyes in the deeply obnoxious way that only someone who knew they couldn’t be punched would use. “Birds are dinosaurs. Real dinosaurs are alive.”
“Yeah, but they’re boring.”
The kid’s eyes narrowed, but around then the dad grunted in triumph and the purchasing of an old anvil saved me from more lecturing.
Little smart-ass. What did kids know anyways? As if it being real was the point.

That weekend the dog went missing. Well, less money on kibble, and she was a bit past the best-by date anyhow. And whatever coyote, wolf, or cougar that had surprised her had saved me the effort of digging a pit out back, too.
Amazing the sort of luck the world can go out of its way to hand to you.

*

“I don’t like it,” said the register monkey. She was fidgeting at the till again; damned kid couldn’t sit still. With that sort of instinct you’d think she’d be better at making change, but no.
I sighed. “Well, too bad. It brings people in, you don’t. Just thank your lucky stars or whatever that you aren’t competing for the same job.”
“It’s creepy. Its eyes like, almost follow you. Around. You know?”
“No, I don’t, and also: no, they can’t. They’re little splotchy smears in empty pits, that’s impossible.”
“Whatever. It’s creepy. And it’s not even a real dinosaur. Real dinosaurs have feathers.”
“No they don’t.”
“Yeah they do. They found them out in China or something.”
I restrained the urge to reach out and flick the register monkey directly in her nose – you never knew what part of the province’s labour laws she’d memorized – and contented myself with rolling my eyes. “Whatever. It’s not about the scientific accuracy. And if you care about that sort of thing, we’ve got five tons of paperbacks from the ‘50s in the showroom you can annotate that think that Pluto’s a planet, cavemen and dinosaurs co-existed, plate tectonics doesn’t exist, Venus is a jungle, and man-with-a-penis is the center of the universe.”
“Really?”
“No, you dumbass. It’d spoil the resale value.”

The register monkey flaked out on me that very night. I came in the next morning; the whole building was shut down about as competently as she ever did it – the lights were on, the register was short five bucks, the doors were (mostly) locked – but her rickety car was still in the side lot and she didn’t show up for work again.
I sold the car. I mean, why wouldn’t you?

*

“Where the hell did THAT come from?” asked Brian.
“Old lady Crane.”
“Where’d she get it?”
“Didn’t ask, she wasn’t in much shape to answer.”
“Fair, fair.” He squinted out the window at it through those ancient Harry Potter glasses of his, little eyeballs lost in giant lenses. “Gad that thing’s been beaten with an ugly stick. When was it made, the ‘40s?”
“Could be the ‘40s, could be the ‘50s, could be the ‘60s, could’ve been six months ago. It’s a sign, not a statement.”
“Every sign’s a statement,” he said peevishly. “This one says ‘help me help me my knowledge of biology is fifty years out of date.’ Might as well put up a big sign saying ‘COLDS ARE CURED BY CHICKEN SOUP’ or ‘ACADEMIC STUDY INDUCES HYSTERIA IN WOMEN’ or something.”
“Little bit of a difference there, Brian. For one thing, nobody cares.”
“I care.”
“Nobody worth mentioning.”
He punched me in the shoulder, I grabbed his skull and noogied it, we drank six more beers and I kicked him out to do shutdown.

When I came outside he was gone, already left to walk home by himself in the dark. The kind of advanced thinking you only got from Brian after six more beers, and it must’ve done him iller than usual because nobody ever saw him again.
Was it the creek? Did he cut through the woods and fall in a ravine? Some careless idiot with a car who removed the evidence? Something else?
Shit. What a miserable autumn.

*

November.
God, it was such a November out there. If it had been October the weather would have been merely outrageous; as it was it was just damned depressing. There was an inevitability in the clouds; the comfortable gloom and despair of someone that knew they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
And it was pissing down like a drunk with six catheters.
If I’d known this was going to happen – if the weather report had done its fucking job – I wouldn’t have even opened today. Lost the whole afternoon and now I’d have to stay overnight; the highway was a river right now and my car was short a few paddles.
Not the first overnighter I’d pulled, but it was never fun. The smell fermented in the night, the creaking intensified, the mice ran across your feet, and that was all WITHOUT the pleasure of whatever the hell was going on outside. Maybe it was seven catheters.

I looked at the yard. The rain wasn’t falling; it was pounding. The parking lot looked as if someone was hurling shrapnel down on it and the few puddles deep enough to exist were exploding like raccoons on a highway.
Well, if I hadn’t had potholes before, I did now. Resurfacing time again, yay. A good end to a good summer, and that’s if I could get it in before the frosts started. I didn’t like the idea of trying to rope Hugh into winter work. Miserable bastard complained in a light breeze; a snowstorm would have him whining hard enough to break my windows, and THAT was just straight-up unaffordable.
I looked at the yard. Lightning took snapshots of it for me, carving familiar garbage into unfamiliar and ugly shapes with shadow chisels.
Too much garbage. A shameful thing to say for an antique shop, but it was true. Maybe I’d overreached? No, no. There’d been enough space, there’d been enough time. The customers, they’d failed me. Driven by fickle fancy and the weather, but I repeated myself. Some years you win, some years you lose.
I looked at the yard. Something wasn’t quite right.
Had the wind taken something? I’d chained down the sandwich board years ago after one too many pranks led to one too many replacements, but maybe it’d rusted up or come loose or something. It was hard to see, but maybe if I squinted.
The doorbell rang.

*

My life wasn’t very big, and I knew that, and maybe I wasn’t one-hundred-per-cent happy with it, but I was used to it and the way that I knew every inch of its happenings. I could wake up and from dawn to dusk spend no more thought on anything than someone would on breathing.
So there was absolutely no need for me to stop and think and run down the entire list of everyone who might ever have a reason to ring the doorbell.
Delivery not in this rain; Liz she moved down to Mexico last year; Aunt Edith was in the hospital after that fall; who who who who who.
Ding-dong.
Twice.
Nobody would ring it twice.
I thought about that, or tried to avoid thinking about it. So I looked out the window in-between squalls and….well.
The yard wasn’t quite right.
Everything was there. The gravel parking lot, the ancient old giant sandwich board, the big weather-beaten (bashed after this) flower trough, the hitching post.
There wasn’t anything at the hitching post.
Well.
Well.
Well.

Obviously some kids had made off with it. That was what had happened.
Something crunched against the side of the building.
Tree branch coming down, of course. I hadn’t trimmed well enough around the lot this year.
I was standing very still, but that was just because my explanations weren’t convincing me, which my forebrain told me was completely normal. It was a dark and stormy night and I was nervous, that’s all. Tomorrow morning it would be different. Nothing was frightening in the daylight.
My hindbrain was screaming that maybe that was because things that wanted to eat me liked the dark.
I kept standing very still, and I wondered if this was how nervous breakdowns started. My uncle Bill had been steady as a rock until one day Edith asked him to pass the pepper and he just laid down and started crying. Maybe it ran in the family.
The back door creaked open and I was upstairs in the attic storage.
I couldn’t explain either of those events. I had no idea who was at the back door. I had no idea how I’d gone through two doors and to the top of a rickety, creaky staircase in-between breaths.
I had no idea why my chest was hurting from the inside like there was a little man in there with a mallet, and I had no idea why I knew, just knew, from my marrow-on-out, that I needed to be quiet.
Something was scraping along the floor downstairs, slow and unsteady, moving with jerking and uneven footsteps.
I knew what it was even before I looked. I knew it wouldn’t help if I looked. I knew that any movement right now was a terrible idea.
I leaned down and looked between the floorboards anyways, because the alternative was leaving it to my imagination.
Damnit, I should have trusted my imagination more.

