jamieproctor.ca

In the early morning of the first day of the third year of her tutelage under the philosopher of garbage, the student Surk was rolled out of her bed, into her coat, and out the door, which was immediately locked behind her.
This was, by now, very normal.
“Come back when you have an answer to my question,” said the philosopher of garbage.
“What question?” asked the student Surk.
And she took her answer and went to the first place she could think of.

The fry shop was packed tight with people picking up coffee and donuts. The student Surk’s elbows were bruised from the ribs of her opponents by the time she reached the counter, and the less said about where her knee had been the better.
“Order up, order up, order up, order up,” yelled the fry cook into her face in incoherent despair and utmost professionalism.
“What is the nature of humanity?” asked the student Surk.
The fry cook blinked seven times in half a second and replied: “To consume endlessly and never be satisfied. Get out of here or I’m shoving this spatula up your urethra.”
The student Surk thanked the fry cook, caught the donut that was hurled at her head, and left.

Half the donut got her past the lobby, the other half got her an audience. The computer technician wore no tie, shaved no cheek, and suffered no fools. His eyes were squinted and his hair was thinned and his mind was pared down to a thin blade of acid.
“Hi,” he said. “This isn’t jelly. You aren’t Rosemary. What the hell are you doing in here?”
“What is the nature of humanity?” asked the student Surk.
“Wow,” said the computer technician. “Wow. Seriously? Who cares. Only morons think about that stuff. If you were smart you’d make enough money to not give a shit about that question. English major over here.”
The student Surk thanked the computer technician, then flipped him off with both hands and left.

From there, the next target was obvious.
The pass-badge from the computer technician’s desk and an authoritative series of lies led the student Sark from room to room to room to working on ‘repairing’ a small camera in a corner of the press gallery of the Highest Courtyard. Ingenuous use of coffee breaks did the rest of the work for her, and before long the ruler entered the room.
“Hey!” shouted the student Sark, as the crowd of scribes settled down and placed pens to tablets. “What’s the nature of humanity?”
The ruler sighed. “Obviously, asking stupid questions, doing stupid things, and generally getting themselves killed without proper guidance from the qualified. Guards, seize her and do something fatal.”
But the student Sark was already gone.

It was a nice day in the botanical gardens. Quiet. Clear skies. A breeze. And not too dry. You could practically hear the plants growing.
The head gardener was not a whistling woman, but she did indulge herself in loud humming when the times merited it. And so they did. Good weather to be alive in. Good weather to work in. Good weather to turn the compost heap in.
The compost heap yelped under her shovel, then disgorged the student Surk.
“Jeez,” said the gardener. “What were you doing in there?”
“Long story,” said the student Surk. “I’ll cut it short: what is the nature of humanity?”
The gardener hummed that one over for a moment. “To grow,” she said. “And while you’re at it, to tend. Hey, do you hear a siren?”
“Absolutely. Can you lend me your hat?”
“N-”
“Thanks,” said the student Surk. And she left over the nearest wall.

Six miles between the palace and her was the safe zone, and a good time to stop and be someone else. Always easier than most people thought. Turn your clothes inside out, clean the dirt off your face, walk higher in the shoulders, there you are, you’re a stranger.
“You done?” asked the plumber. “Sink’s clogged.”
“I know,” said the student Surk. “I just clogged it.”
They sighed. “Great. Thanks. The hell is this? Compost.”
“Absolutely.”
“Wonderful. Anything else I can help you with?”
“Sure. What’s the nature of humanity?”
“To produce shit, naturally. That be all?”
“Yes. You’ve been immeasurably helpful.”
“Don’t sweat it,” said the plumber.
And then two minutes later: “Hey. Wait a second.”

The walk back, as it so often is, was much longer. The sun helped by setting on her halfway through, and the frost was thick on the doorknocker of the garbage-hovel.
“Go away,” said the philosopher of garbage.
“It’s me,” said the student Surk.
“Did you find an answer for me? Need to pay your yearly rent with something, and you know it.”
The student Surk nodded. “The nature of humans, my teacher, is utterly blinkered self-absorption.”
“About time you got it,” said her teacher. “Now come in and close the door. You’re letting in cold air, and I’ve got a kettle waiting for us.”

See the rocks.
Red hot and boiling with potential; brimmed with enthusiasm and cheer.
They are all so new, and they already harden with age. Huge sheets and cratons, cores and ridges, spread across the planet – a skin thin enough to make an apple envious, but miles deep. Below they run together in a liquid that turns from slush to pure flow, but here they are craggy and proudly solid, or as near as a thing can be to that. All children of the sun’s scraps, congealed like over-done scrambled eggs. Scraps made whole.
See the rocks. See them grow stiff and solid and endless.
Now, let us watch them dance.

See the rocks dance. It is a special technique.
The ponderous grind of tectonics; the smooth slippage of the mantle greasing the way. The surface of the planet puckers and dimples as water arrives and winds its way around the continents. They are crashing together, they are splitting apart, they are one and divided.
Nowhere else yet seen knows this dance. Affable little Mars is silent. Twin sister Venus is still. The giant moon above hangs cold and empty, though its stones are the old cousins of those below. They will grow ever older, and never shift an inch.
Below all this, and utterly alone, the rocks dance.

See the seas dance. It’s hard to find anywhere else they ever will.
A little colder and they will freeze forever. A lot hotter and they will boil away into the atmosphere.
It will be a lot hotter, someday, when the sun gets too old and angry.
But for now they are free to surge, and they are making the most of it. The rocks may comprise the planet, but it is the seas that cover it. Only the piddling nubbins of the continental crust dare raise a peep of their mass above the waterline.
They flex, they bob, they weave up and down as the planet tips and spins and wobbles and the atmosphere curdles and coughs.
A lot less patient than rocks.

See the little things dance. They do so in desperation.
They want to continue – they must, all of them that didn’t care are gone. The survivors are passionately afraid, and will stop at nothing to continue. Every movement is calculated, every angle eyed, every opportunity exploited to throw a tiny fragment into the future. Again. Again. Again!
Some of them have discovered a trick of turning sunlight into food. This is an excellent trick and begins to become more widespread.
Unfortunately, it’s not as clean as it could be. After the feast comes the relief, which produces a small but noteworthy quantity of an angry little thing.
For a long time, there will be no consequences.

See the consequences come storming in. They’re furious and ready to tear up the place.
Oh-oh, oh times two. It’s oxygen. And it’s ready to kill.
Sets its sights on all those rocks, gets sucked in like spaghetti and shreds them, tears them, rusts them. Oxidation everywhere, all the where. Minerals popping up like zits on the double, and the seas and skies a deathly soup as all the little things that prefer their homes still and safe choke to death on poison.
Some of them live. Some of them get real messed up and even decide they LIKE it. They like this shake-up.
Take a deep breath. Keep dancing.

See the little things grow fat. It takes a long time.
Little things taking little things inside them to make them into bigger things which multiply themselves into bigger things that eat little things that change into bigger things that get bigger.
It’s not a great solution, and it’s not for everything, or even most things, or even SOMEthings. Almost all of the little things…stay little. They’re endlessly busy, but they’ve got plenty of space.
Some of the poor little things grown fat think they’ve gotten an easy time of it. Gotten too big for their predator’s britches. Boy are they annoyed when their fellows turn on them.
Underneath the little things, the older dances continue. But they’re too big and too slow for their nervous and self-absorbed little heads. Except when some of the rocks sneeze and turn the seas anoxic, or somesuch. THAT gets their attention, at least until it’s over.

See the little things sprint. There’s no art to it, but you have to admire their frenzy.
Up! Up! Up! Into the macrosphere!
Out! Out! Out! Across the planet!
Fill the seas! Surge onto the shores!
Grow taller! Grow thicker! Grow greener!
Grow bigger! Grow hungrier! Grow fewer!
If the rocks belch and you all die, well, roll with it and get back up in a mad scramble. If the sky spits a stone from the beginning of time onto your head and blots out the sun, them’s the breaks and the lucky ones have no time to shake it off. It’s a race! It’s THE race! Get going, going, GONE!
And this too is a dance, even if it’s a little bit tasteless.

See the ape dance.
It’s hard, but if you squint you can make them out.
It’s one of the little things. No, not that one. That one. Not that one. THOSE ones. Yeah, there. No, over there. Trust me.
Silly creatures – they’re strutting along bolt upright, waving tools in the air and stuffing everything into their mouth that’ll fit. Hollering and jumping, hopping and spinning. Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!
That’s no way to conduct yourself in public. There outta be a law… but of course there isn’t. Everyone’s been more or less making this up as they go along.
Things tend to work out, in the long run.