*

The way it moved was the worst thing I’d ever seen. In clumsy jerks and thuds, like a cross between cheap old stop-motion and a cheap old children’s toy. Something cast out of a cheap mould in cheap plastic, disposable and born decaying. Its mouth opened and closed in a parody of breathing, its little arms twitched against its chest with something more than the vibrations of its walk.
Its walk. Gods, its walk. Each foot swayed and meandered in the air, like a drunk man descending a staircase in the dark. And no wonder; its head remained firmly erect, eyes forward, blank little smeared-yellow eyesockets staring dead ahead as it groped its way along.
Forward. Down the hall. To the front windows. Where I’d been standing.
Every single hair on my body was standing erect and my clothing felt like it was made of needles. I felt the suicidal urge to giggle.

Somehow, some delusional thing at the back of my head that kept pretending it was my common sense was yammering at me, telling me that this was crazy. Its claws were chipped and blunted little plastic pegs; its teeth were a single jagged mass with vague serrations carved into them; the whole shebang couldn’t weigh much more than two of me and it was top-heavy; it was nonsense to be afraid of it.
That same idiotic response had also tried to tell me that none of this was going to happen, so I decided on the most fundamental of levels that I was going to entirely ignore my head and would listen to my gut now.
My gut put my knee in the wrong place on the wrong floorboard and I went through the ceiling in a hail of timber dust and exploding joists.

*

I must’ve blacked out for a second – not the lost seconds of my trip to the attic storage, a genuine loss of consciousness – but when I woke up I couldn’t breathe. I flailed my arms and legs a little and fell over and could breathe again and realized that I had been wrapped around the toilet.
And that the footsteps had stopped by the register.
Oh no, there they went again. Getting closer this time.

It was going to get me, it was going to get me just like it got Brian and the register monkey and the dog and damnit, this made no SENSE It wasn’t even a real dinosaur.
Not that I’d be any better off if it was a real dinosaur. Hell, it’d probably have its shit together better and I’d be dead by now. This thing was such a lumbering oaf it was amazing it could
Hmm.
I let my brain chase that inspiration while my gut hauled my entire body together starting with the legs, and I made it out of the bathroom just ahead of the thing. Something lurched behind me and I heard plastic scrape against hair.
Run run run. Where? Somewhere that isn’t here!
Through the show-room vaulting tables chairs knocking over a jam-packed shelf of garbage all to get faster to get to the back door. It was creaking open softly, back and forth. The wind was fast, but it was sturdy and heavy and the handle had been mangled and was dangling there by a little twist of torn metal.
It wasn’t fair. It was cheap. It was so cheap and so incompetent and it was going to kill me.
I let that outrage seep into my muscles, let it burn inside, let it take me out into the pouring rain and around the side of the parking lot – past my car; my keys were in my coat, fat lot of use now – and out onto the wide mud flats of the parking lot, where I made the mistake of looking over my shoulder.
There it was, big as daylight and twice as horrifying in the dark, all its imperfections slickly stroked away by the rainfall and the gloom and the gale. I couldn’t even see the fakeness of its teeth.
It was stupid. I was going to die. I was going to die in the dumbest possible way to the dumbest possible thing unless it really WAS the dumbest possible thing and then maybe I had a chance and maybe I could do it if I ran just a little farther, just a little faster.
Thud, thud, thump, shuffle, splash.
I reached the hitching post, I spun again, and this time I saw what I’d hoped – a cant, a list, a lopsided lean, a foot embedded in a pothole that was more of a pit – and I was so filled with hope and prayer that I almost forgot to throw the hitching rope at it.
It’d been years since I played cowboy, but I was pretty proud of my aim, and it wasn’t as if it was a small target. Over its head, around that thick lizard neck, yanked tight-slick-fast in the rain, rope screaming over rough, wet plastic, and then I yanked.
If it’d been on flat ground, it might not have worked.
If it’d been on dry ground, it might not have worked.
If I’d been just a hair less panicked and desperate and furious at the idiocy of this entire problem, it definitely wouldn’t have worked.
But as it was I was so damned scared and angry I yanked the thing over on its rough-cast snout, and the splash it kicked up soaked me to the core with triumph.
Three times I spun in a circle, laughing in the rain. Three times I yelled up at the storm, not even using syllables. And three times I kicked that stupid, writhing, twitching mess as it mired itself in the liquid gravel, tiny useless arms thrashing and rigid legs hopelessly unable to bend.
It made an upturned turtle look like an Olympic gymnast.
Still, I tied a few more ropes, just to be safe. Then I went inside and got more and tied them too.
Then I got the handsaw. Chainsaw’d be nicer, but it was a bit wet for that, so I’d just take off the feet. I had to leave something to do in the morning anyways.
Not that I knew tomorrow’s weather report. But hell, you never know what a lucky break’ll look like, do you?

Jordan brought the weed.
I brought the rum.
Steve brought something in an unlabeled bottle he swore must be vodka.
And Mark brought us down Mill street and through seven sticker bushes and down a hill made of sharp rocks and onto a twenty-foot scrap of almost-sand with a rotting-ass shack in it that looked like it had been put up by thumbless drunks and smelled like it too.
“Gross,” said Steve.
“Sick,” said Jordan. “What, you never wanted to get wasted on beachfront property? What’re you, a peasant?”
And it was true, the Atlantic was right there – made a little smaller and safer by the rocks. Hidden, too; nobody was seeing this place from the water. I made a fire – well, I piled up a fire, then it wouldn’t light so after the fourth miserable little puff of dead smoke I gave up.
“Hell with it,” I said. “Breeze wouldn’t let it work anyways.”
“Breeze is cutting my ass apart,” said Jordan. “Mark, you sure this is a building? I’ve seen nets with fewer holes.”
“I know one way to get warm.”
“No matter how drunk I get, you aren’t good-looking enough.”
“Nah. Hey, Rob, pass that rum.”
“Pass yours first.”
“Fine.”
Slosh, slosh, slosh, clink, chug.
“Eww!” said Mark. “Straight outta the bottle?”
“It’s a disinfectant,” said Steve.
“I don’t want to catch dumbass.”
“You’ve had it since birth.”
I spat out my mouthful.
“Hey! Don’t waste it!”
“Nothing to waste – the hell is this?”
“Vodka.”
“Vodka? It’s got no flavour.”
“Vodka has no flavour, dumbass.”
“I know, but it’s got no kick!”
“That’s because it’s working. It sneaks in.”
“No it doesn’t.”
“Yes it does.”
Jordan grabbed the bottle out of my hand and swallowed a quarter of it.
“Jesus, careful!”
“Nah.”

And so the circle began. Take a pull, pass it on, vocally suspect Steve’s claims and my taste-
“It’s the same one my mom buys!”
“Your mom’s taste then.”
-and then pass it on. We got into a rhythm and it started to feel good, or at least normal.

“How’d you find this place anyways?” I asked Mark.
“Fell down a hill.”
“How’d you fall down a hill?”
“Steve’s brother and his friends picked me up and threw me into a bush.”
I whacked Steve on the head.
“Hey, I didn’t do anything you prick!”
“Yeah. Pass it on to your brother for me.”
“Fuck that! He’ll throw me into a bush.”
“Worked out for Mark.”

The bottles made a circle again.
“Heyy, Jordan. When you gonna share?”
“Not until I get more booze in me. You have no idea how hard it is to hand this out to you assholes. Know what I had to pay my sister for this?”
“No?”
“It wasn’t anything,” Steve said, “because you stole it from her sock drawer while she was at work.”
Jordan leaned over and smacked him on the cheek.
“OW!”
“Sorry. I’m almost drunk enough to share, and I’m getting all reckless. Can’t control my own strength and shit.”
“Bullshit.”
“Can’t hear you. Too drunk.”

The bottles made a circle again.
“It’s not so bad. This is vodka?”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, maybe.”
“Ech. Whatever this was, it’s more water than drink.”
“Says who?”
“I did. Better find the man who sold you this and take off a thumb, because you been robbed six ways to Sundays and back again.”
I looked to my left. Someone had squeezed his way between me and Steve without noticing – he was crazy-thin, which explained a little.
“Uh. This your shack?”
“No, but no one’s said otherwise for a long time.” Oh Christ he was a gargler. Sounded like half his teeth had been pulled out and put back in the wrong order. “Been a decent place for me and the boys to lie low.”
“Oh. Sorry. Should we… go?”
The new guy turned to face me, and maybe the rum and…maybe-vodka was kicking in, because he had the most sunken eyes I’d ever seen on anyone who could still talk. “You got another bottle?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s in it?”
“Rum.”
“Deal us in and you got the place for the night.”
I tried to think this over with whatever brain cells I still had at 100%. Potentially offend a strange man living in a shack, or invite him and his shack buddies in and risk offending them later?
“Sure,” said Steve.
“Fuck,” I said.
“Booze’s up, boys!” said the new guy.
And then his buddies pulled themselves up out of the dirt to join us.
Jordan had been sitting on the biggest one’s head. Neither of them were thrilled about that.

His name was Jack Witless. The others were Big Louis and Half-Shin Terry and Chop.
Chop had one arm and Big Louis was about six five; the rest were less obvious. Mind you, it was hard to tell them apart in the first place, on account of all of them being skeletons held together with glowing…stuff.
“Ectoplasm,” said Mark.
“Jelly,” said Half-Shin Terry.
“I sure as shit wouldn’t put it on toast,” said Jordan.
“Quit hogging the bottle,” said Chop.
Jordan threw it to her and she caught it with her missing arm.
“Shit!”
“Three hundred and sixteen years and you still haven’t figured that out,” said Jack Witless.
“It was my good arm!”
“WAS. Get over it.”
“You cut it off!”
“It was your arm or your life, you whinger. And I don’t recall any complaints at the time.”
“You’d shoved two bottles of rum down my throat!”
“And never got any thanks for that neither.”
“Quit hogging the bottle,” said Jordan.
Chop threw it to her with her missing arm, starting a quiet but angry wrestling match until Big Louis took it.

“So,” said Steve. “You guys were like…pirates?”
“Yup,” said Half-Shin Terry. He’d pulled a pipe the size of a baby’s arm out of his rags and was trying to light it with…something.
“Woah. What was that like?”
“Boring.”
“Woa – oh, yeah?”
“Ever sailed?”
“My grandpa has a boat.”
“Don’t inherit it. Dullest profession on earth. Winds and braces and mainsails are one-tenth of it and the rest is weevils.”
“What’s a weevil?”
“Good lad. Stay ignorant.”
I gave him my lighter.
“What’s this?”
“Click the top.”
He clicked the top.
“Well. Thanks.”
“No problem.”

And to think I’d been worried we’d brought too much. Lucky our landlords were light sippers – well, sort of. They TRIED to chug, but the muscles didn’t seem to want to cooperate. Or exist.
Mind you, some of them still did. Big Louis arm wrestled everyone one after another and then all at the same time. He won all of them, which wouldn’t have been so bad except the winner had to take a drink each time and by the end our rum was down to half the bottle and he was laid out flat on his back which meant half the shack was full of dead ghost pirate man.
“Budge up, you bastard,” said Chop, kicking him fruitlessly.
“That’s your missing arm,” said Jordan.
“Wha’?”
“You’re kicking him with your missing arm.”
“Aw fuckoff,” said Chop. Then she switched to her missing arm and didn’t catch on until Jordan almost threw up laughing.

The fifth time the bottles made a full circuit Mark started doing his stupid pirate voice impression. Good thing he was a mumbler and they didn’t seem to understand what a pirate voice sounded like, otherwise that might’ve started some shit. Chop was still sore over the arm thing.
Everyone else was having a good time though. Especially Steve, who was sitting close enough to Half-Shin Terry to get a good second draft of whatever-it-was he had in his pipe. And Mark, who didn’t seem to realize how close he’d probably come to getting shanked by dead pirates. And me and Jack Witless who’d decided to finish Steve’s maybe-vodka all at once between us to see if it actually did anything or was just pure water.
“S’garbage.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. Y’know. Thans.”
“Yeah.”
“Yur a goo’ lad, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Been a goo’night.”
“Yeah.”
“Lissen…hate to ask, but need a favor.”
“Yeah.”
“C’n you….clean up? Tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
“Thans. Y’know what?”
“Yeah.”
“Yur a goo’ lad.”
“Yeah,” I said. Then I threw up in my mouth, but just a little.

Things got pretty good after that, I think. Some laughing, some swearing, I think someone started making out and I’m PRETTY sure I didn’t imagine Mark using Big Louis’s ribcage as a xylophone. But it was harder to remember stuff after Half-Shin Terry gave me a toke of that whatever-it-was he had in his pipe which must’ve been pretty good because when Steve shook me awake I was wearing someone else’s pants.
“No,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Steve. “Morning. C’mon, we gotta hurry up.”
“No,” I said. The wall I wasn’t looking at was comfy. My face fit right into it.
“Yeeeaah. C’mon, we need help.”
“Aww. S’just. Bottles.”
“No it ISN’T. C’mon!”
I was rolled over and opened one eye in protest and was eye to eye socket with someone. I think it might’ve been Big Louis; whoever it was had nice solid brow ridges.
“Oh,” I said.
“Yeeeeaaaah.”

It took us four hours to bury all those dead pirates, and man my parents were pissed when they caught me sneaking back into my room smelling of three-hundred-year-old dank and corpses.
But y’know, what’s a grounding compared to a life experience? And let me tell you, that was one hell of an experience. Valuable and educational – Jordan says she’s got her career figured out now. I told her I thought the pirate market in Somalia is pretty saturated but she says naw they won’t be expecting it in New England this time of century, so she figures she’ll have a few months of easy money before she heads for college.
And hey, everyone needs a first mate, right?

A twitch of an eyelid. A too-casual picking of a very specific tooth. A curl of a lip.
They were very good, very good, as good as anyone could be.
But Charity had her good eye on them, so she saw through it right away.
Player One, the fat long one, he tossed a pair of hips.
Player Two, the sleek big round one, he pulled a set of phalanges, and made a snort of discomfort.
Player Three, the one with the smile he couldn’t quite hide, he tossed down a complete cranium with half-ribs, and he let his face fly its flag high. And why shouldn’t he? He’d won, and his friends (who were VERY good at hiding it) would split the pot with him later.
Now if Charity were ten years younger and in a forgiving mood, she would’ve smiled happily, rolled her bones, and sharked them so flawlessly they wouldn’t realize they’d lost their legs right out from under their pants until they stood up to piss the next morning.
If she were twenty years younger and in an unforgiving mood, she would’ve called them all cheats, flipped the table, and killed them with her bare hands.
But she was twenty years older now, and so instead she took the pieces, gave them a fumbling toss, and casually let an entire set’s-worth of bones slide out from her right sleeve into the middle of the table in front of everyone.
“Full cadaver and uh…. Some other pieces,” she said into an extremely loud silence. “Calling it.”
Their eyes got even louder.
“Oh. I thought this is what we were doing now. Was I wrong?”
Someone somewhere sucked on their teeth.
“Drop it and call it quits?”
There weren’t any tells at all for what they did next, which told her they were even more used to it than cheating at bones. Out came the guns; small, well-worn things that didn’t shine or glisten but sure as hell smirked with the straightforward gumption of machines that killed things.
But Charity had closed her good eye, which meant her bad eye was out. So things didn’t go their way.