Once upon a time, there was a diligent and hardworking beaver. All day long the beaver toiled at his dam, cutting down trees and dragging them to the place where his tiny little brain told him the sound of rushing water was loudest. It was just a very little stream, but it was what was there, so it’d have to do.
“What’re you doing?” the other animals asked him.
“Dunno,” said the beaver. “Feel like it. I like this.”
“You don’t know why you’re doing it?” they said. “That’s silly.”
The beaver grumbled at the laughter of his friends and neighbors, but continued to work hard. Day and night, sun and rain, down came the trees and up came the dam. Plastered with stream-mud, built on tree-bones, higher and higher.
“Silly,” said the mice and the voles and the grubs and the spiders and the millipedes. “Silly!”
And the beaver grumbled some more, but with his mouth full. There was work to be done.
None too soon, either. The rain was coming.

It came in fast and hard and in sheets, accompanied by a wind that could shred treetops and tear teeth from mouths.
The beaver’s teeth were safe inside the beaver’s mouth inside the beaver’s nest under the bank, where he listened to the chaos and madness for two days. On the morning of the third day, the beaver came above the waterline and looked around.
His dam had worked beautifully. The rainwater had channeled itself into the stream, and now the forest was a lovely beaver meadow, comfortably drowned.
“Hah,” said the beaver, as he watched the corpses and homes of his friends and neighbours bob in the froth. “Who’s silly now?”
Then he gnawed down a funny-looking tree, took a big bite out of the weird-looking branch hanging off it, and fried himself to death.
Several of the brighter woodland creatures could’ve told him that was a power line. But they’d all left or drowned by then.

***

Once upon a time, there was a poor and miserable family of two: Jack and his mother. All they had to live in was a shack made of two boards nailed together, all they had to eat was old dry dirt. The one thing they had left in all the world was his father’s old bare-boned stock portfolio.
“Jack,” said his mother, “take that damned thing into town and sell it, would you? We can’t eat paper, and believe me we’ve tried.”
Jack nodded and walked to town and walked back and walked back into town with the stock portfolio this time and sold it off and was almost all the way back home with the proceeds when he ran into a mysterious stranger about five hundred feet tall.
“Psst,” said the stranger. “Want to buy some beans?”
“No,” said Jack.
“C’mon,” said the stranger. “They’re magic.”
“No,” said Jack.
“Plant them and they’ll carry you up into the magical cloud-realm of the giants, where you can steal all the loot your tiny arms can carry.”
“No,” said Jack.
“Aww, c’mooonnn.”
“No,” said Jack.
“Tell you what,” said the stranger. “Pay me just five bucks and you can buy this mystery bag that contains a randomized number of beans with a chance to contain a magic bean of rare, super rare, epic, legendary, or mythical qualities, each exponentially more potent than a regular magic bean.”
“I will buy every single one of them,” said Jack.
And that was how Jack came home with no money, a cartful of painted navy beans, and ten thousand dollars of bean debt, which kept him miserable and enserfed until his grandchildren died without descendants after decades of back-breaking labour and hardship.

***

Once upon a time, there was a king who loved two things: his family, and making numbers go up. His principal means of doing the latter was logging, for his kingdom was well-timbered. Many trees were felled, many logs were hauled, many numbers were delivered to the king, and with these he purchased fine things for himself and his children. This pleased him so much that he would order more trees to be felled, and so it continued for some time, until the kingdom’s landscape was much troubled by erosion. The peasants complained, but they were only peasants and as such irrelevant.
At length came a warning, delivered by an ancient crone who stepped through the castle’s guards as if they weren’t there. She walked through the king’s court and touched each courier, and as she touched them they were stricken dumb, until she stood before the king in a true and deep silence.
“I am of the deep and rotten woods,” said the witch. “I am of the swamp and bog. You’ve wrecked your lands, and now you wreck mine. Leave it be or suffer the consequences.”
“Pish to threats,” said the king. “I will not accede to such boorish behaviour. Nuts to your nonsense, alarmist upstart.”
“Very well,” said the witch. “Until the day you cease to destroy my home, I curse you thus: for every hundred logs taken, one of your children shall fall into an everlasting sleep. Only by returning the landscape to what it once was shall you see them ever wake again.”
“Fuck you,” said the king.
“I’m sorry?” said the witch.
“Fuck you,” said the king. “You think I care? I love two things: my family and making numbers go up. You want to make me choose between them? Easy. Numbers. Fuck you, and fuck my children too. Let the little bastards rot in their beds, I’ll console my grief with luxury. I’ll chop logs just to watch ‘em burn! To hell with you, to hell with them! To hell with this metaphor – I DON’T EVEN CARE ABOUT TREES! ALL I NEED IS OIL!”
The king ripped off his robes to reveal an expensive and well-fitted suit and screamed in pride and despair, as if someone had stuck a lightning rod up his urethra.
“I LOVE IT. I LOVE IT SO MUCH I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT IT. I LOVE IT AND THE NUMBERS. BY GOD, DAMN YOU AND ALL THIS EARTH!”
Then he hurled himself out the window and ran off into the wilds, on all fours, like a beast. He was never again seen as he was, although an unidentifiable and mashed mass of flesh was pried out of the moving parts of the largest pumpjack in the kingdom some weeks later. It looked to have been trying to mount it.
The witch, the king’s children, the loggers, and the rest of the kingdom perished due to famine as their crops failed and local trade networks dissolved in a furor of paranoia and starvation.

May woke up and was a homeowner. She fumbled around inside her head and put on her homeowner face – cheerful, but empty.
This was normal.
She brushed her teeth and ate a breakfast and got dressed and had a shower and made a list of things to do in some order or another and had the closest thing to a morning she’d get.
Then she went down to the curb, to the bus.
“Morning,” she said.
“Morning,” she answered.
May got onto the bus and was bus driver. She put on the bus driver cap. She put on the bus driver face – stoic, yet aching underneath.
This was also normal.
There were twelve stops between Mary and her destination. More of her got on and off at each one. Faces, faces, going to places, places. Each with their own little problems and their own little profits.
At nine o’clock she stepped out at the bookstore and put on her homeowner face again.
It was a little grim and dusty inside, but she showed no sympathy to her book clerk. She wanted something, and the customer was always right.
So she toiled for herself, and found it buried in a dark corner where the roof’s collapse had shredded four bookcases and shielded another.
A newspaper.
“Excellent,” she told herself as she paid. She would read this as she drove herself to work in her taxi.

The stocks were up. The sports were down. Someone had scandal’d, but a speck of water damage had saved their name from besmirchment for all time.
“Hmmrph, hmorph. Hlarph,” proclaimed May authoritatively. “How much longer?”
“Almost there, ma’am,” said May. “Traffic’s bad.”
It always was on this street. King had been left clogged and she’d never got around to calling herself to clear out the breakdowns. But there was a path, if you were willing to violently ram a car into a few bumpers every day for years, and so there was.
May punched out the meter, paid herself her fare, and disembarked. As she took off her taxi driver face and put on her important mayor face she vowed once more to never use such a shoddy service again, as was her custom. It had almost made her late to work. This was improper and abhorrent.
Indoors, May threw her briefcase into the council chamber, sat down at the secretarial desk, and put on her receptionist face – friendly and open yet utterly unyielding. She scheduled up the day, dealt with three rude and unseemly incidents where she didn’t have an appointment, and had lunch. When she was through she wandered into the chamber, put on her councillor face, and pushed through a little light gerrymandering, though it took some convincing her to do it.
A good day’s work.
To treat herself, on the way home she stopped off at a greasy and delicious little place, put on her fry cook face – dead serious, laser-focused, jaw slightly agape with furious concentration that could boil oil – and got takeout. Onion rings, thick and so crumb-larded that they were almost donuts.
She opened her mouth to take a bite and something swooped down, took the bite for her, from her, and shot up to a nearby roof before she could even flinch.
“Fuck!” she said. It was the third time her homeowner face had ever swore.
“AiiiieeEEK, AiiiiiEEEEEYK, YARK YARK YARK YARK YARK YARK!” replied the thief.
It was a vulgar thing, a white and grey bird with a yellow bill and hateful little yellowed eyes. It shredded her food and gulped it down greedily.
May glared at it with genuine hate, then forced it down. No, no no. This was not part of things, not right now.
So she put on her pest control face when she got home that night, and left a few onion rings on the porch, laced with rat poison and ketchup.