Their pockets were full, at least. Even after she paid back the bar for damages she was up on expenses for a few days if she was frugal and the rest of the night if she was bored.
And she was so very, very, very, very bored.

***

When Charity woke up there was the morning sun in her eyes and there was a cold wind blowing over her face and there was a sleeping bag half-unwrapped around her thigh and there was a snake on her boot.
It was a very beautiful creature. Longer than her leg and thicker than her arm, with eyes like jewels and a rattle like a drum and probably enough venom to sock out an elephant, not that it’d ever need to.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” said the snake.
“Hope I didn’t kick you.”
“Nah, you’re a heavy sleeper.”
“You’re telling me. Time was I’d have heard you coming.”
“I’m pretty quiet.”
“I used to have pretty good ears.”
“What happened?”
“Now I snore.”
“Huh.”
Charity really wanted to stretch.
“Sun’s getting high,” commented the snake.
“You’re telling me. Shoot, can’t believe it’s already this late. I haven’t slept in this hard in years.”
“What brought it on?”
“Hangover.”
“And the time before this?”
“Oh, I was going to have to shoot someone at noon in the middle of town.”
“Stayed up all night worrying?”
“Stayed up all night wiring the street to blow.”
The snake snickered. It was not an attractive sound, but it WAS interesting.
“Dumb move, really. How was I supposed to know he’d stand on the other side of the street?”
“What’d you do?”
“Shot him on count of two and ran for it.”
“Some’d call that cowardly.”
“Waiting ‘till ‘two’ instead of ‘one’ was a damned brave thing considering how short I lit that fuse. At ‘one’ I’d be missing more than all the hair on my back.”
“Hair,” said the snake, shuddering in an eloquent and ripply sort of way.
“Not a fan?”
“It’s indigestible and execrable and generally lousy. Blech. Less of it you have the better off you are, trust you me.”
“I’d be awful cold without it.”
“Bask more.”
“Well, I’ll try. Reckon you could move off my boot so I could stretch out some?”
“No,” said the snake, and its rattle twitched somewhere uncharitable between comfort and annoyance, tickling against her knee. “I got here first.”
“Fair. Mind you, that doesn’t always work.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. A while back – a WAY while back – I found a lode out east of Sqobbish.”
“What kind?”
“Pure.”
“How pure?”
“PURE pure. You could scratch it with your little finger and your nail would glitter like a mirror for a month. And it ran deep. Good deep. Finders keepers, right?”
“Seems so.”
“Right, except the one person I trusted with it trusted it to his drink, and he wasn’t so good at whispering. So by the time I got back out there –”
“-You had company?”
“About fifty of ‘em. Lucky enough I took so long to get back they had time to start arguing without me.”
“Hah. What happened to the lode?”
“Who said anything happened to it?”
“These aren’t a rich woman’s boots.”
“You ever seen a rich woman’s boots?”
“Nah, but I heard of ‘em. These aren’t snakeskin.”
The pause was so pregnant its water almost broke.
“Right. Well, uh. I brought explosives with me. Just in case. Y’know. For mining.”
“Yes.”
“And I may have gotten carried away with cleaning up my self-defense, and well. Blew half the mountain down. Biggest landslide I ever saw; would’ve had to mine out the whole lode just to pay for the cost of digging it up again.”
“Easy come, easy go.”
“A good philosophy for an ambush predator.”
“Or a congenital fuckup.”
Charity laughed at that one. Not a fully-belly, mind you. She didn’t want to jostle her leg. “Hey. I’m not the worst, you know?”
“You’re asleep in a ditch at midday with a rattlesnake on your boot and you haven’t had a real conversation in years.”
“Well. I mean. I’ve never really been the partnering kind.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I value my independence.”
“Yep.”
“Stop making noises at me like I’m talking horseshit.”
“Wouldn’t dream it.”
The sigh hurt her ribs and made the back of her head bluster at her. “Awright, fine. Look, there was this guy. And we didn’t plan it – just a one-bar team-up, then a one-town scam, then a two-person job, then… well, then it had been five years.”
“Times fly when you’re having fun.”
“Yeah. Yeah they do. And of course, a lot of it we were drunk.”
“Well, that helps too.”
“No foolin’. But then we stayed one day too long in this town – this little dusty dried fly-bitten corpse of a fly’s taint of a town, damnit, don’t know why we even rode in – and the morning we headed out we run into a whole band of, well, bandits. Banditing, or at least extorting. And since we were still technically ‘in town’ that day, we got to be part of the protection tax.”
“He objected?”
“I don’t travel with idiots. We groveled and paid up. Then they went into town, cased everyone –”
“He objected?”
“-now WHAT did I just tell you? Anyways, we followed them out of town, waited until they finished drinking the bar’s payment, shanked the sentries, let loose the horses, and took off with their loot.”
“Sounds fine to me.”
“Well, it was. But well. We were a little keyed up, and he stopped to take a piss without telling me, and when that horse came galloping up without so much as a by-your-leave, I kind of. Well.”
“You shot him?”
“Yeah, but it missed. Boy we laughed.”
“Wow. Lucky.”
“Yeah. But the guy following us heard it and well, he didn’t. Hell of a day for highs and lows.”
Someone cleared their throat.
“’Scuse you?”
“My neck doesn’t work that way.”
“Up here.”
Charity rotated her head a tenth of a degree and squinted harder. A powerful moustache blotted out the sunlight. Behind it was an unfriendly and prominent set of teeth, and behind THEM were a couple of distant twerps.
“Oh. How long you been there?”
“Long enough. My boy Tenner here says you put a shot through his friends.”
Charity turned her good eye on the distant twerps. Ah yes, one of them was about two-thirds of a twerp. That fitted the state she’d last seen Player Three in. His smile wasn’t there anymore, making him look awful drab and small. “Well, they were cheats.”
“Makes you of a kind, what else he told.”
“Yeah but I wasn’t a sneak about it.”
“Says the lady laying down with snakes.”
“Leave me out of this,” said the snake.
“First I can’t move my leg for your sake, now you don’t want to share in my troubles? You’re damned fickle, snake.”
“Says the human.”
“Fair play. You sure you won’t pick sides here?”
“No sense in it.”
Charity sagged. “Oh well.”
Well, it was just her and her gun and her good eye – which was closed – and her bad eye.
Which was wide open and ready.
Charity’s boot moved fast but her foot moved faster and they separated soon after, the snake’s fangs snapping an inch shy of her leathery toes before soaring, gloriously soaring, terribly soaring, beautifully soaring into the face of the moustache, which they attached to with violent force.
“AUGH!”
The boot, meanwhile, smashed into the arm of the distant twerp who wasn’t Player Three, throwing his aim afoul into the side of Player Three, who let out two-thirds of a scream before wholly and finally collapsing.
“AUGH!”
By then Charity had time to sit up, and things got over with pretty fast after that.