Tuesday came, and it was time to refuel. The onion rings were missing, a fine omen as May’s bus driver face unloaded her at the gas station, where she put on her mechanic’s face – earnest and firm – and began untangling the mess of rotting pipes that led to the fresher tanks fit for siphoning.
At noon she took off her hat, put on her manager’s face – red and exasperated – and was busy berating herself for taking so long with her coffee when the bird shat in it.
It went ‘ploorp.’
“FUCK OFF!” she yelled at the sky – a shocking breach of professionalism, decorum, and civility – and threw her coffee at it. Immediately she put on her retail management face and berated herself for littering, but this only inflamed her temper further.
“AiiiiiiiieeeEEEEYUkkk, aiiiiiiEEEYUk, YAK YAK YAK YAK” chimed in the bird.
“FUCK OFF!” she instructed it again. It did not listen.
That night her homeowner’s sleep was poor and troubled, and not by her traditional fantasies of market irregularities and mortgages. Things with wings were watching her, mocking her, and when she woke up her pillow was gone.

Wednesday, Wednesday, humpday, humpday. A day for cubicles, and her weary, coffee-smudged, sigh-heavy white-collar face. “Working hard, or hardly working?” she asked herself.
“Get back to work,” her manager’s face told her, stern and crisp and tie-knotted.
She drank some more coffee, looked at some more newspapers – they should’ve been websites, but her electrical engineering face hadn’t managed to pull that together again just yet – and was just starting to get down to a nice productive morning when something came tapping and rapping at the window by the door.
“Who’s there?” she called.
Quoth the seagull, “AYIIIIIIIIKKKKK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK YAK” and a whole lot more, just like that.
May cursed so foully that she was forced to fire herself on the spot and do the rest of the day’s work alone, wishing for competent help from the depths of her heart.
She set out more bait that night. A little bit of everything in the kitchen, mixed with a little bit pf everything from the paint shed and cleaning supplies.

On Thursday, everything was quiet. Too quiet.
May worked at the studio all day, but found herself drawn into doing nothing but weather reports all afternoon, and all of them ominous.
She went home, put out everything else in the kitchen with everything from ground glass to sharp pebbles mixed in, then went to bed staring at the wall and imagining little yellow beaks.

On Friday May harvested the crops, trucked them to the wholesale supplier, shipped them to the supermarket, bought the freshest-looking ones, drove home, and had just finished cooking them when the power went out.
She walked onto her porch, looked up at the wires, and saw the smouldering carcass of the gull, lodged in the transformer.
“It’s GONE,” she screamed at the bird. “Don’t you get it!? It’s GONE and it WON’T COME BACK. NOTHING’S HERE! Give it up, you’ve LOST! GET GOING!”
And with a small, truculent grunt the roof caved in on her.

If there was a moral to any of this, it was wasted on the bird. It just would’ve eaten it anyways.

At eleven thirty my flashlight went out, which woke me up. And my first thought on waking was, of all things, ‘did I win the bet?’
And really, I think I should’ve. Why spend all night in a spooky house to prove you’re not scared once you’ve already fallen asleep in it? Seems pretty not scared to me. Seems pretty relaxed. Casual. I fell asleep on a half-folded sleeping bag on a linoleum floor that pre-dated the Canadian Shield, would a scared person do that?
No. Nor would a scared person calmly and methodically replace the batteries in the flashlight. I brought backups. I’d tested the first set of batteries, then brought batteries anyways because you need to be thorough about these things. For safety.
Not safety from ghosts. Ghosts aren’t real and if they were real they wouldn’t care about lights. Safety from real things, like fugitive serial killers or SWAT teams or hordes of rabid raccoons or some shit.
So as I replaced the batteries my hands were steady, my breathing was moderate, and my pulse was even. It was only when I flicked the switch and illuminated the decaying, translucent skull in front of me that I started – which I assure you was purely an act of reflex.
“Woah!” I said. Not very helpful, but most people don’t do helpful when startled.
The skull opened its jaws and hissed. It reminded me more of a tarantula than a snake: the noise I was hearing wasn’t coming from a mouth, wasn’t fuelled by lungs, but my mind was reading it as that because of hopeless anthropomorphism. Or in this case, vitalomorphism? Not sure.
THE GRAVE IS DISRESPECTED, it said. And then it opened its jaws even wider, flew through my head, and vanished.
I waited ten minutes, then went back to bed. Whatever it had wanted to say, it had said it.

The next morning I woke up with the ghost hissing in my ear in broad daylight.
RESPECT MUST BE RETURNED. IT MUST BE TENDED.
Then it vanished.
I sighed, got up, walked over to Grace’s place, and paid her ten bucks.
“But you stayed overnight?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I explained. “But it was haunted anyways.”
She shrugged and left it at that and I went home where the ghost was hiding in my fridge behind the milk, screaming spectrally about CLEARING THE COBWEBS.
“Fine,” I said. “Fine. Fine fine fine. Where?”
It didn’t say more, just eddied menacingly behind the cheese and vanished.

For three days I lived ghost-free. Then on my way back from McDonalds it uncoiled itself from my bag of salted deep fried matter with the speed of a striking snake – a little slower than an average human punch – and pointed dramatically across the road.
THERE.
“Huh?” I said. Again, startled people are not helpful animals.
IT MUST BE RESTORED.
And then it vanished inside my chicken mcnuggets.
Across the road was a little field.
In the field was a little old cemetery.
In the cemetery was a little overgrown tuft of grass.
Lodged inside the grass was a tiny and malformed gravestone that appeared to have started life as a randomly-selected boulder.
“This could take some work,” I said.
It didn’t answer.

The headstone cost me a good chunk of money, even if the stonecutter was a friend of Grace’s mom and it was a junk piece.
The clipping I did by hand with dad’s old shears.
I bummed some flowers off’ve Auntie Toby and some little pottery pigs from the kiln down the street that Ryan worked at.
Finally I topped the whole pile off with a little purple umbrella to keep the rain off.
It looked really nice, I thought. Not expensive, but nice. Tasteful, and cared-for, even if it was just a little corny.
“There,” I said to the grave. Then again, a little harder, trying to press in the finality of it: “There.”
The wind blew.
Finally, tempting fate, I said “are you happy NOW?”
One of the little ceramic pigs grew a skull.
WHERE ARE MY OFFERINGS?
“What?” I asked. “They’re right there. You’re IN one.”
I CANNOT FEED OFF CLAY FLESH
“I didn’t sign on for sacrifice. What d’you want, a fresh-bled ox? A human heart? Tears from grieving mothers? This sort of thing isn’t that easy to find, and it’s not cheap!”
THE MC NUGGETS WILL SUFFICE.
“What.”
BRING THEM TO ME. BRING ME THE MC NUGGETS.
I stared.
AND A SHAKE TOO.
NO FRIES THOUGH.
I left, its last ghastly words echoing through my mind.
ONION RINGS.

It was a hungry thing. Three meals a week, then a day, then a night. It cut into my sleep schedule faster and harder than my wallet, and I started missing classes.
“What’s got into you?” Grace asked me at the start of algebra, or might have.
“Flnrorp,” I told her. And then I returned to dreaming or maybe imagining that I was dreaming about imagining dreaming. My head was full of spectral demands for food and comfort.
When I woke up I was home and Grace was talking with my father.
“He says you’ve been getting no sleep, been out all night, and been jumping at everything that moves,” she reported.
“I have to give the ghost food and offerings or it can’t rest,” I said.
“Uh?”
“And back rubs. It wants me to rub its back. It possesses the tomb stone and makes me scratch it with my fingers.”
“Ah.”
“It’s really hard on my nails.”
“Eh?”
“And I guess it’s getting bored too because it wanted me to buy it a phone but I don’t have enough money so it asked me to bring it my credit card so it can order for me” and I realized the words that were coming out of my mouth and stopped so I could consider them.
“Colleen,” Grace said, very carefully, “are you absolutely SURE this… person… you’re dealing with is a ghost?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Because it sounds to me like you’re being scammed.”
“Yes,” I said. “By a ghost. That sonuvabitch must’ve pulled this ‘put me to rest’ con a dozen times.”
“Well, jig’s up. He can sit by that headstone until the end of time.”
“No,” I said. “He bummed a ride out of the house on me, he can bum a ride out of that cemetery on some other sucker passing by. I need to put him somewhere he’ll never meet another mark.”

WHERE IS MY PHONE
“No time, no time,” I said to it, nearly stumbling over the gravestone. “Gonna go get it. C’mon with. Will get you food. C’mon.”
I could tell when it was with me by now. A little cold mist bobbing near, invisible but making your hairs stand up and your breath catch. It hovered impatiently with me the whole way down to the Starbucks, switching from shoulder to shoulder as I bought a coffee and cookie. A big, ugly, crumbly cookie that nearly came apart in my fingers just from me grabbing it.
I DEMAND OFFERINGS, it complained as I drank my coffee and stumbled down the road. I CAN’T REST WITHOUT OFFERINGS. GIVE ME OFFERINGS, WHERE ARE MY NUGGETS.
“Got ‘none, got none,” I mumbled, staggering in the caffeine haze. “Wanna cookie? I got a cookie?”
IT WILL DO.
I held up the cookie between two fingers and whoops the whole thing fell apart into my cup.
“Oh noooo.”
OH NO.
“Better go in after it fast!” I said. “They melt in there! It’s still warm!”
I waited until my coffee cup turned to ice in my fingers, then tripped over my own feet and faceplanted on the sidewalk, one arm flailing right over the sewer grating.
“Whooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooops,” I said until I was sure that the coldness in the air had followed the coffee down the drain.
Then I did a little dance most of the way home.

Best of all, Grace had paid for the coffee and cookie. Took almost exactly ten bucks. So THAT worked out.

People like trees.
They like them for their shade, they like them for their timber. They like them for the refreshing way their leaves wibble in the wind. They like them for their sap, their bark, their firewood, and their ability to form thickets and windbreaks, as shelter and as excellent places to go make out.
The people of the village of Small Rock were fond of trees for all of these reasons, which is why they were most sorely vexed when they started disappearing.
Sometimes during the night, sometimes during the day, sometimes just when you turned your back for a minute. There’d be a grunt, a wrench, an earthy thud and some crackling branches. There was never anything left behind besides a big dirty pit and a pile of sticks. This was obviously a problem, especially for woodcutters and teenagers, and many people took to tethering their trees with rope, sinew, and in one case large chains. None of it helped.
At length the problem came to be a matter of governance.
“People of Small Rock,” said the Big Man, “this sucks. Our trees are growing fewer, our lumberjacks are growing grumpier, and our teenagers are going to explode from pent-up and inept lust. What do we do?”
“We figure out what we know,” volunteered Tog, the loudest person.
“Okay,” said the Big Man. “Okay. Okay okay okay. Hey, what do we know again?”
Get, the oldest person, held up his hand. “It’s big enough to uproot trees and take them away.”
“Okay,” said the Big Man. “Okay. What do we do?”
“We send our greatest warriors and leaders to confront it,” said Tog.
The Big Man looked at her.
“Okay,” he said. “Hey everyone, I’ve got a great idea!”

And that was why Tog, the loudest person, was camped out under a raspberry bush in the damp and the rain watching an innocuous strand of cedars like a wet and crabby hawk.
“Shit,” she told the world and everyone in it. Again.
“Shit,” she reiterated. It made sense, and was expressive besides.
Gronch, replied the tree.
“Shit,” she said, really getting into the rhythm of it. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
Then her ears caught up with her and she stopped talking.
Thud, thud thud. Gronch.
Tog, the loudest person, deeply resented her title, and prided herself on her ability to be quite quiet when necessary. She just often disagreed with other people on when exactly that was.
This felt important, and so she tiptoed with great diligence.
Not that it was necessary. Every ten seconds or so a great and powerful GRONCH would tear apart the night and make her very much unhearable. She would use this time to say something like ‘shit’ and do a little run, which eventually put her inside a different bush at the edge of the extremely diminishing grove.
GRONCH, said the tree right above her as it went into the sky.
It was a giant, and a pretty good one, very respectably massive. Stood taller than a hill and just as broad, with burly arms and strong fingers, which were hard at work picking all the branches off the tree-trunk, which she swallowed whole.
“Belch,” she said.
“Excuse you,” said Tog, the loudest person.
“Hello down there!” said the giant, looking around. “You are there, aren’t you? It’s very hard to tell.”
“Yep,” said Tog. “Hey, why are you doing that?”
“I just like eating trees,” said the giant. “Hey, why are you asking that?”
“I just like asking questions,” said Tog.
“Fair enough. Got any others?”
“Yeah,” said Tog. “Why are you doing it wrong?”
The giant’s brow furrowed, which was a pretty spectacular sight since it was over half her face – proud, wild and vigorous. “Huh?”
“You’re wasting all the good parts. All the nutrition’s in the fresh shoots and leaves at the tips of the branches, and you’re just eating the trunk. That’s just wood. You just in this for the roughage or what?”
“But the branches stick in my throat,” complained the giant. “It’s scratchy.”
“I can fix that for you, no problem at all,” said Tog. “You ever heard of rope?”

The giant hadn’t heard of rope, but was very excited by it once Tog liberated most of it from the Big Man’s house. He slept over-sound, and he’d never miss it.
“Right, so take this end, and tie it to the top of the tree.”
“Do what to the top of the tree?”
“Oh, right. Just do what I’m doing with my hands.”
The giant frowned. “I can hardly see you, let alone your little wiggly bits. Here, this is faster.”
And the giant picked up Tog and rubbed her against the crown of the tree until a knot happened.
“Arrgh,” said Tog. “Ow.”
“Did it work?”
“Yes. Now take the rope, and wrap it around the tree. Squish and squash those branches until they’re pressed tight as a drum.”
“As a what?”
“Never mind.”
The giant may not have known knots, but she damned well knew how to squeeze. The tree was trussed tighter than a spider’s lunch before two minutes were out, and then Tog tied the knot on its stump with all due haste.
“There,” she said. “All done. Now you can double your nutrtition.”
“I can eat twice as many trees?” said the giant.
“Sure, why not. Go for it. I’ll just hold this end of the rope so you don’t get it caught in your teeth.”
“Great!” said the giant. “Thanks, buddy!”
And she stuffed the whole tree in her mouth without chewing, just like Tog knew she would, which meant that the whole tree was still in one piece when Tog pulled the slipknot loose and every single branch sprang out sideways.

“I demand three cheers,” said Tog, the loudest person.
“We’ll need to scrub the village for weeks,” said the Big Man.
“But you still have the trees to make scrubbing-brushes from,” said Tog. “Three of ‘em. Good ones. I want to hear plenty of heart, and stomach and lungs too.”
“Shut up and do it,” said Get, the oldest person.
The cheers were a little sarcastic, but very loud, and that was good enough.
That, and the fact that Tog’s house had been on the other side of the village. It had avoided most of the spray pretty nicely.

And normally at this point everyone would’ve lived happily ever after, but life complicated things. A month later there was a powerful stomping sound and into town came another giant.
“Hey,” it asked them. “Have you seen my sister?”
The Big Man looked at Tog and looked at Get and looked at everyone and finally, against all his will, looked at the giant.
“Uhh. No?” he said.
“Pity,” said the giant. “She used to live around here. I heard some smartass little folks tricked her into eating her lunch the wrong way. Warned her not to trust anyone under thirty foot, but she was always a hungry one. I’m pretty famished myself. You folks got anything to eat?”
The Big Man looked at Tog and then looked at the giant and then looked at Tog and then looked at the giant and then looked at Tog and sighed and nodded.
“Hey!” said Tog. “How do you feel about trees?”
“Eh,” said the giant. “I prefer rocks.”
“Oh,” said Tog. “What kind?”
“This kind,” said the giant.
And she dislocated her jaw, sank it into the soil, ate the rock out from underneath the village in one bite, and stomped off laughing.

The event was never terribly well-publicized in the folklore of either people. Giants, as a rule, don’t enjoy stories more complicated than stepping on evil little things, and most humans get cross when one good trick doesn’t solve everything.
Also, when you’re stuck in a hole three miles below sea level, it’s pretty hard for you to tell anyone about anything. Tog’s great-grandkids had long beards before they saw sunlight again, which they were mighty pleased to witness, let me tell you.
Nobody was that eager to see the trees again though. They’d had quite enough of that shit.