“Ungrateful jackass,” hissed the snake from atop the moustache’s hat.
“Sorry,” said Charity, halfway through a dead man’s pockets. “But I DID offer nicely the first time.”
“And after all I did for you! See if any serpent in the state shares your bed with you again.”
“Fair enough. Fair enough. I said I wasn’t the partnering kind.”
“You did. And I said not to move, and look what you went and did.”
“Exactly. I break all my promises, or didn’t you notice?”
The snake laughed at that, a little dry chut-chut-chut. “Get going before I start rattling.”

So she did, and she went, and though she never saw a snake in her sleep again she did run into the odd spider.

Ugh. Fall.

Such a meandering, dreadful, suspenseful time of year. Waiting with baited breath for the moment when it’d all start to go wrong, when the winter would peel in and sever summer once and for all, for a while.
The children get hit hardest by it, bless their simple little selfish heads. The least to worry about of us all, but still they groan and grumble at the back-to-school sales – the notebooks, the backpacks, the guywires and tethers. Little idiots don’t realize yet that these are the best days to be alive. All summer to be free and fancy as they please before they have to deal with fall, or rather, others deal with it for them. Ah well, aren’t we all that selfish at heart, just better-hidden? How much of the innocence of children is simple shamelessness?

Fall’s getting closer.

Everyone’s got a checklist, the hard part is getting them done when the right times are obvious. Of COURSE it’s sensible to go early for rakes; that’s why the mall’s a hellish swarm in August. Of COURSE it’s smart to pick up leaf bags at the same time; that’s why they’re all sold out. And of COURSE you make a nice tidy list of everyone to leave emergency contacts with and check in with them in the last week, which is why the phone lines are overflowing with tearful goodbyes and just-in-cases and I-promise-I-love-yous.
Frustrating but understandable. Planned-for-frustrations. The prisoner’s dilemma and everyone makes the same moves at the same time and everything clogs. What’s a seasonal event without a seasonal stress? It adds spice, it’s true. Even if the spice is pure bitter almond.

Fall’s getting closer.

It’s that common purpose, that strange common purpose that arises from shared hardship. Universal yet delicate. It brings friendly nods and casual judgments as you all walk around doing the same chores the same tasks the same plans. “Oh, hello there.” “Hi.” And then in the wake of that, the thoughts.
Hmm, doesn’t look like they’ve shored up the foundations yet. Hmm. Have they really done a good enough job of chopping down the big trees? Wellll…. That’s good enough, I suppose, but is ‘good enough’ the kind of diligence I want in a neighbor, is it what I admire? At least I did MY best, nobody could say otherwise. Could they? Did I? Are they looking at me the way I look at them?
…And other such human neuroses. Social animals, what are you going to do about it? Suffer, but in a friendly way.

Fall’s almost here.

The sirens are ringing on the dawn of the day. The flags fly briefly, then are quickly taken down along with the poles. A celebratory cake is served for good luck and eaten in haste. The gutters are triple-checked – were they cleaned? Will they hold fast? The panic rooms are inspected for the last time – are they padded well enough? Will the ceiling stand the stress?
The last of the pumpkins are harvested; the rest will simply become squash. The corn came in long ago and the farmers have abandoned their fields for the deepest, strongest shelters they can dig into that fertile soil.

Fall’s about to come.

All around the block people are gathering leaves, hanging horseshoes, whispering prayers, hugging loved ones goodbye and tending to wills. Just in case. You can’t be too careful in fall. No amount of preparation is too much, no obsession too stifling. Every hand is needed and every thought is demanded and hurry up hurry up hurry up THE CLOCK IS TICKING.
Lash on that last bit of extra padding. Cross any extra fingers you’ve got. And for god’s sake take a big breath.

Fall’s here.

DOWN come the leaves.
DOWN come the trees.
DOWN come the walls.
And the dam bursts and DOWN go the streams into the earth; DOWN topple the steeples, bells tolling into the dirt; DOWN fall the radio towers, collapsing tidily on prehinged joints; DOWN go the birds, little lead airborne weights aiming for soft spots on a hard world (stack your leaves carefully!); DOWN come the clouds sucked like reverse silly string; DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN and up up up above the town comes the roaring avalanche of an entire mountain range sinking another six inches into continental crust.
Thirty-one seconds of that and then the weight comes off everyone’s chests and they can breathe again.
Take an hour or two to do just that. It’s good to breathe. Soon the winter walls will need to be constructed, but for now? Breathe.

Ugh. Fall.
At least THAT was over.
But really, spring was going to be a nightmare this year.

I watch the cars. Someone has to.
See, that one is an angry car. Look at the angle of its headlights, the set of its grill. Observe the truculent set of its tires and the grudging grumble of its brakes. That car must be owned by a ninny or a nincompoop, the sort to really grind your gears. Oh, poor car.
That one is a happy car. Its antenna is at a jaunty angle; its engine whines with the excitement of a dog with a leash in its mouth. Wind is whistling over its windshield. How pleasant!
I never get tired of this.

***

When I was very little some relative whose name I don’t recall and whose funeral I probably attended gave me a little set of toy cars whose wheels didn’t work and whose roofs were crumbled and whose innards were clotted up with sand from a thousand ancient sandboxes.
They were easily the best thing I’d ever seen in my life, and I cared for them diligently until the dog ate them and died. It was a great shame, but it taught me a valuable lesson: if you must care for cars, you should care for ones that are too big for someone to eat. I have lived by that every day since, and it has served me very, truly, really well.
Every day on my way on the highway I put my knowledge to good use and great pleasure.

***

I watch the cars.
That is a very puzzling car indeed – quite old to be out and about on the road in this heat. Its lights are glassy and shiny, its cab is bunched up in a sort of confused box. There is a powerful sensation of befuddlement and uncertainty about it, but it moves spryly and in good order. A reassuring reminder that even the oldest of us can learn and move and grow! Good going, car! Good show!

***

The key thing about a car, of course, is its reliability. I have known many people and many cars and let me tell you, the people were FAR less reliable creatures, which I put down entirely to locomotion.
Every car I have known has kept all four of its tires in contact with the ground at all times, low-slung and ready to roll.
Every person I have known has tottered about balanced on two wobbly and unsettlingly-jointed legs, and has spent much of their time with only one of them planted on the ground. It is deeply disconcerting and a sure sign of an indecisive and weak-kneed personality.
No, no, no to people, I say. It is the cars for me!
And besides, I can actually read their expressions. Never quite managed that with people. The eyebrows get in the way.

***

I watch the cars.
This car has something to say, and it’s trying so hard to say it that it’s impossible to even say for sure what ‘it’ is.
Its other car is a Mercedes. It is the proud parent of an honour student. There is a little family of stickmen on its rear windshield and a little happy face on its trunk. It encourages you to honk if you love Jesus, cinnamon buns, and dogs, and its bumper boasts the fading names and logos of half a dozen politicians, one half-atop of the other.
I have never seen a more scatterbrained and incoherent vehicle, and I feel a sort of pity at its wild disarrayment. It needs a firm hand in guidance, and I wish that I could provide but alas, my trailer is full of cars and there is no room for one more. I will simply hope for my cargo and my co-traveller here: for them, a life of hope and purpose; for it, a car wash that will remove these unsightly snarls from its mind and body.