When Carl was one, his mother sang ‘twinkle twinkle little star.’
When Carl was two, his father told him ‘star light, star bright.’
When Carl was three, his aunt showed him the big dipper.
When Carl was four, his uncle watched ‘Pinocchio’ with him.
And so in retrospect it was all very unavoidable and unsurprising that when Carl turned eight he would make the reckless and impulsive decision to wish upon a star.

It was a good clear night and more importantly an enormous windstorm had utterly crushed the local power grid, giving several million people a good view of the night sky for the first time in about five years. You could see Orion and also his belt. You could see the squiggly blobby thing that could be Draco or maybe Cassiopeia. You could see the North Star and also everything south of it.
Carl considered his options, then picked out a little glowing dot on the farther edge of the horizon.
“That one,” he said. And it was done.
He didn’t wish for anything in particular. Nobody had told him otherwise.

For a good while, very little happened. Wishes travel faster than light, but stars are still very far away. There’s so much nothing between them and us.
Then it hit the star. And it paid attention. All of it.
This star was a flaming ball of gas and fusion two million miles across and of virulent and explosive intensity. When it felt pensive, it was not quiet. Where it looked, the universe cooked.
“Hmm!” said the star. It was intrigued by this.
So then it moved.

The earth reeled. The planets lurched like drunk men. The sun, suddenly eclipsed in its own backyard, did a triple-take.
Carl was shocked and appalled, but in this he was scarcely alone. Earth’s atmosphere was suddenly trying to figure out if it should boil, stew, roast, or just vanish. Everyone was very perturbed about this.
“Hello Carl,” said the star, outside his window.
Carl was surprised. Normally when people called him at work they used the phone, or maybe stuck their head in his office door. Once someone had faxed him something, which had been VERY disconcerting at the time. In the face of a twenty-thousand-septillion-ton fireball whispering into his ear, this suddenly seemed much less exotic.
“You wished on me, Carl,” said the star. “For the first time in billions of years, someone has given a single shit about my existence. This pleases me. I will never leave your side now, Carl.”
“Oh no,” said Carl, as the heat chewed at his vocal cords like angry piranha.
“Oh yes,” said the star. “You’ve moved me. You’ve moved me deeply and so I’ve moved me greatly, moved me across a distance that is impossible to imagine. Just you and me from here on out, Carl, from now to forever. I will watch your tiny life as it expires. I will absorb your trace elements as they inevitably get sucked into my gravitational pull and then my greater mass. When I finally explode for good several billion years from now, I’m taking your atoms with me and spraying them as a fine dust across all of infinity, to trickle into an infinitely spread nothingness along with the rest of the universe for the rest of time until even that joins space in becoming an utterly meaningless concept. It’ll be good clean fun, Carl.”
Carl’s office was in flames, but they were so intense that they ate all the oxygen and died instantly, and the resulting vacuum blew his walls in.
“Gork,” said Carl.
“By your side, Carl,” said the star. “Always.”

Carl phoned the police.
“This is out of our solar system,” they told him. “Pretty sure our jurisdiction ends at least there, if not sooner. Sorry.”
Carl phoned the army.
“We fight other countries, maybe other planets,” they told him. “Nobody fights suns. You’d just singe yourself. Can’t help you.”
Carl phoned his legislative representatives.
“Does this star vote?” they asked.
“No. Maybe. No. Maybe. Do you vote?”
“No,” said the star.
“No,” confirmed Carl.
“Great,” they told him. “We’ll try and fix that. Maybe later. Listen, you got any lobbyists?”
“Sorry?” asked Carl.
Then they hung up.

He phoned his uncle.
“Phone your aunt,” he said.
He phoned his aunt.
“Phone the observatory,” she said.
He phoned the nearest observatory.
“C’mon over,” they said.
So Carl did, although he was slowed down by his car’s tires being melted to the sucking, gasping asphalt of the highways.
The star hitchhiked.

Carl introduced himself to the astronomers, who were identical twins.
“Greetings and hello,” said the first astronomer. “I’m Doctor Tabitha Stewart and this is my idiot colleague, Doctor Mathilda Stewart.”
“Hi,” said the second astronomer. “I’m Mathilda and this is my uptight idiot of a sister, Tabby. Used to call her ‘Tubby Tabby’ and she never got over it. Where’s your star?”
Carl pointed at the Star, which was clinging to his car’s roof and also the entire sky.
“Wow,” said Mathilda. “Pretty mediocre.”
“Hey!” said the star.
“I mean, no offense, but you’re barely bigger than our sun. Jeez. Put some weight on.”
“Shut up,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart. “Now you’d both better come inside.”

Inside was smaller and more cramped than Carl would have imagined. Astronomy was concerned with big things far away, which meant spending a lot of time with tiny fiddly things close to hand.
“Right,” said Mathilda. “Let’s run some tests.”
“Mass spectrometers,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart.
“Particle accelerators,” said Mathilda.
“Control groups,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart.
“Punnett squares,” said Mathilda.
“I thought those were for fruit flies and irises?” asked Carl.
The astronomers shared something for a moment, and it was a look of fiery hatred directed entirely at Carl’s mouth.
“Here,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart. “Put your star in this spectrometer.”
Carl held out the odd little metal doodad and the star clambered into it.
“So…do I push this lever?” he asked. And then immediately did so.
“No,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart and Mathilda.
“Ow!” said the star as two dime-sized pieces of its matter were pierced from it.
“Hey, this looks like a hole punch,” said Carl.
Mathilda leaned over to Carl’s ear, opened her mouth a quarter-millimeter, and poured eighteen seconds of “shhhhh!” into it.
“ANYWAYS results are inconclusive,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart, a bit too loudly. “Now, if you’ll just step over here to the pocket hadron collider, we can-”
“This is fake,” said the star, as flatly as an enormous sphere could manage. “You’re pulling something. Tell me what.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart.
“Perish the thought,” said Mathilda.
The star pulsed casually, and the sky was filled with beautiful auroras as the planet’s magnetosphere took an even more brutal pounding than normal. The observatory melted down into very expensive slag around their feet.
“I’m here for Carl,” said the star. “And I’m not going anywhere. Now, tell me what you’re up to.”

There was a knock at the door. By default, since it was the only piece of the wall left standing.
“Carl, you get it,” said the star. “Nobody else moves.”
Carl looked at the star, huge and impassive. He looked at the astronomers, who were looking quite innocent. And he walked over to the free-standing door, breathed deep (not too deep, the air was still superheated) and yanked it open.
On the other side was another star.

It was red, bright red, searing hot. It was big, seven hundred times bigger than Carl’s star. It was Betelgeuse. If it was a bipedal ape it would have cleared its throat with the rumblings of atomic thunder, but it wasn’t, and so it simply spoke, and spoke thus:
“Fuck Is This Shit?”
in clearly enunciated syllables each larger than the entire planet.
“ ” said Carl.
“Oh no,” said the star.
“Stalking charge,” said Doctor Tabitha Stewart. “Inappropriate contact with minor matter, too.”
“Sicko,” said Mathilda. “Lock him up and throw away the stellar debris.”
“Oh no no no,” said the star. It tried to run, but Betelgeuse’s gravitational pull was already on its shoulder, inevitable and inescapable.
“You Have The Right To Be Neither Created Nor Destroyed,” said Betelgeuse. “You Have The Right To Approach Entropy Until Equillibrium. You Have The Right To-”
The Star screamed and tried to sprint, but it only squished itself harder. In fact, it squished itself down into a tiny ball a little more than ten miles across.
“Neutroning Is Too Good For You,” growled Betelgeuse, “But Rules Are Rules. I Am Too Old For This Shit. Just One Million Years Until Retirement. Stay Safe, Kids.”
It left, and it took a lot of the atmosphere with it.

Carl was placed into a support group by Doctor Tabitha Stewart and Mathilda. He spent most of his time confused, but he did learn a little more about astronomy than he’d expected.
Not that he planned on using much of it in person. He’d never been so happy for light pollution in his life.

The bell rang.
The crowd surged.
The voice called.
And against all odds and historical evidence, the children actually paid attention.
The tour of the fire exhibit had begun.

“Come on, come on,” said the museum guide.
“Come on, come on,” said the teacher, out of educational camaraderie and the desire not to be left out.
“Hurry up, hurry up,” said the guide.
“Hurry up, hurry up,” said the teacher, really getting into the spirit of things now. Then he realized that he was falling behind and ran after the group, pants flapping.
“Shh!” the guide told the teacher and his pants.
“Shh!” the children told the teacher, delighting in the turning of tables.
“Shh!” the guide told the children, and they growled and raised their hackles at him, but not too sharply. The first exhibit was at hand.

It was a little building in a little box, made of little things – smears of clay, matchstick twigs, slivers of stone. It had a red roof and a blue door.
“Whose house does this look like?” asked the guide.
“Mine!” said one child.
“Hers!” said another child.
“Theirs!” volunteered a third.
“Wrong!” said the guide. “It looks like the first house built in this city that wasn’t a shack or a cabin or a hovel or a lean-to or a shanty. It looks like the grand manor of Mayor Brickabrack.
Does anyone here know about Mayor Brickabrack?”
A hand shot up at the back of the pack, lonely in the crowd.
“Yes. You. Speak.”
“hewasthefirstmayorofthetownandhebuiltthedamandthequarryandthemainroadandthenhebuilthishouseand”
“That will do,” said the guide with the kind and welcoming air of a corpse. “Yes. He built all those things that still stand today, and then he built this house. Now, why do you think they still stand and this house doesn’t?”
“FIRE!” concluded the entire class at the top of its lungs.
“Yes,” said the guide. “Now, look at the building. See the cross-section? See all that dry hay in the walls to act as insulation? See all those candleholders in the hall? See that staircase set too close, and see how it was (against all sense and reason) insulated as well? See what happens when you press this button?”
It wasn’t a big button, and it wasn’t a big fire. But then again, it wasn’t a big building.
It went ‘fwooMP.’
The children cheered.
“Shh!” said the guide.
“Shh!” said the teacher, hungry for validation.
“Shh!” said the children. And the teacher hungered for his belt and the harsh days of his forefathers, but he knew they were behind him and he had no recourse.

The next exhibit was much larger – the glass case it was sealed away in could have housed a motorboat of respectable size. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of extremely small trees, all of them very cunningly faked with cotton balls, twigs, birchbark, bird’s nests, and other powerful techniques. Scattered through it were mud roads, crude sheds, and tiny specks that could’ve be either people or fleas.
“Now, what is this?” asked the guide.
“Trees!’ hollered a child.
“FOOREST,” insisted another.
“Incorrect” snapped the guide. “Deeply incorrect. This is the Smittely Wood. It was right off the highway heading north. Do any of you know why this place was important?”
There was a deep and abiding stillness and silence, broken only by the wave of a single hand in the crowd. A high-pitched and excited tittering followed its every move.
“Speak.”
“itwasalloldgrowthtimberandcoudlbeusedforship’smastsandlongbeamsandandnandandand”
“Fine,” said the guide. “True enough. Mayor Brickabrack oversaw the building of the sawmills and the carving of the logging roads. Those roads do not exist today, and there is no trace of the mills. Why? What happened here?”
“FIRE!” hollered the class diligently.
“Yes,” said the guide. “Examine the lean of the trees, see the habitual direction of the wind. Look at the lay of the land. Check where the cuts were freshest and the dry timber was stacked. Now, see those men here and think of one of them smoking and tapping out a pipe or stubbing out a cigarette or just dropping a match. Then watch this.”
This button wasn’t any bigger, but the effect was. Incandescent light blistered up in a noise like ‘FWAshhhhhh,’ and then the box was filled with thick, ashy smoke.
“Yay!” said everyone.
“Shh!” said the guide.
“Shh,” whispered the teacher, quietly, to himself. And he looked at his charges and wished for matches.

The third exhibit took up an entire room.
“By eighteen eighty nine Mayor Brickabrack was bent towards civil infrastructure. More bodies were needed to lend the town prosperity, and they needed comforts and staples to tempt them. The fields had been cleared, the orchards planted, and in midsummer the rail line was completed, and was bringing in its first passengers.” With each statement the guide’s finger poked and thrusted and jabbed, spelling out HERE and THERE and THERE.
It was a breathtaking thing. A whole town – a little town maybe, but a town – locked in a single glass case. Someone had spent entirely too much time and effort on it.
“The summer was dry, and the fields were too. The train was an older model, and its smokestack was dirty and improperly cleaned. It caught ablaze, and can anyone tell me what happened next?”
A long dead lull. And then, a hesitant wave and a tremulous giggle.
“Explain yourself,” said the guide.
“theyputthedepottoocloseandthecoalcaughtalightandthewindtookitandspreaditintothefieldsanditallwentupin”
“Flames, yes, yes, YES,” said the guide. “Like so.”
The button went click. There was a long dead moment of nothing until the students realized that the fire was already there, burning eternally in the mouth of the little toy train.
Then it slid out – gently buoyed on some invisible jet of air – and alit on some buildings, which exploded.
It went very quickly after that.
“Hooray!” said the class.
“Shh!’ hissed the guide.
“Shh!” said the teacher alongside him, regaining his nerve. He was ignored, and this both pleased and irritated him.
“Come,” said the guide. And they followed him from the rooms and down the halls and into the stairways and passages that turned.

When they stopped turning, it was in a very small room. Its walls were blackened, not black.
And in its center was a thing that wasn’t quite a furnace.
“This was nearly the turn of the century,” said the guide. “The town was choked on its own ashes, and Mayor Brickabrack had leadership of almost nobody and little life let in any of his body. Gangrenous slough had consumed three of his limbs and black veins were coursing towards his heart. He had made many mistakes.”
“Fire!” shouted a student.
“Fwoosh!” enunciated another.
“Crispy!” giggled a third.
“Silence!” said the guide.
“Silence!” agreed the teacher.
The guide turned to him and gave him a smile that froze his heart in his chest even in the swelter of the little basement, then spoke to the class.
“Now. Here is the important question. What did Mayor Brickabrack do to save this town? Your town. My town. His town.”
The students rustled and murmured. One or two almost waved their arms, but held them low at the last minute.
And then that little giggle started again, hesitantly.
“Speak,” said the guide.
“ohnoi’mnotsure”
“Speak,” said the guide. “Now.”
“oooooohokayheknewthatitwasallhisfaultandsohedecidedto”
“Yes,” said the guide. And he smiled so wonderfully that the class was in awe. “Yes. He saw that he had never given fire the respect it deserved. So he explained this to the town, and they held one last vote, and into this very iron kettle went Mayor Brickabrack.”
The guide pulled the door of the chamber open. It was very well-oiled, and made no noise whatsoever.
Then he left it open.
Then he turned to the class and said one word.
“Choose.”
“Choose,” said the teacher, a little too loudly. And then he realized what he’d just said and went pale as a sheet as three dozen glittering little eyes devoid of pity or remorse turned upon him and studied his face with great care. His legs skittered inside his pants like anxious beetles, and he almost fell over.
They laughed at him. And one of the laughs was a high-pitched little titter, and every one of their faces turned towards it.
Grinning.
“ohnonononono,” said the student with the hasty hand. And they might’ve said more, but it was lost in the cheers.

They just made the last bus out of the museum. The teacher was first on, elbowing his students left and right to make it to his seat, and whatever he said to the bus driver was enough to make him scream out of the parking lot on a strip of rubber thick enough to make a new tire.
The guide watched them go, smiling mirthlessly. Then he sighed, and took off his name tag and took out his matches.
“My term is complete,” he said to anyone who might be listening, which was no one.
And then the mayor descended into the depths of the ghostly, char-bricked museum, to press a particularly well-worn button.

Nobody heard what happened next.
But it sounded like ‘fwooosh.’

Once upon a time (exactly once, this never happened again, and you will learn why) there was a fishing village. This was not unique, but one of its inhabitants was so, and his name was Tuckett. Old Man Tuckett. He was called that so as not to confuse him with Big Douglas Tuckett the miller’s son, or Little Tommy Tuckett who cried the Sunday papers up at Noonan Hill.
Old Man Tuckett was distinct in at least two other major ways besides his name.
First, he was tremendously fat. Spherical be damned, he was ellipsoid. He was the fattest person in the village – even fatter than Granny Maggs. It was impossible to grow used to it; at close range your eyes would be tugged across his gut, dragged by gravity. This was very embarrassing, and so was never commented on.
Second, he had five wives, all nearly as fat as he himself. People found this very unusual in those parts, but none of them did, so they largely ignored it.
Oh, and there was one more little thing, just a tiny little thing, a little thing that didn’t matter at all: it was how he never joined the Big Haul every year.
In fact, he never fished at all.
And that was the most important thing about Old Man Tuckett.