***

The big bay stretches out alongside us, and my horizon fills with a dubious material.
Water. Hmm. No land for cars, that’s for sure. But out there prowl the boats, pointy and slow, and I feel my brow furrow in apprehension.
Now, I’m no bigot. I don’t hate boats – god no!
I just don’t quite trust them. I can’t read them. Their faces… they all just look sort of the same to me. Funny old world, right? But I like a vehicle I can look in the face. And I can’t. Not these ones.
Not that I’ve got anything against them of course. I’ve been on a boat – hell, one of my best friends had a boat back in the day. I just like them where I can see them, not where I can drive with them.
But I’ve got no problem with that. As long as they’re in their place.

***

I watch the cars.
This car is huffing and puffing. It’s hauling a little trailer – a tiny mockery of the huge transport trailer at my heels – and its cargo is one (1) boat.
It’s a pretty big boat, I guess. Does that make it a ship? Not sure.
The car’s doing very well for itself under the circumstances. It’s not complaining, it’s not blubbering. Its sun roof is down and its mirrors are flipped and it’s ploughing forward with the determined badger-bulling air of something that can do this all day because it knows it damned well will whether it wants to or not.
I tip my hat as it passes. Good going, car. Good going.

***

I stop for lunch. Gas for my truck, and a burger for me, and an extra burger which I ceremoniously unwrap and place on my truck’s hood for it to contemplate and sacrifice to the gulls above us all.
It may not be able to eat it, but respect is priceless. Without respect you haven’t got anything.
That had been the problem with my family. They hadn’t respected their cars. I had told them so over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and somehow they’d never learned, not even a little. Some of them had even gotten worse.
I’d warned them about rust, and about the proper tires for the proper seasons, and about windshield wiper fluids and wiper blades and windshield cracks and body work and oil changes and all the components of the rainbow, one after another. I’d even made up little rhymes for them to help remember the important parts.
None of it had helped. Disowning them had been the best day of my life. It was as if a great weight had been removed from my trunk.
The burger was gone, the gulls had taken it quickly and decisively and silently, with no squabbling. A good omen.
This was to be a portentous day.

***

I watch the cars.
Oh, there are so many of them now. We’re near a town, we’re near the end of the workday, we’re in the zone and the hour and the time and the place and the space.
See them bustle and chuff and jockey for room! More on the other side of the highway than mine – folks heading home to the exurbs – but that just makes those fleeting glimpses of my fellow-travellers all the more striking.
Ah, this one is fierce, with his bumper tucked high and tight and his blazing-red roof!
Oho, this one is jaunty, with her convertible top down and the breeze in her teeth!
Well now, that’s a little one, but sturdy and fast – electric engine roaring invisibly as he takes up the space of half-a-car. Suffer no mockery for this! Children like this are our future.
And there is…
Oh.
Oh no.

***

The police car is professional, sitting at the side of the road as if this were its own parking space, traffic whizzing by two feet away totally and profoundly ignored. Its staid power is blameless to me.
The tow truck is gentle yet uncaring. Its job is at work here, and so is it. Up you go, up you go. Not even a flicker of uncertainty in its crane, the mechanisms and the engine smooth as butter. Seen this all before.
But the car, oh the car, oh my god the car. The poor little thing is as tremulous and lost as a dove or a busted bicycle. Ah! Ah! How has this happened? Its tire is gone, its windshield is cracked, its bumper is all but gone. Oh god! How has this happened?
And there is a man, a dirty little big man beside it, sweating and bellowing and cursing at the police and the tow truck and the world at large, swearing up a storm no doubt that this was everyone’s fault but his own.
The rust on the car’s body belies otherwise.
Oh. Oh you. This isn’t even the first time you’ve done this, is it? IS it?

Well well well. A portentous day indeed.

The red-hot rage of the truly righteous grips me like a steel gauntlet and my wheel smokes through my hands and the median barrier is a tiny wisp of an obstacle before me and then….
There I go. Flying onwards to justice.

***

I watch the cars. So many expressions!
All of my cars are planes now, sailing through the air, free of the earthly bonds of my trailer! See their hoods flap open in joy and disbelief! Ah, what wonders we live to see.
But my eyes are not for them, they are for the lonely little lost car that corkscrews towards my windshield. It looks surprised to me – its grill a big round O – but I think I see the glitter of hope in its dented headlights.
Have no fear, car! I am coming to hel

Damnit it all. Such a ruckus I could barely hear myself think. All I had to do was apply three layers of paint to my snout but the whispering and scheming and plotting out there was fit to wake the dead and send them over to complain.
It was the Sun-days. These days, it was always the Sun-days. At my age I should be sprawled out wide in the morning bask, guzzling heat out of the air like it was dead cattle, but no, no, no, no – I had to be a priest. Had to be all respectable, a pillar of the community; the same community that insisted on waking me up at the crack of dawn with four sacrifices and a pleading look and absolutely no offer of help whatsoever.
Oh no priest, we wouldn’t dare intrude upon the sacred pool.
Oh no priest, we wouldn’t insult you by offering help.
Oh no priest, we’ll just slink off and start basking without you. It’s Sun-day, after all.
Jackasses.
At least the pool always looked nice. Water glistening on the jagged, bloodstained rocks. Barely a ripple to mark the water, a hundred feet below us. Clear and cool and filled with bones gleaming in the early yellow light. Very lovely.

I applied the last layer of paint with a little more force than necessary and stepped out of my meditation chamber and recognized every single one of the faces looking at me. Not the individuals, no – the squishy ape-things all looked the same to me – but the faces.
I sighed. Why did they always have to be like this? If horrible little sacrilegious murdering looting ape-things were going to ruin every single Sun-day for the rest of my life, couldn’t they at least be varied about it?? But no.
Might as well get this over with.
I approached the one that was trying and failing to look frightened. A wiry thing with a permanent quirk to its eyebrows (god how those things nauseated me; they looked like caterpillars) and a smirk waiting behind every twitch of its freakishly mobile lips.
“Oh please, sir,” it said in a voice it probably assumed I wouldn’t recognize as sarcastic, “spare me, spare me.”
Ah. This chestnut. “No,” I said. Damn, their language grated on me even coming from my own maw. It was so high pitched everything sounded like whining.
“If I can’t be spared, sir, then may I make one request?”
Heeeere it comes. “Request?” I asked.
“Please, please, please, please sir, on behalf of all that is kind and merciful, don’t throw me in that sucker-vine clump halfway down your sacrificial pit. A quick death please, sir, not a slow one. Please don’t throw me there.”
I glanced into the sacred pool. “Okay.”
“Wait, wh-”
I added a little spin to the throw, which was unnecessary but made me feel better. He had good reflexes – still managed to scream most of the way down before it cut off in that messy way that suggested sharp rocks.
“Request granted,” I said.

***

The silence after the first always was a little louder than any other, and of course that’s when my stomach decided to rumble.
Oh c’mon. I’d practically eaten last week; surely I didn’t need more now?
Well, a little wouldn’t hurt. In a bit. A day or two.
Hell with it, I was famished. As soon as I was done with these chumps I was going to swallow a damned cow.
The holy man was next. I had to admire his composure; you’d have thought he was perched at home in his own little heathen temple from the expression on his face. The smell of urine did spoil the effect a bit, but he was doing a great job of pretending it wasn’t there.
“Why do you do this, lizard-creature?” he asked as I picked him up by the front of his robes.
“Prayers,” I said.
“Prayers to what wickedness? Surely this is not the will of the Glowing King.”
Oh good, one of those. “Explain.”
“The Glowing King is all that is bright and good and great and powerful and wonderful and admirable and worthy of care in this world,” said the priest, who was clearly warming to his subject and probably eager to take his mind off the dampness in his clothing. “He is the most spiritually and physically vast of all gods, existing wherever there is light or life. Your barbaric actions here will win you no favour with him, and can only consign you to an eternity in the glowless pits of-”
“Request granted. Not interested. Bye.”
The priest didn’t scream on the way down, possibly because he was out of breath. But I still heard the bonk.