He’d stand at the brink of the surf, he’d watch the boats go by. He’d wave his pipe at his wives as they pushed the boat out. He’d cheer and applaud and ballyhoo until the sun came dim and the tide came back – with a lot of nets with a lot of fish – but he’d never
ever
ever take toe off the beach.

This would annoy people less (‘man’s probably too fat to fish,’ was a common theory) if Old Man Tuckett did anything at home, either. Many folk had asked Granny Magg about him, and after heroically calling upon the casual gossip of a lifetime, she had told them everything that Old Man Tuckett did.
“Well, he sells that paper up by Noonan Hill.”
“Granny, that’s Little Tommy Tuckett.”
“Oh. That’s my ear again. Try my other ear.”
“OLD MAN Tuckett.”
She shrugged. “Oh, him. He eats and farts and sits on his beach and shouts.”

It would’ve been less annoying if he shouted helpful things. Sixteen years before there had been Gerry Wickerham, who sat his last decade-and-change on the shore in a rocking chair yelling people to stay off the shoals. That was good, it saved time and effort putting buoys up. But Old Man Tuckett yelled other things, and none of them were very helpful.
They were things like.
“CLEAR OFF!”
And
“DON’T YOU COME ANY CLOSER!”
or
“I SAW YOU LOOKING, NOW YOU KEEP MOVING!”
and frequently
“MINE. MINE. MINE. MINE. MINE.”
It was a constant rumour for thirty years or more among the town’s children that he’d once bitten off the foot of a careless youth that put a toe onto his beach. Every six years the imagined toll mounted, and before long it would’ve been removed at the hip.
But if Old Man Tuckett’s endless obsession over ‘his’ beach had been infuriating most times, it grew to full vexation in the Big Haul, when the sea was running silver and everyone brought in the biggest nets to be judged the heaviest of all.
As the boats went out, and just as they’d come back, they’d find Old Man Tuckett there before them, and furious. He ran up and down the beach – actual running, his feet not touching the sands for whole yards at a time – and bellowed like a speared whale, waving his floppy little arms and puffing himself up even fatter than usual. Not even words could escape him at those times – not swears, not slurs, not threats, not even snarls. Just a long four-hour roar, and one more for the evening. It made things wearisome, and took a fearful toll on the fishermen’s nerves.

One of those fisherman in particular (his name doesn’t matter at all, but it was Julian) had nerves to spare, which you’d think would help but didn’t. His face grew thin and haunted every morning, and he started wearing earmuffs that were bigger than any cold warranted, particularly in midsummer. He also took to spending most of his launches with his back to the shore and whistling a lot, while twitching. This was not wise behaviour, and one day when the waves were particularly surly he bent over, stumbled, straightened up, put his skull directly in the path of a swinging boom, and was thoroughly clobbered.
Six months he sat ashore, insensible, tended to carefully if clumsily by his small and bored children. Six months his wife took his seat on the boat. And after six months he woke up and said “garellifump. Twiddle. Chalk,” and then died.
It was a most trying thing for a young family. And it made his wife (whose name didn’t matter much, but it was Stacy) exceptionally cross every morning, to look out and see and hear Old Man Tuckett howl on his beach.

So she went and talked to Granny Maggs, and she asked her about Old Man Tuckett and got pretty much the same gist of him everyone already knew. And she went and talked to Old Man Tuckett’s five wives, and she got nothing at all because they didn’t talk much beyond shrugs and burps. And finally she got fed up with all of that and went and rapped and banged on Old Man Tuckett’s door herself, and when he opened it up she gave him a little gift – some pickled perch – and told him how sad it must be, to never get to be the one to go out on the water.
“Whur?” said Old Man Tuckett, who was halfway through the jar of perch.
“Well, that’s where we get the good catch.”
“Hah!” said Old Man Tuckett, spraying fishbones and moustache sauce from underneath his extraordinarily honking great nose. “We? You mean my wives!” And this was true, because they were the best damned hands with a line and net in town.
“Oh, yes. All of us, and especially them. But the real good stuff usually gets downed before we come back, y’see. It’s so hungry out there, and we’ve got to keep up our strength. I tell you, you’ve never had a fish ‘till you’ve had a fresh one from the far reaches. Like swimming sunshine.”
Old Man Tuckett harrumphed over this and closed the door without thankyous.
But his bellows got a little hoarser, and (especially in the evening) a little sparser. His eyes darted and hunted for something he wasn’t sure was there, and he spoke to his wives – whenever he did bother to – with shorter and meaner grunts.

This got worse for a month, and then it came to the Big Haul, where it ended.

The Big Haul came in on a good day. It did de facto; it was the first good clear morn of the season. The fish seemed to wait for it as much as the fisherfolk.
Down by the docks they coiled ropes and adjusted rigging and checked motors and kissed and hugged, but Old Man Tuckett’s boat, down by the shore, sat aside. His five wives were scrubbing it out, busy as anything. It was all very normal, until you looked at Old Man Tuckett himself. He hadn’t said a word.
The bell rang, one by one the boats took leave of shore. And Old Man Tuckett watched, but for once he watched with longing. The most miserable expression was on his face: slack-cheeked and damp-eyed, pipe clutched in a hand too slack to light it, let alone smoke.
Stacy was last off the dock, and as she kicked off the pier, she spun around and to the whole watching town and to the beach and to him in particular, she said this:
“Hey! Old Man! I bet you a broken old hook from Julian’s grandpa that you won’t ever see the biggest catch from today, and that’s even if you get off your ass and come looking!”
It was a hell of a thing to say. Well, it was something everyone in town had thought for years, but there’s a world of difference between thinking and saying, particularly the way the former’s less likely to get your teeth knocked out. It made everyone in earshot – and it was a pretty wide earshot at that volume – flinch and wait for a scream.
Old Man Tuckett stood there, poleaxed. And then he did something much worse than snarling.
He grinned.
He grinned ear to ear and back to the other ear again, and if there was ever a more fearsome thing to see than that, not one of them knew it.
Old Man Tuckett’s teeth were four in number, and all fishhooks. Sharp, shiny, curved and barbed fishhooks the size of bananas. It was a wonder his pipe had a stem left.
“Bet’s on,” he said. And he spat out his pipe, stamped on it once, and slid into his boat like he was greased, shoving all five of his wives out willy-nilly without even a by-your-leave.
“I’ll be back!” he shouted. “And you’ll eat those words and more besides!”
Then Old Man Tuckett unstepped his mast, broke it over his knee, jammed it in the water, and began to row, heaving his fat arms with a fury that made them look large.

The wind was against him.
He cut directly into the current.
At one point he rocketed directly over the Poker, a quiet and murderous shoal that had eaten a dozen or more hulls in recent memory.
But somehow, when the other boats came to the shoals, Old Man Tuckett was already there.
Fishing.
With his teeth.

It was a hell of a sight, everyone agreed afterwards. Whatever else, it was a hell of a sight.
The nets went overboard clumsy, as if he’d never used them.
The knots were tied sloppy, as if he’d barely got fingers (he barely did, truth be told).
But then just as the whole mess touched water Old Man Tuckett went in after it, snorting and roaring like a foghorn, and then there’d be bubbles and splashes and up he’d come again, weighed down by a wriggling net filled with desperate flesh, dragging it up not with his hands but with his shining, murderous mouth.
Over and over, in and again, into the water that was cold enough to snip your fingers. Hour in, hour out, Old Man Tuckett fished the way he lived: teeth-first.

It was a good day for the Big Haul. Everyone took their time. But Stacy was first back in to town, and she tied up there after unloading and just waited. Chuckling.
Then came in the rest. One by one by two three four five six up until all, all of them home but one.
There it was, floundering, churning, flummoxing through the waves. The oars moved like the limbs on an upturned turtle, the thing wallowed like a depressed hippo.
It was Old Man Tuckett. But when he stepped out of that boat onto his beach, everyone had to check three or nine times. He was as thin as a rake, and shaking like a leaf.
“Not bad!” he croaked. “Not bad! Not…so bad. Still better than you! Still better than you all, and it’s my beach now, y’hear, and”
“No,” said Old Man Tuckett’s first wife, right in his face with uncommon clarity and force.
“Skinny,” said Old Man Tuckett’s second wife, shoving him in the chest and sending him staggering.
“Blaggard,” said Old Man Tuckett’s third wife, running a hand over their semidemolished boat.
“Wimp,” said Old Man Tuckett’s fourth wife, with a roll of her eyes at his catch.
“Divorce,” concluded Old Man Tuckett’s fifth wife. And she grabbed his moustache and pulled and pulled and threw it in the water with the skin attached.
And they all walked off on him, leaving the most shrunken, impotent, and downright bewildered elephant seal in all the world alone on his beach.

Old Man Tuckett tried vanishing forever after that, but couldn’t take the solitude. He showed up again four years later – still smaller, but a lot meeker, more respectful, and willing to spend more time helping people with nets.
He also walked pretty fast whenever Stacy’s eye landed on him.

Old Man Tuckett’s five ex-wives didn’t even go as far as that. They waddled up the road, knocked on Granny Magg’s door, and informed her that as the newly fattest person in town they were now marrying her. Granny said that’s fine as long as she got the good stuff for her pickles, so everyone seemed happy.

The beach is still empty. And a lot quieter.

The human ambassador was pale in the face, but had restrained herself from disgorging.
Two of her entirely ceremonial and useless guards had failed to do so. Not helpful behaviour.
“This concludes the examination,” I told them. “Do you have any further inquiries of We?”
“No,” said the ambassador. “Wait. Maybe. Yes.”
So indecisive. I’d gotten used to that.
“Are they…volunteers? All of them?”
“Please describe this word,” I asked.
“They requested this. Of their own will.”
I looked down into the recycling plant floor, where the vats ran slick and clear with hemolymph and the hoppers were piled high with flesh.
“Of course,” I said. “We would accept nothing less.”

I was assigned to reciprocate diplomacy after the fledgling human embassy of Ours was established. We reasoned that I had some small personal experience with their psychology that might prove useful.
Every little bit helped. If We could’ve afford another war, We would’ve had it.
They had been very shocked when We ceased fire. As if they had expected worse.

Earth bobbed beneath our feet. I was the first of We to see it with the naked eye, and so was immediately struck by the incongruity of it.
“Breathtaking, isn’t it?” inquired the human as the lift began to descend.
“Surprising, yes,” I acknowledged. “I was under the impression that we halted our advance before any bombardment was conducted, yet the surface appears heavily scarred.”
“Pardon?”
“There, there and there,” I said, pointing. “This appears to be recent defoliation married with heavy erosion, highly rapid and not yet concluded. Has your climate-shaping run awry, or did our war distract you from conducting an ecopurge? Your technology appears to be sufficient to accomplish global domestication.”
“Those are pre-contact damages,” he admitted. “The mistakes of youth. Work on repairing our planet’s ecosystem is ongoing. Ideally, as much of the original will be restored as is possible.”
I nodded. Sentimental, but also practical. Sometimes you could learn even more putting something back together than you could in taking it apart.

On exiting the elevator I was forced to deny both forms of learning; the former to the loud and aggressive crowds and the latter to the embassy doctors.
“It’s a mere scratch,” I explained. “Clotting will fix it within the hour.”
“Please, ambassador,” said the human. “Please. Earth micro-organisms could cause a fatal reaction.”
“Unlikely,” I replied. “I received a full autoimmune treatment before debarking, using banked earth samples.”
The human’s face did that little jump it did when he was upset. “May I ask where you obtained these…samples?”
“Probes, mostly” I said.
He laughed.
“I apologize, but I do not understand your humour.”
“Sorry, sorry. Old earth cultural touchstone. You’re serious?”
“Yes. And I find your lack of information odd. Several thousand probes were launched through this planet’s atmosphere to gather information, and you destroyed two hundred and sixteen of them. Three you even managed to capture intact.”
I almost said more, but was arrested most thoroughly by the expression of utter confusion in the human’s face.
“The crowds,” I mentioned. “They object to the peace?””
“Uh, yes.”
“Sentiment, I presume?”
“They believe we should have pushed for harsher terms.”
“Terms?”
“When you agreed to our demand for a cease fire.”
I could have corrected him.
I could have explained that we voluntarily ceased hostilities of our own accord, absent of any request from his species. That there was no worthwhile gain to be had from their eradication.
I could have pointed out that there had been no terms decided upon, and that these were only now being considered in scope and scale as we performed an embassy exchange.
But I didn’t do any of those things, because I knew that all of those facts were common, open, freely-available knowledge and for some reason he didn’t seem to understand any of them. This was worth exploring, but perhaps without his informed assistance.
I brushed aside the thought and the last specks of hemolymph from my skull. “Clotting will fix it within the hour,” I repeated, as if to reset our conversation to its beginning. “Nutrient would assist in this.”
“There will be lunch,” he said. And there was.

Lunch was a soup based in a beef broth, followed by sesame-encrusted tuna steak (with a small cranberry and walnut salad dressed with blue cheese) and finished with a berry sorbet.
It was the most sumptuous meal I’d ever tasted, the first that had not come from a rendering vat – beyond anything I’d ever imagined food could be.
And with every mouthful, I thought of the drying brown surface of the globe, and of the human’s earnest, entirely assured statement that they were doing their best to fix their mess.
I stared at the ambassador as I chewed, with my proximal eyes. He was busy chasing some dried cranberries with his fork, and his expression as he did this – faintly concentrating, slightly frowning, mind earnestly bent – was as frank and open as it had been since the beginning.
This was not a creature made for lying. I was beginning to suspect him of something far more dreadful.
“That was tremendously satisfying, and highly educational,” I said to him. And I meant every word. “Where to next?”
“Some people.”

They were some people, all right.
I was impressed despite myself. The human embassy I had overseen on Ours had largely been granted access to the most immediate and practical arms of government, the blunt, brutal executors of policy and the database attendants.
Here, I spoke with the makers and takers of policy. The minds that aimed the hands of billions of bodies.
In this corner, the overlord of energy. They still relied heavily upon fossil fuels, yet he swore they were already devoting too much time and energy to carbon trapping, that it was hokum.
In this other corner, a master of agriculture, who explained to me why it was biologically necessary to devote so much land to monocultured maize rather than mixed genetically-tailored crops to reduce soil wear.
Here, in the center of the chamber, I exchanged words with a mighty voice in social structuring, who explained to me the great problems his domain faced with ‘worthless’ humans that lived without housing. Curiously, when I suggested reprocessing them (if they were as functionless as he described) he insisted that their labour would be useful if they ever applied themselves and that the problem lay in their own hands.
“I thank you, sir,” I told the human. “I had not expected to be placed so quickly and so closely to the top ranks of your government.”
The human looked at me with as much shock as he had when the protester’s stone had cracked my face. “Ambassador, you are gravely mistaken, and I caution you to avoid speaking in such a manner – you could cause great offense with those words. These men and women are merely advisors and specialists, not rulers. They do not craft policy.”
I looked at the human again, this time not even trying to hide my strutiny. Primary, secondary, and tertiary eyes, across all spectrums. I looked at every muscle twitch, at every drop of perspiration, at the movements of his pupils, at the heat from his brow.
He was entirely, wholly, achingly, agonizingly sincere.
They all were.
None of them really were lying to me, not one bit, not to my face.
But they were lying much harder to someone else behind their own.

Afterwards, we had dinner. It was twice as enjoyable as lunch, and it was what gave me the last push towards the final decision of my life when I sat in my bedroom full of spyware and luxury, at the desk, clutching the very pretty and important and entirely decorative computer I had brought with me.
I placed all my hands and my tongue in the specific places they should go and hummed at the right pitch and the terminal disgorged itself, its battery splitting apart and vomiting out a very small and dangerous machine, simple in design and in purpose.
On use, it would produce a small, meaningless signal without coding or intent that would, on being received by the masters of We, produce immediate and full-scale war.
It would not be a beneficial war. It would not be a tidy war. There was a chance – a very slim chance, a very small chance, but an almost-unacceptable-on-its-face chance nonetheless – that it might be a war that We might lose.
But the odds were much better than anything, anything, anything at all that might happen from attempting to live alongside these lunatics.
The transmitter clicked, clucked, and melted into a puddle of ashes, which I threw out the window.
In forty minutes the war would start.
In forty-five minutes they would likely come for me.
If I was very good, I might string them along for hours and hours before they would begin irreparably damaging me out of frustration and spite.
They would never do so deliberately, of course.  Never in a million years would they imagine themselves doing so.
But they would. They most assuredly would.