***

I paused to work out a kink in my shoulder. Oh hell, had I pulled something? Not exactly as young as I used to be; maybe I’m bigger now but I don’t heal any faster and there’s a lot more of me to muck up without warning. Could even swear I lose more teeth now than I used to.
The third one was…oh hell. He was wearing even more elaborate robes than the priest. Gaudier, too – spirals and runes and etchings and who knew what kind of claptrap. Most of it was probably for show, just like him.
Wizards. Ugh.
(sorcerers, warlocks, witches, whatever they were called they were all bad news)
“My request,” he said, “is much less tedious than that oaf’s.”
“Explain,” I said.
“Simple. I challenge you to a game of chess.”
“Chess?”
“I win and you release us. You win and you may throw us into your holy hole or whatever it is. I’m sure a mighty priest such as yourself can easily best-”
“Request denied.”
“What?!”
“Don’t know chess. You’re up to something. Bye.”
“You can’t just-”
The one pleasant thing about wizards: you can get a pretty good distance on them. The man couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred ten under that robe, and even all the flailing didn’t spoil the aerodynamics. He skipped three times before sinking.

***

And at last, there was one. Glaring at me with generic stoicism. Chin jutting out in what I was pretty sure was meant to be defiance, (I wouldn’t laugh, I wouldn’t laugh, I wouldn’t laugh….DAMN human chins looked funny), eyes smouldering with generic justice and rightful fury.
“Request,” I said.
“Untie me,” he demanded. “I’ll throw myself in.”
Ah. One of THOSE, and right on schedule.
Heroes. Ugh.
I bent over, mouth agape, and shredded his restraints. Much to my surprise he didn’t bother jumping me – not that any weapon he could’ve hidden would’ve penetrated my scales – and instead stood slowly and deliberately, rubbing his wrists and ankles and pacing slowly at the edge of the sacred pool. Calculating. Weighing.
Oh, this could be good.
At last he straightened up to his full (deeply unimpressive) height, looked me in the eye, and spoke.
“I will return.”
“Bye.”
A beautiful dive for a land mammal, arced like an arrow. He hit the water with barely a splash, and no red flowed forth – every rock had been missed.
Astounding. I broke into applause as he surfaced, gasping for air, and I think he must’ve impressed the sacred crocodile too because it didn’t attack until he was halfway out of the water.

A job well done and noon still not here. Might be just enough time to eat a cow and bully my way into a decent basking spot.
Maybe Sun-days weren’t so bad after all.

The well was deep, dark and smelled like clean old moss. There was a sound about it that reminded Jesse of ripples.
“Now, throw in the pebble and shut your eyes,” said his grandmother.
He did.
“Now concentrate.”
He did.
“And breathe out-”
He
“-and in.”
did.

“Nothing happened,” he said.
“Look.”
He looked, jumped, and dropped the top six scoops of the ice cream cone down the well. Then he said a few words that he normally pretended he didn’t know.
“Oh, poor little Jesse. Well, at least you still have half the cone!”
“Wow.”
“Eat it slow, love. Only one wish per customer – more would make a mess. If wishes were fishes… well, you’d eat more fishsticks. Than you already do, that is.”
“Wow,” said Jesse, but now it was filler, just a verbal tic while his brain rolled around. “Wow.”

***

Jesse’s brain kept rolling. He grew up and up and it rolled on and on as he got older and older and finally it stopped on a conclusion right around the time he received his MBA.
“So,” asked Ben, “you got a plan?”
“As of five seconds ago,” said Jesse. He looked at Ben – his best friend or probably something close to it – and he looked at the number of glasses in front of him and he decided this was just about right. “Hey, want to invest in something?”
“Huh?”
“Real estate.”
“What kind?”
“I’m gonna buy the farm.”
Ben’s brows furrowed, taking most of his head with them. “Woah. That should be your LAST plan, not your first.”
“My grandparent’s farm.”
“Oh. Why? Condos?”
“Not quite.”

***

Inconveniently enough, Jesse’s grandmother had gone and gotten herself buried on the lot next to his grandfather. He had to pay quite a lot of money to have them moved, and he hoped they hadn’t seeped into the water table. Grandfather had certainly had enough time to percolate.
So they were overbudget already, which made Ben nervous. But that was fine, that was fine, that was fine. The main thing was the hydrology, and the charts and the maps and the funny little man with the fussy little ruler were all in accord on that.
It was a fine day for cautious optimism, but Jesse indulged himself and speculated recklessly for half an hour.
What with the land deal, the survey, the permits, and the contractors, a new pair of pants could squeak onto the company ledger without anyone noticing.

***

The test bore was shallow, shone under the flashlight’s beam, and smelled like freshly turned soil.
The pebble was tiny and irregular and as deeply, thoroughly dull as Jesse could find.
He flicked it in.
“Holy shit!” said Ben.
Jesse’s triumph was undimmed by the toppling of very nearly all the ice cream cone down the well. Twenty scoops had been a bit much, but he’d been guesstimating.
“So… what are we thinking? We’ve got to keep this exclusive or else whackaloons might get at it.”
“Agreed.”
“Got to keep it among the hands of those who wouldn’t abuse it.”
“Of course.”
“There’s at least one way to ensure that, I’d wager.”
“I know exactly what you’re thinking.”
“So then…a million a shot? Two million?”
“Ten,” said Jesse. “But if you buy a shot at each well, you get the second one at half price.”
“Nice.”
“Nice.”
Their fists bumped together lightly.

***

Fads rippled through the wealthy. Some now flew without the need of private jets. Some stopped aging. Some owned castles made of candy that never spoiled.
There was an art to one-upsmanship, especially of the kind you only ever got two (at a great price!) chances to exercise.
Around a year in they started to run into problems with repeat clients.
“No, you can’t pay someone else to make your wish for you. Doesn’t work.”
“No, you can’t make a selfless wish and get it to happen anyways. Doesn’t work.”
“No, you can’t wish for more wishes. Doesn’t work.”
“No, you can’t wish super hard and get half a wish out of the same well. Doesn’t work.”
“No you can’t.”
After that last one Ben and Jesse knew they’d reached the tipping point.
So they let the great and powerful and obscenely, fabulously, gloriously profligate squirm and writhe and twist in the wind for six months more, and then they unveiled the all-new Third Well.
Ben unexpectedly died while testing it of completely natural causes that nobody was even a little suspicious of, after signing over all of his worldly possessions to Jesse in a manner that everyone agreed was completely normal.

***

Well Four was a big splash.
Well the Fifth did big trade.
Six Wells was many little pipes and faucets linked together in a way that gave the illusion of hundreds of wells and hundreds of wishes, a haunting sight indeed.
“Lucky” Well Seven had one of the longest reservation lists in their history.

Really, it was only at Wellty-One that they ran into problems. Big problems to go with the big money – Forty Well and Seven Gulps To Go had cost ninety billion a shot; this one was due to stand at an even trillion. Of course, it all wished the same, but at this point the exclusivity was the real draw.
Anyone who was worth anything had taken a shot at the Wishing Well. But how many had taken the queue all the way?
“It’s dry.”
Jesse fidgeted with a perfect, golden fountain pen that beautifully matched his perfect, golden, unaging fingers. He liked the pen; it had been his tenth wish as a little present to himself. “So? Drill deeper. The water table’s still there.”
“Oh no, sir. The water’s fine. It’s the wishes that are missing.”
Jesse broke his pen in half quarters eighths sixteenths and stopped halfway through thirty-seconds to scream himself hoarse entirely in swearwords.

Doubling the depth worked, especially once Jesse wished himself a few tons of brandy.

***

The subsequent project – Well, the Universe, and Everything had to be drilled half again as deep.
Then half again.
Then double that twice.
In lieu of expensive mining drills, Jesse began to wish for deeper wells. That lasted him up until Well Five Zero.

Well Five Zero was so deep you couldn’t imagine it as real. Well Five Zero was blacker than the inside of a cave cricket’s innards. Well Five Zero smelled like the secrets that Earth itself had forgotten.
Jesse dropped a pebble down Well Five Zero and wished for Well Over Halfway and got nothing but an itchy nose a sneeze and a feeling of grave and terrible remorse.
“Personal appointment only, no listed price,” Jesse muttered. And he ran into his office and began sweating his way through his carpet, which he’d managed to get a good head start on before someone knocked at his door and told him that Forty Nine: The Well seemed to be having some sort of problem.

***

Wells forty-eight to thirty fell apart in the course of a few days, causing a corresponding riot in the news, stocks, and private lives of thousands of excessively to obscenely wealthy individuals and societies.
It held stable for a week at well sixteen, and that was enough time for hope to get nice and big before it was crushed in the loss of everything down to well three.
Two.
One.

Jesse’s email pinged.
He stared at it.
The Wishing Well was now dry.
“Wow,” he said.
He sat there in the office, sixty stories above the spot where his grandparent’s farmhouse had once stood, vaguely but powerfully sure that he was meant to say something else.
“Wow,” he said.
Nope. Nothing else came to mind.
“Wow.”
Maybe there was something else he was meant to feel?
“Wow.”
Not particularly.
“Wow.”
Come to think of it, he didn’t feel like he wanted to say ‘wow’ anymore either.
Or wanted anything else at all.

***

Sixteen rescue efforts at the Wishing Well Center failed due to instantaneous and overpowering apathy before attempts were called off indefinitely and the entire complex was condemned on account of total depletion of the local wanter table. Trespassers were prevented by sign, barricade, and a little life preserver attached to a rope that could be used to retrieve the aimless, listless bodies of anyone that made it three feet past the fence.

It wasn’t all bad. Much like Chernobyl, nature took over where humans feared to tread. Vines climbed; trees grew; shrubs ran riot. Topiaries and potted plants seized their days, their time in the sun.
The wells overflowed and trickled everywhere. Little ponds and streams came and went.
In those fleeting waters swam fishes, so many fishes. And not one of them wanted for a thing.

The last person into the room moved hard and fast, but not as much so as their words.
“Alright. This job can’t wait, so introductions are fast. We’re in the parking lot in three, at the scene in ten. Ready? Steady. Go.”
A finger snapped out, pointed at a wall of meat with a man’s head on it. “This is Lenn. He’s our backup. If something goes wrong, Lenn deals with it. If one of you gets cold feet, Lenn deals with it.”
“Heh,” enunciated Lenn. He picked his nose with calculated menace and discarded the results with calculated indifference.
A second finger, aimed at what appeared to be a twelve-year-old. “This is Jenny. Jenny’s our electronics expert. No alarms, no problems.”
Jenny waved.
“Now, since our regular locksmith got busted for drunk and disorderly last night, this is our backup plan. Yugopogo. His mother was an earwig, his father was a whale, got a little bit of head and hardly any tail. And he gets us through the door.”
“Hello,” I said. Jenny waved again; I bobbled a flipper politely.
“And my name’s Your Boss and I’m your getaway driver tonight. Now let’s get out there and make some money.”

The drive over was tense, although Jenny and I got in a couple rounds of rock-paper-scissors to shake out some of the worst jitters. But then we were there, and we were parked, and Your Boss slammed the door open and whispered something very urgent and we were out and up and at the employee side door of the city’s finest chain pizza outlet, established 1992.
“Ready?” asked Jenny.
“Steady,” I replied.
“Go,” said Lenn, bopping me on the back.
I flinched, nodded, pulled out a finely-braided strand of dampened seaweed, and pushed it into the lock, which it bonelessly glided off of and fell apart.
“Uh,” I said.
Lenn cracked his knuckles.
“Maybe try again?” Jenny suggested.
“Sure. Sure. One second.”
This time I used my backup seaweed. No good.
“Shoot,” I said. I sagged against the door in sorrow, popping it off its hinges and sending it flying into the building, where every single alarm went off at once. Half a second later the twenty-nine cop cars filling the parking lot turned on their lights.
“Oh no,” I said.
“Oh YES,” said Lenn. He raised his hands above his head, hollered, shaped them into fists, and ran towards the ruckus making whooping noises.
I looked to Jenny for moral support, but she was already inside and accelerating.

“Red wire or blue wire?”
“There are no wires.”
“Oh. What do we do then?”
Jenny looked under the desk next to the safe, said “it’s two-five-six-seven-nine-four,” and entered that. It popped open, revealing it to be completely empty.
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Didn’t expect that.”
“How’d you know?”
“Well, people write down their passwords in the worst places. But I what I MEANT was that I thought there was supposed to be money in here.”
“So did I.”
Someone kicked down a door (unnecessary) and shouted something very authoritative (maybe necessary?).
“Hide!”
We ducked back into the corridor, spun through two doors, ran into the employee washroom and crammed ourselves into the single stall – Jenny on the toilet, myself inside it. Exactly two seconds later six cops crowded in with us.
“Freeze,” said the smallest cop.
“Already done,” said Jenny. “Muscle cramps.”
“Yeah, you gotta stretch first. C’mon with us.”
One of the larger cops looked down at me. “Hey, you seeing this?”
“Just a shoal of fish,” said the smallest cop dismissively. “Now let’s do that c’monning. We’ve got an early night ahead of us.”
They left, and six minutes later so did I, trailing shame and toilet water all the way out into the now-deserted parking lot.
“Hi,” I said, sticking my head into the car.
Your Boss wasn’t there.

As a matter of fact, Your Boss was standing four feet behind me with a taser in one hand and a cellphone in the other.
“Hi,” I said again.
“Shut up,” she growled at me. “Last time I bring a damned lake monster on a job. Do you know how fast you screwed this up?”
“Gosh I’m real sorry.”
“Not sorry enough. There was barely enough time for me to clear out the safe while you three kicked up a fuss! I almost got caught! I almost got nabbed! Do you know how depressing that is?”
“Sort of,” I said. “But I pretended to be fish.”
The parking lot filled with flashing light again; a lone cop car with five unalone cops. They spread out in an elaborate series of showy poses.
“Officers!” said Your Boss. “I have apprehended the mastermind behind tonight’s events.”
The cops looked at me.
“Well, you can’t prove that,” one said.
“Security footage will show otherwise,” she said.
“We already checked that, lady. Two perps showed up.”
“What!? There were THREE.”
“Nah, nah. A big guy, a little girl, and a suspicious floating log. Nothing strange about it. You should go have a lie down.”
Your Boss shot me with the taser, which failed to penetrate my blubber. In the confusion of the arrest I slunk away across the road, through the culvert, down the creek, and back into the lake.
Why did this sort of thing always happen to me? Next time I was going to try retail.